Jan 30 2010

Learning While Doing

One thing I’ve found is that when I am doing stations, the first one is the least effective. By the fourth one, I have it wired; what to say, how to explain it. This makes it hard on the students in the first station, of course. If I were the teacher I could stack the first station with the kids who need the least help. Or, God forbid, rehearse it (but where would i find the test subjects). Or just accept that as the way things go.

I do recognize what an advantage long time teachers have, having seen and done pretty much everything multiple times. The challenge there seems to be not getting jaded or burning out.

Jan 30 2010

Personal Challenges

Based on your experience and background, what challenges do you foresee in entering the education profession?

One thing I have learned won’t be an issue is stress from the hectic nature of school. I was standing knee deep in chaos a couple of weeks ago and realized that I had just about gotten to the comfortable operating level of noise and activity that I am so familiar with from trading. I’m not sure that’s a good thing in general, but it does give me great comfort knowing that I won’t break down like Ahnold in Kindergarten Cop. 🙂

Back to the question, there is no particular challenge I see as a problem. I do see a number of areas where I will need to feel my way and be very careful, reflective and flexible as I go.

As I’ve mentioned before, I am still working on discipline. I like an orderly classroom and tend to believe a credible threat goes a long way to preventing its use. But I also believe and have seen the power of positive reinforcement. I’d like to mostly work with carrots but have a (metaphorical) stick handy somewhere, I think.

I do well in class with “boy problem energy.” “Johnny kicked me” is pretty easy for me. But I’ve had several “girl problem energy” situations (“Sally hates me”) which defied all of my normal tools. It’s almost hard for me to describe because it is so alien to me, but I know I will need the extra tools of listening and honoring such a conversation while at the same time not indulging it. And I’ll get better with practice. 

I need to have more numbers between zero and ten. I tend to be more zero or ten as in “This is good”, “This is bad”. I’ll need that both for evaluating my students and, particularly, in discussing those students with their parents. I also tend to have more judgement about those analyses than is productive, meaning I need to have more room for little Johnny to be exuberant or easily distracted or slow to read or whatever. I think an ideal teacher honors where each child is in the class in terms of progress. I tend to have that essentialist impulse to want every child to be where I want them to be.

It’ll be interesting to see how I do in the school social setting. I’ve very pleased with my relationships at my daughter’s school but I’m ‘just a parent’ so the rules and expectations are different. However, I intend to be friendly and cooperative with other teachers and administrators and remember my place as ‘newbie.’

I think that’s about it. My main goal in becoming a teacher is to work with children to prepare them and help them as best I can within the grade level slice I’m given. If I remember that’s what it’s all about, the rest will fall into place, I think.

Jan 30 2010

When Will We Use This? – Part Two

Of course his answer to that might be “Ok, but I’m not interested in earth science”. A further complication is the length and intensity of the course may be a lot if it’s purpose is just to expose students to the subject.

The philosophical progressive, liberal arts premise is that everything is connected to everything else and to be truly knowledgeable and therefore wise a broad body of knowledge is essential. What I don’t know is whether I believe such breadth of knowledge is a luxury or a necessity. (That’s the debate from my other post about making all education about ‘profession’). I also don’t know if a progressive education requires a solid essentialist foundation.

On the one hand, it’s easy to say “Our schools are failing to teach many children to read and write. Let’s put all our resources into that so that they have a basic chance to survive.” That’s certainly a ‘science’ of teaching argument. You have to know inorganic chemistry to learn organic chemistry, or whatever.

On the other hand, the ‘art’ of teaching might argue that the most important thing is for a child to find a spark that lights his or her imagination. Once the imagination is lit, they’ll learn what they need including all the essentials. If the imagination isn’t lit, every day is just like pushing the kids across a carpet face down like a vacuum cleaner.

And that’s the scary part of that second argument. The essentialist instinct has a strong tendency to suck all the fun out of learning. It doesn’t have to of course, but the whole ‘drilling and testing standards’ thing has a mechanical air to it that lends itself to forgetting the flesh and blood. If firing the imagination is key, the harder the system tries to force core learning, the fewer children will retain their inborn love of learning.

I don’t know whether firing Childrens’ imaginations is essential to learning but I have a strong sense that it is a very positive effect on kids of any resource level. I can’t imagine anybody making this argument in a political forum but maybe somebody should be advocating brining the joy and wonder back to education.

You said you aren’t that excited about earth science yourself. Maybe the best way to help that kid is to find something in the subject that does excite you and share it with him. I’d be curious if it helps.

Jan 30 2010

Budget Cuts, Part 2

There are so many contradictory ideas in how we run our schools. The idea that they can make kindergarten a half day must be based on a belief that kindergarten is like it was 40 years ago: just play and art and getting used to the school environment. That’s not a bad idea to have kindergarten be that way but somewhere since I was a kid the powers that be changed the rules. Today, kindergarten is like first grade used to be. The standards include significant achievements in math and reading/writing. Kindergarten today is a critical foundation for the rest of elementary school. But there’s no way those skill get taught in half a day, certainly not unless the kindergarten schedule gets very, very academic. So suddenly, even kids who have a chance to be prepared for first grade aren’t.

I was talking to a friend this morning. He’s very much the ‘pillar of the community’ type, yet he brought up the idea that all this may well drive significantly more people to homeschool. Private school is tough because, as you mention, this all comes at a time when private financial resources are tight too. What’s particularly sad about that is the area where the school system is failing children most systematically is in low SES areas. It seems to me that families in such situations have the least options. In many cases neither homeschooling or private school are options. They’re stuck with what public school provide.

I believe government generally does a pretty mediocre job at what it does. I’m ok with that. It’s usually better than the alternatives and it’s the nature of big, political organizations. But this situation, if it plays out as threatened, seems like one that’ll be much worse than mediocre. That’s bad enough on the face of it but when I consider that this is kids lives we’re discussing, like you, it makes me very angry and sad.

Jan 30 2010

Computers

If we follow the essentialist instinct to its extreme, there may be substantially less need for teachers. Let’s say the powers that be can define a set of standards for required knowledge and make those standards concrete (i.e. no “well rounded individuals” verbiage and even concepts like ‘problem solving’ are expressed in operational terms). If that is the case and if adhering to those standards is deemed sufficient, than much of what is today done by teachers can be drilled by well designed computer programs. Spelling, vocabulary, math and other objective subjects could be easily computerized. Writing, lab science and some parts of foreign language would be more difficult. But there is a big chunk of day to day teaching that -could- be automated, if society was so inclined.

There are even some areas where computerized training is superior to (or anyway a useful addition to) real world training. Training soldiers, police, first responders and medical personnel on simulators makes a lot of sense due to the costly nature of real world mistakes. However, training grown professionals serves a very different societal function than primary or secondary school. On the other hand, I’ve written elsewhere here about the possible need for more drastic approaches towards changing a system that seems to be failing in major areas in major ways. Perhaps this possibility of widespread computerized intervention will be a good catalyst for change and result in superior integration of humanist and essentialist goals.

Jan 30 2010

Budget Cuts?

Our daughter is lucky enough to go to a relatively well-funded school with solid PTA support. She’s had 19-21 kids in both her kindergarten and first grade classes. The district is talking about increasing class size from 23 to 30. If they really do put that many children into kindergarten or even first grade, the math is devastating. 

Right now, for stations, the children are separated into four groups of five children. They do two station rotations a day, 20-25 minutes a station. There’s one adult (teacher, TA plus parent) in each of three stations plus a free play station. One full set of stations takes roughly 80 minutes.

Thirty children is five groups of six kids. So there’s 50% more kids in each group and one more station. One more station is an extra 20-25 minutes twice a day (40-50 minutes total) plus the adult’s attention is spread over 50% more students. It’s hard to see where the extra 80 minutes will come from so we’ll need to either double the number of kids in each group (four sets of eight kids) or do only one set of stations per day or drop something else from the day’s schedule. Whichever, the students lose a lot. 

In addition to the grim math above, there is the challenge of children of different abilities and/or starting points. In the groups I run, there’s typically one child who’s breezing through the activity, several who are struggling with the task and/or perhaps one or two who are tuned out or disruptive. Just getting through the activity with everybody getting the core lesson is no picnic with five students. It is hard to imagine reaching the same progress levels with eight or even six children.

The studies we’ve read say that class size is one of the major determinants of learning success. I can see why. And my guess is that the situation I describe above is relatively luxurious compared to districts with more challenging financial situations. Those districts may already start with these larger class sizes before the budget cuts. It’s hard to imagine where major cuts would leave them…

These same threats we made prior to this school year and the district somehow found a way to avoid substantial cuts in Amelia’s education. I hope they find a way again, because what’s being discussed would be a substantial blow to the educational output of these schools.

Jan 30 2010

When Are We Going to Use This?

That’s a darned good question your student asked: “When are we going to use this?”

There is a conceit implicit in philosophical progressivism that a “well rounded education” is a foundation of a ‘full’ or ‘rich’ life. Like most philosophical progressive beliefs, this one seems buried quite deep in our structures and our educational goals. Isaac Asimov wrote a short story many years ago the name of which I can’t remember which has as its premise that all of a future society’s educational efforts were directed at discovering the ideal job for each individual and training them for that profession. There is something in our national belief system which is intensely uncomfortable with such a process. Perhaps it’s the “All men are created equal” thing. But ‘all people are equal’ means in this usage that no one is ‘better’ or more ‘worthwhile’ than another, not that we are all the same. There is an belief in our society, implicit or sometimes explicit, that life has a starting line and what we are entitled to is an ‘equal start’. But the ‘race’ described seems to be towards a particular, narrow definition of success, the “American Dream”: to become wealthy and successful. These three, usually unspoken, assumptions keep us stuck in our educational philosophy, a philosophy that is leaving quite a few kids behind.

Sorry for being long winded, I’m thinking as I’m writing to some extent. The point that I’m working towards is that it is possible to imagine an entirely different school system, one built on Asimov’s vision of finding the truth of each child and preparing them individually to be successful in their livelihood and their life. This cuts against several strong cultural biases, but those biases are ones that could stand some scrutiny. In Japan, for example, it is believe that every employee from the janitor to the CEO is equally valuable, they just have different jobs. There are some cultures that place spiritual ‘success’ as the highest goal and view material success as in impediment to spiritual achievement. It’s really not such a long journey, but as a culture we’d have to become ok with the idea that fulfillment is a higher and more realistic goal that preparation for a race that, by definition, only a few can win.

Back to your student’s question, I agree with you, needing to know it to graduate is a weak and alienating answer. Our students deserve a better answer. I think it’s assumed in the elite circles where these things are decided that ‘in the long run’ the value of such education will be clear. But two things are true. One, it does no good to hold this as a pedagogical goal if by having it as a goal we drive many children from the system before they get to ‘the long run’. Two, it is far from clear that many of the things we teach will be useful to many of the students. It may be that the ‘long run’ assumption is wrong.

I have a vision of thousands of kids standing in front of the Board of Education holding signs saying “Teach us something useful!” That’d get the conversation started!

Jan 30 2010

Oops, Evolution!

Ok, having just commented on religious holidays, it’s time to move on to creationism. Apparently it is my day to live dangerously. 🙂 All the caveats of my prior post apply, especially that I mean no offence and that my motives are purely academic. 😉

To leave creationism and evolutionism completely out of school discussions is a powerful null curriculum.

Personally, I think elements of our society have taken both sides of this controversy to untenable extremes. Science is about hypotheses and the constantly evolving understanding of the universe. The exploration and discovery of nature (of which evolution is a part) is an unending process. Discussing the evolution of evolutionary theory is a fascinating and wonderful exploration of sciences at its best (and most dramatic). Yet, some of the evolutionists make Evolution into its own kind of religion, a dogma. On the other hand, religion is about faith. Faith is believing things that can’t be proven. That’s fine. But things that can’t be proven can’t be taught as fact in a secular curriculum. Having said that, creationism does have its place in the discussion of nature. It is a powerful social meme and we have a rich social history of the tension between the two poles. In fact, it is a brilliant teaching opportunity, ripe with nuance and knowledge.

My very favorite part of the story is that the science text John Scopes used to teach evolution (Hunter, 1914) contained a number of ‘scientific’ conclusions about the relative inferiority of various ‘races’, which it also defined, and the ‘benefits’ of eugenics. Really, it’s breathtaking the number of wonderful lessons this controversy contains. By teaching this story, we can teach the distinction between faith and knowledge. We can teach the nature of ‘knowing’. We can teach the evolution of science. We can teach how culture interacts with science. We can teach knowledge and the nature of living a faith-based life. It is an enormous loss to society that we mostly choose to include this in the null curriculum. Doing so is a kind of de facto censorship and it serves and honors no one.

As with religious holidays, in a school environment I would tread lightly. But, unlike religion as a whole or religious holidays as extension of religion, this controversy has its roots in tangibles that can be examined and discussed. As in all things, there is room for like minded individuals to disagree at the end of the discussion. But those from either extreme who seek to close the conversation are violating one of the core principals of liberal, democratic society dating back 2,500 years.

To me the discussion should not be if it is taught but how it is taught.

Reference

Hunter, G. (1914). A civic biology: presented in problems. New York, NY: American Book Co.

Jan 30 2010

Oops, Religion

I wouldn’t normally stick my nose into a discussion of religion but we do have a participation requirement and this topic is interesting to me. Please understand I mean no offence and that I am commenting purely out of academic motives (pardon the pun).

I certainly agree that religious instruction has no place in public education. On a very basic level, the separation of church and state in the constitution means that there is no ‘public’ religion to be instructed and therefore any religious instruction is an intrusion.

Having said that, my personal belief is that respecting differences (which I agree with very much) is more about allowing each to have their own. In a public environment, it seems unfortunate to me to allow what is permissible to be defined by what no religion prohibits. This is an odd definition of tolerance, tolerating being imposed upon by another’s beliefs. As a parent, I would prefer if schools simply let families opt out of events and occasions they find religiously (or otherwise, for that matter) problematic. On the other hand, I am eager to have my daughter learn the traditions of other cultures and religions in school. This makes her more worldly and more tolerant. After her Presbyterian pre-school burned down in the 2008 fires, they were housed in the local Jewish center for a year. There they could only have kosher lunches and they joined in the Shabbat celebrations on Fridays. It was great!

One of the side effects of this aspect of the first amendment is that the government is mostly not even allowed to make judgements about what is a religion. This being the case, the circle of who can outlaw what in a classroom becomes very wide indeed. Pretty much anybody who wants to call themselves a religion has the right to an equal legal voice. Typically, religious celebrations are about the nature of life, its joy and its sadness. To move through the weeks as a school community without them (with all of them) would be very dull and oppressive. It also becomes a null curriculum of a kind – teaching the students that some things can’t or shouldn’t be discussed.

Anyway, I trust I haven’t given offense. And as a teacher I would step MUCH more carefully, including considering the option of avoiding certain concepts, events or activities if necessary.

Jan 30 2010

Ratey’s Spark

I am always interested when schools cut programs to place resources into ‘core’ curriculum. The research I have read pretty uniformly suggests that time spent on arts, music and PE improves core learning results versus just spending more hours on the core subjects themselves.

With regard to PE specifically, there is a fantastic book from a couple of years ago (Ratey, 2008). It makes an extremely strong and results based claim that aerobic exercise improves learning. Such exercise is obviously generally good for student health. But fascinatingly, it appears to balance brain chemistry as well, promoting psychological and emotional health. That’s something we could all use a little more of I’m sure. 🙂

Anyway, it has certainly made me a strong advocate of aerobic PE in my daughter’s school. Her PE teacher read it too and now he’s implementing some of the modifications to standard PE class to make it more aerobic and individually targeted.