Northern Lights

I've been following with interest the reactions to the release of the 2009 PISA scores last week. Secretary Duncan called them a wake-up call, a challenge to the US to improve. Others have pointed out that those 15-year-old students who were tested are really our first group of kids who have been exposed to the high-stakes testing curriculum for their entire academic experience, and suggest that such an approach may very well be flawed.

Two of the most successful groups were students from Shanghai, China and students from Finland. According to many sources, these two countries have diametrically opposite methods of educating their students. Chinese students have 10-12 hours of formal education, 6 days a week, in addition to homework. Their curriculum is focused on test preparation, and most schools have removed the arts and physical education from their schedules in order to devote more time to tested disciplines.

In Finland, teachers are recruited from the top 10% of college graduates and paid commensurately. One Finnish official is quoted as saying that in their language their is no word for accountability. "We put well-prepared teachers in the classroom, give them maximum autonomy, and we trust them to be responsible" He added: "We don't believe in competition among students, teachers, or schools. We believe in collaboration, trust, responsibility, and autonomy."

I want to move to Finland.

Good Question

"The day before winter break is early release, right?" one of my students asked me today.

I told her it was.

"Are we going to do anything that day?" she asked.

I looked at her a moment before answering, trying to gauge where she was coming from. She's a good student who seems to enjoy school, so I asked her a question in response. "Do you mean anything important or do you mean anything special?"

She told me that her family was thinking of taking a day trip to Princeton, NJ, but her parents asked her and her seventh grade sister to check at school before they finalized their plans.

How to answer? The truth is that I'll be out on a personal day myself and the other teachers on the team are considering showing a movie which will have some curriculum connection, but more of the enriching kind. Still, it's not good PR to tell anyone that it's fine to miss a day of school.

When I was a kid there was never any instruction the day before winter break; it was filled with a party and other fun stuff. That's far from the case today when it seems like every bit of focus is supposed to be on accountability to standards and preparing our students for the inevitable tests at the end of the term. Of course, there are valid arguments to be made on both sides of this issue, which is one of the reasons that education is such a complex enterprise.

As for my student? I told her that she wouldn't miss anything she couldn't make up, one way or another.

Winter Night

There's a poem by Georgia Heard that I've always loved, and it's on my mind tonight.

What We Hoped For

Sometimes I hear the wind in the trees
and I think it’s him come back
ready to ask the earth for forgiveness.

The smoke rises from the chimney.
It is late fall. All life has stopped
waiting for him to arrive.

I see him walking down the snowy driveway
to a house he never saw,

so much like the man I feared
when I was a girl.

Somewhere up there among the stars
is the way life could have been.

My father circles with Ursa Major.
He has become part of the great spectacle.

We had a chance here on earth, and what we hoped for
rises and sets with the sun.

Not So Small Talk

I don't usually like to make small talk with the cashier at a store (or anyone else for that matter), but today the young man ringing up my groceries seemed determined to chat me up. "Did you have a good Thanksgiving?" he asked, which was weird because that holiday was two weeks ago, and everyone is pretty much focused on the next one.

Still, I like to please people, and so I smiled and told him that I had. Then I used that trick I learned from a four year old a few years ago. "How about you?" I looked at his name tag and added, "Mohamed?"

He told me that it was very nice. His family is not in the area, but he has a group of friends that are like family, and they all celebrated together.

"Did someone cook a turkey?" I asked.

Yes, they had, but he doesn't like turkey so he only ate the sides. Silence fell then, made a little uncomfortable for me by my perception that he wanted to talk. "Where is your family?" I asked him.

"Morocco," he told me, and I nodded with interest. "You know, this country is not like any other country in the world," he said.

"This country? America?" I asked him to clarify.

"Yes," he affirmed. "There are people from everywhere here. Africa, Asia, South America, Europe-- they all live in America, together. It's very good."

"That's true," I agreed. "But this area of the country is different than some other places."

"I've heard that," he said, but his admiration did not seem diminished. I thought about his limited experience of America and compared it to that of my students, who have grown up and are living and learning in such a multinational environment. I had to agree with him; it was pretty extraordinary.

He put the last of my items into the bag and thanked me. "Nice talking to you," I said and I meant it.

Ghost Post

Today I posted the answer to the five-minute mystery from last Friday. I did so in the form of a confession from the culprit in which she described her motives and the consequences she faced when she was caught. I also wrote it in what the kids four years ago called "ghost posting". You change the font color to white so that the reader has to highlight the text to see what it says. Discovering how to read the solution was the last part of solving the mystery. Fun day!

Call it What it Is

Part of a school's job is making sure that all children are receiving an appropriate education. In our district this conversation usually begins at the school level at one of the daily team meetings where all the teachers on a team discuss student concerns, usually with the counselor present. From there we have a series of standard interventions-- a parent conference, after school study hall, meeting with the counselor, or daily point sheet are a few examples of these.

If a student continues to be unsuccessful, we may formalize our concerns at either an Intervention Assistance Team meeting or even a Special Education Student Study to see if educational, psychological, and/or medical testing might be in order. If it is, an Eligibility meeting is held to consider all the results and to determine if the student is eligible for special education services and an individualized education plan. The committee who makes that recommendation consists of the student's parents, a special education coordinator, the director of guidance, the student's guidance counselor, the school psychologist, the school social worker, a general education teacher, and a special education teacher. A majority of the committee must agree that the student qualifies for special ed, and the parents must agree to opt in for services.

Students are found eligible for different reasons-- a learning disability, "OHI" or Other Health Impaired (which usually means Attention Deficit Disorder, but could be another physical issue as well), a cognitive disability, or an emotional disability. It is this last one, an ED label, which sometimes presents a challenge to some committee members. Rightly or wrongly, they perceive a stigma attached to such a designation, even though it has well-defined criteria, one of which is that the student's lack of control over his or her emotions is negatively impacting his or her academic progress. Still some people hesitate to apply that category of disability to a student on the grounds that it's a negative label.

I would argue that their attitude is contributing to the misconception that there is something wrong with kids who might be ED. They are perpetuating the stigma by their hesitancy to consider that label as nothing more than an objective condition that a student is struggling with and should be supported through. If you need help, you should get it, and no one should try to protect you from that.

Thieves and Liars

It's not really good teaching practice to call the students negative names, even when you catch them red-handed with something they don't own or in a bald-faced fib. In the heat of the moment it may be hard to be tactful, but later on such indelicacy can be trouble. No matter how accurate they might be, many parents and administrators object to such harsh words.

I've found the best strategy is to have the kids say it themselves, like so:

Teacher: "Does that belong to you?"

Student: "No."

Teacher: "What do we call that when people take something that isn't theirs?"

Student (usually reluctantly): "Stealing."

Teacher: "And what do we call people who steal?"

Student: "Thieves?"

Exactly.