Project management and teaching middle school

The NYT has a great article (free registration) on the challenges faced by middle-school teachers in the US. I can identify with the article as my mom is a high-school teacher in India and I have heard similar stories. Kids will be the same everywhere...

From the article, there was one particular characteristic of successful teachers that I can directly correlate to great project managers.

From the article... (emphasis is mine)
“You have to have a huge sense of humor and a small ego,” said Jason Levy, the principal of Intermediate School 339 in the Bronx. “There are some people who are born to do it and some who learn to do it, and there are some people who really shouldn’t do it.”

So lets look at this "small ego" aspect. The small ego here is not that you think less of yourself. Instead, it comes about when you know yourself fully well, and are aware of your abilities (and their limits). From this awareness comes a kind of calm confidence. This is the confidence that allows you to handle people with diametrically opposite viewpoints as you know fully well that you will be able to finally steer them to your point of view. This is the confidence that allows you to handle people with different behavior types because you realize that you really don't care about how they behave since you know that you will be able to get your point of view across and get something done your way. And this is the confidence that gives you the humility to accept that you might be wrong some of the time and acknowledge it when that happens.

Ultimately when you think about it, this confidence allows you to persuade rather than force other people into your point of view. Other people's perception of your ego is predominantly based on this factor and that's why people who are genuinely confident and secure in themselves appear to have small egos.

But this is not the only trait for great project managers. In addition to this, you need to -
-- Have a special insight in the field you are in. If not, you are simply a manager and not a leader
-- Be able to recognize and hire great people; Preferably people better than yourself
-- Be able to gain the respect of your team; Thru your insight and your "small ego"


Since the article might be archived behind NYT's walled gardens pretty soon, here is a short but relevant excerpt...
When a student at Seth Low Intermediate School loudly pronounced Corinne Kaufman a “fat lady” during a fire drill one recent day, Mrs. Kaufman, a 45-year-old math teacher, calmly turned around.

“Voluptuous,” she retorted, then proceeded to define the unfamiliar term, cutting off the laughter and offering a memorable vocabulary lesson in the process.

Such are the survival skills Mrs. Kaufman has acquired over 17 years at Seth Low, a large middle school in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn: How to snuff out brewing fistfights before the first punch is thrown, how to coax adolescents crippled by low self-esteem into raising their hands, how to turn every curveball, even the biting insult, into a teachable moment.

But not all middle school teachers can do it.

Faced with increasingly well-documented slumps in learning at a critical age, educators in New York and across the nation are struggling to rethink middle school, particularly in cities, where the challenges of adolescent volatility, spiking violence and lagging academic performance are more acute.

As they do so, they are running up against a key problem: a teaching corps marked by high turnover, and often lacking expertise in both subject matter and the topography of the adolescent mind.

The demands of teaching middle school show up in teacher retention rates. In New York City, the nation’s largest school system, middle school teachers account for 22 percent of the 41,291 teachers who have left the school system since 1999 even though they make up only 17 percent of the overall teaching force, according to the United Federation of Teachers.

In Philadelphia, researchers found that 34.2 percent of new middle school teachers in one representative year quit after their first year, compared with 21.1 percent of elementary school teachers and 26.3 percent of high school teachers.

“There was a lot more anger and outbursts,” Christian Clarke, 29, a Bronx high school teacher, recalled of the students he encountered during his four years teaching middle school. “Twice as much time was spent on putting out fires; twice as much time was spent getting the class quiet. Twice as much time was spent on defusing anger in the kids.”

A good middle school teacher needs to know how to channel such anger into class work, and whether inappropriate questions like “Are you gay?” (as a Seth Low student recently asked her math teacher) merit serious discussion or feigned deafness.

“You have to have a huge sense of humor and a small ego,” said Jason Levy, the principal of Intermediate School 339 in the Bronx. “There are some people who are born to do it and some who learn to do it, and there are some people who really shouldn’t do it.
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Rest of the article here