Ahh, Research

I'm taking a break from the thinking-in-circles my research paper for grad school has become. A bit of context, since I haven't written much about it: this is the final paper summing up my semester-long research project on formative assessment and remediation. It's due in a week, and I present on it two days after that. I have the claims I had already figured out about halfway through, but I'm looking at the rest of my data and going "uhhhh...." right now. Lots of patterns, bits of ideas, but I'm not sure any of it makes another solid claim. Blegh.

While taking a break, I've been catching up on my edu-blogs a bit. I'm sad to see that Dan Meyer has decided to go PhD and stop teaching, although I'm sure it's the right move for him. Still, a lot of my experimenting with assessment this year is owed to his insightful rants on How Math Must Assess. Of course, I have to go in very different directions with what I do, history being rather different than math. :)

I also ran into this post that's worth spreading: How Will We Survive?

"My library has already been cut. We will have no bookroom clerk, making novels almost an impossibility and replacement costs much higher than previous years for sure. We will lose one adviser, the person we send students to when they are problematic. We will have a total of fifteen more students each day, meaning that we’ll teach five and a half classes for the same pay as we usually get for teaching just five..."

It's not quite that bad around here, but we will be losing staff, gaining kids, and considering the drama that already exists around copies I can't wait to see what happens next year with reduced budget. Still, I find myself hopeful about next year. All those problems will just be little obstacles, and I'll be too busy worrying about giant finishing grad school project & really getting to grips with my problems with classroom management to focus on copy room drama.

A Mathematician's Lament

I recently came across this fascinating article about everything that's wrong with math education according to Paul Lockhart. (Click through and read the pdf, I promise, it's worth it.)

He starts with the idea of what music or art classes would be like if taught as math is:

"A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where music education has been made mandatory. “We are helping our students become more competitive in an increasingly sound-filled world.” Educators, school systems, and the state are put in charge of this vital project. Studies are commissioned, committees are formed, and decisions are made— all without the advice or participation of a single working musician or composer.

Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious black dots and lines must constitute the “language of music.” It is imperative that students become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed, it would be ludicrous to expect a child to sing a song or play an instrument without having a thorough grounding in music notation and theory. Playing and listening to music, let alone composing an original piece, are considered very advanced topics and are generally put off until college, and more often graduate school."

This goes on for a few pages before he gets into the real rant. His main point is that math is actually as creative an endeavor as art or music or history or anything else generally recognized to be interesting and creative, yet we teach it as something to memorize and practice and kill most students' interest in it. I think there are some elements of his argument that could be critiqued, but he does have some valid points.

It certainly appeals to the part of me that never remembered formulas but did remember the principles the formulas were based on, and would re-derive them all on the test because that was more fun than memorization. His "real" description of the standard math courses seems pretty accurate, especially in judging the utter uselessness of Algebra II and PreCalc. (Do you know how many definitions of limits we had to learn? Me either, but it was a lot. Why? We never used them in Calc.) Despite all that, I enjoyed math, because solving a problem is fun, an interesting challenge, and has a definite end-point. This is a much-needed break when you're also writing papers, themes and doing research--there's always more research you could do, more editing you could give that paper. At least, that's how I feel: I'm never done with a writeen assignment until I turn it in, and even then I'm only turning it in because it's due now.

Anyway, I started to write because I could take a lot of his points and apply them to history. As I've mentioned, I don't actually think that the point of learning history is to learn a set of facts. Especially not the set of facts currently contained in the curriculum, which are heavily political history biased, as well as being heavily biased in general. Facts without context are useless. (A problem he has with formulas, heh.)

Context isn't the whole problem though--I don't really want my students to learn history because I think they need to know everything that ever happened, or even certain important events that happened. I want my students to learn to do history: to analyze primary sources, to go digging for information, to construct narrative around a pile of facts, to argue interpretations of said pile of facts, to wrestle with deeper questions of morality and human nature and to think. Lots of thinking. Just as Lockhart wants his students to discover math for themselves, I feel that the most valuable history is that which you discover for yourself.

What is the purpose of public education?

No, really, I want to know.

I know what I think the purpose should be, but I'm pretty sure that the current system is some sort of purposeless monster stumbling around like a headless chicken while we argue about whether to bring it back to life with electricity, clockwork or good old-fashioned black magic.

(Okay, that was a little grotesque.) It's just that I've become pretty convinced that we can't fix anything until we can agree as a society on what we want our public education system to achieve.

What do you think is our purpose? (Multiple purposes are acceptable, I suppose.)

Dear Hollywood: Go make insipid movies about some other profession

One of the requirements for my first session of grad classes this summer was to watch Freedom Writers and discuss the different assumptions the students & Ms Gruwell brought to school. Luckily, our professors are open to critical interpretations of everything, so we could have a good discussion about the problems with the Hollywood version of teaching.

How is she only ever shown teaching one class a day? What about her other 150+ students, are they not good enough for her field trips and dinners and such? Seriously, she may have taken two extra jobs, but you can't make me believe she had enough money to buy 180 copies of every book she wanted her students to read. (Where am I getting this number? I teach six classes of between 25 & 30 students each year, so I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that she has at least as many students as me.)

There are a lot of other issues with this movie, and the whole genre of heroic teacher movies. As a recent op-ed at the NY Times explains:

While no one believes that hospitals are really like “ER” or that doctors are anything like “House,” no one blames doctors for the failure of the health care system. From No Child Left Behind to City Hall, teachers are accused of being incompetent and underqualified, while their appeals for better and safer workplaces are systematically ignored.

Every day teachers are blamed for what the system they’re just a part of doesn’t provide: safe, adequately staffed schools with the highest expectations for all students. But that’s not something one maverick teacher, no matter how idealistic, perky or self-sacrificing, can accomplish.

If the only way to be a good teacher is be as self-sacrificing as Ms Gruwell, then we have a problem. Actually, there's no "if" about it. Chris Lehmann, principal of SLA often talks about issues of sustainability and system in teaching. Just the other day he had a good post, in which he said:

But if being a great teacher is only achievable by Herculean effort, we're going to always struggle to create systemic reform. What do we need to do to make it easier for more and more teachers to always make that right choice toward careful crafting of curriculum?

I don't know, but I know that it's something that needs to be figured out.

The end of summer break...

It's been a while. Honestly, after school let out I just needed a break from anything and everything to do with education. I've had a great month of vacationing, visiting and being visited, et cetera, and now I'm hopefully refreshed enough for the next round.

When I was still a student, mid-July would still be early summer break. I would still feel like I had all the time in the world until I had to think about school again. Instead, my summer break is about to come to an end. On Monday, I start the first session of classes for my master's program. I'm excited!

In preparation, we have a variety of assignments. Right now I'm reading Critical Pedagogy by Joan Wink. I shan't bore you with my reading journal (half of it is scribbled in the book anyway) but I do have a couple of thoughts to share:

1) I like being a student! I was sitting on the couch, scribbling a note onto a sticky after highlighting a bit of text and I looked up and said "This is fun." I miss reading and engaging with texts on my level when I'm teaching, and I miss the feeling I get when I'm learning and making connections. It's still there, sometimes, but there's so much more going on.

2) How did I get to be so good at being a student? I've been trying to figure out where and when and how I learned all these skills that so many of my students still lack as 10th graders, partly so I can figure out how to help them be better students. The hardest things for me to teach are the ones I don't remember having to learn. I know I learned them at some point, but...?

What would a time-traveler use to keep a journal?

I'm one of those crazy history teachers who likes to use creative writing assignments. They're a good assessment on a variety of levels and they give me a chance to help students develop historical perspective.

Throughout the year my students have written postcards from the New World, made "phone calls" from war-torn nations, written letters to the editor on whether the US should participate in World War 2 (in June 1941) and created "monuments" to imperialism. I like these assignments, but as I'm thinking about next year, there's some changes I want to make.

The first change is the obvious update--can we find ways to incorporate 21st century tech in these? (Yes) More importantly, I'm rethinking my class "notebook" and I want to create a more organized, unified system of assignments. I want to be able to tell my students, after appropriate introductions to "how we do things" to add an entry to their "time-traveler's journal" about this and then let them loose to create.

So, I'm asking, how do I set this up? What tools & tricks can you recommend to make this work? What online tools would work well for submitting assignments? (Class blog, forum, wiki, something completely different?) I especially want it to be flexible enough to include more than just text, centralized enough that they'll see and respond to each other, and easy to use. (I know, I don't want much at all.)