EdObserver

Back in the late 60’s when Miss Austerlitz told us we were never to use that term in her classroom again, she meant the expression, “Shut up.” It was rude, and unacceptable in her math class, in any class. We couldn’t chew gum either. Any time a kid was singled out and scolded, the worst that happened would be a few choice words under his breath – way under his breath. Maybe the kid in the next desk would hear that Miss Austerlitz was a fat windbag, but no one else. Certainly it was never loud enough for Miss A. to hear.

I thought of Miss A. the other day when one of the students in my math class told another kid to “f*** off.” When confronted by the young math teacher, he said “What the f***’s the matter? He made me mad!” Even Miss Austerlitz would have been happy to hear him just say “Shut up.” This was followed by the teacher taking the student out into the hall, having the student walk away, and the teacher finally “writing-him-up” This happens in many classes, two or three times a week.

Sometimes it’s just banter -no anger- just the language of the streets as it was called, student to student, in the classroom. When told to stop, the conversation inevitably turns into a discussion of whether the language is in fact unacceptable.

A little drama in the math class

Student: “Don’t ask me if I would talk to my mother like that, that’s how she talks to me!”

Teacher: “I don’t care what language you use at home, you will not use that language in my class.”

The rest of the students talk among themselves, sometimes discussing whether the teacher over reacted, or they remain enthralled, plugged in to an iPod. In the mean time no one is doing math, or social studies or English. The student gets “written-up.” The student gets a detention, doesn’t miss the bus because he drives to school, and starts over the next day. When we have no rules of behavior with no real punishments assigned, the problems are never solved. More classes get disrupted. More teachers are demeaned. More kids lose interest.

Why don’t teachers demand more of the administration? Why doesn’t the administration demand more of the parents? Why don’t the parents demand more of their kids?

Six years ago when high school students started having cell phones in great numbers, and everyone had a CD player, the school I worked for banned their use during the school day. Four years ago when almost every kid had an iPod, or wanted one, the PTA and the engineering club each ran a fund-raising raffle with an iPod prize. The ban was rescinded and each teacher set the rules for his or her classroom. The English department tried to ban them in all of its classes, but it didn’t work and they too let every teacher decide on their own.

Cell phones were even more problematic. They were expensive; so how to confiscate them and not become liable or be charged with invasion of privacy. And parents argued that they needed to be in touch with their kids, what with work schedules (theirs and their children’s) and all. So the administration allowed their use up until the morning bell, the first ten minutes of lunch — only outside the caf’ — and right after the afternoon bell.

Turning a deaf ear

Both the  iPods and the cell phones became an increasing annoyance to many teachers. How many times can you ask a student to respond, only to find that he or she hasn’t heard a word because they were “plugged-in?” Text messaging on cell phones contributed to even more problems. Up to one-quarter of a class might possibly have their hands under their desks, texting furiously. In one of my classes, two girls were actually texting each other across the room.

Class after class, the teachers had to remind students to take out their ear buds; a lesson was about to start. The kids would only take out one. Then you can’t tell if they are listening or not; they must be questioned; the class is disrupted; and we do this up to three or four times per class. Cell phones under the desk are just as common. Any break in the classroom action and the cells come out, and mad texting begins. If you’ve never seen it, I don’t think you can believe it.

When the school finally banned cell phones—the penalty was immediate confiscation— with parents receiving phone calls to come and retrieve them. The outcry was deafening. Not only were the parents unable to reach their children during the day, but it was unreasonable to think that a parent had the time to come to school over so minor an infraction. So the ban was lifted during lunch, in the cafeteria.

Think about this. If a student were eating lunch with a friend, there would be no need to text. If  students were texting someone not eating with them, it was probably a friend who was sitting in a class. It is insane.

In my current school, in any given class, seventy -five percent of the kids are plugged-in at some time. Wires hang down from everyone’s ears. iPods are constantly being dropped, or being adjusted. More kids come to school with iPods than come to school with pencils or pens. I am serious.

We had a math test today. Eighteen students. Only one girl took the test without music in her ears. Six students had neither pencil nor pen; one took the test with a pen, which cost him two points on his overall score. Some educators even argue that the music helps some students to concentrate. I wish I had something to say. I don’t.

It was a four day week this week because Monday was Presidents Day. My only comment is to repeat something I heard one of the juniors say last Friday: (The teacher iterated the upcoming schedule of lessons, noting that the next class was Tuesday), “That’s right it’s a four-day week. I hate them; there’re always so long!”    Amen.

Some thoughts about a new technology that seems to sweeping the public schools — interactive white boards (IWBs). These are digital, touch-screen, projection systems that are replacing blackboards and “dumb” whiteboards, as well as the overhead projectors that are popular in every classroom. There are a number of brands, sizes, features and software, but they are all similar.

A teacher prepares a lesson on a laptop computer which interfaces with a projector which projects the document, pictures, videos or interactive presentations on to the white board. A digital pen allows you to write on, erase and manipulate the contents of the page. There is the potential for a fully integrated lesson for every class. And they can be used merely to write on, in real time, in multicolored script for emphasis.

We put them in our school this year, covering the primary blackboard in the classroom, so teachers would be forced to use them. Math classes were first, science second, and the teachers seemed to like them. The kids didn’t; which seemed odd. Give them a new cell phone and they program and customize it in an hour and talk about it with all their friends; but this was different. They had no time to fool around with the smart board, or customize it, or get proficient with it. And when high-schoolers go up to the front of the classroom to put problems on the board, they don’t want to find that they can’t erase a mistake, or their writing looks hideous in purple, and most of them rejected the use of the smart boards outright. Most of them have come around after one semester.

I expect that will be the case with our English and Social Studies teachers who have been dragged kicking and screaming into the second phase of installations. One of whom was so opposed to mandatory installation (covering the primary blackboard) that she turned all the desks around to face the small secondary board in the room. Sure enough, the installers were tricked into installing the gizmo over that blackboard. Yesterday I passed her room and she was giving a totally integrated lesson, including a video, projected on to the new IWB.

Once the decision was made to buy this new technology, which requires a laptop computer, a ceiling mounted projector and the white board (at a cost between $3,000 and $6000); it was essential to require their installation as the primary classroom board. It is also essential that the school offer the training necessary for teachers to become proficient, feel comfortable, and use as much of the system’s capabilities as possible. Then we can start assessing whether our technology dollars were well spent and whether teachers really want to participate in a new world of education.

Tom Hopper, a social studies teacher at Chippewa Middle School in Okemos, MI who is proficient in the use of a smart board, demonstrates how an interactive whiteboard works.

A father of one of our high school students contacted the administration last week to get an accounting of the school day. Our day runs from 7:25 am to 2:30 pm, seven hours. He was trying to reconcile this fact, with the fact that block schedule classes are 90 minutes long and there are four blocks for a total of six hours plus a 25 minute lunch. What happens in the remaining half hour, he asked? It seems a petty concern. There is a ten-minute homeroom and there are four six-minute passing times between blocks. I guess he was wondering if there was wasted time in the school day. He doesn’t know the half of it.

The only reason I would defend the block schedule, which I hate, is that with longer classes, a smaller percentage of class time is wasted at the beginning of each class. Today was a good example. (For a discussion of the pros and cons of block schedules, see Melissa Kelly’s entry on About.com.)

Friday was a senior activity day with seniors  giving up any late arrival privileges, for the enjoyment of a free continental breakfast and two thirds of a morning at an entertaining assembly. So the five seniors in my first block class had to make up a test. Seniors never want to or give up lunch, or stay after to make up a test – many have early dismissal (Yes, there is late arrival and early dismissal for seniors.) Because there were so many of them,  they were allowed to take it during class time. That meant moving desks and chairs out into the hall, and running back for pencils and calculators.

Then attendance and distributing of class note sheets for returning absentees. Followed by setting up the laptop for the “smart” whiteboard lesson, then initializing the whiteboard, then monkeying around with the computer when the file wouldn’t open. Fortunately there was only one latecomer, and he was a senior so he just hoisted another desk over his head and carried it into the hall. Finally our 7:25 block began its lesson at 7:45. Had it been a regular 50 minute period, well, you can do the math.

One of my daily classes is a special-ed class for “neurotypical students” (education jargon for normal) which teaches learning skills. We cover study techniques such as SQ3R and classroom note taking. We also devote quite a bit of class time to memory issues. We encourage the use of mnemonic devices like PEMDAS for the order of operations in math and a PEG system that aids in remembering lists. We’re in this class 90 minutes a day. We have a vocabulary session that uses funny cartoons to help recall the words and their meanings. We’ve had a PowerPoint presentation and a brief video on the “layers of memory” and their value in establishing study schedules. You can argue about whether or not this class is worthy of an elective credit, but in our high school it is.

The memory lessons emphasize the need to see, visualize, write, review, and then study the information repeatedly, in order to reach layer four, the long-term memory in the brain.

Brace yourself for the classroom collision!

The next 90-minute block I walk into is a chemistry class designed for exactly the same level of student, with a six-foot wall chart of the periodic table that has the atomic symbols, numbers and masses — but not the names of the elements! So these kids will spend a semester — for a full “year” of chemistry — never reinforcing the name of an element and its symbol. The brand new teacher speculated that it was designed so that the kids could not use it on the test of common elements and their symbols. For only one exam, by the way!

So, we’re going to skip the daily reinforcement of the element names, risk failing to reach layer four of memory, just so we can test whether they’ve mastered H for hydrogen, O for oxygen…  for 20 elements? When I asked this teacher if she really thought this was the reason the school district purchased one of these monsters for every chemistry class in the district, she responded with, “it works for me.”

I found this periodic table wall chart so useless that I Googled “wall chart period table without element names” and Google responded with ” Did you mean: wall chart period table with element names ?” Try as I could, I couldn’t find a company selling a wall chart that did not include the element names. So who made this purchase for the district? Did anyone notice that there were no element names on it? Did someone realize the mistake after spending the money and just say,  “it works for me.” Maybe the buyer never heard of the four layers of memory.

But there’s more. In a classroom exercise involving a worksheet game that used elements and their symbols, the students asked the teacher why tungsten’s atomic symbol was “W.” She told them that she had no idea. A chart with an alphabetical listing of the elements in the back of the room, however, lists Tungsten and its alternate name—Wolfram.

Maybe there’s a mnemonic device to remember all of the elements that don’t alphabetically match their atomic symbols. Now that would be teaching across the curriculum.

It’s Presidents Day and I am home from school and reading some reports on education by Rick Hess at the American Enterprise Institute.  I have read a number of his books and reports and I have seen him on TV. I agree with most of what he says, but I never detect a fire in his belly. He is well-educated, thoughtful, and articulate, but he hasn’t been in a public school classroom in over twenty years, except as an outside observer. He hasn’t seen what’s going on, day to day,  for a full year.

He articulates what he wants to change, but what does he intend to do about it.

In an interview with Alexander Russo on his blog, Hess commented on the role of his think tank, AEI, in education. Hess’s reply: “AEI is a funny place. Like a university or the Brookings Institution, we don’t hammer out institution-wide policies or have any explicit agenda. Our education program is whatever the scholars are working on that year. In most cases, that’s determined more by intellectual interest than the policy agenda.”

And what did he think was his main accomplishment at AEI: “It’s been convening folks to pursue topics that I find interesting and important but that, for whatever reason, schools of education and advocacy organizations haven’t spent much time on.”

Convening folks to pursue your interests is not an accomplishment. It was admirable of Eleanor Roosevelt to let Marian Anderson sing at the Lincoln monument, but it took Rosa Parks, daring to sit in the front of the bus, to make a difference.

Many people, although not nearly enough, realize that there are serious problems with the American education system, and need to speak out at every opportunity.  I only point out that even those in a position to speak out rarely see the problems first hand.

Like the Schrödinger’s Cat paradox, you can’t tell what’s going on in the box if you don’t open the box. But when you  open the box, you change what’s going on in the box.

From bad textbooks, to a lack of curriculum, to bad teachers, and discipline problems, very few see the educational system from “inside the box,” except the kids. And like Schrödinger’s cat they can wind up, intellectually at least, dead.

The problem  is that there’s no way to really know what’s wrong with American public schools if you only observe them as an outsider. And what has Hess accomplished in terms of making a change?

Today I thought I would go out of my mind if the young teacher of my chemistry class said “thank you” or “thanks so much” to one more student. I must explain.

No one is a bigger advocate of treating students with respect than I. It is a weakness of many older teachers that they tend to cut kids off when they offer explanations; and then the teachers make quick, often unfair judgments of an incident that they didn’t witness. Many times the kids will come to the para-educator in the classroom and plead for some validation. It puts an adult in a difficult position and we all hate it. I wish teachers would respect the fact that most students are not lying to cover up what they did. And they deserve a chance to speak even if that has to be delayed until the end of class.

That having been said, if a student comes into a classroom late and holds out his late pass, and interrupts the class presentation – just take the pass and go on with the lesson.

It is a weakness of  young teachers who would never say “I expect you to get here on time.” But there’s absolutely no need to say – “You have a pass? Oh, thanks so much.” – interrupting the class even further. It’s a big deal because this is a first-block class, with 28 kids. That means that on an average day there will be three to four latecomers. If they come in late enough to have missed the homework collection, the teacher will delay the class even more and ask the tardy student if he or she has the homework? If they have it, they get it out and hand it over – another delay. This is greeted with another “Thanks.” If this is done to accommodate two or three students a day, the whole class starts ten minutes late while the kids in their seats start talking to one another.

Why does being late deserve a “thank you”?

Day three of state assessment testing and our long homeroom was filled with an exercise that required the students who weren’t being tested, to write a letter. So an example of good letter writing was provided. It was a letter written by President Obama to his daughters.

Over two hundred years of the republic and the only person that the principal of this school can imagine quoting is a new president who has yet to establish any legacy. Ironically, the great letter writer was A. Lincoln, whose birthday is today – the 200^th anniversary of his birth, to be precise. No one in the school noticed.

It reminds me of something that happened when I worked in a middle school. I decorated the February bulletin board with the traditional silhouettes of Washington and Lincoln. The day they went up, most of the kids asked me who they were. One girl said she thought the one on the on the right was Lincoln, but why was he on the board. I told her that she was correct and that the one on the left was George Washington. I also told her that both of them had birthdays in February, but now we only celebrate President’s Day.  “Cool! What a coincidence,” she said, “that they both just happened to born in the same month as President’s Day!”

But back to Obama and the schools. When I started school, there was always a picture of the current president hanging in the office. I certainly remember Eisenhower and Kennedy. I think distaste for Nixon killed the practice. Certainly no one in the public schools would have hung a picture of George W. Bush. I have a sneaking suspicion that the practice will be resurrected with the election of Obama. I’d like to hear from anyone who sees the President’s picture hanging in any local public school.

In the continuing saga of state assessment testing and long homerooms, I spent a relatively enjoyable hour-and-a-half with a group of sophomores. We had an experienced teacher subbing for our homeroom teacher who was proctoring an exam. One of the boys who had the teacher last semester called her by a diminutive of her last name.

I’m not even fond of students calling teachers by their last names only, as in “Nice work, Findlay!” accompanied by the ubiquitous high-five. But calling Ms. Goldfarb, Goldie, is over the top – just too friendly, too “peer-ish.”

If it makes me sound old fart-ish, I don’t care. We’re not their friends. We are adults. We can be friendly, we might even be cool, but we are not their peers. To expect respect for position is a good thing. That’s what coaches expect, and even team captains. Today’s young teachers – which means anyone under thirty – just try too hard to be loved. The banter between student and teacher sounds more like two kids hanging out. And it almost never works out. Somewhere in the course of a term, some student will step over the line in class. The young teacher must either stand there and take it, or stand up for what’s right and shock the class when he or she turns “mean.”