Have a few minutes and some construction paper?

From VolunteerSpot on Facebook. Facebook users, this site is worth scrolling through. I loved Mom Guilt Bingo.

P.S. The book Mindset by Carol Dweck should be on a teacher’s must-read list.

(A post for newbies, especially, which should be of interest to others.)

I am sitting in a bright, cheerful Spanish classroom. The teacher here does a whole lot of evening and week-end work. I’ve never met her but I only have to look at this schedule. She is teaching Spanish I, Spanish 2, as well as two different social studies classes, and math for English language learners.

I have been there. Getting ready for five separate subjects takes an enormous amount of time, at least for a teacher  determined to do right by her students. You can borrow from colleagues and the internet but, in the end, each day’s instruction should follow from the previous day’s instruction; frequently the only way can happen will require creating original materials and activities.

This room has activities and posters all over the wall. The Spanish/ELL teacher here must love decorating, she does it so well. I particularly like the clock. When I first entered the room, I was impressed with the learning possibilities on the walls. We have the alphabet, numbers, colors, shapes, days of the week, months of the year, various body parts, types of animals, common verbs, greetings and, up on top of the whiteboard, a set of useful Spanish phrases, helping students to tell their teacher in Spanish that they need to go to the bathroom or forgot their homework, among other common daily phrases.

After I had enjoyed looking around the room, I struck by an absence, though, and I’d like to blog that missing piece. Where are the standards? I know they exist. She has a slot for them on the wall. I am sure she provides those standards. But they occupy a small space on her wall. I was pleased to see that almost all the material in this room is for learning — rather than for learning about learning.

This post is for newbies. Maybe you are being told to put all your standards and plans up so that students can read them and know your master plan. Supposedly, this helps students. I’d like to observe that until recently few people — none that I’d ever met — put all this information on the board, but some study indicated that posting standards and plans contributed to classroom learning. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. As I always note, social science studies are often conducted in fairly idyllic conditions which don’t translate well in all classrooms.

But since keeping students abreast of the standards and lesson plan has become all the rage, I will go with this flow. I’d like to observe, though, that all minutes we use in a classroom are taken away from other activities and instruction we might have provided, had we made alternative instructional choices instead. Those missing fragments in our lessons are our opportunity costs. When we spend too much time telling students what we plan to do, we take away from actual doing.

As Yoda said, “Do or do not do. There is no try.” Spending too much time explaining a standard or the flow of a projected lesson strikes me as a version of trying. While our students are learning the content of Common Core standards, they are not actually learning the math the standard requires.

By all means, if administration requires that you post your standards and lesson plan for each day for students to see, do so. Some battles aren’t worth fighting and maybe the standards will help students. (We got along for decades without them, of course, and today’s students don’t seem to be overtaking students of the past, even with the new standards plastered all over the place.) But be alert to the time loss the class incurs from talking about those standards and plans. The time we spend telling students that they are going to learn how to calculate ratios could actually be spent teaching students how to calculate ratios.

I promised a kindergarten curriculum. I found one in a school a few suburbs over, inside a quiet, white, wooden schoolhouse that looks as if it fell through time from some idyllic 1950s street. The school has quiet security. I still had to ring the bell to be admitted by the secretary, a feature of schools everywhere now, as far as I can tell. My little school from the past appears much more contemporary once we peer at its curriculum, however.

Please click on the above picture to get the gory details. R.I.P. naptime, that’s my first response. The first paragraph sets the tone for what follows.

Eduhonesty: I regard this as a completely rational kindergarten curriculum. The question I might ask, though, is did we really need a kindergarten curriculum? This plan has the potential to be challenging and stressful in the wrong, overly-enthusiastic hands. Not all five-year-olds are developmentally ready to take on the challenges listed on this piece of paper.

Feedspot is taking people to this post that does not exist. So I had better create a post, post haste, I guess. I like the above idea: You can have cheap and good, but that will require some time. You can have cheap and fast. If so, what you get probably won’t be particularly good. You can have fast and good, but that product is unlikely to be cheap. If we scour the goods and services in our lives, no doubt we will find exceptions. I happen to think McDonald’s Egg White Delight is cheap, fast and good. But moving away from ADHD breakfast observations, I find a kernel of truth in the idea that getting two of these characteristics together may be easy, but instances of all three together are uncommon at best. I also see a looming problem as we keep trying to find cheap and/or fast ways to get improved academic results.

This being an education blog, I thought I would connect the cheap/fast/good idea to fixing schools. Any fast, good fix will not be cheap. I don’t know that a good, cheap fix is possible. The problem lies in that word, “cheap.” How do you do “cheap” when the livelihoods of thousands and thousands of people rest in your hands? How do you do “cheap” when your buildings are aging, their floors chipping, ceilings leaking, plumbing slowly becoming unplumbed? How do you do “cheap” when access to technology has become a defining characteristic of our best districts?

Like many quick ideas that seem sound on the surface, that “pick two” option above does not help us when applied to Chicago and Detroit schools. Cheap, fast fixes will never fix those schools. I doubt any cheap or fast fix can be good. We can cut costs and trim overhead, but the problems in Chicago and Detroit will only be improved at the margins by these measures.

Returning to a theme, America needs to move away from local funding of school districts. The problem with the current funding set-up is that many districts can only make cheap fixes — and there are no cheap fixes that can be expected to turn out well. Local funding in areas where industry has fled and housing values are falling will result in falling revenues for schools — at a time when those schools require the opposite to stay competitive. Cheap and good together cannot attract the STEM teachers and pay for the technology that will give our academically-disadvantaged students the educational opportunities that they need to prepare for college and today’s work force. Fifty  years ago, lack of technology meant no overhead projector and a lack of mimeographing materials. Students could be entirely ready for college despite those nonexistent overheads and fuzzy worksheets. Now that lack of technology can translate into missed, vital practice and skills, as students without internet retrieval practice, keyboarding experience, or familiarity with modern software fall behind counterparts in more prosperous schools.

Cheap won’t work today. Between aging infrastructures and growing demand for new technology for teachers and students, cheap has become impossible for most districts to manage while still preparing students for college. I’d say fast is impossible, too, since almost all our initiatives today must ooze through layers of government intervention.

If we want good, we will have to shake up the system. Eliminating our piecemeal funding system might be one way to start. I hate to create more possible layers of bureaucracy but, without more equitable funding, I just don’t see how the kids at the bottom will ever be able to get off the bottom. Yes, we can find exceptions. Some kids can learn with a flashlight in a broom closet. But a review of college success rates between districts shows that the kids where I live are vastly more likely to finish college than those kids in Chicago.

We have to tackle that gap in success rates.

Today’s post only obliquely relates to education. If I made a graphic organizer, I’d have to make something like the above. Oh, wait! I did make a graphic organizer. It occurs to me that some comforting home, school and other rituals would undoubtedly overlap alien abduction rituals if the abductee were conscious, but I’m sure readers are clear on the concept.

We have our rituals. Maybe the family goes to Superdawg on Friday. Maybe they stop at their favorite ice cream parlor after baseball games. Maybe they go to the local ice rink on Sunday afternoon. Rituals often involve family and friends. They frequently include food, usually not the healthiest food. The soccer team hardly ever goes out for tofu. The vegetables in that Thanksgiving dinner are  probably swimming in fried onions and mushroom soup, unless they are covered in butter, brown sugar and marshmallows. Our rituals are peculiar to our families, friend groups and classrooms.

I thought I’d write about rituals today because rituals are struggling to hold their place nowadays. We are too busy. Oops! We were going to go out for ice cream, but we had to wait on hold for two hours to talk to the IRS. Oops! We were going to go ice skating, but we had to go to Michaels to get science project materials instead. Oops! We were going to go to Superdawg, but mom has a late meeting at work, dad’s still in Chicago, and the babysitter can’t drive.

I thought I’d take a few minutes today to put rituals on the radar. My girls are grown now. They remember Homers Ice Cream after piano lessons. They remember almond steamers after trips to the bookstore. (Starbucks should bring back that almond syrup.) They remember lunch after Saturday Enrichment classes at Northwestern.

Our rituals are our own. But they form the backbone of later memories and the glue that holds family and friends together. I remember birthday dinners with fried prawns and fizzy Coca Colas. I remember trips to the swimming hole near my grandma’s house. Sometimes the asphalt on the road to that swimming hole was so hot we’d be hopping on the sunny patches of the road. I remember the three-scoop ice cream cones we always picked up on the way to grandma’s, a short stop to break up the long drive. Sometimes we ate them in the car, licking as fast as we could on summer days so the ice cream did not drip on the car. My parents were not exactly neat freaks.

I remember the weekly spelling test with my fifth grade teacher, Mr. Stocker. If you got all the answers right, he gave you an ice cream bar. I remember that former-military, nut case of a fourth grade teacher who whacked your chair with a pointer if you were not sitting up straight. I remember weekly math games in Mr. Marvin’s class.

I remember recess. Who doesn’t? Four-square and swings, climbing and playing baseball or hopscotch — recess was sometimes the best part of the day. Some kids may not remember recess in the future — not the way I do. I subbed for an all-day kindergarten class this week (Fingerprints finally came through!) and discovered the kids’ recess was attached to their lunch, part of the forty-five minute break in the middle of the day. Except for that break, we were working on some version of academics all day long. Oh, they got to color and make valentines for soldiers, but we were working on letters, days, seasons, weather and numbers throughout the day. We had a fun discussion about whether or not the mouse in Mercer Mayer books was a main character. He never speaks, but he is on every page. I’ll post a kindergarten curriculum in the next day or two. Those curricula are becoming formidable in my view.

But returning to my topic, readers, I want to suggest we all pay attention to our rituals. What are they? Let’s define those rituals. I’d ask my kids for their opinions. Which rituals are their favorites?

In home and in the classroom, we should try not to slight our rituals, try to avoid preempting or replacing them too often. Rituals provide security to kids. They provide a sense of order. They also build lifetime memories. Long after the exact details of trips to grandma’s house are gone, pictures of huckleberry ribbons in vanilla ice cream remain.

“An undefined problem has an infinite number of solutions.”
~ Robert A. Humphrey

I want to take a break from big cities this morning and move from the macro to the micro world again. The above quote resonated with me immediately, although I am honestly not sure what Robert A. Humphrey intended to say. I know what I took away from his utterance, and I’ll put that in my own words: Leave the teachers alone and they can solve many of our current problems.

Boxes, boxes, boxes, We are building data, data walls and spreadsheets for administrators. We are changing our instruction to match the new Common Core standards, despite zero evidence that our previous state standards were any sort of a problem, except for the effect of differing standards on standardization of data. We are attending endless meetings to prepare our matching instruction, share our data, and discuss new standards. We have extra meetings to discuss using the new Common Core-aligned books that some students cannot even read. We add meetings or professional development on developing college-readiness and reducing absenteeism. Etc.

All of these problems represent real problems. Some new solutions to these problems are creating their own new sets of problems in my book. But my problems are not Sally’s problems are not Fred’s problems. Why am I wasting my time in the absenteeism meeting if my class pretty faithfully turns up every morning? I may have a useful contribution or two for other teachers, but I’d like to hammer my favorite nail: All of our meetings have an opportunity cost. What could I be doing during that meeting that will have almost no effect on my own classroom? I could be improving my Jeopardy game on the solar system. I could be creating individualized materials for my autistic Anne-Marie.  I could be calling Darnell’s mom to talk about his sudden change in behavior over the last few weeks. I can solve so many problems — but my ability to do so has been adversely impacted for years now by requirements that choose the problems I should address — problems which I may or may not be encountering, problems which may be blips on my personal radar even if they represent an incoming attack for other teachers in other places.

Each teacher has his or her own set of problems during the instructional day. In my classroom, Darnell’s moodiness may be a much bigger problem than statewide absenteeism rates. I should be left to work on helping Darnell. As far as standardization of learning standards and instruction, in a time of increasing diversity and rapidly changing demographics, rather than putting teachers in pre-approved boxes, I am convinced we should leave our teachers alone. Newly-arrived Rima from Syria should not be receiving the same instruction as Kyle from Duluth. Historically, our teachers decided how to teach their classrooms and had a great deal of voice in what to teach as well.

For Anne-Marie, Kyle and Rima’s sake, I wish we could return control of the classroom to the classroom teacher.

Eduhonesty: Some administrators and government leaders would reply that, of course, I ought to be individualizing instruction for my three students above. What those administrators and government leaders seem to miss is that if I spend 220 minutes of meetings during a week — the absolute minimum last year, and sometimes the amount ran over 300 minutes — that’s potentially 5 hours or more lost (depending on the topic) from instructional preparation and individualization during the week if I am a rank and file teacher. If I am a team leader or coach, with extra meetings, that amount may be considerably higher.

My most effective instructional year ever occurred years ago when I had two planning periods and almost no meetings. I was free to spend time figuring out exactly what my individual students needed and preparing individual sets of materials. If we go by annual test scores, my students had an amazing year.

I’d like to rephrase Humphrey’s statement. I believe, “A too-well defined problem may have few or no solutions.” Thinking about this problem mathematically, we can put so many restrictions on teaching and preparation time, that we are no longer creating solutions; instead, we are preventing solutions. As we add more and more terms to our equation, eventually the only solution to our problem may be the null set.

For those whose memory of past math classes has gotten a little hazy, the null set is also called the empty set, the set that contains no elements. The null set can arise naturally when we place too many restrictions on sets. An example of the null set in education might be “the number of students reading at third-grade level who can pass a Common Core-based, mathematics quiz or test filled with story problems designed to stimulate critical thinking in a test written a seventh-grade level.”

I was required to give too many of those tests last year, wasting colossal amounts of my time and my student’s time. I shudder to think of the effect of those ridiculous tests on student motivation and enthusiasm for learning. I’m not sure what problems the administration was addressing with those tests, but I’m sure we’d have all been better off if we’d left my classroom’s problems for me to define. Even if I’d been popping Xanax while talking to tiny, scaly, lizard-like aliens lounging in my bathtub while I created classroom instruction, I could hardly have done worse. Even if I had been arranging aluminum foil on my head to keep the lizards from invading my thoughts, I suspect my instruction would have made more sense. I honestly could hardly have done worse by my students than I did by giving them those tests. At least the lizards and I might have had a sense of humor.

No one will give those children back their missing educations, that’s for sure.

The articles on Detroit schools talk about buckled floors, missing toilet seats and mystery mold. They don’t talk about Carlotta’s attempt to teach in the classroom with the odd smell and the black patches. I know Carlotta*. I listened sympathetically as she laid out daily life in the dank, subbasement.

Her room’s wiring did not work. She could not buzz security. She could not call security either, at least at first, although I believe the administration finally fixed her phone. When fights occurred — I remember two — Carlotta had to send a student running down the hall and up the stairs to administration. Other fights may have occurred that I did not know about, since Carlotta was far from me and far from almost everyone else in the school. She was by herself in an isolated corner of the school, teaching in a room that had been abandoned due to funky smells and poor location, a room that was reopened in response to an alleged need for more classroom space. The kids complained fiercely about that room. They hated going into that empty hallway and Carlotta’s first challenge was to manage the understandable whining. No one could identify the room’s strange smell, and that smell made Carlotta and the students uneasy.

Kids don’t learn well in a situation like the one I watched unfolding in the basement that year.  The best teachers don’t stay in a situation like that. They find another, more comfortable district where the water can be trusted, and the rooms don’t smell funny or have black patches in spots. Administration responded to Carlotta’s problems and moved her mid-year, but those administrators in Detroit may have no options. You can’t find a better room for a teacher if that room does not exist.

Eduhonesty: To add to an underlying thread, school funding reform has become overdue. Dank, moldy rooms matter. The students in Detroit need America’s help.

*I’ve changed her name and she taught in another moldy room in another scary place.

P.S. She retired early after that year.

Found this in my Facebook crawl, courtesy of a friend who liked it. I messaged the source and snagged his picture. These words take me straight back to my second year of teaching. I was talking with a likable, smiling young man who was in my alternative high school math class, trying to get him to focus on academics. I don’t know how we got to talking, but I’d guess his eyes were bloodshot. A lot of eyes were bloodshot in that school on any given day. That chat woke me up to realities I’d never even thought about.

Ms. Q: What would your parents think?

Student: They don’t care. We get high together. I go home and smoke with them after school.”

Oh.

I imagine he enjoyed derailing my lecture, which he did manage to stop cold. I believed him. He was an honest, likable kid. The alternative high school had a number of kids like him. They had great dispositions and a scary lack of mathematical understanding. Unfortunately, zero tolerance policies had gotten them thrown out of high schools when baggies of alleged oregano fell out of their lockers. Oregano was kind of a joke that year. “I had some oregano, Ms. Q. and they found it.”

I don’t remember exactly how that conversation ended. I am sure I defaulted to something like, “we have a lot of math to learn and it will be easier if you don’t smoke before you come to school.”

But that was one of the moments when I realized just what I was up against in my attempts to help my students. It’s hard to learn high school math when you are high. For some kids, I suspect it’s impossible.

I don’t know how many of the parents meant to see this Facebook post are reading my blog, but probably not too many, if any.  If you are out there, stop that! Don’t smoke with the kid before school and don’t smoke with the kid before the homework’s done. In fact, don’t smoke. This last line might be one of the silliest things I’ve ever written. I know and I’m sure readers know I can hardly begin to manage or control this problem, although I have been known to step into the gap and at least try.

Eduhonesty: I present this post as one more reason why we have to stop “grading” teachers on student performance and behavior. Those rubrics that grade teachers based on their students’ test scores and behaviors will lead some teachers to move into more upscale, easier schools with more dedicated students. I loved that kid in the above post. But he would have been nothing but trouble on a Charlotte Danielson rubric day. Too many kids like my boy — I have had many of them by now — and a smart teacher has to think about filling out the common application for a district where most of the students are college-bound.  If you are going to grade me on my students behavior and mathematical prowess, my best move will be to pick the best-behaved, highest-scoring kids around, and those kids are not usually found in urban and academically-disadvantaged schools.

For more on Charlotte Danielson, see my April 30, 2015 post.

Yes, I am against unsupervised bail-outs for dysfunctional school districts. Yes, I know that charters sometimes work very well. Charters may be the best local option for education. Yes, I know my state is … financially challenged, maybe even broke.

I would like to make one observation, though. I don’t trust privatization. When op-ed pieces tell me I need to be freed from the union taking my money, I flash to a thought: The only people I know with decent pensions at this point are union members. The affordability of that pension for the state may be debatable. But my corporate friends are on their own. They invest their money or they don’t. Those who don’t save enough money find themselves in a world of hurt. Awhile back, my brother and I had a conversation revolving around fifty-some-year olds who have realized they can’t retire in the near future — or, indeed, in any future. He talked about the scared look in their eyes, the higher-pitch in their voices as they discuss numbers that don’t add up, numbers that will lock them into the workforce long after they desire to leave.

Thanks to the union, I retired with health care and a pension. I did not work long enough to get a big pension, but I can afford to sit at this computer right now in my Star Wars t-shirt and pajamas. O.K., I’ll admit without my husband’s contribution, I’d have to work another 10 years probably to sit where I am, but I did not quit with no recognition for my time and effort. Every year I worked, my pension got a little bigger.

We are breaking the unions in this country. For readers who are not in unions or who are beginning to believe the prevailing propaganda out there, I would like to say this: Unions are not tools of top secret communist cabals. They are bargaining organizations that support rank-and-file workers. In the corporate world, the world that many government leaders now want for education, who will bargain for the workers? Who will protect those workers?

Eduhonesty: I don’t know that I trust unions to always have my interests at heart, but I’d have to be batshit crazy to trust corporations to put my interests ahead of their profits. That’s the bottom-line to this discussion. I have seen unions represent workers, known workers who recovered jobs or pay because of the union.  I have never seen a corporation do the same unless threatened with legal action.

That’s the critical fact that our op-ed pieces tend to leave out.

From Education Week:

Amid Controversy, Detroit Schools Emergency Manager to Resign