A Bike Ride in Search of a Metaphor

There is a canal that runs 184 miles through the Potomac River gorge, right alongside the river itself. Built in the early 19th century, it was constructed to do what all canals do: make a river navigable so that barges might transport cargo from one point to another. Although it was closed to commerce less than a hundred years after it was built, today the canal is a national park and the tow path is restored for hiking and biking.

These days, the river is high and muddy because of all the rain. It's a challenge to experienced kayakers, and even then, there are areas such as Great Falls, that are always too dangerous for those boats; it's easy to see that a barge would never make it through. When you consider the hilly terrain that surrounds the canal, the tow path becomes an ideal destination for a nice, flat, bike ride, too. You can spin hard for miles in the shade getting a pretty good workout, and, in many places, enjoy that view of the wild, brown Potomac.

The special education teachers in our building often face resistance from their general education colleagues when it comes to the issue of putting accommodations in place for their students. Many regular ed teachers feel that accommodations "dumb down" the curriculum and make it "too easy" for the special ed kids, so they ignore the fact that the IEP (individualized education plan) is legally binding.

Today as I pedaled along the tow path, it occurred to me that special education is the canal that makes the curriculum navigable. The destination is the same for all who travel this route, and not everyone is an expert kayaker or a mountain biker. In fact, in the case of the Potomac, there are places when the canal is the only way to make it through. It was to the advantage of many that the barges were able to reach their destination; surely, we can say the same for our students?

An Interesting Calculus

So, I wanted to know why so many of our sixth grade students couldn't do sixth grade math. As a language arts teacher, it's hard for me to figure out, not because I don't know math-- believe me, I've been in sixth grade a long time, and I'm down with the curriculum-- but because I don't know the kids as math students. We disaggregate the data by race, ethnicity, gender, special needs, and socio-economic status, so I understood the profile of the kids who failed, but I wanted to know why. Is it developmental? Intellectual? Cultural? I asked the math teacher what she thought.

We talked a bit, and she was fairly non-judgmental in her description of what she saw. Her theory was that it was SES more than anything else, and related to that was the level of those students' parents' education, as well as their knowledge of English. (Yeah, a lot of Latino kids failed.) One point she made was very thought-provoking to me: When parents of struggling students sit next to their children in meetings with the teacher and admit that they can't help with math, because they don't know it themselves, it sends a powerful message to their kids. If this math is too hard for their parents, who are successful, working adults, how can the kids ever learn it? And, on some level, why should they bother?

It's not the full picture, but it is an interesting piece of the puzzle, and I still think that we need to understand any problem as fully as possible before we start proposing answers.

Testing Season

It's that time of year when teachers, even those who don't "believe" in standardized tests, talk standardized test results. In this world of miraculous modern technology, kids take all of their tests on the computer, and in theory, they could get immediate results. In practice, it takes a couple of days, at least in our state, and then the news goes to the teachers. At sixth grade in our district, students take reading, math, and U.S. history through 1877. We're done with the first two, and the last is on Monday, so the conversation has turned to percentage passing, and the students who failed.

Who are they, these kids who don't meet the minimum standards of our state? For reading, on my team of 99 kids, with the exception of two, they were all special education or second language, and all were minority students. As a language arts teacher, I know these kids as students in my discipline, and so I have an idea of their strengths and weaknesses, and therefore, I sort of understand what went wrong. That's not true for math.

In our state, once past 5th grade, students don't take a grade-level test for math, they take the test for the class they are in. So students who are in the advanced class in 6th grade take the 7th grade test, because that's their curriculum, and students who are in the next level up take the 8th grade test, again, because that's where they are. That leaves only the kids who are at or below grade level to take the 6th grade test, and as a consequence, those results are awful. It's less than a 60% passing rate.

I asked the math teacher today, because I really want to know, what's going on that these kids can't do math? I'll tell you what she said tomorrow.

Whatever

I read today on another blog what Suze Orman said about teachers in the NYTimes Magazine a couple of weeks ago. I get the Sunday Times, but I hadn't had a chance to read that article before today. It's really less than a paragraph in a 5500 word piece, but the author characterizes Orman's opinion as follows:

...students can’t learn empowerment from people who aren’t empowered, and teachers, she says, are too underpaid ever to have any real self-worth. She told me: “When you are somebody scared to death of your own life, how can you teach kids to be powerful? It’s not something in a book — it ain’t going to happen that way.”

You can imagine that this has caused quite a stir in the teacher blogosphere: many voices have risen in rebuttal, but even so, I'd like to comment briefly...

...a roll of the eyes, a shake of the head, a sharp exhale, and now, back to work.

The End is Near

"What are we going to do for the end of the year?" one of my students asked me today. "Can we have a party?"

Maybe it's my personality, but I like the year to end with as little fuss as possible. (For the record I hate any good-byes, especially long ones.) If it were up to me, we would follow our regular schedule until the very last day, and then I could bid each class a warm farewell; perhaps instead of my usual, I had fun today-- thanks for your hard work and enjoy the rest of your day, I could substitute "this year" and "rest of your life" and call it a year.

Somewhere along the line though, the students have gotten the idea that June is a non-working month of celebration. Not only that, but since the advent of extensive standardized testing, they feel like they should be rewarded after each and every test, as well. Some teachers oblige, but I don't share this view. I believe that it's our job to help the kids understand what the tests are: simply a measure of what they know and can do, data that we will very likely use to figure out their placement and instruction. When we explain it that way, there's no reason for students to do anything other than their best, and there's no reason to look at the tests as anything but another day at school.

The Examined Life

We kicked off the last week of our month of May Slice of Life Story Challenge today with a common text about Socrates and his famous quotation that, "the unexamined life is not worth living." Students worked in small discussion groups to figure out what Socrates may have meant by this and how in the world it might relate to the brief personal anecdotes we've been reading and writing all month.

In case I needed any reminding, probably the main thing I took from today's lesson was that kids are funny. Not one of them would have chosen death over an unexamined life. Living as they do in a land where free thought and free speech are a given and so often taken for granted, many of them could not fathom Socrates' choice. Why didn't he just choose exile and go examine his life somewhere else? They wondered.

Even so, I'm not very worried that they are lemmings in training. Too many expressed their annoyance at this silly idea of self-examination (offered as it was by their teacher) all too clearly for that. One girl opened her group discussion with, "If self-examination is so great, how come we've never heard of it before? Everybody knows that vitamins and positive thinking will improve your life, but self-examination? I don't think so."

At the end of each class, I asked two questions. The first was: How does this essay relate to what we have been doing this month? The most common answer to that one was always that this story was a slice of Socrates' life, but eventually each class made it around to the idea that the daily writing we've done has been an opportunity for us to examine our lives. My second question was, What's your opinion on the value of self-examination? On that one, they were mixed. More than one student told me that if you spend too much time examining, you'll miss out on the living. And, as true as that seems at 10:35 PM on this Tuesday night, I had to take exception and encourage them to always make time for the living AND the examining.

Is Anybody Out There?

One of the top lessons any writing teacher plans for her students is on audience. "Consider your audience," we say. "Who are they and what do they want to know? Choose your words, details, and examples for them."

And, so, as it turns out, the most astute students try to write for their teacher, the one person they are sure will read their writing. (English teachers, we see the irony, right? How many pieces does the number one reader skim at the end of a very long day, desperately looking for something to comment on? Or worse, something to criticize? It's not that we don't care, kids, it's just that there are so many things to read...)

Audience is a tricky lesson, though. When my students share their writing with each other, the silliest, grossest, and most childish stuff is usually the most popular. I roll my eyes as I circulate through the room, but if they are writing for their peers-- 11- and 12-year-olds in this particular case-- how can I possibly be surprised? The audience LOVES it, even if I do not. What's the lesson there?

I don't know who I thought my audience was when I started writing and posting here. I guess I just didn't follow my own lesson plan. In the beginning, I was surprised that anyone was reading at all. Since then, I've pressed the link onto some and given it out upon request to others. I don't disillusion myself that a whole lot of people read what I write, but I know that some do, because they are kind enough to tell me so, either in writing or in person. As my audience has grown, so has my consideration of them evolved: do I really want to write that, if I know so-and-so may read it?

About a month ago, I gave the link to my blog to my nephew, and he took the time to read it. He wrote a very considerate reaction to it on his own blog. He's a thoughtful guy with some interesting friends, and I have reason to believe that some of them have taken the time to look at my blog, too. That's really cool, but it makes me think about what I write... many of these people are students in my school.

But, a blog is public, and I although I knew that when I started, I didn't understand it in quite the same way I do now. Clearly, there is a balance between honesty and discretion that any published writer must know how to negotiate (or learn to do so quickly), that a novice may not consider fully. What impact might such a recognition have on a writer? A friend asked me this today. I want to say, nothing of substance, but I'll have to wait and see.