What should the purpose of public education be?

Of all my old posts, I keep coming back to "What is the purpose of public education?" the most.

I still think this is a major part of our problem as a society in dealing with education. We don't agree on what it's for, and we often say we think it's for one thing while legislating based on some completely antagonistic purpose. We expect miracles from a system that we denigrate while simultaneously hero-worshipping and hating the people who work in it.

I gagged during the Presidential debates last fall at the "I think we all love teachers" comment. I shouted at my television about how they sure have a funny way of showing it. (Side note: I tell my students this all the time. They do something ridiculous, I give them The Look, they say "You know I love you, Mrs ---", and I say "You sure have a strange way of showing it.") We talk about how great teachers are one minute and then complain about how lazy they are the next. We say that school is the best way out of poverty and then refuse to truly desegregate or fairly fund schools and then blame the teachers or the students or the parents or anything but the well-documented effects of poverty for our failures.

I'm tired of the talk about needing to improve our public education system so that our kids can compete in the 21st century world. (Read: We better improve our education system so those scary yellow people won't do better than us. I'm sorry, I can't even hear anything but the racist subtext anymore considering how often people immediately point to "oh no, China's growing" to prove that we aren't competing enough any more.) I'm tired of the talk about how education is the answer to our broken economy. (Really? So why are there so many angry un(der)employed college graduates right now?) I'm tired of all of this because it posits one sole purpose to education: creating compliant hard workers.

What about unlocking creativity? What about educating our citizens to make better choices than their forebearers did? What about creating empathy and an understanding of the strength in diversity embodied in our motto "e pluribus unum"? What about leaving the world a better place than we found it? (I firmly believe that this is golden rule #2: you leave anywhere you go nicer than you found it. Something to do with being a Girl Scout, I guess.)

Look, the reason our economy is in such a bad place is partly that we already live in a post-scarcity society. We don't actually need people to work that much in order to provide for everyone's basic needs. Accepting that won't bring massive profit, though, so we invent new needs and push a ridiculous tech cycle. That way no one is ever satisfied and people still have to work so hard that they don't get enough sleep or time with their families. We live in a world of overabundance, in which productivity continues to increase, and yet we seem to have to work more and more to keep treading water. How does this make sense?

I don't believe in the idea that hard work for work's sake is moral. Rather than worrying about how prepared our children are to do pointless work for the sake of beating another country, let's worry about how prepared they are to work together to make the world a better place.That's a purpose of public education that I can get behind.

How about you?

So what if it's a project?

So today's dilemma is about World History II. I'm home planning with a little leisure time for once because we all got sent home after work and after school meetings were cancelled due to severe weather warnings. The plan was to slightly modify a skit project that one of my colleagues has his kids do on the Protestant Reformation. So I sat here and read through it again, thought about other project ideas, and then started to think some more.

The problem with this is that now I'm doubting my whole plan. If I weren't doubting it I could just make a few tweaks and be done and get up early to make the copies I would've made this afternoon. Given time to reflect, I start to doubt the entire premise.

See, history teachers like to do projects that are "somewhat authentic" - we're taught in college that this a better way to assess history knowledge and get kids interested in a subject than just lecture/notes and tests. The idea has been popularized by the History Alive! folks. Don't get me wrong - I like a lot of what they do. I'm just so skeptical anymore about standard history teacher projects.

As a new teacher I jumped into these ideas, following what I was taught.  I've had some success but over the years I've come to be skeptical of projects like have the students write a newspaper on the Reformation or make skits or interview historical figures. Do the kids really learn more from doing this or do they focus on the product and not retain the information? Plus, how engaging are they, really? The kids who already come to my class with some motivation will find a hook, but those are the same kids that gave me gorgeously detailed artwork for an assignment on finding pictures related to each religion we studied in Unit 1. What about everybody else? Why should they care more about writing a fake newspaper about the Reformation than notes?

I know a lot of people's answer to this is audience. Despite some initial ideas I never really jumped into the idea of having kids blog or otherwise post schoolwork online. Honestly it doesn't seem that much better - it's just another form of the same old phony project. Like how webquests were going to be so awesome (I had to make one in college for my class on social studies specific pedagogies) but turned out to be just another form of making kids do research projects, except now there's a computer. I do not believe that adding a computer/the internet suddenly makes it better. Sorry.

Unfortunately all of this has left me with lots of questions and no answers. I have time in my schedule (for once) to do more than go over the basics of the Reformation and I already told the kids we're doing a group project starting tomorrow and I want to throw my existing plan out the window and it's 7pm.

So yeah, that's my dilemma right nw.

Interesting article about long terms effects of the recession

Take a read! There's a lot of apparently depressing research about the impacts of unemployment on things like future earnings and physical health. Basically, people just a year or two younger than me who graduated into the Great Recession will probably earn $100,000 less than me over an identical career and will be significantly more likely suffer from depression, alcoholism and so on. Blerg.

What stuck out at me, though, was this:

Ron Alsop, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and the author of The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaking Up the Workplace , says a combination of entitlement and highly structured childhood has resulted in a lack of independence and entrepreneurialism in many 20-somethings. They’re used to checklists, he says, and “don’t excel at leadership or independent problem solving.” Alsop interviewed dozens of employers for his book, and concluded that unlike previous generations, Millennials, as a group, “need almost constant direction” in the workplace. “Many flounder without precise guidelines but thrive in structured situations that provide clearly defined rules.”

This is very true of my students. The article blames it on parenting and teaching methods. They may be right, but I'm not sure what can be done about it. My giant, year-long research project for grad school is all about encouraging student self-sufficiency and independence. It's going...ok. There's a lot of things we can do as teachers to push students, but in all of them there comes a point where the student has to be willing to put in the work and to persevere when things get hard. I can't do it for them, that's the whole point!

So if this is already a problem by high school, when and how can it be fixed? How can children be encouraged not to have falsely high self-esteem but the kind of deep confidence that allows one to push through when things get hard?

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.

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.)

How do you teach the incomprehensible?

Imagine:

You have a total of 3 hours (in two 90-minute chunks, minus the usual housekeeping time) to teach your students about the Holocaust and other modern genocides. You have some state standards to guide you, but they focus on terminology (what is genocide?) and a laundry list of genocides to mention. Your students will come to the first lesson fresh from spring break.

How do you teach this weighty topic without trivializing it?

I don't have an answer. I struggle with this every time.

The hardest thing about teaching history, for me, is to do justice to the tragedies of the past without turning it into sensationalism. It seems there's a fine line to walk between glossing over what happened (11 million people died) and turning it into a horror-show (look at these pictures of concentration camp survivors) that, rather than building empathy and compassion, appeals to the enjoyment of the grotesque that so many of us have learned from tv and movies. How do you use the tools of modern media to tell a real story, with real people? (Now I'm starting to sound like Claude Lanzmann.)

My students, by the way, are fascinated with the topic. I don't know how to respond to that.

Part of my problem is that I spent an entire semester studying Nazism in college. It was a senior seminar, so we read a lot, had the sort of discussions that continue for an hour after class is over, and thought long and hard. Everything I do will seem too shallow after that, I suppose. I can't take the reading and discussion of a variety of "biographies" of Hitler and easily turn it into something my students can do in a block, and yet I want to. I can't show Shoah. (I'm not sure I want to, really.)

I'll probably do what I did last year, and piece together fragments of the things I'd love to spend more time on. I just know it's not good enough. It never is.

Games, dream electives, and why I want a 20th century history course to be taught in 11th grade.

It's been a busy week. I've been starting a new semester, new units, generally trying to do a better job of staying caught up and taking a Spanish class. I wanted to make sure that I posted a couple of thoughts before they escaped my brain though.

1) I love it when I can make a game out of something to introduce it. This week was the "Scramble for Africa" game. (The day after I finished playing it with my classes, I found a nicer "Scramble for Africa" game someone had made. I now have a whole plan on how to make a totally cool, SMARTboarded up, version. Next year, though. Now I need to concentrate on teaching World War 1.)

2) World/European History and American history classes should all stop around 1890. Then you should do a 20th century/modern history class that combines the two. Seriously, February-May is annoying. I teach about World War 1 in US and then the next week I'm teaching it in World. I feel like I'm getting planning whiplash. It's not exactly the same curriculum, since the emphasis is different. (Example: with the Great War, in US I emphasize why we got involved and the 14 points, whereas World emphasizes the actual course of the war, Russian Revolution and overall Treaty of Versailles effects.)

Considering how much I had to reteach my US class that was supposed to be in the World curriculum, and how truncated those emphases are without each other, it makes much more sense to devote an entire course to the 20th century and include both perspectives in it. (This might also give us a chance to do a better job at including Latin American, African and Asian perspectives on a lot of these events.)

3) I'm working on a dream electives list.

• There's already the "Media and American History" one that Tom and I wanted to teach together.
  
• I also want to teach "History vs Hollywood" as a semester course. The students would vote on 5 "historical" movies for us to examine, and it'd be very project-centered, encouraging them to use the research on the accuracy of the movie to jump off into research/projects about the time period.
  
• "Italian City-States: A Historical Soap Opera" would be fun, although I'd need to dust up on my Florentine intrigue.
  
• I also have always wanted to teach a social history-oriented elective that went at about the same pace as the regular World History courses. This would be my chance to incorporate all the pieces I think are missing from a standard history curriculum: art, music, clothing, food, daily lives of real people, social structures, literature, gender, advertising, propaganda outside of wartime, race outside of slavery, etc.

What history-related electives would you want to see taught? What changes would you make to the structure of the social studies curriculum?

Finally, how many of you agree that all high school history and english should be taught as humanities courses? (History provides the context in which we practice those language skills. English provides the great literature that we read about in historical context. It's a match made in heaven.)

Cursive is Dead

Cursive is dead.* Praise your favorite deity!

When I get handwritten assignments from students, most of them print. The ones that write in cursive, I curse. It takes me several times longer to read most student cursive and that distracts from paying attention to the content, which is what I'm grading here.

Obligatory no-I'm-not-just-young-and-lazy note: I can read cursive. I can even write it better than most of my students. (I remember the capitals!) I can read it well enough to decipher letters written a hundred years ago. I haven't written in it voluntary except when I sign my name or write with a certain type of pen.

I have heard people complain about the death of cursive due to computers and the widespread existence of printers. I think they're missing the point: cursive has been dying since the invention of the ballpoint pen. Writing in script is much easier and more useful when you write with something in which the ink is loose and flows quickly (quill pens). When you write with something that is stingy with ink, like your standard bic pen, cursive is actually more work.

Although I think the ability to read script will stay useful, considering all the documents written in it, I think that it is time to make it a much smaller part of the elementary curriculum. It's dead. It has no reason for existing, beyond signing one's name.

PS: This is directed at the people out there who still make their students write exclusively in cursive.

PPS: This will lead to a larger exploration of issues about tech and "in my day" and the like, but not today. It's Friday.

--------

*Inspired by an instant message conversation...
"Andrew: there was a huge ridiculous project for stats due today. Doing advanced statistical calculations by hand. its just tedious and useless and time consuming and bleh. I got 5 hours of sleep
Me: ugh. I guess doing them by hand proves you know them or something
Andrew: I hate when I'm too angry to get the assignment done, thats a stupid feeling . . .its like, a required relatively basic stats course I don't understand why she wants that.
Me: because you're in grad school now, and grad school is HAAAARD. or some such nonsense
Andrew: but its not even hard in a intelligent way! its hard in a time consuming and unnecessary way! COMPUTERS WERE MADE TO HELP ME**
Me: but when the prof was in grad school, you had to do it all by hand and it was good enough for her.***
Andrew: I disregard that reality
...
Me: have I told you about how I think cursive is dead and shouldn't be taught or required in school anymore?
Andrew: . . . no, but I agree
Me: aww, then I don't get to argue my well-reasoned explanation at you! I'll just go write it up in my teacher blog instead."

**How many of your students are having this conversation about your class right now?

*** Seriously, don't even start telling me about how you can use a slide rule or studied calc back when you had to look up logs in the back of the book. The microchip is here to stay. Get over it.

Why are you a teacher?

I've always wanted to be a teacher.

This is mostly true. There was a brief time where I thought I wanted to be a programmer instead, and some doubt in the middle of college. Otherwise? I've wanted to teach practically since I entered school.

I still remember, the summer before my younger-brother-by-3-years (I have 4 brothers) entered school, I made him come to two weeks of "school" with me. I don't really remember what I had him do, except that he had to spend 2 hours with me and what the chair he sat on looked like.

Since I can't even remember not wanting to be a teacher, I wonder about other people who teach. How did you realize you wanted to be a teacher? Did you doubt your career choice as a pre-service teacher, a newbie? Do you doubt it now? How do you deal with doubts? How did you decide that teaching beat out the alternatives you'd considered?

Wishing...

I've been thinking. (Yes, yes, you could smell it/hear the gears turning, me too.)

I really just want a chance to talk to other secondary social studies teachers about ideas, lessons, et cetera. To post my "stuff that works" and see theirs and generally actually collaborate with our people doing what I'm doing in my subject.

Is there interest out there for this sort of thing? Or am I totally blind and missing it?