School improvement happened today, complete with free coffee and doughnuts. I enjoyed my breakout session on cultural sensitivity. I’m sort of cultural senstitivitied to death by now, as any recent teacher with a bilingual certification might be. We do a lot of coursework that revolves around that topic. But the discussion was invigorating.

What did I learn? America needs more boxes for one thing. The multiracial often feel lost when they have to check the box on all those official forms. The melting pot’s contents are pretty liquid by now. We are often unclear on the difference between race and ethnicity, too, as demonstrated by the very pale fellow from Spain who was told when he first entered the U.S. that checking the “Hispanic” box had been a mistake, he should check caucasian instead. The next time, though, another customs agent told him firmly that caucasian was the wrong box to check since people from Spain are Hispanic. Other teachers talked about the identity struggles of their own children, students with Hispanic mothers and Polish fathers. One teacher pointed out that many of those statistics used to show that certain racial groups are outperforming others are probably flawed by the number of participants picking “white” instead of other options that might also fit.

A musing I never discussed: Another possibility is that America needs fewer boxes. I’m not sure we need our racial boxes. We are using them to provide social remediation for groups that have historically struggled, but we might be better off with educational boxes. The fact that a student’s parents never finished high school is far more important that the ethnicity of those parents. My children are likely to have much more in common with an African-American financial analyst’s kids than they do with a white fast food worker’s kids.

(That last sentence makes me uncomfortable. I am getting sick of all the digs against people who did not enter or finish college. We need to respect the people who fix the sink and deliver our packages. Not everyone belongs in college and some people prefer physical work.)

I understand why we want those boxes. The information’s not useless. But I wonder if the boxes perpetuate the idea that race somehow matters. After all, why would we keep asking people to check the box if race was unimportant? If we ever hope to be a truly racially colorblind society, I believe the boxes will have to go.

My last post talked about the resentment created by having to actually memorize new vocabulary for Spanish class. I want to write a defense of those students later, but for now I’d like to relate a short vignette:

A musing related to yesterday’s Jeopardy post:

Teachers are told to stimulate higher-order, critical thinking, to ask “high-level” questions. It’s in a rubric for teachers that I have here. Students are to be participating and demonstrating “true discussion.” I’ll say upfront that when this discussion happens, teaching’s the best profession in the world. Nothing is more fun than watching students make connections.

Here’s the fact that seems to get lost lately: Students can only do this when they have a body of knowledge to draw upon.

We are not allowing enough time for learning facts. We are even discouraging learning facts, as we teach retrieval skills. Various educational texts now emphasize the need to shift from traditional memorization to fact retrieval. Teaching Spanish this year brought home to me the flaw in that retrieval approach. Retrieval has its uses, but you can’t learn anything without storing it in memory somewhere. Some of our students have reached the point, though, where they don’t expect to have to retain new knowledge. When you send them home with twenty-some words to learn over the weekend, they view that as some incredibly unreasonable burden.

They then say things like, “Maybe I’ll just get Rosetta Stone over the summer,” pretty sure that the magic Rosetta stone thing will make learning Spanish easy. They are looking for the fast fix, the easy out. Only you can’t learn a language without memorizing thousands of words and a great number of concepts as well. But that’s work and many are relatively unfamiliar with academic effort.

Unfortunately, nowadays you can write a paper filled with facts that you never learned and never will learn, all taken from the internet and quoted or rephrased, It’s easy. I wish I could add that many students have become masters at rephrasing internet information, but I can’t. Most don’t have the necessary vocabulary.

How much vocabulary is actually learned by playing Jeopardy? I’m not sure but I do know that kids work for candy. I was flinging sugar all over the place today. The blue and pink chewy Jolly Ranchers are the clear favorites, but Jolly Ranchers are a general win.

The first thought that comes to my mind when we talk about “college and workplace readiness for all” is that “all” don’t want to go to college. “All” will never be ready, although a great many may eventually be able to handle the academic rigors of college. “All” are also less likely to be workplace ready now than they were 10 years ago and the trend is hardly going in the right direction.

I have spent 8 months now in a high school whose vision statement reads “College and workplace readiness for every student without remediation.” It’s not the snappiest vision statement. That “without remediation” takes some of the wind out of its verbal sails. But it’s a sensible enough goal.

This high school is a public, four-year high school  in Illinois, located in a northwest suburb of Chicago. The school has not made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) on the Prairie State Achievement Examinations under the the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Since almost no school is making NCLB targets, this is no disgrace. Many of the best high schools in Illinois have failed to make yearly progress. 

But educational administrators at the high school have locked into the goal of making AYP, especially since job retention is now hinging on score improvement. 

Efforts to make AYP have not improved life for students or teachers. With every class assigning 5 paragraph argumentative essays, those students have been buried in essays at various times. They then often do a substandard job on those essays, a “good-enough” effort to placate their teachers. But student motivation is low and the questions from the gallery are pretty much tailored to figure out just how little effort is acceptable. What will happen if I don’t do it? What will the point value be? How many points can I lose before it affects my grade? Math minutes have shown a similarly potent lack of motivation. Once students discovered no grade would be given, some students began to write any answer that looked plausible and a number of answers that were clearly impossible. At first,  students tried to cheat and use calculators when they weren’t supposed to. Then those same students gave up the calculators, having decided that the answers were irrelevant anyway. A fair number of students did a good job, of course, taking their essays and math minutes seriously. Those students benefited. But for the most part, those were not the students who needed to be doing essays and math minutes.

Something has to be done. That’s certain. Many students are frighteningly far from college and workplace readiness.

But the big problem I see is that we are attacking skills when the problem is actually motivation. With motivation, the skills would come with extra practice. But without motivation, that practice is almost useless and requires a great deal of class time, not to mention the extra time needed to grade over 100 some essays — essays that many students won’t even bother to look at when the papers are handed back. Practice only makes perfect when that practice is taken seriously.

Eduhonesty: To repeat a line from above: We are attacking skills when the problem is motivation.

My fan attacker is almost at the end of his year. He’s learned almost no Spanish, been suspended for a stupid, off-campus attempt at theft in another high school, and is just generally squandering his talent, often with the help of a friend. That friend also ended up suspended, essentially for advising fan-man to get rid of the evidence. I keep having to write them up for talking and other misdemeanors, while they keep wasting my time, their time, and everybody else’s time.

Too much to do! Always too much to do!! I am teaching four different subjects in two different disciplines and I am never caught up. This is my first year teaching these classes.  I spend the nights getting ready for the next day. I spend the week-ends grading papers. I would like to return graded papers the next day, but I have to have instruction prepared first. As it is, I have been cutting sleep sometimes.

Too much to do! Always too much to do!!