The Dilution of Kids' Experience

A recent commercial shows a boy commandeering his school's PA system to play a song (never mind that, in this era of zero tolerance, he would doubtless be suspended or perhaps even expelled for this prank).  It is not really clear whose voice he plays over the PA.  Is the bland rap about peanut and jelly sandwiches his own song?  A friend's?  A pop star's, improbable as that is?  All we know is that he causes the rap to be played, and his friends are impressed.  We see him looking on from another room, enjoying their reaction.  What interests me is that he is at least twice removed from his own experience:  Once by sharing his recorded voice, and again when he looks on from a distance as the other students react.

Alternatively, if the song he plays is not his own, his experience of authorship is diluted. He is like a frantic college freshman who is copying and pasting from Wikipedia, only the boy in the commercial goes a step further.  He is crowd-sourcing his own school years and social life.

A student who is consuming media or on the internet sits at the point of two prisms connecting.  An infinite amount of possible inputs stream in, and infinite possible creative outputs stream out.  At least, that is what we envision in the best case scenario.  Yet the sheer overwhelming force of that much input diminishes kids' real, stumbling, imperfect experiences.  Few middle school students will command a whole school's attention (to good effect, anyway).  Their experiences will rarely yield the regular wins of computer games, and their images don't compare to the airbrushed perfection of teen pop stars.

Does the flood of information and images discourage young people from engaging in their own lives?  Do young people take time to dwell quietly in thought, come to know boredom as a birthplace for action, and embrace their own experience as full enough?

Looking Back to Step Up My Game Going Forward

Out of the blue, just as he was going to bed the other evening, my nine-year-old son asked "Did they ever find Van Gogh's ear?"

"Ah..." I stumbled, recalling the story of Van Gogh's ear, but not the conclusion "I don't know, honey."

"What??? I thought parents were supposed to know everything.  You need to step up your mom game!"

Now, many things went through my mind at that moment, such as:  Where is the internet when you really need it, and, we should have gone with fear and intimidation as a childrearing philosophy, but we didn't, and now look what has happened... my younger son is smart, but he's also an incredible smartass.

Ultimately I didn't say any of this, but the exchange did amplify my self-doubt.  At work I strain to help 45 special ed students, whose needs stem from a wide range of conditions that include hearing impairments, learning disabilities and paralysis.   Apparently, this was my time for feelings of inadequacy at home as well.  My sons are twelve and nine and now fully plugged into a larger world.  This makes them aware of much this is good and educational, but it also dwarfs (by comparison) their parents' knowledge, even though we both have Master's degrees.

I recall that, when I was young, an argument that broke out at the dinner table would sometimes be resolved by a dusty volume of our encyclopedia set.  The set was out of date, as it had first belonged to my father's second set of children (he married three times).  By the time I could read he was long gone, however, he did leave the reference books, perhaps as a kind of salute to the values that he and my mother did share.  Those values are: Knowledge and education above all else.

At any rate, even then (in the 1970s) it was becoming apparent that there is more that is unknown than known.  Universities had long since ceased building in the cozy "quadrangle" design inspired by Oxford and Cambridge.  In this conception the academic buildings face inward, seemingly confident in the conviction that all that is worthwhile and knowable can be found within their walls.   

To return to the dinner table, however, I am reminded of the reminiscences of a woman I know.  Like so many of my older African American neighbors, she emigrated North to work and then returned to her birthplace in retirement.  When she was a child in the 1930s her father would lead the family in reading the newspaper, and then the children had to recite something they had learned in school.  She was not the only person I interviewed to mention this evening routine.  Before electric lighting, television, and certainly before computers carried a torrent of information into our homes, many families looked to each other for edification and entertainment.  

In my house we do eat dinner together, but being advised to "step up my mom game" made me wonder  whether the level of discourse is all it could be.  Sometimes questions or arguments arise, but now we reference an iPhone instead of a musty encyclopedia.  Admittedly, I was feeling a little low when something else happened:  My older son brought home a Humanities assignment about ancient Greece.  

"We were learning about the Odyssey in class" he told me "and I could answer most of the questions because I remember when you read it to us."

I guess my game is not completely lacking.

Creating Mental Space for Learning through Responsibility

Sometimes I think the most important learning space a teacher can create is the one that comes first, in the teacher's mind, when s/he first allows for the possibility of what could happen when the children are given real responsibility.  This occurred of necessity in Rosenwald schools, because the children played important roles in the actual running of the school.  Boys brought in firewood and kept the stove going.  Girls raked the yard and polished the floor.   The older children were expected to help the younger children with their lessons, many of which involved recitations.  So here we see an interesting juxtaposition of rote learning and the creative initiative the older students had to take to make sure their younger charges were on track.

Now our academic expectations are more complex and conceptual, but on the other hand I think our respect for the children's ability to make meaningful contributions has diminished.  It is as if we are always saying, tomorrow there will be time for that.  Next year will be the time when they are ready to practice adult roles and make real contributions.  Yet, when next year comes, there is always some other reason to delay responsibility.  For example: We just adopted the Common Core standards, and the teachers themselves have to get used to planning with the new objectives, so how could the students possibly help?  It wouldn't be practical to have students help clean the school, and anyway parents would get angry.  Grade levels are segregated, so older students don't intersect that often with younger students except for the occasional "Reading Buddy" program.

So the signs and practice of maturity are continually put off, until we arrive at the situation we have today, in which the majority of Americans polled believe that one is not an adult until at least age 25.  To be fair to schools, our elongating concept of maturity must be mostly influenced by our life spans, which have increased by decades.  But the situation of prolonged adolescence amazes many of my elderly friends, who in their teens were doing such things as working full-time and getting married and having children.  (Not in a reality show, "Teen Mom" style, but actually establishing stable households of their own.)

Certainly I am not advocating that we all return to teen parenthood, but I do think that schools create more learning when students have real responsibility.  This begins with a simple conviction on the part of teachers and administration that students are capable of making real contributions.  Within the classroom, it means the students pitch in.  Many times they will do so spontaneously, if we allow them.  Sometimes I don't even know how a student might help until s/he has actually jumped out his/her seat, come over to where someone is struggling (for example, I might be having trouble with the LCD projector, or another student might have lost his/her place in the story) and fixed the situation.  That is why I am slow to reprimand the children.  Is he out of his seat so he can go bother someone else?  Or is he out of his seat to help?  I wait until I can see their intentions.

In order to have the potential benefit of children taking initiative, you have to be open to children making decisions, which inevitably will sometimes lead to chaos.  However, I have found that the more trust I have in them, and the more I allow them to practice making small decisions, the better things go in the long run.

An example on a larger level:  One year, there was an issue with students getting too boisterous at assemblies, to the point where the administrators suspended whole school (800+ students) assemblies.  However, in the spring the student government wanted to have a pep rally in preparation for EOGs (End of Grade tests), and they wanted to include all the grade levels at once.  The student government made a plan, persuaded the administration, and pulled it off.  All of the students were well behaved; in fact, teachers remarked that they were almost subdued!  To me, the fact that this assembly was planned by students and went better than the others was no coincidence.

Curriculum goals may differ from state to state or from school to school, but everyone gives lip service to the idea of having children grow as problem solvers.  Yet many school environments undercut their decision-making in the name of discipline or of covering material.  To me, however, the question is simple:  If we don't allow them to make decisions now, then when?  If we don't even trust them to help choose a lesson activity or decorate a classroom, how will they grow into adults who can vote and solve problems on a job?

Accountability: A View from the Trenches

I adore my students, but by the end of the fall semester I was feeling discouraged.  Sometimes I can't go to sleep, thinking about what I am doing and how much more they need.  It was in this context that I had my first observation for this year.  I was teaching reading to a young lady who never attended school before last year; she really has made remarkable progress for someone who missed so much early schooling.

Mid-way through teaching this lesson, another student of mine, one who needs a lot of physical assistance, came to school tardy.  I had already sent my teaching assistant to the library with a group of EC students who were taking a test (most of them have 'separate setting' written into their IEPs, meaning they have a right to take quizzes and tests in a small group separate from the larger class).  So there in the middle of my reading lesson I began assisting one student with eating his breakfast while I taught the young lady... all while the principal did her observation.

Fortunately for me, everyone took this in stride, and the lesson went well enough that my principal gave me positive feedback.  During our conference I asked her about the new software the state is using that is supposed to rate our individual impact as teachers-- in other words, that is supposed to be a measure of individual teacher accountability.  We have been told that this software will "automatically populate" (complete) the section of our online evaluation that addresses a teacher's impact on student achievement (i.e., test scores).

Now, I have no problem with teacher accountability, but I do think it's fair to ask that I be judged by the growth (or lack thereof) of the students I actually teach.  However, it turns out that this is not the case.  As often as I have been in meetings where scores from EC students were identified and measured as a group (often broken down by grade level), I learned that somehow these data cannot be used to evaluate my performance.  My rating will be a reflection of the average growth of the entire student body.  So my rating in the "teacher accountability" section will NOT be based on EC students' growth at our school, much less the growth of my actual group of students.

This was disappointing to me, given the gains many of my students made last year.  One boy had never before scored above a level one on his EOGs, and he scored a level two on both Math and Reading.  Granted, it's not the stuff of fairy tales, there is still room for improvement.  However, I was excited for him, and he is a much better student this year after feeling it is possible for him to succeed.

One other issue I have with the software the state is using is that it is based on EOG scores, but it doesn't take into account students' retest scores.  In the past if a student took an EOG test and scored a level two, that student was automatically retested to see whether s/he could achieve a level three. This is not commonplace, but it does happen.  However, for some reason the software the state is using does not take retest scores into account-- so the report from that system might indicate that a student did not score at the proficient (level three) level the previous year, when in fact that student did achieve proficiency when retested.  This oversight will doubtless also have a small but meaningful impact on measuring teacher effectiveness.

Then again, it's hard to know what is coming, since NC joined the Common Core movement and the EOGs are being completely rewritten.  We are told there will be no retests given this year and that EOG scores from May 2013 will not be available until the fall.  The EOG test scores have to be "normed."  In other words, it is an entirely new metric, based on a new test, but we will carry on with the idea that the scores are somehow comparable to the old EOG scores.  DPI does not pretend to know where the cutoffs for proficiency will be, they are waiting to see how the test goes.  I have been told they will use, among other things, their expectations of how certain schools will perform as one means of setting the scoring levels.  In other words, they will get what they expect.  Rogue students or schools who break out of an underperforming mode don't fit well into this model.  In my bleaker moments it seems to me as if the state is saying "Yes, we're holding you accountable, but we're not going to take the trouble of trying to measure your actual, individual impact."

Still for me, next to my own children, the sun rises and sets over my students.  We'll carry on.

Schools as Targets: How Can We Respond?

It is a difficult year to say "Merry Christmas", haunted as we are by the children and adults who lost their lives in the senseless shooting in Newtown.  I have been praying for the families of the victims, as I think most of us have.  Praying that God will envelope them with His healing love.  As for the victims themselves, we know God is holding them in the palm of His hand, with infinite love and care.  Their souls He has doubtless already healed.   It is the ones who are left behind who suffer and mourn.  

It is not enough to say, this time, that this event only leads us to appreciate our own families all the more.  It is not enough just to take this occasion to be grateful for our own children.  It is not enough because the murders struck at the heart of all that is good and orderly, in the only place where we still come together as a society, the one place where we should be able to assume that children are safe.  For many people school is the only common civic endeavor we undertake.  Perhaps that is why schools have become a target (although it's difficult to know, because it's difficult to understand the twisted motivations of a mass murderer).  

As a teacher in a title one middle school, I am acutely aware of all the possible pitfalls that happen inside of a school-- perhaps a jacket is stolen, or a rumor starts that makes a child cry.  A fight may even erupt.   One thing we don't expect is for an armed person to come in and create mayhem and tragedy.  Even while we're adjusting to this threat, we need to ask ourselves what what we can do to counteract the spiritual chaos that created it.  Yes, we need protective measures, increased security, heightened awareness.  Yet what are we doing to counteract the root cause, the sense of isolation and hopelessness that young people may develop?

It's not enough just to excise the cancer, we need to strengthen our whole civic body.  Volunteer your time at your house of worship, in a local school, or be a part of a mentoring program.  If you garden or care for animals, pull children into your activities.  Don't allow your own children to be isolated.  Reach out to families you know who are stressed by circumstances.  Encourage children and teenagers when they do good and creative things.  Help your town to expand arts programs and recreational sports facilities.  Even in these tough fiscal times, encourage your legislators to vote for increased mental health and youth program funding.  

Most of all, I think, we need to seek God's guidance in this and all things.  Early each morning, before I pack my kids' lunches and begin the whole hectic morning routine that lands them in one school and me in another, I pray "God, help me to know Your will for me, and help me to do it.  Bless those who suffer, Lord, and bless those who mourn.  Enfold them in Your peace.   Help me to be a blessing to my family, my students, and my community.  Make me a channel of Your love and Your peace.  Amen."

The Words that Form Us

It is quite something to hear my friend Carrie recite Chaucer (in Old English), or Shakespeare, or lengthy poems from her days at the Chinquapin Colored School, the Rosenwald school (see www.underthekudzu.org)  she attended in Duplin County, NC.  Hearing her speak with such wonderful expression, hearing her talk about how she and her sisters would recite as they worked in the fields, makes me think about the value of memorization and recitation.  When words seep into us, whether literature or poetry or famous speeches or song lyrics, they shape and form us.

When I was in middle school, words and music saved me.  I tell my middle school students now, be happy that your teachers and administrators are in the hallways, and monitoring the lunch room, and with you at recess.  We hassle you because we love you.  The thing I don't usually say is, I know what it's like to attend a middle school where the adults have given up.  When I attended middle school in NYC in the 1970s, the adults hid in the offices and classrooms.  The halls were a riot of children shoving each other, boys assaulting girls in corners, kids pushing each other down the stairs.  Three years went by, and I wouldn't have recognized my principal if s/he had walked into me. (I just realized I don't even know whether the principal was a man or woman!)

At any rate, the situation was quite stressful, and I think I would have felt hopeless except for one thing:  Somehow, I got pulled into chorus class with Ms. Morrison.  She was the only adult in the entire school who had the respect of every student.  She was a talented singer and a demanding teacher.  Ms. Morrison was beautiful and commanding, and I never tired of looking at her colorful print dresses, her elaborate silver earrings, her high cheekbones set off by her hair, which she wore in a short Afro.

I have to say here, I have very limited singing talent.  While a few of my classmates were so talented that they were part of the Children's Chorus at the Metropolitan Opera House, and many more of them  had impressive ranges and pure soprano tones, I did well to carry a tune in my alto voice.  Ms. Morrison was well aware of my inherent limitations, but she didn't kick me out of her class.  In fact, back in those days before strict attendance laws and computerized student records, we frequently left gym and other environments that were too wild and headed to the chorus room.  I don't recall that she ever turned us away.

It was in this haven that I first became aware of the power of words, repeated words, historic words, words set to music.  Never before or since have I heard anyone sing part of the text of Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, but we sang it in that class, and it was powerful.  Gradually, my mind began to open.  The words of the gospel songs we learned wove with an Italian opera solo that Ms. Morrison would sing for us.  My capacity for recalling and savoring words expanded.  I began to memorize poetry and quotes that struck a chord with me.

Sometimes I wonder whether, due to our discomfort around the topic of segregation, we discarded some valuable educational practices from that era.  During the course of my documentary research, blacks and whites alike mentioned the poetry, speeches, plays and literature they committed to memory during their school days.  Often, they recited for me with great feeling.  I could see that, like me, their minds return to these words in spare moments, and also in times of stress or despair.

When I quote Shakespeare or Pound or MLK to my students, they fall silent and look, blinking uncertainly.  They are not quite sure what to do with these words, but they sense the power in them. In modern education parlance, we stress the ability to deconstruct and analyze over any task of mere memory.  In my experience, though, and in the experience of countless others who have been formed by great words, memory and recitation are gateways to deeper meaning.

The Flood

Sometimes, as a teacher, I feel overwhelmed by a flood of needs.  On Friday I became depressed at the end of the day, when I had to break up a fight in the hallway, then rush out to afternoon duty.   After that I went back to speak with my assistant principal about the fight, as well as another student who should probably go into a day treatment program.  

Going to back to my room, I did some of the mountain of paperwork on my desk, and then looked up to realize I was running behind for my own sons' school event.  I rushed out at 5:20, picked them up from their after school program, and barely made it to the event.

It's easy to feel overwhelmed and overlook the fact that most of the children are doing what they're supposed to, and it's also easy to underestimate the difference a teacher can make by noticing individual  students' talents.

So my day Friday started this way:  I stole some time during homeroom to run upstairs to the 8th grade hall and find a student I taught two years ago at another school.  He is an exceptional young man:  Poised, ambitious, an A student whose family has few material resources but tremendous integrity.  I went to see him because I want him to apply for our district's early college high schools; if he is admitted he could earn two years of college credit at no cost to his family.

When I saw this young man on Thursday, he said his mother wasn't sure about him applying-- I asked him why, pointing out the benefits of the small classes and college credit.  He said "I know, that's what I'm saying."  I could only conclude that his mother didn't really understand the opportunity.  That is why, Friday morning, I took some printed information to him about the programs and asked the 8th grade counselor to be available to answer his mother's questions. By the end of the day the counselor told me he had decided to apply.  Of course, there are no guarantees-- he might not be admitted, or he might decide in the end to attend his regular zoned high school so that he can play sports.  The main thing is, I wanted him to expand his horizon, to have more choices.

Fridays are usually a "mop up" and testing day, when I pull some of my EC students in for individual conferences while we proctor tests.  I check in with some students, help them organize their notes, and give them encouragement.  One young lady lacks self-confidence but has a burning desire to be a journalist; I had pushed her earlier this year to sign up to work on the school newspaper, which she did.  At our conference yesterday we talked about a great website (www.writingkid.com) that lists publishing opportunities just for kids.  With luck, she will get an early start on her writing career.

At lunch we had a little pizza party for a student who is leaving for another school.  He is very bright but his social perceptions are sometimes way off because of his disability.  This has often made it hard for him to connect and to see others' good intentions.  We sat around the table and talked about what we would remember about this student's time at my school.  When I asked him, he said he would remember "That there are good people in the world."

In retrospect, my day had some real high points, but I allowed myself to feel carried away by the flood of circumstances and needs that no one person could ever fulfill.  Yet Monday will bring a chance to try  again!