Bill Gates, $5bn, and a good idea gone horribly wrong

I'm feeling more reflective than I have in a while.  Maybe it's the approaching end of the school year.  There's less to look forward to, which is not to say there is less to do.  It was in the mindset of thinking back on the school year that my RSS feed told me about Bill Gates's 5 billion dollar plan to film teachers and use that to evaluate them.  I'm broadly in favor of filming teachers teaching.   The first several times I felt self-conscious, and I felt like I was changing my behavior away from my norm and towards what I though I was supposed to be doing, usually with disastrous results.  I can only imagine how the students felt about it.  After they got done mugging for the camera, maybe they just felt like I was spying on them, despite my reassurances that I wasn't recording them, I was recording me.  Whatever the case, I consistently get a good idea of what I'm doing after watching myself do it.  Some brave souls even open up their videos to student critique in class time.  I'm not there yet--I still feel like I know what good teaching looks like better than they do--but I see the value in it.

Having said all that, I agree 100 percent with Valerie Strauss's evaluation of this system of evaluation.  It should be used strictly in a coaching environment, and not as an "evaluation."  The conversation should be, "This is how you get better," not "This is what you did wrong."  There are a number of problems with billionaire philanthropists paying for social changes in areas they know nothing about, but among the problems with this particular movement is one of timing.  Teacher improvement and teacher evaluations are not the same thing.  To use the lingo, we should be talking about formative assessments for teachers, and instead summative assessments are taking up all the oxygen.  Instead of talking about turning good teachers into really good teachers, we're talking about firing bad teachers, and making the metric for "bad teacher" eventually impossible to overcome.  Futher, while I agree that having strangers (presumably experts, but somehow I doubt it) watch our videos and provide us with feedback could provide an unbiased perspective, it also would remove all context from the lesson.  That context makes all the difference.

Morning musings

I have a sub this afternoon, so I should be writing my sub note.  Plus my cereal is getting soggy.  But we talked about the declining student count all over our county at our staff meeting last night, and I wanted to know more about it.  So without further ado:

Number of Public School Districts in Michigan, 1976-2012

In the '70s, Michigan had 579 Local Educational Authorities.  I'm not sure, but my guess is that that means school districts.  In the '80s, there seems to have been a mild push for consolidation, since by 1992, there were 559 school districts.  This number was fairly stable, and for the next 20 years, we have lost 10--in 2011-12, there were 549 school districts.

In 1993, the first public school academy / charter school opened in Michigan.  They have grown since then, often bumping up against state-mandated caps in their early years.  In 2011-12 there were 256, up nine from the previous year.  This growing effect means that the state of Michigan has increased the number of school authorities since the 90's to a total of 862 different local school authorities.  (Charter schools and public schools operate with different administrations.  For that matter, they play by different rules.)

Since the 1970's, Michigan has had a student population decrease of almost half a million students or 25%.  We used to have over 2 million kids, now we have a little over 1.5 million.  So to a certain extent the consolidation of public schools, while tragic for us in the teaching industry, is understandable and necessary. 

How this jives with increasing the number of school entities and spreading increasingly rare resources even more thinly truly escapes me.

Visuals for foreign language instruction

A cool little site with drawings of all kinds of scenes and dialogue bubbles, meant to be used in World Language classrooms.  I can see it having applications in other classes, as well. 

In my class, I'll use these as story starters, as follow-up activities, or as end-of-the-hour last-few-minutes exercises. 

H/T Free Technology for Teachers

News for some more processing

Washington Post: What Americans keep ignoring about the schools in Finland: They don't have any private schools.  Or any private colleges, for that matter.

The Answer Sheet: Instead of closing schools, how about this?  Try NOT closing schools. 

So just in case you haven't heard, Lansing has cut every teacher whose subject doesn't get covered by the MEAP.  That's not what the pink slip says, I assume, but come on.

Michigan Public Radio: Art, music, and gym teachers get the ax in Lansing

Community Music School, Michigan State University: Statement regarding proposed cuts to art, music and physical education in the Lansing School District.

School officials fail standardized test

It's always fun when this kind of thing happens.  It's doubly interesting that it was organized by the school's student union.  I always wonder why more schools don't have those. 

What was the last standardized test you took?  How did you do?  I think the last real one that I took was the teachers' licenture test, and as I recall, I smoked it.  I also took part of an AP Reading practice  test, and did...erm...less well. 

Wherein I ramble about parents

So you've probably seen it by now: the CNN article that purports to say what teachers really want to tell parents.  A friend of mine posted it on some other social networking site and (somewhat foolishly) solicited opinions from her teacher friends.  (The "you" is my friend and the little girl is her less-than-1-year-old daughter.)

I responded.

---

I have an easy solution to this. I never talk to the parents, ever. For any reason. During parent teacher conferences, I set up a cardboard cutout of myself with a motion sensor; when a parent sits down, a speaker plays the pre-recorded phrase, "¡Hola, y bienvenido a nuestra escuela! ¿Qué tal tu estudiante? ¿Le gusta la escuela?" I'm told that parents say, "Well, thank you for your time," leave my table, and never come back.

No, really, though. I read this article from time to time, and I know I have co-workers who feel this way about parents. Some of them are real pains. I don't know if I do, strictly speaking. I DO know that parents are the #2 reason I will never be a principal. (Having to catch kids chewing tobacco or having sex in the bathroom is #1.) Everbody wants what's best for their student, and everybody wants to work with their teachers. But riddle me this: your little girl is likely to be on the bright side of the comprehending-things spectrum. She will probably understand lots of things faster than her classmates, and that's okay. What will you do when a teacher paces her class to accommodate people who don't learn as fast? When she's not learning as much in her classes as you know she could be, because her classmates need more practice at a concept? When she has slack time because she finishes her in-class work faster than everybody else? When she uses that slack time to do things that get her into trouble? Working with teachers looks a lot harder all of a sudden.

Or worse--imagine a student who is NOT crazy intelligent, one who, in fact, has a hard time grasping the simplest mathematical concepts. Or one who doesn't understand how squiggly lines on a paper mean words. Or one who doesn't know that THIS face means "happy," and THAT face means "angry." Or one in whose family nobody has ever graduated high school ever, and they all turned out "just fine." In short, imagine the whole pile of students that school was always MEANT to serve, but hasn't historically been very good at it. Imagine you're the parent of one of THOSE children, and you want what's best for him, but no matter how hard he works and no matter what you do, he's falling further and further behind all the time. How do you work with a teacher now? 

I want my students' parents to trust me. I also want them to take an active interest in their students' education, to advocate what is really best (not just what is easiest) for their students, to understand the role education has in their students' lives and the transformative power of what an education can do for them. Honestly, what I expect for them is to be busy people with an agenda that only deals with their child, and for them to cover for that with the phrase, "I know you have 30 other kids to deal with, but...". I expect them to not understand why it's important for EVERY SINGLE KID, yes, including yours, to take a world language or to learn to multiply or why we "waste time" on skills and knowledge that they'll "never use in the real world." (Is there a more odious phrase to a teacher?) I expect them to associate me with the teacher they hated in high school, and to view my interactions with their student through the prism of their experiences with their own teachers. I expect that when I say, "Your student has a problem I'd like your help solving," they hear, "Your student is a problem I'd like to get rid of." So what I'd reallly want to tell parents is this: I'm on your children's side.

...You did ask.

---

The rest of the exchange is worth noting.  I'll try to get permission from the involved parties to re-post here.

Language acquisition research

For a long time, I did my level best to avoid speaking English in my Spanish classes.  I would use pictures, gestures, comparison charts, whatever, to avoid telling students what a given word or phrase meant.  The idea was for me to create "Aha!" moments*, situations in which it was easy and natural for students to engage, and for engaged students to accurately guess the meanings of words and phrases.  Somewhere around here I have an article that suggests that this is what language learning is--the transition from confusion to creating meaning.  Inherent in that idea is confusion: you have to start out not knowing what's going on, and use the tools available to you to create first a broad sense of a communication, then increasingly more accurate detail as you get a better base of the language and more skill at creating meaning.  I saw speaking in English the same way I see shouting at students as a classroom management technique: it does more harm than good, it's a failure of good practice that nevertheless happens because we are after all only human. 

When I went to the TPRS training (see an earlier post), I had a minor crisis of faith.  It was fairly public, and it wasn't pretty.  Everything I thought was essentially undermined--constant translation, followed by repetitions ad nauseam, was sort of the root of how to do it right.  There was no confusion, just a continuum of processing speed.  You start out as a slow processor: you have to look up at the translation, listen as the teacher enunciates every word very clearly, watch carefully as she points out every word she says, and in general try to pretend you're paying attention to the meaning.  If the story hook is good enough, you will.  As you go through, you have to look at the translations less and less, and your confusion between similar-sounding but very important words starts to clear up.

There's another article in support of what TPRS does, and what I'm trying to do.  (The link is to a German website, but the article is in English.)  It feels a little heavy on the interpretation and a little light on supporting "clinical" trials, but it has enough to be a credible source.  It argues in favor of using a learner's first language to support learning a second language.  I find it faintly troubling that the author appeals to 2000 years of language teaching practice as a reason to ignore recent developments--what did the Romans know about language acquisition?  He does, however, take pains to point out that the learner needs to use the new language: "We do not learn any language by using another one."  

At any rate, another point of research in a growing body.

*Like "teachable moment," I hate this phrase.  I'm beginning to think that I just don't like the word "moment."