On Time

After the couple of inches of snow we had on Thursday, many citizens of our little county awoke on Friday anxiously wondering about the day's schedule. Would we go? Would there be a delay? Other surrounding jurisdictions had already made the determination the night before, but here it turned out that any who were hoping for a couple of extra hours of sleep were disappointed, and some folks were confused as to why. The roads were treacherous in places (there had been several school buses involved in fender benders the day before), and a two hour delay does not count against the system as a make up day.

Some people wondered if this was all part of our new focus on accountability: don't all kids and teachers-- especially those without irreproachable test scores-- belong in school? About mid-day another explanation emerged. President Obama had made a surprise visit to one of our elementary schools to read to a group of second graders. The video of it is charming; both the kids and the commander in chief clearly had a wonderful time. And it wouldn't have happened if there was a delay.

Sure, Go Ahead and Ask

For the first time in a long time, I'm impressed by what the Senate's accomplished in the last little while. To be fair, I know how they feel-- it takes a deadline to get me to move my ass, too.

Choose Your Poison

With the bustle of the holiday season, I'm a little behind on my commitments, and particularly my own gifts of writing. Every year I participate in this activity with my students, and since I have five sections of English that means I get five writing pieces dedicated to and/or inspired by moi, but I also have to write five of my own. The students' were due today, so that we may exchange them on Monday, but mine are not quite finished.

Perhaps mirroring the inevitable escalation that seems to accompany gift-giving at this time of year, or simply because the standards set by the examples I showed them are higher, this time more is more, and my students expect not the pretty poems of the past, but rather some solid stories, preferably choose your own adventure or five minute mysteries, featuring themselves and their interests. Oy vey. I've spent the last few hours at my computer spinning such tales and creating wordles to accompany them just so I won't disappoint anybody on Monday.

If you have sympathy for me, click here, if not, click here.

Look! It's Snowing!

A colleague described the scene at sixth grade lunch this way: They were holding each other and screaming! All because of a little snow. Screaming! Yes, the students were very excited about the weather today, and thanks to all of the new windows we got during the renovation, there was plenty of opportunity to watch the flakes fall to the frozen earth. It was sometime after lunch (and that conversation) that I realized how accustomed I am to children of this age-- who would expect them to do anything else? I kept the blinds wide open and enjoyed their enthusiasm before redirecting their attention to the work at hand.

Lost Analogy

I have a student who is a super-resistant writer. He's also a very proficient passive-aggressive excelling at blaming everyone else for his shortcomings. I also know from reading the little writing he does and talking to him that he loves playing football. Today, as the students were working on their gifts of writing which is usually a very high-interest assignment, I could see he was struggling, so I asked him to sit near me.

It seemed to me that he had everything he needed to produce a workable first draft-- plenty of models and information about the person he was writing for-- and yet he professed to be stuck. I gave him some advice on how to start and he composed a few lines and then turned to me, stymied again. "Alfonso," I said, "what would you do if you were on the line in football and some guy was blocking you? Would you give up?"

"No," he answered.

I shrugged. "Would you keep on pushing forward?"

"No," he said.

I looked expectantly at him. "Then what?" I asked.

"I'd find a way around him," he told me.

"Exactly," I said. "That's how it is with almost everything. If you can't do it one way, you have to look for another way, no matter how hard it is. You've got to get it done, man."

He nodded seriously. "Do you know what I mean?" I asked.

"Not really," he said.

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.