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education and teaching

Back to the Dream

Tuesday 11 August 2009 | 0 Comments

DSC02059

I end the year dusting and I start it with a rag in my hand as well. Before we can check out for the summer, we teachers have a myriad of duties and responsibilities, not the least of which is preparing our room for the summer cleaning. This involves taking everything not attached to the floor out into the hall way, refinishing the floor, then putting everything back. At both ends of the summer, then, there is a thin layer of dust on many things.

There is usually something similar clouding students' minds in the early weeks. They act as if we've awakened them from a deep sleep and not given them the time to clear the haze from their thinking. In short, they forget some of what they learned the year before.

It's to be expected. After all, who wants to rehearse subject/verb agreement and the quadratic equation when everyone else is at the pool or on a trip?

So I spent the day dusting and arranging, preparing to dust and arrange.

On Fire, In More Ways Than Intended

Wednesday 05 August 2009 | 0 Comments

I've been buying and reading books on pedagogy this summer, and one I bought was Rafe Esquith's Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire: The Methods and Madness Inside Room 56. Esquith is all the rage: after all, how many fifth grade teachers do Shakespeare with students after class?

There are some good ideas in there, and initially I was hopeful that it would be a useful book. His discussion of the importance of trust in the classroom and some ideas of how to integrate that into a classroom management plan excited me, as this was something I was hoping to focus on this year.

Soon, though, some things started to feel off. Discussing the fact that educators are role models, Esquith writes,

Some of my students laugh bitterly at a teacher they once had. They discuss her in the most unflattering of terms. She often comes to school late. [... She] talks on her cell phone constantly. Even when the kids are being taken somewhere, their fearless leader walks in front of them gabbing on the phone. [...] The same teacher thinks she is "secretly" shopping online while the kids do their science assignments. She believes the kids do not know what she is doing. She is very much mistaken. (10)

My initial reaction: what an awful teacher. My second, more thoughtful reaction: how in the world does Esquith know this? Certainly, a teacher can overhear students talking in class about a teacher they had, but if the conversation continues long enough for the teacher to garner this much information, one of two things is happening:

  1. These kids aren't working but sitting in class having free time, which they're using to gossip about another teacher; or,
  2. Esquith discusses other teachers with his classes.

Neither one of these is terribly flattering. The passage in the book is terribly unprofessional.

One passages deserves to be quoted at length:

You see, the children at our school do not read well. They do not like to read. As of this writing, 78 percent of the Latino children on our campus are not proficient in reading, according to our state's standardized tests. This means one of two things: Either we have the stupidest kids on the planet , or we are failing these children. Please believe me when I tell you that the vast majority of our students are perfectly capable of learning to read. No one wants to admit it, but a systemic conspiracy of mediocrity keeps these children on the treadmill of illiteracy.

To fight the problem, we now have "literacy coaches" at schools. Most of these "experts" are former classroom teachers who never accomplished much with their own students. [...]

Teaching our children to read well and helping them develop a love of reading should be our top priorities. People seem to understand this. Millions are spent on books and other reading material, celebrities make public service announcements, and thousands of hours are spent training teachers. The spin doctors at various publish companies tell us that our students are doing better, but honest people know this is simply not the case. Concerned teachers have learned not to bother raising their voices, because powerful textbook companies have carefully prepared answers to anyone who points out that the emperor has no clothes. Young teachers are afraid of being crushed by bureaucrats whose only real mission is to keep selling their product. As testing services compete to rake in millions of dollars, nervous school districts anxiously await the latest test results. And year after year, most children do not become passionate lifelong readers.

It's complicated. There is a lot of finger-pointing. But to borrow a phrase from another big, fat book that won a Pulitzer Prize, our children are victims of a sort of “confederacy of dunces.” Powerful forces of mediocrity have combined to prevent perfectly competent children from learning to love reading. These forces include television, video games, poor teaching, poverty, the breakup of the family, and a general lack of adult guidance. (29-31)

There is a lot of truth in the statement, Testing services do make a lot of money from the increasing number of standardized tests students have to take. There can be pressure to use state-funded textbooks regardless of a teacher's preference. But the bottom line is this passage is highly insulting by presumptively marginalizing literacy coaches.

This book has some good ideas, but most of the time, I found myself thinking, "I'm glad I'm not this guy's colleague!"

Still, listening to him on NPR, I sense a humility that just doesn't come across in his writing, which is too bad.

No Child Left Behind: The Football Version

Tuesday 14 July 2009 | 1 Comment

Many educators are not fond of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, which Obama doesn’t seem intent on scraping. I suppose education is never the priority politicians claim it is, though to be fair, neither candidate made much of education in 2008.

Some outside of education are confused as to why a teacher would oppose NCLB. They see it as an unwillingness to be held accountable for what happens in the classroom. Or even a fear of accountability. This is deeply inaccurate, at least in my case.  I (and many others) oppose NCLB because of how it (claims) to hold teachers accountable.

One effective way of illustrating some of the absurdities of NCLB is to apply it to sports. I’d seen this online a time or two, but a professor posted this for us in class the other day and it made me realize anew how skewed some people’s perception of NCLB actually is. So here’s the scenario: football is run according to guidelines similar to NCLB:

The regulations:

  1. All teams must make the state playoffs, and all will win the championship.
  2. If a team does not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be held accountable.
  3. All kids will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time and in the same conditions. No exceptions will be made for interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities.
  4. All kids will play football at a proficient level.
  5. Talented players will be asked to work out on their own without instruction.
  6. Coaches will use all their instructional time with the athletes who aren’t interested in football, have limited athletic ability or whose parents don’t like football.
  7. All coaches will be proficient in all aspects of football, or they will be released.
  8. Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th and 11th games.

This will create a New Age of sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimal goals.

The fact is, children in the same grade start at different places intellectually, emotionally, and socially.

What’s worse, NCLB is a moving target. Every school must achieve “Adequate Yearly Progress.” If you fail to make that progress, you have to make up all that ground and then some for the next year. Another sports analogy (this time, my own) might make it clearer:

Let’s say to make the football team, you have to run the 40 yard dash in 5.5 seconds. You fail to make it by one tenth of a second. You work out. Finally, you reach 5.5 seconds and come back to try again. The coach now tells you that now you have to run the 40 yard dash in 5.4 seconds. You can’t do it, so you go back and work out some more. When you can sprint it in 5.4 seconds, you go back to the coach, who informs you that now the bar has been moved to 5.25 seconds.

Or, as someone else put it:

The annual measurement bar is a moving target and once missed it is like chasing after a train pulling out of the depot year after year. Of course then it becomes the fault of the instructors, and not the curriculum , or the administration, or heaven forbid the students themselves. (Source)

Accountability is good; poorly-thought-out accountability can only be harmful.

Strangers in the Classroom

Friday 05 June 2009 | 0 Comments

They enter the classroom in August and they're strangers. I struggle for a couple of weeks to learn everyone's name; the energetic talkative ones I get down by the end of the first day. Slowly, I learn their personalities: their passions, their quirks, their fears. By mid-October, I know a group of 80-100 thirteen-year-olds fairly well; by mid-May, I can almost predict their every move.

This is what keeps me hooked on teaching: the relationships. A picture of a group of students is a fairly meaningless thing to anyone but the students' teacher, but to that teacher, it's a thousand stories about 180 days spent working, laughing, and sometimes arguing together.

And this is why I consider it a privilege to teach. Between 160 and 200 parents trust me with their children for almost an entire year. In some ways, I know their children better than they do. This can be problematic -- "Oh no! My child would never do that!" -- but only rarely.

Yesterday, I said goodbye to the kids I spent 180 days with. In a few, short weeks, I'll begin again, with a new group of strangers in my room.

It is a testimony to how well the year went that I am as excited about starting next year as I've ever been. Last year was a tough year, with a tough group of kids. Many teachers on the eighth grade hall said it was the most challenging group they've ever taught. "Baptism by fire," one laughed when I commented it had been my first year teaching there. Last year, the goodbyes were a formality, and I was relieved to have the year behind me; this year, the goodbyes were touchingly sincere, and I was a bit saddened to see the year come to a close.

One young man was terribly upset. I saw him and smiled; he thought I was mocking him. "Mr. S, don't laugh!" he begged. I went quickly to him, trying my best to smile warmly. "I'm not laughing," I reassured him, telling him-probably vainly-that the sadness of this ending will transform itself into joy at a new beginning. I didn't tell him how difficult it was for me to go through endings, how it's still difficult. Perhaps I should have, but I was afraid I would upset him more. On his own, he will learn to recognize the sweet in the seemingly bitter moments.

If I'm fortunate, he'll come back to tell me about it.

xtranormal in Action

Friday 29 May 2009 | 0 Comments

I mentioned earlier my efforts to use xtranormal.com -- the free animation site -- in school. Here are a couple of examples from students who used the site to animate research done on selected topics about Victorian England.

(Content removed--website died.)

Education in Victorian England

(Content removed--website died.)

xtranormal Shakespeare

Monday 04 May 2009 | 2 Comments

I've been playing with xtranormal.com, the site that allows you to create a movie merely from text. I'm thinking I might use it somehow next year with my English I Honors class when we work on Shakespeare.

Something like this:

(Since removed.)

The pronunciation is a bit off at times, but otherwise, a potentially useful tool.

I'm just not quite sure how to use it...

Eighth Grade Shakespeare

Friday 24 April 2009 | 0 Comments

Shakespeare is a challenge to our modern ears, no doubt about it. Even the most knowledgeable experts halter a line or two of a performance before they settle in to the poetry. In my experience, it takes me about a few minutes before the language on stage sounds completely natural and non-foreign.

I've been teaching Shakespeare to eighth graders of various academic levels for the past week: an enlightening, frustrating, ultimately rewarding experience. We're reading an abridged version of Much Ado About Nothing. It is, in fact, part of the required eighth grade curriculum here in Greenville County, and I'm thrilled that those who designed the curriculum had the wisdom of chosing a comedy rather than, say, Julius Caesar. (A perfectly fine play in its own rights, it's an absolute bore to teenagers.) Much Ado has all the elements adolescents can relate to: unrequited love; jealousy; the twittery, jittery joy of new love.

Yet it's still been difficult enough for them that it's been, at times, a chore. And so to remedy that, I changed my unit plan and decided to show the Branaugh Much Ado concurrently with our own reading. We've completed the first two acts in class; we watched the first two acts today.

What a joy to watch the kids watch Shakespeare and enjoy it. What was most rewarding for me was to hear them laugh at lines that had been omitted from our abridged version. "They're really getting it," I almost said aloud.

Head

Thursday 23 April 2009 | 0 Comments

This was an unpublished entry that had been lurking with the other drafts.

A couple of years ago, when I was working with autistic children, I learned the versatility of using “head” as part of a compound word. The children were absolute masters. A small selection:

  • poo-poo head
  • Barbara head
  • shoe head
  • chair head
  • silly head
  • birthday head
  • sugar head
  • bye head
  • pizza head
  • straw head
  • puckle head (no idea what that is)
  • five minutes head

Fred Sanford, Where Are You?

Thursday 02 April 2009 | 1 Comment

South Carolina would probably be in better hands if governor Mark Sanford handed the reins to another Sanford. They both seem to know about as much about education:

The dispute between Gov. Mark Sanford and state lawmakers over the use of $700 million in economic stimulus money from Washington threatens to become a "constitutional standoff" that can only be resolved in the courts, according to a legal analysis released today by state Attorney General Henry McMaster.

The $700 million is a portion of about $3 billion in cash that various entities in South Carolina, including the state government, are expected to receive under President Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus program.

Sanford has threatened to reject the money unless it can be used to pay down state debt, but legislative leaders prefer to use the funds as Washington intended, mostly to maintain education spending. (Greenville Times)

Paying down the state debt is a great idea -- I'd love to pay down our mortgage debt. However, I wouldn't sacrifice L's education to accomplish that, which is exactly what Sanford wants to do.

Sanford says this notion is nonsense, that there would be adequate funding under his budget. Perhaps he's right. But the worrying thing is that he's not accepting stimulus money earmarked (I hesitate to use that term, but that's just what it is) for education. Refuse to accept some other portion of the stimulus money.

Flustered Enraged upon hearing this, I wrote a letter to the governor:

It troubles me that, in this era of waning American international influence, you would consider such drastic cuts in education as would occur if you continue to refuse to use the stimulus money intended for education funding. Our classrooms our crowded; our educational infrastructure is woefully inadequate; our teachers are under-paid -- yet you want to force school systems to cut even deeper: up to 480 positions in Greenville County.

The rest of the Western world has surpassed America in the quality of its education: "average" eleventh-grade students study mathematics topics in America that are taught in the fifth grade in Poland, for instance. A six year lag. (How do I know this? I've been a substitute teacher in an American mathematics classroom and I lived in Poland for seven years -- it's first-hand knowledge.)

What you're proposing would only increase that difference.

Please reconsider. The state unemployment rate is significant enough without adding teachers to the fold, and more importantly, our kids can't afford it.

It seems that South Carolinians are not the only ones concerned, though.

A White House official said Wednesday that only Gov. Mark Sanford can apply for nearly $700 million available in federal stimulus funds, but U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said that even if Sanford turns down the money he still plans to seek funding for the state because of the poor condition of South Carolina education.

"To stand on the sideline and say that the status quo is OK there and that the children are well served, it simply defies logic and is not reality," Duncan told reporters.

Asked if he was developing a plan to send the money to the state in the event Sanford didn’t ask for it, Duncan replied he was, then rattled off several facts about education in the state that bothered him.

Duncan said that only 15 percent of African-American children in the state are proficient at math and 12 percent at reading. He said the state has the nation’s fourth worst graduate rate for freshman.

"Those are heartbreaking results," he said. "Those are children that if we don’t do something dramatically different for them will never have a chance to compete in today’s economy." (Greenville Times)

A Greenville Times editorial summed it up succinctly:

Most Republicans in Congress opposed the excessive stimulus bill that greatly expands the reach of the federal government. So did this newspaper in several editorials. But the bill was passed, the fiscally conservative argument did not prevail, and every penny of those hundreds of billions of borrowed money will be spent.

So, as U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham was quoted as saying, the "question is do we use it or lose it?" (Greenville Times)

This leaves us wondering why Sanford is so staunch in his refusal. His name was bantered about as a potential running mate for McCain in 2008; there have been rumors of a planned presidential campaign in 2012. Could this be political posturing? Could this be Sanford's no-thank-you-to-a-bridge-to-nowhere?

Time!

Sunday 15 March 2009 | 0 Comments

Ten or so years ago, while preparing for the GRE in Poland, I was getting frustrated with the analytical section and how rushed I felt during the practice tests. One evening, I sat down with a cup of coffee and no timing device whatsoever, and I took a practice analytical section -- and completed it without a single mistake. It took me almost twice the usually allotted time for the section.

When I took the actual GRE, my analytical results were substantially lower than the perfect score of 800. I attributed this solely to time pressure, and included a note in my grad school applications to that effect: "This test, I feel, was a test not of my analytical ability, but my ability to work under artificial time restraints," I wrote, or something similar.

Yesterday, while taking ETS's "Principles of Learning and Teaching, Grades 7-12" Praxis test, I found my mind returning to those long-forgotten themes.

What is the point of a time limit on a professional test? I understand that the administrators don't want examinees to be there all day, but what is the thinking behind making the time so incredibly short that everyone is frantically working up until the moment time is called?

The PLT test consists of twelve short-answer questions and twenty-four multiple-choice questions. Or, as it's put on their web site: "12 short-answer questions and 24 multiple-choice question" (my emphasis added). Those twelve "short answer" questions are divided into four scenarios, with each one having a long case history.

Here's a sample, provided by ETS:

Case History: 7-12

Directions: The case history is followed by two short-answer questions.

Mr. Payton

Scenario

Mr. Payton teaches world history to a class of thirty heterogeneously grouped students ages fourteen to sixteen. He is working with his supervisor, planning for his self-evaluation to be completed in the spring. At the beginning of the third week of school, he begins gathering material that might be helpful for the self-evaluation. He has selected one class and three students from this class to focus on.

Mr. Payton's first impression of the three students

Jimmy has attended school in the district for ten years. He repeated fifth and seventh grades. Two years older than most of the other students in class and having failed twice, Jimmy is neither dejected nor hostile. He is an outgoing boy who, on the first day of class, offered to help me with "the young kids" in the class. He said, "Don't worry about me remembering a lot of dates and stuff. I know it's going to be hard, and I'll probably flunk again anyway, so don't spend your time thinking about me."

Burns is a highly motivated student who comes from a family of world travelers. He has been to Europe and Asia. These experiences have influenced his career choice, international law. He appears quiet and serious. He has done extremely well on written assignments and appears to prefer to work alone or with one or two equally bright, motivated students. He has a childhood friend, one of the slowest students in the class.

Pauline is a withdrawn student whose grades for the previous two years have been mostly C's and D's. Although Pauline displays no behavior problems when left alone, she appears not to be popular with the other students. She often stares out the window when she should be working. When I speak to Pauline about completing assignments, she becomes hostile. She has completed few of the assignments so far with any success. When I spoke to her counselor, Pauline yelled at me, "Now I'm in trouble with my counselor too, all because you couldn't keep your mouth shut!"

Mr. Payton's initial self-analysis, written for his supervisor

I attend workshops whenever I can and consider myself a creative teacher. I often divide the students into groups for cooperative projects, but they fall apart and are far from "cooperative." The better-performing students, like Burns, complain about the groups, claiming that small-group work is boring and that they learn more working alone or with students like themselves. I try to stimulate all the students' interest through class discussions. In these discussions, the high-achieving students seem more interested in impressing me than in listening and responding to what other students have to say. The low-achieving students seem content to be silent. Although I try most of the strategies I learn in workshops, I usually find myself returning to a modified lecture and the textbook as my instructional mainstays.

Background information on lesson to be observed by supervisor

Goals:

  • To introduce students to important facts and theories about Catherine the Great
  • To link students' textbook reading to other sources of information
  • To give students practice in combining information from written and oral material
  • To give students experience in note taking

I assigned a chapter on Catherine the Great in the textbook as homework on Tuesday. Students are to take notes on their reading. I gave Jimmy a book on Catherine the Great with a narrative treatment rather than the factual approach taken by the textbook. I told him the only important date is the date Catherine began her reign. The book has more pictures and somewhat larger print than the textbook.

I made no adaptation for Burns, since he's doing fine. I offered to create a study guide for Pauline, but she angrily said not to bother. I hope that Wednesday's lecture will make up for any difficulties she might experience in reading the textbook.

Supervisor's notes on Wednesday's lesson

Mr. Payton gives a lecture on Catherine the Great. First he says, "It is important that you take careful notes because I will be including information that is not contained in the chapter you read as homework last night. The test I will give on Friday will include both the lecture and the textbook information."

He tape records the lecture to supplement Pauline's notes but does not tell Pauline about the tape until the period is over because he wants her to do the best note taking she can manage. During the lecture, he speaks slowly, watching the class as they take notes. In addition, he walks about the classroom and glances at the students' notes.

Mr. Payton's follow-up and reflection

Tomorrow the students will use the class period to study for the test. I will offer Pauline earphones to listen to the tape-recorded lecture. On Friday, we will have a short-answer and essay test covering the week's work.

Class notes seem incomplete and inaccurate, and I'm not satisfied with this test as an assessment of student performance. Is that a fair measure of all they do?

From this, examinees answer three questions. They're called "short answer" questions, but they're really essay questions if one wants to answer the question carefully and thoroughly.

Question One

In his self-analysis, Mr. Payton says that the better-performing students say small-group work is boring and that they learn more working alone or only with students like themselves. Assume that Mr. Payton wants to continue using cooperative learning groups because he believes they have value for all students.

  • Describe TWO strategies he could use to address the concerns of the students who have complained.
  • Explain how each strategy suggested could provide an opportunity to improve the functioning of cooperative learning groups. Base your response on principles of effective instructional strategies.

Question Two

In the introduction to the lesson to be observed, Mr. Payton briefly mentions the modification he has or has not made for some students. Review his comments about modifications for Jimmy and Burns.

  • For each of these two students, describe ONE different way Mr. Payton might have provided a modification to offer a better learning situation for each.
  • Explain how each modification could offer a better learning situation. Base your explanation on principles of varied instruction for different kinds of learners.

There are two sample questions provided at ETS's web site; on the actual test, there are three questions, each one asking for two specific examples of this or that. For each case-history essay section (like the one above, though with one more question), ETS allotted twenty-five minutes.

This might be fine if the case histories didn't sometimes require multiple readings:

  • trying to figure out things like whether Bobby is in the first group of students Mr. Tadeusz spoke with or the second group;
  • wondering about the nature of the student-teacher relationship and prior interventions in a question about dealing with a disruptive student; or,
  • fighting the urge to scream, "This test is ridiculous!"

Teaching is a reflective task, and often one's first response to a situation is not the correct one. It leads me to believe that this test is only about testing how ingrained standard "first responses" are and nothing more. Indeed, any test with a severely restrictive time limit can only be testing how quickly examinees can recall and synthesize information.

One positive emerged from it all: I need to be more aware of how much time I'm giving my own students for tests and exams.

To its credit, South Carolina does not impose a time limit on its main standards-assessing test, the PASS (Palmetto Assessment of State Standard).