(Spoiler alert for The Walking Dead.)

The pot’s about to call the kettle black. I am hardly the person to protest zombie shows. I watched The Walking Dead until a few screaming nightmares made me decide to find viewing alternatives. I am watching Fear the Walking Dead because I got sucked in by the first few episodes. I am waiting for the return of Colony, too. Post-apocalyptic, end-of-the-world drama happens to be a favorite genre of mine.

So I’ll confess to feeling hypocritical as I write this post. But I am concerned at the number of students who seem to be watching with me. As I tried to explain a lesson while substituting for a drama teacher, I needed a common reference point. I tried a few current shows. Nope. Then I went straight to Fear the Walking Dead. I know from experience that if a teacher wants to share TV viewing moments with students, The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead are great launch points — or gangplanks if you choose. Connect! My student and I discussed character motivation. What did Victor see in Nick? Why? What was Victor’s motivation in saving the Clarks? Why as actors would we want to know these background details? How might the backstory affect our performance?

But I am talking with 7th graders here. I was talking with 8th graders about the same show last year, lamenting with a favorite student the probable death of a prescient bit character. Within the middle school demographic, these are popular shows.

Are parents watching these shows with their children? Are they aware that the romantic, heroic and popular Glenn was just graphically beaten to death with a barbed-wire-covered baseball bat, while his beloved Maggie watched in helpless horror? TV shows shape children’s worlds. What visions of the present and future are we sharing with our children? Or worse, not sharing with our children?

Eduhonesty: How many children in America watched Glenn die? I shudder to think. The Walking Dead is the No. 1 series on TV among 18-to-49-year-olds.  Over 12,400,000 people viewed the episode shown during the last week in October, many of them younger than 18. Among other sources, Walmart and Amazon sell “Lucille,” the barbed-wire covered bat pictured above.

What are our children and students watching? With all the electronics scattered throughout houses today, parents must remain especially alert. If fifteen-year-old Aidan is babysitting nine-year-old Trent, I would not want them both viewing Glenn’s horrific death. I loved Preacher last season but, readers, if your child or your students are watching the show, I suggest you take in a few episodes. Or go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preacher_(TV_series) and read the content of those episodes. “Gore, glee and guile,” as Rotten Tomatoes says, captures this clever, funny series in a few words.*

At a certain point, we all have to let go and let our children immerse themselves in Criminal Minds if they choose to do so, but I wrote this post because I think the sheer volume of content out there sometimes overwhelms efforts to select viewing choices for children. I also think teachers might sometimes want to step into the gap during conferences or phone calls to say, “Mike certainly does talk about The Walking Dead a lot.” Mike may be watching his favorite shows privately to avoid upsetting his parents, for one thing, streaming content onto his laptop in his room.

The “What are your favorite shows?” conversation should happen regularly today, at home and even in classrooms. At home, the “You have to make sure your little brother does not see that show. It’s too scary!” conversation may have to follow. I have had too many students ask me, “Do you think zombies are real, Ms. Q?”, followed by the question, “But what if the virus got loose. Then could there be zombies?”

Young kids don’t understand chemistry and medical limitations, but they are aware that zombies have been proliferating on large and small screens across the globe. Classrooms will erupt into disputes as students take sides on the possibility of zombies. In these times, brain-eating viruses that can leave animated corpses have become perfectly plausible to many students.

I remember spending elementary-school years terrified that I would be attacked by sudden lightening in my bedroom, lightening that would make me disappear forever. I kept looking toward — or trying not to look toward — the corners of my room. The source of my irrational fear was a mediocre, black and white Outer Limits episode starring Donald Pleasance. But small children believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. They cannot separate fictions from reality easily. They may not talk about their fears. I do not know if I ever asked my mom or dad about the lightening. I just kept peeking at corners of the ceiling, hoping not to see flashes of light.

Project Runway, anyone? I believe we need to rein in the apocalypse. The death and mayhem have gotten out of hand. If I were a small child today, I’d probably be stacking heavy items on a chair in front of my bedroom door to stop the dead from walking in while I slept, tearing out my throat, and then leaving me to reanimate as a shambling horror of blood and teeth.

Children’s imaginations should not be underestimated.

*I already said I had dubious taste in entertainment. But I also bought Disney movies for my kids when they were little. What’s good for the eccentric, retired teacher may not be good for elementary or middle school boys and girls.

(Click on the pic for a better view.)

She gave it a shot, this pretty, young Hispanic girl with her long dark hair and friendly smile. She worked through the hour while I subbed. Others in the class completed this paper. One boy did not even try the more difficult side. “I don’t know how,” he said.

The girl is in 10th grade. The boy is in 11th grade. I passed out that paper throughout the day. Most of these bilingual high school students could not do the more difficult side. I’ll grant that a few may have been getting out of work by dishonestly claiming ignorance of a process that looked like too much effort for them.

I’ll also grant that readers who wonder why high school students should be doing this multiplication worksheet have grasped a serious issue. Was this the best use of students’ time? But a sub is supposed to deliver the lesson plan handed to her and pass out the worksheets the teacher has prepared. I did exactly that.

It’s worth pausing to think about the fact that we keep adding more and more outside responsibilities to our teachers’ workloads, more meetings, professional development, and committee work that result in subs in classrooms. The best that will happen with any substitute will be that no learning time gets lost, thanks to thoughtful advance planning combined with strong efforts by a capable substitute. That’s the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is a wasted hour, possibly even a mistaught hour, as the sub blows off the lesson plan or tries to do math he or she does not understand.

I would call this lesson a loss of instructional opportunity. I talked with a few classes as students worked on multiplication sheets. Apparently these students are taught multiplication regularly. (Sigh.) But I cannot solve any underlying problems in my one day in the classroom and I was expected to make students work on this sheet, and I was expected to turn in all student worksheets at the end of the day.

I would argue that this example could be added to the list of reasons why we ought to stop sending teachers out of the classroom for data meetings, curriculum meetings, Common Core standard meetings, etc. during the school year. The classroom teacher in this example may be doing a better job than I suspect from the worksheet. He may have chosen this activity because he was sure that all of his students could at least do the easy side, which required multiplying large numbers by single digits. He may have been trying to keep all students occupied to prevent disciplinary issues and help me out. I don’t know.

I do know I wasted the time of many students — both those who could do the worksheet and therefore did not need to do the worksheet, and those who could not do the worksheet and therefore needed instruction rather than a worksheet.

Teachers should be in the classroom. I taught this multiplication to some of the students in that day’s classes, but those students deserved better. They deserved to be taught math in incremental steps by a teacher who could focus on their individual needs.

Eduhonesty: I like to sub for half-day assignments and all these meetings and professional development seminars are making life easy. Click. Click. I tell the software I want an assignment. Today, I started at 11:00 and ended at 2:30 on a warm, bright, sunny day. I stopped for squash soup, walked the dog, and went to the movies to see Dr. Strange.

With a few rare exceptions, though, those proliferating meetings and seminars are not helping America’s students learn math.

I rocked lightly in the teacher’s rocking chair, reading to my all-day kindergarten class, watching the twenty faces sitting cross-legged out on the rug. Subbing kindergarten can be crazy, but I love that age. I tie shoes and wipe faces between teaching letters, numbers and technology. They need help with the volume on their earphones, although they are pretty good at using the QR code to open their books.

We were reading a story about a llama that followed his girl to school. Somehow, we branched out to talk about students’ cats, hamsters, bunnies, dogs and puppies and I accidentally walked into the minefield of an unfamiliar classroom. While discussing my dog and how she would joyfully follow me to school every day if the school allowed me to bring her along, I discovered that three students’ families had dogs that had passed away.

A little boy in front with tousled brown hair and a Chicago Cubs t-shirt, who had lost a dog while not much more than a toddler, brought me near tears when he said, “I bet after the dogs die, they follow their boy to school every day.”

I just said, “I bet they do. I bet they do.”

Then I moved on fast before the tears started slipping out.

Why did No Child Left Behind’s (NCLB) test-based reforms fail? Why did our enormously expensive efforts flop? Why did we fail to get America’s students “up to grade level” by 2014 as demanded? Considering the time and money many school districts sank into pulling up test scores, why do hundreds of thousands of American high school graduates remain unready for college or university classes?

While the achievement gap between our more and less fortunate students in different zip codes is regularly reviewed by pundits and newscasters, a critical question tends to fall below the radar: What if current educational policy is contributing to the lack of progress in our academically-challenged zip codes? What if bars in some academically-challenged zip codes have risen because our students have learned what to expect on the test, while learning practically nothing else? What if some bars are stagnant or falling because students were unready to learn the material on the test – but were offered nothing else?

Today’s educational climate moves too quickly. Various Drs. Frankenstein in state and federal bureaucracies funnel energy into new programs only to watch their creations rise and die. No one does an autopsy, not one worthy of the name anyway. When Race to the Top becomes a Race to Nowhere, suddenly ESSA rises, the new focus of professional development meetings and seminars everywhere.

Where did No Child Left Behind fail? Where — if anywhere — did it succeed? Why do we need ESSA? Did Frankenstein need a bride? What are we doing? Where are the autopsies? Why did all those students fail the PARCC test? What did those failures mean?

Eduhonesty: Unqualified and underqualified government officials keep mandating educational fixes based on untested, unpiloted programs such as RtI, NCLB and Race to the Top. I understand the desperation. But these mail-order-diploma, academic surgeons never seem to stop to find out why the patient failed to improve. In the case of PARCC, I’d say the patient died. But we still give PARCC tests in many places, if fewer now than when the test first came out.

Where are the autopsies? We might learn a great deal from stopping long enough to carefully analyze where and how our efforts failed — and where they succeeded — before we attack Education with yet another knife.

http://www.lovethispic.com/image/22242/that-age

Eduhonesty: While the age of this shift in perspective varies somewhat, I’d say most students tip over in 7th grade. That’s the age when a previously smiley, compliant boy told a teacher “Bullshit!” when asked to remove the hoodie forbidden by the dress code.

He was quite indignant about his day’s suspension, too, waving the paperwork in my face as he presented me with proof of the injustice perpetrated upon him for, in his words, “One word! Just one word!”

Especially in academically-struggling districts, our students are now being directly prepared for state tests. What are the costs of almost purely test-focused preparation. What non-test content is being jettisoned to make this happen? In the past, teachers took time to explore personal passions with their students. They might spend a few extra days on the First World War or add a lesson on the Tokugawa Dynasty in Japan. This time spent off or adjacent to the curriculum nonetheless produced test scores that suggest students learned as much or more back then, despite teachers’ deviations.

We don’t know how well teaching directly to the test works. We cannot measure the costs and benefits from a state-test-focused approach to education because we cannot know the results alternative strategies might have provided. We can’t even compare past tests with current tests, because past teaching placed far less weight on that test; testing conditions in the past and today are too different to allow valid comparisons. How would our students have tested if we had provided a more student-focused education for them today? Or a more test-based educational experience in the past? Teaching to the test removes the focus from students, and puts that focus on an annual measuring instrument instead.

Once, educational leaders chose curricula based on what they believed students needed to know for their future. The annual spring test was intended to measure student progress, but its content did not define student progress. In some schools, students might study additional classical topics such as rhetoric, logic, and grammar, as well as Latin, Roman and Greek history, and classics of American literature that have now been replaced by easier reads. In Common Core states, those easier reads tend more often to be nonfiction than in the past.

For the prodigious amount of time and effort we are now putting into testing, we know little about how today’s students compare to students from forty or fifty years ago. Thanks to the Common Core Initiative, we may never be able to even approximate that data. The new PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests, along with other state tests that are being rewritten to match the Common Core, ensure that we cannot compare today’s apples to yesterday’s apples. Students are taking significantly different tests. They are also taking those tests differently, as computers replace paper and pencil. These changes in testing content and testing instruments effectively eliminate our ability to compare test results over time.

If a million students took a test in 1975, and a million students took the same or a truly similar test in 2005, we could comb our data (assuming we had saved enough of that data) to compare educational results for 1975 and 2005. We could say that Nebraska’s students had answered 67% of a section’s math questions correctly in 1975 and only 52% in 2005. (I made those numbers up for purposes of illustration.) When the same test is employed over time, results can be compared over time. Questions that were changed over time can be eliminated from analysis provided remaining questions still comprise a sample large enough to compare.

Once our students started taking the PARCC test instead of previous tests, our ability to compare student performance over time became immensely more complex. We don’t have apples to slightly different apples now, we have apples to watermelons or even shellfish. With the new emphasis on critical thinking and scenario-based problems, we may have shifted to testing different student attributes as well as different test content.

Eduhonesty: I can’t help but be struck by the extreme irony here. At the same time when education has suddenly become heavily about data and numerical results, governmental requirements and attempts to improve education are pretty much destroying our ability to compare student learning data over time, whether by accident or design or both.

I talked to a substitute across the hallway who had subbed in a low-income school. She was discussing the fact that she could not settle those classes down. She kept trying to get quiet and order so she could teach and the minutes marched on as she became more frazzled, watching too many students blow off her most sincere efforts, many deliberately bating her.

After awhile, a group of kids came up to her desk to help.

“Just teach us,” they said. “If they don’t want to learn, ignore them.”

“It was so sad,” she said to me. I had to return to work so I don’t know exactly how this story ends. I know I internally subbed in the 90% poverty district in which I worked once and ended up doing exactly what those kids suggested.

“If you want to learn the material, come up to the desk,” I finally said. “If you don’t, find a corner and quiet down enough so that others can hear.” I then invited specific kids forward.

That approach can work better than an outsider might expect. At least those kids who are creating disruptions for the sake of adding chaos to their environment sometimes pull themselves together. They don’t want to be excluded from the group. They just want to be the center of attention. In general, ostracism works well with a subgroup of kids.

Eduhonesty: I have watched sub positions from my old district sit for days waiting for some sub to pull the trigger and agree to take the helm of those classrooms. Waiting, waiting, waiting. In the more academically-motivated, wealthier and better-funded districts where I am also on the sub rolls, positions are snatched up, often within a few minutes of the posting.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an article on this specific topic. Teachers are legally required to do a great deal of professional development nowadays, much of which takes them out of the classroom. If a teacher misses 9 days to professional development, IEP meetings, curriculum meetings, etc., she has missed 1/20th of the school year. Who filled in for her? The best districts can find and retain the best subs. Those academically-struggling, less fortunate districts — especially those suffering from high percentages of widespread disorder within the classroom (see previous post) will not sign on the best subs.

Why would I put up with widespread disorder in a disrespectful classroom when 10 miles down the road, I can walk into a room with well-prepared sub plans and enthusiastic students who are excited to see me? I signed on with my old district to help out friends, but working conditions remain substantially better in every other district I have joined.

Once again, the kids who need the most help end up likely to receive the least.

At the daily morning assembly last week, as I substituted for an elementary teacher in a district with a poverty rate over 80%, I listened as the principal went through various inspirational chants with her students. I was struck by how she ended the assembly: “All children have a right to learn,” she trumpeted. “All teachers have a right to teach!” The children parroted her, repeating these phrases.

Underneath her words, I heard the challenge facing our financially-disadvantaged and urban districts.

In the middle- to upper-middle-class suburb where I substituted today, I can’t imagine the Principal saying all children have the right to learn. In his world, that “right” would never need to be put into words. I can’t imagine him saying all teachers have the right to teach. Again, no alternative would occur to him. The idea that teachers would not have a right to teach would seem absurd. Teachers in his district go straight to work on academics in the morning without inspirational assemblies.

That Principal’s quote during her motivational assembly may be helpful in a financially- and academically-struggling district, epitomizing the disciplinary struggle that our least-advantaged districts face daily. Underneath those words, I hear a quiet plea to young, elementary students to behave, to please let their teachers teach and their classmates learn.

The site http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2011/2011002.pdf has a slew of government statistics on crime and disciplinary problems in schools that I might use to pick up this particular football and run with it.

I’ll pull out one set of facts. The category “widespread disorder in classrooms” can be found on page 114. When 0-25% of a public school’s students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, the percentage of schools reporting widespread disorder in classrooms is 1.4% with a note to interpret that data with caution. At 26 – 50% free and reduced-price lunch, the total rises to 2.5%, at 51 – 75%, 3.9% of schools report widespread disorder in classrooms. But when the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch hits 76 – 100% — like the elementary school where I listened to that Principal assert that teachers have a right to teach — widespread disorder in classrooms suddenly jumps up to 10%. One in ten classrooms has then been categorized as out of control — and I promise that these estimates will be underestimates. No sane school administration with administrators who want to retain their jobs will ever over-report these numbers. They will attempt to minimize or even sweep under that proverbial rug as many awkward numbers as possible.

Eduhonesty: I just felt like pulling some numbers out from under the rug. That Principal and her teachers in that low-income school are fighting formidable forces that almost never get pulled out into the light. I am not saying that poverty causes disorder and consequent disruptions in learning — but the correlation between poverty and behaviors that disrupt learning exists strongly. Last week, I heard an earnest young Principal playing cheerleader to the students in her school before their academic day began, attempting to preempt problems in classroom learning environments.

I offer this fact as one more reason why we should not bash teachers in low-income schools for their test scores.

(Click on the above graph for a better view.)

All my friends drank Coke, Tab, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, Bubble Up, Sprite and 7-Up. We drove to Baskin Robbins for hot fudge sundaes as soon as we got our licenses. We ate macaroni made with Velveeta cheese, garnished with cheap wieners, as well as bacon and stacks of pancakes for Sunday breakfast. We scarfed down buttery, salty school lunches until we became old enough to walk three blocks to the local drive-in for burgers and fries. I guarantee my high school only served organic produce by mistake.

I fell into those short bars in the graph above, though. In fact, all of my friends were part of the short bars. Obesity was rare in my high school and in colleges I intended. At the time, the female obesity rate was running five to six percent, and the male rate less. But we went to the beach on our days off. We played tag, Red Rover, and Mother May I. We played four-square and hopscotch. As we became older, we exercised in physical education daily and we were not allowed to sit out activities without a doctor’s excuse. We walked to our friend’s houses. We went hiking. We carried our rackets to free tennis courts in local parks.

Eduhonesty: I am not against new, healthier lunches, despite sometimes negative posts on this issue. I am absolutely against lunches that consist of tiny, single chicken legs, tasteless brown rice, and boiled, bland carrots. Organic or not, those lunches lack the calories growing children require. They also encourage crazy snacking when kids get home.

But I can get behind tasty, healthy lunches with enough calories for active kids. Give the kids two pieces of chicken and a warm roll or baked breadstick, along with spices or condiments for additional flavor, and I’ll mostly shut up about the lunches.

I will still be posting on this issue, though, because are attacking a serious, growing problem from the wrong direction. We don’t need less food. We need more exercise. America’s kids should be running back and forth across the soccer field, rather than testing how well they can think for a whole afternoon on less than 250 calories.

*http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/09/study-school-based-physic_n_1659579.html

Saved from the clever Someecards site.

I won’t add much to this, except I now know teachers who are spending the bulk of their week-ends preparing lesson plans. NOT LESSONS — but lesson plans, those sheets that tell what the teacher intends to do in class, and why and when, based upon what state or national standards, including plans for differentiation for learners of all different levels. Teachers today frequently borrow or buy lessons from the internet since they have no time left after writing lesson plans and fulfilling data requirements to actually make a lesson. The five to ten pages of lesson plans that must be submitted to administration usurp the time that might have been used to craft a fun lesson.

The plans are not optional. I recently talked to an administrator who was forced to tell teachers as part of Staff Appreciation Day that, if those multi-page, preformatted, canned lesson plans came in late, teachers were going to be penalized. They would be obliged to give up their lunches or time before or after school until the lesson plans were completed to some higher administrator’s satisfaction. I can imagine how well that particular piece of staff appreciation went over.

Less than a decade ago, I customarily handed in one or two pages total for my middle school classes, showing the topics and standards I intended to address. Somehow, the classes were exposed to all the standards and content that today’s students receive, but I also had time to create the Martian backpack project, the Martian calendar project, and short-story assignments with zombies and other fantastic creatures, as well as the usual little brothers and bicycles. My projects had roles and rubrics. We did fine without my writing a book covering every detail of my intentions in advance.

Eduhonesty: When teachers are writing ten pages worth of work on what they plan to do during an upcoming week, showing exactly how that plan matches the Common Core or local standards, they cannot be cutting paper strips and preparing other props for a fractions’ activity. They cannot be gathering microscopes, and setting up red onions and slides so students can learn how to create, view and describe onion cell slides. At worst, today’s ridiculous lesson plans steal time directly from preparing student instruction, shutting down experiments and activities when not enough time remains to actually pick up onions from the store.

It’s as if we spent the afternoon writing down recipes for veggie fried rice and Moo shu pork, until we were so desperate for time that our only choice was to race to Yee’s Chinese Restaurant for take-out, and then cross our fingers that Mr. Yee makes a Moo shu pork which at least resembles what we intended to serve.