education and teaching

Busted

Thursday 29 October 2009 | 0 Comments

Reading over student work, I find a sentence that troubles me: it has a maturity that belies its author. I continue reading, and within a few moments, I'm pulling out the laptop and Googling the suspect sentence: it's lifted directly from Wikipedia. With a sigh, I write "See me" at the top of the paper, underlining it emphatically.

Dealing with plagiarism is one of my absolute least favorite duties as a teacher; it's especially tough when it's a student I really like, a student who is sensible and gives every impression of being a conscientious student.

Plagiarism is a sin that is hard to treat evenly. Is unintentional plagiarism as bad as intentional? Is malicious plagiarism ("He'll never catch on, the oldÂ doddering fool.") worse plagiarism motivated by laziness or procrastination?

As I'm reading, and I begin to grow concerned about the authenticity of a particular essay or poem, I find myself tensing up. A brier patch of issues awaits, and it's seldom a pleasant experience.

Celuacy for non-Poles, is a grade above an "A". It signifies mastery of a subject accompanied by superior extra-curricular work.

On one occasion, though, a young lady of supreme character managed not only to avoid losing respect but managed to increase it. She was a student in Poland, and she worked hard to have celuacy ("excellent") in as many classes as she could. She turned in a journal that was clearly plagiarized. (With English learners, it's easier to discover copied work, for obvious reasons.) I spoke to her about it, asking her why she'd done it.

"I just didn't understand that we weren't supposed to copy."

A lame excuse, but she had so endeared herself to me (to all teachers) with her hard work and dedication that I put off the inevitable. "Well, I'll think about how we can handle this; my standard policy, though, has always been to give a failing grade for plagiarism." She said nothing, but she was clearly upset.

The next day, she approached me. "I've been thinking about it," she began, impressing me with her correct use of the present perfect continuous tense. "I should have known better. I want you to give me a zero."

I did, but I made sure she had plenty of opportunity to offset that zero and maintain her high average.

She did.

Every time I've had to deal with plagiarism since then, I've hoped for such a response. So far, no luck.

Maybe tomorrow.

Outsourcing

Tuesday 13 October 2009 | 1 Comment

For the first several months of L’s life, K and I could be fairly sure that everything she knew was something we’d taught her, directly or indirectly. Sometimes she would imitate us with prompting, sometimes without. There were few moments that prompted comments of “Where’d she get that?” and the like.

When she started spending time with other kids and adults at daycare, the gradual shift began. Slowly she picked up as much at daycare as at home; then, daycare overtook us.

Now she comes home with songs we’ve never heard:

Twinkle, twinkle traffic light…
Red means stop
Green means go
Yellow means very, very slow

She comes home with skills we haven’t touched on: tracing numbers and letters is the most recent.

These things come from the teacher, who told K this morning during the first of many parent-teacher conferences, that L is a “good old-fashioned girl” with good manners and a strong sense of right and wrong.

Other things come from friends. Brooke taught her how to swing by herself.

She’s growing more and more independent.

Now, she knows she can get her information from other sources, that she’s not dependent on us mentally any more than she is physically.

Which, in reality, is still quite comforting: still many years to go. It comes in mercifully slow steps.

Shock and Disbelief

Wednesday 07 October 2009 | 3 Comments

In preparing to read the dramatization of Anne Frank’s diary, I spent some time going over the Holocaust with students. I was taken aback at how little they seemed to know about it. “A bunch of people — I think they were Jews — got killed” seemed to be the general view. They do know something about it now, but their questions revealed both how complicated and unfathomable such an act is.

Most common was, “Why did they hate Jews?” Why indeed? Many answers, none of them short and simple. I offered a few: notions of Jewish conspiracies; Jews as “Christ killers” and the old blood libel; the fact that there are a substantial number of Jews in banking (which is directly traceable to early Christians’ reluctance to engage in usury) as proof of some international Jewish conspiracy. All those explanations in turn (which is why I was silent about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion).

As I spoke, though, and showed pictures and short clips of survivors, it was almost eerie how closely they paid attention. Any noise brought immediate shushing, and the look of shock on everyone’s face told me that there is at least one thing they’ll remember from their time with me.

This Is a Test

Thursday 01 October 2009 | 1 Comment

I gave three of my four classes a test a few days ago. It's worthy of comment because I so rarely give tests. In fact, I despise giving tests. It's true that they're a relatively quick way to assess student understanding, but our school district has such a regimen of standardized tests and tests from other teachers that I seem always inclined to find alternative methods of assessment.

Recently, our state mandated yet another standardized test for eighth graders. We now take the MAP (Measure of Academic Progress), ITBS (Iowa Test of Basic Skills), Explore, and PASS (Palmetto Assessment of State Standards) tests. Additionally, students who elect to pay the fee can take the PSAT test. Each of these tests require multiple days to complete, and so we have thirteen testing days built into the 180-day calendar (not including the day it takes for the PSAT).

When teachers complain that their students are drowning in an acronymic sea of standardized testing, this is precisely what they mean. When states complain that their schools are underfunded, these tests represent a significant expenditure.

What are these tests for? What is taxpayers' money buying?

The PASS test is the assessment used for NCLB (No Child Left Behind) compliance. It's a new test, replacing the PACT (Palmetto Something-or-other Challenge Test or something like that) at the start of the 2008/9 school year.

Because it's a new test, there are additional costs as the first year's results are audited to determine cut-off points for the achievement standards. This in itself is problematic for me, because it underscores the arbitrary nature of any standardized test. Once the results were in, test administrators began analyzing the scores to determine what score should be the thresholds for the Exemplary/Met/Not-Met standards. And what standard did they use to determine those standards? Did they perform basic statistical analysis that showed X% scored within some range, Y% scored within another range, and Z% within yet another and then used those numbers as the thresholds? If so, that would only measure future test takers against the first year's results. Surely there must be an objective standard, right?

The MAP test is administered twice, at the beginning and end of the school year. It is just what the name implies: a measure of the progress of individual students in the school year. It's useful for teachers to see how much progress individual students have made; it's useful for administrators to determine how much progress the teacher has made. Of all the tests, this has the most practical application.

The ITBS is a measure of basic skills. I'm not sure its purpose. We get attractive printouts that we send home. That's about all I use it for.

The Explore test is the newest addition. It is, as far as I can determine, a pre-ACT test. Useful, I suppose. For all students in eighth grade? I'm not so sure.

We began taking the Explore test today; we'll finish up during the first half of tomorrow. The one heartening aspect of the test: at least one student wondered aloud about the impact so much testing was having on his education.

Getting to Know Them

Wednesday 30 September 2009 | 0 Comments

Donald Graves, in A Fresh Look at Writing, suggests a deceptively easy pen-and-paper method to gauge one’s familiarity with students. After creating a three-column table for a given class, begin writing students’ names in the left-hand column and including information about interests (especially academic) and not-quite-obvious personality traits in the middle. The third column is to indicate whether that has been specifically confirmed by the student.

Doing it all from memory should show how well a teacher knows his students. It also shows the students a teacher enjoys and worries about most (the first listed) and the students who are not immediately noticeable in the classroom (those listed last and/or forgotten).

I tried it mentally immediately after reading Graves. There is only one excuse for how insufficiency and insignificance of my list: it’s still very early in the year. It looked something like this (names changed, of course):

Samuel	Enjoys talking with friends; plays The Godfather like a master but has never seen the film	âˆš
Justine	Plays violin; switched piano violin .	âˆš
Andrew	Likes eating hot food	âˆš
Susan	Shy; admittedly tends to think of herself as inferior to many others in her class	âˆš
Janet	Likes dancing

It continued on like this for another five or six students.

I learned that I still know nothing terribly significant about anyone in that class. I have given myself a mandate: learn more about these students by the month’s end.

Yet how? The opportunities to have a genuine conversation with students are few. Certainly one could simply spend class time talking to some of them, during student conferences and such, but that’s not always the most efficient method, not to mention it being a particularly ineffective use of class time.

A few of the ideas I have begun implementing:

In the hallway between classes. Because our school uses the team-teaching model, students stay in the same area of the hall throughout most of the day. They have the time to chat with each other, so they have the time to chat with me.
In lunch lines. There’s always a long line of students waiting to get their lunch. They chat with each other, and it’s a good, non-academic environment for conversation.
In the hallway, on the way to the library/lunchroom/computer lab/etc. While I require my students to remain silent as we walk along, I break my own rule and chat with one or two of them quietly. Perhaps it’s unfair, but as a colleague tells students, “I earned a college degree to get this privilege.”
During fire drills. Once we get the students outside and counted, there’s always a few minutes before we’re called back into the building.

The single best way to get to know students, though, is through a journal assignment. I have one class writing a thrice-weekly journal, and I learn more about the students in ten minutes of reading than I could ever learn in 180 days of teaching. This girl runs cross country; that boy enjoys using Google’s Sketch Up; she has a talkative father; he has a talkative mother. I walk into class the next day and see a whole person rather than a 50-minute sliver.

Teaching Writing

Tuesday 15 September 2009 | 0 Comments

Teaching writing means reading things like this

The crowd looks like a box of crayons with their colorful shirts on to support their favorite school.
The most magnificent and wonderful part of day is the night that takes us within. It gives you your dreams and time to think about the day that trailed behind you.
I ask my mom. “I’m too busy at the moment. How about later?” Knowing that later will be near 7 PM, I slither back to my room.

How can you not smile when gems like this are scattered through student writing? Evaluating each assignment becomes a treasure hunt.

Pushing Buttons

Wednesday 09 September 2009 | 5 Comments

"Buttons, Arduino & unsped shield" by musicalgeometry on Flickr

Many of my students expose their emotional buttons and switches freely and openly. Within a few minutes of meeting some of them, I can tell what their sensitivities are.

"How many administrative referrals did you get last year?" I ask some of them, with a smile that I hope says, "I'm not trying to size you up -- I'm just curious."

"A lot," a girl -- call her Ann -- responds.

"Did you notice my question?" I query. "I didn't ask, 'Did you receive any referrals?' but rather 'How many did you get?' I'll bet you got several of those referrals because you simply walked away from a teacher who was saying something you didn't want to hear."

I have her attention: she's curious, and that's always a good thing.

"How could you tell?" Ann asks.

With their posture, gait, tone and volume of voice, many of these kids speak loads without saying a word. Yet they're totally unaware of it. Of more concern is that they're unaware that others are aware of it and can use it against them.

"When you advertise what 'makes' you lose control," I explain, "You provide others with ammunition. The teacher who doesn't like you at that moment knows: 'All I have to do is push a little harder and she'll definitely give me something to write up.' You let others know your weakness and they might use them against you." I pause for a moment, deciding to use a bit of vernacular: "Then who got played? Who got owned?"

"Me," she says meekly.

I have these little conversations after class with the kids that would be labeled "at risk" because they are at risk: they're in danger of becoming slaves to their own impulses and the people who can pick up on those signals and use them.

Occasionally, there are moments that illustrate that they are indeed beginning to pick up on the signals they give off. They are aware that others can only "make them" mad if they allow it by advertising their sensitivities and reacting predictably.

This afternoon, while students were waiting for their buses, I was joking with a young man that I could probably get him in a state that would end in a disciplinary referral for him. We'd been joking with each other all class about such things, and he stridently denied that I could "push his buttons."

"How about you," I ask the boy's neighbor. "Do you think you have advertised what gets you hot? Do you think I could push your buttons and get you furious in just a few moments in class" He shrugs his shoulders.

I turn to Ann, always one of the last students waiting for her bus. "I'll bet I could get you." I know I can: I already have, inadvertently. The question -- the hope -- appears in my mind: "Will she own up to it?"

"You already have, Mr. S." Her grin is an odd combination of devilish delight and sheepish vulnerability.

I smile. "Do you think I could do it again if I tried? I won't ever try, but if I were to try, what do you think?"

She shrugs her shoulders and looks away. For just a moment, though, her eyes say, "I don't think so. At least I hope not." A first step -- an admission of ownership and of personal responsibility.

"One small step for man..." I think, as the students leave for the bus. I glance down at the roll book and see four more names that need to have such a brief moment of self-confidence in their ability to control their lives.

"I'll start on him next week," I mumble.

It's all part of the growing realization I'm having about working with these "tough" kids. The cliche is spot on: they don't care what I know until they know that I care. And they're beginning to know that I care because with me, it's not business as usual in the discipline department. The etymology of "discipline" includes notions of teaching, not notions of punishing, and I try to put that into practice in the classroom.

Confusion

Saturday 05 September 2009 | 0 Comments

Some weeks seem intent on confusing the sense out me. Students say things that literally leave me speechless, wondering whether or not the kid is joking. Parents and pundits around the land fall into spasms of paranoia about a presidential speech intended to encourage students to take their studies seriously. An odd, high-pitched whistle begins drifting into the house through the back windows at various times during the week leaving everyone wondering what the devil that sound could be.

A long weekend away from all the confusion and nonsense hopefully will help. At the very least, L will experience and hopefully enjoy her first camping trip.

Journals

Thursday 03 September 2009 | 0 Comments

How does one keep a journal? It’s something I’ve done for so long that I no longer even think about it. And yet when you’re starting out, doing it on command–and for a grade, no less–then it might seem a little intimidating.

“Three hundred words, three times a week,” I said. “About anything.”

“Anything?” the students ask incredulously.

“Yes, anything.”

“Anything” is an awfully big topic. So big it could be overwhelming. I understand their concerns.

One thing I mentioned was writing about school work and projects. I need to tell them, “You should think of a journal as a place where you simply think aloud.” Perhaps that will help. “It’s a place where you can think through the Lord of the Flies project or tease out all the reasons you don’t really like So-and-so, or where you can simply play with language.

“Here language, fetch.”

Students tend to question the value of it, especially when I tell them that I won’t be reading each journal in its entirety. “Then why write it?”

“Writing is just like any other activity: the more you do it, the better you get.”
Some buy it, some don’t.

Fork

Friday 28 August 2009 | 0 Comments

It's a famous riddle: You stand at a fork in the road. One road leads to happiness; the other leads to sorrow. You don't know which is which. At the fork stand two men. One always tells the truth; the other always lies. You don't know which is which. You're allowed one question to determine which road to choose. What do you ask?

The intricacies of the riddle concern me less than the general theme: a life-changing moment, with two, diametrically opposite outcomes.

As a middle school teacher, I often encounter kids standing at just such an intersection. Generally, they don't realize this, and the ones who do will probably ask the right questions in life.

Of the ones who haven't yet realized that every moment offers decisions that can change the outcome of the rest of their lives, there are three varieties.

The first give every indication that all will be well with them. This is not to say they're all studious and hard working. Indeed, many are not--as many of us were at thirteen. Still, there's something about how they carry themselves that speaks to their future success.

The second group is a mystery. Truth be told, they usually turn out alright too, but they're just not giving the clear signs yet. They're not giving any signs yet, and that's fine. They're thirteen.

The third group is the group that haunts me. I see them and it's difficult for me to imagine them making many good choices in life because it's hard to see them making choices, period.

And not to choose in this case is a choice.

It's not that they lack intelligence or even vigor. They simply don't see the choice. They don't see choice at all in their lives.

They are victims, eternally, and of everything. Adults don't seem like them and they don't know why--and they think there's nothing they can do about it. They speak with loud voices that echo through the hallways and it's just the way they are: "I'm a loud talker--it's just the way I am." They get referrals because teachers are picking on them and out to get them. Only with great difficulty can the make eye contact with anyone at all. They are subject to the whims and silliness of others: people are constantly "making" them do something.Â They react violently when they feel they've been disrespected, and often no disrespect was meant. They consistently showÂ self-destructive views that make it all but certain that the cycles of dysfunction that they have obviously experienced in their lives will continue to haunt them, and their children, and their grandchildren.

Working with them is like working with a blind girl who's always been blind and who doesn't even realize she's blind. Talking to them, trying to present any view that differs from the calcified reality of their first thirteen years is like speaking Finish to an Egyptian.

There are those that wake up and make the changes they have to, that realize they're actually in control of a great deal of their lives. I know several such people. But the odds are against them, and the fact that I can do very little to change those odds is sometimes the most depressing aspect of teaching.