For those of you who followed my earlier post about the (latest) Pearson test screw-up, the multi-national educational juggernaut did actually respond to Sarah Blaine's original post with an apology of sorts.
Pearson did make an error on the specific quiz question in a lesson in
the Envision Math textbook and we sincerely apologize for this mistake.
As corporate apologies go, it's actually refreshingly clear and unequivocally weasel-word free.
The down side, as Blaine notes, is that it doesn't acknowledge the larger issues she raised, other than to note that "trust in our products and services is key." Well, yes. And I would make fun of them for pointing out the obvious, except that we see too many examples of corporations that don't see the obvious, so bravo, Pearson, on seeing the obvious.
So the larger issues go unaddressed (a little transparency, folks?), but at least they said, "We screwed up. Sorry about that." Which by modern corporate standards is not too shabby. Is it too snarky for me to note that apparently all that practice apologizing for mistakes that Pearson has had is apparently paid off? Maybe? Sorry about that.
Sunday, October 12, 2014
College-ready Five Year Olds
We periodically hear of the notion of college-ready five year olds. Not that they are ready to go to college while still that young, but that we can clearly tell in kindergarten whether these children are on the collegiate trajectory or not.
Recently a pair of teachers attempted a response to Carol Burris's Real Clear Education interview. Since the two work for Student Achievement Partners, a group started by CCSS architect David Coleman and financed by Bill Gates, what the two SAPs is not exactly a surprise.
The kindergarten SAP argues that her students (at her select charter school in Oakland, California) are able to do super-hard things that let her know that they are ready for college. In particular she is arguing for having kindergartners count to 100. She does not clarify whether she uses the technique of Rote Repetition of the Numbers With No Idea What They Mean or the technique of Counseling Out Students Who Can't Count To 100.
I'm excited about being able to ID college-ready five year olds. This presents a host of opportunities including the chance to start applying to college at age six. I mean, my high school juniors and seniors get very stressed about the whole application process. Imagine how much more relaxed and focused they could be if they had locked up that collegiate spot by age seven. They are just childhood as an excuse to be lazy anyway.
Of course, deciding college that early would really mess with David Coleman"s College Board SAT revenue stream. There's a pretty hefty industry driven by the general college-seeking panic of teenagers and their parents, so even as Core boosters claim that we can determine the college prospects of small children, reformsters once again face two challenging choice:
1) Shift the industry around to monetize the new impact areas or
2) Pretend they don't understand the implications of what they're saying.
For cradle-to-career railroad, it's a big number two all the way.
Mind you, they've occasionally admitted that they really do want to be able to predict the adult life of a small child with a "seamless web that literally extends from cradle to grave." But nobody who A) knows who Big Brother is or B) wants a future in American politics is going to hold up that infamous Marc Tucker "Dear Hillary" letter and say, "Yes, this is what we should do." Not out loud.
Reformsters could argue that the very notion of being able to place a five year old in a college is silly because, of course, any number of things in his life outside of school could happen in the next thirteen years to interfere with his college readiness-- but they can't make that argument because then they would have to admit that life factors outside of school affect the child's education.
No, we have to pretend that the educational journey is a train-- one track, one beginning and ending, everyone traveling along the undeviating, uninterrupted trail.
So if that's true, why wouldn't we fill out those college applications at the end of kindergarten? If all students are going to meet the same standards at the same time, and we can tell whether kindergartners are on track, and there's only one track, why isn't that good enough?
I suspect that in a dark moment of honesty, some reformsters would say it was good enough, that they already knew that Chris was destined for a life of corporate servitude and all we're doing is waiting for the sapling to grow large enough to harvest.
But in the meantime, reformsters will at once pretend that it's not absurd to declare a five year old on track for college, even as they fail to acknowledge the implications of that college-ready declaration. If we know that a five year old is on track for college, why not sign her up now? The answer-- sort of-- is that reformsters can't explain why a five year old's college application is absurd without also explaining why reform itself is absurd.
Recently a pair of teachers attempted a response to Carol Burris's Real Clear Education interview. Since the two work for Student Achievement Partners, a group started by CCSS architect David Coleman and financed by Bill Gates, what the two SAPs is not exactly a surprise.
The kindergarten SAP argues that her students (at her select charter school in Oakland, California) are able to do super-hard things that let her know that they are ready for college. In particular she is arguing for having kindergartners count to 100. She does not clarify whether she uses the technique of Rote Repetition of the Numbers With No Idea What They Mean or the technique of Counseling Out Students Who Can't Count To 100.
I'm excited about being able to ID college-ready five year olds. This presents a host of opportunities including the chance to start applying to college at age six. I mean, my high school juniors and seniors get very stressed about the whole application process. Imagine how much more relaxed and focused they could be if they had locked up that collegiate spot by age seven. They are just childhood as an excuse to be lazy anyway.
Of course, deciding college that early would really mess with David Coleman"s College Board SAT revenue stream. There's a pretty hefty industry driven by the general college-seeking panic of teenagers and their parents, so even as Core boosters claim that we can determine the college prospects of small children, reformsters once again face two challenging choice:
1) Shift the industry around to monetize the new impact areas or
2) Pretend they don't understand the implications of what they're saying.
For cradle-to-career railroad, it's a big number two all the way.
Mind you, they've occasionally admitted that they really do want to be able to predict the adult life of a small child with a "seamless web that literally extends from cradle to grave." But nobody who A) knows who Big Brother is or B) wants a future in American politics is going to hold up that infamous Marc Tucker "Dear Hillary" letter and say, "Yes, this is what we should do." Not out loud.
Reformsters could argue that the very notion of being able to place a five year old in a college is silly because, of course, any number of things in his life outside of school could happen in the next thirteen years to interfere with his college readiness-- but they can't make that argument because then they would have to admit that life factors outside of school affect the child's education.
No, we have to pretend that the educational journey is a train-- one track, one beginning and ending, everyone traveling along the undeviating, uninterrupted trail.
So if that's true, why wouldn't we fill out those college applications at the end of kindergarten? If all students are going to meet the same standards at the same time, and we can tell whether kindergartners are on track, and there's only one track, why isn't that good enough?
I suspect that in a dark moment of honesty, some reformsters would say it was good enough, that they already knew that Chris was destined for a life of corporate servitude and all we're doing is waiting for the sapling to grow large enough to harvest.
But in the meantime, reformsters will at once pretend that it's not absurd to declare a five year old on track for college, even as they fail to acknowledge the implications of that college-ready declaration. If we know that a five year old is on track for college, why not sign her up now? The answer-- sort of-- is that reformsters can't explain why a five year old's college application is absurd without also explaining why reform itself is absurd.
How To Align Painlessly
(Originally post at View from the Cheap Seats)
The Dream
The ideal, as imagined by the Common Core Crowd looks something like this:
A group of fresh-scrubbed teachers gather in a room with a consultant (because, after all, they're only teachers and lack the expertise to do this work on their own). The CCSS expert teaches them how to "unpack" the standards, and over the course of many days, the teachers unpack a standard and decide how best to implement that standard in a well-constructed CCSS-aligned lesson. Depending on the consultant, they will probably also incorporate some features that are not actually in the Core, but which the consultant likes.
Once implemented, this new curriculum will totally revolutionize the way these teachers teach, and soon, awesome test scores will descend upon them like manna from heaven. Because once you align the to the standards, your students will automatically be prepared for the aligned standardized tests.
The Reality
Well, sadly, some peoples' reality will be a pursuit of the dream. If your administration has soaked too long in the special Common Core Coolade, the Dream will be your goal. Good luck with that.
For the earthbound districts, the process looks something more like this.
1) Spread out printouts on big desk. On one side, the printout of the Common Core National Standards (or the lightly edited version that your state is passing off as state-developed standards). On the other side, your pre-existing curriculum.
2) Go through curriculum, cross-referencing against standards. Look for standards that you can reasonably claim are being met by old lessons (e.g. "This paper I have them write about Great Expectations requires them to support their statements with evidence from the text. Check!") Check standards off of list.
3) Gather up standards you didn't meet. Make one last attempt to justify attaching them to pre-existing units. Rig up some new unit to meet those standards. Finish checking off list.
4) Go to PARCC/SBA/Whatever websites and gather up sample questions. Buy some sample question practice books. Schedule test prep units strategically through year.
5) Wait for High Stakes Test results. Analyze results to see what test prep units you need to beef up. Start collecting materials for next year. decide which units you can cut to make room for additional test prep. Do not forget to count your test prep units as part of your aligned curriculum.
Alternate approach
For the above steps 1-4, substitute the folowing:
1) Buy pre-aligned book and materials from dependable vendor like Pearson. Print out their alignment materials. Insert printout in alignment report for district.
Anyone Can Play
Slapping some Common Core numbers on the same old same old is a popular game these days. For instance, at a site called ELA Common Core Lesson Plans, we can find a deadly dull lesson on humor in literature that could easily be from ten, twenty, thirty years ago, except for the CCSS standards tags at the end. Or take this site that cheerfully plugs literature circles as a great CCSS technique, as if lit circles haven't been around almost as long as crop circles. Watch a video of a teacher using basic techniques that were actually well known long before CCSS. Or check out this lesson using song lyrics to teach figurative language, a technique used by every English teacher in the history of ever. But hey-- there are standards numbers attached to it, so it must be Common Core.
In fact, these lessons cover the other challenge of alignment-- what to do with the parts of lessons that actually contradict the Core approach. Teaching humor in texts? You're probably cheating by bringing in information from outside the four corners of the text, because humor's pretty hard to get in a context-free vaccuum. And we'd better hope that the fifth grade teacher working with the text about Harriet Tubman and slavery is not actually answering her students' questions about the origins of racism and slavery, because that would be contrary to the Core's love of Close Reading 2.0.
So painless alignment is not only about finding ways to line up things you already do with the Core-- it also involves ignoring the Core when it wants you to stop using tried and true successful practices you've used in the past.
Painful Alignment
There are of course more painful ways to align. Teachers who have been through a reality-based alignment in which CCSS has no major effect on their classroom may well wonder what the big fuss is. But the Dream described above is pretty painful.
Alignment by textbook series can be fairly painful until you have worked out your own unoffical editted edition of modern classics like the elementary math textbooks that require you to perform twenty sensless math activities in thirty minutes.
It can get worse. Core-soaked administrators may anticipate your roguish behavior, or may simply not trust you to behave yourself and stay within the lines. In that case, you may be subjected to the most painful alignment of all-- alignment by script, in which you are required to simply do exactly what is laid out in the pre-crafted modules. If you are in a scripted district, my condolences-- you work for dopes.
The Realest Alignment
All of these approaches bring us back to the bottom line. We've seen this movie before, under NCLB-- the ultimate alignment instrument for the district is the High Stakes Test. Advocates of the Core may swear that if you follow the standards, the test scores will take care of themselves. This is simply not true, and we all know it. Test prep was the order of the day under NCLB, and under the Core, the high stakes test will drive the curriculum bus once again. All other alignment is just doing the deck chair dance of doom.
The Dream
The ideal, as imagined by the Common Core Crowd looks something like this:
A group of fresh-scrubbed teachers gather in a room with a consultant (because, after all, they're only teachers and lack the expertise to do this work on their own). The CCSS expert teaches them how to "unpack" the standards, and over the course of many days, the teachers unpack a standard and decide how best to implement that standard in a well-constructed CCSS-aligned lesson. Depending on the consultant, they will probably also incorporate some features that are not actually in the Core, but which the consultant likes.
Once implemented, this new curriculum will totally revolutionize the way these teachers teach, and soon, awesome test scores will descend upon them like manna from heaven. Because once you align the to the standards, your students will automatically be prepared for the aligned standardized tests.
The Reality
Well, sadly, some peoples' reality will be a pursuit of the dream. If your administration has soaked too long in the special Common Core Coolade, the Dream will be your goal. Good luck with that.
For the earthbound districts, the process looks something more like this.
1) Spread out printouts on big desk. On one side, the printout of the Common Core National Standards (or the lightly edited version that your state is passing off as state-developed standards). On the other side, your pre-existing curriculum.
2) Go through curriculum, cross-referencing against standards. Look for standards that you can reasonably claim are being met by old lessons (e.g. "This paper I have them write about Great Expectations requires them to support their statements with evidence from the text. Check!") Check standards off of list.
3) Gather up standards you didn't meet. Make one last attempt to justify attaching them to pre-existing units. Rig up some new unit to meet those standards. Finish checking off list.
4) Go to PARCC/SBA/Whatever websites and gather up sample questions. Buy some sample question practice books. Schedule test prep units strategically through year.
5) Wait for High Stakes Test results. Analyze results to see what test prep units you need to beef up. Start collecting materials for next year. decide which units you can cut to make room for additional test prep. Do not forget to count your test prep units as part of your aligned curriculum.
Alternate approach
For the above steps 1-4, substitute the folowing:
1) Buy pre-aligned book and materials from dependable vendor like Pearson. Print out their alignment materials. Insert printout in alignment report for district.
Anyone Can Play
Slapping some Common Core numbers on the same old same old is a popular game these days. For instance, at a site called ELA Common Core Lesson Plans, we can find a deadly dull lesson on humor in literature that could easily be from ten, twenty, thirty years ago, except for the CCSS standards tags at the end. Or take this site that cheerfully plugs literature circles as a great CCSS technique, as if lit circles haven't been around almost as long as crop circles. Watch a video of a teacher using basic techniques that were actually well known long before CCSS. Or check out this lesson using song lyrics to teach figurative language, a technique used by every English teacher in the history of ever. But hey-- there are standards numbers attached to it, so it must be Common Core.
In fact, these lessons cover the other challenge of alignment-- what to do with the parts of lessons that actually contradict the Core approach. Teaching humor in texts? You're probably cheating by bringing in information from outside the four corners of the text, because humor's pretty hard to get in a context-free vaccuum. And we'd better hope that the fifth grade teacher working with the text about Harriet Tubman and slavery is not actually answering her students' questions about the origins of racism and slavery, because that would be contrary to the Core's love of Close Reading 2.0.
So painless alignment is not only about finding ways to line up things you already do with the Core-- it also involves ignoring the Core when it wants you to stop using tried and true successful practices you've used in the past.
Painful Alignment
There are of course more painful ways to align. Teachers who have been through a reality-based alignment in which CCSS has no major effect on their classroom may well wonder what the big fuss is. But the Dream described above is pretty painful.
Alignment by textbook series can be fairly painful until you have worked out your own unoffical editted edition of modern classics like the elementary math textbooks that require you to perform twenty sensless math activities in thirty minutes.
It can get worse. Core-soaked administrators may anticipate your roguish behavior, or may simply not trust you to behave yourself and stay within the lines. In that case, you may be subjected to the most painful alignment of all-- alignment by script, in which you are required to simply do exactly what is laid out in the pre-crafted modules. If you are in a scripted district, my condolences-- you work for dopes.
The Realest Alignment
All of these approaches bring us back to the bottom line. We've seen this movie before, under NCLB-- the ultimate alignment instrument for the district is the High Stakes Test. Advocates of the Core may swear that if you follow the standards, the test scores will take care of themselves. This is simply not true, and we all know it. Test prep was the order of the day under NCLB, and under the Core, the high stakes test will drive the curriculum bus once again. All other alignment is just doing the deck chair dance of doom.
Saturday, October 11, 2014
Watch Public Education Nation Today
On Saturday, starting at noon, there will be a live event in the auditorium of the Brooklyn New School, featuring four panels:
Testing and the Common Core: New York Principal of the Year Carol Burris will lead a discussion with educators Takeima Bunche-Smith, Rosa Rivera-McCutchen and Alan Aja.
Support Our Schools, Don’t Close Them: Chicago teacher Xian Barrett will moderate a panel featuring education professor Yohuru Williams, Hiram Rivera of the Philadelphia Student Union, and a representative of the Newark Student Union.
Charter Schools: North Carolina writer and activist Jeff Bryant will host a discussion that will include New Orleans parent activist Karran Harper Royal, New York teacher and blogger Gary Rubinstein, and Connecticut writer and activist Wendy Lecker.
Authentic Reform Success Stories: The fourth panel will be led by Network for Public Education executive director Robin Hiller and will include New York teacher and activist Brian Jones, and author of Beyond the Education Wars: Evidence That Collaboration Builds Effective Schools, Greg Anrig.
Diane Ravitch and Jitu Brown, In Conversation: The event will finish off with a conversation between leading community activist Jitu Brown and Diane Ravitch, who will talk about where we are in building a movement for real improvement in our schools.
There are some great names here, and subjects well worth discussing. There is clearly an agenda for solutions, not just complaining about reformster baloney.
Anybody connected to the internet can watch a live stream of the event. And if you would like to help with the costs, you can follow this link to the NPE website and contribute by way of paypal.
I cannot watch today-- it's Homecoming weekend and I'm the student council adviser, so I'm about to spend most of the next 36 hours in the gym. I am counting on all of you to watch, to blog and tweet about what you see and hear, to spread the word that there are non-corporate voices out there, smart, well-informed voices that support public education and see ways to move forward that aren't primarily focused on making somebody rich(er).
Planning vs. Creativity
Indeed, nothing stunts growth more powerfully than our attachment to the
familiar, our blind adherence to predetermined plans, and our inability
to, as Rilke famously put it, “live the questions.”
This comes from an article written by Maria Popova at her blog Brain Pickings (it'[s a great blog, despite her love for Duckworth's grittology) entitled "The Perils of Plans: Why Creativity Requires Leaping into the Unknown." Popova is looking at Dani Shapiro's memoir Still Writing which includes this great line:
The writing life isn’t just filled with predictable uncertainties but with the awareness that we are always starting over again.
And in reference to her own career
It might seem to you that all this has been the result of a methodically carried-out plan. Or any plan at all. But I planned none of it. Almost everything that has happened in my writing life has been the result of keeping my head down and doing the work.
Shapiro's view matches what many writers have to say about writing-- that it is neither the result of waiting for some uncontrollable bolt of squishy lightning to strike, nor can it be harnessed by a careful and precise plan.
If you've taught writing, you've worked with young writers on both ends of the problem scale. On one end you find students who want to wait until they're in the mood, until they've had an inspiration, at which point they imagine the genius will just automatically pour out of them. On the other end, you find students who want a list of steps to follow, an exact hoop-by-hoop layout of where to jump in order to land on writing excellence.
The hoop jumpers want to be right. They want to know that there is One Right Way to get to the One Right Destination and they want you to tell them what it is. They want to know that every step they take will be Correct, and so not fraught with risk or uncertainty.
And while Popova and Shapiro are looking at writing, living your life is itself a creative venture. Our students need to learn to deal with the writerly creative uncertainty because they will meet it every day of their lives-- from deciding whether to marry someone to deciding what house to live in to picking a job to deciding what to have for lunch. To really live your life, you have to be willing to take the leap into the unknown.
The secret is not in the plan, but in the preparation. Build your muscles, marshal your strength, develop your focus so that you know the direction you want to go and have the strength and determination to deal with the obstacles and uncertainty. The best way to flub the leap into the unknown, to come up short, is to flinch and pull back at the very moment you should bear down and put all your strength and focus into launching yourself.
Putting faith in the Plan limits your possibilities, and it makes you inflexible. You make your choices based on what you think you're supposed to be able to achieve instead of your true goals. And when things don't go according to plan (as they will), you are stuck because your guide was the plan, not the goal. Planning is the straightjacket of creativity.
Again-- this is not just about writing. This is about living your life.
One of my most fundamental objections to the reformster ideals for education is that they seek to enforce a reality in schools that does not reflect the reality of the world. It is the tyranny of the hoop-jumpers. They seek to have students practice and model an approach to life that is stunted, small, low on possibilities, devoid of true creativity, sad, grey. They believe in planning, not just for themselves, but for everyone. Not even a range and variety of plans, but one plan for everyone. It is not just a bleak view of education. It is a bleak view of life.
They will say, "Oh, but within the standards and tests there is freedom to achieve the goals any way you wish." Yes, and Henry Ford offered the Model T in any color the customer wanted, as long as it was black.
It's good for us as teachers to think about pedagogical method, instructional strategies, best ways to organize content, all that good teachery stuff. But we also need to step back and ask larger questions. I prefer to ask, "Does my classroom model approaches for living a full, rich, creative life with bravery and strength? Are we learning an openness to the uncertainty of that leap?" I can't say I always know exactly how to get there, but that's the leap, and I try to take it anyway.
This comes from an article written by Maria Popova at her blog Brain Pickings (it'[s a great blog, despite her love for Duckworth's grittology) entitled "The Perils of Plans: Why Creativity Requires Leaping into the Unknown." Popova is looking at Dani Shapiro's memoir Still Writing which includes this great line:
The writing life isn’t just filled with predictable uncertainties but with the awareness that we are always starting over again.
And in reference to her own career
It might seem to you that all this has been the result of a methodically carried-out plan. Or any plan at all. But I planned none of it. Almost everything that has happened in my writing life has been the result of keeping my head down and doing the work.
Shapiro's view matches what many writers have to say about writing-- that it is neither the result of waiting for some uncontrollable bolt of squishy lightning to strike, nor can it be harnessed by a careful and precise plan.
If you've taught writing, you've worked with young writers on both ends of the problem scale. On one end you find students who want to wait until they're in the mood, until they've had an inspiration, at which point they imagine the genius will just automatically pour out of them. On the other end, you find students who want a list of steps to follow, an exact hoop-by-hoop layout of where to jump in order to land on writing excellence.
The hoop jumpers want to be right. They want to know that there is One Right Way to get to the One Right Destination and they want you to tell them what it is. They want to know that every step they take will be Correct, and so not fraught with risk or uncertainty.
And while Popova and Shapiro are looking at writing, living your life is itself a creative venture. Our students need to learn to deal with the writerly creative uncertainty because they will meet it every day of their lives-- from deciding whether to marry someone to deciding what house to live in to picking a job to deciding what to have for lunch. To really live your life, you have to be willing to take the leap into the unknown.
The secret is not in the plan, but in the preparation. Build your muscles, marshal your strength, develop your focus so that you know the direction you want to go and have the strength and determination to deal with the obstacles and uncertainty. The best way to flub the leap into the unknown, to come up short, is to flinch and pull back at the very moment you should bear down and put all your strength and focus into launching yourself.
Putting faith in the Plan limits your possibilities, and it makes you inflexible. You make your choices based on what you think you're supposed to be able to achieve instead of your true goals. And when things don't go according to plan (as they will), you are stuck because your guide was the plan, not the goal. Planning is the straightjacket of creativity.
Again-- this is not just about writing. This is about living your life.
One of my most fundamental objections to the reformster ideals for education is that they seek to enforce a reality in schools that does not reflect the reality of the world. It is the tyranny of the hoop-jumpers. They seek to have students practice and model an approach to life that is stunted, small, low on possibilities, devoid of true creativity, sad, grey. They believe in planning, not just for themselves, but for everyone. Not even a range and variety of plans, but one plan for everyone. It is not just a bleak view of education. It is a bleak view of life.
They will say, "Oh, but within the standards and tests there is freedom to achieve the goals any way you wish." Yes, and Henry Ford offered the Model T in any color the customer wanted, as long as it was black.
It's good for us as teachers to think about pedagogical method, instructional strategies, best ways to organize content, all that good teachery stuff. But we also need to step back and ask larger questions. I prefer to ask, "Does my classroom model approaches for living a full, rich, creative life with bravery and strength? Are we learning an openness to the uncertainty of that leap?" I can't say I always know exactly how to get there, but that's the leap, and I try to take it anyway.
Friday, October 10, 2014
Is the Paperless Classroom Coming?
In the new Time, Michael Scherer breathlessly announces the imminent arrival of the paperless classroom. Yeah, sure. And soon my students will arrive to class on their hoverboards and get lunch from the food replicators.
The piece opens with an anecdote of grumpy parents pushing back during an orientation session. The teacher, Matthew Gudenius, says that they don't really care about handwriting. A mother quickly replies, "Yeah, we do." But despite the resistance to a paperless, e-book classroom, Scherer is sure that the paperless classroom is just around the corner.
Last year, President Obama announced a federal effort to get a laptop, tablet or smartphone into the hands of every student in every school in the U.S. and to pipe in enough bandwidth to get all 49.8 million American kids online simultaneously by 2017.
True enough. The federal government could also announce a federal effort to have every citizen driving a Lexus. But since "federal effort" doesn't mean "make money grow on trees," it doesn't really mean a thing. The saga of computing in the LA school district is a cautionary tale about how every single step in the cyber-conversion process can be botched-- and botched very expensively.
The transition to an e-classroom is hugely expensive, not only because of the initial investment, but because of the repeated upkeep. Promoters like to say that e-textbooks are great because they can be updated every year without the school's spending a cent; what they neglect to say is that the devices on which e-texts are viewed have a dependable life of only a few years. I have textbook sets in my cupboard that are twenty years old and still perfectly usable. Nobody is working on twenty year old computers.
The rapid and expensive obsolescence of computer tech is a huge issue for schools, but it makes schools hugely attractive to tech companies. Where else but in education can a vendor find a single customer who will buy thousands or tens of thousands of units, to be handed over to rough users who are sure to hasten the tech's inevitable demise? We're not just talking millions of dollars-- we're talking millions and millions of dollars every year, year after year after year.
Gudenius started as a computer lab instructor, but he saw computers as a tool, not a subject. Now he estimates that he saves 46,800 sheets of paper a year, "or about four trees." That's laudable, maybe, though if you want to save trees, stop eating fast food hamburgers. The trees that go into paper generally come from managed tree farms; the actual processing is more concerning than the trees themselves. I realize that's a picky side note, but as an English teacher, I long ago tired of the Paper Kills Trees discussion.
There is research that suggests serious pitfalls in education-by-screen, including some that suggests book reading results in greater comprehension. And Scherer does cite the ergonomic concerns-- eyestrain, neck strain, etc. But computers are so cool!
“The problem we have in K-12 is we are not engaging the kids because we are not using the things they use outside the classroom inside the classroom,” says Lenny Schad, who is overseeing the purchase of 65,000 devices for Houston-area high school students.
Maybe. But the things my students use outside the classroom are smart phones, and I'm not about to suggest that they can effectively read Huck Finn or write a paper on an iPhone screen. For many of my students, a tablet or laptop screen is almost as quaint as a paper book.
My school went one-to-one several years ago. We put a device in every students' hands, and there has been some interesting learning since then.
First has been the technology itself. We went with what seemed like a good choice at the time-- netbooks. At the moment we are at a crossroads because nobody actually manufactures netbooks any more; we've been limping along on new old stock, but it's time to move on. Again-- expensive, inevitable, speedy obsolescence.
The tech is not reliable. I mean, it's pretty reliable, and I argue that it's unreliable the same way a pencil or a pen is unreliable. But students get frustrated really quickly when tech won't do what they want it to. Maybe this is a good life lesson, but after many years of computers in classrooms, most of my colleagues would still say you're a fool to plan a tech dependent lesson without a Plan B in place.
Second, the tech has limits. We have some e-textbooks in use in the school. Mostly the students seem to hate them. I often assign e-copies of works of literature. It's frankly great-- as a teacher of American literature I could almost do away with the textbook entirely. But the first thing that many, if not most, of my students do when they surf on over to the online copy of the reading is print it out so they can use a paper copy. When they've written something they want to keep forever, they print it out.
E-reading has had ample opportunity to win over entire generations of readers; it's not happening. There's a reason that books have evolved and survived over centuries. They are a tested, tried and true technology, reliable and adaptable. I can interact with paper at almost any time in almost any setting. Just as pencil and paper are not the right solution for every situation, neither is a computer screen.
Finally, the new frontier of privacy. We spend a lot of time trying to teach students to be good digital citizens and to be mindful and careful about what data they give away about themselves. Then in many schools we turn around and plug them into platforms and online ecosystems that strip mine their data as effectively as Facebook. Yes, they readily give that stuff away in their online lives, but that doesn't mean schools should be complicit in hooking students up for data-hoovering. We can plug every aspect of students' lives into the internet. But that doesn't mean we should.
Almost two decades ago, yearbook publishers started offering digital books and digital supplements. If you purchased one of those, all you would need today is a computer that runs Windows 95 with a cd-rom drive and some software from a company that no longer exists. If you bought a paper yearbook, however, all you will need are your fingers and eyeballs.
The obstacles to a paperless classroom remain the same-- expense, utility, safety, and longevity. There are clear and definite benefits to computer tech in schools, but achieving the paperless classroom is not easy, definitely not cheap, and certainly not inevitable.
The piece opens with an anecdote of grumpy parents pushing back during an orientation session. The teacher, Matthew Gudenius, says that they don't really care about handwriting. A mother quickly replies, "Yeah, we do." But despite the resistance to a paperless, e-book classroom, Scherer is sure that the paperless classroom is just around the corner.
Last year, President Obama announced a federal effort to get a laptop, tablet or smartphone into the hands of every student in every school in the U.S. and to pipe in enough bandwidth to get all 49.8 million American kids online simultaneously by 2017.
True enough. The federal government could also announce a federal effort to have every citizen driving a Lexus. But since "federal effort" doesn't mean "make money grow on trees," it doesn't really mean a thing. The saga of computing in the LA school district is a cautionary tale about how every single step in the cyber-conversion process can be botched-- and botched very expensively.
The transition to an e-classroom is hugely expensive, not only because of the initial investment, but because of the repeated upkeep. Promoters like to say that e-textbooks are great because they can be updated every year without the school's spending a cent; what they neglect to say is that the devices on which e-texts are viewed have a dependable life of only a few years. I have textbook sets in my cupboard that are twenty years old and still perfectly usable. Nobody is working on twenty year old computers.
The rapid and expensive obsolescence of computer tech is a huge issue for schools, but it makes schools hugely attractive to tech companies. Where else but in education can a vendor find a single customer who will buy thousands or tens of thousands of units, to be handed over to rough users who are sure to hasten the tech's inevitable demise? We're not just talking millions of dollars-- we're talking millions and millions of dollars every year, year after year after year.
Gudenius started as a computer lab instructor, but he saw computers as a tool, not a subject. Now he estimates that he saves 46,800 sheets of paper a year, "or about four trees." That's laudable, maybe, though if you want to save trees, stop eating fast food hamburgers. The trees that go into paper generally come from managed tree farms; the actual processing is more concerning than the trees themselves. I realize that's a picky side note, but as an English teacher, I long ago tired of the Paper Kills Trees discussion.
There is research that suggests serious pitfalls in education-by-screen, including some that suggests book reading results in greater comprehension. And Scherer does cite the ergonomic concerns-- eyestrain, neck strain, etc. But computers are so cool!
“The problem we have in K-12 is we are not engaging the kids because we are not using the things they use outside the classroom inside the classroom,” says Lenny Schad, who is overseeing the purchase of 65,000 devices for Houston-area high school students.
Maybe. But the things my students use outside the classroom are smart phones, and I'm not about to suggest that they can effectively read Huck Finn or write a paper on an iPhone screen. For many of my students, a tablet or laptop screen is almost as quaint as a paper book.
My school went one-to-one several years ago. We put a device in every students' hands, and there has been some interesting learning since then.
First has been the technology itself. We went with what seemed like a good choice at the time-- netbooks. At the moment we are at a crossroads because nobody actually manufactures netbooks any more; we've been limping along on new old stock, but it's time to move on. Again-- expensive, inevitable, speedy obsolescence.
The tech is not reliable. I mean, it's pretty reliable, and I argue that it's unreliable the same way a pencil or a pen is unreliable. But students get frustrated really quickly when tech won't do what they want it to. Maybe this is a good life lesson, but after many years of computers in classrooms, most of my colleagues would still say you're a fool to plan a tech dependent lesson without a Plan B in place.
Second, the tech has limits. We have some e-textbooks in use in the school. Mostly the students seem to hate them. I often assign e-copies of works of literature. It's frankly great-- as a teacher of American literature I could almost do away with the textbook entirely. But the first thing that many, if not most, of my students do when they surf on over to the online copy of the reading is print it out so they can use a paper copy. When they've written something they want to keep forever, they print it out.
E-reading has had ample opportunity to win over entire generations of readers; it's not happening. There's a reason that books have evolved and survived over centuries. They are a tested, tried and true technology, reliable and adaptable. I can interact with paper at almost any time in almost any setting. Just as pencil and paper are not the right solution for every situation, neither is a computer screen.
Finally, the new frontier of privacy. We spend a lot of time trying to teach students to be good digital citizens and to be mindful and careful about what data they give away about themselves. Then in many schools we turn around and plug them into platforms and online ecosystems that strip mine their data as effectively as Facebook. Yes, they readily give that stuff away in their online lives, but that doesn't mean schools should be complicit in hooking students up for data-hoovering. We can plug every aspect of students' lives into the internet. But that doesn't mean we should.
Almost two decades ago, yearbook publishers started offering digital books and digital supplements. If you purchased one of those, all you would need today is a computer that runs Windows 95 with a cd-rom drive and some software from a company that no longer exists. If you bought a paper yearbook, however, all you will need are your fingers and eyeballs.
The obstacles to a paperless classroom remain the same-- expense, utility, safety, and longevity. There are clear and definite benefits to computer tech in schools, but achieving the paperless classroom is not easy, definitely not cheap, and certainly not inevitable.
Thursday, October 9, 2014
The Five Percent Rule
I call it the Five Percent Rule, and it goes like this:
Ninety-five percent of everything is unimportant baloney, crap that we humans use to torture ourselves and each other. Neckties. Eye shadow. Funny hats. Hair length. Only five percent of what we deal with is true and important and lasting. Only five percent of what we deal with is really important. Only five percent of what we deal with really, truly matters. It's what Thoreau was saying- simplify your life by getting rid of the ninety-five percent junk.
I'll bet you that many people agree, that many people would also say that folks waste way too much time and concern and effort and worry and energy on stuff that just doesn't matter.
But here's the catch. We can agree that a huge slice of life is wasted on inconsequential stupid stuff, and that only that small sliver, that five percent, really deserves our heart and soul and attention.
But we can't agree on what falls within the five percent.
We all subscribe to "Don't sweat the small stuff." But we can't agree on which stuff is small.
You may think that having a neat and orderly house is essential to a good life, but I think comfort and personality is what really matters. I may think that an unexamined life is not worth living, while you feel all that navel gazing is a waste of time. You may think ready access to fresh, compelling music is an unnecessary luxury, while I believe that life requires it.
Oh, there are some things we all mostly subscribe to, like "Nobody ever lay on his death bed wishing he had spent more time at the office." But so many of our fights with other humans are about what constitutes that essential, true five percent. (And of course, some people will argue that the five percent is really twenty or thirty or fifty. The Five Percent Rule also applies to the Five Percent Rule.)
Sometimes we make accommodations by association. There are things I have never really believed are part of that five percent, but my wife is part of my five percent, so what she values, I value, because I value her.
Disagreements about the five percent don't have to be a big deal. Particularly if we value other people and hold them in our five percent, it's not that hard to accept that we all have our own five percent's, and that doesn't make people wrong necessarily-- just different. Though, of course, if your five percent includes a moral absolutism that you hold more important than other people...
The problem comes when we start trying to enforce our five percent on everyone. I think this value is real an true, so you will value it also or else.
Educational reformsterism, the GERM, the new status quo-- it's all about enforcing and inflicting one particular idea about the five percent.
Traditional schools in the post-war period allowed for a certain looseness, a certain freedom for students to pursue whatever five percent they felt connected to. If they clashed with one teacher who held a conflicting view of the five percent, they might also find a teacher who valued a similar sliver.; They were free to sues out that deepest of adolescent mysteries-- what do I really value? What falls within my five percent?
What Common Core based, high-stakes test driven, data-hovering, no excuses, college and career ready schooling does is tell students (much as schools did 100 years ago) that the only correct view of the five percent is the one dictated by the People In Charge. There is no need for a young person to search or probe or question. The five percent is already there, on the test, in the standards, in the insistence that education is only job training, and that only scores and dollars are the measure of a person's life. Listen to what reformsters like David Coleman say-- it's not so much about education as it's about what they believe constitutes the five percent. Coleman's whole educational philosophy has been about saying, "We are spending school time on things like feelings and literature that are not important in life, are not part of the five percent."
My dispute is really two-fold. First, I disagree with their view of the five percent. I think it's stunted, sad, and wrong. But second, even if the reformsters embraced most of the values that I do, I would still object to enforcing them as the only values pushed by public education. One size does not fit all-- not even if it's the size that fits me.
It is a hard thing to learn in life, that letting go of the ninety-five percent, that learning to stop bothering with the sweaty small stuff. But it's essential to living a full and focused life in which one does not waste time on things one does not care about. Education must leave people free to figure out their five percent, not force them to adopt somebody else's.
Ninety-five percent of everything is unimportant baloney, crap that we humans use to torture ourselves and each other. Neckties. Eye shadow. Funny hats. Hair length. Only five percent of what we deal with is true and important and lasting. Only five percent of what we deal with is really important. Only five percent of what we deal with really, truly matters. It's what Thoreau was saying- simplify your life by getting rid of the ninety-five percent junk.
I'll bet you that many people agree, that many people would also say that folks waste way too much time and concern and effort and worry and energy on stuff that just doesn't matter.
But here's the catch. We can agree that a huge slice of life is wasted on inconsequential stupid stuff, and that only that small sliver, that five percent, really deserves our heart and soul and attention.
But we can't agree on what falls within the five percent.
We all subscribe to "Don't sweat the small stuff." But we can't agree on which stuff is small.
You may think that having a neat and orderly house is essential to a good life, but I think comfort and personality is what really matters. I may think that an unexamined life is not worth living, while you feel all that navel gazing is a waste of time. You may think ready access to fresh, compelling music is an unnecessary luxury, while I believe that life requires it.
Oh, there are some things we all mostly subscribe to, like "Nobody ever lay on his death bed wishing he had spent more time at the office." But so many of our fights with other humans are about what constitutes that essential, true five percent. (And of course, some people will argue that the five percent is really twenty or thirty or fifty. The Five Percent Rule also applies to the Five Percent Rule.)
Sometimes we make accommodations by association. There are things I have never really believed are part of that five percent, but my wife is part of my five percent, so what she values, I value, because I value her.
Disagreements about the five percent don't have to be a big deal. Particularly if we value other people and hold them in our five percent, it's not that hard to accept that we all have our own five percent's, and that doesn't make people wrong necessarily-- just different. Though, of course, if your five percent includes a moral absolutism that you hold more important than other people...
The problem comes when we start trying to enforce our five percent on everyone. I think this value is real an true, so you will value it also or else.
Educational reformsterism, the GERM, the new status quo-- it's all about enforcing and inflicting one particular idea about the five percent.
Traditional schools in the post-war period allowed for a certain looseness, a certain freedom for students to pursue whatever five percent they felt connected to. If they clashed with one teacher who held a conflicting view of the five percent, they might also find a teacher who valued a similar sliver.; They were free to sues out that deepest of adolescent mysteries-- what do I really value? What falls within my five percent?
What Common Core based, high-stakes test driven, data-hovering, no excuses, college and career ready schooling does is tell students (much as schools did 100 years ago) that the only correct view of the five percent is the one dictated by the People In Charge. There is no need for a young person to search or probe or question. The five percent is already there, on the test, in the standards, in the insistence that education is only job training, and that only scores and dollars are the measure of a person's life. Listen to what reformsters like David Coleman say-- it's not so much about education as it's about what they believe constitutes the five percent. Coleman's whole educational philosophy has been about saying, "We are spending school time on things like feelings and literature that are not important in life, are not part of the five percent."
My dispute is really two-fold. First, I disagree with their view of the five percent. I think it's stunted, sad, and wrong. But second, even if the reformsters embraced most of the values that I do, I would still object to enforcing them as the only values pushed by public education. One size does not fit all-- not even if it's the size that fits me.
It is a hard thing to learn in life, that letting go of the ninety-five percent, that learning to stop bothering with the sweaty small stuff. But it's essential to living a full and focused life in which one does not waste time on things one does not care about. Education must leave people free to figure out their five percent, not force them to adopt somebody else's.
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