The Teaching Life

Sex Scandals Seem to Dominate Education Coverage

I read The New York Times education section regularly, and it’s usually great. Michael Winerip in particular is definitely one of the best ed reporters out there. (Check out his depressing story from earlier this week about sub-literate work that earns passing scores on the New York State English Regents exam.)

I also appreciate that the Times still features an education section on their homepage; CNN, The Washington Post, and many other major news outlets have buried theirs. The Times has actually gone even further to establish SchoolBook, an excellent site dedicated to “news, data, and conversation about schools in New York City.”

However, on the nytimes.com homepage at 1 p.m. on Wednesday, February 8, 2012, here were the three features headlines:

“Aide Accused of Taping Sexual Acts With Students”

“California: More Sex Abuse Charges”

“School Linked to Abuse Claims Will Replace Entire Faculty”

Fifty million students. Four million teachers. Three top stories. I’m hanging my head.

Am I an unfair cherry-picker or does it feel like bad apples and sex scandals receive outsized education media attention?

On Writing & Teaching

I love teaching and I love writing about it, but it's a challenging duality. The biggest challenge is directing my creativity.  My mind is constantly chasing the next creative endeavor.  When I am really in the groove with teaching, my creativity is always in relation to my classroom, my students, and sometimes my teaching team or a school-wide project. 

Any of those ideas can become material for writing, but writing itself needs some space of its own. Like Virginia Woolf argued in A Room of One's Own--a woman cannot be expected to write while she's cooking and taking care of children in a confined space.  Her writing will suffer.  I always hated that point, thinking it was narrowminded, but there was some truth to it.  One needs mental space to bring the ideas out of the working memory and onto the paper. Space to focus on putting the words together. That process requires as much brain-power as creating materials for a lesson or a new seating plan.  It is difficult to occupy both of those thought spaces at once. 

The work of teaching never ends.  Does writing about teaching help me teach better?  And should that matter?  Teachers need to be able to articulate what they are doing in the classroom, why, and how it's working. The National Board Certification Process is based on this kind of reflection.  So yes, writing promotes reflection, which has value for my teaching.  

Also, as a professional, in the still semi-profession that is teaching, it's also important to me to be a part of a dialogue about the work we do and the policies that comment on and affect aspects of teaching. I wish this last part wasn't true. I'm stubborn and don't like to admit that we teachers are usually seen as second class professionals without valuable ideas and valid career goals. The act of participating in dialogue about teaching does make us more professional, but the fact that we must insert our voices into an environment that is so often hostile toward teachers gives the conversation a bitter tinge-- as well as the overwhelming feeling that this conversation too, never ends. 

Finally, as an English teacher, the opportunity to write professionally for a real audience allows me to speak from experience when I teach writing. There are so many benefits to this. One pretty tangible one is that I have lots of first hand experience with all steps of the writing  process, especially revision, which can be hard for kids to understand.  My writing experience has really helped me to be able to teach students to write nonfiction beyond the 5 paragraph essay and to articulate my reasons for this choice.

[image credit: emich.edu]

“Detachment” Looks Like a Teacher Movie to Put on Your Radar

Another teacher movie hits American cineplexes next month and this one looks to be worth seeing. (I still haven’t bothered with last summer’s Bad Teacher.)

Detachment, starring Adrien Brody and a strong supporting cast and directed by eccentric Tony Kate, arrives March 16. Consider me curious. Here’s the trailer:

 

What to Do When You’re Buried in Papers to Grade

Woe are we! 

Across the nations, high school teachers are collectively wringing their hands. This time it’s not over any curriculum-distorting policy or suffocating shortfall of funds. We are in the heart of midterm exam season, and teachers are swamped.

I understand the indispensable value of scrutinizing student work— but grading a stack of sixty-six midterms in a weekend is just downright painful. Each six-section test takes about fifteen minutes to read carefully, annotate, and score.  That’s 16.5 hours with no breaks. 

When I was a student teacher at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, I worked with teachers who carried five classes maxed out at 34 students apiece. With 170 kids, even assigning essays felt prohibitive. Putting 15 minutes into each student’s exam equals 42.5 hours of grading— with no breaks or pauses to scream included in the calculation.

According to NEA research publishing in The American Public School Teacher: Past, Present, and Future, heavy workload is the most frequently cited by teachers as the top hindrance to quality teaching. 

So how to get through it? I wish I had some brilliant organizational strategy to share. My best tip is to just get started. Eyeing the stack without tackling it can bring on paralysis. Breaking through those first few papers— before late Sunday night— is key.

There’s a silver lining in grading dread; I’m extra-productive elsewhere. To duck the exams, I’ve run long-delayed errands, cleaned the office, put together a photobook, fired off overdue email, and now I’m writing this blog...

Back to the stack for me.

 

 

 

Obama Says "No Dropping Out Until Age 18" ...But Here’s How We Make It Work

Last night in the State of the Union address, President Obama directly addressed the dropout crisis:

We also know that when students aren’t allowed to walk away from their education, more of them walk the stage to get their diploma. So tonight, I call on every State to require that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn eighteen.

Forcing students who want out to stick around will have limited returns. Reversing the dropout crisis, a crucial goal, would take a extraordinarily comprehensive effort to undo the systemic elements to facilitate students’ decisions to walk away from school. Many young people (7,000 per day; 30% of all students) may wait until high school to disappear physically, but the damage that ultimately manifests in dropping out has likely been done much earlier in their lives.

Russell W. Rumberger has answers. The University of California professor has written Dropping Out: Why Students Drop Out of High School and What Can Be Done About It, published last year by Harvard University Press. In the Washington Post, Jay Mathews called it a “masterpiece” and summarized Rumberger’s key takeaways on how to reverse the dropout crisis:

1. Redefine high school success. The measure of a school should not be just mastery of reading, writing and math, but what are called noncognitive skills, such as motivation, perseverance, risk aversion, self-esteem and self-control. This would help both potential dropouts and kids going to college who need work on their social skills.

2.Change the dropout accounting system so schools aren’t rewarded for transferring problem kids. Even students who spend only a semester in the ninth grade before transferring to another school should be counted when the original school calculates how many ninth-graders completed high school four years later. Otherwise, schools will have an incentive to send students most likely to drop out to other schools rather than try to help them.

3. Stop trying to improve schools by forcing them to change their practices over the short term. Instead, help them build their capacity to improve, with more money and staff, over the long term.

4. Work harder to desegregate schools. Rumberger cites a study that found two-thirds of high schools with more than 90 percent minority enrollment had fewer than 60 percent of their students remain in school from ninth to 12th grade. “In short,” he writes, “it matters with whom one goes to school.”

5. Strengthen families and communities. Compared with other developed countries, the United States has one of the highest rates of children living in poverty. Those are the kids most susceptible to dropping out. Anything that improves the health and job security of school neighborhoods improves graduation rates. More early children education and preschool are also useful.

Sign me up as a supporter. The Obama Adminstration should be all over this!

Must Read: “Why Don’t Students Like School?”

 I’m leading a faculty book club on Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School? The subtitle is a mouthful: A Cognitive Science Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means For the Classroom. It’s the most eye-opening edu-book I’ve read in quite some time. Each chapter addresses a different core question asked by teachers like. “How Should I Adjust My Teaching for Different Types of Learners?” and “Why Do Students Remember Everything That’s on Television and Forget Everything I Say?” I highly recommend it.

In the chapter on different types of learners, Willingham makes a compelling case that the theory that students are either visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learners is bogus and kept alive by confirmation bias— the need to seek support for something we want to believe. When instruction matches a student’s supposed cognitive style (they learn better through seeing images, hearing sounds, or making physical contact with materials), optimal results do not follow. He explains (italics are mine):

Most of the time students need to remember what things mean, not what they look like or sound like. Sure, sometimes that information counts; someone with a good visual memory will have an edge in memorizing the particular shapes of countries on a map, for example, and someone with a good auditory memory will be better at getting the accent right in a foreign language. But the vast majority of schooling is concerned with what things mean, not what they look like or sound like.

This blows a hole in the conventional wisdom about differentiation.

The whole book is not this “Grinch-like,” a comparison that Willingham invites for the chapter on different types of learners. It’s an illuminating and substantive book— all insight and evidence, no fluff.

Get it, teachers.

Mentors Gain a Lot Too

I’m one day into my career as a mentor for a student-teacher, and while I can’t speak for her— though she seemed very positive— I know I’ve already gained a lot.

Since we are now a team and I’m responsible for helping her to get a foothold on the craft of teaching, I am upping my game. Prior to class today I took more time with my plans, talked through all of my decisions, and afterward sat down to scrutinize student work as soon as it was handed in. That level of reflectiveness can be hard to gin up when you’re on your own.

Today I tried to model my best practices as a teacher and it felt good. The class was clicking a notch or two better than usual. As the semester progresses and I hand over more and more control of the classes to my student-teacher, I expect to gain a whole new perspective on what works with my students, with ample opportunities to talk it all through.

Alone, teachers can become islands and slip into lax practices. With a good match, both become stronger teachers.

Synchronous Teaching and Living Resolutions for 2012

Resolution I. Do it now, not later.

Living: Do not go to bed with dishes in the sink ever again. 

Teaching: If it can be graded and entered in a single prep period, do not leave it for later. It will pile up and start to stink. If the email can be answered now in less than 3 minutes, I will not leave it for later, because I will likely forget.  When I do remember, it will be more urgent and in less appealing form.

For that matter, if I can quickly draft a blog post while the idea is fresh in my head, I should do it that day!  I lose so many blog ideas to the notion that I can "do it later." Do it now! 

Resolution II. Plan more out-of-the-ordinary activities. 

Living: I tend to think I'm such a "spontaneous" person that I will just create fun when I need it.  But lately I'm more of the busy/tired type and I end up only putting energy into the essential things.  I have some fun along the way, but I limit myself to what doesn't take me out of my usual routines...and that's a little boring after a while.  Once a month, I will plan something out of the ordinary that I consider fun--a hike upstate, a dinner party at my house, ice-skating, a dance class, etc. 

Teaching: I like to think I'm pretty good at creating engaging lessons that utilize a range of modalities, but I have become comfortable and somewhat limited in my usual repertoire. Switching things up takes extra planning, but it can make all the difference in reaching all students and in the overall impact of the class.

One thing I never do, for example, is create educational games for my class (beyond the very occasional Jeopardy). I know this is something kids really respond to, and there's nothing stopping me from finding or making games to reinforce skills and content, except deciding to do it and carving out time to plan it. I also want to include more time for dramatic play and debate into my curriculum. I also want to seek out recommendations from other teachers when my own tool-kit gets stale. 

Resolution III: Work on maintaining a beautiful physical space.

Living: Maintaining an aesthetically pleasing living space is worth my time. It is a reflection of how much I care about myself and the experience of others who enter my home. It can lift spirits. Something as simple as making the bed creates a neater and more pleasing image to look at. Among other things, I resolve to make my bed daily, repaint the apartment walls, buy some new plants, and change some of the wall decorations. There is no need to always look at the exact same pictures for years!

Teaching: During the year, I spend more than half of my waking hours in my classroom!  My students spend a significant amount of time there every day as well, and it is my job to make those as impactful as possible.  I always start out the year putting a lot of love into the physical space, but tend to let it fall by the wayside later.  

Luckily, I have students to help me--not only with general organization, but also with updating bulletin boards with student work.  As a former principal use to tell us, "They're not meant to be museums! Update them!" I will also bite the bullet and get a few classroom plants (which students love to help maintain) and get a carpet for my meeting area. Local carpet stores are usually happy to donate a remnant. I just need to devote a little time to go and ask.

 

After writing these resolutions, I realize that the common thread is definitely shifting where I focus my attention and how I spend my time.  

Every teacher wishes she or he had more time.  Since we don't, the next best thing is to experiment with how we use the time we do have.  If I follow through on these resolutions, what else will change?  

 

[image credits: 1.123rf.com    2.en.wikipedia.org    3. montessoriaruba.com] 

 

Priority Number One in 2012: Unite to Realize the Vision of the CETT Report

The NEA has come a long way. Last year, the largest union in America assembled an all-star team of educators for its Commission on Effective Teaching and Teachers (CETT), provided them with all the resources they needed, and provided no editorial guidance. I had the privilege of lunching with some of the commissioners at the NEA convention in July, and they are definitely some of the most impressive teachers I've met.

Earlier this month, the commission delivered their report, a brilliantly articulated vision for “Transforming Teaching: Connecting Professional Responsibility with Student Learning.” It's a blockbuster.

I highly recommend reading the whole thing. We need to rally around this. Our disparate voices have weakened us for too long. My hope is that 2012 will be the year that educators finally move towards a common platform— and the CETT report is it.

My Education Reading List in 2012

These books are burning holes in my shelf, just waiting for me to finish Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. (I know I’m late to the party, but it’s pretty fantastic!) What education books are you looking forward to reading in 2012?

Finnish Lessons by Pasi Sahlberg

Why Don’t Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham

Why School? by Mike Rose

The Good School by Peg Tyre

Courageous Conversations About Race by Glenn E. Singleton and Curtis Linton

Tough Liberal by Richard Kahlenberg

The Influence of Teachers by John Merrow

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