It’s a struggle, working with a class of students that are such a mixed bag as some of my periods. Some have never really had much success in school, and they show it with their behavior. Some have never really learned basic social skills, and they show it with their behavior. Some desperately want to learn but struggle, and they show it with their behavior.

Many times, I’ve thought (and a few times even said) that I wish students could see them as I see them, to see their behavior issues as the problems they are, to see their future as I fear I see it unless they change. How to do that though?

“I’d give a whole month’s pay” begins one such little fantasy. Let them sit in my head, as in Being John Malkovich, but see what I see as I see it. But how to do that? It is of course impossible. The closest we could come would be a numerical representation of behaviors: you do this x times per lesson; you do that y times per lesson. Data, in other words. Yet how to get that data?

Enter: a perfect solution. A silly web site and app that are not so silly after all. I’d heard of classdojo.com before, but I’d only heard of it? Why hadn’t I simply loaded it into a browser, for when I did, I immediately saw the potential.

Numbers don’t lie. I might not catch all positive actions (and that’s what I really need to focus on for this to work), but I catch enough to make it meaningful. To make it count — literally now.