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Today I was remembering back to my 11th grade year of high school when I placed an ultimatum on my guidance counselor to help me graduate early or I would drop out. How smug I must have sounded! I don’t recall her name or face, probably because I stopped looking at her when she started explaining that leaving high school early would set my life on a “downward trajectory”. Against her guidance, we worked out a plan for me to graduate that summer with the final credits I needed. That first graduation of my memory had five students in the ceremony…four of whom were correcting their senior-year mistakes…and me trying to avoid a senior year altogether.
Today I was remembering back to that 11th grade guidance counselor’s words as I sat in the graduation ceremony for my second college degree. I remember the joy of my paramedic training when life was young and exciting, the challenge of my undergraduate work as I started a family, and I am probably temporarily scarred by the intense work I’ve just completed while trying to be a decent husband, father, and teacher, but in no way has my trajectory dropped. I knew something of myself that day that she didn’t and I hope I allow myself to see how well each of my students know themselves.
Life and learning are about setting goals and doing whatever it takes to achieve them. I didn’t know I would end up here, but I sure knew my trajectory would not be downward. I hope not to profess doom upon anyone in my care who feels they need to follow a different road. I went where there was no road and I feel it has only pointed me upward.
As an adult, I sometimes notice a behavior or response in myself that I can attribute to some passing wisdom one of my parents imparted along the way. When this happens I try to call one of them as soon as I can to thank them for the long-ago lesson. It seems the least I can do to honor their hard work in raising me.
As a teacher, sometimes I see a reflection of the life lessons I came here to teach. When it’s subtle and unprovoked, you know it’s real and it’s magic. In a lot of my teaching, I try to include the essence of a quote that Martin Luther King, Jr. apparently told his children before they left for school each day. It is along the lines of, “…always consider those who cannot get an education even as good as yours…you will not be the best you can be until they are the best they can be…” This is a heavy load for me to burden eight-year olds, but a model of the responsibility I want to see in the world.
Today some of that magic happened. In short, we were finishing a math lesson. Four of my kids who share a table and frequently argue about anything were wrapping up some independent work. As I made rounds, I realized that they were whispering to one another. Two of the kids are average at fractions, two were really struggling. I watched from afar as the former two patiently walked their peers through the final problems. In elementary school we often, foolishly call this cheating. As adults, we call it collaborating. As a person who believes we won’t be our best until everyone is their best, I call it the reason I came to be a teacher.
So, I waited until the four were done, then made sure everyone in the class came together to listen as I explained what I’d seen and how important it is. If they attribute this to me later in life, great, but if they continue to live this way on their own, even better!
I am halfway through a week-long teaching experience at a local nature center. My teaching partner and I have 42 of our kids outside, experiencing learning through experiencing nature up close. As expected, it snowed on the first day, rained on the second and third (Did you check the date up there? Classic Michigan weather!), but the spirits were not dampened, rather enlivened; our learning not frozen, but thawed from the traditional classroom. I suppose I am feeling influenced by the videos on my prior post and the realization that there can be amazing alternatives to our current education structures.
Archimedes apparently said, “Give me a long enough lever and a place to stand, and I can move the world.” I now say, “Give me a 90-acre park and a laptop and I can teach a kid anything!”
I don’t typically watch something again and again, unless it’s involves the Three Stooges or the first season of Scrubs. However, I have watched this video from the 2010 TED Conference, repeatedly over the past year. If you’re interested in children, learning, or technology, give yourself an uninterrupted 17:25 minutes to really take this in. It continues to inspire me about where human learning could go and the nature of children that I try so hard not to dull through the current system. Without further explanation, here are a couple quotes from Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey to prime the pump, “A teacher that can be replaced by a machine, should be” and, “If children have interest, then education happens.”
During my undergraduate studies, I heard people speak of how public education is a profession that “eats our young”. While I wasn’t sure how this could be much different than the challenges and rituals rookie employees might face in other industries, I entered cautiously. I, personally, don’t think I ever experienced being loaded with the toughest kids, being given the hardest schedules, being assigned to the worst committees, being given extra tasks, or any of the threats they warned me about. If I was “dumped on”, it apparently didn’t work and I remain blissfully naïve as I’ve felt that each child in my care was a gem that left me with an improved polish (mine and theirs, however you want to read it ;).
Maybe I’ve been lucky. I’ve learned more each year, that’s for sure. I feel I’m in a career that will never be mastered and if I ever thought I had, that would surely be naïve. Still, something in my heart sulks a little when I interpret the spirit of “eating our young” from another teacher. Recently, I was at the seminar of a nationally-recognized educator who made it a point to repeatedly call out first-year teachers in a room of hundreds, gently but surely mocking them for their status of being born after she’d left the classroom. There is a value to the experience we gain with age, that I will not deny, but the teachers who have left the best marks on my mind and heart are those who have never made me feel any younger or older, wiser or naïve than themselves. Learning and teaching is a sister- and brotherhood, a parent-child relationship, a marriage of minds, a debate and a compromise, and always a joint creation. I believe we should never relegate someone’s value to their inexperience in our world and I surely hope if I am ever in a position of influence others, I won’t be so naïve.
(By the way, there is a conspiracy theory for eating our young. If you pay into the pension fund, but leave teaching before you’re vested at ten years, it provides for those who remain eligible…but I’m not a conspirator.)
I read a post on Facebook in which someone made some pretty pointed remarks about their child’s teacher. I put myself in both the parent’s and the teacher’s shoes to try and understand the situation. As a parent, I’ve experienced the frustration of not completely understanding monologue communication from school. As a teacher, I imagined how hurt I would be if someone went to a social networking site to blast my mistakes (I do make them daily) or especially a misunderstanding that I didn’t have the chance to correct. It dawned on me how similar this rhetoric is to the “virtual bullying” that we are now learning to teach about in schools, where bullies resort to defamation and hurting victims, I have to imagine that teacher was not on the “friend” list of that parent, so it was a one-sided assault.
On the side of the parent, bullying or pain was probably not the intention at all. We live in an age of online discourse. If a restaurant, a movie, a song, an emotion, a blog…any human interaction is terrible or great we publicly flaunt or flog it. Maybe we sometimes forget that there is a human on the other side of that interaction. From this, I have decided to make it a point to use the communal “WE”, so that anything I may observe, experience, or evaluate includes me as an active participant, not a critic-sans-solutions.
For a while I’ve been in limbo about merit pay for teachers, or providing bonuses to enhance teacher salaries based on their professional performance or students’ achievement. I thought I was leaning toward this being a good thing, given my past professional experience in business where bonuses and raises were measured on performance improvement. Now, I’m simply in limbo that this is neither a good nor bad thing, but an irrelevant thing.
Here’s my line of reasoning:
My core belief as an educator is that learning is central to living, intrinsic motivation is essential for learning, and the example we show teaches much more than anything we say in the classroom. Thus, if I were to choose a system of extrinsic motivation, I would be modeling a social convention of greed that I fundamentally oppose.
I don’t think I could work or think harder about improving my profession and my students even if earning more depended upon it. I would extend this to the best teachers I know that this is a passionate calling that we would pursue at personal cost regardless of the reimbursement. (Perhaps this is why the burnout rate is 50% of new teachers within the first five years?)
The small amount of research on pay-for-performance teaching shows about no difference in student performance by teachers who did or didn’t receive incentives. In a profession where we are lacking and trying to create collaboration, incentivizing an individual would further exploit this problem.
Finally, I already receive merit pay. Just last week a grandparent volunteer told me, “You’re smarter than you look”, responding to the effort he observes me exerting to challenge my kids and their families’ thinking. A few days before, a parent from four years ago called me at home merely to share with me that her son and daughter, my former students, had received accolades for their school performance. I wouldn’t venture to infer that their prowess had anything to do with my teaching years before, but I am sure the care I gave that family was reciprocated in that voicemail.
The way education is going, our profession may go the way of merit pay through powers beyond me. Either way I already receive merit pay and I really appreciate it. What do you think?
Stick with me on this, as it may be a little complicated and long, but one of the more profound realizations I’ve had since becoming enmeshed in public education!
Around 1956 psychologist Benjamin Bloom unleashed his “taxonomy” of escalating thought-process on the education community. It since has become a cornerstone theory in instructional design and professional development. In brief, the idea is to move a learner from lower-order thinking (knowledge and comprehension) to higher-order thinking (application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation).
About a year ago, Linda Darling-Hammond was featured in a video comparing the U. S. Education system to similarly-developed countries. According to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) the United States ranks behind many of these countries and is continually falling behind. The proposal is that the U.S. does not teach or test our children at the same levels of higher-order thinking. This is not news as the multiple-choice, standardized tests we’ve relied upon for years can attest.
My proposition is that we, as a country, infrequently go beyond lower-order thinking. Most educators I know value learning through inquiry, but are bound by multiple forces to function in perfunctory ways that may not necessarily facilitate higher-order thinking. The knowledge and comprehension are out there, and have been for years, however we as a people have not moved into higher-order thinking as we play out our political values.
A few examples of things we “know” and “comprehend” across multiple domains of our society, but especially effecting the education of our children:
Equitable tax structures for a sustainable economy
The significance of socio-economic differences
Learning styles of children
Non-traditional school organizational structures
Solid learning standards (deep, not wide)
Effective instructional practices
The relationship of learning standards to instructional practice
In few instances has our society “analyzed, applied, or synthesized” such concepts into reality or action. To be fair, we do plenty of “evaluating” of the same old systems and any new thinking that tries to rear its ugly head…perhaps that’s our higher-order thinking. Is this lack of higher-order thinking due to some political agenda, financial deficiency, or hidden class system?
I’m left wondering: if we know it, why don’t we do it? I suppose that question could be applied to many industries or situations, but it might require some higher-order thinking to answer.
Again it played out on television, this time with a backdrop of Libya. It could have been Iraq or Afghanistan, perhaps even Vietnam years before. Either way, we’ve seen it, teachers more than most. The journalist is surrounded by adrenaline-pumped people, all speaking at once when one, with the best broken English, becomes louder than the rest about atrocities committed against the group by another group, an evil leader, a bully. Our senses are overwhelmed; we can’t believe people are treated this way; we question who is being truthful; we try to quell the heightened emotions; we try to make sense.
I didn’t draw the parallel until today, after years of seeing the same, confused dance that I have so often disregarded as “playground politics”. I danced it as a child; I moderate it as a teacher. I painfully see those suffering it on a greater scale in the world. Someone feels wronged. Maybe they are. Someone did wrong. Maybe they did. I wasn’t there to witness how it began, but now it is on my plate to make sense of, to compromise, somehow to sooth the souls affected by disagreement.
Some say that’s life and children must learn to solve their problems. I suppose there is some truth in that, but as I see this desperation for justice play out and be placed upon the hands of the rest of the world, I do wonder: If we can’t figure out how to help them solve problems on the playground, how will they help us figure out how to solve problems in the world?
