This site is closed until further notice.

Chris’s latest post just came across my Google Reader–I guess he posted it last night, but I was in a turkey haze from which I’ve just emerged. In it, he addresses one of the things that makes me most embarrassed to be a teacher: the notion of “high expectations” of student behavior.

I know you know these teachers. There’s the one who posts a three-page list of rules (NO HATS! NO GUM!). The one for whom every deadline is treated as a sacred event. The one whose first response to any rustling is to tell students to be quiet.

I don’t work like that. If it weren’t for the bugs I’ve seen in my classroom, I’d bring my own breakfast every day and invite my students to join me. But really? Hats? Gum? Spending all your time chasing down malefactors? Not why I’m in the classroom, buddies. I don’t know how else to put it.

A couple of weeks ago I got into a conversation about homework with a couple of my colleagues. They’re young, they’re hip, and they shocked the hell out of me when I shocked the hell out of them by telling them I just didn’t do homework for about three years, from 7th through 10th grade. I refused, I said, to do homework that seemed like a waste of time. Why would I do 20 math problems when I could go read a book? Why read a book that was assigned when I could read something I’d just gotten from the library? Why bother?

But, one of my colleagues said, what about trusting your teachers to know what’s best for you?

I said nothing, thinking about a lot of the people I’ve worked with for eight years at two real teaching jobs and two student teaching assignments.

What I did say was that every day was a struggle for me to come up with homework assignments that were crucial and built up to some sort of classroom-based epiphany experience for the young human beings in my care.

And don’t, I said, even get me started on not accepting late homework, etc.

But what, said the other of my colleagues, looking very concerned indeed, about holding these kids to some sort of standard? In the real world, in real jobs, there are deadlines, and you get fired if you miss them.

Well, sometimes, yes. But certainly not the first time deadlines are missed. I thought about back when I worked for one of those dotcoms that were ubiquitous at the turn of the century, and how we had a product that was supposed to ship on a certain date. This wasn’t just any product–it was the latest version of our flagship software package, and it represented massive change from the last version, and it was what was going to either make our company a viable force in the asynchronous collaboration game or completely sink us. We had clients (municipal governments of major foreign cities, oil companies, etc) with a little bit of clout. I was writing custom manuals. It was huge.

And we missed our ship deadline. Twice. And there were meetings, and a couple of the clients were annoyed, but in the long run, you know what happened? The final product was way better. The company’s now huge, and though I no longer work there (they tried to claim that it was me who missed the deadline, when in fact no product existed at the time for me to write manuals about, and they finally admitted that they were pretty much full of it), I check in on them from time to time to see how they’re doing.

Maybe not the best example. But I’m sure you can think of one, too–in the corporate world, deadlines are missed, budgets are exceeded, and you know what? The show goes on. The people regroup, and good managers help the employees who are behind to catch up and learn what’s going on.

Also, in offices, you’re allowed to chew gum.

I’m all for high standards–academic high standards. But I’m also for not knocking a kid’s grade down from a B to a C- because he didn’t hand in his homework in time. Are we teaching our students how to read and produce a variety of texts, or are we teaching them that nothing is more important than timeliness?

The best decision I made last year in terms of accepting work was that for my Essay and Creative Writing classes, I’d make everything due in the last week of the quarter. Giving the students weeks and weeks to really polish their pieces made the end results fantastic, in many cases. It made the mid-quarter progress reports an exercise in creative writing themselves, but I’d say it was totally worth it. I’m still experimenting with ways to apply that kind of thinking to my other classes, to treat classes more like workshops with students working at their own paces, but I really have no idea how to do that. It seems, however, more worthwhile than anything else I can think of relating to education. It’s certainly better than complaining.

That is all.

I want to do more personal and political blogging, but I don’t think my edublogs.org account is the most appropriate place for it.  Therefore, anything along those lines that I write will now be at rhinosplode.wordpress.com.  This will hopefully, in time, become a group blog; even if that never happens, expect it to be updated fairly regularly (say, every few days or so).

In the meantime, When the hurly-burly’s done (this site) will continue to host my thoughts on matters educational and literary (ie, things that are appropriate for the school blog of an English teacher).

Thanks for your patience as I figure this all out.

There’s an alternative to acceding completely or whining constantly, and it begins with thinking through and naming the commitments you bring with you into the classroom, your values, your pledge. These are not pure abstractions, but rather standards to hold in mind. A fundamental commitment might involve taking the side of your students, affirming the humanity of each and resisting anything that constrains or reduces them. Another might be to create in your classroom an environment that is a kind of republic of many voices, allowing every student a space to be seen and heard and known well as a person of worth and value.

Because teachers work in a fluid, complex, idiosyncratic world, and because there’s much beyond our immediate control, it makes sense to focus on these things that you can control. First, you can see your students as whole human beings, three-dimensional beings much like yourself with hopes and dreams, bodies and minds and spirits. You can see with your own eyes, your own curious and critical mind, your own generous heart. And you can resist the alphabet soup of deficits and the toxic habit of labeling kids that infects most schools. No one can make you see kids as creatures with labels clinging to them like barnacles, sharp and ugly. You have a mind of your own, and you can become a student of your students in spite of everything. This gesture alone can be full of surprise, and deeply satisfying.

Ayers writes almost poetically about the main point I took away from yesterday afternoon’s CWP-sponsored workshop with Jeff Wilhelm. Classrooms are places where students should be engaged with learning what’s important to them, and what they see as useful. The inquiry model, about which more at a later date, seems to be a good way of starting to begin to make that change part of daily practice.

As far as “teachers work[ing] in a fluid, complex, idiosyncratic world” goes, few people can say it better than Doug Noon. His latest post, “Teaching for Change in a Culture of Compliance,” gets at the Ayers controversy (kind of) and the notion that teaching for social justice is somehow dangerous or subversive:

Test-based school reform and the politics of accountability has pushed classrooms further away from discussions about social issues than at any time in the last two decades. Teachers and administrators have been all too willing to embrace the authority of test scores, standards, and “research-based” reading instruction, minimizing and forgetting the value of community, intuition, genuine motivation, and common sense….Inquiring into our history, sources of power in society, current events, and discussing race and stereotyping does not preclude observing high academic standards. And there’s nothing subversive about such discussions unless you admit that the moral order has already been undermined.

What is our purpose as teachers if it isn’t to help students recognize and understand the patterns that might need to be changed?

Oh! And Bruce Fuller weighs in, too. Man, this is a great day.

Politicians’ obsessions with making schools and colleges more vocational in character are unlikely to lift the economy. According to new research by James Heckman at the University of Chicago, today’s workers don’t need vocational skills, they need better “non-cognitive” skills — like the capacity to communicate effectively or to cooperatively solve problems.

Schools should be focusing on these human skills, as well as ethical reasoning. Wall Street’s meltdown, linked to shady lending practices, reveals the moral bankruptcy of huge segments of the market. Yet political leaders now urge our children to quietly fill-in bubble tests, seeking only to become productive cogs in a broken wheel.

Amid growing challenges to its role as the pre-eminent force in college admissions, the College Board on Wednesday unveiled a new test that it said would help prepare eighth graders for rigorous high school courses and college.

A test to “help prepare” students?  Really?

All sailors know the great story of the white whale, and everyone who’s faced him has either died or been traumatized. So no one would really care if, after Ahab’s incident, he just gave up like all the others. I feel that that could possibly be another reason why he’s risking everything: because he doesn’t want to be like all the others. After all, how awesome would it be to be known as the man who battled Moby Dick and lived? And then have enough courage to go back and search for him again? We all speak about Ahab’s thirst for revenge, but (I could be totally off here) could it be a search for fame as well?

Isabelle:

Chapter 108 was when Ahab had the carpenter make his new leg. It was interesting because for what seems like the first time someone ( the carpenter) voices how crazy they think Ahab really is. I’m surprised that throughout the book no other characters have noticed or disagreed with Ahab’s decisions. Ahab’s obsession with the white whale is evident again in chapter 109 because Ahab initially refuses to go into shore to fix the leaking oil casks. He no longer cares about the profits of whaling or their vessel, he only cares about finding the white whale.

Amanda:

Ahab is completely off the wall. Even after FEDALLAH, his own little devil man, prophecy’s his death he is still completely undeterred from his quest. True, it won’t be Moby Dick himself, but it will be the ropes, which only exist in a potentially harmful whale on the ship itself. Any sane person would get off as fast as they possibly could.

James:

All he has to do to further his survival is to not go after this dangerous animal. He clearly does not care about his own life or any of his shipmates lives. He himself is his worst enemy. He will cause his own demise i predict.

Welcome to the desert of the real.

Of course, the local press is fawning over the Portal. Here’s Colin Gustafson’s lede in his article on the Portal for the Greenwich Time:

The days of the “dog-ate-my-homework” excuse may be numbered in Greenwich.

It’s probably not true, of course. There are plenty of reasons why students still won’t do their homework, and plenty of reasons why their parents will continue to get them out of it. It’s pretty much a high-tech version of the homework-monitoring sheets we give to students who are having trouble staying afloat–the week’s homework is written on a sheet that is signed by the student’s teacher, indicating that the assignments on the sheet are the ones the teacher actually assigned, and then the student shows the sheet to his or her parents.

My issue, of course, isn’t whether it’s a good thing for parents to know what their students are up to in school, or even what their homework assignments are. What interests me is the discussion that’s come up in pretty much every office at my high school, which focuses on the question of how we’re going to teach responsibility if our students no longer have to write their homework assignments down in their planners.

Really? This is the big question about the Portal? Whether we’re damaging our students’ potential to be productive citizens by not forcing them to take out their student planners, write down a few words, and put them away before they can start drawing all over them again?

I’m a member of our school’s Technology Working Group (TWiG), which might as well be called the Portal Support Committee. I’m the English department’s de-facto go-to guy on this thing, which is a thing I don’t entirely believe in.

I’m not anti-Portal per se. I love the idea of having a central online space for communication, file storage, research resources, etc. This is why I use the Web 2.0 tools that I do–Google (search, email, document storage, RSS aggregator, calendar), Delicious (bookmarks), and Flickr (photo sharing). Oh, and Facebook (everything else). But using those tools–and encouraging my students to use them as well–only points out the limitations of our very expensive Portal, and makes me a little nervous when I read cheerleading articles like Mr. Gustafson’s.

The big problem with the Portal is a very big problem indeed–it’s a top-down imposition of District authority on both students and teachers. The teacher problem is easy to see–we were told we had to start using the Portal on October 1st, whether we liked the Portal or not, whether it fit with our educational philosophies or not. That’s it.

But the effect on the students is going to be a lot more powerful. It’s not just that it eliminates the need for students to write down homework assignments–that’s nothing. That’s a smokescreen. What the Portal does is directly contradict Constructivist philosophy and pedagogy, which is the same philosophy and pedagogy that the CAPT test is based on. Yep, that same CAPT that is a graduation requirement for all Connecticut high school students, and the same CAPT that we’re getting hammered on because our scores have fallen somewhat.

Or, to quote Cypher in The Portal Matrix:

I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.

I’ve been reading more and more about constructivism, though my study is far from complete (there’s plenty of meaning yet to be made). To me, though, there are certain pieces of classroom-ready technology that support constructivist learning–RSS aggregators, for example–and plenty that don’t. I am saddened to report that our Portal falls into the latter category.

It doesn’t encourage two-way communication to make meaning. Yes, students now have school email accounts, but how many students check them? Leaving aside my inability to imagine a 17-year-old getting excited about something called “ePals,” I’d be willing to bet that only a few students would consider email to be their primary, secondary, or even tertiary mode of communication. Email is what grownups use. High school students use Facebook and SMS. Much more interactive. Much faster. Instead the Portal is more top-down communication, like the teacher who lectures and “gives notes”–it assumes that there is a person who possesses knowledge (in this case, what the assignment is) and several people who are competing to show that they have mastered that knowledge (in this case, what the assignment is). I wish I could post an open link to my teacher home page on the Portal (it’s password-protected, alas)–you’d see that the only RSS feed we can currently get comes from the–wait for it–Greenwich Time. I can’t even set up my Honors Am Lit I class page to display feeds from my own students’ blogs on Moby-Dick. Teacher-to-student communication, maybe, but certainly not student-to-student. And under “Professional Learning” we have links to our staff development registration system and the Paul Potts video. I’d think someone out there might want to, say, provide a capability for teachers to, like, share what they do in their classrooms. Like some way for professionals to learn how to be even more professional.

It isn’t flexible. Constructivism is less about demonstrating mastery of memorized facts than the ability to think flexibly about how acquired experience and information can be used to engage with new circumstances. The District’s technology focus has so far seemed to be on data collection and display–the best part of the Portal for me as a teacher is that it provides one login and password for all of our data services. We can get to students’ attendance records, grades, state test scores, and previously recommended academic interventions. This is useful, especially for those of us who have trouble remembering our District-assigned passwords.

But I have yet to have my requests to be able to add, as mentioned previously, student-generated RSS feeds to my class pages, taken. I can’t have the latest Delicious bookmarks added by my students show up on our class pages.  I’m not sure what sort of talking-to I might receive if I were to put a note on my class pages on the Portal telling anyone who wants to know what’s going on in my classes just to come here.

We have some District-wide staff development coming up this Friday. The District has selected “Checking for Understanding” and “Making Connections” as our year-long goals, which, I fear, might lead to several District-targeted wedgies in State educational locker rooms.  In all seriousness, these are things that need to be addressed, but they need to be addressed intelligently.  Last year, we had an all-day lecture (with a couple of too-short break-out sessions) about Differentiated Instruction.  The building resounded with complaints about intelligence insulted and time wasted.  Friday’s session has to be better.  I’m looking forward to listening for a while, then being That Guy–asking questions, finding out how, exactly, this speaker’s research, which “focuses on specific strategies that classroom teachers and schools can implement in the areas of curriculum, instruction, and assessment which lead to improvement in student learning,” will help me.  Hopefully he’s not going to recite lesson plans or tell me to do a Do Now.  I want to know how this guy’s strategies will help my students–from 300 to 212 to 500–seek deeper understanding of the material they are studying.