Betsy DeVos has long been a fan of cyber-schooling. Her husband was an investor in K-12, the cyber-charter behemoth, way back at beginning of the millennium (we can start saying that now, right?) Back when she was still running the American Federation for Children, she had this to say
Families want and deserve access to all educational options, including charter schools, private schools and virtual schools. States are well ahead of Congress on this and their efforts should be encouraged and supported. Twenty-three states plus DC have 48 publicly funded private school choice programs; 43 states have charter school laws; and virtual schools are growing across the country. Greater innovation and choice will contribute to better K-12 educational outcomes for our children.
AFC often spoke out in favor of cyber charters, and DeVos has continued to advocate as Secretary, even as the dismal results rolled in.
DeVos has been an unwavering supporter of remote schooling. But her support for remote work stops at the doors to the Department of Education.
One of the Trumpian initiatives (under the general banner of "Grampaw Says That Back In Has They Didn't Need That Stuff") has been to clamp down on remote working. Per the Washington Post:
President Trump’s government is scaling it back at multiple agencies on the theory that a fanny in the seat prevents the kind of slacking off that can happen when no one’s watching.
The initiative is government-wide, and so includes the Department of Education, where DeVos fully supports the notion that remote work is bad. Despite a survey suggesting the desired results weren't happening, DeVos decided to stay the course, because she believes that remote work is damaging to collaboration, communication and productivity.
Is there some cognitive dissonance evident here? Not necessarily. It would be in keeping with the DeVosian approach to believe that all public employees (aka those slackers who have been insulated from God's own free market private enterprise system) are probably lazy public teat-suckers who need to be kept under the hammer. This would include government workers and public school teachers. Also, there would be some hypocrisy involved if DeVos were advocating for cyber schools because she thought they actually did a good job. But the language quoted above is typical of DeVos on the subject-- she almost never argues that cyber-schools should exist because they educate children so very well. She just wants that choice to be available.
This little paired text exercise just reminds us that when DeVos says "parents should have choices" what she means is "business people should be free to tap this market any way they want to." They may be making a buck by marketing junk, but that's their God-given right.
Wednesday, January 15, 2020
Tuesday, January 14, 2020
Should Tax Dollars Pay For This Discrimination
From Kentucky comes the story of a fifteen-year old student expelled for wearing a rainbow t-shirt. Seriously.
Kayla Kenney used to be a student at Whitefield Academy, where the mission is "to serve Christian families by providing a Christ-centered, Biblically-based education marked by academic excellence and spiritual vitality." Part of their vision is "to produce powerful and effective student leaders." The name, incidentally, is from George Whitefield, an 18th century preacher credited with helping to found Methodism and evangelism-- so not a subtle whiteness thing, just a subtle "refusing to be dragged into the 21st Century" thing.
The school's language suggests that this is part of an ongoing issue with Kenney, because, I guess, she often wears rainbows? Who knows. It doesn't really matter; Whitefield is a private school and they can eject any student they wish for any reason they wish. This story is spreading rapidly, but I'm not sure there's much to see here.
Except.
Except that this is Kentucky, where the fans of school choice have been pushing oh-so-hard for charters and vouchers in all their various forms. Like this old op-ed in which the head of EdChoice Kentucy tries to argue that scholarship tax credits don't cost the taxpayers a cent because they aren't really vouchers. This is some first rate bluegrass bullshit (and the type preferred by Secretary DeVos). To review-- a tax credit scholarship program means works like this. The state tells Bobby McGotrox that instead of paying his taxes, he can give money to a private school. This means that the state does not get the benefit of McGotrox tax dollars, which means whatever amount the state allows, the state is missing that much money from its own budget. This is some clever sleight of hand, but the end result is exactly precisely the same as spending tax dollars on vouchers for private schools.
Private schools just like Whitefield Academy.
This is what voucher programs get you-- taxpayers who literally have to foot the bill for schools that would reject or eject that same taxpayer's own children.
This is not choice. It is privatization. It is using the power of the government and the money of the taxpayers to support schools that behave in immoral and not-really-legal ways. It's not okay.
Kayla Kenney used to be a student at Whitefield Academy, where the mission is "to serve Christian families by providing a Christ-centered, Biblically-based education marked by academic excellence and spiritual vitality." Part of their vision is "to produce powerful and effective student leaders." The name, incidentally, is from George Whitefield, an 18th century preacher credited with helping to found Methodism and evangelism-- so not a subtle whiteness thing, just a subtle "refusing to be dragged into the 21st Century" thing.
The school's language suggests that this is part of an ongoing issue with Kenney, because, I guess, she often wears rainbows? Who knows. It doesn't really matter; Whitefield is a private school and they can eject any student they wish for any reason they wish. This story is spreading rapidly, but I'm not sure there's much to see here.
Except.
Except that this is Kentucky, where the fans of school choice have been pushing oh-so-hard for charters and vouchers in all their various forms. Like this old op-ed in which the head of EdChoice Kentucy tries to argue that scholarship tax credits don't cost the taxpayers a cent because they aren't really vouchers. This is some first rate bluegrass bullshit (and the type preferred by Secretary DeVos). To review-- a tax credit scholarship program means works like this. The state tells Bobby McGotrox that instead of paying his taxes, he can give money to a private school. This means that the state does not get the benefit of McGotrox tax dollars, which means whatever amount the state allows, the state is missing that much money from its own budget. This is some clever sleight of hand, but the end result is exactly precisely the same as spending tax dollars on vouchers for private schools.
Private schools just like Whitefield Academy.
This is what voucher programs get you-- taxpayers who literally have to foot the bill for schools that would reject or eject that same taxpayer's own children.
This is not choice. It is privatization. It is using the power of the government and the money of the taxpayers to support schools that behave in immoral and not-really-legal ways. It's not okay.
Monday, January 13, 2020
More Proof The Big Standardized Tests Mean Diddly-Squat
Chad Aldeman (Bellwether Education Partners) wants us to take heart. He's over at The 74 (Campbell Brown's House of Reform Advocacy) arguing that although reformsters are writing off the last ten years as a "lost decade" there was actually some good news-- while "educational achievement" (by which Aldeman actually means "standardized test scores") remained stagnant, college attainment has been on the rise.
Well, that's a puzzler. Adelman suggests that you might explain the incongruity by claiming that colleges and high schools just lowered their standards. But he thinks the attainment rates deserve attention.
One reason is that it’s much easier to gauge attainment than achievement. Measuring attainment is as simple as asking adults what their highest level of education is, whereas measuring achievement involves a complex process of defining what people at various ages should know and be able to do, developing a tool to measure those skills, sampling the given population and then translating the sample results into larger estimates.
Well, yes. That second thing, the measuring achievement is hard, so hard I would argue (as I have for forever) that we can't actually do it, but in the education disruptor's desire to have such a tool, we've just rushed a couple of bad proxies to market and continued to pretend that they measure what they don't.
We already know that the NAEP is not actually a "gold standard" for measuring educational achievement. And the PARCC, SBA, and all their sad cousins/replacements have never, ever made a convincing case that they can measure educational achievement. And soaking all this crappy data in a vat of VAM sauce doesn't make it any better. And even reformsters have accepted that changing Big Standardized Test scores does not have any connection to changing future life outcomes.
Aldeman goes on to parse and pick at the data a little more, but the main conclusion here is obvious. The proxy-of-choice for education achievement is supposed to tell us, among other things, how many students are how ready for college. And yet while that proxy has been screaming that students are no more ready for college than they were a decade ago, many more students are successfully completing college.
Look- if your local weather man gets the forecast wrong for ten straight years, you do not scratch your head and wonder what's gone wrong with the weather. You must conclude that whatever he's using as a tool for prognostication is busted. If your yardstick tells you that your child has not grown in ten years, and yet your household budget, your clothes shopping, and your actual eyeballs tell you that your child has grown three feet in ten years, you don't assume that your child is perpetrating an amazing illusion-- you throw out the yardstick.
The Big Standardized Tests that generate the scores that folks keep trying to pass off as a perfect proxy for student achievement? They do not work. They do not tell us what folks claim they tell us. How much more evidence do we need before we stop pretending that we know how to measure educational achievement?
Well, that's a puzzler. Adelman suggests that you might explain the incongruity by claiming that colleges and high schools just lowered their standards. But he thinks the attainment rates deserve attention.
One reason is that it’s much easier to gauge attainment than achievement. Measuring attainment is as simple as asking adults what their highest level of education is, whereas measuring achievement involves a complex process of defining what people at various ages should know and be able to do, developing a tool to measure those skills, sampling the given population and then translating the sample results into larger estimates.
Well, yes. That second thing, the measuring achievement is hard, so hard I would argue (as I have for forever) that we can't actually do it, but in the education disruptor's desire to have such a tool, we've just rushed a couple of bad proxies to market and continued to pretend that they measure what they don't.
Aldeman goes on to parse and pick at the data a little more, but the main conclusion here is obvious. The proxy-of-choice for education achievement is supposed to tell us, among other things, how many students are how ready for college. And yet while that proxy has been screaming that students are no more ready for college than they were a decade ago, many more students are successfully completing college.
Look- if your local weather man gets the forecast wrong for ten straight years, you do not scratch your head and wonder what's gone wrong with the weather. You must conclude that whatever he's using as a tool for prognostication is busted. If your yardstick tells you that your child has not grown in ten years, and yet your household budget, your clothes shopping, and your actual eyeballs tell you that your child has grown three feet in ten years, you don't assume that your child is perpetrating an amazing illusion-- you throw out the yardstick.
The Big Standardized Tests that generate the scores that folks keep trying to pass off as a perfect proxy for student achievement? They do not work. They do not tell us what folks claim they tell us. How much more evidence do we need before we stop pretending that we know how to measure educational achievement?
Sunday, January 12, 2020
ICYMI: Unexpected Spring Edition (1/12)
It is unseasonably warm here, even as some parts of the country deal with a fresh helping of winter. Either way, we've got things to read. Remember-- if the piece strikes you as an important one, go to the original location for the post or article and share it through your social media. It's all about the amplification.
Putting a Price Tag on Public Schools
Wendy Lecker doesn't write enough, so this piece from the Stamford Advocate is a welcome look at the legacy and future of Eli Broad's do-it-yourself superintendent school.
3D TV Tells You Everything You Need To Know About This Decade's Tech
This Wired piece isn't about education, except that it is. Tag line: "You don't need special glasses to see what it looks like when smart people run out of ideas." Tech that's all about what you want to make, while steadfastly ignoring what the users actually want.
Bad Tech-- Pearson Wants Teacher's Jobs
Alan Singer at the Daily Kos about the problems with AI replacements for actual humans.
Laziness Does Not Exist
Yup. A psychology professor explains why not.
Bernie Sanders: End High Stakes Testing
This was the week that Sanders plugged that one hole in his education platform And USA Today let him write an op-ed to do it.
Hoboken NJ Charter Schools
Nobody is better than Jersey Jazzman for breaking down actual facts and data and rendering it all intelligible. This look at Hoboken tells us a lot about much of the charter universe.
Top Reads of 2019
I can resist a good reading list, and Nancy Flanagan has an excellent one.
John White Resigns
And the indispensable Mercedes Schneider is here to tell him goodbye, and good riddance.
Pressuring Parents To Teach Their Kindergartners To Read
Nancy Bailey and another disturbing trend among parents of the littles.
Mike Feinberg's New Home
Feinberg was booted from KIPP over allegations of harassment and abuse, but that didn't end his career in the ed reform biz. Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat has the story.
Bugs In Teachers Ears? What We Should Be Doing Instead.
Yes, Nancy Flanagan again. When EdWeek trotted out bug-in-ear coaching again, lots of shade was thrown, but Flanagan is smart enough to take it a step further and ask what the answer to ear-bugging should be.
Homeowners Fed Up
Up in Wisconsin, Up North News reports that taxpayers are getting tired of paying for two school systems, only one of which has any accountability.
The Rural Conundrum
Coincidentally, Jennifer Berkshire was just in rural Wisconsin, where even the red parts are still voting to raise their own taxes for schools. What's going on?
Putting a Price Tag on Public Schools
Wendy Lecker doesn't write enough, so this piece from the Stamford Advocate is a welcome look at the legacy and future of Eli Broad's do-it-yourself superintendent school.
3D TV Tells You Everything You Need To Know About This Decade's Tech
This Wired piece isn't about education, except that it is. Tag line: "You don't need special glasses to see what it looks like when smart people run out of ideas." Tech that's all about what you want to make, while steadfastly ignoring what the users actually want.
Bad Tech-- Pearson Wants Teacher's Jobs
Alan Singer at the Daily Kos about the problems with AI replacements for actual humans.
Laziness Does Not Exist
Yup. A psychology professor explains why not.
Bernie Sanders: End High Stakes Testing
This was the week that Sanders plugged that one hole in his education platform And USA Today let him write an op-ed to do it.
Hoboken NJ Charter Schools
Nobody is better than Jersey Jazzman for breaking down actual facts and data and rendering it all intelligible. This look at Hoboken tells us a lot about much of the charter universe.
Top Reads of 2019
I can resist a good reading list, and Nancy Flanagan has an excellent one.
John White Resigns
And the indispensable Mercedes Schneider is here to tell him goodbye, and good riddance.
Pressuring Parents To Teach Their Kindergartners To Read
Nancy Bailey and another disturbing trend among parents of the littles.
Mike Feinberg's New Home
Feinberg was booted from KIPP over allegations of harassment and abuse, but that didn't end his career in the ed reform biz. Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat has the story.
Bugs In Teachers Ears? What We Should Be Doing Instead.
Yes, Nancy Flanagan again. When EdWeek trotted out bug-in-ear coaching again, lots of shade was thrown, but Flanagan is smart enough to take it a step further and ask what the answer to ear-bugging should be.
Homeowners Fed Up
Up in Wisconsin, Up North News reports that taxpayers are getting tired of paying for two school systems, only one of which has any accountability.
The Rural Conundrum
Coincidentally, Jennifer Berkshire was just in rural Wisconsin, where even the red parts are still voting to raise their own taxes for schools. What's going on?
Saturday, January 11, 2020
NH: No, Again, To Federal Charter Money
A month ago, the Granite State's Joint Legislative Fiscal Committee said, "No, thanks" to an offer of $46 million from the feds to be used in doubling the number of New Hampshire charter schools from 28 to 55. The money was to come from the federal Charter School Program, a grant program that has come under fire due to a recent pair of studies showing massive waste and fraud by recipients of CSP money. The legislature was concerned that doubling the number of charter schools would harm public schools and existing charters.
But that, it turns out, was not the end of it.
Frank Edelblut is currently the grand poohbah of education in NH. He was previously a businessman, venture capitalist, and one-term state representative. He took a swing at the governor's office, but was beaten in the primary by Chris Sununu; he then supported Sununu who, upon becoming governor, appointed Edelblut to the education post based on God-only-knows-what. Edelblut has no education background, pushed vouchers as a representative, and homeschooled all his kids.
But Friday (1/10) Edelblut brought the $46 million back to the table for the committee with what I suppose he thought was a sweetener-- a quote from Democrat Maggie Hassan, former governor and current senator for New Hampshire. Hassan had supported a similar grant in 2016, writing:
An objective of this grant is to use best practices from positive outcomes at our charter schools to inform programs at other public schools, which in turn benefits our entire public education system.
This is, of course, baloney. Note that Edelblut did not follow up with, "And here's a list of the successful academic best practices that have been pioneered by our existing charter schools and transferred successfully to our public schools." He couldn't, because if we've learned one thing after two decades of modern charter schools, it's that charter school operators don't know anything about how to educate students that public schools don't already know.
Republicans accused Dems of sticking it to taxpayers and children, but Democrats pointed out that the grant left too many questions unanswered while circumventing both the legislative and budgeting process. NH charters already have empty seats, and one analysis showed a long-term cost to the state of $57 to $104 million.
It would have been fiscally irresponsible for the Fiscal Committee to move forward with this grant, which would have doubled charter schools outside of the legislative process, jeopardized the financial health of New Hampshire’s current traditional and charter public schools, and made an end run around the state budget that would have committed the state of New Hampshire to millions of dollars in unbudgeted education aid years into the future.
The Dems also cited the NPE reports showing CSP waste. As for Edelblut, he was sure that the committee just didn't understand the grant the first time around. He also wanted to claim that the money could totally be used by public schools, somehow. Is he now satisfied that the committee understands what they have rejected twice? Well, as he told the Union Leader:
Do I look like someone who gives up that easily? We’ll be back.
So watch for New Hampshire's head of public education to continue trying to undermine and defund public education. Speaking of people who just don't understand.
But that, it turns out, was not the end of it.
 |
| This frickin' guy. |
But Friday (1/10) Edelblut brought the $46 million back to the table for the committee with what I suppose he thought was a sweetener-- a quote from Democrat Maggie Hassan, former governor and current senator for New Hampshire. Hassan had supported a similar grant in 2016, writing:
An objective of this grant is to use best practices from positive outcomes at our charter schools to inform programs at other public schools, which in turn benefits our entire public education system.
This is, of course, baloney. Note that Edelblut did not follow up with, "And here's a list of the successful academic best practices that have been pioneered by our existing charter schools and transferred successfully to our public schools." He couldn't, because if we've learned one thing after two decades of modern charter schools, it's that charter school operators don't know anything about how to educate students that public schools don't already know.
Republicans accused Dems of sticking it to taxpayers and children, but Democrats pointed out that the grant left too many questions unanswered while circumventing both the legislative and budgeting process. NH charters already have empty seats, and one analysis showed a long-term cost to the state of $57 to $104 million.
It would have been fiscally irresponsible for the Fiscal Committee to move forward with this grant, which would have doubled charter schools outside of the legislative process, jeopardized the financial health of New Hampshire’s current traditional and charter public schools, and made an end run around the state budget that would have committed the state of New Hampshire to millions of dollars in unbudgeted education aid years into the future.
The Dems also cited the NPE reports showing CSP waste. As for Edelblut, he was sure that the committee just didn't understand the grant the first time around. He also wanted to claim that the money could totally be used by public schools, somehow. Is he now satisfied that the committee understands what they have rejected twice? Well, as he told the Union Leader:
Do I look like someone who gives up that easily? We’ll be back.
So watch for New Hampshire's head of public education to continue trying to undermine and defund public education. Speaking of people who just don't understand.
To A Teacher At The End Of A Discouraging Week
It just sucks. You spend the time and effort (and maybe money) to create a lesson that you hope will be engaging and provide your students an exciting, maybe even fun, break from routine. And it bombs. More than once. Not only do your students not appreciate it, but they bitch about it. Sure, these are students who generally bitch and moan about everything (that's partly why you went an extra mile for them), but this still feels like you stayed up late to bake someone a beautiful cake and they just took a bite, spit it out, and threw the rest back in your face.
It feels personal, but it also shoots straight to your core as a professional (because, let's face it, your personal and professional selves are pretty intertwined anyway). Maybe my pedagogical sense is not very strong, you think. Maybe I'm not very good at motivating or connecting with the students. Maybe I just suck at this whole teacher thing.
I was in the classroom for thirty-nine years, and I still remember, way too vividly, those days, or weeks, or, in one case, the better part of an entire year. It just sucks. And nothing anyone can say really makes it any less sucky. Nevertheless, let me offer you a few pieces of hope.
You Don't Always Know
Here's a story. In February of my first year of teaching, one of my students entered my classroom during a period other than his scheduled one, and stood in front of me threatening me with assault. It lasted roughly seven hundred hours, and then he left. I pretty much kept doing what I was doing (handing out papers) and responding very little to him (I later learned the students in that class were split between believing I was scared and believing that I was secretly a kung-fu master and I didn't want to kill the kid). It was not a good moment. I'd been trying to reach the student, and congratulating myself on doing a decent job of getting through. This did not seem like a sign that I was doing all that well.
Then, at the end of the day, he came back, sat down in a desk, and we talked for thirty or forty minutes about what was bothering him. What I came to understand was that I had probably been the recipient of his threats and venting because he actually felt safe with me. He served his suspension and we had a decent rest of the year.
Now, the point of the story is not that threats are okay (they aren't-- and if he had actually thrown a punch at me, this would be a much different story). The point is that sometimes it looks like you're not getting through at all, and yet, you actually are. You just don't know. I can't tell you how many times students later in life would tell me how much they liked my class or even me and all I could think was "But you were an absolute ass to me all day every day." It's a mystery. If you care about them and act like it, somehow they get that, somehow? I don't know. I just know that you're probably reaching more students than you think you are.
It's Not Personal, Because You're Not A Person
Okay, most teachers get this, and it doesn't always make you feel better. But to your students, you're not a real person (the younger they are, the more true this is). Sometimes this is cute, like when they run into you in the grocery store and are shocked to realize that you eat food and do actually leave the school building. But sometimes it means that you are like a door or a sofa or some other object that they punch because they can't strike out against what they'd really like to strike ott against.
This Is About Them
How your students treat you is largely about them. It's about the baggage they carry to school with them, about the families that create a particular atmosphere at home, about the problems that nagged them in the morning before they left for school and the problems that will be waiting for them when they leave the building. This is about whether or not they've learned the basics of respect and kindness. This is about whether or not they have the emotional resources to deal with one more thing in their life, even if that thing is as innocuous as an art project.
Yes, I know. A great teacher is supposed to be able to reach past all of that a perform pedagogical awesomeness, and it's true that the longer you teach, the better-trained your reach. But you're not magic and you're not a superhero and you don't have infinite time or resources, and so you aren't going to be all things for all students on all days. Plus, their main job is to grow up and you can't do that for them.
Play the Long Game
Sometimes education comes in time-release capsules. Another benefit of teaching a long time in a small place-- I've had former students tell me about how they had fond memories of, or had been influenced by, Lesson X. And I have no memory of teaching that lesson, or saying that thing they've always remembered me saying. I can recognize most of them as thins that certainly sound like me, but that's it. And I know that I must have thought that Lesson X was a dud, because if I hadn't, I'd remember it from the many times I used it over many years.
Or there's my former colleague who taught upstream from me. Her students would come to me the next year, often disparaging her class. "Oh, heck-- we didn't learn anything in there," they'd say, but as each unit began, I would quiz them on prior knowledge, and they would already know all this stuff, and I would ask how they knew that and they would scratch their heads and say, "Huh. We learned that last year in Ms. Z's class." She was the greatest stealth teacher I've ever known.
Sometimes teachers are just planting seeds, and the harvest doesn't come until weeks, months, or years and years later. It sucks, because we usually don't get to see the crops come in, but there can be no doubt-- just because your students don't appear to have grasped anything right now doesn't mean that the lesson failed completely and forever.
Some People Are Jerks
Seriously. You know adults who are jerks; do you think they turned into jerks suddenly when they turned 21? The tendency, in my experience, runs the other way-- far more young jerks grow up to be great adults than great children who grow up to be jerks. The odds are excellent that somewhere in your classroom are some young jerks. The odds are good that they will grow out of it, and it would be jerk-like for a teacher to hold it against them or engage them in a contest of jerky wills. Still, that's what you're working with in the here-and-now.
De-jerkification lessons like "other people exist" and "being unkind is uncool" take a long time to take root, and you may never reap the rewards of teaching them (see above). But in the meantime, some of your immature students will act like immature children, and that is natural and normal and the greatest teacher in the history of the world cannot instantly erase nature.
Yes, if you find yourself blaming all your classroom troubles on all your students being jerks, then you are a big part of the problem. But it is okay to recognize that children will sometimes act childishly, and that is both normal and outside your control. Just keep focusing on their better parts.
Avoid the Failure Spiral
Any teacher worth her salt can tell you, right now, five things that she needs to do better. One of the hardest parts of teaching is this-- you know what you should be doing in a perfect world, but you don't have enough time, enough resources, enough you to do all that, and so you have to pick deal with the knowledge of all the ways you're coming up short.
What that means is that if you go deliberately looking for reasons that you are inadequate, you can always find them. Don't let yourself get sucked down that failure and shame spiral. And do not imagine that somewhere in the world, or your building, there are teachers who never have any of these problems. You know which teachers don't think they have anything to work on as teachers? Lousy teachers. That experience of getting to the end of a day and thinking, "I am just never going to get good at this," is absolutely universal.
After 39 years, I still had those days. My secret? Not taking a single day as an indication of my whole career. At the end of a crappy day, I (mostly) said "Well, today I sucked" and not "Well, I guess I'm a total failure as a teacher always and forever." Teachers have successes and failures; don't get into the habit of thinking that your failures mean everything and your successes mean nothing.
Next Week Is Another Week
The students will reset quickly-- a day is a long time to them. You will reflect on what happened, what worked, what didn't. Spend time with people who love you. Do that self-care thing. Next week is another week. You will go back to the classroom better than you left it, and you will continue to grow stronger and better as a teacher. You got this.
I was in the classroom for thirty-nine years, and I still remember, way too vividly, those days, or weeks, or, in one case, the better part of an entire year. It just sucks. And nothing anyone can say really makes it any less sucky. Nevertheless, let me offer you a few pieces of hope.
You Don't Always Know
Here's a story. In February of my first year of teaching, one of my students entered my classroom during a period other than his scheduled one, and stood in front of me threatening me with assault. It lasted roughly seven hundred hours, and then he left. I pretty much kept doing what I was doing (handing out papers) and responding very little to him (I later learned the students in that class were split between believing I was scared and believing that I was secretly a kung-fu master and I didn't want to kill the kid). It was not a good moment. I'd been trying to reach the student, and congratulating myself on doing a decent job of getting through. This did not seem like a sign that I was doing all that well.
Then, at the end of the day, he came back, sat down in a desk, and we talked for thirty or forty minutes about what was bothering him. What I came to understand was that I had probably been the recipient of his threats and venting because he actually felt safe with me. He served his suspension and we had a decent rest of the year.
Now, the point of the story is not that threats are okay (they aren't-- and if he had actually thrown a punch at me, this would be a much different story). The point is that sometimes it looks like you're not getting through at all, and yet, you actually are. You just don't know. I can't tell you how many times students later in life would tell me how much they liked my class or even me and all I could think was "But you were an absolute ass to me all day every day." It's a mystery. If you care about them and act like it, somehow they get that, somehow? I don't know. I just know that you're probably reaching more students than you think you are.
It's Not Personal, Because You're Not A Person
Okay, most teachers get this, and it doesn't always make you feel better. But to your students, you're not a real person (the younger they are, the more true this is). Sometimes this is cute, like when they run into you in the grocery store and are shocked to realize that you eat food and do actually leave the school building. But sometimes it means that you are like a door or a sofa or some other object that they punch because they can't strike out against what they'd really like to strike ott against.
This Is About Them
How your students treat you is largely about them. It's about the baggage they carry to school with them, about the families that create a particular atmosphere at home, about the problems that nagged them in the morning before they left for school and the problems that will be waiting for them when they leave the building. This is about whether or not they've learned the basics of respect and kindness. This is about whether or not they have the emotional resources to deal with one more thing in their life, even if that thing is as innocuous as an art project.
Yes, I know. A great teacher is supposed to be able to reach past all of that a perform pedagogical awesomeness, and it's true that the longer you teach, the better-trained your reach. But you're not magic and you're not a superhero and you don't have infinite time or resources, and so you aren't going to be all things for all students on all days. Plus, their main job is to grow up and you can't do that for them.
Play the Long Game
Sometimes education comes in time-release capsules. Another benefit of teaching a long time in a small place-- I've had former students tell me about how they had fond memories of, or had been influenced by, Lesson X. And I have no memory of teaching that lesson, or saying that thing they've always remembered me saying. I can recognize most of them as thins that certainly sound like me, but that's it. And I know that I must have thought that Lesson X was a dud, because if I hadn't, I'd remember it from the many times I used it over many years.
Or there's my former colleague who taught upstream from me. Her students would come to me the next year, often disparaging her class. "Oh, heck-- we didn't learn anything in there," they'd say, but as each unit began, I would quiz them on prior knowledge, and they would already know all this stuff, and I would ask how they knew that and they would scratch their heads and say, "Huh. We learned that last year in Ms. Z's class." She was the greatest stealth teacher I've ever known.
Sometimes teachers are just planting seeds, and the harvest doesn't come until weeks, months, or years and years later. It sucks, because we usually don't get to see the crops come in, but there can be no doubt-- just because your students don't appear to have grasped anything right now doesn't mean that the lesson failed completely and forever.
Some People Are Jerks
Seriously. You know adults who are jerks; do you think they turned into jerks suddenly when they turned 21? The tendency, in my experience, runs the other way-- far more young jerks grow up to be great adults than great children who grow up to be jerks. The odds are excellent that somewhere in your classroom are some young jerks. The odds are good that they will grow out of it, and it would be jerk-like for a teacher to hold it against them or engage them in a contest of jerky wills. Still, that's what you're working with in the here-and-now.
De-jerkification lessons like "other people exist" and "being unkind is uncool" take a long time to take root, and you may never reap the rewards of teaching them (see above). But in the meantime, some of your immature students will act like immature children, and that is natural and normal and the greatest teacher in the history of the world cannot instantly erase nature.
Yes, if you find yourself blaming all your classroom troubles on all your students being jerks, then you are a big part of the problem. But it is okay to recognize that children will sometimes act childishly, and that is both normal and outside your control. Just keep focusing on their better parts.
Avoid the Failure Spiral
Any teacher worth her salt can tell you, right now, five things that she needs to do better. One of the hardest parts of teaching is this-- you know what you should be doing in a perfect world, but you don't have enough time, enough resources, enough you to do all that, and so you have to pick deal with the knowledge of all the ways you're coming up short.
What that means is that if you go deliberately looking for reasons that you are inadequate, you can always find them. Don't let yourself get sucked down that failure and shame spiral. And do not imagine that somewhere in the world, or your building, there are teachers who never have any of these problems. You know which teachers don't think they have anything to work on as teachers? Lousy teachers. That experience of getting to the end of a day and thinking, "I am just never going to get good at this," is absolutely universal.
After 39 years, I still had those days. My secret? Not taking a single day as an indication of my whole career. At the end of a crappy day, I (mostly) said "Well, today I sucked" and not "Well, I guess I'm a total failure as a teacher always and forever." Teachers have successes and failures; don't get into the habit of thinking that your failures mean everything and your successes mean nothing.
Next Week Is Another Week
The students will reset quickly-- a day is a long time to them. You will reflect on what happened, what worked, what didn't. Spend time with people who love you. Do that self-care thing. Next week is another week. You will go back to the classroom better than you left it, and you will continue to grow stronger and better as a teacher. You got this.
Friday, January 10, 2020
The Foundation of Real Writing
As I've mentioned before, we have the poor fortune to live in a golden age of bad writing instruction. There are a variety of reasons for this, ranging from the rise of high-stakes testing to some less-than-wonderful traditions to the widespread discomfort with writing instruction of many classroom teachers.
The last is probably the worst issue facing writing instruction. It's a curious thing; you don't find many band directors who don't play an instrument or many phys ed teachers who aren't involved in some sort of physical activity, but schools are loaded with folks who teach writing, but who never write themselves.
You can spot the different kinds of bad writing instruction by the foundations on which they are built, by the things that are treated as basic building blocks of writing. Here are the false foundations you're likely to find.
Text and a Question
Colemanism in action, this approach to writing starts with the idea that the only writing worth writing is in response to a text in order to answer a particular question that a teacher or test manufacturer has posed.
Look at the Big Standardized Tests of the past two decades and you find a remarkable phenomenon-- the writing test using multiple choice items. That's possible because one of the premises of this bad writing is that there is really only one correct answer. Every excellent answer to the prompt should use the same text evidence organized in the same way to support the same points; all of the best essay answers to the prompt should be essentially indistinguishable.
The other premise here is that the content of writing must be a reaction to someone else's writing. As with most types of bad writing, there is a germ of truth here-- great critical writing or strong explication do indeed start with someone else's writing. But then the author brings his or her own thoughts, ideas, reality and reactions to the piece. In Colemanism, nothing outside the fabled four corners of the text is allowed. Also in Colemanism, there is only one "true" interpretation of what lies within the four corners.
So this type of bad writing is an exercise in mind reading, a task that involves figuring out what the test manufacturer wants you to say and how they want you to say it, and then performing that response. It has words arranged in sentences and paragraphs, and that creates the impression that it is writing, but the fact that it can be translated into multiple choice questions (What is the main idea? Which of these statements can best be used to support the main idea? etc) is a dead giveaway-- this is not actually a writing task at all.
Structural Outline
An approach most commonly enshrined in the five-paragraph essay. You start by knowing how many paragraphs there will be in the essay; in more extreme examples, you also know before you start how many sentences each paragraph will contain. Which is patently nuts, but here we are.
It's not that the five-paragraph essay is useless; I've taught it myself, particularly early in my career when few of my colleagues were teaching writing at all. If your ideas are a formless soup, a bucket to hold them in can be helpful at first. But the five-paragraph essay is like training wheels; they might be-- might be--useful at first, but they go very quickly from being an aid to being a hindrance.
What you get is a more-involved fill-in-the-blank puzzle. The writer tries to answer the question "What can I use to fill in these paragraph-shaped blanks?' No real thinking about the topic is required.
In the very worst of these scenarios, we find state writing assessments that are "scored" by computer software. As has been shown repeatedly, computer software does not care about your ideas. It does not even care if your details are correct. All it can do is break down structure and vocabulary. Companies trying to sell this baloney will sometimes trot out "research" showing that the software gets the same results as human scorers, but the correct statement is that the software will get the same results as humans, if the humans are trained to score the essays just like software would.
But that's the appeal of a structure-based foundation; it gives the evaluator some simple, clear items to look for and "assess."
Sentences and Paragraphs
The previous two approaches may have been given a special boost by the high-stakes testing baloney, but this school is old, and still much-beloved by edu-experts. Folks like Judith Hochman, who declares in interviews and her many writing instruction guides that the foundation of writing is a sentence.
I don't mean to pick on Hochman, who is just a high-profile example (and enabler) of teachers across the country whose idea of writing instruction is first you do a unit on sentences, then move on to paragraphs, then on to full essays (and it should come as no surprise that the essays are often five-paragraph ones).
This is writing for school, not an authentic task, but a performance of writing-like tasks that is comfortable for all parties. But like the structural approach, it pushes students to start with the wrong question-- what can I write to fulfill this assignment. In its most traditional form it focuses on writing that is error-free, and as such is not so focused on what it does do, but on what it avoids. But mistake-avoidance is not a virtue in writing. First, it encourages timid, safe writing (don't attempt anything that might risk including an error). Second, the absence of mistakes is not the same as the presence of quality. A sports team can make zero mistakes and still lose. A musician can perform a piece with zero mistakes and still be excrutiatingly boring.
This can also lead to a performance tug-of-war, in which students try to figure out how small a technical performance they can get away with and teachers set artificial performance limits to thwart them ("This paper must be two pages long, size 12 font, margins exactly one inch, etc")
Does a writer need control of her technical tools? Sure-- but those tools need to be employed in something other than an empty display of tool use.
The Actual Foundation of Real Writing
An idea. Real writing starts with a deceptively simple question-- what do I want to say? In a school setting, it might be "what do I want to say about this topic" ore even "about this text." After that, we move on to "how can I best say that," a question for which there are hundreds of answers. The writer should pick the answer that best suits her.
Not all students will greet this approach warmly. My usual answer to "How long does this have to be" was "Long enough to make your point effectively, and no longer," which students do not find helpful when they're really asking, "What's the least I can get away with here?" Students will deliver versions of "Just tell me what hoop to jump through and how to jump so I can get my grade and move on." Because part of what's appealing and comfortable about the kinds of bad writing that students get used to in school is that thought is not required; in fact, real thinking about the content can get in the way of the performance you're supposed to give.
But think you must. Figure out what you have to say and how you want to explain it (and, maybe, to whom you want to say it, though focus on audience is overrated) and also what may be most important of all, saying it in your own voice. But the thinking is critical. Most of my students' writing problems were really thinking problems-- a failure to figure out what they wanted to say or how the supports fit into the larger picture (plus those parts that didn't belong, or seemed not to belong because the writer didn't show the connections clearly enough).
Does it make life harder for the teacher? Of course it does, because writing and writing instruction are squishy and messy and it is not possible to impose any standardization without having an effect on the process and product. Compromises are necessary for teacher sanity and survival, but make every one mindfully and conscious of the cost.
If you are serious about teaching real writing and not just the test-based or scholastic tradition versions of a performative writing-like activity, then you have to embrace the mess, open your classroom to more student control, and make your peace with whatever corners you have to cut. I've written elsewhere about some of the basic rules for teaching real writing-- hell, I have part of a book about this, but then John Warner wrote a book that says much of what I have to say and I felt redundant. So until I get wind back in my sails and some publisher offers me a juicy deal, read his book.
What's the point of teaching writing for real? Because of the various types of writing being discussed, it's the one that is most useful in the actual world. Writing for tests is good for tests. Writing for school is good for school, and for places that still pattern themselves on what they remember as "good" writing from their school days. And having a good technical command of structure and other tools is useful if you have a career that involves concealing baloney under a verbal smokescreen.
But for everything else, including, especially, bridging the gap between human beings with actual communication, writing for real is what's useful. It's not a performance or a show or a trick to be performed under artificial conditions; it's authentic, actual, real. Writing instruction is yet another area where teachers have to ask themselves whether they want to do what serves the institution or what serves the students.
The last is probably the worst issue facing writing instruction. It's a curious thing; you don't find many band directors who don't play an instrument or many phys ed teachers who aren't involved in some sort of physical activity, but schools are loaded with folks who teach writing, but who never write themselves.
You can spot the different kinds of bad writing instruction by the foundations on which they are built, by the things that are treated as basic building blocks of writing. Here are the false foundations you're likely to find.
Text and a Question
Colemanism in action, this approach to writing starts with the idea that the only writing worth writing is in response to a text in order to answer a particular question that a teacher or test manufacturer has posed.
Look at the Big Standardized Tests of the past two decades and you find a remarkable phenomenon-- the writing test using multiple choice items. That's possible because one of the premises of this bad writing is that there is really only one correct answer. Every excellent answer to the prompt should use the same text evidence organized in the same way to support the same points; all of the best essay answers to the prompt should be essentially indistinguishable.
The other premise here is that the content of writing must be a reaction to someone else's writing. As with most types of bad writing, there is a germ of truth here-- great critical writing or strong explication do indeed start with someone else's writing. But then the author brings his or her own thoughts, ideas, reality and reactions to the piece. In Colemanism, nothing outside the fabled four corners of the text is allowed. Also in Colemanism, there is only one "true" interpretation of what lies within the four corners.
So this type of bad writing is an exercise in mind reading, a task that involves figuring out what the test manufacturer wants you to say and how they want you to say it, and then performing that response. It has words arranged in sentences and paragraphs, and that creates the impression that it is writing, but the fact that it can be translated into multiple choice questions (What is the main idea? Which of these statements can best be used to support the main idea? etc) is a dead giveaway-- this is not actually a writing task at all.
Structural Outline
An approach most commonly enshrined in the five-paragraph essay. You start by knowing how many paragraphs there will be in the essay; in more extreme examples, you also know before you start how many sentences each paragraph will contain. Which is patently nuts, but here we are.
It's not that the five-paragraph essay is useless; I've taught it myself, particularly early in my career when few of my colleagues were teaching writing at all. If your ideas are a formless soup, a bucket to hold them in can be helpful at first. But the five-paragraph essay is like training wheels; they might be-- might be--useful at first, but they go very quickly from being an aid to being a hindrance.
What you get is a more-involved fill-in-the-blank puzzle. The writer tries to answer the question "What can I use to fill in these paragraph-shaped blanks?' No real thinking about the topic is required.
But that's the appeal of a structure-based foundation; it gives the evaluator some simple, clear items to look for and "assess."
Sentences and Paragraphs
The previous two approaches may have been given a special boost by the high-stakes testing baloney, but this school is old, and still much-beloved by edu-experts. Folks like Judith Hochman, who declares in interviews and her many writing instruction guides that the foundation of writing is a sentence.
I don't mean to pick on Hochman, who is just a high-profile example (and enabler) of teachers across the country whose idea of writing instruction is first you do a unit on sentences, then move on to paragraphs, then on to full essays (and it should come as no surprise that the essays are often five-paragraph ones).
This is writing for school, not an authentic task, but a performance of writing-like tasks that is comfortable for all parties. But like the structural approach, it pushes students to start with the wrong question-- what can I write to fulfill this assignment. In its most traditional form it focuses on writing that is error-free, and as such is not so focused on what it does do, but on what it avoids. But mistake-avoidance is not a virtue in writing. First, it encourages timid, safe writing (don't attempt anything that might risk including an error). Second, the absence of mistakes is not the same as the presence of quality. A sports team can make zero mistakes and still lose. A musician can perform a piece with zero mistakes and still be excrutiatingly boring.
This can also lead to a performance tug-of-war, in which students try to figure out how small a technical performance they can get away with and teachers set artificial performance limits to thwart them ("This paper must be two pages long, size 12 font, margins exactly one inch, etc")
Does a writer need control of her technical tools? Sure-- but those tools need to be employed in something other than an empty display of tool use.
The Actual Foundation of Real Writing
An idea. Real writing starts with a deceptively simple question-- what do I want to say? In a school setting, it might be "what do I want to say about this topic" ore even "about this text." After that, we move on to "how can I best say that," a question for which there are hundreds of answers. The writer should pick the answer that best suits her.
Not all students will greet this approach warmly. My usual answer to "How long does this have to be" was "Long enough to make your point effectively, and no longer," which students do not find helpful when they're really asking, "What's the least I can get away with here?" Students will deliver versions of "Just tell me what hoop to jump through and how to jump so I can get my grade and move on." Because part of what's appealing and comfortable about the kinds of bad writing that students get used to in school is that thought is not required; in fact, real thinking about the content can get in the way of the performance you're supposed to give.
But think you must. Figure out what you have to say and how you want to explain it (and, maybe, to whom you want to say it, though focus on audience is overrated) and also what may be most important of all, saying it in your own voice. But the thinking is critical. Most of my students' writing problems were really thinking problems-- a failure to figure out what they wanted to say or how the supports fit into the larger picture (plus those parts that didn't belong, or seemed not to belong because the writer didn't show the connections clearly enough).
Does it make life harder for the teacher? Of course it does, because writing and writing instruction are squishy and messy and it is not possible to impose any standardization without having an effect on the process and product. Compromises are necessary for teacher sanity and survival, but make every one mindfully and conscious of the cost.
If you are serious about teaching real writing and not just the test-based or scholastic tradition versions of a performative writing-like activity, then you have to embrace the mess, open your classroom to more student control, and make your peace with whatever corners you have to cut. I've written elsewhere about some of the basic rules for teaching real writing-- hell, I have part of a book about this, but then John Warner wrote a book that says much of what I have to say and I felt redundant. So until I get wind back in my sails and some publisher offers me a juicy deal, read his book.
What's the point of teaching writing for real? Because of the various types of writing being discussed, it's the one that is most useful in the actual world. Writing for tests is good for tests. Writing for school is good for school, and for places that still pattern themselves on what they remember as "good" writing from their school days. And having a good technical command of structure and other tools is useful if you have a career that involves concealing baloney under a verbal smokescreen.
But for everything else, including, especially, bridging the gap between human beings with actual communication, writing for real is what's useful. It's not a performance or a show or a trick to be performed under artificial conditions; it's authentic, actual, real. Writing instruction is yet another area where teachers have to ask themselves whether they want to do what serves the institution or what serves the students.
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