My apologies, everyone: I have come down with a very nasty cold, and I don’t think it would be a good idea for me to write a post this week. So instead, here is an older post I’m still pleased with and which addresses one of the major issues with education: grading. Here is part of my prescription for removing the problem as much as possible.
I spent a large part of last weekend grading. Not unusual, really; I’m a teacher. I generally spend part of every weekend grading, along with every free moment in between classes during the school day (and the former because there aren’t many of the latter, between teaching and planning and corresponding); and that’s even after my student count was cut in half when I changed from the comprehensive public school to the STEM charter school where I am now. Grading is something I have ranted and raved about far too often in the past; because it is, quite simply, the worst thing about teaching. Well, maybe the second worst thing: being treated like a criminal is no frosty chocolate milkshake.
But enough of ranting about grades: I need to be more positive. I need to spend less time being angry, and more time trying to see the light and share…
So first, here’s a sneak peek of what’s coming up on the blog:
More ranting about education.
But you knew that already. More specifically, I will be posting about standards, because I hate and oppose those little buggers, and I think more people both would and should if they thought about them the way that I do. I will also be posting about how school administration imposes new expectations and demands and responsibilities on teachers, in the form of new programs that get added every year, without ever taking away any programs or recognizing that teachers are already overwhelmed. Both of these posts are intended as foundations for a post I want to write about censorship in schools: because my colleague recently had to fight to get In Cold Blood by Truman Capote approved for her class for seniors.
Why did she have to fight? Because the administrators worried that the book would be too graphic and disturbing for students. That’s right. The book written in 1965, which does describe the murder of a family and the crime scene afterwards, is somehow going to be upsetting to students — seniors — who listen to true-crime podcasts, who watch horror movies and cop shows and more true crime documentaries. And that book is somehow more objectionable than 1984, with its scenes of torture, and Night and The Diary of A Young Girl with their (also historical and non-fictional) accounts of the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust, and every Shakespeare play ever with all of the murders and suicides and dirty jokes (And sexism and racism and so on, but that’s beside the point, right?), and The Iliad and The Odyssey with all of those multiple murders and sexual assault and misogyny and cannibalism and Hell and so on; and The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, which is about the Vietnam War and includes a scene where two soldiers have to scrape the remains of their friend off of a tree after he gets blown up by a mine. All of those books are on the approved reading list.
I was trying to decide between the first two options, standards or new programs, when something happened: and it combines both problems. As part of the fallout from the tussle over In Cold Blood, there was a meeting yesterday with the faculty of my school and the academic team, who preside over all curricular decisions for the whole charter network, which comprises seven schools in two cities.
Now I have to write about that meeting.
So here’s the deal. The school system I work for is moving to Standards-Based Grading. At all schools, at all levels. The move has been discussed frequently for the past couple of years, always with caveats where I and my fellow high school teachers were concerned: Don’t worry, we were told. It won’t happen for a long time, we were told. It’s only going to be the elementary schools that do it. Welp, there’s been a change in leadership, and now the decision has been made: all schools, all levels. Next school year. So I guess that shows you how much you can believe people who tell you not to worry.
Standards-Based Grading, referred to in the acronym-manic pedagogy system (Hereafter to be known as AMPS) as SBG, is the idea that students’ grades should reflect their learning and their skills: not their work. The basic idea is that grades, rather than being applied to the level of completion of assignments — “You did half of the problems on the math homework sheet, Aloysius, so you get half credit. Sorry.” — should be applied only based on level of mastery of the specific standards for the class, according to a single summative assessment (Though there are caveats there, too. Don’t worry.): “You got 80% on the quiz, Nazgul, so you achieved Proficiency in the standard. Kudos.” Whether Nazgul completed the homework or not is irrelevant; she was able to show proficiency on the standard, and so she gets a passing grade for that unit, for that standard. If she continues to show mastery of the standards, she will earn a passing grade for the class, regardless of the work she completes other than the actual assessments.
Now. The idea of this is to make grades reflect the students’ actual learning and mastery of the key skills, the standards. How the students reach mastery is not the point: which means, proponents of SBG say, that a student is not penalized if they cannot complete work for reasons other than ability (such as they have too many other obligations, too much other homework, they get sick, they don’t have materials, etc.), and students do not have to waste time doing homework when they already know the information, have the skill, mastered the standard; which in theory streamlines education and stops making it feel like a waste of time and an endless grind for the students. The academic team was big on advocating for those poor, poor students who are ahead of the class, and who are bored with work when they already understand the concept and have the skill in question. (By the way: boredom is good for you.) It would also reduce the workload for teachers, because we wouldn’t have to grade all that homework and stuff; and as a sop to teachers who don’t like being told what to teach or how to teach it, with SBG we would have freedom to use whatever content and whatever teaching methods we wished, so long as the assessments and grades for the class focused on mastery of the standards.
That’s the ideal. And in some cases, it works: there are examples (usually cherry-picked, but nonetheless real) of SBG being effective. It is more common at the elementary level, because it makes more sense there to have students’ grades focus on mastery of skills; elementary report cards always have: remember how you got ratings in various traits, which were added up sometimes to a letter grade or the equivalent? But there were no percentages, no test scores averaged with quiz scores averaged with daily bell work scores. Just “Dusty does not play well with others. Dusty’s reading is exemplary. Dusty’s Nerdcraft is LEGENDARY.”
So what they want is for me to teach students, say with a short story, but really (they tell me, adding, “Don’t worry”), it could be anything, a poem, an essay, a full novel, about how to Analyze how complex characters (e.g., those with multiple or conflicting motivations) develop over the course of a text, interact with other characters, and advance the plot or develop the theme. Or as we call it in the biz, Arizona Reading Literature Standard 9-10.RL.3. And then after I have taught them — or, really even before I’ve taught them, because one of the selling points of SBG, remember, is that it allows students to avoid doing unnecessary work when they already know the information or possess the skill — so before I teach them, I would give them a pre-assessment (They like the term “assessment” much more than the word “test,” and they are quick to tell us that the assessments don’t have to be multiple-choice quizzes, Don’t worry,) to see if they already know the standard, and then teach them, and then give them a post-assessment to see if they have mastered the standard after the instruction. Those who master the standard, on either assessment, get a passing grade.
See how nice that looks? How simple it is? Just two required assessments, and you have a complete picture of which students learned what they were supposed to learn, and which did not. None of that muddy water that comes from Student A who does all their work and yet can’t pass the test — but passes the class because they do all their work, and then graduates from the class without having mastered the actual skills — and Student B who does none of their work but who can ace the assessment, either before or after, because they already know how to analyze how complex characters develop over the course of a text. (Don’t think too much about the students who pass the pre-assessment and therefore don’t need to do any of the instruction in the unit, and who would therefore sit and be bored… there’s a whole lot more to say about this aspect, and I will.)
So that’s SBG. And according to my district academic team, it is coming, soon, and it will affect every teacher, including me. And, they said, they hope it will make things better: it will give us a laser focus on the standards. It will make grading more representative of students’ actual growth, as measured by mastery of the standards. It will simplify grades, to the satisfaction of all concerned, teachers and parents and students as well as the state Department of Education, which mandates that all schools teach mastery of the standards they set, and assess a school’s success rate using standardized tests of standards mastery — in our case, as a high school in Arizona, using the ACT, one of the College Board’s premier college application tests (the other is the SAT), which tests all 11th grade students in Reading, Writing, Math, Science, and Writing again (The first one is a multiple-choice exam of grammar and style questions; the second writing exam is an essay the students write for the exam.). They’re sure this is the right way to go.
Don’t worry.
As you can tell (And if you’re a teacher who has heard of or dealt with SBG, you already knew from the moment I mentioned the topic), I am worried. Very worried. As were the majority of my colleagues, from all subject areas, who came to the meeting. The purpose of the meeting was for us to ask questions and voice our concerns with this move to SBG, and we had a lot to say.
The academic team, however: not worried at all. They are confident. And every time a question was asked or an objection was raised — and there were several, which I’ll address here — the response from the academic team was, essentially, “But that’s not really going to be a problem, so — don’t worry.” Or, “That potential issue won’t matter as much as this improvement we expect to see, so — don’t worry.” Or, “We think that question shows that you don’t understand what we’re talking about, or that you are somehow against students learning, so — shut up.”
That last sort of response? That was an asshole response. It happened more than once.
But that’s not the issue here.
The issue here is SBG. The first question, the first worry, is: why are we doing this? Why make a change away from traditional grading, and why is this a better system? The answer according to SBG proponents is what I said earlier: SBG focuses more on student achievement of the standards, rather than completion of tedious and repetitive homework, like math worksheets of hundreds of similar problems, or English vocabulary assignments that require students to just copy down definitions or memorize spelling. SBG is simpler and more streamlined. There is also a stronger focus (“Laser-focused” was the phrase that our chief academic officer kept using; but he has a doctorate in optics, so of course he would enjoy a laser metaphor. [If you’re wondering why our chief academic officer has a doctorate in optics instead of education, well. I can’t talk about it. Or my head will literally explode.]) on the standards themselves, rather than on old models that focused on content: as an “old school” English teacher (Sorry; that made even me cringe), I think of my class as organized around the literature: the first quarter we focused on short stories, and now we are reading To Kill a Mockingbird; next semester will be argument essays featuring Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and then drama, most likely The Crucible, and poetry. What SBG will do, it is to be hoped, is force me to focus instead on the standards: because proponents of standards believe that standards should be the goal of education, rather than completion of units, rather than a goal based around something amorphous and unassessable, like “Students will understand and appreciate great literature.”
I have a response to that. And when I write about standards, and why I hate those evil little gremlins, I will explain.
For now, put it aside: SBG proponents believe that focusing grades on the standards will focus both the teachers and the students on the standards, and therefore improve the students’ ability to master those standards, because the instruction will be more targeted and specific, and because the students will be more aware of what is expected of them, and therefore will try harder to achieve exactly that. Obviously if mastery of the standards determines their grade, then they will try to master the standards.
Our academic team, when my colleague asked why we needed to change to SBG, said that it was forward progress. When she asked more explicitly what in the current system was broken, what was wrong, which necessitated this change, she was told that nothing was wrong; this was simply a better system, for the reasons listed above.
She was also told (along with the rest of us, of course, because we were all in the same meeting) some bullshit: we were told that traditional grading systems are unfair, because the standards that define a grade for a specific teacher are malleable and individually determined. If you give five teachers the same assignment, those five teachers will grade it five different ways. One will focus on the correct answers; one will focus on the student’s process for reaching the answers; one will focus on the neat presentation of the work. All different standards, all different grades.
Remember how I said that they told us not to worry because not all assessments for mastery of the standards had to be multiple-choice-type quizzes or tests? Right. That was because more than one teacher asked about assessments like essays, or labs, or long projects, or large unit tests, rather than single-standard, short, multiple-choice style tests. “Of course you can use any assessment that you like,” we were told. “Don’t worry, we don’t want to force you all to give nothing but multiple-choice tests to the students.”
Shall I mention here that the curriculum which the academic team purchased and imposed this year features short, five-question multiple-choice tests as assessments for all of the standards? Shall I also mention that this curriculum doesn’t apply to any subjects other than math and English — also known as the tested subjects? No, you know what, I’ll wait until later to mention that. Forget this paragraph for now.
We were also told, when my friend also objected that the purpose here seemed to be test preparation, that of course we should be focusing on test preparation: the school is rated according to the results of the ACT (and other standardized tests for other grades); and research shows (They are big on research. Less interested in actual experience teaching, but they do love them some research. Our chief academic officer has also never taught. [Head. Will. Explode.]) that one of the best ways to improve student scores on standardized tests is test practice: exposure to the system of the test, familiarity with the format of the questions and the means of providing the answers (Bubble sheets vs. writing numbers in boxes vs. clicking on options on a screen, and so on, so on). So if one of our goals is to improve the test scores (And the administrator answering this objection asked my friend if she wanted to have our scores go down, and then the school’s rating would go down, and then we would lose students and close, and did she want that? Which, of course, is a belligerent attempt to turn an uncomfortable question back on the person asking, using a strawman argument. It’s bullshit. It’s not a response to a question, it’s not what it looks like to hear someone’s concern. Because the academic team doesn’t listen. Did I mention that the point of the meeting was, ostensibly, for the academic team to hear our concerns and answer our questions?), and test scores are improved by practice with similar testing format, and the assessment test in question is the ACT, which is a multiple-choice test: guess which type of assessment is going to be favored by the academic team?
It ain’t essays. Or projects. Or labs. Or large unit tests. Well — essays will get some respect, because one of the sections of the ACT is an essay. But there aren’t any, for instance, poetic recitals, or creative writing, or music performance, or any of the million things that teachers and schools create so that students can do something more than just bubble in A, B, C, or D. You know: the assignments and projects and grades which mean something, which give students a chance to make something important to them, something authentic, something real.
So this is why what they told my friend was bullshit: because if they really meant that we could use various other forms of assessment, so long as those assessments focused on the assigned standard, then they were lying about SBG being intended to make grades more fair. If their argument is that different teachers will focus on different aspects of the same piece of student work, and make different grading decisions about that same work, then the exact same thing will still be true if we grade according to a standard. Because it is still up to an individual teacher what it looks like when a student achieves mastery of a standard. Also true for a multiple-choice quiz, by the way: because what is “mastery?” 60% right? 80%? 75%? Different ideas of proficiency, individual standards of success. Which, by the way, reflects everything else in life, because our success or failure is generally determined by individual people with individual standards of success. And the way we deal with that is not to try to standardize everyone into adhering to a single standard: it is making sure we understand what the measure of success is, and how we can achieve it. You know: learning what your boss wants from you and then providing it? Does it matter if the bosses at two different jobs have different expectations of you? It does not. So why would it matter if two different teachers have different expectations of you? It does not. To be sure the grading is fair, we need to make sure that the teacher consistently applies the same standards to all of their students. That’s fair.
You can address that issue, by the way, if you want all of your teachers to grade according to the same criteria and the same success expectation. But SBG is not how. You need to bring your teachers together, give them the same piece of work, and discuss with them what grade (or proficiency measure, or whatever you want to call it) that piece of work should receive, and then make them practice until they all grade approximately the same way. It’s called “norming,” and I’ve done it several times, in different contexts. It’s actually good practice, and I support it.
But it doesn’t answer my friend’s question about why we are changing to SBG. Because you can (and should) norm while retaining traditional grades. Using the need for norming as a justification for changing the entire system? Bullshit.
There’s another aspect of the change to SBG which I should maybe mention now, though I realize that this post is getting too long. (It was a long meeting. There were a lot of concerns. I have a lot of worries about this.) They are also intending to eliminate the usual percentage-based grades. There are four levels of mastery of a standard, as determined by the Arizona Department of Education: Minimally Proficient, Partially Proficient, Proficient, and Highly Proficient. The academic team wants to use those four as the new grade scores, for the purpose of averaging into a final grade for a course: 4 for Highly Proficient, 3 for Proficient, 2 for Partially and 1 for Minimally. The student’s class grade will therefore be something like a 3.23, or a 1.97, etc. Sure, fine, whatever; it’s not like I need to use A, B, C, D, and F.
But see, they want to translate those numbers back into letter grades. Because students and parents like letter grades. Because (As was mentioned, as yet another concern, by yet another colleague) colleges, and scholarships, use letter grades — or, more frequently, the overall GPA, weighted and unweighted, that is the standard across this country. So that’s fine, right? We can just translate the proficiency numbers directly: Highly proficient, A, 4.0. Proficient, B, 3.0. Partially is a C, Minimally is a D.
There’s the first issue, by the way. Not Proficient is not an option. Which means there is no F. As long as a student takes the assessment, they will pass the class. Or so it seemed to me: I admit I didn’t ask that question or raise that concern; in fact, other than a few outbursts under my breath, I was silent throughout the meeting. Because I knew if I started talking, my head would explode. That’s why I ranted at my friend for a full 30 minutes after the meeting, and why I’m writing so damn much right now. So they may intend to include Not Proficient, or simply Failing, as a possibility; say if someone takes a test assessment and gets a 0, then they might earn an F. But maybe not. It’s a concern.
But the other problem is this: the academic team has a conversion chart they want to recommend for how to turn this 4-point proficiency scale into a letter grade: and it’s not what you think. They think that a 3, a proficient, should be an A-, a 90%. 4, Highly Proficient, should be an A+, a 100% or close to it. The B grade range should be 2.5-2.99, the C would be 2.0-2.49. D would be 1.00-1.99. (F would, presumably, be 0-0.99, but if there is no score less than a 1…)
I mean, sure. You can set the grade breaks anywhere you want. They did point out that any college asking for our students’ transcripts and so on would be given an explanation of how we arrive at their letter grade, so there would be transparency here. But how many colleges or employers or grandparents looking to give money prizes for every A would actually read the breakdowns? When they are handed a simple overall GPA, in the usual format?
I also have to say, because bullshit pisses me off, that one reason the academic team gave us for the change to SBG was that traditional grading leads to grade inflation: because students who do extra work get extra credit, and therefore score over 100%, which makes no sense if we’re talking about mastery of standards, because once you master it 100%, that’s it, there is no more, and how much work you did to reach mastery doesn’t matter. The standard of mastery to earn a particular letter grade, in this paradigm, is watered down by the inclusion of grades for practice work, what are called “formative assessments.” Think of it like a rough and final draft of an essay for English: when I get a rough draft of an essay, I give feedback on the draft so the student can improve it for the final draft. I give credit for students who completed the rough draft, but it’s just a 100% completion grade: because I want to encourage them to try, and to turn in whatever they complete so they can get feedback, even if it isn’t very good. So I don’t grade the rough draft on quality, just completion. The rough draft grade is a formative grade; it’s just to recognize the work a student put into the rough draft. The final draft grade is the one that “counts,” because that’s where the student shows how much they mastered the actual skill and knowledge involved. That’s called a “summative” grade. SBG would only count summative grades into the final grade for the class. And in order to fight back the grade inflation they see in me handing out 100% grades to students just for turning in a pile of garbage they call a rough draft, they want to change to — this system. Where a 3 is magically turned into a 4, and there is no 0. Nope, no grade inflation happening there, not at all.
And that’s my biggest issue here. Again and again, the academic team told us that the only thing that should matter for a grade is mastery of the standard. Nothing else. No work should ever be graded, because how a student achieves mastery is not the point: only mastery. (Sure. Ask any math teacher if how you get the answer matters, or if it’s only the answer that counts.) They told us that grading for work completion is a waste of time, and essentially corrupt; because it made it possible for a student to pass without mastering the standard.
The essential assumption there, aimed without saying it outright in the face of every teacher in every school, is that the work we assign does not create mastery of the standard. The assumption is that when I give vocabulary homework, it shouldn’t count in a grade because whether a student does it or not makes no difference to their mastery of the standard. In other words, all the work I assign is bullshit, and any grade I give based on completion of it is bullshit.
That. Is. Not. True.
More importantly in terms of what is coming for my school, if a student is told that the homework, the practice work, the rough drafts of essays, are not counted into their grades, they will stop doing them. Of course they will: we just told them those things don’t count. All that counts is the final assessment, whatever that is. It wouldn’t matter how much practice I gave them, how much feedback I wanted to give them; I would have to give all my students an opportunity to show mastery on the final summative assessment, and if they showed mastery, they would get a grade for that standard. A high one, if they showed proficiency. Now, they will have a much harder time reaching that proficiency without the practice work I assign in class: because my assignments are not in fact pointless busywork, I fucking hate pointless busywork and I try very hard not to have any in my class; but regardless of the value of my assignments, if my students don’t get a grade for them, they won’t do them. Period. Except for a very few students who want to try hard, who want to learn, who want to do their best. But those students already succeed, so they’re not the ones we’re trying to help here, are they?
You know what the rest of them will do? They will sweat out the final assessment. They will focus on that. They may study for it, but they will have so much pressure, and so much stress, before any test I give them for a particular standard, that they will not do as well on them as they would with traditional grades and grades for practice work and my own non-test assessments. (Because generally speaking, I also hate tests and try very hard not to have any in my class. I like essays. I like personal responses to questions that ask the students to relate to the literature, to connect to some aspect of it, and to write maybe a paragraph or so. I like annotations on literature, so students interact with the text. I think high school English students should write, as often as possible, and when I ask students to do work in my class, I want to recognize their effort by giving them credit for it in the form of a grade. But I guess that’s unfair grade inflation, right? Busywork? Assignments that don’t show mastery of the standard and so shouldn’t count in their grades?)
I also have to point out that a lot of my students, given the opportunity to do literally no work and then take one assessment to determine their grade in the class? They will guess. Some of them may guess well, but they will guess. Stories will spread of the students who guessed their way to an A on a difficult assessment in a difficult class, and others will try to repeat the feat. I know: I’ve seen them do it. I’ve watched students lie about getting high grades, when they actually got low grades, when they guessed on a test, and that lie made other kids try it. I’ve watched brilliant students describe what they do on tests as “guessing,” when what they mean is that they picked an answer they weren’t 100% sure about: after reading the question, the answer options, using the process of elimination and their generally excellent knowledge to narrow it down to only two good choices, they “guess.” And score high, because that’s actually a really good way to “guess.” But when they say they guessed and got a good score, other students, who are not as brilliant, guess by completely randomly picking a letter, and hope to get the same result — and so ruin their chances of getting a good result, or a realistic result, which they would have gotten if they just tried.
This will make that problem worse. I guarantee it.
And what problem will it solve?
Will it make grades more fair? No: that would take norming.
Will it make grades actually reflect learning? No: students will try to guess and get lucky, or they will cheat. They already cheat, sometimes, but SBG in this model will make it worse because there will be so much weight on single assessments.
Will it make students focus more on mastery of the standards? Maybe, but it will also make them more likely to ignore the work that would actually help them master the standards. You know: the stuff that educates them. Which, yes, is sometimes tedious. Kinda like taking multiple-choice tests several times a week, in all of your classes. But I guess if that helps them score higher on the ACT, then the school is going to look great. Right?
Right?
Don’t worry.
There’s more. Here’s where I should bring up that the curriculum they bought and imposed doesn’t have any material for several of the subjects in the school. That’s sort of a separate issue, because any teacher can create their own curriculum using SBG or not; but whenever teachers asked how we were supposed to implement this, we were pointed to the curriculum and the resources that came with it: which only applies to math and English. The tested subjects. There are also classes, such as my AP classes, and the new electives that we created this year, which don’t have any standards because they are not official Arizona Department of Education classes. And that’s why I like teaching those classes: but how will I do my grades next year if every class has to use SBG and the class has no standards?
Not only do I not know, but the academic team doesn’t know, and even John C. McGinley doesn’t know.
They also claimed that SBG would make grades and student learning more clear to parents, that parent teacher conferences would focus on what the student could and could not do, rather than the teacher merely saying “Little Tikki Tikki Tembo-no Sa Rembo-chari Bari Ruchi-pip Peri Pembo is missing three homework assignments.” Of course, speaking for myself, when I have parent conferences, I EXPLAIN WHAT THE STUDENT SHOULD HAVE LEARNED ON THE MISSING ASSIGNMENTS AND HOW THAT LEARNING CONNECTS TO THE OTHER LEARNING IN THE CLASS, LIKE “When Tikki Tikki Tembo-no Sa Rembo-chari Bari Ruchi-pip Peri Pembo didn’t do the study questions for the first three chapters, that means he probably didn’t completely understand those chapters, and that makes it harder to understand the rest of the novel.” (Though of course, I failed to point out the standard which little Tikki Tikki Tembo-no Sa Rembo-chari Bari Ruchi-pip Peri Pembo didn’t master, so — my bad.) I can’t really fathom a teacher telling a parent the number of missing assignments and then not going on to explain what that means; but that’s how the academic team described our current practice, going on to say that SBG would make those conversations more helpful to parents because we would explain exactly what the student knew and didn’t know, exactly what deficits there are. Which means that their current (apparently, in their eyes, deeply incompetent teaching staff) would change our habit of explaining nothing to parents so long as we had better data to point to.
And one of the staff very intelligently and clearly pointed out that we would be setting students up with a different standard from all the rest of the world, even if everything they hoped for regarding SBG happened exactly as they hoped: because in college, they still use traditional grading, with work counted in the final grade, with individual standards of success and personal bias from the professor. They didn’t listen to her, either.
They told us that we teachers would be helping the academic team to chart the course, that our input would have an effect on the way this process moved forward; but since they didn’t actually listen to any of our questions at this meeting, and they told us that SBG is coming in 8 months regardless of anything we may say, here’s what I have to say to that:
The only times that the academic team agreed with anything the teachers said was when one of my colleagues, and then another, pointed out that parents and students — and teachers — would have a very difficult time adjusting to this entirely new system, and there would be a lot of problems in the transition, and a great need for support. “That’s true,” they said.
But you know what support we will get? We teachers, our students, their families, the whole school community?
“Don’t worry.”
I’ll be a little happier if they at least sing this. A little.
I think that I am not sure. I want to say, without the shadow of a doubt, that it is: because education is necessary (That, I am sure of), and because there are so many people in the world who need education, there’s no way to tear down the structure we have now and build a new one — or even live without one entirely, and let people learn on their own — without losing a whole generation in the transition.
But that seems to me like an extraordinary statement: that we would lose a generation. We wouldn’t: they’d still be there, still be alive. I mean that they would lose their opportunity to gain the same education that every generation has had for the last 150 years in this country, and would lose, therefore, their ability to thrive in this culture and in this economy. But look at how much of that statement relies on the assumption that everyone should be like me, should be educated like me, that everyone should be like everyone else. I assume that the generation who would not get the current education from the system would suffer, as I know people suffer who do not succeed in education: they have to work harder, and they earn less, and they miss out on opportunities to experience life more fully: they don’t appreciate art, they are less aware of the wider world and what it has to offer, and are therefore more likely to be xenophobic and afraid of change and new experiences and ideas. But I also know that all of those things can be gained on one’s own, with travel and experience and exposure to other cultures and ideas and people.
When I say we would lose a generation, I mean that we would be saddled with people who wouldn’t be as productive, who would struggle more and need more help, and who would tend to resist and slow down our forward progress, and would certainly not contribute to it. We’d lose a generation of more of — us. People like us, like you and me. That’s what I imagine would happen if we stopped educating people. I assume they would gain the basic skills, from their parents and from educational games and Sesame Street and whatnot; and then I assume they would know little else other than entertainment, at least until they learned things the hard way, through experience, through life.
But.
That’s a lot of assumptions. And a whole lot of what I can’t describe as other than elitist bullshit. Because the core argument there is, without the system that made me, there would be people who would not be like me. Which assumes that I am how people should be. That being unlike me would be bad.
I don’t like it. I don’t like thinking that way, that my assumption of the necessity of education is just that, an assumption, and one based on elitism. Don’t get me wrong: there is evidence for it. Scads of evidence. Oodles. There are countless statistics which show the benefits of education:
Though now that I have looked at the Google search results, I see that the only statistics they show for “benefits of education,” other than benefits for certain kinds of education within the system such as the benefits of arts education or of inclusive education for students with disabilities, is exactly that one: that more education leads to more money. Which is not the most interesting argument for me, because I do not believe that life revolves around either career, or money; so using that as the sole focus for a discussion of education is obnoxious: I want to know what benefits there are, in addition to income, for the people who go through the school system. There are other benefits: primarily that more educated people have better health, more stability, and commit less crime. Here, this infographic lists several of them. (I was not trying to make a point about the total focus of education on earning money, but I guess that point is unavoidable, isn’t it? Hold onto that for a moment. Let me make this point, which is broader.)
That’s what I was talking about, that there are a number of benefits of education. (Here, this article from UMass [Woo! Home state comin’ through! Wait — what the heck is “UMass Global?] lays out the facts I have seen referenced before, with links to further resources to support the asserted health benefits associated with highly educated people, which are: 1. They’re likely to live longer, 2. They probably won’t experience as much economic or occupational stress, 3. They’re less likely to smoke, 4. They’re less likely to experience common illnesses, 5. They have fewer reported cases of mental health struggles, 6. They tend to eat better and maintain regular exercise habits, and 7. They’re more likely to have health insurance. I presume all the other benefits in the infographic are also supported by studies and statistics.) I have used these arguments in the past, in my own head if nowhere else (And 99% of the arguments I have in life are only in my own head. Since I teach argument, write arguments, and argue online on both Twitter and Facebook, that should give you an idea of how much of my usual headspace is filled with argument. [Jesus, I need to relax. No wonder my blood pressure has been going up.]), and I have heard them and seen them used many times to support the argument for education.
But here’s the thing. And again, I hate this — as you can tell by my obvious reluctance to actually make this point, and most of my arguments with myself over the past week have been between the part of me that wants to face this and the part that wants to hide from it — but I do believe that honesty is not only the best policy, it is the foundation of all other communication: so I need to say it.
None of those benefits are necessarily caused by education. All of them are only correlated. There is no reason, in most cases, to assume that the education itself caused the benefit.
People with more education earn more money in our society, yes. (Though of course, there are exceptions.) But is that because the education — the actual knowledge, not simply the achievement of a degree or certification– is necessary to earn the money? In some cases, most obviously doctors and lawyers and scientists and the like, the answer is emphatically yes, of course; but in many, many cases, the reason the higher income is correlated with the higher educational attainment is because those jobs insist on those degrees.
And I hope we all know that a degree is not necessarily because of actual education. I would make more as a college professor than I do as a high school teacher (Though really, not much more, unless I reached the most elite heights), and even though I guarantee that I could teach a college course better than many current professors, I can’t have that job because I don’t have the degree for it. I have the knowledge and skills and experience; and in my case, since continuing education is a requirement for recertification as a teacher, I have something like two to three times the post-graduate credits for a Master’s degree; but I don’t actually have the degree, so I can’t have the job.
For most of the rest, the correlation is far more connected to two other factors, which are certainly causative in our society: class, and race. Wealthier people have better health outcomes; and whiter people have better health outcomes. Primarily because health in this country costs money, and secondarily because the system is racist. Wealthier people commit less crime; whiter people commit less crime (Though that one is fraught for a bunch of reasons, because people of color are overpoliced and underpoliced simultaneously, so are more likely to be caught, arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for crime; in actuality, in this country, whiter people do commit more crime because all racial groups commit crime at about the same rates, and there are still more white people in this country than any other racial group. Most importantly, all crime rates are heavily dependent on socioeconomic factors, and those favor white people in the US — so again, the correlation is not causation in this instance. But to my point, it still ain’t because of education.) Wealthier people (Also older people) have greater civic and political engagement; whiter people have greater civic and political engagement.
Both of these factors, socioeconomic class and race, are also closely connected to — and causative of — educational attainment. Wealthier people have more education, because they can afford it and because they have more opportunity to pursue it: they don’t need after school jobs, or just to drop out and work; they don’t have to commute (or if they do, it’s in comfort); they don’t have to struggle for resources and materials like books and computers and access to libraries and so on. If they have kids (Statistically less often when young) while they are seeking education, they have greater access to childcare; ditto for providing care to older or disabled family members. People get more education when it’s easier to get, and when you feel rewarded for your successes in it, so this feedback loop is self-amplifying. White people — and again, this is largely because white people in this country are more often wealthier people — have all the same advantages. So this is mainly why educational attainment and these positive outcomes are correlated: because both are influenced causatively by class, and by race.
And then, as I noted briefly above, I have to also point out that many of the benefits overall are benefits economically: notice the “social benefits” in the infographic include “Gains in labour productivity.” And that whole third arrow section is about how all of society benefits when all of us make more stuff and make more money. I love the one one there about how society saves costs when individual citizens commit less crime and have better health. Maybe we should make motivational posters based on that. “Don’t do drugs, kids, or else you’ll become a drain on society’s resources.” So for all of those, the issue here is, there may be benefits of greater education — but for whom? In this society, where 90% of the wealth is held by 10% of the people, and almost all the gains in the past 50 years have gone specifically to that same 10% of the people, almost all the benefits correlated with education do not accrue to those who go through the system.
Sorry, but I can’t not use Leslie Nielsen. Consider it a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down.
So. That’s the truth. The education system creates some positive outcomes directly: I do think that greater civic engagement is good for the people who involve themselves, and I certainly think that greater awareness and understanding of the system and how it works and what is going on helps to create that engagement. But I think we can clearly see from Donald Trump and the MAGA movement that strong civic engagement does not come only from people who are the product of the educational system. And there are, as I said, a number of professions which require education; and those are important both for society and for individuals who wish to pursue them, and so those opportunities coming from education are good.
But that’s where it starts to break down for me, again: because do people who study law, and medicine, and science, really need to go through the education system? For most of them, it works, and so it isn’t an obstacle to positive outcomes; but is it necessary? Are there people who would make excellent doctors even without education? What about lawyers?
That’s not the right question, though: of course people need education to be able to pursue those occupations. The question is: do people need to be educated by a system? Can they be self-taught, and successful?
He’s not the only example, of course. There are countless others, countless because we don’t usually keep track of people who are well-educated outside of the formal system, unless they do something we laud, such as earn billions of dollars or something similar. But Malcolm X was so incredibly intelligent, so incredibly capable, so incredibly knowledgeable — just so incredible — and only and entirely because of himself, with some influence and then support from others, including his family and his faith community. But never, in any way, was he supported by the system: and yet, what he could do, and what he did, is amazing. Simply amazing.
So the truth is, the education system is not necessary. It works, for the most part, for millions of people, and that’s good; but the existence of millions of people for whom it does not work, and the existence of countless people who don’t need the system to succeed, forces me to ask the question: is the system necessary even for those millions of people for whom it works?
And the answer is, I don’t know. None of us do. We have no way to compare: education is only one path, and there is no way to come back and choose a different path in the same life, to determine what would have happened because of that other choice. (Yes, that’s a Robert Frost reference. But did you need to understand the allusion to get my point? [I think your experience is richer if you did understand it, or if you click the link, read the poem, and figure it out. I’ll get to that.]) We can look at people with education who succeed, and people without education who struggle, and we can assume that education was important for them. But in both cases, we’re cherry-picking both the examples, and the definitions of “succeed” and “struggle.” By other definitions, and in other examples, education is irrelevant where it isn’t harmful.
So last week, when I wrote that the Labyrinth was necessary and important to contain the monster, I could only make it make good sense by joking about it: because otherwise the children are the only Minotaur, the purpose and reason for the construction of the Labyrinth, the thing at the heart of the edifice; and children are not a monster who must be contained. It’s pretty upsetting to think of them that way, and to think of school as a way to contain them — quite literally putting them in the box and making them stay there, without letting them out of it. I don’t want to be that teacher, or that person, who really thinks that. I don’t believe in my usual practice that I am that teacher; there are very few instances where I insist that a student conform to my rules or expectations. But I made the joke. And when I was thinking for this week about wanting to explain and justify that joke, by explaining how the education system is necessary and important, even if the Labyrinth isn’t a good or appropriate analogy for it (In terms of the Minotaur aspect; in terms of the inescapably complex maze, it is a perfect analogy. But if you don’t need the maze, if the purpose of the maze is not valid, there’s no reason to maintain the maze.) I sat down several times intending to look up the facts to support that argument.
But I always hit this wall. I know the reasons people argue for education. And I don’t believe them.
There is the aspect I mentioned at the beginning of this, and reference with my overwrought allusions. Education expands the mind, and expands the world. Even apart from the professions that require extensive specific knowledge — and ignoring the toxic narrow-minded view that education is intended primarily to promote economic outcomes — education gives people the ability to create and apply creativity; to identify, measure, and solve problems; to connect different ideas and areas of knowledge in order to gain new insight or create new things; to communicate and empathize with others; to dream and achieve those dreams. Without education, art becomes pale and shallow, and that’s a truly terrible loss. Without education, scientific and technological progress becomes impossible, and that’s — not necessarily all bad, but it does create the possibility for great suffering, if we don’t keep changing to match our changing world. Education is necessary for many people, for many reasons: and I don’t believe education itself is ever harmful.
But education is not the education system.
I do think the Minotaur/Labyrinth analogy is perfect from one perspective: mine. And those of people like me. Because like Minos, and unlike the Minotaur, we need the Labyrinth. I am a good teacher: largely because I work well within, and slightly in opposition to, the educational system. I make the classroom a comfortable place, I make it easier for my students to come to school and succeed and feel valued there. And that’s a good thing. I also teach literature and reading and writing and thinking well, and that’s a better thing. But the things that I teach don’t need to be taught within the system: I have thought often of how much I would love to be like Socrates, or one of the other ancient philosophers, simply declaiming and discussing in the public square, teaching anyone who wanted to learn. That would be so much better than requiring a classroom full of 15-year-olds to write a five-paragraph essay. But you see, I couldn’t make a living doing that. To make a living, I need the system. My other gifts as a teacher, the way I help my students survive through the trials and tribulations of the system — not only do I not need the system to provide support to people who might be struggling, but without the system, those people would not need me. To be meaningful, I need the system.
Basically, to deal with my own problems, I need to make sure other people have problems, too. And that’s Minos and the Minotaur and the Labyrinth. Let’s take note that, not only was the Minotaur captive in the Labyrinth, but Daedalus, the artificer who designed it, was also held captive by Minos; and the tribute of 14 youths who were fed to the Minotaur every year were sent by Athens because Minos defeated them in a war. None of those problems would have existed if Minos hadn’t created them.
And the same goes for the education system. I, like Minos, could make different choices, and live a different life; I don’t believe that teaching is literally the only thing I could do — for one thing, I’d make a hell of a therapist. So I don’t literally need the educational system, I simply benefit from its existence. Minos didn’t need the Labyrinth: he could (in theory) have made better choices in the first place, and never had the existence of the Minotaur to burden him; but if he did end up with the Minotaur, I bet there could be other solutions to the problem. First and foremost, the man lived on an island: surely there were other, smaller, islands nearby. Maybe he could have built a lovely little home for his man-eating stepson, far away from the people of Minos’s kingdom; finding food might still be an issue — but presumably the Minotaur didn’t have to kill what he ate, and dead people are not terribly hard to find. Within the context of an ancient civilization, the Minotaur would be a hell of a capital punishment for Minos to inflict on Cretan criminals.
So the truth is, we may not need the education system at all, other than as a way to maintain the lifestyles of people who are part of the system: and even as one of those people, I don’t believe that justifies the Labyrinth. It is unquestionably valuable and effective for millions of people, as I said; that may be enough benefit to make it worth keeping and trying to fix the flaws and failures that make it useless and even damaging to millions of others, and ideally to make it relevant to the countless people in the third group who just don’t need it. Education is good for all, and harmful for none; maybe we can make the system reflect that. But it is also possible that a wholly new system, or no system at all, in this age of available information and crowd-sourced instruction available to anyone with broadband, would work better for more people.
I’m going to endeavor to figure it out. That’s the long term goal of this series, of this blog. To decide whether or not we need the education system (And if we do, how to fix it), and whether or not we need to replace it.
The Labyrinth was built, according to Greek myth, to house the Minotaur. The bull-headed man-beast was too large and powerful, too uncontrollable, to be allowed to roam free; also, he ate human flesh, which is problematic.
Why didn’t King Minos of Crete just kill the Minotaur, you might ask? Well, because the Minotaur was his son. His step-son, actually, but since the existence of the Minotaur was his fault, I think he should get credit for parentage. (Also it’s named after him — Minotaur is derived from “Minos’s bull” in Greek.) The Minotaur was the child of Minos’s wife Pasiphae and the snow-white bull which Poseidon gave to Minos as a sign of divine favor, which Minos was supposed to sacrifice but which he decided he wanted to keep; so Poseidon made Pasiphae fall in love with said bull — and when a bull and a woman love each other very much…
The point is, Minos constructed this enormous, elaborate edifice, this institution, in order to keep his problematic child alive, but also contained.
And that’s the same reason why we have schools.
Sorry: too far?
By which I mean: did I start too far afield with this analogy?
And also: am I going too far by comparing the youth of today to the man-eating monster of Greek myth?
Junior?
I don’t think I am (At least not the second kind of too far; the first is really your subjective opinion, but I’ll come back to that, too): because after all, the school system is an unbelievably and appallingly large and elaborate maze, one that even the makers would be largely unable to work their way through (Daedalus, the genius artificer who built the Labyrinth, was barely able to escape it himself; and similarly, there’s not an educator alive today who could handle going back through K-12 schooling. Even if we just did Senior year, I would flunk every math class and get into constant fights with my English teachers when they marked my essays down for being too long. As if that’s even a thing!). A maze which people get lost in, one into which we push a new set of “tributes” every year, where they are devoured by the monster at the heart of the system. And that monster — whom we love — is not one we are willing to destroy or to sacrifice, and so we do whatever we have to in order to keep it alive: but we don’t always provide it with what it really needs to thrive; rather, we tend to put it away where we can’t see it, but we know it’s there and safe. And we maybe just hope that it will figure out its own way to, y’know, be okay.
It works, doesn’t it?
Hold on, hold on: I don’t have to say that the Minotaur is children. The beast at the heart of the maze of education is the result of a gift that was granted us, but which we were given for a specific use or purpose, and which we turned into a selfishly, greedily coveted possession instead: a choice that caused far greater problems than what we might have gained from keeping it for our own amusement. The educational system is the Minotaur. It was created (By us, not by the gods — but really, what’s the difference?) for a specific purpose: to prepare children to be better adults. But we refused to give it up, meaning use it, for just that purpose (Maybe because it would have meant losing control of it?) and instead kept it, clung to it, which led to the destruction of every good aspect of it; and here I’m talking about the elements of education which we refuse utterly to let go of, keeping them preserved long past their usefulness, because of some sentimental attachment to them: things like the Pledge of Allegiance, or classes divided by year of birth, or summer vacation.
It works. You know it does. (If it didn’t, you wouldn’t still be reading this.)
To come back to the thread I left hanging earlier (which may lead us out of this maze, like Theseus), I don’t think I’ve gone too far afield in producing this analogy and then trying to find various places where it can fit because: looking from the ancient Greek side, that is the idea of a myth: a story that is supposed to help make sense of the human experience, usually through a metaphorical substitution of divinity and supernatural power for realities we can’t understand. Our education system as a whole is certainly a reality we can’t understand. I would argue that children are, as well. And from our side, analogies like this are not necessarily intended to define every single aspect of the object being analogized: but merely to offer some insight into it, some new perspective on it.
I bet you’ve never been asked to think of the Cretan Labyrinth as a metaphor for the K-12 education system. And I will bet double or nothing that nobody has ever compared children to the minotaur before.
What do you think, though? Is it accurate? Even a little?
If it is a little accurate (And you know it is), then the analogy succeeded.
And here’s the rub: that analogy’s success depends on you knowing at least three different otherwise useless sets of information and skills: Greek mythology; abstract metaphor/analogy; and the ability to analyze both sides of an analogy and recognize parallels, points of comparison.
If it worked, you learned all that in school. K-12, almost certainly, though it may have been reinforced in college. But Greek mythology came into school for me around 3rd grade; analogies were middle school as a concept, and all the way back to kindergarten as a presence (Because the “kindergarten,” after all, is not actually a garden that grows children) Analyzing and finding points of comparison was high school, I assume, though I don’t remember specifically; but since I teach it, I assume it was taught to me, and somewhere around the same time. Probably in my high school English class. Though metaphor and analogy are something that shows up in most subjects, because it (Using a concrete object to represent an abstract idea, which is the essence of metaphor; using a familiar object to represent an unfamiliar one is the basis of analogy) is one of the most useful conceptual frameworks in life.
And that’s the point.
I wanted today (Okay, I wanted yesterday, but I had to spend the whole day yesterday grading because it takes me a long time to read essays, and also I had to get my hair cut. So it’s today. And maybe tomorrow, if I don’t hurry up and wrap this up.) to discuss the value of school as an institution: is there a reason, in a world of constant access to limitless information, to have school? A school that creates a certain uniformity, which replaces the freedom of childhood with the structure — and therefore the conformity — of early adulthood? My students are very clear that they think there is little value in school today: they think they should be free to learn what they want and only what they want. To choose all of their classes, based on what they are interested in and what they believe they need, and to discard all others that are not interesting or needed, in their minds. Press them on this, and they will admit, first, that given perfect freedom of choice for studies, they would waste most of their time (I certainly would have); and second, there may be some value in the curriculum somewhere; but basically, they want to be set free to do what they want, and not told what they need, especially when so much of what we tell them they need is actually useless in their eyes.
Like a bigass maze meant to contain just one creature.
And that is not something I would argue with: there is an enormous amount of waste in the school system, as there is in any large bureaucracy, especially an old and established one. That’s the Labyrinth. And I don’t think it’s a good thing, not in every specific twist and turn, every single nook and cranny.
But I do think the structure is necessary, if we want to contain the beast within. Since we aren’t willing to kill it.
We had an opportunity to see what that beast would do, given its freedom: because school was closed for a while, back there. A few months in some cases; just about two years, in others. The Labyrinth got turned off, and the Minotaur was asked to put on this headset and sit in front of this screen while we showed him pictures of the Labyrinth, and demanded he pretend he was still wandering inside it, perfectly contained.
Instead he just played video games. (Mostly Minecraft, ironically, but hey, it’s a great game.)
There are a number of problems with the school system. The brick and mortar schools themselves are obscenely expensive to build and maintain. One could argue (though I would argue back) that the system which places large numbers of children into essentially unguarded locations creates a vulnerability that could be and has been exploited by monsters who would harm children — and here I’m not making a forced analogy about the Minotaur, I’m talking about the inhuman bastards at Sandy Hook and Uvalde. Apart from that, schools are certainly vectors for disease, as we know from the last three years of COVID and generations’ worth of flu before that. The school building creates the opportunity (and perhaps the certainty) of bullying and abuse so severe that it might have been the cause of other atrocities like Columbine, not to mention the countless suicides that are the second leading cause of death among Americans aged 15-24. And that’s not even mentioning the curriculum, which is also problematic, and is in some ways more the aspect of the system I’m talking about here. Certainly more labyrinthine and Byzantine.
The basic problem with all of it is efficiency. The only way public school makes sense is if one teacher can provide education to multiple students. Otherwise we’re all just tutors for single children, and we might as well just homeschool everyone, the way people raised their kids for millennia, with parents (And extended family members, too) teaching their own children how to live, except for rich people who hired surrogates so they wouldn’t have to deal with it. But no two children are alike: no two children have just the same interests, aptitudes, or future needs. So by trying to increase the efficiency of education so that fewer adults can provide it to more children, we immediately and inevitably lose some individuality. And the more we try to standardize it, the more we try to make it efficient in terms of achieving repeatable, preferred outcomes for all inputs (Students, that is), the more individuality we lose — and since that, the individuality we ruin by trying to create efficiency, is also students, the system becomes its own problem. The efficiency creates its own inefficiency. We harm students in trying to help students.
And if that ain’t exactly like the Labyrinth, I don’t know a bull’s head from a hole in the ground.
But here’s the thing: for all its problems, the Labyrinth is a good solution. Because it works: it keeps the Minotaur alive, and it prevents it from destroying Minos’s people. It’s not efficient, and it’s not kind, and it necessitates other terrible things like sacrificing people (whom Minos is more willing to sacrifice, because he loves the Minotaur but he doesn’t love the fourteen youths sent every year from Athens) in order to feed the one he’s not willing to sacrifice. An essentially insoluble problem is solved.
Education of an entire population is an insoluble problem, for exactly the reason I said above: we can’t hope to provide every child with what they need. We just can’t. And the harder we try, the worse it will get.
But we also can’t give it up. We can’t let the Minotaur — or if you’re tired of the analogy, the children — just run around on their own. There would be too much destruction. Put more realistically, learning everything you need to know on your own is simply not possible for any but the most self-sufficient geniuses. We all need someone to show us how it works, and then, more importantly, to give us feedback on what went wrong when we tried it ourselves. We need it. Can’t live without it. Can’t learn without it, that is — and in this modern world, education is life. Straight up. Not even a metaphor: education is life.
So that’s why education as a system, as an enormous and expensive and unwieldy and inefficient and often abusive and insensitive and even violent and dangerous system, is necessary. Because our people need to learn how to do things: how to read, how to write, how to do math, how to analyze and interpret and connect and compare and contrast. We also need to learn how to work together, how to help each other, how to ask for what we need and refuse what we don’t; and then how to suffer through being forced to do what we don’t need or want, anyway. All of that is important. And all of it comes from school. That’s not all that comes from school, and a lot of what comes from school is shit; but — we get what we need from school, as well. Most of us. Most of what we need.
And we get some stuff we may not know we need. That’s the problem with letting students decide on their own everything they need to learn for their future: how the hell do they know what they’ll need for their future? You never know when you are young what you may need when you are older. Like algebra. Or chemistry. Or how to make analogies. You never know when you will need to understand when some wackadoo tries to turn some freaky Greek myth into something that is supposed to give insight into the modern world. Literally no way you could have predicted that — and if you were asked when you were a teenager, you never would have taken a class that would have helped you understand this ridiculous post. And hey, maybe you don’t need to understand this post, or my analogies, ever.
But if you couldn’t: wouldn’t you have missed an opportunity here? Wouldn’t you be lost?
Here. Take this thread. It’ll show you the way out.
But only after you go all the way in to the heart of the maze, and fight for your life against what you find there.
Good luck. I’ll be here when you come back out.
(And also, I can’t talk this much about Labyrinths without making this reference, too. Which might be an even better one, since the Goblin King takes a child into the heart of the Labyrinth…)
My apologies for being late with this post: it’s Fall Break, which should mean that I have extra time to do all the blog posts I want, but actually means that every other project I have been putting off for lack of time and energy are all clamoring for my time and attention; and I never got to the point of even deciding what the topic should be this week.
My apologies, as well, for not having a definite topic this week: because today, when I decided that I needed to take time and make a post, since I want to keep going with what I’ve been doing and also respect my audience by being consistent with posts, if not entirely on time (I will try to do better next week), even today, I can’t decide which of the topics I plan to write about is the right one today. Because all I can think about is: teeth.
Yup. Teeth. See, I had to go to the dentist this morning. One of the items I have been putting off is a crown I need; I went and got the first appointment for that done this morning — which means I had one of my teeth ground down to about half its height, and then topped up with a temporary crown; I’ll have the real one put on in about three weeks.
I hate going to the dentist. That’s one reason why I’ve been putting it off. Another is insurance: my maximum benefit for the year, on the dental insurance plan I have (You know, the one I can afford), is $1000, and since I had five fillings last year, that took up most of my benefit. Since this crown is itself almost $1000, my dentist and I wanted to wait until August 1, when my dental benefit renews for the next calendar year. Then I put it off until Fall Break so I wouldn’t have to miss class.
And I suppose I’ll be doing that for the next two years, as well, because I actually need three crowns. And as my insurance benefit renews on August 1st, which is also when school starts, I will twice more have to wait until October to get the crown done if I don’t want to miss school; because Fall Break is the first vacation of the year. And my next two, at least, will include more grinding down of my teeth.
That’s why I hate going to the dentist. It’s actually not a terrible experience: my current dentist is an introvert, so she doesn’t try to chat too much while I have four different instruments in my mouth; she has pretty good music in her office; and most importantly, this doctor is lightning fast. Appointments take half as long with her as they have with all of my previous dentists. Which I love.
But you see, I have absolute shit for teeth. Both of my parents have weak teeth, judging from the number of crowns and bridges and root canals they have had between them; my mom also has crooked teeth, which meant I got to have braces for two and a half years, too. (My brother had it worse, though. He had to have oral surgery when he was 8 or 9 to try to resolve his tooth issues. And then braces for him, for longer than I had them. Also, my wife got braces when she was an adult, and what would have taken a year or two if she’d had them at 12 took five years. FIVE YEARS. With braces. As a grown woman. That sucked a lot. Though she did win the Best Hygiene award from her orthodontist every single time she went, because she was the only patient that orthodontist had who actually flossed her teeth. With braces on. For five years. Take that, ya friggin tweens.) And then I took those weak teeth I inherited, and neglected them completely for the first two decades of my life. I brushed my teeth, and my mother made me go to regular dental visits and have fluoride treatments; but I never flossed voluntarily. And then around 17 or 18, I started drinking ungodly amounts of coffee with impossible amounts of sugar in each cup, and also smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, both of which degraded the enamel on my teeth. Which meant, when I went to the dentist while I was in college, for the first time after moving out of my mom’s house, I had 16 cavities: between every one of my molars.
That’s why you floss, kids.
Ever since then, every single time I go to the dentist, they discover a new cavity, or an old filling that has degraded, or a tooth that has had too many fillings and now needs to become a crown — which is the story with my current triple crown, which will make a total of 5 in my mouth. I also had three of my wisdom teeth removed, two with oral surgeries which featured the doctor shattering my teeth with a chisel while I was under anesthetic.
That’s why I hate going to the dentist. Because it never ends. My teeth never get better or healthier: there is always more damage, always more decay. Today while the dentist was filling a different tooth (There’s so much work that needs to get done that they always throw in an extra procedure or two) she commented on how all of my teeth have chips in them. Fucking chips. She made some joke about how I need to stop eating rocks, which was funny and all, but what that tells me is that my teeth are literally just crumbling into dust, inside my mouth: because I do not, in fact, eat rocks. Or crunch bones to make my bread. Or even eat terribly hard nuts, or raw seeds, or chew ice cubes, or open beer bottles with my teeth. I don’t do anything mean to my teeth. I just brush ’em twice a day, floss every night, and use a waterpick to clean out the pockets in my gums.
Oh yeah — I have shitty gums, too, did I mention? Thanks, Dad.
(I’m not actually bitter about my bad tooth genes: my parents have all of my problems and more. I have bad gums, exacerbated by the smoking, and that means I’ve had to have deep cleanings called “root planing”; but my father had a lovely procedure called “flap surgery” in which the doctor cut his gums away from his teeth in order to clean out all the gunk that had collected in the pockets around his teeth, and then sewed his gums back together.)
And I will say that my gums are the one area where I have seen genuine improvement in my mouth health: since I started being much more careful and regular with my tooth care, and since I started using the waterpick, my gums have actually gotten better; my dentist doesn’t even comment on them any more.
But otherwise, I am all too aware that nothing about my teeth is going to get better. They are going to continue to decay and crumble, necessitating ever more invasive, complex, and expensive procedures, until at last they fall out and I can finally just get dentures. (And yes, I know that having dentures will not make things better because they have their own problems. I’m just looking forward to pulling my teeth out of my mouth and cussing at them. Like they deserve.)
I am also aware that the expenses are not going to get less, either: because in this country, where mouth bones are not considered part of one’s overall health, despite every medical professional being clear that oral health is incredibly important to overall health, and where the heinous and horrifying health care hellscape has made it obscenely expensive to get any treatment at all, even while insurance companies continuously dump increased costs onto consumers (Just as one small example: as I said, I need to delay two of my crowns because my annual insurance maximum is $1000; when I got all those cavities in college, my father, whose insurance I was still covered by, ended up paying extra because the sheer number of fillings ran over his annual insurance maximum for dependents — which was $1000. That was 27 years ago. Good to know that dental care is not any more expensive now than it was then, huh? At least not for the insurance companies. I’m sure my premiums are also exactly the same as what my dad paid in 1995.), the out-of-pocket costs of any care are prohibitive, and are rapidly approaching obscene; and that’s not even talking about extraordinary procedures. Just regular checkups, cleanings, X-rays, and fillings.
Last, I am aware that the harm I did to my teeth when I was young is at least part of the reason for the problems I have now: because one of the insidious things about teeth is that they seem stronger than they are, and you don’t realize the damage being done to them until it is too late. And once that damage is done, it’s never going away.
(Are you ready for the turn, where I actually get to the point?)
I told you this wasn’t off topic.
And that is really why I’m writing about my teeth today: because all of that is essentially the same as the situation in education: you don’t notice the damage being done until it is too late, and then that damage causes problems for the rest of one’s life. Fixing that damage is obscenely expensive: as is simply maintaining the basic level of care, at least in this country and this economic system. And though we don’t always talk about it, the essential health of the education system is vital to the overall health of the country.
Phew. Let’s chew on that for a while.
(Though not too hard: I don’t want to break my new temporary crown.)
I mean it. The damage starts young, and the bad habits we created years ago are not offset by the good ones. Just as my pretty-consistent brushing, dental visits, and even fluoride treatments did not prevent my lack of flossing, and the toxins I put into my mouth, from causing tooth decay: so the excellent teaching of dedicated professionals in the early grades do not offset the harm that is done by a focus on standardized testing, on achieving high grades, and away from reading and inquiry learning. That harm is real, and even if we don’t see the damage that is being done for years or even decades, the ground lost can never be recovered, not even if we fix all our bad habits.
That’s not to say the children who go through this current (partly) toxic education system are doomed: many of my teeth are strong and healthy. And again, while my teeth are never going to get better, my gums did; who’s to say that some remedies won’t actually have a positive effect, even on those who suffered the worst? Let’s be clear that there is a limit to this analogy: I know a number of students who overcame early learning deficits and educational damage to become excellent scholars, and complete and well-rounded people. Even if my teeth never fully heal, people genuinely can.
But. It’s expensive. It’s time-consuming: and the first fact increases the severity of the second. It’s expensive for individuals to try to make up the ground that they’ve lost, because they have to try to scramble up the hill while still running forward as fast as they can, as we all do, all the time; my wife and I were just talking about how our income has gone up this year — just in time for the increases in cost-of-living to eat up the increases in our income. If we had to, simultaneously, try to re-educate ourselves to make up for the learning deficits inflicted on us in our youth? We could do it, but it would cost us heavily in time and money, and even more in determination and energy. We might just give up and let ourselves stay less educated.
I could just give up the dental care and let my teeth fall out at their own rate. After all, some are healthy, so I could probably keep chewing for a good long while, on my few remaining teeth.
Because solving the problems caused by a lack of good education, or an excess of bad education, are expensive, it means they have to wait until later, because adults who want to improve their education can’t stop the rest of their lives and go back to elementary school. In some cases, the damage is irretrievable, because the habits of mind and the connections and pathways through the brain are set in place, and in some cases literally can’t be changed. Really, the problems caused by poor early education are expensive to solve even immediately after the damage was done: students in middle school who try to catch up on learning losses from elementary school are doing twice the work, and often with less preparation and less support; and that means there has to be that much more time and energy spent by those students and those who try to support them. Like I said: the expense of trying to retroactively fix old problems increases the time that it takes to accomplish any kind of remedy.
(To be clear: middle school students and high school students who suffer learning “loss” are only suffering losses because we insist that they continue forward even while they are trying to climb up. if we’d just fucking relax on keeping everyone running to the same finish line at the same time, it would be easier for people to fill in the gaps in their learning and get to the finish, even if it took longer. Also, students in school do get support; it’s just not enough because their needs are greater if they have learning gaps from bad elementary education. My teeth will never get healthier, but students can learn everything they were not given the opportunity to learn; there is a limit to the analogy.)
And, of course, just as the insurance companies are leeching off of the dentists’ and patients’ needs, and thus making the problem even worse (by increasing costs, which means people have to put off care, which exacerbates the issues with their teeth, which means the eventual remedy will be even more expensive and even less effective), there are people who take advantage of the problems in education, rather than trying to solve those problems, and who profit thereby, and make those problems even worse: predominantly politicians, but also the entire pedagogical industry, which peddles professional development and takes money from schools that would be better spent on the obvious and necessary solutions: equitable access to quality teaching and educational resources starting at pre-K. We would never have to spend a dollar teaching me how to focus on mastery of standards in high school if we would just spend that same dollar reducing first grade class sizes and making sure all elementary school kids have the resources they need to succeed before they ever get to me.
But we don’t put in the time and effort necessary to solve the problems in early education. So we create for ourselves greater problems in secondary and tertiary education. Which are more expensive to try to fix, and more time-consuming, because they are now more intractable. And when those solutions don’t work, we create for ourselves further problems among the citizens of this country: because we end up with tens of millions of people who don’t believe science. Who don’t understand how this democracy works, and why it needs to be protected. Who can’t empathize with other people, because they never tried to walk in someone else’s shoes, and don’t understand why it is like killing a mockingbird.
Screw it. We should just remove all the natural people and replace them with artificial ones. Dentures, if you will.
Then at least we can curse at them as they deserve.
Just Dusty 