Thoughts on My Students' Reflections

I spent some time inside the heads of some of my students this evening. Every Tuesday I collect reflection journals from half of my seniors and (with the help of a 5 hour energy shot lol) stay in my classroom until I'm done reading and responding. And because I put in the time and dialogue with them in writing...

They tell me everything.

They love their grandparents. (Omg how they love their grandparents.) They miss their grandparents. They cry because it was their "last night under the lights." They complain because the athletes get all the attention. They worry they'll lose their friends. They worry they'll keep some of them. They love some of their teachers. They wonder how others are still in the classroom.

All my seniors are scared. Just yesterday, they were freshmen. They miss their childhoods. They miss their dogs. They are wrestling with depression. They are exhausted. They are strong. They are angry. They're afraid of failing. They're afraid of succeeding. They wonder why their fathers are asses. They're hurt and angry because their mothers have drug problems. They tell me their parents are the most important people in their lives and thank them and thank them and thank them.They tell me about their first taste of death and the birth of their nephews and nieces. The freedom of driving. Their heartbreaks and the love they apologize for because they're "young" and don't know what love is when they really do. Or really don't.

Alone, with their voices in my head, the shy, quiet ones are not shy and quiet. The rowdy ones are soft and reserved.

Every Tuesday I am awed and humbled and I stay in my room until I'm done because that's what they expect from me now and that's the only way they will write and write and write to me as if I were a priest.

And every page I read reminds me why we do what we do. No one who hasn't can ever understand

Michael Lambert - Badass Teacher

Dear Public School Teachers of Oklahoma:

From a mom named Shelly in Oklahoma

"Dear Public School Teachers of Oklahoma,

I am sorry. I am sorry for my lack of concern for the state of the Oklahoma Public schools until this past week when it affected my child directly. I have always been “pro-teacher” and been firmly on the side of funding education above special interests, but until this week I didn’t know the rage that you must feel at the lack of control you have in educating your own students.

I am sorry that we gauge a child’s value, and your worth based on a test score that is taken from a test that cannot be administered properly because the technology needed to support an entire district during testing time is underfunded and therefore , unavailable.

I am sorry that the solution to this problem is more tests and more training for these tests that will become useless once the powers-that-be decide that we need a different test, and you have to lose days and months and years of your time in training for tests that will be deemed “invalid” because of factors beyond your control.

I’m sorry that phrases like “merit pay” even factor into discussions involving your profession when you are wiping my child’s tears away or spending your own money on classroom materials.

Most of all I am sorry that it has taken me this long to get angry. Angry that my child is viewed as a statistic during an election year, and angry that your ability to do your job is secondary to test results.

I hope my apology isn’t too late and you will continue to believe in your value to our state and in the impact that you have on every student’s life.

Thank you,

2nd Grade Mom"

Can You Blame Them?

by Kristine Weishaar

We often hear the phrase "teach to the test," but the phrase that needs our attention is "learn for the test."  Teachers are forced to teach to the test as a means of professional survival.  Likewise, students are forced to learn for the test for their own academic survival.  Public school teachers and students (and many administrators) are simply doing what they can to survive.  Not thrive.  Survive. 

Today's teaching professionals have been backed into a corner.  Stripped of resources, attacked by the media, blamed for social inequities, educators are forced to teach to the test.  If their students perform poorly on the mandated tests, the teacher's reputation and career are immediately jeopardized.  The teacher does what she must to survive; she teaches to the test.  Can you blame her?

Our current students and recent graduates have been trained in a culture of short-term learning to simply perform on a test.   They learn skills and content in isolation in order to score well on an exam.  They are not able to see how rudimentary skills and basic content can lead to higher level thinking and a deeper knowledge base because our system does not provide opportunity.  Students do not value their education because, quite frankly, the culture does nothing to encourage them. Today's students are simply trying to survive the system.  Can you blame them?

Teachers are trying to survive.  Students are trying to survive.  Do you remember a time when young people did more than survive?  When they wanted to learn?  I'm sure you do.  Think of a moment when you watched a young person "do" for the sake of doing and not for a test.  Here's an example: You give a three-year-old building blocks and ask him to build a tower, and he does.  Once we see that he has mastered the task, we don't take away the blocks and move on.  We let him build taller towers and bridges and fortresses and anything else he can imagine.  We are amazed at his ingenuity and discovery of balance and physics.  We allow him to explore and learn.  We also don't require all children to create the same tower at the same pace with the same materials  (or significantly fewer materials) because we know that would be unreasonable.  Besides, do we want only one type of tower in our culture?  Sometimes the child's towers fall.  But we don't blame him.  We know block towers will fall, and we give the child the time he needs to rebuild. 

Why then, do we ask school-age students in public schools to learn something, write (or bubble) it on a test, and then put it away forever?  Why then do we punish students and their teachers for doing what it takes to survive in this culture?  Why? Because we have put too much emphasis on the test.  In our current system, designed by politicians and profiteers, there is very little time for true teaching and learning.  Those in the trenches are merely trying to survive.  Not thrive.  Survive. Can you blame them?

Let's turn back the clock before it's too late.  Let's create a system where children have time to "do" for the sake of doing.  Learn for the sake of learning.  Build for the sake of building. Let's create a culture in which teachers are trusted to teach their students.   Teachers  are regarded as experts.  Teachers have authority in their classrooms.

We need to change the culture and the system. Teaching to the test doesn't work.  Learning for the test doesn't work. Given opportunity, teachers and students will learn to thrive again.  Will you still blame them then?


Kristine Weishaar

Oct. 14, 2013

Bill Gates Speech--With a Brooklyn Accent (of Course) - Parody by Mark Naison

"We have 19th Century Schools for 21st Century Conditions. If we don't radically transform the way schools are managed and teachers are monitored, our country will lose its position as a global leader. We have to move quickly before the opposition builds and apply reforms quickly and ruthlessly. Yes, we will drive the best veteran teachers out of the profession, but we will recruit talented young teachers because their other job prospects are so grim. Yes, we will demoralize a generation of students who can't adapt to the more demanding standards, but that is the collateral damage we have to accept. In fifteen years, when the smoke has cleared, we will have a world class education system in every state of the union, even in high poverty neighborhoods. We cannot falter in our mission to implant these Reforms. The future of our nation is at stake"

I AM A TEACHER

Four Fallacies of Educational Policy

Originally posted by Jeff Bigler on the blog, Waterboarding the Horse

One of the easiest ways to make a parent angry is for people who do not have children of their own to give parenting advice.  Now suppose that those childless people were given the power to make rules that parents had to follow.  This is the situation in education—educational policies are forged and enacted by people who have an agenda and zero classroom experience.

Educational policies that have given us the current climate of test-and-punish are causing the very failures they were allegedly enacted to protect us from.  As our students become more and more ill-prepared for college, the laws and standards become more draconian and unrealistic in response.

The entire argument is based on the premise that we have assessments that can accurately measure the quality of education that a student has received.  There are at least four basic fallacies that work to create this premise.

1. If a student can get the correct answer reliably on an assessment, then the student has a deep knowledge of the subject.  While it is possible to construct assessments that make this statement true, such assessments are few and far between.  Most assessments—certainly the ones that can be scored by a machine—are testing snippets of knowledge rather than deep understanding.  Students can be taught to recognize patterns and to select a correct answer with little or no understanding of the concepts that the test is supposed to assess.
   
2. If a student scores highly on an assessment that tests at the lowest levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, that student must have a similar level of understanding at the higher levels. Standardized tests are tied to state frameworks.  States use standardized tests to generate data that show how students perform on each of the standards.  For this reason, almost every question addresses one and only one standard.  Because the standards are broken down finely, a question that addresses only one standard will almost certainly require recall or understanding, and not any of the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy.  While a student with a high-level understanding of a subject can certainly answer low-level questions, the reverse is, of course, not necessarily true.
   
3. If the students from a given school or district score highly on an assessment, then the school or district must also be living up equally well to its other responsibilities, and the test scores can therefore serve as a proxy for evaluating the school with respect to those other responsibilities.  Whether we believe this or not, most rankings and evaluations of schools and school districts are based solely on test scores.  Society tacitly assumes that a school with high test scores is a good school, and it therefore must be doing a good job with everything that schools do.
   
4. If the students from a given school or district score poorly on an assessment, then the school must be doing a poor job of living up to its responsibilities. If this is the case, the cause must be that the teachers have too much academic freedom, and are spending too much class time on things that don’t matter.  Again, the tacit assumption is that a school with low test scores is a failing school, and it therefore must be doing a bad job with everything else that schools do.

The real difference between the high-performing vs. low-performing schools is usually that the effects of poverty make it impossible for students in low-performing schools to get as much out of their education as the students in high-performing schools.  My own experience bears this out—the second year that I taught AP Chemistry was in a very high-performing, high socioeconomic status (SES) town.  All of my students passed the AP exam, most with scores of 4 and 5.  If I had stood in front of the class and picked my nose all year, most of those students would have learned the content on their own and passed the exam anyway.  The following year, I was certainly a better AP teacher, and my students certainly got a better AP Chemistry class.  However, I was teaching in an average-performing school in a much lower SES city.  Approximately one-fourth of my students passed the AP exam, and those who passed earned a 3 or 4.

The “fix” that is often applied is to give teachers in low-performing schools scripted lessons from teachers in high-performing schools.  The problem is that the teachers in the high-performing schools are generally no more talented at teaching than the teachers in the low-performing schools.  (I have taught at high-, average-, and low-performing schools, and my observations support this claim.)  Moreover, lessons that are designed for students in high-SES districts generally do not work out-of-the-box for students in low-SES districts.  If the teacher is not permitted to modify the lessons to suit the students’ needs, the scripted lessons fail to improve the performance of students from low-performing schools.  When this happens, everyone assumes that the difference must be caused by the difference between the teachers.  The obvious conclusion is therefore to fire the teachers in the low-performing schools.  Unfortunately, not only does this not solve the problem, it results in the low-performing school having to hire new teachers, who actually are less talented at teaching, due to their lack of experience.  When the students fail to improve under the new teacher, the cycle repeats itself, again and again.

The problem of how to make education work for students living in poverty is pervasive, and any solution will need to be multi-faceted.  However, in the short term, if we give teachers in low-performing schools the freedom to teach students the way they need to be taught, we might at least stop losing so much ground.


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Letter From The Front

It has been a tough year so far. I have been very discouraged with what is going on nationally as well as with my own campus and the administration of my particular area. I have been discouraged with how immature and disconnected this year's group of upperclassmen seem to be. I have been upset with how my hands have been tied this year. I am upset that what I know to be good teaching (track record proves it) is being discounted and criticized into oblivion. It has been hard to get up in the mornings to face yet another day full of constant negativity, implied threats and ever increasing bogus paperwork. This is the most discouraged I have felt professionally in many years.

Yet on Friday night, while my school and an opposing football team were notoriously making national headlines, something happened. I was home preparing for the imminent grading period, writing test questions and trying to figure out the statistical strategy to use in the rigged evaluation game we in Indiana call "RISE". I got a text from an unknown number. It was a former student who graduated two years ago. She had left her apartment without her wallet (as teens sometimes do). Her phone was dying. It was dark. It was getting late. She had run out of gas in a less than desirable neighborhood. She had called everyone she could think of to come to her aid. Her mother said she would be there shortly- that was two hours earlier. This student texted me. I went. I was greeted with a rushed dissertation of all the terrible things that had been happening recently. Then she told me how she had called everyone she could think of before calling me. She said, "I knew you would come. You always do." I hugged her, put gas in her car, sat and talked with her for two hours about her future and did a lot of listening and affirming- just as I had done the night before when a classmate of her's had reached out to me on Facebook with an emotional crisis.

It was a nice reminder of why I do drag myself out of bed and face the institutional negativity each day.


Michelle Coy