Fire and Ice

Over the summer my woodpile became infested with box elder beetles and stink bugs. I was not aware of this situation until last week when I built a fire and set a couple of extra logs on the hearth. Within moments there was a mass migration of insects across the carpet. The air temperature outside was very cold, but as soon as those guys warmed up they had twenty-five different directions to crawl in.

Even though I have no fear of bugs, I confess that it was a little disturbing: there were a lot of beetles in the living room. I ran around sweeping them onto folded-up sections of newspaper, but then I hesitated. I don't like to kill bugs unless it's unavoidable; I have a strict capture and release program, but releasing these unfortunates would probably mean their deaths. The mercury was due to drop below freezing that night, and I had already unknowingly burned scores of them, and the wood pile was undoubtedly full of hundreds more. It would be so easy for me to flick my squirming collection into the fire where their demise would be sure but swift, but I could also let them loose to try their luck in the frigid night.

Either way, those bugs were goners, and I would be the instrument of their demise.

Examining the Clues

The week after vacation can often seem kind of long, but this one wasn't too bad. My students are finishing up their Letters about Literature, revising science fair intros, and preparing entries for the four writing contests that are going on this month in our school, district, and local area. My class has seemed very workshop-like as students work through the writing process at various paces on different pieces, and I've enjoyed it.

Twice this week they have shown me again how, collectively, they are very different than the classes of the last couple of years by the way they have responded to lessons I've used in the past. For one, there seem fewer children in this group who are able to cognitively make the connections necessary to write any really successful letters to authors explaining how their books changed these kids' perspectives in some way. Then today, I gave them a quick activity where they read a mini-mystery and try to work out who the culprit might be, and oh my golly, they loved it! There was 100% completion. "You should make all of our assignments like this," one student told me.

I can't really blame them-- I like a good mystery, too. I've been teaching long enough to realize that the same activities don't always go the same way from year to year, or even class to class, but these swings this year seem wider than usual, and I've also been teaching long enough to know that understanding why will help me better meet the learning needs of my students, and so I'm on the case.

Misinformed

As one of their choices of writing pieces in our workshop, some students are working on their science fair project introductions. As usual, my role is to confer with them and make editorial suggestions. The style required for this type of writing is new to them, and some of them are finding it a challenge to compose in third person, passive voice, without contractions.

Tougher still for some is synthesizing the information that they have gathered in their research. For one thing, as eleven-year-olds, they don't have the level of general knowledge they need for an accurate internal fact checker, and so in the past few days I have read some outrageous scientific claims, for example that chewing gum is made of rubber and petroleum and pills are made from the crushed leaves and bark of trees.

I understand the kids will make mistakes like this on their first attempts at such a complex task, but here's what I don't get: when I tell them that they are wrong, they are incredulous and even belligerent. "How do you know?" one student asked me indignantly. "You're an English teacher."

High Point

A friend shared a real estate listing for a house in Stonington, Maine today. It was a bargain, and I was sorely tempted to become someone with a second home. Stonington is a small lobster and fishing town on the Penobscot Bay. It's also where you catch the ferry to get out to Isle au Haut, which is part of Acadia National Park.

I count the day I spent on that island as one of the best of my life. We drove from Bar Harbor in time to catch the 10 AM ferry. I had made reservations at a motel in town, so we left the car there and walked over to the waterfront. Isabel had never been on a boat before, but once she got over the metal grate that was the gangway, she was fine. Our transportation was really no more than a mail boat, and it was pretty crowded until we made our first stop at the tiny town at the north end. There might have been ten of us who ventured on to the primitive camp ground and trail heads six miles away at the southern tip of the island.

Heidi and Isabel and I disembarked on a beautiful July day-- blue skies, 80 degrees, no humidity. I had a map of the trails that criss-crossed the park. "When is the boat back?" Heidi asked me as we watched our ride chug out to sea.

I thought she had understood the plan for this day. "Mmm... six?" I shrugged.

She was a little perturbed. "What are we supposed to do for the next seven hours?! Hike?"

I had a picnic lunch and plenty of snacks and water in my pack. "Well... yeah," I told her, "We'll just explore the island. We practically have it to ourselves."

Isabel was on board from the start-- she had a grand time on the cobble beaches, granite ledges, and balsam trails, in fact the picture on this blog was taken there, and honestly, it didn't take long for Heidi to come around, either. The time passed at a perfect pace and at 5:45 we were rounding the last curve in the trail that led to the dock. Harbor porpoises and seals accompanied our boat back to Stonington, where we had a delicious dinner of fried seafood in our charming efficiency motel room. I was sorry to leave the next day.

I gave my friend an abbreviated version of this tale when she told me about the property for sale. "It was one of the best days of my life!" I said.

"What does Heidi say about it?" she asked me.

"Well," I answered, "she says that it was one of the best days of my life, not hers, but she's glad she was there."

Me, too.

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."