I like this title. As China seems poised to take over the United States economy, I pause to consider the fact that the Chinese may well be better fit to run this economy than we are. I don’t see that situation changing in the near future.  Certainly, much of the world is producing better educational results than we are.

One reason for this is that we don’t drill. We don’t drill our students and they don’t remember what we allegedly taught them. Our students do some fun activity or group project to learn a new concept. They maybe even take a quiz or test, though we often substitute projects for tests now, and then these students move on.

The next year many of them have to start over. People don’t retain information they seldom use. Phone numbers provide a perfect analogy. If I need to call the plumber a few times during a month, I’ll know his number for a few months. By next year, though, I’ll need to look that number up because the number did not quite make it’s way into long-term memory. I see this happening with so much academic material that is lightly glossed over as educators hurdle from topic to topic to try to fit in all the state/common core standards.

On the weekends for example, Chinese children have eight times the amount of homework of American children.  Beginning in elementary school, the two countries greatly vary in amount of time performing academic tasks; in US classrooms 5^th grade students spent 64.5% of their time on academics, while Chinese students spent 91.5% of their time on similar tasks.  Moreover in the US, children were found to spend 20% of their time at school outside of the classroom, while in China they were rarely observed in other non-mandatory tasks (Stevenson et al., 1986).”

Here’s the thing: Worksheets are definitely a dirty word in modern education classes. We no longer drill students. They no longer remember what they learned last year, either. These facts are not unconnected.

Snapshot from ISAT prep in the spring of 2011: We are doing a math review to get ready for the state test, plodding through earlier material. I had a real epiphany one afternoon when we were plotting points on a coordinate graph. I’d done my best to get my points across when we first covered this material in the fall, even going so far as to jump up and squat down when showing what the x’s and y’s do. I had them jump. I showed them the helpful posters on the wall which they could use to remember how to plot points on the ISATs. We had spent some time on the topic and they’d all done pretty well on the quiz and test.

Six months later, many of them had forgotten what to do.

“We did this,” I said. “You knew this.”

“That was a long time ago,” one girl answered and the class chimed in their agreement.

The idea slammed home to me that I had obviously not given them enough homework. That information on points had never made the journey to long-term memory. They knew the information for weeks. The test was some weeks after the quiz. But by spring, the steps to putting a point on paper had been lost by a fair number of students.

I blame myself. But I also blame current pedagogical practices. Teachers are taught to avoid the lowly worksheet. They are taught to avoid boring, repetitive material. Worksheets are so out of fashion, so associated with a time when children sat in rows. Those children read, did the questions at the back of the chapters, and then started the next chapter. I grew up in that time.

I’d like to observe that the literature suggests that our children learned more during that time and maybe not all the difference in learning can be explained by demographic changes. Worksheets are not fun. Worksheets do work, however. They are especially effective for visual learners with good reading skills. They also often improve reading skills.

I should have given that class more worksheets. If they needed to plot 2,000 points to remember how to plot points, they should have plotted those points. I had cheated those students who regularly did the homework by not giving them enough homework. Those students with sketchier homework performance would also have benefited, even if they only plotted 500 or 1,000 of their points.

I have heard many math teachers complain how little their incoming students know. “How come they can’t add fractions?” They ask. A principal once told me that he thought the elementary teachers were not teaching the material. But I’ve talked to elementary teachers who tell me all about the fun ways they have found to teach fractions. A lot of these methods involve eating candy, pizza and pastries.  I’m sure the kids love “fractions.”

I’m also sure that many students enter seventh grade where I work having forgotten how to actually add, subtract, multiply and divide fractions. In the short term, they learned what to do, but that material did not transfer over into long-term memory. The idea of a fraction crossed over into their memory, but the actual methods needed to manipulate the numbers disappeared.

I’d like to put in a strong vote for more worksheets, despite all the literature that favors fun, hands-on activities instead. My fourth grade teacher handed worksheets out like the candy we hand out now. Every day he handed out problems that filled the page. My math class was pretty dull compared to math in 2011. But almost everyone in that class entered fifth grade knowing how to add, subtract, multiply and divide fractions.

Fun can get out of hand. Many students require more repetition to remember a new idea than they actually receive. Liberal use of worksheets could help address this problem. As it stands, we reteach and reteach and reteach. Why not do it right the first time?

The part that’s really nuts: Because of the gun threat, I get to leave on time, which almost never happens. I’m really happy, too, since this means I will have enough time to do all my homework for my continuing education class and still get my sleep. When your response to a gun threat is to be grateful for a free afternoon and evening to read and write about linguistics so you can make a 6-something train to a four-hour, Saturday class, you’re living too damn hard.

For that matter, I scared the lunch ladies for sure last week. I was down in the cafeteria trying to fix the lunch tickets. Almost every kid I have gets free breakfast and lunch, but their paperwork is often screwed up. For one thing, many of the bilingual students’ parents can’t read the paperwork — in English or Spanish — and the illegals don’t want to fill out paperwork sometimes, even if they can read it. So I am in the lunchroom and I can’t do what I need to do. I whirl around in indignation to stalk back to the classroom.

I whirled too fast. It had been too hot in this school with no air-conditioning. The next thing I know, I am sliding down a convenient wall, breaking my fall. The lunch lady runs to the nurse. The security lady hugs me and tells me about Jesus. My assistant principal arrives and HE hugs me, telling me that I can have a mental health day if I need one. Lots of fuss and commotion over this near faint.

Bless the security guard. There wasn’t much I could do except hand the situation to Jesus. It was sure out of my control.

I am living too hard.

Friday we go into Code White, a lock-down. Not a drill. Some kid was apparently bringing a gun to school, planning to kill some other kid. I spent a few minutes afterwards comforting a security guard who was unraveling because she had realized that a number of students, including the intended victim, had known this might happen.

“What was he thinking?” she said. “He knew this was going to happen and he came to school.” The guard’s eyes were filled with as-yet unshed tears. I told the guard what the lunch lady told me when I collapsed in the lunchroom last week: “Hand it to Jesus.”

I was in gym when the lockdown occurred, picking up straggling students. Then I got to spend a long hour trying to quiet students in the gym, often without success. The students had all been expecting a championship soccer game and they were thoroughly amped up.

We have had too many drills, too. Code White has lost most of its credibility. I nonetheless got a few bodies out of line of the doorway, since my take was an intruder might start shooting there, taking advantage of the cover provided by the stairs and dumpsters.

Finally, the drama was over and we were released from lockdown. Afternoon activities were cancelled. I called off my three afterschool detentions for tardiness. I couldn’t coordinate with students since not all my kids were in gym, so no one ended up with weekend homework.

Academics lost this week.

One reason the world should be kind to teachers is that this job is far tougher than most people realize, especially in poor and urban school districts. I watched almost no recreational TV during the last school year, cutting sleep sometimes in order to be ready for the next day. Lesson planning happens in the evening, grading happens, and phone calls home may punctuate these efforts. High school teachers sometimes have more than 150 students to manage and that management takes skills that only develop with time, time that some would-be teachers never receive. Excessive flexibility doesn’t work in a poor or urban school because the kids generally need a great deal of structure — but, without flexibility, the challenges that these schools and their students pose can prove overwhelming.

I remain amazed that I survived my first couple of years. They walked on me like I was the family room rug. Fortunately, we liked each other. I survived, but many don’t.

Almost half of teachers leave the field after just five years, according to the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. After having dedicated years to the teaching dream, these teachers walk away, abandoning their chosen career despite the many thousands in college tuition that someone paid toward their degree(s). In some cases, the career abandons teachers as supervisors write negative reviews and destroy any possibility of being rehired.

Eduhonesty: This career can be one of the most stressful careers on the planet. A teacher’s performance reviews are based on the behavior of children. Behavior in schools has become steadily more distressing over the last few decades.

I think I like having a top-secret blog. I may have to reveal its location to someone but I’ll get around to that later. In the meantime, science fair work is almost over. Zombieland has zombie rules. I think I’ll create some Science Fair rules:

1) No forcing food into the blindfolded student’s mouth.
2) Be gentle when putting clothespins on noses.
3) Don’t even think of trying to open the spotty petri dish.
4) Try not to leave what you are supposed to observe in the classroom over the weekend. Some things rot.
5) If you are supposed to bake cookies, do not bring Soft Chewy Chips Ahoy cookies.
6) If I have to microwave the Soft Chewy Chips Ahoy cookies, you have to eat them. We have to do something to these cookies so you can write up your “experiment.”
7) You can’t have a sharp knife at school. Cut the apples at home. If you don’t, don’t whine about the plastic, serrated butter knife.
8) If you test the effect of a hot and cold room on classwork performance, you have to remember which assignment you gave on the cold day and which assignment you gave on the hot day. It’s important.
9) I will explain and re-explain this mysterious thing “the conclusion,” but at a certain point you just have to wing it.

I am told the average ACT score for the high school in the district where I work is 15.2.  Ummm… I think you get twelve just for breathing. So many bodies parked in so many desks for so many years  — What went wrong?

This is where the blog begins. It started on another site and has just been moved during this summer of 2013 to its own website. I have blogged mostly for stress relief without regard for an audience. It’s time to share, though. It’s a mess out here. I believe I may be watching the beginning of an educational apocalypse.

That said, if any reader decided to start at the beginning of this blog, I’ll note that some posts that follow are actually rather funny. Teaching is often funny. Teaching is often fun. I live teaching. I only think about the lurching bodies of mindless students in the dark of  night, mostly after another administrative demand sucked still more of my students’ lives away.

Eduhonesty: After a decade of furious government intervention, we have screwed up America’s schools so thoroughly that the whole Marvel League of Superheroes probably cannot rescue us.