I always get conflicted about reading an isolated study. I know I’m going to read it poorly. There will be lots of terms I don’t know; I won’t get the context of the results. I’m assured of misreading.

On the other side of the ledger, though, is curiosity, and the fun that comes from trying to puzzle these sort of things out. (The other carrot is insight. You never know when insight will hit.)

So, when I saw Heidi talk about this piece on twitter, I thought it would be fun to give it a closer read. It’s mathematically interesting, and much of it is obscure to me. Turns out that the piece is openly available, so you can play along at home. So, let’s take a closer look.

I. 

The stakes of this study are both high and crushingly low. Back in 2014 when this was published, the paper caught some press that picked up on its ‘Math Wars’ angle. For example, you have NPR‘s summary of the research:

Math teachers will often try to get creative with their lesson plans if their students are struggling to grasp concepts. But in “Which Instructional Practices Most Help First-Grade Students With and Without Mathematics Difficulties?” the researchers found that plain, old-fashioned practice and drills — directed by the teacher — were far more effective than “creative” methods such as music, math toys and student-directed learning.

Pushes all your teachery buttons, right?

But if the stakes seem high, the paper is also easy to disbelieve, if you don’t like the results.

Evidence about teaching comes in a lot of different forms. Sometimes, it comes from an experiment; y’all (randomly chosen people) try doing this, everyone else do that, and we see what happens. Other times we skip the ‘random’ part and find reasonable groups to compare (a ‘quasi-experiment‘). Still other times we don’t try for statistically valid comparisons between groups, and instead a team of researchers will look very, very closely at teaching in a methodologically rich and cautious way.

And sometimes we take a big pile of data and poke at it with a stick. That’s what the authors of this study set out to do.

I don’t mean to be dismissive of the paper. I’m writing about it because I think it’s worth writing about. But I also know that lots of us in education use research as a bludgeon. This leads to educators reading research with two questions in mind: (a) Can I bludgeon someone with this research? (b) How can I avoid getting bludgeoned by this research?

That’s why I’m taking pains to lower the stakes. This paper isn’t a crisis or a boon for anyone. It’s just the story of how a bunch of people analyzed a bunch of interesting data.

Freed of the responsibility of figuring out if this study threatens us or not, let’s muck around and see what we find.

II. 

The researchers lead off with a nifty bit of statistical work called factor analysis. It’s an analytical move that, as I read more about, I find both supremely cool and metaphysically questionable.

You might have heard of socioeconomic status. Socioeconomic status is supposed to explain a lot about the world we live in. But what is socioeconomic status?

You can’t directly measure someone’s socioeconomic status. It’s a latent variable, one responsible for a myriad other observable variables, such as parental income, occupational prestige, the number of books you lying around your parents’ house, and so on.

None of these observables, on their own, can explain much of the variance in student academic performance. If your parents have a lot of books at home, that’s just it: your parents have a lot of books. That doesn’t make you a measurably better student.

Here’s the way factor analysis works, in short. You get a long list of responses to a number of questions, or a long list of measurements. I don’t know, maybe there are 100 variables you’re looking at. And you wonder (or program a computer to wonder) whether these can be explained by some smaller set of latent variables. You see if some of your 100 variables tend to vary as a group, e.g. when income goes up by a bit, does educational attainment tend to rise too? You do this for all your variables, and hopefully you’re able to identify just a few latent variables that stand behind your big list. This makes the rest of your analysis a lot easier; much better to compare 3 variables than 100.

That’s what we do for socioeconomic status. That’s also what the authors of this paper do for instructional techniques teachers use with First Graders..

I’m new to all this, so please let me know if I’m messing any of this up, but it sure seems to me tough to figure out what exactly these latent variables are. One possibility is that all the little things that vary together — the parental income, the educational attainment, etc. — all contribute to academic outcomes, but just a little bit. Any one of them would be statistically irrelevant, but together, they have oomph.

This would be fine, I guess, but then why bother grouping them into some other latent variable? Wouldn’t we be better off saying that a bunch of little things can add up to something significant?

The other possibility is that socioeconomic status is some real, other thing, and all those other measurable variables are just pointing to this big, actual cause of academic success. What this ‘other thing’ actually is, though, remains up in the air.

(In searching for other people who worried about this, I came across a piece from History and Philosophy of Psychology Bulletin called ‘Four Queries About Factor Reality.’ Leading line: ‘When I first learned about factor analysis, there were four methodological questions that troubled me. They still do.’)

So, that’s the first piece of statistical wizardry in this paper. Keep reading: there’s more!

III.

Back to First Graders. The authors of this paper didn’t collect this data; the Department of Education, through the National Center for Education Statistics, ran the survey.

The NCES study was immense. It’s longitudinal, so we’re following the same group of students over many years. I don’t really know the details, but they’re aiming for a nationally representative sample of participants in the study. We’re talking over ten-thousand students; their parents; thousands of teachers; they measured kids’ height, for crying out loud. It’s an awe-inspiring dataset, or at least it seems that way to me.

As part of the survey, they ask First Grade teachers to answer questions about their math teaching. First, 19 instructional activities…

…and then, 29 mathematical skills.

Now, we can start seeing the outlines of a research plan. Teachers tell you how they teach; we have info about how well these kids performed in math in Kindergarten and in First Grade; let’s find out how the teaching impacts the learning.

Sounds, good, except HOLY COW look at all these variables. 19 instructional techniques and 29 skills. That’s a lot of items.

I think you know what’s coming next…

FACTOR ANALYSIS, BABY!

So we do this factor analysis (beep bop boop boop) and it turns out that, yes, indeed some of the variables vary together, suggesting that there are some latent, unmeasured factors that we can study instead of all 48 of these items.

Some good news: the instructional techniques only got grouped with other instructional techniques, and skills got groups with skills. (It would be a bit weird if teachers who teach math through music focused more on place value, or something.)

I’m more interested in the instructional factors, so I’ll focus on the way these 19 instructional techniques got analytically grouped:

The factor loadings, as far as I understand, can be interpreted as correlation coefficients, i.e. higher means a tighter fit with the latent variable. (I don’t yet understand Cronbach’s Alpha or what it signifies. For me, that’ll have to wait.)

Some of these loadings seem pretty impressive. If a teacher says they frequently give worksheets, yeah, it sure seems like they also talk about frequently running routine drills. Ditto with ‘movement to learn math’ and ‘music to learn math.’

But here’s something I find interesting about all this. The factor analysis tells you what responses to this survey tended to vary together, and it helps you identify four groups of covarying instructional techniques. But — and this is the part I find so important — the RESEARCHERS DECIDE WHAT TO CALL THEM.

The first group of instructional techniques all focus on practicing solving problems: students practice on worksheets, or from textbooks, or drill, or do math on a chalkboard. The researchers name this latent variable ‘teacher-directed instruction.’

The second group of covarying techniques are: mixed ability group work, work on a problem with several solutions, solving a real life math problem, explaining stuff, and running peer tutoring activities. The researchers name this latent variable ‘student-centered instruction.’

I want to ask the same questions that I asked about socioeconomic status above. What is student-centered instruction? Is it just a little bit of group work, a little bit of real life math and peer tutoring, all mushed up and bundled together for convenience’s sake? Or is it some other thing, some style of instruction that these measurable variables are pointing us towards?

The researchers take pains to argue that it’s the latter. Student-centered activities, they say, ‘provide students with opportunities to be actively involved in the process of generating mathematical knowledge.’ That’s what they’re identifying with all these measurable things.

I’m unconvinced, though. We’re supposed to believe that these six techniques, though they vary together, are really a coherent style of teaching, in disguise. But there seems to me a gap between the techniques that teachers reported on and the style of teaching they describe as ‘student-centered.’ How do we know that these markers are indicators of that style?

Which leads me to think that they’re just six techniques that teachers often happen to use together. They go together, but I’m not sure the techniques stand for much more than what they are.

Eventually — I promise, we’re getting there — the researchers are going to find that teachers who emphasize the first set of activities help their weakest students more than teachers emphasizing the second set. And, eventually, NPR is going to pick up this study and run with it.

If the researchers decide to call the first group ‘individual math practice’ and the second ‘group work and problem solving’ then the headline news is “WEAKEST STUDENTS BENEFIT FROM INDIVIDUAL PRACTICE.” Instead, the researchers went for ‘teacher-directed’ and ‘student-centered’ and the headlines were “TEACHERS CODDLING CHILDREN; RUINING FUTURE.”

I’m not saying it’s the wrong choice. I’m saying it’s a choice.

IV. 

Let’s skip to the end. Teacher-directed activities helped the weakest math students (MD = math difficulties) more than student-centered activities.

The researchers note that the effect sizes are small. Actually, they seem a bit embarrassed by this and argue that their results are conservative, and the real gains of teacher-directed instruction might be higher. Whatever. (Freddie deBoer reminds us that effect sizes in education tend to be modest, anyway. We can do less than we think we can.)

Also ineffective for learning to solve math problems: movement and music, calculating the answers instead of figuring them out, and ‘manipulatives.’ (The researchers call all of these ‘student-centered.’)

There’s one bit of cheating in the discussion, I think. The researchers found another interesting thing from the teacher survey data. When a teacher has a lot of students with math difficulty in a class, they are more likely to do activities involving calculators and with movement/music then they otherwise might be:

You might recall that these activities aren’t particularly effective math practice, and so they don’t lead to kids getting much better at solving problems.

By the time you get to the discussion of the results, though, here’s what they’re calling this: “the increasing reliance on non-teacher-directed instruction by first grade teachers when their classes include higher percentages of students with MD.”

Naming, man.

This got picked up by headlines, but I think the thing to check out is that the ‘student-directed’ category did not correlate with percentage of struggling math students in a class. That doesn’t sound to me like non-teacher-directed techniques get relied on when teachers have more weak math students in their classes.

The headline news for this study was “TEACHERS RELY ON INEFFECTIVE METHODS WHEN THE GOING GETS ROUGH.” But the headline probably should have been “KIDS DON’T LEARN TO ADD FROM USING CALCULATORS OR SINGING.”

V. 

Otherwise, though, I believe the results of this study pretty unambiguously.

Some people on Twitter worried about using a test with young children, but that doesn’t bother me so much. There are a lot of things that a well-designed test can’t measure that I care about, but it certainly measures some of the things I care about.

Big studies like this are not going to be subtle. You’re not going to get a picture into the most effective classrooms for struggling students. You’re not going to get details about what, precisely, it is that is ineffective about ineffective teaching. We’re not going to get nuance.

Then again, it’s not like education is a particularly nuanced place. There are plenty of people out there who take the stage to provide ridiculously simple slogans, and I think it’s helpful to take the slogans at their word.

Meaning: to the extent that your slogan is ‘fewer worksheets, more group work!’, that slogan is not supported by this evidence. Ditto with ‘less drill, more real life math!’

(I don’t have links to people providing these slogans, but that’s partly because scrolling through conference hashtags gives me indigestion.)

And, look, is it really so shocking that students with math difficulties benefit from classes that include proportionally more individual math practice?

No, or at least based on my experience it shouldn’t be. But the thing that the headlines get wrong is that this sort of teaching is anything simple. It’s hard to find the right sort of practice for students. It’s also hard to find classroom structures that give strong and struggling students valuable practice to work on at the same time. It’s hard to vary practice formats, hard to keep it interesting. Hard to make sure kids are making progress during practice. All of this is craft.

My takeaway from this study is that struggling students need more time to practice their skills. If you had to blindly choose a classroom that emphasized practice or real-life math for such a student, you might want to choose practice.

But I know from classroom teaching that there’s nothing simple about helping kids practice. It takes creativity, listening, and a lot of careful planning. Once we get past some of the idealistic sloganeering, I’m pretty sure most of us know this. So let’s talk about that: the ways we help kids practice their skills in ways that keep everybody in the room thinking, engaged, and that don’t make children feel stupid or that math hates them.

But as long as we trash-talk teacher-directed work and practice, I think we’ll need pieces like this as a correction.

I love Henri Picciotto’s Geometry Labs text. I was preparing my geometry class for his inscribed angles activity, and saw this:

Thanks to the Which One Doesn’t Belong people (and Christopher’s lovely book), I’m no longer able to look at sets of four things. It’s ruined me. I’m always deciding which of them is the odd one out.

Since there are subtle differences between the inscribed angle cases, I decided to cover up the words and ask my students which of the four diagrams was the weird one.

This drew attention to the location of the centers, the location of radii, and the presence of isosceles/scalene triangles. (I know it’s May, but any chance to get kids to practice using this vocabulary is time well spent.)

This week in 4th Grade I’ve also been using Geometry Labs‘s chapter on tilings. (Sort of a random topic, but random topics are fun. Plus, I need to figure out where we stand on multiplication/division before one last push in our last weeks together.)

There I was, trying to figure out how to attune kids to the subtle classification differences between these two square tilings…

…and while, admittedly, I clearly had “Which One Doesn’t Belong” on my mind, it seemed a pretty good fit for my need here too. I took out some pattern blocks and snapped a picture:

There were lots of interesting aspects of this discussion, though my favorite had to do with whether the top-left and bottom-right tilings were different. I forget if we’ve talked about congruence yet in this class, but there were a lot of good ideas about whether tilting the tessellation made it a different tiling.

Not much else to share here, but I guess I’d say that I do this a lot. I don’t rewrite texts or worksheets or whatever very often. More often I add little activities before or after, to make sure kids can understand the activity, or to react to their thinking. That’s good for me (because I don’t have time to remake everything) and good for kids too (I write crappy curriculum).

I read a lot of teacher blogs these days.

(Incidentally, I turned MTBoS_Blogbot into an RSS feed, which was my reason for begging Lusto to make it in the first place.)

Anyway, I read a lot of teacher blogs. I see your beautiful activities, clever games and meaningful conversations. I wish I had an ounce of the teacherly creativity that Sarah Carter has, but really I don’t. It’s not what I do.

So, what exactly is it that I do?

In 8th Grade we’re going to study exponential functions. Class began with a lovely Desmos activity. They worked with randomly assigned partners.

After thinking through these questions, I thought kids could begin learning about equations for exponential functions, and towards this it would be helpful to contrast linear table/equations with exponential ones.

In years past, I would have aimed to elicit these ideas out of a conversation. I’ve lost faith in this move, though. While it’s nice to get kids to share ideas, their explanations are often muddy and don’t do much for kids who don’t already see the point. (Just because a kid can say something doesn’t mean that they should.) This, at least, is what I suspect.

Better, I’ve come to believe, to follow-up an activity like this one with briefly and directly presenting students with the new idea. I worry more about visual presentation than I used to. Here is what I planned to write on the board, from my planning notebook:

I put this on the board, so that it would be ready after the kids finished the Desmos activity: what could the equations of each of these relationships be? boom, here they are:

During planning I hadn’t fully thought through what I was going to ask kids to do with this visual. At first, I stumbled. I gave an explanation along with the visual, but I got vibes that kids weren’t really thinking carefully about the equations yet. So I asked them to talk to their partners for a minute to make sure they both understood where the exponential equation came from.

You can tell when a question like that falls flat. There wasn’t that pleasant hum of hard-thinking in the classroom, and the conversations I overheard were superficial.

Remembering the way Algebra by Example (via CLT) uses example/problem pairs, I quickly put a new question on the board. I posted an exponentially growing table and asked students to find an equation that could fit this relationship.

There we were! This question got that nice hum of thinking going.

While eavesdropping on kids, I heard that L had a correct equation. I thought it would be good to ask L to present her response, as she isn’t one of the “regular customers.”

Her explanation, I thought, gave a great glimpse of how learning works. She shared her equation but immediately doubted it — she wasn’t sure if it worked for (0,5). After some encouragement from classmates she realized that it would work. Turns out that her thought process went like this: 10, 100, 1000, that’s powers of 10 and this looks a lot like that. But how can I get those 5s to show up in there too…ah! The example involved multiplication so this one can too.

(Of course, she didn’t say this in so many words. After class I complimented her on the explanation and she put herself down: I don’t know how to explain things. I told her that learning new stuff is like that — your mind outpaces your mouth — but I thought I had understood her, and confirmed that I got her process.)

With the example properly studied, I went on to another activity. Following my text, the next twist was to bring up compound interest. I worried, though, that my students would hardly understand the compound interest scenario well enough to learn something from attacking a particular problem.

While thinking about this during planning, I thought about Brian’s numberless word problems. (My understanding of numberless problems is, in turn, influenced by my understanding of goal-free problems in CLT.)

I took the example problem from my text ($600 investment, 7% interest/year, how much money do you have in 10 years?), erased the numbers and put the variables on the board.

Then, I asked kids (again with the partners) to come up with some numbers, and a question. If you come up with a question, try to answer it. (A kid asking But I can’t think of a question is why this activity was worth it. And with some more thought, they could.)

I collected their work from this numberless interest problem, and I have it in front of me now. I see some interesting things I didn’t catch during class. Like the kid who asked ‘How much $ does someone lose from interest after 5 years?’ (And why would an 8th Grader know what interest is, anyway?) Or the kids who thought a 10% interest rate would take $100 to $180 over 8 years.

No indications from this work that anyone uses multiplication by 1.10 or 1.08 or whatever to find interest. Not surprising, but I had forgotten that this would be a big deal for this group.

For a moment I’m tempted to give my class feedback on their work…but then I remember that I can also just design a short whole-group learning activity instead, so why bother with the written feedback at all.

I’m not exactly sure what ideas in the student work would be good to pick up on. I should probably advance their ability to use decimals to talk about percent increase, but then again there was also that kid who wasn’t sure what interest was.

My mind goes to mental math. I could create a string of problems that use the new, exponential structure with decimals:

• 600 x 1.5
• 600 x 1.5 x 1.5
• 1000 x 1.5^3
• 50% interest on a $200 investment

That’s awfully sloppy, but it’s just a first draft.

Or maybe the way to go is a Connecting Representations activity that asks kids to match exponential expressions with interest word problems.

I’m not sure, but all this is definitely a good example of what I do. It’s what I’m learning how to do better in teaching, at the moment. It’s not fancy or flashy, and no one’s lining up to give me 20k for it, but it’s definitely representative of where I am now.

I’m not sure at all how to generalize or describe what it is this is an example of, though. Is it the particular flow of the 45-minute session that I’m learning to manage? Or is it the particular activity structures that I happen to have gathered in my repertoire?

None of those are satisfying answers. Maybe, instead, this is just an example of me basically doing what I think I should be doing. My reading is piling up, and I’m getting some coherent ideas about how learning and teaching can work. This lesson is a good example of how those principles more-or-less look in action. It might not be right (and it sure isn’t at the upper limits of what math class can be) but I’ve got a decent reason for most of the decisions I made in this session.

I think what I have to share, then, is how what I’m reading connects to how I’m teaching. This episode is an example of that.

In what may or may not begin a new series on this blog, I will now (politely and lovingly, I hope) disagree with a tweet.

On the internet, nobody knows if you can manage a classroom or not. Maybe twitter can solve this. Currently, you get a blue “verified account” check next to your name if you did something cool to deserve it, like being rich or popular. Maybe we could have something like that in education. (I’m a verified red apple educator!)

Until then, there’s no way to tell online who can or can’t run a classroom.

I suppose it’s true that someone who has never run a classroom probably can’t, and these people shouldn’t try to tell you about managing behavior. But take Tom. I don’t know Tom. I have no idea what sort of a teacher he was when he was in the classroom. How would Tom’s standard apply to Tom? How can I know if Tom can run a classroom or not?

This is always how it is with teaching. We don’t have access to each other’s classrooms, so we can only rely on each other’s descriptions of teaching. That’s true for everybody, teachers and non-teachers alike.

This matters a lot more to ex-teachers than to teachers, I think. The relationship between teachers and non-teachers is complicated. You might think that teachers are just suspicious of non-teachers, and that’s true, but we also care the most about what some non-teachers say. Someone on twitter once pointed out to me that classroom teachers are generally suspicious of non-teachers but very trusting of a few chosen non-teacher experts who have credibility. This struck me as totally true.

As a consequence of all this, some non-teachers find it helpful to try to hold on to the status of in-the-know teacher even though they have left the classroom.

To which I say, it’s not worth it. Don’t bother. The kindness that teachers offer other teachers isn’t because of a presumption that this other teacher gets it, or that they have useful information to offer that non-teachers don’t. Rather, I’d say, it’s just that: kindness. I would posit that it’s not that teachers are more trusting of others in the classroom, just that we try to be nice to each other, because the job is hard and knowledge is tentative and we all know how little status we each have. Once you leave the classroom your status has just bumped up in the education world, and that extra-kindness can no longer protect you from the skepticism of other teachers.

Which is fine, because you can still influence teachers in the one way you ever could: by describing what it is that you think will work.

Maybe this was a good idea, maybe not.

I was trying to figure out how to start class. My 8th Graders have been studying the Pythagorean Theorem. I knew I wanted to start with some mental math* but wasn’t sure how to start.

* This desire to often begin class with some mental math is, at this point, sort of an instinct. On the one hand you need instincts when you’re planning class, because otherwise everything takes forever as you get sucked into a recursive vortex of decision-making. But is it a good instinct? I don’t know how to think about that.

The way I teach the Pythagorean Theorem, being able to mentally chunk a tilted square into triangles and squares (rather than trying to count each square or triangle) is an important part of the skill. It helps kids quickly see the area of squares, freeing up their attention to focus on the relationship between the squares built on the sides of triangles.

Yesterday, we explicitly talked about the Pythagorean Theorem in terms of the area of squares built on a right triangle’s sides. The plan for class was for kids to get better at using it in all sorts of different problems.

So, I decided to build a string of squares built on the hypotenuses of right triangles, and ask kids to find the square-areas in sequence, building up to a generalization. We start: What’s this square’s area? Put a thumb up (please don’t wave a hand in someone else’s face) when you’ve decided. What is the area? How do you know? OK here’s your next tilted square, etc.

Here’s where my teaching got sort of mushy. The really important skill isn’t finding the area of tilted squares. What kids really are going to want to know, later on, is the Pythagorean relationship between right triangle sides and areas.

So here’s the question: did this string of problems draw attention to the important math?

Turns out, it didn’t. Kids made the generalization in the last step (as far as I could tell from eavesdropping on their conversations) entirely on the basis of the earlier examples. And those areas were found by chunking up the area. In other words, this was arithmetic-generalization. They didn’t use the Pythagorean relationship.

What were my options, when I realized this? I was happy that kids were able to mentally dissect these tilted-squares, but was a bit disappointed that they didn’t start noticing Pythagorus here. I lost a chance to help them try out using that relationship. Since the rest of the class was designed to help them practice this theorem, it became important for me to prompt their memory of it at the start.

What can you do, right? Impossible to predict kids perfectly. Except that I could have prompted the Pythagorean relationship after the first example didn’t go the way I expected it to. I could have said — after I made sure that students were not going to — that this tilted square’s area could be found using Pythagorus, and then I’m sure I would have gotten more kids to play out this relationship in their minds for the rest of the string.

That’s not what happened, though, so I weakly finished the string with my own personal observation that, hey, we could’ve used PT here. The kids shrugged. OK. I pulled out a quick problem that did prompt kids to use the Pythagorean Theorem, but by then I’m not sure I had everybody on board. We finish, and kids are getting jittery. We’ve used up* whatever whole-group learning time we were going to get at the start of class, so I started problem-solving time.

* That’s definitely how I see things right now, at least. Again, I don’t know if this instinct is a good one.

Class went OK after that. But I’m still trying to figure out whether I did this right. Should I have designed the initial string differently? Should I have reacted differently?

(And, the sort of meta-question I have is what exactly it would mean for me — or any teacher — to know how to do this better. Where does that knowledge come from? Can it be shared?)

Everybody should do more mental math — mental algebra, geometry, calculus, topology, whatever — at pretty much every level of math.

Whenever you’re tempted to write comments on a student’s paper, just pick out one common issue from the class’ work and start class responding to that, somehow.

 

Stephen King taught high school English for two years:

I wasn’t having much success with my own writing, either. Horror, science fiction, and crime stories in the men’s magazines were being replaced by increasingly graphic tales of sex. That was part of the trouble, but not all of it. The bigger deal was that, for the first time in my life, writing was hard. The problem was the teaching. I liked me coworkers and loved the kids — even the Beavis and Butt-Head types in Living with English could be interesting — but by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I’d spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain. If I ever came close to despairing about my future as a writer, it was then.

“Jumper cables clamped to my brain.” I totally believe and experience this. It’s an obvious fact of my life…but is it true? Why would it be?

My work isn’t as intellectually involved as e.g. being a grad student, researcher, journalist, etc. Teachers don’t have to regularly learn new facts or disciplines. We don’t make our living as readers, writers or thinkers.

We don’t even work especially long hours. Yes, yes, endless grading. But even taking grading into account, it’s unclear to me how many extra hours we actually put in. I know, personally, that I tend to way over-estimate my out-of-work hours. I tend to count all sorts of quasi-work into the bucket, like all that time that I’m thinking about looking at student work but instead I’m writing a blog post on a Sunday night.

Grading and planning are like (to get back to King) little evil vampire children that rap on the window while we’re catching a break after a long day. Let us in, they say, you need to.

(I just finished reading Salem’s Lot which stars Matt Burke, veteran teacher, which is how I ended up down this road.)

The Bureau of Labor Services surveyed teachers and instead of asking how many hours they worked in a week, asked them how many they worked yesterday. (This includes out of school work.) The stunning results: responses amount to just under a forty-hour work week. We even, on average in this survey, work less on the weekends than a comparison groups that contains health care professionals, business and financial operations professionals, architects and engineers, community and social services professionals, managers.

I’m inclined to believe the more modest hour-estimates of the BLS, as they fit what I see in myself and colleagues at the different places I’ve taught. (I’d also say that, in the places I’ve taught, there are outlier teachers who just go nuts with work. If the BLS stuff doesn’t fit your picture, you might be such a teacher.)

But I’m also inclined to think that King’s brain wouldn’t be depleted if he were a journalist or a researcher or a bond-trader who worked till ten every night.

(Speaking of work hours and exhaustion: I read King’s Under the Dome while working fifteen-hour work days as a delivery truck driver in my summer after graduation. I’ve never been as desperate for a book as I was while working that job. That book took over my life while I was working — my wife [then girlfriend] still teases me about it. The job involved driving around campus, picking up and dropping off recycled furniture, which sort of wore me out. I was physically exhausted but mentally starving and I’d collapse in bed with that book for some of the most satisfying hours of reading I’ve experienced in my life.)

What could there be about teaching that makes it mentally exhausting? Or is this just standard working-adult exhaustion?

I can’t think of anything, which makes me wonder if Steve and I are making this up.

One thing I know about teaching, though, is that you rarely know if you’ve taught well. And that fits with what I know about writing — that it’s lonely work, done in a quiet space over long-periods of time. Unlike teaching, there are certain stone-cold ways of knowing that you’ve done good work — the acclaim of readers — but the lead-up to that moment (if it ever arrives) is the ultimate marshmallow test.

Maybe this is it: teaching exhausts us in a way that kills our willingness to write.