fun in threes, sometimes fours
education and teaching
Dear Teresa,
When I asked you today to keep track of your positive comments and negative comments throughout the day, I didn't really realize you might not be able to tell the difference. I realized this when I saw in the positive column, "Please get out of my face."
Despite what you've been told, "please" doesn't always make all the difference in the world.
With a smile,
Your Teacher
The rumbling in the district probably started long before I first started hearing about coming “new standards.” We’d just revised the state standards a few years earlier, but I’d begun teaching in the state the year the new standards went into effect, so I never had to go back and revamp plans to correspond with new standards.
“Well, I guess I’ll see what that’s like now,” was my only real concern. But I was confused: I knew little about what these “new standards” might be or whence they might come. I assumed it was the state again, fiddling eternally with the numbered guidelines that are my daily metric of effectiveness.
Last year, though, we began going through the process of shifting from old state standards to the Common Core. This meant, it turned out, decidedly more than changing standard numbers on our lesson plans. The head of English instruction in our district, in a series of workshops preparing teachers for the change, constant told us (and more importantly, showed us) how these standards would necessitate a change not only in what we teach but also in how we teach.
I did have some initial concerns over the standards, though. The English standards place high importance on what in Common Core nomenclature is known as “informational texts.” We used just to call it “nonfiction,” but somehow that’s not descriptive enough, I suppose. This is not nonfiction as in essays and biographies, though. By one definition,
informational text is:
- text whose primary purpose is to convey information about the natural and social world.
- text that typically has characteristic features such as addressing whole classes of things in a timeless way.
- text that comes in many different formats, including books, magazines, handouts, brochures, CD-ROMs, and the Internet
This includes, then, things like textbooks, pamphlets, forms, and myriad other textual forms. I’m certainly not going to suggest these things have no place in a classroom; indeed, they’re critical in the classroom. But what proportion? The Common Core suggests that by high school, students should be reading seventy percent informational texts. This means, in short, the classics are essentially gone. Only thirty percent of high school students’ reading should be fiction, and I’ve heard from a friend who is also a teacher that her principal has informed the librarian that she will receive absolutely no funding for the purchase of fiction this year.
What’s the thinking behind this? The earlier-quoted article continues by providing four reasons why these texts are so important:
we feel children should encounter more informational text in the primary grades for the reasons explained below:
- Informational text is key to success in later schooling.
- Informational text is ubiquitous in society.
- Informational text is preferred reading material for some children.
- Informational text often addresses children’s interests and questions.
It’s all a question of supposedly getting kids ready for “the real world,” where most of the texts they read are informational texts. Indeed, the first point echoes things I’ve heard in my own district about informational texts: students get to college and have difficulty reading college textbooks. They’re used to reading primarily fiction, goes the argument. This is simply ridiculous, most conspicuously for the stunningly obvious fact that high schools use textbooks, which ironically is a function of the second point about the ubiquity of informational texts.
Beyond that, though, it belies the my experience and that of everyone else I know who successfully completed college: we all made the shift from (supposedly) primarily fiction reading to mostly nonfictional texts without much difficulty. There is some truth to the claim that much of informational text in the world is argument, written to persuade, but all middle and high school curricula covered that without Common Core’s insistence on seventy-percent informational text coverage.
Yet other portions of the Common Core struck me as reasonable, even necessary. For instance, the CCS places a much higher premium on writing than other standards, and the proposed shift in assessment (via Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium) seemed more like things people do in “real life” rather than simply choosing A, B, C, or D. It involves reading resources with the aim of synthesizing something from them (often an argument). People do that all the time in their jobs, and it’s a critical skill.
I’m ashamed to admit that I never stopped to think about what political forces might have lined up behind these new standards. Somewhat like Milgram’s thirty-seven, I just did what I was told. I heard the hoopla, went to the meetings, studied the new standards, and went along with it, changing my unit plans, ditching this and that, adding that and this. Yet the more I learn about it, the more concerned I am.
The major concern right-leaning people have about the Common Core has to do with the apparent increased control it gives the federal government over education. Yet that seems to be a misplaced concern. Yet I am worried about the loss of state control over education, not to the federal government but to the private corporations that make the tests that will assess students’ and teachers’ performance with the new standards. It is, as one commentator called it, “Education without Representation.”
Another worry: we’re going headlong into these new standards and tests with very little empirical testing. All these states just seem to be jumping on the bandwagon and saying, “Hey, great idea — let’s do it!” But will these standards actually accomplish what they’re touted to accomplish? In modern education, it’s all a question of data, data, data — except in this case.
A final worry is the one that likely rolled around in the thoughts of all teachers who have spent more than a couple of years in the classroom. Educational fads come and go. Standards change and then disappear, reappear, and are reshaped. My fear is that this too will only turn out to be a fad, something that everyone gets excited palpitations about now but only appears in the footnotes of Intro to Ed books. If that is the case, a final, more politically conservative concern: think of all the tax dollars wasted in that case in this clamoring toward these new supposedly salvific standards. We could likely do some real good in the classroom for all that money.
Imagine forty-some states all adopt new standards that involve drastic realignment of what and how all English teachers runs their classes. Imagine that the standards have such a different focus on instruction that most existing state standardized testing would have to be radically changed. Imagine that the standards are in fact so different that you suspect that early and fairly complete implementation of the standards in anticipation of the changes but before the new tests are put into place (i.e., old tests taken by students taught to new standards) would result in a noticeable decrease in overall test scores. And then imagine that perhaps there are rumors swirling that it is all for naught, that it will all be rescinded. If that’s true, think of the time wasted, the tax dollars wasted, the work wasted.
Only rumors? Does it really matter?
Though I am not a mathematician, physicist, or astronomer, and though I teach words, words, words, my professional life is an orbit of numbers. Some of the numbers are relatively innocuous: attendance, school picture orders, class periods. Yet every fall I get a series of numbers that guides instructional decisions for the next months and serves as the first half of what, to some degree, is largely regarded as a metric of my effectiveness as a teacher. In the spring, students trudge back into the computer lab as they did today to take the second MAP test, and I sit at my computer, entering the various scores, hoping that each student will score higher than she did in the fall.
The fall testing regime tells me what I have to work with. There are rarely any surprises: I can often guess within three or four points what a given student will make. By the time they’ve taken the test, the students have been in my class for a month, plenty of time to figure out their strengths and weaknesses. Add to it the fact that English and math classes are grouped by ability in our county and it’s a relatively easy exercise, this “Guess My Score.”
But there are always surprises. Today, for example, student after student in one class just seemed to be scoring higher and higher. Given the fact that an average MAP reading score for an eighth grader is 220, seeing student after student score above 240 is astounding. “It’s no wonder these kids are in English I Honors, effectively skipping eight-grade English and going straight to a ninth-grade, rigorous honors course,” I thought as I punched in the numbers. I knew they would be high, but this high? Unheard of. The highest fall class average I’ve ever encountered. And then one student finished with a score of 255, just four points lower than the highest spring score I’d ever seen!
It’s much more dramatic when one knows the grade level norms for the MAP reading test.
| Grade | Fall | Spring | Growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 160 | 173 | 13 |
| 2 | 179 | 190 | 11 |
| 3 | 192 | 200 | 8 |
| 4 | 201 | 207 | 6 |
| 5 | 208 | 212 | 4 |
| 6 | 213 | 216 | 3 |
| 7 | 217 | 219 | 2 |
| 8 | 220 | 223 | 3 |
| 9 | 222 | 224 | 2 |
So the reading level of the student who scored a 255 is at least a college freshman, if not higher.
“What am I going to do with these kids?” I joked with a colleague. “They’re already scoring higher than they should at the end of ninth grade!”
“Make them your assistant teachers,” she replied.
Yet it’s not a serious problem: I just have to push them harder than usual. It would be a problem if they were mixed in with some students from other classes, because their reading level is significantly below grade level.
Later in the day, I had the opposite situation: student after student was scoring significantly below grade level. By significant, I mean a class average that, for the first twelve or thirteen students, didn’t rise above 197. Several students were scoring in the 180’s. Scroll back up and check the chart: that’s a second- or third-grade reading level. Though several students were absent from that class, I was still hopeful that by the time I entered the final scores, the average would rise above 200. But there were no scores high enough to pull the mean up, until the 223. The highest score in the class, and technically a score above average. The mean soared, rising to almost 201. I sighed in relief: it’s low, but having a sub-200 score seemed impossible. Unheard of. Then the next student finished: 186. The averaged dipped below 200 again, and stayed there until the end of testing, just two tenths of a point away from 200.
At the end of the day, I looked at the summary I’d created. Two classes drastically below average; two classes radically above. The lowest score put one student at a second-grade reading level; the highest score put another student at a college freshman or sophomore level.
“Thank goodness I don’t have them in the same class,” I thought. What could a teacher possibly do with students literally ten to twelve grade levels apart in reading? It’s essentially a return to the one-room school concept. Fortunately, I don’t have to figure out a way to solve that problem in my class, and the math teachers are equally fortunate. But social studies and science? There’s no leveling there, and so one’s class is likely to be an incredible mix of ability, motivation, and preparedness. I know there are ways to compensate for this (I have a Master’s in education, for heaven’s sake), but those techniques and tricks seem hardly up to such a challenge: they seem like they work only in theory. In practice, someone is always going to be bored, and thus someone is always going to be disruptive.
I wish I could end this with some sort of optimistic, pithy observation about the nature of education, about the malleability of the brain, about the strength of the human spirit, or some such cliche. I have answers I’ve found in books, but I don’t know how effective they are in dealing with such issues, especially when a significant portion of the challenge lies in challenging others to change their habits and behaviors.
It leaves me feeling pessimistic.
But I’ll get over it by Monday.
I saw her walking down the hall and as I always do, I shot her a smile.
She seems to need it: there’s always apathy just at the edges of her eyes, sadness just at the corners of her mouth. When she smiles, her dark cheeks set off the whites of her wide eyes and glistening teeth. She is transformed.
“You need to smile more often,” I tell her. It’s not just honey and vinegar and all that. The ability to create a positive affect is a basic skill that everyone needs to master, and when one is as gifted with physical beauty as she is, something as simple as a pleasant smile puts everyone in the room at ease. She has that advantage, and she rarely uses it. In fact, most of her peers and teachers, I believe, think she’s ambivalent to the world, lazy at best, perpetually angry at worst.
Every time I smile at her, she smiles at me. That’s progress.
So I shot her the smile, and she smiled back.
“Who else do you smile at?” I asked.
“No one,” she replied, the smile disappearing.
Heartbreaking and heartening at the same time.
I’m working with my students on how to construct an argument in general and a literary argument in particular. We’re working with single paragraphs now, slowly building to whole papers. Here’s one effort:
The character Montresor from “The Cask of Amontillado” is an untrustworthy narrator. He tries to improve his image to the reader by telling how he’d endured the “thousand injuries of Fortunato”. This is meant to give the reader the idea that Montresor has good reason for wanting to murder Fortunato. However, Montresor does not describe the injuries Fortunato apparently gave him; in fact, because the story is in first person, we don’t know if Fortunato ever even hurt him. Not only that, he lies in the actual context of the story as well; for instance, when he tells Fortunato that he “receive[s] a pipe of what passes for amontillado”. Even if he did get the amontillado, Fortunato wasn’t fortunate enough to see it. He probably lied about being a mason, too. You can see from these quotes and facts that you cannot trust Montresor.
I love teaching writing because we all see the improvement in short order.
Currently reading When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin. It's obviously influencing my listening habits as well: haven't listened to this much Zeppelin in at least twenty years. I mentioned it to a class in a "what are you reading" conversation to fill the last few minutes of class. I was shocked at the number who'd never heard of them. Needless to say, I remedied that the next day during their bell ringer with "Dazed and Confused." The next day, a petite, preppy blond asked, "Mr. Scott, can we listen to that song again?" Small victories...
Observation and inference — two totally different skills, so linked in some ways, so very different in most ways. To observe means to use one’s senses and only one’s senses. In observing, it’s what we see, what we smell, what we hear, what we taste, what we feel — and nothing else. To infer means to take those sensory stimuli and combine them then somehow go beyond them, drawing a logical conclusion based on evidence.
I don’t really recall any lessons in school about how to infer, about how to discern inferring from observing. Perhaps we had some lessons on those skills and differentiating between them, but I don’t really recall. (As if that’s any kind of proof…) Still, I teach my eighth grade students every year how the difference between inferring and observing, and one of the continuing ways I do it is to show a photograph with some statements below it, some inferences, some observations.
It might look something like this:
Are the following a) observations or b) inferences?
Students often insist that the first statement is clearly an observation. With a little prodding they realize, though, that they didn’t actually see the gentleman slip, so it’s only an inference.
“Why do you think that?” I ask.
“Because he’s on the floor, with his papers spread about in front of him, and the floor’s wet.”
“But how do you know the floor is wet?” I push further.
“Because there’s a sign about the floor being wet,” the students press incredulously.
I sketch a “Wet Floor” sign on a piece of paper and put it on the floor.
“Is this floor wet?”
“No!” comes the chorus.
“But how do you know? I mean, there’s a sign here and everything,” I continue. “Prove to me it’s not wet.” Finally one student gets up and touches the floor.
“See?” she says, showing me her dry hand, “It’s dry.”
Inferences that look like observations — how often do we confuse the two? How many disagreements do we have simply because one party thinks she’s observing and instead is inferring? I suspect most, if not all, political disagreement arises from this. One side feels it is only observing the simple facts while insisting that the other side is inferring — and inferring wrongly — from the facts, or worse, inferring based on previous inferences based on previous inferences, ad infinitum. In fact, probably most political positions are built on a long string of inferences. Understanding this might be a good first step to less acrimonious political discussions. Indeed, it might be a good first step to better relationships in general.
Dear Terrence,
I read your letter and felt it really needed a reply: you touch on a lot of issues that got me thinking, gave me hope, and honestly caused me to worry a bit.
You wrote that you “feel like people criticize [you] because of [your] past,” something which “hurts [you] to even try to change.”I don’t know what you thought I might have known about your past, but I knew nothing. I’m fairly sure the other teachers on the team knew nothing about you, either. Yet we can all accurately guess about your past because of your present. I don’t mean to be offensive or blunt, but despite your desire to change, you still exhibit a lot of behaviors that draw negative attention to yourself. I don’t know about other teachers’ rooms, but I can describe some of the things in your behavior in my room that makes it pretty clear that you’ve had a rough past in school.
You write that you want teachers to “just give [you] a chance and stop messing with [you],” but if a teacher is correcting these behaviors, she’s not “messing” with you. You must understand that some of your behaviors genuinely disrupt the class, and a teacher cannot continue teaching over disruption.
I do have some bad news, though: while no one is messing with you, you’ve made it clear what gets under your skin, and if a teacher wanted to mess with you, wanted to provoke you so that she could write you up, you’ve made it easy for that teacher (whom I hope you never meet) to do just that.
Fortunately, I have some good news, too: letters like yours make a teacher’s day. It gives us hope that perhaps we can help make a difference in students’ lives. I don’t know a single teacher–especially the teachers on our team–who won’t go out of his or her way to help a student who wants to change his/her behavior to do just that. However (and it’s a pretty big “however”), you have to show that you are really trying to make these changes. You have to show progress on a regular basis. Not big progress; not 180 degree changes overnight. But teachers need to see that you are serious about something like this. Otherwise, we’re left wondering if you’re just playing us. I’m sure you’re not, but it has been known to happen, and teachers tend to be a bit wary about that.
Here’s what I suggest you do if you really want to be a “changed man” as you so aptly called it. First, make sure you go to each teacher and say as much to him/her. Look the teacher in the eye; make sure your facial expression is pleasant; be sure not to let yourself be distracted by anything other students might be doing; then say what you said in the letter. Second, make your strongest effort to change right then. Show the teacher you mean business. Show the teacher that you are not just talking the talk but you’re trying to walk the walk. Third, when you slip up (and you will: you’re trying to change some habits that you’ve had for a long time, I suspect), apologize. Sincerely. But not right then! If you do, the teacher is likely to think you’re just trying to disrupt further. Just smile as best you can and comply. After class, you can go to the teacher and say, “I really messed up. I appreciate your patience with me. I’ll do better next time.” Finally, make sure all your friends know what you’re up to. If you’re trying to be Mr. Thug with them but Mr. Nice Guy with your teachers, you’ll get those roles mixed up and cause yourself more trouble. Be a leader: tell your friends, “Hey, I’m sick of hating school, sick of dreading school, sick of feeling like I’m wasting time. I’m going to make some changes in how I act, how I think, how I see myself and the world.” Be a leader: show other kids how to do it. They’ll follow your example, because everyone loves to see a “troubled-kid-straightens-everything-out” story. We love it, all of us.
Understand that I’ll do everything in my power to help you. I have some tricks I can teach you about making a good impression, keeping your impulses in check, and having a positive affect. (If you don’t know what that means, ask me: I’ll gladly explain.) But as I said earlier, I and all the other teachers have to see change immediately. Not enormous change, but change. Effort.
Best of luck,
Your Teacher