First Week of School

We are just recovering, over the weekend, from our first week at school.

I am fortunate to have a pretty good space for teaching art. We have a very old school, built in the thirties, and the Industrial Arts building is separate from the main school building. My well-lit classroom is next to a woodshop, where I can make any nice little thing out of wood that I need. If I can’t make it, my principal can and will: last year he made forty-five frames for some student paintings. Talk about dedication!

Like almost all of the schools in our district, our classrooms are not cooled for the four weeks of the end of summer. You would not believe how hot it is in these classrooms! I have one old window that opens, that I can prop open with a stick (closing it at night with a long bolt). High tech. I put a little fan in that window but it hardly touches the front of the classroom, much less the back. The classrooms in the main building are much hotter than mine, almost unbearable. It is commonly known that the district administrative offices are all beautifully cooled. I wish we could trade places with them, just for these four weeks of unbearable heat. During the afternoons, I teach in juvenile corrections, which is always cooled nicely.

I am most impressed that after a week, most of my junior high art kids have bought into the fun and delight of learning art. We did a fairly complex values piece (using pencils to shade in darks and lights to make a picture of apples on a tree), and they are very beautiful and very individual. If I can remember to bring my camera to school, I will take a picture of some of these and put them up here. More importantly, the kids have bought into the idea that they can learn to draw! I’ve got them lining up for images to print off the Internet, things they can work on during class when they finish their assignments. Kids are also bringing in pieces that they’ve done at home.

Now, I’m jaded enough to know that the blush will probably fade; it usually does, but on the other hand, many of the kids keep their enthusiasm for art throughout the year. What could be more fun! Even the history has its delightful hooks, if you know how to tell the stories (van Gogh cut off his ear when his friend moved out of his flat–talk about loneliness and insecurity!). 

Truth to tell, I needed a nap on Saturday, but here it’s Sunday night and I’m ready to go again tomorrow morning. Whatever the drawbacks, teaching is a cool job (even without the air conditioning).

Failing Schools, blah, blah, blah

A recent letter to the editor in a major Utah newspaper continued the typical whining of the misinformed who insist that our schools are failing. It’s almost a chorus, like the knee-jerk chirping of summer evening crickets: one sings a tune, and every one joins in.

By what measure are our schools failing? By national standards? Most of our Utah schools have made Adequate Yearly Progress, and I assume that schools throughout the nation are mostly measuring up. What that means in practical terms is that teachers are qualified to teach what they teach, and students are passing tests.

By state standards? These fall in line with the national standards, as do district standards. When in doubt, follow the funding, and money flows from the top down.

By parents’ standards? I hardly think so, attending parent meetings where you hear, “We done the best we could,” and that sort of speech.

I have taught in the public system over ten years, at the college level for six years, and in homeschools and neighborhood schools in between. All of these educational ventures share common traits: they have good things about them, and they have bad things about them. There are inspired administrators and deadly ones. There are splendid teachers and weary, woeful ones. There are delighted students and there are miserable ones. No one system is going to educate everyone beautifully all the time. Statistics reveal that states with vouchers for private education produce no better results than the public schools, and the charter schools are showing up pretty much the same, if not worse.

It’s a cheap and easy shot to say that the schools are failing. I suggest that the whiners take a seat in the back of a fifth-grade class, a junior high math class, a high school science class, for a week or so, and see how things really go. They will find, I am sure, that there are many illuminated moments, many kindnesses between teachers and students, and between the students themselves. They will see people working hard, teachers and kids alike. They will realize, for sure, that maybe they don’t know as darn much as they think they know.

For serving the majority of the millions of kids in our wide, wonderful and various country, the public school system works the best. Sure, it’s often frustrating, and it often moves slowly. But failing? Not the way I see it, and I see it every day.

A Word about Teachers

We had teacher meetings this last week, getting ready for school last week. We had school meetings, district meetings for all teachers, and district training for the secondary teachers. It was a rather long week of sitting still–pity our poor kids who must sit, sit, and sit!

I made a point of watching the teachers, and here is what I saw.

For such a mixed bag of people with a wide variety of backgrounds, this was a pretty elite group. Mind you, we are a small school district, mostly rural, yet I saw real intellectual engagement, a great deal of humor, and genuine commitment.

These are educated people from all over the U.S. who have chosen to come teach in our little district. And, for a salary which is quite a bit less than most people can live on comfortably, they devote their lives to the quasi-babysitting job of educating young people.

I enjoyed my training week of teacher meetings because of the other teachers! The small faculty at Helper Junior High School, where I teach mornings, is the funniest, most upbeat group of folk you could assemble. They have the lovely attribute of being supportive and not gossipers.

When people start on that old crank line of how badly our schools are failing, just remember this friendly image of smart, funny rural schoolteachers peacefully enduring a week of meetings, and think perhaps that our schools are in pretty good hands after all.

Merit Pay

Our state legislature has approved merit pay, leaving the districts to sort out how to distribute it. Our district superintendent, realizing that teachers are already burdened with so many out-of-class commitments, wrote us a letter saying that teachers may receive merit pay simply by documenting what they’re already doing with research-based strategies in their classrooms. This is a kindly approach, but as with grantwriting, it favors those teachers who write well, and those who are not cowed by filling out yet another form.

Merit pay doesn’t work (http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/edweek/meritpay.htm), but legislatures, driven by NCLB and test scores that don’t measure up to it, are still trying to beat the dead horse. Sure, I’m happy to fill out a form and document my splendid teaching, but then, I’m a writer. The truth is, hardly anybody actually knows whether I’m a great teacher or not. My principal (in the junior high where I teach in the mornings) does know, and he gives me plenty of support, but all it takes is one acting-out kid, bringing in her acting-out parents, to besmirch my name in the community and brand me as a crappy teacher. Furthermore, nobody much knows the quality of my work in juvenile corrections, where six locked doors and a seal of confidentiality close out most adults, although the staff working inside gets a first-hand view every day. In large schools where administrators are spread thin among many classes and teachers, I would guess that much stellar work goes unnoticed.

The problem with merit pay is compounded when legislatures, anxious to fill emptying slots for math and science teachers, gives automatic across-the-board merit pay for those teachers, whether they’re good ones or not. This can cause real resentment, and more to the point, discouragement in teachers who try very hard to teach brilliantly in subjects other than science and math.

Giving merit pay to all teachers in a school when the school’s test scores improve is also a problem, as documented in the editorial above. If you teach in a school where there is a large transient population, where many students do not speak English fluently, where there is rampant drug use, or where there are many special-education students, your test scores may not improve at all, and that has nothing to do with the superior teaching which may be going on.

As a teacher in a state with one of the lowest pay scales for teachers in the nation, I freely admit that it takes two salaries, either from married couples or moonlighting, to make a comfortable living, and so I welcome merit pay, quality teaching days (a system of paying for professional development), and any other additions to my salary, yet, as the editorial above points out, most teachers leave the profession more often because of pressures relating to accountability rather than just low pay, although new teachers, starting out with the lowest pay, may fold because of salaries.

Bottom line: thanks to legislatures for realizing that teachers aren’t paid enough, and thanks to my district for this momentary boost, but in the long run,  no thanks to a system that doesn’t really work.

Dismal Ponderings on Poverty, Race, and Academic Achievement

At a recent arts conference, we heard a university professor present correlations on poverty, race, residential demographics, and academic achievement, including high school graduation statistics, SAT scores, college attendance, and college graduation.

The absolutely across-the-board conclusion: there was a direct and unwavering correlation between low income, non-white families and all of the above academic measurements. You could almost put a map with high incidence of poor, non-white families (concentrated in certain areas of town) right on top of a map with low academic statistics, and they would be identical.

Part of the problem of course is that poor families need the incomes of teens, who often drop out of high school to help the family. Another interesting correlation is home ownership, and this university professor heads up a group to help low-income people buy the homes they’re renting. Oddly, and wonderfully, academic achievement goes up in the areas where people can finally own their own homes, and the neighborhoods become beautiful and more peaceful as well when people can feel settled in a place.

Still, the unrelenting correlation between poor nonwhites and academic struggle was enough to flatten any joie felt by the teachers attending the conference. With all our stellar strategies, we still cannot seem to fix this. The visual image is that the white faces sit at the receptionist desks, while the brown faces clean the rooms and tend the grounds. We only seem to rub elbows at WalMart.

To lighten this story in an ironic sort of way: in our community, white and brown seem to get together a little more easily than in the more urban centers. In my classroom, I really stop seeing the difference. Imagine my chagrin one day when I said, “Whoever gets finished with the project first, grab a broom and sweep out the floor,” and several kids got up to sweep. One of the students still working said, “Wow, Mrs. Wilson, you’re racist. You’ve got all the brown kids doing the hard work.” Sure enough, every single kid sweeping had a brown face! I hadn’t even noticed.

It is very noticeable in our cities, of course, and the problem is compounded when the children of undocumented families somehow beat the odds and achieve, but cannot receive financial aid to attend college. I am the first to understand the problem of giving financial aid and/or in-state tuition breaks to those who have not become citizens, but these political debates lose force when you look into the face of a bright achiever who feels blocked from college upon finally graduating from high school.

You will notice I haven’t suggested any smart fixes to this problem, and the university professor didn’t either. He just got out his guitar and sang us a song about equality, a tune he’d written himself. Nice, but it didn’t lift my heart quite enough. Just imagine the heavy hearts of the families who carry the burdens themselves.

Passionate Avocations

One of my detention students calls his family “rockabillies.” This means that the whole family dresses as if they were in the fifties, including hairstyles They decorate their house a la fifties, and even restore old period cars, which they take on tour to the various antique car festivals. I don’t even know what this boy has done to break the law (I never ask, though they often tell), but I do know one thing: his family has given him a great gift, a passionate avocation.

This business of being passionate about something–anything positive–is on my mind this week, since my husband and I are attending a week-long conference for recorder players. For those of you who summon images of fourth-graders honking shrilly on plastic recorders, let me hasten to assure you that the recorder is a noble, mellow, and beautiful instrument, accessible yet very challenging at the same time. There are recorder conferences and workshops all over the world, and people are attending this one, held in San Francisco, from all over the world, though principally California. These people are lawyers, veterinarians, teachers, moms and dads–all kinds of people, held together with a passionate avocation, recorder playing.

A disclaimer–I don’t count “Guitar Hero” nor texting as a passionate avocation. To me, this kind of devotion needs to build something positive, deep, and individual, and video games just don’t cut it, though restoring and displaying old cars does.

If public education, in addition to our obligatory obsession with test scores in the core subjects, could do this one thing, to help students to begin a lifelong passion for some wonderful avocation, it would be a great gift, perhaps in the long run more valuable than a high SAT score. Why? Because a person with such a passionate devotion to learning and refining and practicing and experiencing things has a greater chance for a joyous life. This is what we mean when we write “lifelong learning” into our mission statements.

Enough of this explication, though. I’m off to a recorder rehearsal, along with my other passionate workshoppers.

“Getting It,” Musings on Mastery in Math and other Mysteries

 

In a July 8, 2008 editorial in USA Today, Patrick Welsh, an English teacher in Virginia, looks at our students’ lack of mastery in math and other subjects (http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/07/math-meltdown.html).

He points out that seventh grade students are urged to take Algebra I, even though most of them are not ready for it. Researchers in brain development point out that such abstract thinking is possible only after a certain level of maturation, usually after age 12, but often later, especially in boys. Seventh graders are only 12. In today’s world, many of these students are immature indeed because they have spent childhoods in front of televisions and video games. If students whose brains have not matured enough to handle abstraction are forced to study math at this level, they simply cannot master it.

Welsh points out that “math gurus” set the curriculum and standards our students must meet. He took a look at the state standards and just had to laugh. Students graduating from high school must take certain upper-level math courses, although many of them cannot even do basic computation and even lack basic skills such as multiplication. A majority of them cannot read a simple story problem–which is everyday math, the kind most people face throughout their lives–and understand it well enough to tackle it.

Welsh also points out that most student emerge from their high school curricula without knowledge of history, without knowing the dates when things happened, and without enough grammar skills to write correct sentences.

I see the same kinds of things in my little rural district here, although district literacy specialists are working mightily to improve comprehension and writing skills, and there are endless interventions happening in math. The proof comes when students go to college–if they go to college–and there evidence their lack of reading, writing and math skills.

What to do? If we reexamine state standards and rewrite course sequences to fit the realities, surely we will be accused of watering down our students’ educations. We just know that the proponents of the status quo will argue powerfully for keeping “high standards,” but what is the point of these standards, these course requirements, this standard curriculum, if students really don’t get it? They really do not know the math, the grammar, the history.

Why not reexamine course sequences and provide legitimate lower-level courses in math, for credit? Why not revamp the English curriculum to provide more writing, editing, and grammar practice, along with constant immersion in the classics? Why not hit the important concepts in science and the important dates in history just a little harder, just a little more often?

Sure, we can argue that this is lower-level work. But this would be a pointless argument, because it’s the only work that many of our students can do.

A Bird in the Hand, a Brief Word on Idioms

My daughter, young and newly-married, is trying to figure out what to do with a property she owns with her husband. Like many starry-eyed young people, she thinks that she can make the big score, score the big buck . . . .idioms that kids her age toss around.

I tell her she should not even consider razing the house, building in its place a mansion, hoping to walk away with millions in her pocket, especially on today’s market.

“No,” I say, “Just clean it, renovate it nicely and cheaply, and sell it for a decent profit, if you can. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”

“Huh?”

My daughter doesn’t know this idiomatic phrase, along with about a zillion others. My secondary students usually know few of them either.

Part of this is the shift in literacy that I’ve been writing about recently. Students know many movie scripts almost by heart. Cult classics may result in  people spending whole hilarious evenings passing around quotes from Young Frankenstein, such as, “Walk this way.”

However, modern kids who don’t know the classics and who don’t participate in everyday discourse with literate adults often don’t know what to make of references to a doubting Thomas, to crying wolf, or to sour grapes. It’s fun to look at websites and books that detail these idiomatic expressions and see how many you know, especially if you can recall mythology or Bible stories behind them. It is also fun to note how many of these expressions are very gritty, harking back to the day when chickens really did run around the yard with their heads cut off.

“You guys don’t read. . ,” new results from NCLB reading scores

My son-in-law’s university philosophy professor said last week, “A big difference between you students today and my generation is that you guys don’t read. You don’t respond to text. You and I don’t share common references and allusions.”

This seems to support the latest news from No Child Left Behind, that student reading fluency has gone up in this year’s testing across the nation, but not their comprehension. This supports Dr. Philosophy’s idea that today’s students don’t have a love affair with text, but instead, with media: video, audio, image.

Well, we teachers can moan and bemoan this reality. Just realize that today’s kids are watching baby videos from the time they’re in their cradles. They deeply respond to image and sound, not that they can’t read, but that reading doesn’t reach into their hearts, for the most part, as it has done for earlier generations. Rather than complaining, we teachers need to accept this reality, somehow, and imagine better strategies for reaching kids than the old read-the-chapter, answer-the-questions routine. The kids can’t read the chapter very well, and the bludgeon-’em-to-death writing style of many textbooks just compounds the problem.

Don’t think for a minute that we can just turn on an educational video and pour knowledge into kids’ heads. The first and obvious problem with that is that most school districts’ videos harken from the fifties and just the opening strains of music are enough to put anyone to sleep. Even good videos lack that important component: the teacher, who interprets, enlivens, explains, and connects with kids.

By writing about these problems, I am not suggesting that I have plenty of wonderful answers. I think that there are certain things that can only be known through books, especially literature. The movie versions usually just do not give us the books’ experience.

I have watched our local junior high English teacher tackle the problem. She does readers’ theater, scene enactments (replete with sound effects and costumes), and reading circles. I think she is reaching the kids in many ways. I have watched our young social studies teacher address the problem, too, with art activities and small-group work. Yet both of these young teachers have confided the same problem: the kids can’t understand the texts. At some point, the song-and-dance, as lively and lovely as it is, must give way to students mastering concepts from. . . .shall we say it?. . . .books.

In my classes in juvenile detention, I must teach biology as well as writing and art. I have this great National Geographic high school biology book. The text is hard. However, my captive audience has to do what I say. . . so I often will say, “Read this paragraph, and define this term in your own words. Don’t read to me. Figure out what this really says, and say it in plain language.”

This approach baffles most of the students, who are used to spouting incomprehensible phrases into the air and onto test papers. Those who spout the best get A’s. For the first time, they have to figure out what the text is really saying. This lead to a very funny experience, for me. I was shopping in WalMart, and there was one of my girls from detention.

“Look, Mom!” she said. “It’s my science teacher!” She rushed up to me. “I’m doing just great in science now! You helped me really understand it!”

This would all be well and good, except that I imagine myself to be the writing and art teacher, roped into science by exigency.

Perhaps what really worked for this girl was my insistent demand on getting into the text and really understanding it. I know my approach won’t work for everyone, but perhaps it can open the door for a conversation about how to help our media kids learn to get into books.

Literacy, Numeracy. . .and Humanity

Toward An Arts Approach to Academic Instruction

The other night, we watched one of those television ads for tutoring services. This one was pitched to parents who fear their children will lose their academic edge over the summer. I found myself getting annoyed with the ad, and it came to me: people do not retain all the information they learn. That is, nobody can hold in memory, for immediate access, all the facts s/he learns. Aside from being an impossibility, it would drive us insane to have that much information floating around in our brains. (This is not to diss the Shannon Wolkins’s of our time, who seem to remember everything.)

Instead, good learners, no matter what their age, have great skills at accessing what they need. Good mathemeticians surely do not remember all the formulas they need, but they know in an instant how to find them, and good writers almost always use a thesaurus. Although we teachers nearly have heart attacks finding strategies to help kids retain everything, it just isn’t humanly possible.

I attended an arts retreat last week. Each school district in the state has a representative called a “District Arts Coordinator,” and we all get together in a woodsy resort and share ideas to promote arts instruction in our districts. One person said, talking about No Child Left Behind, that because of the terrific stress that schools feel about getting funding based on test scores, a la NCLB, that much elementary instruction boils down to Literacy and Numeracy. However, that leaves out the most important thing, becoming human, becoming a responsive human being, thus the adaptation, “Literacy, Numeracy, and Humanity.”

The arts make us human. They teach us how to respond in compassion and kindness. They teach us to synthesize information and use it in new ways. They make us whole. Our retreat discussion often revolved around developing arts strategies to teach core subjects, which can free teachers to meet literacy and numeracy instructional requirements (many schools require a certain amount of hours spent on each in elementary classrooms. . . .lots of hours) with arts strategies.

Call it integration, call it cross-curricular instruction, call it what you will, but it is a splendid idea. Aside from the fact that using arts strategies to teach the academic core often results in stronger test scores, it has the transcendent result of making kids happy. This has to count for something important.

Many school district, faced with low test scores and possible censure, including the loss of funding, from NCLB, have turned to tutoring. However, a June 13, 2008 report in The Washington Post reveals that tutoring has not helped raise test scores (Studies: Tutoring has negligible effect on scores at struggling schools).

We have yet to see definitive studies on the effects of arts integration and test scores, but some people are working on data now. But perhaps it is beside the point. The arts, in themselves, are what make us human. They are worth being at center stage whether they help test scores or not. When our children graduate from high school, they will become many things. In my community, many of them will become coal miners and ranchers. How much better is it that they become coal miners who read literature, ranchers who play the trumpet, housewives who love the symphony? There are many such people in my community, and I have to say that their lives are rich and interesting.

We can only hope that the strictures of NCLB will be loosened someday (soon, hopefully), either by strongly rewriting the law or –we wish– getting rid of it altogether. In the meantime, we can chant this mantra, “Literacy, Numeracy, Humanity,” and then do something to make it so, not only with arts integration in the content areas, but also with a rich arts program for its own sake.