Eduhonesty: Our classrooms are changing dramatically. Reading and reading comprehension have been declining for years. According to the CDC’s National Center of for Health Statistics, births to unmarried women reached 40.2% in 2014, up from 18.4% in 1980.  In some  cities, towns, and rural areas, English-language learner populations are skyrocketing. Fast Facts from the National Center for Education Statistics tell us that nearly one in ten U.S. students now is an English-language learner. According to the U.S. Census, in 1980, 11% of the population spoke a foreign language at home. In 2010, the percentage had climbed to 20.6% — about one in five people. Life-threatening health issues appear to be more common. Epi-pens and asthma training have become annual rituals for school employees. Not only do we have peanut-free lunch tables, we have peanut-free schools. Autism is rising at a seemingly alarming rate, although exact numbers remain impossible to determine due to diagnostic changes and more frequent diagnoses of milder cases. America’s children are getting less sleep, as stories about the rise of childhood obesity and decline of fitness explode across our news channels. Electronics compete with school and family for attention; children sometimes game through the night, and under their desks in the classroom. In urban areas especially, gang-related issues can turn a walk to school into a perfectly good reason to stay home.

We are in a hell of a mess out here and I don’t see how blaming teachers helps anybody.

I have spent the last few days emphasizing that one-size-fits-all approaches do not work for our diversifying student population, while also subbing at a preschool. Alas, the aide who had foot-surgery will return soon, and I will have to move on. I will miss my little nippers. We have been playing together for weeks.

But here are a few observations worth contemplating as we target resilience and mindset: Developmentally-delayed three- to five-year-olds use diapers. The minority who have graduated to underwear cannot be trusted to avoid accidents. Diapers come with the territory. I am going to confess something slightly wacky. I mostly like diaper changes. Some changes no sane person would want to get involved in. How can a cohesive brown substance cover so much surface so fast?  But that soggy, wet waddle? That waddle offers me a few minutes of quiet time to talk one-on-one to a kid. The kids seem to enjoy diaper changes too, most of the time. An adult is taking care of them. The verbal kids happily babble, enjoying being the center of attention.

But almost nobody ever brings the need for a diaper change to my attention. Why stop playing? Clearly, students believe the diaper can wait — almost any diaper. Some students do not care what leaks out or where it goes. No, everyone plays on with the exception of one fastidious girl. She will be potty trained soon. She does not like the feel of that diaper. I honestly don’t think anyone else cares. One boy recently just peed down his leg, making a big puddle on the floor, rather than give up the crayons. He got fresh clothes, but his shoes were soaked, and had been soaked for awhile, I suspect, before I wandered over to watch his quiet, solo play and saw the suspicious yellow puddle. Suspicious is not be the right word. He was convicted on the spot. The snack had been milk and apples.

Pooping is more interesting. (My, this is a silly post, except I honestly think it highlights a truth or two.) Last week, one of the five-year-old trained went in his underpants and just kept playing. I sniffed as we began to get ready for busses. I asked him. He stayed silent. I persisted. He grinned and admitted, yes, he had had an accident. That led to bus craziness as I was forced to abandon bus duties to change all of his lower clothing, borrow pants and clean a pretty large mess. He kept grinning. I guarantee some other students would have been mortified. But not this kid. I ended up triple-bagging that clothing.

A few kids want that turd in the garbage right away. Others would be capable for playing for hours if their teacher had a bad enough head cold. Some are embarrassed. Many are oblivious. A few make calculated choices, as if to say,  “I’ll keep a distance from the adults and finish gym before I deal with this problem.” A few girls have also become self-appointed diaper reporters. One little girl helps so much I am worried. I hope a future teacher works on discretion in tattling. If not, she will struggle socially in elementary school.

Before I ramble on further on this silly topic, I had better make my point :-}. Even in this one small thing, the kids I see daily are so different. If someone was crazy enough to do a study, I suspect they would discover that diaper behavior has various predictive uses. Waddle walkers are messier snack eaters, for example. They are more likely to keep playing for awhile after you sing the clean-up song. I don’t have a large enough sample to assert something this important, but overall they may be happier, too.

With enough pressure, I could make my waddle walkers into fast diaper changers if I tried, I suspect. But why should I subject them to that pressure? As the saying goes, they won’t go to college in diapers. All sorts of verbal messages about how diaper rash hurts just fly past my waddle walkers, even when they repeat my words and ask about them. Those words are still not enough to lure them away from the Lego.

That girl who is reporting all the diaper transgressions? She is going to be an easy student. She works hard and adds many details to her art. That boy who grinned as I ran down people to find me somebody’s extra pants? He’s going to be much more of a handful. He hardly ever starts cleaning after the clean-up song.  If we give them both an identical curriculum presented in a monolithic lesson plan, my girl will outshine my boy almost all of the time, unless maybe the topic is dinosaurs.

Eduhonesty: The Common Core will heavily favor my girl. That’s one reason I am certain we should be moving away from regimented content and instruction. Yes, education classes teach differentiation, but when the curriculum becomes too specific and its time demands too overwhelming, that differentiation can get replaced by an early childhood version of the Curriculum Death March. If you don’t believe me, read the Common Core standards for math for the first grade.

We need to celebrate all our children, not merely the easy and obedient ones. The more we leave teachers alone to work with students placed in their classrooms, the more likely that true differentiation and support will occur. Differentiation and support require time. Fewer spreadsheets filled with superfluous student data and fewer meetings to discuss those spreadsheets would help. The men and women in the field with their boots on the ground should be determining instruction. Our curricular frameworks need to be loosened to meet individual needs.

Because all of these kids are distinct individuals, even the ones who have no idea how to spell their own names.

This post is for readers everywhere:

Let them fail, the wisdom goes. Let them fall down and learn to pick themselves up. Teach them to create positive feedback loops for themselves. Teach them to say, “I will do better next time.” They will develop self-confidence as they keep going and learn they can work to succeed. Let them try, try, try again until they find the path out of the maze.

“Fall down seven times, stand up eight,” the classroom posters say. I like those posters. I believe in standing up. I stood as long as I could, until I finally turned in my retirement papers because I got tired of doing batshit crazy things on the whim of administrators, a couple of whom appeared to be intravenously hooked up to the Kool-Aid. Another required Common Core-based exam for a student testing four or more years below the level of the exam:

Eduhonesty: No. No. No. No. No. Here’s the thing: Some kids will not get up. Some kids will not get out of the maze. If you want to know how a kid can go to school for twelve years and emerge unable to fill out a job application or calculate simple loan interest, I’ll answer that. We gave that kid endless pep talks. We kept telling that kid to try harder. But the corn stalks were too high. The walk was too long. Or maybe gravity just tired that kid out. Whatever the reason, one day that kid went down and never got up again. Maybe he crawled in spurts.

We are willing to acknowledge people can suffer from different degrees of depression. We accept that autism, anxiety and numerous other characteristics fall on a spectrum. Anxiety can be a gnat or a 700 pound gorilla.

Resilience falls on a spectrum, too. Some kids keep standing up, those who believe their positive feedback loops or those who are simply too stubborn to stay down. But we should treat America’s children more gently. Some kids will curl up in the cornfield. They will start playing endless Mortal Combat or Mobile Strike when they get home, and exit education, even if their bodies still occupy desks. After all, somewhere out in the wild world of cyberspace, our students can find a game they can win.

Why always fall down and feel bad, when the right videogame makes you feel like a winner instead?

P.S. As kids get older, other escapes become easy to find. It takes no time to load a bong in the morning. Red eyes and placid expressions greet many middle-school and high-school teachers during their first periods.

“You might be a teacher if you have perfected the staff meeting poker face,” the meme reads.

I posted the meme to my Pinterest teacher board and moved on, deciding to write this post.

I did perfect that poker face, but only at the end. For years, I had spoken up against dumb plans. Sometimes, so many dumb plans emerged in staff meetings that, if dumb plans had been icebergs, Louisiana and much of the Midwest would be underwater.

I sat through so much craziness. Let’s give them more tests from outside firms. Let’s make everybody take the test whether they can read it or not. Let’s make all the classes do the same opening activities, whether students know the activities or not. Let’s all read exactly the same books where the dog dies so we can make valid comparisons between students. (I can already tell you Jackie who just came from India last year will take months of nights to get through that book, which will be fine. Jackie will be learning. But Krystian from Poland will blow the whole assignment off while pretending to read. I could do much better by Krystian if I handed him a nonfiction book.) Here’s a personal favorite: Let’s not try to solve issues during the morning staff meeting because that takes too much time. We will just bring up the issues for solution later. (By whom? When?)

My fellow teachers kept looking at me that last year before I retired, the ones who knew me.* I had been known to speak up, to protest. For years, I’d had the right Principal, too. He listened. I could sometimes stop the madness. But at the end no one was listening, except possibly Lord Vader so he could put another not-a-team-player checkmark by my name. So I shut up. I watched disturbed and even horrified colleagues look at me, as if to say, “Say something!” But what could I say?

Those East Coast written unit tests that my students could not read and always failed had become a fact of life. I got in trouble for substituting another opener for the opener I knew my students could not do. When you grade math papers every night, you pretty quickly know your students limitations. In the meantime, I was required to be rotating groups rather than doing whole group instruction, even if not a single student in the class knew the topic in the common lesson plan. I felt bad for shutting down and leaving my fellow teachers in the morass — although I recognize they were trying to convince me to fall on my sword, rather than taking the chance of falling on their own — but I saw no benefit to impaling myself.

Eduhonesty: That staff meeting poker face is no win for education.

*The district’s attrition rates had reached unprecedented levels and many newbie strangers sat in my meetings. One problem the year I left especially was that nobody remained to tell the newbies where to find useful items that had been buried on stages or in drawers during past years.

P.S. Welcome to my many new readers. This post is an example why I sometimes call this the Secret Blog of Gloom and Doom. I promise it’s not always this gloomy. I’ll try for a funnier post soon.

I was a Social Science major in college, with an emphasis in secondary education. I took as many courses on the American colonial era and westward expansion as I could. This turned out to be wonderful preparation for writing fantasy novels. ~ Rae Carson, Credit to brainyquote.com

I was a social science major, too. I have a B.A. in Political Science, an M.B.P.M. in Business and Public Management, and an M.A. in Secondary Education. Technically, I specialized in high school mathematics, but I am certified or endorsed to teach the whole core curriculum, as well as French and Spanish. I like research. I like reading nonfiction, although I also enjoy science fiction, mysteries and other genre fiction.

Sometimes I wince to read the results of social science studies, though. Here’s one that hit the net a few weeks back.

Study: Teacher Evaluation Scores Linked to Job Satisfaction By Brenda Iasevoli on February 7, 2017 7:00 PM

High performance ratings lead to higher job satisfaction among Tennessee teachers, researchers at Vanderbilt University and the University of Missouri discovered. (Oh, mother help us all. How much money did these guys spend to get these results?) The studies showed high effective ratings in evaluations changed attitudes, causing teachers’ views of their work to improve. Amazingly, the opposite was also found to be true: Low performance ratings led to decreased job satisfaction.

Sigh. Credit Matthew G. Springer, an assistant professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University for these insights. I don’t want to seem too snarky. We have reached the point where common sense seems never to be enough, so we must have the data. I’ll grant that Professor Springer’s work should enable long-overdue discussions to move forward.

Yes, when a teacher has worked nonstop all year to do his or her best, those dings in an evaluation can be a real downer. Some teachers are perfectionists, too. If their Charlotte Danielson rubric numbers average out  to be perfectly acceptable or even good, each lower number of that twenty-one page evaluation may be a personal stab in the heart. There’s almost no way to make a twenty-some page evaluation without throwing in enough average or below average numbers to do some damage. Average is a “C” in the world of education. For that teacher who gave up half or more or every weekend and evening all year, average ratings in various categories across all the many categories may well hurt. Enough of those ratings and the sensitive may say, “Enough. I think I’ll return to insurance claims adjusting for Allstate. At least I was appreciated there.”

Eduhonesty: My picture above applies to students and teachers. Grades don’t determine intelligence, they test obedience.

Here’s another news flash: Grades can also knock teachers as well as students out of the game. Some students respond to ongoing poor grades by redoubling their efforts. Some teachers respond to regular, institutionalized criticisms intended to improve them by saying, “I will work harder.” But some students quit. So do some teachers.

Click for the larger view.

For middle-school and high-school teachers:

Feel free to borrow my picture. If your students ask why they should study and why they would want to go to college, I’d suggest pointing at my picture and saying, “Those were people once, people who got dressed up to go to work every day. His name was Harry. Her name was Sophie. But robots do their jobs now. The only jobs robots can’t take over yet are the ones where you think for yourself.

I like to put those robots on the radar. Kids need to understand that the pound-pound, flip-flip job too often can and will be handed to a machine nowadays. When wages become high enough, McDonalds will put kiosks at the front of the restaurant with one human to run the machines and control for exceptions. Our kids who understand this fact will be better able to see why the college pathway (or the right skilled trades) may be their best and eventually only good choice.

Back to preschool today. If you know the parent of this child, please pass my post along.

I’ll call him “Peter.” He likes Spider-Man. He’s verbal. He can tell you what he likes. If you ask, he will share what he is thinking when he has the words. He’s not quite four, though, and he’s straddling two languages. Communication can be tough. But he’s not afraid to try to talk.

In a public preschool, some children cannot or do not talk. That silence leads directly to interventions providing them with early schooling and early social services. Kids may see counselors, social workers, speech pathologists and other experts as needed. Some kids will receive the whole gamut of services.

Peter’s problems are mostly behavioral. He’s a three-year old bully. He’s a scary, three-year-old bully who does not need a provocation to hit, kick or pull hair. He’s persistent, too. Sit him down for snack and he kicks kids under the table. Put him in a line in gym along the wall and he reaches for a nearby girl’s hair.  The kids shrink away from him. They watch him all the time. In a room where disputes over who-had-what-first are common, the kids leave him alone. If he wants to play house, no one takes a chair or plastic kid out of that house.

The teacher wants him watched throughout the morning and I know why she worries. Somebody should be watching this kid every minute because he is steamrolling through toddlerhood with his fists cocked. He’s not exactly out of control. If he knows I am watching, nothing will happen, unless someone deliberately reaches for a toy he has chosen and, as I said, the kids are mostly keeping a wide distance. He sits down near a girl in the gym and she automatically slides out of reach. He sits down next to a boy and that boy moves his chair as far left as possible, until stopped by the girl next to him. Peter’s fellow students are waiting for the blow to land.

One-on-one with an adult, this boy does well. If he can monopolize his teacher, her aide, or another adult, Peter will play quietly. The room purrs along as other kids go about their business.

A few different thoughts come to mind here:

1. Peter still has at least one year of services and he may learn to manage himself before kindergarten. Mostly, anyway. The Peters of the world seldom abandon their desire to kick. They can and do learn to control that desire in lower-stress situations. If you know parents with a Peter, please encourage those parents to seek help. They may have to push. But behavioral disorders can respond well to interventions.
2. If you have a child in a class with a Peter, it’s time to begin teaching anti-bullying strategies. Now. Don’t trust the teacher to manage. Peter’s already skilled at knowing when adult eyes are looking elsewhere. Your best and main strategy will be avoidance, but learning to speak up and loudly say, “Keep your hands away from my hair!” will help too. In early years, tattling won’t carry much social stigma. “Teacher, he kicked me!” won’t cost a kid socially and should help keep Peter’s feet on the floor.
3. Let’s hope Peter’s family understands that “boys will be boys” does not apply to their boy. Once the kids in class all started watching Peter because he made them nervous, the family had reached the intervention stage. When all the kids in the playgroup avoid a child, that child and his or her family need help.
4. If you are teaching a Peter, try to set aside kindness for him. Peter needs to see kindness and compassion modeled regularly. But (I’m sure I am preaching to the choir) he also must come to understand that kicking is a loser and he will be isolated if he cannot keep his hands and feet to himself.
5. Parents, talk to the teacher before you talk to the administration. Find out how she is managing her challenge. Find out if she feels able to manage the challenge. Ask her what you can do to help.
6. Parents, raise hell with the administration if you must. If your child does not feel safe, you must. Some Peters will eventually require special placements. The teacher in this classroom happens to be strict and alert. She can handle her Peter. But I have seen less safe situations. Unfortunately, some kids should never be handed the scissors, period. Even the wrong-shaped puzzle piece can be a problem.
7. Teachers, keep documenting and sharing your documentation. Yes, I SO know you have a gazillion+ things to do. But the sooner everyone knows that Peter has become an emergency, the better. One problem with our current data and testing frenzy has become the lack of time to work on individual situations. Peter should not get lost as we make our 100th new, required spreadsheet of the year. I absolutely am not criticizing anybody here. I’ve had the where-can-I find-time problem, along with the who-can-I-find-who-will-listen-to-me problem.
8. Hugs to all the teachers out there who are managing as best they can, with love and appreciation for their students, even as they use their week-end to amass their data for the week.

A reply to readers who thought that last post and last project should have had more limits:

I guarantee readers that every high school student in that classroom had watched Maury reveal a daddy or two, or even legions of daddies and nondaddies. One of the saving graces of that classroom — and real frustrations — concerned absenteeism. The class had 35 students, 40 to start until union limits kicked in. On any given day, though, we were likely to have fewer than 30 students. Many knew they were dropping out soon and simply stayed home. I printed copies for 35 but I expected 28.

It’s hard as heck to run group projects in classes like that, and the Maury show helped attendance among other considerations. Kids were excited. Kids wanted to watch the show developing even before presentations. I stand on what I let those guys do. It worked.

Sometimes in urban and academically-challenged areas, you have to do what works. That’s why strict scripting of curricula based on the Common Core represents a step in the wrong direction and a bad idea. Even Jim Carrey might have trouble making the exports of Costa Rica interesting. Some of these politically-correct stories that have been produced by major publishers to teach literature should be marketed as sleep-aids instead of short stories.

In the meantime, yes, my students were America’s children. But I assure readers they had left childhood behind sometime previously. One of my presenters never finished that class. He was arrested and jailed midyear after a gang disciplinary action went wrong and he accidentally killed a friend, He was tried as an adult and then convicted of manslaughter long months later, too many months later. They twisted the system to get him to seventeen years of age before they brought charges. We were a much sobered class by the end of the year.

I loved those kids. This last post brought back many memories. And for all the problems I had trying to teach Spanish to those kids, most of whom had no interest in Spanish, I’d take that class over a Common-Core scripted class or District-Curriculum-Determined class any day.

Eduhonesty: I promise to get back to preschool soon since interest is high.

Continue reading →

This post is for newbies and aspiring teachers, especially those who identify with this picture.(Click on pic for better view.)

Is it in your nature to question what you see? It’s not in mine. I once walked a full block past a rocket on a street corner in Seattle before it occurred to me, “Wait, that’s a rocket!” In no alternate universe am I making my living as a law enforcement officer. When in the middle of a task, I often have tunnel vision. It’s called hyperfocus, I believe, a trait in some people with ADHD.

I nonetheless figured out how to be a teacher. After my first year trying to manage 35 students in my Spanish 1 classes — a probable gang member set off two firecrackers in bottles — I moved to smaller classes, first in an alternative high school and then in middle school, where I entered bilingual education. Here’s my advice for future colleagues and struggling first- and second-year teachers: If the above picture resonates with you, then keep your class sizes down. You will be better off driving 50 minutes to a classroom with 21 kids than you will be trying to manage 32 kids 10 minutes from home. Work with your strengths. My strengths included creativity, flexibility, and a natural rapport with young adolescents. I write quickly. I can adapt materials and even whole chapters without losing my entire evening. But I do best with small classes where I can connect with kids, and see into all the crevices and corners.

Eduhonesty: Less observant educators will find teaching vastly easier and more fun if they can get their class sizes down.

P.S. After the first firecracker goes off, that guy needs to be in the front row for the rest of the year.