Public Schools to Teachers: Run Your Class on Fear or Get Fired
As part of a burgeoning new public school program called “No Nonsense Nurturing” teachers are required to wear earpieces. They’re reminded to be less enthusiastic and “expect 100 percent compliance.” And in at least one high profile case, the teachers who objected were let go.
To her face we called her Mrs. Thompson, but behind her back it was “Sarge.”
Sarge was our 8th grade Language Arts teacher. Rumor was that she’d been in the military, maybe an officer in the Women’s Air Corps, maybe part of the Normandy invasion, charging the beach with a knife in her teeth. Her necklace of Nazi ears was stored away in her top desk drawer.
No one knew the full truth. The legend grew with each successive school year.
Sarge was squat with a short, salt and pepper bristly haircut, and an authoritative, gravelly voice. Think R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket.
Oh, and the stare. Try to pass a note to a friend, she would see you and give you the stare, and then you would shred the paper yourself, rather than waiting for Sarge to come and do it for you.
On the other hand, Mrs. Thompson was also deeply kind and enthusiastic and loving, and one of the most important teachers in my life. I am more than 30 years removed from her classroom and I can conjure her like it was yesterday.
When I first heard of a system called “No Nonsense Nurturing,” via a middle-school teacher Amy Berard’s first-hand account (first published at the EduShyster blog), I thought of Mrs. Thompson, whose entire being seemed to be anti-nonsense.
Berard recounts her experience working with the Center for Transformative Teacher Training, which uses the No Nonsense Nurturing system to “train” teachers in their particular method of “classroom management.”
Somewhere along the line, the school reform movement decided that fear would be their governing value.
During the “real time teacher coaching,” the instructor wears an earpiece and is coached in the NNN method by observers in the back of the classroom. As educator Peter Greene argues, No Nonsense Nurturing is the latest iteration of “scripted” lessons which aim to “human-proof” the classroom. The NNN instructor is told to use short phrases focused on the immediate task at hand, including narration of what the instructor observes each student doing.
As Berard says:
As my students entered the room, I was supposed to say: “In seats, zero talking, page 6 questions, 1-4.” I don’t even talk to my dog like that. Constant narration of what the students are doing is also key to the NNN teaching style. “Noel is finishing question 3. Marjorie is sitting silently. Alfredo is on page 6.”
But Berard’s application of the method displeased her observers. She expressed Public Schools to Teachers: Run Your Class on Fear or Get Fired - The Daily Beast: