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Late to Work, Work Too Late

Dusty 2 Comments

I have a confession to make: I procrastinate my work.

Specifically, I procrastinate my grading. I procrastinate my paperwork, too; if I’m not the last one every year to get my self-evaluation done, I’m the runner-up. It’s almost a point of pride for me to refuse to turn in my Intent to Return paperwork until it is appallingly late; I dress it up as a sort of protest, because I hate the system — my school requires teachers in February to sign a letter of intent that says we do mean to return for the next school year, and listing the classes we would like to teach (There is also an option on there for “I would like to work for the school district, but I am willing to transfer schools” which I have never and will never check, because if anyone puts me into a middle school, I’m quitting on the spot and becoming a meter maid. Or maybe one of those guys who spin signs for tax preparers.), but then they don’t actually offer us a job, or tell us what we will be teaching, until JULY. I hate that we are supposed to commit to the school MONTHS before they have to commit to us — and in some cases, they don’t tell us the classes we are teaching until the school year starts: in 2021 I was teaching a full set of online classes, but I did not know until an administrator emailed me and asked “Hey, how do these students I have registered for your class sign into the Zoom?” ON THE FIRST DAY OF CLASSES. So yeah, the system pisses me off: but also, I do intend to return, and the people who need my signed letter — specifically my principal — are not the people who set up this obnoxious unbalanced system. So there’s no particular reason why I procrastinate signing the letter; I just do. Like with all of my paperwork. And all of my grading.

I don’t like admitting it, because I’m a teacher, and I’m supposed to set a good example for my students; I’m supposed to not only teach them that, in the real world, deadlines matter, and organization and a work ethic are important; but I’m supposed to enforce that learning by requiring them to hold to deadlines, to be organized, to develop a work ethic, so that they will be prepared for the real world. If I don’t prepare them for the real world, I’ve been told, then not only will I be setting them up for a rude awakening when they get fired from their jobs, but also I am tearing apart the foundations of our society by eliminating personal responsibility, which means that everything in this country will fall apart when this current generation gets out of school and goes into the real world.

Where have I been told this? On Twitter, of course. Where I was this morning when I should have been working.

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Please don’t get me wrong: I have a strong work ethic. I take personal responsibility for the tasks that are required of me. If anything, I take too much responsibility, and work too hard; where I could just shrug cynically and say “Hey, if those rotten little punks don’t want to read the book, then they’ll fail and they’ll deserve it,” instead I say, “Maybe I should read it to them in class, so I can explain it and make it more interesting, and they can at least understand what’s in the book and what it means, even if they aren’t reading it on their own.” Does that require more of me? It does. Not only do I have to work harder in class, then, but also it means I can’t assign quiet independent work in class, and get my grading done while my students are working; that means I have to do my grading outside of class, which inevitably means I have to do it on the weekends.

Which causes a secondary problem: because I put so much effort into my daily classes, trying to run every lesson, keep every kid involved, cover every topic with them and make the information interesting, so I can be (at least somewhat) sure that they understand and are learning, I have little energy or motivation at the end of the week to do grading. And frankly, at the end of the week of work, I think I deserve a break: and I’m right. I do deserve a break. Teaching is a hard job, and I work very hard at it. It’s important to me: I recognize the value of education, and the value of an educated populace; I think of it as my most valuable contribution to a world that has been very generous to me in my life — and also, I’m good at it. And my students need to learn, and they need to have good teachers and good adults in their lives, and I am all of those things. So while I am at school, and after school, and during my lunch breaks, and so on, I work as hard as I can to do as much as I can for my students.

The result, then, is that on many weekends, I don’t do any grading. Even though I haven’t done it over the week at school, either. Because I’m tired, and because I deserve a break, and weekends are what I get.

The result is that it takes me too long to grade.

It’s a problem. It’s a problem for a lot of reasons: first because it’s bad teaching practice. Feedback should come quickly: students (like anyone) forget in short order what they did on an assignment or how they did it; if they get the assignment back with feedback within a few days, then they can take the feedback as constructive suggestions on how to improve. But if they get the work back two weeks later, or three weeks later, or four, five, six, seven, even eight weeks later — and yes, I have done that — then it’s useless. They don’t even remember doing the assignment. I have frequently handed back a paper to a class, and had them say “What is this? Oh man — I forgot all about this.” I cringe every time. And tell myself I’ll do better: I’ll spend more time grading, less time doing nothing at school or doing other things at home. The job is important, after all.

But then when the weekend comes, I can’t bring myself to do it. And there are all of the other things that I also need to do: I need to spend time with my wife, who is my whole world; and as important as my students are, and as important as teaching is, she is more important. Much more important. Orders of magnitude more important. Plus, spending time with her makes me happy: which does have the added benefit of helping me recover from the work week, which then gives me more energy to teach as well as I can in the next week. Which is also important: and maybe more important than getting those grades done. The same goes for spending time with my pets, and also working on my house, or going to the gym. All of them are important — the gym helps reduce my stress, and will keep me healthy, which will help me live longer (certainly something that teaching will not do for me…); working on my house makes me more comfortable, and also helps increase the value of the house, which means I will be more financially secure in the future — which not only reduces my stress, it also helps to ensure that I will be able to keep this important job in this underfunded, underpaying state of Arizona.

And so on. There are always reasons to do things other than grade: and I don’t mean bullshit reasons like “I just don’t really feel like it right now,” but valid reasons, genuine excuses: other important priorities that should come first. So I put them first. And so I don’t grade.

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And then there are the feedback loops.

You see, because I know that I take too long to grade, and I give myself all the excuses I could ever want to keep allowing myself to do that, I can’t bear to make my students stick to hard grading deadlines. Even though it would be easier, because that way there would be less for me to grade. Even though it would be “teaching them about the real world and taking personal responsibility.” Even though it would make the work more meaningful when they did it, because when they come back weeks or months after an assignment was to be turned in and they complete it then, the chance that they are still able to learn from the lesson is almost nil. But I can’t do it. If I don’t stick to hard deadlines, how can I make them?

I mean, of course I could. We have unequal power in the class. I get to set their deadlines, and the consequences for missing those deadlines; and I get to decide when I complete my own work. I have the power to make these determinations.

But I can’t justify it. I can’t justify the time I take to do the grading, so I can’t justify holding my students to a short, hard deadline, and then taking weeks and weeks to give them back the grade on the assignment they turned in on time.

So I don’t hold them to deadlines. Which is how I contribute to the imminent collapse of our society, according to those Twitter pundits who told me that holding students to deadlines is critical for preparing them for the real world.

It’s also, I know, how I leave an opening for students to put themselves into a real bind. Because I don’t hold them to deadlines, and I don’t get mad and yell and get them in trouble and ruin their GPAs if they don’t get the work done for my class, I make it that much easier for them to procrastinate the work for my class. And, see, they have so many classes, and so much homework for all of them, and their math and science and history teachers all keep hard deadlines, and chew them out and shame them when they miss deadlines, and refuse to let them turn work in late, and therefore ruin their grades if they don’t get the work done — that they always choose to do the work on time for their math and science and history classes. They know they can take a little more time for Humphrey’s work. So they take it: because after a long day of sitting in classes and trying desperately to learn — and they are trying — even when it is boring, even when the teacher doesn’t communicate well, even when other things in their lives or in the classroom are distracting them, they are tired. And understandably so: it’s hard work trying to learn. Especially trying to learn complicated advanced concepts like how to write an essay. But that’s okay, they can put off Humphrey’s work; he doesn’t care.

Let me just set the record straight on that one, because it makes me mad every single time they say it.

Are you listening, kids? (Of course not.) Here it is anyway.

I care.

I care about how you act in my class. I care about whether or not you are paying attention to me. I care about whether you are looking at your phone or if you are reading. I care about whether or not you turn in the work on time. I care about your grades. I care about your test scores. I care about everything. All of it. Always. I care.

I just don’t have the energy to apply pressure on all of you, all the time. I can’t do it. I can’t make the lesson interesting and useful to all of you, while also fighting to make you listen to the lesson I have already put effort into to make it interesting and useful. I can’t stand to have to fight to make you listen to my interesting and useful lesson: you should just fucking listen. Okay? You want to talk about not caring? How about all of you little punks not caring about how much you annoy me when you don’t listen to me no matter what I do or say? Even after you say you like me and like my class? You still don’t listen, and you don’t care how much that hurts, and how frustrating that is. You make me fight you, make me make you follow the rules you know you have to follow already, and then when I ask you to follow the rules, you argue, and you fuss. So I have to fight harder.

Think of this: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, right? So if it takes a certain amount of time and effort to overcome your resistance to doing work in class any given day, and I have to be the one to overcome that resistance for you, then that means the effort put into my action to create the reaction in you that allows you to learn is just as hard for me as it is for you. So if you struggle to make yourself pay attention and try, I struggle just as hard to make you pay attention and try. The difference is, I have to struggle with 20 of you, every single period, every single day. And then once I have managed the struggle, and gotten you all to pay attention and try — then I have to teach you. And make it interesting and useful for you, so you can keep paying attention. And that takes effort, too.

So much of the time, even most of the time, I just can’t do it. I can’t put out that much effort in every class, every day, with every student. So I blow it off. I procrastinate. I just start teaching the lesson, knowing that not everyone is paying attention; hoping that somehow they will listen to me as I try to make it interesting and useful, and they will do the work themselves, and then I will be able to help them learn.

It never happens. Not with the whole class. Not with a whole unit.

So I have to let it go. And since I let it go, I can’t demand that they put out more effort than I’m willing to put out. To be clear, again: I could do that. Lots of teachers do that. The fact that I don’t do that is one of the reasons they like me. But because they like me, they feel more casual about my class, and it’s easier to blow off work for a class that is more casual, especially when the teacher is cool and doesn’t care about deadlines. (I. CARE.)

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So the students blow off deadlines, and that creates more work for me. Because I need to try to track them down to get the work completed so I can grade it; or by the time they get around to it, they don’t remember how to do it, and I have to take some time to remind them of what the assignment was. Or they blow off some assignments, which lowers their grade, and then they need to make sure other assignments are perfect so they can bring their grades back up — and that means they need to check with me about what the expectations are, and what they need to do, and if the work they have so far is good enough or how they can change it to make it better and get a better grade. Which is freaking awesome: because it means they’re learning, and they want to learn, and they want me to help them get better, and that is the whole point of all of this —

And it takes more time and energy. Which I am happy to expend on students who ask for help, especially the ones who have been struggling and have low grades because they haven’t turned anything in, which always makes me worry that they don’t understand the assignment or the content at all; when they ask for help, and I help them, and they get it, then I feel like I won. And they turn the work in, very very late, and I grade it immediately because I’m so pleased they got it done, and then I am complimentary in their feedback because I want to encourage them to keep turning in work and showing improvement.

Which, of course, just encourages them to keep turning work in late, and getting extra individual attention, and getting nice feedback and so on.

But then I’m even more tired, and so I get even less done for the class as a whole. Which makes me feel bad, like a slacker, like a bad teacher. Sometimes I get so depressed I can’t stand to work at all. But of course, I keep doing it. Because I have to. Because the students need me. Even if they never act like it.

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That’s what procrastination is.

I don’t know how or when or why we all forgot that, all got confused about it. Who told us that procrastination was being lazy? Nonsense: blowing off work entirely, never getting it done at all; sometimes that is due to laziness. (Rarely, I would argue. But sometimes.) Procrastinators do the work, we just do it late, or at the last minute, while also applying enormous pressure to ourselves mostly in the form of anxiety. So if you do the work a little at a time from Monday through Thursday, and I cram it all in on Thursday night, and we both turn the work in on Friday — or if I do all the work on Sunday and then turn the work in late on Monday — which of us has done more work? Nobody, of course, unless, as I said, you want to count the extra effort I expended on anxiety and guilt. (And maybe the extra effort you spent on organizing and managing your time and the project — but you loved doing that, and we all know it.) We all do the work. It is certainly true that waiting until the last minute frequently limits the amount of time we have to put into the work: but in my experience it does not at all limit the effort put into it. That is a separate decision, which lots of people make — and sometimes it is due to laziness, I agree. But procrastination is not lazy.

It’s prioritizing.

As I said, when I decide on Friday night that I would rather spend an evening with my wife than grade papers, that is a choice I am making based on what I think is most important: not what requires less effort. Okay, spending time with my wife does require less effort: but considering how much time I spend away from her doing work, it should be clear that I don’t always pick the easier path because it’s the easier path. I usually don’t. When I do choose to spend time with her, it is partly because I have spent all of the effort I can possibly spend, and now I need to do something that puts something good back into me: and an evening with the woman I love will do that. (Also I choose to spend time with her because she is the best and most important person in my world, and she deserves to have my time more than any of my students do.) The time I spend writing is time I could spend grading, and believe me, this is not any easier in terms of intellectual effort. I think it is more important, at least once a week, for my self-understanding and my identity. So I prioritize: I make a choice. And that choice means I have less effort and time to spend on the other tasks. I will still spend as much time and effort on them as I can: but sometimes — frequently — constantly — that effort is not my full effort. It just can’t be.

Because I have too much shit to do.

Want me to get all my work done? Reduce my student and class load, without reducing my pay (Because if I get paid less, I’ll need to go find a second job to cover my expenses, and I will not have more time.). Or even better, make all of my students do their part by having them pay attention to my lesson, to my whole lesson, every day, so I don’t have to fight to make them stay on task and learn the content. Though, to do that, you’ll need to lighten their load as well: because believe me, after being told all their lives that they need to learn everything and get good grades OR ELSE THEY WILL BE DOOMED TO A LIFE OF MISERY AND WASTE BECAUSE THEY DON’T HAVE ANY WORK ETHIC OR RESPONSIBILITY AND THEY WILL HAVE DISAPPOINTED EVERYONE AROUND THEM, they are also trying just as hard as they can: and it isn’t their fault they can’t do everything we demand of them any more than it is my fault.

We are simply demanding too much. And then calling it procrastination when everything doesn’t get done.

This is the point I want to make, and I want to make it twice. Because people on Twitter (Assuming they are people, and not malicious semi-sentient globs of slime) have repeatedly and vociferously claimed that teachers are lazy. We are not. We work as hard as any and harder than most. Of course there are lazy teachers, as there are lazy people in every group; but teaching as a profession takes all that we have, and demands even more. Students, like all children, are a bottomless hole of need: they always need something, and then they always need more. It’s fine; they are children, they’re not supposed to be self-sufficient. But there is never an end to their need. So we who provide care to children, of any kind, we have the full range of tasks required of us professionally — and then we have all those children. And all of their needs. It’s too much: and so I, like all of my colleagues, prioritize. Some of us choose to prioritize work over family, or over ourselves; some of us choose one aspect of work over others — I have colleagues who spend enormous amounts of time and energy making sure that their students are happy, even if the curriculum maybe doesn’t all get covered; I have others who make sure that the students are understanding all the work, even if that means they maybe don’t have the most fun and exciting classes; I try to make sure that my students find some interest in and affection for my subject, because I want, more than anything else, to get them to be readers: and thus lifelong learners, who will grow far beyond what I could ever impart to them. But the issue is, we all try to do all of those things, all at the same time, along with doing all the rest of our work; and it is too much to get done. So we do what we can, and procrastinate the rest, and when we finally run out of time — we say to ourselves that we’ll work on that next year.

And now let me make the same point twice: students need help. They need support. Not all of them need the same help in the same way, but all of them need something. All of them. Partly because they are children: and partly because everybody needs help; everybody, young or old, needs something. What students need more than anything else is grace. They need kindness. They need us to try to understand what each of them individually needs, and to try to provide that to them, as much as we can. We need to know where our boundaries are, when we run out of energy and the ability to give; because they can’t be expected to know how much is too much, and they will always need more than we can give. It’s fine: they are children. Children need support. And there are fortunate children who get most of what they need provided for them by their families and friends; those children don’t need much from their teachers and other caretakers. But they still need something: even if it’s only praise for a job well done, and a suggestion about where they could go next.

The other reason why students all need help and grace is because we demand too much from them. We give them limited time, limited resources, and the limited energy and support of their teachers, and expect them to accomplish — everything. Not only to learn all of the subjects which their teachers have spent our professional lives mastering, but also to learn everything else they need for adult life. And apparently — according to Twitter, at least — they need to learn it all NOW, before they get into the “real world” and discover that they are unprepared for the harsh realities of life. They need to learn to do their work, and do their best, all the time, no matter what they may have going on in their lives outside of school; because in the REAL WORLD, you don’t get to give excuses: you just get fired if you show up late or miss a day of work or miss a deadline or break the rules in any way.

Never mind that I have frequently been late turning in my work. Never mind that I have had colleagues and coworkers who show up late, or miss work, all the time. (I tend not to miss work, and I’m obsessive about being on time. But also, I let my classes get off topic at the drop of a hat, and waste all kinds of time arguing with students over silly subjects instead of pursuing curriculum. We all do the things our bosses don’t want us to do.) Never mind that I and several of my colleagues constantly disobey the dress code, or don’t clock in or out properly, or cuss in front of students, or spend time on our phones looking at social media when we’re supposed to be working. Or show up hungover to work. (I’ve never done that one, either. But I did get suspended because of things I posted online about my students. So I guess I never learned that “If you don’t have anything nice to say then don’t say anything at all” lesson in high school, huh? Must have missed that day. Probably hungover.)

No: we tell these children, who don’t know any different, don’t know any better, because they have only been in school, because we won’t let them leave, that they have no chance in life if they don’t learn everything we have to teach them RIGHT NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW. And then we give them far too much to learn, all at once. And tell them they not only have to learn all of it, but they have to get high grades, or else they are doomed, and we will be disappointed.

And then we are surprised when they procrastinate? When they blow work off sometimes? When they try to take a little bit of time and space for themselves, to do something they enjoy, after hours and days and weeks of doing work, for no tangible reward? We’re shocked when they sleep until noon on the weekends — and then we call them lazy?

How dare we?

No. Students are not lazy. They are doing their utmost to live up to our impossible standards, to our impossible expectations, even with their limited resources and their nonexistent experience, which means they have not mastered the same coping strategies that we have. They don’t know what to do other than — maybe not do some work. And then we get mad at them for not doing their work, and they feel bad, and they fear the consequences we give them right now so they can learn to avoid consequences later; and all of that adds pressure, which wears them down — and they need to take more time off, to escape from even more work. Just so they can survive.

Just like us.

The answer is: they need to work less. We all need to work less. And if we can’t, then the very least we can do for each other is, when we have the power and the opportunity — be nice. Be kind. Give someone a little grace. And take a little for yourself. Even if it looks to others like you’re procrastinating. It’s better to turn in the work too late, than to work until it is too late.

We’re all doing our best.

Follicular Analogy

Dusty Leave a comment

I have to get my hair cut.

Ugh.

I hate getting my hair cut. I don’t like spending money, or making appointments and keeping them — actually, making appointments is no problem at all; I enjoy being flexible with my time, since I have few commitments that occur at determined dates and times, and I like feeling accomplished because I did an organizing thing. But I hate keeping them. And I hate small talk, which is almost inescapable with a hair stylist; fortunately they are incredibly nice people most of the time, but that just makes me feel guilty for not wanting to chat about my day, and not having a dozen insignificant topics to draw from. Hey, what can I say? I don’t watch sports, I don’t pay attention to awards shows or The Bachelorette, I don’t go out on the town, I don’t have children. Unless you want to talk about my dogs, or the annotated edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit which I am currently reading, I don’t want to talk about whatever you want to talk about.

Is it wrong to say that I like it when I find hairstylists who don’t like talking? It feels mean. I don’t mind the ones who like talking, because they tend to carry the conversation for me, and I can react to other people talking about their kids or their sports teams or what have you. But it’s nice when I can just be left to my own thoughts. It’s rare, though, which is part of why I don’t like getting my hair cut.

I used to have the perfect system: I had very long hair when I was young.

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Me in high school with my dad
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Me in college with my iguana Carmalita. Who never kicked my ass at Gin Rummy like my father was doing in the above photo.

It was easy! I just never got my hair cut. If you look at the end of my ponytail in the second one, you can see all the split ends; but if you just don’t care about things like that, then you never have to worry about getting haircuts.

I used to get grief for the long hair, in high school when they used to call me a hippie, and in college when they used to call me Fabio; but it was worth it to avoid the haircuts. (Also, my hair was one of the things my wife noticed when she first spotted me, so it was part of the reason I found the love of my life — so there, all you long-hair-haters) But as I got older, and my hair got thinner on top, it started looking really bad when it got too long; so my perfect solution eventually stopped working.

I found another solution during the pandemic: I shaved my head.

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I shaved my beard off this last summer; I like saying that I shaved the top half of my head in 2020, and the bottom half in 2022.

That also meant I didn’t have to get a haircut for quite a while; but on the other hand, shaving it was a pain — I also don’t particularly like shaving, though for different reasons; I don’t have to worry about small talk when it’s just me with a razor. Then again, I never worry about shedding blood when I go to a hairstylist, so. — and I decided there will come a day when I will have little choice but to shave my head, and I might as well enjoy my hair while I still have it. I do recognize that I am lucky to have most of my hair at 48, and that it is mostly still my original color and texture. All of which I like.

I originally started growing my hair long not actually for the sake of growing my hair long: but because I got a terrible haircut. (This is not a good comparison, but there’s a meme about people being complimented for their maturity, and they say “Oh, thanks, it was the trauma.” I did that not long ago, with one of my students who is very mature and extremely self-aware; after I complimented them on it, I realized that it was because of the severe anxiety they have always dealt with, which makes them hyperaware of their own emotional state, and the years of therapy they have gone through because of that anxiety, which has taught them coping mechanisms. I adjusted my compliment.) It was during 8th grade, when I had been growing my hair out somewhat intentionally because my friends had long hair and liked heavy metal music, as I did; but at the end of the school year I signed up for a class trip to Italy, led by my Italian language teacher, and my mom took me to get a haircut before my passport photo. The stylist she brought me to was an Italian-American man (Not unusual in Boston, of course), and when I mentioned during my awkward small talk that I was going on a trip to Italy, the stylist said, “Oh, well, Italian girls like short hair.” And he cut all my hair off. Even worse, he poofed it up in front, which was very much the style at the time — and very much not my style, ever. I went out to the car while my mom paid, and I looked in the mirror, and I actually cried.

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I looked a little like this. Not as cool, though.

(By the way, if you’re hoping for a photo of Bad Pompadour Dusty, no such photo exists. The poof washed out of my hair, and I just had short hair in my passport photo. And a sad look in my eyes.)

So after that, I just stopped going to hairstylists. And as I said, it worked for me very well for almost twenty years. (I will also note that the last decade of those twenty years, my wife trimmed my hair for me when the split ends got too bad.) And now that I can’t do it any more, I’m a little sad; but also, I have a stylist I like a lot, and when my hair gets too long, as it is now, I make an appointment, and I go. I don’t want to, and I bitch about it — but I go.

Just like the dentist: though that didn’t work as well when I didn’t go to one during my first years of college. Now I go regularly, even though I hate it even more than getting haircuts: it’s even more money, and far more discomfort, and now somehow I am supposed to make small talk while my mouth is cranked open and filled with dental instruments and dental fingers. And sometimes, just as I dream of shaving my head permanently, maybe with lasers, so I never have to get another haircut, I dream of just pulling out all my teeth and getting dentures: so that when those teeth break, I can just order new ones without ever having to sit in one of those torturer’s chairs ever again.

This last week has been a bad week, so when I thought about this topic — when I remembered that I had an appointment this afternoon — I thought it would be nice to write about something superficial and simple, like hair, and how much I liked having long hair and how much I dislike having to get haircuts. I had been thinking about writing on an education-related topic — namely the argument I had on Twitter (The brief one; the long one is also vaguely education related, but much more bigotry-focused and education-adjacent, and that will get its own full length post, because the topic deserves it as hair does not) about how to address behavior problems in students at school. An education “pundit” named Daniel Buck — who is really just a troll who wants to make himself a name as a right-wing education pundit, and has succeeded to the extent that he’s already gotten a book published and been called in for at least one interview on Fox, where he repeated his talking points without offering a single scrap of evidence, as he is wont to do — commented about how good students prefer to be in classrooms where discipline is strictly maintained. Another person replied to his Tweet with the observation that 80% of misbehavior comes from 20% of students, and recommended expelling those students so the rest of the kids could learn and teachers could focus on teaching.

I have a lot to say about that. But I had trouble yesterday, when I generally sit down to write these posts, and then again this morning; I was much more tempted to just dash off something quick about how much I liked having long hair and how much I hate paying both money and time to get my hair cut short. It didn’t help that I went to the gym this morning — and came out to a flat tire on my bike, which made me have to walk home. I don’t mind walking, of course, and the travel either by foot or by bike is good cardio and cooldown regardless; which I definitely need because I have high blood pressure which ain’t gonna get any better the more I deal with student misbehavior (or arguments on Twitter) — but it did take longer to walk home, and at the end of it I was tired.

But somewhere on that walk, I realized: these are the same topic.

(That’s right, folks — I’ve trapped you into reading about education all this time with another long-winded analogy. Though the title of the post should have given it away. I will also note here that my first attempt at a title for this post was AnaloJollies, trying to make a funny portmanteau out of the word “analogy” that had a lighter tone to it; but seeing the word written out like that made me realize it had a whooooooole different impact based on what it looks like I would be talking about in a post titled that. I will not be writing THAT post.)

(At least not until I get my colonoscopy next summer.)

You see, the argument for expelling the 20% of students who are responsible for most misbehavior is flawed for a number of reasons. The first and most important is that the identification of those — let’s call them “troublemakers” for the sake of the argument — is fraught. Very fraught. Let’s start with the fact that the 20% responsible for 80% of misbehavior are dependent on the misbehaviors being measured: they are not the same students across the board. In other words, while 20% of students or so are responsible for 80% of tardies, and 20% of students are responsible for 80% of disrespectful defiance of teachers, those 20% of the students are not the same. It’s a Venn diagram: there is some crossover, some number of students who are mainly responsible for tardies and for defiance; but the slice is not the whole circle. So in determining which 20% of students we want to expel, we need to start by deciding which behavior is the one that deserves expulsion: and first, we need to realize that violent behavior, or drug use or sexual assault or theft or anything really severe, generally already results in expulsion; and second, we need to realize that expelling the 20% of students mainly responsible for defiance will not reduce tardies by 80%, but by some much smaller number — and so for the rest of the behaviors we don’t like.

Furthermore, identifying the behaviors that “disrupt learning” for the “good” kids is not so simple. If a student is habitually noisy, if they speak loudly and often out of turn during independent seatwork, if they ask constant irritating questions of the teacher — but also they are generally respectful of others, especially of teachers, and are never late to class or what have you — which misbehavior expulsion will catch that kid? Which expulsion net will remove the distraction of a kid who just likes to make loud noises with their mouths while they work? (This example, by the way, was brought to you by a middle school student I have been acquainted with, a straight-A student who could not be quiet for more than 30 seconds at a time. Very respectful. Very smart. Deeply fucking annoying. But I don’t think “This kid annoys the shit out of me” is reasonable grounds for expulsion, do you? Particularly not if our goal is to isolate the students who want to learn, because this kid very much wanted to learn. They just wanted to do it noisily.)

And lastly, the big issue here (Actually there are two, I’ll get to the other big issue in a sec) is the false assumption that misbehavior is static. That the 20% who are responsible for 80% of misbehaviors are always the same kids, and that once you remove them, the problem will be solved. Obviously that’s not true, simply because new students come to the school, to every school, with every new school year; but to this the supporters of 20% expulsion rates would simply say that we would need to identify the bad 20% in the new class and chuck them to the curb as quickly as possible. But even more than new students, the problem is this: nature abhors a vacuum — and so do students. If you remove a child who is disruptive of a learning environment, there will be others who will begin to act up in much the same way that the removed child did. I’ve seen it happen several times. Often the most disruptive student is intimidating to other students, who then feel free to act out when the #1 student is no longer there to intimidate them; even more often, at least in high school, students enjoy the disruption, even if they sometimes get mad about losing learning time, because school is boring, and watching a teacher get mad and a kid get in trouble is interesting. So if the #1 troublemaker vanishes, other students will likely fill in by becoming more disruptive, to break up the boredom, because then they will get the attention and even the admiration of their peers. Or, in an even more likely scenario, a student’s behavior will change over the school year: because misbehavior is not actually static, because kids act out for many reasons, very few of which are their immutable personal characteristics. Tardies are probably the best example of this: if you look at school-wide data, you will find that many tardies come from the same small group of students, who are frequently late to class because they walk slowly, or they hang out with their friends, or they avoid class for any one of a hundred reasons — but you will also find that many students are late only to one class, maybe because the two rooms are too far away from each other, or maybe because their ride to school won’t leave early enough to get them there on time. My freshman year of high school I had some obscene number of tardies — because my ride to school was my older brother, who didn’t give a shit about getting there on time. So I never got there on time. And you can see this behavior frequency change overnight, if a kid changes parent custody, or if they move farther away from school, or if there’s a sudden issue with a car, or a change in parent job status, and so on. And though it is a good example, it’s not just tardies: students often, if not usually, if not always, act out at school because of what’s going on at home. You can bet that, after you expel the troublemaking 20%, some other kid’s home life will fall apart due to divorce or a parent losing a job or some other unforeseeable circumstance, and that child will begin to act out in class.

The point is, you can expel the worst troublemakers, and you will still have trouble. Trouble is inevitable. It is school: they are children. Anybody who pretends there weren’t problems in the past exactly like the problems today is lying, or privileged. Sure, there were very few gang fights when I was in high school: but it’s not because the school expelled all the gangsters before they could start fights; it was because I went to a wealthy suburban high school where the student body was 90% White, and there were no gangs. And I can state for an absolute fact that we had the same number of students who were disruptive because they had ADHD, because I was friends with several of them; they were just undiagnosed, and frequently self-medicated with marijuana by the time they reached high school. When they were kids we called them “hyper,” and laughed at their antics in the classroom. Listen to the immortal George Carlin do his routine on being a class clown, in the 1940’s and 50’s in New York, and you will quickly recognize that young Mr. Carlin was bright, respectful — and deeply, constantly disruptive. Wouldn’t surprise me at all to hear that he had ADHD. I guarantee that Robin Williams did.

Listen closely around 7:45 when Carlin gets his audience to make one of the best group-based noises I’ve ever heard.

The other big problem here is the idea that expelling children from school is a good thing. The idea that the children you expel are deserving of expulsion — or that they are not deserving of an education. This is false, and it is a travesty. Again, while I recognize that some children are genuinely dangerous to their peers — I have been in public education for 23 years, after going through 13 years of public school myself; of course I realize that some children cannot be trusted to respect the safety or the rights of others — I expect that children who are actual threats to others will be expelled from school, and probably should be. But even those, even the worst troublemakers, even the ones who harm others: they are still children. And children both need and deserve an education. Some should not receive their education in the same place as other children; but accommodations can be made for that. Particularly now that we can offer many students the option of remote learning. Even if that weren’t an option, we should all realize that the best thing that could possibly be done for most students who have and cause trouble in school is — an education. If those students cause trouble because they are struggling, then finding a way to help them learn will eliminate the struggle and thus the misbehavior. If someone misbehaves because they are on a bad track, which may lead them to more serious issues in life, such as addiction or criminal behavior, then again, the best thing a school can do for them is help them gain an education and more positive and productive skills and knowledge. Expelling students does none of these things: it simply tells the student that they are less important and less valuable than the other students, less deserving of education and all the things that come with it; and that’s not going to help anybody get better at anything.

No: expulsion of problem students is not the answer. The answer has much more to do with all of the ideas that Mr. Buck and most right-wing edupundits find anathema: restorative justice and social services and educational supports for students in need, despite (or even because of) their disruptive behavior in class. As I have now said several times, students who are dangerous to others should be removed from a classroom of potential victims; but even there it is more useful to think of that process as isolating those students, while maintaining their status as students, as children with the right to an education, who will benefit from an education. We should remember that isolation does have negative impacts on the students who are isolated, but the basic goal of educating all members of our society is not lost with isolation, as it would be with expulsion. (I do realize, as well, that students who are expelled are given further opportunities to learn and improve; I support those systems. I’m just responding to the argument as it was presented to me: the final response was expulsion. The reason was to “save” the “good” students from having their learning “ruined” by the “bad” students.

(Here is where I bring it back to the analogy. That’s right: time to talk about cutting hair. It’s okay if you forgot.)

Expelling students to solve the problem of behavior is seeking a permanent solution to an ongoing problem. It is exactly like trying to fix one’s hair by yanking out the bad hair. In order to avoid the difficult work of handling students who misbehave, trying to find why they act as they do and then addressing the underlying issue, we simply remove the students: it’s like shaving your head to avoid having to get your hair cut. Or, I suppose, plucking out the long hairs, keeping the short ones. Though I suppose “long hair” is not the analogous problem; I should talk about hair that causes problems — you know, the hair in the cowlick, which won’t lay right no matter how you try to comb it; that one hair that curls around and tickles the inside of my ear, or pokes me in the eye. Those hairs should definitely be plucked. Doing so will solve the problem entirely. Then I can focus on the good hairs, and keeping them on track where I want them. And if any of those good hairs step out of line — I’ll pluck them, too.

Rather than seeking simple, permanent solutions to complicated problems like student misbehavior, we should think of addressing student misbehavior the way we think of maintaining hair, or working out, or doing anything that requires long term effort: the key is to build a routine. To find the right tools and resources, to recognize the roots of the issues (No pun intended), and to realize that long term, incremental changes are most likely to have positive effects. If one has high blood pressure, say, the answer is not to remove the angry blood causing the problems, as they would have in Shakespeare’s time (Which I hope we can agree was not a good system); and it is not necessarily to expunge all the causes of stress instantly and without consideration. I would have much less stress if I quit teaching: but the new situation I found myself in would cause me new problems, which would give me all new stress. If one has bad hair, one should look at one’s shampoo, one’s hair care routine, one’s hairstylist and relationship with one’s hairstylist, and try to work through all of those concerns to fix the bad hair — rather than just yanking out 20% of one’s hair and throwing it away to concentrate on the other 80%. The answer is also not to do what I did when I was young, and simply accept that bad behavior exists, like split ends, like cavities in teeth; the analogy falls apart here because an individual hair is not important, and an individual child is. But the prescription for all of these issues is the same: address the problem. Slowly. Carefully. But address it, don’t just ignore it or remove it and throw it all away.

If we want to address student misbehavior, the key is not to expel the “bad” students; it is to work, over the long haul, to turn “bad” students into “good” students. To help the problematic students to solve their problems, and to make progress instead of trouble.

Now I have to go get a haircut.

And a One, and a Two, and a Trivium, and a Quadrivium…

Dusty Leave a comment

As I am wont to do, I assigned my students an essay. As I am also wont to do, I wrote the essay myself. 

The essay topic was free choice within parameters. This was for my College Readiness class: a tangled web, that one is, since it is, first of all, not much about readying the students for college; more about readying them for the college application process, primarily the ACT – which just happens to be the standardized test used to determine the school’s success rate and overall quality rating. Which is, understandably, more important to the school than it is to the students. Also, the class has two sections, and three teachers; so I have one group only on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and the other group Thursdays and Fridays; they also have math two days a week, and “college and career counseling” on the fifth day, with the school counselor. In addition, the class is required, but it doesn’t fit into the usual categories, so the students get elective credit: making it a required elective, an amusing little oxymoron. Also, it is not required for everyone, because in theory all Juniors have to take the class – but if there happens to be a conflict with a “more important” class, such as math or science, then the student is excused from College Readiness: but if the class is a mere elective, such as life drawing, which happened to be scheduled for the same period as College Readiness this year, then the students who want to take the art class are instead forced into College Readiness.

But all that is beside the point. (Actually, it’s not, which is why I said all of it. But hold on.) The point is, I assigned my class an essay, and then gave them free choice in the topic of the essay. I love doing that, because they SUCK at picking topics. Completely terrible at it. There are some with interests of their own, and enough capacity for words to have something to say about their interests; they have a very easy time of choosing a subject and then writing about it, and good for them. But for the most part? Yikes. Free choice is the worst kind of essay.

YARN | don't make me choose, | Twilight: New Moon (2009) | Video gifs by quotes | 2605222e | 紗

So to help them out a little, I gave them a resource. My part of the CR course has two elements: first, yes, I do try to prepare them for the ACT, and the SAT if they want to take that one; college application tests are valuable and difficult, even though we make far too much of their ability to predict success, which is limited at best. But in my part of the class, we do practice the test, work on process of elimination and strategies for finding information in a reading passage, and so on. The second element is application essays: if they are planning on going to college, then next year, when they are Seniors, they will need to write an application essay; so we work on that now, in Junior year, in this class. I use the Common App, a website that creates a single set of application materials which the students can use to apply to any number of colleges around the world; it’s a useful efficiency, and also a good generic application format, for practice. For those who aren’t going to college or who aren’t sure, I see these essays as simply good writing practice: also, I want them to get better at speaking well of themselves, and advocating for themselves, which are both useful skills in all walks of life, and both things most teenagers suck at, because they think talking about themselves is cringey, and bragging about themselves is appallingly arrogant. So we practice essays.

For the first three, I insist they choose a topic from the Common App, which has seven generic topics – things like “What is a problem you overcame and how did you learn from it?” “What is a part of your background or identity that isn’t on your application, but which you think we should know?” – but then for this last one, I show them the University of Chicago supplemental questions.

You see, U. Chicago has, for the last several years, offered a specific question as part of their application. The first question they ask is of the usual type: How does the University of Chicago, as you know it now, satisfy your desire for a particular kind of learning, community, and future? Please address with some specificity your own wishes and how they relate to UChicago.

But then for the second essay, they do this:

Each year we email newly admitted and current College students and ask them for essay topics. We receive several hundred responses, many of which are eloquent, intriguing, or downright wacky.

Those essay topics, which can be found here, are everything they say they are. They include topics like this:

What advice would a wisdom tooth have?

–Inspired by Melody Dias, Class of 2025

And

You are on an expedition to found a colony on Mars, when from a nearby crater, a group of Martians suddenly emerges. They seem eager to communicate, but they’re the impatient kind and demand you represent the human race in one song, image, memory, proof, or other idea. What do you share with them to show that humanity is worth their time?

—Inspired by Alexander Hastings, Class of 2023, and Olivia Okun-Dubitsky, Class of 2026

And

UChicago has been affiliated with over 90 Nobel laureates. But, why should economics, physics, and peace get all the glory? You are tasked with creating a new category for the Nobel Prize. Explain what it would be, why you chose your specific category, and the criteria necessary to achieve this accomplishment.

—Inspired by Isabel Alvarez, Class of 2026

And

Genghis Khan with an F1 racecar. George Washington with a SuperSoaker. Emperor Nero with a toaster. Leonardo da Vinci with a Furby. If you could give any historical figure any piece of technology, who and what would it be, and why do you think they’d work so well together?

-Inspired by Braden Hajer, Class of 2025

And so on. 

Last year, my students challenged me to write an essay to this prompt:

Find x.

—Inspired by Benjamin Nuzzo, an admitted student from Eton College, UK

Because they were hoping to force me to talk about math, which I frequently and loudly say I dislike. (I don’t, but the whole school community where I work promotes STEM and talks smack about the arts – why do you think the math and science students get out of College Readiness, but not the art students? – and I want to push back a little bit. Also, I do have some issues with math, but that’s not important right now.) So I wrote about a pirate finding treasure where X marks the spot. 

Checkmate, Math Nerds. 

This year they didn’t want to choose a topic for me: so I chose one for myself. Here it is:

 The seven liberal arts in antiquity consisted of the Quadrivium — astronomy, mathematics, geometry, and music — and the Trivium — rhetoric, grammar, and logic. Describe your own take on the Quadrivium or the Trivium. What do you think is essential for everyone to know?

And here is the essay I wrote about it.

Understanding the Trivium and Quadrivium

Dr. Jeffrey Lehman Explains the “Arts of the Word” and the “Arts of Number”

Written by Finn Cleary

The trivium consists of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, while the quadrivium consists of arithmetic, astronomy, music, and geometry. Together, Dr. Lehman says they lead students to see a “unified idea of reality.”

“The trivium was always pursued first,” Dr. Lehman says. “It’s commonly called the ‘Arts of the Word’ and focuses on different ways you can attend to words. Grammar is used in logic, which is used in rhetoric, for example. All of them move toward a proper presentation of the truth, which speaks to the mind and to the passions.”

Next, students of the liberal arts traditionally move to the quadrivium, or the ‘Arts of Number or Quantity.’

“Humans communicate with each other using words. Humans communicate with the natural order in numbers and in quantities. By discerning those natural relationships, we come to better understand the cosmos. It speaks to us, and we can talk to the greater universe. “

Source

This, by the way, is the image of me teaching that my students took. And altered.

I have often thought that I was born in the wrong century. I would like to exist a hundred years earlier than I do; because my professions and my passions would be, I think, more valuable then; I would still be able to teach, perhaps at a college instead of a high school (but also, I think I would make a decent one-room-schoolhouse teacher) and my writing would be more marketable, and would perhaps furnish me a non-teaching career, which would be lovely. 

But there is an attraction with going back even further in time: perhaps to a time when universities taught the quadrivium and the trivium, the two sections of what are bafflingly called the liberal arts, even though they were at the time pretty much all sciences. I appreciate that there is a professor at a small liberal arts college in southern Michigan who teaches about the quadrivium and the trivium, which I quoted above, but I’m not sure I agree with his explanation of them and how they work and why they are important. 

Math is how we interact with the natural order? Is it really? I guess we quantify and measure and compare natural things, all of which are math-adjacent if not actually math; but is that all we do? What about living in the natural order in the natural world, of which we are a part? But okay, we’re not talking about life, we’re talking about academia and education. Still: what about art inspired by the natural world; is that not how humans communicate with the world around us? It seems to me like it is. Of course, the classic quadrivium did include music, which I appreciate; but I’m leery of music being the one art when someone starts speaking about mathematics (and when two of the other subjects are math, and the last of the four is a math-heavy science), because there is a strong correlation between music and math. I don’t think that’s all of music, by any means; but I suspect that studying the quadrivium in a program that thinks math is the key to the universe would not teach me so much about improvisational jazz.

(Somewhere right now there’s a math/music geek just revving up a lecture on how there is many maths in jazz. The silences and the spaces between the notes on the scale, the rhythms and repetitions and so on. I get it, sir. Keep your beret on.)

I also take some issue with the trivium, as Dr. Lehman describes it and as ancient universities taught it: grammar to logic to rhetoric as the “arts of the word” is a good way to study language, I agree. But the idea that you could even consider the arts of the word and not talk about poetry? About the great works of literature, past and present and future? That doesn’t even make any sense to me. And “logic” as part of the art of language is a little too close to the math of language, as well: logic is important, both to life and to the proper use of language; but it’s also just about the only place where language can be turned into formulae and equations and functions. 

The other place is grammar. Or word problems, but I think we can all agree that those are abominations.

Doug Maclean Mac GIF - Doug Maclean Mac Kyper GIFs

However: I do think the study of language as a foundation for further learning makes perfect sense. I don’t know that I would split it out in that manner, though. I don’t know that studying grammar would be as effective now as it was in the long-ago past; partly because people are far more grammar-savvy now (assuming that they actually read) when they get to university than they would have been in the illiterate ages where nobody had access to books or very much printed media at all; and partly because I don’t think that studying grammar really helps appreciate and understand language all that much. It helps you to understand grammar. And that enables you to write correctly, but writing correctly does not mean writing well, and I think writing well is far more important. 

So I have some suggestions for an update of the trivium and quadrivium. 

If we consider the trivium to be the stage when we learn how to understand things, instruction in the processes rather than the actual content, I consider that both a reasonable lens to look at the curriculum through, and also a reflection of how we do most school: elementary and middle school are largely about learning how to learn, learning the basic processes and systems of thought, including learning how to read and write, learning how to do math, learning how to think scientifically. Basically for the first seven or eight years of school, we are learning how to think. Then high school, and even more so college, is where we learn things to think about: this is where the serious content appears, and gives us something to understand, which then allows us to build what should be the final goal of all education: our own understanding of the world and our place in it. Every individual should find and create that understanding for themselves, and since that understanding shapes all of one’s life afterwards, it seems like the right goal to see as the pinnacle of education: as the final project before graduation.

So the trivium in university should be the fundamental ways that we think: Language. Mathematics. Art. (“What?!” I hear you cry. “You’re including math?!?!” Sure, I don’t like it, but I respect what it is and what it can do for people.) I think there is room in these to allow for some individual course selection, meaning that the “art” umbrella can comprise visual arts, music, dance, and even poetry, though that might focus too much attention on language when combined with the other strand of study. Definitely we need to learn more about language and how language works and how to manipulate it: too many people focus on too few aspects of language, and that leaves most of us open to manipulation in various ways, and whenever we are manipulated, we don’t learn something we should learn – and that makes it easier to manipulate us next time, and the next thing you know, Donald Trump is president. The same is true for mathematics, and I’d like the university trivium study of mathematics to be more in applied mathematics: probability, statistics, and probably economics, though I’m certainly open to a stronger statement from a more mathy perspective on the specifics there. The language study in the trivium should include some study of grammar in the sense of learning how language is constructed and how we construct meaning with it; I tend to think of that as rhetoric. It should also, without a doubt, include the learning of a foreign language, and I’d like to see that be a different language than the one people “learned” in high school, and I’d like to see the study of that language include study abroad. 

But I’m getting a bit far afield here. The point is that the trivium should be about the ways that we can interact with the world, the ways we can construct thought, the ways we can create meaning: it’s the modes of thought that we can control, that we can manipulate. It’s how we think and how we learn, not necessarily the content, yet.

That’s where the quadrivium comes in. That’s when we learn the material that we are now ready to understand better, to chew and digest, to manipulate and shape, to make something out of. The raw material for building, after the trivium shows us how to build. Where the trivium focused inward, on the ways we think and the ways we communicate – communication with others would be outward, of course, but we also communicate with ourselves, through language and math and art, all three – the quadrivium should focus outward. It should show us about the world we live in, and the people we live with, and how we all, world and people, fit into the larger universe. My first quadrivium subject, then, would be history, as that would give us some understanding of who we are as a people, as a human race. (I would also start with that because I think of “liberal arts” as being the humanities, so science can wait its turn.) I think we need to learn history, but I think we struggle with it in school because we don’t follow the thought process of the trivium and quadrivium, first learn how to learn and then learn things worth learning; learning history when one is still mastering how to read is too difficult, because there is so very much information to take in. Learning the impact of history without having a grasp on the mathematical concepts of probability and statistics means we miss the scale, we fail to understand the interactions between events. Recognizing here how important it is to understand causation, I suppose I should include some focus on logic in the trivium: though I think that would happen best as an interaction between language and mathematics; I also think art wouldn’t be lessened by some connection to logic.

So history (And again, opportunity for individual courses here such as sociology or anthropology, along with the study of civilizations and recorded events), and then, I suppose, it’s time for science. Just like with history, I think we need an understanding of both language and applied mathematics before we can really appreciate science: my science study in high school was just a set of difficult courses to master, where my science study in college was eye-opening. Not that my science teachers in high school were sub-par compared to my college teachers; quite the opposite, in fact. But I wasn’t ready for science, I didn’t understand the full implications of chemistry and physics and biology. I think that’s the best argument for college and university education coming at the end of thirteen years of compulsory education: we’re not ready to really learn until we reach college age and college-level mastery of the fundamentals. (I do also think there’s a great argument for having a break in schooling somewhere between 6th grade and 9th grade, but that’s a whole other topic.)

The quadrivium should include a study of biology and ecology. We need to understand where we fit in with the rest of life on this planet and in this universe, if for no other reason than just so we don’t kill it all. Almost all of the problems we face in our future are related to biology and ecology, so if there is material in our world of knowledge which we need to be chewing and digesting once we learn how to chew and digest, it’s biology and ecology. I also think we should study astronomy: because just as humanity is one race of beings in an almost infinitely complex web of life, so the Earth is one tiny planet orbiting one tiny star – but also intricately connected to the rest of the universe, affecting and affected by it all. And if we do ever manage to solve the problems we face as a race (And I should also point out that the problems which are not covered by biology and ecology will be covered by history: though not solved by it), then astronomy will show us where we need to look in the future, to find our next set of challenges to face and adapt to: the stars.

Best Stars GIFs | Gfycat

So that’s three of the four (and please note, two sciences, one a lab and one a theoretical science; I’m a little disappointed in myself that my education plan is so similar to high school curriculum; but also, I think that shows the curriculum we have now is not bad) – and that’s where I got stuck. I think there is probably value in studying the world of computers and the internet, but I’m not convinced that’s a good subject for university study. I don’t know that a whole lot of overarching theoretical work has been done, that a body of knowledge about the internet and computers has been created; that is, several different bodies of knowledge have been created – and then made obsolete. Are there theories and concepts that can teach students about both the personal computer revolution and Tik-Tok? I don’t know. If there are, if there is a reasonable course of study that would be general enough to include most of the important themes, but also specific enough to be useful, then computer science would be a good choice for the fourth part of the quadrivium. Certainly the digital age is well begun, and understanding and navigating it will be critical. 

If that’s not a reasonable course – or, if like many other things in life, the study of related subjects makes us sufficiently well-prepared to deal with the computer world (which is the same reason we don’t really need to study how to do our taxes in high school, and all those smarmy memes about the Pythagorean theorem can shut it), and personal experience fills in the gaps – then the fourth subject had me stymied for a bit. I think philosophy would be useful: but I don’t know that it needs to be its own study separate from the logic and language of the trivium and the history of the quadrivium. Physics might be a good science to work with, as it enables so many other applied sciences like engineering; but I don’t know that it is applicable enough outside of that, if physics is actually how we solve the problems in our world (And my physicist father is cringing right now, as I write this. Sorry, Dad. I think physics is cool.).

But I did have a thought. As I said, there is a gap in the original trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric: the study of actual literature. I do recognize that in the Medieval period, when the trivium and the quadrivium were being codified and then taught, there wasn’t quite the wealth of material that we have today; there was Chaucer, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and a whole ton of stuff about Christianity – and I guess a couple of Greek plays – but it was more limited. Still: I don’t think you can say you understand language unless you understand the art of the language. The same goes for music and visual arts and all of it; you have to know the history of it, have to study the past masters, to know what is possible and how to build for the future. 

So it seems like a good idea for the fourth quadrivium subject would be the history of the subjects in the trivium. Literature, as the history of language that has already been created; the history of mathematics, both the people who built it and how it got built; and the history of art and music and whatever other elements were included in the trivium – and more, if possible, because I don’t really think you can learn too much art. All of that seems to me like good material to chew and digest, and then use to make something new. 

And isn’t that what education is all about?

(Also, this is in no way connected to this topic, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the band Trivium every time I wrote it for this, and this is my favorite song of theirs. So enjoy.)

A Day of No Need

Dusty Leave a comment

So, as I frequently do, I assigned my AP students an essay. They weren’t happy with it. Most of them didn’t do it. So I wrote an example for them. The assignment was to describe, with imagery and details, your perfect day: and this would be mine.

I think this says more about me and my life than it does about my writing or about my students and this assignment.

A Day of No Need

My perfect day is in the autumn. Probably November: there is no longer any pressure over getting Halloween exactly right; Thanksgiving is coming, but thankfully, I will never host any gathering larger than myself and my wife and our pets, so there’s no pressure there. But thinking about what food we will eat on that day, and about the four-day weekend, blocks any worries about Black Friday or holiday shopping; this is the time of year when, if you see something you think someone on your list would like, you pick it up and buy it, and feel good about yourself for getting ahead of the game.

The weather is perfect: the sun is out, and bright, but not hot; the breeze is cool, sometimes becoming a wind that bites and makes you want to tuck yourself into your jacket like a turtle pulling into his shell. Jackets are a must: which is great because it means more pockets, and also a layer that you are almost required to take off when you go inside, which means you can be warm outside and not too hot inside. If there are leaves on the trees, they are turning into beautiful colors; if they have already fallen, they are turning into beautiful sounds with every step through them, every stride leaving a wake behind, a surging wave of leaves leaping ahead. The smell of warm, spiced apples rises from the cup of cider in my hand.

But in truth, all of that is negotiable. Almost any weather can be perfect: there is such a thing as too hot, and another such thing as too cold; but hot and cold between those extremes are both fine, and warm is as good as cool. Green leaves on trees are almost as lovely as fall colors, and the bright blooms of spring and summer break up any monotony in the foliage. I like rain, and snow, and clouds, and blue sky – and night, for that matter. I don’t need any weather for my perfect day.

I need there to be no need.

On my perfect day, nobody needs me. My parents don’t need to call, my in-laws don’t need to call me to tell me to tell my wife to call them, like some bizarre game of phone foursquare. I don’t need to get up, I don’t need to walk my dogs (though if I feel like it, it would be fine; I like walking with them, as long as I don’t need to), I don’t need to shower, I don’t need to pick out and put on my teacher clothes; if I shower, it will be only when I feel like it, and if I get dressed beyond my pajamas, it will be in whatever I feel like wearing. If I eat breakfast I won’t need to cook. I don’t need to make the coffee for my wife, I don’t need to get her up for work, I don’t need to feel bad for waking her up to go to a job she mostly doesn’t like. I don’t need to find or make lunch, don’t need to fill a water bottle, don’t need to make my coffee just right, because if it’s not sweet enough I can just go into my kitchen and add more sweetener, any time I want to. I don’t need to go to the bathroom before I leave, because there will be time to go whenever I need to. I don’t need to check and double check that I have everything before getting into the car, and I don’t need to drive through traffic for 30 minutes to get to school. I don’t need to change the radio 65 times over that 30 minutes just to find some goddamn music instead of radio DJ blathering or used car salesmen yelling (LOOKING AT YOU SCOTT LEHMAN).

I might go to work, because I like seeing my coworkers, and even some of my students sometimes; but I won’t have duty, and I won’t have to period sub, and I won’t have to run a lunch meeting, and I won’t have to have meetings after school where I have to report on a student’s progress, or even worse on my progress, and I won’t have to listen to somebody or other telling me that I’m not doing my job well enough. I won’t have to stay to watch a sportsing event, or to watch my NHS students sell snacks at a sportsing event.

And most of all: I won’t have to teach. My students will be ready to learn on their own: I won’t have to drag them behind me, or drive them before me, to force them to gain an education for their own good. I won’t have to argue with them about learning, or about what we are learning, and I won’t have to listen to them complain about and criticize everything I do, over and over and over again, even though they probably won’t do it regardless of how they actually feel about it, which is only rarely the same way they say they feel about it. I won’t have to listen to students lie to me about how hard the class or the assignment is, because they want to lower the bar so they don’t have to work as hard. I won’t have dozens of different people trying to wear me down so they can have a day off, even though they have ten times the down time that I have: after all, I don’t have PE, or study halls; and while they have to write the essays, I have to read them – and you figure if I assign an AP essay to my 40 AP students, and they average 2-3 pages per response, that’s somewhere around 100 pages of writing I have to read and respond to, while they ask me if I’ve graded that essay yet.

But not today. Today they don’t fight me, and they don’t argue with me, and they don’t complain at me about what I do to help make them and their lives better. Most of all they don’t need me: they do the work on their own, without the need for me to pressure them. I don’t have to walk around the room and check on them, don’t have to make sure that none of them are cheating or sleeping or skipping, I don’t have to monitor their bathroom visit duration, or make sure they are signing out like they know they have to. I don’t have to tell them to put away their phones or close their Chromebooks. Because today, on my perfect day, my students do what they know they should do, what they know they are expected to do, what is entirely rational and reasonable for them to do: learn the material without being cajoled or coerced, and without disrupting the learning for themselves or others, and without being rude to anyone involved. They act like young adults, today, and so, they don’t need me. If they ask me any questions, it’s only because they’re curious what I think, not because they want my answer so they can write it down so they don’t have to come up with one themselves. None of them will have a test or missing assignments for another class, so they have to ask me, once again, to let them ignore my subject because the other class is more important than mine.

Today none of my students, and also none of my friends, are in crisis, and so nobody needs me to listen to them tell me what’s wrong. It’s not that I don’t want to listen when someone needs me: I just want nobody to need me, for nobody to be having a panic attack, or an explosion or righteous anger, or a bout of severe depression. I want to not need to find a way that I can help even though there’s not really much I can do: because the one thing I can do is listen, and empathize, and I don’t want to have to do that. I want nobody to need that, today. I don’t want to have my own bout of righteous anger or an explosion of panic or a depression attack. I just want to be okay, and for everyone else to be okay. Just for one day.

I want none of my students to need me to grade that one assignment, or to help them figure out how to do that one assignment, or need me to find another copy of that other assignment. Nobody should have a field trip form, or a grade check for their parents, or a failing grade the day of the big game, or a letter of recommendation they need, or advice and editing help on an application essay.

Nobody thinks they need to take advantage of me. Nobody does things they know they shouldn’t do just because they know I won’t get them in trouble for it. Nobody says “Oh, Humphrey doesn’t care if we do nothing.” Nobody lies to me. Nobody cheats on my assignments. Nobody insults me or my subject, calling school useless or saying that reading is boring. Nobody even thinks that the only reason people need to read is so they can learn more vocabulary words. Nobody asks if they can re-read a book they read before, or if they can just watch the movie, or if watching subtitles on an anime counts as “reading.” Nobody asks if we can watch a video on YouTube instead of reading today. Nobody forgets what I taught them the day before. Nobody asks if we can just do nothing today. Nobody even mentions the word “chill.”

Nobody asks if we can play Head’s Up Seven Up.

At the end of the day, I don’t need to drive home, don’t need to go to the grocery store, don’t need to make dinner. I don’t need to make or keep any appointments, and I don’t need to pay any bills, or do anything for extra money. If I write, it’s only because I want to. My bird doesn’t scream at me, and my tortoise doesn’t try to eat my foot, and my dogs don’t whine at me when I’m petting the other one and not them.

The only one who needs me is my wife. Because I need her, and I need her to need me. She will need me to hug and kiss her, and tell her I love her, and she will need to tell me she loves me. We will need to eat together, and share stories about our day together, and then unwind in front of the TV or in our office/studios making art. Though I won’t need to make art, and I won’t need to write an angry rant about anything, and I won’t need to tell all the idiots on Twitter that they are idiots: if I want to play Minecraft, then I can. I would not mind if my dogs needed to greet me when I come home, or need to lie next to me so I can pet them while I eat or while I relax.

And when I go to sleep, I won’t need to take Advil to get rid of my headache, and I won’t need to take melatonin to help fight off my insomnia. I won’t need to lay awake for an hour in the middle of the night, worrying about what happened in school today, or what’s going to happen tomorrow. Nobody will send me late night messages, or early morning messages, because they need an extension on an assignment, or because they are having a crisis and need to vent to me, or because they need me to cover their first period class in the morning. And I won’t have to worry about how I’m getting older, and things about my health are starting to scare me, and how my life has not been everything I want it to be: and I will not need to be more than I am, because I will, the whole day, just. Be. Happy.

That would be perfect.

Standards (De)Based Education

Dusty Leave a comment

All right. It’s time.

Let’s talk about standards.

I won’t say I appreciate or admire the people who picked the word “standards” to describe their prescription for education in this country. But I will acknowledge an absolute masterstroke of rhetoric, which is what that was. “We have high standards,” they could say. “Don’t you think schools should have standards? Don’t you have any standards for your students?” they could ask teachers who objected.

What can I do but hang my head in shame, and agree to teach THE STANDARDS?

I’ll tell you what I can do: I can, and do, object to the standards as they are written. I object, too, to the very idea of standards: but let’s take one thing at a time. And the less radical, first.

It’s not too far out there to object to the standards, at least in one way: pretty quickly after the Common Core were adopted in most states, they received the approval of the Obama administration – and therefore the whole-hearted hatred of the Republican side of the country, particularly during the Tea Party boondoggle. So if I say I hate the Common Core, I at least have allies – though they’re not necessarily the allies I want to have. But I’ll take them, because they are correct in essence, if not in attribution of causation.

Backing up. First, what are the standards? According to the Arizona Department of Education, they are this:

These standards define the knowledge and skills students should have within their K-12 education careers so that they will graduate high school able to succeed in entry-level, credit-bearing academic college courses and in workforce training programs. The standards:

  • Are aligned with college and work expectations;
  • Are clear, understandable and consistent;
  • Include rigorous content and application of knowledge through high-order skills;
  • Build upon strengths and lessons of current state standards;
  • Are informed by other top performing countries, so that all students are prepared to succeed in our global economy and society; and
  • Are evidence-based.

Standards are a list of skills and knowledges that students should have when they graduate high school. Jim dandy. Seems useful to know what a student should know.

Quick question: who decides what a student “should” know? And how do we decide that? What is the basis for picking a specific skill and saying a student “should” know that before graduating high school? That knowledge of X, Y, and Z is necessary to “earn” a high school diploma?

Hang on: first let’s look at the sales pitch for the standards.

Critical Message about Arizona’s College and Career Ready Standards – English Language Arts/Literacy and Mathematics

· The purpose of the new standards is to provide a consistent set of English Language Arts (ELA)/Literacy and Mathematics expectations that prepare all students for college and career options.

· The standards are designed to ensure that our students remain competitive in the global market of the 21st century.

· Arizona’s College and Career Ready Standards – English Language Arts/Literacy and Mathematics standards include Arizona additions. Arizona’s adoption of these standards ensures a more seamless education for high mobility students since grade level standards and expectations are consistent across 46 participating states.

· The creation of the English Language Arts/Literacy and Mathematics standards was a state-led effort coordinated by the National Governor’s Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).

Okay: a consistent set of expectations that prepare all students for college and career options. Cool. Equity of access and opportunity is important, it is a fundamental promise of this country, and it is also one of the best ways to assure the general welfare of our people; so yes, all students should have access to the same preparation for college and career options.

I mean: they don’t. There are several other factors involved in educational outcomes, primarily the students’ socioeconomic status and family educational levels (which are also, of course, socioeconomically influenced if not determined). And because education funding in this country is primarily a factor of local district tax base, it ensures that students in the richest schools have access to the best educational opportunities and resources, and students in the poorest schools do not, and that system will survive that way as long as we keep the same archaic, institutionally-racist and classist funding structure.

But yes, surely all students should meet a certain minimum set of expectations. I’m with that. Standards, right? We have standards, and students have to live up to our standards, or we won’t accept them.

Umm…not sure what that means. I mean, if someone I go on a blind date with doesn’t meet my standards, then they go off to find someone else whose standards they do meet, and I go home alone, But what does it mean when a child – when a fellow citizen – doesn’t meet our standard? Does it mean they don’t get to live in this country? Don’t get to be citizens? Does it mean they have to struggle for the rest of their lives, because they weren’t good enough according to our standard?

You ever think about what it says about a student – a child, that is, since I’m talking about K-12 education, and the majority of students are still under 18 when they graduate high school – when we say that student doesn’t deserve a diploma? Hasn’t earned an education? Didn’t prove themselves to be good enough? If all education meant was the achievement of a specific set of skills and knowledges, then it would be appropriate to say those things (though the implication of merit in words like “deserve” and “good enough” is questionable if not outright wrong); but it doesn’t just mean that. We attach quite a number of value judgments to people who “earn” a diploma, and withhold them from people who “fail” to “earn” one. Those who don’t meet our standards, that is. Those children, we determine and decree, will suffer and struggle, because they’re not good enough. Never mind that there are countless ways to live, and live successfully, without ever mastering the skills and knowledges that “earn” one a high school diploma. Never mind that high school diplomas don’t necessarily show that one has or has not mastered the skills and knowledges: a diploma shows that one was able to prove one’s mastery of skills and knowledges to the satisfaction of those who decide who earns that diploma – me, in other words, as a teacher who gives grades, who determines who passes and who fails my classes. Me and all of my fellow educators. We decide who gets a diploma, who has shown to our satisfaction that they have mastered the skills and knowledges we chose for them to master, to our standard, on our assessments.

I think about my wife, who is one of the smartest and most capable people I have ever known (And I’ve known a hell of a lot of smart people), who was not allowed to earn a diploma because she called her principal an asshole. After he told her that she wasn’t good enough to graduate from his school, because he thought she was lazy and disrespectful. She was expelled from the school. She got a GED, a Graduation Equivalency Diploma – hang on; that’s not it. I just looked it up, and it actually stands for General Educational Development test. Huh. Did you know that’s what it was? Maybe I’m the only one who didn’t. Anyway, she earned her GED certificate, and also a high school proficiency certificate, by acing those two tests (because she is incredibly intelligent, if I didn’t already make that clear – they wanted to skip her two grades in elementary school. TWO GRADES. Nobody ever suggested I skip any grades. I’m not jealous, though.) and then went to work: but she couldn’t get a job, because she wasn’t yet 18 and so wasn’t allowed to work in most places in California during the regular school day. She was also told that the GED wasn’t as good as a diploma because she hadn’t shown she had the work ethic to complete the normal schooling program.

So I guess it isn’t just about showing mastery of the skills and knowledges required for college and career readiness. Huh? It’s also about showing oneself to be the kind of person our society approves of. It’s about winning the good regard of teachers, who are by nature and training judgmental. I mean, I’m a swell guy, and surely all of my judgments of my students’ characters are right on the money, and totally should have a significant impact on the lives of all of the students who pass through my classes. Some of those other teachers, though… pretty sketchy.

My wife’s story – this point I’m making about teachers and our generally subjective judgments of students – is one of the arguments behind standards, of course. Because CHUDs like the guy who told her she wasn’t “Aptos High material,” and she’d never amount to anything in her life, shouldn’t be the ones keeping the gates and refusing entry to our citizens. If students can show that they possess the skills and knowledges we expect them to have, then that should be enough: and no individual with their own biases and prejudices should be able to torpedo any person’s progress into productive citizenship.

I agree with that. It’s the one argument for standards, and for standardized testing, which I agree with and support whole-heartedly. My wife got the shit end of this stick because she was what this guy saw as a “troublemaker;” maybe because she is a woman, maybe because she was not in the same socioeconomic class as many students at that school (Though not all the students at the school were wealthy, not by any means), maybe for any of several other reasons. But there are millions of kids who suffer this same sort of fate, being prevented from achieving not because they lack the skills, but because someone in charge doesn’t think they’re good enough: and the most common reason, of course, is racism. I have heard people who know better than me point out that standardized tests, while imperfectly anti-racist themselves, are at least objective and colorblind in their allocation of success or failure: which means a student with racist teachers can still pass the test, can still prove they have met the standards, and therefore should be able to earn a diploma no matter what their racist teachers think. I appreciate that argument, and I therefore wouldn’t want to argue that all standardized tests and grades and so on should be removed, at least not until we can ensure no bias in the people acting as gatekeepers.

I will argue that we should remove the idea of gates, and specific standards of achievement.

But hold on: before I argue against standards entirely – before I show that I do not, in fact, have any standards – I want to finish my point about the standards we all have right now. They are no longer the Common Core standards, which became politically tainted during the 2010’s; though if you think they are appreciably different from those Common Core standards, you don’t know education: we don’t like changing things, we like keeping the old things – or even better, resurrecting the older things – and giving them a new name. The Common Core State Standards look like this: “By the end of grade 10, read and comprehend literature [informational texts, history/social studies texts, science/technical texts] at the high end of the grades 9–10 text complexity band independently and proficiently.” And the all-new, all-improved Arizona College and Career Readiness Standards look like this: “By the end of grade 10, read and comprehend informational and functional text, including history/social studies, science, and technical texts, at the high end of the grades 9–10 text complexity band independently and proficiently. (AZ.9‐10.RI.10)” You can see for yourself how Arizona is independent, and not still following along with that whole socialist Common Core mandate. WOO! States’ rights!

So my question is, still: who decided what were the skills and knowledges required to graduate high school? Who determined what students “should” know?

It’s not actually a simple question to answer – neither the one about what students should know, nor the one about who decided it. The issue with deciding what students should know is deciding what we think students should be ready to do. Do we think they should be ready to go to work? Do we think they should be ready to go to college? Do we think they should be capable of teaching themselves? Or do we think they should already know everything they will ever need to know? What mixture of those four things is correct, job/college/already know/can learn? But then there are more questions: what should students know to be ready to go to work? What kinds of jobs are we talking about? And what does “ready” mean? I haven’t ever been “ready” for any job, if “ready” means “already capable of every aspect of the job required.” I have always had to learn on the job. Do we want them ready for entry level, or ready to move up to the top echelons of management? Do we want them ready for local jobs, or do we want them to be ready for any jobs? Please note that if we decide to make our students ready for any jobs, then they’re going to be learning a whole lot of things that seem like they aren’t important, because those students will look around their part of the world, look at the people they know, and they will think, “Nobody in my town knows physics, or needs to know physics. Why do I need to know physics?” If our only answer is, “You might find a job somewhere else that requires a knowledge of physics,” we’re not going to convince a lot of students to try very hard in physics class. But also, if we decide that nobody who goes to school in this town needs to know physics, then we are sentencing those students to live only in places and have only careers that do not require any knowledge of physics. Maybe that’s fine: we decided, pretty unanimously, that none of the students in American schools need to be familiar with Mongolian folk dancing; we therefore cut them all off from careers involving Mongolian folk dancing.

Pretty fucked up, guys. Denying our children that avenue in life? Who were we to decide that for them?

But also: how much time and energy do we want to dedicate to teaching Mongolian folk dancing, on the expectation that some number of our students will pursue a life that involves Mongolian folk dancing?

And before you scoff too hard at that: recognize that almost all American students were, at some point in the last several decades, taught how to square dance. We thought that was a valuable use of time and resources. And I, for one, would rather know Mongolian folk dancing than how to do-si-do.

This is amazing.

(Let me also point out, though this is off topic and too large a subject, THAT WE SHOULD NOT FOCUS EDUCATION ENTIRELY ON THE ABILITY TO MAKE STUDENTS PRODUCTIVE AND CAREER-READY. LIFE IS NOT JUST ABOUT YOUR JOB. STOP TELLING STUDENTS THAT EVERYTHING THEY LEARN AND EVERYTHING THEY DO IS GETTING THEM READY FOR “THE REAL WORLD OF WORK.”)

But okay, we’re really only talking about English/Language Arts and Mathematics. (Hey: who decided those two were the most fundamental skills? I agree that communication is vital in essentially everything; but is English the only way to learn to communicate? What if we decided instead to teach every student to be fluent conversationally in three different languages other than English? Or what if we decided that proper communication required an understanding of our context, including our cultural context and the context of our interlocutors, and therefore all students must master 12 years of social studies including sociology and psychology? AND DON’T GET ME STARTED ON MATH.) So surely the expectations of what should be mastered in those subjects is more straightforward. Right?

It may be. I object to a number of the standards – for instance, I am supposed to dedicate considerable time and energy to this one: “Analyze various accounts of a subject told in different mediums (e.g., a person’s life story in both print and multimedia), determining which details are emphasized in each account.” (AZELA Standard 9-10.RI.7) – but I can’t argue against the ones which say students should be able to read proficiently and independently, or that students should cite evidence for their claims, or that students should know how to analyze complex characters. And all of the different sets of standards were all written with input from various teachers and teacher groups and other educators.

But not only teachers.

Common Core, for one example (And there are lots of examples, of course. Education is a very profitable business. Lots of companies get involved in trying to create educational resources, and then trying to sell them to the very large market of schools and teachers flush with all that gummint porkbarrel money), was written by the Council of Chief State School Officers, which is essentially all of the various Superintendents of Instruction from each of the 50 states. They took input from the National Council of Teachers of English, the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators, the NEA and the AFT (the two largest national teachers’ unions), and various other teachers and educators. I suppose I should point out that most of the chief state school officers have education backgrounds, though not all of them; but more importantly, I think, is that the CCSSO was not the only organization involved: it was also the National Governors’ Association, which certainly has a stake in education at the state level, but generally includes a whole lot fewer educators; and also, a certain non-profit group founded in 1996 called Achieve. (Don’t be too impressed, by the way, by this group being non-profit; the College Board is non-profit, and they’re the ones who make all of the AP tests, and the ACT, and the SAT. And then charge millions of students hundreds of millions of dollars every year to take their tests. But they’re not profiting from it.)

That last one is the interesting one. Because you figure the CCSSO and the teachers’ unions are going to represent what the educational establishment wants: what is best for the current school structure, and for the teachers. And the Governors’ association will represent the will of, if not the people, at least the constituents who have the ear of the governors; which surely includes parents’ groups and the larger constituency special interests. I think it’s safe to say that both groups, the CCSSO and the NGA, of politicians would represent the interests of the monied class in this country: since that is who commands the attention if not the obedience of politicians.

So who did Achieve represent? Maybe the students? The ones who have the most skin in this game, so to speak, the ones most affected by all of this wrangling, and the ones who, as lacking votes and money in general, do not have the attention and obedience of the politicians?

Of course not.

Alice In Wonderland Disney GIF - Alice In Wonderland Disney Mad Hatter GIFs

Achieve’s website tells us this: “Achieve is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit education reform organization dedicated to working with states to raise academic standards and graduation requirements, improve assessments, and strengthen accountability.”

Very nice! That sounds great. But…who are you?

I couldn’t actually find a list of the board of directors on their website (I admit I didn’t look too hard, as I expected to have to go outside of the organization to find what I wanted to know), but I found one on Ballotpedia, interestingly enough; seems like Achieve has some involvement in politics, as well as in education. Well, they said they work with the states, right?

Here are their directors, according to Ballotpedia (Which got the list from the Achieve website, accessed in 2016; unfortunately when you follow the same link to the current list of the board of directors, you get this:

Achieve is led by governors, business leaders, and influential national leaders committed to improving K-12 educational outcomes for all students.

Created in 1996 by a bipartisan group of governors and business leaders, Achieve is leading the effort to make college and career readiness a priority across the country so that students graduating from high school are academically prepared for postsecondary success.

Cool, thanks.)

Here’s the list from 2016:

  • Mark B. Grier, Vice chair
  • Michael Cohen, President
  • Craig R. Barrett, Chair
  • S. James Gates Jr.
  • Governor Bill Haslam (R-Tenn.)
  • Governor Jay Nixon (D-Mo.)
  • Governor Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.)
  • Former Governor John McKernan Jr. (R-Maine)
  • Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Chairman Emeritus

Sorry to use out of date information, but also: Mark B. Grier is listed by Ballotpedia as the current top executive at Achieve, and while he has also moved on to a director position at Freddie Mac, his profile there still lists him as a board member at Achieve, so I’ll take this list as representative if not current.

Who are these people? Glad you asked.

Dr. Sylvester James Gates, Jr., is a badass. An award-winning and influential theoretical physicist, professor, author, and documentarian, his involvement with Achieve could only improve their work. Not sure how much sway he actually has, but his presence on the board is the best thing I found. (He’s also the only African-American on the board, but surely that’s neither here nor there.)

Michael Cohen, president (Not THAT Michael Cohen) is actually an educator (Though he worked for Bill Clinton, so he’s a neoliberal educator). He is also the only one with a page readily available on the Achieve website – though to be fair, their Search function is not currently available, and the website hasn’t been updated since 2021. Craig R. Barrett, chairman, is the former CEO of Intel. Mark B. Grier, vice chair (and maybe current chair) is the former CFO at Prudential. (Also: “Grier’s leadership on the board continues Prudential Financial’s longstanding commitment to improving education outcomes.  Former Prudential Chairman Art Ryan served on the Achieve board from 1999 to 2008, and as the chairman from 2005 to 2008.” So again, if the list isn’t current, it’s at least representative. Mark Grier to Lead Achieve Board | Achieve) Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Chairman Emeritus, is the former CEO of IBM, and the former chairman of the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm. Gov. Bill Haslam of Tennessee  is also the former president of Pilot Corp, a petroleum company that owns the Flying J rest stops. Former Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri is one of the Democrats on the “nonpartisan” board, and is a lawyer turned politician rather than a corporate overlord, so he wasn’t too bad – but did hand control of Ferguson over to the state highway patrol and later called in the National Guard to put down riots after Michael Brown was shot and killed. Maggie Hassan (The only woman on the board, but surely that’s neither here nor there) and Jock McKernan are also former lawyers turned politicians, Hassan the current embattled Democratic senator from New Hampshire, McKernan the Republican governor of Maine in the late 80s and early 90s (And the husband of Senator Olympia Snowe, if that matters), and are generally not offensive.

So that’s who wrote the Common Core. Teachers – but also politicians, and business executives. And who do we think had the most influence, the final say? Probably not the teachers. And definitely not the students.

But is that so terrible? I think I hear you ask. What’s wrong with business executives promoting the standards? Well, inasmuch as they were simply people who understood complicated systems and processes, and who live in this society and therefore may have a stake in its success, nothing. But that’s not all they are. Businessmen, especially executives of these sorts of large, international corporations, are not particularly loyal to any one society; they are loyal to the bottom line: shareholder value. I cannot believe that these men created Achieve, and pushed for the Common Core standards to be accepted nationwide, for any reason other than they knew it would be good for business.

From what I can see of the standards, and the intent of those who wrote them, they are very good at producing exactly what businesspeople seem to want: conformist rule-followers who don’t think very originally, and who don’t question authority, but who are very good at mindless, repetitive tedium, and who seek simple entertainment and satisfaction at the end of the very long work week. Good workers (Remember how the work ethic is as important if not more important than mastery of the skills?) who are also good consumers. Good employees, and good customers.

How do standards do that? In a number of ways. Partly because they are standard: the goal is to make every student the same as every other student, capable of all the same things. If we see those things as a baseline, and give schools room and resources to reach beyond that, then there’s no problem; but that’s not how the school system works – and again, that is because of the same people wielding the same influences. Because the other part of the push for common standards is – the push for accountability. It’s right there in the Achieve mission statement. “Achieve is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit education reform organization dedicated to working with states to raise academic standards and graduation requirements, improve assessments, and strengthen accountability.” (Emphasis added)

See, we can’t have universal standards unless we can be sure they are adhered to. Right? We have to make sure these schools, and those wacky tree-huggin’ hippie teachers, are doing what they’ve been told to do. So in addition to creating new standards that will define what is taught, we will create and implement test after test after test after test, to make sure that the teaching is – well, meeting the standard.

Do you know what happens when you create an entirely new system of curriculum, and a new set of assessments? Particularly during a global recession, when state education budgets are being slashed and burned like virgin forests in logging country? (By the way, Jay Nixon of Missouri was also called the “cutter-in-chief” for all the cuts he imposed on the Missouri state budget. But he did also support investment in education when things started turning around, so. Good and bad, I suppose.)

The schools fail, that’s what. New curriculum takes time to figure out and make functional. New assessments take time for students to get used to them. Even in the ideal testing situation, the whole idea is that you take the results of the test and use it to inform the next year’s instruction in order to raise the scores: which pretty much requires that the first year’s scores are going to suck.

And so they did. And do.

Which opens up a lot of options for those who want to control the education system in this country, say, in order to produce better worker drones and more consumers to buy products.

Any time the school does not meet the standard, any assessment that shows the students are not showing the specific evidence asked for which proves they have mastered the chosen skills and knowledges to the extent and in the manner determined by the people in charge, then the school is failing, the teachers are failing, the students are failing. And when a school is failing, we will sanction it in some way, and follow one of a number of alternative courses: we could use that  failing school as evidence that a current politician has failed their constituents, and thus push for the candidates we like; we could use that failing school to argue that the school system in general is failing and therefore we should promote vouchers for private schools; or to argue that the school system is failing and therefore the state needs to loosen the requirements for charter schools; or to argue that the school system is failing and it is the fault of those damn teachers’ unions. So many options!

We could also argue that the school system is failing, so there needs to be greater emphasis on achieving the standards. Now that we have these lovely standards written, we can push to have them adopted across the country (Maybe in conjunction with a huge federal mandate, which rhymes with Moe Wild Heft Refined, which also mandates accountability…), and then use that to impose more expectations that schools will adhere to the standards, so that every child in every state can have the same results! Won’t that be wonderful? If … Moe wild is heft refined?

(Sorry.)

Once we decide that the school is failing and the most important thing is to make sure that students MEET THE STANDARD, the stage is set for the process we have watched play out across this country: we start teaching to the test; and more devastating, we eliminate everything that is not teaching to the test. Electives are cut, because the students need more remedial instruction in math and English. Which frustrates the students, and makes them feel like the system is not helping them but is instead out to crush their spirits (because it is), and of course they resent it, and so of course they rebel against it: they don’t try as hard as they could on the tests, because fuck the tests, man!

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Which means the school does not meet the standard: and so we can go through another round of whatever-flavor-of-damage-we-want-to-inflict-on-the-system.

My school knows that I’m a good teacher. It’s hard not to: my students generally like me, their parents generally like me; the surveys the school does of parents and students always reward me with sterling reviews. I was even named in a Google review of the whole school as one of the reasons why my school is worth going to. And, if I may presume, I think that anybody who comes and watches me teach will see that I am good at it. (I mean, I’m not always sure I’m good at it, but that’s because I have imposter syndrome and a certain amount of anxiety over my abilities. Never mind. It’s not important.)

But what the school tells me, every single time they evaluate me, (Which in this environment of hyper assessment, is every goddamn year; also I live in a “Right to Work” state, for a charter school, which means there is no teacher’s union to represent me, and therefore no tenure. Can’t let them lazy goddamn teachers just relax and teach! They need to worry about losing their jobs all the time! That’ll keep ‘em in line!) is that I need to provide documentation that I am teaching the standards. I need to write objectives on the board. I need to review those objectives with my students, every class. I need to align my instruction and my assessments, and now my grades, with those standards. I need to write daily lesson plans that show I’m focusing on the standards. I need to give common formative assessments, five times a quarter, to show that my students are progressing in their mastery of the standards.

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That’s what my job has become. Standards-based instruction, with (eventually) standards-based grading. Everything standardized. Which makes the businesspeople happy: and since my charter school is run by a corporation, and therefore by businesspeople, they will be happy, too. They’re pretty dang sure that creating a laser focus on the standards will achieve the results they want: proof that all of our students are meeting and exceeding all the standards, because all our teachers do all day long is try to get them to learn and master the standards. Because, we are told, that is how the school is assessed and graded by the state: according to our ability to make our students meet the standard of mastering the standards on standardized tests.

Yeah, it stopped meaning anything to me, too. Quite a while ago now.

You know what might be the most insidious part? There’s still an argument to be made for standards. As I said, there is nothing wrong with a baseline of ability that all students should be provided an opportunity to reach. I still think we should not tell a child that they are “failing” just because they can’t pass fucking Algebra or whatever, but I do think that a general education is a good idea, and that there are things that should be included in everyone’s education. Yes to that. Assessment of student achievement and ability is an important part of education (Though there are YEARS worth of caveats and qualifications in that. Most of which I’ve already written about, and I’ll get to the rest.), so assessment of a student’s mastery of a standard is a valid pursuit.

Here’s the thing that kills me about standards-based education: you get what you measure. You find what you are looking for. If what you want is to see if students have mastered a standard, and you teach to the standard and then assess the standard, then students will show that they achieved mastery. If you focus harder on the standard and teach it more, they will generally do better. If you point out to the students, by writing it on the board and going over it with them every day, exactly what they are supposed to learn and which standard they have to master, then they will do as they are told: they will focus on that idea, that knowledge, that skill, and they will master it. Which means the student data in that class will improve when you do things like write the objectives on the board and go over them in class every day. It works. And, as I have also written about for years, teachers are so hungry for proof that what we spend our lives doing is worth something, when we see those results, see those data points march upwards, know that students are passing the assessments: we like it. We want more of it.

So we do it. We teach to the standards. We use standards-based curriculum, and standards-based grading. It works, after all; and it’s what’s expected of us.

We stop questioning where the standards came from: they’re just the standards, and we have to teach them, so we do. We stop thinking about how dumb those standards are. We forget about the things we used to teach that weren’t measured by the standards – those things are long gone, and after all, they’re not part of the test, not part of the assessment of the students or the teachers or the school. They can’t be that important.

But they are important. All the things that aren’t in the standards are the things that matter most. The things that inspire people, that make them love learning, that make them grow and change. Things like real literature, poetry and novels and plays. Things like learning, for the first time, the history of the oppressed people and the non-dominant cultures – especially important if you happen to be part of one of those cultures, one of those people. Things like relating to and empathizing with other people. Things like school spirit, and community service, and even sports, goddamn it. These things still exist: but they are fading. Students are losing access to sports because they have to spend their after-school time in tutoring, because they haven’t mastered all the standards. Clubs and service organizations are less active, less involved, because there’s not enough time for all of that: students have to study for tests. Teachers can’t give the lessons and assign the projects that become part of a student’s life and personality, because we have to focus on the standards. All of that gets lost by the focus on the standards. Not least because the standards are, by design, simple, measurable nuggets of information. There’s no standard for the intangibles.

You get what you measure. And you lose everything that can’t be measured.

There’s a guy I used to teach with who I think is wrong about almost everything he’s ever said: but there was one thing he said which I thought was 100% accurate. He said that there should only be one standard, one expectation, one guiding goal that drove all of education: Students will learn to think critically. I would actually add to that something more human, like “Students will learn to love their world and themselves,” but I don’t know that schools should consider that a definite and intentional goal, so I’m willing to keep mine as an unspoken purpose, and focus only on the one.

What else is there? There are a dozen ways to learn to think critically, and all of them are valuable. Every subject, every class, can help students to do that. That one skill, with all of the myriad aspects that contribute to it, is the most important thing that people today should have – and that too many of us today can’t do.

And the best part of all? It can’t be measured. And it can’t be standardized.

That’s something that meets my standards.

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Don’t Worry

Dusty Leave a comment

So first, here’s a sneak peek of what’s coming up on the blog:

More ranting about education.

But you knew that already. More specifically, I will be posting about standards, because I hate and oppose those little buggers, and I think more people both would and should if they thought about them the way that I do. I will also be posting about how school administration imposes new expectations and demands and responsibilities on teachers, in the form of new programs that get added every year, without ever taking away any programs or recognizing that teachers are already overwhelmed. Both of these posts are intended as foundations for a post I want to write about censorship in schools: because my colleague recently had to fight to get In Cold Blood by Truman Capote approved for her class for seniors.

Why did she have to fight? Because the administrators worried that the book would be too graphic and disturbing for students. That’s right. The book written in 1965, which does describe the murder of a family and the crime scene afterwards, is somehow going to be upsetting to students — seniors — who listen to true-crime podcasts, who watch horror movies and cop shows and more true crime documentaries. And that book is somehow more objectionable than 1984, with its scenes of torture, and Night and The Diary of A Young Girl with their (also historical and non-fictional) accounts of the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust, and every Shakespeare play ever with all of the murders and suicides and dirty jokes (And sexism and racism and so on, but that’s beside the point, right?), and The Iliad and The Odyssey with all of those multiple murders and sexual assault and misogyny and cannibalism and Hell and so on; and The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, which is about the Vietnam War and includes a scene where two soldiers have to scrape the remains of their friend off of a tree after he gets blown up by a mine. All of those books are on the approved reading list.

I was trying to decide between the first two options, standards or new programs, when something happened: and it combines both problems. As part of the fallout from the tussle over In Cold Blood, there was a meeting yesterday with the faculty of my school and the academic team, who preside over all curricular decisions for the whole charter network, which comprises seven schools in two cities.

Now I have to write about that meeting.

So here’s the deal. The school system I work for is moving to Standards-Based Grading. At all schools, at all levels. The move has been discussed frequently for the past couple of years, always with caveats where I and my fellow high school teachers were concerned: Don’t worry, we were told. It won’t happen for a long time, we were told. It’s only going to be the elementary schools that do it. Welp, there’s been a change in leadership, and now the decision has been made: all schools, all levels. Next school year. So I guess that shows you how much you can believe people who tell you not to worry.

Standards-Based Grading, referred to in the acronym-manic pedagogy system (Hereafter to be known as AMPS) as SBG, is the idea that students’ grades should reflect their learning and their skills: not their work. The basic idea is that grades, rather than being applied to the level of completion of assignments — “You did half of the problems on the math homework sheet, Aloysius, so you get half credit. Sorry.” — should be applied only based on level of mastery of the specific standards for the class, according to a single summative assessment (Though there are caveats there, too. Don’t worry.): “You got 80% on the quiz, Nazgul, so you achieved Proficiency in the standard. Kudos.” Whether Nazgul completed the homework or not is irrelevant; she was able to show proficiency on the standard, and so she gets a passing grade for that unit, for that standard. If she continues to show mastery of the standards, she will earn a passing grade for the class, regardless of the work she completes other than the actual assessments.

Now. The idea of this is to make grades reflect the students’ actual learning and mastery of the key skills, the standards. How the students reach mastery is not the point: which means, proponents of SBG say, that a student is not penalized if they cannot complete work for reasons other than ability (such as they have too many other obligations, too much other homework, they get sick, they don’t have materials, etc.), and students do not have to waste time doing homework when they already know the information, have the skill, mastered the standard; which in theory streamlines education and stops making it feel like a waste of time and an endless grind for the students. The academic team was big on advocating for those poor, poor students who are ahead of the class, and who are bored with work when they already understand the concept and have the skill in question. (By the way: boredom is good for you.) It would also reduce the workload for teachers, because we wouldn’t have to grade all that homework and stuff; and as a sop to teachers who don’t like being told what to teach or how to teach it, with SBG we would have freedom to use whatever content and whatever teaching methods we wished, so long as the assessments and grades for the class focused on mastery of the standards.

That’s the ideal. And in some cases, it works: there are examples (usually cherry-picked, but nonetheless real) of SBG being effective. It is more common at the elementary level, because it makes more sense there to have students’ grades focus on mastery of skills; elementary report cards always have: remember how you got ratings in various traits, which were added up sometimes to a letter grade or the equivalent? But there were no percentages, no test scores averaged with quiz scores averaged with daily bell work scores. Just “Dusty does not play well with others. Dusty’s reading is exemplary. Dusty’s Nerdcraft is LEGENDARY.”

So what they want is for me to teach students, say with a short story, but really (they tell me, adding, “Don’t worry”), it could be anything, a poem, an essay, a full novel, about how to Analyze how complex characters (e.g., those with multiple or conflicting motivations) develop over the course of a text, interact with other characters, and advance the plot or develop the theme. Or as we call it in the biz, Arizona Reading Literature Standard 9-10.RL.3. And then after I have taught them — or, really even before I’ve taught them, because one of the selling points of SBG, remember, is that it allows students to avoid doing unnecessary work when they already know the information or possess the skill — so before I teach them, I would give them a pre-assessment (They like the term “assessment” much more than the word “test,” and they are quick to tell us that the assessments don’t have to be multiple-choice quizzes, Don’t worry,) to see if they already know the standard, and then teach them, and then give them a post-assessment to see if they have mastered the standard after the instruction. Those who master the standard, on either assessment, get a passing grade.

See how nice that looks? How simple it is? Just two required assessments, and you have a complete picture of which students learned what they were supposed to learn, and which did not. None of that muddy water that comes from Student A who does all their work and yet can’t pass the test — but passes the class because they do all their work, and then graduates from the class without having mastered the actual skills — and Student B who does none of their work but who can ace the assessment, either before or after, because they already know how to analyze how complex characters develop over the course of a text. (Don’t think too much about the students who pass the pre-assessment and therefore don’t need to do any of the instruction in the unit, and who would therefore sit and be bored… there’s a whole lot more to say about this aspect, and I will.)

So that’s SBG. And according to my district academic team, it is coming, soon, and it will affect every teacher, including me. And, they said, they hope it will make things better: it will give us a laser focus on the standards. It will make grading more representative of students’ actual growth, as measured by mastery of the standards. It will simplify grades, to the satisfaction of all concerned, teachers and parents and students as well as the state Department of Education, which mandates that all schools teach mastery of the standards they set, and assess a school’s success rate using standardized tests of standards mastery — in our case, as a high school in Arizona, using the ACT, one of the College Board’s premier college application tests (the other is the SAT), which tests all 11th grade students in Reading, Writing, Math, Science, and Writing again (The first one is a multiple-choice exam of grammar and style questions; the second writing exam is an essay the students write for the exam.). They’re sure this is the right way to go.

Don’t worry.

As you can tell (And if you’re a teacher who has heard of or dealt with SBG, you already knew from the moment I mentioned the topic), I am worried. Very worried. As were the majority of my colleagues, from all subject areas, who came to the meeting. The purpose of the meeting was for us to ask questions and voice our concerns with this move to SBG, and we had a lot to say.

The academic team, however: not worried at all. They are confident. And every time a question was asked or an objection was raised — and there were several, which I’ll address here — the response from the academic team was, essentially, “But that’s not really going to be a problem, so — don’t worry.” Or, “That potential issue won’t matter as much as this improvement we expect to see, so — don’t worry.” Or, “We think that question shows that you don’t understand what we’re talking about, or that you are somehow against students learning, so — shut up.”

That last sort of response? That was an asshole response. It happened more than once.

But that’s not the issue here.

The issue here is SBG. The first question, the first worry, is: why are we doing this? Why make a change away from traditional grading, and why is this a better system? The answer according to SBG proponents is what I said earlier: SBG focuses more on student achievement of the standards, rather than completion of tedious and repetitive homework, like math worksheets of hundreds of similar problems, or English vocabulary assignments that require students to just copy down definitions or memorize spelling. SBG is simpler and more streamlined. There is also a stronger focus (“Laser-focused” was the phrase that our chief academic officer kept using; but he has a doctorate in optics, so of course he would enjoy a laser metaphor. [If you’re wondering why our chief academic officer has a doctorate in optics instead of education, well. I can’t talk about it. Or my head will literally explode.]) on the standards themselves, rather than on old models that focused on content: as an “old school” English teacher (Sorry; that made even me cringe), I think of my class as organized around the literature: the first quarter we focused on short stories, and now we are reading To Kill a Mockingbird; next semester will be argument essays featuring Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and then drama, most likely The Crucible, and poetry. What SBG will do, it is to be hoped, is force me to focus instead on the standards: because proponents of standards believe that standards should be the goal of education, rather than completion of units, rather than a goal based around something amorphous and unassessable, like “Students will understand and appreciate great literature.”

I have a response to that. And when I write about standards, and why I hate those evil little gremlins, I will explain.

For now, put it aside: SBG proponents believe that focusing grades on the standards will focus both the teachers and the students on the standards, and therefore improve the students’ ability to master those standards, because the instruction will be more targeted and specific, and because the students will be more aware of what is expected of them, and therefore will try harder to achieve exactly that. Obviously if mastery of the standards determines their grade, then they will try to master the standards.

Our academic team, when my colleague asked why we needed to change to SBG, said that it was forward progress. When she asked more explicitly what in the current system was broken, what was wrong, which necessitated this change, she was told that nothing was wrong; this was simply a better system, for the reasons listed above.

She was also told (along with the rest of us, of course, because we were all in the same meeting) some bullshit: we were told that traditional grading systems are unfair, because the standards that define a grade for a specific teacher are malleable and individually determined. If you give five teachers the same assignment, those five teachers will grade it five different ways. One will focus on the correct answers; one will focus on the student’s process for reaching the answers; one will focus on the neat presentation of the work. All different standards, all different grades.

Remember how I said that they told us not to worry because not all assessments for mastery of the standards had to be multiple-choice-type quizzes or tests? Right. That was because more than one teacher asked about assessments like essays, or labs, or long projects, or large unit tests, rather than single-standard, short, multiple-choice style tests. “Of course you can use any assessment that you like,” we were told. “Don’t worry, we don’t want to force you all to give nothing but multiple-choice tests to the students.”

Shall I mention here that the curriculum which the academic team purchased and imposed this year features short, five-question multiple-choice tests as assessments for all of the standards? Shall I also mention that this curriculum doesn’t apply to any subjects other than math and English — also known as the tested subjects? No, you know what, I’ll wait until later to mention that. Forget this paragraph for now.

We were also told, when my friend also objected that the purpose here seemed to be test preparation, that of course we should be focusing on test preparation: the school is rated according to the results of the ACT (and other standardized tests for other grades); and research shows (They are big on research. Less interested in actual experience teaching, but they do love them some research. Our chief academic officer has also never taught. [Head. Will. Explode.]) that one of the best ways to improve student scores on standardized tests is test practice: exposure to the system of the test, familiarity with the format of the questions and the means of providing the answers (Bubble sheets vs. writing numbers in boxes vs. clicking on options on a screen, and so on, so on). So if one of our goals is to improve the test scores (And the administrator answering this objection asked my friend if she wanted to have our scores go down, and then the school’s rating would go down, and then we would lose students and close, and did she want that? Which, of course, is a belligerent attempt to turn an uncomfortable question back on the person asking, using a strawman argument. It’s bullshit. It’s not a response to a question, it’s not what it looks like to hear someone’s concern. Because the academic team doesn’t listen. Did I mention that the point of the meeting was, ostensibly, for the academic team to hear our concerns and answer our questions?), and test scores are improved by practice with similar testing format, and the assessment test in question is the ACT, which is a multiple-choice test: guess which type of assessment is going to be favored by the academic team?

It ain’t essays. Or projects. Or labs. Or large unit tests. Well — essays will get some respect, because one of the sections of the ACT is an essay. But there aren’t any, for instance, poetic recitals, or creative writing, or music performance, or any of the million things that teachers and schools create so that students can do something more than just bubble in A, B, C, or D. You know: the assignments and projects and grades which mean something, which give students a chance to make something important to them, something authentic, something real.

So this is why what they told my friend was bullshit: because if they really meant that we could use various other forms of assessment, so long as those assessments focused on the assigned standard, then they were lying about SBG being intended to make grades more fair. If their argument is that different teachers will focus on different aspects of the same piece of student work, and make different grading decisions about that same work, then the exact same thing will still be true if we grade according to a standard. Because it is still up to an individual teacher what it looks like when a student achieves mastery of a standard. Also true for a multiple-choice quiz, by the way: because what is “mastery?” 60% right? 80%? 75%? Different ideas of proficiency, individual standards of success. Which, by the way, reflects everything else in life, because our success or failure is generally determined by individual people with individual standards of success. And the way we deal with that is not to try to standardize everyone into adhering to a single standard: it is making sure we understand what the measure of success is, and how we can achieve it. You know: learning what your boss wants from you and then providing it? Does it matter if the bosses at two different jobs have different expectations of you? It does not. So why would it matter if two different teachers have different expectations of you? It does not. To be sure the grading is fair, we need to make sure that the teacher consistently applies the same standards to all of their students. That’s fair.

You can address that issue, by the way, if you want all of your teachers to grade according to the same criteria and the same success expectation. But SBG is not how. You need to bring your teachers together, give them the same piece of work, and discuss with them what grade (or proficiency measure, or whatever you want to call it) that piece of work should receive, and then make them practice until they all grade approximately the same way. It’s called “norming,” and I’ve done it several times, in different contexts. It’s actually good practice, and I support it.

But it doesn’t answer my friend’s question about why we are changing to SBG. Because you can (and should) norm while retaining traditional grades. Using the need for norming as a justification for changing the entire system? Bullshit.

There’s another aspect of the change to SBG which I should maybe mention now, though I realize that this post is getting too long. (It was a long meeting. There were a lot of concerns. I have a lot of worries about this.) They are also intending to eliminate the usual percentage-based grades. There are four levels of mastery of a standard, as determined by the Arizona Department of Education: Minimally Proficient, Partially Proficient, Proficient, and Highly Proficient. The academic team wants to use those four as the new grade scores, for the purpose of averaging into a final grade for a course: 4 for Highly Proficient, 3 for Proficient, 2 for Partially and 1 for Minimally. The student’s class grade will therefore be something like a 3.23, or a 1.97, etc. Sure, fine, whatever; it’s not like I need to use A, B, C, D, and F.

But see, they want to translate those numbers back into letter grades. Because students and parents like letter grades. Because (As was mentioned, as yet another concern, by yet another colleague) colleges, and scholarships, use letter grades — or, more frequently, the overall GPA, weighted and unweighted, that is the standard across this country. So that’s fine, right? We can just translate the proficiency numbers directly: Highly proficient, A, 4.0. Proficient, B, 3.0. Partially is a C, Minimally is a D.

There’s the first issue, by the way. Not Proficient is not an option. Which means there is no F. As long as a student takes the assessment, they will pass the class. Or so it seemed to me: I admit I didn’t ask that question or raise that concern; in fact, other than a few outbursts under my breath, I was silent throughout the meeting. Because I knew if I started talking, my head would explode. That’s why I ranted at my friend for a full 30 minutes after the meeting, and why I’m writing so damn much right now. So they may intend to include Not Proficient, or simply Failing, as a possibility; say if someone takes a test assessment and gets a 0, then they might earn an F. But maybe not. It’s a concern.

But the other problem is this: the academic team has a conversion chart they want to recommend for how to turn this 4-point proficiency scale into a letter grade: and it’s not what you think. They think that a 3, a proficient, should be an A-, a 90%. 4, Highly Proficient, should be an A+, a 100% or close to it. The B grade range should be 2.5-2.99, the C would be 2.0-2.49. D would be 1.00-1.99. (F would, presumably, be 0-0.99, but if there is no score less than a 1…)

I mean, sure. You can set the grade breaks anywhere you want. They did point out that any college asking for our students’ transcripts and so on would be given an explanation of how we arrive at their letter grade, so there would be transparency here. But how many colleges or employers or grandparents looking to give money prizes for every A would actually read the breakdowns? When they are handed a simple overall GPA, in the usual format?

I also have to say, because bullshit pisses me off, that one reason the academic team gave us for the change to SBG was that traditional grading leads to grade inflation: because students who do extra work get extra credit, and therefore score over 100%, which makes no sense if we’re talking about mastery of standards, because once you master it 100%, that’s it, there is no more, and how much work you did to reach mastery doesn’t matter. The standard of mastery to earn a particular letter grade, in this paradigm, is watered down by the inclusion of grades for practice work, what are called “formative assessments.” Think of it like a rough and final draft of an essay for English: when I get a rough draft of an essay, I give feedback on the draft so the student can improve it for the final draft. I give credit for students who completed the rough draft, but it’s just a 100% completion grade: because I want to encourage them to try, and to turn in whatever they complete so they can get feedback, even if it isn’t very good. So I don’t grade the rough draft on quality, just completion. The rough draft grade is a formative grade; it’s just to recognize the work a student put into the rough draft. The final draft grade is the one that “counts,” because that’s where the student shows how much they mastered the actual skill and knowledge involved. That’s called a “summative” grade. SBG would only count summative grades into the final grade for the class. And in order to fight back the grade inflation they see in me handing out 100% grades to students just for turning in a pile of garbage they call a rough draft, they want to change to — this system. Where a 3 is magically turned into a 4, and there is no 0. Nope, no grade inflation happening there, not at all.

And that’s my biggest issue here. Again and again, the academic team told us that the only thing that should matter for a grade is mastery of the standard. Nothing else. No work should ever be graded, because how a student achieves mastery is not the point: only mastery. (Sure. Ask any math teacher if how you get the answer matters, or if it’s only the answer that counts.) They told us that grading for work completion is a waste of time, and essentially corrupt; because it made it possible for a student to pass without mastering the standard.

The essential assumption there, aimed without saying it outright in the face of every teacher in every school, is that the work we assign does not create mastery of the standard. The assumption is that when I give vocabulary homework, it shouldn’t count in a grade because whether a student does it or not makes no difference to their mastery of the standard. In other words, all the work I assign is bullshit, and any grade I give based on completion of it is bullshit.

That. Is. Not. True.

More importantly in terms of what is coming for my school, if a student is told that the homework, the practice work, the rough drafts of essays, are not counted into their grades, they will stop doing them. Of course they will: we just told them those things don’t count. All that counts is the final assessment, whatever that is. It wouldn’t matter how much practice I gave them, how much feedback I wanted to give them; I would have to give all my students an opportunity to show mastery on the final summative assessment, and if they showed mastery, they would get a grade for that standard. A high one, if they showed proficiency. Now, they will have a much harder time reaching that proficiency without the practice work I assign in class: because my assignments are not in fact pointless busywork, I fucking hate pointless busywork and I try very hard not to have any in my class; but regardless of the value of my assignments, if my students don’t get a grade for them, they won’t do them. Period. Except for a very few students who want to try hard, who want to learn, who want to do their best. But those students already succeed, so they’re not the ones we’re trying to help here, are they?

You know what the rest of them will do? They will sweat out the final assessment. They will focus on that. They may study for it, but they will have so much pressure, and so much stress, before any test I give them for a particular standard, that they will not do as well on them as they would with traditional grades and grades for practice work and my own non-test assessments. (Because generally speaking, I also hate tests and try very hard not to have any in my class. I like essays. I like personal responses to questions that ask the students to relate to the literature, to connect to some aspect of it, and to write maybe a paragraph or so. I like annotations on literature, so students interact with the text. I think high school English students should write, as often as possible, and when I ask students to do work in my class, I want to recognize their effort by giving them credit for it in the form of a grade. But I guess that’s unfair grade inflation, right? Busywork? Assignments that don’t show mastery of the standard and so shouldn’t count in their grades?)

I also have to point out that a lot of my students, given the opportunity to do literally no work and then take one assessment to determine their grade in the class? They will guess. Some of them may guess well, but they will guess. Stories will spread of the students who guessed their way to an A on a difficult assessment in a difficult class, and others will try to repeat the feat. I know: I’ve seen them do it. I’ve watched students lie about getting high grades, when they actually got low grades, when they guessed on a test, and that lie made other kids try it. I’ve watched brilliant students describe what they do on tests as “guessing,” when what they mean is that they picked an answer they weren’t 100% sure about: after reading the question, the answer options, using the process of elimination and their generally excellent knowledge to narrow it down to only two good choices, they “guess.” And score high, because that’s actually a really good way to “guess.” But when they say they guessed and got a good score, other students, who are not as brilliant, guess by completely randomly picking a letter, and hope to get the same result — and so ruin their chances of getting a good result, or a realistic result, which they would have gotten if they just tried.

This will make that problem worse. I guarantee it.

And what problem will it solve?

Will it make grades more fair? No: that would take norming.

Will it make grades actually reflect learning? No: students will try to guess and get lucky, or they will cheat. They already cheat, sometimes, but SBG in this model will make it worse because there will be so much weight on single assessments.

Will it make students focus more on mastery of the standards? Maybe, but it will also make them more likely to ignore the work that would actually help them master the standards. You know: the stuff that educates them. Which, yes, is sometimes tedious. Kinda like taking multiple-choice tests several times a week, in all of your classes. But I guess if that helps them score higher on the ACT, then the school is going to look great. Right?

Right?

Don’t worry.

There’s more. Here’s where I should bring up that the curriculum they bought and imposed doesn’t have any material for several of the subjects in the school. That’s sort of a separate issue, because any teacher can create their own curriculum using SBG or not; but whenever teachers asked how we were supposed to implement this, we were pointed to the curriculum and the resources that came with it: which only applies to math and English. The tested subjects. There are also classes, such as my AP classes, and the new electives that we created this year, which don’t have any standards because they are not official Arizona Department of Education classes. And that’s why I like teaching those classes: but how will I do my grades next year if every class has to use SBG and the class has no standards?

Not only do I not know, but the academic team doesn’t know, and even John C. McGinley doesn’t know.

They also claimed that SBG would make grades and student learning more clear to parents, that parent teacher conferences would focus on what the student could and could not do, rather than the teacher merely saying “Little Tikki Tikki Tembo-no Sa Rembo-chari Bari Ruchi-pip Peri Pembo is missing three homework assignments.” Of course, speaking for myself, when I have parent conferences, I EXPLAIN WHAT THE STUDENT SHOULD HAVE LEARNED ON THE MISSING ASSIGNMENTS AND HOW THAT LEARNING CONNECTS TO THE OTHER LEARNING IN THE CLASS, LIKE “When Tikki Tikki Tembo-no Sa Rembo-chari Bari Ruchi-pip Peri Pembo didn’t do the study questions for the first three chapters, that means he probably didn’t completely understand those chapters, and that makes it harder to understand the rest of the novel.” (Though of course, I failed to point out the standard which little Tikki Tikki Tembo-no Sa Rembo-chari Bari Ruchi-pip Peri Pembo didn’t master, so — my bad.) I can’t really fathom a teacher telling a parent the number of missing assignments and then not going on to explain what that means; but that’s how the academic team described our current practice, going on to say that SBG would make those conversations more helpful to parents because we would explain exactly what the student knew and didn’t know, exactly what deficits there are. Which means that their current (apparently, in their eyes, deeply incompetent teaching staff) would change our habit of explaining nothing to parents so long as we had better data to point to.

And one of the staff very intelligently and clearly pointed out that we would be setting students up with a different standard from all the rest of the world, even if everything they hoped for regarding SBG happened exactly as they hoped: because in college, they still use traditional grading, with work counted in the final grade, with individual standards of success and personal bias from the professor. They didn’t listen to her, either.

They told us that we teachers would be helping the academic team to chart the course, that our input would have an effect on the way this process moved forward; but since they didn’t actually listen to any of our questions at this meeting, and they told us that SBG is coming in 8 months regardless of anything we may say, here’s what I have to say to that:

The only times that the academic team agreed with anything the teachers said was when one of my colleagues, and then another, pointed out that parents and students — and teachers — would have a very difficult time adjusting to this entirely new system, and there would be a lot of problems in the transition, and a great need for support. “That’s true,” they said.

But you know what support we will get? We teachers, our students, their families, the whole school community?

“Don’t worry.”

I’ll be a little happier if they at least sing this. A little.

Really Really

Dusty 3 Comments

Last week I wrote that the education system, for all of its flaws and issues, is necessary.

But is it really?

Really really?

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I think that I am not sure. I want to say, without the shadow of a doubt, that it is: because education is necessary (That, I am sure of), and because there are so many people in the world who need education, there’s no way to tear down the structure we have now and build a new one — or even live without one entirely, and let people learn on their own — without losing a whole generation in the transition.

But that seems to me like an extraordinary statement: that we would lose a generation. We wouldn’t: they’d still be there, still be alive. I mean that they would lose their opportunity to gain the same education that every generation has had for the last 150 years in this country, and would lose, therefore, their ability to thrive in this culture and in this economy. But look at how much of that statement relies on the assumption that everyone should be like me, should be educated like me, that everyone should be like everyone else. I assume that the generation who would not get the current education from the system would suffer, as I know people suffer who do not succeed in education: they have to work harder, and they earn less, and they miss out on opportunities to experience life more fully: they don’t appreciate art, they are less aware of the wider world and what it has to offer, and are therefore more likely to be xenophobic and afraid of change and new experiences and ideas. But I also know that all of those things can be gained on one’s own, with travel and experience and exposure to other cultures and ideas and people.

When I say we would lose a generation, I mean that we would be saddled with people who wouldn’t be as productive, who would struggle more and need more help, and who would tend to resist and slow down our forward progress, and would certainly not contribute to it. We’d lose a generation of more of — us. People like us, like you and me. That’s what I imagine would happen if we stopped educating people. I assume they would gain the basic skills, from their parents and from educational games and Sesame Street and whatnot; and then I assume they would know little else other than entertainment, at least until they learned things the hard way, through experience, through life.

But.

That’s a lot of assumptions. And a whole lot of what I can’t describe as other than elitist bullshit. Because the core argument there is, without the system that made me, there would be people who would not be like me. Which assumes that I am how people should be. That being unlike me would be bad.

I don’t like it. I don’t like thinking that way, that my assumption of the necessity of education is just that, an assumption, and one based on elitism. Don’t get me wrong: there is evidence for it. Scads of evidence. Oodles. There are countless statistics which show the benefits of education:

Though now that I have looked at the Google search results, I see that the only statistics they show for “benefits of education,” other than benefits for certain kinds of education within the system such as the benefits of arts education or of inclusive education for students with disabilities, is exactly that one: that more education leads to more money. Which is not the most interesting argument for me, because I do not believe that life revolves around either career, or money; so using that as the sole focus for a discussion of education is obnoxious: I want to know what benefits there are, in addition to income, for the people who go through the school system. There are other benefits: primarily that more educated people have better health, more stability, and commit less crime. Here, this infographic lists several of them. (I was not trying to make a point about the total focus of education on earning money, but I guess that point is unavoidable, isn’t it? Hold onto that for a moment. Let me make this point, which is broader.)

That’s what I was talking about, that there are a number of benefits of education. (Here, this article from UMass [Woo! Home state comin’ through! Wait — what the heck is “UMass Global?] lays out the facts I have seen referenced before, with links to further resources to support the asserted health benefits associated with highly educated people, which are: 1. They’re likely to live longer, 2. They probably won’t experience as much economic or occupational stress, 3. They’re less likely to smoke, 4. They’re less likely to experience common illnesses, 5. They have fewer reported cases of mental health struggles, 6. They tend to eat better and maintain regular exercise habits, and 7. They’re more likely to have health insurance. I presume all the other benefits in the infographic are also supported by studies and statistics.) I have used these arguments in the past, in my own head if nowhere else (And 99% of the arguments I have in life are only in my own head. Since I teach argument, write arguments, and argue online on both Twitter and Facebook, that should give you an idea of how much of my usual headspace is filled with argument. [Jesus, I need to relax. No wonder my blood pressure has been going up.]), and I have heard them and seen them used many times to support the argument for education.

But here’s the thing. And again, I hate this — as you can tell by my obvious reluctance to actually make this point, and most of my arguments with myself over the past week have been between the part of me that wants to face this and the part that wants to hide from it — but I do believe that honesty is not only the best policy, it is the foundation of all other communication: so I need to say it.

None of those benefits are necessarily caused by education. All of them are only correlated. There is no reason, in most cases, to assume that the education itself caused the benefit.

People with more education earn more money in our society, yes. (Though of course, there are exceptions.) But is that because the education — the actual knowledge, not simply the achievement of a degree or certification– is necessary to earn the money? In some cases, most obviously doctors and lawyers and scientists and the like, the answer is emphatically yes, of course; but in many, many cases, the reason the higher income is correlated with the higher educational attainment is because those jobs insist on those degrees.

And I hope we all know that a degree is not necessarily because of actual education. I would make more as a college professor than I do as a high school teacher (Though really, not much more, unless I reached the most elite heights), and even though I guarantee that I could teach a college course better than many current professors, I can’t have that job because I don’t have the degree for it. I have the knowledge and skills and experience; and in my case, since continuing education is a requirement for recertification as a teacher, I have something like two to three times the post-graduate credits for a Master’s degree; but I don’t actually have the degree, so I can’t have the job.

For most of the rest, the correlation is far more connected to two other factors, which are certainly causative in our society: class, and race. Wealthier people have better health outcomes; and whiter people have better health outcomes. Primarily because health in this country costs money, and secondarily because the system is racist. Wealthier people commit less crime; whiter people commit less crime (Though that one is fraught for a bunch of reasons, because people of color are overpoliced and underpoliced simultaneously, so are more likely to be caught, arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for crime; in actuality, in this country, whiter people do commit more crime because all racial groups commit crime at about the same rates, and there are still more white people in this country than any other racial group. Most importantly, all crime rates are heavily dependent on socioeconomic factors, and those favor white people in the US — so again, the correlation is not causation in this instance. But to my point, it still ain’t because of education.) Wealthier people (Also older people) have greater civic and political engagement; whiter people have greater civic and political engagement.

Both of these factors, socioeconomic class and race, are also closely connected to — and causative of — educational attainment. Wealthier people have more education, because they can afford it and because they have more opportunity to pursue it: they don’t need after school jobs, or just to drop out and work; they don’t have to commute (or if they do, it’s in comfort); they don’t have to struggle for resources and materials like books and computers and access to libraries and so on. If they have kids (Statistically less often when young) while they are seeking education, they have greater access to childcare; ditto for providing care to older or disabled family members. People get more education when it’s easier to get, and when you feel rewarded for your successes in it, so this feedback loop is self-amplifying. White people — and again, this is largely because white people in this country are more often wealthier people — have all the same advantages. So this is mainly why educational attainment and these positive outcomes are correlated: because both are influenced causatively by class, and by race.

And then, as I noted briefly above, I have to also point out that many of the benefits overall are benefits economically: notice the “social benefits” in the infographic include “Gains in labour productivity.” And that whole third arrow section is about how all of society benefits when all of us make more stuff and make more money. I love the one one there about how society saves costs when individual citizens commit less crime and have better health. Maybe we should make motivational posters based on that. “Don’t do drugs, kids, or else you’ll become a drain on society’s resources.” So for all of those, the issue here is, there may be benefits of greater education — but for whom? In this society, where 90% of the wealth is held by 10% of the people, and almost all the gains in the past 50 years have gone specifically to that same 10% of the people, almost all the benefits correlated with education do not accrue to those who go through the system.

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Sorry, but I can’t not use Leslie Nielsen. Consider it a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down.

So. That’s the truth. The education system creates some positive outcomes directly: I do think that greater civic engagement is good for the people who involve themselves, and I certainly think that greater awareness and understanding of the system and how it works and what is going on helps to create that engagement. But I think we can clearly see from Donald Trump and the MAGA movement that strong civic engagement does not come only from people who are the product of the educational system. And there are, as I said, a number of professions which require education; and those are important both for society and for individuals who wish to pursue them, and so those opportunities coming from education are good.

But that’s where it starts to break down for me, again: because do people who study law, and medicine, and science, really need to go through the education system? For most of them, it works, and so it isn’t an obstacle to positive outcomes; but is it necessary? Are there people who would make excellent doctors even without education? What about lawyers?

That’s not the right question, though: of course people need education to be able to pursue those occupations. The question is: do people need to be educated by a system? Can they be self-taught, and successful?

And the answer is: Malcolm X. Who had an 8th grade education. Who taught himself in prison. And who then could do this. (That last one is an hour-long speech he gave. Without a teleprompter. Compare it to any politician you can think of, both in terms of content and presentation.)

He’s not the only example, of course. There are countless others, countless because we don’t usually keep track of people who are well-educated outside of the formal system, unless they do something we laud, such as earn billions of dollars or something similar. But Malcolm X was so incredibly intelligent, so incredibly capable, so incredibly knowledgeable — just so incredible — and only and entirely because of himself, with some influence and then support from others, including his family and his faith community. But never, in any way, was he supported by the system: and yet, what he could do, and what he did, is amazing. Simply amazing.

So the truth is, the education system is not necessary. It works, for the most part, for millions of people, and that’s good; but the existence of millions of people for whom it does not work, and the existence of countless people who don’t need the system to succeed, forces me to ask the question: is the system necessary even for those millions of people for whom it works?

And the answer is, I don’t know. None of us do. We have no way to compare: education is only one path, and there is no way to come back and choose a different path in the same life, to determine what would have happened because of that other choice. (Yes, that’s a Robert Frost reference. But did you need to understand the allusion to get my point? [I think your experience is richer if you did understand it, or if you click the link, read the poem, and figure it out. I’ll get to that.]) We can look at people with education who succeed, and people without education who struggle, and we can assume that education was important for them. But in both cases, we’re cherry-picking both the examples, and the definitions of “succeed” and “struggle.” By other definitions, and in other examples, education is irrelevant where it isn’t harmful.

So last week, when I wrote that the Labyrinth was necessary and important to contain the monster, I could only make it make good sense by joking about it: because otherwise the children are the only Minotaur, the purpose and reason for the construction of the Labyrinth, the thing at the heart of the edifice; and children are not a monster who must be contained. It’s pretty upsetting to think of them that way, and to think of school as a way to contain them — quite literally putting them in the box and making them stay there, without letting them out of it. I don’t want to be that teacher, or that person, who really thinks that. I don’t believe in my usual practice that I am that teacher; there are very few instances where I insist that a student conform to my rules or expectations. But I made the joke. And when I was thinking for this week about wanting to explain and justify that joke, by explaining how the education system is necessary and important, even if the Labyrinth isn’t a good or appropriate analogy for it (In terms of the Minotaur aspect; in terms of the inescapably complex maze, it is a perfect analogy. But if you don’t need the maze, if the purpose of the maze is not valid, there’s no reason to maintain the maze.) I sat down several times intending to look up the facts to support that argument.

But I always hit this wall. I know the reasons people argue for education. And I don’t believe them.

There is the aspect I mentioned at the beginning of this, and reference with my overwrought allusions. Education expands the mind, and expands the world. Even apart from the professions that require extensive specific knowledge — and ignoring the toxic narrow-minded view that education is intended primarily to promote economic outcomes — education gives people the ability to create and apply creativity; to identify, measure, and solve problems; to connect different ideas and areas of knowledge in order to gain new insight or create new things; to communicate and empathize with others; to dream and achieve those dreams. Without education, art becomes pale and shallow, and that’s a truly terrible loss. Without education, scientific and technological progress becomes impossible, and that’s — not necessarily all bad, but it does create the possibility for great suffering, if we don’t keep changing to match our changing world. Education is necessary for many people, for many reasons: and I don’t believe education itself is ever harmful.

But education is not the education system.

I do think the Minotaur/Labyrinth analogy is perfect from one perspective: mine. And those of people like me. Because like Minos, and unlike the Minotaur, we need the Labyrinth. I am a good teacher: largely because I work well within, and slightly in opposition to, the educational system. I make the classroom a comfortable place, I make it easier for my students to come to school and succeed and feel valued there. And that’s a good thing. I also teach literature and reading and writing and thinking well, and that’s a better thing. But the things that I teach don’t need to be taught within the system: I have thought often of how much I would love to be like Socrates, or one of the other ancient philosophers, simply declaiming and discussing in the public square, teaching anyone who wanted to learn. That would be so much better than requiring a classroom full of 15-year-olds to write a five-paragraph essay. But you see, I couldn’t make a living doing that. To make a living, I need the system. My other gifts as a teacher, the way I help my students survive through the trials and tribulations of the system — not only do I not need the system to provide support to people who might be struggling, but without the system, those people would not need me. To be meaningful, I need the system.

Basically, to deal with my own problems, I need to make sure other people have problems, too. And that’s Minos and the Minotaur and the Labyrinth. Let’s take note that, not only was the Minotaur captive in the Labyrinth, but Daedalus, the artificer who designed it, was also held captive by Minos; and the tribute of 14 youths who were fed to the Minotaur every year were sent by Athens because Minos defeated them in a war. None of those problems would have existed if Minos hadn’t created them.

And the same goes for the education system. I, like Minos, could make different choices, and live a different life; I don’t believe that teaching is literally the only thing I could do — for one thing, I’d make a hell of a therapist. So I don’t literally need the educational system, I simply benefit from its existence. Minos didn’t need the Labyrinth: he could (in theory) have made better choices in the first place, and never had the existence of the Minotaur to burden him; but if he did end up with the Minotaur, I bet there could be other solutions to the problem. First and foremost, the man lived on an island: surely there were other, smaller, islands nearby. Maybe he could have built a lovely little home for his man-eating stepson, far away from the people of Minos’s kingdom; finding food might still be an issue — but presumably the Minotaur didn’t have to kill what he ate, and dead people are not terribly hard to find. Within the context of an ancient civilization, the Minotaur would be a hell of a capital punishment for Minos to inflict on Cretan criminals.

So the truth is, we may not need the education system at all, other than as a way to maintain the lifestyles of people who are part of the system: and even as one of those people, I don’t believe that justifies the Labyrinth. It is unquestionably valuable and effective for millions of people, as I said; that may be enough benefit to make it worth keeping and trying to fix the flaws and failures that make it useless and even damaging to millions of others, and ideally to make it relevant to the countless people in the third group who just don’t need it. Education is good for all, and harmful for none; maybe we can make the system reflect that. But it is also possible that a wholly new system, or no system at all, in this age of available information and crowd-sourced instruction available to anyone with broadband, would work better for more people.

I’m going to endeavor to figure it out. That’s the long term goal of this series, of this blog. To decide whether or not we need the education system (And if we do, how to fix it), and whether or not we need to replace it.

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Dusty 1 Comment
Recognize this?

The Labyrinth was built, according to Greek myth, to house the Minotaur. The bull-headed man-beast was too large and powerful, too uncontrollable, to be allowed to roam free; also, he ate human flesh, which is problematic.

Why didn’t King Minos of Crete just kill the Minotaur, you might ask? Well, because the Minotaur was his son. His step-son, actually, but since the existence of the Minotaur was his fault, I think he should get credit for parentage. (Also it’s named after him — Minotaur is derived from “Minos’s bull” in Greek.) The Minotaur was the child of Minos’s wife Pasiphae and the snow-white bull which Poseidon gave to Minos as a sign of divine favor, which Minos was supposed to sacrifice but which he decided he wanted to keep; so Poseidon made Pasiphae fall in love with said bull — and when a bull and a woman love each other very much…

The point is, Minos constructed this enormous, elaborate edifice, this institution, in order to keep his problematic child alive, but also contained.

And that’s the same reason why we have schools.

Sorry: too far?

By which I mean: did I start too far afield with this analogy?

And also: am I going too far by comparing the youth of today to the man-eating monster of Greek myth?

Junior?

I don’t think I am (At least not the second kind of too far; the first is really your subjective opinion, but I’ll come back to that, too): because after all, the school system is an unbelievably and appallingly large and elaborate maze, one that even the makers would be largely unable to work their way through (Daedalus, the genius artificer who built the Labyrinth, was barely able to escape it himself; and similarly, there’s not an educator alive today who could handle going back through K-12 schooling. Even if we just did Senior year, I would flunk every math class and get into constant fights with my English teachers when they marked my essays down for being too long. As if that’s even a thing!). A maze which people get lost in, one into which we push a new set of “tributes” every year, where they are devoured by the monster at the heart of the system. And that monster — whom we love — is not one we are willing to destroy or to sacrifice, and so we do whatever we have to in order to keep it alive: but we don’t always provide it with what it really needs to thrive; rather, we tend to put it away where we can’t see it, but we know it’s there and safe. And we maybe just hope that it will figure out its own way to, y’know, be okay.

It works, doesn’t it?

Hold on, hold on: I don’t have to say that the Minotaur is children. The beast at the heart of the maze of education is the result of a gift that was granted us, but which we were given for a specific use or purpose, and which we turned into a selfishly, greedily coveted possession instead: a choice that caused far greater problems than what we might have gained from keeping it for our own amusement. The educational system is the Minotaur. It was created (By us, not by the gods — but really, what’s the difference?) for a specific purpose: to prepare children to be better adults. But we refused to give it up, meaning use it, for just that purpose (Maybe because it would have meant losing control of it?) and instead kept it, clung to it, which led to the destruction of every good aspect of it; and here I’m talking about the elements of education which we refuse utterly to let go of, keeping them preserved long past their usefulness, because of some sentimental attachment to them: things like the Pledge of Allegiance, or classes divided by year of birth, or summer vacation.

It works. You know it does. (If it didn’t, you wouldn’t still be reading this.)

To come back to the thread I left hanging earlier (which may lead us out of this maze, like Theseus), I don’t think I’ve gone too far afield in producing this analogy and then trying to find various places where it can fit because: looking from the ancient Greek side, that is the idea of a myth: a story that is supposed to help make sense of the human experience, usually through a metaphorical substitution of divinity and supernatural power for realities we can’t understand. Our education system as a whole is certainly a reality we can’t understand. I would argue that children are, as well. And from our side, analogies like this are not necessarily intended to define every single aspect of the object being analogized: but merely to offer some insight into it, some new perspective on it.

I bet you’ve never been asked to think of the Cretan Labyrinth as a metaphor for the K-12 education system. And I will bet double or nothing that nobody has ever compared children to the minotaur before.

What do you think, though? Is it accurate? Even a little?

If it is a little accurate (And you know it is), then the analogy succeeded.

And here’s the rub: that analogy’s success depends on you knowing at least three different otherwise useless sets of information and skills: Greek mythology; abstract metaphor/analogy; and the ability to analyze both sides of an analogy and recognize parallels, points of comparison.

If it worked, you learned all that in school. K-12, almost certainly, though it may have been reinforced in college. But Greek mythology came into school for me around 3rd grade; analogies were middle school as a concept, and all the way back to kindergarten as a presence (Because the “kindergarten,” after all, is not actually a garden that grows children) Analyzing and finding points of comparison was high school, I assume, though I don’t remember specifically; but since I teach it, I assume it was taught to me, and somewhere around the same time. Probably in my high school English class. Though metaphor and analogy are something that shows up in most subjects, because it (Using a concrete object to represent an abstract idea, which is the essence of metaphor; using a familiar object to represent an unfamiliar one is the basis of analogy) is one of the most useful conceptual frameworks in life.

And that’s the point.

I wanted today (Okay, I wanted yesterday, but I had to spend the whole day yesterday grading because it takes me a long time to read essays, and also I had to get my hair cut. So it’s today. And maybe tomorrow, if I don’t hurry up and wrap this up.) to discuss the value of school as an institution: is there a reason, in a world of constant access to limitless information, to have school? A school that creates a certain uniformity, which replaces the freedom of childhood with the structure — and therefore the conformity — of early adulthood? My students are very clear that they think there is little value in school today: they think they should be free to learn what they want and only what they want. To choose all of their classes, based on what they are interested in and what they believe they need, and to discard all others that are not interesting or needed, in their minds. Press them on this, and they will admit, first, that given perfect freedom of choice for studies, they would waste most of their time (I certainly would have); and second, there may be some value in the curriculum somewhere; but basically, they want to be set free to do what they want, and not told what they need, especially when so much of what we tell them they need is actually useless in their eyes.

Like a bigass maze meant to contain just one creature.

And that is not something I would argue with: there is an enormous amount of waste in the school system, as there is in any large bureaucracy, especially an old and established one. That’s the Labyrinth. And I don’t think it’s a good thing, not in every specific twist and turn, every single nook and cranny.

But I do think the structure is necessary, if we want to contain the beast within. Since we aren’t willing to kill it.

We had an opportunity to see what that beast would do, given its freedom: because school was closed for a while, back there. A few months in some cases; just about two years, in others. The Labyrinth got turned off, and the Minotaur was asked to put on this headset and sit in front of this screen while we showed him pictures of the Labyrinth, and demanded he pretend he was still wandering inside it, perfectly contained.

Instead he just played video games. (Mostly Minecraft, ironically, but hey, it’s a great game.)

There are a number of problems with the school system. The brick and mortar schools themselves are obscenely expensive to build and maintain. One could argue (though I would argue back) that the system which places large numbers of children into essentially unguarded locations creates a vulnerability that could be and has been exploited by monsters who would harm children — and here I’m not making a forced analogy about the Minotaur, I’m talking about the inhuman bastards at Sandy Hook and Uvalde. Apart from that, schools are certainly vectors for disease, as we know from the last three years of COVID and generations’ worth of flu before that. The school building creates the opportunity (and perhaps the certainty) of bullying and abuse so severe that it might have been the cause of other atrocities like Columbine, not to mention the countless suicides that are the second leading cause of death among Americans aged 15-24. And that’s not even mentioning the curriculum, which is also problematic, and is in some ways more the aspect of the system I’m talking about here. Certainly more labyrinthine and Byzantine.

The basic problem with all of it is efficiency. The only way public school makes sense is if one teacher can provide education to multiple students. Otherwise we’re all just tutors for single children, and we might as well just homeschool everyone, the way people raised their kids for millennia, with parents (And extended family members, too) teaching their own children how to live, except for rich people who hired surrogates so they wouldn’t have to deal with it. But no two children are alike: no two children have just the same interests, aptitudes, or future needs. So by trying to increase the efficiency of education so that fewer adults can provide it to more children, we immediately and inevitably lose some individuality. And the more we try to standardize it, the more we try to make it efficient in terms of achieving repeatable, preferred outcomes for all inputs (Students, that is), the more individuality we lose — and since that, the individuality we ruin by trying to create efficiency, is also students, the system becomes its own problem. The efficiency creates its own inefficiency. We harm students in trying to help students.

And if that ain’t exactly like the Labyrinth, I don’t know a bull’s head from a hole in the ground.

But here’s the thing: for all its problems, the Labyrinth is a good solution. Because it works: it keeps the Minotaur alive, and it prevents it from destroying Minos’s people. It’s not efficient, and it’s not kind, and it necessitates other terrible things like sacrificing people (whom Minos is more willing to sacrifice, because he loves the Minotaur but he doesn’t love the fourteen youths sent every year from Athens) in order to feed the one he’s not willing to sacrifice. An essentially insoluble problem is solved.

Education of an entire population is an insoluble problem, for exactly the reason I said above: we can’t hope to provide every child with what they need. We just can’t. And the harder we try, the worse it will get.

But we also can’t give it up. We can’t let the Minotaur — or if you’re tired of the analogy, the children — just run around on their own. There would be too much destruction. Put more realistically, learning everything you need to know on your own is simply not possible for any but the most self-sufficient geniuses. We all need someone to show us how it works, and then, more importantly, to give us feedback on what went wrong when we tried it ourselves. We need it. Can’t live without it. Can’t learn without it, that is — and in this modern world, education is life. Straight up. Not even a metaphor: education is life.

So that’s why education as a system, as an enormous and expensive and unwieldy and inefficient and often abusive and insensitive and even violent and dangerous system, is necessary. Because our people need to learn how to do things: how to read, how to write, how to do math, how to analyze and interpret and connect and compare and contrast. We also need to learn how to work together, how to help each other, how to ask for what we need and refuse what we don’t; and then how to suffer through being forced to do what we don’t need or want, anyway. All of that is important. And all of it comes from school. That’s not all that comes from school, and a lot of what comes from school is shit; but — we get what we need from school, as well. Most of us. Most of what we need.

And we get some stuff we may not know we need. That’s the problem with letting students decide on their own everything they need to learn for their future: how the hell do they know what they’ll need for their future? You never know when you are young what you may need when you are older. Like algebra. Or chemistry. Or how to make analogies. You never know when you will need to understand when some wackadoo tries to turn some freaky Greek myth into something that is supposed to give insight into the modern world. Literally no way you could have predicted that — and if you were asked when you were a teenager, you never would have taken a class that would have helped you understand this ridiculous post. And hey, maybe you don’t need to understand this post, or my analogies, ever.

But if you couldn’t: wouldn’t you have missed an opportunity here? Wouldn’t you be lost?

Here. Take this thread. It’ll show you the way out.

But only after you go all the way in to the heart of the maze, and fight for your life against what you find there.

Good luck. I’ll be here when you come back out.

(And also, I can’t talk this much about Labyrinths without making this reference, too. Which might be an even better one, since the Goblin King takes a child into the heart of the Labyrinth…)

Back to Balance

Dusty Leave a comment

What is education?

I mean it. What is it really?

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

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

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

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

Let’s discuss.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wrong.

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

Vedic Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

educate (v.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now that’s what I was looking for.

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

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

Bass and Good, p.7

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

Balance Requires Dialogue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Character, self-control, social awareness, culture.

And then: liberation.

That’s education.

More Weight

Dusty Leave a comment

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

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

It’s because we’re tired.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And in 2020, we didn’t have it.

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

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

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

We haven’t gotten it back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Giles Corey simply said “More weight.”

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

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

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

How much more weight?