I'm It.

amo has tagged me (a long time ago at this point) to answer some questions about my highschool years. Reading her answers, I realize mine would be rather dull so I'm adapting the assignment. The questions I'm supposed to be answering are here.

I was homeschooled which automatically knocks off a number of those questions; when you study in your pajamas, what does being expelled look like for instance? How do you determine a favorite teacher (question 7) when you at times decide not to talk to that teacher anymore! In fact, much of the high school experience is rather lost on me and the middle school one only because more pronounced as I taught those grades. I finally understood what people meant when they sadly say that middle school was the worst time of their life and they think everyone should be homeschooled during that time period. Looking back on my homeschooled years (question 9) I certainly don't want to go back: I was awkward and shy, a bookworm who pretty much lived in books and became rather grouchy when made to live in the real world. But more importantly, I think I was too apt to accept what I was taught, mainly because there was little distinction between the home and the school, leading to further confusions of what constitutes "the truth" and what is an opinion. Which doesn't mean that I was uncritical, just that I saw everything through a single lens focused on tradition and Christianity, but both of those interpreted in very specific ways. (Ways which (question 12) I've departed radically from now.)

I came across to posts today that reminded me of where I was and where I've come. In The Middle referenced both Michael Bérubé's recent article on Academic Freedom and a counter by Vanishing Shakespeare . The first reflects my current positions on literature and the roles of life and literature in the other's realms. The latter, a version of my older views. I wasn't as vitriolic about "new-fangled" classes as they are (I am particularly frustrated with their references to how classes such as ones on racial relations or cannibals in the Middle Ages weren't real literature classes, conveniently ignoring that these topics lead into discussions of all sorts of literature, though they wouldn't agree that all of it is literature!) mainly because I didn't know what these courses were about and just thought them boring. Now I find them fascinating! In short, the major difference between how I viewed the world then and now (and how Vanishing Shakespeare views the world) revolves around realizing that the study of literature is not an objective experience: we don't search for Truth in literature, but for how our individual perspectives engage and interact with what we read. While we frequently recognize the truthfulness in much literature, we can never approach it without interpreting it. To be unable to recognize this limits one's ability to recognize the fullness of literature: that it is not just about absorbing, but engaging with it.

At any rate, that was my highschool experience and it's long been a distantly removed part of my life. So ...

The Care and Feeding of Children

Reading today's NYTimes and ran across this article on Food additives and Hyperactivity with a wonderful quote:

“Even if [the study] shows some increase in hyperactivity, is it clinically significant and does it impact the child’s life?” said Dr. Thomas Spencer, a specialist in Pediatric Psychopharmacology at Massachusetts General Hospital. “Is it powerful enough that you want to ostracize your kid? It is very socially impacting if children can’t eat the things that their friends do.”(emphasis mine)

I'm rather astounded by the concept propounded here that a child's diet is related to a child's popularity or perceptions of social worth.

I remember as a child not being allowed to eat sugar at choir receptions and being miserable because of it, but I still ran around with my friends and played with them at those events without social rejection. And more recently, I've seen articles (again, hearsay evidence, but I'm not sure how the dear Doctor's is any better!) where parents send their children to school with yummy, gourmet leftovers and find their children are envied because their diet is not the one-size-fits-all American lunch parade.

More importantly, though, the suggestion that one cannot instill healthy eating habits because of social pressure just seems ludicrous!! As does the idea that the one cannot replace bad foods with better ones and explain the choices to children who will understand and feel empowered by the decision to take control of one's future health by changing the diet. Who knew: diet as an antidote to social dependency?

School Testing, Evaluation & Money

NB: In running through my posts, I discovered a few unfinished ones so I've revised them and am now posting them. The first two paragraphs were written back in early July.

Lately the NYTimes has covered the issues surrounding school testing from a variety of angles: paying teachers (the article and the letters to the editor after) and then today's article evaluating whether schools should consider bulk test results or follow individual students to gauge progress. I have also mentioned this before in my blog post Sunday Reader. All have at their basis a continued commitment to testing students rigorously and using that as a measure of whether they have learned something. And my basic problem with this idea is that what the tests measure is not really what is important! It's difficult to evaluate whether a student can think critically, weigh information and make an informed decision, use higher order thinking skills and so forth. Some tests do this, but a multiple choice test will always be limited by its possible answers. Regardless, though, this is not what tests are actually measuring for No Child Left Behind.

NCLB tests are minimum competency tests, designed to establish a bottom level of achievement. Today's NYTimes article discusses how schools are finding that gifted students are not achieving better on these tests, which could be accounted for in two ways: gifted teachers realize that what the tests teach are not as important for students who have mastered most of the material before and take up a lot of time and thus those teachers focus on different skills or the tests are really measuring difficult material. But as we're seeing growth on the lower ends (where the tests are most specifically taught to), I'm inclined to go for the first option.

Which pulls us full circle to the issue of what the testing is supposed to accomplish. Are we evaluating the overall achievement of a school population, or seeking to encourage -- and demand -- individual growth and progress. And here is where I think testing diverges from the goals it wishes to achieve -- I'm assuming that the latter is in fact the goal. The one-size-fits-all model of teaching is anathema to individual progress, but changing the way we track students (i.e. judging a school's progress on individuals improving) will not address the more important problem that the basic competency tests are not appropriate or useful for gifted students. They aren't evaluating these students by beginning where these students are competent and then pushing them to excel; rather, they tell them they "exceed expectations" on a scale of minimum comptency and everyone is happy.

So by all means begin tracking students individually (as this will help everyone and insure that no child is overlooked in the race to have 98% achieve a passing rate -- this is the standard in north Fulton County where I used to teach), but this must lead to tests that match the student's ability and can be tailored to an advanced curriculum for advanced students. If we are to continue this testing nonsense, then we need to move towards tests which are geared towards students who score in the 50% percentile (average) and different tests for those who depart from this mean. Otherwise, teachers are forced to teach shopworn material, administer tests (and practice tests) frequently on material that does not effect the student's knowledge at that moment. Perhaps such an approach could also lead to less multiple choice and more short answer and essay questions, which require much more from students than educated guessing. And allow teachers to emphasize critical thinking skills and writing instead of mere factual recall. And maybe this approach will return us to a system where we start teaching again rather than teaching plus teaching for that test.

Sunday Reader

Today's NYTimes had three articles I want to comment on, ranging in subject from elementary school girls to underprivileged youth. They all consider the intersection between education and personal responsibility, though with a different angle on all of them. Read along! (PS: click on the title links to get to the NYTimes articles)

Role Models

This article presents the usual encomia about the bad it-girls, those whom they influence and then the analysis of what it means. The article struck me because it discussed how these girls are fascinated by the lives of the fallen celebrities, but also censure their life-choices. Course they're also 8-12 and the article points out many times that they still follow their parents' examples. (Which is quite true -- they experiment with other's experiences, but it is controlled by the desire to still be accepted into adult society the same way when it's over).

On the second page, there is a portrait collage of six "good" girls and it occurred to me that a few I don't even recognize and for the most part don't know anything about them except that they stay off the gossip pages. That, in fact, is the only time they show up in them -- when they talk about how their behavior is different from Lindsey Lohan's and so forth.

And that brings me to my point -- why do we rarely hear about the good? With the exception of Angelina Jolie we find ourselves submerged by the scandals. The only time I hear of Hayden Christiansen, for instance, is what she wore to the latest party. (official party, not Britney Spears' party) So why can't someone start writing about the good these girls do? When they visit the soup kitchen, etc. It's not that People is adverse to this sort of reporting -- it's there all the time. It's just that the scandal sells more issues. But what if there were a glossy magazine that told the other side of the stars? That gave those teens and tweens glamour and access, but also established a more well-rounded picture of their favorite celebrities?

Testing, Testing, Testing...

When did a word that means to evaluate before sending the person on to bigger things become the be-all-end-all of academic life?

The people in this article pretty much infuriated me! When students weren't passing the test, the admin realized something was wrong. Which is a given. These tests are so easy that students should be able to take them without much preparation. Teaching, yes, but teaching for the test is absurd. But what these admin did was have the teachers teach what was going to be on the test...but they didn't stop there:

the principal, Jerome S. Schulman, made them rewrite lesson plans to mirror the state’s standards. Every test had to be cleared to make sure it tested material that might be on the state assessment, Mr. Schulman said.

Note the "every test" part -- it assumes that what the state assesses is the most important thing the teacher is teaching. This success was summed up by the superintendent:

“There are superintendents who want to avoid teaching to the test,” Dr. Lodovico said. “I say, we’re going to provide the kind of instruction that the state standards want us to provide. If that is teaching to the tests, so be it.”

The state's standards become reduced to a single test and every lesson becomes reduced to that same test, then.

My problems with this approach is that it eliminates creativity from the curriculum, but also that it stifles a desire to learn. When we say that the basics that we teach on a test need to be the forefront of our curriculum, we reduce the curriculum to easy answers: A, B, C or D. If all you need to do is pick from one of four choices, you quickly fail to be interested in what is outside those boxes. These tests can't evaluate critical thinking (though they do try...or at least the better tests try) and certainly don't allow for students to demonstrate that they can effectively use the information they've been given.

Even writing exams, which ought to allow for such individuality fail to. I had two students A and B take the exam my first year teaching. A wasn't a profound writer; she knew the basics, worked very hard and held a piece together nicely. A teacher of hers had once told her to make sure that she varied her words. So her strategy was to write a piece and then spend a lot of time revising -- she would make lists of words she repeated and then plug in new ones. This made her writing more engaging and the result reflected the work she put into it. But B was a brilliant writer, though still working on the mechanics. His thoughts always delved into a problem, considered it from a few angles and so forth. He also liked to experiment: he would try long sentences, for instance, so long that they became convoluted and un-followable. But he was looking for a unique style and those long sentences became more manageable as he gained practice with them. But who scored a "superior" on the exam? A. And who sored an average? B. And have I really ever seen anything else? Alas, no.

So, in summary these tests should be a starting point and should lead to more individualized instruction (i.e. if the student can pass it with his eyes closed, move to something else; if he can't, find out what his weaknesses really are. Why doesn't grammar make sense? Not, teach him what a complex-compound sentence is.). Further, students need challenge, depth and interest to keep them actively engaged in school. Testing, and the emphasis we place on it, don't provide this.

Overcoming Poverty

Amherst appears to have a great program for attracting, accepting and nurturing Americans from poverty-stricken backgrounds. What I really liked about this article is its focus on the student's achievements rather than what precisely his economic background was. (Too many of these articles detail the exact poverty the people come from.) A number of similar programs just look for the bright students, but Amherst singles out the potentially bright and helps them to achieve the potential they would have if they had been given opportunities.

The only concern I have is the workstudy requirement. 7-8 hours of workstudy is what I did in college as well and if you're juggling catching up in addition to the studying that comes easily to others, 7-8 hours that you could use to study or just relax is a lot. Wonder why the rich kids with all expenses paid, or the scholarship kids whose talent and background earned them the reward, don't have a similar program. While having some spending money, especially when you're around people who have money to blow, is important, I think it would be better offered as part of the scholarship. It just seems a lot to ask a student to work when they've probably been doing nothing but that their whole lives. On the other hand, the work experience might be useful; how about asking them to work during the summer at an unpaid internship (with living expenses covered by Amherst)? Those are the opportunities that really push kids further and only those whose parents take care of their living expenses in NYC can afford such a luxury.

Other than that, kudos to Amherst!

Students Today

Here is a generally depressing article I found while trolling through other people's blogs. There are, btw, a number of really fun ones...who knew for instance that J.J. Cohen posts article reviews of forthcoming articles on his blog for comment or that there were cynical graduate student teachers? Ok, the last one is a given.

The article has a number of quite valid points and makes me a bit trepiditious to be teaching college next year -- I was kind of hoping that things might be different from teaching middle school. Though then I recalled today's lovely Beowulf class. There are (apparently) 5 undergraduates and me in the class. So one of them has not shown up since the mid-term exam...we all assumed he dropped, the professors spent a week wondering where he was...and then today I walk in and there sits X! Ready to translate and, presumably, taking the exam on Friday. Wow -- article confirmed to the nth degree. But the other undergrads in the class are really great. They had interesting observations about Beowulf today, were able to connect the course with their plans, offered a nice balance between academic reflections and personal reactions to the poem and so forth. And they've been uber-prepared all semester, pay careful attention to the text and ask questions such as how a word is pronounced in the Northumbrian dialect.

So a counterpoint to the above are those students who always say hello, chat after class, delve into the work and have plans for their lives.