Alpha Shrugged

2011-05-22T16:17:00.000-07:00

"If weak government, low taxes, union busting, guns, and a hugely influential church were a recipe for success, then Mexico would be a paradise."

Sorry, folks. Needed a place to store that.

Celebrate

2006-05-11T07:51:00.000-07:00

Fib

2006-04-26T19:22:00.000-07:00

Just
Ate
Salad.
With croutons
Store-bought from a bag.
Gonna buy me a nice fry pan.

Why would we expect otherwise?

2006-03-31T08:33:00.000-08:00

A couple of students at the school I last taught at have stirred up a tempest in a teapot over whether they should be allowed to carry bottled water to class. The full story, from March 21st's Review-Journal is here, with last the next day's follow-up here. Basically, a couple of juniors protested the no-bottles-of-any-kind-in-the-classroom policy that had been implemented during cooler weather

"We live in the middle of the desert," Smith said. "There's no reason not to carry water everywhere."

That sentiment carries a grain of wisdom: I always had a couple gallons in the car, along with some antifreeze. Just in case, you know?

But I know that campus very well. I know where all four of the drinking fountains (that students have access to) are. And there are others in the (separate) gym building. And "up" at the elementary. However,

"That water is disgusting," high school junior Stephanie Van Sluis said. "I can't stand it."

I know which fountain she's talking about. She's exaggerating, though probably not by Dasani's standards. The water from the fountain by the front door, though, is excellent. And it's less than twenty steps from the one she's more likely talking about. Of course, I had access to the kitchen (shhhh - don't tell the health inspectors) where I could and did get ice so the water would actually be cold, but still...

Then in this editorial that Thursday, the paper asks,

Why have these Indian Springs students, their parents and administrators allowed so much time to be wasted on an issue irrelevant to education?

I'll get back to that question in a second, but a cynical reader answered in part when he said they "got their 15 minutes of fame."

So in that sense (again, just assuming the legitimacy of the question), the R-J itself, by covering it, encouraged the very wasting of time it turns around and disparages in its editorial. Sort of like bloggers who expose things so they can make fun of them...

(Really - how many of you knew Las Vegas even had a newspaper (or schools, for that matter?)?) (And for the record, 'Vegas has two newspapers" the Review-Journal and the Sun.)

Now, in fairness to the R-J, they also covered the actions of students at the school when the senior class voted to give to Katrina charities the funds they had accumulated for their senior class trip (story here).

But I think what got lost in all of this is that these kids are high-school juniors. They're studying American history. They know that this is a nation founded on protest. They've heard of the Boston Tea Party. They've heard of Carrie Nation and Sojourner Truth. They've heard of Kent State and sit-ins. Should we blame them if they want to see if it still works, even if on a smaller scale and over an arguably less significant issue? The question posed by the R-J implies that "education" is reading and math - the NCLB stuff, the stuff that's proficiency-tested, the stuff that effects AYP.

Obviously, I think there's more to education than that. I think part of my education was learning that if we (students) all got together and approached things right, we could get the dress code changed so that we could wear Levis (they have the rivets on the "wear-points" - the custodians didn't like having to refinish the wooden chairs that the rivets scratched). Was it inconsequential in the grand scheme of things? Probably. Other kids in bigger cities were protesting the war.

And today, other students, in bigger schools, are walking out of school to join in protesting immigration-control efforts. It's all part of the education process, and I'm not at all sure we should be poking fun at kids who apply what they're learning to their day-to-day lives. Even if it's just bottled water.

Maybe it's not the principals' fault

2006-03-24T04:39:00.000-08:00

According to this story out of Minneapolis:

St. Paul is known for hiring superintendents short on school chief experience and keeping them longer than the average two years that most urban superintendents last.

Most urban superintendents last only two years? Maybe I shouldn't have been disappointed that my urban-district principals shuffled in and out every three (or less).

If it's Wednesday...

2006-03-22T04:51:00.000-08:00

it must be Carnival Time. Once again, the Education Wonks host in their splendid fashion, this time Week 59.

Warning to those inclined to experiment with the little flags down here: I just looked at the French translation, and it's pretty much horrible.

Dark clouds, silver lining

2006-03-21T15:35:00.000-08:00

In his post this afternoon, Dan McDowell at A History Teacher reveals the crux of so many educational dilemmas: "It is the teachers that make the school and we simply have not had consistent leadership (3 principals in 4 years, 4 in my 10 years) to bring us together."

He's speaking in the context of a protracted contract dispute (going on two years, which strikes me (pardon the term) as beyond protracted)and says important things in his piece. It's what I quoted above, though, that struck me hardest, in no small part because it resembles my own experience. I wish I couldn't relate.

I taught for 28 years. Without bothering to count assistant principals (whose turnover was even higher), I did so under the leadership of ten different building administrators. Actually, two of them hired me in May and had retired by the time I actually started serving on the campus, so let's say it was only eight.

The first seven years it was all the same principal. The second seven were split between two. The last fourteen there were five, so right in the same problematic neighborhood Dan talks about for 75% of my teaching career: inconsistent leadership.

Stop and think about what that means: it's not at all uncommon for public schools to change leaders with over twice the frequency that our country has, and at this time when people are so vigorously and verbally concerned about the performance of those same schools.

I'm not about to blame any of those who left behind the task of writing my evaluations in response to greener pa$ture$. I'll be cynical about the lure of the almighty dollar, but I won't blame them for following it. Some of my favorite lures are green, too, so I understand.

However, I want to return to Dan's point(s): it is the teachers who make the school, and consistent leadership matters. I'm concerned that an ever-expanding educational bureaucracy seems dominated by entrepreneurs. Of the eight I worked for, only two principals struck me as genuinely interested in the students; the others were there for the financial or bureaucratic mobility the position offered: the green frosting on the other side of the fence.

We're living in an age wherein teachers, much as they might want to make, as much as they might hope to make, as much as they might actually succeed in making a difference with individual students, are viewed as interchangable steps on an invisible ladder by the people who revolve through the leadership door. We want to be consistent. We need to be consistent. Because when you get right down to the bottom line, none of it works without us. We are the school.

And then every two or three years, the wind changes direction...

Traffic woes

2006-03-03T15:07:00.000-08:00

Mike at Education in Texas lamented yesterday the behavior of some drivers. And as much as the situation he describes irritates me as well, I had an interesting experience this morning:

This break we're on has us in Colorado, west of Denver a little, spending much of our day relaxing in the motel while members of our extended family work their respective jobs. Evenings, of course, are a different tale.

As we drove this morning to meet my wife's sister for lunch, we came up behind a small car with its right-turn signal blinking. For three miles it blinked. When I finally pulled to the left lane to pass the car, I was surprised to read the sticker proudly centered on the rear bumper:

Brief break

2006-02-28T18:57:00.000-08:00

Gonna take a week or ten days off (revels in retirement). Have some cool family stuff going on that needs my attention. I'll pack the laptop so the dog can post if he has to...

Super-Glued, or the Virtues of the Tube

2006-02-26T17:42:00.000-08:00

Periodically, I have adventures, some of which start in my backyard and end in the hospital ER. The ones that don't end there are generally more fun, but today was not one of those.

Don't panic, friends. Nothing serious happened to me. Serious things happened in the ER, but my time there was more of the human stupidity sort than of the human tragedy sort. I can still type. I can't, however, play the piano or sing, so I'm disappointed. Except that I couldn't before either, so I've lost nothing except a chunk of my annual deductible.

I was unpacking the new patio furniture we had just picked up at a major competitor of Home Depot (sorry, HD - you just didn't have anything that tickled our fancy), taking the cast aluminum parts out of the case and cutting the plastic bands that bound them with my Swiss Army Knife (not the same as the Russian Army Knife).

At any rate, I managed to create a situation wherein I was happy that the blade of my knife was indeed surgical-quality stainless steel, but wished that it hadn't cut quite so deep as to suggest a trip to the ER might be appropriate. Only because I want to be able to drive by Wednesday, and don't like extra biohazards on the steering wheel. Seriously. If it weren't for the impending road trip I'd have just cursed and duct-taped the wadded-up paper towel to my palm and gone back to putting chairs together.

Now it has been a very long time since I visited the ER, a time measured in decades. It might even be 35 years since my last tetanus shot. In the meantime, I have toughed-out a number of injuries, all of them in a category with this one: mere flesh wounds. I remember breaking up a hall-fight between a couple of students, and having one of them come back later and apologize for having knocked the grapefruit-sized bandage from my thumb. We had a dean of students at the time who had been an RN in a previous life who said, "You should have had stiches in that, Al. Paper towel and white tape ain't getting it." She was wrong. That thumb is now numb, which means I can whack the space bar with impunity. I just get extra spaces sometimes, but I can go back and delete them. With the other thumb.

Be patient. I'm about to cut to the chase (I might have to say that again):

After the broken foot (that dude was in some serious pain, even with the ice gauzed to his foot), who was in line ahead of me, and the heart attack who came in while I was there (and I'll make light of my own injuries because they deserve it, but the hired care-giver/house-cleaner/chief-cook-and-bottle-washer who rode in along with this person in the ambulance is NOT to to be made light of. She was scared to death and functioning on adrenalin and did a helluva job answering the necessary questions with the necessary answers. When they asked her, "Does she want us to put a breathing tube down her throat, or does she want to go when she's called?" She said, "I don't know - we have to talk to her children." And I said to myself, "God save me please from ever walking in those shoes." I mean, I was there when my wife had a stroke. I was there when she later had something that hasn't to this day been identified to her satisfaction or mine but which left her with reduced functionality in some of the fingers in her left hand. She's otherwise fine, and right-handed anyway, and sings like a nightingale and is the best natural-born teacher I ever saw in my five decades.

But I knew the answers to those questions. We've talked about it. We've written it down. It's been notarized, and photocopied, and filed in all the right places, including the hospital whose ER I was waiting in.)<--That's for those of you who were waiting for me to close that parenthese.

...after that heart attack came in and was stablized, the nurse called me away from the TV. That was fine with me, as I was tired of watching super-modified Jeeps crawl up crevices in some super-modified-for-TV competition. I was reading a magazine. The doc came in and took a look. Said, "If it were fingers involved, or something else that flexes a bunch, I'd say stitches. In this case, down there in the palm of your hand, glue will work just fine."

I said, "Cool. Glue it up."

The nurse did exactly that.

Now this is the same nurse who did the triage on me when I came in. She took my temperature, my pulse, my blood pressure, and as she did those things, I said to her, "Joanne, I let the knife get away from me. That was my stupidity. I just need some of that surgical-quality, super-glue you guys have that's all sterile and stuff, to hold this together till it heals."

Between my diagnosis and the RN's work, we didn't need the doc for this at all. Oh, I'll get a bill for his words of wisdom, but his time would, in all seriousness, have been better spent sorting out either the broken foot-bone or the heart-attack. Instead of telling me, "This is not regular super-glue: it's a different formula, and it's sterile, but if you're out in the wilderness and can't get to a doctor, super-glu will work okay," instead of telling me that, he should have been doing something productive with one of those other patients. Or reassuring that care-giver as she waited for a chance to let go of the adrenalin and know everything would be okay.

And now I know how people who bitch about teachers feel: Jeez. I could have done something constructive instead of just venting.

Remodeling can be tricky

2006-02-25T09:11:00.000-08:00

The Science Goddess talked yesterday about bursting bubbles of expectation for a science department she's working closely with, and reminded me of what happened when my classroom was remodeled to accomodate thirty computers.

That she can say this:

The science group did end up lowering their expectations a bit (no ice-maker), but the total was still around $1 million.

tells me that they're at least getting some input into what happens, which is more than I had, but when she says this:

Further discussions were had about reusing more of the HVAC and electrical systems, along with some other possible cuts.

I REALLY start remembering how my retrofit shook out.

It seems that the specs for a computer lab (which my room was, in effect, becoming) called for a separate HVAC unit. To avoid that expense, the district engineering team called it simply a lab, as in science lab or reading lab or whatever, which let them leave the AC as it was.

Now I'm not about to start complaining about being an English teacher in what amounts to a dedicated writing/multimedia/internet research lab. That part of it was magical.

The magic disappeared, though, as soon as air-conditioning season started, which, in southern Nevada, is almost here again. Oh, it was possible to set the thermostat low enough to get my room and the adjacent newly-retrofitted computer classroom comfortable. But there were three additional classrooms on the same original HVAC unit, so if the labs were comfortable, the other three teachers had to wear sweaters and jackets to teach while it was in the 80-110 degree range outside. Net result? We sweated and/or dozed in the labs. We got tubs of ice from the kind kitchen manager to set in front of industrial fans that precluded lecture or discussion. We improvised every way we could think of to approach comfort.

It took four years of bitching from me, my students and their parents, and the principal(s) to get the district to pony up for a $7000 (installed) auxiliary heat pump , which (barely) took the edge off and leaked oil on the counter below it. Because of the oil leak, our building engineer shut the unit off at the breaker, so we were back to square one for another year until the powers that be decided that maybe the room needed its own completely separate unit after all.

As much in favor as I am of reusing what can be retained, for reasons beyond simple cost-cutting, I'd add my cautionary note: be careful of what you expect the old hardware to do if you make substantial changes to the loads placed upon it.

I don't often get excited.

2006-02-23T16:06:00.000-08:00

But right this minute I am. And it's something as simple as following moron-proof instructions that has my soul dancing. As I mentioned yesterday, Darren, up there in the frozen North at A Difference was discussing multi-lingual blogging through the use of one-click translation tools.

He, the kind man and wonderfully tech-savvy saint that he is, emailed me such fine instructions that it took me about six seconds each to make my blog and my dog's blog speak nine (count 'em. NINE) different languages at the click of a mouse.

Now, I stand by what I said yesterday: the translations are a little rough in places, but that's only because we haven't put enough pressure on the crafters of the tools. The more of us who do this, the more pressure there will be, and the more accurate the results will become.

Of course, arguing on the behalf of "foreign" or "modern" language teachers everywhere, I don't necessarily want all the roughness gone, as long as an intelligent reader can intuit the translation of metaphors. Besides, part of me says that it provides us enough insight into another culture - into the way they do or DON'T say things, to leave the rough spots alone.

Now I have to go back into my template and figure out how to make it say, right above the line of flags, "Darren taught me how to do this...

The Multilingual Blog

2006-02-22T11:09:00.000-08:00

Darren Kuropatwa, at A Difference has this conversation going with Regina Nabais (a Portugese educator and blogger), about his recent discovery of a tool that lets him add to his blog instant translation into several languages. They're gearing up to participate in a "Blog Translation Carnival."

Any blogging teacher who flirts with the idea of classroom blogs should visit Darren's site anyway: if a math teacher can get kids to discuss algebra and calculus with each other outside of school hours, then the rest of us should have no problem getting them to discuss other things as well. His is a carefully-designed, well-implemented approach that serves his students' education as an extention of the classroom, a place to think and learn.

Part of Darren's interest in multi-lingual capacity stems from the fact that he has an increasing number of Philipino students whose parents struggle with English. By providing translation to Tagalog, he includes them in his educational community, just by adding a line of code to his blogs. Such a simple process, with such potential for dramatic results. Now if I can figure out where to put that line of code, I'll do it too. I'm working on it. When I get it working, you'll know.

In the second of Regina's comments, she acknowledges that translation tools can sometimes make us laugh with their results. (Go ahead. Go to Babelfish. Translate "sweet" from English to Spanish and then back again. Not funny-haha, and you can even see how it could happen, but it demonstrates what can happen with any translation tool currently available.) Actually, translation tools have brought tears to the eyes of language teachers for years, either of laughter or of frustration. Because they imply accuracy, kids think they're accurate, even as they say, "My aunt is candy." A teaching moment of a higher order than rote memorization is created, yes, if you can get the kid to believe that the teacher is right and the internet is wrong.

Seated at a community theatre dinner-and-play event a few days ago, I was reminded of the how-to-translate dilemma when my father-in-law apparently shared his pride in my bilinguality with the lady seated next to him. Down the table came a program with the request that I write "Sweet Dreams" on the back in French. First of all, I didn't know the lady, and wasn't at all sure she merited such a wish (not that she'd have known if I had instead wished her unspeakable nightmares), and second, the only people with whom I've shared that particular wish are mono-lingual English speakers, so I've never had to construct that phrase in French.

In American English, we can speak of a sweet person, and generally we mean someone who is kind and gentle. We can speak of a sweet dessert, and mean something in which we can taste sugar. Or we can speak of sweet dreams, and mean neither of those, but rather something comforting and easing. And what about a sweet revenge? Or a sweet victory? Or...?

The translation tools cannot make those distinctions yet (though they will, probably sooner than I think). They work on words in isolation rather than in context, from all I can tell (I haven't seen the code and wouldn't understand it if I did). Yes, they recognize that a possessive pronoun has to change form depending on the gender of the noun it describes, at least in the Romance languages (mon oncle/ma tante), but that's about as far as they've come in recognizing context. They have yet to tackle idiom, and not every culture on the planet recognizes "it's raining cats and dogs" for the figure of speech it is. Nor do the translation tools.

In a sense, we're relying on a four-pound hammer to reshape fine jewelry. If we tap it once, we'll probably still be able to recognize what we started with, but repeating the process rapidly renders the product useless.

Having said so much that could be taken as negative about translation tools, let me return to an earlier statement: as soon as I figure out where exactly to place that line of code in my template, you'll see a row of flags across the bottom of each of my posts which will give you a quick, one-touch translation of the post into the language of your choice (as long as your choice is a fairly common one). The tool isn't perfect, but the more pressure we put on it, the better it will become.

And so, my friends (and the lady at the other end of the table), rêves doux.

Carnival Time!

2006-02-22T06:20:00.000-08:00

The Education Wonks have Week 55 of the Education Carnival up and running. Stroll the midway, take a ride or two.

More on retaining the good ones

2006-02-18T07:24:00.000-08:00

From the Contra Costa (CA) Times:

Posted on Wed, Feb. 15, 2006
Higher pay no longer enough to make new teachers stay
By Juliet Williams
ASSOCIATED PRESS

SACRAMENTO - A moderate salary raise for a new teacher boosts the chances they'll stay in the profession, but mentoring programs and training are even more effective, according to a report to be released today.

(Thanks, Angela, for the link.)

The Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment program, sponsored by the (California) Commission on Teacher Credentialing, is credited in this study with increasing teacher retention by 26%, more than half again what a $4K raise did (17%).

Commission Director Mike McKibbon says, "It makes an enormous difference in setting up the first two years as place to learn and grow and get better, rather than the way we used to do it, which was kind of a rite of passage."

When I started, back before everyone and his brother could claim grandparents who walked upright, the first couple years were where you either sank or learned to swim, and what McKibbon refers to as a "rite of passage" meant that you were thrown to the wolves that no one else wanted and either survived by developing your skills or were devoured.

That worked for many of us: the majority of the people I entered the profession with are still at it, or, like me, retired after years of productive service. Some didn't make it, though: there's the one who decided to run a string of snack machines, another who went to wait tables, another who used a math background to move into accounting, yet another who became a marriage counselor.

A mentoring and support program of the sort discussed here might, might, have kept one or two of those in education. That sort of program, though, could certainly have helped me hit my stride earlier. The "rite of passage" process left me feeling as if I had been abandoned to my own devices, when it would have made far more sense to have someone show me some of the already-invented wheels that might have fit the rig I was driving. As it is, I feel as though it took closer to five years for me to come to my senses and look outside myself for answers, and I don't honestly believe there was ever much support from above for that, either (consider that I had to get "sick" and pay for it myself to go to the NCTE convention and indulge myself in workshops that were actually worthwhile...).

Yes, I'm entirely in favor of paying all teachers more. If we start doing that, I'll get irritated that I can't reap the benefits anymore, but we'll keep more good teachers in the classroom longer (and maybe avoid some of this sort of conversation). But even more, I'm in favor of support and mentoring that brings earlier success to beginning teachers. The difference between a veteran and a novice doesn't have to loom as large as it does.

If we kept the good ones...

2006-02-14T07:52:00.000-08:00

Like Miss Dennis, I called John Stossell to task a few posts ago. She revisits her fury again in yesterday's post, and compares him unfavorably to CNN's Anderson Cooper and the NYT's Michael Winerip. She includes a quote from the later, which I think relates to my last post:

"By far, the issue getting the most ink is the need to reduce the time it takes to dismiss bad teachers - a pet peeve of the mayor's. While this is clearly a problem, the far bigger problem is holding on to good teachers. Last year New York City had 3,567 "regular" teachers leave, the most in memory, 936 more than the year before, and 1,100 above the previous three-year average. These are not retirees or troubled teachers - they're certified teachers in good standing."

Winerip is right: the problem of getting rid of bad teachers gets far more coverage than does the problem of retaining good ones.

What no one I've read comes to terms with, though, is that getting rid of bad teachers is easy. The trick lies in recognizing them before they have tenure. You'll have a difficult time convincing me that a teacher can fake being "good" for the one or two or five or ten years it takes to achieve tenured status, and then suddenly flush those abilities down the nearest sewer.

A couple of examples, one from each extreme of my teaching career. There were many others in between:

First, my eighth-grade math teacher. There one year, gone the next. That's forty years ago (Ouch-who knew it would take turning so many calendar pages to finally hit my prime? Or have I?).

Second, a science teacher at the school I last taught at. There one year, gone the next (and not to another school, not with the evals she had). That was two years ago, so it's still just as easy.

So how in the world do we end up with bad teachers holding tenure, and thus protected by the easy-to-bash, easy-to-hate unions?

Part of it is irresponsible administrators, who, for whichever of myriad reasons, look the other way. Or human resources people who practice an inexact science (or art, or whatever it is), and inflict less-than-sure-choices on building admins who prefer not to second-guess their superiors.

But part of it is also the pressure to fill the vacancies created when good teachers leave. Look at the NYC numbers that Winerip cites: over 3500 "certified teachers in good standing" must be replaced. Why?

Some of them, I suppose, retired, as I did. But honestly? I retired two years earlier than I had originally planned. I got tired of the politics and the bureaucracy, got tired of the writing on the wall that said that no matter how good you are, you're going to fail in or around the year 2014 and it's going to be a slow, miserable slide until then, and so I juggled some accounts, rolled some into others, sold a house, and bought my way to a different life. But when so many analyses show that close to half of all teachers leave within the first five years, I don't believe the problem is the three percent or so who complete long careers and move on.

Part of it might well be psychological. Not everyone can handle administrators who make superficial observations (thank you, Fellow-ette).

I think NYC Educator also makes a valid point in his post about teacher pay: if we want the good ones, we have to pay them. That will remain difficult as long as we refuse to accept that some of the money to do that has to come out of our own pockets.

Some truly excellent teachers, having burned the candle at both ends (and the middle)for a few years, find they can no longer do it. That problem won't be solved with more money, but it might be alleviated with more time (which of course costs more money, but not as obviously as salary).

And Joanne Jacobs references the unwillingness of Millenials to tolerate busywork, which much of day-to-day educational paperwork is. Now don't waste too much time looking over your shoulders, but guess who the new young teachers are? If it's busywork you hand them, they'd rather do surveys on MySpace. You want attendance recorded two or three different places? Ummm... No. Unless you find a way to integrate it so they only have to do it once. Same with grades.

And please be careful about those staff-development "opportunities." Darren said it very concisely here:

I know what might help make me a better teacher. And it's probably not the same thing as the two teachers on either side of me need to help make them better teachers.

A Tale of Two Math Teachers

2006-01-30T16:17:00.000-08:00

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and

anyone paying attention to educational trends knows that politicians of every stripe wish we had more math and science teachers who can actually teach those subjects, just as they wished when the Cold War factored in everyone's life, rather than occupying space in history texts. Evgeny Zamyatin said that history is a helix. It made sense when I read it thirty years ago, and it makes more sense now that I've seen more events cycle back around to remarkable familiarity.

Like everyone else, I've been through it, which makes me an expert. Couple that with the fact that I live at least 75 miles from all but the barest handful of those who read this, and I merit quotable status. And just for the record, I do realize I'm talking about more than two math teachers in what follows. The title just felt better this way to this English teacher (ret.).

I had a miserable excuse for a math teacher as an eighth grader. I remember only three things from that class: he leaned against the doorway as he talked to the class, casually swinging his right leg and kicking Charlie, the kid cursed by the alphabet with the first seat inside the door. He threw chalk at anyone he deemed inattentive. He once assigned 60 problems as punitive homework (which we bribed the resident genius to do, and to let the rest of us copy). And I remember that that was the only year he taught there. He was shuffled on in the network of small school districts in southern Minnesota, and (I hope) eventually on to employment of another sort.

Then came Mr. F (that's not a grade, just the first letter of his last name), my high school Algebra I and Geometry teacher. And no, it wasn't all one course; I had him for two years in that small high school. When it came down to it, he had all the freshmen for Algebra I and all the sophomores for geometry. He was friendly, almost jovial.

And Mr. F knew more about the Civil War than anyone I've known before or since. I've read several of Bruce Catton's books, and my brother-in-law is a Civil War buff and history teacher, but Mr. F would have wiped our combined backsides without reaching for any paper.

Mr. F also knew exactly how many theorum memorizations ahead or behind last year's lesson plans this year's class was. Or where we were in relation to the class a decade ahead of us. But he ended up teaching us more about General Lee's horse than he did about congruent triangles. I acquired my understanding of Pythagoras, and how handy that darned theorum could be, somewhat later.

Mr. F was followed by Mr. K, who taught Algebra II and what's more commonly seen now as Trigonometry/Pre-Calculus, though it was called something more like Senior Math on our schedules back in that day. King K, we called him, and he was indeed imperious. If you had no vision of college, you avoided King K at any cost. If you had a glimpse of college on the horizon, you took a deep, summer-long breath, and entered his realm for two years.

Mr. K had worked outside of education: in wartime shipyards as a pipefitter, in a factory as an operating engineer. He was an inventor, with a patent or six to his name. He had somewhere along the line acquired a teaching degree in math and in physics, and he had devoted his life to passing on his knowledge and enthusiasm for the utility of advanced mathematics and of physics. Years after I graduated from college, I was still calculating square roots in my head for the mental exercise.

I won't belabor the going-to-school-in-Belgium thing that inspired my previous posts; I will say that I was not particularly challenged in my math classes there (but then my chosen curriculum wasn't math-heavy, either).

Of course, college algebra followed soon after graduation, but by that time I was bored with algebra. My mind doesn't handle the repetitive well, so my work in that course was careless. I coasted to a grade that didn't jolt my GPA too badly.

When my future wife decided to go back to college and major in elementary education, it wasn't the college math professor who got to see the light in her eyes when she finally understood the concept of numbers in bases other than 10. I had that privilege, thanks to the foundation that had been laid years before by the King.

Much of what I've said makes the King look like an excellent math and science teacher. I don't think that's the case at all, though those of us going on to become doctors and lawyers and pharmacists and teachers and engineers received an appreciated background. But what of those who went on to become the very same pipefitters and operating engineers that he had been? His inaccessible nature (to all but the math- or college-inclined) made the math and physics they would need and use on a daily basis inaccessible to them. They should have been able to get them in high school, but they couldn't because of the aura that surrounded the King. They took bookkeeping* instead (not that that didn't serve them well).

My dog posted some time ago, before he decided to post nothing more than an occassional joke, that a good teacher is identifiable by the fact that students are engaged with the material. I agree with him, but would expand that definition to emphasize that ALL students are engaged by a truly excellent teacher, not just those willing to put aside trepidation.

So we have a dilemma. Half-century-old concerns revisit us wearing slightly different clothes, and our nation's leaders (both in education and in politics) beat their breasts and call for more math and science teachers. Do we seek them via recruitment from industry and alternative licensure? I don't think the private sector or licensure are THE answer, though they may well prove to be part of the bandaid we put on the problem. We really need to revisit the term "highly qualified" and figure out what we mean by that. I'd have much prefered to have excellent teachers than highly qualified ones.

*I know that a more current term would be accounting, but "accounting" doesn't have three double letters in a row.

For your enjoyment

2006-01-25T05:42:00.000-08:00

The Education Wonks have Week 51 of the Education Carnival up and running.

As an English teacher, I especially enjoyed Chris Lehmann's post on making the English classroom relevant. It would have been far more comfortable (to say nothing of more fun) closing out my career with that sort of leadership.

Too Little Exercise?

2006-01-23T16:15:00.000-08:00

Saturday, Alexander Russo at This Week in Education posted a comment on a story about kids hitting the gym after school that he had seen in the NY Times. It piqued my curiousity, so I read it, too.

The first couple paragraphs surprised me:

AT 13, Jena Jerve has managed to stretch her days to do it all: keep a 4.0 grade-point average, play center on her school's basketball team and nourish her love for dancing with six hours a week of tap, ballet and jazz.

But over the last year and a half Jena has also been cramming a less typical extra-curricular activity into her busy schedule, the health club. There, for about an hour twice a week, she has discovered the rigors of weight training and the joy of building stamina on a stationary bike and fitting into jeans. "I've lost inches around my stomach and waist and legs," said Jenna, who is 5-foot-9 and weighs about 175 pounds. "I have a lot of energy now."

She's dancing six hours a week, practicing hoops AT LEAST another hour a day (and most days probably well over that), and still feels uncomfortable in her body. So she adds a couple hours at the gym (err, "health club").

And it brought to mind last Monday's post by Donna in which her uncle reminds her of all the "unhealthy" practices that kids used to survive. He closes by wondering how we all managed to still be here. It's almost the stereotypical "in-my-day" piece, but he doesn't add the lines about drinking out of the garden hose and walking to school in the snow.

The NY Times article does a good job of balancing nostalgia with reality: how "we" grew up as opposed to how "kids" grow up today. The comments the author received from parents reflect a a past that feels very much like mine.

The simple fact is that we can no longer rely on daily life to provide our children with the exercise that we got chasing through unfenced neighborhood backyards after basketball practice. Conscientious parents carefully wash cutting boards so kids won't get chicken juice on their vetgetables; good for them - they know more than our parents did. Dishwashers boil the living bejesus out of everything a human hand has touched. We live in single-story cookie-cutter houses in gated communities instead of five-story walk-ups down the block from the deli. Those are facts, and we ought not let misty memories distort them. Even if we do wish that thirteen-year-olds didn't have to rely on the gym.

I knew I wasn't alone

2006-01-19T07:01:00.000-08:00

I knew I couldn't possibly be the only soul to have attended a Belgian school. My post received a comment from "David," who attended one as well. What he says rings true, especially since we attended schools in the same city. Since he adds information, his complete comment follows; I'll butt in where our experience differs or where it leads to different conclusions. Or just when it triggers a fond memory.

David said...
I also spent a year in the Belgian school system: I was in (the equivalent of) 7th grade in 1970-1971. So many of your comments ring true. But some things have changed...

We had the same schedule as you, but we only had Wednesday and Saturday afternoons off: Tuesdays were a full day. The teachers must have negotiated an extra half-day since I left!

Actually, we were nearly contemporaries. I was there in '71-'72. I'm guessing my reference to the '96 teachers' strike is what gave the impression that my experience was more recent. That was a result of my doing some search-engine-fueled catching up, as well as my deliberately leaving the timeline vague. The post is dated Sunday, which is when I started it, but I didn't actually post it until Tuesday. I spent the time between making sure that significant details hadn't changed. They hadn't.

As far as the Tuesday afternoon thing, I'm stuck in a place where my memory says one thing, but my "Journal de classe" says another. I certainly don't remember having Tuesday afternoons off, and I'm not finding any evidence that that is current practice either, but without documentation in front of me, I wasn't about to insist that my memory was accurate. The fact of the matter is that I remember classes (dactylo (typing), for example) that don't show on the course schedule I have in front of me from that long-ago year. I remember there was some bureaucratic shuffling and juggling as the school administration sorted out what exactly to do with an American high-school graduate attending a Belgian high school as an exchange student. I guessed, as I wrote the piece, that I was a couple hours off on the total/week, and David's comment confirms that. Thank you!

I'm curious as to the curriculum you were in: I was in (what was then called) "Sixieme Latine" ("Sixth Latin"), which--under the then system--was the first year of secondary school (they counted down from six to one). My classes varied from one period a week (gym and swimming) up to NINE periods a week (latin), with most courses (French, Dutch, math) being four or five periods a week.

I'm jealous of your being there that young, David, though I can't say that I regret having gone when I did (I don't know how well I'd have tolerated nine hours of Latin). I had a (host-family) cousin in Sixieme Latine as well. The kids in Latin-Greque really got a dose of the classical.

As an exchange student, I was a senior, and without the classical-language background my options were somewhat limited. Add to that the fact that every effort was made to accomodate my own peculiar interests and goals, and I was in Premiere Sciences Humaines - human sciences (whatever the hell that is). Is everyone getting the picture here that Belgian students actually declare "majors" as soon as they get out of primary school? That's basically what happens.

As to "modern" languages: that's just to distinguish them from "ancient" languages (Latin and Greek). In those days, the most "scholarly" curriculum was "Latin-Greek" (emphasis on the classics), followed by "Latin-Math" and "Latin-Sciences". Next down in the hierarchy (bear in mind, this is a sociological hierarchy, not an economic one!) were the "Modern" sections, which didn't teach Latin or Greek. Finally, there were the "Technical" sections, which--as was indicated above--were more vocational training and didn't necessarily go all six years.

Your point about "modern" vs. "ancient" is well taken. You're entirely correct, and I realize that. I just find it interesting that Belgians call the language spoken by their neighbors "modern" whereas we insist on calling it "foreign." That just seems like an unnecessary barrier to me. We speak of "native" languages and "foreign" languages; they speak of "first" and "second" and "third" languages.

My younger host-brother was Latin-Sciences; he's now a dentist in Liege. My older host-brother was Latin-Math, and I remember his spending hours trying to work out the curves in a drawing of a spiral staircase. I learned then and there that India ink is so difficult to erase that it's easier to start over.

But again, one can only conclude that Belgian students and families make decisions about their children's futures on the basis of what a twelve-year-old is good at.

As far as competition goes: there were parents who were willing to go to great lengths to send their kids to what they considered good schools. I went to a Catholic school in Liege, the College St.-Louis, which had a rep as being academically outstanding (in those days the Catholic system was considered far superior to the secular state system of "Athenees" [Athenaeums]), and several of my classmates came from small towns deep in the Ardennes: they had a two-hour or longer commute, by public transportation, every day, in each direction.

I remember the College St.-Louis (Rue Grétry 55 (I cheated. I didn't remember exactly where it was in that neighborhood, so I looked it up)). One of the distractions of being an exchange student was going to speak at schools in the area. About six weeks before I truly acclimatised to the language, I spoke to an auditorium of kids there, ostensibly about what it meant to be American - what it was like to live here, etc. I could have handled "rural Minnesota." "America" was a bit more than I was comfortable chewing. Still is. The students seemed more interested in Angela Davis and the Viet Nam war than they did in corn and soybeans. I couldn't blame them at the time. I had to ask how one said "contientious objector" in French, so I could explain that little angle of "life in the States"(Belgian youth were obligated to military service for a year after they finished school, unless they were "objecteurs de consciences").

And yeah (big YEAH) to the commuting-to-school-from-out-of-town thing. I lived right on the Meuse (the river that runs through Liege, for those of you who don't have David and my common understanding of geography) and was able to walk just about anywhere in the city in 45 minutes or less, so I walked to school. Most of my dozen classmates weren't much worse off (one lived just around the corner from the school. over the hobby shop his family ran. I bought a model car there once, just to take a break from being Belgian), but we had a classmate who came in from the Ardennes as well. Ludo (short for Ludovico) was (obviously) of Italian descent and dominated discussions in philosophy class, but was otherwise rather quiet.

I want to gloat a little bit, and say that at least I can find a website for L'Athenee Royal de Liege, which I attended. All I find for the College St.-Louis is tourism sites that refer to its swimming pool. But the site for the Athenee is dismal, and the school would probably be better served without it, so gloating would be totally inappropriate. I'm not even going to link to the site, it's that bad. And the swimming pool is in the basement, just as it was when I was there.

But much of the competition was also in other, non-academic aspects: I knew a couple who lived outside of Liege, and they had the choice of two nearby schools, one larger and more academically challenging, and the other smaller and perhaps less rigorous. They sent one boy to one and the other to the other. Try that here in the states!

I guess this is where my public-school bias gets to blossom: how is choosing between "academically challenging" and "less rigorous" not a desicion based on academics? I recognize the argument that it doesn't have to be in the same school, or lead to the same diploma. What I don't understand is the insistence that it be in separate facilities. I've just had too many special education students in my classes to believe that "separate-but-equal" is appropriate.

One aspect which may or may not have been covered elsewhere: there was no distinction between secular schools and religiously-affiliated ones. They all got state subsidies, and--as previously mentioned--the (Catholic) Colleges were generally considered superior to the (secular) Athenees. I believe that Protestant, Jewish and Muslim schools were also allowed subsidies, though--having never actually encountered one while I was there--I can't swear to it.

Given that Belgium is 95% Catholic, it's hardly amazing that the possible wouldn't exist. I suspect that it's "possible" in several places in this country to establish a Hmong charter school, but does anyone know of one? And if a school's sole funding is derived from a per-physically-present-pupil-on-September 10 formula, is that a "subsidy?" Given that public school funding is solely determined by counting students, I don't think so. A "subsidy" is something that's optional - like paying farmers to keep their fields weed- and crop-free, in order to support prices (or a guaranteed per/bale price for cotton or tobacco, regardless of the market). They can plant (or raise the crop regardless), or they can take the payment. It's a choice. Show me the "choice" for public schools, and I'll acknowledge the use of the term "subsidy."

Having not seen the Stossel report, I can't intelligently comment on it. But if we were to go to a system of state funding for education that didn't distinguish between "public" and "religious" schools; that allowed parents to decide where their kids should go, rather than having the decision made by arbitrary geographical boundaries (and even more arbitrary busing...); and where the dollars followed the student--IOW, a fully-funded voucher system, with open enrollment--I can't see how that wouldn't be an improvement over what we have now.

As some have observed, we've had school choice in this country for years: just not for the poor.

I'm not about to suggest that the public-school system as we see it today is perfect. Nor am I about to suggest that we couldn't learn valuable lessons from the Belgians. What I do suggest is that, as I implied the other day, we shouldn't accept a comparison to the Belgians without understanding what we're comparing ourselves to.

David, thank you. I haven't even gotten to many of the dances down memory lane that you triggered with your response (do you remember La Gallerie, the tunnelesque street of shops with houses over the top of the street?).

Ignore the man behind the dog

2006-01-17T14:39:00.000-08:00

Actually, that pic is just parked there for a minute so I can move it to my Mac (the laptop to my right in the pic), where I have Photoshop. I made the mistake of uploading it to the hard drive on my PC, and I really need to reduce its size a bit and crop some of the periphery so I can use it up in the corner the way Amerloc uses the one of himself behind the wheel of his pickup.

I talked at some length in my last post about the educational system in Belgium, yet managed to leave out probably as much as I told. I'm not going to try to fill all the gaps tonight, but I do have a story from that year that I'd like to share, by way of exemplifying how thoroughly immersive the experience was:

One rainy late-January/early February afternoon, a good friend and I went to the local indoor ice-rink and skated for a couple of hours. When we left the rink to walk home, night had fallen and the rain had quickened. We followed the road along the river through the city, one moment cursing the rain and the next marveling at the way it sparkled in the streetlights and danced in the street. After a couple of blocks, a sedan pulled to the curb alongside us, windshield wipers slapping frantically, and the driver got out, some urgency plain in his eyes: the look of a man trying to find an address in a strange city on a night of poor visibility.

He spoke, and neither of us understood a word he said, but both recognized it as probably German. She asked if he spoke French. He said, "No."

Having studied Dutch for all of a semester and knowing Dutch to be related to German, I asked if he spoke Dutch, and was tremendously relieved when he answered in the negative. I could, perhaps, have recited the dialogue about finding the post office, but really couldn't have helped him much beyond that.

Taking the initiative away from a couple of soggy teenagers, he asked if either of us spoke English. I gave my friend a look that today would be accompanied by an eye-roll and a resounding, "Duh!," then turned to him and said, "Yes, I speak English."

So he asked me the questions in what was possibly his third language, I translated them to her in my second language (though I was at that point certainly mentally wired to French as my first), she gave me the answers, and I relayed them to him in my nominal first language.

I intended to stop there, but I see in the story a couple of things that bear emphasis.

First, no one has created a language acquisition system that out-performs immersion. I wasn't an American speaking French; I was a French-speaking American.

Second, I've used the terminology that I came to associate with academic language study in Europe. No one spoke of "native" languages or "foreign" languages. Everyone had a first and a second language in which they could operate with relative ease (most of a decade of instruction will do that, especially with real-life opportunities to practice only a few kilometers away). And everyone had another language or two in which they could survive when necessary - when they couldn't find their way in a strange city on a dark, rainy night.

Re: Stossel and Belgian Education

2006-01-15T15:26:00.000-08:00

I watched John Stossel's 20/20 piece called "Stupid in America" this afternoon, and what strikes me (other than his strident call for competition) is his at-best-disengenuous, at-worst-ignorant lack of a look at differences between the Belgian system of education and our own here in the States. He insists that Belgian schools compete in the open market, and that such a system would solve all that ails ours as well.

I'm fortunate to have been able to attend school in Belgium for a year: long enough to not only develop significant fluency in another language, but to also develop an appreciation for the culture, the education system it drives, and some of the differences between "over there" and "over here." I don't honestly believe we, as a nation, are prepared to embrace all of those differences, even in the spirit of fostering competition. Here's why:

First, envision a national teacher union, a national teacher contract, and a national right to strike. Think you can talk states like Texas and Nevada out of banning the right to strike to a NATIONAL teacher's union? Collaterally, of course, teacher salaries are established according to that national contract. Stossel berated "a union-government" monopoly on public education, but glossed over this "little" detail in the Belgian not-so-fine print: all those "competetive" schools pay their teachers according to the national contract, not according to local desires or needs.

Now, imagine trying to pass a national law that will impact all teachers without actually getting teacher input. Can you see all the schools in the entire nation shut down because the teachers wouldn't tolerate that? We're not talking a local teachers' strike. We're talking every single school in the "teachers-be-damned" nation shut down. The Belgian teachers did it most recently in 1996, from the end of February through the end of the school year.

Second, understand that Belgian schools do not provide transportation. You can choose a school 20 miles from home, but even if you live within three miles, there will be no yellow bus ferrying your kids at the public's expense. A very dependable system of public transportation will, however, provide regular-traveler discounts. If turning your child over to public transportation isn't something you feel comfortable with, you're on your own. Consequently, at least until "secondary" school, parents tend to keep their kids at the school closest to home.

I beg your indulgence as I get to number three: the Belgian school week was something of a shock to this American. I was used to seven classes (including study-hall), five days a week. Start at about 8 A.M., finish around 3:30 P.M. I had the same seven-class schedule every day, week in and week out.

Imagine my first Monday: Start at 8 A.M., go to four classes, leave at noon to go home for the noon meal. Get back at 2:00 P.M. for three more classes, and finish up at 5 P.M. to return home for the day. The school did NOT provide any meals whatsoever - we had two hours to get home, enjoy the biggest meal of the day with our family, and get back for the rest of the school day.

Tuesday was an equal shock: Start at 8 A.M. again, but five classes straight through to 1 P.M. and we were done for the day.

Wednesday echoed Tuesday: 8-1 and out.

Thursday and Friday had the same hours as Monday. Saturday was the same as Tuesday and Wednesday. Pick your jaw back up off the floor and adjust: we had five hours of school on Saturday.

So on to number three: in those 36 hours of class time, I had no course that met more than four times, but took 16 different courses. Two were four meetings a week, one was only one time, the other 13 were either two or three hours a week. Only twice did I have the same course back-to-back (two hours straight, on paper, but with a "passing-period" between). Three were foreign-language courses (and yes, I cheated. I took English as my second foreign language). No study-hall. That's what those afternoons off were for.

Somewhere here (and this seems the appropriate spot) I should mention that they aren't called "foreign languages" in Belgium: they're "modern languages." If you consider that Belgium was politically created as a buffer zone between Holland and France, by taking part of each country centuries ago, and then adding on a small chunk of Germany after WWII, you might well understand that Belgium has three official languages, none of them "foreign": French, Dutch, and German.

Fourth, the Belgian system made no pretense that all kids were the same, that they all needed the same education just because they had access to it. Mr. Stossel in his 20/20 piece suggests by omission that all Belgian schools attempt to provide the same opportunities to their students. Nothing, quite frankly, could be less true. Belgium does a much better job than we do of acknowledging that one doesn't necessarily need a college degree to inherit and run the family business. The courses you need for that can just as easily be taught in "high school." But if you want to be an architect, you don't need all those marketing and accounting classes either. In either case, you need some understanding of the concepts involved in the other's instance to have a truly well-rounded education, but you CAN actually specialize your secondary education so that if you have no need for university-level studies to accomplish your dream, you don't HAVE to prepare yourself for them.

And Belgian schools take that into account. Some are very, very good at preparing students to manage small businesses. Others are truly excellent at preparing students for a variety of pursuits requiring advanced degrees. Yet others do a marvelous job of preparing auto mechanics (for Peugots and Saabs and BMWs and Ferraris and for many makes we never, ever see on this side of the Atlantic). But none of them tries so hard to be everything to all people as we do with our public schools in this country.

Then we deal with the fact that a student in Belgium who begins on one track may not finish there: a test in eighth grade that determines whether the student is allowed to stay on a purely academic track or whether a "vocational track" might be more appropriate. Same kind of test at the end of tenth grade. If you reach your junior year in an "academic" school, you've demonstrated your right to be there. I wonder which sort of student group Stossel used for his comparison. I don't believe it was anywhere near as homogenous a group as the New Jersey students.

Stossel suggests that the schools in a Belgian city are in competition for students; at the secondary level that's only partially true. They each seek to develop, and perhaps expand, their niches, but none of them is after EVERY student. Before we swallow his bait clear back to the hook, we need to ask ourselves some very serious questions.

Let's see how this goes

2006-01-06T17:54:00.000-08:00

I had a blog a while back, and sorta ditched it when I ran out of energy for spouting off.

Several months later, my dog got himself all worked up and started his own. He's had a fair amount of fun with it. But it's sort of evolved differently than he originally thought it would. I didn't think it had to - he thought it did. One of those kinds of arguments. The author wins. Unfortunately, he's been putting pressure on me to pursue his original dream. He still thinks it's worthwhile (and I do too).

So I will. I make no promise of excessive regularity. With much of technology, I tend to get bored once I've figured out how it works. That's why I haven't finished putting the family videos on DVD . I haven't even started transfering all our old vinyl albums to CDs. That's just too much tedium for someone who has a grandson such a short drive away.