Teaching Reforms Should be Based on Research and Experience. (Californiaprogressreport.com)
This article may have been written in response to a California legislative move, but it's applicable to schools and school laws across the country. Marty Hittelman, president of the California Federation of Teachers, has his head on straight. He says, in a nutshell, that putting emphasis on testing isn't going to improve our schools.
"Anyone who has spent much time in the classroom will tell you that one day’s performance in not a valid indicator of a student’s mastery of his or her school year curriculum and growth."
I could have told you this. My first student teaching experience in my Junior year drove the point home with one amazing boy. He had some learning difficulties, which had not been diagnosed nor even caught (I suspect now that it was ADD) - he was in my mainstreamed classroom and they had -just- started talk of sending him for a few minutes of Title I reading instruction every day. He had also adopted the attitude that he didn't need school at the ripe old age of 9, and insisted that he was going to be a bricklayer like his dad (who worked 60-hour weeks and never seemed helpful with academics, yet would somehow have time to teach his son the trade). So he was a difficult case, and as a first-time student teacher I was frustrated by his lack of attention and disorganization - as was the classroom teacher. Still, when I wasn't presenting lessons I would hover in the back of the room where he sat - keeping an eye out for signs of distraction, prompting and prodding and pulling him along with the rest of the class. He got through a few math lessons that way and actually made good progress... but I was only there for a few months.
I didn't expect anyone to grow attached. I wasn't a great teacher; the lessons were messy and the kids were sometimes bored. Still, on the last day I went home with an armload of notes and cards - most of them hand-made by the kids during study time in between shushing and fits of giggles. I still have all of them but one in particular stands out. It was written by that boy who had already been labeled "trouble".
This is the note (click for an image):
"I had a fun time wall you were hear. you tout me math skille and ss, sin I learnde alot. eavn thou I fallad alot of your tests it was fun you were a verry verry verry nice teacher. Bye!"
Three sentences, from a child who had trouble writing one complete sentence when I started my placement. Even this child, one the system was struggling with, proved that he could learn (and enjoyed it!). And he did so not in one day or on one test but over a couple of months. On a standardized test, he would have been one more failure for the school to be embarrassed about, and there would be no evidence of his growth that year. Tests are great - when properly applied as continuous assessment of single topics. As a general picture of education, they suck.
I also found this to be both funny and sadly true:
"Any effort to close the achievement gap in our schools that does not address the conditions that children grow up in is doomed to failure. Schools can only do so much in the time that they work with students. Until this country closes the gaps in job opportunities with a livable wage, health care, and affordable housing, efforts for improvements in the schools will have limited success.
In addition, you can develop all the best tests in the world but if you don’t improve the conditions in the schools in which students and teachers operate in, the test scores will not improve either. As the famous farmer said, “Weighing my hog accurately doesn’t help it to grow heavier.”"
That 5th grade class lived in a low-income area in which most jobs were blue-collar or agricultural work. The housing in the area was mostly old farmhouses or the cheaply-built homes of the 40's and 50's. None of it was in great condition, a sign of both the area's poverty and the homeowners' lack of ability (or funds) to keep up with the maintenance. The school breakfast program was packed every morning. The computer lab ran old, donated computers that sometimes locked up, and the library was in need of new books. If kids were sick, parents missed work to take care of them... so kids came to school and spent the day in the nurse's office. In conditions like these, can we really expect students to increase their test performance based solely on curriculum changes (which at many schools probably wouldn't be supplemented with new materials)?
Oh, and speaking of low-income education - Race to the Top (link: PDF of the law) horrifies me. Some people are shouting for "underachieving" schools to be shut down, the entire staff fired and new people hired "to show that the district is working to improve the school" and be competitive for federal funding. HAH.
1. The "underachieving schools are often in low-income areas, serving minorities who may also be ELLs (english language learners), and are already understaffed, underfunded and overcrowded. You're going to fire everyone on the staff regardless of the fact that those are the people who can afford to work at the school, who love the school, and who know the school's problems inside and out, and replace them with the people who couldn't get hired at any of the other districts and have no idea what they're in for?
2. Last time I checked there wasn't exactly a waiting list to be hired for inner-city Chicago schools and the burnout rate among new teachers in stressful situations is really high. Do they honestly expect a couple of fresh-faced graduates are going to make a difference before they quit in two years?
3. What will these kids do while their school is shut down for a year because the district can't find a math teacher? Better yet, what will they do when the district hires a math teacher on an interim teaching certificate because they can't find someone "certified" and need the school open anyway? Some of the best teachers I know aren't qualified to teach (officially, anyway) but that doesn't mean that you should be shoving unprepared individuals into classrooms where the message is "Raise the scores, or find the door." That's just cruel, to both the teachers and the kids.
I'd rather They sat down with the current staff, discussed what they're seeing as problems (10:1 odds the teachers cite a rough neighborhood and a need for community resources as part of it!) and then work to fix the cause, not the symptom. Unfortunately, They don't do sense.
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Friday, December 04, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
More thoughts on Education.
Someone on Facebook posted a link to yet another news article detailing the excruciating battle between Christian Values and Scientific Learning that is taking place in school science classrooms. Expressing frustration with the fact that yet another class of children is going to be put through Creationism as a theory while ignoring all the other possible creation myths out there. She claims that she's going to put her kids in private school and supplement their education at home to work around this. I said "Homeschool, duh!".
Someone else claims that public school will be just fine for their kid, with parental involvement tacked on the side after the public school day to make sure they actually learn something. That got me thinking, because that's what my father tried to do with us for years.
The problem with putting very bright, home-educated children into an environment like most public schools is that they are incredibly likely to suffer for it at the hands of both teachers (who are statistically the underachievers of their own past high school classes - what does it say that your kid's teacher probably has a lower SAT score than he will?) and kids (who are either jealous or distrustful of a child who knows so much more than they do and prefers learning over making fart jokes). In some ways, having a parent who is active in your academic life either in or out of the classroom is a dividing factor, especially in days when many children are raised by the TV. Even if they claim happiness with this method, there can be no doubt that many of them desire more attention from the two most important people in their life, and realize that in some way when they react poorly to students who show signs of a strong parental bond.
I know - I was one of those kids. By high school, the system had crushed my love of education pretty badly, and I consider myself one of the lucky ones. The educational system is not only failing our underachieving youth; it's failing the overachievers.
With the exception of a few star pupils who are reading so far above grade level that their parents enroll them in college successfully at 10 years old (and make the national news doing it), most "gifted" kids never find the recognition and challenges they desire in public school. I know I was reading at an 8th grade level (coincidentally, the level that most newspapers write at, and the level at which most kids stop learning) when I was in 3rd or 4th grade. I only know this because my parents bothered telling me. No one at the school, that I am aware of(although this could be due to a fuzzy memory - in those years I was reading so much that I lived half my day in a fantasy world of one sort or another), ever told me that I was smarter than the rest of the class. I wasn't placed in any advanced classes, given harder material, differentiated at all from the others. One of my clearest memories of fourth grade is reading Hatchet in reading circle and being so frustrated with the pace that others were reading at that I wanted to blurt out every word they stumbled on, which was most of them. The teacher told us to follow along, but I couldn't make myself read that slowly, so I half-listened to parts I had read 10 minutes ago being sounded out by the slow readers while I flipped ahead. Inevitably I'd be caught and chastised for reading ahead, as the teacher would skip around the circle instead of following an order, presumably to 'catch' poor students who would otherwise attempt to predict their reading passage and pre-read it several times instead of listening to the story. She never did seem to catch the poor readers (they were right in front of her, stumbling over words like 'assumption' and 'porcupine').
It got worse from there, but after my parents split and I stopped getting so many impromptu engineering lessons from dad, my head start faltered and I ended up in the top percentile of my class instead of high above it. I have no doubt that with the right combination of teacher support, parental challenges and financial aid I could have gone to college a few years early, but no one in the educational system wanted to realize that, and my bet is that they didn't like the thought of pulling their student funding until I had been thoroughly wrung dry by the system and they could graduate me "on time". Consider this: The school districts spent an average of $7000 per pupil to educate us in the '99-00 school year [1]. Considering that lovely sum, why would a school remove a student (and therefore, the student's $7k or more in funding) for early placement in a higher grade when they can continue sucking money out of taxpayers and government?
Teachers really don't help; students seem to despise peers who achieve better than they do. I had friends, but mostly I had competition. By fourth grade it was clear that some of use were "smarter" than the others, and our small group competed within itself for the honor of highest grades and most teacher praise. I remember being especially envious of one boy whose father had helped him with a civil war project. Mine was a clay figure of Abraham Lincoln holding a tiny, painstakingly copied Gettysburg Address in his little clay hands. Mom couldn't find modeling clay so it was the cheap Crayola clay, and it fell apart quickly. The boy (who I also had a crush on) had a plywood board painted as a battlefield, complete with plastic hills and two opposing armies of blue and grey toy soldiers. It was a masterpiece of elementary school projects and I hated him for it. But back to the point - the other kids hated all of us "smart" kids. So we tried our best to stay quiet and not achieve too much, lest we be tormented mercilessly (I bet those kids didn't even know how to SAY merciless at that point!) by the peers who were either jealous of our success or hurt by it.
In a school situation like that it's not hard to see why I'd prefer my children, if I have them, to be homeschooled. I know that even if I adopt, my kids are not going to fit in with the educational system by the time I'm done with them, and I don't want them to. The schools have failed us, and I want them to know this. I don't blame parents who want to send their kids to a better school because they don't think they can homeschool a child. Not everyone is a teacher, and not everyone has the time and energy to play teacher to a bright and curious child. However, I don't think we should be giving bad schools any more support than is legally necessary (keep payin' your taxes, folks), and in fact I think we should protest every board meeting that goes by without improving the situation in our schools... if more of our children were getting a proper education, and not just shoved into boxlike rooms and told to behave for 6 hours a day, I think a lot of our other "problems" would start to fix themselves... but that's another post
1. Gross, Martin L. Conspiracy of Ignorance, The. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. Back to post
Someone else claims that public school will be just fine for their kid, with parental involvement tacked on the side after the public school day to make sure they actually learn something. That got me thinking, because that's what my father tried to do with us for years.
The problem with putting very bright, home-educated children into an environment like most public schools is that they are incredibly likely to suffer for it at the hands of both teachers (who are statistically the underachievers of their own past high school classes - what does it say that your kid's teacher probably has a lower SAT score than he will?) and kids (who are either jealous or distrustful of a child who knows so much more than they do and prefers learning over making fart jokes). In some ways, having a parent who is active in your academic life either in or out of the classroom is a dividing factor, especially in days when many children are raised by the TV. Even if they claim happiness with this method, there can be no doubt that many of them desire more attention from the two most important people in their life, and realize that in some way when they react poorly to students who show signs of a strong parental bond.
I know - I was one of those kids. By high school, the system had crushed my love of education pretty badly, and I consider myself one of the lucky ones. The educational system is not only failing our underachieving youth; it's failing the overachievers.
With the exception of a few star pupils who are reading so far above grade level that their parents enroll them in college successfully at 10 years old (and make the national news doing it), most "gifted" kids never find the recognition and challenges they desire in public school. I know I was reading at an 8th grade level (coincidentally, the level that most newspapers write at, and the level at which most kids stop learning) when I was in 3rd or 4th grade. I only know this because my parents bothered telling me. No one at the school, that I am aware of(although this could be due to a fuzzy memory - in those years I was reading so much that I lived half my day in a fantasy world of one sort or another), ever told me that I was smarter than the rest of the class. I wasn't placed in any advanced classes, given harder material, differentiated at all from the others. One of my clearest memories of fourth grade is reading Hatchet in reading circle and being so frustrated with the pace that others were reading at that I wanted to blurt out every word they stumbled on, which was most of them. The teacher told us to follow along, but I couldn't make myself read that slowly, so I half-listened to parts I had read 10 minutes ago being sounded out by the slow readers while I flipped ahead. Inevitably I'd be caught and chastised for reading ahead, as the teacher would skip around the circle instead of following an order, presumably to 'catch' poor students who would otherwise attempt to predict their reading passage and pre-read it several times instead of listening to the story. She never did seem to catch the poor readers (they were right in front of her, stumbling over words like 'assumption' and 'porcupine').
It got worse from there, but after my parents split and I stopped getting so many impromptu engineering lessons from dad, my head start faltered and I ended up in the top percentile of my class instead of high above it. I have no doubt that with the right combination of teacher support, parental challenges and financial aid I could have gone to college a few years early, but no one in the educational system wanted to realize that, and my bet is that they didn't like the thought of pulling their student funding until I had been thoroughly wrung dry by the system and they could graduate me "on time". Consider this: The school districts spent an average of $7000 per pupil to educate us in the '99-00 school year [1]. Considering that lovely sum, why would a school remove a student (and therefore, the student's $7k or more in funding) for early placement in a higher grade when they can continue sucking money out of taxpayers and government?
Teachers really don't help; students seem to despise peers who achieve better than they do. I had friends, but mostly I had competition. By fourth grade it was clear that some of use were "smarter" than the others, and our small group competed within itself for the honor of highest grades and most teacher praise. I remember being especially envious of one boy whose father had helped him with a civil war project. Mine was a clay figure of Abraham Lincoln holding a tiny, painstakingly copied Gettysburg Address in his little clay hands. Mom couldn't find modeling clay so it was the cheap Crayola clay, and it fell apart quickly. The boy (who I also had a crush on) had a plywood board painted as a battlefield, complete with plastic hills and two opposing armies of blue and grey toy soldiers. It was a masterpiece of elementary school projects and I hated him for it. But back to the point - the other kids hated all of us "smart" kids. So we tried our best to stay quiet and not achieve too much, lest we be tormented mercilessly (I bet those kids didn't even know how to SAY merciless at that point!) by the peers who were either jealous of our success or hurt by it.
In a school situation like that it's not hard to see why I'd prefer my children, if I have them, to be homeschooled. I know that even if I adopt, my kids are not going to fit in with the educational system by the time I'm done with them, and I don't want them to. The schools have failed us, and I want them to know this. I don't blame parents who want to send their kids to a better school because they don't think they can homeschool a child. Not everyone is a teacher, and not everyone has the time and energy to play teacher to a bright and curious child. However, I don't think we should be giving bad schools any more support than is legally necessary (keep payin' your taxes, folks), and in fact I think we should protest every board meeting that goes by without improving the situation in our schools... if more of our children were getting a proper education, and not just shoved into boxlike rooms and told to behave for 6 hours a day, I think a lot of our other "problems" would start to fix themselves... but that's another post
1. Gross, Martin L. Conspiracy of Ignorance, The. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. Back to post
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Word Play (and procrastination)
I should be doing my homework but I've been doing a lot of reading lately (me? read?!) and I wanted to share a few of the thoughts it provoked. As a reader and writer I really enjoy language - puns, playing on the meanings of words, homophones and homonyms and everything else. I'm no English major but I know enough to get by in polite society, or so I like to think.
As a natural offshoot of reading, writing, and playing with words, sometimes I come up with questions - What is the connection (or separation) between condemn and condone? I know their definitions, but 'con' as a prefix didn't quite make sense to me in those words. So what do 'demn' and 'done' mean and how does that change 'con'? (demn is from damnare, Latin: to sentence; done is from donare, also Latin, to donate.) Stuff like this runs through my head in the shower and if I remember later I go look it up with Mirriam-Webster and friends at Dictionary.com.
That train of thought - how easy it is to pull out the electronic dictionary on a whim - sparked some additional insight on teaching. Teachers today many times run into kids who either claim that school is useless for them or that they 'already know it all'. In many cases neither of these claims is true, but it is getting much easier to "know it all", with a little help from our friend Google. I would consider myself an active learner; I seek to engage myself in learning experiences on a daily basis and when I don't get them from a classroom I try to make other connections. A few years ago I probably would have had to find someone nearby to answer any questions I had about etymology, etc unless I had the full (and very expensive) version of Webster's Unabridged sitting around the house. Most people don't even HAVE a dictionary these days, or so it seems - This article tells a touching but probably all too common tale of third graders who were completely unfamiliar with dictionaries and who did not own them at home. And yet I can open a new tab and type the right combination of key words (which might take a few tries) into Google and get you that very article without so much as needing to know it existed, let alone having to look up where it was published, dates, or know how to scan a newspaper database. Information is literally a few keystrokes away.
This kind of open learning environment is one I love, but I think for many people, the knowledge that the information is there is not akin to being curious or able to access it. Someone can now claim to be a know-it-all, and as long as they're sitting at a computer connected to the internet they can try to prove it with virtually no physical, social, or mental work required. They don't even have to read what they're telling you - "key words" do the work for them (although it's always a good idea to pre-read or skim what you plan to present as proof, as many researchers will tell you). The skills to utilize that kind of open information setting are what we should be (and in some cases are) teaching in schools, but for a student who has seen what Google and Wikipedia do for his/her older sister's history report and his best friend's knowledge of how to "get chicks" (even though at 12 he's never practiced) it's probably already too late to start teaching good research skills, how to find reliable sources, and all the other practical parts of learning that no amount of reading Howstuffworks.com will ever give you.
I think in some respects the seemingly endless fountain of information available on the internet is liberating. It gets me out of the classrooms that I associate with powerpoint lectures and well-meaning teachers and into a realm of connections (links, key word searches, images, and video) which I can make or leave for later as I choose. I say "make" because for me reading the article on combustion engines will teach me something, but when I choose to read the connecting articles - on different fuels, maybe, or on rotary engines, how engines are built, or common engine problems, I am not just clicking links in the web, I am making more connections. I am adding more to that file folder in my brain that's now labeled "mechanics" so that later when I read something about fuel efficiency I can connect further. School sometimes fails to to this, but the tactics I learned in school to deal with forming and arranging connections have been invaluable to me as a denizen of the internets.
I love learning like this and I think many others do as well... but I worry about how this kind of learning experience is leaving some people behind (those without 24/7 connectivity or computer experience are foremost, along with those who are already lacking in the background cultural knowledge necessary to 'get' the jokes, arguments, and other things that show up in academia) and separating the classroom and the teacher from their preconceived purposes. This is not to say that the intended purpose of an educator and an education is today what it should be or has been. It is however a growing concern that students rarely see the use or legitimate claims of classroom knowledge in a world where the teacher often seems out of touch with rapidly growing technology and the administration even more so.
What is the solution to our information issues? Handing students the basic tools to explore their world and then letting go has been a wonderful teaching method in the past but there is such thing as information overload - and the internet in all its glory is certainly capable of causing it. It is also capable of sparking interest in "boring" subject matter, making things easily accessible for students of any age... and misleading us.
What is the role of the teacher in learning, if the student does not see a need for guidance in their search for information? Where and how do we set boundaries on what is to be taught, if boundaries are to be set? We can't enforce boundaries on learning if the student is determined enough to learn outside the classroom (which is actually something I would love to see happening!). And how do we excite the students who have decided that even with the knowledge of the world at their fingertips, they would rather not explore? What will bring them into the circle of lifelong learners? It's a very complicated issue... and Google doesn't have the answer! :(
As a natural offshoot of reading, writing, and playing with words, sometimes I come up with questions - What is the connection (or separation) between condemn and condone? I know their definitions, but 'con' as a prefix didn't quite make sense to me in those words. So what do 'demn' and 'done' mean and how does that change 'con'? (demn is from damnare, Latin: to sentence; done is from donare, also Latin, to donate.) Stuff like this runs through my head in the shower and if I remember later I go look it up with Mirriam-Webster and friends at Dictionary.com.
That train of thought - how easy it is to pull out the electronic dictionary on a whim - sparked some additional insight on teaching. Teachers today many times run into kids who either claim that school is useless for them or that they 'already know it all'. In many cases neither of these claims is true, but it is getting much easier to "know it all", with a little help from our friend Google. I would consider myself an active learner; I seek to engage myself in learning experiences on a daily basis and when I don't get them from a classroom I try to make other connections. A few years ago I probably would have had to find someone nearby to answer any questions I had about etymology, etc unless I had the full (and very expensive) version of Webster's Unabridged sitting around the house. Most people don't even HAVE a dictionary these days, or so it seems - This article tells a touching but probably all too common tale of third graders who were completely unfamiliar with dictionaries and who did not own them at home. And yet I can open a new tab and type the right combination of key words (which might take a few tries) into Google and get you that very article without so much as needing to know it existed, let alone having to look up where it was published, dates, or know how to scan a newspaper database. Information is literally a few keystrokes away.
This kind of open learning environment is one I love, but I think for many people, the knowledge that the information is there is not akin to being curious or able to access it. Someone can now claim to be a know-it-all, and as long as they're sitting at a computer connected to the internet they can try to prove it with virtually no physical, social, or mental work required. They don't even have to read what they're telling you - "key words" do the work for them (although it's always a good idea to pre-read or skim what you plan to present as proof, as many researchers will tell you). The skills to utilize that kind of open information setting are what we should be (and in some cases are) teaching in schools, but for a student who has seen what Google and Wikipedia do for his/her older sister's history report and his best friend's knowledge of how to "get chicks" (even though at 12 he's never practiced) it's probably already too late to start teaching good research skills, how to find reliable sources, and all the other practical parts of learning that no amount of reading Howstuffworks.com will ever give you.
I think in some respects the seemingly endless fountain of information available on the internet is liberating. It gets me out of the classrooms that I associate with powerpoint lectures and well-meaning teachers and into a realm of connections (links, key word searches, images, and video) which I can make or leave for later as I choose. I say "make" because for me reading the article on combustion engines will teach me something, but when I choose to read the connecting articles - on different fuels, maybe, or on rotary engines, how engines are built, or common engine problems, I am not just clicking links in the web, I am making more connections. I am adding more to that file folder in my brain that's now labeled "mechanics" so that later when I read something about fuel efficiency I can connect further. School sometimes fails to to this, but the tactics I learned in school to deal with forming and arranging connections have been invaluable to me as a denizen of the internets.
I love learning like this and I think many others do as well... but I worry about how this kind of learning experience is leaving some people behind (those without 24/7 connectivity or computer experience are foremost, along with those who are already lacking in the background cultural knowledge necessary to 'get' the jokes, arguments, and other things that show up in academia) and separating the classroom and the teacher from their preconceived purposes. This is not to say that the intended purpose of an educator and an education is today what it should be or has been. It is however a growing concern that students rarely see the use or legitimate claims of classroom knowledge in a world where the teacher often seems out of touch with rapidly growing technology and the administration even more so.
What is the solution to our information issues? Handing students the basic tools to explore their world and then letting go has been a wonderful teaching method in the past but there is such thing as information overload - and the internet in all its glory is certainly capable of causing it. It is also capable of sparking interest in "boring" subject matter, making things easily accessible for students of any age... and misleading us.
What is the role of the teacher in learning, if the student does not see a need for guidance in their search for information? Where and how do we set boundaries on what is to be taught, if boundaries are to be set? We can't enforce boundaries on learning if the student is determined enough to learn outside the classroom (which is actually something I would love to see happening!). And how do we excite the students who have decided that even with the knowledge of the world at their fingertips, they would rather not explore? What will bring them into the circle of lifelong learners? It's a very complicated issue... and Google doesn't have the answer! :(
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