Eliza Doolittle (Singing):

Words!
Words! Words! I’m so sick of words!
I get words all day through;
First from him, now from you! Is that all you blighters can do?

The school year ending in 2012 drove me to look for work and I have a bad habit: When I look for work, I find it. I even find positions I am not looking for, such as one teaching Spanish 1, Spanish 2 and bilingual social studies in a high school about 25 easy miles from my home. Administration found me from a teacher database before I even knew the job existed. I remembered Spanish. I remembered high school, and except for the size of those Spanish classes during my first year teaching, I remembered my first year of Spanish fondly. But some time had passed since that first year of projects and dialogs. I never thought to ask about curricular expectations attached to my new Spanish position.

I discovered we were expected to cover an entire textbook, more than 300 pages total, in order to get ready for common midterms and finals that had been written outside of the classroom. Those 300 pages were entirely doable. Still, we had a great deal of work facing us and a great deal of memorization that necessarily came with that work.

“That’s too many words,” certain students kept saying as I assigned homework.

My classes and I had a problem, one that I have come to call the internet predicament, based in the intersection between diminished student efforts and high, curricular expectations. Many students today have become experts at retrieval. They can figure out search terms and string search results together. They can copy and rephrase information they find, hopefully giving credit for information their searches turn up.

Teachers are taught to emphasize information retrieval skills using available technology. We are taught to help students learn to put search results in context. We are taught to use critical thinking questions to stimulate making connections between disciplines as students report on retrieved information.

But when called upon to memorize twenty words, students can act as if they have been asked to both raise the bridge and lower the river. American education has been moving away from memorization. American education has been moving away from repetition and even homework.

“They can look it up on their phones,” administrators will say when we are discussing historical dates, for example. Then those same administrators sometimes give a patronizing smile as they add that teachers need to focus on critical thinking instead of memorization.

Critical thinking depends on background knowledge, however, and retrieval skills cannot compensate for the intuitive understanding that comes with actual knowledge. Critical thinking skills are also of limited use in learning the fundamentals of a new language. I’m not saying such skills are useless. Over time, a great deal of critical thinking will occur during language studies. Comparisons between grammar, vocabulary and usage lead us into insights that may bridge cultures and meanings.

But first, language students must memorize groups of basic words and phrases. No short-cuts will work. Some language-learning techniques may work better than others, but new words have to be stored in the brain. Unfortunately, drilling and memorization are trumpeted as examples of older, outmoded pedagogical methods that show a teacher is not up-to-date on the latest best practices, and to say a teacher uses drilling and memorization has become a criticism of that teacher, proof that he or she is not creating a modern “child-centered” classroom. Yet drilling works. Many old fashioned techniques have never been proven ineffective; instead, these techniques have gone out of fashion.

I pity the poor classroom teacher who has students seated in rows memorizing words on paper if an administrator walks in nowadays. He or she will almost certainly be criticized, even if that criticism comes in the form of helpful suggestions about creating group work or gallery walks. A gallery walk is a discussion technique in which students walk around the room looking at pictures or writing on posters. I like gallery walks. Students need to get out of their seats sometimes.

But flashcards — alone or with a partner — will be more efficient for my purposes when my goal is to teach new vocabulary. I can also play computer games – I love Kahoot – that offer students a chance to play against each other while translating words. But I can’t play games all the time and putting a word into long-term memory requires repeating words over and over. The amount of repetition will vary from student to student, but that repetition is not optional. How does a person become fluent in another language? Students practice until magically, one day, words begin popping onto their tongues and those words somehow keep rolling.

Modern educational theory has created a climate in which too many students consider memorization an imposition. Students want learning to be a game and I am sympathetic. By all means, students should play online language games. I enjoy making classroom Jeopardy games. But language learning goes much faster when students deliberately memorize words. Asking friends to practice new vocabulary in pairs or groups is great, but friends will not always be available. During the game, or after the game is over, I believe students ought to make flash cards or lists for tricky words that caused them problems, either on paper or in their phones. After the game is over, they ought to write lists and then cover either the word or its definition, working their way down their lists in a memorization exercise. In the end, we learn a great deal of language alone — and the physical act of writing helps cement new ideas inside the brain.

Eduhonesty: Our challenge today is creating self-motivated learners who will keep going when the game stops and their seat-partners go home. Students ought to go in search of inexpensive or free language learning apps to use to practice during their own time. A trip back into the past of physical media doesn’t hurt either. Older students ought to pop those library language-learning CDs into their car’s CD player. (Update: CD players with Bluetooth or USB connections are available.) I recommend finding translations of favorite books and ordering these off the internet, either in physical or Audible form.

We all learn new words from seeing those words and saying those words. Students who are taught to regard learning as a social exercise filled with fun activities will always fall behind students who also read and consciously work to learn new words after the fun activities are over. As démodé as I may sound, I think we ought to siphon a little fun out of the learning tank.

One of the best lessons we can give students today is this one: you have to keep going even when it’s not fun. A little drudgery here-and-now will often go a long way toward creating a more fulfilling future life. Someday, someone will create an effective method for sleep-learning, but right now that method’s still fantasy fodder for science fiction novels. In the meantime, NOTHING will substitute for learning new words when mastering a foreign (or domestic :-)) language.

The article is “With one change, this school doubled the number of kids eating school breakfast.”* and I thought Frederick Douglass Elementary in Leesburg, Massachusetts, had an idea that ought to be passed on.

Less than 10 percent of students at Frederick Douglass Elementary in Leesburg were eating school breakfast last school year, and educators noticed the impact: Students were fidgety and cranky and sometimes had to leave class to see the school nurse because of stomach aches.

The part about being late matters, but I’d say that much of the charm of this idea comes from the privilege of being able to eat in class. Why not, though? I let kids eat in class with the understanding that oranges and sticky or crumbly treats are not allowed. But the right granola bar or apple does not cause much mess. Frankly, even sticky treats could be fine provided teachers allowed time and kept the wipes necessary for clean-up.

I’d really like to throw my support behind first period breakfast. Hungry kids become cranky kids as the morning wears on. They become drifty kids. Sometimes they become sleepy kids. The days when the family sat down to a leisurely, sit-down breakfast before school are long gone for many families, if those days ever existed. We eat on a catch-as-catch-can basis regularly. McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts are counting on that drive-thru lifestyle. The result can be a pack of hungry kids who take the bus and did not quite make it to the cafeteria on time.

Do you work in a school? Why not bring this up in the teacher’s lounge? Are you a parent with a kid prone to stomach aches and morning disciplinary issues? Why not discuss this with school administration? A few crumbs and spills will create an extra bit of disarray as breakfast moves into the classroom, but the payoff in alert and focused students could prove worth the effort. Certainly, I’d be willing to try this experiment in my school. I strongly suspect the results would be worth the extra clean-up required.

*By Moriah Balingit April 6 at 8:00 AM, this article can be accessed at the following site: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/with-one-change-this-school-doubled-the-number-of-kids-eating-school-breakfast/2016/04/05/561089cc-fb47-11e5-80e4-c381214de1a3_story.html

The advisory topic for the day was stress. I asked the kids how they managed stress. One boy reads. Another boy writes poetry. One eats. A number of boys and girls sleep. Sleep as a strategy appealed to most of them. Other students screensuck, mostly through gaming or social media.

We talked about recognizing stress, knowing our own personal tells. Those tells included twiddling fingers, tapping, and knuckle-cracking, mostly nervous hand gestures. We included gaming and eating. Sometimes kids knew when they were gaming or eating to make themselves feel better. We talked about recognizing depression as well, since stress and depression often travel hand-in-hand.

This half-hour advisory class will focus on stress for a couple of weeks. I like the idea. We started with time management, a big source of stress for middle school students and just about everybody today. If I don’t start my full day of grading of unit tests and other random assignments soon, I will definitely be stressed by tomorrow.

Eduhonesty: I’d recommend this advisory unit for middle schools across the country. Childhood has become terra incognita today, as evidenced by that post — was it just yesterday? — about first graders plotting to kill a classmate. Kids living in the Too Much Information Age learn too many scary facts and ideas before they can realistically process these facts and ideas, and I don’t know that we can shut this information flow down in any substantive fashion. I guarantee readers that some of my Spanish for Native Speakers students are running in fear of Donald Trump. They pretty much told me so yesterday.

“Why should I do all this work? Donald Trump’s just going to deport me when he is President!” My student said.

I don’t often hear excuses I have never heard before, but Trump as a reason to avoid classwork was new to me. The class laughed loudly. But the looks on their faces were not all entertained. The room sank into a more serious mood quickly. Whether there are ten or fourteen million illegal immigrants in this country, I guarantee readers many children in those families are not only stressed, they are living in fear.

As far as America’s “regular” kids go, the new show, “The Internet Ruined My Life” captures one reality that all these kids experience. Many of them feel one click away from disaster. Dumping your boyfriend or having a fight with your best friend has now become an event fraught with scary, potential consequences. What might that person share on social media? What pictures do they have?

Teaching stress and coping strategies ought to be obligatory topics that are regularly revisited in our students lives, even at the elementary level, at the expense of test preparation and other academic requirements. We keep pushing sex, sexual harassment and birth control discussions down into lower grades. We keep pushing academics down into lower grades. The teachers in the teachers lounge almost all agreed a few days ago that parents had to send their students to a local all-day kindergarten option, instead of the half-day option, because half-day students would be too far behind academically when they started first grade. (I was the lone vocal dissenter.) As we raise expectations at lower ages, we should teach healthy coping strategies for stress such as art, meditation, music and other relaxation techniques.

The poet and the reader in my advisory seem to have found healthy ways to manage stress overloads in their lives, but I naturally worry about my sleepers and eaters. Yahoo yesterday carried an article that said 1 in 8 adults on the planet is now obese. I don’t trust that source and if the actual number is 1 in 22.3, for example, I would not be surprised. But the big idea strikes me as real. The world is gaining weight nowadays.

And the reason has little or nothing to do with an increased food supply.

“First-graders’ apparent plot to kill classmate with poisoned lunch foiled by teacher” reads the headline in the Washington Post, in an article by Peter Holley from March 30 at 12:43 PM.

Officials at an elementary school in Anchorage said they uncovered a plot among three first-grade students to kill a classmate using poison, according to news reports.

The conspiracy was foiled when another student overheard the alleged plotters discussing their plan and alerted a teacher, Anchorage School District spokeswoman Heidi Embley told CBS affiliate KTVA.

The plot would never have worked regardless. The silica gel the kids planned to use was not toxic. They had been fooled by a package warning that said “do not consume.”

The article states that officials aren’t sure whether the kids “knew what they were doing.”

I’d say the answer to that will be yes and no. They knew they planned to kill someone. The finality and horror of that death are likely beyond their understanding. In first grade, students sometimes still believe in magic. They may believe that everything can be fixed somehow. They certainly don’t have the long-term view that would allow them to appreciate the future consequences of their choice.

My question was immediate when I saw this article: How did they get the idea? What makes a group of kids get to the point of discussing a plan like this? Of plotting a plan like this?

Eduhonesty: We live in the Too Much Information Age. Especially with younger children, I’d like to plead for less access to that information. Even Law and Order should be off the six-year-old menu. Let’s plug in that Disney DVD or stream Ernie and Bert.

As signals stream in from all over the globe, our kids need us to protect them from the surfeit of information that now enters our homes in dribs and drabs every second of the day.

I am teaching Spanish right now, filling in as a maternity leave substitute. My own middle school and high school Spanish classes remain fun memories. I am Facebook friends with my former middle school Spanish teacher. I fondly remember that Bolivian guy from the high school, who served his daughters and me red wine when I was over for dinner one night in high school. (Nowadays, I imagine he would lose his job.)

My middle school offered French but I chose Spanish, back then a true choice. I could have taken German as well. I could have skipped language study altogether. In high school, I added French and Latin to my coursework. As a result, I can hack my way through easier books in Italian and Portuguese. Romance languages — bring ’em on!

Too many of my current Spanish students do not share my enthusiasm for language. Some do. They listen attentively, ask questions and put in the time to produce quality work. But I am in my third stint teaching Spanish and I am again wondering why I encounter so much negativity.

I have a few speculations. Many students have been pushed into this elective by their parents or other family members, who rightly regard Spanish as potentially highly useful. “George” hates Spanish, he told the administration and his family. His parents are making him take it anyway.”Henry” also says he hates Spanish, but his grandma won’t let him drop. Parents and guardians can see the advantage to being able to add “Fluent in Spanish” to a resume.

Many, many middle schools now offer only Spanish as a foreign language alternative. The only young, potential German teacher I know has never been able to find a job. The other German teacher I know travels between high schools in a large district. The high school in the district where I last worked is phasing out French. Soon Spanish will be the only language that remains.

This leads me to a couple of brainstorms that I had while talking to fellow teachers at lunch: One reason I believe my classmates and I entered into Spanish more enthusiastically than today’s kids was that we were allowed to make a choice. We might have studied French or German. The class was our pick, a genuine choice, not a demanding subject that had been foisted on us. The other reason I think Spanish might have been an easier sell in the past was that Spanish was exotic. We did not hear Spanish daily, as many of our students now do. Like French and German, Spanish spoke to us of far-off lands and big adventures. We were preparing to be explorers, not hospital translators. For most of us, Spanish was the path to Madrid, Mexico City, Bueno Aires, or Machu Picchu, not a useful addition to a resume.

I would go so far as to suggest that the resume connection may be part of the turn-off that makes certain kids want to avoid Spanish language studies, that combined with the many millions of Americans for whom Spanish is their first language. More than a few students have told me that they feel that they can never be as good as the many native speakers around them, so they do not see the sense in trying.

Eduhonesty: Languages cannot be learned by students who do not have an interest in learning them or at least a strong, work ethic. An unenthusiastic student who works diligently may eventually catch a wave and learn to enjoy language studies. But students without that work ethic will mostly fail to learn a language unless they are highly motivated. We are talking about learning thousands and thousands of words, along with occasional quirky changes in language structure and grammar usage.

What can we do to help our students? A few days ago, I suggested that maybe not everyone needs to take algebra. I’d like to extend that thread. Maybe not everyone needs to take Spanish. A kid who hates Spanish ought to take something else — at least until he or she WANTS to take Spanish. Without interest or enthusiasm, languages become throwaway classes for too many kids.

I’d also like to make the case for those lost French and German positions. We ought to bring them back. If we wanted to add or substitute Russian or Japanese instead, that would work, too. What we need to bring back is choice. We need to bring back the idea that language learning can lead toward rollicking adventures in mysterious, distant lands. Language students can find themselves taking trains to castles and ancient aquaducts, while journeying through histories much longer than America’s own. That vision can get a child to study direct object pronouns, even when those pronouns aren’t much fun. Kids like to dream big dreams.

They mostly try to avoid thinking about resumes.

I’d start language learning much earlier, too, but that’s another post.

This is the healthy snack provided to preschoolers at a local school. It’s a small cup of cucumber slices with a carton of milk. Snack time comes near bus time so I guess the fact that this whole snack is only a little over 100 calories does not matter much.

What I liked was the part where the teaching assistant went around the room with her salt shaker, adding salt for students who requested it. Almost all the students wanted salt. Healthy lunches and snacks tend to omit the salt, but if you want four-year-olds to chow down on cucumber slices, a salt shaker’s a great idea.

From the following article:

Lead fears grow in Newark schools, but the problem isn’t new

By BEN FINLEY 14 hours ago

HOW LONG HAS NEWARK KNOWN ABOUT LEAD IN THE WATER?

The district has been tackling the issue of lead coming from water sources, such as old sinks, in some schools since at least 2003, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

John Martin, an EPA spokesman, said the agency found elevated levels in two of Newark’s schools that year. It offered the district help in addressing the problem. But he said Newark turned down the offer because it had its own lead remediation program in place.

Newark schools superintendent Christopher Cerf recently acknowledged that the district has been addressing issues of lead in water sources for more than a decade. For instance, the district had been replacing faucets and adding filters after taps showed higher levels of the toxin.

The district has only started to release test results to the public. But in each year since 2012, an outside laboratory has found elevated levels in the taps of some school buildings. For instance, 15 percent of the water samples taken during the 2014-15 school year showed amounts of lead that require action from school officials.

___

WHAT IS THE SCHOOL SYSTEM DOING TO ADDRESS THE PROBLEM?

Newark is working with the state Department of Environmental Protection as well as the EPA to tackle the issue. Efforts include testing every tap at every school. The district is also offering blood tests of as many as 17,000 kids who were potentially exposed.

In a press release, superintendent Cerf said last week’s test results prompted him to take action.

“By the time school opened Wednesday morning, we were shutting off all water fountains and other affected sites at any school that had received a positive reading,” Cerf said.

But Newark’s teachers union has criticized the state-controlled district for not taking such action in previous years. And Elise Pivnick, director of environmental health for Isles, a New Jersey-based environmental community group, added, “It’s really an old problem. There’s nothing new here. That water hasn’t changed in the last three years.”

As I noted in my post a few days ago, the water in Newark, New Jersey, has not changed. Nothing has changed there except suddenly the public became aware that Newark had elevated lead levels in the water in some of its schools. It appears Newark has known for some time the district needed to replace faucets and add filters “after taps showed higher levels of the toxin.”

Why new faucets? It’s not the faucets, it’s the pipes. Adding filters certainly seems like a good idea regardless, and I imagine that’s what the above article meant. They bought new faucets that had filters to take out the lead.

I hope they are on top of the water fountains. I am not so worried about hand washing as I am about those fountains. For one thing, fountains are an excuse to get out of class. Kids who drink little water at home may drink a great deal at school. They can’t go to the fridge for a drink they like better. They are served milk at lunch, which is healthy but not exactly a thirst-quencher. New health and nutrition guidelines have often eliminated the pop machines, or resulted in rules that allow pop purchases only after school.

On hot days and after gym, requests to go the fountain come regularly. Especially before my school added air-conditioning (only three years ago) I almost always let kids go during the high heat of fall and late spring. The line of water drinkers was trooping out there, one at a time. When temperatures were in the eighties and above in classrooms, administrators regularly reminded students to stay hydrated. Even in schools with cooling systems, some rooms simply run hot. Many cooling systems cannot begin to keep up with a wall of windows that faces sunside.

Eduhonesty: Are you working in an older school? Encourage your students to bring water bottles from home. I’d add those bottles to the list of expected supplies. Encourage parents to send water. I don’t know how much lead is too much lead, but I suspect Newark’s problem may be the tip of an iceberg. Teachers might even consider bringing in gallon jugs of water and little Dixie cups, especially in elementary school.

The Common Core hit me up the side of the head last year, combined with the full weight of the State of Illinois as it took over my district. To that I’d add the complication of whole new sets of Charlotte Danielson evaluation requirements. With all that new noise to process, it took me awhile to appreciate the meaning of rigid common lesson plans written to a set of standards that were set years above the academic operating levels of my students. I had always had some freedom to create original instruction for my students until 2014 – 2015, despite growing time shortages resulting from other demands, mostly demands related to the rising desperation to raise test scores.

I also lost my favorite principal during the 2014-2015 school year as part of the conditions of a government grant which required replacing school leadership. Time demands unrelated to instructional imperatives soared. For all intents and purposes, I did not have a reliable planning period during much of the 2014 – 2015 year. On lucky days, I salvaged some planning time, but I had math meetings, science meetings, grade meetings, school meetings, and bilingual meetings that I sandwiched into that alleged planning period, at least one meeting daily. On Wednesday, I typically had three meetings. In theory, I was supposed to get half of my planning period for actual planning, but my Dean^[1] had a bad habit of running overtime, sometimes through the whole period. I also had to regularly double up math and science meeting days.

I am sitting at a pleasant oak desk in a quiet blue room. I get up when I want to. I meet former colleagues for lunch and dinner, a number of whom retired before they had intended to do so. I had planned on working one more year, but I hit my personal wall. I hit my can’t-do-it-I’ve-sucked-up-enough wall. I can work hard, but I will not work stupid. I want to nurture my students, and the tests I gave last year felt more like bullying than nurturing to me.

Substituting has been working out fine. As I write this, I am ignoring a website filled with substitute requests for today. The system has been trying to call me since 5:30 AM this morning and I could still step into any number of classrooms for the day. No one will step into many of those classrooms. Many of these requests come from top-flight local districts that pay well, too.

Today I am writing my book, though. Yesterday, I covered for preschool teachers who had IEP meetings. My favorite part was taking colored, sticky Styrofoam, yarn, paper and glue and making brains to tape on traced bodies that the kids had made. I liked playing restaurant, too. Restaurant seems to be a pretty good deal. You get a piece of pizza, then they open the cash register and hand you money. I explained a bit about how it actually worked, while I admired the plastic rectangle students now swipe as part of the process before they open the drawer to hand me random sums of money. I admired original Lego creations. I pretended to eat a lot of plastic food that students made for me. I had a great day.

Eduhonesty: All’s well that ends well, I guess. Those former teachers I meet, though? Some of them were excellent educators. Most or all would probably still be in the classroom if the world had not decided that somehow testing for 20% of a school year — while using tests that many students could not even read — somehow made sense.

[1] I don’t want to say a negative word about my Dean, however. She was the best Dean I ever saw. She worked endlessly, and she sweated the small stuff until kids were seldom tardy, and usually well-behaved in class. When I worked until six in the evening, she was always still in her office.