Who is Teacher, Teacher?
What the world needed: another Substack written by a teacher!. Yay.
I’m Matt Brady, and I’ve been a public school (science) teacher for 15 years.
It hasn’t been a quiet 15 years, but I’m sure no stretch of 15 years in public education could ever be called “quiet.” I’ve seen my classroom tech move from an overhead projector (I still miss you, Cyclops) to Chromebooks one-to-one, from elaborate pulley systems to demonstrate simple machines to being pushed on to “learning apps” that gamify the content and strip it of a lot of meaning.
I’ve seen the larger institution react to the charter and homeschool push and to the idea that teachers who question the status quo should be pushed out of the job, and have seen school board members say some really, really uninformed and bizarre things during the COVID-19 pandemic. I’ve seen “research-supported” and “data-driven” go from being quasi-religious mantras and foundations of any action or policy to punchlines.
I’ve seen phones show up and be treated like curiosities by schools and then be treated like learning partners. Now, their masks are fully pulled off, revealing the smaller distraction and chaos engines (and enemies of education, free will, critical thinking, teen mental health etc., etc.) that they are.
It’s been a ride.
I’ve been celebrated, and I’ve been in trouble (protip: if there are ever two principals in a room and you were only expecting one, you’re in trouble). I’ve gotten big grants to do crazy things and been told I need to spend my money to buy vinegar for a lab. I’ve come early, stayed late, worked on schoolwork well past reasonable hours at home (and on weekends and holidays), and celebrated snow days with the glee of a 6-year-old.
I think it’s been pretty much what any public school teacher would call a normal experience.
Revelations
After about ten years in, I realized two things:
I have at least double the classroom experience than any of the administrators who evaluate me, and I know more about classroom teaching than they ever would.
I finally felt like I knew what I was doing.
I came into education laterally when there was a push to bring people into the “real world.” Before starting to teach, I’d co-founded Newsarama.com, a comic book (and way more) website. It was a thing. Before that, I spent five years working on my PhD. in Physiology and Pharmacology, and before that, I earned a Master’s of Science in Marine Biology. Oh, and before that, I majored in Biology.
None of which explains why I teach Physics and Chemistry, but here we are.
I have a few passion hats that I wear and bug everyone about in the larger education space, and you’ll hear about them all in time:
Pop culture in the STEM classroom. Since day one, I have been using it to bridge the gap between me (a white dude, solidly entrenched in middle age) and my students (I started at a Title 1 school and now am at a Tech & Academic Magnet). I can talk about this until I’m blue in the face.
Storytelling as a teaching method. It’s related to that one up there but is broader. I’ll talk about that for sure coming up. I’ll talk about it a lot.
Doing real-world science research in the STEM classroom. It’s much easier than you may think and teaches students invaluable lessons. True, some are about how boring research can be sometimes, but that’s an important lesson as well.
Teaching in a post-pandemic world. What’s changed? Everything. Who knows what’s changed the best? Teachers. Not administrators or chair-warmers at the district offices. Who is listened to the least? Teachers. This is where I get into a lot of…I call them disagreements, but I hear other people call them fights.
Phone-free schools. For me, this spilled out of the Post-Pandemic World stuff, but it's my current passion and cause. In fact, my first four (I know, I can’t believe it either) will be about my journey to get my phone or district to go phone-free and how, in the end, I had to settle for most of my classroom.
What’s Going to Be in Teacher, Teacher?
We’re going to find out together.
As I said, the first four (and they’ll come in as daily installments to get things rolling) will be all about going phone-free. After that, I want to talk about post-pandemic kids.
After that? We’ll see what in my notebooks grabs my attention. Things like unsolicited advice for beginning teachers, management, EdTech talk, advice I wish I had received, classroom engagement, advice to teachers who are seeing the admin track as their way out of the classroom (and one of the few ways to make more money in public education), some memoir stuff, reactions to ed policy news, and a lot more.
I promise it won’t be boring. I’m hoping for a baseline of amusing and hopefully go up from there. After all, like every teacher, I’ve got opinions. Some of them are strongly held and wildly unpopular (I don’t make friends when I refer to football games as “Concussion Friday Night”), so hopefully, there will be interesting things in here, enough to keep you coming back and sharing.
Speaking of sharing, this is Substack, so please smash that subscribe button below, and Teacher, Teacher will appear in your email inbox like magic. Things kick off later today with part 1 of me trying to get my school to go phone-free.
And - one last indulgence—I’m putting this here for me, but I’ve never run into anyone who’s heard Frank talk about this and not feel a spark down deep inside themselves. It’s An Invocation for Beginnings. Everything he says, I’m feeling right now.
Okay - if you made it this far, yes, the title of this Substack is shamelessly taken from the .38 Special song, “Teacher, Teacher,” from the 1984 movie, “Teachers,” and the logo was inspired by the movie poster. It’s a great song and a terrific movie. Watch it if you haven’t. It’s 40 years old but could have been filmed last year at virtually any public school—with better resolution.
We’re all Nick Nolte at this point. Or Richard Mulligan.
See you soon.