Stop Trying to Inspire Me

Introducing ... Red Lines and Highlights!

2012-01-16T15:07:00.000-05:00

I won't be posting here anymore and within a few weeks, this blog will be gone entirely, but before that happens I'd like to invite you to follow me over to my new blog, Red Lines and Highlights!

The focus of Red Lines and Highlights will be mainly on teaching high school English, especially writing and literature. I'll talk about everything from lessons that work and techniques I'm trying out to what I'm reading (both in class and on my own).

So once again, that's Red Lines and Highlights, the link to which is: http://redlinesandhighlights.wordpress.com

Lessons Learned and Mistakes Made #8: True Inspiration, Why I Keep Going, and How to Say Goodbye

2012-01-16T09:03:00.001-05:00

When I was in college, I had a column in our campus newspaper that ran every week (it didn't hurt that I had a three-semester tenure as editor of said paper). It was very much a weekly essay that was mostly observational, sometimes humorous, and occasionally dealt with current events or popular culture; and even though it's been nearly thirteen years since I graduated I'm still proud of that column. Granted, most of what I wrote flirted with decency at best (and some was absolutely terrible) and I'm sure that the actual writing was less impressive than the fact that I never missed a deadline for three-and-a-half years.

Anyway, when I began my last semester of college, I realized that in a few months I would be writing my last column, and I wound up doing something that in the history of writing that column I had never done: I wrote it in advance. One night in January, I got an idea of what I wanted to write about, typed it out, saved it, printed it, and put that copy in a drawer in my desk until the third week in April rolled around and my final deadline approached. The result, after some editing and a paragraph of thanking friends, faculty, and readers, was 1,000 words about how people who write about what college life is like have no idea what the hell they're talking about.

It took a while for my roommates to realize that I was making fun of myself.

Now, I'm not going to write about how I don't know what I'm talking about. After all, I think it is very well established after nearly five years and 400 posts that I don't know what I am talking about. I am as clueless and curious as I was when I first started teaching and when I first started writing about teaching. Actually, what I feel like doing is a little of what I did thirteen years ago this April and that's turn things on their head and on myself a little bit.

I have explained in at least two separate posts what this blog's title meant. It was a response to every time I walked out of PD or a meeting or read an article or blog post or comment or message board where someone was head-over-heels inspired by what they'd just seen or couldn't stop gushing about how their students' (well, as they put it their "kids'") smiling faces that were always full of wonderment made their lives better every day and wondered what the hell I was doing wrong. Was I the only person who thought all that had happened was sunshine being blown up his ass? Was I the only person who'd ever been called a name by a student? Was the I the only person who had a parent say that "a lot of parents" had been saying critical things about me? Was I the only person who didn't think they had darling little faces full of wonderment and wanted to talk about it?

So I started posting here. I knew what I was doing--I had been blogging in a different capacity for years--but at the same time didn't. I didn't know from an edublog or teacher blog or whatever you'd like to call it. I simply wanted to post stuff and speak my mind. The attitude came later, especially after Clay Burrell read a post of mine regarding not standing for the Pledge of Allegiance and seemed to appreciate my candor so much that he made me a sometimes contributor to his education blog at Change.org. At times I was definitely more obnoxious than anything but I always felt I was sticking true to the idea that I didn't want to spout mindless drivel.

Last week, I was in the midst of the latest overflowing pile of work (which is still pretty huge, mind you) and had one of those moments that I think everyone has. When essay #48 passed my eyes and I marked the umpteenth spelling mistake, I wondered why the hell I even make the effort if this is the return. Then I got even more annoyed because I have yet to plan the next unit and can't think of what exactly to do.

Maybe I was truly ... wait for it ... unispired!

God, that was terrible.

Anyway, when you have a block like that, you really can spiral down the existential dilemma hole, especially when it's after 8:00 and all you really want to do is sit back and watch the DVD in the red Netflix envelope that you have been neglecting since it arrive two weeks earlier. It just doesn't make any sense. Why keep doing this for this little, when you're told by anonymous and not-so-anonymous people that you are the reason why the country is getting worse? Am I really, as I always have vehemently denied, a martyr? What was the whole point of it?

Then, thumpthumpthump ... and behind me a light goes on, there's some noise, the flush of a toilet, the running of the sink and I look down the hallways to see my four-year-old son headed back to his room. He glances at me and I get up so I can tuck him back in and tell him goodnight for the third time since I read him his bedtime story and said goodnight the first time. As I walk out of his room, I think for a moment about being a role model and an example. Someone to look up to.

It is hard not to be constantly worried that you suck at being a father, the same way it's hard not to be constantly worried that you suck at being a teacher. The two are not one in the same, of course. I care infinitely more about my little guy than I do the 90-120 or so students I teach. That sounds selfish, I know, but it helps me put things into perspective. It helps me realize that all I really have to do is go into work and do my thing; if they don't respond well, I make a change. If they do, then I keep going. It's just that simple. I don't have to worry about whether or not I'm changing lives for the better or worse. I don't have to worry about whether or not every moment of every period fills them with insight and wonderment. And especially don't have to worry about whether or not they like me. Listening to the theme to the 1960s Batman TV show and "Surfin' Bird" in the car, making Curious George talk to Mickey Mouse, making Spider-Man and Superman punch a three-headed sea monster ... that's way more important than whether or not I am contributing to the downfall of society by prepping for a standardized test.

Because at the end of the day, at the end of the year, they may not remember everything we did or everything I told them. And years from now, I may not even remember all of their names. And you know what? It's okay.

The pressure we put on ourselves to constantly be beacons of light in lives that we somehow perceive as lacking is ridiculous, and we should not need to self-flagellate in order to prove we're somehow worthy of the position we've obtained as professionals. Teaching is just my job. It's a job I love and will strive to do better every day, but it's just a job.

A quick thanks to anyone who's ever stumbled across this blog, read a post, followed, subscribed, commented, and conversed. I wish you all the best and I hope you'll follow as I move on.

Lessons Learned and Mistakes Made #7: There's a place in the world for the Angry Young Man

2012-01-15T07:50:00.000-05:00

First, a prelude:

On some level, I probably owe Erica Goldson some sort of apology. After all, when her valedictory speech made the rounds (I found out about it through a friend's post on Facebook), I wrote an incredibly snarky retort that has gotten the third most hits of any post on this blog. Concurrently, I probably owe every student in the entire American educational system an apology because the most-viewed post on this website is a snarky-at-times retort to their 20 things they want everyone to know about education. Because when you read both of those posts, they do come off as a bit nasty, especially the Goldson one, because I was definitely on a rant.

Readers/commenters definitely thought that I was overly harsh. An anonymous commenter had this to say about the Goldson post:

Erica's speech was much more respectful, insightful and honest than your sarcastic and overly defensive rebuttal. She most likely acquired those abilities from her parents and not from a teacher like yourself who relies upon anger and personal attacks when confronted with an uncomfortable truth about the game of high school.

And Dale Stephens, who apparently is some sort of super non-student/lecturer type, had this to say about the other:

If you believe you are a teacher—and that your job is to instill knowledge—you are in for a rude awakening over the next 10 years. “Teachers” no longer have a monopoly on knowledge. First came libraries, then came OCW. Now we have Google. If you want to have a job in the future I suggest you become a life coach.

Granted, I picked only a little out of both comments for the sake of length (and you can read them anyway on the original posts), but the gist of them is that I'm mean and this is obviously a reflection of my overall personality and that I have an antiquated view that is part of the overall problem (I believe Laurie Couture even lumped me in with the rest of the child abusers at some point). So this should be a mea culpa, an acknowledgement that perhaps my attitude was wrong and my opinions misguided.

Except it's not.

About a week ago, I had a conversation with former student about politics; specifically, the GOP primaries. He's a pretty hardcore Republican and I sit on the opposite side of the aisle, but we had a very good talk and found that we both agreed that while entertaining, the nutjobs were annoying. Especially those nutjobs who tried to make you feel guilty for having a certain party affiliation. "Well," I told him, "unless you're being a bigot or your facts are wrong, you shouldn't have to apologize for what you believe him." Then I added for good measure that I'd still give him crap for being a Republican.

Which is why I never felt the need to take down a post or apologize for one that might be especially incendiary, especially when I know that the reaction might be one of misinterpretation. I've reread my "20 Things..." post a few times and honestly never found anything in it to be disrespectful to students, despite the claims of Dale and several commenters. In fact, I felt that I was acknowledging reality ... and sometimes reality seems painful. It's like Westley tells Buttercup: "Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something."

As for the post on Erica Goldson, I actually followed that up and it's much less-read post but I actually think it's a more rewarding post because I got some more insight into her person and life after that moment (and she even commented on it), and while I stayed true to my original criticism and commentary (btw, I was annoyed that not one person who commented on the original post got the damn Reality Bites reference), I thought the story of her post-high school journey was fascinating. In fact, I'm bummed that she isn't blogging anymore because she really explored the world in a way that so many of us don't have the chance to. And after reading, I felt that I wanted to make more comments and could at least try to add to what I had already said:

The only weakness that the blog really has is the same weakness I spotted in her graduation speech: a lack of perspective. Although this time, I think that despite what commenters may say about her "maturity for her age," she tends to fall into the trap of typical teenage arrogance. When you're 18 and 19 years old and are truly discovering the world for the first time, you tend to take on an air of superiority and act as if you know everything about a particular subject because you just found out about it. Trust me, I've been there and know that I embarrassed myself a number of times during my high school and college years because my mouth was working faster than my brain and I didn't take the time to perhaps look into something a little more before spouting off about it (aaand to a certain extent I still do that).

What gets to me whenever I read something like her speech is not the content, but that people pass it around and hold it up as if it's the only time anyone has ever felt or said that in either a public or private forum. Furthermore, those same people act as there's some sort of unique purity and rightness in that voice, as if anyone older is too corrupt to say what they feel or make a difference. Which is why I brought up the point about perspective in the first place. Any argument has its opposite and one of the greatest things I learned from my high school teachers was that there is that counter-argument and that not everything (in fact, barely anything) in this world is black-and-white.

I had a fun email exchange with John Spencer about people griping about "the system" the other day. I won't get into all the details, but I had been reading a post on another blog and the person writing--an adult, in fact--was going on and on about how you can no longer change the system from within and that you now have to leave it. You know, quit. My first email to John was a snarky comment along the lines of how that's all well and good but I've got a mortgage and a child and bills and do need to find some manner of paying for those things. But as most of my conversations with John go, it turned into something constructive rather than wise-assed riffing. The gist of it was ... what is this system? People like to complain about THE SYSTEM quite a bit, as if it is a giant supervillain or something.

Then again, demonizing your perceived enemy so that you don't have to put a face on him or her is what we've done for centuries, and if you are writing what is essentially propaganda for one side of the argument, you don't need to see any good in the other side so therefore you get ... THE SYSTEM.

And as is true with most complaints about perceived villains, I don't see much in the way of solutions being offered. You know, other than quitting. Maybe it's my perceived cynicism (read: a realistic point of view), but when you repeat the same talking points over and over and don't seem to actually offer any insight as to how to fix things or what the next steps might be, we don't get much of anywhere. Okay, maybe you sell more books or something, but that just makes you a pundit. And full of shit, to be honest (and I know from bullshit. I have a BA).

I'm not angry. Okay, I get angry from time to time, but I am no longer the angry kid that wants to lay waste to everything. I'm no longer the radical revolutionary ...

[I have to interject here. You never were radical, nor a revolutionary. Quit fronting, moron.]

... but that doesn't mean I am not frustrated. It doesn't mean I don't want things to change. I just am more patient, am willing to take a longer look at what is going to work rather than simply latching on to a solution because it is presented to me and looks different.

We need the Erica Goldsons of the world to make speeches. We need the pissed off kids to want to protest the inherent unfairness of the educational system. We need the idealism of youth. But don't sacrifice the wisdom of the experienced. And certainly don't ignore those like me who are still between youth and experience, trying to see where the right path is and while still willing to make mistakes and take risks in order to improve ourselves, our situations, and the world as a whole, are trying to do that while employing what we hope is better judgment than we used to have.

Lessons Learned and Mistakes Made #6: Lists are Fun

2012-01-14T09:21:00.000-05:00

I was ~~being a complete narcissist~~ checking my blog stats the other day and I noticed that if you look at my "Top 5" blog posts, two of them are lists (number five, for some reason, is my review of Teachers. So somebody is either a huge Nick Nolte fan or people really want to know what I have to say about that flick). The two lists are a 2009 post entitled "The Seven Habits of Highly Annoying Students" and a more recent post, "20 Things a Teacher Wants the Nation to Know About Education." My next entry in this whole swan song series actually focuses on the topics contained within these posts so I won't dwell on them too much. At least not today.

No, for today, I thought I would take a few moments to pay tribute to a time-honored blogging tradition: the list. Oh yes, we love our lists, don't we? They're easy to read, easy to digest, and if you're actually ranking things, they're easy to argue over. If you're a blogger and you want people to read your posts and then comment, all you have to do is pick a popular topic, form an opinion, and hit the number or bullet-point button and you're on your way! And okay, they're fun to write, too, especially when you can fill said list with witty bon mots that make you (and hopefully your audience) think you're the next Oscar Wilde or Mark Twain.

But enough about lists. Let me get to the meat and potatoes of this post (mmmm ... meat and potatoes) and present the list (because you can't have a post about lists without a list). Since I am taking a few moments to take a look back at my "career" as a teacher and teacher-blogger, I present to you ...

25 Things I Have Learned While Blogging About Education

The posts you think are clever and insightful will not get re-posted nearly as much as the ones you wrote in the twenty minutes you got to yourself because your kid wanted to watch Wow Wow Wubbzy.
If your blog's title isn't straightforward, doesn't include some sort of superlative, doesn't make a reference to an educational tool, or isn't a pun on teaching, you will get at least two or three comments per year that misunderstand and therefore question or criticize said title.
You can always tell who has latched on to a new philosophy or practice by the earnestness of their posts about it (I have lost count of the number of newly minted homeschooling/unschooling/let's-call-it-something-else-this-time-because-people-still-think-we're-lunatics disciples I think are in the process of trying on black sweatpants and white Nikes).
If the content of your blog isn't 100% about wonderment and puppy dogs and ice cream, it's best you remain relatively anonymous or else your ability to teach will be called into question.
That being said, there are a lot of people firmly in denial that students aren't always special little wonderful snowflakes.
And btw, anonymous or not, it's best to try not to get too specific when writing about your students.
Don't count on people to actually read every word of your posts before commenting.
Also don't count on commenters to not be promoting some sort of agenda.
The bulk of your comments will be from random people praising your site in broken English and providing links to sites that are set up to get your financial information so some hacker in Zandia can buy endless amounts of online pornography. If your blog is on Blogger, these comments will be in Chinese. Oh, and all your base are belong to us.
It's fun to goad commenters who are obviously the type of people who always need to have the last word.
That being said, the dumbest comments on your site--the ones that aren't worth a response--are the ones that you find yourself randomly thinking about and responding to in your head in the middle of your first period class the next day.
If blogging for someone else's site, make sure that you have an editor who is actually going to post what you wrote instead of rejecting your post then cannibalizing it into one of his own about a week later.
Even if they have nothing to do with education, it's awesome to blow off some steam by poking fun at the letters to the editor page of a shitty local newspaper.
I wasn't impressed by name-dropping of experts. After nearly five years of blogging, I'm still not impressed.
As much as you try not to and as much as you think it's stupid to do so, you will inevitably find yourself on Google late one night searching for references to you, your blog, or any of your blog's posts to find out who might be reading or talking about you behind your back.
Blogging, Facebook, and Twitter are not just for the young Turks and it's great to see older, more experienced teachers online because the lessons that can be learned from them are incredibly valuable.
I'm still amazed that in all of the hubbub about teachers on Facebook and whether or not you should friend them, I rarely see the advice of creating TWO Facebook accounts: one for professional use and one for personal use (granted, this might only work if you technically have two names, like "Joseph" and "Joe" or "Antonia" and "Toni").
It's really hard to constantly be "current" with your commentary, especially when the majority of your time is taken up by actually teaching or raising a small child. Play to your strengths and don't feel like you're in some sort of online race.
I sort of give a crap that I was never considered for an Edublog award; then again, I don't.
Even though it's not "cool" to be a good student these days because it means that you were a well-working cog in THE SYSTEM, I will never, ever apologize for the fact that I was a good student.
Coming up with 25 things for this list is proving to be a pain in the ass.
My continuing online presence and exploration of technology and social media has not changed my initial skepticism of using such tools in my specific classes.
It's complete crap that blogging, participating in #edchat and other online activity can't be counted toward recertification/relicensure. I have learned more online as a blogger and tweeter about teaching than I have sitting through bad, overpaid guest speakers.
I am grateful for the conversations I have had and friendships formed with other bloggers and commenters because their insight--especially the ones who don't always agree with me--has helped me learn a great deal and in the end made me a better teacher.
It's always good to finish a list with a statement that wraps everything up in a nice bow.

Lessons Learned and Mistakes Made #5: Politics is Bullshit

2012-01-12T14:10:00.000-05:00

When I was a freshman in college, I went back to my high school during the spring with a friend to pick up his sister at the end of the day (as you do). While walking through the hallway after the final bell (yes, I followed the rules and waited until after the day was over), I ran into one of my favorite teachers, Mr. Kappell, who had been my AP European History and AP Government teacher as well as my mock trial coach. He asked me how I was doing and if I had chosen a major. I told him that I was majoring in both writing and political science.

"Oh, so you're going to be a b.s. artist who can write!" he joked.

I do have a B.A., which I'm sure stands for bullshit artist and not bachelor of arts, so I can definitely say he was right, and I more or less knew what I was getting into (after all, I did have him for AP Gov't). So politics being bullshit isn't exactly something I've learned during my time as a teacher, especially since I came from a career where I was dealing directly with politicians and their hangers-on. At the same time, I have learned, since taking up the mantle of teacher, how frustrating the politics of education can be.

Take, for instance, two things I read about Virginia's schools today. First, Education Week's "Quality Counts" study ranked Virginia fourth in the nation. That's pretty impressive. But then, the governor made his State of the Commonwealth address last night and talked about doing away with continuing contract status because, as he put it, “Just like workers in most other jobs get reviewed every year, and are therefore able to be more accurately promoted and rewarded for their success, so too should our teachers."

I kind of have to laugh at this because while I don't think there is anything wrong with merit pay for a job, I see something underhanded in the GOP push for "accountability" because--and this may be my Democrat mind thinking--they can't think of accountability for teachers actually resulting in reward. Because if you begin to actually reward teachers the way you reward workers at most other jobs, it costs you more money. Which means the budget might be larger. Which means taxes might go up. And you can't have that.

It's punishment they're after, plain and simple. Teachers are easy to scapegoat because they are directly responsible for the most measurable thing in a school: standardized test scores. So if the school fails to make AYP, the teacher is to blame. And the teacher is bad and we need to get rid of them. If you make their job security less possible, you can do that to your heart's content. Or--and I think that this is more of a motivation--if you're looking to cut costs and not have to pay for grizzled old vets who have put in decades of service, you can fire them without any real problem (as opposed to now where you'd actually have to have a reason).

I'm not in the business of giving advice to new teachers, mainly because I haven't been teaching long enough and am not enough of an accredited, certified "expert," but if I were to give a piece of advice, I would tell new teachers that if they are going to follow the politics of education, they should: a) read up on as much as they can so they know exactly what they're getting into; and b) get ready for a constant, pounding headache.

Lessons Learned and Mistakes Made #4: Experts Can't Be Trusted

2012-01-07T18:31:00.002-05:00

In this series of entries so far, I've kind of expounded on some topics that I have written about, stopping to reflect or add to what I've already said. With this particular entry, I wanted to talk about how during the course of the last five years I have really become skeptical of professional development days that involve guest speakers. You know, where someone paid for one day what I make in two months gets up in front of the entire faculty of the school (or maybe even the district) and oozes some sort of wisdom that probably had an administrator beaming at a seminar three months prior and has maybe a few people mesmerized. In other words, the one where you wind up getting a lot of papers graded. They come in, do their thing, sell their books, and then move on to the next sucker of a school, like an olde-tyme medicine show.

But then, I thought, I've written about this numerous times. And well, it's Saturday. And I'm feeling lazy. And I want to be the type of person who constantly points out the many awesome things he said (and plugs a book. And beats a dead horse of a bad joke to the point where I'm making glue). For reals, though, this whole series of posts feels like a greatest hits and a few of the posts that I love on this topic are from way back in 2007 and while they still get a few hits here and there, they're definitely from the album that has the "Nice Price" sticker on it. Here are six in chronological order with quotes.

Harry Wong Wouldn't Like This Entry (8/27/07): "You know, that whole "you never get a second chance to make a first impression" type of argument. And I guess that's right on some level, because in business you don't. If you show up to a meeting with an important potential client unprepared you're probably not going to make the sale. If you have a slightly bad first impression with your students, it's probably not the best thing in the world. But is it the end of everything? Are you completely screwed?

Uh, no. You have 179 more days or so with those kids. You'll get second chances and third chances and on and on and on."

Do It the Right Way, not the Wong Way (8/7/08): "As had been drilled into my head at that point, however, most of the methods used to teach me 15-20 years ago were wrong. So the traditional blowing off of day one was a cardinal sin. Then again, I’m sure the people telling me this hadn’t met my ninth grade English students; if they had, they skipped that truth so I wouldn’t be running for the hills before I even started. But they and Mr. Wong were the experts and everyone around me seemed to be psyched up for a great opening, especially after we all attended a district-wide pep rally. So I went the “Wong” way and bombed spectacularly."

Let's Call The Whole Thing Off (10/1/08): "The way I post the objective on the board is a lot less like a phrased objective and more just like the topic and the corresponding numbered SOL is next to that topic for the day. I wondered, as I left (running a fever of around 100, btw) if I should change the way I post objectives so that my students get more out of my objectives and SOLs on the board. But after some thought, a day off to recover from being sick, and a weekend, I have to say that I don't think how you post your objective is as important as it seems."

Communication Breakdown (2/24/09): "Not that I throw my students into the deep end and make them sink because I definitely do all those "different learning style" things and provide guided notes and study guides. I feel that I give plenty of help to anyone who needs any help understanding what I'm talking about during any given period. But honestly, I think that somewhere along the line there needs to be a reduction in the amount of silly routines and gimmicks that a teacher does."

On and On, Does Anybody Know What We are Looking For? (8/7/11): "It actually is a lot different, and funny enough, this entire blog goes back to Ron Clark."

Some Advice to Those Professional Development "Experts" (10/24/11): "1. Your credentials are nice, but please stop talking about them. I'm glad you got your bachelor's from The School of Hard Knocks, a Master's from Real World College, and a Ph.D. from Whatsamatta U, and I do respect that; however, if my principal or superintendent mentioned that when introducing you, I don't think I need to hear about it again. And again. And again. You know what those degrees are? They're a nice set of tits, and if you want a relationship you're going to have to get me to see past them."

So yes. Quote fest. My apologies for being a jerk off. I'll clean up.

Lessons Learned and Mistakes Made #3: You can't trust 'em. Except when you can.

2012-01-06T18:22:00.001-05:00

I know that I recently posted all about the First Amendment and Freedom of Speech, but in doing this whole "reflecting on my edublogging life" thing (the edublog equivalent of Rob's "What does it all mean" in High Fidelity, perhaps?), I couldn't possibly not talk about my favorite Constitutional Sentence. So I had this whole thing prepared about how I have learned that my students want to be empowered to share their voices and that I really try hard to give them that chance and how sometimes that doesn't work well and sometimes it does.

Then, I saw this: "Sydney Spies, Durango High School Senior's Photo Yanked From Yearbook For Controversial Attire"

Now, on the surface it looks like this: girl submits photo to yearbook, school thinks it's too sexy, I get that Right Said Fred song stuck in my head, picture is not allowed, and girl complains as such:

"Some people might think it's a little bit sexy or inappropriate. But I think it's artistic. I think it's a good expression of who I am as a person," Spies told 9News. "I'm a dancer, I'm trying to be a model, I really enjoy photography and I think that this is a good thing to represent me and I think they are taking away my freedom of expression."

Spies and her mother and some friends have been protesting in front of the high school, act as if this was oppression and censorship on the part of the administration, but if you do a little more research, this story from the Durango Herald tells you otherwise:

The editors – Trujillo, Erin Edblom, Paige Shacklett, Alyssa Spencer and Brian Jaramillo – said they unanimously came to the decision not to run her submitted photo as a senior portrait.

They said the picture could still run in a section reserved for paid senior advertisements. Those ads usually feature “shout-outs” from friends and family and are located at the back of the yearbook.

Two years ago, yearbook staff made a similar decision when a male student wanted to run a picture of himself bare-chested as a portrait.

“If she (Spies) chooses to, the picture will run as her senior ad, not her senior portrait,” Trujillo said.

The editors said their decision was not because of dress code.

“We are an award-winning yearbook. We don’t want to diminish the quality with something that can be seen as unprofessional,” Jaramillo said.

And you know what I have to say to this? GAME, SET AND FREAKING MATCH! If I were that book's advisor I would buy the editors pizza next week because they are an example of the type of mature and responsible people you want as an editorial staff. This is not, as Spies seems to be all adamant about, an infringement of her freedom of expression; this is editorial restraint. I mean, the New York Times isn't going to put a beaver shot on its front page (though I think the New York Post would), so what makes anyone think that a high school yearbook would?

Not only that they said she could pay for it to be in their senior tribute ads, AND there is precedent with a MALE submitting a photo. So there.

I'll let commenter kat.bee on Jezebel's story (the wonderfully titled "Sexy Student’s Sexy Yearbook Photo Banned for Being Sexy") explain:

Former Editor-in-Chief of my HS yearbook here. Rules like this exist at all schools as a way to protect the school/the yearbook staff from any liabilities or lawsuits. This isn't a "new thing" to ban overly sexualized photos from the yearbook. Homegirl needs to seriously get over herself.
Select editors from the YB staff would often go to YB camp (yes, there was such a thing) with other HS staff from around the state. Every year there was a seminar on situations like this — ranging from sexy photos, hidden messages, and other inappropriate crap that could pop up in photos or student submitted content for the YB. We were told of lawsuits filed against YB staffs and horror stories of entire books needing to be reprinted/redistributed to schools after some editor let something slip.

You don't know if some parent would file a complaint once the book came out that would deem this "child pornography" or whatever. You don't know if, once it was published, the girl would suddenly be embarrassed and sue the YB for intending to slander her image. You just don't know. The YB advisor and staff are in the right simply due to industry protocol. Better safe than sorry.

This girl can post this picture all over Facebook, she can make her own lookbook with images of herself plastered on the pages — but it isn't going in the YB of this HS or any HS in America. The end.

And I'll add my two Abraham Lincolns here. First off, if this WERE published, how much do you want to bet there would be a parent outcry followed by the firing of the adviser? We've seen it before over things like this. So here you have a staff being proactive and doing what is right ... and still getting shit for it. It seems that the administration is backing the adviser and staff here, though, so I am sure that nobody's going to get fired. Although I will say that I expect Spies's sad face on Good Morning America Monday morning.

Second, I have further beef with her whole claim that this is a violation of her freedom of expression because it cheapens the idea of freedom of expression. Because there's so much REAL censorship of student work in schools but because of things like this, people don't take teenagers seriously. Teenagers are stereotyped just as much as teachers and someone like Spies claiming her rights are being violated is such a "Boy (Girl) Who Cried Wolf" that it contributes to the next case--a school newspaper editorial that is censored because it looks like bad PR for the school--being taken as a joke, too.

Of course, I could be doing a whole slippery slope argument there, but the fact that she is abusing that defense cheeses me off. But to end on a positive note, in my time as an adviser I have learned that despite what people say about teenagers, you have to trust them with their own publications, even if they have lapses in judgment from time to time, because they will often take the right path and make you feel proud for standing up for their rights (yes, their actual rights). And I apologize for sounding a bit self-righteous here (because I'm never self-righteous), but the yearbook staff's actions make me proud to be a yearbook adviser.

Lessons Learned and Mistakes Made #2: I Never Learn

2012-01-05T19:46:00.007-05:00

So in the course of the last few days The Innovative Educator has posted about how she really never learned anything in school. Her message seems to be that we really don't need teachers to learn and that teachers do not have a monopoly on teaching and that we can learn how to read and write and do all sorts of other things without actually attending school. Some of the points made are valid, if not obvious, but she also seems to be very adamant that in all the time that she attended school, she didn't learn a single thing she either already knew or learned elsewhere (I think the phrase "test-prep factories" is in there somewhere too). Granted, it's a ploy to get people fired up so they'll take the bait and get defensive*, but in both the posts and comments, there seems to be enough vitriol for it to be genuine.

I don't have a monopoly on teaching and knowledge and there's a lot of things I learned in life that I never learned in school, but learned from my parents, from friends, from experience, and even from television (and while my father happened to have a teaching license, I'm pretty sure Cookie Monster doesn't). But as a teacher, I'd like to offer a reply. So I took a few minutes (I think it was 20, but I wasn't timing myself) to think of all of the classes I took in the thirteen years I spent as what she would consider a prisoner of the New York State Public Education System, starting in kindergarten in the fall of 1982 and concluding with my graduation in June of 1995. It's a small sample, mind you ... and I don't think it refutes The Innovative Educator's assertion that you really do learn nothing in school, but I thought it was worth a shot.

WHAT I LEARNED DURING MY THIRTEEN-YEAR PUBLIC SCHOOLS SENTENCE

KINDERGARTEN: how to tie my shoes, how to properly write a lowercase n, how to properly support blocks so you can stack them higher than you had before, why it's not right to eat paste

FIRST GRADE: why keeping a neat desk is important, basic addition and subtraction, how to read vocabulary words meant for third graders, long vowel sounds and short vowel sounds, the definition of the word "motto," what a computer was

SECOND GRADE: asdfjkl; are home keys, borrowing in subtraction, multiplication tables, how to spell "any", how an election works, the names of my senators and congressman

THIRD GRADE: what slang is, how to write in script (aka cursive), different types of dinosaurs, how to play the recorder, what a run-on sentence is and how to correct it

FOURTH GRADE: multiplication of numbers with several digits, complicated long division, the properties of the sun, what was on the moons of Jupiter, the color of Libya's flag

FIVE GRADE: metal expands when you heat it and contracts when you cool it down, what AIDS was, the biological functions involved in human reproduction, the effects of narcotics on the human body, why you don't chew gum when you have braces

SIXTH GRADE: how a pulley works, how a piston engine works, Newton's three laws of motion, what happened to Prometheus when he stole fire from the gods, the history of opera, why I suddenly didn't think girls were icky, why neatness counts in book reports, the basic tenets of Islam, what the SALT treaty was about

SEVENTH GRADE: what happened at the Battle of Saratoga, who Ethan Allen was, the role of The Crusades in the Age of Exploration, why chorus class was a nightmare, how to strengthen your topic sentence, how to organize yourself for eight classes instead of one, how to write a bibliography, the classification of various drugs, how to perform CPR, scientific taxonomy, how to solve for x, how to say "My name is Thomas" in French, "measure twice, cut once," how to use a drill press, what happens when you don't put the leavening agent into your recipe, what you need to run a small business, how to chart your genealogical history

EIGHTH GRADE: the names of the bones in the body, the function of hormones, how the kidneys work as a filtration system, what afterbirth looks like, the causes of the Spanish-American war, the causes and effects of World War I, how families on the homefront in World War II functioned and coped, how to take a small-sized picture and draw it on a larger canvas, how a printing press works, how to create a structure that will support a significant amount of weight, how to sew a button, how to conjugate different verbs in French, the basic components of literary analysis

NINTH GRADE: classification of different rocks, what experimental error is and how to compensate for it, the difference in salt content of various oceans, how to do calisthenics military style, basic layout and design in PageMaker, how to animate something on a computer, how darkroom chemicals work, the difference between pitch and yaw, how to write complete paragraphs in French, the structure of China's government, the basic tenets of Hinduism, modus tollens, properties of a circle, how to solve for the angles in an isosceles triangle, how to spell isosceles, why Romeo was too dumb to check Juliet's pulse

TENTH GRADE: What happened during the Protestant Reformation and its effects, how to type 80 words per minute, the causes and effects of the French Revolution, why 1848 was an important year in European History, how to have a lengthy conversation in French, how to prevent the spread of AIDS, what happens to hair when you put it in a Bunsen burner, what happens when you light a magnesium fuse, how to balance a chemical equation, how to put spin on a ping pong ball, how to provide proof to back up a point made in your intro, how purpose and audience affect your voice, the proper use of a semicolon

ELEVENTH GRADE: what a Christ figure is, the function of the various areas of the brain, classification and treatment for various psychological disorders, the difference between Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democracy, the importance of Marbury v. Madison, the importance of Brown v. The Board of Education, how to argue in front of the Supreme Court, the details of My Lai, the importance of the 1980 U.S. Hockey team, the Coriolis effect, gravity is 9.8 m/s^2, what happens when you leave pizza in the oven too long, how to make fluffy french toast

TWELFTH GRADE: DNA mapping, where the G spot is, how to write a lede, how to report objectively, show don't tell, the function (or dysfunction) of bureaucracy, the nature of the epic hero, the limits on free press in high school, how to edit video, how to filibuster, the principals of capitalism, microeconomics vs. macroeconomics, how to tell a Manet from a Monet.

But who am I to say anything, right?

*Hence, the title of this post.

Lessons Learned and Mistakes Made #1: Sometimes, You Wind Up Liking the Bad Guys

2012-01-04T19:53:00.000-05:00

One of the first running topics on this blog, starting way back in 2007, was called "Teacher Movie Theater." I had some down time here and there (especially over the summer when there really isn't that much to write about when it comes to education), so I decided that I was going to take a look at a genre of film that I generally abhor: the teacher movie. You know what I'm talking about: well-meaning teacher takes over a class of rough-and-tumble students and over the course of two hours they butt heads but ultimately bond to the point where the teacher leaves a lasting impression on the students and vice-versa, then the inspirational song plays and the credits roll.

My original intention was to destroy the genre by just snarking all over crap like Freedom Writers. But along the way, two things happened: first, I never actually got around to watching Freedom Writers (I just couldn't muster the strength to sit through it); and second, I ran across movies that while flawed were great looks at my profession. For instance, the first movie I watched--Teachers--had a kind of weak plot but priceless moments I still think about. And Clerks isn't exactly a teacher movie but I think we can adopt it (same also for two flicks I didn't look at but highly recommend: Office Space and Waiting ...).

I also cannot say enough good things about Chalk, which is so dead on that it's not even funny (in a manner of speaking). I remember this film being blurbed in Entertainment Weekly a couple of months before its release and rushing to the Netflix queue the second it came out on DVD. Not only did it not disappoint, it was better than I thought it would be, and I said so in the entry. Oh, an awesome moment regarding Chalk? David Gonzales, the executive producer left a nice comment on that post. That was really cool.

But the film that I got the most out of in this brief exploration of the teacher movie is what happens to already be my favorite film of all time: The Breakfast Club. I don't think I'd intended to use it for Teacher Movie Theater, to be honest--I was just watching it one day and came to the realization that this would work well for my blog. That's because as I was watching, I had a revelation that, oddly, took me nearly 15 years and probably nearly 100 viewings to get to: I saw the Shermer High School Saturday from Mr. Vernon's point of view:

Carl and Vernon have a pretty standard conversation about "kids these days" and how they don't respect anything. Carl calls bullshit on that sentiment, saying that Vernon has changed just as much as he thinks the kids have. There's not much more than that, but I think you can start to sympathize with him a little here because Carl is actually a former student of his; not only that, but there's a picture of him in the beginning of the movie as one of Shermer High School's Men of the Year. Not that a janitor is a terrible job, but it all symbolizes the fact that Vernon, on some level feels he's failed the students he's supposed to watch over.

Now, I'm not writing this post to quote myself. I mean, I'm not that much of a whore. But I wanted to bring up what I had said because I still see something in the point I made a little more than four years ago whenever I have to read the latest post about how the school system is a failure or how teachers are abusing children or whatever sheet they pulled off of Teacher Basher Mad Libs that particular day. Because while we all know that Mr. Richard Vernon is a prick--that's his role in The Breakfast Club--we also get enough of an inkling that there's more to him to not completely hate him. And if you translate that to real life, you come to what should be an easy realization (but often in punditry and blogging is not): people are deeper than what is shown on screen.

And knowing those people challenges us to think beyond that surface and present a counter-argument to Teacher Basher Mad Libs that's not simply a defensive reaction. Personally, I think that if you can get that perspective, and if you also can laugh at yourself a little, you walk away with a little more than if you were just fired up and spouted off some vitriol in response. And trust me, I've done that plenty of times over the years and while it kind of feels good at first there are times when I have regretted what I said (especially in comments--but I actually never delete my comments because if I said it, I said it). I try to correct my behavior later, possibly by being a little more balanced (though it doesn't always work). But I don't think I've ever stopped laughing at myself.

Lessons Learned and Mistakes Made #0: Prelude

2012-01-03T22:19:00.001-05:00

I don't know whether it was the whole end of the year or that other people were doing it, but I was thinking about what to write for a blog entry the other day and then mindlessly checking my blog stats (as a way of procrastinating, of course) and I noticed that the post that I am writing now is #392. That means that in about eight posts, I'll have 400 posts under my belt. 2012 also means that I'll be on the home stretch of my fifth year. While I'm pretty sure it's the most posts (hey, that rhymes) I have written for a blog, it certainly isn't the longest I've kept a blog going--a now-defunct and deleted blog of mine went for seven years before I retired it--but 400 posts and five years definitely prompts one to pause and reflect.

So I kind of want to do just that. I mean, I can't be the only blogger who rereads old posts of his every once in a while and either cringes at some of the things said or pats himself on the back (come on, we all have egos here, you can admit it). And there certainly are self-proclaimed forward-thinking bloggers out there who like to plug their own work on a fairly regular basis, so me taking a few posts to do something similar is just me following trends, right?

That last paragraph made no sense.

ANYWAY, I figured I would take a look back at some old posts and do a bit of reflection ... call it, as you guessed by the title, lessons learned and mistakes made. After all, if you cannot look back and evaluate yourself, what good are you, right?

Giving Them What They Want

2011-12-22T12:02:00.001-05:00

From "Gen Y Workers to Employers: Flexible Hours, Not 9 to 5" (Time, 12/21/11):

Many companies fear that, without structure, employees will be distracted, not as engaged and less productive. In fact, the opposite is often true. A trusting work environment breeds more-loyal employees and increases efficiency. Here are three reasons for companies to embrace workplace-flexibility programs:

1. Gen Y workers won’t accept jobs where they can’t access Facebook. Cisco’s “Connected World Technology” report shows that more than half of Gen Y employees prioritize social-media freedom over a higher salary when evaluating a job offer. Furthermore, more than half say the Internet is an integral part of their lives. Gen Y-ers wants to be connected to their friends and families, not just their co-workers, throughout the day. Although some companies ban social media at work, other companies have embraced it as long as employees use it professionally. “We do want people to use social networks in order to keep in touch with their colleagues and contacts,” explains Gockel, whose company has no formal social-media guidelines or policies.

It's an interesting piece and it raises a couple of good questions: why so stringent about the Internet? And why such a focus on a schedule with regard to productivity?

Now, I am REALLY SICK of the whole "outdated industrial model" talking point when it comes to the education discussion (it's a favorite of teacher bashers), but there is a bit of truth to it. After all, a bell-by-bell schedule isn't necessarily how the business world works and very often the work day goes beyond the prescribed 9-to-5 hours (I'll set aside the fact that I can use this to advocate for homework). And one of the things that makes working in an office tolerable is the ability to be trusted to work on one's own.

I think that the "they won't accept jobs where they can't access Facebook" is a bit condescending, but I see the point being made and it's been made in discussions I've had with students about web filters and the cell phone policy. My students have said, "If we're allowed access to these things, it won't be a big deal," going on to point out that banning cell phone use (for instance) turns the device into forbidden fruit and therefore makes them more likely to want to use it. If they could use it throughout the school day, they wouldn't be sneaking around as much.

My Devil's Advocate response is: "But what if we were having a discussion right now or taking a test and I saw you with it out? Would you accept the fact that I'd ask you to put it away?"

Overwhelmingly, response to those questions is yes. It seems that most of my students realize that there is a time and a place for certain things and if they're given the opportunity to demonstrate responsibility, they'll rise to the challenge (and accept consequences when they don't). I think the same can be said for social networking and the Internet. One of the most annoying jobs I've ever had was when I was temping a number of years back and the person in charge of temps was like a drill sergeant, reprimanding anyone the second he or she was spotted checking email instead of doing work. I get why, but at the same time, it didn't make me want to work harder (it made me want to find a different temp job).

So what if we changed high school around to make it more flexible? I know we can't exactly have open campuses where students come and go as they pleased (that whole "they're minors" thing ...), but what if we had a schedule in high school where instead of bells and a strict daily regimen of classes, students have a schedule mixed with a study hall or two and an actual 45 minutes to an hour for lunch (instead of what ... 30? 20? I wolf mine down in 5, to be honest)?

I mean, I don't know how to work all of the logistics out on something like that, but wouldn't it be cool to change the way the school day and school policy works and do it kind of organically so nobody actually notices enough to make a big stink about it? You know, little by little over a few years? Subtly? Wouldn't that work?

Free speech defined and my role in it, part two

2011-12-21T19:18:00.000-05:00

free speech? It's messy. Protesting? It's messy. It's sometimes raw, sometimes disrespectful, and sometimes it is very inconvenient. But to see that happen and to have that be the freedom that we exercise in this country is glorious and THAT is what we in America are blessed with.

Yeah, I know I'm quoting myself to start this intro, which is quite possibly the douchiest thing you could do on a blog (or ... is it innovative? Nah, I have neither the experience nor arrogance, nor do I command the salary to consider myself "innovative." I'm just a schmuck. Oh well.), but when I was thinking about what I wanted to write today, I kept coming back to this particular part of a previous post, and the reason for that is that I wanted to take a look at what the First Amendment means in the context of my everyday role as a classroom teacher and my students' everyday roles as well.

I guess I'll be more clear--and since I actually started this post about six days ago and have repeatedly erased everything from this point forward, I might wind up being brief because I'm kind of in "Oh just get it done" mode here--and talk a little about where my students and freedom of speech actually collide. Obviously, I could get into the whole idea of freedom of the press and student newspapers and yearbooks, but I've talked at length about this particular subject and want to get more general with it anyway.

Every once in a while, something happens at school that pisses students off. Okay, there's something that happens every day that pisses A student off, but a whole class riled up about the same thing isn't an everyday occurrence. Usually the riled-up-ness has to do with whatever overblown rivalry is being played out on a football field that coming Friday night; rarely is it something that happened in the world (I think that I may have had the occasional current events conversation in the past couple of years). Sometimes, though, it's something like a change in school rules that directly affects them. For instance, a new policy concerning cell phones or a change in the dress code.

I've used these particular moments of outrage to my advantage before, usually because I have no problem setting aside the day's discussion and because most of the time the discussion we wind up having is way more fun than vocabulary (not that vocabulary can't be fun, but come on, let's be real here). Plus, since I do teach writing (okay, ATTEMPT to teach writing. Let's be real here), it fits because I do cover argumentative writing. So over the course of however long the discussions last (they've gone 10-45 minutes depending on the group), I do my best to mediate a civil discussion (i.e., one person talks at a time so people can actually hear) and also provide counter arguments and other points for discussion.

Okay, so I play Devil's Advocate. And playing Devil's Advocate is fun, but I swear there's a point to it too. No, really. I'll get to it.

At some point in the discussion, especially if it's lengthy, someone brings up what they as students can do. The three I hear most often than not (and this goes back to my own days as a student, back in the early 1990s nadir of pencils, paper, and Z.Cavaricci jeans) are:

Let's get a petition going!
Let's walk out of class!
Let's protest!

In my role as Devil's Advocate, I often shoot down the first two and ask them to go deeper with the third. Why do I shoot down a petition? Well, I personally find petitions to be kind of ineffective. They're often poorly planned (i.e., they don't know who to give the petition to) or peter out after the first day, or kind of show their relative ignorance of how change within this particular system gets going (i.e., it's probably going to be ignored). Walking out of class seems like a bold move, but let's be real: even if you could get everyone behind you to walk to the school board office to scream "Donna Martin graduates!" quite a number of your fellow walkouts would be doing so in order to cut class and at the end of the day, TPTB will probably focus on the cutting class rather than the message sent (see also: TEA Party bitching about how the Occupy movement didn't clean up after themselves).

So, the protest. In trying to get them to dig deeper I'll ask five questions:

What are you protesting?
Why are you protesting it?
Who is your protest directed towards?
What is/are the result(s) you want to see?
What is the best way to get your message across?

Then, the "teaching" begins, in a way. We talk about voice, audience, and purpose. We talk about knowing a desired result and finding the best way to go about doing it. We talk about how too often the audience for their protest wants to dismiss them as "whiny teenagers" so it's worth the effort to show that they aren't and are worth listening to. After all, for all of the smoke adults blow about students, they still take a "We know what's best for you" attitude when it comes to things like rules.

So while this will sound arrogant (I KNOW, right?!), I believe that as teachers, we're bastions of free speech. We provide a place where students not only can use their voices but can work to hone and fine-tune that voice so they get what they want or need. We should never blow a student off when he or she has a concern or wants to express an opinion; instead, we should help them develop that opinion by either strengthening it or challenging it (after all, it is possible for a student to actually be wrong about something).

Okay, that wasn't brief at all. My bad.

Yes, I Needed a Lesson Plan ...

2011-12-19T08:10:00.000-05:00

He thought it was odd that despite the forward-looking reputation of the Baltimore district and Teach for America, beginning teachers had to construct their lessons from scratch, as they have done for centuries. They were shown samples of the state tests their students would have to take. They were told where they might find good material. But as rookies, they had little idea which of a million possible options would work.

Usually, I don't agree with much of what Jay Matthews writes about, but in yesterday's Washington Post, he makes a very succinct and clear point about lesson plans ("Ignoring the Need for Lesson Plans"). I remember being a rookie teacher that took an alternative route to licensure (at one point, I did apply to be with Teach for America and was accepted but that particular route to employment didn't pan out) and being relatively clueless as I headed into my first day of actual school. With the except of a couple of days in a class the previous school year, I hadn't done any student teaching; in fact, I hadn't really set foot in a high school classroom since I had graduated high school nearly a decade earlier. I was teaching English and journalism and had very little clue as to how to teach either (especially on a 90-minute block).

I did wind up stumbling through it and after at least a few days wound up finding that my colleagues were more than willing to help with English, and then found online resources for lesson plans about journalism. That took a little bit of swallowing of the pride, though, because I felt that since I was the "career switcher" among the group of rookies in my department and hadn't spent the last few years ensconced in education, I needed to prove that I was worth the district's investment. I was also lucky that I had a very willing-to-help department that didn't look at me sideways because of my credentials (or lack thereof).

But one of the other things that did help me and that Matthews is making a good point about is that in one of the courses I was teaching--yearbook--I had up-to-date resources and guidelines from the previous teacher. She had given me an entire binder of yearbook adviser's stuff, which included a month-by-month guide to running the yearbook, the greatest piece of equipment a rookie adviser could have and something I left to the next adviser (which she told me helped--and I will say that yearbook after I left kicked so much ass I was very proud) and have taken with me and adapted to the yearbook I'm running now.

I left a similar piece of equipment as well as a fresh set of textbooks for the newspaper adviser after I left that building, too. Her results were mixed but that's because her staff was quite a bit more lazy than the yearbook staff I was leaving behind. I was particularly proud of what I'd done as a journalism teacher there, even if my lasting legacy will probably simply be replacing our decaying copies of Press Time, a textbook from 1985 with something more recent. I remember the meeting at central administration with several teachers and the district English coordinator. When I suggested that I get a class set of texts, another journalism teacher snotted, "Well I don't use textbooks in my class."

"Well, I need something for sub work and it would be nice to have a book in my room that isn't from the Reagan administration," I snotted back.

Which kind of brings me to the larger point here, I guess. There's always someone who's a bit pompous about his/her never needing the structure of plans or textbooks and he/she is never afraid to tell everyone that; however, a rookie who may be coming from a non-traditional route to a teaching license might feel lost in the woods. The really good schools have true mentoring programs, like mine did (and I can never stop thanking that mentor enough). But if a mentoring program isn't available or falls flat, there should be something, even if it's as low-tech as a binder filled with lesson plans on various topics in a faculty lounge somewhere, that someone who has little to no clue (or has a clue but winds up with stage fright on day one) can go to, especially if those around him or her are unwilling or unable to share.

Free speech defined and my role in it, part one

2011-12-14T18:56:00.000-05:00

So I'm sitting at work the other day and happened to see a copy of The Daily ~~Regress~~ Progress sitting around. With nothing better to do, I flipped through it, learning the latest on local ordinances and whatever wire service stuff they had pulled together that was old twelve hours before they put the paper to bed. It wasn't that interesting, except for a letter to the editor that caught my eye. It reads:

We as a family lived in Central America for four years. Though it was a positive experience, we returned with a renewed appreciation for life in the United States. One of the unique blessings we have is a structure of law and order. We have authorities who are concerned about our well-being.

"They are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Will you then not be afraid of the higher power? Do that which is good, and you shall have praise of the same."

The way that the mayor and local authorities responded to transgressors at Lee Park was commendable and admirable. They had the right to do what was right.

I submit a few comments concerning the First Amendment and modern-day protesters. The freedom of speech can be such a blessing. It can be used to encourage or challenge one another. However, all the rights protected by this amendment have limits, as stated in the last paragraph of Amendment 1. The article entitled "Freedom of speech," found in your World Book, also has a category of Limitations, which includes four major restrictions on free expression.

Beyond all that, I ask: Where is the law of respect and decency when protesters "set up camp" on public property, with the idea of staying indefinitely? What does protesting have to do with the spirit of Thanksgiving and the spirit of Christmas? Did Christ insist upon His rights while He walked upon the earth?

We in America still are blessed in multiple ways in spite of all the injustices found in others. Do I want to be found guilty of the injustice of complaining in the midst of all my blessings?
Demanding of rights somehow militates against personal freedom and joy. Doing what is right is more important than claiming my "rights."

May the giving spirit of Christ descend upon us during this time of much protesting. Merry Christmas!

Usually I kind of laugh at these letters and go on with my day, but I think it's appropriate, in a way, to comment on it because tomorrow is the 220th anniversary of the signing of the Bill of Rights and I was thinking of writing about students, freedom of speech, and my role as a teacher in that freedom of speech. I still am going to do that (there's a reason this says "part one"). But I think that a nice little analysis of this particular letter is in order.

After all, there are so many people in our society who seem to think they know history or politics and pontificate on those rights, yet, ironically show how ignorant they are about what truly defines those rights. Now I know that some rights are open to interpretation, but there are times when the interpretation is different and there are times when the facts are wrong. So, let's have a little look, shall we?

The subject matter of the letter stems from the local version of the Occupy movement, which took up space in downtown Charlottesville for the better part of a month or so until the city recently decided that it had had enough and evicted the protesters. I'll skip the "don't know what you've got 'till it's gone" first paragraph and start with his point:

The way that the mayor and local authorities responded to transgressors at Lee Park was commendable and admirable. They had the right to do what was right.

I am pretty sure that the quote is from the Bible (the letter writer should always attribute his quotes, btw ... and a quick Google shows it's from Romans) and I start off wondering if he realizes that St. Paul did not write the Constitution, but I guess I have to give him the benefit of the doubt. Now, as for his use of the word "transgressors," I don't know if that's the type of word I'd use, considering that for the most part (at least from what I recall following the Occupy Charlottesville movement on the news), the protestors actually had permits for their camping out and it wasn't until the permit expired that the city did anything. But let's move on:

I submit a few comments concerning the First Amendment and modern-day protesters. The freedom of speech can be such a blessing. It can be used to encourage or challenge one another. However, all the rights protected by this amendment have limits, as stated in the last paragraph of Amendment 1. The article entitled "Freedom of speech," found in your World Book, also has a category of Limitations, which includes four major restrictions on free expression.

Now, let's look at the text of the First Amendment, which we should all be familiar with anyway, but for argument's sake, I'll post:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

I may be stupid but doesn't that look like one sentence? I don't see a last paragraph there and I also don't see anything about rights that are protected by this amendment having limits. I know that the Supreme Court has ruled time and time again that there are reasonable limits to free speech, but the Amendment itself doesn't say that. And yes, I realize I'm splitting hairs and being a snarky bitch here but come on, if you're going to be all pompous about the First Amendment in a letter to the editor, get it right.

Moving on:

Beyond all that, I ask: Where is the law of respect and decency when protesters "set up camp" on public property, with the idea of staying indefinitely? What does protesting have to do with the spirit of Thanksgiving and the spirit of Christmas? Did Christ insist upon His rights while He walked upon the earth?

We in America still are blessed in multiple ways in spite of all the injustices found in others. Do I want to be found guilty of the injustice of complaining in the midst of all my blessings?

Demanding of rights somehow militates against personal freedom and joy. Doing what is right is more important than claiming my "rights."

May the giving spirit of Christ descend upon us during this time of much protesting. Merry Christmas!

Okay, uh ... so if Jesus didn't hashtag Palm Sundy #occupyjerusalem he didn't care that you thought you had the right to free speech?

Furthermore, since when does freedom of speech have a time and a place and involve shutting up because you should be grateful for what you have? I mean, I realize that the holiday season is a time of caring and compassion, but if I feel that someone is trampling on my rights I'm damn well going to say something and demand that I have rights, Xmas or no Xmas.

I hate to break it to the letter writer and all of those who thought the Occupy movement was wrong because they "didn't clean up their trash" whereas the Tea Party, for instance, did (no, seriously, this is an argument I've read a lot): free speech? It's messy. Protesting? It's messy. It's sometimes raw, sometimes disrespectful, and sometimes it is very inconvenient. But to see that happen and to have that be the freedom that we exercise in this country is glorious and THAT is what we in America are blessed with. And guess what? Christ may have been giving, but he also was disobedient and said things that the authorities this letter-writer holds up as a blessing didn't like ... so maybe the movement he seems so disgusted with had the spirit of Christ all along?

More tomorrow, specific to the classroom, but I'd like to encourage my fellow educators to tell their students about Free to Tweet. If they tweet their support with the hashtag #freetotweet, they can win a scholarship. A great way to support one of the ultimate great causes.

Saved by Zero

2011-12-10T08:33:00.001-05:00

I had a project a few weeks ago. It was pretty cool, if you ask me. Then again, I planned it so I'm probably not the person to really ask about how cool the project was becausethestudents'opinionsaretheonlythingthatmatterandteacher-centeredlearningmakesmeadinosaurthatissimplyperpetuatingthenon-innovativenessofourcurrentpubliceducationsystem. Anyway, whether or not the project was cool is something for another post. The various end-products of the project were more or less pretty good, and I could tell that those groups of students who put the effort in really had a lot of fun working on them.

However, there were several students who didn't hand anything in at all and are now really in the pits because of the way that zero affected their grades. It's one of two inevitabilities of assigning a group project: either you'll have a handful of constant absentees who wind up working independently because of said absenteeism; or you have people who don't lift a finger. The absentees are usually given a reasonable extension and I'd say about 90% of the time, make that up with no problem. But then there is this exchange ...

Me: You guys ready to present?
Group: We don't have it.
Me: Okay, well, you can go tomorrow, but it's late.

Or, this one ...

Me: You guys ready to present?
Group Member: Nobody did anything and I'm not doing it myself.

I often find myself annoyed by the idea that this is an acceptable train of thought. I find myself further annoyed when I think of why this comes about. Going all the way back to my licensure classes, I remember talking about group projects and how good they were but the myriad problems that could occur and how we all had to adjust our grading rubrics to accommodate for those problems. The message sent was that while they may be working as a group, you must grade each student based on his or her individual effort in the group. I remember one particular person telling me that they graded group projects in several "steps" so they "remained fair."

That was something, to me, that seemed to completely counter the idea of a group project. Isn't the idea of a group project that you collaborate to produce something your group can present (and hopefully be proud of) together? And while I know that there are often people in groups who do nothing, isn't that one of the challenges that people face every day in the working world anyway? I remember quite a number of instances where someone I worked with did next to nothing on a project yet the show, as it was, had to go on.

And sometimes the show has to go on because failure to meet a deadline doesn't mean a potential failing grade, but a loss of money for the company (and potentially a loss of one's own job). Granted, my late policy is fair (zeros come into play after a week's lateness), but I have to admit I can't help but be annoyed by an inability to turn something in on time, or the inability to tell me about it beforehand. I mean, there are those times when shit happens and you're not able to get your project in to me and I can be reasonable, but just simply not doing it ... ?

I have heard a lot of negative things about zeros in my time, but I have to say that I wonder if sometimes we get so scared of zeros hurting students' grades that we give them too many chances and then hurt them in another way--by never teaching them the value of a deadline. In fact, very often by giving too many chances to make up work, isn't that what leads to them taking generosity for granted?

Check out Pencilchat: Go now, go!

2011-12-03T17:03:00.001-05:00

A decidedly low tech device, the humble pencil, is providing some tongue-in-cheek insight into current education debates via Twitter. In the past 24 hours, educators have tweeted the hashtag #pencilchat thousands of times. The tweets are undeniably witty, but they also reflect the frustration teachers feel over everything from schools' technophobia to budget cuts, which may make #pencilchat the best—and most clever—education allegory ever.

This was part of a post by Liz Dwyer over on Good.is and I wanted to share it because the person behind #pencilchat is John Spencer, who is one of the best teacher-bloggers (or whatever we're calling ourselves these days) out there and who clearly deserves a lot more recognition and attention. I haven't contributed to #pencilchat myself but I have been following it on and off for the past few days.

And take note: if you want to have an innovative conversation about education, that's how you do it.

2011 Summer Reading Project: Anthem

2011-12-03T07:55:00.001-05:00

Yeah, so I know it's winter and yeah, so I know I'm simply posting a link from another blog here, but I am still working my way through the books I chose for this project (I have four more) and I'm still both fascinated and entertained. Here is "Get Out the Map," about Shainee Gabel and Kristin Hahn's Anthem: An American Road Story ...

What is American is one of those things that is so hard to determine that at this point, it’s almost like a philosophical dilemma rather than a physical entity. Many have tried to define or capture it; in fact, it seems that the right wing has sought to trademark it for the last couple of decades. But pinning the answer to that question to one definition is never successful, and it seems that the journey to find that answer is just as if not more important. Such is the case with Shainee Gabel and Kristin Hahn’s Anthem: An American Road Story.

Just because it's not for everybody doesn't mean it's not for anybody

2011-11-22T21:28:00.001-05:00

So this scenario should be familiar to you: you're surfing the edblogs or blogosphere or blogomultiverse or whatever they're calling it these days and you come across a post written by someone who supports alternatives to the current "normal" path of education in this society (read: go to public school, graduate, go to college, go into the work force). It more than likely includes a lengthy personal story that details injustices (real or perceived) that the poster or his/her child received at the hands of the public school system. This personal story informs the writer's opinion that we as a people need to support other paths to learning and below the last sentence are several comments that include multiple uses of the word "inspiring."

The topic of said post could be about several things. All you need to do is fill in the blank of this phrase: "___________ is not for everybody." It's almost a mantra, or at least it makes for a good slogan or talking point: "School is not for everybody." "Public school is not for everybody." "The system is not for everybody." "College is not for everybody."

Now, the idea behind those last few sentences makes perfect sense. There are plenty of people in this world who have gone to a private school or been homeschooled, or who have decided not to go to college and have thrived. Being a teacher has taught me much about that last thing, which is something I would have never even thought of when I was a student--then again, I had a naive view of the world typical for students like me. I have seen students graduate my high schools and choose all sorts of different paths; I'm not sure that all of them were 100% successful at everything, but I know that those who have been didn't all follow the same exact path I did in life. What gets me, however, is how vehement the tone of the posts I mentioned in the first paragraph of this post. There is a very, well, black and white view of things presented and most of the time it all seems so ... well, this sounds nasty, but it sounds so selfish. Like, good for you but what about the 100 faces I see each day? Are you going to "save" them too? I mean, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one, right?

And, as a matter of fact, aren't there students who thrive within the current "normal" path of education in this society?

I'm probably coming into the middle of this "fight" as it is, but I'd like to know where it started and where any conversation we were having about education in this public forum became all about proving that you're right. You know what I mean: this is the way it happened to ME and therefore THIS IS THE SOLUTION AND EVERYTHING ELSE IS WRONG! Even I fall into that trap from time to time, because it's so easy to argue and sometimes it's even fun. But where does it get us?

It makes for a great book title or a slogan or what have you, but is it really a solution? Or should I just stop getting all worked up about what I read online?

Humanity.

2011-11-13T08:37:00.000-05:00

I saw this on PostSecret a couple of weeks ago and I have to say that my heart sank a little. I'm usually not Mr. Sensitive (oh get that shocked look off your face), but this kinda hit me and it took me a moment or two to figure out why. My first thought was that I am probably just too tired, what with my workload being enormous lately and my not getting enough sleep. But it couldn't really be that because usually when that happens I simply think about quitting and all of the other cool things I could do with my life, which leads to me feeling depressed and lunging for a pint of ice cream while I watch morbidly obese reality show contestants sob for two hours (note to self: treadmill!). Then I thought about how my year has been going and how I have been trying to make this year go better than last and how I have written significantly less in terms of referrals so far (only a couple so far that weren't tardies/skipping class) and how I blamed (and still blame) myself for having a short fuse last year and that I have been making a conscious effort to let things slide off my back.

Because, as I have read recently, teachers abuse children. No, really. What we do every day by having things such as rules and consideration for the proprieties of polite society hurts the precious flowers that come into our classroom with bright eyes and an eagerness to learn on the first day and causes them to have dull expressions and hate the world. Sure, I'm being snarky there, but when I hear such things directed at me or how I should remember that they're "kids being kids" I can't help but get at least a little bit defensive and the reason I get defensive is because of things like the graphic at top right. I don't think this teacher is the only person in a middle or high school who's had a student say something like this, and he/she certainly isn't the last. During my relatively short teaching career I have been told I was condescending, uptight, mean, disrespectful, and even a racist (that was one of my personal favorite moments), both by students and their parents. Each time I have tried my best not to react the way I wanted to react and simply respond in a courteous, professional manner.

This, by the way, is the hardest thing in the world to do. Had that student told me that I needed to get laid more often, I am sure that several comebacks would have raced through my head, most of which involved what was written on the boys' room wall, but I would have simply said, "Go to the office" and followed it up with a referral slip that included the comment (verbatim, btw. I feel like when I write up foul language in a referral I am providing my administration with some entertainment). Then I wouldn't have gone to my car and cried, but I would have been upset enough that I would have kept thinking about it for the rest of the day. In fact, there have been times when I have thought about such things so much that I have been unable to function on my planning period or even been unable to sleep. Sometimes, even, I let things stew for an entire weekend and I am unable to enjoy time with my family the way I want to.

Which, by the way, cannot be healthy and has probably contributed to the 30 pounds I need to lose and the high blood pressure I seem to have. Aside from that, it definitely contributes to an increasingly negative view of my job and my students. And just typing that has made me hear the voice in my head that says: "That's horrible! How DARE YOU think of students that way! I can't believe you're a teacher! I would never want my child in your classroom!" But it's the honest to God's truth. I am reminded day in and day out--by administration, by fellow teachers, by crappy motivational speakers, by articles, by blogs, by message board posts, by commenters--that students are people and that they're human and that they make mistakes and that they might not have the best lives at home and that ... well, you get the picture.

The thing is, so am I and I am sure that my students aren't reminded day in and day out that their teachers also get up early in the morning, take work home with them at night, have families to deal with, have health problems, have money problems, have lives outside of the classroom, and even do things for themselves and not for them on occasion. Okay, I shouldn't generalize there because I have had many students who are great people and are great to talk to about things that have nothing to do with the subject of our class, and whom I have been proud to teach, especially when they have overcome obstacles that anyone shouldn't have to overcome at their age. But there are so many students and parents who see their teachers as this thing rather than a person ("That's horrible! How DARE YOU think of students that way! I can't believe you're a teacher! I would never want my child in your classroom!"). I'm not a man with a family, interests, and life; I am a "teacher" who exploits them by hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society.

Whenever I have rather crappy days and I am trying to see some positive (or at least trying to not beat myself up), I talk to myself as if I were giving myself advice as a new teacher.

Then the men in white coats come and ...

Anyway, what usually happens is the following. First, I remember that this is the reality and that I shouldn't buy into all of the "they love you and are eager to LEARN!" crap that people throw at you as you're entering the field, especially if you're going into secondary ed ("That's horrible! How DARE YOU think of students that way! I can't believe you're a teacher! I would never want my child in your classroom!").

Then I remind myself that sometimes it's worth it to focus on those who actually give a crap during the 45 minutes you see them every day and maybe for the sake of sanity ignore those who are giving you problems, at least for one day and sanity's sake ("That's horrible! How DARE YOU think of students that way! I can't believe you're a teacher! I would never want my child in your classroom!").

Then I say that it's okay if you're not giving 100% all of the time and that just because you're not up on the latest things and aren't using the most innovative teaching techniques every minute of every day, it doesn't mean you're a bad teacher. ("That's horrible! How DARE YOU think of students that way! I can't believe you're a teacher! I would never want my child in your classroom!").

Then, I search for what's worth it, because if I can't think of a reason for coming in every day, then why do I continue to do this? I mean, I seriously consider if they're worth teaching ("That's horrible! How DARE YOU think of students that way! I can't believe you're a teacher! I would never want my child in your classroom!").

Finally, I pack up the pity party and think of what I have to do for tomorrow.

Under the Rug

2011-11-12T08:04:00.001-05:00

When I turned on the television this morning and tuned in to our local morning news, hoping to get the weather, I was greeted by the smiling face of the sports guy, who seemed overly happy to be talking about FRIDAY NIGHT AWESOMENESS or whatever the five-minute high school football segment was called. After sitting through inordinately long coverage of playoff games complete with I-wish-this-was-SportsCenter-but-I'll-never-get-there narration, I started reading the Washington Post and came across "What Joe Paterno Taught Me: It's Time To Stop Keeping Secrets" by J.C. Derrick. The writer is a sex abuse victim who is relating how hard it is to come forward and tries to get us in the heads of the victims in the Penn State sex abuse scandal.

So what does one have to do with the other? Well, the other day, when Paterno was fired and the students at Penn State rioted, we were talking about it at work and I think it took us about two seconds to say that something like Penn State "could happen here." Now, that does sound like jumping to conclusions and I am not going to waste anyone's time with a lesson on how as teachers we'd all be fired if we failed to report something like this to the proper authorities the moment after we heard about it, no matter how confidential a student thought our conversation was. But I do want to take at least a moment to consider "jock culture" and the other things that allowed this to happen at Penn State and why it could happen at a local high school (oh who am I kidding, it probably has somewhere).

I am sure that many administrators, athletic directors, and coaches out there will disagree with me on the point I am going to make, but there are plenty who will definitely agree when I say that athletes get special treatment. We obviously see that in the press for both pros and college players, but spend time at a high school where if you are a male athlete in a marquee sport (football/basketball/baseball), you are given a pass on many, many fronts, from low academic performance to bullying and illegal behavior. And I said male and "marquee sport" on purpose because in my experience, the athletes who are upstanding students and individuals tend to be on teams like golf, CC/track, field hockey, or volleyball; or they tend to be young women (except for cheerleaders, but I'm not going there).

I think this has to do with the fact that things like cross country meets don't get their own segments on the news, and while I know I'm making broad generalizations here, there's some truth to all of that. I also know there are exceptions to the rule--at a former place of employment, the football coach was very quick to come down on players for academics/behavior. But exceptions to the rule are just that, and because a football team's showing up on FRIDAY NIGHT AWESOMENESS makes the school look good, the fact that a running back is in danger of failing three classes or a defensive end was caught for the umpteenth time with pot or was beating the crap out of a weaker kid will all get brushed aside or swept under the rug. So it isn't far-fetched that if something like Penn State happened, a high school administration or a district administration would go pretty far to keep things quiet.

And look, I'm not trying to completely bash sports or athletes. I love sports and I'm a sports fan. But we've created this culture in our schools that has made high school football king of everything and I know plenty of educators who have grown frustrated and even cynical as a result and have more or less thrown their hands in the air when it comes to disciplining misbehavior, especially because punishments are too light or "kids are just being kids." That culture, though it touts the benefits of confidence and leadership, needs to change, and if people are seeing what's going on at Penn State but are not taking a look where they are, there won't be much point.

Some advice to those professional development "experts"

2011-10-24T23:33:00.001-04:00

Oh, hi. So you've been asked to be the speaker at our next district-mandated professional-development day? Greetings and salutations.

Now, I have to say that I feel for you a little bit. After all, I wouldn't want to be in your shoes, walking into an auditorium full of a few hundred people, most of whom heard that you were coming to speak to us and immediately groaned, complained that your speaking fee is probably as much as they make in one year, and may have even emailed an administrator to voice their concerns about thousands of dollars spent on guest speakers when the building doesn't have a working photocopier or heat. You're in front of a crowd that is either going to be completely passive or openly hostile; considering we're all professionals and our bosses are in the room, probably the former.

So your job is hard. Oh sure, there's going to be someone who sits front and center, nods with great interest at all of your points, laughs at all of your attempts at jokes, and strikes up a lengthy conversation with you at intermission (one you will undoubtedly mention after intermission). But you and I both know that he or she isn't the person you are trying to "reach" during this session. The person you're trying to "reach" during this session is sitting all the way in the back, hoping he can spend the next few hours grading papers, and thinks that person in the front and center is a total kissass who needs to die in a fire.

As that person in the back, I thought I would take the time to help you out here. Oh yes, I can hear you now. I'm not willing to change or accept new ways of thinking or be innovative or whatever you want to call it. I'm a luddite. I'm part of the problem. My attitude is disrespectful. You hope I die in a fire. I've heard all of that. But I do think that a few words of advice might do you some good because I'm not the only person who walks around with a grumpy attitude toward professional development. Bad speaker after bad speaker and worthless session after worthless session has completely tainted my view of who you are, which I know isn't open-minded or even nice, but come on, it's human nature.

Anyway, here's some pointers:

1. Your credentials are nice, but please stop talking about them. I'm glad you got your bachelor's from The School of Hard Knocks, a Master's from Real World College, and a Ph.D. from Whatsamatta U, and I do respect that; however, if my principal or superintendent mentioned that when introducing you, I don't think I need to hear about it again. And again. And again. You know what those degrees are? They're a nice set of tits, and if you want a relationship you're going to have to get me to see past them.

2. I don't need your life story. Oh, background is great, especially when you are using your own experience to inform the topic at hand ... but please don't spend 90 minutes of a two-hour session giving me your life story. Furthermore, I really don't care how many years you taught and how many years you worked with teachers. Yes, it's great that it all adds up to 40 years of experience, but there are some people in your audience who have that experience or more. If I simply wanted the advice of a veteran educator, I'd talk to htem. Or I'd call my father, who taught for 35 years. None of them will cost me your speaking fee.

3. Please don't assume I suck. You know how you start trotting out examples of the bad teachers you've encountered in your travels and tell stories of all their bad methods and how you're going to help us correct those problems? I, and many of the people in your audience, are thinking the following: "But I don't do that. But I don't do that. But I don't do that. But I don't do that." And that's how we think it, as if it's a broken record playing until you stop. Please, when you are hired to come speak, do some research that goes beyond knowing the school's name or asking the superintendent for a copy of our test scores. Contact some teachers. Sure, you might get the aforementioned kissasses, but we can see a canned presentation coming from a mile away.

Furthermore, do your research to find out what we DO so that I also don't see all of your examples and think: "I already do that. I already do that. I already do that."

4. I know you taught in 1968, but I wasn't even born then, so stop talking about it. No, really. Do you have any examples of bad teaching from after Watergate? If so, please use them. My younger colleagues and I are feeling like this is a waste of our time.

5. If you are using PowerPoint, please make sure we can read your slides. Black 20-point Times New Roman on a screen that has a lot of glare is giving me a headache and I, along with half the people in here, are now thinking that we could make a more readable presentation in the time it takes to change classes.

6. Oh, and don't just get up in front of us and read your PowerPoint.

7. Identify real problems and please work with us to figure out real solutions. You know, how about asking us to break out into groups to tackle a problem we see and then use your much-talked-about expertise to think up a different approach to a solution? It's much better than you standing up in front of us and giving us a one-size-fits-all solution (especially considering that you have K-12 educators in the room and what works in K won't work in 12).

8. Let us have breakout sessions that last for longer than a few minutes. Let me tell you something I've noticed in my classroom: whenever we do group work, I notice that the first few minutes of said group work is spent gossiping, socializing, and sometimes fooling around. Always. I've developed this approach: instead of telling people to get on task, I let this happen and give a little more time than I intended. Why? Because eventually, most people will turn their attention to the task at hand. Sure, there are individuals who won't and will do nothing but disrupt the situation, but I can deal with them individually instead of getting frustrated with a whole class.

Now, when you break us into groups, you have to account for the fact that at least the first five minutes of that breakout is going to be a bitch session. It always happens. We love to complain. Let that happen. Let it happen and give us more time than you think we need because I have found that if we have enough time, we WILL get to the task at hand and it's when our time is limited that we pay lip service to whatever you're trying to get us to do. Yes, it might take up more time and you won't be able to talk as much, but it'll get us engaged, right?

9. Start a discussion in the session. No, really. If there are 200 people in the room, set up a couple of mics in the aisles and start a town hall. There are things we want to say to you but you're too busy blabbering on and as a result we're too busy tuning out. Get a back and forth going. It makes the classes I teach more enjoyable when we've got a good conversation going, why wouldn't it make for a good in-service?

10. Ask for feedback. I cannot tell you how many times I have left an in-service and never saw a comment card or a link to a survey or anything that would suggest that you care about how I felt about your presentation. Am I not your student? Should you not care about my opinion? Would it not make me stop writing blog posts like this?

So yeah, it's just a few words of advice. See you next in-service day.

How we succeed by failing

2011-10-16T16:00:00.001-04:00

In today's Washington Post, Kathleen Parker has an excellent piece that discusses the topic of failure ("How We Succeed By Failing," WaPo, 10/16/11). She begins by addressing a much-discussed topic in the media lately, the career of Steve Jobs, but then says something that I think is insightful and needs to be repeated:

We’re so afraid that our kids won’t measure up that we drive them crazy with overbooked schedules and expectations and then create a sense of entitlement by insisting on assigning blame elsewhere when their performance is lackluster. Sideline parents, first cousins to back-seat drivers, who challenge coaches, teachers and umpires on behalf of their children are a relatively new development that can’t be considered positive.

I recommend reading the piece and taking it as food for thought, especially in light of our constant conversations on what it means to help students be successful.

Teacher Mix Tape: The Boxer

2011-10-09T10:28:00.001-04:00

I was driving home from work the other day and The Gaslight Anthem's American Slang album was in my CD player (remember, I'm a teacher ... I drive a car from 1998), and as I pulled out of the parking lot, the first bars of track 7, "The Boxer" came on. I think it might have been because I've been in such a combative mood on this blog lately or because I had been in the need of a "Aw hell YEAH!" song to come on, but it just spoke to me. So I figured I'd post it because it's been a while since I've done one of these.

Plus, aren't we all boxers in some way or another?

Okay, sorry, that was cheesy. Anyway ...

The Boxer
Performed by The Gaslight Anthem

Got your pride and your prose
Tucked just like a Tommy gun
Somewhere in the smoke
Just in case you need it

I know you got your pride and your prose
Tucked just like a Tommy gun
Somewhere in the smoke, just in case you need it, son
I heard it's been a ride rougher than the last one
What'd you used to say? Oh, the harder they come

But he, he swears he's praying for a good time
And he, he said he just doesn't miss her
And I have heard you never really lose it, do you?
Do you?

You took it all gracefully on the chin
Knowing that the beatings had to someday end
You found the bandages inside the pen
And the stitches on the radio

But there was something heavy holding you down
And there were whispers that were driving you crazy
And now you haunt the heart of this town
Remember when I knew a boxer, baby

And your tattooed knuckles, oh how they grind down
Try to be a man, tough just like your father
Try to settle down, more like c-calm down
Remember them songs and the reasons we were singing for

But he said he just doesn't miss her
And he, he says it's somewhere in his framework
And I have heard you never really lose it, do you?
Do you?

You took it all gracefully on the chin
Knowing that the beatings had to someday end
You found the bandages inside the pen
And the stitches on the radio

But there was something heavy holding you down
And there were reasons that were driving you crazy
Until you haunt the heart of this town
Remember when I knew a boxer, baby

And you can wait all night long
Until it all goes wrong
And you waste away your soul
And you can wait, wait, wait, wait

You took it all gracefully on the chin
Knowing that the beatings had to someday end
You found the bandages inside the pen
And the stitches on the radio

But there was something heavy holding you down
And there were whispers that were driving you crazy
And now you haunt the heart of this town
Remember when I knew a boxer, baby

Remember when I knew a boxer, baby

The ego vs. the committee

2011-10-08T12:51:00.002-04:00

I was in one of those interminably long professional development sessions this week where maybe 20% of what the hired speaker was saying either applied to me or was something I had never heard about or even tried before, and at one point he was going on about today's companies that are considered innovative and forward-thinking and how they allow for creativity among their employees. Two of the companies he mentioned were Google and Apple.

Now, both are fine examples (yes, Google is a fine example and I shall not make fun of Google unless the Google gods delete this blog, which is published via a Google product. I love you Google, oh yes I do ...), but he neglected a couple of things that I think are vital to any analysis of these companies. Regarding Google (I love you Google, and will be true ...), they have gotten very far because they cultivate creativity and are, from what I have read, probably are one of the best companies to work for; however, they also demand a lot from their employees (long work hours, for instance) and have gotten further in the last few years because they continue to buy other companies and their products. And regarding Apple, well ... I've seen a lot about Steve Jobs during the last few days (obviously) and much has been made of his being an innovator as well as his creativity as well as the fact that he didn't graduate college and was successful.

Not enough, in my opinion, has been said about his ego.

I'm not going to go into the Jobs and college thing because I know plenty of people who never attended college or dropped out and were very successful. I also know plenty of people who attended college, graduated, and were very successful. And in both cases, vice versa. After all, for every Tom Brady, there is a Todd Marinovich.

What I have been thinking of was Jobs's ego and his commitment to having what he envisioned always be at the forefront of Apple's direction. When I heard about his death via Twitter, my wife and I turned on CNN and watched Anderson Cooper interview someone (whose name I forget) about Jobs and his legacy, one of the things I found most interesting was that the person didn't hold back on talking about how driven Jobs was and how when it came to managing the company, he had an ego that had to be dealt with [a side note: at this exact same time, Bill O'Reilly was holding court regarding Sarah Palin's irrelevant announcement that she's not running for president. Way to be with timely coverage, Fox News].

Then I started thinking about two other great modern innovators, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Both were showmen as much as they were creators and both would probably had not be as known and as successful had they not been driven by ego. Edison, for instance, didn't necessarily create all the things he was credited for--he had a lab's worth of people working for him--but his Edison "brand" became very important during the height of his fame. Same with Ford: I think the famous quote attributed to him is that people can buy the Model T in whatever color they want, as long as it's black.

Keep going through history and you can see examples of other greats with vision and an ego propelling it: Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, George Lucas, Jim Henson, Walt Disney, Bill Gates ... and those are just some I could think of off the top of my head.

These people are great examples of creativity and innovation and problem-solving. They did what we strive to do as educators each day and they did what we strive to get our students to do on a fairly regular basis. But the thing is, we have no problem with the fact that sometimes they took risks and made bad decisions or ran roughshod over people beneath them to preserve their vision and were sometimes seen as egomaniacal and tyrannical, because the end result was great. As a teacher and yearbook adviser I don't feel that I have this option most of the time.

The main reason for that is obviously that my students don't work for me. Granted, having a yearbook staff is different because I try to instill the idea that we're all working on a job as opposed to taking a class, mainly because we have work and deadlines as opposed to lessons and tests; but my English students are not employees. If anything, we're all explorers with my role sometimes being a tour guide or simply another explorer based on whatever we're doing that day. Yet I sit in a two-hour session and am told that Steve Jobs is someone to look up to and emulate but I need to leave my ego at the door.

Isn't that the mentality of a committee? And don't committees basically feed bureaucracy? And isn't bureaucracy the reason there's such a problem with the public education system?

Ugh. To quote one of my favorite ego-drive scoundrels: "No time to discuss this as a committee."

Now, teachers shouldn't be tyrants. The tightly wound martinet is rightfully disdained and ridiculed in our educational culture ("Food will be eaten on YOUR time. Why are you continuously late for this class, Mr. Spicoli? Why do you shamelessly waste my time like this") because he has no place in our educational culture. People like that are dinosaurs and may they enjoy long retirements. But we need to be realistic enough to realize that it is part of human nature to have an ego and yes, it's okay if it shows every once in a while.

Let me give you two examples, one as it applies to my teaching English and one as it applies to my role as an adviser. Every year in my English class, the first essay is a "gimmie" assignment, written really for the purpose of being able to see my students' writing firsthand and assessing what we'll need to work on as a class as the year goes on. I spot my students 50 points out of the 100 points the assignment is worth (I tried doing the "it's not a grade, don't panic" thing in the past and it completely backfired so I found this middle ground) so most of the grades are in the 80s or 90s and I usually get some decent stuff. However, based on experience, I know before going in what we're going to have to focus on: improving use of detail in a narrative or proof to support an argument; strengthening organization and flow through better transitions; and strengthening style and voice through more complex sentences. These are kind of the common needs for a sophomore-year writer and had I not considered myself a bit of an expert on the topic I would have a tougher job ahead of me in planning.

They're good assumptions to make and that allows for two things: first, if I see all my students exceed my expectations then I happily work on taking their writing to an even higher level; second, I can look for any other things that need improvement, like mechanics, which always seem to be different from year to year. Then, I can go to the eleventh-grade teachers and give them a report and even ask what they think I should work on so they aren't feeling the need to reteach. It comes from concern out of wanting my students to do their best, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that I didn't want to lose face in front of colleagues. Again, it's human nature.

As far as the yearbook's concerned, I do my best to have my staff run the show while I take care of the rather tedious logistical stuff--bookkeeping, organizing picture days, etc.--but there is a point where I do act as an overseer of content because to a certain extent I am the one constant presence on the staff. There's a natural turnover that occurs from year to year, especially when seniors graduate, so I kind of hold the cards (and by the way, accept all the blame) when it comes to the overall look and feel of the book and wanting it to improve from year to year. This means developing a clear look for each volume and working with them to strike the correct balance between a creative and unique look and a uniform look (see also: templates). When the books are praised, I admit that I hold my head up high, not just because of what my staff accomplished but what I accomplished with them. Again, it's human nature.

We cannot tell someone to take themselves and how they feel and how they want to look completely out of the equation when it comes to being a leader, a teacher, or even a co-worker because that's asking the impossible, especially when we hold up certain captains of industry, creativity, and even athleticism as examples. Keeping your ego in check is obviously necessary, but denying the contribution that an ego makes to innovation is counterproductive to that innovation. In fact, being honest with ourselves about what personally drives us and that we do things out of self-interest is healthy and can actually make us better teachers because we'll honestly care more about what what we're doing.

The country lost a great man in Steve Jobs, and in the time between when I started this post and finished, the passing of one of football's all-time biggest egos, Al Davis, was announced. Both of these men were innovators and paved the way for advances in their fields (NFL Network did a great series on the AFL a while back and Davis's contribution to the NFL-AFL merger was significant), and both of these men had serious missteps along the way. When you get that full profile, I think you appreciate them more, especially when having a vision and being innovative means taking personal risks and acknowledging that self-sacrifice (which we in this field are all familiar with) needs to come with self-reward.

On 21st Century Learning

2011-10-05T23:05:00.002-04:00

On her blog the other day, Alice Leung posted "I'm a 21C learner and teacher," which is expressed in a video that is one of the best things I have read all week. It's honest, it's realistic, it's ... exactly what people need to hear.

99%

2011-10-03T21:39:00.000-04:00

So October is National Anti-Bullying Awareness Month (I seriously had to look up the phrasing b/c I accidentally typed "National Bullying Month" D'oh!), and simultaneously yet unrelated to bullying in schools, protesters have camped out near and on Wall Street because they are fed up with the financial system in the country and how it has completely wasted away and screwed over the middle class.

Additionally, there is an ongoing online voice, a Tumblr called We Are The 99%. The title refers to the disproportionate holding of wealth in today's United States. I've known about the site for a while and when I'm not buried in work have followed it when I can, but taking a look at it tonight and seeing how the media has focused on both Amanda Knox's trial (which GMA called AMANDA KNOX: JUDGMENT DAY this morning ... blech) and Michael Jackson's doctor's trial, something struck me.

I honestly don't know what it was, but as I was reading what people wrote on the site (well, wrote on the papers they're holding in their photographs), I was simultaneously heartbroken and angry. And I wanted to write about it, but I couldn't exactly think about how this ties into my field of education. Okay, I could, but I needed something more than just my usual political views or feelings on various aspects of public education and policy matters.

Then I read this (not edited for spelling/grammar but emphasis in bold is mine):

I am a 56 yr. old mother of 6 with 2 school age children. I make $18 hr., but only get 25-27 hrs. of work per week. I gate NO health insurance. My rent is $1,000 mon. plus utilities. Thank God my children get free lunches at school, because they do not eat breakfast and suppertime is scarce. I drive a car with 192,xxx mi on it; when it does die I will take 3 buses and it will take 2 hours to get to work. If I were to lose my job due to a health crisis, we would be homeless.

WE are the 99%!!!!

I have spent years--since my childhood, even--hearing about how useless my profession is and how public education has done irrevocable harm to this country with its idiot factories and high teacher salaries and pensions (no, seriously). And we're easy to gang up on in the media. After all, we work for little, don't work for most of the year, and spend all day reveling in our ego and superiority over the masses. That is when we're not complaining about being mistreated, underpaid, and overworked. We are bully, victim, or both, depending on who you ask and when you ask them.

But we are also the 99%.

Not only that, every day we are with the 99% because we are teaching them (not teaching the 99%'s children, mind you, but the 99% themselves ... after all, they are part of the population even if most of them are not old enough to vote yet). Just as I try to make do with what little I am paid, they find their parents are like the woman above, grateful for the hot lunch (and even breakfast in some cases) they get every day; they find themselves hoping their parents or parent or grandparent or aunt or guardian is going to be able to make enough to pay whatever bills are overdue; they find themselves working a job not for a shopping habit but to help keep the roof over the family's head.

In turn, we find ourselves struggling to keep them focused on the possibilities after they leave our classrooms, repeating how important a high school diploma is even though we ourselves sometimes grow pessimistic about the future. We want them to stay on the straight and narrow so they have a chance, then find ourselves getting frustrated or even angry when they wind up suspended for starting a fight in the hallway. We want them to read great works of literature and write essays and stories because we see the value of the written word and better communication, then gnash our teeth when they won't, don't, or can't put forth the effort.

And all the while, hearing how much we ruined them. How much we destroyed them. How much a union that some of us don't have destroyed the country. How ungrateful we are. How arrogant we are. How inhuman we are. All that yelling at each other, and it's so misdirected. Why kick me down in the mud? Why enable the 1% who kicked all of us down in the mud?

It's hard not to be selfish in a time like this, to say "I got what I need and what I want and I'm not sharing it with you," to claim your are entitled to certain things while others are not. I'd be lying if thoughts like that never crossed my mind--I am only human and no human is that altruistic or magnanimous. But I spend the early part of the evening reading a book on why leaves change color to my four-year-old son who sits as still as a four-year-old boy can while learning about photosynthesis, and I wonder what example I would be setting if I allowed myself to get sucked into the "me" mentality.

It would be so easy, wouldn't it? To just say "fuck you" to a homeless person or "well, you should have managed your money better" to someone whose house got foreclosed upon and then go on my merry way. But I just can't do that. And while I'm too much of a smart-ass and sometimes cynic to be a true crusader, I feel like I need to do something, even if on the basic level that means going into work tomorrow and doing my job.

Another take on "Education Nation"

2011-10-02T19:17:00.002-04:00

From Nancy Flanagan's "Teacher in a Strange Land" blog over at EdWeek ("Regular Teachers, Regular Schools") ...

And there's the rub, for me: Education Nation is not a program for regular teachers or about regular schools, let alone regular parents and school leaders. "Seeing and being seen" isn't on regular teachers' agendas-- they don't get to attend summits. These days, regular teachers don't even get the opportunity to attend conferences or get good professional development. They're lucky to have a job.

It's a great piece and one I think everyone should read.

20 Things a Teacher Wants The Nation to Know About Education

2011-10-02T11:07:00.002-04:00

*I guess I should qualify this with a note. Much of this post is directed toward the high school level, as that is what I teach. I am of the opinion that what works at and what students need at a lower level is different ... and vice versa.

So earlier this week, NBC News's Education Nation hosted a panel that was attended both live and via Facebook and from that came this list that's been going around from blog to blog called "20 Things Students Want the Nation to Know About Education." I didn't see the NBC News story, mainly because I don't watch nightly network news, but I did see the nice handy-dandy list (we love lists, don't we) on a blog called "The Innovative Educator." I won't say too much about said blog except that it's a little presumptuous to call yourself innovative, and the blogger spends so much time pissing all over teachers that it's no wonder she posted this:

I have to critically think in college, but your tests don't teach me that.
We learn in different ways at different rates.
I can't learn from you if you are not willing to connect with me.
Teaching by the book is not teaching. It's just talking.
Caring about each student is more important than teaching the class.
Every young person has a dream. Your job is to help bring us closer to our dreams.
We need more than teachers. We need life coaches.
The community should become more involved in schools.
Even if you don't want to be a teacher, you can offer a student an apprenticeship.
Us youth love all the new technologies that come out. When you acknowledge this and use technology in your teaching it makes learning much more interesting.
You should be trained not just in teaching but also in counseling.
Tell me something good that I'm doing so that I can keep growing in that.
When you can feel like a family member it helps so much.
We appreciate when you connect with us in our worlds such as the teacher who provided us with extra help using Xbox and Skype
Our teachers have too many students to enable them to connect with us in they way we need them to.
Bring the electives that we are actually interested in back to school. Things like drama, art, cooking, music.
Education leaders, teachers, funders, and policy makers need to start listening to student voice in all areas including teacher evaluations.
You need to use tools in the classroom that we use in the real world like Facebook, email, and other tools we use to connect and communicate.
You need to love a student before you can teach a student.
We do tests to make teachers look good and the school look good, but we know they don't help us to learn what's important to us.

I was thinking about how to respond to this in a way that doesn't sound like I hate students and doesn't sound overly defensive, because there are some great points made here, but I feel that some of them are misguided, and that doesn't mean that the students are wrong or anything, just that they don't have the perspective to understand the issue fully.

That's not the first time that's happened or I've said that. It probably won't be the last, either. And it doesn't make a student's opinion any less valuable or not worth listening to. However, what will make a student's opinion less valuable is if you we take them for what we are and not try to engage them in a conversation about their learning. With caveats, of course--and I'll get to that because I have a list that offers my own (the teacher's perspective) Because lists are fun. So, in case you missed the title of this post, here are 20 Things a Teacher Wants the Nation to Know About Education:

If we're not going to get rid of standardized testing, we need better tests. We need to ditch multiple choice and make the focus on higher-level critical thinking. If that means that Pearson's evaluators spend more time grading the tests, then so be it. We give them so much money anyway they should start earning it.
I know that putting students who are at multiple levels in one class is supposed to encourage the lower students to catch up, but when you have 25 in the room, they don't catch up. They act up. Then the "smarter" students get bored. Either start tracking the students better or make a concerted effort to require a cap of 15 or so students per class. It may mean hiring more teachers and spending more money, but I find that once you get above 15 in a class, you're babysitting more than you are teaching.
I want to connect to students, I really do. But sometimes they come in and they do their best to leave my room. When they don't want to learn in the first place, it becomes trying to get blood from a stone. And when I try to force that connection, I look like a foolish parent trying to look cool.
We need to stop spending so much money on textbooks that are out of date and relatively useless. The only times I've used an English textbook is when there is a story, poem, or play included that I want to teach, which means I don't have to photocopy anything. I know teachers in history who barely touch the textbook except when their nose is to the SOL-prep grindstone. Stop feeding Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and other companies. Oh, and hold them accountable and investigate them as much as you want to investigate us and hold us accountable.
Hey, I'd like to care about every student and I want to see them do better, but this is a maddening, frustrating endeavor because students don't often realizing that "caring" goes both ways. It's hard to continually care about someone who uses that as an opportunity to walk all over you and take advantage of you. And teaching the class is my job and at the end of the day I need to do my job as a teacher and students need to do their jobs as students. Were you out a few days with the flu? I hope you're feeling better. Yes, you can go to the library and make up what you missed while the rest of the class takes the test you're unprepared for, but you eventually do have to take that test.
Every young person has a dream. Our job is to give them skills and tools that they will learn how to use in order to achieve those dreams. It may not look like we're helping them achieve those dreams, but by teaching them how to read and think about what they read, how to write and communicate clearly, and how to weigh the necessary factors before making a decision, we are helping them achieve those dreams.
I am not a life coach. I am not a therapist. I am not a pa ... okay, I am a parent, but I'm not their parent. I am a subject matter expert, and I am a teacher. Sometimes, I find myself falling into those roles because of the rapport I've developed with the individual, but I know that I have boundaries and I know that there are rules I have to live and work by. Students need to know that sometimes I am required to tell others about what they've told me in confidence, because that's the law. They also need to know that I cannot force myself into their lives because that is overstepping my bounds.
The community should become more involved in schools. Except when the community is wrong and seems to want to do everything they can to not pay taxes, which means dismantling the school system. Or want to change the curriculum because they think it violates their political or religious views. Or when they hold Hunter, Austin, or Logan's performance on a football field Friday night in higher regard than his own literacy.
Some of us want to be teachers, but we are finding it increasingly more difficult to do this job for the money we're paid. The masochists and martyrs will continue to be underpaid and suffer through, but so many will leave prematurely for their own sakes. Then, they'll be seen as not being able to "cut it" or probably "never good in the first place," a false assumption made by those who don't want to pay teachers what they're worth.
Technology is great but it is not a panacea. We need to help students use it more wisely. We need to help them use the internet not only to find information and discern which of that information is worth using. We need to help them become proficient in the applications that the "real world" expects them to know. We need to demonstrate that it's more than just bells and whistles that makes everything look shiny and new.
Parents need to be more involved but not confrontational. Very often, students will say things or behave in ways that parents don't know about (or are in denial about). I am not saying that we know more about your kids than you do; I'm saying that we often see a different side of them.
Students need to know what constructive criticism is and why that is more important than a pat on the back. I don't use red pen on their essays because I want to crush their self-esteem. I do it because it shows up and they can see my comments clearly. I also don't mark up their papers because they are bad papers. I do it because I want them to see where and how they can improve. Just because I was thorough in my comments and you got a C doesn't mean that you're a bad writer, that you're stupid, or that I hate you.
As a teacher (in high school, anyway), I need to act professionally. This goes for the people I work with as well as my students. I never think of co-workers as family, and I never think of my building as "home." I have a family and I have a home. These aren't "my kids," these are my students. We are going to have a conversation about reading and writing and hopefully engage the material, and while we may joke around or have the occasional argument, it won't be solved with hugs and kisses because that's not appropriate.
We know when we're trying too hard or when we're being patronizing. Sometimes, we connect with the guys in the class because Sunday's football games were great or it's time for the World Series or we can recommend a great horror movie. Sometimes we connect with the girls in the class because we like the book they're reading or are following how the field hockey team is doing. But sometimes we're watching Mad Men while they're watching Teen Mom. And that's okay. Connecting to students means knowing our strengths and weaknesses and not forcing it.
Teachers have too many students to enable us to connect with them and teach them in they way we need to.
Bring electives that are actually interesting and valuable back to school. Things like drama, art, cooking, music, vocational courses, journalism, psychology, keyboarding, phys. ed. ...
Student evaluations should be part of the year, but they should be one of many factors and they should be a back and forth between teachers and students in the form of an open conversation wherein the teacher takes notes and listens. Administrators don't need to see them because 9/10ths of the time administrators are clueless and will not focus on the right things in a student's evaluation.
If we're trying to use tools like email, Facebook, or Twitter to engage and interact with our students, four things need to happen: administrators need to stop treating these tools like they're agents of the devil; administrators and parents need to trust teachers to use them wisely; those teachers who do not use these tools wisely need to understand there are consequences for doing so (and those consequences should not extend to every other teacher, especially since we're told not to punish every kid in the class b/c Tommy was talking too much); and students need to keep up their end of it, communicate back and know that what's said through those channels weighs as much as what's said in the classroom.
We don't need to love our students. Love is something that is more personal than professional. We need to appreciate our students. Furthermore, they should appreciate us. From that will grow respect for one another.
Teachers do tests to make the school look good, but we know they don't help students learn what's important.

So there's your list. Now let's have a real conversation.

It's like the more money we come across, the more problems we see.

2011-09-17T12:27:00.000-04:00

Recent in Education Week, Nora Fleming reported about how some states and school districts are finding merit pay programs problematic because of issues with funding ("Some States, Districts Abandonding Performance Pay", EdWeek 9/16/11). The article is worth reading in itself and it cuts to the core of what I think is fundamentally misleading about merit pay systems in public education.

I, as we all, have seen the word "accountability" bandied about in the debate over education, and there are many who take a lot of time and energy to vilify teachers because they are (to summarize the argument) taking money away from taxpayers to produce young adults that are increasingly stupid. It's a broken system and they need to be taken to task.

Now, I've never really had a problem with holding teachers accountable for their performance; mainly, because that's what's already done. At least it has in my experience. In seven years of teaching, I have been observed, had meetings with administrators, and had evaluations on a regular basis and in those meetings have discussed methodology of both instruction and classroom management. I haven't necessarily agreed with everything my administrators have suggested, but we've had some good discussions and every once in a while, their feedback or feedback from my peers (and even my from my students) have resulted in me changing or tweaking what I do.

So, it kind of makes sense to simply have a way to make the "teacher accountabilty" you already have more visible, right? Maybe a base pay and bonus program or something that at least produces some sort of statistics that can be held up an published as a counter to the annual AYP festival of pain in the local paper.

Well, as you can see there are a couple of problems with that. One has to do with money and the other has to do with the motivation of those who are very much for "teacher accountability." I know I've said this before somewhere, but it bears repeating: most people who are complaining about school funding and holding teacher accountable for the performance of their students are really only talking about wanting to "fire bad teachers." In other words, they don't see the other side of the coin, which is that for every "bad teacher" you reprimand, there is a well-performing teacher that you have to reward. If you were to have a merit-based pay system and I was doing well, I would have every right to ask for a raise and that would wind up costing those angry taxpayers more money (this, btw, is the same counter I have for anyone who bitches at me about teaching for ... what is it now, one month a year? The length of summer vacation seems to increase in people's minds from year to year). And since schools are not a revenue-generating or profit-making enterprise ... well, you see the problem.

The other has to do with what people really want. There is a sense of entitlement among the public when it comes to their schools. They talk about "making teachers accountable" and what they really want to see is educators put in the stockade or brought up on gallows and hanged. Yes, that's a grisly image and not something that would literally happen these days (I hope), but I have a feeling that there are people out there who will not be satisfied until they, themselves can fire teachers.

And let's not even get started with the concept of "student performance" because that in itself is too loose a term to really measure someone. For instance, is it simply passing a standardized test? That's too simple and leads to a dumbing-down of curriculum and possibly a cheating scandal. Is it passing the class? Well, then, I'll simply pad my gradebook with pointless full-credit assignments and make all tests open book/open note. Or is it simply measurable student achievement despite pass/fail? After all, in a general-level English class, I have students who come in reading above their grade level and students who are reading well below their grade level, so what constitutes achievement for the latter is a cakewalk for the former. Furthermore, the low-achiever might be doing better at the end of the year than he did at the beginning but he still might fail the class despite the improvement. How do you hold someone accountable for that?

So do we continue to throw money at this or do we continue to take it away? Or do we sit down and actually have a constructive conversation with this that comes up with viable long-term solutions that acknowledge the reality of the situation? The frustration continues.

Could I be Paul Krugman in the classroom?

2011-09-12T19:49:00.000-04:00

Lost in the sea of many, many, MANY 9-11 tributes over the weekend were the words of Paul Krugman, noted economics columnist for the New York Times, who has the regular blog "The Conscience of a Liberal." Yesterday and today, he wrote a scathing piece that called out many of the important figures of those times, saying that people such as Rudy Giuliani, George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and others who fall very much on the "conservative/GOP" side of the fence "hijacked" the event during its aftermath and used it for their own personal gain. While he does give the American people credit for their overall behavior of "togetherness" immediately after 9/11/01, he says that in the years after--especially in the lead-up to the Iraq War--this was not often the case.

Today, one of my classes and I discussed three accounts of 9/11, all of which I mentioned in yesterday's post. It was easy for us to dismantle the history book because while they were reading it, some were asking me questions, like "Was the plane that the passengers took over, wasn't that the one in Pennsylvania?" and "Didn't a plane hit The Pentagon?" So they realized that history books are too broad in scope, too vague, and very often too inaccurate.

We moved on to the other pieces, which I specifically picked for them to read because one of them gave the perspective of people their age and the other gave a very "ground level" version of the story. We talked about how the students' perspective was helpful and the staff of the Stuyvesant HS newspaper (which is what they'd read) did the best they could to be objective when necessary, cover as many angles as possible, and not just focus on the grisliness of the event but also on the healing that took place afterwards. I made the comment of how I was envious of the quality of the paper, though I did know firsthand that even the most lackluster of newspaper staffs can accomplish extraordinary feats when the situation calls for it.

Sarah Bunting's "For Thou Art With Us" was another topic and it was interesting to see the reactions, and while I didn't get the analysis of her writing style that I was hoping for (i.e., look at this imagery, look at this use of onomatopoeia), we eventually did get into a good discussion about the worthiness and quality of primary sources and what your perception is versus reality when you go through something like that. I think it helps that we'd just read Life of Pi, but it also helped that they didn't have such a stark view of things in general. Almost none of them would immediately discredit something because it may have embellished a little or was slightly inaccurate due to perception.

I kept my opinion to myself for the most part, at least my opinion on the events of September 11, our reaction, the politics. I'd purposely wanted to make the class non-political and "impersonal" in a manner of speaking. Perhaps if I decide to do this next year and over a couple of days I'll have a segment for things more personal, but as I mentioned yesterday, I wanted what I felt would be a more honest analysis of things. It was slow at times but I thought we were getting there a little.

The other reason I kept things to myself is that I have to say that I didn't have the same attitude of commemoration toward 9/11 that everyone around me seemed to have. Starting on Thursday or Friday, so many of my friends changed their Facebook profile pictures to pictures of flags or the Twin Towers, and then they posted various "Never Forget" sentiments to their statuses. At the most, I linked to the "For Thou Art With Us" story and to a YouTube clip from "The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson" which involves the Twin Towers (and is hilarious, to boot). Oh, and when someone on a message board railed against the idea of calling the day "Patriot Day" and using it to emphasis helping one's community, and then suggested it be called "World Trade Center Day" I reminded that person that "a plane hit another building about 1/2 a mile away from my apartment in Arlington."

Yeah, I was a little over-sensitive there but it was kind of my attitude yesterday. I deliberately avoided most of the media coverage and did my hardest not to say anything completely snarky or rude in the general direction of Facebook, because in all honesty I have grown a bit tired in the past decade of all of it. I was kind of sick of flags by September 16, to be honest. And it's not that I am not patriotic and I don't mean to take a I'm-too-cool-for-school attitude toward the whole thing, but there was a point where I thought it was getting almost maudin and when I read Krugman's posts this afternoon as well as some of the comments offered on The Huffington Post, I have to say that I found myself agreeing with him to some degree, especially his points about how dissenting opinion was treated, especially in the run-up to the Iraq war.

I am slightly grateful that I don't have to wade through the quagmire that will be (or already his) history standards, especially when it comes to teaching lessons on the 2000s, and I fear that though we are ten years removed from 9/11 and eight years removed from the start of the war in Iraq, teachers who discuss the negative side of U.S. foreign policy or how the American public was tricked into supporting a war that it had no business starting will be drummed out of their schools under charges of attempting to "indoctrinate" their students. It sounds paranoid, I know but knowing how vitriolic some parents get when there's a change in the school calendar and how pundits on the right keep beating the "failure of American schools" drum, it isn't too far-fetched.

Btw, one thing I did learn from my lesson this morning -- I probably would have gotten a better conversation out of all of it if I had provided copies of at least one of the pieces. I had simply given them web addresses and told them to come ready to discuss. I asked one of my students if having copies of the essay we were discussing would have made it easier to discuss b/c they could flip back and forth and they said yes. The wonders of technology.

+ or - 19

2011-09-11T07:08:00.000-04:00

The Terrorist Attacks of 9/11
Shortly before 9 a.m. Eastern time on September 11, 2001, American Airline Flight 11 slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. The crash was the first of four airplane crashes in an orchestrated attack against the United States. Just over an hour after the first crash, the World Trade Center began to collapse, trapping the hundreds of firefighters and police who had gone into rescue people. Meanwhile, passengers on another hijacked plane, after learning of the crashes on their cell phones, bravely stormed the cockpit to prevent hijackers targeting another building.

This attack was the first on American soil since the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor 50 years ago. More than 3,000 Americans died in the attacks. American's confidence in their nation's power and safety was deeply shaken.

The above is taken word for word without error correction (there are three--one factual and two mechanical ... see if you can find them!) from Pearson Prentice Hall's high school history textbook Prentice Hall United States History. It's a textbook that I found at work while I was planning a lesson for Monday that centered around the idea of good sources and bad sources as well as being subjective vs. being objective and the importance of perspective when looking at historical events.

Now, I realize that: a) no history teacher worth his or her salt actually relies on a textbook; and b) I don't teach history, I teach English. But I thought that talking about September 11 would be good for at least that one day and be a nice lesson that touches on one of the skills that my students do have to learn, which is conducting better research. After all, they have probably worked on research projects before but in my experience so many of them don't do a thorough enough job and still need to hone their judgment and learn to both not take a source at face value and appreciate the nuances found in various sources.

I was also annoyed when I read that, as well as the next part:

The United States is Attacked
Bush had been in office less than a year when the United States was attacked by a foreign enemy for the first time since Pearl Harbor. Following the hijacking and crashing of four commercial airplanes on September 11, 2001, millions of Americans rushed to donate money, supplies, services, and their own blood. As it became clear that the crashes were part of an organized terrorist attack on the United States, Americans responded as they had after Pearl Harbor--as a unified, determined nation. The attack challenged the new President in unforeseen ways and led to a major shift in American foreign policy.

Having witnessed this particular tragedy (like so many others), I have to say that it's disheartening to see such recent history just washed over like that, especially in a way that deletes the Pentagon attack from the events and glosses over the rather fearful state in which many people lived after those events to the point where there were several hate crimes committed against anyone who looked remotely Arabic and that entire percentage of our population has seen itself persecuted or worse ever since. Plus, why does a company like Pearson think I would need their materials to teach this event? Oh wait, because they give you questions to ask:

Thinking Critically
1. Expressing Problems Clearly Why was September 11, 2001, an "event that changed America"?
2. Draw Inferences After the attacks, a French newspaper declared "We are all Americans." What was meant by this statement?

Gee. I don't know why it was an event that changed America, and considering our popular culture's continuing obsession with frivilous celebrities, I don't know how America has changed, to be honest.

Okay, enough cynicism. Let's show that particular textbook company how you sum up 9/11 in a few paragraphs:

A NATION TRANSFORMED
At 8:46 on the morning of September 11, 2001, the United States became a nation transformed.
An airliner traveling at hundreds of miles per hour and carrying some 10,000 gallons of jet fuel plowed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. At 9:03, a second airliner hit the South Tower. Fire and smoke billowed upward. Steel, glass, ash, and bodies fell below.The Twin Towers,
where up to 50,000 people worked each day, both collapsed less than 90 minutes later.

At 9:37 that same morning, a third airliner slammed into the western face of the Pentagon. At 10:03, a fourth airliner crashed in a field in southern Pennsylvania. It had been aimed at the United States Capitol or the White House, and was forced down by heroic passengers armed with the knowledge that America was under attack.

More than 2,600 people died at the World Trade Center; 125 died at the Pentagon; 256 died on the four planes. The death toll surpassed that at Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

This immeasurable pain was inflicted by 19 young Arabs acting at the behest of Islamist extremists headquartered in distant Afghanistan. Some had been in the United States for more than a year, mixing with the rest of the population. Though four had training as pilots, most were not well-educated. Most spoke
English poorly, some hardly at all. In groups of four or five, carrying with them only small knives, box cutters, and cans of Mace or pepper spray, they had hijacked the four planes and turned them into deadly guided missiles.

Why did they do this? How was the attack planned and conceived? How did the U.S. government fail to anticipate and prevent it? What can we do in the future to prevent similar acts of terrorism?

A Shock, Not a Surprise
The 9/11 attacks were a shock, but they should not have come as a surprise. Islamist extremists had given plenty of warning that they meant to kill Americans indiscriminately and in large numbers. Although Usama Bin Ladin himself would not emerge as a signal threat until the late 1990s, the threat of Islamist terrorism grew over the decade.

In case you are wondering where that summary came from, it's not from a textbook and I didn't write it. It's from the Executive Summary of the 9/11 Commission, which you can read for free online.

Now, tell me, how is it that Congress, which is known for being long-winded on a consistent basis, provides a more succinct and accurate description of the events of September 11 than a publisher whose job it is to provide succinct accounts of historical events to students?

I know I sound a bit too angry at this right now and I probably am. But in all honesty, as I have said at least a few times before, I am getting tired of the constant mourning over these events because I don't think that it does the students in our schools any good. In fact, taking a look at a textbook like Pearson's as a first source for information on recent events continues to keep history class looking like one giant anachronism because I can go to sites like The New York Times and The Washington Post or the great photography retrospective Here is New York for a full, even interactive look at the events of that day and be more engaged and walk away feeling that I know way more about what happened, why it happened, and its effects than if I were assigned a lesson created by Pearson Prentice Hall.

Because "Why is this an event that changed America?" is not a question that encourages critical thinking. This Monday, my students have been assigned to read two online pieces: one is a personal account of being in New York on that day and the other is the student newspaper of a Manhattan high school. We are going to discuss them not in terms of sharing personal stories or talking about the politics of 9/11 or talking about freedom and liberty, but by examining them for their worth and seeing how more than one view on an event--and very often, a "street level view"--can inform people just as well if not better than "official" sources.

Our job as teachers is no longer to stand by and act all sullen during a required moment of silence. The students in high school today were kindergarteners when the attacks happened; that means that the youngest kids were not even born. Unless they were directly affected by it, they don't fully understand why today is important and they need something more than someone telling them that it "changed America" and that "Americans came together." And what that might require that teachers reveal to their students that our country is not perfect.

Unfortunately, that may not happen. A recent piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer by Jonathan Zimmerman ("For teachers, more freedom") laments that the curricula surrounding September 11 is weak and teachers are finding themselves hamstrug by having to teach essentially a "party line" history of the day:

But they'll do so at their peril. And many other teachers will remain mute, or will simply repeat platitudes about America as a land of liberty. Our restrictions on teachers contradict that ideal, echoing a tragedy with a very deep history. Let's see if we can use this anniversary to change it.

I really want to and I really hope we can move forward in the conversation we've been having for the last 10 years. Unfortunately, every minute it seems that someone posts another eagle/flag/towers profile picture to Facebook or posts a "pass it on" status about never forgetting and I can't see that happening.

But ... it would be a disservice to my students if I didn't help them realize that every event, person, or idea you research is incredibly complex and the more you set out to learn the more you find to the point where yes, it can be overwhelming, but it can also be exciting, and you can feel like you truly "know" something (is this "owning your learning"?).

Plus, what is out there for you to find feels more genuine anyway. As I was writing and then editing this post, I came across a blog on the Washington Post that actually endorses Pearson's teaching materials as good ways to start honest conversations about the events, and after what I started this post with I have to call b.s. on that because while it might be more in depth than an approximation of the number of dead, it's still something that's pre-packaged by a company. Yes, the Times and Post's sites are packaged but when you unwrap those packages you see some very raw materials and you can actually follow things unfold. Unwrap what a textbook company as to offer and it's like one of those Russian dolls -- the same thing inside the same thing, just a little smaller.

It's not honest and it's not genuine and it's about as helpful as wearing a bandana with the American flag on it; that is to say, not very.

Today, I'll be with the family that I have that didn't exist ten years ago the way it does today. I'll play with my son's super-hero action figures and maybe go outside and play construction in his sandbox if the weather cooperates. We'll go grocery shopping. I'll hopefully get around to grading those essays. I will watch the Giants take down the Redskins (at least I hope) while tracking my fantasy football teams' progress. I may watch the news if only for the weather. And when I get back to work tomorrow, I will attempt to have that honest conversation, because it's been too long to still be crying, and that would be doing me and my students a disservice.

Edited to add a link to this post on Huffington Post ... a great look at how 9/11 is "taught" in schools.

2011 Summer Reading Project: 52 Loaves

2011-09-04T12:52:00.005-04:00

Yunno, I have really enjoyed taking on a "theme" for my summer (going into fall because I have three or four more books I want to read) reading project, but as I have done this, I've discovered a few things ...

1. While I loved reading these books, the entries about them haven't come so easy. Part of this has to do with the fact that with the school year starting again, I'm overwhelmed with other stuff and haven't had the chance (or when I have had the chance, the patience) to sit down and write, so while I have enjoyed each of the books I have read, the blog entries have been lackluster (sorry).

2. I got sucked into other things that have distracted me from this "project" and have prolonged it (not that it's a bad thing, to be honest). Most notably, Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games trilogy, which is gripping and fun and ... well, I have to say that I love being reminded how much I enjoy good popcorn.

Anyway, I'll continue this series--as mediocre as the writing has been--because the books I've been reading have been worth the time. The latest on this particular journey has been William Alexander's 52 Loaves: One Man's Relentless Pursuit of Truth, Meaning, and a Perfect Crust, which is not necessarily a travelogue (although there is travel involved) but more of a personal journey. Alexander, a writer living in upstate New York, decides that he is going to go on a "quest" of sorts to make the perfect loaf of "peasant" bread and takes on this quest by making at least one loaf of bread per week over the course of a year. During this period, he also seeks to learn as much as he can about bread and the process of bread-making. The journey takes him to some odd places and has some amusing moments. There is a literally back-breaking attempt to build a clay oven in his backyard; his winning a bread bake-off at the New York state fair; his being stopped by the TSA as he attempted to board a plane carrying his levian, which looked suspiciously like plastic explosive; and an almost divine revelation while working in a monastery to develop their own bread recipe, something that is a major part of his quest throughout the book because he had assumed that monasteries were still making perfect loaves of bread.

I had bought this book for my wife by chance a few years ago, based on the fact that she'd read Bill Buford's Heat and both of us have been big fans of Anthony Bourdain's for quite a while (in fact, we're going to see Bourdain and Eric Ripert at the Paramount Theater in Charlottesville in a couple of months), and after she finished and said that she enjoyed it I put it on my "to read" pile, where like quite a number of the books I have read this summer it collected dust for a couple of years.

Once again, I have found myself glad that I dusted this off. Alexander has a very easy and often humorous style that I've enjoyed from writers like Bill Bryson (who I am actually not reading this summer because I have read quite a number of his books already, although I may pick up A Walk in the Woods again). He brings his family into this journey--and drives them crazy as well--and they often provide a very funny running commentary to his sometimes quixotic madness (in fact, it definitely grounds him at times). And while it seems silly that someone would discover some sort of truth about himself while trying to make bread, it is really what makes this book worth the read.

2011 Summer Reading Project: Life of Pi

2011-09-04T12:23:00.004-04:00

200 or so pages of a guy on a boat with a tiger.

Here's what's awesome about that phrase. It's 200 OR SO PAGES OF A GUY ON A BOAT WITH A TIGER.

When this was assigned for the summer reading this year, I had kind of an indifferent reaction to it. Life of Pi was one of those books that I'd always had on the shelf but never actually sat down and read. I had meant to read it, but it always was bypassed for something else. So, having to teach it at the beginning of this year more or less forced me to read it during the summer. Thankfully, it fell under the theme of sorts of my summer reading, in that most of the book is about a young man, Pi (Piscine Molitor Patel), and his journey across the ocean on a lifeboat after it sinks. The only other person on the lifeboat with him isn't a person at all, but "Richard Parker", a giant Bengal tiger who had once been kept in a cage at the zoo that Pi's father oversaw.

When I started reading it, I was honestly a little disappointed because it seemed like the kind of dense, pretentious stuff that passes for "literary" fiction these days. There was a lot of character development that took place under the guise of "discovery of religion" and "the nature between man and beast" (both of which are major themes of the novel as we've been discussing as a class), but once the main character wound up on that boat with that tiger, things got suspenseful and I not only became invested in what was going to happen to Pi, but became more appreciative of that interminable-seeming first section.

Having the chance to discuss this book in class has made me appreciate it even more--which is what happens when you are able to talk about just about any book, good or bad--and it has made for a great start to the year.

I want you to think and speak for yourself. But I don't trust you enough to let you do it.

2011-08-21T14:02:00.001-04:00

"You have the right to free speech, as long as you're not dumb enough to actually try it."

It's a line from The Clash's song "Know Your Rights" that I've used before and think about whenever the issue of the First Amendment as it applies to education comes up in the news. It's happened twice this past week. There is the much-reported story about the "Missouri Facebook Law" and then there is a more traditional student newspaper censorship story that has been on the news in the Charlottesville area.

The Missouri law is one recently passed that is designed to limit student-teacher interaction online under the auspices of preventing inappropriate relationships (I'm not going to get into the fact that the media seems to be beating a drum of teachers as child molesters slightly less loudly than it does for Catholic priests), although as a recent lawsuit alleges, the law is so vague it is bound to be misinterpreted by administrators and worst-case-scenario thinking says that it could lead to teachers getting fired for using Facebook at all.

Those who support the law say that such thinking really is illogical and irrational:

State Sen. Jane Cunningham, who sponsored the legislation, said critics misunderstand the law. She said teachers are not barred from using Facebook and other websites. They also aren't prohibited from communicating with students, providing discussions are public.

"It only stops hidden communication between an educator and a minor child," said Cunningham, R-Chesterfield.

But Ms. Cunningham is wrong because a vaguely written Supreme Court decision has been misinterpreted and misused for the last 25 years, even as recently as this summer. It's Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, the 1987 Supreme Court decision that limited the rights of the student press. The most recent story that I've seen is that of the student newspaper of Madison County High School. The newspaper ran an editorial wherein the staff complained about the conditions in the building, which is an older building and has its fair share of facilities issues. The editorial (which you can read here, courtesy of the Student Press Law Center) is well-written and it is clear that the staff "did their homework," so to speak.

However, the issue was pulled after not just criticism from the school's principal but from higher up in the administrative chain, the superintendent of Madison County Schools himself. The SPLC claims that the paper was pulled due to the fact that it reflected negatively on the school, something that in a local news story, the superintendent disputed, claiming that the SPLC article was full of inaccuracies but not giving much detail as to what those inaccuracies were or why the newspaper was pulled. Then, the newspaper adviser was removed from the paper and the school, being reassigned to the alternative education center, which is off-site. She took a job teaching social studies in another district and was clearly frustrated by the ordeal, saying, "“I thought, what are they really learning from this? That someone can always take away your opinion or say it doesn't matter?”

What is maddening about this whole situation is that the school district, under the Hazelwood decision, was actually within its rights. The decision says, more or less, that a school has the right to restrict the content of one of its publications and "need not tolerate student speech that is inconsistent with its basic educational mission, even though the government could not censor similar speech outside the school" (you can read the entire text here).

Now, the original decision had to do with articles about teen pregnancy and divorce, and those (well, at least the former) are hot-button controversial issues. I don't agree with the Supreme Court's decision, but I understand the logic behind it to a certain extent. One of the major problems is that the wording about student speech being "inconsistent with its basic educational mission" is too vague and can lead to situations such as this. There have been cases of yearbooks and newspapers being censored because of graphic content or articles/spreads which detailed illegal activity such as drug use, and while I don't like censorship, again, at least the administrations doing the censoring had a leg to stand on there.

Here? Not really. You have an editorial -- an opinion, remember -- that takes the school (and subsequently, the district) to task for poor building conditions. It appears to be researched and even quotes the principal. Does it contain explicit content? Not if you consider the possibility of mold explicit. Does it contain a subject of a controversial nature that disrupts the learning process? I don't know how controversial cracks in windows are, but it seems that poor building conditions would be more disruptive to the learning process than an editorial about them.

What you have here is a school district overstepping its bounds even though it is within its rights. The correct response of the building administrators and the superintendent's office should have been to write a letter to the editor or ask to submit a rebuttal op-ed in the next issue, pointing out what the paper got wrong and discussing what their position actually is. In other words, open the type of adult dialogue that should be happening in a public forum. The response of censorship and shuffling off of the adviser only makes them look worse than the article had It also shows that they don't trust their teachers and students and would rather flex their authoritative muscles than have a conversation.

Which is ironic when so many in education these days talk about critical thinking, because sometimes critical thinking actually means being critical. It's taking a look at the world around you or the materials you are given and questioning it. You may ultimately wind up wrong in your assessment, but at least you are developing your ability to make that assessment or informed decision or what have you, and that's something that I think any teacher would love to see out of any one of his or her students. Furthermore, if you look at those school systems that have student publications that are award-winning or praiseworthy, you see a district that is not obsessed with turning the newspaper into a newsletter, invites criticism from time to time, and does not try to simply tamper the spirit of youth because they don't want the boat rocked too much.

If you continue to restrict and ban the voice of the students and the media through which they use that voice, you are going to be an ineffective school district. You will wind up with students who are apathetic (yeah, I know, they're teenagers ... so more apathetic than usual) and that will lead to an apathetic staff and lower performance as well as less innovation. If free speech, or expression, or social networking, or the internet is evil and must be policed, then when you start talking about students being ready for the world and the skills they're going to need, you are sending a message so mixed that those who have it in their power to help develop those skills are going to throw their hands in the air and teach to the test.

Oh, so maybe your test scores will go up. Congratulations, I guess.

Administrators need to be more mature and less reactionary in situations like this. They need to calm down and let the students have their say, especially when it's obvious that they're just mad because they got egg on their face. Students, on the other hand, need to know exactly what their rights are. The students at Madison County High School are right to complain about their free speech being violated, but they also need to be able to express why that speech is being violated in terms of Hazelwood, and not just the First Amendment. That's because it gives them more of a case (and kudos to the SPLC for taking this up because that will give them more of a leg to stand on). I hope that there are more cases like this that come to light and get attention because while the intent of some laws and decisions may be good, there is too much leeway for those who are paranoid to send their schools on that very nicely paved road to you know where.

2011 Summer Reading Project: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

2011-08-16T22:49:00.002-04:00

Okay, so this book sat on a shelf in my house for the better part of three years collecting dust and after I'd finished my last book for this project I thought, "Well, it's about traveling ... hitchhiking ... yeah, I'll give it a shot."

HOW HAD I NEVER READ THIS BEFORE?!

Seriously! I ~~was~~ am a HUGE geek ~~in high school~~ and over the years have read my fair share of science fiction, yet never once bothered to pick up anything by Douglas Adams. I have to say that I can't believe how much I was missing out on. Earth is destroyed to make way for an interstellar superhighway as if it's some poor neighborhood that Robert Moses bulldozed? Mice being some of the most intelligent beings of the universe? 42? This is the type of odd humor that has always been right up my alley.

I think it took me two days to read this (only because I had to go to bed at some point) and I couldn't stop laughing. I mean, I really don't have anything to say about the book beyond gushing about how hilarious and brilliant I thought it was and that everyone should pick up a copy (that and I'm too lazy to post more -- it's late and I've got more planning to work on).

So ... go, now, go!

Can Teachers Alone Overcome Poverty?

2011-08-13T14:02:00.004-04:00

(Props to my friend Jeff for posting this to Facebook)

In the most recent edition of The Nation, Dana Goldstein takes down Steven Brill and other "reformers" (Can Teachers Alone Overcome Poverty? Steven Brill Thinks So):

Not surprisingly, given Brill’s history of interest in only the most controversial school reform issues, the book is filled with misleading discussions of complex education research, most notably a total elision of the fact that “nonschool” factors—family income, nutrition, health, English-language proficiency and the like—affect children’s academic performance, no matter how great their teachers are. (More on this later.) Class Warfare is also studded with easy-to-check errors, such as the claim that Newark schools spend more per student than New York City schools because of a more cumbersome teachers’ contract. In fact, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in 1990 that the state must provide supplemental per-pupil funding to all high-poverty school districts, including Newark. As a result, New Jersey is considered a national leader in early childhood education, and Newark graduates more African-American boys from high school—75 percent—than any other major city.

But here’s the thing: by the closing chapters of his breezy, 478-page tome, Brill sounds far less like an uncritical fan of charter school expansion, Teach for America (TFA) and unionbusting and far more like, well, a guy who has spent several years immersed in one of the thorniest policy conversations in America, thinking about a problem—educational inequality—that defies finger-pointing and simple solutions.
Welcome to the beat, Brill!

The full article is a great piece and really picks apart the arguments that you hear from people on the more conservative side of the political spectrum. It also paints a very realistic and knowing picture of education reform.

The Little Things Can Drive You Crazy

2011-08-10T22:26:00.001-04:00

John Spencer has a great post today called "I Was Wrong" where he lists ten assumptions he's had, criticisms he's made, and beliefs he's had and reevaluates them. It's the type of humble and self-aware post that I wish most writers were able to write, and it shows how challenging even your own preconceived notions about something can actually enrich your life.

The fifth item on the list was something I'd been meaning to write about for a while:

5. Getting Rid of the Teacher Desk: Russ Goerend challenged me on this a long time ago (I was a strong supporter of a separate teacher space). Last year, I ditched the desk. Russ was right.

When I go back on Monday, I'm sure that I am going to take another look at how my classroom is set up and see if I can't change things around a little. Last year, for instance, I was finally able to get better desks--no more trash shoved into where the textbooks should go. The problem with that was that it screwed up a configuration that had worked so well the year before, so I wound up going with rows but made sure that I had plenty of room to walk around behind everyone (this, of course, meant that I was constantly fixing rows because my students love to push their desks as close to the walls of the class as possible). I've been in my classroom a couple of times this summer and saw that the custodial staff put everything back in rows, so I know what to expect going in.

The thing is, I am probably going to keep it that way and it's not because I don't want to find some new way to work my classroom geographically, it's just that the things I want to do are physically impossible within the constraints of my classroom when I have 27 students in the class. I mean, if I had my way I would have a smaller sized class and would have tables where everyone would face one another--I had several classes and workshops that were set up like this in college and I always thought that fostered a better discussion. But like I said, with 27 students and the space I have to work, it just won't happen.

Which brings me to the "getting rid of the teacher's desk" idea. I think that I understand where this is coming from. I have been to many a presentation and read many a blog post or article that talks about tearing down what is considered the "traditional" student-teacher relationship within a classroom. In other words, you don't want to be that teacher, the one who sits behind his desk for 45 minutes as if he's on a throne and rarely steps across the imaginary threshold to where the students sit. Besides, those college classes never had teacher's desks, and those classes were the most engaging ones I ever have.

It's pretty innovative to throw off the chains of tradition and go for something that nobody's really used to. I think it would definitely wake students up and make administrators take notice. However, looking at what John had to say, I think that getting rid of the teacher's desk might be throwing out the baby with the bath water. Those college professors of mine never had desks in their classrooms because they had offices and if you went to their offices for a sit down it was always a welcoming atmosphere and obviously decorated to reflect their personalities (that is, if there wasn't crap everywhere, which was the case with most of my professors). Furthermore, before I worked in a school, I always had a cubicle or office (had an office once) to which I added personal touches. My friend and former co-worker Tracy used to call the tchotchkes and various crap we'd put on our desks our "geek-o-spheres," and while I know this sounds selfish and un-innovative, I've always loved having my geek-o-sphere in my classroom.

If you were to look at my desk and desk area, you'd obviously see my computer (if it's not plugged into the projector cart) but you'd also see a bunch of stuff--collectibles, action figures, posters, old newspaper covers--that reflect the geekier and goofier side of my personality. You'd also see a lot of unorganized papers--in fact, there are moments where my desk looks like something out of an episode of Hoarders. But it is, in a way, my comfort zone. On a crappy day during my planning period, I can sit in my nice chair, plug my iPod into the speakers on the desk and relax for a moment. It's my happy place.

But when it comes to actual instruction, I"m rarely, if ever, at my desk. Yeah, there's the occasional day when I feel horrible and need to sit at my desk during second period so that I have enough energy to make it to ninth, or there's testing days when I can sit there and grade papers. Usually, though, I'm on my feet and walking around the room. It helps me keep my eye on students, it helps me be less nervous about speaking in front of a group, and I think it helps me engage them a little more.

I can remove the teacher's desk and remove the rows configuration from a classroom without literally doing so. It's a mental thing, mostly, and if I were to give advice to a new teacher I would say that if he or she is having a problem with a classroom configuration for day one, then just put the desks in rows because where the desks are is minute compared to where you are.

In fact, too many people get caught up in the minutiae of the classroom. I think it's because that's what they'll hear about the most from colleagues and administrators (probably because it's the easiest to criticize). Where your desks are, why so many kids go to the bathroom, and how many heads are on desks should not take precedent over the material you are teaching or the activity you are doing. Sure, you probably should make sure everyone is paying attention and if Timmy goes to the bathroom and doesn't come back for 15 minutes you might want to speak to him, but don't stress too much about it. For instance, you know that you don't have the time to constantly rearranging desks and that giving Timmy a bathroom pass and just keeping track of how long he's gone takes less time and is less stressful than telling him he can't go and having him curse you out and storm out of the room.

At the end of the day, your students should remember how interesting your discussion was or how what you read makes them want to read more, not whether or not your desks were in a horseshoe.

My response to Bill Ferriter's lambasting of comics

2011-08-09T20:14:00.001-04:00

So the other day, on The Tempered Radical, Bill Ferriter posted a rather inflammatory knock against "graphic novels":

Let’s be honest, y’all: Graphic novels ALREADY take away the need for students to visualize anything while they are reading.

What does the hero look like? How is the light shimmering off of the summer pond at sunset? How does pain—or love, or joy, or surprise—change a face?

“In a book full of pictures, all of the imagining,” my colleague explained, “has been done for them. How is THAT a good thing?”

Based on what her students are saying, it’s a good thing because it means thinking is optional.

I left a response in the comments, which is probably buried, so I wanted to share it here because I think it's worth reading.

With regards to your evaluation of the comics medium (I'm not a big fan of "graphic novel" b/c I think it's a way for people who are pretentious to deny they're reading a comic) not allowing people to visualize, I think that on the surface that seems true, but you need to dig a little deeper.

First, you need to realize that most of the comics that are published by mainstream (and even independent, in some cases) comic companies (i.e., the big two) are the results of visualization themselves. Your average comic book may have six people working on it: writer, penciller, inker, colorist, letterer, and editor. Change the names in each of the parts and it can affect the story (especially if bad art is paired with a good story).
The penciller/inker team is obviously of most importance here because those people are working off of a plot or script from the writer and they are putting into pictures what they visualize based on what was written. It shows the reader how that person interpreted the written word.

Now, take it a step further and look at a trade paperback (i.e., collection of stories or what people often mislabel "graphic novels"). You may have several artists in one book and you get to see how the way image and the visualization is handled changes.

Sometimes, you have multiple creative teams on the same story. Take, for instance, the Death and Return of Superman story in 1992-1993. This story, when it was first published, ran in four different comics (one came out each week). That's four writers, four pencillers, four inkers ... maybe similar letters and colorists ... and one editor holding the whole thing together.

Across those four titles for the better part of nine months, when Superman died, was mourned, and returned after a story that is well-suited for your average summer blockbuster movie, you have four different interpretations of the same character and four different visualizations. But at the same time, it's a coherent story.

How is this not a teaching tool for someone who stares at a bulky text and can't make heads or tails of even the most basic literary elements?

And I realize that every student that reads something in the comic art medium isn't going to go on to read Moby-Dick (a whale of a book if you ask me) or A Tale of Two Cities. But some will--just like some students I've had went from Twilight (which is horribly written, btw) to Anne Rice to even Bram Stoker (a tough read for an average student).

But honestly, I refuse to throw away an entire genre.

Oh, and not to sound flip, but your Jersey Shore analogy is wrong. Comics are scripted and created. If anything, their serial nature and long-term storylines are akin to soap operas (a dying genre in itself).

On and on, does anybody know what we are looking for?

2011-08-07T23:36:00.001-04:00

I guess whenever you write a blog on a topic that gets people impassioned you have to learn how to take inflammatory comments seriously but not too personally. It's a line I feel that I've walked on several occasions and I don't always fall on the right side. But such is how you react to things in life.

What I'm talking about, or what I was thinking about tonight, was a comment from about a year ago ... or a piece of a comment from a year ago. Someone had obviously stumbled upon a post and felt that my attitude was overwhelmingly negative. He/she (it was an anonymous commenter) left a long comment, but the part that I remembered the most was this:

Your "shut up and let me teach" approach to education really demonstrates a resistance to any sort of honest and lasting change.

He/she is completely wrong with this assessment, but as I've been prepping for the upcoming year I have been thinking about why I have been writing this blog for the past four, nearly five years. What you notice when you load up the front page here (before reading on to the first entry) is probably one of two things: the title, "Stop Trying to Inspire Me"; or the subhead below it, "Just shut up and let me teach." So that person obviously interpreted the subhead (or maybe it's a tag line?) as what I think of my field, or maybe even my students. You know, like, you're all making too much noise and I don't want to listen to you. I just want to get through this year and to my summer break where I have three months [sic] off and then have to deal with all of this crap again until I can sit back and collect my fat pension.

It actually is a lot different, and funny enough, this entire blog goes back to Ron Clark.

At the beginning of my second year of teaching, my district held one of those beginning-of-the-year pep rallies. You know, one of those huge events where every school in the district gathers at an auditorium or in a gym and listens to speakers from the Board of Education and Superintendent's Office. Nobody really seems to want to be there--probably because it's sucking two, maybe even three hours of much-needed planning time. Furthermore, the district always brought in some guest keynote speaker to pump us up for the year (and try to sell us some of the books he/she wrote), although its effect was usually to make us wonder how much of our potential raise was spent on his or her speaking fee. That year, the speaker was Ron Clark.

Now, that in itself is pretty impressive, especially considering this was 2006 and the TV movie about Ron Clark starring Matthew Perry as Ron Clark aired either the weekend before or the weekend after he came to speak to us. He'd been on Oprah, he'd published The Essential 55 ... this guy was one of those "guys at the right moment" speakers. And true to his hype, he was a very good speaker, a guy who seemed to really have a passion for what he was doing and while his "aw shucks" mannerisms did get a little tired he was very likeable.

In fact, I'm really not going to piss all over Ron Clark here. If I ever was able to attain the level of success that he did and had the opportunity to ~~profit off of it~~ spread the word, so to speak, I would. Same with Harry Wong, who I've definitely taken my fair share of shots at in the past. Hey, you came up with a method and it worked and you wrote a book and people bought it. That's the American Dream, right?

But what irked me then, and still kind of irks me, is the idea of Ron Clark, or the idea of Harry Wong. That those high-up in a school district feel the need to hire them to speak to their teachers as if we're all going to have some sort of divine revelation as a result. We're all going to walk back to our classrooms with our heads held high and make the nicest bulletin boards anyone has ever seen and we're all going to wear our "I don't teach I inspire!" sweatshirts and smile brightly and the education will shine like a beacon of hope in the dull, downtrodden lives of our students.

Can I get an amen? No? Oh, okay.

I don't blame you. Had I not been seated near some administrators I probably would have been rolling my eyes and making snide remarks during the entire thirty minutes of his speech. In fact, I think that later that afternoon when my department had gathered for lunch I had said, "You know, I'm going to write a book called 'Stop Trying to Inspire Me.'" I started the blog on April 30 of that school year, and I guess the tone has always been a bit of a middle finger. You know, like I am jaded, I don't care, I am in this for ... well, not to inspire or be inspired.

But the thing is, I am not a cold, unfeeling, even cruel bastard. I find inspiration in things and I have those things which I use for motivation. If I didn't, I wouldn't be creative. The operative word here, by the way? Find. You find inspiration. It can be in a song or a movie or a book or even a moment. When others try to inspire you, they are simply blowing smoke up your ass. For instance, I get more fired up from three minutes of Taylor Mali's raw "What Teachers Make" rather than 30 minutes of Ron Clark. I see more passion in Frank McCourt's honesty in Teacher Man than I do in the endless parade of "thank a teacher" bumper stickers, posters, and Facebook statuses. And sometimes I admit that I get more of a reminder as to why I did this in the first place when my yearbook editor sends an email on a Friday night saying, "This deadline is fucked" than I do when little Billy who never speaks answers a question in class.

The latest thing to go around? Matt Damon eviscerating an idiot of a journalist (no, don't defend her, she's an idiot) at a recent education rally. It is inspiring because it's a bit of a "Fuck yeah!" moment. No, not because I consider myself taking on some sort of idealistic crusade by going into this field--in fact, I have always thought that teachers have a martyr complex that actually does more harm than good--but because it seems ridiculous that anyone in any profession should have to defend him or herself against accusations of not working hard enough or "having it easy." I have two parents who, before they retired, worked very hard in two professions. One was teaching and one wasn't. Furthermore, my wife works harder than anyone I know. Would I question her work ethic? No, and not just because I like sleeping in my own bed.

In other words, it is appalling that you would accuse anyone at any level of not working hard or being undeserving of what they have earned just because you want to someone else to have their share of the pie. That's what gets me fired up, at least, because it grows from the same ignorance that allows for a glass ceiling, or for someone at a high position to just sit back and collect tens of millions of dollars when he gets fired while the person who breaks his back for him gets maybe two weeks' severance and the option to Cobra his insurance at an exorbitant price, then have people accuse him of mooching off society because he goes on unemployment.

This post is getting longer than I wanted it to be, but honestly I have been thinking a lot about passion and inspiration lately, mainly because I was thinking a lot about the last year and saw how badly it went. Sure, some things went well, but there were too many times where I got angry at students or reacted badly or was incredibly unprofessional. Not because I actually "hate" anyone or had a bad time, but because I was obviously going through something that I couldn't comprehend. Maybe it was a nervous breakdown? I know I stress ate a lot, I can tell you that. But what I do know is that I have been looking back at that year and I have seen someone who, well, was broken. Defeated.

Then I began getting some stuff together for this coming year. I thought of what I might do for reading. I bought a new stapler (seriously ... no one thing in a classroom takes as much abuse as a stapler). And I got the classroom decor box out of the basement. It's filled with a couple of posters, some sports memorabilia, the crap I usually put on my desk, and things that former students have left behind. I hear from them occasionally via the Internets and it's a wonderful reminder that I used to not be so ... well, so bitter. So angry. Such an asshole.

I feel like I need to get that passion back or else this is going to be it. I'll be doomed to a life of being a crappy teacher going through the motions but still getting kudos because he knows how to prep for a standarized test. I'll be that dickhead that former students post about on Facebook 20 years from now (oh who am I kidding, they probably do it already). I already see sparks of it when I flip through anthologies and wonder what I can do with a certain short story or jot down ideas for a new research project.

At the same time, maybe I am being too hard on myself or putting too much pressure on myself here and maybe it's just a "seven-year itch" (without the Marilyn hotness), but necessity being the mother of reinvention and all, I need ... something. I need something to make me feel like I'm not wasting away. I told a friend of mine a couple of weeks ago that I feel sometimes like I'm floundering and I don't want to feel that way.

The thing is, though, that I don't want to be inspired. I still want to find my inspiration. I want to enter this year with a new curiosity and a new enthusiasm. I want to move forward, and kind of do that my own way, on my own terms. If I am going to sit and listen to someone talk to me about great ideas in teaching, I want it to be a colleague or a friend or someone I can have a conversation with, not someone who's being paid to either rouse me out of my slumber or give some barely legible comic sans-laden PowerPoint on a day when I could be planning my next great lesson (or at least making copies). There is so much of "me" in all of this and I need to give "me" another chance.

In the very least, it'll make for more interesting entries than books I'm reading and article reposts (speaking of which, I just finished two books that I need to post about ...).

So my apologies for the long, incoherent ramble. Here's some Queen to make up for it.

The meaning and effects of "Jock Culture"

2011-08-05T14:51:00.002-04:00

Deadspin has reposted an excellent article from The Nation about the meaning and effects of "Jock Culture" ("What Jock Culture Does to Pukes Like You"):

Jock Culture is a distortion of sports. It can be physically and mentally unhealthy, driving people apart instead of together. It is fueled by greed and desperate competition. At its most grotesque, think killer dodgeball for prize money, the Super Bowl. (The clash between sports and the Jock Culture version is almost ideological, at least metaphorical. Obviously, I am for de-emphasizing early competition and redistributing athletic resources so that everyone, throughout their lives, has access to sports. But then, I am also for world peace.)

Kids are initiated into Jock Culture when youth sports are channeled into the pressurized arenas of elite athletes on travel teams driven by ambitious parents and coaches. A once safe place to learn about bravery, cooperation and respect becomes a cockpit of bullying, violence and the commitment to a win-at-all-costs attitude that can kill a soul. Or a brain. It is in Pee Wee football, for example, that kids learn to "put a hat on him"—to make tackles head first rather than the older, gentler way of wrapping your arms around a ball carrier's legs and dragging him down. Helmet-to-helmet hits start the trauma cycle early. No wonder the current concussion discussion was launched by the discovery of dementia and morbidity among former pro players.

There is no escape from Jock Culture. You may be willing to describe yourself as a Puke, "cut" from the team early to find your true nature as a billionaire geek, Grammy-winning band fag, wonkish pundit, but you've always had to deal with Jock Culture attitudes and codes, and you have probably competed by them. In big business, medicine, the law, people will be labeled winners and losers, and treated like stars or slugs by coach-like authority figures who use shame and intimidation to achieve short-term results. Don't think symphony orchestras, university philosophy departments and liberal magazines don't often use such tactics.

It is an outstanding piece, and a must read.

Nostalgia for "Bad Teachers"

2011-08-02T11:54:00.001-04:00

Toward the end of last week, my friend Kerry created a Facebook group called "You know you're from Sayville if ..." and invited just about anyone she knew from our hometown to post random memories, as if it were a 1990s-era email forward. In just a few days, there have been 2,085 posts from 1238 members and counting. Which is quite remarkable, to be honest, although not surprising because if you know anything about Sayville (or know anyone from Sayville) you know that it is a tight-knit community. Well, as tight-knit a community as roughly 17,000 people can get.

But compared to other towns on Long Island, it is pretty small and the fact that it is a few hundred years old, has a Main Street and for the most part sidewalks, and its own school system (as opposed to a county-wide school system, like where I teach now) contributes to what my wife, when she first visited me at home back when we were in college, called "a Jack and Diane type of town." And with that Jack and Diane-ness comes common ground through generations of people because of places and experiences that have changed very little over the years. That's what makes you nostalgic, I guess--you had an experience that other people can relate to because they had the same one--and the most nostalgia I have seen over these few days has been with regard to either the debauchery of a misspent youth or the hallowed halls of the public schools.

I cannot attest to the debauchery of a misspent youth--I didn't have a night of drunkenness until after graduating high school, and from there it was on to a long and storied career as a designated driver--so I tend to skip over the posts about drinking in the woods or by a lake or in a lot somewhere. But when someone posts about a teacher or school, my ears perk up and I read intently. There are quite a number of teachers and situations reminisced about that I am not familiar with, and that's mainly because they're from before my time. However, there are plenty of people, places, and events that I see posted that I do remember and I've been finding it amazing that the teachers that I had through thirteen years in the Sayville Public School District left that much of an impression, not only on me and those I went to school with but people who are ten years older than me or more.

The posts remind everyone about how cool one teacher was, about some of the things that you could get away with in other teachers' classes. There's a long-running comment thread about Mrs. Miller, the junior high health teacher who reeked of a boys' locker room and used to burn some sort of synthetic marijuana during the drug unit so we knew what pot smelled like (she also showed every, and I mean EVERY health education film ever made between 1970 and 1989). There are memories of Mr. Valenti, who had Grateful Dead posters all over his classroom and got many of us (myself included) to actually enjoy Great Expectations in the ninth grade and had the distinct pleasure of guiding us through that freshman year rite of passage--Olivia Hussey's tit in Romeo & Juliet. There's posts that repeat the military-style commands that Mr. Mills would shout out during warmups in every gym class ("Double arm interval dress right dress!" "Back stoop falling move!"). It's almost a celebration of the quirks that our teachers had, and even an appreciation for what they taught us (whether or not we knew it at the time).

But not all of the memories, mind you, are the greatest, and not everyone agrees. For instance, at one point last night, someone posted, "When you got to high school you realized Miss Piggy was real ...", a reference to my 10th grade English teacher, who was rather large. Most of the comments that followed were along the lines of LMAO and "God I loathed her and the LOADS of weekend/vacation homework she would assign," although I was honest and said that "Funny enough, she's a major reason I teach English." I mean, her liking some of the horrid poetry I wrote when I was seventeen made her ability to distinguish good writing a bit suspect (or maybe she was humoring me when she liked the vomit poem?), but Mrs. Taber continued what Mr. Valenti had started in the ninth grade, which was giving me an appreciation for the deeper meaning beneath the words on the page. Plus, she was one of a host of teachers whom people didn't necessarily like because of things like loads of homework and high expectations. In other words, if you got an A in her class, she made you work for it.

Which makes me think about what lives on after you leave the school where you teach, or what your students take with you after they go. I'm not talking about a reputation--that's what precedes you (I'm pretty sure that when kids see my name on their schedule they either say, "He yells," "He's a dick," "He's hard," or "He makes you write")--I'm talking about a legacy. What are you going to be remembered for in passing years later?

And more importantly, should you care?

Looking at the comment thread regarding Mrs. Taber, I can't help but be proud to have had her because she did make me work hard, just like my Calculus teacher, Mr. Prescia, made me work hard. Then again, I never really "hated" any of my teachers and to this day don't think any of them were bad, per se. Flawed? Most definitely. But bad? I'm not sure, and maybe that's because I rarely, if ever, had a problem with any teacher. Besides, if you were a teacher, would you rather be remembered for having high expectations and making your students work hard instead of being a pushover and an easy A?

Nostalgia, to paraphrase Rick James, is a hell of a drug (it's also a vocabulary word in my class because none of my students seem to know what it means even though their pop culture is awash in it). You remember a lot of the good stuff, and very often can expound on all of the ways that you or things were cooler back in the day; however, it's got its down side. People don't always share your opinions on the awesomeness of a person, mainly because their experiences were awful, and very often they make us spew venom that goes against what the entire idea of nostalgia is supposed to stand for.

I honestly think that at the end of the day, if you feel like you did your job and did it well (which is very often hard in this profession), then that is enough. If you're in this so you can tout to the world that you inspired people or that you touched lives, then there's something underlying your motivation and you're in for a world of disappointment when, years from now, you encounter that first student who thinks you were a piece of garbage or worse, a bad teacher.

You know, the world kind of needs "bad teachers" anyway. Because even a bad teacher teaches you something. Sure, it might not be adding fractions or how a bill becomes a law ... but it may have been a lesson in character, perspective, or even survival. But they did teach you something.

Marc Maron's Montreal JFL Speech is Downright Inspiring

2011-07-29T23:31:00.002-04:00

When I was kid watching comedians on TV and listening to their records they were the only ones that could make it all seem okay. They seemed to cut through the bullshit and disarm fears and horror by being clever and funny. I don’t think I could have survived my childhood without watching standup comics. When I started doing comedy I didn’t understand show business. I just wanted to be a comedian. Now after 25 years of doing standup and the last two years of having long conversations with over 200 comics I can honestly say they are some of the most thoughtful, philosophical, open minded, sensitive, insightful, talented, self centered, neurotic, compulsive, angry, fucked up, sweet, creative people in the world.

I love comedians. I respect anyone who goes all in to do what I consider a noble profession and art form. Despite whatever drives us towards this profession i.e. insecurity, need for attention, megalomania, poor parenting, anger, a mixture of all of the above. Whatever it is, we comics are out there on the front lines of our sanity.

Comedian Marc Maron recently gave the keynote speech at Montreal's Just For Laughs festival and it is absolutely amazing. He also has a podcast called WTF that is simply him having a conversation with another comedian for an hour and a half. It's wonderfully insightful and even though in our professions we're not necessarily comedians, I think it's always important to look to other professions such as this for guidance and perhaps even inspiration.

Read the full speech here.

The WTF With Marc Maron Podcast

A quick addition (8/10/11) ... Marc has posted the full audio of the speech and it's even more amazing to hear him give it than to read it. Click here for audio (or you can get it through iTunes) Enjoy.

Grades can drive you crazy

2011-07-25T11:28:00.000-04:00

[So this self-imposed exile lasted what, ten days? Oh well ... I needed the break, though]

Whenever I am planning something for class, there is a point at which I wind up stopping and thinking about the "what ifs." For instance, say the lesson is a class discussion that relies on assigned reading. The what if there is that I'm relying on the students to be responsible for doing the assigned reading and if they don't, then the entire lesson is shot. So I try to plan around it, which is probably why too many of my general-level classes are in danger of devolving into a glorified circle time where I wind up going through the text with them and they hold out on saying anything so that I'll eventually give up and provide the answers.

But when I sat down yesterday afternoon to do a little planning, it wasn't for my general classes, it was for an advanced level class, so the whole "will they or will they won't read" question gets thrown out the window. I know this sounds presumptuous, but I think that the label "advanced" on the course assumes that you will have reading to do and it will be at home.

Anyway, the planning I was doing was general-level stuff. You know, class policies, ideas for projects, etc. One of the project/instructional ideas I had was one I got from the world literature class I took last spring. Our professor assigned every single person in the class two presentations. One was a simple report either on the author of that week's book or the country of origin. The other was called a "Read and Lead." Basically, you led the class's discussion on the book, doing a quick overview of pertinent characters and events and asking analytical questions. "What you do you think X represents?"; "Why did Y do such and such?"; "Why is Z such an important character to the climax of the plot"?" and so forth. Very often we took those discussions beyond the text itself and to the author's viewpoints, the historical context, and even to a broader philosophical context, which is what looking at literature really should be about.

I loved these read and leads. They not only made the class go faster, but were way more engaging than a teacher-led discussion because each person doing the read and lead brought his own ideas to the table in a way that engaged the rest of us and the professor as well. I'd done "Socratic Seminars" in English classes before, so I kinda knew where the idea was coming from, but this had a less ... well, stuffy feel to it? I can't exactly explain it, but our throwing together presentations via PowerPoint or Prezi (oh how I can't wait to have a little fun with that this year) just with the guiding quesitons on them had a nice, loose feel.

So, I thought, "Okay, advanced English 10 ... world lit ... doing a little research with it. Perfect. You've got your read and lead and your country or author and that will take care of research as well as foster some good discussion. Plus, I can teach them how to do a presentation that isn't paragraphs on a slide." It seemed like a pretty straightforward idea (plus, it kinda got rid of the monster research project/paper, which is an enormous fustercluck every year) and something that was simple enough to carry through the entire year.

"But how are you going to grade it?" came the "what ifs" voice in my head.

Well, I'll have a pretty clear rubric (God, I hate that word) ...

"So you're going to do a unit?" the voice said.

No. I figure I'll stretch it out through the whole year and that way it's a whole course thing. Plus, it helps us to not have to slog through 30 presentations over a week or something like that.

"Are you going to be objective?"

What?

"Aren't you putting the students who go in September at a disadvantage because by the time you hit April, the students going will have seen plenty of presentations?"

No, because I'll probably go a little easier on those who go earlier. Of course, I won't tell them that.

"Well, that's unfair."

How is that unfair?

"Because every student should be graded on an even-leveled playing field."

Oh come on, everyone knows that argument is crap. Besides, considering that I have my students evaluate one another as well, they should be paying attention and learning from the mistakes of the others. Therefore, if they're late in the schedule they should know what to do and what not to do. Plus, I will do the first presentations myself so as to model them so nobody goes in blind.

"How will you decide who goes when? And can they work in groups?"

What are you, one of them? I'll let them decide and sign up and I'll figure out the group/individual thing when I see how many are actually in the class and how many presentations I think we'll need to do. Don't you know anything about logistics?

"Don't get mean with me. If your feelings are truly like this, I seriously doubt you will make it until your retirement. You are expressing lots of feelings of a burnt out educator early on"

What does that have to do with planning for presentations? Focus!

"Okay, so you've got all of that planned out and you'll unfairly grade and play favorites ..."

When did I say I was playing favorites?

"Well, your inability to group all of the presentations together in one period of time and then grade objectively shows that you will obviously favor some students over others."

Bullshit.

"Again, you are being a negative ..."

You're not helping.

"Well, let's say that your rubric is fair and you are completely objective."

You're a little too obssessed with all things fair and objective. Get over it and get to the point.

"Okay, where is this going?"

To a discussion of how much of a shitty teacher I am, I guess.

"No, where is the grade going to go?"

What do you mean?

"Which report card? If you have a kid present in the first quarter and another present in the third quarter where are they going in the report card grades?"

Uh ... oh.

"Because you can't have an extra grade for one and not the other. That's penalizing--"

Shut up and let me think, okay?

Oh, I'll just make it part of the final.

"The final what?"

The final exam, genius.

"What about those students who are exempt?"

I don't exempt students from my final exams. Every one of my students takes a final exam.

"Okay. But isn't it unfair that some will be doing this in September and some in April?"

No. It all goes to the final exam.

"It's unfair."

Not it's not.

"Yes it is."

Is not.

"Is too."

Is not.

"Is too."

Is not.

"Is too."

IS NOT!

"IS TOO!"

IS NOT

"IS TOO INFINITY!"

IS TOO INFINITY PLUS ONE, SO THERE!!!

In all seriousness, this is where I HAAAAAAAAAATE the concepts of units, quarters, and report cards. The way the grading for the presentations went in the class I took was that they were each simply a grade for the course as a whole. Then again, a college course is simply a semester and everything just counts for the grand total and we don't get report cards. Sure, there's a midterm exam but it still counts to the final grade and not some "halfway" report card grade. I really want to make this course seem like a "whole" course and presentations like this really are a great way to do it.

However, I know advanced-level students because I once was one and it's safe to say that they are neurotic when it comes to grades. Shit, they're almost insane. So if the grade doesn't IMMEDIATELY show up on some grade report somewhere, they (or their parents) will freak the hell out.

But you know what? Them's the breaks.

I'm sorry, but like I've said a million times before, I am tired of the Pavlovian desire for grades, as if something doesn't matter if there is not a number attached to it (and as much as we try to provide complicated, objective rubrics, they're arbitrary numbers). The actual reading, analysis, and discussion should be the reward here, not an 85 or a 97. In fact, there's something archaic about doing everything in "units" all the time. The "let's read, let's discuss, let's have a test" approach seems to fly in the face of everything in the student-directed, responsible-for-your-own-learning culture that we're trying to establish. Plus, I can do quizzes and tests when I go over vocabulary or grammar.

My final response to the voice in my head, I guess, should be that this is an experiment and of course it has the potential to fail. But that's kind of the point ... and if the student is so crazy for grades, he or she can go to guidance and transfer out.

Besides, I'd rather spend my time contemplating what literature I'm going to use rather than the logistics of educating in a Skinner box.

Great Post, Had to Share It: "I Am Not A Great Teacher"

2011-07-24T10:23:00.002-04:00

Coming out of my hole to say this is just ... amazing:

"I am Not a Great Teacher" on TeachPaperless

When I started teaching, I was absolutely terrible at classroom management. A decade in, I realize that my classroom management issues stopped being issues around year 3 when I stopped trying to control everything going on in my classroom. I don't think any of us really realize what classroom management is all about until years into teaching when we've realized that we haven't thought about classroom management in a while.

I try to talk candidly with parents. And I will argue my point. But I'll also listen to yours. As a father of three elementary school kids, I value conversations with their teachers where they are open and honest with me even if I disagree with what they are saying.

Sometimes I've gotten into trouble because I've been too open or outspoken about things. I know there are many folks on the faculty who don't like me. I've let certain grudges go on too long.

But at the same time, I feel like there are people who get an idea in their head about what you represent, and from there on out, there is no changing their opinion.

Happens in my head, too.

Radio Silence (or Why I'm Sick of Justifying Two Months Off)

2011-07-15T10:53:00.004-04:00

In the forms, blogs, and other online realms where education is discussed, there is a meme of sorts that is all about the tit-for-tat of how much teachers work. One side claims that teachers are overpaid because they work "part time" and not the "full-time" 40/5/52 that everyone else seems to work (I think their claim is 20/2.5/26). On the other side is the would-you-like-to-see-the-Stigmata listing of hours spent grading papers, sitting through professional development, planning lessons, making copies, spending your own money on pencils, etc.

I'm at the point in my life where I have spent about as much time being a teacher as I did not being a teacher. In other words, I've worked both the 9-to-5 and the teacher's schedule (I also worked a 5-4-9 federal gov't schedule at one point which I sometimes miss because it meant I had every other Monday off). My opinion on this particular part of the debate makes me sound like Claire in The Breakfast Club when she tells Bender and Brian that neither of them is better than the other. In other words, shut the hell up, you're adding nothing to the damn conversation.

That being said, I'm a very neurotic person. To the point where I should probably be either in therapy or on medication. So even though I tend to ignore or get annoyed by this part of the argument, I also find myself ticking off in my head all of the things that I do in my "three months off" (which really is about 7-8 weeks, to be honest) that show that it's worth giving me that time. In other words: look world, I'm not sitting on my ass!!! I taught summer school! I am planning! I'm reading articles! I'm reading books for next year! I'm studying!

Granted, I am doing that. However, I'm getting sick of thinking about why I'm doing that and I am actually getting sick of thinking about work in general. In the past three weeks, I have started and erased blog posts that cover an array of topics, from bigotry to technology to Casey Anthony. Some of them I think were never going to see the light of day anyway and I wrote them in a "I just need to get this off my chest in some way" manner; some of them were just really bad.

After erasing my latest one (and then posting something on my summer reading project), I thought to myself, "Wait, why do I feel guilty for not wanting to think about work for a little while? Why is it that every time I sit down to do something not work-related, I hear a voice saying 'NO! JUSTIFY YOUR BREAK! JUSTIFY YOUR JOB! JUSTIFY YOUR EXISTENCE!'? And furthermore, why do I feel like I need to listen to it."

That voice needs to shut the hell up and the only way to do that is probably to shut myself up for a while. I'm going to burn myself out before this year even begins if I keep trying to make impossible to-do lists with the thought that I need to be doing something more constructive than sitting around and reading Whatever Happened to Rainbow Pudding Pops?

In other words, I get a summer break because I need a break and while that obviously makes me a 20/2.5/26 worker who is sucking off the teat of those who work real jobs, I don't care. I need to relax and get stuff out of my head for a while, which means I'll be taking a much-needed blogging break and probably even a commenting/discussion break.

And to celebrate, here's some Sara Bareilles.

2011 Summer Reading Project: States of Confusion

2011-07-14T22:30:00.002-04:00

A while back, I was bumming around on The Huffington Post and came across this video, which features writer Paul Jury running through stereotypes about all 50 states in two minutes:

At the end, it advertises his book, States of Confusion, which is about his journey across the Continental U.S. about a year after he had graduated college. Being that I had decided to read books about traveling this summer, I downloaded it onto my Kindle and while I was at the beach this week, read it in about two days.

The impetus for Jury's trip is in his book's subtitle: My 19,000 Mile Detour to Find Direction. In other words, at 23, he couldn't figure out what the heck to do with his life, so he took what money he had and decided to hit 48 states in 48 days in a '93 VW van he called "The Spacemobile." The only problem was that The Spacemobile was out of commission at that moment so he had to use his parents' other car, which he refers to as "The Imposter."

The car(s) make for some of the more humorous portions of the book as they factor heavily into the misadventure part of his trip, which is divided into chapters by states and details how he followed rules that he set out at the beginning, mainly those similar to what William Least Heat-Moon set out for himself in Blue Highways, which was to avoid interstates and have some sort of experience as much as possible. The difference here is that Jury is much younger than Heat-Moon was when he made his trip and instead of keeping a personal record of his trip for himself before turning it into a book, he blogged about it from the road. Thankfully, States of Confusion is not a verbatim reprint of said blog (or at least not totally--I admit to never having read the blog), it is a look back and even mentions the blog at points, especially when it comes to his interacting with his parents and his girlfriend while on the road.

This, by the way, is what gives the book some serious heft and makes it worthy of a book. After all, Jury is looking for direction, trying to figure out what to do with himself, and very often spends his time contemplating both what he wants to do but his relationship as well. Appropriately, he broaches the subject with several friends and even random people along the way. It gets philosophical without getting pretentious, which very often happens with soul-searching journeys of self-discovery, and I think that's because Jury's voice has a bit of self-deprecation and humility that makes him likable. States of Confusion both entertains and makes you think, which is what a good travel book should do.

Living History (an open letter to students)

2011-06-25T09:50:00.000-04:00

Dear Students:

It is very likely that at some point in the last few hours, as you logged on to Facebook or Twitter or checked your phone's overnight texts or saw the morning news when you wandered into the kitchen for some Cocoa Puffs, you found out that New York State approved marriage between two people of the same sex.

As a native New Yorker, I could not be prouder of my home state. As a supporter of gay rights, I see this as a huge, very important step toward equality in this country. As a teacher, I see this as a moment that you want to follow closely whether you support this particular cause or not.

When I was in school during the 1980s and 1990s, I learned about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. My theology elective in college, taught by the brilliant Dr. Charles Marsh, was called "Political Theology and Social Existence" and covered that movement in great detail, especially the roles that religious leaders played (it was a theology course, after all). I read about many of the players in the fight against segregation and grew to have a deep appreciation for not only their accomplishments but how complex and nuanced their struggle was.

However, I really didn't feel that connected to it. I was born in a country where Jim Crow had been eliminated 25-30 years prior. It was, for a lack of a better word, history. Now, during my lifetime, I was able to experience important events in world history such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of the Soviet Union, which were monumental events in themselves; and together we as teacher and students have experienced other important historical events.

This, however, is a little different. Yes, we can all turn to a war, an attack, an election and see the history there and talk about it. But what you saw last night is not an isolated event but part of a larger movement, a movement that started before you were born and will continue to exist because their job is not done. You are in the unique position to watch history unfold, get directly involved, and learn about an important issue and just how complicated it can get as well as what a "struggle" really is. Like I said, I learned about Martin Luther King, Jr., but it took a lot more for me to grasp the full scope of the Civil Rights movement.

This is a civics lesson, a history lesson, a philosophy lesson, a sociology lesson. It is a chance for you to learn about something for yourself without a teacher assigning it out of a dry, outdated, badly researched and horribly written textbook. All you have to do is start paying attention. Click through the links your friends post to whatever social media you're on. Pick up that newspaper that your parents insist on subscribing to, and if they don't, just type nytimes.com or washingtonpost.com or latimes.com or huffingtonpost.com or cnn.com or whatever URL you see fit into your browser and start reading.

People in my field talk about "student-centered learning" all the time. Well, that's what this is and the emphasis is on you, the student. I spent the couple of hours of my morning reading about last night's bill and commenting on websites and posting about it to Facebook.

Truly learning about this will be hard work because like I said, it's a very complex story that will not go away with the next news cycle. There will be other states that fight this fight and some will not follow New York's example. There will be people who cry with joy and people who cower in fear at these decisions. But you will be better off if you know how and why things happen the way they do ... even if it leaves you frustrated and upset at times.

So please, go out there and pay attention. Start reading and if you choose to do so, get involved. You will find it's a rewarding way to spend summer vacation.

Sincerely,

A Teacher

Catching Up With Erica Goldson

2011-06-21T15:32:00.000-04:00

It's been about a year since Erica Goldson stood up in front of her class at Coxsacie-Athens High School and gave what those who passed her speech around the Internet considered a daring, brave, and bold valedictory speech. I didn't think it was so much brave and bold as it was arrogant and myopic and said as much in an entry that's gotten the second-most views of any entry on this blog (the first is this one about Harry Wong). When it came up in a post a couple of weeks ago ("Confessions of an Achievement Junkie"), I decided to take another look at Goldson's original speech as well as my post to see if my opinion had changed on it or if I'd learned anything from the chiding I got at the hands of several commenters.

I stand by what's there in my criticism, as snarky or mean as it may seem to some. Her speech still comes off less ballsy and more bratty than anything, and I think that it lacks perspective, to be honest. But I'm not writing this entry to tear into that speech again. In fact, I wouldn't have addressed it at all had I not noticed that she has been updating her blog, "America Via Erica" fairly regularly and that her story actually has been pretty interesting so far.

What begins with said graduation speech and then goes into her first semester of college leads into an odyssey of sorts. Goldson, at the end of that semester, drops out and decides to spend some time traveling around the country, staying with friends as well as a family who lives a bit of a Bohemian lifestyle and drives around the deep south on a bus. She sees this as more of a worthwhile education than she was getting in any school system and has basically done away with the idea that a formal education will really not do one, or at least her, any good. I was a bit skeptical at first when I began reading but kept going because a) this kinda ties into my whole travel-themed summer reading project; and b) Goldson is a good travel writer. In fact, I think she may have inadvertently found her calling here. Her descriptions are very vivid and she does make an effort to experience whatever place she goes to, instead of doing what too many college dropouts have done in the past: bummed around in their hometowns and gotten drunk before finally realizing that dad's not going to pay for gas and beer money anymore and they're going to have to find a job.

The only weakness that the blog really has is the same weakness I spotted in her graduation speech: a lack of perspective. Although this time, I think that despite what commenters may say about her "maturity for her age," she tends to fall into the trap of typical teenage arrogance. When you're 18 and 19 years old and are truly discovering the world for the first time, you tend to take on an air of superiority and act as if you know everything about a particular subject because you just found out about it. Trust me, I've been there and know that I embarrassed myself a number of times during my high school and college years because my mouth was working faster than my brain and I didn't take the time to perhaps look into something a little more before spouting off about it (aaand to a certain extent I still do that).

At times, this winds up being unintentionally hilarious, such as in her final college paper, "Bye Bye Buffalo" wherein she lambastes the stereotypical college life of drinking and parties and sex but instead of coming off as insightful comes off as entitled to the point where it really is comical (I mean, she even quotes her own graduation speech in the paper). She had spent most of the semester complaining about her classes, mainly because ... well, she was a freshman and freshmen don't necessarily get the pick of the litter when it comes to classes; and she doesn't seem to fit in with it all. The comments make it more funny because so many people who write comments on the blog are so positive that they're almost sycophantic, making the few worthwhile negatives (there are a few rude ones that sound more like trolls than anything) stand out. For instance, on "Bye Bye Buffalo", one commenter makes an interesting point:

Your generalizations in your section in Work Life are scathingly stereotypical and jaded as well. Is everyone cut out to be an entrepreneur? No. Many people value a certain amount of stability and are willing to pay for it by getting a college degree. To accuse them of being mindless drones who care about nothing but friends and money is horribly judgmental and inaccurate.

It's comments like that that make this one of the rare times where comments on a blog are worth reading, or at least skimming (if only she'd get rid of the hard-on-the-eyes cursive font she's been using for the comments). They provide a little bit of balance to a story that does tend to be too earnest at times and like I said, often lacks perspective. Still, I'm willing to give that the benefit of the doubt because Goldson's story is still unfolding so she hasn't really reached a big conclusion about things (one of the fun, and sometimes frustrating things about reading someone's story in real time as opposed to a prepackaged book). At the moment, she is working at a pizza parlor in New Jersey after realizing that she needs money to continue her adventure, which is a mature step in itself especially in a time when the cost of living in this country is getting ridiculous.

Unfortunately, she tends to undermine herself by saying things like:

I was talking to Ollie the other day about this job. He told me about his friends coming out of college now that are like, "What, I can't make 60 tho with my college degree, and, instead, I'm getting a job that I could've gotten out of high school?! Shit." According to this article, "[i]n the United States today, 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees." It looks like I can be just like them except without the average of $25,000 in student loan debt. Among the statistics was also "[a]ccording to very extensive research detailed in a new book entitled Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, 45 percent of U.S. college students exhibit 'no significant gains in learning after two years in college." Of course we all learn everyday, but it looks like any type of measurable academic progress was absent. ("Palisades Park, NJ" )

One only needs to tell her that some of those 317,000 waiters and waitresses (who aren't struggling actors :P) are waiting tables because of a horrible job market and waiting said tables is a more positive step than, say, collecting unemployment, which about 9% of the people in this country are doing.

Thankfully, the entire blog is not as short-sighted, and she doesn't completely buy into her own hype even if she teeters dangerously on the edge of falling into the trap of trying to become some sort of "college dropout folk hero," which is gathering a lot of steam these days. I'm not saying that you can't skip college or drop out of college and make a good living for yourself because plenty have done it; I'm just saying that too many people in our culture think that dropping out automatically will turn them into Bill Gates. She's not there ... yet, anyway.

If you're going to read "America Via Erica," start from the very beginning and work your way through the last year or else you won't really get the whole story. There is something very genuine in her search for education through experience, as much as there is something also genuine in a search for education through education, and while you don't have to agree with everything that is there (I found myself rolling my eyes more than once), it's a great effort to go beyond letting one moment for which you are mildly famous define you and is an intriguing read that's worth checking out.

Teacher Movie Theater: Tenure

2011-06-20T19:11:00.000-04:00

Sometimes you wind up falling into Netflix's "suggestions" trap, which is what happened one day when I logged on to check my ever-growing queue and saw that they had recommended this 2009 Luke Wilson indie comedy about an assistant professor at a small, liberal arts college in Pennsylvania who is up for ... well, the title of the movie is Tenure, so ... yeah.

Anyway, Wilson plays Charlie Thurber, the aforementioned assistant professor of English, who is up for tenure at the end of the spring semester at Grey College, an institution that is obviously supposed to represent the type of small college that thinks a little too highly of itself as it faculty is populated by stuffy academics who are more concerned with the "publish or perish" part of their jobs than the actual teaching that can often get in the way. Charlie's problem starts not with the fact that he's up for tenure, but that this is his twelfth year as an assistant professor and his third or fourth school so this feels like it's his last chance.

Further complicating things is his friend Jay (David Koechner), an assistant professor of anthropology who has been denied tenure, probably due to the fact that he has spent the majority of his academic career obsessed with finding Sasquatch in the Appalachian Mountains, and coming up with harebrained schemes to either make money or get back at people.

Charlie's family life isn't so great, either. His sister constantly calls his answering machine and when she's not screaming at him to get a cell phone, she is goading him into visiting his father (Bob Gunton) in the assisted living facility he was placed in the day he walked off and went missing for a few days. The doctors say it's the onset of alzheimer's but the former tenured professor at Princeton, who can use the word "quixotic" in Scrabble, begs to differ.

Finally, there is Elaine Grasso (Gretchen Mol), a new professor who has been hired on the tenure track and is Charlie's direct competition. She's young, blonde, pretty, and from Yale, so the dean absolutely adores her and more or less goes out of his way to make Charlie feel like he's screwed; which, in a way, he is.

So you have a set up for a pretty decent satire of a world that is very insular and isolated with a hero who doesn't necessarily seek to buck the system but is simply tired of it. Charlie spends the better part of the film working on an article that he's trying to get published in a literary journal, any literary journal, even though you can tell that his heart isn't in any of that.

Being that this is an "indie" comedy, Tenure doesn't really go for big, big laughs like another Luke Wilson comedy, Old School. Which is good because in the couple of moments where it does (Charlie walks in on his dad and woman at the old folks' home; there's a whole gag about Charlie paying a woman he called on the PBS telethon line to go with him to Elaine's house for dinner) it falls flat, except for where David Koechner's involved. The problem, though, is that much of the comedy--and much of the writing, as well--revels in its own sense of quirkiness and tends to ask the viewer to "figure out the joke." That's something I can appreciate in my comedies; however, we're asked to read between the lines a little too much. The one big laugh I did get was obviously not the intention of the filmmakers because when in the last scene (highlight for spoiler), Wilson is offered a probationary tenure and then quits to go teach high school English, I laughed out loud. Because there's no bullshit in that.

Still, Wilson is a likable main character--even to the point where he doesn't fall into the "student with a crush on him" trap that's clearly set the moment we see him in front of his students--and by the end of the film you're sort of rooting him to get tenure but you're rooting more for him to figure out what he really wants to do.

I don't have much of a perspective where academia is concerned. I went to a small liberal arts college in the northeast (well, it was small and a college at the time), so I was a student in that particular world, but I did appreciate that Charlie has no "The system sucks! Fight the power!" moment that permeates teacher movies with regard to what's clearly a love of teaching versus a love of being an academic. The ribbing is witty and sometimes subtle and despite what I said about it being too "read between the lines" does work for the most part. Richard Russo's novel Straight Man (which I wish they'd make into a film) is a much better send-up of this type of setting, but this one's still worth the rental.

2011 Summer Reading Project: Blue Highways

2011-06-17T17:20:00.000-04:00

So I know I'm not the only teacher who takes a look at his summer calendar and sees an opportunity to catch up on reading that went ignored during the school year. Sure, I was able to sneak in a few really good books during the last nine months or so (especially after I got a Kindle for Christmas and was downloading whatever free stuff I could find), but for the most part the stuff I read was either for class, work, or for blog. In other words, "required" reading, the type of stuff that can sometimes feel more like a chore than pleasure.

Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the heck out of the literature that I read for my World Lit class and I think I could keep reading All Quiet on the Western Front every year and never really get tired of it, but the pile of books that was on my nightstand for the better part of the year was mocking me to the point that I put them all back on the shelf and decided that I was going to actually have a theme for my reading this year. You know, only read books that are about one topic.

The topic in question, I decided, was going to be travel. Books about journeys, if you will. And I decided that I was going to keep the "travel" theme a literal one, in that I would read books where people literally traveled and discovered things about both the world and themselves. Now, I'm not sure that I'm ever going to pick up that copy of Eat, Pray, Love, but I may finally dive into On the Road and will definitely read that copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that I swiped from the English department book room two years ago.

For the first book in this little project, I decided to take on William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, a book that had intrigued me for years whenever I was bumming around Barnes & Noble in the travel writing section but that I never picked up because I already had two or three graphic novels in my hand or was more interested in what Bill Bryson had to say at the time. Earlier this year, I was at a Borders and had a gift card and Blue Highways was one of several books in a "Buy One, Get one 50% off" pile. I felt that I really couldn't ignore it, so I picked it up, bought it ... and proceeded to ignore it for six months.

After the dust settled on my last paper and my gradebook was about to close, I began reading Heat-Moon's journey via "Ghost Dancing," a van he'd outfitted to live in while he drove only through the backroads of America, which on road maps were often marked in blue (hence the title). But what makes his journey more "high-stakes" so to speak in the context of his life is that he had recently lost his job and was going through a divorce, so he literally put his world in Ghost Dancing and took off to see what he could find. Along the way, he documents just about every conversation he has in an effort to give the reader a feel for the idiosyncrasies of America in 1979 (which is when he took the trip).

It sounds like a total cliche, to be honest. Guy goes off to find himself and meets colorful characters, then comes to startling revelation about life and happiness or something like that. I mean, Steinbeck sort of did it in Travels With Charley and The Grapes of Wrath (I've read and loved both) and there are about a million essays, travelogues, blogs, and even books where someone comes to some divine understanding through travel (Eat, Pray, Love, for instance). But these themes are cliche for a reason and for every hack job done there is one that is really outstanding and stands out. Blue Highways is among those that stands out.

Heat-Moon captures the average person really well and seems to have a genuine interest in everyone he meets. Not only that, he withholds judgment on just about everyone, which I find hard to do ... not that I'm a total predjudicial asshole or anything, but I think that there's something in human nature that makes you take a look at the average person and form an opinion. If he was doing this when he came across a hitchhiker or the owner of a restaurant, he doesn't let us know and instead lets us make up our own minds about who those people are.

Furthermore, his quest to find small towns that are barely on the map is exhilirating without being pretentious. Our culture today is a lot more homogeneous than it was 30 years ago, what with fast food and big box stores taking over the landscape. A person, especially one who is obviously well educated like Heat-Moon, going off to explore the smaller side of America ("the real America" as some people would put it) often easily falls into the trap of shitting all over everything that is large in this country, as if knowing and celebrating the obscure gives him some sort of hipster cred. Blue Highways shows the charm of these places and also tempers the wonderment and rush of discovery with the mundane. Cross-country drives are a complete pain in the ass. Not that I've ever done one, but I have done my fair share of eight- or ten-hour drives and I know how boring sitting on the highway can be, no matter how many CDs you have or playlists you've made or baseball games you can find on the radio. There's bad weather, car trouble, and loneliness that Heat-Moon describes so perfectly at times that it enhances his journey.

I personally really enjoyed his "warts and all" approach to the people of this country, and it makes me wonder what it would be like if he tried this journey again, exactly as he'd done it in the late 1970s, to see how much had changed. Obviously, some of the people he encountered would be dead (there were quite a few elderly people in his travelogue) but would some of the towns still be there? Would some of those blue highways still be operational? Then again, maybe that's one journey you should take yourself?

All in all, a worthwhile experience of a book and one that surprisingly holds up even though it's 30 years old.

OMG is this how u write?

2011-06-16T14:45:00.000-04:00

This type of slang is most prevalent in the classroom but has crept into college-essay writing, according to Chad Dion Lassiter, who heads an academic mentorship program for high schoolers in Philadelphia. "Admissions officers have shared with me that a lot of the essays they're encountering now are deeply rooted in this technological culture of cut-off sentences where you're writing like you speak," he told U.S. News. "After the first few sentences, college admissions professionals toss them to the side."

Is social-media shorthand a problem in your classroom? What have you done to try to nip it in the bud? Or are you O.K. with students writing some assignments using the method of communication they use with friends?

This is the end of a post on Teacher Magazine's "Teaching Now" blog, and while I was going over some basic writing process stuff this morning, I got to thinking about it and what their questions really mean.

That "text speak" permeates the writing of teenagers is really not a new concept, when you think about it. I remember back in high school writing a couple of papers and being criticized for "writing how you talk," which when you are writing a formal report or essay isn't what you should be doing (obvs). So I think that a concern over the lack of capital letters and "LOL" in an essay isn't anything new, nor should it be treated as such. It all essentially falls in line with what my junior high and high school English teachers taught over and over and over again: voice, audience, and purpose.

Yes, I realize that teenagers have a different langauge sometimes, but we don't need to cater our evaluation of their writing to their dialect; they need to cater their writing to whom it's for. If a student sits down to write a college entrance essay, it's the same as when I sit down to write a cover letter for a job that I want. I have to make sure I know who I am writing to and am clear about why I am writing it. Furthermore, I need to make sure it's perfect and doesn't have mistakes. After all, this is a competition and I am being judged against my peers. So, that admissions officer has every right to chuck the application and the essay.

We don't need to treat what is essentially immaturity in language as something that's a brand-new challenge for us because it's done via a different medium than before. We simply need to reinforce what is proper grammar, structure, and spelling as well as teach them how different voices in writing work. And if they decide to put wtf in an essay? Well, that's their mistake.

Pomp and Circumstance and Hilarity

2011-06-13T22:01:00.002-04:00

It's the middle of graduation season and that means commencement speeches, commencement speeches, commencement speeches. And every year, one of those rises above the rest. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Conan O'Brien at Dartmouth:

Confessions of an Achievement Junkie

2011-06-08T17:23:00.000-04:00

Last week, I came across an article "How Important are Grades to You?" by Marcella Purnama in the Melbourne-based Meld Magazine. In the article, she challenges the notion that knowledge and good grades go hand in hand and criticizes the fact that we have become obsessed with the evaluation part of education and therefore have lost the plot. She even goes as far as to quote Erica Goldson's 2010 valedictory speech, which those who read this blog on a regular basis (both of you) will recognize, and picks up the part that most people who were enamored of that speech picked up on, the "I was a good slave, you're all slaves, death to the system!" part.

It's not that necessary for me to repeat that there aren't that many teachers out there who worship at the altar of evaluation and standardized testing; in fact, most of the people I know seem to accept testing as part of the job and strive for their students to get good test scores because ... well, I don't know about you but I don't feel like standing on an unemployment line. But when you get to the heart of the matter and take something like standardized testing out of the equation, I honestly get frustrated by my students' Pavlovian need for a grade on every little assignment to the point where they will not read an article or engage in a discussion if there no type of credit attached. "Is this for a grade?" is the second-most asked student question (the first, of course, is "Can I go to the bathroom?").

But at the same time, grades are obviously necessary on some level. I know that knowledge is a formidable goal in itself and one should be happy that he or she achieved said knowledge, no matter if the grade is an A+ or a C-. Purnama seems to have a pretty balanced view of things and I think she realizes this; however, she ends her piece by saying:

University was never meant to be a pressure cooker. We come to learn new things, not just for the getting of good grades or jobs. More than that, we learn because we are passionate about what we are studying. It’s all about seeing the bigger picture. Good grades aren’t the guarantee for success in life.

And like I said, this is true to an extent. Just because you got good grades in high school doesn't mean that you're going to automatically ascend to the presidency and if you pull a D in 9th grade English you're not doomed to destitution or a life of crime. You know, just like winning a senior award or a scholarship doesn't make you any better than the person who didn't.

I just sat through another senior awards ceremony, in fact. I think that most high school teachers have had to endure one of these, especially at schools where the underclassmen are made to attend and the job becomes a babysitting one. And if we're not complaining about having to babysit, we're complaining about how long the awards ceremony is, or how the same kids seem to win every award (of course, I'm always the first person to point out that very often they're the only ones to apply for the scholarships they win). Somewhere along the line, usually when we get into hour three of the ceremony (seriously, they're like an Oscars telecast), someone pipes up that there's no point in these awards because in the long run, they're all insignificant anyway.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who agree with that sentiment. Obviously, being the person who is given the perfect attendance award in high school doesn't mean that you're set for life. I know someone who was awarded the perfect attendance award in high school and then wound up flunking out of college because he never went to class. And I know people who spent a significant amount of high school "in absentia" who are successful in their jobs as police officers, lawyers, soldiers, or whatever passion they followed. Of course, that all goes without saying because if you think that who you are at 18 defines who you will be for the next 70 years, you're either naive or stupid. Maybe both.

At the same time, however, it's tough for me to follow the cool kids crowd and embrace the pooh-poohing of awards, achievement, and good grades because ... well, I was one of those kids in high school who showed up every day and got excellent grades. It was just last night that I was digging my college graduation gown out of a box in my basement for Saturday's graduation ceremony and underneath it I spotted a stack of stuff from high school. Among old journals, student newspapers and event programs were several awards that I'd earned from elementary school all the way to high school.

I wasn't surprised that I'd kept all of that stuff, but as I briefly thumbed through the high honor roll certificates, President's Academic Fitness Awards, and a Lincoln Avenue Elementary "Citizen of the Month" commendation, I was a little surprised that I'd forgotten that not only was I an achiever in school, I was pretty much an awards chaser. Not in a cutthroat sort of way, mind you, but ever since I was excited that I recieved all "S's" on a second grade report card (second grade was tough for me and I'm amazed I wasn't labeled ADD because of all the daydreaming I did) I spent my academic career trying to get the next award. All S's on a report card led to struggling to do three pull-ups in gym so I could net the Standard Physical Fitness Award; the President's Academic Fitness awards and Honor Roll certificates led to me graduating in the top 25 of my class; graduating in the top 25 in my class led to maintaining a 3.0 in college (harder than it seemed, though I won't go into details); and that eventually led back to high school where I netted a "New Teacher of the Year" award my first year of teaching (funny enough, I have no idea where that award is).

I guess if you were to run a profile on me based on those last two paragraphs, I clearly sought some validation by winning all of those awards. I was really smart and I worked very hard to get the grades I did (and took a lot of shit for being a "know it all") and I know that I received some sort of psychological benefit from all of it, but other than that, was it worth it? Did it matter in the long run?

All things considered, probably not. Like I've already said, I'm sure that if I graduated #100 in my class and wanted to become a high school English teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, or a writer, I probably could have. But at the same time, to say that such achievement and awards are useless kind of makes me feel like an ass for caring about those things when I was younger. Yes, that's my ego talking. I understand the sentiment that we are too awards focused, it's hard for me to let go of the idea that it's nice to get awards, so I can't exactly join this chorus because I don't feel like I should apologize for being proud of what I did accomplish.

Those who harp on their achievements, awards, and accomplishments are arrogant; on the flip side, those who go out of their way to tear down that wall and piss all over said achievements, awards, and accomplishments are bitter. My man, Aristotle, always talked about living in extremes being unhealthy and that life is a search for a mean. Not that I know what that mean is because it's a lifelong search, but I do know that I'm grateful for what I was awarded when I was younger, I refuse to be ashamed for my being a grade monkey, and that I will continue to search for knowledge whether I am awarded for it or not.

Teacher Mix Tape: The Load Out/Stay

2011-06-07T17:23:00.000-04:00

My year unofficially ends tomorrow (graduation's Saturday) and today's early dismissal was the last day of exams, so I spent the afternoon handing in paperwork, finalizing grades, and dismantling my classroom. When I left, there were a few boxes in my trunk and as I was flipping around Sirius, I caught part of Jackson Browne's "The Load Out/Stay," a live track (well, two, actually) that I have loved ever since I first heard during one of those long school nights where I sat in my room doing homework and listening to the local classic rock station, WBAB.

So, in honor of the end of the year I present a great live performance from 1978 (I found one from Browne's 2009 Charlottesville concert, which would be appropriate, but the sound's not so great).

The Load Out/Stay
By Jackson Browne & Bryan Garofalo ("The Load Out") and Maurice Williams ("Stay")

Now the seats are all empty
Let the roadies take the stage
Pack it up and tear it down
They’re the first to come and last to leave
Working for that minimum wage
They’ll set it up in another town

Tonight the people were so fine
They waited there in line
And when they got up on their feet
They made the show
And that was sweet
But I can hear the sound
Of slamming doors and folding chairs
And that’s a sound they’ll never know

Now roll them cases out and lift them amps
Haul them trusses down and get ‘em up them ramps
Cause when it comes to moving me
You know you guys are the champs
But when that last guitar’s been packed away

You know that I still want to play
So just make sure you got it all set to go
Before you come for my piano

But the band’s on the bus
And they’re waiting to go
We’ve got to drive all night
And do a show in Chicago
Or Detroit, I don’t know
We do so many shows in a row
And these towns all look the same
We just pass the time in our hotel rooms
And wander ‘round backstage
Till those lights come up and we hear that crowd
And we remember why we came

Now we got country ’n’ western on the bus R&B
We got disco in eight tracks, cassettes in stereo
We got rural scenes and magazines
And we got truckers on the CB
And we got Richard Pryor on the video
We got time to think of the ones we love
While the miles roll away
But the only time that seems too short
Is the time that we get to play

People you’ve got the power over what we do
You can sit there and wait
Or you can pull us through
Come along, sing the song
You know you can’t go wrong
’Cause when that morning sun comes beating down
You’re going to wake up in your town
But we’ll be scheduled to appear
A thousand miles away from here

Stay
Just a little bit longer.
We wanna play
Just a little bit longer.

Now the promoter don't mind.
And the union don't mind
If we take a little time
And we leave it all behind
And sing one more song.

Oh won't you stay
Just a little bit longer.
Please, please, please
Say you will.
Say you will.

The disingenuous story that we keep seeing

2011-06-04T09:45:00.000-04:00

Jack told us: "There's a lot of pressure on the parents to make donations on a regular basis and a lot of those are for the teachers. There's the Christmas gift, the end of the year gift, teacher appreciation twice a year… there's a lot of solicitation from homeroom moms. In my case it was a direct solicitation for cash -- 'cash is king' the email said."

EdWeek linked to this story from the Phoenix, AZ Fox affiliate. Unfortunately, it's not a very detailed story and the anchors seem to be trying to goad the teacher they interview into admitting that teachers try and solicit their students and their parents for cash at the end of the year. The teacher they interview, Marilun Buehler, and either belittle her or accuse her of being naive or lying and use the typical "a bunch of people say ... some people say ...". Then, they decide it's time to editorialize about how high school teachers are different than elementary school teachers so they can completely discredit the other viewpoint they deigned to put on.

Maybe in some way there is pressure for elementary school parents to give teachers gifts at the end of the year, but what they really didn't get at was that this pressure probably comes from other parents--a sort of extension of the "Mommy Wars" bullshit that the media tries to foist upon the public because people will watch any show where women get all sanctimonious and accusatory with one another about parenting styles.

I've only ever gotten a couple of gifts, ever. I think they were coffee mugs, a Christmas ornament, and cookies. They were completely unsolicited, although the cookies were pretty awesome. Oh, and some students have asked me to signed yearbooks. Honestly, I'm going to echo the sentiment of Ms. Buehler, which is that you can appreciate a teacher year round, mostly by being a good student.

The problem I have is the way this story feeds into the meme that teachers are greedy monsters out to siphon all available money away from the good people of our nation by manipulating the poor innocent students in their charge. I mean, the piece itself is pretty irresponsible journalism and the "you're wasting my time with this?" attitude that Ms. Buehler has is dead on. This is the stuff that gets attention in the media today and we're not having the actual conversation that we need to have about teachers and their students.

Unfortunately, we can't fire all of the media.

But, in defense of "Jack," the parent interviewed for the show, his response is what a father would typically say. In fact, George Costanza had it right: "So now we have to buy an engagement gift? Next they'll get married and that requires a gift. Then they will have a baby and that requires a gift. Then the kid will have birthdays! IT NEVER ENDS!!!!"

The feedback conundrum

2011-05-29T08:55:00.000-04:00

I created this gem of a deomotivational poster for use in a post last year when I was having fun with despair.com's "create your own poster" tool, but I've found myself mentioning it (a cleaner version, anyway) to my yearbook staff when the books come in during these past two Mays as we're about to sort and distribute our books. It's like a rehearsed speech by now. "Look," I tell them, "I think you guys did a great job. You guys know you did a great job. Were there things that could have been better? Of course. There always are. But you should be proud of this book. The thing is, though, you won't hear that from people. All you'll hear about is how something was missing or something was misspelled or something didn't look good."

At this point, one of my editors, who has been on staff for a couple of years, pipes up in agreement, mentioning how ticked off she was when someone decided to rip the book apart and didn't take kindly to being told to therefore sign up for yearbook.

"Yeah, you could say that," I continue, "but honestly, don't take it personally. I can't tell you the number of times I've gotten some email where 'several people' or 'everyone' is upset about something or doesn't like something and honestly that's the first time I've heard about it. I've had them go to the principal before. But honestly, don't take it personally. I think that people--especially teenagers--get some sort of weird rush from pointing out where you guys screwed up. It makes them feel better or something."

It's kind of sad that I have to give such a speech when the book comes in, but that is the reality of the situation. Sometimes, those who don't like what is in the yearbook go straight to the press, which has happened two years in a row at Massaponax HS in Fredericksburg. Last year, it was "offensive" material. This year, it's a few seniors left out (which is quickly solved with what us in "the biz" call a "tip-in") as well as the word "Fredericksburg" being misspelled on the spine (I'm reminded of when I was a freshman reporter at my college paper and wrote an article about ROTC without knowing what it stood for and used the wrong words ... and my editor didn't correct it. Oops.).

I'm sure that after parents went straight to a reporter (after all, last year's stink worked), the yearbook adviser and principal were inundated with calls about how this has "ruined" someone's senior year, as if said mistake is the type of traumatic experience that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. Now, mistakes like that are unacceptable and that's why yearbook advisers are constantly teaching our staffers to be more diligent and are always looking to improve our processes; however, there is such a thing as an overreaction.

Every year, I give that speech and I am a nervous wreck right up until the end of school because I'm waiting for an assistant or my principal (or worse, someone higher up) to walk into my room and shut the door and tell me that a parent said this or that. I deliberately avoid even speaking to an administrator on the first couple of days of yearbooks being out because I just don't want to have such a conversation.

This, by the way, shouldn't be what happens. My only stress should come from whether or not I'll sell enough copies of the book to pay my publication bill (which I mention whenever someone bitches at me about the price of the book ... and that shuts them up real quick). Unfortunately, I can count on one hand the number of times a parent has come directly to me with a complaint about something and someone higher-up has not gotten involved. The other times (and admittedly, they are few and far between), it's a direct call to a principal--who has better things to do with his or her time.

As a teacher, I often hear about open communication and making sure that both students are parents are kept up to date on both grades and behavior so that a bad grade or a discipline issue doesn't come from completely out of nowhere. And while there are some parents who I obviously don't call enough, I am always trying to make sure I give feedback. So is it too much to ask for this to be reciprocated? For me not to be surprised by someone else? Or, when parents do say something, for them not to sound like Fox News reporters by telling me that "several people" share their opinion?

Criticism--constructive or otherwise--is what helps drive the creative process. As a teacher and adviser I am constantly striving to improve. However, there's a certain cowardice that comes with not being direct, and in a situation where "respect" for those in my charge is harped on, I don't think it's too much to ask for respect myself.

Because.

2011-05-25T23:46:00.000-04:00

Something recently said on a forum where people from my hometown are debating the latest school budget (read: complaining about their property taxes):

What constitutes an appropriate, quality, free public education'? And does anyone still think we can make everything accessible to everyone? I've outgrown this utopian nonsense long ago, and have fully come to terms with the fact that my kids will not get to play polo with kids in the Hamptons ...

This was from a frequent poster on the board who is a rabid conservative, or at least that's what she talks about frequently when she's not harping on the fact that she "used to be a misguided liberal" (to which I say: are we overcompensating or what?) and the forum itself is not one I post on very much anymore because the inmates have taken over the asylum so to speak. This remark, for instance, went unchallenged, and that's because the people who would normally challenge a statement like that left a while ago when any contrary opinion was shouted down in a nasty way.

I'm offering my comments in this more "public" forum here because I feel that this needs to be addressed. I know that by addressing such a remark I'm giving ignorance power here but I honestly am getting fed up with how much ... well, how much bullshit is allowed to be spewed in our public arena, especially when it comes to education.

Do you know what constitutes an appropriate, quality, free public education? Well, I don't know how many do because we seem to be changing that definition on a fairly regular basis. Then again, that's what just about anyone who has a limited knowledge of education would expect. I hear too many old farts talking about how things were "back in my day" and how kids had respect for parents/teachers and how if they fell out of line there were real consequences. Of course, nowadays black and white children are allowed to go to school together, the Supreme Court rightfully took prayer out of school years ago, and somewhere along the line someone wised up and realized that you don't hit students.

Besides, if what constitutes an appropriate, quality, free public education doesn't change, then we in the educational field aren't doing our jobs correctly. If you look at it from where I stand every day, you see a situation where you have to move with the punches (in a manner of speaking) because every year and every student is a different challenge. The day I start recycling old lesson plans and worksheets without changing a single thing is when I become a crappy teacher.

Now if you look at it from a higher-up level, then the educational system obviously is changing with the times because it has to. Is it changing fast enough? No. Definitely not. There's too much bureaucracy and not enough money in place. But when you have a very large system in place like the behemoth that is public education you're not going to get quick change, especially when people at the policy level are fighting over the direction of that change (real change vs. better test scores ... not as easy a decision to make as you thought).

But why, then, do we still hold on to the "utopian nonsense" that we can provide everything to everyone? Well, I'll tell you why. Because.

Because we have to, and because we want to. Because each of those students who shows up to school each day has the right to not be a complete ignoramus when he or she walks out at the end of the day. Because you never know if the kid on free or reduced lunch is going to wind up being the first person in his family to attend college. Because the kid who has the shit kicked out of him every day for being a "faggot" wants to make it all the way to graduation so he can know what it means when Dan Savage says that "it gets better." Because the girl or boy who has a learning disability actually wants to be able to read a lengthy book and you're the one who can help him or her with that. Because if you do not educate the people of this country then this country becomes a cesspool of stupid and those who have already shown that they are capable of pulling the wool over our eyes while screwing us in a place that's very uncomfortable (like the back of a Volkswagen) will simply have an easier time doing so.

Because even those of us who don't feel like this is some sort of divine calling know that THIS IS WHAT WE DO.

I'm sorry that your taxes are going up. I'm sorry that you think that a group of people trying to make a living out of doing something they love to do are ruining this country. I'm sorry that your kids will never play polo with stuck up kids in the Hamptons. I'm sorry that maybe some of your tax dollars are going to *gasp* poor people who *GASP* might be black or Latino so they may have an opportunity to do something with their lives. And I'm sorry if I sound a little naive or idealistic with this rant of mine, but isn't that what this country is about?

I don't know about you, but I'm not too far removed from the tired, the poor, the huddled masses and all of that other description on the base of the Statue of Liberty. And getting those huddled masses to be something more than that--no matter what color they may be, mind you--starts with public education where they or their children will learn what it takes to function in this society.

But then again, your property taxes are going up so what the fuck do they matter, right?

I'm sorry, but I have low tolerance for assholes tonight and while normally I'd shrug a comment like that off, tonight I wasn't having it.

Someone really needs to knock Jay Matthews down a peg.

2011-05-22T13:13:00.001-04:00

Today's Washington Post has a section called "The High School Challenge," which is their annual ranking of public high schools in the Washington area as well as nationwide based on a set of criteria that education writer Jay Matthews developed a little more than a decade ago. Basically, he measures a high school's success based on the way it prepares students for college and that means based on how many take AP/IB classes. His philosophy seems to be that the more kids you have taking AP/IB classes, the better things are because they're being challenged.

I'm simplifying it slightly, but for the most part that is what gets a high ranking on his list, and even though he insists that he's not looking to promote white, rich schools most of the nationally high-ranked schools seem to be from white, rich areas. But there is a separate story about poor and high-minority districts and what they are trying to do to compete.

Honestly, I'm not going to delve into this too long, except to say that this seems about as valid as telling me that my school's SOL test scores are the exact measure of our quality; I'm getting exhausted from our culture's constant need to "rank" things, especially when very often down the line such rankings don't mean much; and if you read the article that Matthews wrote as the centerpiece for the Post's special section, he seems to focus just as much on how much of a genius he is for coming up with this ranking system as he does the system and rankings themselves.

You can read the article ("Behold the power of challenging all high school students--not just the A team") and you can also check out a WaPo online chat with Matthews on the topic. They are both worth reading, whether or not you agree or disagree.

Big Pimpin'

2011-05-18T18:59:00.000-04:00

I'm knee deep in final exam essays at the moment but I wanted to plug another, relatively new blog that is definitely worth reading.

Lit Thoughts is the work of an English teacher and friend of mine who is "Learning about teaching through the literature we teach." It's well-researched, smart, and engaging and ... well, I'll just let it speak for itself. From the post "Letter from an American Teacher":

For several years teaching Philosophy to college undergraduates I would tell my students, "These theories are the tools I am providing you. You must then prove to me you can build something with them." The Humanities Program is giving me the opportunity to try that model on the high school level. I can provide the materials: literature, history, art, music, grammar, rhetoric. What will the new American learner build with those tools? The same papers that have been written and re-written, or something new, bold, original and daring?

So go check it out!

The rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated

2011-05-17T21:47:00.000-04:00

Last week on Salon, Kim Brooks who was a student at a "middling high school in Central Virginia in the mid '90s," wrote a piece entitled "Death to High School English" wherein she questions the English education that she received at the hands of what I guess were middling teachers and brings up what has become a pretty big issue for colleges and universities--especially community colleges--remediation. In other words, too many college freshmen enter the hallowed halls of higher education barely knowing how to string two sentences together, much to the dismay of their professors, who wonder aloud, like Brooks does here, what the hell is going on in high schools.

The piece itself is very good and worth reading, though I do have to say that you could write the same from the perspective of a high school teacher who is wondering what the hell is going on in middle schools. Ditto for middle school teachers re: elementary schools. Ditto for all teachers re: home. And while I do have that criticism (that, and Brooks seems awfully pretentious at times and does need to get over herself a bit), I think she makes a solid argument so I'm not going to pick it apart.

However, two particular points she makes got me thinking recently. The first deals with what students do in class and what they remember:

Those who didn't make it onto the honors or A.P. track hardly mention writing or reading at all. They talk about giving oral presentations and keeping reading journals evaluated with a big, meaningless check. They reveal putting on skits, reenacting some scene in a novel or play whose title they can't recall. One student recounts a month of junior English class in which she and her classmates produced digital short film adaptations of the trial in "The Scarlet Letter."

I wonder about this a lot whenever I am reminded about the need to be "engaging" and make learning "fun." I don't necessarily subscribe to the opposite idea, that school is work and should be treated as such; however, I think that sometimes we put such an emphasis on doing cool stuff in our classrooms that we lose sight of the teaching we have to do.

Or, and this seems to be more accurate, we spend too much CLASS time on such projects and activities when those should be done by the students on their own time while we teach the fundamental skills or other basic knowledge that they need to put those projects together. But the problem is that we, as teachers, are almost too scared to allow our students to go it alone with projects sometimes, because said projects are homework and homework is a dirty word nowadays.

Yeah, I know I sound like a doddering old fool in that last sentence, but think about it: how many times do you put too much class time into a project because you know deep down that if you assign them a due date it won't get done or it won't be good? In other words, how many times do you provide too much support to those sorts of "fun" things because you are afraid that they are going to fail and then you'll have to hear it?

She then goes on to mention great literature ...

They read Shakespeare, they tell me, usually "Romeo and Juliet," sometimes "Macbeth." They read "Catcher in the Rye" or "Huck Finn," "The Sound and the Fury," a little Melville or Hardy. They read these works and then they talked about them in class discussions or small groups, and then they composed an essay on the subject, received a grade, and moved on to the next masterpiece. Did their exposure to a few of the great works challenge or change them, did it spur them to read more widely or more critically, or did it make them better writers? Occasionally, I guess. Mostly, they seem to recall struggling with comprehension of these classics, feeling as though they just didn't "get it," and for those students who know they will not major in English, does it really matter, they wonder.

Now my question here is a little more contrarian to Ms. Brooks: uh, how much do you retain from survey courses during college? No, seriously. I took a survey of 19th Century English Literature course during my junior year and what did I retain? Well, based on the fact that I couldn't remember who wrote "Ode to a Grecian Urn" today while talking about poetry and had to look it up (it's Keats, btw), not that much. The paragraph above, again, can be applied to a significant number of college students and their college courses, not just high school. And honestly, could I have gone my whole life and never read The Catcher in the Rye or To Kill a Mockingbird? Probably. I've never watched The Godfather, Part II and I seem to be okay. But I had teachers who were passionate about what they were teaching and did their best to pass that on to me.

Furthermore, they combined those fundamentals of reading and writing with the exploration of literature (in an age without constant computers, btw) in ways that I'm still trying to figure out. Yes, grammar was boring as SHIT in high school and still is but they got me through it.

Our challenge as high school English teachers ... and English teachers overall, really, is very tough because we have to play the hand we're dealt. Sometimes you take seniors from the five-paragraph essay to a ten-page paper over the course of a year (with mixed results); sometimes, you get kids who don't know how to use adverbs properly. To declare "Death to High School English," however, is a little harsh.

This year's perfect commencement address.

2011-05-08T11:12:00.000-04:00

I posted Drew Magary's "Open Letter to the Class of ..." piece a couple of years ago and I've been reading his stuff over on Deadspin at a fairly regular basis except when I get tired of the constant vulgarity and references to masturbation and fecal matter. But the guy still has the ability to write some real gems and the 2011 edition is one of them. It's a tribute to boredom and how it is what drives American ingenuity ("A Special Graduation Message to the Class of 2011"):

This country has a veritable surplus of boredom. We get distracted easily because we always assume there's something BETTER to do, something cooler, something that will feed us ice cream and massage our prostates simultaneously. And that, oddly enough, is a form of ambition. It is, in fact, the very best kind of ambition. Facebook started because someone was bored (and bitter). The Bacon Explosion was created because someone was bored and stoned and probably hungry. Societies that are lacking in boredom and wasted productivity may sound efficient, but they aren't. They inhibit ideas, suppress creativity, and most of all, they SUCK. And they suck hard. Think China will end up overtaking us and enslaving us all and forcing you to work in plastic penis straw factories until the day you die? You're wrong. And sitting on your ass is the reason why. Chinese people are productive, hard-working, and willing to sacrifice. That is not how good ideas come about. Good ideas come from being spoiled, impatient, selfish little assholes. That's us. We've got that. China's not touching that. They may manufacture the iPod, but they sure as shit didn't think of it. SUCK MY BALLS, TIGER MOMMIES.

Needless to say, there's quite a bit of cursing in it (more than I'm known for).

Btw, I would like to dedicate this in a way to those former students of mine that are graduating college this weekend or next weekend. Congratulations, kids.

My Jeff Winger Experience

2011-05-07T16:43:00.000-04:00

Last December, I was dismayed to discover that even though I had more than double the number of professional development hours required by the Virginia Department of Education, none of those hours were course work in my content area, something they require of those teachers who did not have a masters degree. I pissed and moaned about it, pointing out how I felt that I was being penalized twice and how illogical it was to have such a requirement for non-mastered teachers because most of the teachers I know have masters degrees in education and not their specific content areas. Then, I went and signed up for a course at my local community college, Piedmont Virginia Community College.

I had intended to write a series of entries about what I was reading and what I was learning but during these past five months, I either started entries and didn't like what I was writing so abandoned them; found other, more pertinent topics to write about; or simply didn't have the time to really put the effort into writing the way I wanted to. Now that my semester has come and gone and I wait (rather impatiently--how many times can I check Blackboard? Really?) for my final grade to be posted, I can finally sit down and write about it.

What's funny, though, is that the first thought that comes to my mind when thinking about taking a class at PVCC is that I need to apologize for my attitude in high school. You see, I was an extremely good student and graduated in the top 25 of my class so the decision I was trying to make regarding my college choice was which Ivy League school I was going to apply to, not looking to enroll at Suffolk Community. That place was beneath me (and probably a number of my fellow high-achievers, but I am not going to speak for them) and I remember making jokes about it being the "thirteenth grade" and calling it "Scruffolk" (I'm not sure what I was going for with that one, btw).

The reason for my attitude? Well, I was a bit of an arrogant prick who had the same cockiness that I see in overachievers in the schools I've taught. I guess on some level that's understandable considering students like that are the ones who get their asses kissed come senior awards and scholarships time; furthermore, they have yet to hit that point where they are humbled, which for me was the first semester at Loyola. Even though I never intended to major in anything that involved math, I took Calculus II because the college had offered to give me four extra credits for Calculus I if I passed that class with at least a C. The course, combined with a really tough transition to college life, knocked me on my ass and I had to pull a 3.5 in my second semester in order to keep my scholarship or my father would make good on his threat to pull me out of Loyola and send me to somewhere much cheaper.

Thankfully, I pulled it off because I rediscovered my inner overachiever (and well, didn't take any more math classes) and never really looked back. I would be further humbled a number of years later when temping in the graduate admissions office of UVA and talking to a fellow temp who had spent two years in community college because she couldn't afford a four-year at the time. Affordability! It never crossed my mind when I was 17 because again, my parents had the money to send me to college and I had a scholarship (and a student loan too ... which I'm still paying off, btw).

Affordability and ease of simply enrolling in a class was why I went to PVCC this semester instead of seeing if there was anything available at UVA. The only restriction that this relicensure requirement seemed to have was that I couldn't double-up on anything I had taken in college. That meant no British Literature or American Literature but world lit was wide open and thankfully Survey of World Literature II was scheduled for 7:00-10:00 every Wednesday night.

I was actually nervous my first night of class. I showed up ninety minutes early so that I could make sure I knew where my room was (that and I had a shit ton of papers to grade and I found the student union conducive to focusing on it), and I think I must have double-checked my schedule printout ten or fifteen times. When class finally started and I got out my brand new spiral-bound notebook with PVCC on the cover (purchased from the college bookstore that evening) my nerves didn't subside in the least because it seemed that some of the fifteen or so people in the class knew the professor because they'd taken Survey of World Lit I. In an instant, I was 18 and feeling like the absolute dumbest person in my Honors: Ancient World class because aside from Antigone, I'd never read a single piece of Ancient Greek literature and had actually never written a term paper before.

A million questions shot through my head about how tough this was going to be, and how long it was going to take me to say something really stupid in class and have everyone think I once again was the class idiot (can you tell that my experience in that first semester of college led to a neurotic inferiority complex that to an extent I haven't gotten over?). But I wasn't. Nobody was, really. While we spent our time in the third class discussing the second half of V.S. Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur, I found myself contributing substantively and our three hours together on a Wednesday night became an actual discussion. As a result, the class became less of a matter of convenience and more of a matter of me wishing that the classes I taught could be like that as opposed to what seems to be a worksheet factory at times.

What made it work was that my professor took the approach of it sort of being "our class" and then assigned each person in the class to lead the discussion for an entire class in what he called a "read and lead." It's a pretty simple idea but also a pretty great idea and completely student-centric, the type of lesson that I think would blow an observing administrator away where I work. However, the difference between even the first year of college and the last year of high school is huge in this regard because aside from maybe an advanced-level or AP class I couldn't see pulling this off for an entire semester.

That, and when he assigned the read and leads, he allowed us to pick our week/work of literature and his only requirement was that we use some sort of presentation software to help guide the discussion and told us we didn't have to talk for three hours. That was it. He didn't have to provide a rubric (OMG I HATE THAT WORD SO MUCH) that broke down in detail what was worth how many points, he didn't have to answer questions about how many slides were required. Not only that, but objectives were not posted on the board and class sometimes let out early because we were done with our discussion.

Can you tell how jealous I am? Seriously, can you?

But my experience teaching the depths of high school wasn't completely for naught because I was able to fold what I am doing in my tenth grade English class to the research paper we were asked to do. One of the works we had to read was Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and at the time I was teaching Elie Wiesel's Night, so I did about ten pages on how both "bear witness." It was a tougher paper to write than I had originally thought because I had so much information; I'm sure I could have written a book if I'd wanted to (I'm sure someone has).

I wrote the first draft of that paper while I was home on spring break and somehow found the energy and ability to churn out four essays in three hours on two separate occasions--the midterm and the final. I still haven't gotten my grade on that paper or on the final exam, but going into both I had an A going and I was pretty confident that I at least earned a B. What was great, too, was that when I walked out of the classroom and handed in my final, I told my professor to have a good summer and he said, "You too, it was well-earned."

As I head through this last month of work I admit that I'm exhausted but having experienced firsthand such a positive learning environment, I have to say that I've come out of this class with a stronger resolve. When I sit down to plan this summer, the question I'll have on my mind (among others) will definitely be: "How can I make this happen in my class?" I proved to myself that I'm still an excellent student and hopefully that will help remind me that I'm still an excellent teacher. Call me stupid, call me naive, but once again I have hope here.

Teacher Mix Tape: The Entertainer

2011-05-05T22:15:00.000-04:00

I thought of doing yet another snarky Teacher Depreciation Week post this week but honestly, I've done those a few times and while my attitude has not changed toward the week in question (they gave us cake this week. I looked at my colleague and said, "Should I make the Marie Antoinette joke or do you want to do it?"), there's such a thing as going to the well one too often (plus, I don't have the energy to deal with comments about how negative I am).

So I thought I'd start another regular feature on this blog: the Teacher Mix Tape. Every once in a while I'll post a song that you could readily apply to our profession, even make part of a "soundtrack" of sorts.

First up is one of my all-time favorite Billy Joel songs, "The Entertainer." Off of the 1974 album Streetlife Serenade (which is a bit of an underrated gem in itself, btw), it is a cynical, probably autobiographical, look at an artist's struggle in the music business. But really, I look at the lyrics and listen to the music and I see every one of us, entertainers all, who invest so much in our jobs every single day and get ... well, marginal returns? Have our best lessons truncated by bells, passive students, or standardized tests? And are continually faced with the challenge of keeping ourselves up-to-date and relevant?

Happy Teacher Depreciation Week, everyone!

"The Entertainer"
Music and Lyrics by Billy Joel

I am the entertainer and I know just where I stand
Another serenader and another long haired band
Today I am your champion, I may have won your hearts,
But I know the game, you'll forget my name,
And I won't be here in another year
If I don't stay on the charts

I am the entertainer and I've had to pay my price
The things I did not know at first I learned by doing twice
But still they come to haunt me, still they want their say
So I've learned to dance with a hand in my pants, I let 'em rub my neck
And I write 'em a check, and they go their merry way

I am the entertainer, been all around the world
I've played all kinds of palaces and laid all kinds of girls
I can't remember faces, I don't remember names
But what the hell, you know it's just as well
'Cause after a while and a thousand miles
It all becomes the same

I am the entertainer, I bring to you my songs
I'd like to spend a day or two but I can't stay that long
I got to meet expenses, I got to stay in line
Got to get those fees to the agencies
And I'd love to stay but there's bills to pay
So I just don't have the time

I am the entertainer, I've come to do my show
You've heard my latest record, it's been on the radio
It took me years to write it, they were the best years of my life
It was a beautiful song but it ran too long
If you're gonna have a hit you gotta make it fit
So they cut it down to 3:05

I am the entertainer, the idol of my age
I make all kinds of money when I go on the stage
You see me in the papers, I've been in the magazines
But if I go cold, I won't get sold
I get put in the back in the discount rack
Like another can of beans

I am the entertainer and I know just where I stand
Another serenader and another long haired band
Today I am your champion, I may have won your hearts,
But I know the game, you'll forget my name,
I won't be here in another year
If I don't stay on the charts

Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, and what it might mean

2011-05-02T19:09:00.002-04:00

Our first act as free men was to throw ourselves onto the provisions. We thought only of that. Not of revenge, not of our families. Nothing but bread. And even when we were no longer hungry, there was still no one who thought of revenge. On the following day, some of the young men went to Weimar to get some potatoes and clothes -- and to sleep with girls. But of revenge, not a sign.

I thought of this paragraph today, from the end of Night by Elie Wiesel, not because I have had the fortune of teaching that book these past few weeks but because after I initially heard about Osama Bin Laden's death (and after my quick Facebook status of "Can't add anything new to all this but I'm glad that rat bastard is dead" and a comment to my wife about the president's possible political fortunes), I went to bed and had the chance to sleep on it as well as spend some time today reading and thinking about it.

There seems to be two feelings floating around today. One is uber-patriotic, with people chanting USA! USA! and posting a flag for a Facebook profile picture; the other is reminding us all that it is not right to celebrate death and that doing so will not bring back those who died on 9/11. I know that's two "extremes" and I know that many people reacted somewhere between those two feelings and as long as one's reaction did not involve harming someone else I really don't have a problem with it.

But as with everything of this nature, I found that my reaction to it (as if anyone really gives a crap anyway) evolved pretty quickly, becoming more curious and eventually more objective. Instead of wrapping myself in the flag this morning (which I never do anyway), I sat down at the computer during my planning period and went through the Washington Post and New York Times. I wanted to know how it happened and what people were saying about it. When I asked my students about it, the questions weren't about their thoughts and feelings but about how they found out and how they think the way in which they found out (internet, TV, etc.) affects the way they reacted or the impact it had.

I don't know why I personally get so analytical or why I seem to really find a reward in breaking down any historical event from as many sides as possible and using as many sources, but I think it does help me as a teacher. Had I still been teaching journalism, I would have whipped up a lesson or two in these next couple of days where I had my students analyze everyone's coverage. They would look at the different newspaper covers; take a long look at television coverage, from the reporting of the big three nightly news shows to Fox News's "If we show enough pictures of George W. Bush people might think he's still president" extravaganza; and gauge the reactions throughout the internet. It's tough to do because most students don't have the maturity and I don't necessarily always have the patience, but ultimately I think it would have been rewarding.

The one point I did get across, which was probably lost on most of them, is that they should really take a look at how they get their information because in a world that is so full of it they are going to need to learn how to interpret said information instead of being lazy consumers. One student said, "Yeah, because you never do exactly know what's true."

Within a few minutes of the announcement last night, the internet trolls were out in force, trying to slam both the current president and the past president. People were in the streets cheering as if we'd won a hockey game again. Some were scrounging the net for the most sanctimonious quote under 140 characters possible. Others simply chose to throw up a flag and say "never forget." I know the meaning of those two words, in two different contexts and so do my students because we just finished reading the book quoted above. We never do forget, but it pains me to some degree that we never learn, either. I guess I can only hope that I've pointed a few minds in the right direction.

Kids vs. Widgets vs. Money

2011-05-01T20:23:00.001-04:00

Two years ago, when I was posting about teacher image (specifically, my desire not to wear the "I don't teach, I inspire!" sweatshirt on the cover of The First Days of School), I had a discussion with a commenter about the nature of the profession in terms of money. It was a little more deep than most blogger-commenter conversations get and I definitely appreciated that (considering I think 90% of the comments on this blog lately are spam or spam written in Chinese).

The discussion went as such: I had been posting about how we really needed to look at teachers' image and the commenter did a quick comparison of lawyers/doctors to teachers and about how there is much more respect for the former than the latter (if you'd like to read the comments, you can click here) and I offered the reason for that being that there is a higher salary in both fields as well as a profit motive that does not exist in public education. Her reply was lengthy but the most important part of it was:

Also, education is where I find the "economies of scale" discussions so disturbing. Kids aren't widgets. They're individuals. I believe there can be no economy of scale when the unit is the individual.

It was this comment conversation (commentsation?) I thought about while reading a post this weekend over on Spencer's Scratch Pad, "Ten Reasons Merit Pay Sucks." It's a well-thought-out post and I agree with a lot of it because he pokes holes in the argument for merit pay that go beyond "teacher whining." I've thought that merit pay isn't such a bad idea in theory, although I'm not sure how it would work in practice because the people who would be in control of a system like that wouldn't exactly be the most reliable evaulators.

I had started two separate comments on John's post but never pulled the trigger because they were becoming like an entry in themselves, so I decided to move my response over here.

Bluntly put, the reason I think that though merit pay systems won't necessarily work or might be too costly but are worth at least talking about is: we need incentive.

One of the arguments John makes is that teachers aren't really that motivated by money. Oh sure, we definitely want to make more but you don't go into this profession for the money, you don't necessarily leave the profession because of the money and if we're going to reward teachers with more money we need to start by simply raising base pay. I've agreed and disagreed with these ideas before. Raising base pay is the one thing I absolutely agree should be done, especially considering the disparity between pay across the country and the unattractiveness of a first-year teacher's pay.

But as I've said before, I can't spend my time thinking that I've answered a call because that is a step in the direction toward a martyr complex that way too many people in the teaching profession have that is counterproductive to our cause, as it is. And honestly, the salary thing can be crushing when you are trying to make a living doing it, not to mention the lack of respect in our society that "not making very much" gets you.

But, unless you are working as a consultant, for a charter school, or for a textbook company the words "public education" and "profit motive" do not go together. So if you were going to put some sort of merit-based pay structure in place, you are not going to have much success getting people to want to stick around. After all, bad economic times will mean cuts and though that also happens in the private sector, it usually takes longer for the public sector--especially education--to recover from it so you have the "do more with less" mantra being spoken longer than you probably do now (and I don't know about you, but I'm sick of being told to "do more with less").

So what do you do?

Well,I don't think you do away with the current pay system for teachers but if you want to modify it in a way that is more merit-based, you could add a bonus structure but be thorough with the evaluation process. This is easier said that done and pie-in-the-sky but I have to say that while I have no problem whatsoever being evaluated, I do get frustrated with the feeling that it's easier for an evaluation to have a negative effect on me than a positive one. I am a well-evaluated teacher but it seems like the bad marks on my record may count more than the good ones because there's nothing quantifiable to show for the good ones whereas enough bad ones can cause me to lose my job. I know that's the case in many working environments but at least in the other environments I've worked in there's been a "good" to balance out the bad.

If you don't want to give me money for a bonus because, for instance, the district cannot afford to do so, how about other incentives such as the possibility of earning an extra personal day or two? Being in my sixth year of teaching and still only getting two personal days each year is, quite frankly, a pain in the ass. But if I were sitting in my principal's office with my cumulative eval for the year and he said, "You know, you've done a good enough job that we're giving you three personal days next year," I'd feel that I earned something a little more than a pat on the back. I know it's not money, but at least it's something?

Now, to close, I think I'd like to offer a reason #11 to John's post. And that is that a merit pay system will never be what those who want a merit pay system want. The people who really want merit pay, I mean REALLY REALLY want it, are the people who think that teachers aren't worth shit and have been sucking away THEIR tax dollars. In fact, they consider us their employees. So what they really want is a system where THEY get to decide how we are paid. You could put a merit system in place but if THEY are not involved and THEY are not making the decisions for THEIR employees, it's not worth it.

No, seriously. What they want is a teacher evaluation system where a parent has a say in classroom decisions and the crazy old racist nutbag who shows up for EVERY Board of Ed meeting to rant and rave can decide who gets a contract next year and for how much. "Merit pay" in their eyes means cuts, cuts, cuts, and nothing gained.

Although you know what would be cool? We make school year round and then implement a merit pay system wherein most teachers wind up benefitting so it winds up costing annoying parent and crazy old man more money. Then, the district can send out a shiny newsletter on glossy paper with the following message written in big-assed type: BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR, SUCKAS!!!

Did that sound flip?

Carried to term? Not exactly.

2011-04-23T14:42:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite new segment on The Soup is called "What the hell is going on at Good Morning America?" For the past two weeks, Joel McHale has been showing the ridiculous ways that morning news program has been reporting news. It's also a nice reminder of why I turn the TV off at 7:00 every morning after the local news (which isn't very good either but at least I get the weather) signs off.

The latest reminder of the sewage that is morning news/talk shows comes from this morning's Today show and their reporting/commentary on Gaby Rodriguez, a senior at Toppendish High School in Toppendish, Washington, who has made the news recently because she faked her own pregnancy for six months. It wasn't part of an effort to get attention; rather, she was conducting a social experiment, one that her boyfriend, parents, and principal knew about.

This week, the secret was revealed in an assembly as Gaby read some of the comments she'd heard made about her during her "pregnancy" and then removed her "baby bump." It's made national news and it seemed to reveal what she set out to accomplish: how stigmatized and even ostracized pregnant teenagers are.

But if you watched the Today show this morning, the issue wasn't that she conducted the experiment and what it says about our society's treatment of girls in such a predicament. The issue was that she lied to people. After presenting the story, NBC brought on Stacey Kaiser, a "renowned psychotherapist" and author of How to Be a Grown Up: The Ten Secret Skills Everyone Needs to Know for one of their typical "let's ask an expert" segments after a story like this. Kaiser (You can view the video here) starts out by giving the student a "piece" of credit because she had some guts to do this, but then more or less spends two minutes berating her:

There were a lot of people who could have been emotionally or psychologically upset by this. You know, the boy's parents were not told about the fake pregnancy ... I don't think it accomplished anything. I mean, she proved what we are already seeing, that people tease people and that people are hard on people ...

She then continues to imply that Gaby really wasn't experiencing pregnancy and got to go home and be "normal" every night, so in a way she was glorifying teen pregnancy, then wraps up with this comment:

You know, one of the things we see with teenagers is that they are really judgmental of one another and usually teenagers want their friends to be pleased by them and like their behavior, and I'm worried that this girl may lose some friends. I mean, she was lying to people she was close to for six months.

Kaiser then makes the expected "I would never let my daughter do it" comment and we move on.

Uh ... I can understand why anyone would be concerned about her not telling her boyfriend's parents and at first I agreed with that criticism. Then I thought about it some more and since I don't know the whole of the story (as in, the complete details of her entire experiment), I decided to not pass judgment on that because there may have actually been a reason for it. As for the attitude that SHE LIED and that's what we need to focus on, I find that more disconcerting than anyone finds this story.

I mean, I'm sure that Gaby didn't tell the world anything that it already didn't know about how a pregnant teenager is branded because of it and I am the first to admit that I get judgmental when I see a girl walking down a high school hallway with a baby bump, even though very often I don't know the student nor do I know the circumstances. But when I have known the student and the circumstances, I've been able to form a better opinion about it. I don't buy Kaiser's "we already knew" argument because if we already knew that's how girls in this situation are treated, then maybe instead of being all "Well duh" about it she should be using her interview time to explore why it still happens. That blase attitude implies acceptance, which is so wrong.

Furthermore, I also don't buy any criticism that Gaby "didn't think this through" because she got permission from a teacher and her principal to do this. That sounds like thinking this through. I guess since she hasn't published a report on the experiment we can all pick it apart because we only know what's been on the surface, but as an educator it annoys me that any "expert" would be so dismissive because she was doing the type of critical thinking and (for lack of a better word) experimentation that we all wish our students would do. I actually applaud her for her initiative and determination, especially since I think that she was well aware that she could piss off her friends.

That comment of Kaiser's also bothered me. In fact, I know I'm a man and all but I consider that sexist. I have a feeling that we wouldn't be worrying about a boy's friends if a boy were conducting an experiment like this (I know a boy can't get pregnant but let's say ... a terminal illness or something). Does Ms. Kaiser really need to tell all of us that it's important for girls to have friends? Really? Does she not realize that going in that direction is incredibly condescending toward teenage girls? And does she also not realize that: having friends in high school does not make one a better adult; and plenty of successful people took the risk of going it alone at some point on their way to success?

As a final thought, I wonder what the reaction would have been if she'd faked an abortion instead of a pregnancy. I can imagine that Kaiser would have had similar comments and this would have had the Fox News yo-yos up in arms. But really it would come back to one thing: we preach and preach and preach but never provide support when it's needed.

Gay. See what I said, Tennessee? GAY.

2011-04-22T17:30:00.000-04:00

I'll say it again. Gay. And again. Gay. GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY.

Gay.

Now I am 100% sure that during the last few seconds, nobody reading this post tore his or her face off like that guy in Poltergeist, and that Satan did not rise up from the bowels of hell and consume one's flesh, or a heterosexual male decided that he'd had enough of women and wanted some hot man love. But according to Tennessee state senator Stacey Campfield (R--I know! What a SHOCKER!), what I wrote above would be "inappropriate" for a teacher to discuss with students below the high school level. He's even got a bill going through the state legislature to make sure that doesn't happen. What is being called the "Don't Say Gay" bill, according to the Huffington Post, "would make it illegal for educators to discuss any sexual behavior apart from heterosexuality with students in kindergarten up through the eighth grade."

Now, the rationale for this is that discussing homosexuality, even in the confines of a Family Life Curriculum, is not "appropriate" for children under a certain age, and those who are against the bill rightfully say that what this will do is prevent open, honest conversations between teachers and students, especially those who come from families with gay parents. Furthermore it takes away more rights from teachers in that state who currently are fighting for collective bargaining rights, and it will make it ridiculously easy for overzealous administrators and even parents to ruin a teacher's career by getting him/her suspended or even fired. Think I'm being paranoid? I don't know--you've seen stories about teachers being suspended for blogging or whatever other random activity that some parent didn't like. Don't you think that if this gets passed we won't see at least one or two stories about a teacher being fired for talking about what it means to be gay?

I have written before about how sheltered I was growing up and how that made me very immature and as a result, quite the homophobic teenager. Part of that was because I really was never taught about homosexuality. I mean, I was taught about it but it was along the lines of this: 1) this is what homosexuality is (and this is what a lesbian is, btw); 2) it's different; 3) a lot of people who have AIDS are gay but that doesn't mean only gay people get AIDS. Granted, my first exposure to sex ed was in 1988 when the Family Life Curriculum was relatively new and AIDS education was brand-new, so I wouldn't have expected to learn anything about same-sex couples when I was younger.

But that was more than twenty years ago. Shit, the Heather Has Two Mommies controversy was twenty years ago at this point. In other words, shouldn't we be progressing to the point where we don't have to have a discussion about why Heather does have two mommies; it should be just something ... well, something that is.

Of course, I realize that makes me sound naive and that there are people out there who make it their life's work to stop any semblance of open-mindedness and acceptance from "creeping in" to our schools. After all, if you teach a young kid that there's nothing wrong with it, then he will see that there's nothing wrong with it and ... nothing will be wrong with it. And man, we can't have that.

Anyway, I'll close this near-incoherent, angry ramble with two things. First, fuck you, Tennessee. Second, GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY.

Why I Want a Raise

2011-04-16T08:43:00.000-04:00

Hi there, taxpayers; we're the teachers. We know times are bad and that dog food is on the menu five nights a week (dumpster diving for the whole family on Friday and Saturday!) but we think there are still ways you can cut back - say feeding the pets to one another - so that you can give us a nice 3 percent raise. We haven't had one for a year! Really, we were sure you would understand; something has to see us through until we can retire on a pension at full salary!

Thanks so much, and now put that box of Cheerios back on the shelf that you had your grubby mitts on. You need that money for my raise.

This comment, by a poster named "Your money is ours" (do we not love the anonymous commenter? Is he not the true face of courage in our society?) is attached to a story about my district's current budget and how the county may give the school system less money than originally planned. The school board, it seems, is still trying to figure out how to give teachers and staff a raise despite being asked to "do more with less," the mantra of our current recession.

I probably didn't need to post the comment here because there's nothing really new, intelligent, or even interesting about it. In fact, I'd say that it probably came from a random comment generator based on the language used against my profession in recent weeks. And while I should not give this particular ignorant stooge his moment in the sun, I'll humor him because it helps me make a point.

Hi taxpayers, I'm a teacher. I am asking for a raise this year because I ask for one every year. Have I gotten one? No. Not in three years. You may believe that I automatically get more pay because of a pay ladder, but along with a lack of a pay increase has come a step freeze, and along with that comes an increase in cost of benefits (I do pay for my own insurance, even if I am picking up a pension for my retirement, but since the governor wants to raid the VRS to pay for all of his pet projects, I think that pension is becoming about as reliable as Social Security). So I've essentially been facing a pay cut for three years.

Now, here is where you may ask: if this is what you're living with, then why do you stay? Well, I could give you something about how "the children are the future" or "this profession was a calling" but then you would respond with something like, "Well, you chose to be here." This would result in nothing but us going around in circles and never getting anywhere in our discussion.

Truth is, while I am very proud of the fact that I am a teacher and I made a conscious choice to enter this profession a number of years ago, I also have a pretty firm grip on reality and the reality is that when push comes to shove, I need a job. I have a family to help support and bills to pay and I cannot do that without a job and I can barely do that with what I make.

Work somewhere else, you say? Again, my grip on reality is firm. I have looked both in an out of my field for jobs this year because I realize that when you're faced with a situation like this, you have to try and make a change. I haven't gotten a bite on anything yet, so I'm grateful to still go to work every day even if that work can drive me crazy.

I can also try and make a change where I am, however futile it may seem. This starts with wanting a raise. I realize that times are tough and as I've mentioned, I have been dealing with them myself. But I am neither a martyr nor a doormat. I do not bask in the glory of how hard I work and how many extra hours I put in after teaching all day because as much as I can testify to that I think it's counter-intuitive to my argument. What makes the hours I put in teaching more important than the hours that I put in when I was a proposal writer? "The children" only gets you so far with people who adhere to a philosophy based on selfishness.

So what does justify my wanting more money? Because if I don't ask now, I relinquish the right to ask later. I need to advocate for myself and so do the rest of the people in my profession (especially those of us who don't have unions to advocate for us). There is a difference between accepting that I won't get a raise or will have to take a pay cut at the beginning and doing so at the end. If I do so at the end, after all of the budget workshops and number crunching, I do it knowing that I tried even if I'm not happy about the result. If I do so at the beginning, well then I'm a fool.

I am not a fool. I walk into a classroom every day an intelligent, well-educated professional who wishes to impart wisdom, skills, and a love of literature and culture on a group of teenagers who would rather be doing about 100 other things with their time, and while I do not always succeed I take pride in the hard work that I do and I want more compensation for that. You may think I'm being unreasonable or taking away your cereal but do remember that I'm also one of you, a taxpayer, paying my own salary ... and earning it, to boot.

Dealing with the classroom heckler

2011-04-13T18:52:00.000-04:00

I was thinking of posting something insightful today but there's too much going through my head about various topics and it's going to take me too long to do the required reading to post, so I decided to have a little fun instead.

We all try to do things in our classes that are engaging. Sometimes this is through a hands-on activity or it's through a really cool video or it's through trying to expand our students' appreciation of culture through art or classical music. I know I've tried it a number of times, mainly because I read some blog post or a magazine article or a book that expounded on the virtues of such endeavors and had inspiring stories about connecting to students through whatever that activity was.

For those of you who know what the title of this blog means, I can tell you that my Facebook status today was: "would like to send out a big 'up yours' to those people who write articles about how they "reached" their students with something cultural, like art or classical music. They are lying liars." Because how many times have we all taken that chance only to have to spend more time telling students to stop socializing or getting up or trying to get bathroom passes or making childish noises or whatever other crap they love to do?

I know we can't do to our students what he does to this heckler but watching this in the context of dealing with immature bullshit makes me feel better. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Patton Oswalt:

The Lunch Lady Land Wars

2011-04-12T20:34:00.000-04:00

In the United States public education system, there is one group of people you don't screw with, and that is those who serve lunches.

A story recently made its way through the news/blogosphere (I'm linking via Jezebel) about a Chicago school banning lunches from home in "an effort to fight obesity." According to the article, the school, Little Village Academy, and its food services provider, Chartwells-Thompson, had revamped its menu recently for healthier options and they saw a drop in students eating the healthy food:

The school district increased the nutritional quality of its meals last year, but this led to students buying fewer meals. A Tribune reporter noticed many students at Little Village took lunch, but threw it out uneaten. It's unclear if this reflects on the taste, or the stubbornness of a child confronted with healthier food.

So, the solution? Well, force the students to eat Chartwells' food.

I am sure that I am not the only person who sees through the very thick pile of crap that is this "healthy food" initiative at this particular school. Many parents pack their kids' lunches every day across the country and those lunches often turn out to be much healthier than what's slapped onto a tray using an ice cream scoop. I speak from experience here because I brown-bagged it nearly every day from the time I was in first grade all the way to my senior year of high school. While I'm sure the Entenmann's brownie and Yoo-Hoo weren't the best snacks and drink, I know that I wasn't eating chicken nuggets or mozzarella sticks.

No, seriously, mozzarella sticks are served as an entree in school cafeterias.

Then again, I also rode my bike everywhere in high school because I didn't own a car (nor did I have a license) and I spent most of my weekends playing roller hockey or touch football or softball, so maybe I'm the exception to the rule.

But I don't think that having parents who knew from proper nutrition and bringing my lunch makes me exceptional, to be honest. And I think that forcing students to eat only what you serve them is ... well, isn't that what they do in PRISON?

And what's more disgusting about this is that at the heart of all of this isn't a civil liberties issue or any political correctness or another opportunity for Crazypants Palin to bitch about Michelle Obama's hating dessert. It's money. Chartwell's is a company that obviously needs to profit, so when it saw that kids weren't eating their food because it either tasted horrible or cost too much (a common complaint also mentioned in the article), they decided to protect themselves and stop the loss of money by forcing it down these kids' throats.

So what should be done? Other than the bad publicity this school and this company should get for what is a ridiculously stupid decision, I hope that the parents of this school band together and create a ruckus that's actually worth creating. I mean, we hear so much about annoying parents and administrations bowing to their pressure, let's use that for some good for once. I say that they take a two-pronged approach by making the right phone calls to the right administrators and board members, and then making some sort of dramatic stance ... not by sending their kids to school with lunch but by showing up during lunchtime with brown bags filled with lunches in a perfect "fuck you" gesture.

Because someone's got too much power in this situation and is abusing a worthy cause to exercise it.