He taught and blogged for thousands — retiring teacher shares his wisdom
Larry Ferlazzo is retiring after over 20 years of teaching
July 21, 2025
Larry Ferlazzo is retiring this year after teaching social studies and English classes for 22 years at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento. He’s long been a teacher of English learners and new immigrant students. He has also written 10 books for teachers and maintains a popular blog and a column for teachers, where he shares resources and tips.
At 65, Ferlazzo said he wants to retire while “on top.” He said he didn’t want to be the guy everybody says should have retired years ago. He’s co-writing another book called “The Better Teacher’s Toolbox.” He also plans to volunteer as a teacher in a juvenile hall and help accompany immigrants to asylum hearings.
Here are some of his words of wisdom as he departed.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
When did you first become a teacher?
Halfway through my teacher credentialing program, I was a student teacher, and one of the teachers went out on medical leave, so they hired me to take over her class. As anybody who has ever been in that situation knows, when you come in for a popular teacher, students think you killed the prior teacher, that you are responsible for them leaving. It was a rough day and a rough semester, but it prepared me for the next 22 years because nothing could be harder than that semester.
And you spent the next 22 years at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento?
It was a great fit. I was particularly interested in teaching new immigrants, and Burbank was in the area where Hmong immigrants came from the last refugee camp that was closed in Laos that year. So it was a great opportunity. How often can a high school teacher teach an entire class of students who had never been in school before? I spent two years with the same group of Hmong students for several periods a day, and I’m still connected to many of them.
An influential teacher and author shares lessons from 23 years in the classroom
July 24, 2025
Probably about 40% of our school’s students are ELLs (English language learners). And it challenged me to learn about cultures, learn about how to be a trauma-informed teacher, because so many of our immigrants came from traumatic events and now are suffering in terms of being fearful of family members being deported.
What are some of the things teachers need to know about English learners?
ELL students are as smart, if not smarter, than everybody else. They just don’t know English yet. They may know multiple languages. In many cases, my students know three or four different languages.
June 30, 2025
Good ELL teaching strategies are better teaching strategies for everybody. If you speak a little slower, if you have captions on videos, and maybe have them at 25 percent slower, if you use graphic organizers, that makes the content more accessible for everybody, not just ELLs.
Can you share a memory of something that happened in the classroom that changed the way you taught?
Students were writing an argument essay explaining what they thought was the worst natural disaster to experience. And there was a student, we’ll call him John, who had his head down on the desk. And I knew that he liked football, so I said, “John, if you don’t want to write about natural disasters, why don’t you just use the argument essay outline to write about what you think is the best football team in the NFL?”
He looked at me and said, “I could do that?”
I said, “Yeah, just follow the guidelines of that argument essay.” And he did. He wrote a passable argument essay. Later that week, his mother was coming to school for a meeting and she came to my classroom with tears in her eyes and said it was the first essay that he had ever written in his whole school career.
I think what that taught me is the importance of keeping our eyes on the prize. What do we really want students to learn? It really didn’t matter if he wrote about the natural disasters. That wasn’t the focus. The focus was developing writing skills about an argument essay. He was a much more engaged student the rest of the year.
What’s your advice to new teachers?
One, build relationships. Get to know your students. It’s hard to differentiate. It’s hard to create lessons if you don’t know what your students’ interests are, what their dreams are, what their hopes are, and what their challenges are. So get to know them.
Two, show patience. These are kids, right? And kids don’t necessarily think before they do things. There aren’t bad students. There are just good students who have bad days or bad weeks, and in some situations, bad months.
You have a video about how to think about students’ defiance as an asset instead of a deficit. Can you talk about that?
A number of years ago, I read this study about fast food. Instead of trying to lecture students about the nutritional problems behind it, the focus was on the manipulative tools and advertising that corporations did to get them to eat the stuff. Teaching students about that had a dramatic impact on their diet. So I think that’s what I’ve always tried to do.
July 7, 2025
It’s that adolescent defiance; they don’t want anybody telling them what to do. So on food, on advertising, on alcohol, on sports betting, instead of lecturing to them about the morality of it, asking them, “How do they feel about being manipulated?” And I’ve used that in terms of classroom management when students would be getting into conflict with each other, I’d say, “This guy knows what triggers you. Do you really want to be controlled by him?”
The Trump administration is making changes that have big impacts on public education. How can teachers, parents and students cope with these changes?
One of the things that I always try to do is enhance students’ sense of agency and the idea of feeling that they can have some control over their life. At the same time, we want to help students understand that they don’t have total control over what happens in their lives, that there are oppositional forces to their sense of agency that they have to be prepared to combat. And I think one of the things that teachers need to do is prepare students with the tools to be active participants in public life.
In my years, students decided they wanted to organize informational forums on immigration questions, or they wanted to organize to get more halal food in the school cafeteria.
What will you miss from teaching?
The students. They can bring annoying to entirely new levels, but they can say the same about me. They’re a lot of fun, and I’ve always enjoyed learning from them and being with them and the challenge of trying to engage them in learning.
There’s a group of eight or nine former students who contacted me last year and invited me out to lunch, and they want to make it an annual occurrence. There’s no greater honor a teacher can have than if former students want to spend time with you socially.
