CCSS: The Missing 57 Words

Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the Thomas Fordham Institute, and one of the very view reformsters who has actually taught in a classroom. He has worked in journalism, and he worked for Core Knowledge, E. D. Hirsch's group that advocated for the preservation and passing on of, well, core knowledge. Pondiscio and I disagree when it comes to the Common Core, but we agree that background knowledge is critical for the development of reading ability.

Pondiscio's support for the Core, and the heart of much of his edu-philosophy, boils down to 57 words:

By reading texts in history/social studies, science, and other disciplines, students build a foundation of knowledge in these fields that will also give them the background to be better readers in all content areas. Students can only gain this foundation when the curriculum is intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades.

When he says (as he did in the comments section of the above-linked piece) that his support boils down to those 57 words, he's not kidding-- here he is way back in 2012, in front of a not-particularly-core-friendly audience making his case for the Core, based on those 57 words.

So where did those 57 words come from? And what do they have to do with anything? And why are they so rarely referenced as part of anybody's clolege-and-career-standards song and dance?

Those 57 words come from a slightly longer paragraph. Let's look at the whole thing.

To build a foundation for college and career readiness, students must read widely and deeply from among a broad range of high-quality, increasingly challenging literary and informational texts. Through extensive reading of stories, dramas, poems, and myths from diverse cultures and different time periods, students gain literary and cultural knowledge as well as familiarity with various text structures and elements. By reading texts in history/social studies, science, and other disciplines, students build a foundation of knowledge in these fields that will also give them the background to be better readers in all content areas. Students can only gain this foundation when the curriculum is intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades. Students also acquire the habits of reading independently and closely, which are essential to their future success.

You'll see that context doesn't change the point of Pondiscio's 57 words-- it just strengthens the call for rich content. Where does that come from? Well, from the Common Core, sort of. Right here on the page of CCSS ELA anchor standards, you'll find this graph at the end as "Notes on range and content of student reading." 

Did you know that was in there? Don't feel bad. Many folks don't.

I actually agree with Pondiscio on this one, and in fact think the entire paragraph is an important one. So why is it that the vast majority of CACR standards skipped right past it?

First of all, they aren't standards. They're kind of an idea meant (or tacked on) to supplement the standards. And if like most people who just went directly to the list of standards for your grade to see what you were dealing with, you sailed right past the 57 words. They only appear on the anchor standards page; there's no hint of them on the actual standards pages.

That means that if you are using a handy digital software frame for aligning and organizing your lessons like, say, eDoctrina, then the handy pull-down menu that you use to tag your lessons and units with the various standards that you've met-- that pull down menu has only the state standards and no hint of the 57 words.

It's even worse if you're in a state like mine, where officials repudiated the Core Standards and replaced them with pretty much the exact same thing under a different name. If you check through your list of standards, you'll find pretty much the same standards with different tag numbers. But you know what you won't find? "Notes" about how to best approach or reinforce the standards. You won't find the 57 words-- not even in the Big Goals section. (It's only fair to note that I haven't checked every single set of Faux Core Standards-- but I'll be really surprised if any of them include the 57 words).

And in all cases, the Big Standardized Test does not address the 57 words at all.

In fact, the BS Tests runs away from the 57 words. Because the Core itself and the Core tests as well assume that reading is a set of skills that exist in a vacuum, independent of any background knowledge or context, test selections are set up to "level the playing field." How do you level the playing field? By choosing selections for which close-to-zero students have background knowledge. So third graders get test reading selections about Turkish tribal trade practices because nobody will have the unfair advantage of knowing what the hell the selection is talking about (we can also level the playing field by choosing selections that are so uniformly boring that no student will actually be engaged or interested-- because that would be unfair, too).

It's my shortest answer to the question "What's so bad about the common core standardized tests?" What's so wrong is that the very best way to truly prepare my students for the test would be to throw out all the textbooks, all the short stories, all the novels, even all the non-fiction works and do nothing all year except a daily drill of reading one-page excerpts from random sources and answer multiple choice questions about each. That's what's so bad about the common core standardized tests.

The 57 words appear next to the Core standards, but they are not part of the standards, and the vast number of people, from those implementing the standards to those manufacturing tests for the standards-- all those people have ignored the 57 words completely. Those 57 words (and their host paragraph) appear like nothing so much as a compromise that someone included to make somebody happier, but with no mechanism or intent to implement. Like a party platform that the party adopts to make some folks happy, but to which the candidate never, ever refers again.

I have always maintained that the rich content crowd has made a fundamental error in their embrace of the Core, what I call the "Well, surely they don't mean it" fallacy. Your colleague says he's going to punch you in the face and you think, "Well, surely they don't mean it" because you believe that a face punch wouldn't make any sense and so surely your serious-looking determined-sounding colleague doesn't mean it. You keep thinking that right up until you're holding a cold compress on your nose.

The argument that the Core calls for rich content is mostly people saying, "Well, of course it is meant to include rich content, because if it didn't, then it would be stupid."

They have pointed to those 57 words, but there's no sign that anyone anywhere takes those 57 words seriously, and the writers of the standards deliberately did NOT include the requirement for rich content as an actual standard. And the very existence of the paragraph, the 57 words, means that somebody in the room knew what the right thing to do was-- and then they didn't do it. They stuck the paragraph right where it could be easily overlooked, easily ignored, easily dropped. And it has been all those things. Keep that paragraph and we can easily dump the entire rest of the standards. But ignore it, and the Core standards are just as dull and dumb as some of us have always claimed.

ICYMI: Some edu-reading for the day

Many a varied readings for today.
 
How Not To Explain Success

Remember all that noise a year ago about the "triple package" of traits that lead to success. Yeah, that was probably baloney.

Why the New SAT Isn't As Transparent As the College Board Wants You To Believe


What?! David Coleman's College Board is busy blowing marketing smoke?! I am shocked. Shocked!!

Black and Brown Boys Don't Need To Learn Grit; They Need Schools To Stop Being Racist

Yes, it's been said before. It should be said repeatedly until the message sinks in.

DPS sickout a sympton of Lansing's ill behavior

The Detroit Free Press has a few things to say about the Detroit teacher sick-out and just who is responsible

School Vouchers Are Not a Cure for Segregation

At Jersey Jazzman, Mark Weber has been writing a three-part (so far) explanation of just how much voucher systems do not help segregation. Essential reading, with charts and graphs and facts and stuff.

Rely on Local Actors Instead of Faulty Information To Make Judgements About School Quality

Reform fans Jay Greene and Mike Petrilli have been dialoguing about the finer points of testing and evaluation etc, with Greene attacking some reformster orthodoxy. Here he answer the question of what to do if the test data says the school sucks but the people there think it's great. Shouldn't be a radical notion, but that's where we are...

You Won't Believe This (Unless You Know Chicago)

The Chicago Public School system has decided to try to take down principal Trot LaRaviere. Here's his own account of the sequence of events. If this doesn't make you angry, I'm not sure anything will.

We Did Everything the State Asked-- Didn't Matter

A teacher in Georgia gives voice to the frustration of trying to make a reformster regime happy.

Instructional Googling

Robert Pondiscio is in US News sounding the alarm about teachers who develop their own materials either on their own or by googling their way to instructional strategies, on his way to noting that the "dirty little secret" of education is that the quality of instructional techniques is an afterthought, and probably not so great. But I think he's managed to mis-represent the problem and add to it all at once.

Here's the cold open.

If you caught your pediatrician Googling "upset stomach remedies" before deciding how to treat your child and homebrewing medications over an office sink, you might start looking for a new pediatrician. So how would you feel if you learned that Google and Pinterest are where your child's teacher goes to look for instructional materials?

If my pediatrician was stumped by a tricky diagnosis, I would expect her to consult other experts in the field and go look through the literature about the ailment. And because my pediatrician is a trained professional, I'd be unlikely to view treatment that she developed and used based on her professional knowledge and judgment as a "home brew."

So right up front, let's dispose of the notion that Google and Pinterest are automatically bad news. For many teachers they have become the modern equivalent of walking across the hall and saying, "I can't quite get Chris to understand how to work with mixed fractions. Have you got anything that you've had success with?" Google and Pinterest (and few dozen other sites) make it possible to walk across thousands of other halls and ask millions of other fellow professionals what professional advice and materials they might have to offer. This is not a bad thing.

Like any tool, it can be misused. Teachers need that most important of 21st century research skills-- the ability to tell Good Stuff from Crap. And of course the interwebs can enable lazy teachers, but this is not a new phenomenon-- it's simply the 21st century equivalent of your old teacher who just walked the class through the textbook page by page.

Expecting teachers to be expert pedagogues and instructional designers is one of the ways in which we push the job far beyond the capabilities of mere mortals. 

Nope. That's the job. Granted, it's one of the aspects of the job that makes it very difficult. It's one of the reasons that the job is best done by trained, experienced professionals. Designing instruction without knowledge of how exactly it will be implemented, by whom, and for whom, is a clunky business at best, like designing a car if you've never driven one or designing software without any knowledge of who will be using it. It's not that it can't be done, exactly, but that's not the best way to do it.

The growth and development of a classroom teacher often ties directly to their lesson design skills. Early in your career, you probably use the book, or the materials designed by colleagues, or the stuff you find on Google as a way of making your teacher workload manageable. But if you have an interest in doing well at all, that starts to change. You start thinking, "Boy, if I tweak this one thing this way, this lesson would work much better in my fifth period class." And then eventually leads to, "Well, if I just designed this lesson from scratch, I could have exactly what I need with my third period class."

This is also what is happening to the craptastic Common Core...infused? marketed? We can't really say "aligned" because in some cases the only "alignment" that materials have with the Core is to slap a "Common Core aligned" sticker on the front. So teachers at first followed the new materials, per orders-- for at least one year. Then classroom teachers began the revision process ("This lesson about division in the book the "new" way leaves my students confused and frustrated, so I will now supplement it with some additional lessons and just skip the worst parts of the book.")

Pondiscio knows that there are teachers who are very good at both design and delivery ("there are master teachers to whom we should eagerly grant nearly complete classroom autonomy") and he knows that there can be good reason to consult Dr. Google. And he's not after teachers in this piece ("Don't blame teachers.")

Pondiscio is after crappy instructional materials. He doesn't like the fact that there are a million different sets of materials out there, and that in many cases nobody is paying attention to whether they are any good or not. It's a reasonable concern. Here are my concerns with his concern.

1) The Powers That Be asked for this. One of the appeals of Common Core was that it was going to fix this. But the standards are poorly done, created by people who are not educators. If you hand a bunch of one-size-fits-all coat to every teacher in the nation and say, "Get all of your students to wear this," the very first thing that's going to happen is that everybody is going to start making alterations on the coat. If you give a bunch of people nonsensical instructions ("Everybody align your spirit monkey with the grenadines and soul patches!") everybody is going to have to make their own best guess about what the hell you meant. The Common Core absolutely guaranteed that instruction in this country would be a higgledy-piggledy mess.

2) Messy does not equal bad. Pondiscio is one of those folks who is concerned that instruction varies across states, districts and even buildings. I understand that this bothers folks, and I sympathize with them. I just don't see any viable alternative. Teaching involves human beings working with other human beings. Variation is a feature, not a bug. It irritates me that I can't get my current class to write as last year's class, or that a discussion-based approach to the reading works great in ninth period and bombs completely in eighth period. But that's the gig. Yes, absolutely, we should help those who are lagging to up their game. Always, every day. But that will not happen by making everybody play the same game the same way. Standardizing instruction will not help; in fact, it will hurt by restricting the people who really have a handle on what they're doing.

3) Doing it all is impossible-- and necessary. Pondiscio correctly notes that the teaching job description is vague, wide and deep, and that adding to it just makes it harder. The most-read thing I have ever written is all about how there is never enough time for a teacher to do everything a teacher needs to do. But doing it all is how a teacher sees the whole picture, which is a necessary part of the job. Even something as simple as recording grades can be crucial in maintaining your sense of exactly how the class is doing with material. Believe me-- I often entertain the notion of every teacher having a personal administrative assistant, but when I try to think of what that person would do, I come up short. Run copies. Take care of administrative paperwork.

4) The mystification of instructional design. Pondiscio actually adds to his own googling problem here. One of the implications of his piece is that instructional design is just so daunting that not every teacher is capable of doing it. But this mystification of instructional design (which some college programs indulge in) actually increases the googling problem-- "Oh, designing a lesson is beyond my simple powers," says the beginning teacher. "I will just have to trust this textbook or consult Dr. Google." This is one more unfortunate side effect of the Common Core era-- teachers who have been told that they must follow the dictates of a higher educational authority that understands mysteries they can never fully grasp.

5) The clogged crap filter. There's another irony here. If you are going to be your classroom crap filter, the final barrier against implementing bad instruction, you have to be knowledgeable about instructional design. We can't remove the instructional design piece from the teacher job description, because the teacher has to be able to tell the difference between junk and useful stuff.

Finally-- I cannot disagree with Pondiscio's last line:

Great teachers need great instructional materials. It's time we got serious about providing them.

But how does that even happen? Does some centralized government agency certify and regulate all the textbooks and teaching materials out there? I'm going to skip over the philosophical issues of governance, free markets, and central control and go to some more practical questions-- who would work at that agency? Who would decide that those people were qualified to work at that agency? How would they decide which materials were great?

Or do we somehow work on the vendors. Do we somehow get Pearson et. al. to stop producing crap in order to make a buck, and again, how would that happen exactly? Actually-- I have an answer for this one. District purchasing decisions must all be made by classroom teachers, not some non-teaching bureaucrat. And all textbook series and instructional programs come with a one year warrantee-- in other words, after we use your materials/texts/programs/whatever for a year, if the classroom teachers in the district are not satisfied, 100% money back guarantee. There's some creative disruption of an entrenched business model I could get behind.

Pondiscio is right about one other thing-- too little teacher preparation in some programs is spent on instructional design. This is yet another thing that has been further damaged by Common Core-- the average lesson planning class in college programs is now centered on How To Write Your Plan So That It Looks Like Its Aligned To The Core instead of How To Design An Instructional Plan So It Works. We could improve in this area by upping the teacher prep programs in two areas that have always needed to be improved-- more time studying the content you're going to teach, and more time in the field with real live small humans.

The solution is the same as ever. Trained, experienced professional educators in the classroom, making trained professional decisions about what instruction should be used by this particular teacher with these particular students. Have we achieved 100% implementation of this solution? Of course not-- but the solution to that is not to change to some other solution entirely.

The Free Market Does Not Work for Education

The initial spark for this piece was going to be this story out of Philly, where parents are shocked, upset and frustrated to learn that the charter their children are attending is bailing on them at the end of this year. 

But at this stage of the game "Charter Closes Doors and Abandons Students" is completely unremarkable, like breathless coverage of the sun rising in the East. The Center for Media and Democracy has done huge work on this, producing a map of the 2,500 (that's two thousand, five hundred!) charter schools that closed by 2013. CMD has also ramped up pressure on the US Department of Education, which loves charters, pushes charters, throws money at charters-- but in its "transparent" reporting claims to have no idea how many charters have actually closed. (Meanwhile, CMD continues to dig out the truth about charter scamming like this amazing report about KIPP. Do you contribute to the CMD? Because you really ought to.)

Why do so many charters close? There's no mystery to it. Here's a quote from the Philly charter CEO:

Kenderton is facing significant financial challenges due to a number of factors, including the school's rising special education costs. As a result, Scholar Academies has concluded that, next school year, it is no longer able to manage the school in the best interest of kids.

Charters close because charter schools are businesses, and businesses close when it is not financially viable for them to stay open.

The free market will never work for a national education system. Never. Never ever.

A business operating in a free market will only stay in business as long as it is economically viable to do so. And it will never be economically viable to provide a service to every single customer in the country.


All business models, either explicitly or implicitly, include decisions about which customers will not be served, which customers will be rejected, because in that model, those customers will be detrimental to the economic viability of the business. McDonald's could decide to court people who like upscale filet mignons, but the kitchen equipment and training would cost a whole bunch of money that would not bring a corresponding increase in revenue, so they don't do it.

In a particularly apt example, FedEx and UPS do not deliver to the remoter rural areas. If you hire FedEx to deliver a package to your uncle at the end of Bogholler Road in Outer Ruralsville, what they will actually do is sub-contract the United States Post Office to finish the delivery for them.

Note what the CEO said above. Special ed students are too expensive for their business model. When we see across the nation that charters largely avoid students with severe special needs, or English language learners, this is not because the operators of those charters are evil racist SWSN haters. It's because it's harder to come up with a viable business model that includes those high-cost students. Likewise, you find fewer charters in rural and small town areas for the same reason you find fewer McDonald's in the desert-- the business model is commonly to set up shop where you have the largest customer pool to fish in.

Of course, you can game this system a little by creating government incentives. Uncle Sugar can say, "We'll give you a tax break or a subsidy if you will go serve this customer base that it ordinarily wouldn't make economic/business sense for you to serve." But now it's not a free market any more, is it?

Look. As always, I'm not arguing that business-people are inherently evil and dastardly and wrong. But the values and mission of a business in a free market are incompatible with the values and mission of public education.

The first question of the public education system has to be, "How can we get a great education for every single child in this country?" The first question for a business has to be, "What model can we use that will keep this business economically viable?' And the answer to that question will never, ever be, "By providing an education to every child in this country." There will always be students who live in the economic cracks, niche customers that no business wants because there will never be money in them. Some charter fans suggest, either explicitly or implicitly, that educating those students will be the job of public education. But that represents a dramatic and complete re-imagining of the purpose of public education, and to repurpose an entire public sector without a public discussion is irresponsible and undemocratic.

In the meantime, charter schools will continue to close when it makes business sense to do so, no matter what sorts of promises they made to the families of their students. Charter schools think like businesses, not like schools, because charter schools are businesses. We cannot be surprised when they act like businesses, and we cannot keep hiding from a discussion about the implications of turning that business mindset on a public good.

Water, Charters, and Obama

This is what President Obama said in Flint, Michigan.

It doesn’t matter how hard you work, how responsible you are, how you raise your kids. You can’t set up a whole water system for a city. That’s not something you do by yourself. You do it with other people. You can’t hire your own fire department or your own police force, or your own army. They’re things we have to do together. Basic things that we all benefit from.

It's a really good thought, a clear and direct statement about the value of community goods, the things that we create and maintain in the common space.

And yet somehow the administration does not see how this same reasoning applies to schools.

Of course you can't set up a whole water system for a city-- but, if you are rich enough and powerful enough, you can set up a system for yourself and let everyone else in the city go pound sand. Any public good can be purchased with private money, if your pile of money is large enough.

You can't set up a school system for a whole city any more than you can hire your own police and fire fighters. Which is to say, you can do it if you have the money. But it won't be for everyone-- just for the chosen few.

So apparently the President opposes the notion of a charter water system, a charter fire department, or a charter police force as a way to serve a whole city. He did not stand in Flint and declare that when the water system was a mess, the solution would be to let a bunch of entrepreneurs set up various competing small scale water systems as laboratories of innovation. He did not suggest that the right visionary entrepreneur really could create a great water system for the whole city.

It would be ridiculous to suggest that a conglomeration of competing water companies, fire departments, or police stations-- all financed with the same total funding used to run just one of each-- would be a solution.

The President clearly accepted that it's clearly ridiculous to suggest that a messy mass of individually launched public services could ever properly protect and maintain the public good. He clearly understands that letting money-motivated individuals mess with a public good leads to disasters like a poisoned water supply. So the mystery remains-- why does he not see that it is patently ridiculous to let such cash-chasing individuals loose in the public good that is education? Is one of these things really not like the others?

College Debt and Race

I don't have an explanation for it, and neither does anyone else, yet, but the news is worth paying attention to.

A study published in the Children and Youth Services Review compares education debt between low-and-moderate-income families by race, and the findings are disturbing:

Significant variation in education debt was found, as LMI Black students accrued $7,721 more education debt than LMI Whites.

Significant Black-White disparities in education debt persisted after accounting for degree completion and socioeconomic factors.

I don't have access to the full article, but Brookings published a brief report about it. Brookings notes that another study shows that white students generally have more assistance through family connections than Black students. That matches the sort of "social capital" patterns noted by Robert Putnam in Our Kids.

But a more likely cause is the type of schools that students attend. Black and Hispanic students are more likely to attend for-profit colleges, getting less bang for their buck and more debt for their trouble.

Put this together with recent published findings about college affordability in general, and we can see a growing crisis in college education. If college is supposed to be a doorway to a better tomorrow, that doorway is increasingly locked to many Americans. The administration has made the occasional noise about clamping down on for-profit schools, but it has been mostly noise only. Some folks advocate for more ratings and rankings of colleges based on government-issued formulae, but it seems to me that we're long past due for some clamping down on advertising-- particularly cynical race-targeted advertising.

After all-- we stopped letting tobacco companies suggest that their cancer sticks were the pathway to sophistication and sexiness. Why can we not clamp down on predatory colleges that promise the future and deliver debt? Here's one more reason that getting LMI students to raise their Big Standardized Test scores is no secret to college access or success, less like helping them grow big and strong and more like fattening the sheep for the wolves ("Look! You got a high PARCC score! You should talk to my friends at Gotrox University!") If this is how we're supposed to be creating racial equity in this country, well-- it's not working. In fact, it may be doing the opposite of working. Damn, but surely we can do better than this.

The Teachers I Appreciate

It's Teacher Appreciation Week, and like every single adult human in the country, my story includes teachers who made a huge difference in my life.

I don't even know the name of my kindergarten teacher at Maple Avenue School in Claremont, New Hampshire (yes, I think that's it in the picture. God bless the internet)-- but she was the person who pointed out to my parents that my not-so-great Letter Identification skills might be directly related to my not-so-great Seeing Things With My Eyeballs skills. So I owe her for that.

Miss Gause, my elementary music teacher, sternly hunted down the boys sitting in the back of the room not even trying and made us match pitch. That was a small thing, but it got me ready for the music aptitude test which in turn qualified me to take an instrument which has been hugely influential in my life. She made a small choice and it made a huge difference.

Mrs. Fulmer and Miss Eakin let me bring elementary education to grinding halt periodically as I read to my classmates my latest works of fiction. I still have most of them. I have read them, and I can assure you that they were completely void of any signs of Future Promise. But my peers liked them well enough, and my teachers' patience introduced me to the world of Making Things Can Be Cool.

In eighth grade, Mrs. O'Keefe showed me that not only could English class be cool and fun, but because the mission was to get better at reading, writing, listening and speaking, the possibilities for things you could study and projects you could do was virtually endless.

I found Mr. Bianchi's class painfully boring-- but at the same time, I was in awe of his supernatural levels of patience. If he had to go over something for an entire period in order for a student to get it, then he would go over it for an entire period, without ever making that student feel dumb. Years later, it was Tony's retirement that got me my first permanent gig in the high school. He also gave me my first copy of Confederacy of Dunces.

Mr. Lore taught biology, a class I was sure would never be of any use to me (I had already discerned that science was not my gift), but the class was rigorous and challenging and introduced me to a whole new level of intellectual exactitude. I never took a single college course in biology, and this high school class was still some of the best college preparation I ever had.

Mr. Eichholtz showed me how electrifying it could be to have a teacher whose whole passion and excitement was invested in what he taught. Everything in his class was interesting because he thought it was interesting-- in fact, while he was teaching it, at that moment, it was the most interesting thing on earth.

When I headed off to college, I met more teachers who helped chart my course. Dr. Zolbrod gave the best meetings ever-- the man could go over my less-than-stellar paper with me and leave me feeling like a writing champion. He was also a master of seeing what a student needed, and steering them toward that very thing; he showed me how to let students find their own way in their own time to their own place-- even guys like me who were far from star pupils.

Probably no teacher influenced me as much as Mr. Frye. He started me out on trombone lessons when I was in fifth grade, and he was my band director for the next eight years. I did not appreciate at the time how gifted he was in his ability to just step back and let students step up, rather than insist on Harry Dinkle levels of total control. In his band (which was never his band-- it was always our band) we learned about leadership and ownership and working with other people as a team. Plenty of people came out of his program to become professional musicians and music teachers, but he also produced an amazing number of people who did something else entirely-- but always kept music somewhere in their lives. I went to college and met people who had played in high school and never wanted to touch an instrument again, and I was flabbergasted. Music has been at the core of who I am my whole life; if I had had a different band director, I would literally have grown up to be somebody else, somebody completely different from the person I am today.

I never felt that any of the teachers who really affected me were trying to mold me or shape me or turn me into something in particular. I expect that like any other small human I would have actively resisted any such attempts. In fact, on reflection, I suppose that I encountered teachers who did try to mold me, and I did resist, and as I sit here today, I don't even remember them.

No, the most influential teachers I had inspired me, and the very most influential ones saw me, and in seeing me and who I was and who I could become, helped me see that myself. I've never seen teaching as metalwork, where you take a slab of iron and use heat and hammer and brute power to force it into the shape you choose for it. It's gardening. You can't ignore or neglect what's growing there, but you can't force it into a certain shape at a certain time.

Those are the teachers I appreciate. Those are just some of the teachers who were an influence on me, and help me remember what teaching is supposed to look like. This, I think, is how I'll try to spend Teacher Appreciation week from now on-- not wondering if I'll be appreciated, but reflect on which people this teacher appreciates. Exercising gratitude is always a good exercise, as is renewing focus the mission. Have a good rest of the week.