EdObserver

Teachers and administrator love to use the expression “Let’s think-out-of-the-box.” The solution is usually not very far from the box. As in, we don’t have enough money to fund the astronomy club’s field trip, why don’t we have a bake sale? Or eight of my 23 students are failing, why not come up with an extra credit project? When there are some serious changes to be made, it is usually back in-the-box, business as usual.

We are completely renovating our high school. It is a $40 million project. The science department goes first. Our science rooms are pretty disgraceful, but it is much more an equipment problem than a physical plant problem. In the chemistry labs the cabinets are never cleaned, damaged equipment is not replaced, and there is not sufficient equipment for each lab station. And even though we have 90-minute block classes, there never seems to be enough time for the students to clean the equipment, so beakers and test tubes are always left a little funky. It does make for some fun comments when the students record their observations and lab station #3 has a test tube with a solution that turns bright pink, not milky white.

There is one problem with the physical plant: there are more science teachers than science classrooms. The newest teachers, in our case three of them, have no classrooms of their own. They are given a desk in a common working area, usually the space that has the department’s copier/printer, refrigerator and microwave. They are also given a cart to wheel their laptop, plans, and handouts from room to room. When they use another teacher’s room, they often have to use the desk, move papers, check for missing keys etc. And they can’t set up a lab in advance, so they have to take class time to do the set-ups.

And our chemistry labs are located in the back of a regular classroom. There are 28 desks jammed into the open space, almost touching the first lab stations. You can barely walk through the room. It lacks a professionalism that might encourage a respect for the subject.

But we only have four block periods a day. Each teacher has one block for prep and planning. So every block, one quarter of the science classrooms are empty, free of students. Is there any way we could put this empty space to use? Certainly at our school no one thought out-of-the-box to alleviate the pains.

Let’s think this through.

How about a full classroom space assigned for every six teachers, with desks, and bookshelves, a real phone, a work table and a place to hang their coats, or whatever? How about shared, dedicated lab rooms (They are never used more than twice a week.), with room for equipment, room to move around, and room to put the eyewash station in the same room as the students not in the supply room through a door which is not easily reached because there are 28 desks between it and the lab stations? Maybe the existing space could be completely renovated, made modern, well-equipped.

We’re building a new wing. Thinking-out-of-the-box in today’s schools more often than not, involves building a new box!

In these times, someone had better think-out-of-the-box when it comes time to pay for it.

I am assigned to a low level geometry class with a first year teacher who is first rate. I was in one of her Algebra II classes last semester. She knows her subject and maybe because her mother is an elementary school teacher, she handles her classes “old school.”  She gives the kids the respect of teaching a “real” lesson, and then assigns class work that she monitors, and helps them with, teaching the material the entire time. Homework is done at home, is collected and recorded. And she expects the students to treat her classroom as a place of business, with work accomplished and behavior respectful.

With today’s students, she sometimes doesn’t succeed. She may be the best young teacher I have ever seen. She is not tenured and at the end of this year, though she will  be offered a contract in this district, she will not have a position in our high school. That is our loss.

Our loss, too, is a tenured math teacher we will never be rid of. In a chemistry class, a student was studying for a math quiz. When asked who she “had”, the student answered Ms. B. Every eye in the room, rolled – rolled to the back of each student’s head. To a person, everyone agreed, “She is the worst.” Apparently she: doesn’t teach a lesson, can’t answer questions, lets the class get out of control, and cries at her desk when things really sour. She should not be teaching. She is not good at it. She is tenured. She has worked at this school for more than five years. She will never be fired unless she abuses a child or parent physically, sexually or perhaps, emotionally. She cannot be fired for being an incompetent teacher, even if the whole world agrees.

We have just finished three rounds of our state’s assessment tests, and there is one more to go. It is, as I have discussed previously, made as tedious as possible for the entire school. Then it is discussed endlessly, always concluding that they are worthless because they do nothing but encourage the dreaded “teaching to the test.” This is a term, a warning really, that I believe was coined by the teachers’ union to offer an argument against standardized testing.

Without standardized tests we do not have any real measure of what a student in a public school has learned. It is therefore imperative that the educational community encourages parents to think that these tests are invalid. Most parents have bought the argument. Start a discussion of the state of education in America, mention standardized tests, count to three, and some parent will tell you that they only encourage “teaching to the test.” Then look around and see how many heads are bobbing in agreement. The problem is really the reverse: what we thought was important to test was not taught. Our test scores reflect this. The problem with the testing is the lack of curriculum that supports the knowledge we test.

The tests aren’t perfect, neither is the teaching.

Do you think all eleventh-graders should be able to solve a simple algebra equation, that many should be able to recognize and plot simple linear equations, and that some should know about quadratic equations and the graphs that go along with them? Then put that in a test and see how many students have been taught those concepts. If I successfully teach a student these concepts, did I impart the knowledge we value or did I just teach to the test? And if I taught the knowledge we value, why are the kids not passing the test?

We don’t use textbooks very much in our high school. I don’t know why. Teachers don’t like to talk about it. Maybe some of them think that they are outdated, or too politically correct, or too restricting. It doesn’t matter what the reasons are; we don’t use them.

In some classes, they aren’t even assigned. In others they are given out, with instructions to take them home and leave them there, because there are classroom copies that will be used. Or the students are told to leave them in their lockers, waiting for the few times that they will be told to bring them to class. In any case, I have been in no class, in this school, where students have been required to bring a textbook to class regularly. The lessons are never coordinated to the assigned textbook.
This is almost always the case in math and science, where it can create a big problem. It’s a problem for any student who would like to read ahead and come in prepared for the next day’s class, or a student who left class thinking he knew the lesson later to realize that he is still a bit confused, or a student who was absent and would like to read about the missed lesson in detail. It also hurts the parents who would like to see what their child is learning, possibly hoping to help. This last one is important because if parents can’t help, they lose a little bit of the connection between their child and the child’s education.

The textbooks are awful.

I have my own objections to today’s math texts. Our daughter was probably among the last students to use math texts (without four-color pictures that have nothing to do with the math process) which stepped you through the lesson. When she missed a geometry lesson on angles, I couldn’t remember all of the rules. But once you see an illustration of parallel lines with a transverse line and corresponding angles clearly labeled, you can come around pretty quickly. I’ve even helped Kathy with some topics I wasn’t familiar with, just by reading the textbook.

Look at the most recent math texts to see what I am talking about. They begin with applications, and then introduce the math process. There are four-color pictures of mathematicians, or track and field performances. There is sometimes a little PC philosophy tagged on: “Women in Science” (Their numbers are increasing.) or “the future with global warming” (If the temperature rises 0.01% every year… )  In the two districts in which I have worked, no math class has used a text, though both have recently purchased new texts for every grade level. By the way, there’s still a text for every student and they cost $75 – $100 each.

I went to school in a different time, but it sometimes seems like a different planet. For one thing, there was homework almost every night, even on weekends. And though teachers sometimes checked to see if you had done the assignment, if it wasn’t a long-term project, it was never graded. In other words, while you might get a demerit for failing to do it, you didn’t really get credit for doing it. Homework was practice. Learn a new lesson; reinforce the lesson with homework as practice .

I was not a perfect student. I should have spent more time studying every night instead of cramming before tests. But I almost always did my homework. I once got caught with a missing assignment only 30 seconds before the principal announced that President Kennedy had been shot. Everyone remembers what he or she was doing when they heard the news. I was getting a zero for not completing my homework.

Today, homework counts. In most classes it accounts for 10% of a student’s grade. It is usually not a letter grade; some cruder, more flexible grading system is used. Some teachers will evaluate each assignment on a five-point scale, or they will use “√ +, √, and √ ─.” This system lets a teacher assign a weighted grade at the end of a marking period that might more fairly reflect the student’s homework participation.

It doesn’t matter. For the “at risk” students, homework is a waste of time and they just won’t do it. Just doing it will give the student a score of 100% for 10% of your grade. It doesn’t even have to be done correctly, or completely. It doesn’t even have to be done at home.

In most classes, homework is merely the completion of the class work, worksheet or problems, which you didn’t finish in class – usually because you were talking, or texting a friend on your cell phone held under your desk. There seems to be an unwritten code of honor, in a group with an unofficial membership, and a slogan that says “We don’t do homework. No we don’t!”