Not because it was the first day of school inservice season, starting earlier this year than ever before. Actually, that was part of it, because this is WAY too early. I hate being back in the work mindset already: I was having a fantastic summer (though with ups and downs as always), and I very much want to it continue; but now I have to spend my time and energy teaching instead of all the other things I want to do, which I do over the summer. It’s never enough time, because there are a lot of things I want to do; but this year was especially not enough time, which sucks because I was doing really well on my other projects and purposes.
But that wasn’t the real reason why yesterday was sad. (Although the fact that I had to go to school yesterday was the reason why this post is now late. Sorry.)
And it wasn’t because I had to do what I always have to do in the early days of inservice season, which is move a bunch of furniture and run around a lot looking for things. I did that, and it really was crappy because it was about 110° yesterday here in Tucson (Climate change? What climate change?), so I spent much of the day sweating, which is less than enjoyable. It’s also one of those things that makes me feel like I’m wasting my time, you know? Maybe it’s just my job (though I REAAAAALLLLLLYYYY doubt it) but there are activities and tasks I have to complete that don’t feel like the important activities and tasks, and so whenever I spend time doing those, it feels like I’m not doing the things I really should be doing, and so I regret the time spent. Every summer, the school gets a deep cleaning, which is good and necessary: but it then requires me to rearrange my classroom, every year, because the lovely and hardworking cleaning people take everything out of my room, clean it, wax the floors, and then put everything back — but they just sort of put everything inside, not paying much attention to where it belongs. Which is entirely fine (Though the custodian in me remembers VERY carefully keeping track of where things were so I could move them, clean, and then put them back precisely where they were — but also, teachers always change their room configurations, so there’s not much point in being that precise with classrooms), but it means that every year, I have to put my desks back where they belong, and get all my stuff out of the places where I stored it for the summer. And then there are teachers who move rooms, and new teachers, and that means desks have to move, and bookcases have to move; and my wife is an art teacher at my school, and that means I have to help her move her furniture and equipment — and art has a fair amount of equipment involved.
So yesterday was sweaty, is my point. And difficult. And yet I didn’t do the dozen other tasks I have to get to before classes actually start, which makes me feel like I didn’t do much, even though I did.
It wasn’t even sad because on the way home, Toni and I got caught in a raging monsoon: more rain coming down at one time than I have ever seen from inside a car. We literally could not see the road or anything ahead of us, because the windshield was simply a gray screen of water: and at the same time, hail was pelting the car, and the wind was shaking it. It was nuts. But actually, though it was scary, it was also really cool.
And our home didn’t suffer any damage, and our pets were fine. So that’s not why yesterday was sad.
Yesterday was sad because of this.
This is the classroom next to mine. It is the room where my excellent friend and colleague and collaborator and ELA sister, Lisa Watson, has worked with me for the last nine years.
And now she is gone. Because Lisa quit.
It isn’t only sad: Lisa moved from being a teacher and ELA department head to being a principal at another charter school.
It’s a definite step up, and a wonderful role for her: she is an amazing person, kind and caring, determined and perceptive, empathetic and wise; and thus an outstanding leader. She’s going to have a tremendous, and tremendously positive, impact on that school, and on the teachers and students who work there. The school that got her is lucky to have her — and my school is stupid as hell for letting her go, and for not putting her into a similar role for us. The fact that my school has been stupid as hell in not recognizing how excellent Lisa is, is the main reason why she’s leaving, and she’s right to, and I’m glad she is going. So the move is good for Lisa, and great for the school she is going to lead.
But for me? It’s sad.
Lisa hired me. Nine years ago, she and two administrators (one of whom was competent) interviewed me over Skype (That is the MySpace of Zoom, for all you Gen Z’ers out there. Who are definitely not reading this blog. And don’t know what the hell MySpace was. Look it up, punks.) from Oregon, and hired me based on that interview, which is what brought me to Tucson. I don’t doubt that Lisa’s voice was the main one in choosing me, because while I was clearly competent as an English teacher, and she knew right away that she and I would get along well and I would fit into the department, I was also, while I was being interviewed, suspended from teaching because of my blog-blowback. I don’t think I would be any administrator’s first choice — but I was Lisa’s. And while there are certainly things about Tucson which I don’t love, this city has become home, and has been very good for my wife and I: and Lisa made that possible. When people ask me what I think of Tucson, my usual answer is that there is poetry on the rocks here: and Lisa is a poet, as well as a teacher, so she is part of that Tucson poetry, for me. But she didn’t just hire me: she also made sure that I got the Advanced Placement classes, which usually go to the current staff when a teacher leaves, because those are usually the most coveted classes and we distribute classes through seniority; it’s very unusual for a new hire to get AP classes. (I will admit that I was an unusual new hire, because 14-year veteran teachers don’t usually look for new jobs.) I got them. I love them. And Lisa gave them to me.
Lisa and another wonderful teacher she hired, our friend and colleague Aleksandra — who fortunately is still at the school.
Once I got here, Lisa was immediately and enthusiastically supportive. She gave me ideas and materials, but she let me create my own curriculum for all of my classes. She observed me, complimented me, and put her trust in me. She listened to my thoughts, gave me feedback, and encouraged me to keep doing what I was doing, no matter how often I worried about how my teaching was ineffective or misguided; my anxiety and self-doubt and imposter syndrome were no match for Lisa’s loving and generous guidance. Over the last nine years she has defended me from administrative interference, helped me focus on the real goal — helping students improve their language skills — and taught me an enormous amount about teaching. I am ten times the teacher I was before I met her, and it’s because of her, more than anything else. All of my students who appreciate me and my class have Lisa to thank, because I wouldn’t be here in Tucson and I wouldn’t be the teacher I am if it weren’t for her.
Do I need to say that she’s incredible?
As if that weren’t enough, Lisa is also an author: a poet, first and foremost, she also writes essays and short stories and novels. I’ve known a fair number of people over the years with aspirations of writing, but Lisa is one of the only ones to accomplish writing, real writing, good writing, I’ve ever known. Her poetry, especially, is incredible to me: of the several volumes of poetry she has published — and I think I have every one — my favorite is the first one I read, Hear Me Now, which starts with these two poems:
Ashes
The embers of the fire
Glowed in the night sky
Smoke filled cloud
Reigned overhead
Sweltering head from
A
Careless human
Drops a match
Flames dance
Before our eyes. Demolish the wrong
As the mirror sees nothing
You see the dark places
Of humanity
Burn
And burn
Until we all fall down
Dancing with Raindrops
The gray clouds overhead
Have everything to dread
That little spot of sunshine
Is dancing
And she won’t stop
Dancing with the raindrops
She smiles up at the skies
As drops fall carefully
On her eyes
The drops against her skin
Makes her start dancing again.
What beauty does she exude?
What moves does she make?
Her dancing breaks the clouds apart
And her smile heals my broken heart.
I love those. I love the contrast between sky and Earth, between fire and water, sunshine and clouds. That one pun in “Ashes,” “Smoke filled cloud/ Reigned overhead” just gives me chills. I admire the way Lisa can go from despairingly despising humanity for setting fire to everything, to filled with joy because of a child’s dance (which is also the dance of a spot of sunlight under clouds). I love the way one image, one thought, blends into the next, giving more meaning to both — in “Ashes,” is it the dark places of humanity that are themselves burning? Or is it that you see the dark places in humanity commit the acts of arson which burn everything down? And either way, the mirror sees nothing.
It’s amazing work. She is an incredible poet. And what I love most about her poetry is that it is almost entirely instinctive and unconscious: she will not write a word for months, and then suddenly have an outpouring of dozens of poems in one night, when inspiration strikes, and those tiny bits and pieces, the stems and seeds of poems, that have all been germinating inside her, all blossom at once. But then, she is so capable and knowledgeable about language and poetry and the craft of writing, that even her instinctive, unconscious poetry carries incredible meaning, incredible perceptiveness.
And this wonderful writer has taken me as her writing partner. She encourages me, she pushes me to write and keep writing. She has helped me to realize my own dream, of publishing and selling the books I have written, which were just languishing in my files until Lisa (And my wife, who has always encouraged me as well) got me to make a booth at the Tucson Festival of Books, where I have learned that my fears were not true: I am not a bad writer, or even worse, not a writer at all; and I learned that my hopes were true: people like reading my books. Once I started getting my books into people’s hands, the positive feedback has only grown, and that has been a magical gift for me. I might have reached that one without her, because my wife has given me the same gifts of encouragement and confidence; but I needed Lisa to help create that booth, to create that success, and to push me to keep writing. (I will say that I have given her the same gift of support and encouragement with her writing, and she has written more and published more and sold more because of me. I’m proud that I have been able to give that back to her even as she has given it to me.)
Lisa and I at our booth at the TFOB — along with our other friend, Amanda, another one of the actually talented writers I have known. (WHO ALSO LEFT MY SCHOOL, but who’s keeping track?)
That’s what I have had in the room next to me for the last nine years. An amazing writer, a gifted teacher, a caring and supportive colleague and supervisor (She even lets me yell at my class, which I do when I get too excited about the literature or the argument I’m going through with my class, and rather than coming to my room to complain about the noise, she just tells her students that I’m preaching.). And, of course, my friend. One of my best friends. She has carpooled with me every day for the last three years; we have walked our dogs together; we’ve had dinner, had lunch, gone drinking; she gave me her old couch, and my wife’s favorite chair; she called me when she had a bird get trapped in her house and was freaking out. (She literally ran away screaming when the bird took off while I was trying to herd it out the door. It was hilarious.) She calls me her brother, and because I know how important her family is to her, I am mindful of the compliment in that, even though I don’t really think I deserve it. But it is true that we’ve talked about everything, and helped each other through everything, and worked together on everything, and together we have been successful far more than we have failed. But even when we have failed, we’ve done it together.
And now she’s gone. And so I am sad.
But of course, Lisa is not gone. She is working in a different place: but she is still doing the same things. She has given me so much that I have needed for the last nine years, I certainly can’t begrudge her decision to give those same gifts to other people instead of me; I probably don’t need them any more — though I certainly still want her gifts, as they are wonderful, like her. And, of course, even if she isn’t teaching with me, she is still available to help teach me and support me in my teaching; and she is still my friend, and my writing partner, and my sister. I’m going to make her go out for a drink with me and with our other friends at least once a week over this coming school year; because I know that Lisa will need our support as much as we need hers. And now that she has stepped up to take charge of an entire school, I will do my part: and I will try to step into her role at my school, to be the department head and to encourage and support my colleagues and help them to grow as much as Lisa helped me. I won’t succeed as well as she did, but I’ll do my best; and I know I’ll have her support.
Another poem of hers, from the volume Beautiful but Ugly, is called Privacy:
In the bedroom
I found a rock
Another rock
There are too many rocks
I have fallen to pieces
That’s Lisa: so many pieces, and she leaves them everywhere, without even realizing it until she turns around and sees them everywhere. Poems, students, friends, family; people she has touched, people she has inspired, people she has taught and made better, in every case by giving them — us — a piece of herself. She thinks she just does it all without thought, just reacting, just feeling, and sometimes she thinks she’s making a mess, and she apologizes; but exactly as she writes her poetry, her teaching and her friendship are so very intelligent and wise that even her seemingly unconscious and instinctive gestures are wonderful, thoughtful gifts, which I will always treasure. My greatest gift to her has been to show her that she is not falling to pieces, and she does not need to apologize: she is giving her gifts to everyone around her, and we have to thank her for it all. The one area where Lisa notably lacks is that she is not nearly kind enough to herself, for all her generosity with others — and that, too, is a lesson I need to learn.
I’m going to miss her being in the room next to me. It has been so very lovely to have this wonderful friend so close for these last nine years, to have the jokes and the laughter and the passion and the wisdom she brings to every place she is. My school has been lessened by her departure. But my friendship has not been lessened, and though she has given me and everyone else around her so much of herself, Lisa has not been lessened by her generosity — and that’s the most important thing I have learned from her. The more you give, the more you are.
But still, you do have to make sure you give to yourself. So Lisa, I hope you do keep giving to yourself at least a little of the wonderful bounty you have given to all the rest of us.
Last week, I had no words; it was the end of the school year: when I have to grade everything, when I am not sleeping, when I am frustrated with my students every damn day, when I have to say goodbye to people I like and appreciate, either for the summer or forever. So I posted pictures instead.
The week before that, I was sad; so I wrote about being sad — and I got some…reactions. I’m glad that my writing reached people, and affected people, so that is overall a good thing; and talking about being sad led to more conversations about sadness, which is also a good thing. But it was hard to write that post, and hard to have the conversations afterwards; this shows why it’s important to talk about emotions, particularly negative emotions, so those conversations can get easier for all of us — but I didn’t (and don’t) want to write about all of that again, which was also why I didn’t post last week. The end of the school year is depressing, and that’s not what I wanted to write about.
But now? Now it’s summertime. At last. I have been work-free for two days (Almost. I had one student write to ask why they had not gotten a grade on a paper they claimed to have turned in, and one student whom I have been asking to turn things in so I can give them a passing grade. But both of those are minor tasks, both resolved in a matter of minutes — and both finished, now.), and so I have read my book, and I have walked my dogs, and I have played Minecraft. I have napped. It has been lovely.
So now I feel like I can find some time to put together some words that aren’t just a cri de coeur, or packaged a thousand at a time into a picture. Some of those words are definitely going to go into my book: because by God I am going to finish my third pirate novel, and wrap up the Damnation Kane series — the first series I will complete in my writing career. But some of the words can come here, I think.
So. What shall I write about?
Part of me wants to write about how much nicer it is to be relaxed and happy than to be stressed and sad; but that’s really pretty stupid. Because of course it is nicer. Nobody needs to hear that from me. And some people would probably be bothered hearing that from me, because they might have to think about how they are not relaxed and happy, and then they might feel bad for not being relaxed and happy. Also, I’m not simply nor entirely relaxed and happy. So we won’t be talking about that.
Part of me thinks I should review the political book that I read, which I said I would be reviewing; but I’m not sure that’s important. I have noticed, in looking at the stats for this blog, that my old book reviews and essays are by far the most popular posts over time; that some of my personal weekly essays get a lot of views, but the book reviews (like this one) and essays about books (like this one) are the ones that people keep coming back for, month after month; but those are about popular books, not political books — and not political books that are almost two decades out of date, which didn’t change the power of the book’s message, but did leave me wishing it was more current. Which probably means that fewer people will want to read this particular book with each passing year. So I don’t know how many people want to read my thoughts on that book; and I don’t think I could have fun with the review, as I did with the two linked above. So I think I will probably let it go, and maybe write a review of the next book I’m going to read — Slaughterhouse Five, which I am re-reading for the first time in a decade or two, as part of a book swap with my former student, the one who got me to re-read and actually appreciate John Knowles’s A Separate Peace.
But that’s later. For now, right now, what have I got to write about?
I’ve got it. Let’s review this past school year.
Now, I haven’t moved far enough past this school year to be able to judge it fairly and logically; also, I don’t think it a good idea to take an entire segment of either life or education and boil it down to a simple rating out of five. (Because grades are garbage…) I just want to give some of my thoughts and impressions of this past year.
First of all, some of the good things: my wife came back to work at my school again this year. That is one of the best things that could ever happen, because my wife is my favorite person in the world; every time I get to see her at work, it makes my day better. This year I got to ride in to work with her every single day. I got to walk her to her classroom. I got to help her with tasks at school. When she left (Early in the day, because she only worked part time, exactly as she wanted to), she would usually stop by my classroom to say goodbye; it made my morning better, every single time. It’s also good because my wife is an excellent teacher, and I’m happy for the students who got to take her classes; even though not all of them appreciated it. She’s coming back next year, but with an even better schedule, because for the first time in her five years of teaching (Not counting her years of work as a sub, or her summer school experience, or the internship program she helped run and the computer skills class she taught as part of that program — want to know why she’s an excellent teacher? Because in addition to being a brilliant and sensitive and honest person, and in addition to knowing every single little thing about her subject, she has a ton of actual experience teaching. Unlike the administrators who give us our performance evaluations every year. BUT ANYWAY.) she will not be teaching middle school students who are all shoved into a mandatory art class that most of them don’t want. It’s awful to try to teach a subject to someone who doesn’t care about it and so doesn’t care if they learn or not, or if they pass or not; it’s especially tough when you love the subject and know the great value it can bring to lives, as my wife loves art, and as I love English.
Another good thing: in addition to the mandatory English classes I’ve always taught to students who don’t always want to learn English (It’s not as bad for me as it is for her: because I teach high school, not middle school. Middle schoolers are demons. My students are just annoying.), I got to teach my first elective this past year. It was a class in fantasy and science fiction literature, and though there were definitely some missteps, overall it went wonderfully well. It was fantastic to be able to select books because they mean something to my world as a nerd and a writer, rather than because they have lessons I think are important for students to learn; and the books I chose, though something of a mixed bag, generally went over quite well. I actually got a whole class full of students to read four complete novels this year, something I haven’t been able to do in the last two decades. They wrote short stories, and they participated in both discussions and in reading — and I didn’t give a single test. For the whole year. It was wonderful. It was also outstanding to feel vindicated in my choice of M.T. Anderson’s fantastic dystopian novel Feed, which I wanted to teach to my regular classes but was told I could not (Because the book uses dirty words, though with a clear and effective purpose), so I taught it to this class — and they loved it. And were deeply affected by it. One of my better teaching experiences.
(Lessons learned, by the way, from my missteps: The War of the Worlds is a seminal science fiction classic, but it is also as boring as snail snot. And Octavia Butler’s Kindred is a fantastic book, and an important book: but it is not much of a science fiction book. And it’s damn hard to read, because it does such a good job of depicting American chattel slavery. I think next year I will teach The Time Machine, and maybe Fahrenheit 451, and maybe Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.)
Another good thing: all of my best teacher friends were all around me this year, and they all helped support me; and they’re all coming back next year. I have an excellent group of teacher friends at the school, and that makes a world of difference in the teaching experience. As important as it was to me to have my wife there every day, these wonderful people are critical to my survival and stability as a teacher and a person. Thank you Lisa, Aleksandra, Danielle, Scott, and Toni (whom all the teachers refer to as “Not your Toni”) — and let’s add Carrie and Anasazi to the group, shall we? Thank you all for your friendship.
I also had a number of wonderful students this year, both academically and personally, and I think, despite my constant self-doubts, that I was able to help most of them to get better, to learn and improve, to grow as people and as readers and writers. Even though I teach because I need the income, it means quite a lot to me that I can teach well, that I can have an impact on my students, that I can make their futures better, their lives fuller, by imparting to them curiosity and insight and some of my passion for language and literature. That happened this year — it doesn’t always — and I am grateful that it did.
All right, so those are the good things.
The main thing that went badly this year was something I’ve hinted at in the good news: my friends, my wife, and I are all returning to the same school next year. Which is remarkable (as in something about which I can remark) because there are so many others who are not returning. Out of a staff of 38, there are TEN people who are not returning. More than 25%. I don’t want to get into too much detail about this, about the reasons for people leaving, because it would cross a line I don’t want to cross, in that I would end up criticizing my school for things I think they have done wrong, and I would have to do it in a specific and even personal way; but the real essential reason for everyone who is leaving is the same: teachers are not valued commensurate with our effort and our worth. We are not paid enough, not supported enough, not cared for enough. Some of my fellow staff members are being actively devalued, and some have simply grown fed up with not being valued enough; but the result is clear: the school is going to change. Maybe in some cases the replacements will be better, sure — but not in all cases. In the years I have been at this school, and more broadly in the years that I have been a teacher, I have watched teachers and staff members come and go; and it seems to me that in all cases, over time, the staff replacements have been for the worse. Partly that’s because teachers who care get better with experience, all the way up to the point where we get so bitter and jaded that we give up, and then we become much worse; so improvement generally happens with teachers who stay, not teachers who leave and are replaced; but part of that is because good teachers quit when they aren’t valued, and new people coming into the profession are not always good teachers, just by the law of averages. Now they’re not even coming into the profession: we had one position that just never really got filled this year, instead being temporarily patched by a string of substitutes; maybe they’ll fill that spot with a full-time teacher next year. Or maybe they won’t, and the students will suffer again with subs. Maybe, if they find someone, that teacher will even be a good teacher, or someone who may become a good teacher over time.
And maybe they won’t.
It’s hard to watch your school get worse. I feel bad for the students who come here. Not because they get a bad education; I think we still provide what we always have, a generally good and useful education with some definite holes. Partly that’s because there are still teachers who are staying, and who have gotten better over their years of teaching — and yes, I am one of those — and partly it’s because there have always been holes, always been areas where we lack (Arts, along with CTE and practical skills classes, have always been the most glaring lack at my small charter school, and it is the reason why probably 10% of our students leave the school every year to go to larger schools with more programs. Our graduating class every year is half the size of our incoming class.), so the holes are shifting more than they are growing. When I came to the school, they had an incredibly strong math department; now we have an incredibly strong English department. I don’t think one or the other of those is better or worse: they’re just different strengths. (Okay, the strong English department is better. Because math sucks.)
But though we still do our jobs, it’s getting harder. Because the problems exist which are driving teachers away. Every year it gets more and more tempting to follow them, and that means that every year, it gets more strenuous to stay where I am. I’m getting tired of fighting to survive at my school, fighting to overcome the bad policies, the bad atmosphere, the bad personalities that all contribute to the decision so many people have made to leave. I hope things start to get better, at some point. I really do. But in the meantime, I feel bad for the students because their school is in a constant state of flux. It makes them uncertain, of course, and it takes away their relationships and replaces the familiar teachers with a string of new faces. It strikes me that, every year, the students ask me if I will be there next year. Even the seniors ask this, so it’s not only because they want to take my class, or even to see me in the hall; they just want to know that I will still be there, because I am part of their school as they understand it.
The second thing that was difficult this school year was the students. Hold on, hold on: I’m not going to complain about how the students are getting worse; they’re not. I’m also not going to complain about how the students are the root cause of every problem with education — though they are, of course; I say all the time that this job would be a breeze if it weren’t for the students.
See how neat that room looks? How peaceful? Just a teacher by themselves, working on a computer. Bliss.
No, the trouble with students this year was that the students were troubled. I think I have to write about this in more depth, and before I do that I need to talk to a couple of my former students, and get their opinions on how school has been for them; but I think we don’t really know the harm that was done by the pandemic and the quarantine. I do also recognize that it’s too easy to point to that enormous black cloud, the crater that it left in our landscape, and blame it for all the problems we face; I don’t think the pandemic experience is the only factor influencing students today, or the root of all the problems in education, any more than I think students themselves are the root of all the problems in education today.
But it happened. And it happened to these kids. And I think for them, it changed — everything.
All students are different. I tend to think that the trends my fellow teachers always see in the students are generally false. For instance, it has frequently been observed to me that this class or that class is a “bad” class, or a tough class; and my experience has rarely been the same as what my colleagues have told me it would be, based on their experience. I’m sure it goes the other way, too: I have in the past warned my fellow teachers about students and classes I’ve had trouble with, and frequently those students and classes have been great for my colleagues. Because the problem is not that the students are bad: it’s that not every student works well with every teacher, and not every teacher handles everything the best way, nor does every student. Bad circumstances can sour a working relationship very quickly, and often it never really sweetens.
But see, I think that’s part of what happened with the pandemic and the quarantine. The schools didn’t handle it properly. I’m not sure there was a way to handle it properly: my Republican countrymen would argue that schools should have stayed open, but I think there’s no reasonable argument that such a policy would not have led to a hell of a lot more sickness, and that would have had a negative impact on students as well. So I don’t mean to find fault with what we did or how we did it; we did our best. But the reality is that it didn’t work. Teaching a class on Zoom is simply not effective: not when the teachers and students are familiar and comfortable with in-person learning. It’s a separate question whether Zoom made the situation better or worse; it seems to me that simply cancelling school entirely for six months or a year would have been worse — but there’s an argument to be made that giving everyone a break would have been better, and the students could have come back to where they left off, and simply graduated a year later, and so what? I’m a fan of gap years. If I could have used that year to prepare, on my own, for the next year’s classes, my God, what I would have achieved. On the other hand, in that scenario, social isolation would have been much, much worse; I can largely ignore that because I live with my best friend and my four favorite animal friends; but I recognize that many of my students would have suffered even more without being able to hear friendly voices and see friendly faces every day, even if it was just on a screen.
But the gap year, or bulling ahead through sickness, is not what we did. What we did was try our best to pretend that nothing was wrong: when everything was wrong. The students were miserable; the teachers were miserable; the entire world was miserable. The transmission of education online did not work: students were bored and constantly distracted. Teachers were frustrated and floundering. So the result is that teachers lost confidence, because we watched ourselves suck at our jobs for an entire year; students lost faith in schools, because they watched schools fail them for an entire year, and they also lost faith in themselves, because when they were entrusted with the responsibility of being at school while they weren’t at school, they pretty much all failed to live up to it. That is not an insult: there’s not a doubt in my mind that I would have spent the entire school year at home stoned and playing video games while pretending to do my work, if there had been a quarantine while I was a student. The point is that students should never have been given that responsibility. They weren’t ready for it, and so they were set up for failure: and they failed. At the same time, the schools failed: and the students were shown what was behind the curtain of the schools. They saw that their teachers are not wizards, but, too often, traveling salesmen trying desperately to maintain a facade. The advantage we teachers have always had is that, frequently, just like the Wizard of Oz, the facade is enough: students are able to learn enormous amounts on their own, so if I can give them a poem which I myself don’t understand, and then just seem wise when I say, “Well what do YOU think it means?” Students have been able to pull real knowledge and improvement out of that — which knowledge they frequently then teach me. So as long as students had faith that we were really guiding them in the right direction, we were able to move them in the right direction even if we didn’t actually know the path ourselves. Because students could find the way.
But students saw that we couldn’t always get it right, that we didn’t always know the answer: and I think they don’t trust us any more. Combine that with their knowledge, gained from a year so far out in the wilderness that a path forward didn’t exist, and so they couldn’t get anywhere no matter how fast they ran in circles, that they themselves can’t always come up to snuff (This is not true, by the way — but there’s a certain amount of faith, which requires a certain amount of innocence, and these kids don’t have it, for the same reason: they realized that their ruby slippers are just shoes, with no magic at all, and that means they don’t have the ability to make the magic happen. The magic is still there, where it always has been, inside them; but if they don’t believe in it, they’ll never achieve it.), and the constant drumbeat all around in our society these days about how school is maybe not necessary and maybe even bad, how college is maybe not necessary and definitely too expensive — and who could blame them for giving up a little? Or a lot?
So what we have, what we had this year, is a school full of students who maybe don’t see the point of school, and so maybe they don’t do their part. They don’t do their assignments. They don’t pay attention in school. What’s more — what’s made this year much harder — they don’t really care about their grades, or about passing and graduating, no matter what their teachers say. They maybe don’t care as much about what their teachers say, either about the subject matter or about what’s important in life. Because they lost faith in us, and in schools, and in themselves. This is not true of all of them, I have to say; we always have students who are successful, and those show that the school system is not lost, is not entirely broken; but there are a lot of students now who don’t seem to see the point. And as a teacher, there’s nothing harder to deal with than students who don’t see the point.
I would like to apologize to all of my former teachers for what I put them through: because I was one of those kids. I must have been hell to deal with, for a lot of them. I’m sorry for that. Believe me, I’m getting my just desserts now.
So that has been this past year. It should be no wonder that I had a tough time with it. It should also be no wonder that so many of my colleagues are leaving now, that so many teaching jobs are hard to fill, and getting harder. I don’t mean to excuse my school, to put all the blame for the departures on the bad situation with the students; my school has made the problem much, much worse. But what’s more important is that the schools, and the teachers, and everyone else involved — including themselves — we all have to try not to make the situation worse for the students. Because they don’t have a lot of options. They don’t have a lot of opportunities to learn what they need to learn. If they can’t do it now, they may never get it right. And the more years they go through without succeeding, by their standards or ours, the harder it will get to actually succeed. If we keep failing them, we fail.
And then what?
How bad could it actually get?
Boy, good thing I didn’t write about sad things this week, huh?
With many layers. Like an onion. (I’d say “Or an ogre,” but I love Shrek and I won’t bring him down to this level. [Spoiler: I am absolutely going to bring Shrek down to my level. And then sit on him.] But here’s the clip anyway:)
Because everybody likes parfait.
I love Shrek because I relate to everything about him, from his introversion, to his grudging love of humanity, to his deep love for his wife, to his lack of self-esteem combined with an awareness of his strengths and abilities. I appreciate Shrek because he’s a Republican. Honestly. At least, he’s what Republicans should be. (And I don’t mean to ruin Shrek for anyone with this comment, but also, if more Republicans were like Shrek, we wouldn’t have the partisan problems we have now. But noooo, we get the other, uglier, eviler ogre. Ah, well. This isn’t the point.) Shrek is definitely a conservative: he dislikes and distrusts big government, he doesn’t like change, and he wants to be left alone. He’s the NIMBY in all of us. Though that should be NIMS, No’ In Ma Swamp, of course; and I mean that for all cases and circumstances (Though again, the other ogre has sort of ruined the rhetorical use of “swamp.” What an ass. He’s like the anti-Shrek. He doesn’t even have any layers.), because if I ever go to a city council meeting to object to them building a prison in my neighborhood, I’m definitely going to channel Shrek defending his swamp.
I also have to note that Shrek takes action when his home is invaded by refugees: but he doesn’t go after the refugees, he goes after the evil people who took their homes and drove them to his swamp, namely Lord Farquaad. See what I mean? Anti-Shrek.
But if anything is likely to turn me from a progressive into a Shrekian conservative (Definitely not going to become a Republican right now: the party is just too toxic. But also, if Shrek ran for office, I’d vote for him over most mainstream Democrats I know of.), it’s the layers in the sandwich of modern education. The layers in the onion.
Definitely not a parfait.
See, here’s the thing. I’m a teacher, right? We all know this by now; I talk about little else on this blog but books and teaching. But what does that mean, being a teacher? I’ve fulminated and pontificated over this many a time, because if there’s one thing that is clear about teaching, it is that it isn’t clear what teaching is; but the basic concept is pretty simple: it’s right there in the name. I teach stuff. I stand in front of a bunch of people who don’t know some stuff, and I help them learn that stuff. In my case, the stuff is literature, which is another complicated, amorphous concept that isn’t easy to define; but once more, the basic idea is really quite simple: written stuff, words and stuff. So basically, I help people who don’t know word stuff to learn more about word stuff.
Gonna need that on a business card, please.
(I bitch about it a lot, but right now? I thank all the gods there ever were for the internet. Because check this out. I made this on an instant business card generator on the internet, and I love it.)
Eighty or a hundred years ago, this could basically have been my card. It wouldn’t have had Shrek, so it would have been much less awesome, and the font would be much more calligraphic; but basically, it could have said this, and everyone would have nodded and doffed their bowler hats respectfully.
But then in the last fifty or sixty years, things started changing.
Obviously I am taking too broad a view of the history of pedagogy and education to be able to clearly identify causes and effects; there have been far too many influences and impacts on the education system in that time for any one to stand out. But I’m still speaking simply, broadly, in fundamental ways: and sometime over the last two to three generations, educators realized something: education wasn’t working for everyone. And also, that that was a problem.
So they tried to fix the problem.
It makes perfect sense: prior to about the WWII era, the problem was that not everyone had access to education; so the major push in the country was to build schools and hire teachers and buy books and such. But in the war years and the post-war boom, most of that got accomplished; and so the focus changed, from spreading education, to improving education.1954 saw the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision from the Supreme Court, and that threw into stark relief the clear truth that not all schools were equal, and also that people who did not have access to an equal education were in trouble. Title IX in 1972, and the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, which then became the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, along with the Americans with Disabilities Act, in 1990, helped to show that race was not the only reason why some people were denied equal access to education. And somewhere in there, we reached a point where everyone had access to school (Though obviously as this is still not true, particularly in rural areas and especially affecting indigenous and Native American children, I’m not covering the whole story: but I’m not covering the whole story.), and so at that point, where broadening inclusion into education became less of a concern, people started looking more at the quality of education that everyone in this country now had some sort of access to — part of that fight being the specific issues I have named, making sure that people of all races, genders, and abilities had equal access to education. Because once everyone gets something, which is always the first fight, then you try to make that thing better for everyone. Hence, reform.
In 1955, Rudolf Flesch published Why Johnny Can’t Read — and What You Can Do About It.
It was a bestseller for — no kidding — 37 weeks. In my own shallow understanding of the history of education in the U.S., I’m going to identify this as one of several flashpoints, points when people started looking seriously at the deficiencies in the education system, and started trying to plug the holes, fill the gaps, bandage the wounds. If you look at that image, you see one example of what I’m talking about: the top banner text there calls this “The classic book on phonics.” There: that’s one thing, one example of what I’m talking about. Not the first, I’m sure; if this isn’t the right era and the right flashpoint to identify, I should probably go back to John Dewey, who singlehandedly broke down and then rebuilt American education in the first half of the 20th century. But I think for quite a long time after that, people were still just — helping people who didn’t know word stuff to learn more word stuff. I don’t think they were doing as much to discover the gaps in some people’s learning of word stuff, and trying to figure out how to fill those gaps, or at least stop the wound from bleeding any more.
I’m using the wound metaphor because there’s a metaphor that I and all of my fellow teachers use all the time for this kind of stuff: bandaids. Which is actually where I came up with the metaphor that started this whole mess, this idea of layers, of a sandwich, or an onion. Or an ogre. (Sorry, Shrek.)
Not a parfait.
You see, the issue is, once someone identifies a problem, and then tries to diagnose it, and then proposes a solution to the problem, that leads to — repetition of the same process. Partly, I think, because most solutions proposed for most problems in education are bandaids only: they are a failure to understand the real underlying problem, along with two things: a refusal to admit that the underlying problem can’t be solved — and a refusal to throw up one’s hands and do nothing, since the problem has been identified. That last part is particularly insidious in education: because teachers, who are the ones most likely to become reformers, are used to attacking problems when we see them: and we’re also used to being right. (Look at me, spouting all this “history” without any source or evidence that my account is right. Forget about it: I know I’m right. Because I’m a teacher. So my idea for solving all of this is the right one. Now sit down and start taking notes.) So when we become aware of a problem, we immediately have a solution: and we are immediately going to put it into practice, even if we are running entirely on assumptions. I think that urge, to take action always, and that (generally misplaced — certainly true in my case) overconfidence in our abilities and ideas, means that education gets waaaaayyy more bandaids than other aspects of society that need fixing. Medicine, for instance (since I’m using the bandaid metaphor) is much more likely to investigate and analyze, using the scientific method to find real solutions, and to make change happen slowly, but effectively; schools are just like “That didn’t work? Oh well — here, I have another idea. No no, this is a good one!”
Flesch, an education theorist, had a pretty reasonable proposal here about reading instruction: having recognized that Dick and Jane books were a crap way to learn word stuff, he suggested an expansion of the use of phonics for reading instruction, rather than the “Look-Say” method that had been in common use prior to the publication of his book (Look at the word; now Say the word. “See Dick run. Run, Dick, run!”). Now, I haven’t read the book, but I’m confident that Flesch noted that there was a problem with literacy in this country, that too many people didn’t know how to read, or didn’t know how to read well enough. He identified that problem, and then after examining the education system, he diagnosed a cause for the problem, and suggested a solution. Phonics instead of Dick and Jane. Awesome.
And I bet it worked. Pretty well. In some cases. Maybe even a lot of cases. Which is wonderful, because it meant more students learned more word stuff, and of course that’s always good. Of course, it meant that teachers who had been teaching Dick and Jane for generations had to change: they had to learn better how to use phonics, how to teach phonics, how to explain to confused parents why their kids weren’t learning from Dick and Jane the way the parents had; but I bet it worked.
For a while.
But then they realized that people still didn’t know how to read. Not enough of them, or not well enough. Because then Flesch published this:
That one came out in 1981: because the problem persisted. And why did the problem persist, despite the gains that might have been made — that probably were made — in the area of child literacy, at least partly because of Flesch’s promotion of phonics, which is in truth a pretty good way to learn reading?
Because the problem wasn’t simply a lack of phonics training. It wasn’t just a problem with Dick and Jane. That was surely part of it — which I know because Dick and Jane are gone now, and have been gone for a long time; I don’t specifically recall learning to read with phonics, but I know I never read a Dick and Jane book when I was a child. And I was in 2nd grade in 1981; I could have been that kid on the cover of the sequel, with its “new look at the SCANDAL in our schools.”
I haven’t read this book, either, but I bet I know what the scandal was: it was that some people still couldn’t read, or couldn’t read well enough. And I bet this book has a new proposal for helping those people learn more and better word stuff; whole language instruction, maybe, which was one example of a backlash against phonics teaching. Flesch might have still been flogging phonics in this second book, but plenty of educational theorists have completely reversed their field and gone back on their own pedagogical theories when faced with new evidence that says their old theories were garbage. And that’s good, because you should be willing to change your ideas in the face of new contradictory evidence: but if you just make the same errors in trying to understand and address the problem, rushing ahead with your new idea (“No no, this one’s a good one! Seriously!”) you’re still not going to actually solve the problem, no matter how innovative the idea is you end up on: it’s just going to be a much more innovative bandaid, slapped on top of the other bandaid. And as bandaids are wont to do, it might slow the bleeding for a while: at least for as long as it takes for the blood to soak through the new bandaid just like it soaked through the last one.
But education gaps, and problems that real people face in trying to learn, are not like bleeding wounds, because problems in education don’t clot. They don’t have mechanisms to solve themselves. They do eventually disappear, but that’s because the people who have trouble learning leave school, and don’t show up on our graphs and charts any more. They are replaced by other people who have the same sorts of issues, often because of the same underlying problems.
But the people trying to fix education, trying to fill gaps and stop the bleeding — and also heal the wounds — never recognize the actual underlying cause of the gap, of the bleeding; or they recognize it, but can’t or won’t face the truth and try to at least name the problem, if not address it: which they avoid because they can’t address the problem. Teachers hate when we can’t fix the problem: and what we generally do is address the symptoms, just so we can do something. Like if students come to school hungry, rather than deal with whatever the home life issue is that leaves kids coming to school hungry — lots of teachers just buy and distribute snacks. So when education reformers, largely teachers and ex-teachers, can’t deal with the real issues, instead they find something else they can point to, and some other new bandaid program they can slap on top of the issue, to make it look like it’s going away.
Like this:
I mean, my first theory is that Johnny can’t write because Johnny can’t read.
And please notice that we’re still not really talking about why Johnny can’t read, beyond the idea of More Phonics Training: which is only trying to address one symptom, and ignoring entirely the underlying cause of the gaps in literacy in this country.
Then that leads to this:
Oof. That’s a big one. We still deal with this today. Still not well: I have many students with ADD or ADHD; many of them have had their issues addressed in a dozen different ways. But you know what?
They still have problems.
Because we’re not addressing the underlying issue. Just slapping on bandaids.
And that leads to this:
And eventually, to this.
And here we are, today. With conservative assholes like Sowell (Who, I must say, is clearly a brilliant man and an influential thinker and writer and teacher; but his mentor, when he studied economics at the University of Chicago, was Milton Friedman. The Fountainhead [In the Howard Roark sense] of assholes. And this quote here is an asshole quote.) making asshole pronouncements about what’s wrong with kids these days. And still not looking at the real, underlying problems. Just trying to find another way to slap a bandaid on the problem, and hope that it isn’t visible for a little while: long enough for the person who put forward the bandaid to get paid, or to win an award, or to get a cherry position in one thinktank or institution or another.
Okay: but I’ve strung this along too long without actually making my point. (There’s a reason for that.) So let me make the point, and then I’ll explain why I have done it this way — and also why I mentioned soup in the title of this post. (No, I haven’t forgotten that. It’s okay if you did. I know I am frequently confusing, and you kind people who read my nonsense are willing to put up with me, God bless you all.)
Again, I’m not versed enough on the history of education and education reform to have a strong argument about where this process I’m describing came from, how it got started, and how it came to dominate my profession. I just know what the actual answer is, which nobody ever seems willing to address: and because of that, for the last 23 years that I’ve been a teacher, I have had to deal with unending nonsense, while knowing it was nonsense. It is for this reason that I hate inservice: because I have to spend days being told how we are going to address the problems in education, and every single time, they don’t address the actual problem which is the cause of every difficulty in schools.
Here it is. Ready?
The actual answer is this: the problem is with school itself. And more broadly, with the human race.
You want to know why some people struggle in school? Because school is incapable of addressing everyone’s needs. The whole idea of it is to increase the efficiency of learning, through the use of specialization: that is, since I know a lot about word stuff, I can provide word stuff-centered learning to a large number of children, thereby sparing their parents or extended family members from having to teach their kids word stuff. In the past, those parents or family members did just fine, and better than me in a lot of cases, at teaching kids to read and write; but it’s more efficient if they can send their kids to school, and I can teach 100 or them at a time how to do word stuff. Or 200 at a time, at my last school. Those parents and family members of my 100-200 students can now spend their time and energy doing other things — in this country, mostly struggling to make ends meet while also providing a lavish lifestyle to the parasitic capitalist class who extract wealth from their labor. (I know a fair amount about Marxist stuff, too. I learned it in a class on word stuff in college. But since it was a word stuff class and not an economics stuff class, I can only give a basic overview of the economics stuff. You should find an expert in economics stuff to learn from instead of me. Specialization.)
Is this a better way to learn word stuff, in a classroom with several other students being taught by a word stuff expert? In some cases, yes. In some cases, no. Two of the best students I’ve ever taught were homeschooled up until 9th grade. But the advantage that public school has over homeschooling in whatever form is efficiency: parents can only teach their own kids, and that only at the cost of much of their time and energy. But I can teach a hundred kids all at once. See? Efficiency.
But the only way I can efficiently teach a whole bunch of people word stuff is if those people all learn word stuff in basically the same way, and all of them can learn it from me and the way I teach word stuff.
And of course they can’t.
Some of my students have obstacles to learning reading and writing, such as language disabilities, or simply language barriers because their first language isn’t English, which is the only language I teach word stuff in. I am an auditory learner, and an auditory teacher; and some of my students — many of my students, in fact — struggle with learning that way. But honestly, there isn’t a whole lot that can be done to help a kinesthetic learner, that is one who learns by moving and doing things, to learn word stuff, which is inherently a non-moving and non-doing kind of system. These days, the biggest obstacle to learning word stuff for my students? They don’t care about reading. They like watching videos and playing games. They like livestreams and YouTube and TikTok. They don’t see the point in reading and writing, which means they don’t want to learn word stuff.
What do I do with that?
Nothing, is the answer. It’s just going to get in the way of my students learning my specific subject. Which may not, of course, have any serious negative impact on their lives (Though I will always maintain that a person who cannot read well enough to enjoy reading is always going to be a disadvantage: doubly because they may never realize what they are missing); but it certainly creates a gap in their learning progress according to the measurements we use in this country, which focus on math and English. My students’ test scores will be lower than in past years, because these kids don’t really care. (Also, they don’t care about testing. Or grades, really. Or, well — education.) Also, because I have taught Fahrenheit 451 for decades, I have to restate the thesis of that book, which is: a society that doesn’t read is a society that doesn’t have empathy, and is therefore a dying society. There is truth there. Want to talk about the empathy crisis in this country? (I will write a whole post about this, I think. It will be depressing.)
Which leads me to the other half of the problem, as I stated above, that isn’t caused by the inherent nature of the school system: the human race in general. Not all of us want to learn. Not all of us can learn. That’s just the way we are: we are different, we have different capacities and interests, different wants and needs. When we, as educators ALWAYS do, act as though one size fits all, that one set of goals will work for every single individual and one system of achieving those goals is the best path for every single individual (Specifically, the one that I choose, as I am the expert here. Now sit down and take notes.), our measurements are always going to show gaps and holes and flaws and even bleeding wounds: because not everyone can learn. Not everyone wants to learn. Not everyone can learn or — here’s the big one — wants to learn from me, or from my fellow teachers, in a school setting.
And then there are the other problems that get in the way of people who can learn and want to learn, but can’t do it at a particular time in a particular set of circumstances, and so also show up on our measurements as an issue to be solved, a wound to be bandaged: problems like poverty. Hunger. Illness. Trauma. Abuse. A lack of physical safety or security. Institutional racism or other forms of discrimination. And on, and on.
All of which get in the way of someone’s learning. None of which can be addressed by increasing my use of phonics.
You can see, maybe, why people don’t want to talk about the real problems, or the real solutions to those problems: because often, the real problems don’t have solutions. At least not ones we can implement.
There are people we can’t help. There are people who don’t want help.
That is not to say we shouldn’t try to help. We should always try. If for no other reason, then simply to show people who need help that someone cares enough to try. To show people who don’t want help that, if their wants or their needs change, someone will care enough to try, and help might be available someday which will do some good.
But we have to accept that we can’t fix every problem, and especially not in education. There will always be disparities. There will always be gaps, and failures. It’s inevitable. That’s the truth.
So what’s the soup?
It’s the alphabet soup. Though as my title states, it’s not soup: it’s a sandwich. It’s not soup because the old layers don’t go away: we just slap a new layer on top of it. If it were soup, all the layers would mix together in one thick broth, and that’s not how it goes: the individual layers tend to have enough cohesion to avoid mixing with other layers. So, a sandwich. Or an onion. Or an ogre.
Not a parfait.
Though that is the reason I put that title above, and held off on explaining it until here and now: because now you have been through the layers. And maybe, if you have been confused by my wandering through half a dozen layers that touch on entirely different perspectives and different paradigms and different strategies about different aspects, maybe you will understand what it is like, as a teacher, to try to work through all of these layers — to try to master and implement all of these layers — when I just want to teach word stuff, man. That’s all I want. But they have all these layers stuck on top of that word stuff I want to teach. Layer on top of layer.
Those layers are often called “alphabet soup” because the snake oil salesmen who put them forward in an attempt to enrich themselves by treating symptoms instead of addressing the real underlying conditions are inordinately, eternally fond of acronyms. Everybody in education loves a good acronym: nobody more than the people who imagine they have created a brand-new system whereby schools can solve the problems in education.
See, that’s why I’m not just a teacher who helps people learn word stuff. Because snake oil salesmen are very good at convincing one particularly vulnerable group, who themselves don’t ever want to address the insoluble underlying conditions (Which, to be fair, are so large and so insoluble that it would be like a doctor saying, “Well, the problem is that you’re mortal, and so you’re going to die. Here’s your bill.” On some level it’s worth looking at treating the symptoms. But that’s not what the layers are about. That’s what teachers and other adults in schools trying to help is about. I don’t think it’s a bad idea for teachers to buy snacks and give them to hungry students. I do it, too.), that this new program that the snake oilers have cooked up is the best way to address the problems in education.
Those vulnerable people? Adminstrators.
It’s not their fault; they don’t know any better. They are simple people. They don’t understand. They just want to make a difference and fix things (And also improve their own reputation as people who get results), and when they hear about this new program, with its new acronym, which will treat these symptoms with these provable results as presented in this bar graph? Well hell, sign us up! they say. And here, take this large sum of money, which of course is not the administrators’ money; it’s taxpayer money. It’s so easy to spend taxpayers’ money. After all, we’re just trying to address these learning gaps, these holes in our data, and the blood that just keeps flowing out of them. (Like I said, if anything would ever drive me to become a conservative, it’s this. Bureaucrats spending taxpayer money for no good purpose, with no real understanding of what they’re doing or why: that’s enough to make any liberal go crazy. And here we go.)
So: I’m not just a teacher. I’m also an expert in PLCs (That’s Professional Learning Communities.). And in AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination — I’m going to a conference this summer to learn more about it!). And in PBIS (Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports — I was on the schoolwide committee for implementing that one.), which I insist on pronouncing “Peebis,” which makes everyone uncomfortable while it makes me laugh. And in SEL (Social-Emotional Learning). And in RTI, Response to Intervention. Naturally I’m an expert in ELA (English Language Arts) and in ELD (English Language Development — what used to be called ESL and then ESOL [English as a Second or Other Language]) and in SPED, which is now becoming ESS as SPecial EDucation becomes Exceptional Student Services (Which some places call ESE, Exceptional Student Education, but I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from saying “Orale, ese!” every time I thought about it. So it’s good my school uses ESS.). I won’t say I’m an expert in ADD and ADHD and ASD and ED (That’s Emotional Disturbance, not Erectile Dysfunction — these are kids, after all) and ODD (Oppositional Defiance Disorder — and while I’m not a Boomer bitching about how we used to walk to school through three miles of driving snow every day, I will say that when I was a kid, ODD was just called “Being an asshole.”), but I’ve been in enough IEPs and 504s and dealt with enough SLDs that I know as much about all of those as most, and more than many. Naturally I can’t get more specific, because I’ve been well trained in FERPA.
This is the result of all of this: I have been given so many additional duties, so many new processes to learn and programs to implement, that I don’t have enough time and energy left any longer to just — help people learn more word stuff. My specialization — the whole reason for a public school system — has been smothered under layers of new generalized knowledge that I have had to master and implement. Because people keep identifying problems, and then prescribing solutions that aren’t really solutions, but maybe have enough of an impact, or at least are convincing enough to make an administrator think the program will have an impact that they spend money on it and implement — which means telling me I have to become an expert in this, and I have to be trained in it and then implement it, and then follow up by collecting data to show how effective this new program is, in order to justify the administrator’s decision to implement it, and the money they spent on licensing it and hiring a trainer to teach me how to do it and a data processing firm to confirm how well it works: provided I can implement it with fidelity and then collect the data on implementation to show how effective that program is. And guess who gets blamed if I can’t do all that on my end: not the snake oil salesman who got my administrator to buy the program, and not the administrator who bought the program — and not the students who spend my whole class scrolling through TikTok.
And if I do manage to do all of that successfully, the snake oil salesman who sold it to my school will then use my example as proof of their program’s efficacy, and go on to sell it to a hundred more schools. And the administrator will either squat in their job for decades, buying new programs EVERY GODDAMN YEAR but never taking away the old ones, because it worked so well that one time and that success ensured the administrator’s retention in their position (Meanwhile my retention depends on my ability to keep up with each new year’s new layer on the onion…), or else the administrator will move up the ranks, and be replaced by a new administrator who will have to buy all new programs so they can make their own individual impact on the problems in school (Also, since most administrators are ex-teachers, they also believe they have diagnosed exactly what the problem is and how to solve it, with this new acronym they bought with taxpayer money).
And my students, and the students at all those other schools, will learn a little bit less word stuff. And other stuff. Which will just convince the students that school isn’t really useful, after all; they’d be better off learning how to make their own Twitch livestream and making a living off of that. Which means they won’t try as hard to succeed in school.
And there will be new learning gaps.
Fortunately, I just heard about this new program to address it.
As I am wont to do, I assigned my students an essay. As I am also wont to do, I wrote the essay myself.
The essay topic was free choice within parameters. This was for my College Readiness class: a tangled web, that one is, since it is, first of all, not much about readying the students for college; more about readying them for the college application process, primarily the ACT – which just happens to be the standardized test used to determine the school’s success rate and overall quality rating. Which is, understandably, more important to the school than it is to the students. Also, the class has two sections, and three teachers; so I have one group only on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and the other group Thursdays and Fridays; they also have math two days a week, and “college and career counseling” on the fifth day, with the school counselor. In addition, the class is required, but it doesn’t fit into the usual categories, so the students get elective credit: making it a required elective, an amusing little oxymoron. Also, it is not required for everyone, because in theory all Juniors have to take the class – but if there happens to be a conflict with a “more important” class, such as math or science, then the student is excused from College Readiness: but if the class is a mere elective, such as life drawing, which happened to be scheduled for the same period as College Readiness this year, then the students who want to take the art class are instead forced into College Readiness.
But all that is beside the point. (Actually, it’s not, which is why I said all of it. But hold on.) The point is, I assigned my class an essay, and then gave them free choice in the topic of the essay. I love doing that, because they SUCK at picking topics. Completely terrible at it. There are some with interests of their own, and enough capacity for words to have something to say about their interests; they have a very easy time of choosing a subject and then writing about it, and good for them. But for the most part? Yikes. Free choice is the worst kind of essay.
So to help them out a little, I gave them a resource. My part of the CR course has two elements: first, yes, I do try to prepare them for the ACT, and the SAT if they want to take that one; college application tests are valuable and difficult, even though we make far too much of their ability to predict success, which is limited at best. But in my part of the class, we do practice the test, work on process of elimination and strategies for finding information in a reading passage, and so on. The second element is application essays: if they are planning on going to college, then next year, when they are Seniors, they will need to write an application essay; so we work on that now, in Junior year, in this class. I use the Common App, a website that creates a single set of application materials which the students can use to apply to any number of colleges around the world; it’s a useful efficiency, and also a good generic application format, for practice. For those who aren’t going to college or who aren’t sure, I see these essays as simply good writing practice: also, I want them to get better at speaking well of themselves, and advocating for themselves, which are both useful skills in all walks of life, and both things most teenagers suck at, because they think talking about themselves is cringey, and bragging about themselves is appallingly arrogant. So we practice essays.
For the first three, I insist they choose a topic from the Common App, which has seven generic topics – things like “What is a problem you overcame and how did you learn from it?” “What is a part of your background or identity that isn’t on your application, but which you think we should know?” – but then for this last one, I show them the University of Chicago supplemental questions.
You see, U. Chicago has, for the last several years, offered a specific question as part of their application. The first question they ask is of the usual type: How does the University of Chicago, as you know it now, satisfy your desire for a particular kind of learning, community, and future? Please address with some specificity your own wishes and how they relate to UChicago.
But then for the second essay, they do this:
Each year we email newly admitted and current College students and ask them for essay topics. We receive several hundred responses, many of which are eloquent, intriguing, or downright wacky.
Those essay topics, which can be found here, are everything they say they are. They include topics like this:
What advice would a wisdom tooth have?
–Inspired by Melody Dias, Class of 2025
And
You are on an expedition to found a colony on Mars, when from a nearby crater, a group of Martians suddenly emerges. They seem eager to communicate, but they’re the impatient kind and demand you represent the human race in one song, image, memory, proof, or other idea. What do you share with them to show that humanity is worth their time?
—Inspired by Alexander Hastings, Class of 2023, and Olivia Okun-Dubitsky, Class of 2026
And
UChicago has been affiliated with over 90 Nobel laureates. But, why should economics, physics, and peace get all the glory? You are tasked with creating a new category for the Nobel Prize. Explain what it would be, why you chose your specific category, and the criteria necessary to achieve this accomplishment.
—Inspired by Isabel Alvarez, Class of 2026
And
Genghis Khan with an F1 racecar. George Washington with a SuperSoaker. Emperor Nero with a toaster. Leonardo da Vinci with a Furby. If you could give any historical figure any piece of technology, who and what would it be, and why do you think they’d work so well together?
-Inspired by Braden Hajer, Class of 2025
And so on.
Last year, my students challenged me to write an essay to this prompt:
Find x.
—Inspired by Benjamin Nuzzo, an admitted student from Eton College, UK
Because they were hoping to force me to talk about math, which I frequently and loudly say I dislike. (I don’t, but the whole school community where I work promotes STEM and talks smack about the arts – why do you think the math and science students get out of College Readiness, but not the art students? – and I want to push back a little bit. Also, I do have some issues with math, but that’s not important right now.) So I wrote about a pirate finding treasure where X marks the spot.
Checkmate, Math Nerds.
This year they didn’t want to choose a topic for me: so I chose one for myself. Here it is:
The seven liberal arts in antiquity consisted of the Quadrivium — astronomy, mathematics, geometry, and music — and the Trivium — rhetoric, grammar, and logic. Describe your own take on the Quadrivium or the Trivium. What do you think is essential for everyone to know?
And here is the essay I wrote about it.
Understanding the Trivium and Quadrivium
Dr. Jeffrey Lehman Explains the “Arts of the Word” and the “Arts of Number”
Written by Finn Cleary
The trivium consists of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, while the quadrivium consists of arithmetic, astronomy, music, and geometry. Together, Dr. Lehman says they lead students to see a “unified idea of reality.”
“The trivium was always pursued first,” Dr. Lehman says. “It’s commonly called the ‘Arts of the Word’ and focuses on different ways you can attend to words. Grammar is used in logic, which is used in rhetoric, for example. All of them move toward a proper presentation of the truth, which speaks to the mind and to the passions.”
Next, students of the liberal arts traditionally move to the quadrivium, or the ‘Arts of Number or Quantity.’
“Humans communicate with each other using words. Humans communicate with the natural order in numbers and in quantities. By discerning those natural relationships, we come to better understand the cosmos. It speaks to us, and we can talk to the greater universe. “
This, by the way, is the image of me teaching that my students took. And altered.
I have often thought that I was born in the wrong century. I would like to exist a hundred years earlier than I do; because my professions and my passions would be, I think, more valuable then; I would still be able to teach, perhaps at a college instead of a high school (but also, I think I would make a decent one-room-schoolhouse teacher) and my writing would be more marketable, and would perhaps furnish me a non-teaching career, which would be lovely.
But there is an attraction with going back even further in time: perhaps to a time when universities taught the quadrivium and the trivium, the two sections of what are bafflingly called the liberal arts, even though they were at the time pretty much all sciences. I appreciate that there is a professor at a small liberal arts college in southern Michigan who teaches about the quadrivium and the trivium, which I quoted above, but I’m not sure I agree with his explanation of them and how they work and why they are important.
Math is how we interact with the natural order? Is it really? I guess we quantify and measure and compare natural things, all of which are math-adjacent if not actually math; but is that all we do? What about living in the natural order in the natural world, of which we are a part? But okay, we’re not talking about life, we’re talking about academia and education. Still: what about art inspired by the natural world; is that not how humans communicate with the world around us? It seems to me like it is. Of course, the classic quadrivium did include music, which I appreciate; but I’m leery of music being the one art when someone starts speaking about mathematics (and when two of the other subjects are math, and the last of the four is a math-heavy science), because there is a strong correlation between music and math. I don’t think that’s all of music, by any means; but I suspect that studying the quadrivium in a program that thinks math is the key to the universe would not teach me so much about improvisational jazz.
(Somewhere right now there’s a math/music geek just revving up a lecture on how there is many maths in jazz. The silences and the spaces between the notes on the scale, the rhythms and repetitions and so on. I get it, sir. Keep your beret on.)
I also take some issue with the trivium, as Dr. Lehman describes it and as ancient universities taught it: grammar to logic to rhetoric as the “arts of the word” is a good way to study language, I agree. But the idea that you could even consider the arts of the word and not talk about poetry? About the great works of literature, past and present and future? That doesn’t even make any sense to me. And “logic” as part of the art of language is a little too close to the math of language, as well: logic is important, both to life and to the proper use of language; but it’s also just about the only place where language can be turned into formulae and equations and functions.
The other place is grammar. Or word problems, but I think we can all agree that those are abominations.
However: I do think the study of language as a foundation for further learning makes perfect sense. I don’t know that I would split it out in that manner, though. I don’t know that studying grammar would be as effective now as it was in the long-ago past; partly because people are far more grammar-savvy now (assuming that they actually read) when they get to university than they would have been in the illiterate ages where nobody had access to books or very much printed media at all; and partly because I don’t think that studying grammar really helps appreciate and understand language all that much. It helps you to understand grammar. And that enables you to write correctly, but writing correctly does not mean writing well, and I think writing well is far more important.
So I have some suggestions for an update of the trivium and quadrivium.
If we consider the trivium to be the stage when we learn how to understand things, instruction in the processes rather than the actual content, I consider that both a reasonable lens to look at the curriculum through, and also a reflection of how we do most school: elementary and middle school are largely about learning how to learn, learning the basic processes and systems of thought, including learning how to read and write, learning how to do math, learning how to think scientifically. Basically for the first seven or eight years of school, we are learning how to think. Then high school, and even more so college, is where we learn things to think about: this is where the serious content appears, and gives us something to understand, which then allows us to build what should be the final goal of all education: our own understanding of the world and our place in it. Every individual should find and create that understanding for themselves, and since that understanding shapes all of one’s life afterwards, it seems like the right goal to see as the pinnacle of education: as the final project before graduation.
So the trivium in university should be the fundamental ways that we think: Language. Mathematics. Art. (“What?!” I hear you cry. “You’re including math?!?!” Sure, I don’t like it, but I respect what it is and what it can do for people.) I think there is room in these to allow for some individual course selection, meaning that the “art” umbrella can comprise visual arts, music, dance, and even poetry, though that might focus too much attention on language when combined with the other strand of study. Definitely we need to learn more about language and how language works and how to manipulate it: too many people focus on too few aspects of language, and that leaves most of us open to manipulation in various ways, and whenever we are manipulated, we don’t learn something we should learn – and that makes it easier to manipulate us next time, and the next thing you know, Donald Trump is president. The same is true for mathematics, and I’d like the university trivium study of mathematics to be more in applied mathematics: probability, statistics, and probably economics, though I’m certainly open to a stronger statement from a more mathy perspective on the specifics there. The language study in the trivium should include some study of grammar in the sense of learning how language is constructed and how we construct meaning with it; I tend to think of that as rhetoric. It should also, without a doubt, include the learning of a foreign language, and I’d like to see that be a different language than the one people “learned” in high school, and I’d like to see the study of that language include study abroad.
But I’m getting a bit far afield here. The point is that the trivium should be about the ways that we can interact with the world, the ways we can construct thought, the ways we can create meaning: it’s the modes of thought that we can control, that we can manipulate. It’s how we think and how we learn, not necessarily the content, yet.
That’s where the quadrivium comes in. That’s when we learn the material that we are now ready to understand better, to chew and digest, to manipulate and shape, to make something out of. The raw material for building, after the trivium shows us how to build. Where the trivium focused inward, on the ways we think and the ways we communicate – communication with others would be outward, of course, but we also communicate with ourselves, through language and math and art, all three – the quadrivium should focus outward. It should show us about the world we live in, and the people we live with, and how we all, world and people, fit into the larger universe. My first quadrivium subject, then, would be history, as that would give us some understanding of who we are as a people, as a human race. (I would also start with that because I think of “liberal arts” as being the humanities, so science can wait its turn.) I think we need to learn history, but I think we struggle with it in school because we don’t follow the thought process of the trivium and quadrivium, first learn how to learn and then learn things worth learning; learning history when one is still mastering how to read is too difficult, because there is so very much information to take in. Learning the impact of history without having a grasp on the mathematical concepts of probability and statistics means we miss the scale, we fail to understand the interactions between events. Recognizing here how important it is to understand causation, I suppose I should include some focus on logic in the trivium: though I think that would happen best as an interaction between language and mathematics; I also think art wouldn’t be lessened by some connection to logic.
So history (And again, opportunity for individual courses here such as sociology or anthropology, along with the study of civilizations and recorded events), and then, I suppose, it’s time for science. Just like with history, I think we need an understanding of both language and applied mathematics before we can really appreciate science: my science study in high school was just a set of difficult courses to master, where my science study in college was eye-opening. Not that my science teachers in high school were sub-par compared to my college teachers; quite the opposite, in fact. But I wasn’t ready for science, I didn’t understand the full implications of chemistry and physics and biology. I think that’s the best argument for college and university education coming at the end of thirteen years of compulsory education: we’re not ready to really learn until we reach college age and college-level mastery of the fundamentals. (I do also think there’s a great argument for having a break in schooling somewhere between 6th grade and 9th grade, but that’s a whole other topic.)
The quadrivium should include a study of biology and ecology. We need to understand where we fit in with the rest of life on this planet and in this universe, if for no other reason than just so we don’t kill it all. Almost all of the problems we face in our future are related to biology and ecology, so if there is material in our world of knowledge which we need to be chewing and digesting once we learn how to chew and digest, it’s biology and ecology. I also think we should study astronomy: because just as humanity is one race of beings in an almost infinitely complex web of life, so the Earth is one tiny planet orbiting one tiny star – but also intricately connected to the rest of the universe, affecting and affected by it all. And if we do ever manage to solve the problems we face as a race (And I should also point out that the problems which are not covered by biology and ecology will be covered by history: though not solved by it), then astronomy will show us where we need to look in the future, to find our next set of challenges to face and adapt to: the stars.
So that’s three of the four (and please note, two sciences, one a lab and one a theoretical science; I’m a little disappointed in myself that my education plan is so similar to high school curriculum; but also, I think that shows the curriculum we have now is not bad) – and that’s where I got stuck. I think there is probably value in studying the world of computers and the internet, but I’m not convinced that’s a good subject for university study. I don’t know that a whole lot of overarching theoretical work has been done, that a body of knowledge about the internet and computers has been created; that is, several different bodies of knowledge have been created – and then made obsolete. Are there theories and concepts that can teach students about both the personal computer revolution and Tik-Tok? I don’t know. If there are, if there is a reasonable course of study that would be general enough to include most of the important themes, but also specific enough to be useful, then computer science would be a good choice for the fourth part of the quadrivium. Certainly the digital age is well begun, and understanding and navigating it will be critical.
If that’s not a reasonable course – or, if like many other things in life, the study of related subjects makes us sufficiently well-prepared to deal with the computer world (which is the same reason we don’t really need to study how to do our taxes in high school, and all those smarmy memes about the Pythagorean theorem can shut it), and personal experience fills in the gaps – then the fourth subject had me stymied for a bit. I think philosophy would be useful: but I don’t know that it needs to be its own study separate from the logic and language of the trivium and the history of the quadrivium. Physics might be a good science to work with, as it enables so many other applied sciences like engineering; but I don’t know that it is applicable enough outside of that, if physics is actually how we solve the problems in our world (And my physicist father is cringing right now, as I write this. Sorry, Dad. I think physics is cool.).
But I did have a thought. As I said, there is a gap in the original trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric: the study of actual literature. I do recognize that in the Medieval period, when the trivium and the quadrivium were being codified and then taught, there wasn’t quite the wealth of material that we have today; there was Chaucer, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and a whole ton of stuff about Christianity – and I guess a couple of Greek plays – but it was more limited. Still: I don’t think you can say you understand language unless you understand the art of the language. The same goes for music and visual arts and all of it; you have to know the history of it, have to study the past masters, to know what is possible and how to build for the future.
So it seems like a good idea for the fourth quadrivium subject would be the history of the subjects in the trivium. Literature, as the history of language that has already been created; the history of mathematics, both the people who built it and how it got built; and the history of art and music and whatever other elements were included in the trivium – and more, if possible, because I don’t really think you can learn too much art. All of that seems to me like good material to chew and digest, and then use to make something new.
And isn’t that what education is all about?
(Also, this is in no way connected to this topic, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the band Trivium every time I wrote it for this, and this is my favorite song of theirs. So enjoy.)
So, as I frequently do, I assigned my AP students an essay. They weren’t happy with it. Most of them didn’t do it. So I wrote an example for them. The assignment was to describe, with imagery and details, your perfect day: and this would be mine.
I think this says more about me and my life than it does about my writing or about my students and this assignment.
A Day of No Need
My perfect day is in the autumn. Probably November: there is no longer any pressure over getting Halloween exactly right; Thanksgiving is coming, but thankfully, I will never host any gathering larger than myself and my wife and our pets, so there’s no pressure there. But thinking about what food we will eat on that day, and about the four-day weekend, blocks any worries about Black Friday or holiday shopping; this is the time of year when, if you see something you think someone on your list would like, you pick it up and buy it, and feel good about yourself for getting ahead of the game.
The weather is perfect: the sun is out, and bright, but not hot; the breeze is cool, sometimes becoming a wind that bites and makes you want to tuck yourself into your jacket like a turtle pulling into his shell. Jackets are a must: which is great because it means more pockets, and also a layer that you are almost required to take off when you go inside, which means you can be warm outside and not too hot inside. If there are leaves on the trees, they are turning into beautiful colors; if they have already fallen, they are turning into beautiful sounds with every step through them, every stride leaving a wake behind, a surging wave of leaves leaping ahead. The smell of warm, spiced apples rises from the cup of cider in my hand.
But in truth, all of that is negotiable. Almost any weather can be perfect: there is such a thing as too hot, and another such thing as too cold; but hot and cold between those extremes are both fine, and warm is as good as cool. Green leaves on trees are almost as lovely as fall colors, and the bright blooms of spring and summer break up any monotony in the foliage. I like rain, and snow, and clouds, and blue sky – and night, for that matter. I don’t need any weather for my perfect day.
I need there to be no need.
On my perfect day, nobody needs me. My parents don’t need to call, my in-laws don’t need to call me to tell me to tell my wife to call them, like some bizarre game of phone foursquare. I don’t need to get up, I don’t need to walk my dogs (though if I feel like it, it would be fine; I like walking with them, as long as I don’t need to), I don’t need to shower, I don’t need to pick out and put on my teacher clothes; if I shower, it will be only when I feel like it, and if I get dressed beyond my pajamas, it will be in whatever I feel like wearing. If I eat breakfast I won’t need to cook. I don’t need to make the coffee for my wife, I don’t need to get her up for work, I don’t need to feel bad for waking her up to go to a job she mostly doesn’t like. I don’t need to find or make lunch, don’t need to fill a water bottle, don’t need to make my coffee just right, because if it’s not sweet enough I can just go into my kitchen and add more sweetener, any time I want to. I don’t need to go to the bathroom before I leave, because there will be time to go whenever I need to. I don’t need to check and double check that I have everything before getting into the car, and I don’t need to drive through traffic for 30 minutes to get to school. I don’t need to change the radio 65 times over that 30 minutes just to find some goddamn music instead of radio DJ blathering or used car salesmen yelling (LOOKING AT YOU SCOTT LEHMAN).
I might go to work, because I like seeing my coworkers, and even some of my students sometimes; but I won’t have duty, and I won’t have to period sub, and I won’t have to run a lunch meeting, and I won’t have to have meetings after school where I have to report on a student’s progress, or even worse on my progress, and I won’t have to listen to somebody or other telling me that I’m not doing my job well enough. I won’t have to stay to watch a sportsing event, or to watch my NHS students sell snacks at a sportsing event.
And most of all: I won’t have to teach. My students will be ready to learn on their own: I won’t have to drag them behind me, or drive them before me, to force them to gain an education for their own good. I won’t have to argue with them about learning, or about what we are learning, and I won’t have to listen to them complain about and criticize everything I do, over and over and over again, even though they probably won’t do it regardless of how they actually feel about it, which is only rarely the same way they say they feel about it. I won’t have to listen to students lie to me about how hard the class or the assignment is, because they want to lower the bar so they don’t have to work as hard. I won’t have dozens of different people trying to wear me down so they can have a day off, even though they have ten times the down time that I have: after all, I don’t have PE, or study halls; and while they have to write the essays, I have to read them – and you figure if I assign an AP essay to my 40 AP students, and they average 2-3 pages per response, that’s somewhere around 100 pages of writing I have to read and respond to, while they ask me if I’ve graded that essay yet.
But not today. Today they don’t fight me, and they don’t argue with me, and they don’t complain at me about what I do to help make them and their lives better. Most of all they don’t need me: they do the work on their own, without the need for me to pressure them. I don’t have to walk around the room and check on them, don’t have to make sure that none of them are cheating or sleeping or skipping, I don’t have to monitor their bathroom visit duration, or make sure they are signing out like they know they have to. I don’t have to tell them to put away their phones or close their Chromebooks. Because today, on my perfect day, my students do what they know they should do, what they know they are expected to do, what is entirely rational and reasonable for them to do: learn the material without being cajoled or coerced, and without disrupting the learning for themselves or others, and without being rude to anyone involved. They act like young adults, today, and so, they don’t need me. If they ask me any questions, it’s only because they’re curious what I think, not because they want my answer so they can write it down so they don’t have to come up with one themselves. None of them will have a test or missing assignments for another class, so they have to ask me, once again, to let them ignore my subject because the other class is more important than mine.
Today none of my students, and also none of my friends, are in crisis, and so nobody needs me to listen to them tell me what’s wrong. It’s not that I don’t want to listen when someone needs me: I just want nobody to need me, for nobody to be having a panic attack, or an explosion or righteous anger, or a bout of severe depression. I want to not need to find a way that I can help even though there’s not really much I can do: because the one thing I can do is listen, and empathize, and I don’t want to have to do that. I want nobody to need that, today. I don’t want to have my own bout of righteous anger or an explosion of panic or a depression attack. I just want to be okay, and for everyone else to be okay. Just for one day.
I want none of my students to need me to grade that one assignment, or to help them figure out how to do that one assignment, or need me to find another copy of that other assignment. Nobody should have a field trip form, or a grade check for their parents, or a failing grade the day of the big game, or a letter of recommendation they need, or advice and editing help on an application essay.
Nobody thinks they need to take advantage of me. Nobody does things they know they shouldn’t do just because they know I won’t get them in trouble for it. Nobody says “Oh, Humphrey doesn’t care if we do nothing.” Nobody lies to me. Nobody cheats on my assignments. Nobody insults me or my subject, calling school useless or saying that reading is boring. Nobody even thinks that the only reason people need to read is so they can learn more vocabulary words. Nobody asks if they can re-read a book they read before, or if they can just watch the movie, or if watching subtitles on an anime counts as “reading.” Nobody asks if we can watch a video on YouTube instead of reading today. Nobody forgets what I taught them the day before. Nobody asks if we can just do nothing today. Nobody even mentions the word “chill.”
Nobody asks if we can play Head’s Up Seven Up.
At the end of the day, I don’t need to drive home, don’t need to go to the grocery store, don’t need to make dinner. I don’t need to make or keep any appointments, and I don’t need to pay any bills, or do anything for extra money. If I write, it’s only because I want to. My bird doesn’t scream at me, and my tortoise doesn’t try to eat my foot, and my dogs don’t whine at me when I’m petting the other one and not them.
The only one who needs me is my wife. Because I need her, and I need her to need me. She will need me to hug and kiss her, and tell her I love her, and she will need to tell me she loves me. We will need to eat together, and share stories about our day together, and then unwind in front of the TV or in our office/studios making art. Though I won’t need to make art, and I won’t need to write an angry rant about anything, and I won’t need to tell all the idiots on Twitter that they are idiots: if I want to play Minecraft, then I can. I would not mind if my dogs needed to greet me when I come home, or need to lie next to me so I can pet them while I eat or while I relax.
And when I go to sleep, I won’t need to take Advil to get rid of my headache, and I won’t need to take melatonin to help fight off my insomnia. I won’t need to lay awake for an hour in the middle of the night, worrying about what happened in school today, or what’s going to happen tomorrow. Nobody will send me late night messages, or early morning messages, because they need an extension on an assignment, or because they are having a crisis and need to vent to me, or because they need me to cover their first period class in the morning. And I won’t have to worry about how I’m getting older, and things about my health are starting to scare me, and how my life has not been everything I want it to be: and I will not need to be more than I am, because I will, the whole day, just. Be. Happy.
I won’t say I appreciate or admire the people who picked the word “standards” to describe their prescription for education in this country. But I will acknowledge an absolute masterstroke of rhetoric, which is what that was. “We have high standards,” they could say. “Don’t you think schools should have standards? Don’t you have any standards for your students?” they could ask teachers who objected.
What can I do but hang my head in shame, and agree to teach THE STANDARDS?
I’ll tell you what I can do: I can, and do, object to the standards as they are written. I object, too, to the very idea of standards: but let’s take one thing at a time. And the less radical, first.
It’s not too far out there to object to the standards, at least in one way: pretty quickly after the Common Core were adopted in most states, they received the approval of the Obama administration – and therefore the whole-hearted hatred of the Republican side of the country, particularly during the Tea Party boondoggle. So if I say I hate the Common Core, I at least have allies – though they’re not necessarily the allies I want to have. But I’ll take them, because they are correct in essence, if not in attribution of causation.
These standards define the knowledge and skills students should have within their K-12 education careers so that they will graduate high school able to succeed in entry-level, credit-bearing academic college courses and in workforce training programs. The standards:
Are aligned with college and work expectations;
Are clear, understandable and consistent;
Include rigorous content and application of knowledge through high-order skills;
Build upon strengths and lessons of current state standards;
Are informed by other top performing countries, so that all students are prepared to succeed in our global economy and society; and
Are evidence-based.
Standards are a list of skills and knowledges that students should have when they graduate high school. Jim dandy. Seems useful to know what a student should know.
Quick question: who decides what a student “should” know? And how do we decide that? What is the basis for picking a specific skill and saying a student “should” know that before graduating high school? That knowledge of X, Y, and Z is necessary to “earn” a high school diploma?
Critical Message about Arizona’s College and Career Ready Standards – English Language Arts/Literacy and Mathematics
· The purpose of the new standards is to provide a consistent set of English Language Arts (ELA)/Literacy and Mathematics expectations that prepare all students for college and career options.
· The standards are designed to ensure that our students remain competitive in the global market of the 21st century.
· Arizona’s College and Career Ready Standards – English Language Arts/Literacy and Mathematics standards include Arizona additions. Arizona’s adoption of these standards ensures a more seamless education for high mobility students since grade level standards and expectations are consistent across 46 participating states.
· The creation of the English Language Arts/Literacy and Mathematics standards was a state-led effort coordinated by the National Governor’s Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).
Okay: a consistent set of expectations that prepare all students for college and career options. Cool. Equity of access and opportunity is important, it is a fundamental promise of this country, and it is also one of the best ways to assure the general welfare of our people; so yes, all students should have access to the same preparation for college and career options.
I mean: they don’t. There are several other factors involved in educational outcomes, primarily the students’ socioeconomic status and family educational levels (which are also, of course, socioeconomically influenced if not determined). And because education funding in this country is primarily a factor of local district tax base, it ensures that students in the richest schools have access to the best educational opportunities and resources, and students in the poorest schools do not, and that system will survive that way as long as we keep the same archaic, institutionally-racist and classist funding structure.
But yes, surely all students should meet a certain minimum set of expectations. I’m with that. Standards, right? We have standards, and students have to live up to our standards, or we won’t accept them.
Umm…not sure what that means. I mean, if someone I go on a blind date with doesn’t meet my standards, then they go off to find someone else whose standards they do meet, and I go home alone, But what does it mean when a child – when a fellow citizen – doesn’t meet our standard? Does it mean they don’t get to live in this country? Don’t get to be citizens? Does it mean they have to struggle for the rest of their lives, because they weren’t good enough according to our standard?
You ever think about what it says about a student – a child, that is, since I’m talking about K-12 education, and the majority of students are still under 18 when they graduate high school – when we say that student doesn’t deserve a diploma? Hasn’t earned an education? Didn’t prove themselves to be good enough? If all education meant was the achievement of a specific set of skills and knowledges, then it would be appropriate to say those things (though the implication of merit in words like “deserve” and “good enough” is questionable if not outright wrong); but it doesn’t just mean that. We attach quite a number of value judgments to people who “earn” a diploma, and withhold them from people who “fail” to “earn” one. Those who don’t meet our standards, that is. Those children, we determine and decree, will suffer and struggle, because they’re not good enough. Never mind that there are countless ways to live, and live successfully, without ever mastering the skills and knowledges that “earn” one a high school diploma. Never mind that high school diplomas don’t necessarily show that one has or has not mastered the skills and knowledges: a diploma shows that one was able to prove one’s mastery of skills and knowledges to the satisfaction of those who decide who earns that diploma – me, in other words, as a teacher who gives grades, who determines who passes and who fails my classes. Me and all of my fellow educators. We decide who gets a diploma, who has shown to our satisfaction that they have mastered the skills and knowledges we chose for them to master, to our standard, on our assessments.
I think about my wife, who is one of the smartest and most capable people I have ever known (And I’ve known a hell of a lot of smart people), who was not allowed to earn a diploma because she called her principal an asshole. After he told her that she wasn’t good enough to graduate from his school, because he thought she was lazy and disrespectful. She was expelled from the school. She got a GED, a Graduation Equivalency Diploma – hang on; that’s not it. I just looked it up, and it actually stands for General Educational Development test. Huh. Did you know that’s what it was? Maybe I’m the only one who didn’t. Anyway, she earned her GED certificate, and also a high school proficiency certificate, by acing those two tests (because she is incredibly intelligent, if I didn’t already make that clear – they wanted to skip her two grades in elementary school. TWO GRADES. Nobody ever suggested I skip any grades. I’m not jealous, though.) and then went to work: but she couldn’t get a job, because she wasn’t yet 18 and so wasn’t allowed to work in most places in California during the regular school day. She was also told that the GED wasn’t as good as a diploma because she hadn’t shown she had the work ethic to complete the normal schooling program.
So I guess it isn’t just about showing mastery of the skills and knowledges required for college and career readiness. Huh? It’s also about showing oneself to be the kind of person our society approves of. It’s about winning the good regard of teachers, who are by nature and training judgmental. I mean, I’m a swell guy, and surely all of my judgments of my students’ characters are right on the money, and totally should have a significant impact on the lives of all of the students who pass through my classes. Some of those other teachers, though… pretty sketchy.
My wife’s story – this point I’m making about teachers and our generally subjective judgments of students – is one of the arguments behind standards, of course. Because CHUDs like the guy who told her she wasn’t “Aptos High material,” and she’d never amount to anything in her life, shouldn’t be the ones keeping the gates and refusing entry to our citizens. If students can show that they possess the skills and knowledges we expect them to have, then that should be enough: and no individual with their own biases and prejudices should be able to torpedo any person’s progress into productive citizenship.
I agree with that. It’s the one argument for standards, and for standardized testing, which I agree with and support whole-heartedly. My wife got the shit end of this stick because she was what this guy saw as a “troublemaker;” maybe because she is a woman, maybe because she was not in the same socioeconomic class as many students at that school (Though not all the students at the school were wealthy, not by any means), maybe for any of several other reasons. But there are millions of kids who suffer this same sort of fate, being prevented from achieving not because they lack the skills, but because someone in charge doesn’t think they’re good enough: and the most common reason, of course, is racism. I have heard people who know better than me point out that standardized tests, while imperfectly anti-racist themselves, are at least objective and colorblind in their allocation of success or failure: which means a student with racist teachers can still pass the test, can still prove they have met the standards, and therefore should be able to earn a diploma no matter what their racist teachers think. I appreciate that argument, and I therefore wouldn’t want to argue that all standardized tests and grades and so on should be removed, at least not until we can ensure no bias in the people acting as gatekeepers.
I will argue that we should remove the idea of gates, and specific standards of achievement.
But hold on: before I argue against standards entirely – before I show that I do not, in fact, have any standards – I want to finish my point about the standards we all have right now. They are no longer the Common Core standards, which became politically tainted during the 2010’s; though if you think they are appreciably different from those Common Core standards, you don’t know education: we don’t like changing things, we like keeping the old things – or even better, resurrecting the older things – and giving them a new name. The Common Core State Standards look like this: “By the end of grade 10, read and comprehend literature [informational texts, history/social studies texts, science/technical texts] at the high end of the grades 9–10 text complexity band independently and proficiently.” And the all-new, all-improved Arizona College and Career Readiness Standards look like this: “By the end of grade 10, read and comprehend informational and functional text, including history/social studies, science, and technical texts, at the high end of the grades 9–10 text complexity band independently and proficiently. (AZ.9‐10.RI.10)” You can see for yourself how Arizona is independent, and not still following along with that whole socialist Common Core mandate. WOO! States’ rights!
So my question is, still: who decided what were the skills and knowledges required to graduate high school? Who determined what students “should” know?
It’s not actually a simple question to answer – neither the one about what students should know, nor the one about who decided it. The issue with deciding what students should know is deciding what we think students should be ready to do. Do we think they should be ready to go to work? Do we think they should be ready to go to college? Do we think they should be capable of teaching themselves? Or do we think they should already know everything they will ever need to know? What mixture of those four things is correct, job/college/already know/can learn? But then there are more questions: what should students know to be ready to go to work? What kinds of jobs are we talking about? And what does “ready” mean? I haven’t ever been “ready” for any job, if “ready” means “already capable of every aspect of the job required.” I have always had to learn on the job. Do we want them ready for entry level, or ready to move up to the top echelons of management? Do we want them ready for local jobs, or do we want them to be ready for any jobs? Please note that if we decide to make our students ready for any jobs, then they’re going to be learning a whole lot of things that seem like they aren’t important, because those students will look around their part of the world, look at the people they know, and they will think, “Nobody in my town knows physics, or needs to know physics. Why do I need to know physics?” If our only answer is, “You might find a job somewhere else that requires a knowledge of physics,” we’re not going to convince a lot of students to try very hard in physics class. But also, if we decide that nobody who goes to school in this town needs to know physics, then we are sentencing those students to live only in places and have only careers that do not require any knowledge of physics. Maybe that’s fine: we decided, pretty unanimously, that none of the students in American schools need to be familiar with Mongolian folk dancing; we therefore cut them all off from careers involving Mongolian folk dancing.
Pretty fucked up, guys. Denying our children that avenue in life? Who were we to decide that for them?
But also: how much time and energy do we want to dedicate to teaching Mongolian folk dancing, on the expectation that some number of our students will pursue a life that involves Mongolian folk dancing?
And before you scoff too hard at that: recognize that almost all American students were, at some point in the last several decades, taught how to square dance. We thought that was a valuable use of time and resources. And I, for one, would rather know Mongolian folk dancing than how to do-si-do.
This is amazing.
(Let me also point out, though this is off topic and too large a subject, THAT WE SHOULD NOT FOCUS EDUCATION ENTIRELY ON THE ABILITY TO MAKE STUDENTS PRODUCTIVE AND CAREER-READY. LIFE IS NOT JUST ABOUT YOUR JOB. STOP TELLING STUDENTS THAT EVERYTHING THEY LEARN AND EVERYTHING THEY DO IS GETTING THEM READY FOR “THE REAL WORLD OF WORK.”)
But okay, we’re really only talking about English/Language Arts and Mathematics. (Hey: who decided those two were the most fundamental skills? I agree that communication is vital in essentially everything; but is English the only way to learn to communicate? What if we decided instead to teach every student to be fluent conversationally in three different languages other than English? Or what if we decided that proper communication required an understanding of our context, including our cultural context and the context of our interlocutors, and therefore all students must master 12 years of social studies including sociology and psychology? AND DON’T GET ME STARTED ON MATH.) So surely the expectations of what should be mastered in those subjects is more straightforward. Right?
It may be. I object to a number of the standards – for instance, I am supposed to dedicate considerable time and energy to this one: “Analyze various accounts of a subject told in different mediums (e.g., a person’s life story in both print and multimedia), determining which details are emphasized in each account.” (AZELA Standard 9-10.RI.7) – but I can’t argue against the ones which say students should be able to read proficiently and independently, or that students should cite evidence for their claims, or that students should know how to analyze complex characters. And all of the different sets of standards were all written with input from various teachers and teacher groups and other educators.
But not only teachers.
Common Core, for one example (And there are lots of examples, of course. Education is a very profitable business. Lots of companies get involved in trying to create educational resources, and then trying to sell them to the very large market of schools and teachers flush with all that gummint porkbarrel money), was written by the Council of Chief State School Officers, which is essentially all of the various Superintendents of Instruction from each of the 50 states. They took input from the National Council of Teachers of English, the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators, the NEA and the AFT (the two largest national teachers’ unions), and various other teachers and educators. I suppose I should point out that most of the chief state school officers have education backgrounds, though not all of them; but more importantly, I think, is that the CCSSO was not the only organization involved: it was also the National Governors’ Association, which certainly has a stake in education at the state level, but generally includes a whole lot fewer educators; and also, a certain non-profit group founded in 1996 called Achieve. (Don’t be too impressed, by the way, by this group being non-profit; the College Board is non-profit, and they’re the ones who make all of the AP tests, and the ACT, and the SAT. And then charge millions of students hundreds of millions of dollars every year to take their tests. But they’re not profiting from it.)
That last one is the interesting one. Because you figure the CCSSO and the teachers’ unions are going to represent what the educational establishment wants: what is best for the current school structure, and for the teachers. And the Governors’ association will represent the will of, if not the people, at least the constituents who have the ear of the governors; which surely includes parents’ groups and the larger constituency special interests. I think it’s safe to say that both groups, the CCSSO and the NGA, of politicians would represent the interests of the monied class in this country: since that is who commands the attention if not the obedience of politicians.
So who did Achieve represent? Maybe the students? The ones who have the most skin in this game, so to speak, the ones most affected by all of this wrangling, and the ones who, as lacking votes and money in general, do not have the attention and obedience of the politicians?
Of course not.
Achieve’s website tells us this: “Achieve is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit education reform organization dedicated to working with states to raise academic standards and graduation requirements, improve assessments, and strengthen accountability.”
Very nice! That sounds great. But…who are you?
I couldn’t actually find a list of the board of directors on their website (I admit I didn’t look too hard, as I expected to have to go outside of the organization to find what I wanted to know), but I found one on Ballotpedia, interestingly enough; seems like Achieve has some involvement in politics, as well as in education. Well, they said they work with the states, right?
Here are their directors, according to Ballotpedia (Which got the list from the Achieve website, accessed in 2016; unfortunately when you follow the same link to the current list of the board of directors, you get this:
Achieve is led by governors, business leaders, and influential national leaders committed to improving K-12 educational outcomes for all students.
Created in 1996 by a bipartisan group of governors and business leaders, Achieve is leading the effort to make college and career readiness a priority across the country so that students graduating from high school are academically prepared for postsecondary success.
Sorry to use out of date information, but also: Mark B. Grier is listed by Ballotpedia as the current top executive at Achieve, and while he has also moved on to a director position at Freddie Mac, his profile there still lists him as a board member at Achieve, so I’ll take this list as representative if not current.
Who are these people? Glad you asked.
Dr. Sylvester James Gates, Jr., is a badass. An award-winning and influential theoretical physicist, professor, author, and documentarian, his involvement with Achieve could only improve their work. Not sure how much sway he actually has, but his presence on the board is the best thing I found. (He’s also the only African-American on the board, but surely that’s neither here nor there.)
Michael Cohen, president (Not THAT Michael Cohen) is actually an educator (Though he worked for Bill Clinton, so he’s a neoliberal educator). He is also the only one with a page readily available on the Achieve website – though to be fair, their Search function is not currently available, and the website hasn’t been updated since 2021. Craig R. Barrett, chairman, is the former CEO of Intel. Mark B. Grier, vice chair (and maybe current chair) is the former CFO at Prudential. (Also: “Grier’s leadership on the board continues Prudential Financial’s longstanding commitment to improving education outcomes. Former Prudential Chairman Art Ryan served on the Achieve board from 1999 to 2008, and as the chairman from 2005 to 2008.” So again, if the list isn’t current, it’s at least representative. Mark Grier to Lead Achieve Board | Achieve) Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Chairman Emeritus, is the former CEO of IBM, and the former chairman of the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm. Gov. Bill Haslam of Tennessee is also the former president of Pilot Corp, a petroleum company that owns the Flying J rest stops. Former Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri is one of the Democrats on the “nonpartisan” board, and is a lawyer turned politician rather than a corporate overlord, so he wasn’t too bad – but did hand control of Ferguson over to the state highway patrol and later called in the National Guard to put down riots after Michael Brown was shot and killed. Maggie Hassan (The only woman on the board, but surely that’s neither here nor there) and Jock McKernan are also former lawyers turned politicians, Hassan the current embattled Democratic senator from New Hampshire, McKernan the Republican governor of Maine in the late 80s and early 90s (And the husband of Senator Olympia Snowe, if that matters), and are generally not offensive.
So that’s who wrote the Common Core. Teachers – but also politicians, and business executives. And who do we think had the most influence, the final say? Probably not the teachers. And definitely not the students.
But is that so terrible? I think I hear you ask. What’s wrong with business executives promoting the standards? Well, inasmuch as they were simply people who understood complicated systems and processes, and who live in this society and therefore may have a stake in its success, nothing. But that’s not all they are. Businessmen, especially executives of these sorts of large, international corporations, are not particularly loyal to any one society; they are loyal to the bottom line: shareholder value. I cannot believe that these men created Achieve, and pushed for the Common Core standards to be accepted nationwide, for any reason other than they knew it would be good for business.
From what I can see of the standards, and the intent of those who wrote them, they are very good at producing exactly what businesspeople seem to want: conformist rule-followers who don’t think very originally, and who don’t question authority, but who are very good at mindless, repetitive tedium, and who seek simple entertainment and satisfaction at the end of the very long work week. Good workers (Remember how the work ethic is as important if not more important than mastery of the skills?) who are also good consumers. Good employees, and good customers.
How do standards do that? In a number of ways. Partly because they are standard: the goal is to make every student the same as every other student, capable of all the same things. If we see those things as a baseline, and give schools room and resources to reach beyond that, then there’s no problem; but that’s not how the school system works – and again, that is because of the same people wielding the same influences. Because the other part of the push for common standards is – the push for accountability. It’s right there in the Achieve mission statement. “Achieve is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit education reform organization dedicated to working with states to raise academic standards and graduation requirements, improve assessments, and strengthen accountability.” (Emphasis added)
See, we can’t have universal standards unless we can be sure they are adhered to. Right? We have to make sure these schools, and those wacky tree-huggin’ hippie teachers, are doing what they’ve been told to do. So in addition to creating new standards that will define what is taught, we will create and implement test after test after test after test, to make sure that the teaching is – well, meeting the standard.
Do you know what happens when you create an entirely new system of curriculum, and a new set of assessments? Particularly during a global recession, when state education budgets are being slashed and burned like virgin forests in logging country? (By the way, Jay Nixon of Missouri was also called the “cutter-in-chief” for all the cuts he imposed on the Missouri state budget. But he did also support investment in education when things started turning around, so. Good and bad, I suppose.)
The schools fail, that’s what. New curriculum takes time to figure out and make functional. New assessments take time for students to get used to them. Even in the ideal testing situation, the whole idea is that you take the results of the test and use it to inform the next year’s instruction in order to raise the scores: which pretty much requires that the first year’s scores are going to suck.
And so they did. And do.
Which opens up a lot of options for those who want to control the education system in this country, say, in order to produce better worker drones and more consumers to buy products.
Any time the school does not meet the standard, any assessment that shows the students are not showing the specific evidence asked for which proves they have mastered the chosen skills and knowledges to the extent and in the manner determined by the people in charge, then the school is failing, the teachers are failing, the students are failing. And when a school is failing, we will sanction it in some way, and follow one of a number of alternative courses: we could use that failing school as evidence that a current politician has failed their constituents, and thus push for the candidates we like; we could use that failing school to argue that the school system in general is failing and therefore we should promote vouchers for private schools; or to argue that the school system is failing and therefore the state needs to loosen the requirements for charter schools; or to argue that the school system is failing and it is the fault of those damn teachers’ unions. So many options!
We could also argue that the school system is failing, so there needs to be greater emphasis on achieving the standards. Now that we have these lovely standards written, we can push to have them adopted across the country (Maybe in conjunction with a huge federal mandate, which rhymes with Moe Wild Heft Refined, which also mandates accountability…), and then use that to impose more expectations that schools will adhere to the standards, so that every child in every state can have the same results! Won’t that be wonderful? If … Moe wild is heft refined?
(Sorry.)
Once we decide that the school is failing and the most important thing is to make sure that students MEET THE STANDARD, the stage is set for the process we have watched play out across this country: we start teaching to the test; and more devastating, we eliminate everything that is not teaching to the test. Electives are cut, because the students need more remedial instruction in math and English. Which frustrates the students, and makes them feel like the system is not helping them but is instead out to crush their spirits (because it is), and of course they resent it, and so of course they rebel against it: they don’t try as hard as they could on the tests, because fuck the tests, man!
Which means the school does not meet the standard: and so we can go through another round of whatever-flavor-of-damage-we-want-to-inflict-on-the-system.
My school knows that I’m a good teacher. It’s hard not to: my students generally like me, their parents generally like me; the surveys the school does of parents and students always reward me with sterling reviews. I was even named in a Google review of the whole school as one of the reasons why my school is worth going to. And, if I may presume, I think that anybody who comes and watches me teach will see that I am good at it. (I mean, I’m not always sure I’m good at it, but that’s because I have imposter syndrome and a certain amount of anxiety over my abilities. Never mind. It’s not important.)
But what the school tells me, every single time they evaluate me, (Which in this environment of hyper assessment, is every goddamn year; also I live in a “Right to Work” state, for a charter school, which means there is no teacher’s union to represent me, and therefore no tenure. Can’t let them lazy goddamn teachers just relax and teach! They need to worry about losing their jobs all the time! That’ll keep ‘em in line!) is that I need to provide documentation that I am teaching the standards. I need to write objectives on the board. I need to review those objectives with my students, every class. I need to align my instruction and my assessments, and now my grades, with those standards. I need to write daily lesson plans that show I’m focusing on the standards. I need to give common formative assessments, five times a quarter, to show that my students are progressing in their mastery of the standards.
That’s what my job has become. Standards-based instruction, with (eventually) standards-based grading. Everything standardized. Which makes the businesspeople happy: and since my charter school is run by a corporation, and therefore by businesspeople, they will be happy, too. They’re pretty dang sure that creating a laser focus on the standards will achieve the results they want: proof that all of our students are meeting and exceeding all the standards, because all our teachers do all day long is try to get them to learn and master the standards. Because, we are told, that is how the school is assessed and graded by the state: according to our ability to make our students meet the standard of mastering the standards on standardized tests.
Yeah, it stopped meaning anything to me, too. Quite a while ago now.
You know what might be the most insidious part? There’s still an argument to be made for standards. As I said, there is nothing wrong with a baseline of ability that all students should be provided an opportunity to reach. I still think we should not tell a child that they are “failing” just because they can’t pass fucking Algebra or whatever, but I do think that a general education is a good idea, and that there are things that should be included in everyone’s education. Yes to that. Assessment of student achievement and ability is an important part of education (Though there are YEARS worth of caveats and qualifications in that. Most of which I’ve already written about, and I’ll get to the rest.), so assessment of a student’s mastery of a standard is a valid pursuit.
Here’s the thing that kills me about standards-based education: you get what you measure. You find what you are looking for. If what you want is to see if students have mastered a standard, and you teach to the standard and then assess the standard, then students will show that they achieved mastery. If you focus harder on the standard and teach it more, they will generally do better. If you point out to the students, by writing it on the board and going over it with them every day, exactly what they are supposed to learn and which standard they have to master, then they will do as they are told: they will focus on that idea, that knowledge, that skill, and they will master it. Which means the student data in that class will improve when you do things like write the objectives on the board and go over them in class every day. It works. And, as I have also written about for years, teachers are so hungry for proof that what we spend our lives doing is worth something, when we see those results, see those data points march upwards, know that students are passing the assessments: we like it. We want more of it.
So we do it. We teach to the standards. We use standards-based curriculum, and standards-based grading. It works, after all; and it’s what’s expected of us.
We stop questioning where the standards came from: they’re just the standards, and we have to teach them, so we do. We stop thinking about how dumb those standards are. We forget about the things we used to teach that weren’t measured by the standards – those things are long gone, and after all, they’re not part of the test, not part of the assessment of the students or the teachers or the school. They can’t be that important.
But they are important. All the things that aren’t in the standards are the things that matter most. The things that inspire people, that make them love learning, that make them grow and change. Things like real literature, poetry and novels and plays. Things like learning, for the first time, the history of the oppressed people and the non-dominant cultures – especially important if you happen to be part of one of those cultures, one of those people. Things like relating to and empathizing with other people. Things like school spirit, and community service, and even sports, goddamn it. These things still exist: but they are fading. Students are losing access to sports because they have to spend their after-school time in tutoring, because they haven’t mastered all the standards. Clubs and service organizations are less active, less involved, because there’s not enough time for all of that: students have to study for tests. Teachers can’t give the lessons and assign the projects that become part of a student’s life and personality, because we have to focus on the standards. All of that gets lost by the focus on the standards. Not least because the standards are, by design, simple, measurable nuggets of information. There’s no standard for the intangibles.
You get what you measure. And you lose everything that can’t be measured.
There’s a guy I used to teach with who I think is wrong about almost everything he’s ever said: but there was one thing he said which I thought was 100% accurate. He said that there should only be one standard, one expectation, one guiding goal that drove all of education: Students will learn to think critically. I would actually add to that something more human, like “Students will learn to love their world and themselves,” but I don’t know that schools should consider that a definite and intentional goal, so I’m willing to keep mine as an unspoken purpose, and focus only on the one.
What else is there? There are a dozen ways to learn to think critically, and all of them are valuable. Every subject, every class, can help students to do that. That one skill, with all of the myriad aspects that contribute to it, is the most important thing that people today should have – and that too many of us today can’t do.
And the best part of all? It can’t be measured. And it can’t be standardized.
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…)
(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.
Just Dusty 