Oh, the Cobbler's Children

Friends of mine whose parents are doctors or nurses would joke that their folks never believed them when they said they were sick. I guess after seeing so much at work, these medical professional parents didn’t jump to the concerns some of us lay parents do when a fever strikes. My parents both worked in education, and as a parent-educator myself, I’ve started thinking about the impact it has on a kid to have an educator parent. How does my relationship to the big machine of education affect the way I participate in the education of my own kid? Since my kid is young, I’ve focused on some basic stuff here. I don’t know yet how I’ll be with helping my kid with homework or when I’ll go to school to advocate for my kid…

Because I teach, I believe much of the real teaching goes on at home.

I’m not talking about running drills or reviewing workbooks here at home; after years of observing students, I’ve concluded that kids really do know what they live. By reading ourselves, by discussing the world, by taking trips to see natural and historical wonders, by living lives of intellectual curiosity, my husband and I are teaching our son a way of being in the world that we hope will serve him well, not just on state tests but in the long journey of life. (I also don’t think there are guaranteed recipes for a “successful kid.” It's not like I think I've got raising a kid figured out; I just don't think what teachers my kid has will matter as much as other parents I know seem to think it will.) Yes, I want my kid to have great teachers, but I realize sometimes he won’t, and I don’t believe all the power of whether or not he loves learning rests with his teachers. (As a loving and supportive teacher, I haven’t wielded such power, so I should know!) Yes, teachers have a big influence, but at this point, I think our home’s influence is bigger.

Because I teach, I'm less likely to yell.

It took years and years of classroom conditioning, but I really don’t yell much any more. I yell more as a parent than I ever do as a teacher, but it takes way more to get me there than it might if I didn’t teach. Teaching has helped build a pause button between my feelings and my mouth that really helps with parenting. Let’s hope that lasts! I'm told by fellow teachers that this changes when our actual children are the same ages as the students at school.

Because I teach, I'm resistant to helping my kid right away.

I think it was somewhere in the middle of my second year of teaching when it dawned on me that students claimed they didn’t understand something as a stall tactic or as a trick to get me to do it for them. Instead of rushing right in with clucks of “Of course you can do it! You do it just like this…,” I’ve learned to ask, “I’m really happy to help you with your questions. What don’t you understand?” I’ve found this skill transferable at home. Sometimes I think I may appear…well, callous to other mothers. I want my kid to know I think he’s competent, and I trust him enough not to solve everything for him right away. No, I don’t wait until he’s in a puddle of tears, either. It’s like “wait time” for parents, and I think teaching has given me the practice needed to resist the knee-jerk desire to sweep in and fix things.

Because I teach, I'm more focused on genuine ownership of learning gains rather than quantifiable objectives or benchmarks.

Because I give grades and sit on committees to determine benchmarks, I understand the shortcomings of what they can measure. Will I have no comment to a child of mine bringing home D’s and F’s or even C’s? Not likely…I think a modicum of effort can keep most failures away in American public education. Right now, we’re still in the stage of life where achievement is measured by what age a child does something. Reading by three? Prodigy. Riding a bike by five? Olympic athlete. Sigh. I’m surrounded by people really concerned about their kids’ mastery of the alphabet and basic phonics. I, too, love a student with a strong command of alphabetical order, but I’ve failed to see it correlate to long term life achievement. It’s difficult for me to buy-in to a Hooked on Phonics score when I know that so much more of long term learning rests upon genuine ownership and curiosity.

Because I teach, I think I’ve seen it all.

Okay, so I know I don’t know everything. But teaching the public gives me a broader view of people’s lives and skill sets and interests than I would have if I worked in an industry where I didn’t see the general public. My dad taught high school, and he’d always try to shock me with “stories from the ‘hood.” “I know what goes on at these parties,” he’d say, shaking his head. “I know about the drugs and the sex. I’ve helped girls out of garbage dumpsters after boys have tossed them in there; I’ve seen things that would curl your hair, my friend. So don’t tell me you’ll be home at 1 a.m. You’ll be home at 11 p.m. or you’ll not be out of this house again.” Stuff like that. I hated it. I thought he was histrionic and slightly out of his mind. We’re still a stretch from these concerns at our house, but I already know I’ll sound similar. Teaching takes some of the rose color off the parenting glasses. I don’t think “nice kids” look a certain way, and I don’t think “good kids” don’t have sex or bully or drink, and I’m sure I’ll bring the full impact of what I’ve seen to my kid’s house rules, too.

I hope my classroom experience enriches my parenting identity more than it detracts from it when everything’s said and done…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

"My Grades are in."

When a teacher enters the workroom, copier room, or lunchroom able to make that comment at the end of the year, he or she elicits one of two reactions. Teachers who have also put their grades in might offer a high-five, a “Whoo-hoo!,” a raucous off key round of “School’s out for sum—mer!” or just a fervent, “Me, too, thank goodness.” Teachers who have not put their grades in will most likely groan and grab the remaining pile of whatever still needs grading exclaiming, “How does everyone do it? I still have x papers left!,” while scurrying away from the rising energy of teachers liberated from the wheel of stuff to do. It is a feeling fragrant with childhood memories of reaching summer vacation, and I love it, and I’m so grateful to have an adult profession that doesn’t break down into 50 weeks of work with 2 weeks off. Unlike most other working adults, I can clear my desk without a pink slip. My work here is done.

Getting my last set of grades in for the calendar year creates euphoria in me, but like every good buzz, there is a letdown, a sugar crash, a hangover. While getting my grades in, I push down concerns about students whose grades might not accurately reflect their learning (too high? too low?), about lessons with choppy areas that need reworking, and about situations I could have handled differently. My thoughts swirl at this time of year, like party debris left to clean up in the morning when the mind is clearer and the body rested. It’s too soon to jump right into reworking things for next year; my mind feels so saturated that I can’t yet think about doing things differently. However, I try to pack my bag when I leave at the end of the summer term with all the materials I might need when I restructure my lessons at home:

Eventually this summer, I’ll pull apart the seams of my research unit and put in new pieces while paring down some of the old ones. I can’t see the solutions yet, but I see the places that are worn out and need attention. Our department plans to norm an essay together in the fall, and I want to help prepare that process. Usually, I’ve got some kind of income-earning work during the summer, too, but I get a change of scenery and space from the classroom. Yes, as a teacher, I work on my craft all summer, but the hiatus from actual students does make summer refreshing. After a little break, I’ll clean up the party debris and enjoy thinking about how I want my next party to go…To my fellow teachers on a traditional calendar, may your grades be in!

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Bittersweet June

I’ve been on a school calendar since I first let go of my mom’s hand and stepped into that kindergarten classroom. I think its rhythms are programmed deeply into my blood. The routines become so internalized that when my father retired after thirty-eight years of teaching, we all joked that he was going to have to change tasks every forty-two minutes. The ending of my time with my students as their teacher is one of those rhythms. As a kid’s teacher, I have a clear role. Once students pass on to the next teacher, we have to strike up a new relationship or just move on. Sometimes students still come around once I don’t teach them anymore, but as often as not, we’ll just wave in the hallway.

I can catch up with individual students, but another teaching reality is that once classes end, a class combination is gone for good. Class combinations of students are as organic as any other organism I’ve studied, and I don’t need a degree in social anthropology to recognize what a complicated creature it can be. There’s always one class in particular that I know I’ll miss especially. Even though some of these students will still pursue a mentor-type relationship with me, this place in time, our class, will end very soon. Already it feels different, like a rose one day past its fullest bloom or a sweet banana the day before it gets too many spots. I can smell tomorrow; we all have an energy, a momentum towards the end of the year, which will be the end of this class, too.

I’ve felt this way about classes before, and I’m sure there will be classes I’ll feel this way about next year, too. Blessedly, I’ve come across this kind of class dynamic almost regularly, usually one group per semester. It’s funny, because sometimes it’s my morning class, like this one, and somehow the rapport we established as we woke up and began thinking and working for the day together just created a good space. I’ve had other classes, perhaps more rare, where as the last class of the day, we just sustained each other meaningfully until that final bell. It’s not the personality of one kid or even a particular grade level, and it certainly doesn’t correspond to how “smart” the students may or may not be. It isn’t me, either, because I never know which class will strike this emotional eco-system with me. I can’t seem to conjure it into every class I teach even though I enjoy each class and have a fine energy and consistent work production with most students most days.

It’s intangible, it’s difficult to describe, and it ends with the school year. I’ll stay in the same room and teach a different group of students at the same time in the same desks with the same materials, more or less, and it will be different. I’ll see these young people places: the hall, the parking lot, the mall. At first, they’ll greet me really warmly and come up to me, but when it’s just two or three or four of us, we won’t recapture the energy that existed in class, when we acted as a learning community. Sometimes I’ve tried to hold on too tightly to these special classes, bringing in doughnuts, elevating the end with special circumstances. I’ve mostly created a kind of awkwardness. Some kids say things as they flick jimmies off the glaze like, “This was a really good class. I don’t just mean the work we did, it just—I don’t know…” “Yeah,” the rest of us will nod.

It’s crazy to me that I’m the teacher, the leader, and I don’t know much more about this phenomenon than they do; it’s like the prism on a bubble blown away and into the sun. I know sooner than they do that it will end, and that we won’t be able to recapture it with each other again. We’ll miss it, but I hope they learn, like I have, that this kind of feeling is what academic communities can sometimes yield; we’ve been lucky to enjoy it, and as learners, they’ll experience it again with new people. I like having a job that ends, that refreshes itself, and I trust that I’ll have many more special classes in my future. I’ll just miss this particular class for a while…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Ruminations on Favorite Lessons

At this time of year, I reflect over lessons and think about what to keep, what to improve, and what to replace as I reorganize and prepare to pack up my stuff for the summer. Often, my colleagues and I show up at lunch clutching some beloved handouts as we put away files for the year; “Do you think you could use this?” “I found this worked well…” “What do you think I need to add to this one?” During these informal share sessions, I’ve gotten the seeds for some of my favorite and most useful lessons, so I thought I’d start an online version for us virtual colleagues. Every time I put away my research essay unit binder, my hand lingers affectionately over assignments for the Annotated Bibliography. I started using it in my research essay unit about five years ago, and each year, I think it serves students more and more.

When I was a girl, long, long ago in the eighties, we found our research sources via the card catalog and the Readers’ Guide to Periodicals. I only found as many articles as I was willing to fill out little slips of paper and ask to be retrieved from the shelves for me. Today, with the click of the mouse, my students find thousands of sources. As they select the HTML or PDF full text files, all the sources show up and print out in near identical appearance to each other. Back in my day, I looked at the hard copy article within its original publication. The ads on opposing pages, the pictures and font all gave me information about the source’s quality even if I didn’t actively realize it at first. I knew a medical journal must be more academic than a magazine just from its boring goldenrod cover and Times Roman typeset. For my students, all that peripheral information has been stripped away. The Annotated Bibliography process helps put it back.

I adapted directions I found on Cornell’s website. Students use the process to vet about ten sources before they sit down to begin organizing the essay itself. Initially, students think the process will be easy. In fact, it is easy, but it is also time consuming because it requires critical thinking. As students complete the steps, they need to ask themselves, who wrote this source? Per instruction, students “Google” authors’ names to find information they can use to establish credibility. We practice all these steps together, and then students repeat the process on new sources independently. I ask them to complete the annotations on ten sources, and let them reject some of those sources as inadequate, trying to communicate that not everything is of equal quality just because it all looks the same when found through a library database.

This process takes a couple of weeks. As students work on the project for homework, I do classroom lessons on reading and taking notes, paraphrasing, and how to write Works Cited entries. The work can be rote, but students tend to find the process empowering, too. This process provides clear, distinct steps for determining the “good” stuff from the “not so good” stuff, and my students are glad for the tool. Because the Annotated Bibliography repeats the process for each source, it lends itself to differentiation, too. Students can learn the steps and then re-apply them, working at their own paces. I can direct students to sources appropriate for their reading level, too. Not everyone gets it right the first time through; I let students revise the document until all the annotations are high quality. Sometimes students thrill me during this revision process and say things like, “Actually, I’m not going to use that source at all. I couldn’t really establish the author’s credibility, so I think I’m going to find something else.”

Writing a good research essay takes experience, but an Annotated Bibliography can really be mastered the first time out once students understand the process. I like including this assignment in our research process, not only for the enhanced research skills and critical thinking it provides, but for the sense of accomplishment it gives students during what can often be a long and wearying process. I’m always on the look out for processes that improve the research essay unit!

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Educator

A Parent's Big Questions about Education, Part 2

This week concludes my response to a concerned parent, Nanci, who emailed me some questions she has about her children’s schools. Nanci wrote that she wanted to hear what teachers thought of her concerns, so please don’t be shy about contributing thoughts and comments.

In a situation where an administration receives feedback from numerous parents that a new teacher is proceeding with poor teaching, frequently changing deadlines and rubrics, and harmful grading policies, WHY does the administration not assign a supervisor to micro-manage and closely remediate the teacher for the balance of the year?

The school may have assigned a mentor, but in my experience, no one is available to take on another teacher’s work load to the level of micromanagement and remediation. (If a teacher gets fired, that would free up some money to pay someone else to do the job.) Let’s say another English teacher got assigned to me. That English teacher already has a full class load of her own. How is she supposed to really improve my teaching while handling her own course load? Schools don’t usually have teachers with little to do. If that teacher tries to help me, she’s going to do it in half hour bursts after school or during lunch. The problems you describe, like changing deadlines and grading policies, have to do with organization and experience. It is very difficult to really help someone with a month long unit plan while teaching and grading five class sections of your own. Schools have not made the financial commitment to pay for that kind of support for new teachers. I currently teach and live in Central Florida, where the arts keep getting cut and class sizes continue to increase. These administrators’ budget constraints do not allow for a teaching position without a class load to support new teachers. The system in place is old, and it does not respond adequately to the time it takes teachers to learn to meet the needs of 21^st century teaching.

Why do schools NOT have a standardized grading policy? Wouldn't it make sense to universally say that tests are 40% of a high-schooler's grade and that 40% must contain at least 5 tests?

As an English teacher, I give very few tests, so I would rail against such a policy myself. I think school systems are often too big to make such sweeping policies. In my experience, the county system restricted how much of a percentage homework could be and wrote a specific curriculum for each course. In English, the curriculum determined how many major essays needed to be completed each semester. In our department, we standardized how much of the grade each of those essays should be. After the essay grades and the homework grades had been determined, the rest of the average was left to the teachers’ discretion. So for example, a new teacher would be told, “This semester you need to do Essay A and Essay B, and they each should be 20% of the grade. Homework can’t be more than 10%.” The other 50% could be divided up as the teacher saw fit. I’ve actually never had a “test” category at all. I have “Quizzes,” and they usually make up about 10%. I guess if a school told me to have 40% tests, I’d have to call an essay a test. I don’t know for the life of me how I’d come up with five in a semester…

Here’s the thing: I know I’m a good teacher, and that’s not who parents are worried about with grade questions. However, education cannot make rules for the lowest common denominator, or it will lose people like me. Discretion to customize my teaching is very important to me. I’m comfortable with parameters, like curriculum requirements or a grade cap on homework, but if teaching comes in a can, I may not want to do it. I now love the part new teachers struggle with—the planning, the customization, the organizing. Somewhere there are adult people who had me my first year of teaching, and I wish I could go back and teach them again with what I know now. The medical profession has a very long training and residency program; education does not. It doesn’t expect that much training, and it certainly doesn’t pay enough to support it, so sadly for our first students, many of us teachers learn on the job. Learning how to manage a fair and effective class average can be part of that learning curve, and if new teachers had more support, system-wide grade standardizations wouldn’t be necessary. Nanci, your questions go to the heart of the matter. In today’s more challenging classroom climate, are Americans willing to pay for more prepared, more qualified teachers or not?

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

A Parent's Big Questions about Education, Part 1

Recently, a concerned parent, Nanci, emailed me some questions she has about her children’s schools. She wants a teacher’s perspective before she pursues her concerns; I’ve addressed the first of her questions here rather than simply emailing her back because I certainly can’t speak for all of education or all teachers. Feel free to chime in!

Why is teaching the one profession where a brand new person is put in charge of 100+ people with little to no assimilation training and -- more importantly -- little top-down evaluation?

I don’t think many other professions put as little money towards their new people as education. The career of teaching has grown more challenging over the past fifteen to twenty years, and the management structure for supporting—or assimilating—new teachers has not changed adequately to meet the new challenges. Student teaching is the primary training, and for a long time, that six month to one year long, unpaid internship seemed sufficient. (In fact, the student teacher pays the college for the experience.) I’m not familiar with a program that pays teachers without designating them a full teaching load. School budgets just don’t seem structured for that kind of investment in workforce. Many districts are responding to the current recession by cutting the arts and increasing class sizes, so a program that paid new teachers modestly while they mastered their craft would probably be the first to go anyway.

After student teaching and graduation, most new teachers are paired with a mentor once they begin teaching. These mentors, for the most part, are fellow teachers with a full teaching load. I’ve seen programs where mentors receive no additional pay and no reduced teaching load for this role; I’ve also seen programs where mentors have three to five new teachers and receive a $500 stipend for the year. Some schools may provide substitute money so that a mentor can take a day from his or her own classes to observe a new teacher, but how much support a mentor provides will vary greatly by the individual. Also, if the new teacher is a coach or has other extra-curricular responsibilities (as many untenured teachers do), he or she may not be available after school for help. Few mentors want a phone call at 9 p.m. (when many of us planned our lessons that first year) when the mentors aren’t receiving a reduced teaching load or financial compensation for the task. Scheduling conflicts can stagnate many mentor relationships.

In addition to mentors, most schools, because of No Child Left Behind requirements, have school or district-wide training for new teachers after school or on in-service days. I’ve seen good mentors and bad mentors. I’ve seen hiring years where so many new teachers start in one year that even the good mentors have very little time left to offer. School budgets and structure have not responded to the fact that student teaching does not prepare people to the extent it may have at one time. This organizational problem creates a high rate of new teacher turnover, which wears out dedicated mentors, too! One strategy for a parent concerned about a struggling new teacher may be to go to the principal and ask who is supporting this new teacher. By saying, “Gosh, I think Mr. or Ms. So-and-So really needs some more support from what I’m seeing with my child. Who is his/her mentor?” This approach suggests that administration needs to support new teachers, and the concerned parents can seek to contribute questions and issues through that support program. If there isn’t a support program for that new teacher, parents might start to demand that one be put in place…

Most schools utilize lots of top-down evaluation on new teachers. In one school district I worked, I was formally observed every six weeks and informally observed on a weekly basis. My department chair signed my lesson plan book every two weeks for the first year. In education, the problem isn’t the observation and evaluation of new teachers; the problem is that there isn’t really a structure in place to do more than record the problem. Qualified teachers, especially in math or science, aren’t waiting to be called in mid-year to replace a struggling new teacher. If a new teacher has big problems, I can guarantee that the department chair and the front office know about it. It becomes a triage situation, including documentation of the problem and a record of mentoring (see above). Most schools just try to get the new teacher through that first year. However, this strategy does little to help students who have that teacher for that year. If the teacher gets fired for bad teaching in say, February, who will pick up those classes, especially if state testing happens in the spring? Schools cannot afford to have a substitute who may not be a certified teacher preparing students for a state exam.

I realize, Nanci, that I haven’t been very hopeful here. Essentially, I think education needs to restructure its relationship with new teachers, which will take money and community dedication. I can’t say I see that on the horizon, either. In the meantime, we teachers try to help each other as best we can in passing time between classes.

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

A Reason to Come to School?

If a student comes to school and cuts my class, I consider that my problem. However, if a student doesn’t come to school at all, I tend not to worry about that kid. Unless I know a student from a previous class or a club relationship, I begin my sense of responsibility when students and I cross into the building. Therefore, Gretel C. Kovach’s “To Curb Truancy, Dallas Tries Electronic Monitoring” in the New York Times intrigues me.

I’ve never worked in a school with a truancy program; in fact, I’ve never given much thought to where the kids are who don’t come at all. I guess I’ve fully turned that one over to the front office. While watching Season 4 of HBO’s The Wire, I felt for the character of Cutty, an ex-con now working in various ways to keep kids off the street. In the show, a middle school in Baltimore uses a couple of temporary custodial positions to hire men as informal truant officers, and Cutty has taken the job. As the HBO episode guide relates:

“Out on his truancy rounds, Cutty learns what his job is really about. The school is only interested in having the kids show up for one day a month in September and October - the minimum attendance that assures each school will be funded for the fullest enrollment. Cutty is incredulous. 'Naw, naw man. School is school,' he says to deaf ears. 'Which one of y'all still needs your September day?' his round-up partner asks the kids in an abandoned lot. Cutty is disgusted.”

This kind of bureaucratic ugliness can crush any educator’s spirit, and I try to stay away from school issues beyond my realm of control as a classroom teacher. I know I don’t have these system-wide answers. However, what would I think about teaching a kid wearing an ankle bracelet? Would I even know? My initial reaction is distaste, not unlike the state senator who “complained that ankle cuffs used in an earlier version were reminiscent of slave chains.” But since I’ve already admitted I don’t think much about where these students are, how much does my personal distaste matter?

Kovach writes: “The effort is financed by a $26,000 grant from Bruce Leadbetter, an equity investor who supports the program’s goals. The bulk of the money pays the salary of a full-time case manager, who monitors the students and works with parents and teachers.” I wonder if it is the relationship with this case worker that really makes the difference. It’s not fully clear in the article if the nine students at the featured school are the only members of the program, but Kovach gives the impression that nine students are in a six week pilot program. “The bulk” of 26K for six weeks and nine students sounds like a nice wage for the case worker, not that he or she doesn’t deserve it. I just wonder how that compares to the case loads and salaries of high school counselors.

The article creates the impression that once these formally truant kids get to school, they attend all their classes. Do the ankle bracelet and the focused attention from the case worker give these kids a sense that someone finally will notice whether or not they go to school? What does it say about a school system that can be fixed this way? It makes me want more information, information I could use to prove that smaller school sizes could create schools where kids knew people cared whether or not they showed up without electronic monitoring. To be fair, if I feel like doing extra educational research, it will be about teaching writing or critical reading; as I admitted already, I tend not to take on this kind of school system issue. An article like this one reminds me just how much work and thought has gone into getting my students in front of me. Free public schooling for the masses is some undertaking, isn’t it?

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher