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Chapter 6: Coolness and Respect

Being the “cool teacher” has a dark side. It means your class has no rules. At least, this is what people would have you think. It means the kids know they can goof off and they don’t respect you. 

 

Fifteen years ago, I almost failed student teaching. My classroom management skills were supported by a spine roughly the strength of a stiff pudding. I taught under two mentor teachers. At one mid-semester assessment, my professor sat with my two mentor teachers and went through his grading rubric. For each category, one mentor graded me “Proficient,” while the other grimaced and contorted her face as she repeated, over and over again, “Not Proficient.” 

 

According to her, four weeks before graduating, with tens of thousands of dollars in debt and job applications spinning through cyberspace, I was “Not Proficient” at things like Creating a Safe and Purposeful Learning Environment, and Develops and implements classroom procedures and routines that support high expectations for student learning. 💭 These are known as the “Iowa Teaching Standards” and “The reason I nearly had an aneurysm at 22.”

 

My professor, after observing a period of sophomore US Government, sighed and said, “This class needs training.” My professor was the former principal of the building now letting me hone my skills on their kids. 

 

In how many other professions is your assessed performance so dependent on the actions of others?

 

I passed. Either I improved, or my mentor had pity on me.💭 No letter grades in student teaching. "Pass/Fail" is supposed to be easier, but I disagree. Either way, I could now get a degree and a teacher’s license, both of which are required in this profession. (I don’t think that mentor served as one of my job references.) 

 

Fast forward a year or two and I’m not sure how I wound up the “cool teacher” at my first job teaching seventh and eighth graders. I didn’t try and it wasn’t a goal of mine. And, I’m pretty sure the eighth grade girl who told me on my fourth week of teaching that she hopes I get hit by a bus on the way home didn’t think I was the cool teacher. 

 

Did having an active class, maybe a bit noisy, mean I still lacked classroom management competence? At that point, maybe I was too young to know. I do remember interviewing one of my favorite middle school teachers when I was in college. With this challenge, he advised me to, “Look at what they’re doing. Are they on-task? Are they producing the work they’re supposed to? Are they showing evidence of learning?” Noise and activity levels were secondary to those goals. 

 

I didn’t struggle to have kids do good work. I had demonstrated results and growth from my students. And yet, I was young, I was new, the kids liked me—something must be wrong. It felt like kids liking my class was a problem for the people around me. 

 

How I wound up thinking the entire world was against me, I’m not sure. I think a small part of me assumes people don’t like me by default. By the middle of year two, I wound up in a battle with my team which began with a simple request that I disallow gum chewing in my class and ended with my blasting back an email that I refuse to be “arbitrarily mean to kids.”💭 This is a phrase I heard from a presenter at a conference and I thought, if he could get away with saying it, so could I. It sounded like the perfect phrase to use in this exact situation. Through experimentation, I learned I could not get away with saying it.

 

That went exactly as well as you might expect. 

 

To my credit… no. There’s nothing to my credit. I had no good justification. I was blind, clueless about the big picture, and thought I could demonstrate my competence and intelligence with lofty emails and an impressive vocabulary. 

 

Like my hero Toby Ziegler, President Bartlett’s speechwriter from the famed TV series The West Wing, I am smarter, have the morally-superior argument, words are my weapons, and I don’t back down from fights. 

 

The first sign that it was a mistake for me to borrow my moral backbone from a fictional TV character was when I was nervous - literally shaking - while walking into the building the next day. I went straight to my classroom and hid with the door closed until the kids came in. 

 

In 2013, after eleven years together and winning a historic five consecutive NASCAR championships, legendary driver Jimmie Johnson and his crew chief bickered so often their team owner sat them down at a plastic kids table and made them eat milk and cookies while talking out their issues. Likewise, I got a firm and justified “talking to” from the rest of my team. 

 

Also, for the next few weeks, I kept finding random sticks of gum in my workroom mailbox. 

 

What second-year teacher Mr. D (circa 2012) didn’t understand that principal Mr. D (circa 2025) does is that it’s not about being right, it’s about being together. Teaching is a team sport. Principal Dubczak has to develop a teaching community that ensures your starters are taking as good of care of the back-bench rookie as they are their fellow superstars. If he does, then the rookie won’t feel like every comment about his class is some underhanded critique on his teaching abilities. 

 

What second-year teacher Mr. Dubczak didn’t understand that Principal Dubczak does is that all student behavior communicates to us something. Maybe they don’t know the routines, maybe they don’t understand what cooperative work looks like, or maybe they’re covering for an insecurity. It’s not about having the right consequences, it’s about knowing what the kids are communicating. 

 

The little demon inside of me that takes “people don’t like me” as the default position also lives on the shoulder of a 5th grader I work with. Clearly not understanding his work, he covers with boisterousness and gets loud, making jokes, and finding ways to be a general distraction. I pull him into the hall and he’s immediately on defense - “What did I do wrong? I didn’t do anything wrong! They’re the ones bothering me! I wasn’t here last time!”

 

“I can see your energy level is very high,” I said, “so I brought you out here so we can take a breath before we figure out what to do.”

 

I hope that’s a move that would make my former mentor proud (and help me pass student teaching). 

 

I’m proud of my current team, how the team is the superstar and the veterans are there for the rookies. Some days, we play like the championship Mighty Ducks and some days we play like the haphazard District 5 Peewee team, but, oh man, can we play. 

 

Respect. 

 

__________________________

 

David Dubczak is an educator and writer documenting his final year in the classroom before transitioning into school administration. Follow David Dubczak - Writer on Facebook to keep up with semi-weekly posts. 

 

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