Ferat-isms

Wait, what's equity?

2011-12-31T10:56:00.003-05:00

So, I was reading this article in The Atlantic about Finnish schools -- a hot topic these days as they are the best schools in the world and we are in the middle -- and I was thinking about the main message that the Finnish Minister of Education brought to the US that the article points out most people ignored.

Finnish schools focus on equity -- making sure all students in all areas are receiving the same high quality education -- rather than focusing on statistics of students. They don't have standardized tests, micromanagement of teachers, or competition between schools. They don't even have private schools except for specialized institutions. Oh, and they have a fully unionized teacher workforce.

So, why don't we follow their lead? It would be too unpopular and the American mindset is all wrong. We say we're for equality (one nation indivisible and all) but we're really not. We love competition too much, which goes against equality -- see how we follow baseball stats and track the best athletes, for example -- and thus we push schools to compete based on numbers only. The best school in New Jersey is based on HSPA, SAT, and AP scores. In Finnland, there is no "best school." They don't compare them that way; they don't rank anything. We would have to change the entire system from the ground up and convince parents and politicians (and statisticians, I guess) that this is the best way to run an education system.

But we don't really want to be the best either. Americans like to compete; they like to strive; they like an underdog. If we were the best, who would we compete against?

Maybe we'll see some hope in 2012. Probably we'll just see more of the same.

Happy New Year!

True reform, which won't happen

2011-12-29T18:42:00.001-05:00

Sir Ken Robinson, a "world renowned education and creativity expert," gave this talk a couple of years ago which the RSA (Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) published this whiteboard marker video of.

Sir Ken makes several salient points about education and the way it should be reformed, which is, of course, the exact opposite direction of the way it is going. And, of course, I agree with him. Why else would I put this up?

The biggest point he makes is that our public education system is completely outdated and we are pushing toward reforming it into more of its outdated-ness. Basically, the structure of our system is based on the Industrial Revolution's model and has no bearing on what we now know about the development of the brain or how the 21st Century works, which is a bit different from the 19th, for those who haven't noticed.

I would love to work with the system he proposes, but it is impossible from within the system in which I work. If only policy makers would listen to experts in the field rather than figure out what the best economic plan is. If anyone would decide to actually do his job and make true reforming policy and then TEACH the public why that plan is best, there would be no real problem. But our government is too lazy and is run by people who just worry about the next election. Nothing really changes unless people start dying. Look at any major changes to the way the US does anything and you'll see that they are mainly based on catastrophe of some sort.

It amazes me how this country, which used to be a leader in nearly every field, has fallen behind in nearly every field because we settle for "fine" and "okay' rather than actually putting aside differences and politics and striving for "great."

2011-12-08T21:30:00.001-05:00

On the lighter side: how's your English education? Try reading this poem aloud. :)

Make them all take the tests!

2011-12-06T11:46:00.001-05:00

In a Washington Post article today, a board of ed member took his state's standardized 10th grade test and made his scores public. I don't want to spoil the surprise.

Okay, I lied.

2011-12-05T08:54:00.001-05:00

So, I'm back. Enough people convinced me that I shouldn't stop blogging, so here I am. And I'm pissed.

Why do people keep listening to "ed reformers" like Michelle Rhee still? Here's a testimony to her wonderful work in Washington from The New York Times. Great job there, Ms. Rhee. We should all follow your example.Schools continue to decline as money gets siphoned away from education. Yesterday, at dinner with my family and my mother and her significant other, named Art, we had a discussion about education, which stemmed from having just watched the New Jersey Ballet perform The Nutcracker.

Art, who is CEO of a small company outside of New York City, said what a wonderful thing it is that we expose our daughter to so many different arts and experiences and asked if she gets something like that at school. She does. He said wouldn't it be great if kids could take a survey of classes that came from all fields -- shop, home ec, dance, studio art, etc. -- so they could find what they really enjoy and choose something they really want to do before they got to college? We all agreed. Many of us had had some experience like that in school when we were back in middle and high school, but those days are gone.

Public schools, before high school, barely have foreign language programs. Non-academic programs are constantly cut. Why? Because we don't value anything in education other than getting out of it. My students even say to me: "I just have to pass so I can graduate." Then what? Okay, you squeak by and pass. You get into a mediocre college because everyone has told you you HAVE to go to college -- another basic lie -- and then what do you do there? Just get through those four years, passing, in order to get out and get a job? Doing what? What are you doing with your life?

WHY ARE WE TEACHING OUR YOUTH TO JUST PUNCH A TIMECARD AND HATE THEIR JOBS? Well, you have to have a job that makes a lot of money because you need a lot of money to enjoy life. Really? Although I think I should earn more than I do, let me make this clear: I have a good life. I have a house, two cars, a dog, a cat, a fish, an amazing daughter that I send to private school (because of what I have mentioned about public schools), and a wonderful wife. My wife and I work hard to make a life we like, but we enjoy the work we do.

Sure, I could have gone into a field where I could work 80 hours a week making a six to seven figure salary. I'm smart and could probably have pulled down a job like that, but I would HATE MY LIFE. I enjoy having time to spend with m y daughter. I enjoy working with students, even the ones that piss me off sometimes. If I just had to go to an office every day and sit at a desk to crunch numbers in order to earn a paycheck, I would be unhappy. Don't we all want to be happy? Isn't that important? Remember, "the best things in life are free."

And speaking of my going to The Nutcracker yesterday, what the hell has happened to our society? People were talking throughout the performance even though I asked them to stop. A man was playing "Angry Birds" on his iPhone the WHOLE TIME while sitting next to his children, and then took them out before the performance was over. People were constantly getting up and walking out and then walking back in during the whole thing. I couldn't believe the extend of the rudeness and selfishness of the entire audience! There were over twenty dancers working their hardest to entertain the audience with a holiday classic and people couldn't give a damn to sit down, shut up, and pay attention. AND THE AUDIENCE PAID MONEY FOR IT!

My advice to you: if you don't like sitting quietly during a performance and having good manners in a theater, DON'T GO. Stay home, rent the film version, and talk all you want. Stay the hell away from the theater so my family and others like us can enjoy live performance. You want to pay a lot of money to have a conversation with your friends about taking a cruise up the Hudson (yes, that's what five old ladies behind me were talking about during the beginning of the first act) then go to an expensive restaurant and talk.

Okay, I've returned with enough hatred for humanity for today. I need to go teach a class. :)

Been a long time... this may be the last.

2011-11-20T08:24:00.003-05:00

I know I haven't posted since August. I haven't seen the point. It seems things are starting to turn around a little in education, though, in New Jersey, the governor is still trying to push through reforms that studies show will be detrimental to public school students. Will they pass? Does it matter? No one seems to care. I know teachers who have come up with new, innovative techniques to involve their students and expand those students' learning and have been told, "no," they can't teach that way. Why? Because it might become a trend and we can't have everything changing without approval of people who have never set foot in an academic classroom. Education has always been ruled over by those who have little to no experience in the classroom or even with children in any setting other than a home. So why bother trying to innovate based on actual academic research? No one like the truth of it.

So this may be my last post and I dedicate it to a more national, political thought: with all these religious right candidates in the Republican race for the presidential candidate and all these ultra-right wing, ultra-rich people saying we're not running the country correctly, so they vote for the Tea Party candidates because those people want fewer restrictions too, has any of them actually read the New Testament and words they so highly praise?

Didn't Jesus say it is easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than a rich man through the gates of Heaven?

Wasn't Jesus an advocate for the poor, old and sick and felt they deserved better treatment?

Didn't Jesus point out that we should take care of our children because they are our future?

Oh yeah, and in BOTH Testaments, isn't there a golden rule of some sort that goes sort of like "DO UNTO OTHERS AS YOU WOULD HAVE DONE UNTO YOU"?

Okay, ultra-conservative, right-wing, Bible-thumping, candidates and supporters of those candidates, explain that one. Do I need to actually go and quote chapter and verse of Jesus healing the leper, the parable of the Good Samaritan, and the Sermon on the Mount?

I'm not even a Christian and I know these things. Why don't the Bible literalists? Oh, right, because it all goes against the way they live their lives. I'm so fed up with stupid, hypocritical people, I think I'm done. What does it matter anyway?

Disincentives

2011-08-31T09:01:00.002-04:00

Great. The US is worried about its level of education and here's what is pushed:

-- Michelle Rhee and her "Students First" initiative want to push a removal of tenure and an implementation of merit pay based on test scores. This, of course, removes one of the incentives (job security) to become a teacher and actually pushes teachers to teach solely to the test in order to get high scores, which means better pay. So, job security=bad, high test scores, which have been PROVEN to reflect no serious data about learning=good. Blue Jersey lists several sites here that demonstrate that tests don't work.

-- Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education for those who've been asleep for a while, says that advanced degrees for teachers don't demonstrate any significant difference in the classroom with no data to support it. Thus, he says, we should stop paying teachers for higher education. So, basically the SECRETARY OF EDUCATION is pushing for LESS EDUCATION of TEACHERS. Here's where the quote is posted.

-- Teach for America is becoming more popular and more college students are being pushed to enter it with the "incentive" to make poor schools better by sending these young, driven teachers to teach their children. This sounds good at first, but here's the problem: Teach for America is sending these teachers out with a salary of $37,000 per year. That's below the national poverty line. So poor teachers are going to poor cities just out of the goodness of their hearts.

--Finally, all three of these sources of "better education" want to push young, less experienced teachers to stay in the profession, while making older, more experienced teachers want to leave. They claim we want to keep better trained, younger teachers who will be able to connect better with students. But the bottom line is: YOUNG TEACHERS ARE CHEAP. So, we no longer have to tax people as much, because teacher salaries come out of property taxes. We no longer have to tax the rich, because we can cut so much money from the system with these three programs. And who wins out? Not the children because they are being pushed into larger classrooms with young, less experienced teachers. Not the teachers, because the hundreds of thousands of them are now being paid less and many of them are too old to go and start a different career, and they can't retire because their pensions have been altered to make them work more years before they get a fair retirement deal. Not the economy because now a whole generation is graduating with a worse education than before so they don't work as well in the workplace and thus produce LESS as well as the hundreds of thousands of middle-class teachers who are now tightening their belts and spending less so they can survive, so they aren't putting as much money INTO the economy. Not public schools because the leaders of this country and "education reform" are pushing for corporate sponsored charter schools instead of funding public schools, which culls the best students from public schools and then, as public schools fall further IN TEST SCORES because the student population has been reduced to underachievers and special ed, the pushers for charter schools will say they "told us so."

So, who is gaining here? Rich people and corporations. The rich get to keep more and more of their money and can afford to send their kids to expensive private schools, which teach according to proper education research and not some statistical analysis. Corporations finally get to privatize the only public area left in this country -- schools -- and start making profits where they hadn't gotten them before. Good job, America.

Meanwhile, there's Finland. A fully unionized teacher base with one of the best public school systems IN THE WORLD. Read about what they do and compare to our system. You may be SHOCKED or DEPRESSED or both.

Hyvää päivää!

New Approach

2011-07-23T10:42:00.002-04:00

Okay, several people have mentioned to me that I'm a little obsessed with teacher salaries and how teachers are perceived, etc.

Today, I am changing my ways!

It's true what Governor Christie said: I knew what I was getting into when I chose to become a teacher. Yes, I just agreed with the Governor of New Jersey. See, I told you I was changing. Of course, he's changing everything about being a teacher including making the perceptions of teachers even worse than they were, but I'm not going there. Today.

I love my job. I don't think I express that enough. I love working out how to teach various skills and texts. I love working with high school students and watching them grasp higher concepts as well as come into their own as individuals. I love going to work each day so much, that I spend a lot of the summer looking forward to the fall!

Sure, I think teachers should be paid more for what we do. I think we're a much more valuable resource than people, in general, believe, but I am through whining about what I make.

No, instead, I am going to set out to try to help change the perception of education. I don't think the general public quite understands just how important the actual education in schools is. I think most people, parents and students alike, see going to school as a hurdle to getting into a good college and getting into a good college as just a jumping off point to getting a good job. That is patently false.

There is so much to learn in school that can enhance one's life in so many ways starting with just understanding one's self and reaching out to understanding the world at large. That's just in high school! College is a place to experiment and find what passions one has, what drives one to move forward in life. Education is about making one's self the best one can be. It is not a tool for social advancement.

So, I am taking up the standard that was passed on to me by my junior year of high school English teacher, Mrs. Herman, when she referred to teaching, particularly English, as "fighting the good fight." I'm going to try to stop complaining, and just focus on teaching in all aspects.

BEWARE the Ed Reformers!

2011-07-15T12:21:00.004-04:00

Today I received a flyer in the mail encouraging me to join an organization called Better Education for Kids, Inc., a non-profit, non-partisan organization that supports education reform around the country, specifically in New Jersey, my state. Their website is located at www.b4njkids.org.

Besides the obvious question, if New Jersey is #3 in the nation and sets an example for public education not only in the country, but also in the world, why would we need to completely reform the system, there are some questions I had about this organization that states "It's time to reject the narrow interests of the teacher's union," on the back of the flyer.

1.) Who are they?

The Executive Director for Better for Kids, Inc. is Derrell Bradford. The orginization's website posts this as his bio:

Derrell Bradford is the Executive Director of Better Education for Kids’ 501c4 efforts. Before joining B4K, he served as the Executive Director and Director of Communications for Excellent Education for Everyone (E3), New Jersey’s largest school choice advocacy group. He also led and co-led the research and legal efforts, respectively, for the organization. Derrell served on Governor Chris Christie’s Educator Effectiveness Task Force, which gave recommendations on designing a new, statewide evaluation system for teachers and leaders, and is a member of the State Department of Education’s Charter School Advisory Board. He is a signatory for the Education Equality Project, and was recently named to NBC’s “The Grio 100: History Makers in the Making.” Derrell also sits on the boards of Immaculate Conception (Montclair) and St. Anthony (Jersey City) Catholic high schools. Derrell appears frequently in print, radio, and on television to discuss and debate a wide range of education reform issues.

A native of Baltimore, MD, Derrell is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a B.A. in English and Creative Writing.

Note the boldfaced facts about Derrell: He worked for Governor Christie (non-partisan?), he is on the board of two CATHOLIC schools, and he only has a BA in English. So, he has no actual education background and is going to reform public schools while he is clearly interested in Catholic education. Conflict? You decide. There's more...

The Executive Director of the New Jersey subset of this organization is Mike Lilley:

Mike Lilley has a long history in public service and philanthropy. Mike graduated from Princeton University, where he majored at the Woodrow Wilson School and played varsity football. He later graduated cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center and then served ten years in the Marine Corps as an infantry officer, attaining the rank of captain. After the Marine Corps, Mike worked in finance as a bond trader at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America/Merrill Lynch. Mike’s family has a long history of public service. Mike grew up in Asia, where his father served as US ambassador to Taiwan, Korea and China, among other diplomatic assignments.

Mike has long been interested in public service. In addition to serving in the Marine Corps, Mike has been active in several veterans’ charities and student mentoring programs, and has had a longstanding interest in education, public policy and international affairs.

Besides the friendliness of Mike's using a nickname instead of his full first name, which is a cute tactic to get you to like him, what else is there to like about this guy running EDUCATION reform movements in New Jersey? He's a corporate finance lawyer and ex-Marine with "a longstanding interest in education." Just because he's INTERESTED he should run this movement? This is a true businessman who understands legalese. "Mike" wants public education to be run like a business. Fire those who don't work out, test every kid equally and judge them equally. One size fits all, right?

It doesn't end there.The flyer mentions "Rewarding Good Teachers with Merit Pay." B4NJKids defines merit pay being based on "performance evaluations, student test scores, teaching practice, and service in high-needs schools and subject areas." Besides the lack of information on how much each of these points is valued toward teacher pay -- re: student test scores -- what do some of these things mean? Who judges them? What is "teaching practice" and how is that going to be evaluated? Who determines a "high-need subject area"? And just because I work in an affluent area of New Jersey, I shouldn't be paid as much as a teacher who is just as good with all the same experience who works in a "high needs school"? That's fair? Okay, let's pay our MBAs more money if they go work for failing companies and see how they like it.

This is another attack on an education system that is NOT failing, but does need reform. It is an attack on teachers too. The flyer states: "Currently, underperforming teachers are protected by an outdated tenure system; only 17 of approximately 100,000 New Jersey teachers have been removed for ineffectiveness in the past decade."

True, there were probably more than 17 ineffective teachers in the past 10 years that should have been removed, but where did they get that number? Does it include teachers fired in their first three years before they got tenure? And the way this is phrased is an unparallel comparisson. It implies that there are 100,000 ineffective teachers out there, but that's the WHOLE number for the state, so it compares 17 released teachers for ineffectiveness to the whole body of teachers. You can't do that. How many ineffective teachers were kept in relation to those 17? That would be a fair comparison. These are skewed statistics, where they have them, with no basis in factual surveys of anything. There are no citations on their website to support any of their claims.

DO NOT SUPPORT Better4Kids in any state, particularly New Jersey. Their plans are not better for kids. They are better for corporations and big money makers around the country.

Surrender?

2011-06-20T21:52:00.004-04:00

I give up.

I don't think I can keep pushing to try and get people to understand that education is important; that good teachers matter and no school will get proper teachers without offering some benefit. I just can't when people everywhere -- locally, statewide, and nationwide -- continue to push through legislation that will make teaching an even more undesirable career and will continue to treat education like a company that just builds the latest widgets.

When a single widget is produced incorrectly, it is thrown out. We can't do that with children. When a workforce in a factory becomes so unskilled, the production of the widgets reduces in quality and the company goes out of business.

We can't do that with education. Privatization of public schools is wrong on so many levels. Charter schools only SEEM to work because they can be selective in the children they admit. Public schools must educate everyone who walks in the door no matter their race, religion, gender, sexual preference, mental capability, or even political affiliation. What is more American than that?

But we don't seem to want the vision of America that our founding fathers did. We impose restrictions on all the basic liberties supposedly guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence -- life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What happened to the truths that are self-evident? "All men [and women] are created equal." REALLY? In which state of this country, because it certainly is not true on the federal level.

We allow corporations to take over one of the last truly public systems in our country -- our schools. We allow the government into our bedrooms, but keep them from restricting greedy bankers. We allow our young men and women to go and fight wars in the name of freedom and democracy, but it is a hypocritical act that only brings death. I wonder what Thomas Paine would say about his country today. Or Alexander Hamilton, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, or John Adams. George Washington, the man who led our forces to break from the British Empire, who refused a lifetime position as president because he feared that no one man should have that kind of power. That no man should be a king. Washington is turning in his grave right now because we have people trying to take his office who don't know American history; who consider millionaires being taxed and the poor having free healthcare crimes.

Too many people in this country worry about fetuses but let children starve once they are born. Too many people in this country scoff at teachers and then complain that the US is falling behind in the world in all respects. Too many people in this country live with fear and hate in their hearts and then wonder why people in other countries hate us.

Shame on us. We used to be better than that. We used to have a dream called America where people were free to thrive and find a place for themselves where they can live and prosper. We use to have a dream in this country where we would work together to build a better place on Earth and help others to raise themselves up. But the American Dream is long dead. It has become simply greed. "He who dies with the most toys wins."

We have become a country of short-term memories and blindness toward anything we don't like. We look for quick fixes to our problems and don't consider the long-term consequences of any of our actions. Well, what are you going to do about it? I suggest you think before you vote next time. Consider what you want this country to be for you when you are old, for your children, for your grandchildren.

Somehow, we need to learn to respect each other in this country instead of trying to make everyone the same. We need to let down our guard just a little bit with those who are also Americans, and, maybe, we can put the dream back together. I don't know. I look to the news and all I see are the Bernie Madoffs, Sarah Palins, and Snookies. Where are the Jack Kennedys, the Martin Luther Kings, and the Humphrey Bogarts? I thought President Obama might be one, but I think I was wrong. He's seeming more and more to be just another politician.

What do you think? Is there any hope out there? Or is my daughter going to grow up learning that education and kindness don't get you far, but if you're willing to screw over the next guy and take advantage of any weakness anyone shows, you can be rich, and that's all that's important.

Most people who read this are just going to think either I'm being my usual pessimistic self and there's nothing to worry about, everything will be okay, or they're going to think I should shut the hell up; if I don't like it here, I should move to another country.

And that's exactly the problem I'm talking about.

Thoughts About Money

2011-06-01T17:05:00.002-04:00

As I complete a year of school with no contract, which means I am being paid the same wage as last year, although since I teach in New Jersey I am actually making 1.5% less than last year thanks to the governor's mandated 1.5% wage reduction for benefit payments, I started thinking about money and its necessity to education.

Okay, other than that first sentence, I am not talking about my salary. In fact, I understand the contribution to my benefits. Plenty of people don't even have benefits in this country, which is why i support universal health care. Then everyone would have proper health care to prevent from getting sick, and I wouldn't have to pay out of my salary directly, just through my taxes for it. But I digress again before I even get started.

What I am referring to is the bigger picture. As school districts around the country fight teachers on salaries and salary guides and how are they going to pay us teachers, they are simply ruining the education of anyone who is to be educated in the public system. That's a grand sweeping statement, but let me clarify.

Forget all the emotional content of making teachers look bad, because that's an old argument. Look at simply salary. If people reduce salaries of teachers over all, why would anyone go into teaching? Teaching has already been painted as a thankless job that requires a lot of work and has a lot of oversight that will dictate more and more how one does the job of teaching and now, it will pay even less than before offering no salary or benefit incentive to become a teacher. So why? For the sake of the children? That's certainly a factor, but as I am the primary wage earner in my family, as many teachers are, that doesn't put food on my table or gas in my car so I can get to work.

So who will become teachers? People who actually can't do anything else. People always said to me when I told them I was changing careers to be a teacher, "Why would you do that? You're so smart!" I used to respond, "Who else would you want teaching your children? Morons?" Then the rest of us will eventually age out and disappear. Some sooner than others.

This is what I get for wanting to change careers to something that meant something in this world. (Sorry, feeling pretty bitter today.)

The Push for the Lowest Common Denomonator

2011-05-25T14:15:00.002-04:00

"You get what you pay for."
"You only get out what you put into something."
"Garbage in = garbage out."
"You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar."

Cliches all and what do they all mean? If you only put in little effort, little money, and little knowledge, you get next to nothing in return. So why all the cutting of education? Conspiracy theorists would tell you that it's because the government, particularly the Republicans, want to keep young people poorly educated, learning only to repeat rote ideas and barely able to understand the depth of a discussion. Considering the arguments they make these days over anything including healthcare, budget cuts, taxes, or education, I'm almost ready to believe it because none of their rhetoric makes any logical sense.

But there's another aspect to "dumbing down" education: financial GAIN. At least, for the top 5% of earners in this country. These are the corporate bigwigs who stand to gain millions if we cut back on education, reducing it to putting money into "technology" -- funding computer companies like Microsoft -- wait, who used to run that company and now runs an education foundation? -- and standardized testing -- funding test-making companies and tutoring organizations. Charter schools are the new fad, the new "miracle cure" for education. These small schools that only accept certain students and reject others, are backed by large companies that then earn money off of everything the school purchases -- books, uniforms, tests, supplies, everything. And do they have to educate children any better? No. No one is actually regulating them.

But when things get bad in education, we all blame public school teachers. People who have little control over what is in the curriculum -- that's made by a small group of people and has to be approved by the board of education. People who attempt to work around low salaries, large classroom sizes, and any number of "issues" each student may have because public schools MUST take anyone as a student. When things go well in education, politicians get the credit. They changed policy that made students do better.

The truth is, we are all to blame. Too many teachers have become complacent about teaching, just going through the motions. Parents have become lazy and want teachers to handle every issue their kids have, we see them more hours of the day after all. Education policy makers have become overly greedy, looking for easy money to be made through cutting money going to teachers and increasing spending on materials from companies that they are connected to. Politicians have... well, they haven't changed. They still are just out to make statements that people want to hear to insure they can ride the public money teat as long as they can. Name one politician that has taken a pay cut or pays into his own health insurance or will not receive a pension.

Standardized Testing

2011-05-18T09:08:00.003-04:00

Okay, if there is anyone out there who reads this and SUPPORTS standardized testing, read on and please answer my question. Everyone else just read on. Feel free to respond, but if you agree with me that standardized testing is stupid, wasteful and has nothing to do with real education, then your comments are appreciated, but can't answer my following question.

First, the set up: I have just completed proctoring over four hours of a standardized "End of Course" test for Biology that was taken by students in Biology classes over two days (from 7:45 a.m. to about 10:00 a.m., yesterday and today). While these students, approximately 200 of them, were taking the exam, the other 1000+ students were NOT IN SCHOOL. They had a delayed opening. This is across the state of New Jersey, by the way, not just in my school.

Besides the strangeness of having an "End of Course" exam in mid-May when school ends in mid-June, how is this benefiting anyone's education? (That's the question.)

Here are more details to support my argument against it:

1.) Why does it take over four hours to test students on one year's worth of Biology when the AP exam, which is meant to test students on a college level, is only 3? Not only that, but students have been taking assessments all year anyway, so why do we need this? Also, who decides what the standard level of learning in Biology is? Is there a minimum amount of Biology that I should have learned before I graduated from high school? (NB: I was an AP Bio student.)

2.) By giving this exam, we have reduced every other student's academic time by a whole day. In mid-May, this is crucial time, particularly when teaching seniors, to trying to keep them on task and learning as much as possible, but when they get to sleep in and wander into school around 10:00 or later, they don't want to be there even more than any other day, so they don't focus on the tasks at hand. Senioritis isn't a real medical disorder, but it exists nonetheless, even in the best of students.

3.) Once the scores are tabulated, and, if this test actually counted -- did I mention that this is only a "practice" exam? -- toward something, then what? Students who scored below average, or whatever minimum marker some one comes up with, won't pass the class and have to retake Biology before graduating? Really? What if several students don't "pass"? Then there becomes a pile up of students taking Bio like the George Washington Bridge at rush hour. Classes will get bigger, which means less learning in those classes, which, in turn, would mean lower test scores. See where that leads?

4.) Finally, and this ties to #3, New Jersey wants to have these tests in ALL SUBJECTS. This means that there will be several days, not just two halves, cut off of teaching time for testing. It means more back-up into classes as certain students fail the tests. It means more apathy of students to actually learning something rather than just the "right answers" for the test. And all this adds up to a DECLINE in education.

So, I ask again, who benefits from all this standardized testing, other than the companies that make up the tests?

Signs of Hope

2011-05-01T21:56:00.002-04:00

It is unlikely for me to go optimistic on anything, but there were some glimmers of hope this past week and I thought I'd share.

(a) 80% of NJ School budgets passed this week including the one for my district. This is UNPRECEDENTED and I will take it as a sign that people DO care about their kids public education and do NOT like what Christie is doing.

(b) More people with more clout are writing about how we as Americans are approaching education in the wrong way, treating it as a business and making teaching a profession that is NOT attractive to smart, dedicated people. This should seem obvious, but it isn't and now writers for major newspapers are taking sides and calling people out who are wrong.

(c) Race to Nowhere is still touring and playing. Though i have not seen it yet, family members of mine, including my wife, have and it sounds like it has the right message to get to parents, educators, administrators, and politicians: good education means quality of work not mass quantities of work and we need to pay attention to our children and allow them some time to rest and play EVERY DAY.

So, maybe things will get better in the future, hopefully sooner than later.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

2011-04-29T09:30:00.002-04:00

To say people hate teachers and that's a the basis of many of the problems with our education system may sound overly dramatic and whiny, but read this and see what you think for yourself:

http://truth-out.org/pedagogism-prejudice-and-hatred-directed-teachers/1303922220

Thank you, Bill James

2011-03-30T11:42:00.003-04:00

Slate magazine published an excerpt from Bill James' new book Solid Fools Gold: Detours on the Way to Conventional Wisdom that seems to say it all about our culture and where TALENT really comes from.

I let it speak for itself.

As if I weren't unpopular enough...

2011-03-22T12:14:00.003-04:00

The American Red Cross just collected $34 million for Japan to help with the rebuilding efforts there despite the Japanese Red Cross stating they don't need money. The New York Times ran the article last week.

Yesterday, the US launched 130 Tomahawk missiles, over $60 million worth, at Lybia in support of "democracy" there, despite not knowing who will lead the people of that country should Qaddafi be overthrown.

But I want health care for my family at $20,000 per year and a fair salary for teaching the future of America and I'm being unreasonable.

Do I need to say anything more?

There are 3,000,000 children in THIS country who don't know where their next meal is coming from but we are sending countless millions to Japan, a richer country per capita than the US, where nearly everyone affected by the earthquake/tsunami is insured.

Have you ever noticed that when someone gets very sick or dies in your neighborhood, people all gather together and donate money, but when the government wants to raise their taxes $20/year they scream like someone is murdering them?

And no one can save you if you threaten to cut an athletic budget.

At least there will always be war, football, and a strong Japan.

I've said this before...

2011-03-16T20:03:00.003-04:00

... but I'll say it again: our priorities in this country, in terms of education, are messed up.

There is only one other country in the world that spends more on elementary education than us, Luxembourg, yet the United States ranks far below countries like Korea, Finland, and Singapore ACROSS THE BOARD for all subjects. Why? It's not because of the amount of money spent. It's because we spend more money on facilities that don't promote better education.

An article in the Herald Tribune puts the whole situation in a new perspective: a foreign one. A committee based in Paris recommends that the US do several things to improve education: national standards for each subject (already being worked on), better assessment tests that actually assess students for skills and knowledge that is desired they learn instead of just basic skills, and the number one recommendation: improve the status of the teaching profession. Countries like South Korea and Finland recruit only the best from college graduates to go into the teaching profession. I don't need to explain that the US does not. We're the ones who came up with the great phrase "Those who can't do, teach."

The studies mentioned in the article also found that we spend more money on transportation and athletic facilities than anyone else. Hmm... we put too much focus on athletics and not enough on academics. Is anyone surprised? But it's also our attitude. We have become a society that expects every student to get straight A's in every subject no matter his actual ability levels. We just modify the curriculum. There are pressures from many sides to pass students and move them up and out in our schools, particularly to maintain reasonable class sizes and not to have 18-year-olds in sixth grade. But there are also pressures from parents who don't want to have their children repeat a year or be classified in certain ways because of the stigmas attached to those situations.

That's not how it is in Europe. I spent a year of high school in the Netherlands and knew one student who CHOSE to repeat a year because he didn't feel qualified to advance. There people accept education as important at all stages of development and students do THEIR BEST, which is not always the best in the class. The best students advance to the best universities and on down. Is it fair? No. But what is? Of course, all people there don't need to have a high paying job just to own a home, get health care, or eat. Luxuries are luxuries and not for everyone, but that's understood. Unlike here where everyone is supposed to own a 52" flat screen TV, premium cable, two cars, and a big house.

Can we change the our culture? Can we get people to value high school education over high school athletics?

"Fear will keep the local systems in line."

2011-03-06T20:59:00.003-05:00

What is everyone so afraid of? Here I am "public enemy #1" because I am a public school teacher and make $70,000 INCLUDING benefits while the governor of New Jersey lets the taxes on people who earn over $400,000 to lapse. On the national scale, people keep trying to extend the Bush tax cuts for people earning more than $250,000 but they want to CUT what I make because the state, which I WORK for, pays my health benefits. I have been paying into a pension plan that the state was supposed to match, but hasn't for 16 years. But people fear me because a small number of powerful politicians have told them that I am the reason why the economy tanked. It wasn't the major bank CEOs making millions of dollars a year who mislead investors in order to inflate the market so they could make more money. No, it was me and the other unionized public employees like police officers and fire fighters. Be afraid of them. They are the ones out to get your money.

And what about this new war on women? Why are the Republicans out to kill women? Did they not get enough dates in high school or something? Banning abortion does NOT reduce the number of abortions, it just makes them more dangerous leading to more deaths of women. There is a bill in Congress now that seeks to outlaw MISCARRIAGES. Seriously? Members of our government want to equate an unintentional, biological process that eliminates a fetus with murder? Do I need to say anything more? Let's shut down Planned Parenthood so that poor women with no health insurance can have absolutely nowhere to go for help should they get raped and become pregnant. Doesn't that sound like a good idea?

We live in fear of all sorts of things every day, but stop for a moment and ask yourself are you afraid of the right things? Or are you just listening to the loudest fear monger in the room?

Education? Who needs that?

2011-02-24T18:03:00.003-05:00

Recently, a bunch of teachers, in support of the teachers' unions in Wisconsin and other states, put out a small video to demonstrate the importance of supporting teachers around the country. I like it, but it is flawed, much in the same way as the anti-teacher rhetoric is flawed. There are non sequitur arguments and pure emotional appeals with little actual fact to back SOME of the statements up. But that's okay. At least they're trying.

The biggest point in the video, and there are many points, is simply this: if states like Wisconsin and New Jersey completely break down the union supported contracts for teachers, thus increasing the payment into benefits, the loss of the state-supported match on teacher pensions, the loss of tenure, and an across-the-board reduction in pay, who is going to want to be a teacher?

I come from families of teachers and school employees. Not only am I a teacher, but my father was an art teacher, my mother a school social worker. My wife is a teacher, both her parents were teachers and still, in their retirement, they continue to teach to some extent. My brother is a social worker looking for a school job (he works in a teen crisis center right now) and his wife was a teacher and is now a learning disabilities specialist in a school. I fear for my daughter because she's probably doomed to working in schools too.

Ask any of us why we became teachers, or want to work with school aged children, and we'll all have similar answers: it is one of the most important jobs out there as we, teachers, help to shape the future by, hopefully, educating children to be lifelong learners and critical thinkers when they become adults. That's WHY we became teachers, but there was also the underlying understanding that being a teacher was a secure profession, which never would make one rich and famous, but would provide a decent living so that one could support one's family. No, teachers don't get paid on the same scale, including raises, as anyone in the corporate world does. Yes, we are "given" health benefits to cover us and our families as well as a supposedly secure pension which we can start to collect after a minimum of 25 years of service to the public. But what is all this in exchange for?

We spend countless hours studying, planning, and executing lessons to instruct the young of this country to be the leaders of tomorrow. We become mentors, counselors, and role models for these young people so that they understand what it means to be an adult in the real world as well as that they have someone they can connect with who is older and more experienced when they need someone to talk to who is NOT one of their parents. Some times we even stay in touch with our students even after they have left our classrooms in order to keep supporting them, mentoring them, so that they can always feel like there is some base they have built off of and can continue to build their lives off of.

Why do we do this? Because children are the most important RESOURCE, not PRODUCT of this country. If we treat education like a business, we treat our children like products. They are not all the same, machine-made widgets that are cranked out on an assembly line. They are each individual and must be treated as such, and, as a public school teacher, I have to teach them all, no matter what makes them individual. I can't choose. Private and charter schools DO choose.

The benefits and supposed "high" salaries and vacations are what the public "gives" to teachers in exchange for educating and mentoring their children. Yes, there are some who take advantage of this system, but they are few, and I agree we need to find better ways to weed those people out, because they are helping no one but themselves. Getting rid of tenure is not the solution for that, but there is a way out there.

These attacks on teachers come out of a fear of the US slipping behind in the world because our education levels have dropped below where they used to be and no one knows exactly what to do, so people blame the implementers of it. We, the teachers, DON'T create curriculum or education standards. We meet them as they are dictated to us by supervisors and state administrators. What do these governors of Wisconsin and New Jersey think is going to happen if they get their way? What will the end result be? Fewer well-qualified people will enter the teaching profession because it will be less attractive a career than nearly anything else out there. Programs that give our students a well-rounded education will be cut because there will be no money for them either and we will be forced to teach only the basics of English, Math, and Science. And where will the education level of the country be then? Does that sound like improvement? But they have a solution too! Charter schools! Privately backed, publicly funded schools that can select who they want to teach. So, the students that are accepted into a charter school and live up to the expectations of that school will receive an education that MIGHT be better than a public education (1 in 5 charter schools ARE more successful than the public school equivalent) and the rest of the kids? Well, do we really need to educate them? What are they going to do with that education anyway? And, besides, charter schools funnel more money into the private sector, which will "boost the economy." Why are people suckered by this?

One of the last points of the video is an appeal to the viewer's emotions: don't you remember your favorite teacher? That person is under attack. Well, I won't end this post with such a sappy appeal. I will end with this one: look at your careers, all you lawyers, doctors, Wall Street investment bankers, and governors. Which one of you would not be enjoying your career and all the benefits and high salaries that come with it without having had good teachers?

Read This

2011-02-09T09:02:00.003-05:00

A former student of mine has his own blog where his latest post points out the failings of our national education and why it will continue to fail unless we do something. I can't claim any credit for his being well-informed or well-educated, but I'm still pretty proud to place a link to it here.

The Informed Decider

Addendum: I have added a link to Eric's blog on the lower right of my page.

Pushing the Limits

2011-02-05T08:22:00.003-05:00

As outlined in the book Academically Adrift, students are "drifting" through college, not truly learning anything for the first two years and barely learning anything in the second two. The book argues that the main source of this problem is a lack of academic rigor. That the studies the text uses as its sources have found that those students who were challenged in harder classes or majored in more thought-based subjects (i.e. liberal arts) showed clearer advances in education than those who took business or education classes, which have a more structured, rote-based learning system apparently. Also those students who were more involved in social activities such as sports teams and the greek system, did much more poorly than those who weren't.

A study at UC Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia found that the reading of challenging literature, like the works of Kafka, promotes higher levels of critical thinking in students. That more challenging works of literature raise the expectations on the reader, particularly young readers, thus pushing them to actually use the analytical parts of their brains more, not just in the attempt to understand the works, but also to understand their world.

And here I thought I was being too hard on my students.

Several teachers over the years, not just ones I work with, but one's I've socialized with too, have claimed that I give too many "old" books. That I make my classes too hard for some students. They have claimed that we, as English teachers, need to give students books that they can connect to better and will actually read so that they learn that reading is a good thing.

My response has always been: bullshit.

What teenager can't relate to the self-doubt of Sydney Carton of A Tale of Two Cities on some level? What high school student can't recoil at the nonsensical judgment of Meursault in the second half of The Stranger and come to understand that they were just judging his character in the same way through part one? What young woman doesn't want to find a Mr. Darcy and what young man wouldn't want to be Mr. Darcy? Seriously! They can't connect to these people? They can't love the stories of these books? Sure, some will not like the stories, but no one book was written for everyone to love it.

I have plenty of boys who don't like Austen. They find her too "girly". I can accept that. I have many students who don't like Camus. They find his writing to be depressing and odd, too far from their own experiences of the world. Fine. I teach 108 students this year. Has anyone found a group of over a hundred people, of any age, that can completely agree on a list of books that they all like? And why do they all have to like them?

One student of mine this year, after finishing Pride and Prejudice, said: "I didn't like reading it. I found it too slow and too 'girly', but I can appreciate why it's an important book." My job is done with that one as far as the appreciation of literature is concerned. My job isn't to get students to love reading. My job isn't to pander to students' tastes and give them books that "they will read." My job is to push my students to expand their thinking, to use their brains, to understand that there are well-written books out there that have established a canon upon which all books today are based, to express their newly found ability to think critically in writing, and, hopefully, to love LEARNING.

Don't get me wrong. I don't spend my free time reading classic literature only. Though some people will point out that I am currently reading Nicholas Nickleby by Chales Dickens, but I don't read Dickens all the time! I read Grisham, Brown, Irving, and even Riordan and Rowling. I enjoy a good story in a book I read for pleasure, and everyone should find authors that are still writing that they like to read for pleasure. I'm not even saying that those are bad books. in fact, I believe that literature classes in the future will hold up some of these writers, like Irving, as classic writers too, but they haven't stood the test of time yet. Reading for school and reading for pleasure are totally different forms of reading, just as academic math is different from doing a sudoku puzzle. But people rarely challenge themselves academically outside of school, so it is my job to do that and the research backs me up.

Formal Apology and a Question

2011-01-31T20:55:00.003-05:00

The previous posting got overly rant-y and somewhat offensive to certain people, including some of my former students. I was really angry after watching some of the response to the State of the Union Address and took it out on some people that I have been dealing with at my job.

So, I apologize. There are really good students who go to many different types of schools. I remember some from my classes who chose to go to smaller, less-known schools for various other mitigating reasons: need to be near home, specific special programs, and, of course, money.

Which is one problem, of several I assure you, that I have with what the president talked about in his speech. If we are going to push everyone to get better educated and go to college, who's going to pay for it? Colleges are insanely expensive now and, thus, cost-prohibitive for many. That's not just either.

The truth is nothing is black and white, but really shades of so many grays we can't actually fathom a solution or the depth of any problem, but we can take some stabs at them.

Back to the apology. It seems I more a snob than I thought. That being said, I hope whoever reads this -- and I'm always surprised there is anyone -- just goes out there and tries to experience everything and learn everything there is out there. Don't settle for what you know or what is safe. Don't settle at all.

Was Anyone Listening?

2011-01-30T07:13:00.003-05:00

Last Tuesday, the president gave his state of the union speech, during which he made several comments about education and the future. Mainly that we cannot hope to advance in the future if people aren't well educated. He also stated that people can't be well educated if we don't have good teachers, and we can't get good teachers if we don't consider teaching a worthy profession.

Thank you, Mr. President.

He said that good education begins in the home, with parents, which is something that we educators are taught long before we ever enter a classroom, and he pointed out that everyone needs to pay attention to their children and teach them to love learning from an early age.

Again, thank you, Mr. President.

But was anyone listening? Did anyone question what he meant by this? Will anything change in the way the public views teachers and school and education or will they continue to raise their children to see school as something they "just have to get through" in order to grow up and get a "good job"? I have a student in an AP Literature class who has admitted, in front of the class, that he doesn't really like to read much. Fine. I don't think everyone has to enjoy reading to the level that I do, but then why is he taking an AP Lit class?

Because it looks good on a transcript and it gives a higher GPA.

Once again, education as business model. Students are taught not to take classes they are interested in or to be interested in their classes. They just need to take what looks good on a transcript or resume and then use that to get ahead to a "good" college. I've seen over 700 students graduate from my high school so far. The current class I am teaching is starting to find out what schools its students are going to this fall. You want to know who gets into actually GOOD schools? The ones who embrace learning and love whatever is thrown at them. The ones who come to school to try and take something away with them. The ones who rise to the challenge to think critically about everything they take and question everything that their teachers teach them, myself included. Those are good students and they go to good schools; not schools that people say "oh, that's a pretty good school" about. Schools that people from around the world say, "you're going there? Congratulations!"

Does this make me an intellectual snob, an elitist? Yes and no. I am an intellectual snob. I like smart people who think about things, who question things, even if they don't agree with me. Hell, some of my closest friends in high school and college were people who challenged me on everything that I thought and believed. I think being smart and well educated makes one actually part of the world around us and allows us to challenge the future, help create the future even.

But I am not an elitist. Not in this country. I'm tired of politicians who make high six-figure salaries and can fly off on vacations to Disney World or pay enough publicity people to turn her unwed daughter's teen pregnancy into a positive soundbyte calling people who are well educated and critical thinkers like myself elitist. The elite in this country are the wealthy individuals who just continue to ride on the backs of everyone else to put themselves in the spotlight as much as possible and/or increase their wealth further. President Obama is not the elite. He's a kid who grew up to be a true example of the American Dream. Governor Christie of New Jersey is the elite. He uses his connections and political position simply to do what's best for him no matter who gets crushed along the way. The elite is a group of people considered to be the best in a particular society or category, especially because of their power, talent, or wealth. No one considers me the best in society, not even myself.

So, was anyone listening to the president? Will we strive to be the best? Can we turn this country's "me, me, me" attitude around, put aside our differences, and work to educate our young so they can grow up and lead a strong and prosperous nation that no longer thrives on the exploitation of 90% of its population and its debts but one that excels in producing the future and all that the future holds? One that actually leads the world again instead of just limping along thinking its great when really, it's just a flabby, mediocre nation.

I hope so.

What is Education For?

2011-01-19T20:04:00.002-05:00

Good question.

I used to think that it was to introduce people first to basic skills needed to survive in a modern environment and then to teach them how to think, which would be how they apply those skills in ways that make them productive, self-sufficient individuals. Education was to broaden minds and allow students to figure out what they were interested in and find their passions in life.

But I seem to be wrong, which is not a rare occurrence, by the way. Apparently most high school students already "know" what they want to do in the future so they are only interested in learning what they think can get them there. Schools, more and more, are pushing for all students to study exactly the same things in the same way and then testing them all on the same thing in the same way so they don't have to think. What used to be a way of promoting individualism and pushing children to explore interests and finding themselves has become the engine of conformity.

Sure, there are some who make it through and find their way on their own, never feeling negative effects of high school. But then there's this study that shows that students in specialized education programs beyond high school aren't learning critical thinking either. This is due, according to the article, to many reasons including students not taking challenging classes, professors not wanting to make their classes challenging because they might lose the class all together, and a lack of focus on thinking skills for a focus on structured systems rather than open, thought based work. Liberal arts majors are doing well, but then some schools, like UAlbany, are cutting those programs too.

Where does this leave education? I don't know. I fear for the future as our country continues to pump out young adults into the world who don't know how to think for themselves and are only interested in lining their own pockets. I fear for those few who do learn to think, to critique, to analyze, because they are going to have a hard time of it dealing with so many who will rise to power who do not have equal skills. We, Americans, live with so much fear all the time -- kidnapping, terrorism, religious cults, sex, drugs, violence, etc. -- that this may seem just another fear to add to the list.

But I wonder, what's more scary? The possibility of my being a victim of a terrorist attack, which is only slightly RARER than being hit by lightening, or the fact that more and more people are reaching levels of power who think "because I said so" is a good argument and that the best education is the one that just keeps kids in line.

One More Voice on "Violent Words"

2011-01-16T13:01:00.002-05:00

Frank Rich of The New York Times says it all in his column this week. Read it and learn from it. We are heading in the wrong direction no matter what "side" you are on. We, as a nation, need to learn to listen, think, analyze, and understand that, for one thing, carrying guns is not the same as carrying placards (See the reference in Rich's column) and that words of hate DO influence hate, not just in "crazy people" but in everyone, on both sides. Haters hate more and then those they hate hate them back.

STOP IT!

Addendum to previous post...

2011-01-11T17:15:00.002-05:00

I just want to be clear: what I mention in the previous post is not a quick fix. It would take years to completely accomplish what I propose, but we would have to start sometime. Slate magazine published another article describing how the environment of the US today creates situations like what happened in Tuscon. Any "quick fix" solutions will only continue this trend. We need to relax and look at the long term, which seems to be very hard for Americans. Quick solutions that are short-term do not work. They create more strife and anxiety and really don't fix anything. Just look at the security in airports. The scanners don't really work and the rules are ridiculous. (There are links to two different stories there.)

Stop looking for quick fixes people! From fad diets to expensive pieces of technology that do next to nothing, we are not going to fix major problems in a week.

Words, words, words

2011-01-10T21:31:00.003-05:00

POLONIUS
...What do you read, my lord?

HAMLET

Words, words, words.

POLONIUS
What is the matter, my lord?

HAMLET
Between who?

POLONIUS
I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.

HAMLET
Slanders, sir: for the satirical rogue says here
that old men have grey beards, that their faces are
wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and
plum-tree gum, and that they have a plentiful lack of
wit, together with most weak hams: all which, sir,
though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet
I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down, for
yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if like a crab
you could go backward.

This moment from Hamlet, Act 2 Scene 2, says it all. Hamlet mocks Polonius by telling him he is reading only words in his book and that they are the worst slander, which he goes on to describe as the truth. In other words, nothing is to be believed, not all that is written down could be true or false. For us, the audience, we must decide for ourselves what to believe. That words are just words until we ascribe meaning to them. Why do I bring this up? In the news this past week, people have accused words as being the problem that led to the shooting in Tuscon, which some people in the press are referring to as a "massacre," but I refuse to use such a heavily emotional word.

In response to the events of last week in Tuscon, people in the press and the government have been calling for a "tamp-down" of language, an evening-out of rhetoric, so as not to inflame people. Slate magazine has several articles on this and particularly focuses on the fact that this is a STUPID idea. There is even a bill being proposed by a Democratic congressman to restrict any kind of "violent" references/rhetoric in reference to any member of the government. This obviously won't pass as it is in conflict with the First Amendment.

Why is this the reaction? These are only words. In fact, no one is really sure what prompted Loughner to start shooting in Tuscon; people assume it was some kind of political rhetoric that used violent imagery/words like Palin's targeting map.

The problem here is not words. To dumb down our public rhetoric and trying to silence the voices of dissent in this country only panders to the deranged and stupid and smacks of 20th Century Soviet press policies. No. The problem is that our government and our media assume that our public is mostly like Loughner. That if we see something on TV we will react in the most concrete and basic way. They assume we are stupid.

Perhaps they are right, in some way. If we don't educate people to THINK about what they read and see and look for the true meanings behind the words, then they will only listen to and believe the words at face value. Then those students grow up to make unfounded statements that are meant only on a concrete level and people will only believe those words instead of looking for the intent behind them. Thus we perpetuate the cycle of poorly educated public that will just do what those in power say. The problem, once again, is education. If we don't teach students to think critically, to examine evidence to search for truth and intent, then they will grow up to believe only what they are told. They won't question when they hear that new members of Congress want to cut taxes and increase spending in order to balance the budget. (READ THAT CAREFULLY!) They will complain about deficits, but reject every possible solution because any solution requires some kind of sacrifice on behalf of "the people."

Yes, for once, and maybe only this once, I am defending Sarah Palin and her friends. They have the right to say whatever trash they want to spew. Woe to us as a country if the majority, at least the voting majority, don't take the time to THINK about what they are saying and to EXAMINE what they really mean.

A Final Rambling Rant for 2010

2010-12-31T08:23:00.003-05:00

Last night a friend of my wife, who she knows from high school, came over for dinner. He's an engineer, former Army Corps of Engineers, who works for a company down south and is also studying for his MBA. Why is he getting an economics degree now, at the age of 36? He has become interested in macroeconomics and has found, according to him, serious logical holes in the theories of macroeconomics and how our nation's economy is run. He didn't go into details, but did say he decided to try to go into economics now to "save the world," not make money, like everyone else I know who goes into economics/business these days. What really struck me though was that he talked about his conversations with professors about his theories and found that many people have be espousing similar ideas about global economies but no one listens to academics in economics. This got me thinking.

If people making economic decisions don't listen to academic experts in economics -- people who spend their lives studying the ways markets work, etc. -- then who is making these decisions? But I don't concern myself with global economics much. My personal economics are hard enough to deal with, but as my train of thought has a tendency to find new rails to roam, the same thinking went to education policy. Who is really making the decisions about education in this country? On the local levels, it is boards of education, which mainly consist of local residents who have varying backgrounds, perhaps a few of them in education, but usually not many of them are up on the latest in education research. On state levels, it's the Departments of Education for each state, which are run by governor appointed directors. In New Jersey, this used to be Bret Schundler, a career politician who used to be mayor of Jersey City when I lived there in the early '90s, not someone up on recent education developments, if any. The current acting commissioner of the NJ DOE is Rochelle Hendricks, a highly experienced policy maker for education with over 20 years working in education policy who was a high school teacher in Rumson for THREE years in the early '80s.

Now, Governor Christie has named Christopher Cerf to head the DOE in New Jersey. According to the governor's website, Cerf "Christopher Cerf is a nationally recognized expert in comprehensive school system reform. He most recently served as Deputy Chancellor of the New York City public schools, where he was responsible for a broad portfolio, including organizational strategy, innovation, human capital and external relations in the nation’s largest schools district, serving 1.1 million students in 1,450 schools. He previously served as the Chancellor’s Chief Advisor on Transformation. Prior to his work in the New York City public schools, Mr. Cerf worked as General Counsel and Executive Vice President, and then President and COO for Edison Schools, Inc., a nationally-recognized private-sector manager of public schools. Under Cerf’s tenure, Edison, Inc. was the largest such operator in the nation." So his experience is predominantly in the private sector of education and then some public sector work with the Chancellor of New York City. Cerf seems to have lots of policy making experience, but when was he last in a classroom? When was the last time he studied educational theories and philosophies?

Here's where I get idealistic and "utopian" for a moment. Shouldn't our leaders, not the BIG politicians, but the heads of departments like Education and Agriculture on local, state, and national levels, be experts in those fields? Shouldn't they have extensive experience in what they are making policies for? Why would you ask someone who has never even grown his own garden to make policies for farmers? Why would you ask someone who doesn't know what it is like to try and open young minds to the possibilities of more than one way of thinking about something to make policies on how to go about doing that? Shouldn't our leaders be experts in what they are leading us in? You wouldn't ask someone who hasn't studied law to defend you in court so why would you ask someone who knows nothing about the effects of class sizes in a classroom to determine what the maximum class size is going to be in a school? Or have someone determining the basic standards for curricula in every educational department who doesn't have experience in planning academic lessons for an actual academic class? Sure, the states and the nation require people in these positions to have completed some kind of course work in economics or education and have some experience connected to the field, but you can't learn everything from books. Just because you can pass a test on curriculum development doesn't mean you know how to develop a viable curriculum. So why don't we find these true experts, put them in positions of power in their own fields, and LISTEN TO THEM?

Now, I drop the idealism and revert back to my usual, pessimistic self: because that's not good politics. Leaders only want people to work for them that agree with them, not challenge them, not make them think and re-think about policy in any field. They want people who are going to make things as easy, efficient, and cost-effective as possible. The problem is they don't seem to take into account that these systems, these policies affect people's lives, some of them children who can't advocate for themselves, and we trust them, because they are our leaders and we should just do what they say to do and enjoy what we get out of it. Don't question, don't think, don't pursue truth. Just accept and move on. Here's something new and shiny for you to buy this season. Look, our test scores on standardized tests have gone up. Aren't we doing well?

Aha Moment!

2010-11-25T19:44:00.002-05:00

I was having a discussion about education in this country with my wife the other evening -- I know, shocking -- and she put the biggest problem with the whole situation in very succinct terms that was so obvious I wondered why no one with any real power had seen it yet, though my wife is one of the smartest people I know. That's why I married her.

*pause for "awwwww"*

Okay, here it is: everyone thinks they know what it takes to educate children because everyone has been through school. Every educator, who does know what it takes to educate children, assumes that the non-teachers know what they know. Both sides are patently wrong. An example: Bill Gates, of Microsoft fame, has said that experience doesn't matter in teaching and has called for larger classroom sizes in order to shrink the number of teachers hired, which would reduce the expenses for education. Besides the obvious increase in unemployment from the out of work teachers, this is WRONG. Here are some of the facts according to the National Council of the Teachers of English: http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/whyclasssizematters.

And here is a statement by a professor of economics who cites several studies: http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2009/10/education_the_best_evidence_sh.html.

And here is an archived statement of findings from the US Department of Education: http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/ClassSize/academic.html

Though the statement from THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION only targets grades K-3, the conclusions do pinpoint that the data from the studies mentioned indicate improvements in education at higher levels with smaller classes.

By the way, I found all this information in about two minutes. Gates made his statements based on studies done in his own charter schools. Teachers, myself included, assume that parents and administrators understand the problems with class sizes, but the reality probably is they think we just don't want so many kids in the class because it means more work. Though that may be true for some teachers, it is not for most of us. When classes grow beyond certain numbers, teaching styles must change.

So, what can we do? Educate people. Go out there and talk about education. Refer people to information that explains actual pedagogical research.

A Plea Of Sorts

2010-11-21T21:19:00.002-05:00

There is a hell of a lot of flak being given to teachers these days. (I've always been told I have an incredible knack for stating the obvious.) But I want everyone who reads this -- all four of you -- to stop for a moment and think about where you are now in life, the last time you felt smart because you knew something more about a topic, the time you were able to correct an authority figure -- a teacher, a parent, a "know-it-all" colleague -- on something. Just stop and look at your life and all the good that has come to you, all the potential you see coming, all that is past, present, and future. Now, consider all this and ask yourself, HONESTLY, how did you get there?

Yes, you made a lot of choices on your own based on experience of messing up in the past. Yes, you have a lot of information at your fingertips on the internet to find the answers to your questions. But, how did you learn to find or even read those answers? How did you learn to assess your situation and make choices? Human beings don't live on instinct alone. We act more on LEARNED behaviors than any instinctual ones. Where did those come from? Teachers -- parents as teachers and teachers in schools -- taught them to you, and that includes bad behaviors too.

My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Buckley, taught me to hide my intelligence because she sat me in a corner with worksheets to stop me from interrupting class since I already knew the alphabet. My first grade teacher, Mrs. Morton, saw what the previous year teacher had taught me and turned it around, teaching me NOT to just do the minimum to get by, but to use all the "powers" given me. My junior year English teacher, Mrs. Herman, taught me to love the English language and to not be afraid to actually put my thoughts down on a piece of paper. My senior year calculus teacher, Mrs. Paes, taught me to embrace logical thinking and to understand that the true rewards come from hard work, not just knowing the right answer. Two senior year English teachers, Mr. Krauthamer and Mrs. Minsky, taught me that literature and poetry are the expressions of all that is good and bad in humanity, and they gave me a chance to really write when others would not. I am a teacher because of these people, many others like them, and my parents, who were both teachers of mine on many levels.

I have had students thank me for helping them to "look smart" in college or for turning them on to a new way of thinking or for getting them to read good books or to write well so that they shine in all they do after they leave my classes and high school. No one can quantify what I do. There is no test to assess a student's success in thinking, in learning what's really important in life, which is not the major themes of Frankenstein or how Dickens uses apostrophe to entice his readers to buy the next installment of his novel.

So, here's my plea. Take these thoughts of YOURS, of all your successes and all your growth, and connect them to their sources. Where did you learn that? Who taught it to you? And tell people about those teachers. Remind those around you that education is a cultural exchange of knowledge that is passed from one person to another, through experience and expertise, not just some sentence to twelve years sitting at a desk, though to some it may feel that way. Remind people that there are those of us who fight every day for the minds of the future, to create not the conformist, non-thinking followers of the few who muddled through to a higher position of power, but to create the thinkers of tomorrow who will ponder, question, and challenge the future to make it the best it can be. Consider the possibilities if everyone learned to think for themselves and came together to discuss ideas instead of just following what one person said and continuing only along that one train of thought. I leave that latter possibility to the science fiction writers, hopefully, and not to the future, not to my child, not to you.

A Smaller Subject With Larger Implications

2010-11-13T08:51:00.003-05:00

I recently asked myself a question as I completed grading papers through one marking period of this school year and found that many of my students have difficulty constructing a good essay. "Why," I asked myself, "do they only write plot summaries in five paragraphs?" Then it hit me. We don't teach them what an essay really is. We simply structure them into a single format of writing, which they buy completely as "THE WAY TO WRITE AN ESSAY" and then tell them to "be creative" with it. The 5-paragraph essay is easy to write and easy to grade. The 3-point thesis is a simple, mathematical formula to insure that, if done correctly, will provide a significant amount of information to prove "the point that the student is trying to make in her thesis." I put quotations around the end there, because it's a lie.

The 5-paragraph essay with a 3-point thesis, if done correctly, actually proves that the student read enough of the material that she is writing about so the teacher can assess whether the student is doing the work. One cannot phrase a significant argument and prove it with textual examples and come to a conclusion that is far more important than just that fictional characters completed the story created by an author in five paragraphs with 4-5 sentences each. But we as teachers are taught, and most of us understand, that an essay is a way of thinking. It's meant to express a way of thought. This is why this is far more sinister than we know.

Ken Watts, a veteran teacher of high school and college English, explains in his blog that by pushing students into the 5-paragraph essay from an early age and simply reinforcing that as the RIGHT way to present an argument, they will only present arguments like that -- stating something they believe is true and then cherry picking supposed evidence from a text to support it in a simple, linear fashion -- and believe that arguments presented in this way are correct. This means that any public figure, say a politician, who makes a statement about, let's say, state deficits being the fault of teachers' overblown salaries and health benefits will be believed if he can give three points of evidence that could be completely out of context. A news reporter could claim that a public official is racist merely by showing a clip of a speech that has supposed racist language in it, but when looked at in the broader context, is really an example of racism in the past that the official was citing. Sound familiar? We believe these things all the time.

Not only that, but to bring this to a smaller context again, teaching the 5-paragraph essay is a complete waste of time. Where does it exist in the real world? It doesn't even exist in college! The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's writing center website details the argument that high school teach this format because it creates structure for students, but that structure doesn't work on the college level, because in college students are expected to actually think about a topic and present a logical argument about it.

If college professors don't accept 5-paragraph essays, why do we teach this structure beyond Ninth Grade? It is a good starting point, like a tricycle, to writing more than a few sentences of unsupported opinion, but eventually we need our students to get on a bicycle, take off the training wheels, and ride. We need them to THINK for themselves, not just be nice little conformists who accept whatever they are told.

PS: If you noticed the above is in five paragraphs, good, because there is nothing wrong with the number 5. It's the lock-step formatting that's the problem.

A Pseudo-Manifesto

2010-11-05T21:50:00.003-04:00

A former student of mine, who is involved in a student-based think tank in Washington, DC, asked me to tell her what I thought I would do to fix education in this country. I thought about it and wrote a bit of a ranty, pseudo-manifesto or how to go about it. I don't propose money to support it and it's near impossible to do in reality, but, with all the right people in the right places, I think most of it could be possible. People just need to be brave, which is, honestly, quite rare these days. Here it is:

What would I do if I were in charge of education in this country? It’s hard to say. There are many more people far more qualified than I to answer this question, but I’ll do my best.
First of all, dispose of “No Child Left Behind.” That policy, though well-intentioned, is so poorly written and upheld it does more harm than good. It bases all assessment of student achievement on standardized testing, which has been proven to be completely biased and ineffectual, even by Diane Ravitch, creator of NCLB.
Then get rid of the bastard child of NCLB, “Race to the Top”. This new policy mirrors NCLB in all the wrong ways and creates a new air of competition in a field where there shouldn’t be competition. RTTT treats education like a business with its ideas of efficiency in spending and rewarding those districts that re-invent themselves, whether they need to or not. We push our schools too hard to compete with other schools when we should be trying to improve them together.
One more negative before I make proposals: remove funding of schools from the public vote. Many states, including New Jersey, still allow the public to vote on school budgets and that’s wrong. People vote with their wallets in mind and politicians sway votes against schools in just that way. Put the school budgets in the hands of the budget makers just like the police and fire departments and the cities themselves. The general population knows nothing about education just like it knows nothing about police work. They just think they do, because they all went to school.
Now, what do we do instead? First, create a national standard of education for each grade level that must be met by EVERY school. This is not meant to unify curriculum by any means, but just to set a standard of education where we all understand what students should be achieving by which year of school. These standards should be created by experts in the teaching of each field of student, not politicians or pedagogical philosophers, teachers.
Then, get rid of redundancy in school districts. My district is a brilliant example. There are four boards of education in three towns that all feed into two high schools. There should be one board of education per education system PreK-12. If the system is regionalized, we still don’t need a BOE for each town. This situation just creates a “too many chefs” problem. Also, it guarantees consistency in curriculum from PreK to 12th grade, so there isn’t repetition of studies between, say, middle school and high school.
Create parent outreach programs that provide understanding for parents as to what their role should be in their children’s education. Parents are the first teachers, so they should actually know that and know what that means.
By getting rid of all the programs that demand high stakes testing, we need to create a new, more pedagogically sound way of assessing whether a student has passed high school well enough to graduate. This should be a portfolio of work, done from 9th through 12th grade, which is presented each June to a panel of teachers appointed in each school. The portfolio should include enough examples of a student’s work to demonstrate progression of learning and ability to move on to college or the workforce, meeting all education standards.
Enforce school administrations’ leadership. Schools should not be afraid of parents, so the local governments should support school policy toward the need for attendance and discipline. Too many schools push kids through and graduate them just to get rid of them. This doesn’t help our population; it hurts it. If we give kids high expectations, and attending school and doing one’s work aren’t that high of expectations, most of them will rise to those expectations. If we give them low expectations, they will just as easily sink to that level. Our school leadership should be spending most of their time working to improve the education in our schools, not dealing with whiny parents who insist that their child who just set fire to the locker room, deserves to be in school. No, that kid needs to get outside help first, then come to school.
Finally, we need to address the body of teachers out there. Already there are requirements that teachers need to continue their educations and better themselves constantly through professional development classes (PDCs). But many teachers just check in and get their hours, learning nothing and doing nothing in their classrooms. Many people, inside and outside education blame tenure for the keeping of these teachers, and they are partially right. Tenure doesn’t guarantee a job for life, but it makes it very difficult and often costly to oust a tenured teacher unless there is a complete reduction in force due to severe population or economic decline. Tenure should be renewable every five years, based on several factors: a review of student achievement beyond the teacher’s class, observation by a lead teacher or supervisor, and a review of a portfolio of lessons and assignments by a panel of administrators and teachers. Anyone not meeting the standards set by the government (see the national standards idea above) is put on probation for one year to show improvement.
Tenure is necessary to protect older teachers, preferably the good ones, because a teacher who is fired after several years becomes too expensive for other districts to hire, thus forcing a middle-aged person to start a new career from scratch, which just isn’t possible. We could get rid of all this if there were no need for collective bargaining, unions, school boards, etc. If we completely restructured the system so that teachers were paid truly fair wages based on their background and their experience, like anyone who works in the corporate world, then perhaps we could ditch tenure too.
But that much restructuring would take a complete overhaul of the system we have in place as well as a complete change of mindset about education in this country to make it a true priority instead of just giving it lip service when the need arises. It would mean making bold statements in our culture that tells the general population that, in order to succeed, one must have a good education rather than throw a ball through a hoop well or shoot a gun well. It would mean showing that education is a privilege, and graduating from high school is a noble goal, not an obstacle in the way of “freedom.” It would mean driving our children’s attention away from “get rich quick” mindsets and realign the American Dream itself to what it used to mean: work hard, save for one’s children, and help one’s neighbors. The American Dream wasn’t meant for one person to “be successful”; it meant to be a part of the success of America.
That came out a little corny, but I actually mean it.

More Politics

2010-11-04T08:02:00.003-04:00

I don't know what the result of the elections this year will be. Odds are, nothing will change and life will go on. After all, most of the time we all wake up, go to work, come home, raise our families, eat our food, sleep, and so on. The word games of Washington and other political arenas don't affect our lives all that much on a day to day basis. But what if it could?

What if we actually thought about who we voted for and why instead of voting to "send a message"? What kind of message does it send when people vote for someone they don't even agree with just because they aren't satisfied with the fact that progress has been slower than they expected? What kind of message does it send when we support people who make impossible promises that can only lead to policies that will harm the majority of this country instead of help? What kind of message does it send when we support the elite few who have more money than they know what to do with instead of those who truly want to help ALL Americans? What kind of message does it send when we elect a politician who claims to want to help all Americans but simply lines his own pockets and those of his friends?

Anyone who has read the news for the past two years would actually see that there has been some recovery. When President Bush left office, the Dow Jones average was hovering around 8900-9000. Now it's over 11,000. Unemployment is still high, but it has gone down from what it was two years ago. Hiring rates are rising. Is it all happening as quickly as we'd like? No. We Americans don't have patience. We need to see action right away or we deem nothing happening. Look at our movies. Why develop any plot or character when we can just blow stuff up within the first five minutes and be number one at the box office. our culture bespeaks our mindset.

People call our president the "intellectual elite" like it's a bad thing. A man who struggled to raise himself up from his low-income roots in a single parent home to graduate from Harvard Law to become president is not the elite. He is the American Dream. The man who has had all the privileges a wealthy family can give him and even goes to an Ivy League school like Yale not on merit but because of legacy is the elite. Somehow we have gotten everything backwards here. We elevate the athlete and the plumber and we demonize the teacher and the scholar.

When we make educators the enemy, how can we expect to improve education? When parents turn to their children and say things like, "You just have to get through English class so you can graduate from high school," they don't emphasize the importance of education. They emphasize the obstacle that is in the way of the child to an imagined "freedom." When people help children graduate high school and go to college at any cost, despite endless absences, lack of work ethic, lack of skill in any area, but pushed through standardized tests with a barely passing grade, can we call that success? What of that child when he is in college the next year? What's he going to do then?

If we want to improve this country we need to start from the bottom, not the top. "Trickle down" is a phrase we should only use for raindrops on windows, not economics. History has shown that it doesn't work. Rich people want to hold onto their money just as much as the poor. Economics should be viewed like building a house. If you don't have a strong foundation, a strong base, the house is going to fall over, especially if the roof is heavier than the rest. If we work to give every child a safe home, food to eat, and good education opportunities, then some day, maybe even he could become president.

Politics As Usual

2010-10-23T07:24:00.002-04:00

The buzz conversation about education these days is that our public schools are no good and they have to improve. The "powers that be", whoever they are, push more and more toward test scores, teacher "responsibility", and student motivation, all three of which are supposedly interconnected. Meanwhile actual experts in the field of pedagogy, like Diane Ravitz, publish books, go on speaking tours, and publish articles in prestigious newspapers like The New York Times saying none of the things that government proposes to improve our schools actually work. They are even damaging to our schools.

High stakes testing simply pushes teachers to "teach to the test". All that matters is improving scores to show that the schools are getting better, because that's all they are rated on, so all that matters is what is tested. So who needs to delve deeply into literature or understand the finer details of calculus? Just make sure all students can read a passage and answer multiple choice questions about the details of the passage and they are set for life apparently.

There has been a lot of flak about teachers lately and how they shouldn't have tenure and they are the reason why our economy sucks and probably that we are bringing about the apocalypse too, so they now want to rate teachers based on their students' improvement and learning. How do "they" want to judge us? Test scores. Therefore, a good teacher is one who EVERY YEAR gets students to get higher scores on standardized tests. Go back to the previous paragraph and read that one.

Student motivation is apparently all on the teachers too. Students will want to learn and improve themselves in our classes if we "motivate" them correctly. Not by raising expectations, challenging them with important concepts and ideas that make them feel smart when they finally understand them. No. By coddling them and making them feel safe in our classrooms that they can never be wrong, never fail, and never have to do anything that makes them feel uncomfortable. We're supposed to inspire "friendly" competition without anyone getting hurt or feeling bad. All this despite students who come from broken homes, poor families that can't afford to feed them properly, families that never see each other because the parents have to work three jobs to make ends meet, social "distresses" that all teens go through, war, economic recession, and increased teen suicide.

Clearly all these problems are the fault of teachers who don't actually complain they are paid less than other people in the workforce who have professional and masters degrees, but simply try to compare themselves to those others when people outside education point out that teachers have an "easy time" and are paid for fewer hours than the rest of the workforce. I'm not going to start complaining about the fact that I can't support my family with my salary and have to take on additional work after school and over the summer as well as my wife's having to work two jobs while taking care of our daughter too. No, I've ranted about that quite a bit and probably will bring it up again in another post. No. I just want to say this: anyone who wants to work in a room where five times a day a different group of 20-30 teenagers come in, all with different personalities, wants, and desires regarding education, and try to get them to not just read a book or write an essay, but to think critically about a text and connect that thinking to the world around them all while worrying about your own life where you have to juggle bills in order to balance when you pay them versus how much food you can buy this week and whether you'll be able to take your family on one vacation this year and do all this while people outside your profession, and inside in terms of they control your contract and curriculum, continue to hold you up as the reason why our society is failing and that you are in a profession that is actually destroying America. Go ahead. Why anyone would want to be a teacher these days is beyond me. Let's pay our young people as little as possible, make them feel bad about themselves and what they do, put them in a high stress situation, and then hold them accountable for absolutely everything as determined by a single, bubble-sheet test. Why would anyone want to do this?

Then people mock you when you reply: I do it for the kids. I want them to have every possible opportunity in their futures as they can have by my helping to give them a good education.

"Superman Can Stick It"

2010-09-28T09:23:00.002-04:00

I just read this blog post that actually supports teachers while the media continues to bash us.

http://budtheteacher.com/blog/2010/09/27/im-not-waiting/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BudTheTeacher+%28Bud+The+Teacher%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Check it out. Bud is eloquent and to the point. It made me feel good about being a teacher for once, instead of angry that people like Oprah just don't get it.

Once Again With Feeling

2010-09-24T21:09:00.003-04:00

Another school year has begun, but it feels different this time. It's year seven for me, which may not seem like much, but when you consider I have now taught, counting this year's class, over 700 students, it seems a little more daunting. At least to me. But I was writing about how it's different this year. People in the teaching "biz" refer to a teacher of seven or more years as a "master teacher" and I think that's it. There was no sense of "stage fright" like previous years. Frustration with parts of the system, sure, but it didn't matter to me who was going to be in my classes at all. I had no doubts as to whether I could teach them. I know I can.

So, with that in mind, I take on new responsibilities, of course. I am now co-adviser of the newspaper and a mentor teacher for one of our newest additions to the English department. And why not? We all have to keep learning things and challenging ourselves, otherwise, what's the point?

Thus, if anyone out there has any advise for running a high school newspaper, please drop me a comment or something. I could use some help.

It's Not About the Money

2010-09-03T21:46:00.003-04:00

There's a lot of talk, especially with colorful expletives, in New Jersey these days, especially concerning money and our state government. I've had enough of it. I agree the governor is messing up our public school system, but other than voting, there really isn't much I can personally do. I agree that negotiating contracts right now (I am currently working without one like many in this state) sucks. But the truth of the matter is school starts, at least in my district, Tuesday, September 6th.

I have five classes containing a total of 113 students that I need to get ready for college -- I teach seniors. Perhaps I won't have as many supplies at my disposal. Perhaps I'll have to encourage my students to buy their own copies of the texts more this year. No matter what restrictions the government or the board of ed put on me, I have to teach these students to the best of my abilities. I made a commitment to be their English teacher. That's the priority here. Yes, I will have to cut back on my personal spending. Yes, I will have to take on additional jobs this year to make enough money to support my family since my wife's job got cut back. My family and I will survive, and I will fulfill my commitments to them as I always have.

My job is not about the money. If it were, I would have been a stock broker or an ad exec. My job is about trying to make the world a better place through educating youth about critical thinking, multiple points of view, and good literature. In this way, when they are stock brokers, lawyers, and politicians, perhaps they will realize that they could not have gotten to be those powerful, successful people without having teachers.

"The circle is now complete; when I left you, I was but the learner, now I am the master."

2010-09-02T21:45:00.001-04:00

The stage is set, the copies made. They arrive on Tuesday and I think I am ready. Another school year begins next week, and I am looking forward to it. I have had some great classes in the past -- quite recently, in fact -- but that doesn't mean there can't be more of them.

This is going to be my seventh year teaching. I'm not the newest teacher in my department; I'm not the most veteran. Yet, I feel that I have reached that stage that some refer to as "the master teacher."

What? No Federal Money for NJ?

2010-08-26T21:46:00.002-04:00

If you don't know about this big "oops" by the governor and his Department of Education in New Jersey, then I suggest you read up on it. I don't want to get too nasty and political here, but making a mistake on a government form due to not reading all the directions properly is something I TEACH!!! Did Mr. Christie and his employees not learn this skill in school? Perhaps he should stop cutting money from education and start putting more into it so the future of this state don't make the same mistake he made and keep our children from getting $400 MILLION in educational funding.

Enough said.

One Smart Student

2010-08-16T16:11:00.002-04:00

I have little to say that isn't in this valedictorian speech. I haven't confirmed if it is real, but if it is, it is awesome. If it isn't, it still says a lot about our public school system that I agree with. Read, learn, act.

See you all in September, which is not that far off.

Another End of the Year

2010-06-24T06:48:00.003-04:00

I always try to end the school year on a positive note as I look to my now former students and all that they have ahead of them. I hope they have taken something from my class, if not a lot of "somethings." Many students enter my classroom in September expecting to read more books and write more essays because that's what one does in English class. But that is not the goal of an English class. I use literature and writing to, hopefully, teach my students three things that they may not even realize, so I reveal it to them now. (I know some of them are reading this.)

Of course, I hope they gain insight into what makes good literature and that they learn to at least respect, if not enjoy, well-written books. This is why I try to weed out any overly contemporary works from my curriculum. I'm not saying there are no well written books these days, but if my students learn to love reading classic lit, then they will pick up those books on their own. Also, many of those books have not stood the test of time, so who are we to say what is a future classic and what isn't? People didn't study Catcher in the Rye when it came out. It started appearing in schools much later.

But a love of literature is low on my list of what I hope my students take from my class. I hope they have learned, to some extent, to think about things that are beyond their own little perceptions; to consider the world at large and what their places in it might be. This is why they write many of my essays: to make connections beyond just their own views or the singular world of a book.

Finally, what I think is the most important lesson I teach throughout the year, I hope they walk away with some understanding that they need to find out who THEY are as individuals and don't just follow what others tell them is the "right" way to do things. If they look back at EVERY SINGLE text we read in my class, no matter what level, they will find that theme resounding loudly throughout them. I don't care what your parents say, your religious leaders say, your teachers say, you need to think for yourself and decide what is right for YOU. That's the way of Siddhartha, Sydney Carton, Nora Helmer, Meursault, etc.

I leave this year with a quote from my senior yearbook page -- from 21 years ago! -- that I feel sums this all up:

What you own is your own kingdom.
What you do is your own glory.
What you love is your own power.
What you live is your own story.

-- Rush, "Something for Nothing"

Right or Privilege?

2010-06-03T21:53:00.003-04:00

This country has determined that a "proper" education is a right of all its citizens, yet our students are constantly told how "privileged" they are to be able to have such a great public education, one that is so much better than a lot of the world. When I was a student, I remember one teacher saying to me, in elementary school, "You don't know how lucky you are! Children in China would kill to have an education like the one you are privileged to be getting." Okay, I actually paraphrase, but I do know he was comparing my education to that of the Chinese. But wait, you say, the Chinese are actually more competitive in a global market today than we are? Their country's educational system as a whole does better in all areas of learning than ours? Hmmm....

I'm torn on this issue as I feel everyone should have an opportunity to receive a full education, to the extent they want one. Yet, I don't think college is for everyone and if we actually stopped telling every child that he can some day go to college and get a better job, perhaps our education system would improve a little. How? Those that want to pursue a higher education for the reason one exists -- careers in academia, law, medicine, high finance, etc. -- would be able to get a good education. Those that really just want to get a job that pays well could do so with a high school degree. This means a high school degree would have to be worth something in the workplace and college degrees would probably become a little more specialized.

How dare I suggest that Johnny can't be a doctor some day? Well, if Johnny really isn't interested in academics, particularly the sciences, then no, Johnny can't be a doctor. He has no aptitude in medical sciences based not on one standardized test, but on years of achievement and work in school, then, no, he can't be a doctor. If Johnny really likes wood shop -- a class that is rapidly disappearing from our schools because it is "not important" -- then let him take that and apprentice himself to a carpenter after high school. Why not? The contractor who just did some renovations on my house worked in a cabinet factory for years after high school and he makes a LOT more money than I do. Most carpenters do. And we all need carpenters and they don't need college degrees. They need to know some basic math and writing skills and then the "tricks of the trade", so to speak.

So is education a right or a privilege? I guess it's both. All people should have the right to pursue an education, but education itself should not be compromised to suit the lowest common denominator. Either people should rise to the education they want or find something else to do. I know some good tradesmen who work hard, make a great living, and have great stories to tell. I know people in service industries, like firefighters and police officers, who have had specialized training and are terrific at their jobs. These are not people to look down on just because they didn't go to college. They help make this country better in many ways, so why don't more kids want to be those things when they grow up?

Voting for Budgets

2010-04-18T08:17:00.002-04:00

I teach in New Jersey where the public gets to decide whether the school systems have a sufficient budget for next year. The day to decide this is Tuesday of this week -- April 20th. I encourage all who vote to support the public schools and get out there and pass the budgets. Why? Because if that doesn't happen, the massive cuts that EVERY school system is enacting will grow even larger. Our governor has hamstrung the public school system in New Jersey and if the budgets don't pass, the students will suffer larger classes, fewer class and activity choices, and fewer athletics. Some may even have to switch schools as some systems will have to close schools. Notice I don't mention what will happen to teachers. That rhetoric is getting old and few people listen or care what happens to us, even if some of us. like myself, are the primary earners for our families and a reduction in pay means a reduction in my being able to support my family. But I digress.

My real point here is that New Jersey should go the way of other states. The education budget should be decided by the towns and the boards of education, not the people. Everyone thinks they know what it takes to educate our children, and most just vote against school budgets because they tend to make property taxes go up. These days the word "taxes" seems to be equivalent to other, more socially unacceptable words. You guys know to which I refer. The public doesn't vote on the police budget, the fire budget, or the public maintenance budget, but they do the school budget. Why? Because there is less value placed on education than these other things, so why not let people vote down giving money to schools in order to give them the sense that they control their own taxes? Please. It's time to grow up.

I know preaching that education is important is about as useful a thing to do as massaging a wooden leg these days. The economy is just starting to show some signs of hope, but people are still suffering from the recession. They don't want to spend any more than they have to, so they are saving where they can and want to cut taxes where they can so they can what? Afford their cable bill so they can watch every game the NFL plays in HD? Maintain their season tickets to Yankee Stadium? Buy designer clothes for their toddlers who will outgrow them or destroy them within weeks? Buy that fifth pair of black pumps because one can't have too many pairs of black shoes? We're in a recession and you should go to the mall. Look around. Notice what people are spending their money on. I saw someone purchase a 70" flat screen television yesterday. But ask them to pay an extra $25 in taxes per year and they go ballistic. What do we value in this country?

And we complain that other countries are ahead of us educationally. How dare they value education over HDTV!

In Defense of Funding Public Schools

2010-03-21T07:10:00.003-04:00

Lately, there has been a lot of anger and hostility in the state of New Jersey, where I live and teach, due to a series of proposals from its new governor, Chris Christie, to cut money in public education on several levels. I'm only going to address the education aspect, but do note that many of these proposals are also toward all public employees such as firefighters and police officers, so they too are under attack.

Governor Christie has proposed an $800 million cut of funding to public schools across the state. This, of course, means that the money has to come from elsewhere, so odds are the school districts are going to do one of two things: cut programs and fire teachers, or raise property taxes. If programs are cut and faculties are reduced, the result is obvious: larger class sizes and fewer programs beyond the basic, necessary subjects. Thus, poorer education across the board. This is just at the K-12 level, of course. At the higher education level, this means cutting funding for students who can't afford college, so they'll just have to go get a job without any higher education for the time being.

If taxes are raised, then the school systems look like the bad guys, NOT the governor, who has promised a reduction in taxes. And that's just the PR side of it. Christie has already proposed a property tax CAP for next year, meaning districts CANNOT raise property taxes above a certain percentage. This is the death of Jersey's high level of public education.

In 1978, California passed Prop. 13, which stated, basically, that several millions of dollars of public money would not go to public education and property taxes may not be raise over 2.5% per year. Over the following 32 years, California public schools have declined into a state of chaos and bankruptcy, creating a situation where students are suffering poor education, especially in poorer areas, and teachers barely make livings. Welcome to the future of New Jersey. But Governor Christie says he's after unions, not individuals and none of this will hurt the students. Okay, but wait, there's more.

He proposes a salary freeze for three years (this one affects all public workers) and state mandated contributions to health care benefits. Okay, everyone else, for the most part, contribute to health care benefits, with the exception of anyone serving in a career that "serves" the US (why teachers, police, and fire aren't included in this definition, I'm not sure). Fine, so we should put money into our heath care and a starting rate of 1.5% per year plus whatever is negotiated on the local level, which is variable, of course. But a salary freeze over three years now reduces the amount of pay in comparison to the rising cost of living in this state, so, effectively, teachers will make less money while contributing more to benefits, which means less take home pay. There are over a hundred thousand teachers in the state of NJ who will now make less money, which means they will spend less at stores, restaurants, etc. So, that would mean LESS money going into the economy, not more, which, and I'm not a math teacher here, would NOT help the economy, right? Not done yet.

Christie has stated that if teachers are really so concerned about the students, they should take a 5% pay CUT and put that money back into their school systems, especially after he's cutting so much state funding to the schools. Fine. Each teacher takes a 5% pay cut, which will not greatly hurt teachers as far as living wages are concerned (My wife and I did the math and we'd survive.) but you couple this with a salary freeze and increased benefit donation and what do you get? Even less money going to a LARGE population of the state, which will stop spending money on smaller things to focus on necessities, forcing a REDUCTION in income for smaller, "luxury" businesses like pizza places, jewelry stores, and flower shops. Given the choice of buying food for my family from the supermarket at approximately $10 per meal versus getting a pizza at $17+ per meal, which am I going to choose when I'm earning less money?

But the students aren't really hurt by all that, right? At least the kids are still getting a quality education. WRONG. Now, the governor's proposals have increased contributions from teachers to pensions and benefits, reducing the quality of the benefits. They've cut salaries and frozen them for three years. They've created an even higher stress environment because with raising taxes (at least for this year) the blame will fall on the teachers, and, in subsequent years, job security for many will disappear. So who is going to want to enter a career where one is paid little, given weak benefits, low job security, and work in a HIGH stress situation? (Yes, my students, both former and current, teaching my classes is a high stress situation.) Certainly not the best and the brightest of people. People who could be lawyers, doctors, or Wall Street bankers are not going to consider teaching because where's the draw? Helping children learn for the future? It's one thing to want to dedicate one's life to teaching -- a choice I made as I changed careers -- but it's another to be willing to sacrifice the livelihood and security of one's own family to follow a career that isn't respected and will accomplish less if there is no one to support it.

Someone once asked me, as I was working on my Master's degree and becoming a teacher, "Why would you want to be a teacher? You're so smart you could make a lot more money doing something else." My response: "What kind of person do you want teaching your children?" So, shouldn't we work hard to make teaching an ATTRACTIVE career?

So, if you live and vote in New Jersey, please support the growing protest against Governor Christie's cuts and attacks on education. If you don't live here, support your public schools wherever you are because without good schools and good teachers, there are no other careers. And if we don't have smart and dedicated teachers, there will be no good schools.

Waxing Existential About Athletics

2010-03-09T20:25:00.003-05:00

Bear with me. It's been a long week already and I recently finished teaching a unit on existentialism to my AP classes, so I'm in a little bit of a mood.

What's with high school athletics? I think it's great that students are involved in physical activity, and, for some, sports is a way to some much needed money for college, but what is the big deal? Tonight my school basketball team is vying for a state sectional championship, which, by the way, I'm not sure what that means. If they win, the kids will be absolutely nuts about it tomorrow. The administration and many of the teachers will be nuts about it tomorrow. But tomorrow, nothing will really have changed in the world. At all. Well, we'll have a champion basketball team, I guess, but that only lasts until next season. Then we start over at zero. I know "it means a lot to the kids", but my question is: why?

Even when I was in high school, I didn't care much about sports. I participated each season in something, but I didn't dress up in school colors, paint my hair and face, and write slogans across my chest of how great my school was. Not all, but many of my students do all that. I guess it's good for school morale. It's good to have students proud of their school, right? At least it passes the time. Sports are entertaining.

But why not be proud of a school's academic achievements? Why not brag about how many students went on to four-year college programs last year? Ivy League former students? Distinguished alumni who have done something great in some field. I know for a fact that the school I teach in produced professional writers, businesspeople, doctors, lawyers, and teachers. Some of them are even famous (NOT the teachers, of course). Why not brag about that? Why not have them come back and talk to students to encourage them to have pride in their WORK at school instead of some three-hour basketball game that, in the grand scheme of things, means very little.

But athletics, for some reason, brings prestige, which brings MONEY. A good English program doesn't bring in money, just literacy. And what good is that any way? How many people really need to actually know how to read in this world any more? I mean, read for more than just basic information or instruction.

After all, does any of this really matter at all?

Special thanks to Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett for the preceding rant.

Irony by Design

2010-01-24T06:51:00.002-05:00

Last Monday I heard Grant Wiggins speak about designing mission statements for school districts and curriculum for individual subjects. For those who don't know about Dr. Wiggins, he is a phenomenal brain in the pedagogical world, best known for his co-authoring of Understanding by Design, a textbook used in most educational programs around the country about planning curriculum. I read this book in graduate school and loved it. It describes how to design one's curriculum backwards, so that one starts with the end goal for the students, which should NOT be just "read a book" or something simplistic like that, and then works back to the actual activities the teacher is going to assign to guide students to that goal. It's a great method and I use it to some extent -- there are times it just doesn't work completely -- but the ultimate lesson from Dr. Wiggins, both from the text and his lecture the other day, is to strive for something more, to really question what we want our students to accomplish.

Now, surprisingly or not, not all teachers do this. There are some who just plod along through a textbook, or a book list, making sure that students know who wrote what and what certain images and symbols mean, along with a few obscure literary terms to show "higher" learning. Luckily, I don't know many teachers like this. In fact, I don't think I work with any of this kind. But why do teachers teach like this? Is it important for a student to know the exact content of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens? Absolutely not.

WHAT?? Cry all the supporters of classics in the classroom. Let me explain. The ultimate goals of an English classroom should be that students learn to think critically, to be able to convey those thoughts through writing coherently, and to understand the importance of good literature. Reading Dickens falls under the third part, but, no matter the text, students must learn to decipher text -- to read beyond the words to a deeper understanding of the human animal -- so that they can apply this skill later on in whatever they do after school. John Dewey saw public education as the means to forming better citizens of a democracy. How can one be a good citizen if one doesn't know how to think about what the government is doing and then vote based on informed thought? That's what Dewey meant! Having read Mark Twain does nothing for a member of society directly. Knowing that Mark Twain's writing is the basis of most modern American writing is a little more important. Being able to read "between the lines" of Twain's writing and then apply that skill to a speech by the president, that's the real world importance. Understanding Twain just makes one look smart at parties, let's face it. But the skills involved in picking through a difficult text, are priceless. (Now I sound like a MasterCard commercial.)

So why is this ironic? Over the past decade or so, maybe more, this country has been moving more and more to high-stakes standardized testing. Doing well on those tests has become the end goal for many teachers and schools; the pressure is on to have students get high scores because that is how schools are judged. But we need to ask ourselves, is it really all that important that our students can do well on one test? Is this how we want to judge our schools? Wouldn't you rather send your child to a high school that has a higher percentage of students graduating and going on to what you consider to be good colleges of higher learning rather than which school has the overall highest state test scores?

And what happens after the students do get high scores on the state tests and SATs? When is anyone ever going to ask them to solve forty math problems in an hour or to read a passage they've never seen before and answer ten questions about it? MAYBE in college, but after that? What are we really trying to accomplish for our future? Perhaps this is why many of my students, all seniors in high school, still just want to know "what is the right answer" when there is none.

Teaching the TV Generation

2010-01-14T14:32:00.002-05:00

Okay, that title's a little broad, but let me explain.

I was talking to a colleague of mine earlier today and we "discovered" a problem with our students being raised on watching so much television. There are so many, but this one pertains to the teaching of literature, and, thus, is important to write about on this blog. This may even be true of older individuals, the teachers themselves perhaps, but I see it with my students as I read their writings.

They are too invested in the plots and characters of what they read.

What? Why read then? What is supposed to attract them to reading? Well, that's just it. The plot and characters of a text ARE to attract the reader, make them relate to certain people in order to "live" through those characters' experiences, but, in truth, the plot and characters are NOT important. How could they be? They are fictional. They never existed. What is IMPORTANT is what the author is trying to convey to the reader via the plots and characters.

When we watch TV, we don't question what we see. We don't seek intent. We seek passive entertainment. (I do this too, don't think I'm above this.) Thus we invest huge amounts of time watching the lives of fictional (or even "real") people unfold week after week and even discussing them after we have watched them with others who are equally invested. ("Did you see what happened on 'Lost' Wednesday?")

My students do the same thing. When they write they focus on the characters as if they are real people with important decisions to make in their lives and important outcomes. The truth is they only do what the author wants them to do, thus, they reveal the author's intent. This is what they SHOULD focus on. This is what we, the teachers, should focus on. It's fine to talk about the plot of a book, make sure everyone understands what is going on. But we owe it to our students to teach them how to THINK on their own and dig deeper to discover true meaning behind a text. Dickens did not write 390 pages of a novel just to tell a good story. If he did, his books would not have lasted as long as they have.

What Does a Teacher Do?

2009-11-25T19:28:00.003-05:00

A lot of people think they know how to teach. Heck, I did when I first started trying to teach in the New York City Fellowship Program, which supports career changers into becoming teachers by putting them in some of the toughest classrooms in the city and then supposedly giving them support and graduate classes, along the way. Perhaps you can tell from my tone how that worked out, but it was partially my fault. I thought I knew what a teacher does. I had gone to school and seen teachers in action. My father was an art teacher. I knew lots of teachers. Of course I knew what a teacher did.

I was wrong. VERY, VERY WRONG. I had no idea how to plan a lesson, what a lesson should entail, how to capture students' attentions, keep them on task, make sure they don't kill each other, have them accomplish some worthwhile task that will guide them to learning or practicing some skill that will serve them in the future with or even without them realizing it. In other words, I was up a particular creek without a paddle. I don't think I even had a canoe, to tell the truth.

My former supervisor always used to say that a teacher had to be part police officer, part social worker, part referee, and part actual teacher, and, dependent on the personality and ability level of each class, those parts divided up into different percentages. I agree with that somewhat, but it still doesn't explain what we do. I had a parent just the other day try to tell me how she would teach her son if she were the teacher of my class. This was an intelligent, well-educated woman who had asked to meet with me because she was concerned about her son's grade in my class. It wound up being a discussion of my teaching ability, which I did not appreciate, and I felt like this person was making certain assumptions about me and my job (and we all not what happens when we ASSUME), which made me angry and her look ridiculous. Luckily for me, I can have a level of politesse when necessary. But it inspired me to write this blog entry.

A teacher guides his students toward certain goals of learning, depending on the subject at hand. This is called "pedagogy" (from the Greek for "child's tutor") and there is a whole science and philosophy to it. As I am an English teacher, many people think this guidance means I "teach" students to read books better (whatever that means) and write well, which is commonly defined as having correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Wrong. well, not completely wrong, but that's not what my goal is entirely. Sure, I am a stickler for spelling and grammar, but that's only 10% of an essay grade in my class. My real focus is to instill in my students the ability to analyze and think critically about anything that is put in front of them, whether it is an article from The New York Times or William Shakespeare's Hamlet. The texts actually don't matter to my main goal. They could be anything well-written from anyone. I also aim to teach my student a sense of style in their writings. By senior year they should know the basics -- if they don't, I work with them to get them down, of course -- and are ready to write at a higher academic level. So I push them to lose the basic structures and try to help them find their own voices.

The texts I choose to teach, or am required to teach, which amounts to pretty much the same thing, have secondary goals with them: to teach students what good literature is, to demonstrate where the stuff they read and watch comes from, and to inspire them to strive for a higher level of reading. Anyone can pick up a copy of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones' Diary and say, "Hey, that was a fun, romantic story." But some of my students, when I'm done with them, can say of the same book, "Hey, that is a very interesting modernization of Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice. I particularly like the way Fielding incorporates Lizzy's sense of sarcasm into the character of Bridget and how she maintains the character of Darcy right down to the name." The former gets a few hours of entertainment from a book; the latter gets an experience that connects different parts of her life into something new. Which do you think is more important?

There is one other thing: what teachers do not do. We do not work to boost self-esteem, coddle children so they don't feel bad, give second chances when they aren't deserved, and lower our expectations just because so-and-so has a lot on his plate right now. We are sympathetic and are willing to make exceptions for understandable circumstances. Your parents are suddenly getting divorced? Have the essay in as soon as you can; take your time. Your grandmother died on Wednesday and you've been helping with the funeral? You can take the vocabulary quiz next week. You don't have your homework because you had a lot to do last night after playing soccer and doing homework for your other classes and felt that the work for my class was not as important? You get a zero. It's not easy being a teenager. There are a lot of things going on inside and outside one's body. But I've been there and I remember it. I've also studied how to work around a lot of that stuff, which is part of what makes me a teacher. My education.

Parents are to instruct their children in right and wrong, good manners, and whatever else they consider important to making their children self-sufficient human beings by around the age of 18. They need to check up on their kids, make sure they are doing what is right and what they are supposed to be doing. They must insure that their children are getting the best of everything that is available to them. I am a parent too and this is what I see my role as father as. As a teacher, none of that is my job for the 109 high school seniors that I spend each day with. I am there to teach English. To quote Mr. Lorry from one of my favorite novels, A Tale of Two Cities, "It's just a matter of business, you see. Only business." That doesn't mean I don't get involved in the lives of my students. On the contrary, they keep sharing their lives with me whether I want to hear about them or not. But I am not their friend, parent, or confidant. I may inspire. Okay, I hope I inspire, but that is not expected. All I expect from my students is their absolute best when they are in my class and that they take away something, ANYTHING, that stays with them into the future.

Loving the Lit

2009-11-18T22:11:00.002-05:00

Okay, here's one that's not really about the students, though, of course, everything about teaching is about the students.

I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but if a teacher doesn't at least like the book he is teaching, if not LOVE it, the students are not likely to like it either. I survey my students each year, at the end, about the texts they read during the year, and invariably, they, as a whole, like the books I like more than the ones I don't like as much. Thus, I try to weed out texts I don't like, so that they pick up on my positive vibe over what I teach and then, hopefully, they like the book too.

Sure, there are always going to be students who don't like a text no matter how much the teacher loves it. I have a former student who still lets me know how much she hated reading A Tale of Two Cities. But, over all, I find that because I love that book so much, it is one of the top books of the year for the classes that read it.

Of course, there are texts that are required, but, for the most part, I see choosing a text for my class the same way people I used to work with in the film industry referred to working in film: "love it or leave it."

And if you don't love books, don't teach English.

Trust and Text

2009-10-20T21:53:00.003-04:00

Perhaps this just happens to me -- perhaps I'm not writing to any other teachers here -- but I always find it awkward to have a class stare at me awaiting a right answer to a question about interpretation of a text. I understand that as a teacher I am an authority, but that doesn't mean I have the right answers. In fact, if there are any other teachers out there reading this, as you all know, there are NO right answers. How are we supposed to read Polonius in Hamlet, a baffled old man or a savvy politician? Why does Antigone suffer in the end? These are questions that have plagued academics (and students) for centuries!

Students need to trust their instincts and their reactions to the text. There are wrong answers, of course, but there are rarely any right ones when it comes to interpretation. No one knows what Shakespeare or Sophocles intended. None of that is written down. All we have are their words, their creations. We can infer a lot, but what was meant by all of it? Who knows? I have my opinions based on my education and experience with text, but are they the RIGHT ones? Certainly not.

What we, the teachers, need to do, and what I hope I'm doing in my classes, is foster stronger interpretation skills in our students. I try to lead them through the process at first and then stop back and let them do the work. Once they get going, the results are spectacular, but it happens only once in a while. If there were some way to convey to these young adults that their opinions DO matter as long as they are grounded in the text, then perhaps they would discuss them more and learn more from each other and stop STARING AT ME!

English Teachers...Who Needs 'Em?

2009-10-03T10:07:00.003-04:00

I received an email from a former student of mine who graduated last year. She wrote to thank me for being such a great teacher that she is finding her college English class too easy. She also had a journal assignment for said English class to write about her favorite high school class and she picked mine. She attached the journal entry so that I would read how much she liked my class. But this entry is NOT about tooting my own horn for reaching one student. This is about what she ACTUALLY learned in my class.

"When we read Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, I fell in love with the text and understood it although it was difficult reading. I don’t read as much as I should, but I love to get lost in a story and when I can take a lesson from a book and apply it to my life, it makes me feel more educated."

She was in a regular English class with an average experience in reading for this generation of students. A nice girl who was always involved in class and did the work, graduating with a good grade in English, so what happened in my class? She connected with a text and it made her feel EDUCATED. She discovered something about herself in the writings of someone from nearly a century ago because literature is really about being human. Don't take my word for it. Here are her words:

"I believe English is one of the most affective subjects to teach to students because it can help someone look inside themselves and pull out ideas and thoughts they never knew they had."

We English teachers are really trying to get our students to think, to connect, to analyze the world around them. It's all well and good that they like a book, or not, but the heart of an English curriculum should be to see that what it means to be human has been written about for centuries and that we are not alone. Also, students should learn how to express themselves coherently and clearly, but that's for another entry.

Day One... Again

2009-09-08T21:29:00.003-04:00

So, today was the first day of school for my students. As usual, I'm teaching all seniors, all day this year, by choice. I have now added AP Lit and Comp to my preps, giving me a large selection of elite students. As I know some of my former, and probably some of my current, students read this, I'm not going to complement or criticize them, though I would like to thank the young women who referred to me as "the Dickens guy" today. It's good to be the Dickens guy.

Observations: first days are weird. Students are nervous, even the seniors, about what are the teachers and classes going to be like and it's hard to get a true sense of how well they will work in class and with each other. Despite the gloominess and negativity of this blog, I remain optimistic about this year.

President Obama spoke today too, encouraging students to stay in school and work their hardest in all their subjects because what might not seem important today, may be tomorrow. No truer words have been said about education. So, let me take a moment to thank those English teachers from my high school days. Little did I know how important their lessons and their passions for literature would be to me, though I still can't stand Thomas Hardy.

Teaching is a lot like a paraphrase of a famous quote from one of my favorite Dickens novels. It is "the best of times," it is "the worst of times." Today was one of the former. See? Good to be the Dickens guy.

A Fond Farewell

2009-06-25T20:10:00.002-04:00

Some call it graduation, but I prefer the term "commencement." It's become cliche at this point to mention that high school commencement is not really an ending, but a beginning, hence the name. It's a time when my students leave me each year to finally go off into the "real" world of college, work, or the military and put to the test all they learned in high school.

I love commencement. It's a happy occasion with tradition and honor that signifies achievement on behalf of students; students who are on the brink of adulthood. They have halcyon visions of the future they hope to achieve and experience and they will learn, with time, that it isn't what they thought it would be, but it's pretty darn good.

For five years now I have gone to commencement. I stand there in my suit and watch the cap and gowned individuals collect a piece of paper that lets them know they are free. Free to choose their own destinies. Free to follow their own paths.

I wish them all the luck in the world. I hope they use all their talents to create the world that they should have, not which is given to them.

Congratulations to the class of 2009.

Relieving Frustration

2009-06-10T20:47:00.002-04:00

I went up to a student today and asked her if she had handed in a paper that would constitute 20% of her marking period grade. She simply replied:

"Nope. I didn't."

No surprise. No begging for clemency as the paper is not accepted after its due date. She got a zero and had no problem with that. Her grade dropped from a B+ to a D with the click of a mouse. She would now have to take my final exam. She didn't care.

That's the one thing that frustrates me still. The unabashed laziness of some students that defies most logic. People told me she probably figured the final exam is easier than doing the paper, so why bother. After all, she's going to college in the fall anyway.

I don't take it personally. I just don't understand that mentality. You work hard all year long to just give up at the end? That attitude is NOT going to fly in college and it doesn't really work for my class, but what do I have to hold her to? Her grades? They don't mean anything anymore. She's in college. They don't really take back admission.

Solutions? None, unless colleges stop admitting students early in the year and just notify them after Memorial Day, or they hold students to a full transcript review at the end of the year. So, in other words, none. Just let them do whatever they're going to do and move on. Five more class days and then on to thinking about the students of next year.

Taylor Mali Explains Teaching.

2009-06-04T11:44:00.002-04:00

Check out this YouTube video. I think it says it all.

http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=107128568335&h=f5hUZ&u=FUrqx&ref=mf

"Stupid is as stupid does."

2009-06-03T17:09:00.004-04:00

It's been a while since I posted and, thanks to an anonymous commenter, here's a new one, finally!

The end of the year is in sight and suddenly the questions begin. Questions like: "Wait, Mr. Ferat, is there anything I can do to raise my grade?" or "Can I have some extra credit to bring my grade up?" Of course, at this point in the year, the answer to questions like these are a resounding "No." Of course, this happens every year, but this year there was something different about the students who asked these questions: they were GOOD students!

Several of my students had accomplished maintaining grades of B- or higher to stay exempt from my final exam -- a standard policy for seniors in my school. Suddenly, in the last marking period, their grades dropped. They stopped working. They stopped caring, as I warned them that their grades were dropping. They started plagiarising -- a sign of laziness in my book. Suddenly they realized that they were going to have to take the final exam and then they would start to whine and ask for favors.

On top of this, they don't think ahead at all. One young woman walked into my class late for the 65th time this year with tears in her eyes. My students were watching an excerpt from a documentary, so she came up to my desk and asked quietly, "Mr. Ferat, am I losing credit for this class?" Her voice quavered. She was clearly shaken by the idea of losing credit and thus not graduating. I told her I didn't know -- I don't take away credit; I just put in the attendance -- but I would check to see if she had more than 15 unexcused absences for my class and let her know. She returned to her seat. At the end of class, after wrapping up a discussion about what they had just watched, I asked my students who would actually be in class on Friday and Monday as this is prom weekend this weekend. (Don't get me started on the issues with that!) The tearful young woman, so worried about her credit for my class based on her attendance, did NOT raise her hand for either day, implying that she would be cutting both Friday and Monday for going to the shore after prom. What were the tears for? Why ask me about her attendance, something she was at least warned about losing credit for, when she was going to cut two more days?

Now I'm not saying teenagers, especially high school seniors, should always be thoughtful and responsible. How can they be? They're teenagers. But to thoughtlessly throw away hard work and effort goes beyond teenage carelessness and angst. It's just stupid. On top of that, where are the parents in all this? My gradebook is accessible online and I send out warning notices, as well as phone calls, for those in danger of severe grade drops and failures. Why do students get away with this kind of behavior?

Complaints and Opinions

2009-05-05T09:32:00.003-04:00

Why do students feel like they can complain and voice their opinions whenever they feel like it? There are times in my class when students are asked to voice, or write about, their opinions of a text or film, but for the most part, whether they LIKE a text has no bearing on the importance of the text or what we are doing with it in class.

At the end of the school year, I teach a "Film as Literature" unit to my senior classes. Every year I get students who vocally complain about black and white films ("I can't tell who's who.") or old films ("I hate anything old. You know, more than five years old."). I tell them I didn't ask for their opinions. This is what we are studying and analyzing for class as we did with the texts we read earlier in the year. This isn't a class based on fun, but if they would open their minds, something might actually get in.

Yes, no book or movie was ever made to appeal to EVERYONE. I even tell them that, but they should understand the importance of these texts or films. There are many reasons why Casablanca is one of the greatest films of all time. The opinion of one 18-year-old girl is not enough to eliminate that importance. In fact, after complaining at the beginning of the film, that girl admitted to liking Casablanca once we had finished watching it.

I guess I'm fed up with my students' sense of entitlement that their opinions matter more than whatever is being taught or studied. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but not to the disruption of other people's desire to learn something. The classroom is not a social setting like one's living room.

Evils of Computers

2009-03-04T10:26:00.003-05:00

Putting aside the irony of that title for a blog post, I want to point out a few things that computers have done to dumb down students.

1.) Because answers are at their fingertips, students click on the first link to come up, take that piece of information, and look no further.

2.) Only the first definition of words are used from dictionary.com

3.) Online assignment logs remove any responsibility from the students for their own work.

4.) Books don't give them information as quickly and require more interaction, so they are seen as tedious and slow. Students have become more resistant to actual reading vs. decoding words on a screen to meet "right answer" needs.

5.) Students assume spell checkers and grammar checkers are actually right, so they just click "change" without looking at what the suggestion is.

Of course, computers have brought great benefits and, when used properly, can make students better than they've ever been. But who is insuring that students actually work with computers as tools as opposed to just believing everything the machine spits out?

The Power of Words

2009-02-23T14:59:00.002-05:00

After watching the Oscars last night -- yes, I watch them -- I was struck by something that came up in a couple of acceptance speeches, particularly in Sean Penn's. Having received the award for playing Harvey Milk, an openly gay activist, Penn proclaimed that it was shameful the way California voted to ban gay marriage and that everyone should be equal under the laws of this country. This brought me to the fact that we don't teach students to pay attention to the meaning of the words they use.

Every single day, my student stand up and pledge their allegiance to the flag and nation of the United States. They recite the following:

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all."

Notice the last phrase: "INDIVISIBLE WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL". The country cannot be divided and provides liberty and justice FOR ALL. Can I repeat myself any more? There aren't any better words for this. EVERYONE is guaranteed freedom and justice in this country, according to this pledge. Are we call hypocrites then? The government certainly is for not sticking to the pledge that its members recite each morning in the halls of Congress. They recite the same pledge as my students.

Such should be the power of words. We say these things and they should be true. It is what we stand for supposedly. But time and time again we contradict ourselves and say "freedom for all... except those people over there." Whether we refer to American Indians, African Americans, Japanese Americans, or homosexuals, we seem to always find some exception.

PAY ATTENTION TO THE WORDS!

The Right to Fail

2009-01-25T09:40:00.003-05:00

What is with education today where every student MUST pass and graduate from high school in four years? If a student does not take advantage of the education OFFERED to him and is given every OPPORTUNITY to pass, then why should he advance to the next grade or graduate that year? What does a high school diploma mean if anyone can get one with less than minimal effort?

I spent my junior year of high school in The Netherlands and witnessed something extraordinary: students CHOSE to repeat a year. I had a friend named Piet who chose to repeat the Third Form (equivalent of Junior Year) because his grades just weren't where he wanted them to be. Because of the multi-level classrooms, he could advance in particular courses that he did well in and repeat the ones he failed in. No one thought this odd. People saw it as RESPONSIBLE.

In this country we tell our kids that all of them can go to college after 12th Grade. It's a "right" of every American to graduate from high school, and, if some student doesn't, it is now seen as fault of the SCHOOL, not the student. Teachers are asked to do all sorts of extraordinary things for students who fail, and I'm not talking about kids with IEPs either. Students are failing at one level, drop them down to the lowest level class. Still failing? Give his parents all the homework, meet with the student after school every day to chekc that he's doing his work, have periodic meetings with guidance and parent, and then round all his grades up to a minimum of a 50. I've seen requests for all this for ONE student, and, like I said, he DID NOT have an IEP. WHY???????

Our students, and I know as a parent I'm probably going to be called out on this some day if my daughter gets in academic trouble, have the right to fail. Education needs to be considered a priviledge and an opportunity for all, but not a given "right". Students need to know that they have to take advantage of the opportunities given them and not take for granted that they will pass as long as they show up 90% of the time.

The 10-Percenters

2009-01-06T15:02:00.002-05:00

I read somewhere, I don't remember where and I know that's not good for citation purposes, that only 10% of the population makes it to the "intellectual elite." The "know more, do more" kind of people that dominate, or at least consider themselves to dominate, our society. These are the well-educated innovators, writer, commentators; the movers and the shakers. The other 90% just plod along the pathway to Death apparently.

Well, I'm starting to believe that statistic. About 10% of my students strive to excel beyond expectations and do their best every time they have something to do, even if they don't "like" the work that's given. The rest just plod along and do the bare minimum to get by. That minimum varies for each student -- the brighter ones tend to still get a B-range grade even for what I would consider minimal work for those students, others just barely pass.

Why is that? Are we, as a species, inherently lazy, unable to strive for better unless pushed, with few exceptions? Hard to believe, but my students are starting to demonstrate it. It's not senioritis. I've seen that monster rear its ugly head enough times to recognize it. It's something more sinister and subtle that percolates through their work when they think I'm not looking. More on this later, as I see what happens.

Something Positive

2008-11-25T11:47:00.002-05:00

Okay, it's been a while and I apologize to the one possible person who has read this blog, though i think I'm still writing to no one out there. I finally have something POSITIVE to say!

Previous rants I have made have pointed out the necessity, in my opinion, to challenge students and raise the bar of expectations, not lower it. I currently have three classes of high school seniors reading Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. For the most part, they love it. How do I know? Not because they tell me, though a few have, but because they are discussing the text OUTSIDE of class! I listen to them as they pack up for class trying to figure out if Mr. Darcy is a good guy or not. A teacher of History in my school came up to me the other day and told me his students were debating issues in the text in HIS class before he started his lesson. They enter my room complaining about the treatment of Jane by Bingley or wondering about the trustworthiness of Wickham.

Are all of them this engaged? Absolutely not. You can't get them ALL, but when one boy lent me the most recent film version of the book because I had mentioned I hadn't seen it, he was excited to be reading it. He told me it's one of his favorite films.

I'll admit I'm a little surprised, mainly because it is a difficult read, but I also expect them to like the book, if not love it. How can they not? It's funny, romantic, has realistic characters, plot twists and people we could all relate to to some degree. Haven't we all thought someone was different than they actually were? Haven't we all been prejudicial at some point in our lives or felt too much pride that got in the way of meeting certain people? Aren't we, as a society, too focused on outward first impressions? of course, we are and Austen throws it all back in our faces in such a fun way, how can one not understand and enjoy this book?

So, with that lovely experience in mind, I put it out there again into the ether where no one will read this: expect more from your students and you will get more out of them.

Responsibility

2008-09-29T09:32:00.002-04:00

What ever happened to student responsibility?

When I was in high school, the teacher wrote the assignment on the board and reminded us about it verbally at the end of class. We had to have our own agendas to write it down and were expected to do the assignment properly and on time. If I got a bad grade, my parents came down on me hard and made sure my work was done properly next time. if I got in trouble for some reason, which didn't happen that often, my parents confronted ME, not my teacher about the situation.

Sure, we didn't have the internet back then to check up on assignments posted there -- I'm getting closer to the age of dirt every day -- but we were expected, certainly by high school, to be able to manage our own work. I haven't had a lot of "bad" students in my time, but I've had a number of them and the parents almost always came to me, the teacher. When did teenagers become so helpless? Sure, there are some students who have certain special needs that may include additional access to assignments, extended time, etc., and those students should receive those modifications, but do they all need them? Isn't this a practice of playing to the lowest common denomonator? Why do parents now demand that their students receive help in everything they do? Isn't this retarding the student from becoming an independent individual when he goes to college?

The "Right" Answer

2008-06-23T09:11:00.002-04:00

As I look back on the past year of school, I thought about why I had a lot of trouble getting many students interested in my subject -- English. I don't mean they didn't do the work -- though some did not -- or that there weren't texts they read that they found interesting -- many commented on the books they enjoyed over the year. They just weren't into the class. Participation was low this year, even in my advanced classes, and the level of involvement with the texts and the class beyond that, the simple "lust for knowledge", just wasn't there. Why?

This is a problem my colleagues and I have puzzled over and I don't think I have one right answer. I'm an English teacher, there are no one right answers, but that's the answer. Confused? Well, here's the thought:

My students are just looking for the right answers to the questions presented to them so they can finish the course and move on. There is no desire to learn for the sake of learning. There is no drive to expand on their own personal knowledge. They just want to end this stage of their lives -- high school -- and move on to the next -- college. Many of them will probably approach college in the same way. They'll take the courses they think are necessary to get their degrees in the subject that they think will get them a job that will make a lot of money. I guess that's their only goal? It's a shame, but as I reminisced about the year, I remembered things students said, not just directly to me.

"Why do I need to read this? It's not like I need to know Shakespeare to go into business."

"Is this really on the curriculum because I hate poetry."

"I get the point of the story. We have to think about the consequences before we make a decision. Okay. What are we reading next?"

That last question is the one I always got, even before we had started the current text. They just want to know what they have to get through to get a "good enough" grade (the level of the grade desired varies per student) to get them out of my class and on to college.

Has it always been this way? Not all my students were like this, but a majority were, and I teach at an excellent public school. There are phenomenal teachers here who are incredibly knowledgeable and teach well too. Have students always just wanted to get through school thinking there was something better on the other side, or is this something new? I remember being in high school and all my peers and I tried to learn as much as we could. We didn't know what waited outside the walls of our classrooms and we wanted to be as ready as possible. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore, or am I just having another ideal shattered?

Giving Students the Benefit of the Doubt

2008-06-08T07:39:00.005-04:00

This idea is really quite simple: don't underestimate your students. Don't pander to their desire to do the minimum possible because then they will not stretch their minds and grow. We, as the human species, achieve our best when faced with adversity, or challenge. Some call this the competitive spirit, but I think it can be a personal experience as well; no one else need be involved.

I have read several articles lately about students not needing to study the "classics" because they can't relate to them. There was even one in which a student claimed that she read SparkNotes instead of the the texts simply because it was more efficient. She could glean the themes, intentions, and plot simply from a couple of hours -- over a few days -- of reading the entry for the text on SparkNotes. Her claim was that this "efficiency" is necessary in a world of business that she and her peers will be entering after graduation. My response is simply this: if you can't master the challenge of reading Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, how do you expect to master the intricacies of the business world? But I digress...

I give my students challenging books. I expect perfection from them and I tell them as much. There is no "you all start my class with 'A's" in my classroom. I tell these high school seniors from day one that I expect them to rise to the challenge that I present and open their minds to new experiences. Some do, some don't. Many of my professors in graduate school told me I wouldn't reach all of my students all of the time. We, the teachers in the classroom, do need to keep that in mind. We should strive to reach them all, but understand that no everyone likes Dickens or Shakespeare. (Why? I don't know, but it is true.)

For example, I introduced Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities a couple of years ago to the advanced classes I teach. Some people told me I was crazy. The book was too long and Dickens' language too "boring" for the students to grasp or stick with through the time it takes to get through the novel. I have taught the text for two years now and it is one of the top liked books in that class. The first time I taught it, about halfway through the book, two of my students left my room discussing the text:

"I really like this book," said one.

"Yeah, I don't get it all, but it's written like how English should sound," replied the other.

Need I say more?

As for the argument of connection, that's just lazy talk. Literature is based on universal themes. It doesn't matter if the protagonist is a French white male in the 18th Century or a Southern black female in the 1930s. Human beings undergo a series of experiences in their lives and the great writers write about them. Our students can relate to them. Sure, none of them are ever going to be medieval Scottish lords, but haven't they all experienced greed? Can't they relate to the idea of making sacrifices for the greater good or searching for love (sometimes in the wrong places)? Of course they can. In fact, they probably relate better than adults do because teens' emotions are so much on the surface -- they feel so strongly about everything -- that they can connect to the emotions and situations portrayed in ANY piece of literature.

I am all for diversity in the English curriculum. I'm not saying we should eliminate more recent authors like Morrison or Achebe at all, but don't sell short the ability of your students to read, understand, and learn from the "classics." You, and they, might be surprised. Students can only reach the level of expectation that we set for them, so we need to set that bar high so that they can achieve more than just the "right" answer on a quiz.