The Teacher Version of Click and Clack

11.11.09 By Neema Avashia

This morning, on my “day off”, I woke up to a text message from my colleague Amy. “Call me when you get up,” it said. Amy is just back from maternity leave, and trying to navigate the challenging waters of motherhood and teacherhood, so I called her, and spent the better part of an hour talking her through lesson plans and seating charts. While I was on the phone with Amy, my friend Sarah called to consult about the performance evaluations she’s writing for the social workers that she supervises in BPS schools. While I was talking to Sarah, my sister left a message asking me to call her back to help her with writing criteria for success and designing assessments for the pediatric residency program in Texas where she is a faculty member. During all of these phone conversations, I was also managing text messages from former students, trying to formulate a plan for picking them up and getting them over to Charlestown to be part of the documentary that some friends and I are making…

And this was all before 11:30 in the morning on my day off!

Lately, I’ve taken to joking that I often feel like an education call center. I sign into my gmail, and former residents from the History methods course I teach for BTR message me to get advice about lesson plans. I spend a good couple of hours a week on the phone walking new teachers through the paces of planning, management, and initiation into the quirks of the profession. And there’s email, and face-to-face conversations, with colleagues both at my school and across the city, which happen more often than I can count.

The thing is, I love being able to provide people with the sounding board, and the resources, that they need to better teach their students. It’s one of ways in which I feel like I can support more kids in BPS than just the ones in my classroom. And it’s pretty cool to feel like I’ve been at this work long enough now to actually have ideas to offer, rather than always just being the one asking, as I spent a lot of my first years in teaching asking questions, asking for resources, asking my way into being a good teacher.

So I’ve been toying with a new idea. A radio show modeled off “Car Talk” (one of my favorites), where people call in with their teaching-related questions, and I alternate between making fun of them, and helping them! I think I’d call it “Chalk Talk.” Can’t you picture it? “My student is continually making this tap-tap-tap-tap sound in class. What can I do about it?”

I guess you would have to be a Car Talk fan to fully understand (listen to NPR!), and I doubt NPR is going to pick up my show idea and run with it anytime soon, but in the meantime, I’ll continue to play call center for my beloved community of educators in this city, and try to come up with a name that beats “Click” or “Clack”.