No More Molasses Classes

"America's Educator" Ron Clark, author of "The End of Molasses Classes," talks about how to banish boredom from the classroom, make teaching a desirable profession (again), and what to do when you don't like your kid's teacher.

"I  never envisioned myself teaching," says Ron Clark. The first in his family to graduate from college (with a degree in history), Clark followed that up with backpacking around the globe and jumping from one odd job to another. Then, he "got food poisoning in Romania and flew home to North Carolina, recuperating in the hospital." Clark describes his various adventures up until then -- or misadventures, as his mother might have said -- as including everything from streaking across the football field in college to hiding in the oven during a game of hide-and-seek on a shift at Dunkin' Donuts. Next up, at that time: "a run down the Great Wall of China."

But his "distraught" parents convinced him otherwise. "My mama just lost it," he describes. "She said that at a local school, a teacher had just passed away and if I didn't go teach those kids, they were going to have substitute teachers every day for the rest of the year. I didn't want to do it, but she told me that if I didn't at least go and talk to the principal, she'd never support anything I did ever again. So I went to the school. During my visit one student asked, 'Is you going to be our new teacher?'

"I sort of fell into it, and have loved it ever since."

From Reluctant to Exuberant

When he began his teaching career, Clark felt appalled by the blatant lack of enthusiasm and dreary environment in the classroom. He became committed to helping his kids feel energized by the learning material instead of bored or underwhelmed. It wouldn't be at all unusual to see Clark excitedly leap up on a desk during a lecture, or to change around the lyrics to Rihanna's hit "Umbrella" in an effort to teach long division.

Since his days as a newbie fifth-grade teacher in South Carolina, Clark went on to spend time teaching in Harlem and later to found The Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta, a private, nonprofit school for fifth- through eighth-grade students.

Today, Clark is a New York Times-bestselling author, was named Disney's American Teacher of the Year in 2000, has been featured on Oprah,
The Today Show, and CNN, and has even been the subject of a film, The Ron Clark Story (2006), starring Matthew Perry. After publishing his first two books, The Essential 55, and The Excellent 11, Clark debuted a third book, The End of Molasses Classes: Getting Our Kids Unstuck -- 101 Extraordinary Solutions for Parents and Teachers, last summer. We sat down with Clark to talk not only about his teaching philosophy, but what parents can do to enhance their child's education at home.

For parents unfamiliar with your books or philosophy, what exactly are "molasses classes"?

A: Classes where kids don't have a spark. They don't have a passion for learning. There's no energy. The teacher is either sitting at her desk or standing still in front of the classroom lecturing. There's no movement, there's no excitement, there's no laughter, there's no joy. Kids aren't sitting on the edge of their seats, excited about what they're learning. Their heads are down, they're slouched over, they're leaning back, and there's just no light or love of education in the classroom.

Unfortunately, as I travel, I see classes like that all of the time. There's no urgency and the lessons are being taught with a focus on the kids who either aren't achieving or are barely meeting standards. No one's really pushing the lessons to the kids who are achieving standards. I think in our country we assume the higher achieving kids are doing okay because they "already know it," but shouldn't we instead be saying, "They already know it, can we push them to learn something else?"

How do you get teachers to instill a "spark" in the classroom if materials are older or the school faces budget cuts?

A: Well, one way would be to make teachers feel a little more appreciated. I've traveled all over the country in every state to talk to educators and I always hear them talking about how they don't feel appreciated or respected. They feel that parents don't understand the work that they're doing, and that our society as a whole doesn't understand the work of a teacher. You always hear, "Oh, teachers, they have a thankless job," and it's the truth, because it's the hardest job.

As parents, you should be going out of your way to show your child's educators that you appreciate them. Do kind things for them, whether it's sending them food, buying them gifts, or simply sending a card or a nice email of thanks. Little things like that really mean a lot. Parents should really just do all they can to uplift and support teachers. It helps.

Something we can do as a society, of course, is to pay teachers more. If teachers were paid more, then college graduates would consider the profession more strongly. In the United States, we're obviously not ranked at the top in education. We tend to hover in the range of 17-25th. Countries that do the best have the top third of their college graduates going into education. The problem is, we have the bottom third of our college graduates going into education on average. We have those who aren't quite performing as well as they need to. We're losing our brightest minds to the fields of medicine and law, and other fields, which are amazing -- but the problem is in education. We're not pulling from the best and the brightest. If we pay educators more, we can go on to recruit better ones.