Month: August 2011

Things I Know 204 of 365: I went to a rural school

I think maybe the rural influence in my life helped me in a sense, of knowing how to get close to people and talk to them and get my work done.

– Gordon Parks

Somewhere between eighth and ninth grade, they tore down a portion of my high school. It was the oldest part of the building, and a local bond had passed for the construction of a new wing.

As it turned out, my grandfather had attended classes in the old wing.

After it was torn down and the new edifice was erected, I was invited, as a student council representative, to the installation of the commemorative stone denoting all the school board members of the time.

This was nothing compared to the excitement surrounding the opening of the Casey’s General Store. We could walk their after school, before practices.

You could buy pizza there.

Up until that point, you could only really buy food from the IGA, and that was at least six blocks away.

Casey’s was more convenient. It sat directly across from the bus barn.

Well, it did until someone burned the bus barn down.

My bus was driven by a man named Charlie who farmed when he wasn’t driving his route.

Since I’ve been gone, I’m told my alma mater’s archery team has taken the state championships a few times.

When I was in school, our claim to fame was being home to the FFA National Meat Judging Champion. I’m pretty sure that kid won the title more than once.

I drove by my old high school today. Consequently, the building also houses my old middle school.

Earlier this summer, I’d happened by and noted the school sign’s recognition of students’ placement in the state bass fishing tournament.

I was hoping to snap a picture, but the sign had been changed in the intervening months.

It struck me, as I turned the car around in the old bus loop, that my old school, and other rural schools like it, aren’t what we’re talking about when we talk about school reform. At least, I’m fairly certain their not the schools people are picturing when they make decrees or talk about the future of education. The voices of teachers from small schools in small towns aren’t the ones being featured in EdWeek or the New York Times education section.

What a shame. Many of those voices are the ones that helped me learn some of the most treasured pieces of information I carry around with me.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in the 2007-08 school year, approximately 23 percent of U.S. public school students were enrolled in a rural school. Include students enrolled in towns and the percent moves to almost 36 percents.

One in three public school students was enrolled in a town or rural school.

Look at the news coverage of education at the time, and it read as though every student America educated or teacher who led a classroom was located in the heart of an urban environment.

I realize the numbers are nothing when compared the monolithic concentrations of students in urban and suburban public schools, but that doesn’t mean they have any less stake in the game when talking about what it means to teach the students they serve.

It’s also precisely what makes the drafting of a standardized test such a ridiculous endeavor. By the time you’ve written a test item that lowers the cultural threshold sufficiently enough to allow students from all environments access, you end up with an item no one would have any interest in answering. (I’d imagine you’d be hard-pressed to find someone with much intrinsic motivation for writing such an item in the first place.)

The national educational landscape is as varied as the actual national landscape.

As I pulled out of the bus loop today, I realized exactly how much we’re not talking about when we talk about teaching and learning in America.

Things I Know 203 of 365: My dad could climb a rope

If I were to draw on a paper what gym does for me, I would make one dot and then I would erase it.

– Elizabeth Berg

On matters of policy, my father and I are traditionally at odds. Fiscal, foreign, defense, entitlements, everything.

Education is no exception.

While I’m able to steer clear of most of the others when we get together, I’m not so great at keeping my mouth shut when my dad starts talking about education policy.

Last night, we started talking about testing and Sec. Duncan’s decree easing the expectations of schools around the country to get to 100% proficiency as called for by No Child Left Behind.

My father is of the, “I guess that’s just another thing we don’t expect of our kids anymore” mindset.

He works in the technology office of the school district from which he graduated. As anyone can imagine, this means he often sees the worst from teachers. Rarely do faculty members bake cookies for tech team.

To further illustrate his point of the lowering of the bar for today’s students, my dad talked about a rope.

He first encountered the climbing rope on his first day of middle school P.E.

It kicked his butt.

A competitive swimmer from way back, my dad thought he should have been able to make his way up the rope with no problem. Such was not the case.

For weeks, my father struggled to make it to the top of the climbing rope.

For weeks, he could not make it.

This, for my father, was the bar to which all students should be held.

“I walked through the gym the other day, and do you know what I saw?”

Not pausing for a response, my dad continued, “The rope has knots in it.”

I was confused.

He explained.

The same climbing rope, which had been my father’s adversary for weeks in his youth, had single knots running in it every few feet up to the rafters.

Dad explained this and sat looking at me for a moment.

“It took me weeks to get up that rope, but when I did, I knew I could.”

He lamented the knotting of the rope the same way he was lamenting the easing of NCLB’s testing requirements.

“Are we too worried kids aren’t going to feel good about themselves, so we make everything easy on them?”

I see his point – I really do.

For the same reason folks are worried playgrounds are becoming too safe, learning should have some scraped knees, some trial and error.

My problem with my dad’s point accepts his metaphor and rejects his premise.

What are we still asking kids to climb ropes?

Maybe, in dad’s day, the climbing rope was the best we could do to figure a upper-body strength and endurance. Maybe, way back when, we had no other choice than to make a student’s learning and abilities a matter of public display. Maybe, when my old man was coming up, we didn’t know any better.

I doubt any of that was the case, but I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Today, though, we certainly have better methods and tools at our disposal.

Cut down the ropes, find out the best ways to figure out if kids are fit and healthy, and then truly teach them how to do it better for reasons other than their peers will laugh at them if they don’t.

Yeah. The metaphor works.

Let’s cut down some ropes.

Things I Know 202 of 365: It’s time to re-collect

Today is tomorrow. It happened.

– Bill Murray, Groundhog Day

I had a chance today to interview a fellow teacher from Omaha for a new podcast episode. She’s been in the classroom 17 years and brings to the table all of the perspective of those years.

We talked a bit about teacher burnout and she brought up the movie Groundhog Day.

She said she certainly had her moments of burnout when she knew she wasn’t the best she could be, but that she knew those moments wouldn’t last.

“In the movie,” she said, “Bill Murray’s character goes through a phase where he tries to kill himself because he can’t find any way out of the day. Then, at some point he changes and starts making ice sculptures.”

As it was a perennial favorite in my household growing up, I remembered the scenes she was describing.

“It’s like that with the classroom – sometimes I want to die, but most of the time I’m making ice sculptures.”

I’ve been collecting teachers’ comments and thoughts as they gear up for the trip back to the classroom.

This is the first time in eight years I won’t be entering the classroom as a teacher, and I’m enjoying observing the rituals of return that I’ve been too tied up in myself for the past several years to truly appreciate.

My friend Henry posted tonight that many of his students are coming from other schools:

They have been rejected. I understand rejection because when I was in high school I didn’t fit in and it was very visible. Today, I am a better person and a better teacher.

Henry was one of the first African Americans to integrate his school district in the South. I’ve talked with him about the experience and read his recollections of the events.

And that is what he was doing when he wrote his post, he was re-collecting.

It’s what the teacher I interviewed does as she’s “making ice sculptures” – re-collecting all the moments of weariness and frustration from the darkest parts of teaching and connecting them to the moments that bring her the most joy.

When Henry enters the classroom tomorrow, he will not have simply collected whatever rest and renewal his summer break provided, he will have re-collected every memory of being other, different, afraid or strong that has made him who he is as well.

And to truly teach and connect to the children in our charge, we must re-collect all the pieces and experiences of who we are so that we can see the richness of experience each student brings to the classroom.

While the perspective of 17 years in the classroom is a powerful source of strength, it is nothing if we do not re-collect who we are as people and offer that to our students.

Things I Know 201 of 365: When times are tough, service matters the most

Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.

-Peter Drucker

Generally speaking, I’m not one for confrontation. Diplomacy is my goto route. If there’s an agreeable way to get what I want and what is fair and just, that’s the way I’ll take. Sometimes, this means taking more time to go through the process than I initially bargain for.
Sometimes, it’s not the advisable route.
Friday, I was scheduled to fly out of LAX to Denver for a three day visit with friends before heading home to Illinois.
I’ve been on the road for over a month, so I was ready to start the trek home.
I entered the sliding glass doors and attempted to pull my mobile ticket up on my phone.
No luck.
An error, my phone told me.
Best to go check in at the counter.
I wound my way to a self-check-in counter, entered my confirmation number and was alerted to the fact my flight had been canceled.
Talk to a person, the screen told me.
I wasn’t sure whom the screen meant, so I asked someone with a name tag.
“You want to be in Line 6,” person with name badge told me.
I looked at Line 6, AKA the Line that Time Forgot.
In my 45 minutes waiting I learned Line 6 was home to those displaced by the cancelation of my flight as well as passengers kicked off another of the airline’s flights.
This was on top of those passengers who needed to redeem paper tickets. Line 6 was their line first. We were just scavengers.
By the time I got up to the counter, I’d done my homework. With the help of friends, I knew every other flight to Denver leaving Friday night on every other airline.
“I’d like to be re-booked on Flight X,” I told the ticketer behind the counter.
Flight full.
We did this same dance four more times before he told me the only other flight available had one seat available in first class, and that was over $1,000.
I took my hotel voucher and headed to the airport hotel.
I was angry in that moment.
It was an anger made more intense when I called the airline’s customer assistance line.
My 3-day trip was cut to two, I told the agent on the line, and I would like to be compensated for the inconvenience.
I would have to send an e-mail to Customer Relations, the agent told me.
Would she just transfer me, I asked.
The agent told me she couldn’t. I needed to e-mail Customer Relations and they would e-mail me back.
I asked for the number of the Customer Relations department.
There isn’t one, said the agent, would I like for her to provide me with the e-mail address?
No, thank you, I can find my way around the Internet.
Here’s what gets me about the hole process. It’s what got me about the process when I got to the airport at 4 the next morning to sit stand-by for a flight I wouldn’t get on.
This is an industry with every incentive to get customer service right.
For almost 10 years, now, the airline industry has been melting away, attempting to claw its way back to soluble ground.
If anyone should want to serve me and every other customer well, it’s the good folks at the airlines.
They had every possible piece of contact information for me a person could have.
My mother doesn’t have so many ways to get ahold of me.
Still, it wasn’t until after the hour+ drive to LAX that I learned my flight had been canceled.
Bad form.
Make it company policy to contact a customer the moment a flight is canceled. I don’t need minute-by-minute play-by-play each time a flight falls behind or jumps ahead of schedule. I’m fine with needing to sign up for those services.
Realizing that I’ve purchased a ticket to get somewhere because I genuinely want to get there and that I would appreciate a heads up if that plan falls through seems the decent thing to do.
While we’re re-writing lines of code in the mainframe of airline thinking, when a flight is canceled, if no other flight to that destination is heading out under the same airline, let me know my options on the other airlines. Perhaps, even be so bold as to make it easy for me to select one of those flights or book a later flight on my original airline.
Yes, it might mean I end up flying on another carrier, and you risk losing me as a customer.
Might I suggest, though, that the current system seems to be set up to try to lose me as a customer the moment anything goes wrong.
Watch Miracle on 34th Street. Macy’s sending customers to Gimble’s. Gimble’s sending customers to Macy’s.
Customers are looking for service.
And, if the service is superior, I’m willing to overlook the problems I understand arise when operating a international transportation company.
If I am treated like a human being, I’ll be more likely to remember my humanity when things go wrong.

Things I Know 200 of 365: I trust Liz Dwyer

Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.

– Edward R. Murrow

Liz Dwyer has given me some of the best and worst news I’ve ever received about education.
She’s pushed my thinking on as many issues around teaching and learning as any one other person in my life.
When I can’t sleep at night, she’s there to help keep my mind busy. When I need to make a point to friends, she’s got my back.
She even helped me raise money for college.
And we’ve never met.
Dwyer is the Education Editor at GOOD.IS.
Though I knew I was head-over-heels for Good’s print mag when I picked up their first issue, it took me a while to realize how much Dwyer’s online work meant to me.
I’ve got it now.
While every other online education writer is stuffed comfortably into the “EDU” folder of my feed reader, Dwyer sits in her own thread.
I needed to shut down my browser the other day. Rather than waiting for each of the dozens of tabs I had open across two monitors to find their ways back to their respective pages, I shut each one and decided what to bookmark and what to send into the ether of the Interwebs.
As I shut down, I started to take account of how many tabs marked content Dwyer had created or shared.
Final tally – 16.
No other online writer owned as much of my browser space.
With all of the world and its information at my disposal, this one writer had caught my attention at least 16 times in the last week to the extent that I felt the need to keep open and share what she had written.
I am reminded of visits to my grandparents when I would sit down to lunch and my grandmother would hand me a stack of newspaper clippings from stories she thought I would be interested in.
I’d inadvertently done the same with Dwyer’s work on the chance someone would ask me a relevant question, and I’d be able to share.
My generation will never have an Edward R. Murrow. Anderson Cooper might be as close as we get.
Tom Brokaw and the later Peter Jennings belong to my parents and grandparents.
Finding a voice or two in the din of neo-journalism’s protean nature that serve a reliable and constant purveyors of understanding and information is grueling.
I’m glad I’ve found Liz Dwyer.

Things I Know 199 of 365: I won’t be mourning cursive’s passing

It was in second grade that Mrs. Kelly attempted to teach me to write in cursive. By some strange fluke, I was the only left-handed student in the class. I remember sitting at the back of the classroom filling in math worksheets while she led the rest of the class through complex curlicues and how to connect the capital H to the lower-case E.

Later, when Mrs. Kelly had finished the lesson for the others and they were diligently working, she would spend a couple minutes with me.

She made certain I had the basics, but I wouldn’t exactly call it differentiated instruction.

As a result, my handwriting has always endeavored to be, but never quite reached the status of, penmanship.

So, when I read this piece on Indiana’s decision to halt the mandated teaching of cursive in Hoosier schools and this impassioned piece from Vancouver mourning it’s death, I sat open-gobbed for a few moments.

I wasn’t alone.

A little bit of digging showed slews of comments wherever the story turned up. People are feeling some kind of way about Indiana’s decision.

I’d write, “Indiana’s decision to kill cursive,” by my handwriting took care of that long ago.

Because of that, I don’t write in cursive. When I take notes, it’s printed and shorthand and all over the page. It’s nothing that could be contained by the tri-lined paper of elementary school. When I return to it, though, to remind myself what I learned or heard, I know what I meant. If I need to share it, I type it. And, never, do I sit at the keyboard thinking how much better it would be if I were writing a cursive version of anything.

Doug Kennedy, quoted by Cincinnati’s WKRC 12, said. “When you’re born, someone signs your birth certificate. When you’re married, you have to sign your marriage license. When you die, someone’s going to sign your death certificate. All these things are important aspects of your life.”

Sure.

I’m with Kennedy. Those signatures happen.

But they didn’t always.

Did we think they would?

Without cursive, people won’t stop being born, getting married or dying. We’ll just signify it some other way.

Most commonly, those opposed to the optionalization (with no more cursive, it’s a world gone mad and anyone can make up words) question how these poor children will sign their names to documents as they grow older.

I don’t have any other answer to that question than, we’ll figure something out.

And that’ll be fine.

Language is an arbitrary, symbolic devise that moves to fit the needs and tools of the times and cultures in which it is being used.

I love calligraphy. It is an art I have all the more appreciation for because I do not practice it. When communicating, I want my medium to make my message as accessible as possible. Indiana has taken a step toward that objective.

Writing for The Vancouver Sun with a full-throated defense of cursive, Naomi Lakritz had this to say:

There’s one more crucial reason kids need to know how to write longhand.

As any teacher will attest, writing things down helps children remember. Typing at a keyboard does not. There is something about the act of writing that makes information stick.

Sure. It’s true.

We know having kids learn by teaching and doing are even better conduits to building the synaptic relays of memory, so maybe we can cut the lectures requiring them to take the notes Lakritz worries about and have them learn by doing – maybe in an art class.

I’m not worried children won’t be able to read cursive. I’m worried they won’t know how to read.

The two are related, but not interdependent.