A friend of mine put on Facebook an article called "Why Generation Y Yuppies are Unhappy." It's from Wait but Why, a blog I've never read before, so I don't really know what the author's (or authors') angle is. As a representative of Generation Y (as defined by this guy--I always thought I was a GenXer) who is generally pretty pleased with myself, I thought I'd see what the buzz is.
Without stealing the guy's thunder, he makes the generalization that a person's happiness is the difference between how they expect their life to go and how it actually goes. The lives of people of my age or younger have turned out to be much more difficult than we expected them to be. He places responsibility for this on our unrealistic expectations, caused by a ridiculously successful period with the Baby Boomers. Also, we all think we're special.
I make it a point not to read the comments of non-education-themed blog, but I suspect I wouldn't have to go far down before somebody blames public schools for the destructive "I'm special" idea that everybody 35 and younger supposedly has. "Can you believe they give ribbons to everybody at track and field day?" "Everybody has to be recognized, so nobody gets any attention." And so on. I suspect strongly that this straw man I've chosen to attack would like the alternative even less. The alternative is schools (public and otherwise) choosing who is special and who isn't. And, honestly, if there's one thing we've demonstrated beyond any doubt, it's that we're no good at predicting who's going to be successful. It's true that not everyone is "special," as the author defines it. It's equally true that anybody could be, and it's not my job to tell someone they're not.
So I'll keep making sure that every kid in my room gets caught doing well once every two weeks and preparing them as best I can for a world that doesn't care how clever their memes are.
PD The blog in question is hosted on huffingtonpost.com, which strongly suggests that the author himself is a Gen Y Yuppie. For what it's worth.
Monday, September 16, 2013
Sunday, September 15, 2013
Wherein I try to write about everything, and it doesn't go so well
The beginning of the school year is off to a banging start. I felt better prepared than I ever have. As always, sequencing a curriculum is a marathon, but I feel like I've gotten a better start off the line than in previous years. More interestingly, the path forward is pretty clear. It's almost...too easy. All it takes is a committment to do the work and the time to do it.
Last year, I ran the after-school homework make-up program. We're continuing that program this year, even though a number of important teachers on our crew are still dubious about its value in their own teaching. The middle school teachers seem to be taking advantage of it, as are the language arts teachers. We've made some changes this year to make the "mandatory" part of the assignment more mandatory. If you don't come to an assigned ASAP, it's a day of in-school suspension, just like it would be if you skipped a detention. That hasn't changed. But this year, if you don't finish your work in the Tuesday session, you automatically go to the Thursday session. If you don't finish your work in the Thursday session, you spend lunch and your non-core classes in the office on Friday. We'll see how that goes.
The big difference is that this year, I probably won't be running the program. We have an exchange student who speaks very little English--so little English, it was difficult to explain that I want to help her. Because I only have so many hours in a day to do things that are not my job, I have to pick between the two. Exchange students are supposed to come to our country with a certain level of English language competence. I don't think this girl has anything close to that. The school isn't responsible for giving it to her, but I know what it's like to be far from home with no idea what the people around me are saying--and she is in a MUCH worse state than I was when I went to Spain. So I'll see how much English I can cram down her throat in 2 hours a week. In that time, we'll do some English language training and as much homework tutoring as I can give her. This is not going to end well, but nobody will be able to say I didn't try. Of course, maybe that's what she's thinking, too.
The political climate for educators has not gotten any worse for teachers in the last four months, but then, it's hard to imagine how it could have. The legislature made some silly choices last session that are just now starting to pay out--making mandatory the Pledge of Allegiance, for example--but they haven't done anything to make things worse. They won't fund Common Core implementation, so the biggest reform in education since NCLB (and probably since a lot longer before that) will have to be paid for out of schools' general funds. It's a good thing teachers are grossly overpaid, because schools won't be able to afford raises for a long time. The state appointed a board to pick a singe state-wide teacher evaluation tool. I like their short list--the usual suspects appear, Danielson, Marzano, a few others I don't remember right now--but I have no faith that the system will be implemented with fidelity. Most especially, I don't trust that the evaluations will be used to improve teacher practice, and not to "hold bad teachers accountable" (read: fire people the administrators don't like). (As a sidebar: I've also had conversations with other crew members about a teacher-driven model of evaluation and training, but in the current environment, too many of them feel like they would be training their competitors.) Well, also most especially, I don't trust that the state will adequately fund the training and implementation procedures.
How's TPRS going? Pretty well, all things considered. I'm now good enough to know I wish I were better at it--I feel like I could be moving things along a little bit faster, if I knew how to keep things interesting. I'm now answering questions on the listserv, instead of just asking them (or, more frequently, anxiously reading the answers of people who ask the questions I'm not smart enough to). For the first time, I'm going to have a regular homework assignment, because I'm confident enough in my in-class assignments to worry about what the students are doing when I can't see them. I've internalized the standards enough that I can incorporate them into a lesson nearly on the fly, and if my paperwork isn't all in order, it's actually well on its way.
The school's PBiS program seems like it's off to a good beginning. We had all of our lesson plans written, and from my observations, they went off pretty well. The proof is in the pudding, though. Everybody knows what they're expected to do; now we'll encourage them to do it. We have some pretty exciting possibilities for prizes. Last year nothing jelled. Here's hoping this year it goes better.
Last year, I ran the after-school homework make-up program. We're continuing that program this year, even though a number of important teachers on our crew are still dubious about its value in their own teaching. The middle school teachers seem to be taking advantage of it, as are the language arts teachers. We've made some changes this year to make the "mandatory" part of the assignment more mandatory. If you don't come to an assigned ASAP, it's a day of in-school suspension, just like it would be if you skipped a detention. That hasn't changed. But this year, if you don't finish your work in the Tuesday session, you automatically go to the Thursday session. If you don't finish your work in the Thursday session, you spend lunch and your non-core classes in the office on Friday. We'll see how that goes.
The big difference is that this year, I probably won't be running the program. We have an exchange student who speaks very little English--so little English, it was difficult to explain that I want to help her. Because I only have so many hours in a day to do things that are not my job, I have to pick between the two. Exchange students are supposed to come to our country with a certain level of English language competence. I don't think this girl has anything close to that. The school isn't responsible for giving it to her, but I know what it's like to be far from home with no idea what the people around me are saying--and she is in a MUCH worse state than I was when I went to Spain. So I'll see how much English I can cram down her throat in 2 hours a week. In that time, we'll do some English language training and as much homework tutoring as I can give her. This is not going to end well, but nobody will be able to say I didn't try. Of course, maybe that's what she's thinking, too.
The political climate for educators has not gotten any worse for teachers in the last four months, but then, it's hard to imagine how it could have. The legislature made some silly choices last session that are just now starting to pay out--making mandatory the Pledge of Allegiance, for example--but they haven't done anything to make things worse. They won't fund Common Core implementation, so the biggest reform in education since NCLB (and probably since a lot longer before that) will have to be paid for out of schools' general funds. It's a good thing teachers are grossly overpaid, because schools won't be able to afford raises for a long time. The state appointed a board to pick a singe state-wide teacher evaluation tool. I like their short list--the usual suspects appear, Danielson, Marzano, a few others I don't remember right now--but I have no faith that the system will be implemented with fidelity. Most especially, I don't trust that the evaluations will be used to improve teacher practice, and not to "hold bad teachers accountable" (read: fire people the administrators don't like). (As a sidebar: I've also had conversations with other crew members about a teacher-driven model of evaluation and training, but in the current environment, too many of them feel like they would be training their competitors.) Well, also most especially, I don't trust that the state will adequately fund the training and implementation procedures.
How's TPRS going? Pretty well, all things considered. I'm now good enough to know I wish I were better at it--I feel like I could be moving things along a little bit faster, if I knew how to keep things interesting. I'm now answering questions on the listserv, instead of just asking them (or, more frequently, anxiously reading the answers of people who ask the questions I'm not smart enough to). For the first time, I'm going to have a regular homework assignment, because I'm confident enough in my in-class assignments to worry about what the students are doing when I can't see them. I've internalized the standards enough that I can incorporate them into a lesson nearly on the fly, and if my paperwork isn't all in order, it's actually well on its way.
The school's PBiS program seems like it's off to a good beginning. We had all of our lesson plans written, and from my observations, they went off pretty well. The proof is in the pudding, though. Everybody knows what they're expected to do; now we'll encourage them to do it. We have some pretty exciting possibilities for prizes. Last year nothing jelled. Here's hoping this year it goes better.
Monday, August 26, 2013
Best school comic strips
From the imcomparable Larry Ferlazzo.
http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2013/08/24/the-best-comic-strips-for-students-teachers-in-2013-so-far/
More later.
http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2013/08/24/the-best-comic-strips-for-students-teachers-in-2013-so-far/
More later.
Friday, June 7, 2013
School reform, school "reform," poverty, and teacher responsibility
First off, the inciting article: Salon.com: New data shows school reformers are full of it. Its main thesis is that the school "reform" movement ignores student poverty in order to sell the myth that really good teachers can overcome any negative force in students' lives and bring them academic success.
Next, my prior knowledge, beliefs, and bias about the subject: There are two parts to the school reform movement, the good part and the bad part. The good part focuses on effective teacher practice and student learning and does everything it can to promote them. It recognizes that we can learn what works and what doesn't by watching it happen, but it recognizes that there are limits to this practice. I call this school reform.
The bad part of school reform, I call school "reform." The bad part believes that since teachers have an outsized impact on the academic success of students, when students don't achieve academic success, it is ipso facto the teachers' fault. Or the schools'. Or possibly the unions', or maybe the administrators' or the school boards' fault. (Although, come to think of it, the volunteer, twice-a-month, no-expertise-necessary model of school boards receives relatively little attention in the "reform" movement. It's taken for granted that school boards are best ignored and replaced by shareholders.) The bad part argues that the problem with learning is institutes of learning, and they should be done away with at once.
I am in favor of good reform. We should do our best in the areas where we have control. I want to be the best teacher I can be to get as many stuents to learn as much about Spanish and as many other subjects as I can in the time I have with them. I want higher-order thinking and critical analysis to be the rule, rather than something some students can accidentally do through no fault of the schools. I want systems that support genuine student learning, and I want teachers to be active participants in their onw improvement. I am against bad reform. I oppose charter schools; they are for-profit institutions that take already-limited resources and divide them into two camps, which fight each other. If charter schools are successful, the best-case scenario leaves community public schools as educators of alst resort, teaching students with learning disabilities or students in such bone-crushing poverty that they can't afford to do things like get themselves to school or bring their own lunch. The worst case scenario involves a million students being taught by a hundred teachers with the aid of computers and macros and algorithms which don't actually do very much, while a thousand investors take $5000 per student to the bank. I approve of teacher evaluations; it's how you know what skills a teacher needs to improve. I do not approve of firing teachers who don't hack it--sorry, holding teachers accountable. I approve of frequent formative assessments to measure learning progress. I do not approve of massive standardized tests 3-5 times a year. (Do you know how much the MEAP COSTS?)
Next, what changes because of this article: for me, kind of nothing. I'll still teach students in poverty. I might be teaching more of them now. I'll still to continue to do my best, and advocate for school systems that support teachers as the primary vehicle for student learning. For the rest of the education world, I hope that a discussion of child poverty reduction methods becomes a serious plank in the education reform movement, although I'm not holding my breath.
A random observation that doesn't really fit into the structure of the paper, and would probably have to be cut from later drafts: The author's tone is aggressively opposed to school "reform," which is fine. I think the author might be willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Interestingly, which part is the baby and whch part is the bathwater is less easy to distinguish than you might think.
Now, some kind of conclusion: The myth of school "reform," good teaching can overcome all problems, is based on a fact, even if it is a self-aggrandizing fact: teachers work miracles every day. (Maybe not today. Today is mostly just paperwork.) From this premise, school "reformers" conclude that since it happens all the time, it must be something we can do EVERY time. In a way, I'm flattered. But I feel like the Goblin King in The Labyrinth . (From the heckler: "You mean your leather pants are chafing and you're afraid your hair's going to get caught in a ceiling fan? A-HAHAHAHA!") I am exhausted from living up to your expectations.
Next, my prior knowledge, beliefs, and bias about the subject: There are two parts to the school reform movement, the good part and the bad part. The good part focuses on effective teacher practice and student learning and does everything it can to promote them. It recognizes that we can learn what works and what doesn't by watching it happen, but it recognizes that there are limits to this practice. I call this school reform.
The bad part of school reform, I call school "reform." The bad part believes that since teachers have an outsized impact on the academic success of students, when students don't achieve academic success, it is ipso facto the teachers' fault. Or the schools'. Or possibly the unions', or maybe the administrators' or the school boards' fault. (Although, come to think of it, the volunteer, twice-a-month, no-expertise-necessary model of school boards receives relatively little attention in the "reform" movement. It's taken for granted that school boards are best ignored and replaced by shareholders.) The bad part argues that the problem with learning is institutes of learning, and they should be done away with at once.
I am in favor of good reform. We should do our best in the areas where we have control. I want to be the best teacher I can be to get as many stuents to learn as much about Spanish and as many other subjects as I can in the time I have with them. I want higher-order thinking and critical analysis to be the rule, rather than something some students can accidentally do through no fault of the schools. I want systems that support genuine student learning, and I want teachers to be active participants in their onw improvement. I am against bad reform. I oppose charter schools; they are for-profit institutions that take already-limited resources and divide them into two camps, which fight each other. If charter schools are successful, the best-case scenario leaves community public schools as educators of alst resort, teaching students with learning disabilities or students in such bone-crushing poverty that they can't afford to do things like get themselves to school or bring their own lunch. The worst case scenario involves a million students being taught by a hundred teachers with the aid of computers and macros and algorithms which don't actually do very much, while a thousand investors take $5000 per student to the bank. I approve of teacher evaluations; it's how you know what skills a teacher needs to improve. I do not approve of firing teachers who don't hack it--sorry, holding teachers accountable. I approve of frequent formative assessments to measure learning progress. I do not approve of massive standardized tests 3-5 times a year. (Do you know how much the MEAP COSTS?)
Next, what changes because of this article: for me, kind of nothing. I'll still teach students in poverty. I might be teaching more of them now. I'll still to continue to do my best, and advocate for school systems that support teachers as the primary vehicle for student learning. For the rest of the education world, I hope that a discussion of child poverty reduction methods becomes a serious plank in the education reform movement, although I'm not holding my breath.
A random observation that doesn't really fit into the structure of the paper, and would probably have to be cut from later drafts: The author's tone is aggressively opposed to school "reform," which is fine. I think the author might be willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Interestingly, which part is the baby and whch part is the bathwater is less easy to distinguish than you might think.
Now, some kind of conclusion: The myth of school "reform," good teaching can overcome all problems, is based on a fact, even if it is a self-aggrandizing fact: teachers work miracles every day. (Maybe not today. Today is mostly just paperwork.) From this premise, school "reformers" conclude that since it happens all the time, it must be something we can do EVERY time. In a way, I'm flattered. But I feel like the Goblin King in The Labyrinth . (From the heckler: "You mean your leather pants are chafing and you're afraid your hair's going to get caught in a ceiling fan? A-HAHAHAHA!") I am exhausted from living up to your expectations.
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Not with a bang but with a whimper
Stephen Krashen is one of the bigwigs in language acquisition theory, and one of the main reasons we have shifted from the grammar-focused, drill-and-kill methods of the past to a listen-and-understand model of language instruction. He also has lots of interesting things to say on the subject of teaching as a professon and teachers; generally he is opposed to approximately everything that reformers want to have happen.
In this post he links to another post that predicts that by 2018, the teaching profession will be a very tightly-controlled, 1984-type dystopia. Then Krashen suggests that the author is being too generous, that by 2018 there will be no more teachers. I have very much been wondering if that isn't the ultimate goal of a lot of big-money reformers. I'm not sure what to do with this, but I thought I should link to it. I imagine I'm going to want to find this again.
In this post he links to another post that predicts that by 2018, the teaching profession will be a very tightly-controlled, 1984-type dystopia. Then Krashen suggests that the author is being too generous, that by 2018 there will be no more teachers. I have very much been wondering if that isn't the ultimate goal of a lot of big-money reformers. I'm not sure what to do with this, but I thought I should link to it. I imagine I'm going to want to find this again.
Sunday, May 12, 2013
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.
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.
Thursday, May 2, 2013
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.
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.
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