“All the information is out there on the internet,” education instructors and administrators say. “We need to teach retrieval skills, not just facts. We need to teach students critical thinking skills, not just facts.”

But critical thinking skills only work when a person has a certain number of facts at their disposal to put into some sort of framework. That information on the internet is only useful within a framework. In language, the framework is called grammar. We have been moving away from teaching grammar. It’s not much fun, for one thing. I also suspect that we’ve reached the point where many of our elementary school teachers don’t know basic grammar.

In language studies, a formidable amount of new vocabulary comes packaged with unavoidable and often unfamiliar grammar. Since many districts now teach almost no grammar in elementary school, accordingly, many high school freshman and sophomores (plus a few juniors and seniors) cannot identify a subject and verb, much less a direct or indirect object. All first year foreign language classes run up against these problems, and foreign language teachers often become grammar teachers, filling in the blanks for students who don’t understand the basic structure of language.

(If you doubt that last statement, check with your school district. I was entertained in a staff meeting a couple of years ago when speakers brought up the greater success of local Catholic schools at state standardized testing. The pundit who had been trying to tease out the Catholic advantage told us, “One thing they do is teach grammar. That seems to help their students on the test.” A few teachers around the room expressed surprised, grammar being so old-school and out of fashion. The rest of us sat there thinking, “Duhh.”)

The current retrieval/critical thinking approach to education has various flaws. While I am not objecting to teaching information retrieval and critical thinking — vital components for today’s students without doubt — I think teachers and others should stand up for grammar.

If we are going to teach writing — and we do — then we ought to teach more grammar. If you’re reading this blog, on some level you know English grammar You can put words in an order that makes sense with endings that tell where you are in time. But if we want our students to develop critical thinking skills, one place we might start is with the structure of language itself. Do we need formal instruction in grammar? Probably not. Most of us probably don’t need algebra either.

But if we want to develop critical thinking skills, we need to learn to break down how processes work. We need to understand how the parts of processes fit into the whole. What better place to work on developing this understanding of processes than the English language itself?

Retrieval can be a gateway to learning. But our students have to open the gate. They won’t do that by cutting and pasting facts into word documents.

We rely on our machines to provide us with answers. Educational administrations love Smart Boards and computers, IPads and graphing calculators. All these tools have a place and, please, don’t get me wrong: I love technology too.

But learning is grittier than that. Learning requires mental sweat. Learning requires a time commitment. Before anyone can think critically, they need to gain knowledge and marshal facts to form their arguments.

I can’t put the fault on district difficulties. I am the one who took another position in another district, changed to high school and changed subject areas. But if we are addressing poor schools, I ought to add that while my primary motivation was to change subject areas (and to get out of a school where the classroom temperatures were regularly in the mid-eighties and above in the fall and spring), I also wanted more money. When personnel in the new district called to tell me my new salary, I felt positively elated. My husband, who had been wondering if I should change positions, immediately leapt on board with this latest job offer. If I had been younger or in serious need of money, I might have left for the money a few years ago. That’s a huge problem poor schools face. Turnover will always be high when driving 8 more miles can result in a pay increase of over 25% in a more inviting physical space.

I have seen many young, talented teachers put in their first year or two in our poorest school districts only to move on to much better positions in academically-advantaged suburbs. Our poor schools are often just training grounds, subject to constant turnover. Of the eleven or so new teachers profiled in the school newsletter from when I started four years ago in my last district, I believe two are left.

“Miss, the boys dood something bad.”

They dood, dood they?

I don’t correct her directly. I just put that word “did” somewhere in the next sentence. She’s a talker and, for a language learner, that’s a good thing.

She’s also quite an artist. I love Mochi. If “the purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls,” as Pablo Picasso once said, I expect Mochi to live out her life with a shiny, dust-free soul.

Teaching is one way to help a young adult understand (or try to understand) the following:

“To see a world in a grain of sand
A heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
and eternity in an hour.”

~ William Blake

My girl is busy planning her lessons for next year. I am not. I would plan my lessons but every single year of my last four years in my district, I have found myself teaching different grades and/or subjects. I suspect I will teach 8th grade language arts and social studies, but I can’t be sure.

This is a subtle cost to being part of a poor district that sees constant personnel changes. I won’t do a lot of work before fall because for all I know I’ll end up teaching 7th grade science and math instead of the English and social studies I taught this year. Two of four of last year’s bilingual teachers will be gone next year. (At four years, I am an old timer.) Who knows whose role I will fill next year? For all I know, I will be a resource teacher without a classroom.

P.S. Actually three of the four bilingual teachers were gone.

P.S.S. The following year, I left the district. The year after that I came back. At that point, nobody familiar was working in the bilingual department. They are all strangers now.

“Many people love falsehood. Few love the truth. Because falsehood
can be loved truly, but truth cannot be loved falsely.”

~ Rebbe Yaakov Yitzchak of Peshischa

It’s easy to love the falsehood that all we need is to work harder and raise the bar. Such falsehoods persist because few love the truth — that many of our students are years behind grade level and, at least in the short-term, that cannot be changed. While it is remotely possible to pack five or more years of academic learning into one year, that will never happen in a standard classroom. The intense instruction required cannot be accomplished within the constraints created by that classroom — especially when we “raise the bar.”

America’s lowest-scoring students need easier books they can actually read. They also need more time in school. They need longer school days, shorter summer vacations, and more time spent on academics during the evening. We can raise the bar, lower the bar or or do a pole dance with it. It won’t matter unless we find enough time to help our students learn what they don’t know.

If they are far enough behind, it’s nothing but fiction to think the fix can be accomplished in a regular school year. For one thing, those higher-scoring students in healther and/or wealthier districts are learning faster than their disadvantaged counterparts. The studies show that reading is the best predictor of academic success and also influences the rate at which students learn. Better readers learn more — and they also learn faster.

Our disadvantaged students take longer to learn, in large part because of reading deficiencies. If we want those students to catch up, they need to put in more time than their more-advantaged counterparts. To give an example, let’s say I am teaching chapter five in an astronomy book. If my academically-advantaged students can read and understand the chapter in eight hours, and my disadvantaged students need fifteen hours, then the only way to keep these groups even is to find the extra 15 – 8 = 7 hours my lower group needs to make it through chapter five. There is no substitute for that extra seven hours.

Raising the bar is likely to hurt that lower group of students, too. Let’s say we hand these students a harder book. Now the advantaged group needs 10 hours to get through chapter five of the astronomy book while the disadvantaged group needs nineteen hours.  The lower group now needs an extra 9 hours to be caught up to the higher group. Only that “extra nine hours” does not exist.There may be a few hours of afterschool tutoring available, but that tutoring generally will be for math and English since those are the areas will most benefit test scores.

That raised bar just smacked my students in the head..A lot of newly-raised bars are dealing similar blows. Many kids can’t jump over the bars we have now. To quote Stephen P. Crawford, superintendent of the Byng school district in Oklahoma, “It’s the same principle as asking kids to jump a bar one foot off the ground and providing no exceptions for children who are in a wheelchair” (Quality Counts, 2004, http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/special-education)

How crazy is all of this? Because the placement of the bar has never been the problem, moving the bar is asinine solution.

I believe I had an insight today. An earlier post (May 18th) talks about a special education student who has been having problems in my class. A couple of boys have picked on him. I noted that he has poor social skills, a contributor to the problem.

But I think I have teased out another factor. This kid is so very low, effectively unable to read and write. That makes him noticeably lower than all the kids in the class. Unfortunately, a couple of my boys have probably been waiting for years to have someone below them on the academic ladder. I have students reading at a first and second grade level in this seventh grade class. It’s no surprise that my special education student’s problems have come from that group. The sad fact is that when you have been feeling dumb since early elementary school, finally having the chance to make someone else feel dumb probably has great appeal.

It’s kind of sad when the teacher goes to weather.com to check the wind direction before going to school. I’m not actually sad, though. The wind is from the North and ends from the NW — solidly good for me even if the sun may unfortunately be blazing away through my wall of windows.