The Teaching Maxims of Karl Love

My father, Karl Love, taught masterfully for 35 years in public and private schools in Oregon and Brazil.

He retired from the classroom in 1991 but it was my good fortune to teach alongside Dad at Oregon City High School during his last job. I was in my second year of teaching and felt unsure of my future in the profession. I had neither a coherent teaching philosophy nor a defined idealism. One day, I overheard Dad discussing an indifferent student with a struggling colleague. “Don’t prop up mush,” he advised. I wrote this succinct phrase down and began compiling all of Dad’s maxims on teaching because they taught me how to teach with efficiency, integrity and passion. Over the years, I kept adding to my list after each new maxim emerged from one of our many conversations on the art of teaching. To me, these maxims provided a concise and crystallizing model for dynamic and timeless teaching for any grade level. They are organic. They are in no way academic. They don’t belong to ideologues or consultants. They are utterly practical. They separate the strong teachers from the weak and my father was the most effortlessly strong teacher I have ever observed. They are not a panacea but they do inspire reflection and conversation about the craft of teaching. In 2011, I published 300 copies of a letterpress edition of The Teaching Maxims of Karl Love and sold or distributed them here and there, mostly to teachers. I have seven left. Recently, as I have spent more time with my father, and availed myself of his passion for poetry, I thought I would publish the maxims on the blog and let more people read them. In a way, they are poetry.

Disrupt the disruptor in student misbehavior scenarios.

Don’t prop up mush.

Never back a student into a corner. Always give a student a dignified way out of a confrontation. Most will take it.

Engage. Engage. Engage.

Good teaching flows from 90-percent preparation and presentation, 10-percent evaluation.

Any teacher without a coherent philosophy of teaching isn’t a teacher.

Beware of teachers who are martyrs.

Put your best energy into the show.

Gadgets don’t teach. Teachers teach.

There is no substitute for a teacher in love with their subject, in front of their students.

Quote: (To students) I will never waste your time.

(Borrowing from Confucius) It is immoral to teach a child who doesn’t want to learn, but every child wants to learn something.

Weak teachers need canned discipline systems.

Weak teachers issue detentions.

Teachers who issue detentions should administer them.

Quote: (To students) I have only one rule: We respect each other.

The principal should be the best teacher in the building.

Always rig a classroom for success. Enable every student to enjoy genuine success. Do not contrive phony success.

Occasionally give students the impression that something extraordinary happened randomly in the classroom, when in fact, the teacher orchestrated it behind the scenes.

Keep your room clean. Make the custodian’s job easy.

Never talk disparagingly about colleagues in front of other students. Never allow students to talk disparagingly about colleagues in front of you.

Good teachers are never bored.

All I need is piece of chalk and a slate and I can teach.

Never argue with a kid.

When a faculty meeting begins turning to shit, go into your creative mind.

Never use profanity in the presence of a student.

A good teacher never really leaves the job behind.

If you’re not exhausted at the end of a teaching day, you haven’t taught.

Learn to sample grade.

If you teach more than two periods of the same course during a day, teach all of them differently.

I don’t care if a kid comes in naked or has green hair. I will not judge him. I will teach him.

Want to improve public education? Choose the five worst teachers everyone in the building knows are the worst and have them shot at an assembly.

A well-written test will teach as well as evaluate.

If you can’t get fired up for the first day of school, quit.

If you don’t want to be the teacher a student never forgets, get out.

Avoid the purple flood (a reference to the old ditto machines).

Worksheets are for losers.

Good teachers never post rules.