Is there a band or isn't there?

I have too much and too little to write about in my own personal teaching experience -- and I will try soon.  I no longer move from one small success to the next as I did when I started this blog -- there's been too much re-learning, and much of this is not suitable to be shared in a public forum.  (Sorry, if that's a strange remark in these share-it-all era we live in.)

But for the sake of keeping this gasping blog alive, I thought I would share some recently published pieces that may suggest we are beginning to outgrow the cant about school reform which has made our jobs as teachers so difficult and has palpably damaged the education of our children for half a generation.  It was as though you found out that you have asbestos in your house, and you called in a guy who, in order to prevent your children from contracting asbestosis, burned your house down, gave your kids cancer and pocketed a few million from the insurance company.

To begin with, here's a piece written by an education professor and published in my local paper, The Record, (called by most The Bergen Record) remembering a remarkable, life-transforming teacher and observing how unlikely it would be for that teacher to earn a high evaluation using the feckless metrics our public officials have helped put in place.  Think about that.  Remember that great teacher, that one that made you happy to be a student, that person who helped you maybe see a way through towards finding out what truly engaged you and made you happy, maybe even towards your life's work?  Did they prepare you for a standardized test?  Did they execute a perfect, tidy 48-minute lesson in which you had acquired a skill that you never had before?  No, it's ridiculous.  It's a ridiculous paradigm, and people are starting to realize it.

This piece by an actual working teacher and published in the Huffington Post suggests a metric, but one which is unmeasurable:  A teacher is a nurturer.  I do not expect my year-end eval to suggest that I need to do 23% more nurturing.  The fact is, administrators, parents and politicians, you don't understand why I do my job and therefore you have no idea how to incentivize it.  The truth is, that is beyond your powers.  My rewards come principally from my interactions with my students, and only they and I have control over that.  There's nothing you can do, despite your fervid attempts to limit and proscribe those interactions into merely preparing for and conducting endless one-dimensional low-function assessments.

And speaking of low-function assessments, the fact that the Emperors and Empresses of School Reform have no clothes is becoming more readily apparent to more walking-around regular people.  This is the worst hypocrisy.  These people use statistics to prove that our schools are failing, but have no reliable statistics to show that their proposed reforms, the academies filled with inexperienced novices, the pre-fab charter schools, the increasing testing, year after year, cutting into actual instructional time, will work.  They never have yet.  (Check the links in the Salon piece I've linked in this paragraph if you don't believe me.)

I think what America needs is to sit down and watch The Music Man.  That's a super-great musical from The Golden Age in which a slick con-man comes to a small town, invents a problem which is destroying that town's youth.



Then after the gullible villagers have been suitably riled up, he shows up again as if out of nowhere with his pre-packaged canned solution to the "Trouble," no matter what it was. A boys' band is the Magic Thing which will keep the youngsters off the street and busily engaged. Good idea, right?

 

But there's one problem. He can't do what he says he will do. And he has no intention of doing so. He just wants to collect the money and run? Sound familiar?

And then -- this is where our con, Harold, makes the Big Mistake that our school reformers never make.  He gets to know and care about one damaged and hurt kid and about that kid's family.  And then, all the slick, phony pre-packaged programs and solutions fall apart.  He admits to the boy what he can't admit to anyone else.  He's a liar and a fake.  But then he tells the broken child just how extraordinary he is -- not as a platitude, but from his own personal knowledge.

The boy is not mollified.  "You said there's a band!" he shouts.  Harold looks like he's been hit with a brick.  He shakes his head, "I always think there's a band, kid."

I don't know about our reformers -- I don't know if they think there's a band or if they know perfectly well there isn't.  But I sure do know that there COULD be a band -- if the people who know how to make music were put in charge.

Maybe we could try that.

What works

I've been sitting on this piece for a while, but since I am in the throes of final exams as I write, it seems appropriate to share it now.  You should read the post yourself, but to summarize, a college professor describes his process of switching from in-class timed essays as his final assessment to independently-written work as a more valid and accurate measure of his students' progress in his course.

I applaud this professor for his reflectivity, and the reasons he gives for changing his methodology all make excellent good sense.  His course sounds very rewarding, and I am certainly looking forward to adjusting the general-literature high school courses I teach to be more thematically unified.  He even writes so temptingly about the Margaret Atwood novel Oryx and Crake that I thought about putting it on my summer reading list, until I read the synopsis and realized it has all the irritating and tedious qualities of science fiction -- made-up words, arbitrary premises, implausible psychology and politics.  Yes, I realize that if you are going to write about humans, things will be implausible and unpredictable, which is why I prefer history, in which it is impossible to argue with the events or a play, in which you see the implausible performed in front of you -- again, it cannot be denied because it is made palpable.

Everything else just strikes me as Lewis Carroll.  But then, I am becoming impatient with just about all fiction.

But the real point I want to make is that this fellow persisted in a procedure which he knew was not just unsatisfactory, but downright counterproductive and completely worthless at producing reliable data about student achievement for 15 years.  And every semester.  He did something that didn't work 30 times before he decided to change it.

Perhaps that defines the difference between college instruction and us secondary and middle-school peons.  My first year of teaching -- before I knew anything, I looked at the numbers for the vocabulary instruction system I had inherited (the dreadful outdated Sadlier-Oxford series) and realize that the numbers had not moved at all over the year.  The students who scored high at the beginning of the year scored well at the end.  The students who struggled continued to struggle.  Was it difficult to jettison that?  When it took up at least one-fifth of my instructional time, and sometimes more?  Easiest thing in the world.  What I substituted was far more work intensive for me -- I got a list of SAT words and identified them in the assigned reading, and built exercises and quizzes from that -- but many students showed real improvement.

True, one often has to delay jettisoning a non-working portion of a course until there is an alternative that has some possibility of being more effective.  But that's what summers are for.  But knowing how awful it feels to persist with something that demonstrably doesn't work even once -- I can't imagine how you could keep going at it 30 times.  (And read the comments in the post.  The writers make some intelligent observations about learning in college -- which were made and measured scientifically in K-12 pedagogy about 25 or 30 years ago.  Next, I expect some college professor to announce the startling discovery that students learn in different ways from each other!)

I come to teaching from the performing arts, and what I love about the latter is their pure empiricism.  It's OK if nobody knows that Moby Dick was great until 30 years after Melville dies.  But a play, a film, a piece of music must work right now or it fails on its own terms.  Because the way the artist in the performing arts develops and improves is to listen to the audience.  Same with teachers.  What doesn't work with students, doesn't work, no matter what the theorists and consultants say. 

Now, back to work on my perpetual motion machine!

First impressions of the first week

I am gratified to have received so many messages of support for me in my new position (mostly upright) at American History High in Newark, and so many inquiries about my first week. These Interwebs can really reinforce one's sense of community. (Or, for some people, their illusion of community, but this is not the time or the place.)

So a few scattered observations about Week One, partly to satisfy the curiosity of friends, but mostly to amuse myself when I reread it at the end of the year.

First, the students have been enthusiastic and welcoming, and judging from the comments reported by my principal and colleagues, hopeful for and supportive of me. They in turn seem to be ready and willing to do what is required for success and to effect change in their lives and perhaps the lives of their families. When I talk about ramping up the workload, where I would have received loud protests in my old suburban district, here I get a few murmurs and demurrals, with a general understanding that the expectations must be high in order for them to reach their goals. The students seem to know and accept that the results they want can only come from hard work, even if they have the natural resistance of the young to the prospect of hard work (although usually not the work itself).

The faculty is definitely on-board as well. The school is only five years old, and yet has already had a change of principals and some upheavals in faculty, some caused by the madness of our politics around school funding. [If you ask me, and you didn't, school funding should be in a lockbox as untouchable as that for Social Security, buffeted from changing political winds. It is part of the sacred compact between us and the Americans who preceded us and between us and those who will follow. To suggest crippling changes is to recommend treason to the very idea of America. Sure, we can argue about how to spend the money, and see if we can't do it more efficiently, but savings should be plowed BACK INTO OUR CHILDREN, not any other little projects people have up their sleeves. End of hysterical screed.]

As anyone who knows me would expect, I have far more doubts about myself than about my students, who are still young and flexible. Will I be able to maintain the pace and the standards? Will I find the words to say and things to do to coax and coach my students to performing at a collegiate level? Virtually all of my classes are with seniors (I have a handful of juniors in Creative Writing), and as far as we at AHHS are concerned, they are all college bound; therefore, the biggest part of my job is to make sure that freshman English contains few, if any, shocks or surprises.

So the question is, can I get my assessments out of the trap of worksheet-type short answers on the one hand, but steer clear of assignments that aim so high they become vague and poorly defined? Can I tune the tone of my students' written voices so that they have the detachment of the academic voice without losing passion and personality. (I always think of E.B. White as the perfect essayist - calm, rational and observational while also being warm, human and SPECIFIC.) Will I get these courses to hang together and make sense in the brain as we move from project to project, from one literary work to another? Will I properly differentiate among students and among classes? Will I figure out a bright-line distinction between CP English and Honors English? Will I challenge my AP class without wearing them (and me) out? Will Creative Writing get its focus and not devolve into throwing things against the wall to see what will stick?

I've volunteered to advise National Honor Society, which is a first for me, but seems appropriate for a teacher of seniors. I have only a slight idea of what and how much that entails, so that is terra incognito. I will not even discuss my other extracurricular plans, insofar as they are only in the proposal stage now, but suffice it to say that should they move forward, a huge amount of trenchwork will be required, as there is no pre-existing infrastructure to support such activities, as there was in my last school.

All this to say, I really hope I am up to this. That said, my supervisors are investing a lot of confidence in me, and if I succeed, it will be done more to justify their faith in me than because of my innate belief in my abilities. I know I have taste, energy, seven years of classroom experience and an ability to communicate. I feel the lack of formal training in teaching, especially in literature. This is where I feel most acutely that we should change our titles from teacher to coach. I know how to coach -- that's how we teach music and drama. It's an apprenticeship, trial and error method. There is no map, and that is what I am used to. But real literature teachers have maps, and I will learn to make and use them. And being a mere child of 55, I am just as resistant to doing something new as my 17- and 18-year-old students.

We all know that we have to stop thinking about schools like factories. But are we ready to think of them as laboratories, as loci for, in FDR's words, "bold, persistent experimentation?" To do so is to accept that some experiments will fail. This doesn't trouble me. The default position for young brains is to learn. They will learn, willy nilly, like it or not. Often, the best thing you can do as a teacher is not to impede the education that is going on, with or without your own agency. The question is exactly what and how students will learn. Stephen Sondheim got it right (as he so often does) about our responsibility as parents and teachers.

Guide them but step away,
Children will glisten.
Tamper with what is true
And children will turn,
If just to be free.
Careful before you say,
"Listen to me."
Children will listen...

Also, I really need to get more sleep.

English class is killing the essay

My parent's generation called them "themes." Students hate to write them. Teachers hate to read them. Brief expository pieces of writing on a subject usually specified by the teacher, set out in a strictly structured format, with all passion and color drained away to make way for rational "on the one hand--on the other hand" sort of blather that students have been taught to believe the teacher will like. No one will ever read them except the teacher, who regrets the forever-irretrievable 20 minutes of his life he spends reading and commenting on this (usually) drivel. Incidentally, a lot of this has been perpetuated by the standardized testing which requires working strictly to formula so as to be evaluated in an economically feasible fashion. (Essays on standardized tests are, we are told, graded in two minutes or less. This is what we are doing to writing in order to dance to the political music today.)

How to did such a great and noble art form get dragged down to this level? We don't define painting by what we did with acrylics in 2nd grade? Why is the word "essay" confined to this horrid exercise? My simple answer is that our students have never read great essays.

I discovered the form via Benchley, Thurber and Perelman. And while I don't imagine those writers will mean a lot to our students (well, maybe Thurber), but they do enjoy David Sedaris, who has the benefit of performing his works aloud very well (a la Benchley). As time went on I became interested in more serious practitioners of the form, such as Ian Frazier, E.B. White (pictured above), I.F. Stone, A.J. Liebling (who is perhaps more of a journalist), Joseph Mitchell and Lewis Thomas. In time I stumbled over Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own being a seminal feminist work), Emerson, Thoreau, Twain (I love his travel books), Orwell, Swift, DeTocqueville and Montaigne. (I confess I have never been able to really make my way through Montesquieu or Macauley, who are supposed to be the true giants.) An extensive collection of public domain essays can be found here.

I am a bit handicapped with many of the major 18th and 19th century essayists, as their given subject is literature itself, in which I am not as deeply read as the average writer of that era, plus I'm just not interested in reading about reading. (This is a peculiarity of writers. There are not, to my knowledge, a lot of music about music or paintings about paintings. Only writers can't resist the temptation to overthink it.)

Far more interesting to me is a Malcolm Gladwell, who writes about science and sociology or a Michael Lewis, who writes about two of the most popular subjects of the day, money and sports (he is author of the book The Blind Side).

Blogger Paul Graham, whose site I've commented on before, writes eloquently about the things called "essays" we had to write (and which I now have to read) for school, which students treat like bodily waste--to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible and never looked at; and the difference between those things and actual essays. He gives some tips and pointers on how to think about them and how to go about writing them, as in this central passage:

To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called "essais." He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning "to try" and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.

Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.

If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them.

In the things you write in school you are, in theory, merely explaining yourself to the reader. In a real essay you're writing for yourself. You're thinking out loud.

You can read the entire piece here.

This age of bloggers is, of course, a new golden age for the essay, or if not the essay, what The New Yorker called "a casual." 1 I have a few blogs I check in on regularly, and I encourage students to develop their own list. The great improvement of the internet is that one can not only comment, but the comments can develop into their own dialogue; a virtual salon that 18th-century belletrists could only envy.

We really should come up with another name of those things we call "essay questions" or the 5-paragraph essay that is required for standardized tests. I nominate the term squonkle, which, as far as I can tell, means nothing. I think that makes it eminently suitable.

I expect a 1000-word squonkle on this blog post by Wednesday start of class, no excuses.
________________
1 The term casual was used by Harold Ross, founding editor of The New Yorker, to refer to "fiction and humorous pieces of all kinds", and "indicated Ross's determination to give the magazine an offhand, chatty, informal quality". Thurber, James, The Years With Ross, 1959 ISBN 0-06-095971-1, pg. 13. - Wikipedia

Nerds: A powerful resource being wasted

Sadly, it may be news to some teachers that nerds hate your class as much as the "cool kids" do. Yes, those kids who always read the assignments, have their hands up in class and ace the tests have as much or more contempt for the way school is conventionally conducted as the kids who are struggling.

Following are some excerpts from an essay by Paul Graham, an expert on programming languages and on technology startups called "Why Nerds are Unpopular:"

I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's populated by adults, but that...the things you do have real effects. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect...

When the things you do have real effects, it's no longer enough just to be pleasing. It starts to be important to get the right answers, and that's where nerds show to advantage. Bill Gates will of course come to mind. Though notoriously lacking in social skills, he gets the right answers, at least as measured in revenue...

Another problem, and possibly an even worse one, was that we never had anything real to work on. Humans like to work; in most of the world, your work is your identity. And all the work we did was pointless, or seemed so at the time.

At best it was practice for real work we might do far in the future, so far that we didn't even know at the time what we were practicing for. More often it was just an arbitrary series of hoops to jump through, words without content designed mainly for testability. (The three main causes of the Civil War were.... Test: List the three main causes of the Civil War.)

And there was no way to opt out. The adults had agreed among themselves that this was to be the route to college. The only way to escape this empty life was to submit to it.

Teenage kids used to have a more active role in society. In pre-industrial times, they were all apprentices of one sort or another, whether in shops or on farms or even on warships. They weren't left to create their own societies. They were junior members of adult societies.

Teenagers seem to have respected adults more then, because the adults were the visible experts in the skills they were trying to learn. Now most kids have little idea what their parents do in their distant offices, and see no connection (indeed, there is precious little) between schoolwork and the work they'll do as adults.

And if teenagers respected adults more, adults also had more use for teenagers. After a couple years' training, an apprentice could be a real help. Even the newest apprentice could be made to carry messages or sweep the workshop...

Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food, which evolved to exploit precisely this fact. In almost any other kind of work, they'd be a net loss. But they're also too young to be left unsupervised. Someone has to watch over them, and the most efficient way to do this is to collect them together in one place. Then a few adults can watch all of them.

If you stop there, what you're describing is literally a prison, albeit a part-time one. The problem is, many schools practically do stop there. The stated purpose of schools is to educate the kids. But there is no external pressure to do this well. And so most schools do such a bad job of teaching that the kids don't really take it seriously-- not even the smart kids. Much of the time we were all, students and teachers both, just going through the motions.

In my high school French class we were supposed to read Hugo's Les Miserables. I don't think any of us knew French well enough to make our way through this enormous book. Like the rest of the class, I just skimmed the Cliff's Notes. When we were given a test on the book, I noticed that the questions sounded odd. They were full of long words that our teacher wouldn't have used. Where had these questions come from? From the Cliff's Notes, it turned out. The teacher was using them too. We were all just pretending.

[Side note--personally I cringe whenever I administer a test in my classroom I have not written or created the database for myself. I believe that I should be testing what I taught and how I taught it. Thus I have a distaste for department-wide tests, although of course I comply with department and school policy. I just think those policies are misguided and dysfunctional.]

Everyone yearns to be of value, to do and make things that are valuable, which is exactly what most of schoolwork denies. That is why winning a game, or a band competition or putting on a successful show is so much more important to students than handing in an essay which only the teacher will read. This is doubly damaging to the super-competent students, who can see through the charade and recognize the emptiness of the entire exercise.

Judging from my own adult children and their circles of friends and associates, we have raised a generation of auto-didacts and sharers. This is exactly what we're supposed to be aiming for--to create lifetime learners. But I sense that this behavior has either developed in post-secondary education or in reaction against the style of secondary education dominant in the US today (or both). Young people today have become self-educators because we have failed them, yet the thirst for learning has survived nonetheless.

The downside to this is that we have lost the opportunity to direct this thirst toward areas and subjects that our former students might not have considered. People's interests and proclivities tend to be set in early adulthood (until perhaps late middle age, when we seem to start branching out again) and a high school teacher who has turned a computer geek off to literature, for example, has probably lost them for most of their adult life.

We need to tap the nerds in our classroom as a resource--not as little assistant teachers, but as learning leaders. And to do that, we are going to have to create learning tasks that are more authentic, that have more intrinsic value, and convey a sense of worth--both for the work and the worker--than much of the busywork we engage in today.

The nerds are watching.

Belling the cat

Last month, draft common core state standards were published for comment by The National Governors' Association. It seems like simple common sense to agree on what a high school diploma in this country means, and that such agreement is best pursued as a consortium of sovereign states, rather than as a federal initiative.

I looked through the 9-12 standards for English Language Arts Literacy and they appear unexceptionable to me. (A summary of general preliminary comment appears here.) They are more simply and directly phrased than our New Jersey standards, appropriately rigorous and geared toward post-secondary education and workplace readiness. Since I was never part of the professional education system (I entered teaching via Alternate Route), I don't really have much to say about the proposed standards. They seem reasonable and I would have no problem designing lesson plans and projects to specifically address the goals.

Goals are relatively easy. Then comes assessments. When I was a kid, one of my favorite Aesop's Fables was "Belling The Cat." In case you don't remember it, here's the Harvard Classics version:

LONG ago, the mice had a general council to consider what measures they could take to outwit their common enemy, the Cat. Some said this, and some said that; but at last a young mouse got up and said he had a proposal to make, which he thought would meet the case. “You will all agree,” said he, “that our chief danger consists in the sly and treacherous manner in which the enemy approaches us. Now, if we could receive some signal of her approach, we could easily escape from her. I venture, therefore, to propose that a small bell be procured, and attached by a ribbon round the neck of the Cat. By this means we should always know when she was about, and could easily retire while she was in the neighbourhood.”

1

This proposal met with general applause, until an old mouse got up and said: “That is all very well, but who is to bell the Cat?” The mice looked at one another and nobody spoke. Then the old mouse said: “IT IS EASY TO PROPOSE IMPOSSIBLE REMEDIES.”

So how do we bell this cat? Here is what the proposed standards suggest:

• Employ a robust mix of test questions and performance assessments* necessary to measure the full breadth and depth of the Common Core State Standards. Although decisions about item types should be based on an analysis of how best to measure the standards, new summative assessments will likely need to incorporate a larger proportion of more sophisticated multiple-choice questions, constructed-response (or “fill-in-the-space”) questions, on-demand performance tasks, and—to the extent feasible— classroom-based performance assessments.

• Aggressively pursue technology-based solutions for more efficient delivery and scoring of state assessments and to report test results more rapidly, clearly, and in various formats that are useful both for accountability and for improving classroom instruction.

• Employ “universal design principles,” strategies for developing new assessments in ways that allow the widest possible range of students to participate fully from the outset, along with appropriate accommodations to ensure maximum participation of students with special educational needs.

* Performance assessments are ways to measure students’ knowledge and skills that go beyond asking them to answer multiple-choice or fill-in-the-space questions. Typically, students are asked to complete a hands on task that can take 40 minutes or can be completed over several class periods. For example, students
might be asked to research and write a magazine article or to conduct and explain the results of a scientific experiment.

• Support and involve classroom teachers in efforts to improve assessment at all levels by:

o Providing teachers support materials and tools (curriculum frameworks, syllabi,
banks of curriculum-embedded performance tasks) which help teachers to become “assessment literate”; and

o Offering teachers opportunities to participate in the development and implementation of new state assessments, including the design of constructed-response items and performance tasks for summative assessments.

This sort of assessment reform has been rumored as long as I've been in the education racket (about 9 years now). And as a teacher, I believe "classroom performance-based assessments" would be the best possible ones. But measurements in such matters defy standardization. The solution contains its own contradiction.

And it is terrifically expensive. It requires trained educators, not mere compilers of data, and it requires assessments to be gathered in groups of 25 or fewer in a classroom, rather than thousands in one fell standardized-test swoop. (And I applaud the acceptance of accommodations for special-needs students, which is not substantially embraced by NCLB. There are physical and time accommodations, but no real adjustments to the performance mode.)

So my question is--is anybody serious about this, or is it political theater? Because this type of assessment, if adopted, would represent a radical turn toward quality which our current political landscape cannot support.