Our education system is broken because so many families in America don’t have maps, and that’s why our education system is not helping South Africa as it should.
Since we now live in SC, I’m particularly proud of this video…
education and teaching
Eduwonk.com: The Teacher Voice in Data-Driven Accountability
From Eduwonk.com:
Rather than invest in teachers, and capitalize on their knowledge, policymakers and administrators attempt to create systems that they hope will obviate the need for excellent teachers." The Teacher Voice in Data-Driven Accountability
Fortunately, this is far from the situation in my new school...
August, and Everything After…
And so August arrives, and instead of thinking, “I start teaching next month” it’s a question of a few days. August 20 — kids return and I, for the first time since finishing college, will be doing the work I spent all that time preparing for while in college: teach English.
I have nine years of teaching behind me. Seven are teaching EFL: English as a Foreign Language. One I spent working with autistic children. One I spent trying to teach science and social studies to at-risk youth, and spent most of my time teaching social skills. Now, for the first time since student teaching, I’ll be teaching “The Most Dangerous Game” and gerunds and dangling modifiers and indirect modifiers and interpretative skills and how to avoid run-on sentences.
I’ve got some planning done, bought a new domain name to have a class blog and to have a place to stick Moodle, and I’m starting to feel relaxed about it. Excited, even…
Teaching to Standards
One of the problems of teaching to No Child Left Behind standards is the risk of teachers becoming nothing more than their students’ test scores.
Via Eduwonk.com I found one such teacher’s story:
I teach in an inner city school where inequity is apparent. The neighborhood has a high poverty level. Violence and poor housing conditions tuck my students in at night!
Underemployment, unemployment, lack of health insurance is the norm. It has only been of late that a “real” grocery store was available for residents to purchase fresh foods.
We are locked into teaching reading practices that are driven by federal government’s bad research. I witness a lack of all that made school a joy for my students. Literally the things that helped to build community and self-respect and self-esteem for children have disappeared. In their place is rigid schedules and long periods of disjointed phonics, and disjointed language practices.
One of the reasons many teachers are not fans of NCLB is that it’s a one-size-fits-all solution. That “one-size” is often, as this teacher comments, “disjointed.”
This teacher writes of her students’ lack of satisfactory achievement according to the NCLB-mandated state testing.
My Unsatisfactory “grade” was followed by the comment:”This teacher�s students made minimal growth in her classroom this year.”
Most of my children are reading on or above grade level. The amount of “progress/growth” made this year by most of my children was no where near minimal.
I asked my principal if she believed that statement that appeared on my evaluation. She said “Yes, I do, based on your DIBELS scores!”
Her statement hurt me because I know the amount of work I did this year with my precious students. The amount of growth the children had in all areas was in no way “minimal.” I mentioned that the reading levels of some of my first-graders were equal to the end of second grade. She said the district didn�t recognize non-standardized test scores. (susanohanian.org)
Having worked with at-risk kids, I can understand (to a degree) what this teacher is going through.
Such “teaching” turns both students and teachers into little more than cogs in some great bureaucratic machinery. No one is working toward “learning” in any real sense here, and as far as teaching critical thinking, it’s probably non-existent.
Very often, kids coming from such backgrounds need so much more than simple reading and writing instruction. They step into school with huge disadvantages to begin with, and to some degree, reading and writing alone will not help them. They need work with social skills and an understanding of the social framework that exists outside the inner city.
This is not to say that I am advocating a sixties-style “go where the students take us” type of teaching, and I am not suggesting that all standards are a bad thing. However, NCLB’s cookie-cutter approach seems to do little for many students and teachers.
A Day at the Park
Last week, we took the kids in the program -- who have been really working hard on their social skills of late and making great progress -- to Carowinds, a theme park on the North/South Carolina border.
It had been years since I'd been to an amusement park. And it certainly showed me how much I've aged -- within about an hour, after having ridden one or two coasters with the kids, I was thinking, "Well, if we were to leave right now, I'd be perfectly content."
And then one of the kids got the idea to go on the "Drop Zone Stunt Tower." A tower with seats that pull you up to some relatively impressive height -- at least it seems that way at the moment -- and then drops you. Fairly simple.
The specs are not all that impressive:
- Tower Height:174 feet
- Maximum Height Reached by Transports: 160 feet
- Length of Freefall Before Braking: 100 feet
- Highest Speed: 56 M.P.H.
- Lift Speed: 16 feet/second
But the overall experience is -- weightlessness for just a few moments.
And I must admit that I, another staff, and one of the kids (we split up for a while) rode it more times than we could later remember.
Imagine that -- in my mid-thirties and still able to have fun in a park.
Still, I couldn't help but think the unavoidable, the predictable: I can't wait until we take L to such places...
Improvement
When teaching English as a Foreign Language, I often wondered whether I would work in an educational setting that provided such clear evidence of progress. When you take a first year class that speaks no English and help turn it into a group of kids almost all of whom pass the English language exit exam with good marks, there’s a definite sense of achievement.
Then I spent seven months working with autistic children.
A couple of the students finished the year as completely different children than when they started. Gains in reading ability, social interaction, verbal expression, math skills, and general life skills left me simply astounded, and understandably proud that I had something to do with it. (Seven Months)
Now, working with at-risk kids, I get a third example.
A young man came up to me the other day to tell me something.
When he first arrived, he spoke to me only when he absolutely had to, he cussed me out on a fairly regular basis, and he never, in any circumstances, looked me in the eye. He had trouble getting along with other kids, and if you judged him just from that, you’d come away thinking he was a fairly unpleasant person.
This time, his eyes wide with a big smile, he said, “I done something good today, but you didn’t see it.” He then told me about how he’d managed to keep his temper under control with another kid in the program whom he finds irritating.
It was the first time I’d ever seen pride in his face.
NCLB
How effective is No Child Left Behind? Not very.
In fact, it harms our kids instead of helping them. How?
Here’s a letter from a parent who’s also a teacher with 21 years’ experience which explains the problems perfectly: Letter about Re-Authorization of NCLB.
Reading in America
Almost all of the kids in the program in which I teach have one thing in common: a hatred of reading. If I have them read a couple of paragraphs (say, 200 words total), they immediately begin complaining about how long that is.
"Man, that's too long!" is a common refrain in the classroom.
When I have them read something to me aloud, it becomes clear fairly quickly why they're not fans of reading: they're not very good at it. They stumble on very basic words, and don't recognize words they themselves use every day. And like most activities, the only way to improve reading is to practice -- to do it. But many of the kids in the program come from demographics -- low education and low income -- in which reading is not particularly popular, probably for the very same reason.
And so for them, the dilemma of the 21st century is intensified: how do we teachers, in a world of video games, YouTube, and music videos successfully encourage reading?
Teaching Trotsky
Given the fact that the lads in the program had a very weak grasp on recent history, I decided to do a six-weeks' grading period on 20th century history. A hundred years in six weeks means 16.7 years per week, and I knew it would be a very rough overview at best. That said, I started in 1917, with the Russian Revolution.
"Why are we studying this crap?" one asked. He'd been keen on learning about the 20th century, but an obscure revolution led by people with "weird" names in a country on the other side of the globe was not what he had in mind.
"Because what came out of the revolution, namely the Soviet Union and the totalitarian Communist state, shaped much of the 20th century." Already I knew that I was painting with broad strokes. The revolution had produced a communist state, but it wasn't immediately totalitarian -- unless you happened to be in the upper class. Value judgments aside, I went on.
We looked at the revolution, the outcome, and then spent most of our time on the Stalinist Soviet Union.
The classic free-market critique of communism is that it destroys incentive. If I'm going to get my needs met whether or not I work, why should I work? If I know that no matter how hard I work, I'm going to get the same rewards, why not just do what's necessary to get by? I used to think "Whether or not this argument is valid on a scale large enough to make an impact on society's production remains to be seen," but then I lived in Poland in the years just after the fall of communism. What I experienced were people who were supposed to be helping me -- after all, by my shopping in their store, I was paying their salary -- sitting and reading a newspaper, then looking up with an expression of disgust and saying, "What?"
A consultant who's been working with our program mentioned later, as an aside admittedly unrelated to his job description, that he felt I'd painted with strokes too broad and therefore misleading. He felt I'd blurred the lines between Stalinism and communism and that the lads would equate the two as being necessarily connected, synonymous even.
"Communism doesn't have to end in totalitarianism," he pointed out.
True enough, but I began thinking about this and realized something that one thing missing from the discussion is scale. To have a small-scale commune is one thing; to have an entire country that is communist is something entirely different. Small-scale communism can work because it can foster a tighter community spirit -- it can be more like "family." You're less likely to cheat someone whom you know, with whom you share common values, etc. Small-scale communism also tends to be more voluntary. Choice goes a long way in determining how much you'll play "within the rules" of a given society. Bottom line, because of the community sentiment and the voluntary nature, small-scale communism tends to be ideologically self-sufficient.
Marxism suffers from fatal oversimplification: all workers are saints and all owners are devils. There are saints and sinners among workers and owners alike, and communism cannot overcome the inherent selfish nature that so many of us have.
State-scale communism, however, is not ideologically self-sufficient, and it's largely anonymous. Corruption arises more easily when you have no idea whom you're cheating. Add the fact that communism historically has not been "voluntary" and you have an instant recipe for Animal Farm-type "cheating." And since it's not voluntary and the state has to keep a lot of people "in line," it's easy enough to evolve into a police state.
Talking with the consultant later about this, I sketched out the above thoughts, concluding that, to my knowledge, there's not a single modern communist state that hasn't evolved into a totalitarian regime.
He suggested Cuba. Aside from the imprisoned political dissidents, the fact that Cubans are shut up behind their own "Iron Curtain", and the lack of any oppositional political party, I guess I'd agree...
It’s a Beautiful Day
It's rare that we wake up with a sense that today something truly fortuitous will occur. I guess that has to do with the etymology of the word:
1653, from L. fortuitus, from forte "by chance," abl. of fors "chance." It means "accidental, undesigned" not "fortunate."
Online Etymology Dictionary
We can't foresee luck -- it would be the ultimate oxymoron.
All of that notwithstanding, I woke up this morning feeling positively positive. I arrived home in a bit of shock.
For some time, K and I have known we will be moving out of the Asheville area -- the real estate market is ridiculously overpriced. Yet where to go? We needed a place that's developing so K can get a job; we needed a place with good schools and lots of them. Greenville, just across the border in South Carolina, seemed the ideal locale.
Spring comes, and the school systems across the countries publish their anticipated and actual staffing needs for the next year. As such, for the past few weeks, I've been checking the Greenville County Schools website almost daily, applying for almost every English/LA position that appears.
Last Sunday evening I got a call.
"Have you accepted a teaching position yet?"
I think: "Are you kidding? I haven't even heard much of a 'we received your resume thank you very much.'" I say: "No, not yet."
"Would you be able to come this Wednesday for an interview?"
I think: "Try keeping me way." I say: "Certainly."
How fortuitous. I have an interview, and I can drop by a few schools as well.
I wake up this morning feeling that something good is going to happen. Something better than good -- something beyond unexpected.
First school: principal is there, but not available. We'll take your resume and be in touch.
Such has been my experience. It's understandable -- principals are busy, to say the least, and they don't have the time to see every single applicant who drops it to try to get a head-start on the rest of the pack.
I drive to the second school. The receptionist doesn't know where the principal is, but gets on the now-standard walkie-talkie and asks the principal if he's able to come meet me. He's in his office, and within a few moments, I'm sitting across from him as he looks over my resume and asks a few questions. Then: "Okay -- you've got five minutes. Sell me."
I'm not dressed for an interview; I'm not expecting an interview; I'm certainly not prepared for an interview at this moment -- but apparently I'm having an interview.
What do I say? Long story, and perhaps I'll share it here. Probably not. Suffice it to say that I do fairly well. How do I know?
"Well, I don't want to make a decision right now," the principal says, "But let me get in touch with your references and I'll be in touch."
There are moments when you're fairly sure your ears are compacted with wax, or have been blown like Pete Townsend's, or are submerged in water -- certainly he didn't say by implication, "You're almost hired."
At any rate, I walk out to my car in a bit of a daze. "I knew something good was going to happen."
Lunch with a friend, then I change into my Superman suit and head across town to the interview. The actual interview. The scheduled interview.
Questions about
- the integration of technology and instruction;
- how I keep up with developments in my field;
- my comfort level of teaching to rigid standards (i.e., NCLB);
- how I might go about creating an atmosphere that is conducive to learning;
- what sorts of professional development programs might help me feel more comfortable teaching;
- how I might bring my life experiences into the classroom; and,
- how I dealt with the cultural and linguistic differences while teaching in Poland.
More questions, more answers -- I am hot. I speak with a fluidity that I've never experienced in an interview. I'm enthusiastic. I'm succinct yet not wooden.
In the past, I've had absolutely awful interviews. I walk out to the car fighting the temptation to go back and say, "Look, let's not play games. I know I blew it. Thank you for your time."
During a pause in the interview, I think, "I might have a chance at this job!"
After that pause, I hear "And how would you respond if I offered you the position right now?"
Count to ten. Slowly.
I sat stunned for at least that long.
I think: "What would I do?!? Fight the urge to dance on the table! Swallow the 'barbaric yawp' that's muscling it's way up my throat!" I say, hoarsely: "Are you offering me the position?"
"Yes."
Count to ten again. In the meantime, I look at all the other faces in the room. I remind myself that it's May, not April. I slap myself mentally and shout, "You're just sitting there like a zit, you dolt!"
What to say?
I go with the subjunctive voice:"I would ask when you would want a decision."
"Now," she says, with a warm and polite smile.
Red flags! Flashing lights! "Danger, Will Robinson!" Our Kia adventure made me hyper-sensitive to any kind of "decide now" situation. What's going on? Do they have so few applicants? As Julie Andrews asks in Sound of Music, "What's wrong the the children?"
As delicately as possible, I ask why the rush.
"Because we simply don't want anyone else to snatch you up."
I did wake up morning, didn't I? I remember having my morning tea, followed by a now-rare morning coffee. No, I'm out of bed, showered, dressed, sitting in a conference room being offered a job, being told that my interview was "exemplary."
After a tour of the school, meeting faculty and staff along the way, I go with my gut feeling. Back in the administrative offices, the principal says/asks, "So I'll call you tomorrow?"
"No, I don't think that will be necessary."
The last person I meet on my way out is the secretary. "She'll be sending your paperwork to the district office today," says the principal.
And so, come August, I'll be the new eighth-grade Language Arts teacher at Hughes Academy of Science and Technology.