Blue Skies

Once my brother told me that in our area grass grows fastest in April and October. It seems counterintuitive-- what about those long, sunny, humid days of summer?-- but I believe him: he's mown a lot of grass in his life. I think that if I were grass, I'd like those clear, blue sky months, where the sun is warm, but not too hot, as much as I like them now, and I might just grow, grow, grow in appreciation, too.

We have had a cold spring this year, though, and it seems like the grass might just be getting its boost, nearly a month late. Only in the last week or so has it shown its true emerald luxury, and I worried about farmers and gardeners last night when I heard there may be frost.

I've noticed that there comes a point in every school year when conditions are perfect for both teaching and learning. It's usually after the first of the year, when all the excitement of the beginning of school and the fall and winter holidays has worn off, and the end of the school year is so distant that it may as well be non-existent. One day you realize that you and your students have created a nearly ideal learning community. You know and trust each other, and no one is going anywhere anytime soon, so you all take a deep breath and exhale at leisure, and then, like the grass, the kids bolt for the blue sky and the warm sun, because their roots are solidly planted in the familiar expectations and predictable routines that you have established together. For a few weeks, a couple of months, even, everything seems to effortlessly go as planned, and we all just learn, learn, learn, until reality intrudes, and end of the year jitters are brought on by any number of harbingers: the calendar, the first really hot day, state testing, whatever.

This year, like the grass, my students and I were a little later than usual in establishing our mojo, but we've got it going now. Today the weather was beautiful-- sunny and cool without a cloud in the sky. We had a modified schedule, so I took one of my classes outside for a half an hour before their state math exam, and the bond was there. In a pack of eighteen, we talked and joked our way around the trail that circles our campus. The kids ran, and did cartwheels, and climbed trees, and played tag, but stayed close to our group until it was time to go inside. Then, we used a stopwatch to time their bathroom and water breaks to see who could get back the quickest (no running in the halls-- hand washing mandatory-- top honors to fastest girl and fastest boy), before I sent them off to their testing groups.

We still have another four weeks of school, and this weather is predicted to hold for a few more days, but then it's supposed to turn hot and humid. Summer's coming.

Epilogue

"We should start our own school."

How many teachers have had that conversation with colleagues either in earnest or in jest? My hand is raised as I type. Masters of our own classroom, maybe it's not such a big leap to be sure that we could run a whole school. And in those classrooms, what is it that we do? We take a prescribed curriculum and find, adapt, or create the lessons and activities we need to meet the needs of our students. Well, that's what the best of us do, anyway.

Usually the toughest part of that task is reconciling the demands of those who define what our students must know and do with the people our students are. It's a teaching cliche that accountability predicated on standardized testing contradicts all we know of true individualized instruction, and so there will be some children left behind. Standardized means, by definition, that some square pegs are gonna have to squeeze into those round holes.

A couple of years ago, Ruth moved to the next state over, and enrolled her boys in a Sudbury School there, and she joined the staff last year. I like the concept of these schools, and the student I mentioned in my last post probably would approve as well-- they help you to learn what you need to know when you want to know it. In other words, they change the hole, not the peg. BUT... (and you had to know this was coming), I'm conflicted about the elitism of such a school, and I'm disappointed that people who support this idea don't do so from within the structure of public schools so that more children would benefit.

Obviously the easiest way to make the curriculum relevant is to ask the students what they want to learn, like the Sudbury schools do. That's how adults learn, right? You decide you want to knit or snowboard or speak Italian, and you make it happen. The teacher is secondary to your will to learn. But such an approach with children sets aside all standardization whatsoever, and where will we find our well-educated citizens then? You know, the ones that have those minimum skills and knowledge and who will carry us all into the future? The ones that have a good work ethic and understand that sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do? Who's going to teach the kids that lesson?

Last November, at the end of an ideal Thanksgiving weekend, I found myself embroiled in a bitter argument about what we should reasonably expect from students. My point, and perhaps I wasn't clear-- it had been a long weekend, and I was tired-- was, that for students who are already alienated from the status quo for one reason or another, insisting that they comply with assignments that they consider irrelevant, and punishing them when they don't, is counterproductive. We all learn best when we want to know, and so the task for a teacher is finding what the students want to know, and framing your instruction in terms of that, if possible.

But look-- here we are back at the round hole again. What should we do? Focus on changing the hole or changing the peg? Maybe I'll just keep working on both.

Fourteen

A couple of weeks ago, there was a big debate in one of my classes. It actually started as a result of reading the poem God Says Yes to Me by Kaylin Haugh, which I've mentioned in an earlier post. In the poem God tells the speaker that "you can do exactly what you want to do."

"Really?" one of my students jumped at the opportunity he saw there. "I'd never come to school." And the rest of the class period was spent with all the other students trying to convince him that he was wrong. He held his ground admirably. "Think about it," he said at one point. "What has school ever done for you? When have you ever needed something we've learned here?"

Oh, they tried to convince him of the things he would need to know in the future, but the best they could come up with was cooking or "more math". "I already know how to cook," he replied, "and anything else, I'll learn it then, if I need it."

Up to this point, I'd been silent, listening and allowing the students to work this out on their own, but now the change of class was minutes away, and I felt like I should nudge the conversation to some closure. "How awful it must be for you," I said to the student, " to come every day to a place where we ask you to do work that you don't think is valuable. I'm sorry you don't like school."

He frowned for a moment, and then he said, "Awww-- school's not that bad."

The groans of the other students started low and rose to a stunned crescendo as the class ended. They couldn't believe that the conflict was resolved just like that, and they were still talking about it on the way out the door, until the room was empty but for a single student and me. "Thank you for letting us have that debate," he said. "It was important."

Thirteen

A little more than a year ago, I got a phone call from my brother-in-law. He, my sister, and their two children had recently moved to a new city, and they were shopping for a house. At the time my nephew was two and my niece was four months, but the family was planning in advance, and they wanted to be sure that they could count on schools where ever they bought their new home. They were looking at a specific property, and he sent me the link to the local elementary school.

He explained that the neighborhood was undergoing "transition" in terms of property value and the socioeconomic status of the residents, and when I checked out the school's "report card" I could see some evidence of that as well. Over the last three years, the percentage of minority students and those on subsidized lunch had declined. Over the same time period, their standardized test scores had gone up a bit, but they had met the state standards to begin with. Even so, the scores were not as high as in some of the less diverse schools around them, and that concerned my brother-in-law.

I told him what I've told many parents who have asked me similar questions: your children's test scores will be pretty much the same no matter what school they attend, and for a more accurate picture, look at the disaggregated test data for the kids of your race and SES. I also pointed out that schools with more affluent families tend to offer more opportunities for the students, mostly because their parents (along with their greater resources) are more involved. So a family in the situation that my brother-in-law was describing faced a choice: would they join their neighborhood school and, working from within, commit their time and resources to improvement for all the children there, or would they go someplace else?

The deal on that house fell through, but some questions remain. If a school isn't good enough for your kids, which kids is it good enough for? When something as important as that is broken, whose responsibility is it to try and fix it?

Twelve

I got an email this afternoon, subject line "Something for your research..." from my friend, the teacher from yesterday's post. The message was a link to an essay about why kids hate school.

Of course I read the piece with interest. In it, the author outlines many of the same problems with school that I have observed myself and tried to write about: an outdated and irrelevant curriculum, arbitrary and meaningless grades that are frequently demeaning and most often take the place of detailed evaluations, and unreasonable restrictiveness aimed at controlling and punishing the misbehaved rather than encouraging the learner.

This guy makes a clear and compelling case, and I would include the link here, were it not for the fact that this web page happens to be part of a site that offers custom research papers for sale to students. Forty bucks a page and a click on the radio button acknowledging that you have consulted your instructor to ensure that using this service is okay with your educational institution, and you will have your own "ghost writer" to assist you on a given assignment. Hmmm...

I'm not interested in spreading that particular word, but I guess it makes sense in a very loose Robin Hood kind of a way-- perhaps in order to express disapproval of an imperfect system, these folks offer students a way to undermine it. If only they weren't working for a profit, and if only they weren't helping students cheat to succeed within the very system they criticize, I might have an easier time accepting their good intentions.

Suppose someone wanted to really change things, though. What might be the best way to go about that-- from within or from without?

Eleven

"So, I was thinking," a teacher friend started, "isn't middle school the time in their lives when kids are gravitating toward their peers and away from adults? Think about it-- school is run by adults! Doesn't it make sense that they wouldn't like it? Could it be developmental?"

I'm so happy she's reading my blog, I thought, and the look on my face must have tipped her off to something.

"Uh oh," her toned changed. "Is this going to show up on the internet?"

"It's funny you should bring that up," I returned to the original subject. "Yesterday, I asked my students to decide if they liked school or not and explain why, and then they were to write a slice of life story that showed what they meant." I took a stack of papers from the corner of my cluttered desk, and examined my informal data. "It's about half and half," I reported.

"But how much of that is kids who don't like school because of the social challenges?" she wondered.

"That's a good question," I said. "There are a few who say they don't like school because they don't feel like they fit in. BUT, there are just as many, or more, whose primary reason for liking school is that it's the place where they see their friends."

We pondered that in silence for a moment.

"Other kids say that they don't like school because it's not worth their time," I continued. "My favorite example is the boy who wrote, probably the biggest waste of time was when my third grade teacher tried to teach us to read lips," I laughed, "but that was followed closely by the girl who said that if she wasn't stuck at school, she could be doing really important things like playing games or hanging out at the mall." My friend nodded, unsurprised at the mall thing.

"Then there are some kids who don't feel challenged, some who think there's too much work, and some who don't think their teachers treat them fairly." I flipped through the papers. "But... several said that they do like school because they learn new things and their teachers are nice," I added hopefully. "That's not too bad."

"I'm kind of compliant," she said, "and I went to Catholic school, so I was used to doing all sorts of things I didn't want to, but I didn't mind middle school."

"I liked school," I agreed. "Look, I came back forever."

"Well, keep thinking about it," she said. "It's good material."

Ten

In case you're wondering, I'm not quite sure where this whole series is going. I'm pretty much writing for discovery. It's like what I've told my students, if you have something on your mind, write about it, work it out. Well, okay, I don't say "work it out," but secretly I hope they do, and some have tried.

I have a group of girls in my class this year who have been friends since kindergarten. They are lovely children: thoughtful and compliant, but with a bit of an edge. As similar as they all seem on the surface, they are really very, very different, and as the teacher who reads their writing, I can see that clearly. I haven't cracked their social code well enough to know exactly who is best friends with whom, but I understand that as close as they all seem to outsiders, there is a hierarchy.

One of the girls has written several slice of life stories about another, who is in a different English class. She starts each piece by explaining that they are best friends, and then describes an incident in which she was mistreated by the other girl. "Maybe you guys should talk about this," I told her after reading the third one. "It doesn't seem good to hold on to your resentment."

She laughed. "Oh, she'll never change," she said, "but I do feel better writing about it."

Is that what I'm doing, too? Public education and I are pretty tight, but I do harbor some doubts.