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On the Twelfth Day of Blogging, Just Dusty Blogged for Me . . .

Dusty Leave a comment

… A blog about love and epiphanyyyyyy!

 

If you’ve read this blog before, you’ll know that I – like most people – don’t particularly like my job. In some ways, on some days, it’s fine; but all in all, it’s not where I’d prefer to spend my time. I’ll never get a bumper sticker that says “I’d rather be working.” As I tell my students, “If I win the lottery tonight, I won’t be here tomorrow.” I tell people that I’m a teacher, but I don’t actually define myself that way; I consider myself a writer, and a reader, and a nerd, and a family man. Teaching is my source of income, not my identity.

But since a source of income is a necessity, and teaching is a pretty decent one, I thought I’d share some tips for making work a little more manageable – that is, if you can’t get your boss to change your work hours so he/she will stop torturing you. (There’s a scientist who says we should start work around 10am.)

First, figure out when you can say No. I know it’s true for teaching, and I’ll bet it’s true for a whole lot of jobs, that your employer will keep asking you for more for as long as you keep giving what they ask. They’ll ask you to do extra duties, to join committees, to come in early, to stay late, to take work home, to give up your weekends, your evenings, and your vacations. In my case, they ask me to come to meetings, to go to seminars, to agree to be a mentor or a coach or a tutor. They are constantly after my lunchtime, and they’d love it if I could fill in for the various staff members they’ve laid off or cut back – at my school this includes the security guard and the staff psychologist. They want me to train myself, and then train others. And of course, they want me to give every ounce of energy and every minute of time to the doing of my actual job: they want me to grade eight hours a day, prepare new lessons and new curriculum eight hours a day, and spend at least eight hours a day with students, preferably one-on-one. And for all of this, they want me to do it the way they want it done, whether or not I like that way of doing things or think it is the right way: it is their way, and therefore they want it to be my way.

But with teaching, and I’ll bet with a lot of jobs, there is a specific thing or things I’m supposed to be doing. In my case it is two things: first, I need to be a responsible babysitter, meaning that students cannot be hurt under my watch, particularly not by me; and second, my students need to learn. The first is easy to measure: students getting hurt, or students complaining about how I hurt them, are no-nos. The second is more difficult to measure, but figuring out how the bosses measure it was the key to knowing when and why I can say no. For me, it is two things, one positive and one negative. The positive measure is test scores. My students’ test scores can’t be terrible. They don’t have to be perfect, but they can’t be terrible. The – I guess it’s an advantage? – for me is that I have students measured by multiple tests, and as long as they’re doing well on one, then the other is less critical; so in my case, since I teach AP classes, as long as my AP test scores are sufficient, then the school wants to keep me around and keep me happy, even if my state testing scores are less wonderful. They’re not terrible, but they’re not as good as the school wants them to be; but my AP scores are. That gives me more ability to say No. It gives me No-power.

The negative measure of students learning is even better, for me: there can’t be any students or parents complaining about me. As long as none of my students go to the administration and say that the class is unfair, that the grade was too low, that the test was too hard and that the students weren’t prepared for it, then the school feels confident that I am doing my job. And that gives me even more No-power.

It’s not that simple, of course; there is more to it. I do need the credentials that I have, a degree in my subject and years of teaching experience and so on; I get observed twice a year and I have to look like I know what I’m doing; there are meetings I have to attend and duties I have to perform. I have to go to staff meetings, I have to meet with parents on the scheduled days or when parents request it, I have to be available for extra help if students need it. But those are the main things: babysitting, test scores, no complaints.

How did I figure this out? I listened to what people said about the people who used to have my job. The person who had it the year before me actually had a doctorate and college-level teaching experience; but the students thought she didn’t teach them enough. They thought she spent too long on one unit, they thought she didn’t explain things well, and they thought she couldn’t manage a class well enough to get them to listen. I heard the same things about her from other teachers, too. The person before her was a bad babysitter: she left the students locked out in the hallway after the bell rang; she left early and left the students alone in the classroom; she cussed at them when she was mad. So when one of my students told me that I taught him more in five minutes than my predecessor had taught him all year, I knew I was pretty well set. (I already knew I couldn’t lock my students out of the room, nor leave them alone in it. But that’s kind of a gimme, isn’t it? I mean, really.) The other key was watching the person at the top: the best teacher at the school, the one that everybody listens to and looks up to, the one who seems like they can get away with anything. How does that person get to be that powerful? In my school’s case, it’s basically the same answer, though our top teacher is more of a teacher and less of a babysitter – which tells me that there’s leeway in the babysitting aspect, as long as the test scores are good enough, and as long as the students think they learn. In this teacher’s case, it is more than the negative measure, more than a lack of students and parents complaining: our top teacher earns praise from students and parents. He is the one they thank at graduation for having taught them so much. And that gives him all the no-power he could ever need: he openly defies administrative decrees in certain areas, and nothing happens to him. Because the students think he is their best teacher. Even though he calls them deadbeats and degenerates, and threatens to hide their corpses under the soccer field.

So that’s the most important thing: figuring out what is necessary to gain the power to say No, and then deciding where to spend that power – because nobody, not even the best employee, has limitless power to say No. You do still have to show up (too early) and do your job. You can’t spit in your boss’s face. But you probably can skip out of some meetings, or refuse to serve on certain committees, and you can certainly say you aren’t going to that three-day seminar out of town (unless it’s in a good place and they’re paying expenses). That’s the key to keeping your sanity at work. The first one, at least.

The second key is to keep doing your work. Don’t let it pile up. Because it will pile up, and then it will collapse and smother you in an avalanche of catch-up. In my case it’s grading, which I did in fact pile up this last semester’s end, and it did almost smother me. It wasn’t the first time, either; and if I ever leave teaching behind before I win the lottery, that will be why: because I let work pile up and collapse on me once too often.

In the past I have let the work pile up because I’ve avoided doing it: I’ve collected essays and then looked at them and said, “Not today,” over and over and over again. Sometimes for as long as two months, though I was doing other grading in that span. That’s one of the nice things about teaching, even though it doesn’t always feel that way; I doubt there are a lot of jobs that allow that much slacking for that long. But since I didn’t get students filing complaints with the administration, it didn’t get me fired. I did have some pretty serious grumbling by the end of it, and I now have a (well-deserved) reputation for taking too long to grade things; I have made a conscious effort in the last few years to keep that from happening again. This last semester, the work piled up for a different reason: because I didn’t plan well enough, and I had too many major things due all at the end of the semester. It was a sudden deluge instead of a slow build-up; but it still almost took me down. So now I have two things to be aware of: not letting things pile up, and not creating a huge pile that will all fall on me at once. I’m sure someday I’ll learn those habits. And then I’ll probably win the lottery.

But all of that, though I hope it will be useful for some people to know, is not actually the thing I wanted to talk about. There is something else, something that I think is actually unusual, something that I know that most people don’t. This is my epiphany, if you will. And it is this: if you have the chance, then work alongside of the person you love.

I’ve done it a few times, now. When I was a janitor in college, my wife (then unwedded soulmate) worked in the same facility, selling tickets and concessions for the box office while I cleaned the place. When I became a teacher, she spent two summers teaching summer school with me, once in the same room. We met because we were sort of working side by side: she worked in the college bookstore, and I sold student IDs in the same building; I used to get change from her, and she used to pass my table on her way to get coffee or a bottle of water. And now, by a fortuitous set of circumstances, she is the art teacher in the classroom right next to my English class. And it is the best thing about my job.

Now, it is better for me than it is for her. Teaching unquestionably gets easier with experience; this is her first year of full-time teaching, and it’s my seventeenth. I’ve been at the school for two and a half years now, so I have a better idea of how things work and who I can get help from and who I can’t; she is figuring all of that out. She also got screwed over by her predecessor, who cleaned the room out of any useful materials or curriculum, and left the art supplies in a hellish mess; I came to a classroom with class sets of novels and textbooks, and filing cabinets full of quizzes and worksheets and materials I could use. I have a department with three other English teachers who give me help and advice and share good stuff with me; she’s the only art teacher at the school, and one of two in the district – and the other is also brand-new. She’s starting completely from scratch, and it makes the job twice as hard. And it’s pretty goddamn hard to start with. Add to that the fact that she doesn’t particularly like teaching, either; that it isn’t how she defines herself or any part of her identity, and it’s easy to see that it’s been a tough year for her.

But she does have this advantage: I’m right next door. That means that she, like me, always has someone to cover for her if she needs to run to the bathroom. I always have someone to eat lunch with, and to sit with in meetings. When I’ve had a tough class or an annoying meeting, I can go to her and bitch about it. I can complain – no, scratch that; I never complain about my students, the little angel-babies.

No, sorry, can’t say that with a straight face. When I want to complain about my irritating, obnoxious, tiresome students, I can go straight to her and say whatever I really think, without any fear that she will judge me, or get me in trouble for it. I can get advice from her – and regardless of her inexperience with the profession or in the school, I do, because she is naturally brilliant, and because she knows quite a lot about working in general, having dealt with office politics in an actual office, where they are more pervasive and pernicious than they are in a school, where most people work behind closed doors all day. She’s also, it turns out (No surprise to me), a genuinely good teacher, though without the mixed blessing of test scores, it is sometimes harder for her to see it. And because she is a more dedicated artist than I am, being a good teacher means less to her than it does to me; she cares about being a good artist.

She’s that, too.

But it is a lovely thing to have another person there with you, in that place where you have to spend so many hours, and for such pragmatic, uninspiring reasons. (“I just worked a full day! That means I can pay my heating bill! And maybe the electric, too! WOO!”) We keep our behavior appropriate, of course; but I still get hugs, and even a kiss or two. The main thing is just that I get someone to talk to. We go to the water cooler together, and to the lounge to use the microwave. I walk up to the office with her when she has to drop something off, and I’ve helped her learn the eccentricities of our Xerox machine. She is already friendlier with the rest of the staff than I am, and we like and dislike the same people (But never the students! We love every one of them! Angel-babies, they are!). We drive to work together, and leave together, which makes it much easier to run errands after work and to arrange our morning schedules. It’s really been fantastic, having the woman I love with me all day, at work and at home. I know some people would get tired of that much time together; and we are in separate classrooms for most of the workday, which probably helps – but I have had nothing but joy from this arrangement. I recommend it highly.

And the best part is this: I have never, not once in the last four months, had to say goodbye.

Responding to Comments

Dusty Leave a comment

I got these two comments on an earlier post on this blog. I intended, when I started this blog, to respond to all comments; therefore, gentlemen, Mr. W.W.W. Gurkancelic Dot-com [Note: I have to write it that way or the browser automatically makes it a hot link, and I am not going to drive this schmuck’s traffic]  and Mr. What does t.b.h. mean out, I will endeavor to give you the same courtesy.

W.W.W. Gurkancelic Dot-com

This will make gossips less credible and hence of less interest to others.
Or, Amy, a supervisor, may hold meetings without co-workers
even though the workers are available and vital to the success of the company.
Gossip magazines revenue s signature, whereas the truth was that
it was a crime that he hadn.
Gossip gives us information on how to better interact with other people.
Online gossip girl 6 évad Control freaks feel that there is only one way to do things and that’s
theirs. Your probably wondering why I created this article.

Well, I am in favor of making gossips less credible and hence – fancy word, there, “hence” – less interesting to others; but I am certainly not going to click on your link to see what exactly will do this. I also don’t think that being incredible will make gossips less interesting. Seems like the less credible the gossip, the more enjoyable people find it. Ever read the Weekly World News?

And I have to say (though it seems like you’re spreading rumors about Supervisor Amy), I think holding a meeting without coworkers sounds genius. I did it earlier this year, and it was wonderful: my coworkers, who also didn’t want to be in the meeting, all stopped by my classroom and said, “Are we having a meeting?” I said, “Do you have anything for the agenda?” They replied in the negative, and I said, “Good meeting.” And away they went. When the supervisor (Mine isn’t named Amy) showed, I said that we had had a quick meeting already, and nobody had any particular concerns. It worked: the supervisor nodded and went away, his unholy thirst for meetings and networking sated, for the moment. (I had to further propitiate the beast with minutes for the “meeting,” which read a lot like the above: Short meeting, no concerns. BACK TO THE MIDDLE MANAGEMENT HELL FROM WHENCE YOU CAME, DEMON!) But it is nice of you to recognize that the workers are vital to the success of the company. Any chance of a raise? What’s that? Something about revenue and a signature? Hey, thanks – is that a – oh. The check’s in the mail, I see. Just a rumor, right? Yeah, that is a crime.

Okay – but now you’re saying that gossip gives us information? Useful information? On how to interact? I have to say, you’re not making that gossip seem less credible, here. Oh – Gossip GIRL gives better information, I got it. Gossip Girl 6? The 6th season? Never watched any of them, honestly; not my kind of thing. I prefer Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Or the Simpsons.

Your right about control freaks. (And damn my word program — and browser — for not recognizing that mistake.) But I am not, in fact, wondering why you created this article.

Thanks for the comment.

What does t.b.h. mean out

In saying that, He was referring to the feast of the Marriage Supper of the Lamb as discussed
above. It is salutary to accept one’s losses, but there comes a
time when one must reaffirm what remains and even begin to explore previously untapped potentials.
Meaning of tbh?
Moreover, the modems may not be usable (as often is the case) with other operating systems
or other Windows versions, because the drivers are simply not available.
When you are tired and complain about your job – think
of the unemployed, the disabled, and those who wish they had your job.

So I looked up the Marriage Supper of the Lamb to which you refer, and I have to be honest: it’s a little creepy. But it’s creepy in kind of a spectacular way. Here’s why: it’s a reference to Revelations, which includes a verse saying that Jesus Christ, risen in the End Times, will take a bride. The interpretation I read explained that this was metaphoric, that the bride is not a literal bride, but rather the Church. And those who have been reborn and taken Christ as their savior will become the bride of Christ. Which is weird, because it makes me picture a Moonie-like mass wedding; and it is spectacular, because that is unmistakably and unapologetically gay. Just picture all the beer-bellied bearded suspendered workbooted intolerant redneck Christians you know: the ones who pray, in earnest, for a winning football team; guys who would beat their sons to death if those sons came out; picture them in white dresses and veils, holding bouquets and looking starry-eyed up at the bearded Christ smiling down on them at the altar. That is fab-u-lous.

I agree: it is healthy to accept that which cannot be changed. I am moving that way with Bernie Sanders’s campaign for the nomination, which it is now looking like he really won’t win, and not because of the media, but because of votes. But I am willing and able to reaffirm what remains: Hillary Clinton. No, she is not everything I hoped she would be; like her husband she is beholden to moneyed interests, and I fear will not help us fix out longterm financial problems. But she has managed to push back Bernie Sanders; that means she will not have much trouble with Donald Trump. And that makes me very happy. I also believe there is additional potential there which, if tapped, could help solve some of our other problems, like wage equality. I also think that Barack Obama’s presidency helped to reveal some of the hidden racism that still seethes in this country, bringing it to the surface and, hopefully, helping us thereby to heal; perhaps President Hillary Clinton could do the same with the deep sexism that still infects us.

Oh – and speaking of accepting one’s losses, I think it’s time to throw away that modem. Of course you can’t find drivers for it: who the hell uses modems any more? How many baud you got on that thing, big fella? Get yourself a nice wifi router and a cable connection in your house, and call it good. Come into the modern age.

Ahhh, now you’re speaking my language. I am tired and complaining about my job pretty much every day. My job is hard. It is exhausting, and often frustrating. Of course it makes me tired. It doesn’t help, either, that I worry about doing it well, which sometimes keeps me up at night; last night it was because I got pissed at one of my classes yesterday because one of them walked in and before I could even talk about what we were going to do that day, before I could even start class, he says, “Can we just do nothing today?” That drives me nuts. Because why am I the one who has to come up with the motivation to do work? I get paid either way, and I can find a new job. These frigging kids are the ones who are building their futures – or not. And they want to take the one hour of the day that could be dedicated to improving their English skills, and just sleep, instead? Bite me.

But you’re right. I am employed. It is fortunate, because I came very close to ruining my own career. And I am both lucky and healthy enough to have avoided disability. I should be thankful for what I have, and for what I have the opportunity to do with my remaining time in this life. Well, not thankful, because I don’t think there’s anyone to thank for what I have; because I don’t actually believe in God, nor do I want to marry him. I don’t think beards are attractive. Plus I feel like he’d be preachy. Like if you blew off your cleaning, left dirty dishes in the sink, he wouldn’t say anything, he’d just sigh and shake his head and look sad. I would hate that. So passive-aggressive. So not thankful for my good fortune, but – pleased with it. Sure. I can do that. Hey – thanks. Really. I appreciate the reminder.

And t.b.h. means “to be honest.” Like this: don’t fucking spam my blog again. It’s an asshole move.

Out.

This is a test. It is only a test.

Dusty Leave a comment

(How perfectly ironic is it that the above clip was preceded by an advertisement by HP that runs on the tagline “Every student learns differently.” Now let me talk about standardized testing of those different-learning individuals, shall I?)

 

It’s testing season again.

If only that meant we could shoot them.

I have been reluctant to write about testing from a teacher’s perspective, because it feels so obvious: of course we hate tests. Of course we do. Everybody knows it, right?

But in the last week I’ve been asked by two different people – one a current high school student, not one of mine but one who presumably knew I’d be good for a rant; the other an auditor for the state of Oregon, who sent me (and presumably thousands of others – but wouldn’t it be funny if it was just me? If some random number generator landed on my Roulette-wheel slot, and my answers were the only ones that mattered?) a link to a survey looking for feedback – about standardized testing. And I’ve had to give standardized tests to my students, and I am working to prepare my AP students for standardized tests that are coming up soon and that are freaking them out; and in my discussions of those tests with those students, I have been sending mixed messages. And presumably thousands of other teachers have done exactly the same.

So there is a reason to write about this. Because maybe it’s not so obvious that teachers hate standardized tests.

But it should be.

I know I’ve written about standardized tests before in terms of grades and evaluation, and that criticism holds true: we put too much weight on test scores only because they are easy to understand. We feel like knowing that someone scored a 1500 on their SATs, and a 142 on their IQ test, tells us something about that person’s capacity and ability and potential. But think of it this way: if I tell you that I scored a 92 on my driver’s test, does that tell you how well I drive? Of course not: it tells you how well I drive when there’s a DMV employee with a clipboard in the car watching my every move. The situation is artificial, and therefore the results are not representative of my genuine abilities or normal performance. And the testing people would say yes: we create a situation of artificial intensity in order to put someone to the test; that’s what a test is, a crucible that melts away the impurities and discovers someone’s purest essence, so to speak. My driving abilities under pressure should represent my best driving abilities, right?

But they’re not, are they? As I drive around town, I will not be driving the same way I did when I drove for the clipboard-man. I will not be as alert, and I will not be as cautious, and I will not be as scrupulous in following the rules. And because of that, I will not drive as well. I will not be using my full driving capacity because I won’t feel the pressure. And so which is my purest essence: the things I can do in an artificial high-pressure situation, or the things I do on a daily basis? Which is my verbal language ability: the 720 I scored on my SATs, or the successes and failures in my day-to-day reading and writing, my failure to comprehend reading material that I didn’t pay much attention to, my failure to make someone else understand my point in an email or a letter or a memo? Wouldn’t it be the latter? Will Durant wrote, “We are what we repeatedly do.” (Often attributed to Aristotle, because Durant was writing about and paraphrasing Aristotle when he wrote it. But Durant was the one who actually said that.) So I would argue that it is our daily practice that shows our actual skill level, not the level we can force ourselves to when put on the spot: that reveals much more about our ability to handle pressure. Even that is flawed: because test pressure is different from actual crisis pressure, because tests are expected and planned, and we can prepare for them, study hard, psych ourselves up, have a good breakfast, bring extra #2 pencils; whereas crises happen without foreknowledge and with infinitely more chaos. What does my ability to handle clipboard-man pressure reveal about my ability to drive in a haboob?

(Note to non-Arizonans: a haboob is a sudden and intense sandstorm or duststorm. It is one of the hazards that Arizona drivers face. But I only included that because I wanted to write “haboob.”)

Nothing at all. And that’s what tests give us in terms of useful information: nothing at all. The nice thing, I suppose, is that now the test companies aren’t even pretending to give useful information; because teachers don’t get to see the test questions.

That’s right. Standardized tests are, like all tests, supposed to tell us how well a student is doing, right? To show us where the student is struggling, so we can focus our instruction on that area and help the student improve? Right: except standardized tests don’t do that any more, because they don’t reveal their questions, nor do they show a student’s right and wrong answers. The scores on standardized tests are also becoming more obtuse: test companies wish to preserve their market, and so they make their score reports esoteric, in order to ensure that people require the company’s services to interpret the test scores. Students don’t get a 70%, a 95%, or an A; they get a number without any context at all. Either a percentile rank, which tells you how well you did in comparison with other students, or you get a raw score that means essentially nothing. When I taught in Oregon and pushed my students through the proprietary Oregon reading test, the OAKS (Oregon Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, isn’t that clever; if test companies and others who sell education materials excel at anything, it is generating semi-clever acronyms.), they got their score automatically at the end of the 54-question multiple choice test. The highest score I ever saw was a 274. The lowest score I ever saw was a 206. So you tell me what that means. Sure, 274 is higher than 206. But does the 206 mean that the student got nothing right? Did the 274 student get everything right? Does that mean the 274 needs no further instruction in reading? Does the 206 kid go back to elementary school? Who knows: the range of scores is wider than the number of questions on the test. It’s not even a matter of multiple points, or partial credit; it’s a multiple choice test. And even if I could know how many questions a student got right or wrong, I don’t get to see the questions, because of fears about test security, because the testing company doesn’t want to have to create entirely new tests every year because that’s expensive. So all I as the teacher know is: the student got a low score on the reading test. Tell me how I plan instruction to help that student improve.

Which brings us, I suppose, to the real problem with standardized tests: students don’t care. It was extremely rare for the students who got the lowest scores to be the ones who actually have the most trouble with reading. Those students, aware of their troubles with the subject, tried harder than anyone else, because they wanted to do well, they wanted to improve, they wanted to succeed. In almost every case, the lowest scores came from those who simply didn’t try on the test, who clicked through the screens guessing randomly rather than paying attention to the (hideously boring) reading passages, because they didn’t think the tests mattered. And they were right: even when I attached a grade in my class to the test scores, it was only one grade, and it didn’t ever change much in the grand scheme of things. Besides, how many of my students really cared about their grades? Cared so much, that is, that they would take two hours to complete a test they could zip through in about twelve minutes? The students who did well were those who wanted to do well on the test; the students who scored the highest generally weren’t my very best students in terms of language ability, but rather my very best students in terms of diligence. What a shock: standardized tests reveal the best standardized students, the ones who respond best to the usual motivators, the ones who can put forth the most consistent effort on the most tedious tasks. The ones who can work without passion and never feel the lack. Essentially, the ones who are the best at not caring: because they can not care, and still complete the task.

Tests do not find the smartest people; they find the best cubicle monkeys, the best worker drones. And perhaps that’s what schools are for: we have surrendered the idea that education builds a meritocracy, that the cream rises to the top, that the very best students at the very best schools are the ones who should be in charge or our companies or our country; no, we’d rather have the guy who swills beer and watches football, the guy who goes to church, the regular Joe as our president, and we’d rather have the guy who shows results in charge of the company – tangible results. Increased profits. Higher test scores.

This is the real value of standardized tests. They allow people who profit thereby to manipulate the system. The new politician, the new superintendent, the new principal, they come in, they point to the low test scores; because no matter how successful a school is, there will be low test scores. Especially when test scores are reported as percentile ranks; because that means there has to be a bottom rank as well as a top rank – even if everyone who took the test scored 95% and above, percentile ranks simply compare those students to each other, so the ones who scored the 95% now get placed in the bottom rank of students, because other students scored 96% and above. So the new hired gun points at the low test score and says, “This is unacceptable. I will change this.” Then they do a few obvious things: maybe they dedicate more computer labs to the tests, or longer testing periods. Maybe they offer prizes, like pizza parties, to the students if they do well. Maybe they force the teachers to provide free after-school tutoring to students who are struggling. Maybe they buy a test-prep program – conveniently provided by the same company who runs the testing, because why wouldn’t you use them? They make the tests, of course they can tell you how to pass the tests! And then the scores go up. The new principal or superintendent or politician points to that raised score, they claim success, they collect huzzahs; then they parlay that result into a better position, moving higher up the ladder, lifted skyward by their new reputation as an Education Reformer.

Tests are very good at that. They are also very good at making profits for the companies that make the tests – mostly the College Board, which runs the SATs and the AP and ACT tests, and Pearson Testing, which makes pretty much every state assessment for public schools – who make billions off of their purported ability to reveal important information about a student’s learning, and about a school’s success in teaching, when they actually reveal nothing of the kind. At least the College Board releases their test questions after the fact. But they take a three-hour test, following a year’s intensive study, and boil it down to a number between 1 and 5. Then they return their test scores attached to advertisements for products, books and seminars and training and websites, that will absolutely no question guaranteed raise those 1’s to 3’s, and those 3’s to 5’s.

Teach those students more? Help them to learn? Pssh. Why would we do that? We can raise their scores. What else matters?

This matters: every minute, every consultant, every dollar dedicated to test prep is time and money and effort and people taken away from actual education. When students are learning how to succeed on tests, they are not learning how to read and write and think and calculate and plan and analyze and evaluate and hypothesize and create. They’re not even learning how to play dodgeball.

I’d rather they spent the same amount of time playing dodgeball. At least they’d have some fun and get some exercise. And when it’s a question of my tax dollars going to buy tests, or going to buy those big red rubber balls, I’d rather subsidize Wham-o than Pearson any day.

It’s just like health care, and the military. We spend more money on education than most other countries, and yet we don’t get good results.

In 2011, the United States spent $11,841 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary and secondary education, an amount 35 percent higher than the OECD average of $8,789. At the postsecondary level, U.S. expenditures per FTE student were $26,021, almost twice as high as the OECD average of $13,619. Source

Why? Because this is capitalism. Our money funds profit. It funds profit for the companies that make the tests, and for the administrators and politicians who come in, raise scores, and then move on, without having actually improved anything, without having had any effect on education itself. I have no doubt there are teachers who do the same thing: who swoop in to low-performing schools, teach their students a good trick or two, bribe them with donuts on test day, and then reap benefits in the form of a reputation as a reformer, and maybe even merit pay bonuses. I myself have profited from my predecessor’s low test scores, because the fact that mine (and when I say “mine,” I mean “The scores earned by students I’ve taught”) are higher helps to ensure my job security. But the difference is, I actually teach. And I’ve never earned merit pay.

But I have helped to create this problem. I have told my students, in all sincerity, taking advantage of my reputation as a trustworthy authority figure with their best interests in mind, that tests are important and they should try their hardest. I have attached grades in my class to test scores that I can’t predict, that I can’t really improve, and that I can’t even see, in some cases; I have given students grades in my class based on their effort on the state tests, based largely on how long they took to complete it while I watched. I have shook my head and gotten annoyed, and I have even lectured my students, when they blow off the tests as unimportant. Right now I have students who are paying almost $100 apiece and who knows how much in stress and anxiety to take the AP test simply because I have decided that those who take the AP test get an automatic 100% on the final exam in my class – and some of them have told me straight out that they’re doing it to buy the grade from me. I have taken money to fix grades, and I haven’t even gotten the profit myself. I should ask College Board for a bonus.

I have told parents that test scores matter. I have offered ways for students to improve their test scores. I have even given out those atrocious, terrible test prep books from Princeton Review and Kaplan and the like, and told people they can use them for practice in order to master the tests. Not the material: the tests. I have sat through meetings about test scores and discussed the reasons why they’re low, and ways to raise them. So has every other teacher I know, and presumably every teacher across this country.

When put to the test, the real test of understanding and caring about education, I and my fellow teachers have failed.

In his Letter From Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr., said this:

“[T]here are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

“Now, what is the difference between the two? […] Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.”

Is there any better description of how test scores make us feel? A false sense of superiority and inferiority? A segregation between the haves and the have-nots?

“Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law.”

So: students. Who, when it comes to having any real say in their own education, have been left behind.

 

I agree with Dr. King’s argument. I think he’s right, that we have a moral obligation to disobey unjust laws – and unjust policies – when we know them for what they are. And so I would like to call on my fellow educators to join me in finding ways to resist, non-violently, of course, the invasion of standardized testing in American schools. Let me quote Dr. King again:

“I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.”

Or, in this case, the highest respect for actual education. I believe that we must defend education against the tests: we should begin simply, by telling the truth, by calling the tests what they are: a sham and a fraud. Useless. A waste of time and money and resources. A drain on students and teachers and schools and the entire country, perpetuated only for the profit of a select few. Say it. Say it in public, say it to your students, say it to their parents, say it to administrators, say it to your fellow teachers, and help them to start saying it, too.

We are teachers: we must be the leaders in this fight. We won’t have to risk jail, not for refusing to pretend the tests have value. We may risk our jobs, but there are ways to counter that, particularly if we are good enough teachers to help students learn and therefore improve, with or without test scores.

If I may end by quoting a less august source, but one no less poetic and no less accurate than Dr. King:

It has to start somewhere.

It has to start sometime.

What better place than here?

What better time than now?

All Hell can’t stop us now.

 

Mmm… Marshmallow Pie!

Dusty 1 Comment

Let me start by saying: I work at a very good school. I complain about it, and I criticize it for its flaws; but it is a very good school, with excellent staff and lovely students, overall.

But the people there? They’re people. And sometimes we people say and do some goofy things.

Tonight we had an open house, because we’re a charter school in a market full of them, and so we compete for students. Our open houses include a presentation from our principal, a PowerPoint that shows a variety of nice things about the school which he explains. It’s a lot of information , some of it interesting; but the best part, at least for me, is listening to the amusing things our principal says: because English is his second language.

Tonight’s best line: “We take all students at all levels; we don’t just take the cream of the pie.”

 

This past Tuesday, two of my students came into my room during my prep period; they were carrying styrofoam bowls and spoons. “Mr. Humphrey? This … isn’t good.” The other one chimes in: “Yeah. I thought this would be great, but … It’s really making me feel bad.”

These — Honors students, in advanced classes, might I note — had made themselves a bowl of nothing  but the marshmallows from Lucky Charms. In milk.

image

Yeah. Definitely not the cream of the pie.

Marketing lol

Dusty Leave a comment

“You’re not marketers,” she said. You’re right. I’m not.

So why have I been in a training about marketing all afternoon? (Especially on Monday?? After a four-day weekend???)

“It is not your responsibility to recruit.” Right again.

So why are we discussing the best ways to recruit new students?

“What sells this school, what brings new students here, is two things: the rigorous academics, and the familial atmosphere.” Makes sense to me; that’s what brought me back to this school for my second year.

So why, rather than spending these same 90 minutes working on my rigorous academic curriculum, am I being told how to bring strangers into the school family? Why am I being treated in this rather condescending way, which somehow assumes that I don’t represent the school well? Why do you feel you have to tell me that I should speak well of the place where I work, and that I should do my job well in order to turn people into positive voices for the school rather than negative ones? Do you think I don’t know that? More importantly: do you think I do my job well so that the school can have good PR?

Hi! In case we haven’t met, let me introduce myself. I’m Dusty. I’m a high school English teacher. I work at a public charter school. If you’re not familiar with charter schools, they are just like other schools, except rather than an elected school board making decisions, there is a private entity – in this case, it is a board of directors for the corporation that runs about ten different schools in this state – and the students are drawn from all over, rather than a specific geographic area. We are non-profit, tuition-free, state-funded, and we teach the same basic curriculum, with the same accountability, as do other schools. I teach five English classes, two of them Advanced Placement, and I run a creative writing club. My students like and respect me, and so do their parents, as far as I can tell. I work very hard at what I consider the most important aspects of my job: I create a comfortable atmosphere, where students feel like they can say whatever they need to say; I drive my students to think critically and dig deeper, both into the content I teach and into their own thinking and assumptions; and I try to make language arts a vital and useful part of my students’ lives, by showing the beauty and power of great writing, and the importance of reading and thinking. And I am good at what I do.

Now let me tell you what I’m not.

I am not a salesman. Despite what the marketing consultant hired by my school said to us in that afternoon workshop, that’s what the school wants us to be. She even said why: because the charter school market in this state is flooded, is one of the most competitive in the country, because Arizona turned to “school choice” as a priority earlier than most other states that have since followed suit; the school where I work has a 15-year history, which is lengthy for a charter school. But you see, despite the belief that competition brings out the best in everyone and everything, that the free market inevitably produces the best possible results, competition between charter schools to recruit students has quite the opposite effect: rather than encourage schools to be the best schools and get more students that way, it asks teachers to become marketers – because advertising is cheaper, easier, and let’s be honest, more effective than simple excellence. Just ask Donald Trump. As part of my regular job – which is apparently at least part marketing executive – I am required to staff open houses, where I give tours to prospective student families; I am frequently asked to volunteer at community events, to hand out fliers, to put those doorknob-hangers on the houses in my neighborhood. I am asked to encourage parents to post positive reviews of the school on Yelp and GooglePlus and the like.

But I am not a salesman. I do not consider my students to be either clients or customers: that’s why I call them students. Their parents are also not clients or customers: they are the parents of my students.

I am not a parent. I do not consider my students my family, nor my fellow teachers and staff members. I like them, both students and staff, and I do what I can to help and support them as I would any group of students or staff. But I do not staff sleepovers (Seriously: my school has sleepovers. Where students stay the night at the school, with teachers supervising them. I suppose I should mention that the school is K-12, and the sleepovers tend towards the younger end of the range than the elder.), and I don’t do home visits and have dinner with students’ families, and I would not describe the school to others as having a familial atmosphere. Even though the marketing consultant wishes me to say that, and what’s more, wishes me to draw other people – she calls them “prospective clients” – into that familial atmosphere, to show them how wonderful the school is so that they will want to be a part of it, will want to join my family.

But I can’t help but wonder: at what point does it cease to be a familial atmosphere? Do people recruit strangers for their families? I suppose if I were a medieval baronet looking to arrange marriages for my offspring, then sure; but I’m not. I think the answer probably is: it ceases to be a familial atmosphere when my bosses ask me to go out and bring strangers into our family so that my family can secure more funding. I think that’s the point that I no longer feel valued for my own contributions to the family.

Now all I can think of is The Godfather. Forgive me, my Don, for speaking against the family.

I am not competitive. I do not care if the school is the besterest in the whole wide world. I do not care if the school’s reputation is shinier than anyone else’s. I don’t care at all how the school is perceived, other than I want that perception to be accurate. I do want the school to be an effective place of learning, and a safe place for our students and staff; and if other people want to know about that, then well and good. But school pride makes no sense to me, any more than does patriotism: my country didn’t make me, didn’t raise me, didn’t teach me; people did that. Those people shared a national identity with me, but they also shared a generally symmetrical and bipedal form, two ears, two eyes, and a chin, and I don’t feel any special loyalty to that, either. (Yay for chins! Chinned people unite! See how ridiculous that sounds? Now replace “chin” with “America.”) So talking up the school? Trying to enter competitions so that the school can add awards? Creating special events so that we can brag about the awesome stuff we’re doing there? Nah, and double nah. If I do awesome stuff, if I encourage my students to enter competitions or help them win the ones they enter, it is for the sake of the awesome stuff, or for the sake of the students; I couldn’t care less about whether the school’s reputation benefits.

My essential point is that I am not a capitalist. I do not believe the profit motive is actually a good way to bring out the best in people; I do not think the free market produces the best possible goods and services. I teach as well as I can, and work as hard as I can, because I believe in what I do. I believe that art is the soul of humanity, and language is our church. I believe that young people should have help to become better adults (Though I also believe that help should be offered but not imposed, and the young people have to want it and take it from me.). I believe that I can help them, and that I do a good thing when I do it. That’s why I work hard. I require a wage for my work, because I require subsistence, and my work deserves reward; but I do not work harder and improve my craft in the hope of more money; I do it in the hope of better results. I teach as well as I can because I teach: and that is important to me.

I am not a data collector. More, I am not a data masseuse. I will not put my time and effort into squeezing a few more points out of my students. The school would like me to, as they would like me to actively market the school (And please note, in terms of capitalism: they are not paying me more for my marketing, not even if I bring in new students. And that’s why the free market doesn’t produce the best possible product: because sometimes you can get results without improving your product, especially if you can get your employees to work harder for nothing.). The number-one way that the school earns its reputation, and therefore increases its recruitment numbers, is academics. And rightfully so: I’d rather be at a school known for its education than one known for its football program; there’s a reason I don’t live in Texas. But there is a right way and a wrong way to show academic success: the right way is to hire good teachers and provide them the time and support they need to teach well; to provide many opportunities for your students to succeed in various academic endeavors; and to help your students achieve academic success in their chosen endeavor. If you then want to brag about that stuff, go nuts: I’ll even join in. And in those things, my school has done a good job: the graduating class earned an average of $25,000 in scholarships last year, we had two National Merit semi-finalists this year; we have an award-winning robotics program along with award-winning essayists, artists, and a poetry recital contestant going to the state finals.

The wrong way to go about it is to have high test scores and high grades. Because the more you focus on those aspects as the means to a better reputation, the more you force teachers and students to focus on superficial data, rather than actual education. The reputation based on test scores becomes advertising, intended largely to increase our funding; and like any other advertising, it takes on the shade of propaganda: in other words, it becomes a lie. We have all of those award winning students because they were not forced to focus solely on raising their test scores. I will not participate in that superficial, specious, insidious nonsense called “teaching to the test.” I will not recommend certain of my students for the AP exams and discourage others; when asked which of my students are ready to try the AP exam, my answer is, “All of them. And all of the other students, too. And how about some people walking down the street? And their dog? And that lizard basking in the sun over there?” Because why not? Other than the hefty test fee, why shouldn’t everyone give it a shot, if they want to? What does it matter if they fail? It’s only a test, after all.

I like the school where I work. I am proud to be associated with the staff there, and happy to work with the students there. It’s the best school I’ve worked at in sixteen years as a teacher, in three states. But I wish they had a better idea of who I am, and what I do. I wish they understood me.

Isn’t that what family is for?

“Teachers” Teaching Teachers

Dusty Leave a comment

The trouble with education in America today is this: the teachers that are teaching teachers how to teach can’t teach.

I have a friend who is going through teacher training right now. (My friend has requested anonymity, and so I am going to leave out everything including gender.) I have been a teacher for a long time, and I know this friend very well, and here’s the truth: my friend is going to be an excellent teacher. My friend knows the subject matter, knows how to deal with teenagers – the intent is to teach at the high school level. Most importantly, my friend, like me, had a tumultuous personal experience in high school, and has been both a good student and a crappy student, both a model citizen and a juvenile delinquent; my friend will be able to speak with students, relate to students, understand students. My friend will teach students, and for some of those students, my friend will be their favorite teacher, the one they remember for years afterwards. Though they won’t come back to visit, just like they don’t come back to visit me. It’s okay – they don’t come back because most of the students who really bond with me do so because they are having a spectacularly miserable high school experience, the kind that beat poems and punk rock songs are written about. And if they came back to visit me, they’d have to relive what I hope was the worst time in their lives – and what I hope I helped them through. I don’t need to shake their hand to know they needed me to be who I am.

My friend will be the same. I know it. I try to be convincing and confident when we talk about the future teaching career, but my friend is also humble enough to have doubts, doubts that have taken me fifteen years to dispel, doubts I haven’t completely dispelled even now. It’s okay. Doubt combined with ideals makes us try to improve. It’s a useful tension.

You know what’s not a useful tension? Having a class that is half the duration of the usual college level course, and going almost half of it without getting any feedback from the professor. No grades, no comments, nothing for three and a half weeks, which covered ten graded assignments. No grades on any of them. That is not useful tension: that is a teacher not doing her job. And it drives me nuts, hearing about this, because I’m a slow grader, for two legitimate reasons: I don’t assign my students busy work during class, which means I never get to get grading done while my students are working on their new worksheet (Yeah, math teachers, I’m looking at you, you lazy punks); and two, I read everything my students write, and I try to give substantive feedback on everything I can. So it takes me a while. Except for two times during the year: the end of the semester, when I have to kill myself getting the grades in on time, and the beginning of the year, when I realize that my students are not familiar with what I want from them, what I am like as a grader, what is really important to me. They need to get a grade and feedback from me before they can feel comfortable doing assignments for me. So I try to grade the first serious assignment as quickly and thoroughly as I can – generally I can pound it out in a weekend, though I tell them it will never happen that quickly again. From that assignment, they learn the following: I don’t really care much about deadlines. Don’t care much about spelling, unless it is a formal essay. I don’t care at all about format, font, handwritten-versus-CG, or those little frilly edges that come from ripping pages out of a notebook. I care about what they think and how well they can express it to me. That’s what their grades are based on: and I make sure they know that before they have to turn in their second assignment.

My friend’s classes are all online. Which means there is no lecture, and there is no class prep; the teacher’s only job is to grade the work and monitor discussions. And yet the teacher – who had in her instructions dire warnings against even the thought of turning work in late – took three and a half weeks to return the first grades.

That’s not all: not by a long shot. The assignments come fast and furious: every week, the students in these classes – all of whom have degrees already, and so most of whom are already working, some full-time – need to read at least two chapters from the text, post a discussion topic that is thoughtful and thought-provoking and that cites sources; respond to at least four others students’ posts or responses to posts; and read at least 75% of the posts and replies in the discussion forums. For extra fun, the other students, eager little gold-star-seeking chipmunks that they are, try to post on every single topic and reply to every single response, sometimes at 11:00pm on the due date. And the more responses there are, the more each student has to read in order to hit the 75% of responses read mark. Thanks, guys. Way to throw your classmates under the bus in order to suck up. (But I also have to say: how American.) And each week culminates in a quiz, an essay, or a PowerPoint presentation on the week’s topic. Times two classes, times eight weeks. And even though both classes have large final projects due in the last week, which are weighted more heavily in the final grade, the discussions and responses and reading are still assigned for that last week. Nothing like giving people large projects and not giving them time to get them done!

The grades – now that my friend has gotten some (To be fair: in the other of the two classes my friend is currently taking, the professor, a former high school English teacher, responded within a week with the first set of grades, with reasonable comments. It’s only one of the two professors who can’t keep up with her own class’s pace.) – are sort of based on the content; but every assignment, my friend has lost some points not because of what the essay or presentation said – but rather because of the formatting of PowerPoint slides, or, more commonly, the lack of correct APA (That’s the American Psychological Association. Why are we using their format? Who knows?) citation formatting. This despite both professors letting some elements of APA formatting slide – the APA says, for instance, that every paper must have a title page and an abstract; neither professor has required that. But God forbid you fail to use hanging indents on your references page!!!

The textbooks are absurdly poorly written: they drag on and on and on, repeating the same information in a slightly different format, with ridiculous and unrealistic examples that don’t actually illustrate the concepts. For example, one chapter, on constructivist cognitive theory, explained the need for self-directed learners thusly: because change occurs rapidly, and certain innovations – like smartphones and green energy – have a large impact on society, it is vital that our students learn to become problem solvers. Now I agree that it is important that students become problem solvers, but the reason is because there are quite a number of problems that need solving, and the solutions will need to come from new minds that understand the problems and the possible solutions in new ways; traditional methods will not be effective. And the speed of change in society has precisely fuck-all to do with that. Thanks for the explanation, Mr. Textbook Guy. (Note: that is not a correctly formatted APA citation.)

The essays have minimum and maximum page assignments; this is common practice, I know, but as with every essay that has ever been assigned with a length requirement, the students focus first on the length, and only afterwards on the content. This aids in both creative editing and bombastic word-fluffing; not in learning content.

The short, informal discussion topics are worth 30 points and the essays are worth 35 points. That would be fine, except the essays are far more difficult and take at least three times as long to complete. For five more points. Way to prioritize. And here’s the best part: if you don’t earn a B on the final project, you cannot pass the class. That’s right: you can bust ass for seven weeks, run at 100% over 20 or so assignments; get a C on the final project – and fail the class. Really makes all that earlier effort seem worthwhile.

The quizzes, which are multiple choice and allow for multiple correct responses on one question, draw from different chapters that give different answers to the question, and require contradicting responses both marked as correct responses (I.e., the question was something like “Which are elements of how students learn?” and the responses had both “Through information processing” and “Through behavioral training,” which are opposing theories of learning – and both were correct answers.).


Here’s my point, in case I’m being unclear. Every single thing I’ve described here is terrible teaching practice. Good teachers build personal relationships with their students: these teachers are only online, and only contact their students indirectly, late, and in the vaguest possible terms. (And one of them uses Comic Sans. In multiple colors. With large amounts of capital letters and exclamation points. Reading her e-mails is like looking at Doge memes. But without the cute dog in the middle.) Content assessment should evaluate mastery of content, above all else if not to the exclusion of all else. Focusing on the minutiae like deadlines and formatting ruins the actual instruction of content. It’s fine to teach study habits that way, but not actual subject matter. Tests should never be tricky or obtuse, and the content resources should be clear and easy to understand, no matter how complex the subject – in fact, the more complex the subject, the easier the text should be to read.

And these are the people who are teaching new teachers how to teach.

My only hope is that the people in the class, including my friend, will learn nothing from these people. The last thing we need is a bunch of new teachers who don’t talk to their students, who give warnings but not grades, who give their students failing grades because they didn’t use one-inch margins and twelve-point font, and fail to help their students learn what they actually need to know.

Martin Luther King said that we have an obligation to disobey unjust and immoral laws. I would like to add that we have an obligation to ignore teachers who model bad teaching.

Grateful

Dusty 2 Comments

(Note: this was mostly written Monday.)

Yesterday I was feeling down. All right, I admit it: I was feeling pissy. I have to go back to work today, after a two-week vacation, part of which was spent visiting my father’s family in San Diego. And as an introvert, I do mean “spent:” it costs me energy and will to go a-visitin’, to put on my happy face first thing in the morning (because I was staying with my aunt and uncle, who are lovely people – but unfortunately early risers, at least my uncle, who was up with or before me every morning) and then keep it there all day, even when I am enjoying myself, as I did on this trip. But the days after a trip like that are precious layers of rest in which I can wrap myself, like armor, against the day I have to go back to being around people (No, my wife and pets don’t count: being with them is restful, as I do not ever have to put on an appearance or affect. And I am supremely grateful that that should be so.). And today’s the day, so yesterday was my last day of resting: hence, pissy. My rest-armor still feels thin.

Plus, today isn’t going to be a good day of work. I frequently enjoy my job, more frequently don’t mind it too much, and sometimes can’t stand it: today is going to be one of those last. My current employer takes the first day of the new semester as a chance for professional development, which they do like the corporation they are: all of the employees at the various sites all have to converge at a single school – luckily, it’s mine; half of the schools are in Phoenix, and those poor bastards have to start their morning with a three-hour commute in order to get in on this little hootenanny – and we start with a motivational speech from our CEO, a polished politician who has probably never taught a day in his life; then a team-building exercise generally involving random groups (for the last two I have been grouped with my boss, who’s a nice guy, but – yikes!) and competition and office supplies: we have built wind-driven vehicles out of pencils and paper and aluminum cans; we have had to open sealed envelopes and break apart chains of paper clips using nothing but a single pencil per team member. Then we will have “breakout sessions,” which are individual seminars on teaching methods, none of which I will ever, ever use. Then a “networking lunch,” and yes, it actually says that on the schedule of events; followed by another “breakout session” and then a final group discussion of the importance of what we do, especially what we have done here today, and the granting of awards which I will never win (My data is insufficiently polished.). It is a complete waste of time. Part of me is happy that I don’t have students to deal with – but more of me realizes that dealing with students is actually what I do, and I do it well and it is better that it be done; therefore any day that is spent without students, and also not spent on preparing for students, is wasted time. Today will be wasted time. I suppose it’s possible that I will find something useful in one of these meetings, but in fifteen years of being professionally developed, that has rarely been true; I’m not holding out much hope for today.

And the last thing is this: I’m dreading Tuesday, too – the return of students. Not because I don’t like my students; I do, most of the time, and some of them all of the time. Not because it’s going to be a terribly hard day of teaching: we’ll mostly go over old work and start orienting ourselves for the new semester, which is more big picture stuff, less actual sifting through the ash for things that survived the fire (Because that’s what I do: the searing heat of modern life has destroyed much of the literature I would have taught fifty years ago, made it impossible for young people today to read and appreciate and gain from, along with the understanding of the importance of the skills centered around that literature, namely reading and writing and thinking.); I’m dreading Tuesday because of grades. Two and a half weeks ago, I gave my students final exams, and collected final projects, and then I did the thing I hate most about teaching: I assigned grades. I passed a final judgment on them, categorized and evaluated them – emphasis on the “value,” in our current view of school as a churn that brings the cream to the top and curdles what’s left, a process in which grades are the vital element, the stick that I thrust up and down and swirl around through them, beating them until they convert from liquid to solid and start turning sour. And now I will have to see them again. I know several of them are going to be upset, generally because that 90% slipped down to an 89%, and their letter went from A to B. And they’re going to want to know why. Oh, I’ll be able to tell them; but it will be upsetting for them to know how they failed to achieve their goal of straight As, to know that they couldn’t quite or didn’t quite muster enough wherewithal to accomplish their best result. They will feel defeated and futile. They will also blame me, though they may not say it, and it will strain our working relationship. And as for me, I will be unable to convince them that grades are meaningless, that nobody should pay attention to them ever, least of all the students who get them. I wish I could convince them of that. I do try. But then, because it is my job, I have to make myself a hypocrite, by assigning grades, by placing them into arbitrary categories which have actual consequences in their real lives, and I have to try to do that in a logical manner, as contradictory as that sounds. Then I have to face them with the result, and admit that I am not right when I say that grades don’t matter. Even though I should be.

So yeah, not a good week ahead of me. And it made my mood go black and jagged Sunday afternoon – despite the fact that I saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens earlier on Sunday, and it was awesome. But work, and grades, and breakouts that are a lot more like imprisonings.

But then two things happened last night. One was this: Toni and I watched an episode of Inside Man, a show created by and starring Morgan Spurlock, our favorite documentary filmmaker – Supersize Me quite literally changed our lives, and we’ve watched everything he’s done since then – about immigration. And in the show, Spurlock tries to go into the lives of people involved in a particular issue; in this case, he went and picked oranges with the migrant workers, visited their homes, met their families.

I saw people who work ten hours or more a day, hauling 90-pound bags of oranges up and down 20-foot ladders that aren’t really propped on anything, just sort of leaned against a tree’s leafy boughs and then driven down by the picker’s weight until, hopefully, a branch catches and holds it; they dump these bags into enormous tubs which must hold a half a ton of oranges: a tub for which they are paid 95 cents. On a good day they fill ten tubs – which takes ten-plus bags of oranges per tub — and make a little more than minimum wage. A family of six, with two working parents, lived on around $25,000 a year – and that’s without any social services, as they are illegal immigrants and therefore have no access to health care or food stamps or any other government programs that require a social security card, which they can’t get. The father of the family had open-heart surgery last year, and was back in the orange groves six weeks later, because he doesn’t get disability or sick leave or unemployment, and now he had a hospital bill to pay along with feeding his family. Hey: at least they pay taxes.

And I realized: my god, my job is easy. Well, okay – no, it isn’t; it requires a tremendous amount of knowledge and preparation and dedication and patience and energy to do it, and even more to do it well, which I think I do. But it certainly isn’t back-breaking. It won’t cripple me before I’m fifty, as farm labor will. I won’t say I make a decent living, because I don’t think what I’m paid is decent; but it isn’t obscene, which is what I would call farm labor wages in this day and age. I don’t live my life in fear of being discovered, because any discovery by authorities – anything, a traffic stop, an accident, any official report of any kind – would lead to jail and deportation.

It made my crappy Monday seem a whole lot less onerous. Still unpleasant, but no more than that.

The second thing that happened was this: my mother called and told me that my uncle is seriously ill. Maybe dying. And it’s a cliché, but – how can you not think of the good things in your life when you hear that someone else is about to lose everything? Okay: I have a job that drives me crazy, and a vocation on top of that that frequently leaves me feeling frustrated and insignificant; but I’m not dying. I have years and decades ahead of me to solve the problems that face me now. And even if I never solve them, I have a lovely and pleasant life: I have a wife who is my soulmate, who is my apotheosis of beauty and of kindness, and who makes me laugh all the time; I have pets that love me unconditionally; I live in a beautiful city, where the sun shines almost every day, on rocks inscribed with poems. I have all of my senses, and I can hear music and see art and taste coffee and smell perfume and feel my new warm socks on my feet. I have all of this, and I’m mad because – what? Because I’m going to be bored? People who don’t understand what I do will presume to teach me how to do it better? Because I can’t sit at home for several hours, as I’ve been able to do for most of the past two weeks?

So rather than coming on here and ranting about the irritations and frustrations of teaching, and of working for a corporation with corporate-style management, and of the state of education today (And let me break the narrative thread here and say: it’s Tuesday now, since I didn’t get this piece finished yesterday morning, and after a full day of professional development on Data-Driven Instruction, Toni and I watched the next episode of Inside Man: which was about education. So believe me when I say I have some ranting to do.), I would like to say this: I am grateful. I don’t want to say thankful, as most of the things I have that make me happy are not due to another person’s actions, and of course I believe in neither God nor fate; though I will say I am thankful for those people who did influence me: I am thankful to Stephen King and John Steinbeck, Edgar Allan Poe and Piers Anthony, Robert Frost and William Shakespeare and James Baldwin and Virginia Woolf and all the rest, for writing and publishing their work; I am thankful to Rocco MacDougall and Nick Roberts for teaching what their hearts and minds told them to teach; I am thankful to my parents for raising me to be a thinking person and a compassionate person; I am thankful most of all to Toni for asking me if I wanted gum, and for actually coming when I invited her to my vampire-themed LARPing session: most people would not have done so. I am very thankful that she did.

But beyond that, I am, if not thankful, grateful: a word that comes from gratus, the Latin for “pleasing.” I am pleased: pleased with who I am, and where I am, and what I am. The life around me fills me with pleasure, today, and yesterday, and tomorrow. Life is good, and I have it still.

Now let’s get to work.

Out With The Old, In With The New. Well, Maybe.

Dusty Leave a comment

Toni and I just got SlingTV a month ago, and for the first time in two years, we can watch HGTV. At last.

First, let me just say that this “a la carte TV” thing is starting to work out. We first killed our cable (though at that time it was Dish) in 2006, because we had been watching too much and paying far too much for the privilege. For two years, we got all of our news from the internet, and watched DVDs. It was good, for a time; this was when Blockbuster was still renting movies, and we had a store in our town, and they had their mail-order service working; so we would get DVDs of interesting movies in the mail, and then we would go and trade them in at the store for a free rental of another interesting movie. We watched some TV shows that way, too – Deadwood, if I recall, and The Sopranos, and the first season of Dexter. It was tough to manage the TV shows, though, because you only got them one disc at a time, and you had to space them well in the queue of discs you wanted to rent so that you could get the next one when you wanted it, but not be inundated with show discs.

But then Blockbuster went bankrupt, and the store in our town closed, and the mail-order service folded soon after; the go-to entertainment activity of my youth went away, to be replaced by “Netflix and chill.” (I have only recently discovered that this is the slang for “Come over and let’s have sex.” Back in my day, we just said “Come over and let’s have sex.”) We looked into cable again, because we had Comcast for internet, and we decided to get regular broadcast television again. It was nice, to go back to watching actual shows as they were broadcast instead of months or years after they had ended, though our movie consumption went down again as we didn’t have to fill up a queue with movies that we thought we might want to watch; on the plus side, we stopped watching so many bad movies. Plus we had HGTV, and Animal Planet, and Bravo and AMC; we got to watch The Dog Whisperer, and Millionaire Matchmaker, and The Amazing Race – and our beloved House Hunters. This period ended when Comcast just got too expensive for the package we wanted: it became our highest bill, and we just weren’t watching enough TV to justify it.

But we had heard of Hulu, and Amazon had TV now, and of course there was Netflix, that flimsy cover for teenage hormones. We had just bought a Playstation 3, and we decided we’d try out streaming all of our TV and movies. The price was wonderful, and the convenience, as well; there was also a Redbox, now, that we could walk to when our streaming TV had nothing worth watching – which frequently happened, as they didn’t have a lot of good stuff on there, none of the premium channel shows we had been watching on cable, no Nurse Jackie, no Shameless. But we knew we would be moving, and we didn’t want to get caught up in contracts.

So we moved, and because Comcast didn’t cover Tucson, we had to change internet providers; fortunately – I guess it was fortunate – Comcast had a sister company, another tentacle of its media juggernaut beast-parent company, that ran the cable business in southern Arizona. So we went to Cox and signed up for internet service – and they offered us a bundle with TV, for the same price. Only the basic channels, but with HBO and Starz, free for a year. Sure, we said, free TV? Why not? Well, because the basic service had about two channels that weren’t home shopping, religious, or local access, and those two channnels were generally filled with shows we didn’t much want to watch. And we still had the Playstation and subscriptions to Hulu and Amazon – we would have kept the Amazon Prime regardless, as it gave us free shipping on our frequent Amazon orders. Plus they had Downton Abbey and Sons of Anarchy.

But of course, Cox jacked up the price at the end of our free year of TV bundling (That’s what they used to call sex back when the Puritans had cable), and so we shut them off and went back to streaming. And now, after two years without HGTV or the Food Network, we found SlingTV, and signed up for a three months’ subscription which got us a free Roku. Now, once more, we can watch House Hunters. And see broadcast news on CNN, and even ESPN, if I ever decide to follow basketball again.

All of which is not the topic I meant to discuss. (Don’t worry; this will all come together in the end. Which is what they used to call sex back in the 60’s.) I was going to use House Hunters to introduce the conflict I am interested in: the tension between tradition and progress. So let me get to that. (That was how they asked for sex in the 70’s. At least that’s how Shaft did it. And his woman understands him, even if no one else does.)

House Hunters, if you are not a devotee, shows people, usually a couple, who are looking for a new home. The show and its spin-offs span the globe, though the majority are in the US; they have people looking to rent $500-a-month apartments, and to buy $5 million islands. There is no host, just a camera crew and some voiceovers and graphics added later, and the pattern is always the same: the realtor shows the client three places, and the client tours them, complains incessantly about minor deviations from perfection, and then makes a choice, first eliminating one and then picking between the other two. The last minute of the half-hour program shows them after a few days or months living in their new home and talking about how happy they are with their purchase. It’s a great show, and it will never run out of episodes, because there will always be people looking to buy homes and be on TV, and the only overhead is the camera crews (I presume there are several working all at once, as they pump out episodes at an amazing rate; you can watch two of these a night and never see a repeat.) and the one woman’s voiceover salary. No host, no script, no studio, nothing but homes. And carping clients.

The inevitable tension on the show comes from the different wish lists of the people buying the home; I presume the show prefers couples so they can have that drama, because they always play it up. And the conflict is almost always the same: he wants modern/contemporary, clean lines and open spaces, and she wants traditional, with historical charm and cozy comfort. He wants it to be move-in ready, and she wants a fixer-upper, or at least some projects, so she can put her stamp on it, make it her own.

Since we’ve been watching this show at least once a day since we got the Roku, I’ve been thinking about this conflict a fair amount. And it occurred to me that it related to the question a friend of mine posed after the last blog I wrote about education – You Have Been Weighed, You Have Been Measured – which was this: “Trend v. tradition. The powers that be seem to thrive on pushing us deeper and deeper into proficiencies and standards, yet they cling to an archaic grading system of A-F? Once the dust settles from all the rubric scores we then assign a letter grade??? What gives?”

Why is that? Why is there a strain between conservative and progressive, between clinging to the past and reaching for the future?

I have at least something of an answer. (Thanks, HGTV.) Though I’ll have to stretch a bit to make it suit the actual question about education. Here goes.

When we are trying to do something that will last, like buy a home or teach a class, we look back to the experiences we have had ourselves: we buy homes based on the ones we lived in, we teach based on the way we learned. This probably goes for everything: I write the way I do because of the authors I have read; Toni paints the way she does because of the art she has seen. We raise Sammy the way we have because of our experiences with Charlie, and, I would assume, people raise their human children using their own parents as a model.

But not everything we have experienced is positive, and so we use our past experiences as both examples and warnings, things to do and things not to do. If I were to have children, my children would read the same way my parents had me read: they gave me the best children’s books in the world, Harold and the Purple Crayon and Where the Wild Things Are and of course Dr. Seuss, Green Eggs and Ham and The Fox in Socks and The King’s Stilts. My mother read me the books she had loved as a child, like The Land of the Lost and Uncle Wiggily and Freddy the Pig. When I was past that stage, my father read stories to the entire family: Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe and J.R.R. Tolkien. My kids would have that same experience, with the addition of books that are more recent but also awesome – my kids would read Harry Potter. But on the other hand: my parents gave me the opportunity to participate in the classic team sports, soccer and baseball – which I absolutely loathed. So my child would not suffer through that experience. My child would do something more awesome, like rockclimbing or kayaking or hiking or martial arts. (My parents did put me in martial arts, which I liked but was no good at, so it didn’t last long.) Or fencing and sailing. I’d like to make my child into a pirate. But that’s not the point.

The point is that we try to keep the things we like, and replace the things we don’t like. I think it telling but not surprising that this plays out along gender lines on House Hunters: traditionally speaking, women have the role of nesters, seeking to make things comfortable and welcoming; hence traditional and cozy and charming. Men traditionally seek to build things and make things bigger and better and newer, to conquer new heights and expand into new territory, partly for the glory and partly to improve their family’s situation. And so, when looking for a home, men seek modern things, things that are new and don’t need to be patched up, things that require little maintenance – because they have to go out there and get to work bringing home the bacon, hunting down a mastodon, subjugating the neighboring tribes. You know – man stuff. And of course this isn’t always the way it breaks down: I hate modern and contemporary styles, and while Toni also dislikes the coldness of modern homes, she does like to have as little maintenance as possible: when we are watching someone coo over their enormous bathroom with its walk-in shower, Toni’s inevitable thought and frequent comment is “Do you know how long it would take to clean that?” There are sometimes couples that agree, or with the reversed preferences; because traditional gender roles are sometimes discarded for something more new, something that works better than what was done in the past.

So that explains both House Hunters and a la carte television, which allows us to watch the shows we’ve liked for years, and also try new things like Mozart in the Jungle and Orange is the New Black, which never appeared on broadcast television. But does it answer the original question?

I think it does. I think people teach based on the way they learned, and they keep what they liked and they try to replace what they didn’t. So those of us who didn’t like handwriting instruction embrace word processing, and those who write a lovely script bewail the demise of cursive. People who have fond memories of running track or making it to the state championships in softball argue that sports are an integral part of schooling, and people who eschewed jocks and embraced the arts consider music and drama and painting to be the linchpin of education. And even in the classroom: my favorite teachers used to discuss the subject matter at length; they would joke with us and tell stories. There were very few worksheets and not a lot of group work – I hated group work. I hated having to be teamed up with people I couldn’t stand, and I hated doing all the work for them. I didn’t mind doing all the work, but I hated the freeloaders getting a grade that I earned them, that they couldn’t have gotten without me – because it was unjust, and even worse, the pricks were never grateful enough to stop picking on me.

So what does my classroom look like? It’s fun; we discuss and tell stories; I love my subject and I show that to my students. And there is never, ever, any groupwork, and there are only worksheets when I’m angry and want to punish them. Other than vocabulary. I loved vocabulary. And silent reading, though that doesn’t work very well, since my students don’t really love to read.

This is not merely an emotional reaction to our own childhood (though I think the power of that should never be discounted): there is logic in keeping what works and replacing what doesn’t. The only question remaining, and it’s a difficult one with education, is – how do you decide what works? And when something doesn’t, how do you get rid of it? Because letter grades, as I argued before, don’t work: they really don’t work when, as my friend pointed out, we use more modern assessment methods, like rubrics and working portfolios and the like, which clash with the overly simplistic letter grades.

The answer, I think, is that those things stay because the people making the decisions like them, and think they work just fine. Because most of the people in charge are the ones who won their spots on top of the heap because they work well within the current system, the same one they came up through. When our current politicians and superintendents were in school, they were popular; they were elected to class office; they had great GPAs because they wrote neat papers and did well on multiple-choice tests. They were proud of their A’s, and they remember fondly how happy their parents were when they got that report card at the end of the semester, how they called Grandma to brag, and posted the grade printout on the fridge with a magnet. (This also describes the majority of teachers, by the way.) Those people think that system works beautifully, and so long as it continues to produce people just like them, and reward those people for doing those specific things well, then they will continue to believe the system works well. And as long as the system puts people like that into positions of authority, they will keep making the same decisions; and as long as people keep thinking that certain things have to be the way they’ve always been – as long as we keep telling our students, and they keep believing, that grades are a valid means of figuring out how well or how poorly one is doing in a class, and as long as we keep thinking of an A as a reward and an F as a punishment, and telling our students that they have to do the work in order to get the grade, the system will remain in place. I really don’t think the commercial education industry (which is the other major driving force behind changes in education, though that is only partly for the sake of improving what doesn’t work, with the other half coming from what is most profitable) cares at all about letter grades. But my students’ parents certainly do. So here we are.

And here I am. Facing the truth: that I don’t want either a traditional Victorian or a modern loft: I want a castle. On top of the Cliffs of Insanity, with a pirate ship docked below. I don’t want the past, or the future – I want the fantastic. I want the epic. I want the legendary.

I’m just not sure where to find it.

You Have Been Weighed, You Have Been Measured.

Dusty 3 Comments

I spent a large part of last weekend grading. Not unusual, really; I’m a teacher. I generally spend part of every weekend grading, along with every free moment in between classes during the school day (and the former because there aren’t many of the latter, between teaching and planning and corresponding); and that’s even after my student count was cut in half when I changed from the comprehensive public school to the STEM charter school where I am now. Grading is something I have ranted and raved about far too often in the past; because it is, quite simply, the worst thing about teaching. Well, maybe the second worst thing: being treated like a criminal is no frosty chocolate milkshake.

But enough of ranting about grades: I need to be more positive. I need to spend less time being angry, and more time trying to see the light and share the light. I need to make more jokes. I need to offer solutions instead of pointing out problems, especially problems that everyone already knows about. The time has come to try to fix the problem. Today, I wish to share my plan: how to replace grades with a system that would actually work.

A brief summation of the many, many rants: The problem with grades is that they summarize what should be expanded upon. A student is a person, a complete person; not an A or a B or an F. Because grades are only summaries, everything that matters is lost: character, personality, the challenges and obstacles one faces and overcomes – none of these are apparent in a grade. The grade doesn’t even clarify positive traits: was it earned through natural intelligence and aptitude for the subject? Through grueling hard work? Through charm and sly manipulation? It isn’t clear: but this answer is terribly important, because the decisions we make based on grades are intended to be based on these actual qualities. If you want to hire an applicant for a job, or accept a student into your college, you want to know how they got A’s: was it work or talent? Or charm?

In other words: was the applicant in Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, or Slytherin? Or perhaps they had the courage to overcome great personal difficulty, earning a high grade by fighting for it, the way a Gryffindor should?

People need to know these things. But we don’t do that. Because all they know is this: B+ in Language Arts. A- in Math. C in Economics. A in Physics. And because I don’t teach at Hogwarts. Which is too bad: I’d be an awesome wizard teacher.

This lack of useful information means that grades are not doing their intended job. I would give grades an F. (Now imagine if all I said in this whole piece was “Grades get an F.”) But I’d also include a note that it isn’t really their fault; we just ask too much of their limited abilities. Grades shouldn’t be graded, really; they’re not up to the work we are demanding. They are incapable. Really, they should be on an IEP or a 504; they need extra support.

Man, there’s just nothing like a SPED joke.

But the reality is, we make those decisions that matter — about hiring, about college entrance — the way they should be made; and in every case, grades are not discounted, but they are negotiable. You can get into any college, and you can, I think, get any job you want, with poor grades; it’s just a matter of what else you can do to show your ability and character, and what explanation you can give for the grades.

So why are grades given such weight? Why is it so ingrained in us to seek grades, to give grades, to look for grades as the answer to our questions – how many stars did this book get? Did this movie get two thumb’s up, or only one? Did you get an A- on that test, or only a B+? (Please note that the difference between those grades is exactly one percent. Where else does one percent matter to us quite so much as the line between 89 and 90? I mean, other than milk, of course.) It’s because grades are symbols. We like symbols. We like attaching additional meaning to things that don’t have it intrinsically; this is why we salute and pledge allegiance to the flag, rather than to our actual country or its leaders. We actually enjoy reinterpreting symbols to mean what we want them to mean, completely apart from what the symbols originally meant; this is why Republican Jesus exists.

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The problem is that we very often reinterpret and reinterpret symbols until – we forget what they actually stood for. Kind of like the decorations on a red Starbucks cup. Grades are only symbols representing a student’s work/aptitude/determination; but we have forgotten the actual matter represented, instead focusing solely on the symbol itself: parents are happy, students are happy, schools are happy, the President is happy, as long as students are getting A’s, because each of us takes that grade to mean exactly what we want it to mean. As a teacher, I take my students’ good grades as evidence that I taught well, and they “got it” – frequently, I think, despite their lack of ability. Go me. I have no doubt that my students take their good grades as representative of their own hard work, frequently despite poor teaching. Their parents take them to represent good parenting, and possibly an early retirement with little Syzygy and her brother Ermingarde  footing the bill. We don’t really care how we get the good grade as long as we get the good grade – but that’s the only thing about an A that actually matters: how did you get it? Grades conceal that.

Okay, so not a brief summation.

Let me try again: At the end of a time of learning, a student should be told whether or not they were successful. (though I would argue that they already know; but it is true that we learn to judge these things by having our own judgments confirmed by experts; it is also true that there are a few folk in the world who think they’re much smarter than they are.) The student should be aware of strengths and weaknesses, and especially where they showed improvement and what future potential this area of education holds for them, and they for it. A letter grade simply cannot carry all of that information.

A better system is narrative evaluations. At the end of the semester, the end of the class, the teacher writes up a paragraph or so explaining what each student in the class did well or did poorly: “Odwalla does very well on tests, but listening to her speak in class is like hearing someone bash one of those ‘The cow goes MOOO!’ toys with a sharp rock.” These allow instructors to go into more detail regarding a student’s strengths and weaknesses, their successes and failures. Switching to these would be a real improvement, in part because it would force teachers to get to know their students better, and would thus (it is to be hoped) force schools to keep class sizes low enough to make it possible for teachers to do this job how it should be done.

Here we see one of the problems with grades: it is a problem with schools. The fact that teachers can’t teach 40 students in a class didn’t stop us from putting 40 students in a class. We are not willing to do what it takes to make education work. Which means this endeavor is doomed unless we re-form society, as well.

I’m working on that. My own Republic. Needs a new name, though – that one’s been taken.

But for now, let’s try to deal with the present. Going to narrative evaluations would not change the way people think about grades: students and parents – and probably admissions officers and employers – would scour through the evaluations looking for buzzwords, and then translate the evaluation into a letter grade. I write the equivalent of narrative evaluations on student essays, telling them everything I can about what they did well and where they need to improve; and every time I hand back a paper, students run their eyes over the margins, looking for a letter or a percentage standing alone, like wolves searching for yak calves (Can those be called “yaklings?” Actually, can my students be called yaklings? Or yaklets?)

Mama yak and two yaklets.

that wandered away from the herd; when they don’t find one, they turn on me. “What did I get on this?” they cry. If narrative evaluations came only at the end of the class, parents and students would go back through and do the math, adding up grades and percentages on individual assignments, and then they would report that in some way, posting it on Facebook for their own satisfaction, and making sure that the grade percentage got into the application letter for the college or was dropped casually in the interview. We could try to do narratives for every assignment, but not only would the workload become prohibitive, not every assignment deserves a narrative evaluation: if I give a three-question multiple-choice pop quiz, what could I write in the narrative? “Helsinki got all of the answers right, but she needs to work on the way she circles the letters of the correct answers. Those ‘circles’ are at best ovoid, and one of them wasn’t even closed.” I guarantee you, as well, that plenty of teachers – every single math teacher, for one – would write narrative evaluations that looked like this: “You got a B. 85% on tests and 84% on homework. Good job.”

We can’t simply replace grades with a longer grade. We need to change the way we think about evaluating students and putting that information before those who need to know it. Like I said: we need to remake society entirely.

So, ignoring for now all of the societal changes we would need to make in order to get to the schools that I think we should have, let me describe how student evaluation should work.

One of the constant threads in the mad tangle that is education is the idea that students should do the work, rather than teachers. Modern pedagogical theory (which will henceforth be known as “edutainment,” first because it fits their “Make the ‘customers’ [the students and their parents] happy!” philosophy, and second because those yak-butts don’t even merit a good nickname) takes this too far, as edutainment does with everything, saying that teachers should guide the students to creating their own knowledge rather than transmitting information to them; this becomes a large problem that will receive its own essay. But the essential concept is correct: students should build their own knowledge. I think that part of knowledge building is the awareness of your progress. Not a psychic vision of a loading bar that reads “Chemistry – 51% complete,” but the ability to judge, or at least to ascertain, where you are sufficient and where not, and what you can do with that.

So let’s have students do that. What’s the best way to know if you’re ready to move on to the next stage, to go from Spanish 2 to Spanish 3? It’s to go from Spanish 2 to Spanish 3. It is to move on to the next stage, where you will succeed or fail. It is to find the place of your competence and your struggle, and try to advance that place further along the continuum.

You gotta set the difficulty to Hard to know if you can win the game on Hard.

Why should teachers be the arbitrators of advancement? The trouble with me as the gatekeeper is that I don’t know everything about my students, not even within my own subject: if a student does poorly in my class, was it because of the subject and the student’s aptitude within it? Was it because the student doesn’t get along with me, didn’t like me, didn’t want to do the work I assigned? Was it because of entirely external struggles that happened to coincide with my class? I don’t know. You know who knows? The students know.

So let’s have the students decide for themselves. Just think how satisfying it would be to have some precocious, arrogant teenager tell you “I don’t need this class, I already learned this,” and you say, “All right then, go. Get out.” And then the kid actually leaves. Oh, that would be sweet.

But of course the students will frequently be wrong. They will want to change classes because they are bored or because the teacher has weird hair. They will want to move on with their friends. Their parents will want them to advance fastest so they can WIN! They will believe they learned the subject when they only scratched the surface. In all these cases, they will move on to the next level – where they will fail. So what we need is the ability for students to go back to the previous class and try again – and for this not to have a stigma.

This means we need to eliminate the “levels” of school, the numbered grades. Students shouldn’t be segregated by age; they should be sorted by ability. I hope we all realize how ridiculous it is to put students together based on when they were born, rather than what they know and what they need to learn; just think back to your own elementary education and remember the difference between the smartest kids and the dumbest in your class. Yup. But at least you all had the same number of candles on your birthday cakes. This means we’ll need K-12 schools, with all grades in one building, so that a 10-year-old math whiz can take calculus classes with the older students while sticking with his age group for English; but frankly, I think that would be an advantage: it would certainly make it easier for parents with multiple children, who currently have to run to as many schools as they have kids, and who therefore have to miss some events, and have to make extremely awkward arrangements for transportation, care, and feeding of little Cabaret and littler Burlesque. Older siblings could look out for younger siblings at the same school – or serve as constant reminders to little brothers and sisters of what not to do. Either way is good. It would enable the staff to get to know kids and families for the long term, to build relationships with them, which would also be beneficial.

So here we are: in a K-12 school, which is no longer a K-12 school because there is no K and no 12. Students go into the classes they think they are ready for, and then go back a step if they were wrong. There would need to be a fair amount of give in the structure of the classes; the first month or so, you’d have a lot of students transferring up or down, and they shouldn’t have to be left behind when they did. There are no grades apart from marks and critiques: this answer is right, this one is wrong; this aspect of this project needs improvement. There will still be some temptation to translate those marks into letter grades, so I would recommend that the teachers try to focus on narrative evaluation here as much as possible; after all, even on a math test, would you need to know exactly what problems you got wrong if the teacher writes “You need to work on simplifying fractions” at the top of the paper? Wouldn’t that be enough to guide the student to improving what they need to improve? Perhaps not; perhaps the red pen is still necessary. Even with that, if a total percentage correct is not given (because the total percentage means nothing, of course, just like every grade) and there is no emphasis on grades as markers of success, the temptation to do one’s own math and wear the total as a medal or a scarlet F would fade away soon enough. Education would focus on learning, rather than just the empty symbols of it.

The only question left is graduation: when is a student ready for the real world, for college or jobs? And how will those colleges or employers know what the former student is capable of?

The obvious answer is that when a student finishes the sequence of classes, they are ready to graduate. But first, if we’re letting students decide, there’s going to be a fair amount of backtracking – especially when the decision is when one is ready to leave school. Are there any kids who don’t think they’re ready to go out on their own somewhere around 14 or 15? When everything, every rule, every adult, every responsibility, is stupid and pointless, and you just want to be free to live like adults do, hanging out with your friends all day, playing video games all night, eating Cheez-Its with frosting for every meal? Those kids who leave school before they are actually ready need to be able to come back, but if they are free to try, a lot of time will be wasted, a lot of awkward changes will need to be made and unmade, for no real good reason. The second problem with simply allowing students to leave when they feel they have mastered a subject is that almost no one learns all subjects at the same rate, so a student may be done with math but still need to work on English and social studies. I’m not even going to get into the issue of students who believe they will never need math, ever. We’ll leave it at this, that students may be done with some things but still need to master others; and the question is, how many subjects must they master, and to what extent, before they can leave school? We can’t leave it entirely up to them, and we can’t go entirely the other way – that students have to master EVERY subject the school offers before they may leave. Though that is tempting. I love the idea of a balding 35-year-old who just can’t get the notes right for “Hot Crossed Buns” on the recorder, but he can’t graduate UNTIL HE CAN PLAY THAT SONG!

“Welcome to Adult Recorder Education. Thank you all for obeying our dress code.”

A couple of answers: one would be internships. If a student had mastered all of the math classes, and was interested in going further with math while still working in language arts in a school setting, that student could go out and do an internship, part-time after the school day (which would be shortened to just some Language Arts classes, etc.), in a math-based field, computers or architecture or what have you. That way, the transition from school to skilled work would be essentially seamless: as the student/intern finished up classes, they would have more time to work, and would eventually just be an employee of the company where they interned. Or they could move on to college with some real-world experience and an excellent bullet point for a resume. This does presume professional work settings close by the schools, which would be an issue in more rural areas; but educational opportunities are already limited in rural areas, which is a larger problem than I am proposing to fix (But which I will address in my utopia.); the best we can offer those in the boonies might be the internet.

Another piece of the answer is that it may not be so bad: if some students figure they can leave school early, because school is stupid and stuff, and then those students slink back with their tails between their legs, it may be an effective object lesson for the rest. As well as for those students themselves: one of the best students I ever taught left school after sophomore year, and then came back at the age of eighteen to finish two years of high school. Worked harder and tried more, and did better, than anyone else.

The rest of the answer is for me to go back on what I said earlier: teachers would become the gatekeepers. I said that I can’t really know why a student has done well or badly in my class, and therefore I shouldn’t be the one to decide when a student should go on to the next level; but more importantly, I can know when a student has actually mastered the material, learned the skills necessary to succeed in my subject, even if I don’t know for sure how they did it. It still holds that students should be the ones to decide when they are ready to move on, because they should be aware of what they know and what they don’t, of what they can do and what they can’t; but when the transition in question is one entirely out of school, they should have some confirmation of their self-analysis.

So there should be a conversation. Between the students and the teachers, and anyone else involved – the prospective employer, the college admissions officer, what have you. There can be a task to prove competence, such as a senior project or a thesis with an oral examination; but I would argue the best way would be for teachers to simply get to know their students well enough to say when they were done learning what that teacher, that school, has to offer. And after that conversation, if everyone agrees, congratulations, Graduate. On to college, on to employment. And if the employer or the admissions officer can’t actually sit in on every conversation, then they should contact the teachers, or a school graduation representative – call it a counselor – and have a conversation about the conversation with someone who was in it and who knows the student. It is hard for me to accept that student application essays and teacher letters of recommendation are the best way to know if a kid is ready for college or a job; I know for damn sure that transcripts aren’t it. Maybe a conversation with a counselor wouldn’t be any better, but I think it might, provided the counselor actually knows the student and had some interest in what was best for J’oh’nn’y. Of course, all of this assumes that relationship between teacher and student, along with a teacher’s genuine ability to judge mastery of the subject, which certainly implies mastery on the part of the teacher.

But shouldn’t we be able to assume those things? Shouldn’t all schools be interested in what’s best for their students? Shouldn’t all teachers be masters of their subjects? I’ll tell you this: I could spend more time learning about my students, and I could spend more time improving my own knowledge in my subject, if I could spend less time grading papers and filling out report cards. I’m not talking about telling students what they did right and what they did wrong; I’d still need to write comments and critiques on essays, and mark answers right or wrong. I’m talking about the time I spend thinking, “Is this paper a B+? Or an A-?” I’m talking about the time I spend recording those letters into a grading database. Most of all, I’m talking about the time I spend telling students, and students’ parents and coaches and other teachers, what little Aardvark’s grades are, why they are what they are, what Aardvark can do to improve her grades, how much effect every individual assignment has on a grade, what the hypothetical grade would be if the alleged work is turned in tomorrow, and then arguing with all of those people in all of those circumstances why the grade shouldn’t be just one percent higher.

Believe me. It’s a lot of time. And all wasted.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have essays to grade. I can’t spend all my time thinking and writing. I’m a teacher, after all.

Caveat

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*world's

 

Caveat Emptor, they say. Let the buyer beware.

I want to add a caveat: Caveat Magister. Let the teacher beware.

There are a lot of problems and difficulties, even hazards, in being a teacher; someday I’ll write about all of them, and why people should — or, more likely, why you should not — go into teaching. But right now, I want to focus on only one problem. It’s tempting to say it’s the worst or the most serious, but it may not be; what it is, though, is the source of a great number of difficulties that teachers face, on a great number of fronts.

It is this: very few people understand what we do.

Please don’t add a new misunderstanding: I am not complaining “Nobody unnerSTANDS me!”; I am not feeling a black, absinthe-scented drizzle of angst slipping icily down my spine; I am not currently pouting. (All right, I’m pouting a little. But it’s because I’m hungry and yet I have to wait for my lunch to cook. Where the hell is my Star Trek replicator? Or maybe those instant food-pills they had on the Jetsons? Hell, right now I’d take the fat-making shakes from Wall-E.) The issue is not that being misunderstood makes us sad. The issue is that being misunderstood, because of the way we are misunderstood, means that our job, the task of teaching, becomes impossible, if one means to do it in any meaningful way.

The issue is this: at some point in the past fifty years (I’m looking at you, 1980’s) this country decided that all that mattered in life was income. Now, we are a democracy and a capitalist society, which means that we have always focused on money as motive: because in a free society, anyone can improve their lot in life; and in a capitalist society, one rises through wealth. Put these together, and you have a country where cash is the key to the kingdom, and here we are: in a world where we teach our children that they can be anything they want to be — and what they want to be, we tell them, is rich. But looking at our social institutions, particularly education, one sees the pervasive and controlling belief that education was good for people: good for the mind, good for the soul; not just good for the wallet. People used to fight for education; now they just fight it. College cost less, and taught more; K-12 schooling was more difficult, more challenging, more effective, more reasonable. Teachers were more respected, seen as experts, because what they offered was valuable in a larger, holistic sense — the way that religious leaders are respected, the way that doctors and law enforcement and firefighters are respected, because they offer something more than a simple exchange of goods and services for money: they give something that means something. Teachers used to be seen that way, I would argue. It is possible I am wearing rose-colored glasses.

But we certainly don’t think that way now. The predominant (though not the only) view of school is as a means to one very specific end. The progression goes like this: elementary school gets you ready for high school; high school gets you ready for college; college gets you a job. The goal is the job. We have a somewhat broader view of that end, because we want our children to have a job that is satisfying, and valuable, in addition to financially rewarding; but the crux of the biscuit is the number of zeroes in front of the decimal point at the end of the year.

My students think this, universally and uncritically. Whenever I ask them, “Why are you here?”, which I do with some regularity (Because I am fascinated by this and terrified, too), they joke that they’re here because they are forced to be (They’re not joking.). But then the serious answer, the one they think I want to hear and the one they parrot with eerily similar language, year after year, is this one. High school gets you ready for college, college gets you a job. They even have a similar cutoff of the pragmatic value of education: they all tell me that you learn skills and knowledge that are directly applicable and necessary in life until around 8th grade; then, once you know all the math and literacy you will need to get through your day, it’s all about the college-job-paycheck.

They think this because their parents think this. Their parents want them to do well, but mainly, they want them to be made ready for college, and to get into a good college, because a good college means you get a good job — a mediocre college means you get a mediocre job. Or at least, a good college means a better job.

And because the parents think this — or perhaps this is the reason the parents think this — the administration and the political system behind schools all think this. Our success is determined by our graduation rate, and inasmuch as we can follow it, the rate at which our students go on to successful (meaning well-paid) careers.

These aren’t bad goals, of course. The job you do matters, both to you and to society; and in this society, money talks. I do this job because I get paid to do it, and though there are times when I wish I could leave it, I don’t because I don’t know what I would do that I would enjoy more and get paid as much. And college was a prerequisite for doing this job. I even agree that most people get by on what they learned before 9th grade. That’s why they have so many problems spelling text messages. (Please note the meme above.)

But there’s a problem when you focus on the financial side to the exclusion of all else. When money is the only thing that talks. We see that in our national politics these days, when the wealthy get elected to represent the interests of the wealthy, and the rest of us just shuffle along behind hoping we don’t get trampled on by the sudden changes in direction. The problem in the predominance of money in education is this: when we keep our eyes on that particular prize, we blind ourselves to all else.

When elementary school is only intended to prepare one for high school, then all that matters is promotion through the grades. Parents pressure administrators, administrators pressure teachers, and students who aren’t ready get promoted, when twenty years ago, they would have been held back until they learned what they needed to learn — back when the goal was education and improvement, a goal that takes some people longer than others. Parents don’t care now if their kid is learning everything; they care if their kid gets promoted. Because elementary school isn’t what matters: high school matters. Because high school gets you into college and college gets you a good job, and nowhere in that equation does a child need to master the multiplication table. If a kid has trouble with math, well, he’ll go into a career that doesn’t need math. He’ll be a lawyer. He likes to argue. Besides, his brother is good at math. Can’t read, but he’s good at math. That one’s going to be an engineer. Probably with computers. Computers magically make something a good job, did you know? Yes: that’s why we have to have computers in school, now. Because kids need to learn the skills that are necessary in today’s economy. That’s why they’re in school.

So the children are promoted to high school. Now it’s time to get serious. Serious about grades, that is. Because the purpose of high school is to get into a good college, and so all that matters is the GPA. Sure, sure, they need to learn how to do the things they’ll do in college — and that’s the magical argument, by the way, which we all use, including me: they need to read this book because it’s the sort of thing they will do in college — but really, the focus is the grades. We trust the grades to tell us that the child is progressing properly, learning what he needs to succeed: the grades are all we need to worry about. And the same thing for the administration and the politicians, except you can replace “grades” with “test scores.”

I’ve never taught at the college level, but I have no doubt it is the same thing there: the second a child is accepted to a school, he is expected to know what his career after graduation will be — preferably down to the exact position he wants and the exact company where he wants that position, but at the least, a field of endeavor and a job class. And I am sure that everyone grumbles about the classes they are forced to take but don’t need for their career, just like they did in high school, just like they do in elementary school about the stuff they won’t need in high school or college, like learning cursive. And I am sure this myopic view of college as nothing but a series of hoops to jump through until you make lots of money has all the same deleterious effects as it does in K-12.

And what are those, exactly? What are the problems with focusing on promotion — grades — career? Only this: you learn what you set out to learn, gain what you intend to gain, from everything in life. And if all you mean to gain from school is getting out of school — then that’s all you get. I know: that’s what I got from high school. All I wanted was to be left alone. So I was left alone. It was college where I found that learning could expand my mind and make me into a person I liked more with every new thing I learned. College made me who I am. High school didn’t even make me ready for college, because I didn’t try to make it do that for me. I had friends who went to the same high school I did, who went on to far more intellectually challenging college experiences than mine, and into more — well, maybe not “challenging,” but I think probably more cognitively difficult careers than mine, and I’m sure that our high school prepared them better than it did me. Because they went there trying to do that. They focused on learning, and they learned. Garbage in, garbage out: and so with nothing.

There are other problems. The focus on promotion — grades — career moves resources and support into those areas, and not into others. If we need our students to learn more math in order to increase promotion rates, then we will focus on math, and drop art and music. Because after all, they don’t need art and music to succeed in high school or in college or in their careers. If students are having trouble in high school English, then we don’t add classes or more teachers to reduce class size: we dumb down the curriculum, restrict it to basic skill drilling. It doesn’t matter if they learn less, because as long as the curriculum focuses on easily mastered skills, they will inevitably get good grades, and that means they will get into college and we win. And thus we have Common Core, where the focus is on easily mastered skills, and which has been and continues to be pushed onto teachers so that students can get good grades and good test scores, and our graduation rates go up and our college attendance rates go up. Sure, our college graduation rates suffer; but that doesn’t matter to us here at the high school level, just as high school failure based on students coming in with below-grade reading skills doesn’t matter to the elementary schools that focused on promoting students no matter what the cost, because that is the only thing that matters to the administrators, because it is the only thing that matters to the parents, because all that matters in life is a good job with a big paycheck.

It’s not true. Of course future failure bothers teachers, but we have little control over this. I am, for the first time in sixteen years, teaching Common Core this year. Because that is what my administration told me to do, and because I now work in a school that has no tenure — because teacher’s unions are essentially non-existent in this Republican-controlled Right-to-Work state (A state of affairs that exists largely because teachers are not respected like they used to be, because all we do is give kids good grades and get them ready for college so they can get a good job, and then, when the child does eventually fail, because the entire system is broken, teachers make a handy scapegoat. And if it doesn’t sit right with your conscience to talk about teachers like they are all incompetent pinko hellspawn, because you remember your own teachers being good to you, well, you can always blame the teachers’ unions.) — and therefore I have to do what I am told if I want to continue earning a living. And so because my school focuses on grades and test scores and graduation and college acceptance to the exclusion of all else, I am told to teach a canned curriculum that focuses on improving basic skills in order to improve grades and test scores and graduation rates and college acceptance. And I do it.

And here’s what gets lost: novels. There aren’t any in my Common Core curriculum. Because the focus is on easily mastered skills, and because the tests that create the test scores do not require the completion of any full-length texts, just comprehension of short passages. Unless I change the curriculum in some way, I will not teach any full-length novels to my classes this year. No Shakespeare plays, except in excerpts. These students will not have the patience or the perseverance to finish anything that can’t be finished in one setting. I hope that they will learn it somewhere else, because they won’t learn it from me. But I know they won’t. (One quick note: I am allowed to change the curriculum. They will by god read To Kill a Mockingbird. And all of one Shakespeare play. But if I wasn’t the age that I am, with the experience that I have, and the curmudgeonly attitude, I wouldn’t change that curriculum. So what happens when a kid who wasn’t raised reading novels takes my place?)

Here’s what gets lost: our culture. I know it seems like America doesn’t have any beyond Disney and organized sports and bacon, but we do: we have Mark Twain and John Steinbeck and Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost and Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou and Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. People in this country read To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye and The Call of the Wild. Our schools have always taught those works, and that gives us something important, along with all of the wonderful gifts that come from making literature like that a part of you: it gives us something in common. It’s books like these, learned in school, for no other reason than because they are worth learning, that make us who we are and that keep us as human as we are, because they are the ones that teach us it’s a sin to kill something that doesn’t do any harm to us, and that we should stand on the edge of the cliff and catch those kids running through the rye, and that every life counts, even a dog’s. And I’m only focusing on the literature because it’s what I know, but you could do the same thing with art, with Norman Rockwell and Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock and Frederick Sackrider Remington (No — I’m not making up that middle name.); you could easily do the same thing with music, or with film.

None of these things are part of the promotion — grades — career path. All of them are our culture. And if we don’t teach any of these things in school — and we don’t, because they don’t relate to our one overriding purpose for education — then we’ll have no culture left except for organized sports and bacon. And perpetual war, of course.

Toni and I just watched The Wolf of Wall Street last night. It’s about a guy who cared about nothing but money, and did whatever it took to get as much of it as possible, and then went about living the most worthless, hollow excuse for a human life I can think of outside of serial killers and the Inquisition. And the movie focused on that, for three hours, in excruciating detail. I have never seen that many scenes with hookers in my life. It’s a true story, based on an autobiography of the same name; the reviews online of the book (which I will not be reading myself) make the guy sound just as he was portrayed in the movie: as a guy who would lie and cheat and steal as much as he had to just to get more money to put on the pile, so that he could spend it on drugs and prostitutes and midget-throwing parties at work. (Not making that up, by the way.) Who would not regret anything in his life, because, in my opinion, he lacked sufficient humanity to know regret. All he knew was money. All he cared about was money. Now, because the movie was made by Martin Scorsese, it was not actually a celebratory movie: it was an expose of the emptiness of this kind of existence. And I have never felt happier about my life and my choices than I felt while I was watching this epic debauch. I am so proud of myself and everyone who helped me to become what I am — my parents, my wife, my teachers, my culture — that I care about things other than money, that I see money only as a means of survival and not of any source of self-worth or identity definition. I am so happy to be me instead of that shit-heel who called himself “Wolf.” I hope that was Scorsese’s intent, because if so, it was a masterful piece of work that was completely successful.

But I couldn’t help but think: if my students watched this movie, they would want to be this guy. Because he made money. And if I asked them, the next day, why they were in school, they would tell me “Because I want to be like the Wolf of Wall Street.” (I’ve heard similar sentiments in the past, but using Hugh Hefner as an example, or Bill Gates.) And that scares the hell out of me.

Caveat Populus. Let all of us beware.