Yeah! What She Said-- Part II

In the the November 28, 2010 issue of Newsweek, Bill Gates posed some questions for Diane Ravitch, NYU Professor and education historian who, despite her initial support of No Child Left Behind has examined the evidence and reconsidered her position on high stakes testing and emerged as an opponent to the Obama administration's education reform policies, as well as many of those supported by Gates and his foundation. In today's Washington Post Answer Sheet, Valerie Strauss got Ravitch to answer Gates, point by point.

Both articles are must-reads for any of us interested in the current political debate surrounding public education, but I'll tip my hand as to which side of the fence I'm on and quote Ravitch in response to Gates's question, "Is she sticking up for decline?"

"Of course not! If we follow Bill Gates' demand to judge teachers by test scores, we will see stagnation, and he will blame it on teachers. We will see stagnation because a relentless focus on test scores in reading and math will inevitably narrow the curriculum only to what is tested. This is not good education. 
 
"Last week, he said in a speech that teachers should not be paid more for experience and graduate degrees. I wonder why a man of his vast wealth spends so much time trying to figure out how to cut teachers' pay. Does he truly believe that our nation's schools will get better if we have teachers with less education and less experience? Who does he listen to? He needs to get himself a smarter set of advisers. 

"Of course, we need to make teaching a profession that attracts and retains wonderful teachers, but the current anti-teacher rhetoric emanating from him and his confreres demonizes and demoralizes even the best teachers. I have gotten letters from many teachers who tell me that they have had it, they have never felt such disrespect; and I have also met young people who tell me that the current poisonous atmosphere has persuaded them not to become teachers. Why doesn't he make speeches thanking the people who work so hard day after day, educating our nation's children, often in difficult working conditions, most of whom earn less than he pays his secretaries at Microsoft?"

What She Said

I received a fund-raising letter over the weekend from Nancie Atwell in support of her demonstration school, The Center for Teaching and Learning. One particular paragraph stood out to me:

While today's neo-reformers tout accountability as the goal of education and seek to measure and judge teachers based on student scores on context-stripped standardized tests, CTL teachers hold ourselves accountable-- to students, their parents, and our own standards as professional educators. Our methods for assessing and reporting student growth across the disciplines are time-consuming, individualized, and specific. Grown-ups-- and students-- understand what a child has accomplished, along with the goals he or she needs to tackle next. All parents want teachers who know their sons and daughters as learners, not percentiles.

Yeah.

Looks Can Be Deceiving

I spent an hour on the phone catching up with a friend from high school yesterday. We've known each other nearly 35 years, and even though we have never lived closer than 200 miles after we graduated, we've managed to get up to our share of hijinks together. She reminded me of one such time yesterday.

I was living at the beach after college and she came down to visit with an English guy she had met over the summer. Karen and Peter and I went out to hear a band play and at the end of the evening after plenty of fun we decided that it would be a good idea to go down to the beach. It was warm and the moon was out and after a while just sitting on the sand listening to the surf didn't seem good enough. We decided to go swimming, or rather skinny dipping, since we didn't have our suits with us.

We were at the residential end of the beach, but there was one hotel on that stretch, too, and once in the water we kind of bobbed in that direction, probably because there was a flood light. Once we entered the illuminated portion of ocean, though, we heard shouts and a whistle. Squinting toward shore, we saw a security guard waving furiously at us. My friend and I ducked back into the dark, but Peter strode confidently out of the water to see what the guard wanted.

He tried to tell us that it was illegal to swim after dark, which may have been true, I still don't know. Pete apologized in his very English accent, explaining, as he stood stark naked in front of the guy, that he was from out of town. "Yeah," the guard nodded, "I thought you looked different."

Traditions

Earlier it was board games with the grown ups and playing with the kids over at my brother's house, and now it's turkey leftovers, a fire in the fireplace, and plans to take in a movie a little later. This has become the tradition for Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend.

I'll take it.

It's Time to Play the Music

On the last day of my first year of teaching another newbie and I decided to show Jaws to our students. I remembered the kick I got out of it at the age of thirteen, and I wanted to send my students off on summer vacation with the same thrill. Yeah... 20 years of water under the fishing boat had taken its toll on that particular movie, and even Bruce the mechanical shark couldn't rescue the experience-- it was yawnsville for the kids and a disappointment for us.

Even so, that impulse to share what we enjoyed as children with the children in our lives runs strong. Today it was the Grinch. When it came up in conversation that neither my nephew or niece had seen or read that classic tale, a quick trip to the bookstore was in order, and soon we were all settled around the TV watching that slimy green villain slither around Christmas trees like nobody's business. Unlike Jaws, Dr. Seuss was a hit. But it was the second purchase I made, simply on impulse, that was more telling.

The first season of The Muppet Show shone in the display as if there was a ray of light on it, and I could not resist. For many people of my age and perhaps a dozen years younger, the muppets were a weekly ritual of entertainment. Stetler and Waldorf, Pigs in Space, the Swedish Chef, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker, they are all woven into the fabric of our memories. But do they hold up? That was the question of the afternoon.

The answer? Sort of. Times have changed to the extent that the show doesn't really merit 30 minutes of anyone's undivided attention, but I think we have all enjoyed the muppet marathon as background today. The kids like the muppets and the adults like the nostalgia... Rita Moreno, Florence Henderson, Jim Nabors, Paul Williams? They were all staple guests of those classic variety shows of our youth, and to see them as they were 33 years ago has been like a time machine. Of course, the muppets haven't aged a day, either.

Last Minute

"Excuse me! Where's the celery?" A young man just about the age of my students pummeled me with that question as I scanned the produce section this morning. I don't think I've ever been shopping on Thanksgiving day before, but lack of a crucial ingredient and the knowledge that this particular store was open sent me out around 10:30.

"I think it's over there," I told him, but I was too slow; he was already interrogating someone else. My encounter with this manic kid on his Thanksgiving mission made me curious about my fellow shoppers as I made a quick loop through the grocery, and I speculated about their traditions as I roamed the aisles in search of the things on my last minute list. Were they, like I, here for something forgotten, or were they, like that kid, just doing their holiday shopping now?

I reckoned it was about half and half with a small percentage of people buying nothing feast-related at all. At the check out I saw Mr. Excitable and his parents one more time. "This is going to be great!" he told them as they unloaded their cart full of fixins onto the belt.

I'm sure he was right.

Units of Measurement

We went out to lunch while we were at the beach a couple of weeks ago. The mid-November weather was spectacular, and we sat outside on a deck overlooking the wide Patuxent river. We ordered seafood, of course: crab cakes, chowder, oysters, and my brother got a dozen clams. When they arrived, he counted them up and there were 21 in the bowl. We speculated about the number-- too many for a baker's dozen, too few for two dozen. At last we decided that it was a Broomes Island dozen. "What a deal," my brother said, and we set about calculating the cost per clam. It turned out to be three for 87 cents or there abouts. "You know what that is, right?" my brother asked. "A Solomon Island dollar!"