When the hurly-burly’s done

And they’re not good, at least in my school.

Greenwich Time:

Science and reading scores fell sharply for Greenwich High School students taking the Connecticut Academic Performance Test this year, while scores in math dropped slightly and writing scores improved, according to results released yesterday.

The test, administered each spring all public school sophomores, is used to determine areas in which schools need to improve to comply with the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Reading beyond the lede, which is obviously a little scary, the picture’s not as bad as it could’ve been.  At least we’re still above average.

Greenwich percentage of students meeting the “goal” level in all four areas exceeded the state averages of 53 percent in writing, 45.5 percent in reading, 44.5 in science and 45.3 percent in math.

Still, there’s going to be a lot of fallout from this.  Town education officials have promised to work to remedy the problem.  Since one of the big problem areas is the reading section, the English department’s going to hear a lot about it all year.

But what does one do to fix this problem?  Let’s forget any arguments, right now, about whether No Child Left Behind is designed to save or destroy our schools.  That’s been covered enough, and I really don’t want to dive into it again.

What I’m wondering about, though, is remediation and preparation for the CAPT.  This past school year–yep, the one in which the reading scores at GHS dropped precipitously–was the first time in four years that I’d made a conscious effort to blatantly prepare my sophomores for the test.  Students took practice exams, spent days grading anchor sets and each other.  I won’t find out how my individual students did until the fall, but I bet they contributed to the decline.  And it’s through no fault of their own.

In years past, my students have done pretty well on this exam, and I have to believe it’s because the reading section of the CAPT is actually a reasonable test of what students should be able to do as sophomores in an English class.  Most of the test requires students to read an unfamiliar short story and write four informal responses to it.  One response asks students to explain their initial understanding of the story, including questions it raises and things they’re not certain about.  Another asks students to explain a particular quite’s significance to the story as a whole.  Another asks students to draw parallels between the story they read and any other story, film, life experience, or what-have-you that they know.  And the fourth response asks whether the author of the story succeeded in creating a good piece of literature.

The problem isn’t the test.  All the test does is separate out the kinds of questions good English teachers ask their students all the time.  The language is a little more formal, but who doesn’t ask these questions in class, for homework, in essay assignments?

The problem is preparing students for the test.  As teachers, we need to understand that CAPT (at least the reading section) is a constructionist exam.  It invites requires students, albeit in an artificial setting, to make meaning and explain their thought processes.  And the only way I can think of to prep for this kind of exam is to do more real CAPT prep in our classrooms.

Wait.  Real CAPT prep?  Like more practice tests and anchor set analysis?  Like more timed writing in stale forms?

No way, buddies!  Like encouraging constructivist teaching techniques learning.  Like establishing the classroom as a place where, with the guidance of a devilishly handsome and bearded fellow of, say, thirty, les étudiants essaient their ideas, interpretations, and analysis of carefully selected texts.  Success on the reading section of the CAPT will, I imagine, jump with increased focus on the higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy.  CAPT is a thinking test, not a memorization or drilling test.

Now, I don’t know what’s going to come down from the higher-ups this fall.  We have a new program chair for the high school English department, but she’s strong probably the best teacher of any discipline in the school, and not one to suffer fools lightly.  I imagine the people downtown and in our main office will tell her she needs to get the scores up, and I imagine we’ll have to spend a lot of staff development hours poring over stats and trying to figure out what went wrong.  In the meantime, though, I’m spending the rest of my summer getting ready to teach my new classes this fall and figuring out how best I can lead them to their own academic discoveries.

Wish me luck, people.  I’ll need it.

Sleeping gorilla

Originally uploaded by One Ping Only.

So far:
1. Heard Blues Traveler, Gato Barbieri, and Aztec Two-Step perform live. Still to come: DJ Shadow/Cut Chemist, the Black Crowes, Trey Anastasio.
2. Seen Iron Man and Mongol in the theatre and Rocket Science and Sweeney Todd at home.
3. Almost finished reading Sacred Games (just hit p. 660/~900).
4. Gone to beaches local and far away.
5. Participated in (and led for an afternoon) CWP’s Teaching with Power course.
6. Bought a new bookcase and moved my couch to a better spot.
7. Played a lot of music.
8. Broken in my new grill. It’s charcoal and it’s the manliest thing I own.
9. Learned a lot about myself and my relationships with others.
10. Removed more edubloggers from my Google Reader rolls. Instead, I’m now reading stuff like Stamford Talk and Big Contrarian. It’s much better for my soul.

Still to come:

1. A recital this Friday.

2. A wedding this Saturday.

3. Gathering of the Vibes, Newport Folk Festival, and Oliver Mtukudzi two weekends from now.

4. At least one trip to the big flea market on the PA/NJ border.

5. Quality time with people I love.

6. Rereading Moby-Dick so I can teach it this fall.

7. Less computer time.  More outside time.

8. Repeating #7.

Slavery Assignment

Background Readings on Historical and Modern Slavery

Starter Questions for Each Group

Damian got me:

Christian Long’s summer vacation is off to a bang with the development of the first meme of the season, in which he asks:

What was the “worst job” you ever had that ironically helped prepare you to one day become an educator?

This one is pretty easy. I haven’t had a lot of jobs, but the year before I entered grad school to become certified as an English teacher, I worked as a technical writer for S——. I don’t want to cast aspersion on the company or the people who worked there (bygones are bygones, I say), but the job really wasn’t for me.

I’m not really a detail-oriented guy. I like to work quickly.  I like to write something and leave it and come back to it later.  I like to plow through my work as soon as I can, so as to enjoy the time after it’s done at my leisure.  I like to be left alone with my headphones on so I can block out all other distractions.

None of this really went down well with the people at S——.  I’d finish a week’s worth of writing assignments on Tuesday morning, then sit around not doing much of anything for the rest of the week.  When I was fired laid off, they tried telling me that it was because I hadn’t got enough done, which I easily disproved.  In fact, I’d gotten so much done so quickly that I had no choice but to sit around waiting for the engineers to program more stuff for me to write about.

So what did I learn?  I learned a lot about pacing, boredom, and assumptions.  I learned a lot about delegating tasks and trusts.  And I learned a TON about why I was the happiest boy on Earth when I lost my job and got to go to grad school.

–jw,

who thinks little hiccups are the key to future success

So I’d never heard of the term “edupunk” until I checked my RSS subscriptions this morning and found Dan Meyer’s parody. I spent some downtime today (sorry, kids, your homework’s coming back a day late) trying to figure out what exactly edupunk is. Stephen Downes’s post helped a little, but not much–I get the concept, but fail to see how it’s different from, say, regular old good teaching while not being a tool of The Man. Downes points to a post by Leslie Madsen Brooks at BlogHer that says

…edupunk is student-centered, resourceful, teacher- or community-created rather than corporate-sourced, and underwritten by a progressive political stance. Barbara Ganley’s philosophy of teaching and digital expression is an elegant manifestation of edupunk. Nina Simon, with her imaginative ways of applying web 2.0 philosophies to museum exhibit design, offers both low- and high-tech edupunk visions.

Edupunk, it seems, takes old-school Progressive educational tactics–hands-on learning that starts with the learner’s interests–and makes them relevant to today’s digital age, sometimes by forgoing digital technologies entirely.

So forgive me, edupunkers, but I totally came up with this first. I’m so anticorporate that I won’t even let my students leave my class to plunk down a buck for a bottle of water in our cafeteria. I forgo digital technology pretty often, including today, when we all went outside to work on our class graphic novel. And web 2.0? Shoot, I’ve been forcing my students to use blogs and wikis since autumn 2006.

Anyway, the “punk” part of the word kind of bothers me.  If we’re going to take a suffix from a musical/social movement that promised, but never really delivered, change, why not start the edubeat movement?  Afrobeat, after all, was an expansive, anticorporate, anticolonial, pro-community kind of music that had the added bonus of making anyone within hearing distance shake their collective thangs.

Terminology aside, yes, the whole edupunk thing makes sense, from what I can tell.  Creatively using internet tools and the offline world, including books and pencils and stuff, makes sense.  Suspicion of crappy and expensive panacea software makes sense.  Hands on, project-based learning makes sense.  Letting students use their interests to guide their inquiry makes sense.

This is what we call good teaching.  Now someone tell me why this is new.