Compounding interest is brutally unsexy. You put away a small sum of your money - let's say 5 % of your paycheck - every month and you just let it sit in the stock market for around 40 years. Somewhere around year 30 your money starts growing at a ludicrous rate. You become wealthy. 30 years of incredibly boring consistent behavior leads to unbelievable returns on investment.
I’d argue the same is true of great teaching, it just happens on a social and psychological level.
Let's take the example of the fist bump - superior to the hand shake or the dap due to its faster speed and ability to spread less germs. If a teacher stands at his door at the beginning of every period and fist bumps the 20 kids who enter his class for 5 classes a day, by the end of the day he’s just given 100 fist bumps. By the end of the week he’s given 500 fist bumps and by the end of the month he’s given 2000 fist bumps.
Let’s think about what a fist bump is. It’s an affirmation of your relationship with another human being. It’s the cool way of communicating, “hey man, I’m with you right now.” In the space of half a second your knuckles connecting with another humans' knuckles lets you make a connection with your students. The action doesn’t cost a damn thing and the payout over time is immense. Needless to say I hand those out like candy.
Now, let's extrapolate this compounding interest idea to enforcing classroom norms - lets say getting kids to do a workout. When I first started introducing a workout in P.E. class I could barely get half the class off of the wall. They simply refused to budge no matter how many times I asked them. I eventually resorted to opening up the grade book and reducing their grade right in front of them.
At first they ignored me, but when the first period marking grades came out they suddenly had a very different reaction to the grade book. “Oh why you gotta be like that,” they would grumble as they would get off the wall to perform the class workout. This is just boring consistent work paying dividends. Writing down grades in front of kids in a composition notebook = boring. 95% class participation in the class workout where kids are the trainers = fun.
Exponential Growth
Here’s where the compounding analogy really continues to track. Kids talk.
They want reviews from each other. Is this teacher’s class easy? How hard are they on attendance? What do I have to do to pass? Is the class any good? Any student about to take your class will ask these questions on repeat, and any kid currently taking your class will answer them. Depending on your consistency with the boring work such as enforcing rules, keeping a tight grade book, handing out fist bumps, your students reviews will make your job easier or harder.
If this year’s new juniors walk into your class with the knowledge that your class is difficult to pass, before you even speak your reputation has already set the expectation for hard work. If upperclassmen students tell lowerclassmen that a particular teacher will call mom for being on your phone, that teacher will deal with less phone problems from the get go. Of course, the opposite is true as well. If students know you’re a big softie, you’re about to have a class where kids regularly take 12 minute bathroom trips.
How do you establish a good reputation? Consistent, unsexy work. I get it, no teacher wants to call parents after teaching 5 classes, planning for 2-3 lessons, and feeling like the final bell is a signal you can breathe again…but it’s exactly those calls over time that will reduce classroom management fatigue. Nobody wants to give 2000 fist bumps a week, that kind of consistent enthusiasm is exhausting…but teaching a classroom full of kids who don’t give a shit about you is even worse. Nobody wants to input grades every single day, but when you do more kids respond when you threaten their grade, and then more kids do your work.
When Do I Rake in the Teacher Wealth?
So when does the reputation kick in? When do you finally achieve the mystique of a teacher who knows what the hell you’re doing? When do you reap what you sow?
By my estimation, 4-5 years.
I know, sounds like a lot.
Thats because it is.
I say 4-5 years because thats the amount of time it takes for a freshman to graduate. Once a full cycle of kids leaves the school, all the student body knows is your teaching style, and your consistent habits. Once the expectations of the teacher you replaced is fully gone, thats when know where your reputation will stand. Even the students who had the former P.E. teacher for only their freshmen year would grumble about how they used to be able to play basketball whenever they wanted.
Perhaps you’re a rookie teacher reading this article and you have a Rocky-teaching-montage of you grinding away in your grade book and giving fist bumps as fast as you can. That’s beautiful, but keep in mind, once you blink, your imaginary montage is done and you’re back to faking enthusiasm and struggling to keep up with grades in real time.
4-5 years is a helluva grind, and giving around 80,000 fist bumps is no joke…but if you can stick with it, the rewards are great. Classes that manage themselves, students that engage before you even have to convince them, students who don’t mess with you because they already know you’ll mess back twice as hard…this is the job as you envisioned it. This is the rewarding life changing position every teacher hopes it will be when they enter the profession.
Just be prepared to do a lot of fucking paperwork.
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