There are education critics out there who have what some might consider an extreme view on the intentions and damages caused by the public school system -- in both its present and past incantations. They believe that the education system is designed to break down innate creative genius, and replace it with the ability to follow directions, be subservient to authority, and learn to preform boring tasks with little to no complaint or questioning.
I try not to think this way. Instead, I choose to believe that the task of educating billions of children -- all with their different needs, different backgrounds, and different ways of learning -- is so great, and the needs to consider so vast and untamable, that even the best intentions can go awry.
How to best ensure all children receive an equal level of education when some are homeless and some live in mansions? When some speak English and some do not? When some want to learn how to build engines, and some love to read literature? How to homogenize the non-homogenizable so that everyone learns equally, equitably, and thoroughly?
Meetings are held. Arguments are had. Plans are made. Laws are implemented. Panels convene. Experts are consulted. Studies are completed. Money is given. Money is taken away. Libraries are made. Libraries are closed. Libraries open up again. New theories are produced. New buzz words are created. Teachers are re-trained. Class sizes are reduced. Class sizes are blown up again. Teachers are hired. Teachers are laid off. And on, and on.
It takes a herculean show of effort. So I feel bad sometimes, being critical. Like it's wrong of me to judge any of this when it's amazing that it happens at all, that as contentious as we humans are with each other, we manage to pull together an education system for every single child living in the United States -- and provide it to them free of charge.
But I try to teach my students that one of the most important skills they can nurture in themselves is the ability and willingness to question -- and so I live by example, even though it often feels safer not to. Never stop questioning your education, I tell them. Ever. I started questioning mine when I was five years old, the year I started Kindergarten, and I'm not about to stop now. I hope they won't either.
Subscribe To Whiteboard Report
Posts
All Comments
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Monday, January 25, 2010
Below Average
Recently I asked some students a hypothetical question -- garnered from a great resource entitled "Nonstandardized Quests: 500+ Writing Prompts That Matter" by David E. LeCount. Great book, full of challenging, thought provoking writing prompts. The question was: "If humans hibernated two months of the year, what two months would you choose?"
Their answers were surprisingly similar and not at all like mine: "The coldest two months of the year, thank you very much."
No, weather was of little concern. They would like to sleep away two months of school -- whatever two months have the least amount of vacation time.
This response struck me as unfortunate. After all, we require that, for fourteen years of their life, all children attend school -- five days a week, seven hours per day. Shouldn't school, therefor, bring them a certain amount of joy? What does it mean when they spend the majority of their earliest years engaging in activities that they dislike? That they find exhausting? That they find mind numbingly boring? What does it mean when they are forced to engage in academic activities that often cause them to feel disinterested, inept, inadequate, frustrated, and in the case of almost every one of the students in my continuation high school classroom -- STUPID.
I asked my students to explain further and they informed me that school is a way of breaking you in, so to speak. Life sucks, you work a job you hate, you co-mingle with people you can't stand, and then you go home at the end of the day and get ready to do it all over again. It's important to go to school, my students tell me, because it gets you prepared for how crappy the rest of your life is probably going to be. But childhood should be fun, I tell them. They disagree. Why get a kids hopes up? No, stick them in Kindergarten, that way the rest of life won't be such a let down.
Their answers were surprisingly similar and not at all like mine: "The coldest two months of the year, thank you very much."
No, weather was of little concern. They would like to sleep away two months of school -- whatever two months have the least amount of vacation time.
This response struck me as unfortunate. After all, we require that, for fourteen years of their life, all children attend school -- five days a week, seven hours per day. Shouldn't school, therefor, bring them a certain amount of joy? What does it mean when they spend the majority of their earliest years engaging in activities that they dislike? That they find exhausting? That they find mind numbingly boring? What does it mean when they are forced to engage in academic activities that often cause them to feel disinterested, inept, inadequate, frustrated, and in the case of almost every one of the students in my continuation high school classroom -- STUPID.
I asked my students to explain further and they informed me that school is a way of breaking you in, so to speak. Life sucks, you work a job you hate, you co-mingle with people you can't stand, and then you go home at the end of the day and get ready to do it all over again. It's important to go to school, my students tell me, because it gets you prepared for how crappy the rest of your life is probably going to be. But childhood should be fun, I tell them. They disagree. Why get a kids hopes up? No, stick them in Kindergarten, that way the rest of life won't be such a let down.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
State Standards
The words "State Standards" will be appearing frequently in this blog. If these two words make you nauseous, I apologize in advance -- but State Standards are a reality that all public school teachers must live, breathe, and sleep with. Relationships have been known to crumble over teacher devotion to these Standards. Spend an afternoon with the right kind of teacher, and it soon becomes clear that many of them having been sleeping around -- with their book of State Standards. It's not pretty. The State Standards are insidious. We can not ignore them, no matter how much we wish we could.
This brings me to one of the most disturbing trends I see in public education -- the consistent attempt to make meaningful things that, in essence, are not. Standards are to be written on the whiteboard at all times. Standards are to relate to the lesson being taught, and students should be made aware of the standards attached to their lessons. This is in case any government spies happen to come into the classroom (I'm not kidding), and in case they question any of your students and ask them the dreaded questions, "Does your teacher teach to the Standards." Your students must answer, "Yes." If they do not, terrible, unspecified things could happen to you.
Teachers live in fear of many things -- parents, principals, pink slips, reassignments, benefit cuts -- now, they also live in fear of being busted for not taking the Standards seriously. If you don't take the Standards seriously, then your students will not do well enough on the STAR test (you know, that infamous yearly spate of testing that makes elementary students pee their pants and barf, and destroys low income schools). If your students do not do well on the STAR test, then the government spies will take over your school and destroy it further, (I'm not kidding).
Depending on how badly the administration is breathing down your neck, many teachers actually opt to give their students packets that contain the Standards in their particular subject matter, (each subject has its own elaborate set of Standards). This packet of Standards is now seen as an automatic justification for what the students are being forced to learn. This is a wonderful tool for teachers, actually. No longer must they feel guilty for lulling their students to sleep with empty, boring content! They can just point to the Standard on the board and say, "This is why you need to know this! Because California thinks it's important!"
In my experience, this explanation means a whole heck of a lot to your average American teen. I once made my students read Romeo and Juliet backwards, then I had them attempt to translate the entire book into Polish using a shared English/Polish dictionary. Whenever they questioned me, I just pointed to the Standard on the board and they settled right back into the lesson with looks of almost sage contentment on their faces.
It's kind of a relief actually -- to be freed of responsibility for deciding what to teach. Not creative? No problem! Don't care about your subject matter? Who cares?! All you need to worry about is getting your students to do well on the STAR test, and you're path is paved with...well, maybe not gold, after all, our country has weapons to build, but at least stainless steel, or maybe aluminum. Something cheep, but shiny.
This brings me to one of the most disturbing trends I see in public education -- the consistent attempt to make meaningful things that, in essence, are not. Standards are to be written on the whiteboard at all times. Standards are to relate to the lesson being taught, and students should be made aware of the standards attached to their lessons. This is in case any government spies happen to come into the classroom (I'm not kidding), and in case they question any of your students and ask them the dreaded questions, "Does your teacher teach to the Standards." Your students must answer, "Yes." If they do not, terrible, unspecified things could happen to you.
Teachers live in fear of many things -- parents, principals, pink slips, reassignments, benefit cuts -- now, they also live in fear of being busted for not taking the Standards seriously. If you don't take the Standards seriously, then your students will not do well enough on the STAR test (you know, that infamous yearly spate of testing that makes elementary students pee their pants and barf, and destroys low income schools). If your students do not do well on the STAR test, then the government spies will take over your school and destroy it further, (I'm not kidding).
Depending on how badly the administration is breathing down your neck, many teachers actually opt to give their students packets that contain the Standards in their particular subject matter, (each subject has its own elaborate set of Standards). This packet of Standards is now seen as an automatic justification for what the students are being forced to learn. This is a wonderful tool for teachers, actually. No longer must they feel guilty for lulling their students to sleep with empty, boring content! They can just point to the Standard on the board and say, "This is why you need to know this! Because California thinks it's important!"
In my experience, this explanation means a whole heck of a lot to your average American teen. I once made my students read Romeo and Juliet backwards, then I had them attempt to translate the entire book into Polish using a shared English/Polish dictionary. Whenever they questioned me, I just pointed to the Standard on the board and they settled right back into the lesson with looks of almost sage contentment on their faces.
It's kind of a relief actually -- to be freed of responsibility for deciding what to teach. Not creative? No problem! Don't care about your subject matter? Who cares?! All you need to worry about is getting your students to do well on the STAR test, and you're path is paved with...well, maybe not gold, after all, our country has weapons to build, but at least stainless steel, or maybe aluminum. Something cheep, but shiny.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Continuation High
I work at a Continuation High School. This means, for various reasons, my students do not fit into the standard public school mold -- usually for failing classes, chronic ditching, breaking school rules, dropping out then returning to school, an inability or unwillingness to do homework, or just because they don't like the pressures of "normal" school. They are here either temporarily or until they graduate -- for credit make-up, and extra support.
Classes are smaller than average -- 12-18 or so, in most cases. Sound easy? Imagine plucking the most loud mouthed, rebellious, angry, easily provoked, school loathing students from your average public school classroom, and putting them all in one class -- at the same time, on energy drinks, without a proper breakfast, or enough sleep the night before. Then try to teach them English, while the quiet ones cut daggers at you because the rampant out of control outbursts of their peers makes them crazy, and they blame you for it. Not every class is the same, of course, each comes with its own dynamics, some have synchronicity, some not so much -- but one thing is consistent throughout the day -- English class is no easy sell, no matter how you spin it. Ours is not a relationship based on a mutual love for literature, that much is for certain.
That's why I am so lucky to have State Standards. Gosh, without those, I'm not sure how we could get anything accomplished in the classroom. At the end of the day, I like to remind myself how lucky all of our children are that there exists a group of consultants out there that know exactly what our children should be learning, on any given day, from year to year, all across the great long state of California. In fact, I have been told that, if all teachers would really buckle down and attach every single one of their lessons to a State Standard then every student graduating high school would know exactly the same things! You could even give them all the same test, and no matter how unimportant and random the information on that test -- everyone would know all of the answers! From what I can gather, it's almost as if the State Standards are magic. I think that, next time there's a fight in my classroom, I am going to pull out my book of Standards and just recite from it. I've been told that this makes them settle down almost immediately. I'll let you know how it goes.
Classes are smaller than average -- 12-18 or so, in most cases. Sound easy? Imagine plucking the most loud mouthed, rebellious, angry, easily provoked, school loathing students from your average public school classroom, and putting them all in one class -- at the same time, on energy drinks, without a proper breakfast, or enough sleep the night before. Then try to teach them English, while the quiet ones cut daggers at you because the rampant out of control outbursts of their peers makes them crazy, and they blame you for it. Not every class is the same, of course, each comes with its own dynamics, some have synchronicity, some not so much -- but one thing is consistent throughout the day -- English class is no easy sell, no matter how you spin it. Ours is not a relationship based on a mutual love for literature, that much is for certain.
That's why I am so lucky to have State Standards. Gosh, without those, I'm not sure how we could get anything accomplished in the classroom. At the end of the day, I like to remind myself how lucky all of our children are that there exists a group of consultants out there that know exactly what our children should be learning, on any given day, from year to year, all across the great long state of California. In fact, I have been told that, if all teachers would really buckle down and attach every single one of their lessons to a State Standard then every student graduating high school would know exactly the same things! You could even give them all the same test, and no matter how unimportant and random the information on that test -- everyone would know all of the answers! From what I can gather, it's almost as if the State Standards are magic. I think that, next time there's a fight in my classroom, I am going to pull out my book of Standards and just recite from it. I've been told that this makes them settle down almost immediately. I'll let you know how it goes.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)