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Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Huck Finn's Advice to Teachers


Whether from nature or nurture, I've always been troubled by a noisy, nagging conscience. It always prods me to do what is deemed the right thing and gives me seemingly everlasting hell when I refuse to do so.

I also seem to be genetically predisposed to please people.

I also have a burning desire to win. For me, a second-place winner really is a first-place loser.

I was also brought up to believe "the boss is always right." In fact, I remember being reminded of that when, at about 10 years old, I was sent out the door to work in tobacco fields.

I was brought up in the non-unionized South that felt secure in the presence of stable hierarchies.

All of the above makes me easy to exploit. I can be made to work harder than the rest without financial reward.

It gets worse. All of this is reinforced by the fact that my current job site took me in, some 15 years ago, like a hungry orphan off the streets and made me feel at home immediately and was quick to express appreciation and gratitude for my work, something I'd been craving for years.

In short, even though I am a child of the turbulent '60s, almost everything about me prefers compliance, placation, a life free of uncomfortable confrontations.

So think of the volatile cocktail that results when you mix the above with an externally imposed system, of dubious pedagogical value, that claims to measures teachers' value through number crunching and and relentless monitoring of their planning, goals, objectives, execution in the classroom, their assessment of these things, and the final outcomes as measured by test scores, also of dubious value.

On top of that, the system claims to reward those who are "highly effective" (according to the system's standards), and to refuse to reward a less effective batch and to punish yet another.

 And on top of that, the system is also imposed on each school's administrators, making it difficult for teachers to find or reach the appropriate targets of the metaphorical rocks they ache to throw.

In short, it is a system so vile, insidious and manipulative it makes me want to use the word "evil."

So all of this is falling upon teachers like me (I assume my feelings and my character are not unique) who love to teach, who long to do the right thing, who like to win, who hate to disappoint, who desperately need a raise and who have a conscience.

Are we damned if we follow our conscience or damned if we don't or are we damned either way?

I wonder if I have two consciences: My conditioned conscience says that things handed down from high are always right; my innate or born-with conscience insists I listen to my heart, that I trust it and stand up for it even when risk is involved.

My conditioned conscience tells me not to be a rabble-rouser or a resister and to go back to grading those vocab tests my students took Friday; my innate conscience tells me it is being violated, that there is poison in the air. It tells me either to take action or shut up and do what they tell me.

For decades, I've been waking up every workday morning believing that I'm doing the right thing with my life, that I'm making a difference in the lives of a handful of young people and I'm doing it in a way that depends largely on the gifts that I came into the world with, as opposed to systems imposed from on high.

Under Marzanoification, how can I turn that off now and wake up at an ungodly hour to put my Internal Teacher second or to stifle him or rename him or re-educate him? I can't learn to accept dreading my work.

I've been singing the song of teaching far too long for someone to hand me pre-fab, cookie-cutter musical notations, insist that I follow them and claim that my song will remain the same.

The dilemma I describe above -- the well-meaning do-gooder confronted with the need to engage in civil disobedience -- reminds me of a book people used to read called The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

The crisis point of the novel (not to give anything away) comes when Huck finally has to decide whether to turn in the slave Jim -- who has become his best friend -- or help him escape. His "conscience" speaks to him from all that he has heard about the justification of slavery and the evil of stealing. He knows that if people learn that he has helped Jim, he'll be an outcast, a no-good abolitionist. He believes that he will have stolen the slave from Miss Watson, Jim's "rightful owner," a woman who "never done [Huck] no harm." He is moved to do "the right thing" and writes Miss Watson a letter revealing Jim's whereabouts.

Upon thinking, then thinking again, however, and remembering Jim's goodness toward him, he tears up the note, saying "All right, then. I'll go to hell."

For Huck, the price of going with his heart is as harsh as his young mind can imagine. But Jim is worth it.

I think I can add my name to the long list of folks inspired by that fictional kid's courage. The time comes when we need to "go to hell" for the things we believe in. It's not personal -- we don't mean to hurt Miss Watson -- but it's a matter of principle. So we do it.

As for continuing to be exploited and for compromising my integrity for bogus points in this evaluation system, I'd like to quote another character from American lit, Melville's stubborn Bartleby the Scrivener:

"I would prefer not to."

Monday, November 10, 2014

In Which I Apologize to Marzano

This is embarrassing. Over the years I've referred to Marzano as "the Dark Lord," and I've coined terms such as Marzanopolooza and Marzonify and Marzanopoly. I've just pummeled the poor guy.

My bad!

As the attached video will confirm, all the things I've complained about were not his idea. Not only that, he strongly opposes the way many school districts use his baggy list of indicators and domains and such. You watch the video and see for yourself.

Anyway, my school district has renamed its evaluation process so Marzano is no longer in the bull's eye, but the Big Marz's name shows up on the bottom of all the handouts next to that little copyright symbol.

"This isn't about Marzano. This is something else because it has a different name. Do NOT look at the person behind the curtain! Crap! Toto! Get away from me!"

It's still used to give teachers scripts to memorize and even blocking, as they say in theatre: "The teacher will now move toward the board and point out. . . . " "At this time the teacher will form groups. . . . "

It's still an anxiety-causing form of evaluation for the poor younger faculty and just something else to keep up with for the older ones.

We'll talk about this more later. Those of you who are neither teachers nor students in the public education system will think I'm writing science fiction or hyperbolic satire. Not so.

But now, listen to Marzano. I never thought I'd be saying that.

Monday, August 18, 2014

How to teach effectively in an overcrowded classroom

Well, darn it. I was not planning any future posts this year -- or, quite possibly, in the years to come -- because I felt I had already told the world everything there is to know about teaching. What else could I say?

With the dawn of the 2014-2015 academic year, however, a new topic has surfaced. Many of my colleagues in the Seminole County Public School system, due to an unwonted spike in enrollment, find their classes overflowing with students. Many of them have over 30 young scholars in a class -- and that includes courses for "standard" kids, AP kids and kids required to do labs.

So, as you can imagine, after being stunned by Class-List Shock (CLS), many young teachers have flocked to me in the halls of my beloved school, on the streets of my beloved town, and in this little community's many fine mom-and-pop coffee shops and just bombarded me with questions.

Here are some of them:

Where do I put all the new desks being brought into my room? How do I arrange them in order to achieve feng shui, instilling my young charges with energy and inspiration to learn in densely crowded spaces? How do I leave enough room for students and teacher to walk between the rows?

How can I make it more difficult for the few dishonest students to cheat? How can I keep texters from hiding amongst a huddle of their classmates? How easy will it be to find that one, reclusive, lost student who needs a little more individual attention to find her groove?

How can I memorize their names in a timely fashion? How much instruction time will I lose while I'm trying to actually get to know my many students so they don't look like so many identical (but identity-less) faces one sees packed into massive corporate work spaces?

Where will I find the courage or faith to assign anything to that many students, knowing I'll have to grade that assignment? How will I get even the simplest quiz back in a timely fashion? How will I give essays the attention they deserve when I have roughly 30 students in a class? When am I supposed to mow my lawn or walk my dog or speak to my wife and/or kids or have a social life? How will spending most of my weekends grading affect my existence -- socially, emotionally, spiritually, physically?

How much will my pay increase due to this new influx of students? And if I do get a pay increase, will the extra money make this situation any better? Or will there still be too many students?

How will I do effective group work? Will the groups need to be larger, and therefore no longer really groups, but mini-classes, offering the unmotivated or easily distracted students a chance to coast? Or will the groups be smaller, so there will be so many of them they can't all give meaningful input?

Have pedagogical gurus such as Marzano and Kagan written helpful books explaining how to remain a domain-savvy, effective and responsive teacher when there are just too many students?

For AP teachers, will the nice people at College Board be informed of our overpopulated classes so they can adjust their grading accordingly? Will pass rates be prorated for teachers who have 25 or more students in a class or who have a total of over 150?

For the rest, will special consideration be given by our multi-layered, slippery, protean evaluation system, e.g., "Some of your test scores were a little low, but you had a truckload of students, so we're gonna let that go."

Is it okay to complain about this and if so, to whom do I complain? Who is responsible for this mess? Who tipped the first domino that resulted in this avalanche? Where would I start to find who is to blame? Should I just work my way up the high-school echelon, starting with colleagues, administrators, SCPS supervisor-type people, school board members, superintendent? And who will listen to me, one high-school teacher, with just one stinking little vote?

Will the candidates now seeking election to the school board do anything to keep this from happening again? Will they come forward and promise to do so in good faith?

Why was the cutoff for the maximum number of students per teacher set at 150 for so long? Had someone done research to show that 150 is the maximum number of fellow human beings one can establish any sort of relationship with (except on Facebook, of course, where our friends can soar into the thousands!)? Is 172 students too many for a writing teacher (to take just one example at random)?

What form of Machiavellian mathematics was used in which 172 students could indicate compliance with even the most far-fetched class-size restrictions? Is allowing a teacher to have that many students an example of adhering to the letter of the law while ignoring the spirit? When a teacher is given too much to do, does this show faith in the teacher or just a lack of concern for her?

Since there are no strong arguments that very large classes increase student learning and raise faculty morale, is it okay for me to object to this practice? Or will it make me seem like a selfish, whiny malcontent trying to foist my workload onto my colleagues?

If my school as a whole values its students as people and learners, and if overloaded classes make them more likely to be unattended to as both people and learners, and if I object on the students' behalf, am I going against my high school or simply reminding it that we are one body, and our students are the most important part of that body, and to cry out against their mistreatment is to plead for a stronger, more sensible body? Can a person object to error or folly in the person's country or school and still love that country or school?

Or is it better just to be a good sport and do the best we can with this rough hand we've been dealt in order to maintain a more civil esprit de corps? Should we all just lay low and take our medicine, with the confidence that this loathsome burden will blow over like, for example, the 7-period day?

Wow, that was a lot of good questions! Thanks to all of you who asked them. Sadly, answering any of them is beyond my simple powers, but I'd like to welcome this blog's many readers to provide some solutions, if possible.