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.

Whether tis nobler to write a recommendation

These days I find myself teaching high school seniors, primarily, a literally mixed blessing.  At the moment, we are relieved from obligatory preparation for high-stakes testing, as most of that is over; on the other hand, we shepherd our charges through the minefields of college and scholarship applications.  And with that territory comes the not inconsiderable burden of recommendations.

My colleagues recommend forms.  I was a lawyer for 20 years, and even then I could hardly stand to put my name to any kind of form communication.  It felt like an essential compromise of self.  So, like a proud idiot, I write every recommendation roughly from scratch (admittedly, my openings and closings are a bit of a formula) based on my personal knowledge of the student.  I pretty much ignore their resumes and brag sheets -- after all, the Admissions Office can read that stuff as well or better than I can.  I need to provide something available from no other source -- what the student is like as a student.

The problem is when they are a lousy student.  And not lousy in spite of decent effort.  I mean when they have a lousy attitude, a lousy work ethic and lousy results on paper.  I suppose most other teachers would say I should just steer clear of the whole thing.

But is it fair that our life be determined by the mistakes of our youth?  Who of us would survive that?  Who's to say that the inconsiderate lunkhead in front of me could not be an incredibly productive purpose once they recover from universal handicaps of being young, from their urban backgrounds and their toxic families?  Do I, with the short acquaintance of 40 minutes a day, 5 days a week for a few months of their life, have the right to be gatekeeper to their future?

Many of you are thinking of me as hopelessly wishy-washy as you read this.  I suspect you have a bad memory.  The only other explanation is that you were once insufferably perfect and are now intolerably judgmental.  So I say, "foo!" to you.  I cannot be cavalier about these recommendations.  Too much weighs in the balance.  One young person's life -- that's an immense weight for a relative stranger like me to toss around like Adenoid Hynkel tossing the globe-balloon in The Great Dictator.



Scold me if you will, I err on the side of opportunity, of the second chance and the third, all those chances that I needed to get where I am.

So that said, what the devil do I write in such a recommendation?  I adopted a pretty firm policy when I began to teach not to lie.  Not to my students, not to my supervisors, not to parents and not to other members of the educational system.  (This was a drastic shift from the M.O. of the entertainment business from which I had come.)  So I will not say that Johnny is a wonderful student when he is not.  I certainly can't claim greater intelligence or writing skills than he has, since the college or scholarship organization will have their own data on those matters.

So I devote myself primarily to issues of character.  Which presents its own challenges in the case of a student who has no self-discipline and rarely exhibits consideration to me or his fellow students.  Still, there must be some nugget, some kernel of promise somewhere down there.  That's what I write about, all I can write about.  The rest should be capturable by some sort of metric already on the record.

I must confess to smug satisfaction when I learn that research confirms that character is key; that the best predictors of success are not cognitive achievements, but elements of character -- persistence, consistency, those qualities researcher Angela Duckworth gathers under the term "grit."  There's something I can tell an admissions officer about that might not show up so clearly on a transcript.  And if I lack data, I can legitimately shade what I do know in an optimistic direction.

Because optimism is another element of grit.  And I need it just as much as the students.

So maybe I write some recommendations that are more positive than justified.  But who can be sure if that is so until the student in question has actually failed to live up to my hopeful projection?  Until then, it's all about the journey.  A journey that starts with an open gate.  I'd rather let Joe Schmoe in and watch him flail, then lock Steve Jobs out and let him disappear into the mob.

Sue me.

Taking a bat to TLWBAT

Insight often takes its time.

Quick, name a significant skill you have acquired in 48 minutes or, better yet, 40 minutes.  What's the matter, can't think of one?  Yeah, me neither.

Aftter the earliest grades, we teachers are, by and large, playing the long game.  Often teaching can be like a tossing a rock into a deep dark abyss and waiting to see when that distant "plash" can be heard. 

How many of us knew our teachers were complete idiots when we were in school, only to realize ten years later that we had learned something really important, something we were grateful to have learned?  (And how many times have you tried to reach out to that teacher?  Did you get a satisfactory response?  Me neither.  It's a sad fact that we will never be as important to our teachers as our teachers were to us.)

I suppose there are times in, say, math class, that a high school teacher can teach a certain specific operation which can be practiced a few times, and because that operation has few potential variables, it can be considered "mastered" within a single class period.  But most of the time, the application of that operation will need to be learned over a period of time, and integrated among other operations.  For teachers of literacy, it can be even more complex.  The great essayist E.B. White admitted that, 40 years after his time under the tutelage of Professor Strunk that he was only batting .500 with regard to omitting the "needless" words, "the fact that."  If E.B. White only got it right half the time after writing for The New Yorker for over 30 years, how is a high school student going to "master" a skill in 40 or 48 minutes?

So what's the problem?  Admit that things take time and get on with it! 

The problem is the way most teachers are required to report how they plan their lessons.  The plan for every day includes a space in which the teacher must specify what "The Learner Will Be Able To" do when the lessons is complete.  TLWBAT.  (When I started it was SWBAT, which is easier to pronounce, but evidently the Student  became The Learner while I wasn't looking.*  This is educational progress.)  The only honest choice here is to admit the lie to yourself and make the honest explanation.  No, the learner won't be able to do that when 3rd period is over on Wednesday.  But a few weeks from now, after some consistent practice, the learner should at least admit -- perhaps under duress -- that the learner ought to be able to do that by now.  Because other than grades or cookies, what is the incentive to practice an important but dull skill which demands steady application?  Yes, we'd like it to have an inherent incentive, but often that's just not going to happen.  Do you know a way to make mastering punctuation of quotes inherently engaging?    If you can't should we skip it?  No, we learn it because it is a small part of the inherently self-motivating task of making oneself understood by other people. 

There are a lot of moving parts involved in reading and writing well -- especially writing.  It is hard to assess whether those parts have been truly assimilated and meshed well together until a great many steps have been combined and practiced and practiced.  And mastery -- well, if E.B. White didn't get it after 40 years, what can we expect for our students?

The fact is, this daily mastery model does not comport with the science of how people learn.  There are long periods of confusion or mental dullness, followed by flashes of insight.  It is rarely a slow, steady progress.  We teachers just have to keep in there, pitching steadily, waiting patiently for the Great Cosmic A-Ha.

Teachers understand and accept the value of metrics.  We gauge our students by them, and the most honest among us gauge our teaching by our students' metrics.  But many deep, complex important things we teach are not really susceptible to hard-and-fast numeric measurements.  We can test you on whether you know the plot of Macbeth.  We can even ask you to identify themes and discuss how Shakespeare works them out.  But can you really quantify for me the level of cunning when Macbeth tells his wife "False face must hide what false heart doth know"?  Can we test how deep into the bowels of hell Lady Macbeth reaches to intercede with Hecate himself to "unsex me here"?  Can we measure how deeply you register Macbeth's existential despair as he spits out the words, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?" 

None of this desire to measure is fatal to learning. But why, administrators, why do you impose the necessity of a silly lie upon us, and then judge us on our failure to achieve a phony metric?

Ultimately, we are dealing with the indefinable, the unutterable, the ineffable, the -- literally -- unmeasurable.

And the end of that learning journey may be years and years from now.

So can we at least put some qualifiers on our TLWBATs?  Or spread them out over days and weeks?  Or do something to make them honest aspirations, rather than industrial-model evasions?
______________
* At least "SWBAT" can be sort-of pronounced -- "SwƏ- bat."  But TLWBAT is unprounceable.  You can invert a couple of letters and get "Twill-bat," but that's cheating.

UPDATE:  My friend Keith Peterson suggests I adopt the phrase "The Ideal Learner Will Be Able To", yielding the slightly-more-pronounceable TILWBAT.  Still not sure exactly what to do with the W, but I think it's an improvement.

Taking down the scaffolding

Since I began teaching about a decade ago, I've heard about scaffolding.  I was congratulated early on, before I had even begun Alternate Route courses for my instinctual scaffolding.

For those not acquainted with the jargon, and to grotesquely simplify it, scaffolding is supporting student learning by posing a problem, then guiding and coaching the student through the task, often relying on the students' prior knowledge.

The idea behind the metaphor is that one erects scaffolding to provide support to the workers who are constructing a building, and eventually the job is completed and the scaffolding comes down.  Thus, eventually the student achieves mastery and is able to perform problem-solving independently.

But I don't like the metaphor anymore and I think it leads down some cul-de-sacs.  Because I worked in Manhattan for 20 years and there's one thing a Manhattanite knows -- Scaffolding Never Comes Down.  That piece of sidewalk will never see the sun again.  Those contractors will figure out a way to keep the job going and going and going.  And your students will figure out ways to keep you from dismantling your scaffolding and maintain their dependence on you.

Second, scaffolding is not generally used in construction.  It's for renovation.  New buildings use cranes and elevators, not scaffolds.  Hopefully we are not renovating knowledge, we are building it afresh.

And third, we really aren't building knowledge.  Most of the time, we are exploring knowledge that already exists.  True, the student hasn't seen it before, but it is already there.  We are not creating anything.

We are laying down a path through this forest of knowledge.  We are mapping it out.  We are exploring.  Even when there are skills involved, those skills are not ends in themselves, but means toward acquiring knowledge.  To take my own discipline, one doesn't learn to write literary analysis in order to write literary analysis.  That is not a very valuable product.  It exists almost exclusively within the tight borders of academia.  One writes analysis in order to explain TO YOURSELF what you just read.  You may also be demonstrating your mastery to your instructor, but that is merely a by-product.  The chief end is to set out the metes and bounds of one's own understanding of the reading. 

We are not a construction crew -- we are explorers, hoping that the young explorers we train will go deeper into the woods and come back and tell us of the treasures they found there.  It is pure arrogance to think we are making something from nothing.  In fact, unless our students are creating genuinely new literature, conducting new research, fabricating new inventions, they are not building, they are mapping the terrain.  We take them through the part of the forest we know, then we let them go.  Some move beyond us, others wander back to home base.

So from now on, although I will use the jargon as required by professional courtesy, in my mind I will know that I am not a foreman, but a surveyor, training others mostly to be surveyors and a few special ones to go beyond our maps, out into the darkness, out toward the edges, out where there be dragons.

Annual reflection and setting new goals

I have never done this in public, but I think it's worth doing if only to publicly commit myself to some goals and raise my own level of accountability.  Now, as we approach the dawn of a new school year, it's time to lay out specific plans for improvement in my courses and my classroom.

Management Issues

Lateness - With only a 40-minute period, too much time is being lost to lateness.  Moreover, the problem got so bad late in the year with one course that it was hard to determine, even ten minutes after the bell, whether I had enough students to proceed with my plan or to shift course.  I would shift, and then the stragglers would show up.

One problem is that detention does not work.  It palpably does not work, because at the end of the year we still had dozens of students assigned to detention every day.  This is as effective as locking up drug addicts has been in fighting addiction in our country.  Yet we persist (in both cases).

I've spent some time this week reading everything I can find on the subject and it is all the same and it is all unhelpful, because the advice addresses individual aberrant cases of lateness, and a lot of attention is given to tracking and record-keeping.  I am fundamentally opposed to punishing myself for a student's misbehavior.  (That is one reason I don't have my own detention.  Another is that I am too involved in co-curricular activities to be able to drop what I'm doing and see a student after school.)

Phone calls home are school policy and I will, of course, comply.  But I don't believe in them, partly because we have so few reliable ways to communicate with our parents in a timely manner (will have to work on THAT this year) and because I teach seniors.  Parental disapproval and sanctions may be effective, but they are a poor preparation for the phase of life my students are about to begin.  They need to have their own discipline and their own habits in place, unless their parents are going to run their whole lives for them.

Clearly I need to move beyond sanctions.  Many of my colleagues (including many who should know) believe the lateness thing is cultural.  (Incidentally, that should not be viewed as racist.  Many European Mediterranean cultures do not value punctuality, and they are not generally oppressed minorities in this country.)  However, I need not investigate root causes or do some deep character education.  What I need to do is establish that whatever culture my students come from, when they enter my room, they enter MY CULTURE with my expectations.

So I need to be disciplined myself, start the class within a minute of the second bell, disregard who's there and not there, ignore late students when they enter (which I do anyway) and deal with lateness reporting issues later.  I will establish that I will mark absences at the top of the class and that unless they sign the latebook, it will go down as a cut, with the attendant consequences, which are out of my hands.  Hopefully, once it is clear that the class begins when it begins, the issue will diminish.  I only wish that I could flip my classroom so that the entrance was in the back of the room, but that is not practical for a number of reasons.  In any event, I will stop trying to use punishment and shame, and try and establish a social and cultural norm and set of expectations, at least within my own four walls.  Consistency.

This also supports a specifically educational imperative I want to press this year:  that, as we learn to write, we are writing in a specific and separate dialect called Standard Written English.  (Not Standard White English.)  SWE is not the way we speak every day.  It may not even coincide with formal speech.  It is a special, particular language which my students will be expected to use in college composition, and in most written communications other than to friends and family.  It is not a denigration of natural speech, but a commonly accepted and preferred alternate to it, and using it does not signal racism, but simply the employment of a Lingua Franca.

So in both punctuality and form of written expression, we have different expectations in the classroom than you have with family and friends.  Not superior, just different.

Phones - There is little or no support on the ground for a no-phones policy in class, although that is the stated written policy of the district.  Confiscation is not practical and could lead to liability problems, especially without support up the line.  Again, I must establish a cultural expectation, which I will reinforce with by distributing a copy of the page in the district handbook banning phones and having each student sign and acknowledge that.  I know that is no solution to anything, and is frequently an empty gesture, but perhaps it will be a signal that I intend to be consistent with that.  I must not let myself slip and lose heart about reminding students to get the phones out of my sight.  On the other hand, there will be times (I hope) when I will invite the students to use their smart phones in class, as a reminder that it is not that I am a Luddite, but that there is a time and place for everything, and that it is important to be present in the place where one is physically present, and to leave the cyberworld from time to time to be here now.  You know, all zen and stuff.

The Teaching of Literature  - I read an interesting piece this summer about the ascendancy of teaching literature over rhetoric in our high schools, which puts them out of joint with our colleges.  The fact is, I have never formally studied rhetoric, but as a former lawyer, I am familiar with and equipped to teach its application.  And as a reader, I am far more interested in journalism and other forms of non-fiction than I am in literature.

This comports with a district and building initiative to intensify the reading and analysis of short non-fiction on a regular basis.

So a couple of interlocking decisions.  I am not going to attempt to "teach" novels.  I will frame them and contextualize them at the outset.  Students will read them independently, using a schedule I provide as a rough guide.  I am still debating assessment of reading, whether to journal, quiz or other technique. From time to time, students will rotate in leading discussion, a process I will teach, building on what they learned junior year.  There will be the assessment of rote reading in a one-period timed test and a more important assessment in the form of a project which requires synthesis, as I have done historically since I began teaching.  The larger point is that our book of the moment should only occupy one or two days per week.  This leaves two days for writing and two days for everything else.

The Teaching of Writing AND Reading Non-Fiction  - This provides an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.  As mentioned, there is an initiative to stress non-fiction reading.  The plan as it stands right now, is to assign new non-fiction reading each Monday.  (Note to self -- because photocopying must be submitted in advance, must have non-fiction selected before leaving building on Thursday night.)  This can be in class, silently or aloud, partially in class and partially independently, etc. etc., depending on the specific task to be performed in connection with the reading -- analysis, rebuttal, extrapolation.  Then writing based on the writing can be assigned every other week, to be submitted electronically by Thursday.  I must then faithfully review and assess all writing over the weekend and return e-mail it before Monday.  On alternate weeks, students will be re-writing per my comments, to be submitted the following Thursday.  That is, one week write, next week rewrite.  After one semester, and with the use of projections and lecture-demonstrations, students will understand the edit and rewrite process well enough to do peer review, and start to incorporate those ideas about better style into their own drafting.

I have to brace myself to work harder this year and get better at seeing around corners.  At least this year, I've read most of my literature once already.  And the longform work must be interlaced with more short work.

Assessments - More of them, more at higher levels, more rapid marking and return of them.  Last year, my students rarely had the opportunity to benefit from comments.  That must change.

Advanced Placement -  I have ideas about re-formulating the Advanced Placement, starting with administering practice tests within the first week and regularly thereafter.  Earlier classes seem to have been completely sandbagged by the test, and there is no reason for that.  As high level as the class is, at some level it is all about the test at the end.  I am determined to have some 4s and 5s this year.  I will have more to say about this after next week, when I complete my mini-course on teaching AP.

Social Justice in Film  - Very charged up about this new elective.  I have always had trouble designing assessments for electives.  I am thinking of two principal modes at the moment -- having students blog about each film and having a rotating assignment of introducing and giving context to each film.  I will give the student a list of terms, names, etc. which are connected to the film and ask them to prepare 10 minutes for the class.  (Naturally, I will be prepared to back this up.)

Work Deadlines - This year I really want to walk the talk.  Keep deadlines myself and hold students to them.  I must start at the beginning of the year and not accept late homework at all, other than for excused absences.  I understand that students are allowed to re-take tests, but if they never hand in a paper assigned in lieu of a test, can they "re-do" that?  I am inclined to given them the 55 for a missing assessment and then assign something else, rather than give the impression that deadlines mean nothing, and that any work can be handed in at any time before the last day of the marking period.  That was just making me miserable.

I am hereby putting my DC and my principal on notice that my September gradebook may look very scary, but I am confident the situation will correct itself if I remain firm.

Use of the School Website  - As soon as possible, I am getting all my classes to the computer lab, show them my page, show them where their work is posted, give them the Twitter feeds and the Facebook page they can like in order to receive information about all the homework assignments.  It must be clear that if they are absent, excused or not, they are responsible not only for doing the work but for finding out what it is.  I must consistently refuse to answer questions about what the past work was except to direct them to the website.  They must learn that this is how most college courses operate.  The professor will not chase you and scarcely will talk to you about past assignments.  They must assume responsibility.

Apps - Speaking of the school website, I have it on reasonably good authority that a bright high-school level hacker/code monkey could write an app that makes our school website legible on a smart phone.  I would love to offer a prize for a student to do that for all the obvious reasons.  I also want to research free or cheap apps that help students manage their assignment calendars, not to mention college and scholarship application deadlines, which leads me to...

The War Room - I hope that Coach T and I can hold to Mr. Gregory to his agreement to commit Room 401 to be a War Room for college applications and scholarship applications.  Too much was compromised last year due to students not managing timelines.  We need to support that, to counsel students on their choices and to celebrate ALL THE ACCEPTANCES.  Last year, some got noticed and some didn't.  That's not right.  They are all a big deal, and we have to make them that way.  Which reminds of something else that needs to be different this year...

College Presentations during English instruction time  I need better advance notice of this, and they must be limited.  There have to be other times and places found to meet with seniors other than decimating a graduation requirement course.  Also, I'm putting my foot down on this specifically -- NO CLASS TIME AFFORDED TO FOR-PROFIT SCHOOLS.  We don't know what those schools are doing, what kind of financial problems they could create for our students, and they are off-mission for us.  Yes, some post-high-school education is the goal for all Newark Public School students, but AHHS is specifically a college prep school, and our message should be consistent.  Again, there must be other means, other times for the for-profit schools to reach our kids.

Well, that's all I can think of now.  There are a lot of details that are still fuzzy to me, such as the sequencing of my literature units (chronological order did not work), but this reflection was more about architecture than engineering.  Time for the latter later.

Now I've published this and you can all throw it in my weary and bedraggled face in June!

Enough said

"Students are turned on by greatness and bored by mediocrity"

(First of all, I apologize for the ad inserted before this video, but I think the clip is worth the wait.)

The title of this post is a quote from a former student of Albert Cullum, who left a career in theater in the late 1940s to teach elementary students, most notably in Rye, New York in the early 1960s, where much of his work was filmed by Robert Downey (Sr.). He created a powerful legacy and a challenge to every teacher.

I've never written about the film A Touch of Greatness because I first saw it before I began this blog, but it has been and remains a major source of inspiration for me as a male, second-career teacher seeking to bring what I learned in my earlier life into the often stale air of the classroom. It probably tells you too much about me that I can't watch even this brief trailer without tearing up, because what is going on is so very beautiful; this deep communication and love between teacher and students based on the teacher's confidence that children can and want to learn in complex and varied ways about the very best in our world and in our culture. We don't have to spoon-feed them the best in our culture or shield them from things we think are too hard or too psychologically complex.

In one sequence, the students are having a spirited debate as to the world's greatest author, between Sophocles, Shakespeare and Shaw. You can see a student who could not be older than 6th or 7th grade expressing a preference for Shaw over Sophocles for his unpredictability. A 6th grader charged up about Shaw!

He taught the classics not because he wanted to be high-falutin'. He did it because they are the essential building-blocks AND expressions of our culture. They state what we believe about what is good and what is bad. They are guides to a good life. To teach them is to reject the idea that our schools are adjuncts to America's employers, preparing productive and docile workers and obedient subjects, I mean citizens.

In short, to make your students readers, give them something they want to read. Now the question for me is not what to teach...I will let my ambition guide me. No, the problem is how to deliver that content past their prejudices about school material, and how to make them the active agents in their own progress and development.

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.

Good luck or bad luck - you never know

I am very pleased to announce that I will begin teaching senior and AP English classes at American History High School in Newark on Monday, September 19th. Both the classes I have been assigned and my students are elite. AHHS is a selective magnet high school, rated 6th in its category in New Jersey by the Newark Star-Ledger, with a 100% graduation rate and 97% continuing their education.

It's easy to guess that it will be a privilege to work in such a place. What is less intuitive is that, for me, that only became possible because of all the jobs that seemed wonderful to me that I didn't get. Over and over I would have an interview which seemed reasonably pleasant, but which bore no fruit, and over and over I would curse my bad luck at not being offered such a plum position. Little did I know that the real plum would have been unreachable for me if I had been under contract as of the first day of school. It is one of those weird concantenations of circumstance that makes one realize that while it's pretty easy to know when your luck is good, it's hard to know when your luck is bad.

All through my middle and high school years, I was a devoted fan of the humorist Jean Shepherd, who improvised 45 minutes of comic observation, jaundiced nostalgia, social comment and kazoo music every weeknight for almost 20 years on WOR. Shepherd later became famous as author and narrator of the film A Christmas Story, which weaves about a half-dozen of his written short stories. His first full-scale film project was The Phantom of the Open Hearth starring Matt Dillon as a teenage Ralph Parker taking a summer job in an Indiana steel mill. It was my brother who brought my attention to the film's chilling closing words: "Once you've stared into the enigmatic face of the Phantom of the Open Hearth, she will give you either good luck or bad luck -- no one knows which."

As Hal pointed out, this is an ambiguous conclusion (probably deliberately). It may simply mean that at the time the luck is conferred on a person, that person does not know in advance whether they will receive good or bad luck. Or -- and more significantly -- it could mean that one never knows, even at the very end of life, whether one's luck was good or bad. There are just too many imponderables.

Somerset Maugham's story "The Verger" is an old favorite of mine. It tells of a church sexton whose tiny world is shattered when he loses is humble but beloved job because he is illiterate. Distraught, on his way home, he seeks the solace of tobacco. But he cannot find a convenient tobacconist between the church and his house. Detecting a gap and an opportunity, the former verger scrapes together some savings and opens a tobacco store. And in time another, and another and another until he is the tycoon of a vast chain of stores. A bank manager dumbfounded by the huge deposit being made by this illiterate titan of retail, asks:

Good God, man, what would you be now if you had been able to [read and write]?"

"I can tell you that sir," said Mr. Foreman, a little smile on his still
aristocratic features. "I'd be verger of St. Peter's, Neville Square."

I do expect this new position to be a harbinger of good fortune, success and happiness. But I arrived there by dint of a lot of what I thought at the time was bad luck. And after all, I am the son of a woman who, while virtually on her deathbed, wrote an article for a church magazine called "The Blessings of Cancer." You just can't rely on bad luck to stay bad.

This is how we ALL will be teaching in less than a decade

This is a good presentation, although it's slightly too simple. I would also add the use of video games, as I discussed in an earlier post. And for those of us who teach writing, videos may not be terribly useful. Most likely, there will be some other online resource for the student to access in non-classroom time.

Still, there's no question this is a better use of the extremely rare and precious resource of teaching time than what most of us do today.

Lecturing and teaching

I first saw Professor Michael Sendel of Harvard talking about his book Justice: What's The Right Thing to Do? on The Colbert Report and immediately sought it out. It's a very readable, straightforward, unfootnoted primer on Political Philosophy built on an inquiry into ideas of justice, morality and ethics.

Then I discovered that the course from which this book arose had been recorded for broadcast on PBS and was available on disc and online. In fact, here's the first episode (warning - it's 54 minutes long and there is a good chance you will be fascinated and unable to stop watching):



Now you can paint me blue and call me a Buick, but I don't think any of that is beyond a reasonably accomplished high school senior. (I believe Professor Sendel's course is for freshmen -- they sure talk like freshmen.) And if I had the chance, I would love to build a course on the use of these lectures (they are divvied up into discrete 24 or 25 minute segments), using my own classroom as the seminar-discussion portion of the class between lectures, just like in college. It would be a nice foretaste of college procedure, and these are issues and ideas that automatically engage any young person. In fact, these are the issues that any thoughtful young person MUST reflect on as they are becoming who they will be.

But that's beside my point in making this post. What's really interesting, beside Dr. Sendel's clear and simple explication of the ideas and analysis of the writers and questions considered, is a good illustration of the difference between writing a book and teaching a course. As I said, the book Justice is ultra-clear and ultra-simple to read. I think I even almost understand Kant's categorical imperative, at least if I stand very, very still and don't look at any flashing lights or kitties or anything.

But oddly, it is almost too clear, too smooth. It goes very fast and ideas rush at the reader very quickly. It's probably not a good idea to sit down and read the book straight through, but to stop and reflect for a while between each chapter. But when you watch Professor Sendel teach virtually the same material it doesn't rush at you the same way. We can see him "feel the room," engage in dialogue with the students, incorporate what he needs, deflect what he doesn't, and yet make every student there feel included in the conversation. Because oddly enough, while he is teaching in the most regressive and (research tells us) ineffectual mode available, yet he is effective and his ideas land and stick and leave a residue in your mind after the video is over.

Of course, when you're actually at Harvard you have a week or so between lectures to absorb what Sendel has said, to read the material for the next class, to find the holes in his arguments and to prepare questions about how it all fits together. But even without that, the videos are more effective than the very fine book. I would summarize the difference as teaching.

It all put me in mind of another series of lectures recorded at Harvard back in 1973, when Leonard Bernstein occupied the Norton Chair for Poetry and conducted six very lengthy lectures -- the longest was just shy of three hours -- on the direction of concert music. In fact, the whole thing was a defense of diatonic harmony which had been on the wane for the previous 60 years or so, but which turned around and defeated non-tonal music within a decade of his lectures, especially in the work of Philip Glass, John Adams and Steve Reich. And oddly enough, Bernstein built his argument on linguistic theory, justifying the whole series as a matter of poetics, which was what the endowment was supposed to be for. (But really, who would have hassled Bernstein if he had wanted to show home movies of his dog for 102 minutes?)

Again, the lectures were published as a book, but the book is really missing something. What they're missing is both Bernstein's pedagogical skills and the force of his personality. Which are inseparable, as they are with the charming, though less histrionic Professor Sendel.

Here's a short excerpt explicating Bernstein's central conceit:



Fun, huh? And you don't even have to know anything about music to engage with his ideas. You don't have to agree, but you almost HAVE to respond.

What makes this work, what makes old-fashioned lecturing appropriate for both Bernstein and Sendel is that they are not simply delivering information you could get from a book or a website. They are conducting an inquiry and constructing an argument; engaging in the fine art of persuasion. And to do that effectively, you must bring the power of human personality to bear, provided you have one.

Aw, the heck with it. Here's the entire first lecture by Bernstein, if you've got an hour and three-quarters to burn. It's really worth it.



All of the Sendel course is available on YouTube, and here, where there are supplemental materials. And all of Bernstein's Unanswered Question lectures are on YouTube, absolutely free. (The DVDs cost hundreds.) Isn't this a great age we live in?

And if your school IT guy still is blocking YouTube, show your principal this and start knocking some heads together. Don't take any guff.

Maybe if a movie star says it...

Matt Damon says a lot of what I've been trying to say here, but maybe people will pay attention if a movie star says it:



By the way, stupid interviewer lady, actors don't do good work just to get their next job. All professionals do good work because they're professionals. They can't help it, or at least they can't help wanting to do their best. Probably not a factor for the hacks at "reason.tv", whatever that is.

Tip of the hat to Rob Lockhart, game designer extraordinaire for highlighting this link.

Infusing Poetry in Language Arts instruction Part II

This began with my post urging English teachers NOT to celebrate National Poetry Month in April, because that shunts poetry into a calendar-bound ghetto, whereas poetry should be freely roaming around your curriculum, lurking behind every pedagogical corner.

One of your obstacles will be the general resistance to poetry, or, to be more precise, to the way poetry was taught to your students in the lower grades. Too much emphasis was put on rhyme and other technical matters, and the subject matter tended toward nature and other harmless warm and fuzzy topics. It would be surprising to find an elementary school teacher presenting students with poetry that talked to where they really live.

Slam poetry is all about where we really live here and now. It is not interested in posterity. It is literally of the moment, of the moment it is being performed. Even now, into its second decade, there are not a great number of printed anthologies of slam poetry, any more than there are books of rap lyrics. Slam is primarily an aural medium, meant to be experienced, which brings the focus back to the aspect of poetry most greatly neglected in the 20th century. Poetry had become reflexive, self-referential and driven by academia. (The exception in the United States, were the new Black and Latino writers creating a poetry of the streets, designed to be shouted and chanted from the pavement up toward the sealed windows of the people who run things.)

Slam, on the other hand, was born and bred in a barroom and the critics are not academics, but audience members selected at random and given no criterion. The pressure is on for the slam poet to reach the listener immediately and have them like what they hear. Frank Loesser described song lyrics as being written on the side of a train which the audience has once chance to read as it goes by. So it is with Slam. No chance to reflect on the reference to Baudelaire and the significance of post-modernism. Get it now and it goes.

Simply put it, you must understand it -- at least some if not most of it -- on first hearing. This will appeal to your students. Also, it must have a performance rhythm and audience appeal; typically, this is the long upward build to a climax with a denouement, perhaps witty, wry or touching. Performance requires poetry to take a narrative shape, even if the purpose is not storytelling but reflection on a subject -- that narrative shape asserts itself in nearly all oral presentation.

And in New Jersey, and probably your state as well, oral presentation is part of your core curriculum. So forget about making it optional. All students must get up and slam. I leave it to you as to whether you require memorization, they all must speak before the others, learn how to speak clearly and evenly, to emphasize what is important, to vary the speed and the pitch of their speech. I know a lot of them will fight you on it, but it is teaching abuse to leave your students unequipped and afraid of public speaking. I've backed off in this area before for fear of traumatizing children, but I believe that was a mistake. Like other times and places when you must move your students out of their comfort zone, you can't bully and threaten them on this. You must persuade and cajole and coax. But you must insist and be firm. (My thought about memorization is to announce that it will be required, then let them use the paper on the day itself. This provides the benefits of both thorough and complete preparation of the text with relaxation and security during delivery which allows them to focus on the quality of what they are doing rather than the brute effort of recitation from memory.)

And there is the competition factor. My first principal, who is a superb teacher, was always skittish around competition and its negative aspects, which I need hardly recite here. But I believe that many of those negatives are mitigated here, as there is no built-in advantage for the brainiacs or the jocks in this competition. Most years there is at least one or two surprises as to who will excel at slamming. But one of the great values of competition is that it is its own intrinsic motivation. I rarely, if ever, offer prizes in classroom competitions. Pride of success is sufficient. Most young people cannot avoid wanting to compete any more than my cat can avoid jumping on a shiny thing that is moving. Some kind of atavistic impulse kicks in and, provided that they each believe they can be basically competent, they will try to do well at slam.

Getting them to a confidence about basic competence will take some time. Months, probably. You need to start adding the writing of poetry onto other writing assignments right away at the beginning of the school year. Have them add a poetic reflection to their five-paragraph essays. Have them do their classroom warm-up as poetry. Most of all, break the doggerel habit. Too many children are swamped by the tyranny of rhyme and meter and their expressive instincts have been completely suppressed. Find organizing principles other than rhyme, such as repetition, anaphora, antistrophe, alternation of long and short phrases, controlling metaphor and the like. Most of all, get them to write and not worry about the process and the devices much.

A side benefit of writing poetry -- by having to break thoughts and stories into lines and stanzas, they will gradually fall away from turning in prose in one single unbroken paragraph. Personally, I find unparagraphed so literally physically difficult to read, that I will hand such papers back and demand they be resubmitted with some divisions. Again, teaching in the lower grades has damaged them a great deal, and they thrash around fearing they have no topic sentences and that not all the sentences will support that, and generally write as if the chief end of writing was to be able to be outlined easily. As you can see by my style in this blog, I think this is hooey. The chief end of writing is, obviously, communication of (1) emotion; and (2) ideas. (3) Information is OK, but it is a lower order of writing, valuable to know but not aspirational.

How you organize your competition, your teams, selecting judges, involving other classes or other faculty, you are a far better judge than I. I can no more engineer your methodology than you mine. I am just here to be a cheerleader. But make sure that it is fun, that it is competitive, that is emphatic, that is strong, that it is real and true.

And this is authentic learning, in that slam competitions are going on each and every weekend, if not each night of the week, all across this country. As far as introducing your students to the ethos of slam, there are a number of videos on YouTube you could cull. Here's one example:



I would also suggest the very selective use of HBO's Def Poetry Jam -- but you MUST preview this, because unobjectionable material alternates in rapid sequence with very adult themes. I like to use excerpts from a documentary feature SlamNation which although more than a decade old and with some technical lapses, shows a lot of the great early stars of the medium (Taylor Mali, Saul Williams, Beau Sia), and presents the heat of battle well. And the film has a bleeped school-appropriate edition which can be ordered here. Another resource is the Russell Simmons miniseries Brave New Voices, which is too long for classroom use, but excerpts from which can be used to show actual high school students preparing for competition.

All of this is to prove that poetry is not for the faint of heart. It's not just for flowers and clouds and unicorns and rainbows. Although maybe it is for rainbows, because it is a powerful medium for all the colors of your classroom to be heard.

Jon Stewart nails it

He's on to us, colleagues. The greed, the corruption, the sloth that led us into teaching and drives us inexorably in our war against the middle class, which we are waging while pretending to be one of them!

The Daily Show

Raise the bar, dammit, RAISE the bar!

I don't have much to add to this story in the New York Times about a historical research quarterly written entirely by high school students (mostly public school students, by the way). These kids are researching, analyzing and writing up ORIGINAL RESEARCH for no school credit, no money, no headlines, no appearance on Jersey Shore. So why do it? Why does anyone want to be excellent? Do we really have to ask this question? (Yes, it will help with admission to college, but that has to be viewed as a secondary outcome, given the complexity of the task and the unlikeliness of one's paper being singled out.)

Here are some topics I found on the site currently: Austria-Hungary and the Compromise of 1867, The Paradox of Power: An Analysis of the Rise of Parliamentary Power with the Consolidation of the Monarchy in the English Reformation, and An Analysis of Alexander Kerensky's Handling of General Lavr Kornilov. I'm a bit of a history buff, and I find this stuff pretty arcane and sophisticated.

William Fitzhugh, who runs this journal, The Concord Review, is reportedly difficult and disagreeable. Maybe so, but maybe it's because he's swimming against the dominant school current of diluting and lowering standards. This impulse comes from a good place -- we want to provide success scenarios for all students, especially those who struggle and are likely to be frustrated. But the problem comes when we exchange interim, partial goals to be celebrated in order to spur students on for ultimate goals of excellence by objective standards.

The other reason that Fitzhugh may be difficult may be that his values conflict with parent's values, and those are always a problem for us classroom teachers. Let's be honest: the surest way to lower standards in education is to give parents more control. Parents are, as a rule, more interested in outward measures of success than in actual success. They press for higher grades for less work. They prioritize family activities, sports and other extracurricular obligations over school work. The Concord Review was not created by parents, nor would it likely to be run by them. It doesn't hand out "A"s or cash prizes or guaranteed school admissions. It's about learning a process, not rewarding an outcome. And the process should be its own reward.

Also, it's elitist. There's a mistrust of experts today, and that also comes from a reasonable place. "The Best and the Brightest" told us to trust them and led us into the Vietnam war. Experts lie and misrepresent. But that didn't make us smarter, didn't make us experts. It's not that we should disdain the hard work it takes to become expert in a field -- it is that we should question ALL AUTHORITY, including academic authority. Don't discard it, don't subvert it, but question it -- in an intelligent way, which requires being informed. Every time a politician compares the national debt to a household budget, you know either he's an idiot or thinks he's talking to idiots. The budget of a nation which has its own economy and its own currency is NOTHING LIKE the budget of a household. This is like saying, "I know all about defense appropriations because I own a Hummer."

We need smart, informed, hard-working people in the next generation and our school culture is moving in the opposite direction. Let's celebrate The Concord Review and identify the students we can get excited about writing for it, before it's too late.

Video gaming is the future of teaching

Since I started teaching, early in the previous decade, it has been accepted wisdom to treat video games like television, instant messaging and pop culture -- a distraction that pulls students away from a disciplined program of learning.

I've learned better. Video games ARE learning. We teachers need to not only accept this, but embrace it. As long as we abandon the field to commercial game-makers, we are surrendering important real estate in our student's brains which could yield better and deeper learning than we have seen in our generation as teachers.

I was converted largely due to this episode of On The Media, an NPR show I am seriously addicted to. The episode made two points that were clinchers to me: First - of all the things video games are teaching, they are teaching perseverance. So many of us are convinced that kids don't want to do anything that's hard or that takes a lot of time and has a lot of obstacles. Beating a video game is hard, takes time and has many obstacles to success. The key difference is that players are motivated to play and to win. That is obviously the piece that we are missing when we are teaching. We do not create tasks that students want to succeed at. Some will be motivated by secondary rewards like parental approval, better GPAs with possibilities for better futures, but not everyone is wired that way. That has nothing to do with our "modern high-speed culture." Twas ever thus. Most people need reinforcement while they are working and they need to be able to visualize the goal right in front of them. Video games do that.

The second clincher was this: 10,000 hours. According to this podcast, studies show that students will spend 10,000 hours playing video games during their school careers. Anyone who has read Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers knows that 10,000 hours is what is required to create an expert or a virtuoso. That's the amount of time young Bill Gates spent learning to write programs; it's the amount of time the Beatles spent in dirty German dance clubs learning to become a band; it's the time Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan needed to become who they are. So like it or not, are students are becoming experts, and the problem is that we don't know at exactly what yet.

Another important element, which I picked up from a book called What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee is that despite the stereotype of the lonely, isolated nerd, gaming at its best is intensely social. First of all, many games, especially online games require one to enter a milieu, adopt an identity and interact with others. Right away, the gamer is performing critical learning and synthesis functions, taking information about the environment and the persons one finds in that environment and transforming the data into tasks and choices. This is higher-order learning, and the learning increases. Moreover, one can work cooperatively with other players, or learn about cheats, shortcuts and easter eggs from other players. And most experienced players don't mind helping out novices, and teaching them how to avoid rookie mistakes. This is exactly the kind of cooperative learning that we are trying to implement in school, both because it is an element in workplace preparedness and BECAUSE IT WORKS. Students learn better by teaching and learning from each other.

Game playing transforms the learners relationship with text. As Gee notes, people under 40 don't pick up manuals to learn to play a game, they start playing. And if you pick up the manual before you play, it doesn't make sense. After you have some expertise, the text starts to make sense. So it is with reading. For a 14-year-old to pick up a 19th century novel makes no sense. The entire environment is foreign, and it works by rules the reader has not yet learned. How much more sense it would make in cooperation with an integrated course which included social studies which laid the groundwork for the novel and made acquisition of both texts more comprehensible and enjoyable.

I'm not saying that schools should buy video games with educational content pasted in to Make Learning More Fun. What I'm trying to say is that we need to understand how it is that students are becoming willing and enthusiastic learners for thousands of hours without coercion or compulsion, and use those discoveries to make our students into motivated learners, without regard to external rewards and punishments.

Here's an example: Learning is more engaging when it's embedded in narrative. I'm not saying everyone should teach literature. We English teachers have made the teaching of reading into a stunningly boring process by dissecting the beast, tossing the juicy meat of storytelling away and forcing students to chew on the gristle of literary devices and "authorial voice" and sociological interpretation and a whole lot of rubbish. So don't look to us to help. Here's an example. You have to teach trig. You have to. And as you begin to draw charts of sines and cosines, the students ask "why do we have to learn this?" and you get pulled down that boring road.

What would happen if you never mentioned trig, but simply started with a blood-spattered crime site, one which required you to figure out from the angle of the spatter on the wall, exactly where the bullet impact had taken place. What if you arrived at trig inductively from a narrative, rather than introducing the narrative AFTER the boring bits. Suddenly the "boring" bits become a means to an interesting end, and I would bet that students would breeze through for the opportunity to solve a murder.

That's just one example of what we learn about learning from gaming, and I for one will need more time and study to glean what I can. But I know that I need to start now.

A lot of real smart people have given a lot more thought than I have to this, and one of the most inspiring is Jane McGonigal, as you can see in this TED talk:



In the interest of full disclosure, there are educators, such as Ali Carr-Chellman, seen below, who believe in the actual use of video gaming in instruction, for the specific purpose of re-engaging young men who have become disengaged or even absent from school, a observable trend over the last 40 years. This is a more localized application of the concept, but may be of specific interest to some of my fellow teachers:



I've been kicking and screaming about kids playing video games instead reading Hawthorne for many years now. I'm convinced now that the video games are not the problem, but the way I've presented Hawthorne; and that, moreover, the solution is found in a discerning analysis of what it is that makes those games so compelling.

Negative lessons

OK, it's hard to explain why I've only just seen this film for the first time, but boy does this sequence nail down the factory approach to education. As Paul Simon said, it's a wonder we can think at all.

Changing educational paradigms - Animated

I love Ken Robinson, but I also love what this artist did with this talk about changing the way we think about education as a whole.

It's the curriculum, stupid

There was a remarkable story in the New York Times yesterday about a 4,000-student school in Massachusetts which has had spectacular results in raising student achievement across the curriculum by simply requiring students to write across the curriculum. Even Phys Ed (which some of the teachers complained about). There were no mass firings, no technology gimmicks, no alteration of the work rules. Time ordinarily spent in routine administrative meetings were spent in retraining teachers and getting everyone on board with the goals and the plan.

Incidentally, the focus on writing confirms my own long-held belief, confirmed in law school, that organized writing requires organized thinking; that one way to calm down the chaotic thinking in our students' brains is to make them habitual writers.

The success story comes from a report presented in June 2009 at the conference for The Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University. Here's an excerpt from the abstract [emphasis mine]:

The main lesson from the presentations was that student achievement rose when leadership teams focused thoughtfully and relentlessly on improving the quality of instruction...Leadership teams succeeded initially because they used their positional authority effectively to jump-start the change process. Then they built trust. More specifically, they demonstrated commitment through hard work and long hours; they studied research-based literature to expand their knowledge and competence; they persevered to follow through on the promises they made; and they found ways to remain respectful of peers, even when asking them to improve their performance. In these ways, leadership teams earned the respect of their colleagues and the authority to push people outside their comfort zones. With cultivated competence and earned authority, they were able to help their colleagues overcome the types of fear and resistance that so often prevent effective reforms in American high schools.

Gee, I thought the thing was to threaten to fire teachers and completely demoralize the faculty!

The gazillionaires all claim that small schools and charter schools are The Answer. But apparently, they're not. Like everything else in education, it all comes down to curriculum.

How smart is book smart?

I am hitting the books these days, not only to get ready for the school year but to prepare for another Praxis test in order to be certified as highly qualified in a field in which I worked, off and on, for 25 years, and which I have taught in the classroom for a number of years, by virtue of my two other subject-area certifications. I am reminded of the Wizard of Oz:

Why, anybody can have a brain. That's a very mediocre commodity! Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain! Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts — and with no more brains than you have. But! They have one thing you haven't got! A diploma! Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Universita Committeeatum E Pluribus Unum, I hereby confer upon you the honorary degree of Th.D..Doctor of Thinkology.

With one hand we denounce this passive process in favor of "authentic" that is, real-world learning, with the other hand we base our educational credentials (and compensation) system on the conventional (and supposedly discredited) system.

The irony is that the field for which I am doing some book-larning in order to pass the test, theater, is an apprenticeship-based system, and has always been. New technologies and social structures have some impact on the the way theater is conducted and its subject matter. But the knowledge required to create theater is and has always been passed to the next generation on a one-to-one basis. There is no way to learn theater other than to do theater with experienced practitioners. Yes, you could start up all by yourself and be an auto-didact, but you will be doomed to re-invent a lot of wheels.

And that's what we do with new teachers. We make them re-invent wheels every day of the week. I was fortunate in that the among the first courses I taught was two double-sections of a team-taught course (Humanities--combined Social Studies and Language Arts). And as a matter of circumstance, I was teamed with four different teachers in four years. From two (luckily the first two) I took great positive lessons in classroom effectiveness; from the second two I mostly learned negative lessons and gained an opportunity to become a leader, at least in a small way. I have since gone on to teach in more conventional situations, and I realize how lucky I was. If I had been put out into the ocean of teaching in a boat by myself, I probably would have sunk long ago. But in most middle and high-schools, alone is what you are going to be most of the time. And teacher's room lunchtime anecdotes is no substitute for working with an experienced teacher and gaining a sense of what works and what doesn't.

And my career as a lawyer required some apprenticeship as well. A large firm handles this in a formal way. The place I started handled it more casually, but everyone involved understood that new lawyers must learn every day from more experienced lawyers, especially since rookie mistakes can be costly to clients and to the firm. Translated into educational terms, rookie mistakes can be costly to students and to the school. But we more inclined to laugh about those and treat them as inevitable, when they are so easily avoided.

We don't see the value of this passing-on of experience in schools, and so we won't spend the money to apprentice new teachers to more experienced ones. I don't mean meeting with a mentor from time to time; I don't mean professional development, in which we sit on our tails for hours at a time except for breaks to do a worksheet or to talk with each other (bleaah); I mean actual teaching in a classroom side-by-side for months at a time.

Oh well, back to the books. Let's see if they teach me anything I don't know.