Month September 2022

Watch This

Dusty Leave a comment
(Actual footage of me trying to keep up with grading.)

I work a lot.

My work day runs from 7:45 to 4:20; just about an 8-hour day if I got a half hour for lunch. I don’t, of course; my lunchtime is spent supervising and often talking to students, or else grading and planning. I do sometimes manage about 20-30 minutes for eating and something mindless like scrolling through social media or playing Minesweeper; but as there are almost always students in the room while I’m doing it, it isn’t duty-free: I would still need to intervene if one of them punched another, or if they said something that required action on my part, like “I’m going to cheat on my math test next period” or “I’m going to blow up the school” or “Clearly trickle-down economics are the key to prosperity, and also donuts taste terrible.”

And of course, my work day doesn’t actually end at 4:20. (No comments, please, about how the administration at my school decided to let teachers go PRECISELY at the Smoking Hour; it’s a coincidence of scheduling, not evidence that one of the superintendents is Snoop Dogg. Though that would be badass. “Hell yeah, you can teach that CRT shit, yo. Load them lil homies up wit dat GANGSTA truth, fo shizzle! CRT from tha LBC, and the D-O-Double-G!“) I commute, which certainly should be considered part of the work day; that adds an hour or so total. But even without that, I frequently have meetings and so on which run past 4:20; 5:00 is more accurate at least two days a week. Most teachers go home every night and plan for the next day; I’ve been teaching my classes long enough that I don’t need to do that any more — but I do work on the weekends, every week, for between four and eight hours; sometimes more. It’s the only way I can keep up with the essays I have to assign, and the kind of feedback I want to give on my students’ writing. I also read extensively for my classes: finding new material, refreshing my memory of old material, and so on; all told, my work week is closer to 50 hours than 40, and often beyond that mark.

This is not intended to complain — though I will certainly use this, as all of my fellow teachers do, to rebut the absurd claims of those who hate education and educators and argue that teaching is an easy job because we have summers off: even apart from the truth about teachers in summer time, which is that we are still working on planning and researching and completing professional development, and often working our second jobs required to make ends meet; when teachers work approximately 50 hours a week during the 36-38 week school year, those extra ten hours every week add up to almost 400 extra hours, which is — yup, just about ten weeks of a regular 40-hour-a-week job. Or the length of summer.

But no: my point with this summation of my work schedule is this: if I work something like 50 hours a week, for the 38 weeks of my school year — why is my performance evaluation based on one or two formal observations, which total less than two hours’ worth of watching me teach?

The observation and evaluation system in education is well-known among teachers and students, and pretty roundly derided as a ridiculous means of assessing a teacher’s ability or worth. First, the criteria for success are unbelievable: my school uses the Charlotte Danielson method. Here it is.

Seems reasonable, right?

Most formal observations are planned and scheduled, which means, as we all could guess and teachers talk about frequently, that we just trot out the dog-and-pony show for the administrators. (By the way: has anyone ever actually seen a dog and pony show? If you haven’t, watch this. The video quality is pretty choppy and annoying, but the dogs and the pony are very cute.) Stories abound of teachers who feed their students the correct answers to questions before the observation so the students can give all the right answers while the administrators are watching; my favorite is the urban legend of the teacher (Which I know has been actually imitated more than once, but I suspect the original story is apocryphal) who told the students that, when the teacher asked a question, if they knew the answer, they should raise their right hand, and if they didn’t know, they should raise their left; that way the teacher could pick from a sea of raised hands, and every time, the student would give the right answer. Genius.

Whether that clever story is apocryphal or not, the dog-and-pony show definitely is not: I’ve done it myself several times. My very first observation, I tried to work out a complicated group work system called “jigsaw” groups, to show off that I did indeed know how to run a group lesson; unfortunately, several students were absent that day (Maybe because they didn’t want to perform for the admin?) and that screwed up my groups, so the whole lesson bombed; that taught me the folly of trying too hard for an evaluator’s observation. But at my current school, when my administrators had observed me half a dozen times, always telling me I needed more group work and universal student participation — suggesting, every single time, that I both call on students (which I refuse to do, having been a dreamy introvert and therefore understanding how terrible it is to be snapped out of a reverie to suddenly have to admit you don’t know the answer, and frankly I’d rather let them daydream and miss part of the lesson) and use exit tickets (which I don’t refuse to do, but — my God, what a pain in the ass those things are) — I did indeed create a group lesson specifically for the next observation, and ran it when the admin came even though it was out of sequence with what the class was working on every other day that week. And I got my most glowing review to date. And then the next day I went right back to what I had been teaching before the interruption of an observation.

So beyond question, the system of scheduled formal observations does not give good information about what a teacher’s classroom is like on a day-to-day basis. But it’s more than that: even surprise observations, which I’ve had every year for the last eight years I’ve been at my current school, and will have again within the next month or so when observation season starts, don’t give the observers a good idea of what the classroom is like every day: because on a normal day, there aren’t a handful of school administrators looking uncomfortable in student desks during the class. Does anyone imagine that students are unaware of administrators in the room? When these are the people who most frequently enforce school discipline, and impose consequences on the students who break the rules? And there they are, just staring at the students?

Let me ask it this way: when you see a cop car driving down the road near you, do you slow down and make sure you don’t pick up your phone for any reason? Me too. And so with students while an administrator is observing the class: it’s called the Hawthorne Effect, after a study of productivity in a factory called the Hawthorne Works. When management changed conditions for the workers, productivity improved every time, even when the change was to go back to the former conditions. Because the workers knew: when something changed, the bosses were watching. So they worked harder, for a short period of time. I can never get a class to behave nearly as well as any class being observed. Though at the same time, the discussions that are the standard operating procedure in my literature classes are much more stilted and uncomfortable, because normally I and the students both crack jokes all the time, and go off on tangents into different subjects that I or they or both find interesting; none of that stuff happens during an observation — which means the observers get to see precisely what they want, which is an orderly, focused classroom; and not what my class actually is, which is an environment where a whole group of people can feel comfortable sharing ideas and discussing literature.

But even without that, formal observation is a terrible system: because it’s just not enough time. I work hard to ignore the observers when they come in. I actively make jokes and go off on tangents (I didn’t always, please note, but I am now one of the more senior and one of the more respected teachers at my school, and there’s little chance that I’m ever getting fired, and no chance that I’ll ever get fired for incompetence or irreverence during an observation; for God’s sake, I dress up like a pirate every Halloween and teach my classes in my Hector-Barbossa-like pirate accent. Irreverence is a given. Also, I am a highly competent English teacher.) and encourage students who do the same. So while observed lessons are better behaved, still, the discussion actually isn’t all that different; it does in fact give a pretty good view of my regular class, if still an unusually well-behaved one. But the other problem remains: the observers are only seeing one class, on one day. They’re not seeing the procession of students through my room. They’re not seeing how different it is to have a class in the morning versus the afternoon, to have one on a Monday versus a Friday, versus the last day before a vacation, versus a test day, or the day before a test day. They’re not seeing the same class when THAT ONE KID is present, or if they are, they don’t see what a difference it makes when THAT ONE KID is absent. And of course, they’re not seeing the work: they don’t read the essays, don’t look at the quickwrites or the annotations or the graphic organizers. They don’t read the emails apologizing for that bad day I had the other day, Mr. Humphrey, but I promise I’ll do better. They don’t read the emails from parents asking for some leniency because they had a family emergency and their child hasn’t been able to sleep for a week.

They don’t know what I do as a teacher. They can’t see what I do in just a single hour. They can’t see what I do unless they watch ALL of what I do; and of course they can’t do that. There are so many incredibly different elements that go into teaching, so many different skills and tasks that all must be completed for a single effective lesson, as part of a single effective class. There’s just no way to observe it all for every member of a school faculty. And of course, it changes every year, as students change and class dynamics change and class assignments change for teachers, as curriculum changes, as new ideas occur to us and we replace things that didn’t work last time — and so on, so on.

When I worked as a janitor, my performance evaluations were both easy, and fair. There were a set of assigned tasks that had clear outcomes: if I was told to mop the upper corridors, then my boss could go look at the floor and see the job I had done. If the floor was clean, I had done my job; if not, not. My boss was generally at work with me every shift: she could see how long it took me to complete a task, how efficient I was. She could see if I had initiative to take on a different task if I finished my assigned duties, or if I just sat around like a lump. She could hear me interact with my coworkers (Not to mention she herself interacted with me every day, pretty much) and with the clients and the general public, because she was there when I was working, and we were working in pretty much the same place, all the time. Once I’d worked there for two or three years, I was given more independence and responsibility, which meant I worked unsupervised more often; but still, my boss could look at the windows the next day to see if I had actually washed them like I was supposed to. So those performance evaluations were a breeze, and I never felt like they were unfair.

Now? I don’t feel like I could possibly get an evaluation that could be fair. I generally get sterling evaluations: I really am a good teacher, and a popular one, and the school both recognizes that and recognizes that they should probably keep me happy, because it would hurt the school to some extent if I quit. (The school would remain, don’t get me wrong; but here in Arizona, where School Choice is such a strong part of the education environment, you can bet your sweet bippy that some students would leave the school if I did. It’s happened several times in the past when popular and successful teachers have moved on.) But even though the evaluations I get are good, and I get an amount of “merit pay” as a reward for my good ratings, I still get a little offended by the evaluations. Because those people don’t have any idea what I do. Not really. So who the hell are they to judge me?

The irony, of course, is that so much of school these days (And maybe always) is about judgment. Assessment. Evaluation. Accountability. It seems like that’s all anyone in authority can talk about — though my colleagues and I have noticed that they have stopped using a phrase that was all the rage ten or twenty years ago: authentic assessment. Authentic assessment was the idea that some evaluations of a student’s learning would be more genuine and more effective if they were attached to a task that was, first, genuinely part of a class, rather than an externally created and scored standardized test, and second, similar in some way to something the student would actually do with the skill in question: so, for instance, testing a student’s writing ability with a resume and a cover letter seeking a job, if a class has been studying resumes and cover letters, would be an authentic assessment. We don’t talk about that any more. Probably because standardized tests are still the only thing that higher-ups pay attention to, a problem that has only gotten worse in the last decade; but maybe also because they became aware that their own assessment of teachers was anything but authentic, no matter how it had the trappings of authenticity. It seems clear to me, at least, that the idea of having the appearance of authenticity is self-contradictory: and so with formal classroom observations.

I’m talking about this this week for two reasons, even though it doesn’t necessarily fit in with my planned course of investigation and explication of the state of education in the US today; certainly this is a part of the world of education, and inasmuch as observations and evaluations have some impact on teacher retention and so on, this subject isn’t far away from what I’ve been speaking about. But if I had been going straight ahead with my intended subject, this week would have been about school as an entity: the purpose and value of actual schools with actual classrooms where students sit in actual desks, as contrasted by virtual classrooms or homeschooling. Hopefully I’ll take that on next week; unless I find something else that takes my focus, as has happened this week.

The first reason for this semi-tangent is my wife. My wife taught art full-time for three years, and then quit three years ago, because she is first and foremost an artist in her own right (And an incredible one) and teaching full-time took too much time and energy away from her art. But while she was working there, she got observed — by administrators who do not know the first thing about art. They told her, directly, that they hadn’t understood what she had been talking about in class while they observed her — “But the students seem to get it, so good job!” In truth, past administrators who have performed my evaluations haven’t understood my subject terribly well; some of them haven’t even understood teaching in general, and their comments and critiques relied on what they had gleaned from professional development and teaching manuals and so on. Not terribly helpful, but they seemed satisfied when I would nod, say, “Okay, that makes sense, I’ll try to do more of that” — and then go straight back to teaching the way I always have. Because I do understand teaching, and my subject, and because the way I teach is effective. It is not effective with every class and every student: but that’s part of the conversation about schools, which I will come back to next week.

The second reason I wanted to talk about this subject for this post is because this last week, I was observed. Not by my school-level administrators, and not to evaluate my teaching: this time it was district personnel come to check my compliance with the new systems that have been put in place this year. As with every year (And this is the other contender for next week’s subject matter: the way every new year brings new systems and new demands and new policies, and the old ones are sometimes superseded but never simply taken away, until we end up with something like a multi-layer shit sandwich — or perhaps a shit tiramisu would be the better metaphor. I’ll consider.), and despite the last two years being maddeningly difficult and exhausting years because of the pandemic and the quarantines, we have a new system in place, implemented by the district without any consultation with the teachers (and apparently over the objections of school-level administrators, though that is only scuttlebutt), which has to do with the curriculum. Not a change in curriculum: only a change in pacing, and in — you guessed it, if you have any experience working in education — assessment. So two district administrators made the first of what will be several monthly visits to the school, to step into various classrooms and examine how well the teachers are implementing the new system.

And if you have any experience with me and my teaching, you already know what they found: nothing. I’m not complying with the new system, precisely because it doesn’t mandate any change in curriculum; and I’m not going to change my teaching methods unless somebody gives me a good idea. They didn’t. So they saw what every other administrator has seen when they come into my classroom: a discussion — lively, in the case of the class they came into, one of my more active groups — with a fairly intense focus on specific details that show characterization and theme, in a complex piece of literature, in this case the brilliant short story “Valedictorian” by the incredible N.K. Jemisin, a piece I have picked up in the last three years because I’m trying to include more modern writers, more women writers, and more writers of color, and Jemisin is all three in addition to being incredible. And I hope they liked what they saw, even if I’m not in compliance with their system: because if their job is to improve education, then what they saw was reflective of their goal, if not of their methods.

But I don’t really care what they saw: what I care about is what they did. These two men, complete strangers to most of my students (One of them used to work at my school site, but was largely invisible in the lives of students, particularly these students, because they have often been online for the last two years and so don’t know any school personnel other than their teachers, and us only as faces on Zoom until this year, in some cases), came into class, opening the locked room door with a master key, in the middle of said lively discussion. They had emailed me that they were coming (I had warned the students they might come in, but I had no idea what period or what time they might come into my classroom) and told me not to make a fuss, so I didn’t acknowledge them; but I’m sure I did exactly what I saw the students do: they got quiet, they subtly hid away their phones and headphones and so on, and sat up more straight, their eyes darting to the men and away. Passing by the comfortable chair I had set up front in case one of them wanted to sit there, and ignoring my desk chair, which was also open, they went and sat amongst the students: one in an unoccupied student desk, and one standing awkwardly in the corner of the room, right behind a female student who spent the next fifteen minutes deeply uncomfortable with the close presence of a strange man right behind her. They stayed there for a quarter of an hour, saying nothing, while my students gallantly and honorably maintained their composure and actually had a pretty damn good discussion of the story; and then they left. And, I’m sure, promptly invaded another classroom, and made another group of kids vastly uncomfortable.

This is not a good system. If they wanted to see if I am in compliance with their system, they should have asked me. I would have told them I’m not. I might have done it sheepishly and said I would try to comply in the future; but I wouldn’t have pretended to be doing what I’m not. They could have looked at my online records to see whether or not I was completing the tasks they wanted me to; it should be immediately clear that I’m not (To be fair, I’m doing a couple of the things they want. And also, I already achieve what they’re hoping to achieve: one of those same administrators gave me an award at the beginning of this year for my students’ achievement last year. But I’m not in full compliance, and they could know it without even setting foot in my room.). If they wanted to know if I’m writing what they want me to write on my board every day (Standards and objectives in “student-friendly language,” and no, I’m not — that’s another post I’ll write, about the appalling lie that is standards-based education), they could have come in at the end of the day: no teacher on Earth erases the board at the end of the day, except those who then go ahead and fill it up again with the needed information for the next day; if I was writing standards, they’d see one or the other, the past day’s or the next day’s.

All of that evaluation could be done without disturbing my class. Without making my students — and me, but that’s not important — uncomfortable when we should be working, trying to achieve the very thing they are trying to see if we’re achieving. And if they’d stayed away, we could have made more progress towards that goal of actual learning. Not much more progress; they weren’t in there long, and it didn’t mess the discussion up too much — but it did get in the way. It was a problem. And for what? So they could leave some boxes unchecked. If you’re thinking they came back to talk to me later, to let me know I was out of compliance and that was an issue, or to share with me their observations, perhaps even to offer helpful or at least well-meaning advice, well — you’ve never worked in education. School administrators sometimes do that. District and above? Never.

The last reason I’m writing about this, the part that upset me most, was this: the observation made one of my students, as they told me the next day, feel as though they weren’t being treated as a person, but rather just some data point to be measured. It made that student mad, and it should have. And it made me mad, because I have worked very hard to make this student feel as though they belong in my classroom and at this school. And they do. It’s the administrators who don’t. And let me just note: you people put cameras in every classroom, over the objections of the majority of the students and staff. Use them. Observe me through the lens. Stay the hell out of the room unless there’s a problem you’ve come to fix, instead of cause.

One part of my job which I hate, but which I take very seriously, is assessment. My students want to know how they’re doing; the community, everyone from the school administrators to the students’ parents to their future employers and college admissions officers, all want to know how they’re doing. So even though I hate and despise grades and grading, I do it. I do it as well as I know how, and I spend appalling amounts of time doing it. And one thing that is critical to the process is: time. Time, and multiple measures. No one thinks that we can know all about a student’s knowledge or ability or especially their progress based on a single assessment, a single observed moment, no matter how rigorous that assessment may be, no matter how reliable or valid is the data that comes from it. If nothing else, all of the education system these days is focused on growth over time: and of course growth can’t be tested in a single instance, because you need two points to make a line and find the rate of change for that line over time. So I guess it’s good that the administrators are going to come back to observe again — but it’s absurd and terrible that they’re just going to do the same thing over again, with the same problems and flaws and negative consequences of their actions, many of which will invalidate their data. Again.

If I graded my students this way, those same administrators would fire me.

If they had any idea what I was doing.

Back to Balance

Dusty Leave a comment

What is education?

I mean it. What is it really?

Is it school? How much school? What kind of school? Elementary, secondary, post-secondary? We call all of it school, call it education; but is that really all the same thing, from kindergarten all the way through a doctorate?

Or is it experience? We’ve all heard that Twain quote, right? “I have never let schooling interfere with my education.” Great line. It’s not Twain’s, of course. Man named Grant Allen said it first. But regardless, it’s the truth, isn’t it? You don’t really begin learning until you get out of school — and into the school of HARD KNOCKS! Amirite?!?

Maybe. It certainly makes sense to recognize that learning must continue outside of the classroom, that application of knowledge and skills is as important as the acquisition of the knowledge and skills, if not more so.

But if that is the case, then is school itself unnecessary? Is it better to learn by experience?

Let’s discuss.

I had wanted to go back to the beginning of education, to try to figure out the fundamental concept; because I have no doubt that the essence of education is being lost, is being forgotten, in the modern era. We have fallen prey to a completely human and understandable error: the temptation of opportunity. We look at all these kids in school, all trying to learn, and we think, “Hey, you know what else those kids need? They need to learn CPR. And how to do their taxes. And cursive! Gotta learn cursive; how else will they learn how to write their signatures? And maybe how to square dance — I loved square dancing when I was a kid. Ooo! You know what else they should learn? To Kill a Mockingbird. I loved that book. They should definitely read that. And wait — what do you mean, kids today don’t learn Latin? Bah. That’s what’s wrong with the world today: we’ve gotten soft! We’re taking it too easy on those kids, gotta toughen them up!”

And so on. Having almost every child in the country, readily available, particularly with a large institution already in place designed to impart knowledge and skills to those children? It’s too tempting. We all have things we think kids should or need to learn; and everyone with any authority piles on their pet project. Not enough awareness of how the country works? Add a required government class. People don’t understand how the economy works? Add economics. Our math scores are falling behind those of other countries? We haven’t won a space race in 70 years? MORE STEM! Hey wait — STEM is fine and all, but really, those kids can’t even name the three branches of government. Give ’em a civics class. They need to know this stuff before they get out into the real world!

It never stops. And that’s what’s mainly wrong with education today: we’ve been adding to it for a hundred years, and we’ve taken very little away.

(Another issue, and one I want to write about in its own post, is the way we try to solve problems in education, and by doing so we create other problems; which we then try to solve, and create other problems… But that’s still just adding, without taking anything away, so same basic issue.)

So I want to go back to the very beginning, and try to figure out what it really needs to be so we can honestly decide what we need to be doing right now with education.

The problem with that strategy is the assumption I’m making that the people in the past had any damn idea what they were doing, and that their ideas were good.

Wrong.

“In Mesopotamia, the early logographic system of cuneiform script took many years to master. Thus only a limited number of individuals were hired as scribes to be trained in its reading and writing. Only royal offspring and sons of the rich and professionals such as scribes, physicians, and temple administrators, were schooled.[5] Most boys were taught their father’s trade or were apprenticed to learn a trade.[6] Girls stayed at home with their mothers to learn housekeeping and cooking, and to look after the younger children.”

…

In ancient Egypt, literacy was concentrated among an educated elite of scribes. Only people from certain backgrounds were allowed to train to become scribes, in the service of temple, pharaonic, and military authorities. The hieroglyph system was always difficult to learn, but in later centuries was purposely made even more so, as this preserved the scribes’ status. Literacy remains an elusive subject for ancient Egypt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education

So class segregation. And gender segregation, too. Awesome. It makes sense: whatever else we may think of it, knowledge is power, and the ability to control knowledge is even greater power; of course school was originally used to reinforce the existing power structure within the society.

(Though also, I am down with this curriculum: “Ashurbanipal (685 – c. 627 BC), a king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, was proud of his scribal education. His youthful scholarly pursuits included oil divination, mathematics, reading and writing as well as the usual horsemanship, hunting, chariotry, soldierliness, craftsmanship, and royal decorum.” I could teach the hell out of an oil divination class.)

(Also please note that not all ancient cultures were quite so rigidly authoritarian:

In ancient Israel, the Torah (the fundamental religious text) includes commands to read, learn, teach and write the Torah, thus requiring literacy and study. In 64 AD the high priest caused schools to be opened.[18]

…

In the Islamic civilization that spread all the way between China and Spain during the time between the 7th and 19th centuries, Muslims started schooling from 622 in Medina, which is now a city in Saudi Arabia, schooling at first was in the mosques (masjid in Arabic) but then schools became separate in schools next to mosques. The first separate school was the Nizamiyah school. It was built in 1066 in Baghdad. Children started school from the age of six with free tuition. The Quran encourages Muslims to be educated. Thus, education and schooling sprang up in the ancient Muslim societies. Moreover, Muslims had one of the first universities in history which is Al-Qarawiyin University in Fez, Morocco. It was originally a mosque that was built in 859.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education

I think, however, this is the kind of thing I was hoping to find:

In ancient India, education was mainly imparted through the Vedic and Buddhist education system. Sanskrit was the language used to impart the Vedic education system. Pali was the language used in the Buddhist education system. In the Vedic system, a child started his education at the age of 8 to 12, whereas in the Buddhist system the child started his education at the age of eight. The main aim of education in ancient India was to develop a person’s character, master the art of self-control, bring about social awareness, and to conserve and take forward ancient culture. [Emphasis added]

The Buddhist and Vedic systems had different subjects. In the Vedic system of study, the students were taught the four Vedas – Rig Veda, Sama Veda, Yajur Veda and Atharva Veda, they were also taught the six Vedangas – ritualistic knowledge, metrics, exegetics, grammar, phonetics and astronomy, the Upanishads and more.

Vedic Education

In ancient India, education was imparted and passed on orally rather than in written form. Education was a process that involved three steps, first was Shravana (hearing) which is the acquisition of knowledge by listening to the Shrutis. The second is Manana (reflection) wherein the students think, analyze and make inferences. Third, is Nididhyāsana in which the students apply the knowledge in their real life.

During the Vedic period from about 1500 BC to 600 BC, most education was based on the Veda (hymns, formulas, and incantations, recited or chanted by priests of a pre-Hindu tradition) and later Hindu texts and scriptures. The main aim of education, according to the Vedas, is liberation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education

Let me repeat that last part one more time: “The main aim of education, according to the Vedas, is liberation.” And that earlier part, too: “The main aim of education in ancient India was to develop a person’s character, master the art of self-control, bring about social awareness, and to conserve and take forward ancient culture.“

(No, it didn’t take them long to fuck it up, either. “Education, at first freely available in Vedic society, became over time more rigid and restricted as the social systems dictated that only those of meritorious lineage be allowed to study the scriptures, originally based on occupation, evolved, with the Brahman (priests) being the most privileged of the castes, followed by Kshatriya who could also wear the sacred thread and gain access to Vedic education.”)

(And also, of course so-called “Western civilization” wasn’t any better: “For example, in Athens, during the 5th and 4th century BC, aside from two years military training, the state played little part in schooling.[35][36] Anyone could open a school and decide the curriculum. Parents could choose a school offering the subjects they wanted their children to learn, at a monthly fee they could afford.[35] Most parents, even the poor, sent their sons to schools for at least a few years, and if they could afford it from around the age of seven until fourteen, learning gymnastics (including athletics, sport and wrestling), music (including poetry, drama and history) and literacy.[35][36] Girls rarely received formal education.”)

(Parts of the U.S. were better. For a while. The Puritans valued education and so provided it. Not so in the South, and not once the secular authorities took over the New England colonies, and began reserving education for the sons of the wealthy. So it goes.)

So here we have, I think, the fundamental conflict faced by cultures that begin any form of formalized, standardized education: knowledge is power, and the society has to decide whether it wants to spread that power out among the populace, or concentrate it in the hands of a few. Most of the time, we choose the latter. That is largely what we are doing right now in this country: letting education collapse (Or hoping and praying for that collapse, or even pushing it to collapse faster, depending on which side you’re on and how evil you are.) because then power will be more concentrated, and easier to wield for those who have it. So just as soon as the power elite recognize the value of education, they work to keep it all for themselves; nowadays by convincing the rest of the people that that education stuff is just not necessary, and probably pretty stupid — and maybe a little too socialist.

But that’s not what education is: that’s how it can be corrupted.

For what education is, I think I’m going to go straight to the root: the root of the word itself.

educate (v.)

mid-15c., educaten, “bring up (children), to train,” from Latin educatus, past participle of educare “bring up, rear, educate” (source also of Italian educare, Spanish educar, French éduquer), which is a frequentative of or otherwise related to educere “bring out, lead forth,” from ex- “out” (see ex-) + ducere “to lead,” from PIE root *deuk- “to lead.” Meaning “provide schooling” is first attested 1580s. Related: Educated; educating.

According to “Century Dictionary,” educere, of a child, is “usually with reference to bodily nurture or support, while educare refers more frequently to the mind,”

https://www.etymonline.com/word/educate

That’s the etymology of the word educate, and it taught me something I didn’t know: there are two words that serve as the roots of educate. The two words are related, even in Latin (Both are pronounced with a hard c, by the way, so educare is pronounced [ed-you-CAH-ray] and educere is pronounced [ed-you-CARE-ay]), but one of them in English is closer to the word educe (pronounce with a soft c, like “reduce” without the r), meaning to draw or lead out. To bring forth. The etymology website points out that in Latin, the word educere was related more to bodily nurture and support, and while nurturing and supporting students’ bodies is certainly worth talking about, I think in our society that has more to do with making our current system of mandatory attendance at brick-and-mortar schools feasible and positive for the students, more than it has to do with understanding why we have or should have brick-and-mortar schools in the first place. (And that’s something writing a separate post about.)

I’m more interested in the idea of education being at least partly about educing something.

But it turns out (unsurprisingly) I’m not the first to notice or care about this.

Craft (1984) noted that there are two different Latin roots of the English word “education.” They are educare, which means to train or to mold, and educere, meaning to lead out. While the two meanings are quite different, they are both represented in our word “education.” Thus, there is an etymological basis for many of the vociferous debates about education today. The opposing sides often use the same word to denote two very different concepts. One side uses education to mean the preservation and passing down of knowledge and the shaping of youths in the image of their parents. The other side sees education as preparing a new generation for the changes that are to come—readying them to create solutions to problems yet unknown. One calls for rote memorization and becoming good workers. The other requires questioning, thinking, and creating. To further complicate matters, some groups expect schooling to fulfill both functions, but allow only those activities promoting educare to be used

Educare and Educere: Is a Balance Possible in the Educational System?
Bass, Randall V.; Good, J. W.
Educational Forum, The, v68 n2 p161-168 Win 2004
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ724880.pdf

In the United States and most other western countries over the last 150 years, school has been thought of as a system to prepare well-behaved citizens and good workers (Parsons 1985). Neither of these functions requires much educere. Students who demonstrated a significant capacity for creativity were viewed with alarm, because they could not be counted on to follow orders. Those who questioned the wisdom of the ages and suggested alternatives to the tried and true were dealt with harshly, and they too eventually faded from the educational scene. History is littered with creative geniuses who were less than exemplary students but went on to make significant contributions to society. Even one of the latest transforming forces—computer technology—is not immune to this phenomenon. Bill Gates, the world’s wealthiest man, is a college dropout; and he is only one of many in the field with less than stellar academic achievements.

As schooling has become more universal and longer in duration, the relative shortage of educere has become more important in our society. When students spend more of their time in institutions that don’t teach in educere-friendly ways, and even condemn initiative and creativity, they have less opportunity elsewhere to learn to question and create. Correcting this problem is not a simple undertaking. A culture has been established that is remarkably resistant to change. When new teachers or administrators enter this culture, they are pressured from every side to conform to the cultural norm. If the culture cannot change them, it attempts to drive them out. Generally, it is successful in one or the other of these endeavors.

Clearly, the preceding scenario does not exist in all schools today. It does, however, accurately represent what takes place in many schools. In many others, there is constant movement along the continuum between educare and educere. It is this vacillation between the two that consumes so many resources. The result is much time, money, and effort put into education, producing little net result.

In the overall scheme of things, educare and educere are of equal importance. Education that ignores educare dooms its students to starting over each generation. Omitting educere produces citizens who are incapable of solving new problems. Thus, any system of education that supplies its students with only one of these has failed miserably.

Bass and Good, https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ724880

Now that’s what I was looking for.

Forgive the long quotations, but this was a good article. I’m not sure I believe their final conclusion, which is that the organizational structure of schools has to change, so that the thinking can change; but I love what they say about the two aspects of education — which, as they correctly point out, are both important, and I shouldn’t mock the importance of learning the fundamentals, which does often include memorization and repeated focused practice. Honestly, learning to be a good worker isn’t a bad thing: as long as it isn’t the only thing you learn. I consider myself creative and non-conforming — but I also pride myself on the fact that I work hard and I do a good job. Bass and Good push for balance between the two aspects of education, and I think that makes excellent sense. I also appreciate when, in describing how educational organizations must change, they identify these as the priorities:

Educational leaders must take action to support education as a learning organization. Most importantly leaders must provide the conditions favorable for a learning organization. These include facilitating development of personal mastery in schools and providing information to challenge existing mental models of educators. Specific actions include involving stakeholders in decision making, encouraging creative actions in the classroom, and supporting educators with sufficient resources.

Bass and Good, p.7

And if you know me at all, you know I really loved the next paragraph:

Balance Requires Dialogue

Communication and understanding of what students are learning also contribute to balance. For example, there must be a change in thinking from importance of grades to importance of learning. A grade is devoid of balance and, by itself, connotes no evidence of achieving balance. Only dialogue about learning will achieve balance. To achieve understanding, it is necessary to focus on what is learned and not learned rather than on a grade representing the learning. Focused thinking comes as a result of examining personal mastery and existing mental models.

So. I think we have it, now. Educare and educere as the two fundamental aspects of education, and the goal of the system of formal education (meaning schooling, because experience is certainly a good and valid way to gain education; but formal schooling certainly is too. I’ll write more another time about what “school” is and what it should be.) should be the balance between the two. I think my personal bias towards educere is largely because I teach at the final stage of compulsory K-12 education: I teach high school, and in fact I only teach grades 10-12, and I focus on my Advanced Placement classes, which are intended to be college-level curriculum. Of course I’m more interested in the educere side; that’s the side I live on. And I think that’s a reasonable and important point to make: that balance between fundamental skills and creative enrichment doesn’t have to be achieved simultaneously, it’s not a matter of spending Mondays on skill building and Tuesdays on application and problem-solving, in every single class for all the years of formal education; there’s no reason why we couldn’t do more educare in elementary school and more educere in high school, which is largely what we do. But it’s worth remembering and talking about how we need both sides at all levels: I do skill-building repetition, and first-grade teachers absolutely should include creative enrichment in their curriculum.

One more time, now, I want to bring back the essential ideas from Vedic education in ancient India, because I don’t want to fall into a trap that I think snares a lot of us: I found an answer I really like, and so I’m ignoring that it doesn’t really answer my original question, which was, What is education? Because I think you can’t really understand something unless you understand what it’s for, what the purpose of it is. Form follows function. So I have an understanding which I like of what education is: but what is it for? If the goal of education in this country, in this society, is to maintain the current imbalance of power, then I don’t really want to understand it better: I want to remove it, destroy it, kill it with fire. (And you bet there are parts of it that need to suffer exactly that fate. Like goddamn school uniforms. Burn ’em all. [Take them off the kids, first.])

So here they are again: and there’s no particular reason to choose the Vedic ideals over the Muslim or Jewish or Athenian ideals; except inasmuch as the Vedic ideals are the best ones of the bunch.

First: “The main aim of education in ancient India was to develop a person’s character, master the art of self-control, bring about social awareness, and to conserve and take forward ancient culture.”

And second: “The main aim of education, according to the Vedas, is liberation.”

Now look how well those align with, first, educare; and second, educere.

Character, self-control, social awareness, culture.

And then: liberation.

That’s education.

More Weight

Dusty Leave a comment

Continuing from last week’s post, I still want to discuss the probability of education collapsing under the current weight we are carrying. In last week’s post, I wrote about how educators are leaving the profession, largely but not exclusively due to the poor pay compared to the duties and expectations of the job; and rather than deal with that problem, America is asking teachers to do more to cover the gaps left by those who have already made it off of the sinking ship, which is making it even harder on those of us who remain.

Today I want to talk about the other reason why people are leaving.

It’s because we’re tired.

I had another day, yesterday. Another day that wore me out completely, that left me dragging my way home, feeling drained and depressed even after I had a lovely, fun, relaxing evening with friends, and even after dinner with my wife. I woke up this morning feeling the same way: at least partly because I have to go back and face the same classes, the same students, who wore me out yesterday, which certainly puts a pall on the morning; but partly because I just don’t have the energy to keep going back and doing all of this, day after day after day. I used to have it: but it’s gone now. And that fact makes me worry about my long-term future as a teacher, and even more, it makes me worry about the long term future of education.

Now, I don’t want to sound like I’m whining: I recognize that everyone is dealing with this, and all of us for the same reasons. I do not think that teachers have it harder than everyone else; that’s not my point.

My point is that teachers have it harder than we used to have it.

I’ve been a teacher for 22 years, and it’s always been hard. But it’s gotten tangibly worse in the last three years.

Here’s the problem, and what I felt yesterday and what I have watched get worse and worse and worse for the last three years: we’re tired, more now than ever before, and all for the same reason. All of us: students, teachers, parents, administrators and staff. We’re all so tired. The pandemic and the shutdown took this already difficult and troubled endeavor — using limited and uneven resources to provide a complete education for every student in the country — and made it so much harder. Over a two-week span, between March 13 and March 31, I had to change everything I had done for 20 years before that, and essentially without any help or guidance, because everyone else was doing the same. Students, too, had to try to adjust to a brand new, entirely different way of learning, at the tail end of the school year — and they, like their teachers and parents and all of their supports, were also dealing with the threat of a deadly pandemic, and all of the political and economic turmoil that came with it. Worrying about ourselves and our loved ones, and the whole world, while trying to build whole new resources for learning, on the fly, before the school year ended. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

And it didn’t stop there: at the end of that school year, we were still in a serious quarantine, still watching the crisis take the lives of millions of people around the world, watching economies crumble, watching our “leaders” screw the whole thing up in a hundred ways (And worrying that the election in the fall was not going to fix that problem, and uncertain what we could or should do about that) — and knowing, the whole time, that we would need to continue doing things differently in the fall, when classes started up again. That whole summer, I had no idea what to do about the coming school year. I wasn’t sure what it was going to look like. At the time, I was primarily worried that we would have in-person classes, and I was confident that I would, therefore, get COVID, because children are germ factories, and every teacher gets sick every year, usually several times, because children sneeze on us; so I knew that I would probably get it, whatever precautions I took — and I was certain that I would bring it home and give it to my wife, who has indeed gotten numerous colds and flus over the two decades of my teaching career for precisely that reason; and because she has severe allergies and consequent asthma, I was terrified that COVID would kill her. That’s what I spent my summer worrying about. And I know I wasn’t alone.

And before I leave that terrible summer of 2020 to talk about the terrible school year of 2020-2021, let me point out another aspect of the whole ordeal that affected me and other high school teachers — and to a different extent, teachers at all grade levels: graduation. It’s one of the parts of the school year that makes being a teacher worth it: to watch our students cross that final finish line, accomplish this remarkable achievement, and to celebrate it with them, is one of the great joys of being in education. I expect elementary and middle school teachers have the same feeling watching their students move on to the next stage; but high school graduation is the real rite of passage, and it is a tremendous source of joy and satisfaction. I have for the last five years taken a key role in the actual commencement ceremony at my school, as I took over the Master of Ceremonies duty after my predecessor left: I’m the one who welcomes the students and their families to the ceremony; I’m the one who reads all their names as they come up to get their diploma; I’m the one who tells them to turn the tassels to the right, to officially mark their completion of their mandatory education. It means a lot to me, because it means a lot to them.

And in 2020, we didn’t have it.

We did, actually; precisely because we knew graduation meant so much to the students and their families, and because the seniors who were graduating in 2020 had already lost the last third of their senior year, including Prom and the Senior Trip, we found a way to make graduation work. We had it outside, during the day — in 100+° heat, in glaring sunshine, in masks with social distancing. But it was terrible, and the graduates have told me since they wish we hadn’t had it then; they would have preferred to come back a year or two later and had a proper ceremony inside, with a tiny hint of reunion. Ah, well. Hindsight is — never mind.

We had a graduation ceremony, but it didn’t feel right. Just like everything else that year didn’t feel right. The usual rewards for what we do were missing. The usual joys were all stripped away from us, leaving only the bad things behind, the worry, the stress and anxiety and fear. And the anger. And the exhaustion. The exhaustion from doing all the work, first, while also trying to make joy when there wasn’t any, trying desperately first to hold onto normal, and then to recapture and recreate normal after it had vanished. It didn’t work: we would have been better off moving on to new normals, finding new joys. Frankly, we should have known that from the outset, should have accepted it and dealt with reality instead of trying to cling to a doomed past; but I guess when it comes to longing for what has been lost in a time of upheaval, we’re all Boomers.

But we tried. We tried to lift up that weight, to make everything okay even when it wasn’t okay. And like adults all over the world who try to conceal difficulty in order to protect their children, we were suffering ourselves while we were trying to lift up that weight. We couldn’t do it, but we tried. And that trying took everything we had.

We haven’t gotten it back.

Okay. I’m losing control of this. I apologize: I started this post Friday morning, and now it is Sunday morning, and I want to finish it and post it, but — I don’t know what else to say. I don’t know what point I’m making. I don’t know where I’m going with this.

I don’t know if any of this makes sense; I don’t know if other people had the same experience — or a worse one. I’ve tried to imagine what it must have been like to go through all of that and also lose your job and your home, move back in with family with your own family coming with you, or even move onto the streets; I certainly have enough examples of people all around me who have lost their homes, as the unhoused population has exploded in the last two years, here in Tucson, where it doesn’t snow and kill people with cold (Though the heat is certainly deadly in the summer) and therefore the population of visibly desperate people is larger and more obvious; but I find myself shying away from that. It’s another result of everything we’ve gone through, the trauma we have suffered, the grief we are still suffering for what we have lost, for the joys that were taken and have not and will never return: the loss of empathy. I can’t do it, can’t reach out and take on the feelings of other people, not like I used to. I don’t have room. I have too many feelings inside me already. And yes, that means I shouldn’t be talking about all of this to other people who are also suffering empathy overload. All I can say is, I seem to not have any choice. I looked back at my posts for the last two years, and I realized that I keep writing this same thing, over and over, about every six months: I’m tired. This sucks. I can’t take this any more. And here I am again. Again. I’m frankly getting sick of myself feeling this way.

And just like that, I know that I am speaking for others as well: because I know other people feel that, too. We’re sick of ourselves feeling this way. Sick of being tired. Sick of being angry. Sick of not feeling the happiness we used to feel. Just fucking sick of all of it. Aren’t you? Aren’t we all?

I’ve had more students come to me for help this year. Not help with school work, my students never do that; help with their lives. Help with their emotions. I am sort of a pseudo-therapist: mainly because I listen well, and I know how not to give too much advice when people really just need to talk. And I’m very pleased that I can help young people who need help: but also, I don’t know how much more weight I can carry. Judging from how this post has gone, the answer is — not much.. Not very much more weight at all. I got pissed, just furious, on Friday this past week, the same day I started writing this post, because my administration sent out an email reminding all of the teachers that we need to update our grades, and that the expectation is that we should all have two grades per week, per class, which means we should now have 10-12 grades in the gradebook. The reason they sent this email and prodded us to update our grades? Sports. The student athletes who had failing grades, who had turned in their work, had not had their grades updated for as long as three weeks, and so they still couldn’t play.

This blew my top. Completely. First because I don’t have two grades per week per class; not every class does work at that exact pace — my AP classes, for example, tend towards larger, longer projects, because they are doing college-level work, which for English generally has complete essays to write and full books to read, not worksheets to complete in a half hour — and secondly because I don’t have all the assignments graded. Know why? Because they are essays. I read them. I comment on them. I give suggestions for how to improve them. It takes time: 20-30 minutes per essay. I have just about 100 students in classes that write essays (I teach two electives that don’t currently include essay writing): that means, if I give them all essays and they all write them (The latter is far less likely than the former, though they do all trickle in eventually), then I have 50 hours of grading to do. That’s on top of all of my other work. And of course grading is part of my job, and yes, there is some time built into each day to get it done: one hour. Per day. Actually, 50 minutes, because I have one prep period and our periods are not a full hour long. So if I can get two essays done in that time, that means I can get all of the essays done in — yup, only ten weeks.

So of course I work before and after school on grading, and on the weekends as well; but I also have prep work to do, to get ready for my other classes. And those students who come to me for pseudo-therapeutic help? That takes time, too. And I don’t want to turn them away, because I know they’re close to the edge, and I don’t want them to harm themselves, and I don’t want them to suffer additional trauma because they get desperate and feel alone and lost. So all of that time is not spent on grading essays.

And then my admin gets on my case because kids want to play sports.

I get it: of course I do. Those sports are exactly the source of joy that I’ve been talking about which is missing. Of course those kids need that joy. And why should I stand in the way of them having that joy, when all that is needed is for me to go back and grade a piece of late work and enter it into the gradebook? Then everyone will be happy.

I mean: not me, of course. But the kids will be. And that’s all that matters, right?

I lost control of this, and I’m sorry. My wife read my last post and was pleased and complimentary to see that I had stayed on topic the entire time, which is unusual for me; I was proud of that and meant to do it again, this week. I’ve failed. But you know what? I just don’t have the strength to keep up with all of everything, and also take on more weight. I need to put something down. This week, it was this blog being rational and organized; I need to use it to vent. I will honestly try to get back to the actual project of rationally discussing and exploring the world of education; but I think I won’t be able to be focused and reasonable every week. But I do want to post every week, because I need to write and keep writing. So, for this week, here it is.

I’m fucking tired of being told, desperately, that I need to do everything I used to do, and also all of the new things that people have realized also need to get done, right away, or else everything will fall apart. That’s what it has felt like to be a teacher for as long as I’ve been teaching, because every year, they add new things, but they never take anything away: it’s just that now, it’s worse. Much worse. Because I have all this other weight on me from the pandemic and everything that came with it, including the trauma and the grief and the loss of joy. I’m fucking tired of being asked to help other people out with their needs, while not being given help with mine. (Please note: my friends, my family, my wife, they are all doing everything they can for me, all listening, all present, all willing to offer support. I’m only speaking of school people, and not the friends I have there.) And on top of all of that, I’m just fucking tired. Scroll back through my other posts for a better description of why.

Arthur Miller’s classic play “The Crucible” is about the Salem Witch Trials, and about the Red Scare of the 1950s. But really, it’s about a society turning on itself during a crisis, and devouring itself, starting with its best and most beloved members, who are destroyed mainly because they just can’t prevent the destruction, and so they become the first targets. I love teaching the play — though it’s hard to get it right, because the students have to get swept up in the story, and sweeping teenagers up in anything is difficult — and one of the big reasons is Giles Corey. Giles Corey was a real person in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692; he was an 83-year-old farmer at the time, and he was one of the casualties of the society’s inward collapse. Miller turns him into a fantastic character, a cranky old coot with a heart of gold who argues with everyone but means no real harm, who screws up and gets his wife arrested for witchcraft, and then tries desperately to save her. Because he tries to save her — because he failed to protect her in the first place — he gets accused of complicity in the conspiracy, and therefore of witchcraft. One of the complications in the original trials, highlighted in the play, is that when someone was accused of witchcraft, they had to plead guilty or not guilty; if they pled not guilty, they would go to trial, and at the time, they would surely be convicted and sentenced to death. If they pled guilty, there would be no trial and they would not serve time in jail — but their property would be confiscated and sold at auction to the highest bidder. People accused their neighbors of witchcraft in order to essentially steal their land.

But Giles was too smart for that: he had children, and he wanted his farm, which was large and prosperous and valuable, to go to his children, not to his corrupt and greedy neighbors. So when he was accused of witchcraft, he refused to plead. He wouldn’t say guilty; he wouldn’t say not guilty. (In the play, he won’t reveal the name of a friend who gave him evidence, because he knows that friend would be accused in turn; but the end result is the same.) He just kept his mouth shut and sat there.

So they tortured him. They pressed him with stones: they laid the man flat on his back, and put heavy stones on his chest, one at a time, one on top of another. And after each one, they asked him, “How do you plead?”

And Giles Corey simply said “More weight.”

I love that. I think it’s amazing, and brilliant, and courageous, and the perfect cantankerous coot’s way to say “Fuck you” to people who really need to hear someone say “Fuck you.” I admire Giles, and want to think I would be willing to do the same, to suffer torture in order to protect my family and my rights.

The problem, of course, was that Giles Corey died from the weight.

So my question for myself, and my fellow teachers, and for the society and the school system that keeps piling more on us is: how much weight can we hold? How much will they keep adding? How much weight is there?

How much more weight?

Starting with Ending

Dusty 1 Comment

I was going to start this project with the very beginning: with the meaning of the word “education.” Trying to decide what it even means to educate, to be a teacher, to have a school, and students.

But after the day I had last Monday, I think I should actually start with the ending. Because over the last year, I have seen some of what that ending will look like: and keeping that in mind is, honestly, even more important than fully understanding every aspect of what we are trying to do in education. Because if we don’t remember what we have to do to keep this going, there won’t be any education to understand, at least no public education, no teachers, no students, no school.

I do still plan to go all the way back and try to understand where education comes from and what it really means. I have large plans for this project; writing about education is a thing I have been meaning to do for a long time, a thing that I have done in small pieces for essentially as long as I have been teaching. I want to collect all of those thoughts, and try to make some real sense of them: and end up with something worth doing to try to improve the world where I have worked for better than two decades.

It wasn’t just Monday. Monday honestly wasn’t even that bad; of my six classes, one didn’t meet, leaving me with two prep periods (And maybe that’s the first general prescription for improving education in general: teachers who have heavy loads of writing instruction, specifically — certainly English; much of social studies; advanced language teachers and so on — should have twice the prep time while still being considered full time. For students to learn the intricacies of good writing, teachers need sufficient time to prepare, and especially to offer feedback on student work.); my AP classes were (mostly) good; my Fantasy/Science Fiction elective was great, as usual. It was my regular Sophomore English classes that gave me trouble.

But it was more than how my classes behaved Monday, and that’s the point, and the reason why that day helped me to see the end. I was talking with my good friend, fellow teacher, and carpooling partner about where we think this is going, and this is my opinion: either we’re going to change things to make education work again, and better; or it’s going to collapse. I believe that we can make the changes we need to make to fix this situation; but I also believe that the collapse is more likely.

You can already see elements of it. My school has always had trouble keeping teachers, both because the pay is too low in this state, so even though my school is one of the higher-paying schools in the area, people keep leaving teaching altogether, mostly to go into tech jobs (Which is kind of hilarious because I work at a STEM school, which means we can’t keep teachers teaching STEM to students because the teachers would rather just work in STEM — and so goes the nation), and also because our former principal was a terrible, terrible administrator, who drove people away both intentionally and with bad management. But lately this problem has grown so severe that now we can’t fill positions: last year we lost a social studies teacher, and it took three months to find a replacement, who then quit at the end of the year; we also lost a math teacher after the first semester, who was then replaced for the second semester, but then we lost the replacement math teacher after three months, and there was no replacement, just a long term sub. This year the school hired a math teacher from outside the US (One of the great things about my school is that the community is widely diverse, both staff and students), who unfortunately has not been able to get through the US Immigration rigamarole, despite having a job waiting for them. The long-term sub who took the math position at the end of last year, after the second teacher quit, has been hired permanently to replace the social studies teacher who left; and the school has been unable to find a long-term sub for the currently missing math teacher — so the math department has been covering the classes, filling in on their prep periods. This unfair imposition (which really approaches exploitation) was ended after four weeks of school: only for the math department to be replaced by all the other teachers, being forced to cover classes on our prep periods. So now I’m teaching Algebra 1 every Wednesday morning, instead of preparing for my own ELA classes.

It’s not just my school, of course. This article has many lovely little gems in it. Here are the highlights:

“According to one school administrator, many districts started panicking earlier in the year. While Arizona has suffered a teacher shortage for a while now, districts appear to be facing even more teacher vacancies at the start of the school year in 2022 than in years past.”

Isn’t it strange that when you have a problem and you do nothing to address it, the problem gets worse? The fact that the statewide response has been Do nothing, then panic, explains everything about how Arizona has dealt with this issue. And, of course, how America is dealing and will continue to deal with this issue. Or at least the half of America that hasn’t dealt with the issue.

“In May, a lot of my HR colleagues throughout Arizona were contacting me that they have zero applicants for their teacher jobs,” said Justin Wing with the Arizona School Personnel Administrators Association. “They’re worried. Whatever is worse than severe is going to be happening this year.”

“Whatever is worse than severe?” Sir. There are a million words in the English language. Several of them describe a situation that is worse than severe: Dire. Abominable. Deplorable (Oop — not that one…). Abysmal. Execrable. A shitshow.

Or how about “predictable and intentional?”

Why do I say “intentional?” Because here is the crux:

Arizona has one of the highest teacher-to-student ratios in the country, and despite recent raises, Arizona still has one of the lowest average teacher pay, at around $52,000.

The national average for teacher pay is just over $64,000

“When teachers received that 20% in three years, we went from 49th in teacher pay, to 49th in teacher pay,” said Wing. “I do think the main root cause of the teacher shortage is pay.”

This state is loath to pay teachers. Even when they raise the rate, they don’t raise it relative to other states, or to the actual cost of living. The fact that Arizona could raise the teacher pay rate 20% and still not move in the rankings shows just how bad it was before the current governor, Doug Ducey, added the raise to the state budget. (Let’s also note that he cut corporate and top-bracket personal income taxes in the same budget, so. We’ll see how that will all work out. We’ll further note that Governor Ducey is leaving office at the end of this year due to term limits, so the budgetary mess he’s leaving behind? Not his problem.)

Last one from the first article:

In a recent statewide survey of school administrators, two-thirds agree that there are more teacher vacancies this year than ever before. As of June of this year, schools reported more than 2,200 teacher openings, mostly for K-6.

“It’s very concerning,” said Wing. “We can’t leave kids alone in the classroom teaching themselves. Districts have to move administrators or coaches back into the classroom, which means other things are not being supported.”

So here we are: teacher vacancies that can’t be filled, because the root cause of the problem has not been addressed; and the stopgap measure is to put the wrong people in front of the classroom. They would raise class sizes and drop teacher positions entirely, but they already did that. Now they are making those of us who remain work even harder to handle the load. And the state’s newest strategy? Bring in young, inexperienced, underqualified teachers to fill the jobs. But this will, of course, only worsen the problem in the long term, as the state is asking future teachers to become full-time employees before they are ready, before they are fully trained and prepared; and their task will be made even harder by the fact that they will be required to do extra work to cover all the other teachers who have already left. Right now these degree-less teachers have to be in their last year of college, and must be “supervised” by a licensed teacher — verbiage that is supposed to make us think that the licensed teacher is in the room, but of course that’s not what supervision usually looks like with new teachers; usually it means something more like mentoring, with maybe a single weekly meeting and some random check-ins to see how it’s going. When they run through these future teachers, they will expand it to students two years before they earn their degree, and then three years; eventually last year’s high school graduates will be asked to step up and cover a couple of classes. After all, they learned the material, right? They can handle a class or two. (And they’re so much cheaper than fully trained and qualified professionals!)

Or of course we could follow Florida’s lead and believe that, somehow, being a military veteran qualifies you to teach.

This is the path we are on. And it ends when there simply aren’t enough adults to supervise classes, and the students get thrown together into huge masses in gyms and cafeterias, and told essentially to teach themselves. The step after that is when the school just shuts down.

It’s fine: kids can go online, right?

I have no doubt that this is the end goal for those, mainly but not exclusively on the right, who want to end public education and promote stratified private education, which will allow the upper classes to maintain their current stranglehold on economic power and mobility. Education is the great leveler, and the great lifter of those born into poverty; and thus it is the great enemy of the ones on top who want to stay there, and don’t want to share with those below them. And so they yell and scream about indoctrination, and grooming, and thus create livid hatred and distrust of public school teachers: adding social pressure to all of the current pressure.

And at some point, we will collapse under the weight.

But that’s not the really insidious part. You want to know the really insidious part?

It is that public education is locally funded and locally controlled. Which means that, in the most liberal and progressive states, teacher salaries are — well, reasonable, if not fantastic. And education is well-funded and successful.

Which means that people in those states can ignore the problem in the other, redder states. And so they do: because what can people in Massachusetts and Hawaii do about laws and budgets in Mississippi or North Dakota? Their own children are cared for as well as they can be; and that’s the limit of their responsibility. I understand that entirely: I make sure that my students know as much as I can help them learn about English, and I not only don’t care how much math they know, but I actively mock math as a subject. And PE, too, but that’s as it should be.

So I understand NIMBYism.

But consider how that has affected all of the nations in Central and South America, which we have actively exploited and ruined, and then left to their own devices. The problems we created and ignored have returned to us, arriving in our own backyards. As with climate change. And our imperial interventionist tendencies around the world, particularly in oil-rich regions.

And so it will be if we allow education in this country to remain uneven and unequitable from state to state. If we do not all deal with the whole problem, we will all face the consequences.

The two biggest issues facing education today are a lack of funding, combined with ever-increasing workloads as school employees are required to fill in for all of the missing personnel and programs; and the disparate, unequal, and frankly insane system of local funding and local control of schools.

If we fix those now, we can turn this around, still. And it’s one fix: a single, federal source of all funding, of all oversight, of all control. That’s the answer. I know. It’s socialism. Take a deep breath and swallow the medicine: local control of schools is insane and stupid. A nation that has one people — which is, after all, the whole fucking idea of a nation — needs one system of education for everyone, with specific measures to accommodate individual local needs and difficulties. Otherwise it isn’t one nation of one people. Because it isn’t the topic for today, but what is education? The creation and maintenance of a culture. And what is a culture? It is what sets one people apart, what makes them into one people. So if you want this country to be a country, then it needs to have a single, universal, fair, equitable, effective system of education. If we can achieve that, we will have a chance.

If we can’t, then we’re doomed.

http://www.sheina.fr/united-we-stand