When the hurly-burly’s done

So I’ve been reading Dan Meyer’s blog. I suggest you do the same. Start with these two posts, then come back here.

Anecdote:

My mother is also a teacher (and was the inspiration for my career choice, yes, yes). I spoke to her yesterday after she left her homebound tutoring assignment–she works with an 8th grade boy who is in the midst of chemotherapy. This boy can’t go to school until after flu season, even though he feels pretty good and the chemo seems to be working, because his immune system is so compromised that it could be really, REALLY bad.

Anyway. As with any other long-term homebound situation, a lot of procedural/curricular questions have been raised. This boy is obviously not able to participate in my mother’s writing workshops, for example, and has missed out on field trips, science class labs, &c. But he’s going to be taking the Connecticut Mastery Tests. Of course he’s going to take them.

The principal insists that he take them because he’s a Special Ed student who tends to do well on these tests, and because he won’t skip school on the days the tests are administered. He’s homebound, dig, so he really can’t go anywhere, and I guess the tests will be brought to him somehow. He’s a Special Ed student who will take the test, and one of the things that NCLB seems to require (and I haven’t actually read the legislation, but this is what I understand) is a certain attendance rate from every subpopulation of a particular school, otherwise there are consequences.

That’s kind of troubling, I guess, but what’s worse, to me, is that these tests can be taken, and done well on, by students who haven’t been in school, haven’t interacted with other hormonal adolescents, haven’t really left their homes because of immune system problems, in months. What are these tests testing, then? Obviously, it’s not the same things that teachers value and that students need to go to school to learn about. If this boy is expected to do so well on the test (and previous indicators suggest he well, though I guess we’ll really have to wait a few months until he gets his score to know for sure, and I sincerely hope that it’s something his family will still care about in a few months) without having been in school, and with only a two-hour visit from my mother once a week, just what is it testing?

So now someone’s going to say, I’m sure, that it’s obvious that the school just isn’t focusing the curriculum enough. If this boy doesn’t have to be in school to do well on the test, then the school is doing something wrong. Perhaps this is what TMAO meant when he wrote, in the comments on Dan Meyer’s post:

All of the negative by products that are laid on the doorstep of this bill are not the results of provisions therein, but rather actions taken by schools and districts to improve student achievement (or performance, if you think the test are invalid). Any aspersions we choose to cast at schools taking away electives, lengthening the school day, including test prep, and so forth, must be cast at the actual individuals making those choices; they are not the only choices to be made.

Thankfully, I’m not a school administrator, but I’d love to know what the other choices are. Realigning curricula to reflect what’s on the test is a bad idea, because the test should come from the curriculum. Ignoring the test is a bad idea if you’re a school where many students do not meet proficiency standards. So you realign and realign and the where do you end up? Classes that are run just like how Sarah Puglisi described them.

Dan Meyer, in the comments on Sarah’s post, posed two questions that strike me as absurd at best, dangerous at worst:

Are the two of you opposed to accountability measures outright?

If no, are the two of you then just opposed to the accountability measures of NCLB?

“Accountability measures,” here, refer to standardized tests. “Accountability” means that there is some sort of a metric for success, which is created by some human being somewhere, and that people are measured against that metric. Neat, right? Accountability in itself isn’t a bad thing (I hold my students accountable for producing new and exciting work, and handing it in by the deadline, and for showing up and being productive and kind and generous in class), but the way we go about it is. If you’re not in my classroom right now, how will you know that the Satire Project is forcing my sophomores to synthesize their knowledge and understanding of satire as a concept, the writing process, and the realities of their particular community? You’re certainly not going to measure it on any sort of NCLB scale.

But it’s Dan’s second question that gives me that extra-special feeling of encountering the kind of 21st-century “debate” that pays the bills for any number of idiots in suits who pretend to be experts:

[A]re the two of you then just opposed to the accountability measures of NCLB?

Because, y’know, if you say yes, you’re just anti-NCLB without giving it a chance. You’re guilty of giving nothing but a knee-jerk reaction to anything that would suggest that your teaching is anything less than sterling. You’re not giving the children a fair shake.

What about some other sort of accountability? Why do we have to break “success” down into students’ abilities to do a lot of stuff in a short amount of time in an artificial environment (in my school, students don’t take the CAPT tests in their regular classrooms)? I’d love to have someone from the government come hang in my classroom for a couple of weeks and see what we do there. (Union leadership: please forget I wrote that.) There’s learning, my students are progressing, and even my most “at-risk” upperclassmen make progress toward learning and understanding. They read, they write, they debate, they analyze, they synthesize. Who’s going to test that, and how?

Donald Crowdis might be the world’s oldest blogger, but he’s no gimmick.  This guy can think, and he can write, and most importantly, he can write about what he’s thinking.  He is well worth adding to your aggregator or however you get your blog feeds.

I’ve wanted to write this post for a week or so, but life has a funny way of interfering. Exams, late-night visits from old friends, a head-on collision with the fatigue truck, and one of those days when every item of clothing needs to go through the laundry have colluded to put this off.

And now, more distraction: watching da Bears destroy the Saints, who apparently are not accustomed to snow. I’m not much of a hardcore football fan–I don’t follow the NFL–but I like watching the games. I like watching the plays unfold. There’s a lot of planning done in very little time, and while things sometimes work out exactly as called by the QB, the plays gang oft agley. If I had the energy or talent I’d push the metaphor and explain how that’s just like the act of teaching, at least for me, but I don’t think anyone really needs me to explain that.

I just finished reading and grading the ENG213 Huck Finn essays. Yesterday afternoon, when I blocked out several hours in which to grade the majority of them, I never thought I’d be able to get through the whole stack. Now, there have been plenty of times in my teaching career when I’ve hated grading student work. I usually just take a lot of breaks and do things that I otherwise wouldn’t do. It’s a cliche, I know, but any teacher will tell you that their house is never cleaner than right after a huge batch of papers or tests has been collected. Anyway, I usually complain a lot, then somehow muddle through the grading, assessing the work in an impartial and pretty much fair fashion, record the grades in my fancy-shmantzy gradebook, swear I’ll never assign so much work due at the end of the marking period, and proceed to break that oath as soon as possible.

Not this time, though. These essays were good, by any standard measure: I gave a lot of grades in the A/A-/B+ range, because the papers were well-organized and used evidence to support a thesis. Some were even fun to read. The students showed that they understood the controversies surrounding the teaching of Huck Finn in a high school class and presented their opinions effectively.

I will never assign this essay topic again. It’s not that it’s too easy, or too difficult. It’s just pointless. My students read the novel, did a little bit of research, and answered a question that isn’t terribly interesting at best, and irrelevant at worst.

When I first assigned the task three years ago, I was genuinely interested in what that bunch of students thought about the issue. Did they think the book should have been required? Why or why not? Were their opinions influenced by previous and current controversies surrounding the book? Is book banning ever acceptable? Now, three years later, I find myself not caring one way or the other. It’s just not important. Huck Finn is required here. Most students say that the book should not be banned, because why would they go against what their teacher obviously believes? It’s a stupid question, and I never want to read anything about it ever again.

So what’s important? Reading these essays for the past couple of weeks (including drafts, outlines, and the like) has led me to this question: What is English class supposed to be about, anyway? What do my students need to learn? How can we (my students and myself) use the scheduled time and place to enhance our understanding of how humans communicate? Clarence Fisher, as usual, puts it so well I can hardly stand it:

If we are about hundreds of discrete skills that have absolutely nothing to do with their daily lives; if we attempt to fill their heads with facts they just might need some day, it is no wonder we are losing the attention, the concerns, the hearts of our students.

Classrooms need to be about passion.

Classrooms need to be about inquiry.

Classrooms need to be about connections and the stories these bring into our lives.

I’ve been reading a lot about the Classroom-as-Studio model.  The idea is, the way I see it, to change the way classrooms work.  Instead of being teacher-driven (I give you some information, you find more information, you report back on the information, I test you on the information), they will become student-driven (you decide, with some faciliatation from me, what you’ll investigate, then you teach everyone else about it and publish your findings).  There are a ton of different ways to do this, but I’m concerned here with what might work in my classroom, with my schedule.  Sure, that sounds a bit teacher- (or ego-) centric, but if this is going to work, it has to take into account several real conditions:

1.  I don’t have tenure.  This doesn’t scare me as much as it probably should, or as much as the dark mutterings ABOUT non-tenured teachers rousing the rabble would have me believe.

2.  I have 58-minute periods with which to work.  Also, these 58-minute periods meet only three days out of every four.

3.  I share all of my classroom spaces with other teachers.

4.  My classes are approaching the point of overcrowding (and in one instance, I don’t have enough desks in the room).

5.  Unlike Rafe Esquith, I’m not prepared to devote every bit of my energy to this endeavour.  I love teaching, I love my job, and I think about it a lot, but seriously.  I do, however, identify with one of his main points, that “true excellence takes sacrifice, mistakes, and tremendous amounts of effort.”

So, where now?  More reading for me, and definitely more thinking and writing (I think we call that “blogging”).  More highlights of what my students write, when they write something that I think is getting toward where we should be.  More asking them, the students, what they think they need and how I can help them fulfill those needs.  More transparency, more openness, more willingness to experiment and admit that an experiment failed. 

It’s entirely possible that after this semester, after getting scads of student input about the direction of the class, I’ll go back to my old totalitarian ways (This is what you’re learning!  Because I said so!  There are standards!  THERE ARE STANDARDS!) because that works better.  But not without trying something new. 

I’m beginning to see how it all fits together–the classroom environment, the shift in focus from work in isolation to work in a global community, the paper load of an English or social studies teacher.  I think Evan Olmstead hit it out of the park with this post:

Teach quality content, model good communication, and guide students as they create their own valuable addition to the discipline at hand.  In this way education may become a place where students are a part of the real world, rather than waiting to enter it.  As educators, we need to recognize this opportunity and use it to change the face of education.  The classroom up until now has been a hypothetical space – let’s make it real.

Let’s make it real.  Yes.  I have wondered for a while now why essays are assigned as summative assessments.  Why do we assume that students, after reading a book once, are suddenly able to become experts on that book?  I’ve read Macbeth a dozen times at least but I still can’t tell you the difference between Lennox and Angus off the top of my head.

More and more, though, I’m thinking about this question: What’s the point of asking students to do research, to engage in literary criticism, or to write persuasively for an audience of one?  There’s nothing more hypothetical than asking a student to write persuasively on the issue of whether or not Huck Finn should be part of the high school curriculum, then giving the essay back with a grade.  If the issue were a real issue, like if our town were thinking about removing the book, or if we were in a curriculum review cycle, “real” people (nonstudents, I guess) would write letters to the editor of the local paper, speak out at Board of Ed meetings, and drop in to visit elected officials and school administrators in their offices.  They would not be graded on the veracity or flow of their arguments, or whether their thesis is clearly stated in both their introduction and conclusion, but real honest-to-God pushback from people who held the opposite view.  There would be an argument, either orally or in written form, and each side would try to inform and convince the other.

Now, of course it’s hard to grade something like that.  And there’s a whole curriculum to cover.  And we can’t go manufacturing controversy.  But what if (and I swear I just thought of this now) this Huck Finn assignment isn’t the end product, but is the beginning of a whole-class discussion on what an English curriculum should include and what its goals should be?

Laura Huertero is wrestling with the fact that individual little grades–homework, quizzes, &c–are pretty much meaningless.  I’d comment on her blog directly, but I don’t have an account.  So I’ll do it here and hope she gets the trackback:

I now see why my esteemed cooperating teacher just made sure that her grades were in the right spot, not that she had graded every tiny thing or that she had squeezed every bit of homework out of every individual that she could.

It just doesn’t matter.

Too often I find myself doing exactly what I swore I’d never do: worrying about the little grades.  I just finished negotiating with a student who owed me seven journal entries about The Great Gatsby.  I was offended by how late he was in his work.  Offended!  But why?  Why did I care?  I found myself losing sight of the big picture (Did Young Sir interact with the book, did he learn anything about literature or life, does he have something to write or talk about that he didn’t have before) and getting bogged down in the check/check plus/check minus hell that I’ve created for myself.  Me.  The guy who, at the meeting about summer reading, tuned out and started writing angry notes to himself in his notebook when it became clear that people were only concerned that a) the students read something over the summer, b) they can’t cheat, and c) they never read the same book twice.  Too many English teachers are control freaks who feel offended when something, anything, isn’t handed in or assessable.  Of course, that probably works for those teachers, and for some of their students.  But there’s got to be another way.

I just came across Rob McCord’s piece in yesterday’s Philadelphia Inquirer, “Pursuing the dream”:

Look, I know it can seem artificial consciously to consider race or ethnic background. But simply not thinking about integration is a failing tactic in much of America.

Keep it in mind as we wrap up the Twain unit with our own original satires.  There are plenty of social problems in current American society, so pick one that interests you.  You’ll find plenty of raw material if you know where to look.