Another great movie teacher

Why didn't any of the advertising or promotion for the film Precious (2009) say that it was, in part, a film about an inspiring teacher as well as the liberating power of literacy?

As far as I can remember the publicity for this film when it opened last fall, it was all: overweight girl--sexually abused--expecting second baby--Monique plays horrible mother--terrible circumstances--escapes into fantasy, etc., etc., etc.

Were they trying to cover up the fact that most of the running time of the film she is enrolled in a successful alternative high school program with an extremely hard-working and empathetic teacher and a supportive community of similarly troubled, but striving young women? Was that shameful? Frankly, I avoided the movie at first because it was advertised as a depression-fest about people treating each other terribly, and only caught up with it on video this spring.

But the story (both novel and film) is about a young woman who escapes and transcends her environment, mostly through the power of the written word. Shouldn't we have been insisting that everyone, especially disadvantaged young women, see this movie? Even today, searching for an image on-line to illustrate this post, most of them show the star, Gabourey Sidibe, scowling, being taunted or otherwise looking miserable. There were no pictures available showing the class working together, learning, reading, writing, discussing, which, as I said, takes up much of the action of the film.

And what's wrong with a story about a great teacher who changes a child's life? Is that bad box office now? Do we only show teachers if they have drug problems or are abusing the children?

Not only does this teacher have an effective student-based literacy program, encouraging personal writing in a way that is difficult in a conventional middle-class schoolroom, but she goes above and beyond finding a halfway house for a student and even inviting her into her own home to show her another model for a happy, loving home.

The film underlines a point I try to make with students and parents all the time. Reading is the only real way we can get inside another person's head. Yes, we can watch movies and TV, but when you see a person's face, you cannot see what their eyes see. Only the word can do that--imperfectly, to be sure, but without an intervening medium or interpreter. The word goes straight from the writer's brain to yours and sets off explosions that cannot be stopped.

And all the publicity and discussion about this film will not tell you that Precious has a hopeful ending--not that all the problems are fixed, or that the title character's future is assured, but that she has a future, and the knowledge that she is loved.

Because no one will talk about this--teaching is an act of love. Why do it at all, if not for love?

Inspired and inspiring teacher gone

Jaime Escalante, who taught AP Calculus to inner city students who weren't supposed to be able to master arithmetic, died yesterday. If you haven't seen Stand and Deliver, or you haven't seen it in a long time, put it in your Netflix queue to remember why we do what we do.

Incidentally, there is a "rest of the story" as the late Paul Harvey would put it. Escalante's program faded and died because of the lack of continuing administrative and district support. Persistence may be the hardest accomplishment in education. Read about it here.

Writing lesson plan

Greetings to all my new Twitter followers, mostly thanks to my friend and former boss Eric Sheninger, who is one of the country's leading advocates of the use of Twitter and Web 2.0 in education.

I feel a bit guilty that I haven't posted in a long time, partly because of a career upheaval I've had; but that does not overturn my passion to treat my (relatively) new profession as professionally as I treated my old one. I'm still excited about what I do (and probably about what you do), and I have generated a lot of ideas I want to write about, but there have been other priorities. In the meantime, here's a quick lesson idea from a news note I saw today.

According to this news story, President Obama has 10 letters from ordinary Americans directed to him every day. Reportedly, the President reads them all and personally responds to three or four. Now of course, we are always urging our students to write to public officials, but in my heart of hearts I can't help wondering if this is a feckless task, an empty gesture towards ideals of representative democracy.

Now comes the President with an authentic kick in the pants. Every letter to him is automatically entered into a lottery to be read, not just by a 23-year-old West Wing intern, but by the top man himself AND to be answered personally by the President. I don't know about you, but for me this kicks up the stakes tremendously.

So why not challenge your students to write a letter to the President worth his personal attention? I suspect a preliminary discussion of topics plus specific lessons on tone, and, depending the grade level of the students a basic lesson or a reminder lesson on letter format. Moreover, the letters themselves can be displayed in your school or online--maybe your school forms a Ning for letters to people in power. Help them start the dialogue, uncover their passions and harness the power of the word to that passion.

Speaking of letters, I am crazy about a site called Letters of Note. These are letters with historic or cultural significance, shown both in facsimile and in transcript. A lot of them are not safe for classroom, so I would not invite a class to run amuck at the site, but there are a lot of goodies to be found there for thought, analysis, discussion and writing for both social studies and language arts literacy teachers. Here is a marvelous recent post of a letter from Harry Truman to an old friend, begun just before he learned he was to become president with a post-script added just after. Simple and powerful.

News flash: People are willing to pay higher taxes for better schools and teachers

The things that "everyone knows" are usually utterly ridiculous nonsense that someone with an agenda is trying to cram down your throat. For example, "everyone knows" that the public option in health care is unpopular. Except that between 51 and 76 percent of the population supports it (depending on how it is defined), which used to be a majority when I had math.

"Everyone knows" that a big reason for New Jersey's budget problems is overspending on schools, especially those overpaid and over-pensioned teachers. "Everybody" wants to make sure that teachers share the pain over budget cuts. (Like fewer, older books, crumbling school buildings and increased classes sizes aren't pain enough.) "Everybody" is sick and tired of paying teachers more than they're worth for working from 8 to 2:30 every day. (Then, of course, going home and lazing around.)

Except that in Nevada, where schools are mediocre and the teacher's union is much less effectual than the NJEA, teachers have a 77 percent approval rating from voters, who oppose cutting teacher pay by 83 percent. In fact, 65 percent percent prefer raising corporate taxes to cutting teacher pay in order to make up the budget gap. I hope this will encourage the NJEA to commission a similar study and shut down Mr. Christie's attacks.

New Jersey has real financial problems. But grown-ups know how to look for the real causes of problems and find real solutions, instead of running around making up scapegoats; and in turn punishing the children for the failures of those so-called grown-ups.

Time in school > time spent learning

Before I became a schoolteacher, I used to have an honest job in a real office. Most bosses in these situations operate under a number of ridiculous counter-intuitive assumptions such as (a) if you had your butt in your chair in the office you were, ipso facto, working; (b) if you were anywhere outside of the office you could not possibly be working; and (c) the only conceivable times when work might get done were the very same hours that the boss was in the office, not before and not after. The idea that one might work in different times, places and in different ways did not occur to most supervisors in those days, probably because they hated their own jobs and could not imagine doing them without physical compulsion and social pressure. Nonetheless, the fallacy continues--being present means you're doing work. This delusion is particularly rabid in the public schools.

A few days ago the New York Times reported that

[d]ozens of public high schools in eight states will introduce a program next year allowing 10th graders who pass a battery of tests to get a diploma two years early and immediately enroll in community college. Students who pass but aspire to attend a selective college may continue with college preparatory courses in their junior and senior years...The tests would cover not only English and math but also subjects like science and history.

“One hope is that this board exam system can prepare students to move on to careers, to higher ed and technical colleges and the workplace, sooner rather than later,” said Howard T. Everson, a professor of educational psychology at CUNY, who is co-chairman of the advisory committee. In that respect, the effort is similar to the growing early college high school movement, in which students begin taking college-level courses while they are still in high school and earning college credit through nearby community colleges.

...Its backers say the new system would reduce the need for community colleges to offer remedial courses because the passing score for the 10th-grade tests would be set at the level necessary to succeed in first-year college courses...

...Kentucky’s commissioner of education, Terry Holliday, said ...“We’ve been tied to seat time for 100 years. This would allow an approach based on subject mastery — a system based around move-on-when-ready.”

...Supporters include...National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union.

I'm not sure what this all means. On the one hand, some students will avoid wasting time in high school sitting through instruction on things they have already mastered or subjects for which there are good substitute courses in a community college setting. On the other hand, are we headed for a two-tier class-reinforcing education system, such as has been traditional in Europe, wherein certain students are predestined for laboring trades and others for university work at an age too early to truly assess an individual's intellectual capacity, clouded as it is with issues of maturation and social adaptation?

A quick commercial

My son works for Wolfram Alpha, an online computation engine which attempts to understand and answer any question asked in plain language, the answer to which is susceptible to computation. One of the side effects of this powerful tool is that astute math students who discover it could use it to simply do their homework for them. This is because WA doesn't just answer questions, but shows you how it computed the answer. The smart math teacher (of smart math students) will take account of that and figure out how to incorporate it in their instruction. Here is Conrad Wolfram, one of the key figures in this project, explaining how computers can be integrated into math instruction to promote higher-order learning. (Sorry, this is a YouTube video, so it cannot be viewed within New Milford High School, for reasons which defy rational explanation.)



I am not a math teacher, and my math instruction ended just short of calculus, but I can appreciate the concept of moving math away from mere calculation toward the analysis and the solution of real-world problems and questions. This is akin to where I would like to see Language Arts education to go--away from the study of literature and mechanistic writing skills such as forming paragraphs and punctuating them, and toward locating and de-coding real-world texts for real world purposes, and synthesizing the material found there with other material, such as what the writer generates into a text with a real audience. You know, like writing a comment on a blog and stuff.

And in any case, I'm way proud of my son and the people he is associated with.

A couple more good teachers

I have a more complex and ambitious post I have been working on, subject to interruption for Midterm Exams and closing out the marking period. But I am feeling a bit guilty for not updating for two whole weeks. So in the meantime, a couple more examples of teachers I find admirable.

The first is my lovely sister's lovely husband, Don Loprieno, who has long worked as an historian, curator and historical interpreter. He is currently semi-retired, although he is working hard selling this book, which he wrote and for which he provided the photo illustrations.

That's the commercial--here's the show. This is Don not only demonstrating the proper loading and firing of an 18th century musket, but also explaining the derivations of three common phrases in the English language, "flash in the pan," "Don't go off half-cocked," and "Lock, stock and barrel" (hence the title of the video).


Here is another favorite non-classroom teacher of mine, Max Morath. Max has been playing and talking about ragtime for over fifty years now, in the concert hall, theater and on television. I first encountered him in this series (or one like it) on what we called "educational television" in the olden days. I would compare him to Leonard Bernstein in his ability to elucidate musical issues for non-musicians. In this episode he addresses the importance of business in the music business, going back to the early 20th century.

High expectations vs. Uniform expectations

I am not breaking ground or being controversial when I say that most teachers accept the idea of accountability AND of raising academic standards. The question remains how that is to be done and how do we avoid turning the means into the end.

In that connection, there is a very cogent piece by Alfie Kohn in the current issue of Education Week called Debunking the Case for National Standards: One-Size-Fits-All Mandates and Their Dangers. The heart of his argument is as follows:

Are all kids entitled to a great education? Of course. But that doesn’t mean all kids should get the same education. High standards don’t require common standards. Uniformity is not the same thing as excellence – or equity. (In fact,
one-size-fits-all demands may offer the illusion of fairness, setting back the
cause of genuine equity.) To acknowledge these simple truths is to watch the
rationale for national standards – or uniform state standards -- collapse into a
heap of intellectual rubble.

This disconnect is evident every time you put the current Core Curriculum Content Standards next to a sample HSPA, which is the current high school graduation-requirement test in New Jersey. For example, here are some of my core content standards:

• Analyze how an author's use of words creates tone and mood, and how choice
  of words advances the theme or purpose of the work.
  
• Compare and evaluate the relationship between past literary traditions
  and contemporary writing.
  
• Recognize the use or abuse of ambiguity, contradiction, paradox, irony,
  incongruities, overstatement and understatement in text and explain their effect
  on the reader.

You show me the standardized multiple-guess, true-false, matching test that will effectively measure any of those. And yet those tests, despite DOE undertakings to the contrary, are the actual standard to which teachers and students are to be held.

The core curriculum content is one animal, and the standardized tests are another, and the twain does not meet. We have built a system around tests which measure things other than the things we are supposed to teach.

Can't wait to see what our politicians will propose to solve the contradiction...

Inspiration: additions and clarifications

Shortly after posting an entry about inspiring teachers from the movies, I realized I had omitted François Marin, the committed but harried teacher in The Class (original French title: Entre les murs).



Marin, played by François Bégaudeau, and based on himself and his own autobiographical novel is a realistic mix of strong and weak qualities as a teacher. As stated, he is engaged with his students and wants to reach them where they live, although he must cope with a curriculum which requires he teach material which is less than urgent to his kids. ('Twas ever thus.) But Bégaudeau loses his temper and sometimes needs to be right. He makes a foolish intervention with a student on the playground in order to try to protect his own position. His school also has an insane policy which puts students on the disciplinary committee, a policy with which Marin seems to agree. So he may not be a good model, but he is an admirable and accurate reflection of the real life of a good teacher with good intentions.

John Keating of Dead Poets Society means well, too, and he is a heck of a lot of fun. I am sure most English teachers like me envy his brilliant first class of the semester, with his memorable presentation of the idea, "Carpe diem." And his kinesthetic lesson about meter, marching around the courtyard is also admirable, perhaps worthy of borrowing. But he is too careless about the ultimate effect of his teaching on his students. Yes, it's great to get kids so charged up about poetry that they meet outside of class to read it together. And it is good to teach children, American children anyway, to question authority. But the rebellion they learn ultimately becomes dangerous to themselves. Admittedly, the degree to which it is destructive was unforeseeable. But Keating leaves himself open to being turned into a symbol for the students, a symbol which the school must eliminate and destroy. And it is always better to remain a real person than to be a symbol. So I should not be surprised with myself that I left the exciting Mr. Keating off my earlier list--I should want to be at least as exciting as he is, but not so hazardous, both to himself and his students.

Authentic learning at work

Here's a video of Dave Eggers, principal contributor to McSweeney's and author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius talking about a privately-generated public-service education project that only caught fire when the participants stumbled over real-world authentic tasks for the students. Very exciting.