Why we gotta do this: A book review

I finished the book I’ve been reading this week earlier today, Why Do We Gotta Do This, Mr. Nehring?: Notes from a Teacher’s Day in School by James Nehring, and I have to give it my highest recommendations for any junior high or high school teacher (although it will be more topical for the latter). It is a very compelling book, equal parts narrative and commentary but all contained within a narrative framework that is very approachable. Nehring does a great job of telling the story of education – not a history, but the way things are. I say “are” because I don’t think things have changed a whole lot in the 20 years since this book was written and published; in fact, if you replaced all instances of “Walkmen” with “iPods,” there would be virtually no dissonance with the reality of education in 2009.

There is much that can be said about Nehring’s commentary – perhaps the most important part of the book, although the narrative is entertaining and engaging – but I want to return to that dreaded question that I wrote about a few days ago*.

 

Current reading

I have actually been on somewhat of a roll with my personal reading lately: in the past three weeks or so, I’ve finished the novel A Separate Peace – which was excellent – and read through Dave Barry’s History of The Millennium (So Far) (a fake history in Barry’s normal vein of humor – absolutely hilarious) and Ernest Hemingway’s early short story collection In Our Time, which contains a number of Nick Adams stories. (Both of these were, coincidentally, bargain buys at a local Waldenbooks.)

Tonight, I started reading a book that came to me by way of a rummage sale, something that my mother (who is a fanatic about these kinds of things) picked up for me because it’s about teaching and…well, you probably know how mothers can be.

The book is “Why Do We Gotta Do This Stuff, Mr. Nehring?”: Notes from a Teacher’s Day in School by educator James Nehring (now an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell), published by Fawcett Columbine in 1989. I’ve read a couple of books by teachers about their experiences (most notably Educating Esme by Esmé Raji Codell, a fine read from an elementary teacher’s perspective), so I thought I knew what to expect.

But I have to admit that this is the first book of this sort that I’m reading as a full-time teacher, and it struck me when I started reading the first chapter that I have a much better point of reference now. For example, the major controversy in this first chapter (and keep in mind the time): kids having Walkmen.

It has to be said – Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. (For those of you who, like me, don’t speak French: The more things change, the more they stay the same.)

I’ll keep you posted as I read through this book.

Faithful readers: What are you reading? Anything good?

 

Teachers and ASD

My recent post on autism has apparently sparked some interest (hello Trinity students!), which I’m not altogether surprised at: autism is a hot topic these days, and for good reason. It’s especially a matter of concern for teachers, who are now faced with a greater likelihood of having a student on the spectrum mainstreamed into one of their classes.

Well, besides all of the nice comments that the last article sparked (despite the fact that it was mostly about my own personal dealings with autism as the parent of an autistic child and not really about education in general), I happened to get a message through facebook from a former classmate of mine who student taught and graduated at the same time as I did back in the spring. This message, however, was not about teaching and ASD but instead about teaching with ASD.

 

Disjunction in the union

(Pardon the title.)

I have never been in any industry where unions have been a part of life until now. I’m honestly not that big a fan of unions, although I recognize their importance and function, especially in education where they play a role in mediation and contract negotiation (which of course applies to other industries as well). So I’m just getting my feet wet in this kind of stuff.

Our local union, which is a part of NEA, met today to elect officers. No one really wanted to volunteer to be a part, so most of the current officers were re-elected. One of our co-presidents, however, voiced her strong opinions about NEA leadership and her objection not to helping out the local union but to supporting the national organization. Much of it had to do with controversial retired General Counsel Bob Chanin (check here for a taste, although I’m not too enthusiastic about the reliability of many of these sources). It’s all politics.

That was the timbre of my first real union meeting: no one wants to be in charge, and we don’t much care for the higher-ups.

Union, right.

 

A rant on assessments

I spent this morning doing some work in my classroom, and while I am pleased at the progress I am making in getting organized and making everything feel like my room (although it will feel more like my own room once my wife and I put up posters and other things in the classroom on Wednesday), I must take a moment to rant on a subject that is often a source of frustration for teachers: assessment.

However, my gripe is not with the current institutional assessment practices – standardized testing and what-have-you – but with how some teachers handle assessment individually in regards to instruction.

See, I have this crazy idea that assessments are intended to, you know, assess the learning that students achieve during the course of instruction. Which means that assessments should reflect what is being taught. Good so far? I think most teachers would agree that this is a start.

So when I look at your assessments, you the unsuspecting teacher who doesn’t know that I will inherit your classroom once you leave, I should expect that you taught everything that you assessed, either the content (if fact-based responses are required) or the skills, right?

So if I notice that on every single assessment (and study guide) I happen to look at that covers a unit surveying an author’s work – say, for instance, Robert Frost – you have included the author’s birth and death years as a fill-in-the-blank question, then I can assume that you believed that information necessary for the full and proper comprehension of the works of that author, correct?

…

Wait, you mean that knowing the exact years that an author was born and died in aren’t all that relevant to the specific understanding of that author’s body of work (aside maybe from knowing the general historical era they produced their works in)?

This isn’t difficult, teachers: teach what needs to be learned, and assess what needs to be learned. I have been guilty of this in the past, too, but no more. If a significant portion of your test is filled with objective information that is meant merely to activate the rote knowledge part of students’ abilities (and thereby help out students’ grades), then I don’t know that the assessment will really be a successful one, since it will skew the results of the assessment by favoring students who have mastered memorization and by penalizing students who have not developed good memory skills or who freeze up and forget information even after the most well-rehearsed memorization because of test anxiety. When assessments are not accurate – or just, to use a more evocative word – then no student succeeds, even if they pass.

[end rant, exeunt]

 

Motivation and standardized testing

One of the areas of teaching that I’ve always struggled with has been motivation. I have tried to ask myself the hard questions: How do I motivate those students who have no intrinsic desire to learn or who have no personal interest in what I am trying to relate? What steps can I make? What will I not do to make this work – that is, what is off-limits for trying to motivate students? To date, I have not found easy answers, and I learn more and more that I must have a toolbox of ideas, not one trick to flip that proverbial switch from “unmotivated” to “motivated.”

I have also long been a critic of standardized testing (perhaps even before I decided on teaching as a career), with a rapidly growing (albeit somewhat morbid) fascination with the drive to use norm-referenced tests. (There’s a joke – although it’s not really a joke – about politicians who decry the fact that half of our students are below average: the punchline being, of course, that it is a mathematical certainty that half of any group will be “below average” because of group norms.) I tend to see the effects of standardized testing as destructive and antithetical to a profound approach to education, emphasizing lower-level thought (rote knowledge and memorization) and leaving little opportunity for higher-order thinking, such as analysis and synthesis. I don’t often feel the need to write about this because there are so many others who have written about the topic with greater evidence and precision that I possess.

So when I got my copy of the Illinois English Bulletin, the publication of the Illinois Association of Teachers of English (IATE, of which I am a member), I was interested to read an article entitled, “How Can Students Be Motivated to Do Well on Standardized Tests?” by Tisha Ortega. Unfortunately, Ortega’s approach was somewhat disappointing to me.

 

The rules of engagement: bell hooks on “engaged pedagogy”

Since I have largely completed the work for my education degree at this stage, I thought I would make a rotation back: before student teaching, I wrote a lot about theory, and during student teaching, I wrote almost exclusively about practice, but now I’ll return to theory, relating it to practice (now that I have really had some of it!) where possible. In order to focus my thoughts, I’m returning to a book that a professor and I used to teach freshman composition, Considering Literacy: Reading and Writing the Educational Experience, edited by Linda Adler-Kassner. (Here is an entry on a composition instruction blog on this text as a textbook for a first-year university writing course.) I have previously blogged about essays contained in this collection, specifically Mike Rose’s literacy history entitled “‘I Just Wanna Be Average‘” and Mark Edmundson’s essay “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: I. As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students“; however, there are a number of other works in this collection that deserve attention as well.

One such of these essays is “Engaged Pedagogy” by bell hooks, the nom de plume of Gloria Watkins.

 

A gripe: On the nature of teaching

Today has been a long day, one without the comfort of my cooperating teacher (who is away dealing with the death of her mother). I have had a very capable substitute teacher (who is actually an English teacher who will be looking for a position next fall – my competition!), but it has truly felt like my own class in terms of dealing with matters myself. One student in an early class refused to do the task I had given, insteading preferring to do an assignment for another class, and I told him once to put it away. He acted like he did, but I promptly found him doing the same. I told him he had a detention, but even this did not stop him – I had to go so far as to take away the book and worksheet he was using. I followed through, though; he should have received the detention slip a few periods later.

I also had to deal with a problem that has bugged me for the longest time, a problem that I suspected might come up given the nature of my high school students (who are in fairly advanced honors and AP courses).

 

On Obama’s pick for Secretary of Education

Obama recently revealed his pick for Secretary of Education. Before the announcement was made, the primary two candidates were Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne (pronounced “arn-ee”) Duncan and New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein; Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond, Obama’s education advisor, was also mentioned as under consideration. Ultimately, Arne Duncan was Obama’s choice.

I have had some high hopes for Obama’s administration on education. I’m a strong opponent (as it seems most teachers are these days) of the way No Child Left Behind has impacted public schools across the country, and I have long wanted to see change happen regarding what seems to be a very poorly implemented act (at best). When I found out that Linda Darling-Hammond was under consideration, I was even more hopeful: Darling-Hammond has been very vocal about her opposition to NCLB, even though she acknowledges that the act has some good points (and myself and other teachers have said as much as well). After the announcement, I have been a little discouraged for the pick – Duncan played basketball with Obama on Election Day (Duncan played professionally in Australia), and he is one of many Chicagoans who will be filling the Cabinet of this new administration. That hits home for me, a native (non-Chicago) Illinoisan, who has seen what sort of influence Chicago cronyism has had on our state.

That’s of course not to say that Duncan is a bad pick, certainly; his credentials look good on paper, and he obviously brings a lot of esteem as a reformer. He is not, however, a reformer when it comes to NCLB – he basically supports the intention of the act, although he has called for more funding. (Whether or not that will be even remotely possible given the enormous federal deficit is another question entirely.) But he has his good points: he is very critical of funding methods for schools, which tend to advantage those who already have an economic advantage, and the situation in Chicago public schools seems to have improved during his tenure there. (You can read more about Duncan’s accomplishments here.)

But that’s enough of my opinion. Tell me what you think:

 

Education as entertainment?

The freshman comp class I’m a TA for recently read an article that really got me thinking about education and its purpose. The article, “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: I. As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students” by Mark Edmundson, is somewhat provocative but in a relatively plausible sense: it asserts that education has now become so much about entertainment and diversion because of the increasingly consumeristic outlook that modern students take. I can see this, but I wonder where the line gets drawn between the two.

Perhaps Edmundson is overreacting a bit, but I think I get some of what he’s saying at the beginning of his essay – why should he be evaluated for making the material interesting unless students judge his teaching in large part on whether or not he could present the material in such a way that they are entertained by it? It does make sense to me: as teachers, we should be cultivating the idea that what we teach is worth learning, regardless of its entertainment value. (If it is entertaining, then that should merely be a nice side effect.) I think this value can be cultivated, but the notion that we as teachers need to be entertainers, always on the spot, ready to please our audience students, is a problem, one I’m not particularly sure how to fix (and Edmundson doesn’t offer any suggestions, really).

Here’s the conundrum as I see it: Where does the line exist between entertainment and engagement? Or, perhaps I should say: Where does that line exist now? (It’s surely not true that entertainment and engagement have always had such an association.) If there exists an attitude among students that engagement with material will only occur if some entertaining element is incorporated, then can teachers really afford to stand on principle? The answer, of course, is very clearly no.

So, how can a teacher then balance a commitment to presenting material that ought to be learned because there is something inherently worthwhile in studying it and a circumstantial obligation to provide entertaining opportunities that allow students to become engaged in the material (and hopefully take it with them outside the classroom)?

I think the key is to be clear about the purpose of any activity. If you show a movie of Moby-Dick, be clear that the purpose is to compare the effects of different media and interpretations of a text, how those relate to the symbolism and allegory of the work, etc. Never let students think that you are doing an activity that is merely meant to occupy or divert them – when you do, you reinforce the idea that you are merely there to keep them from being too bored during the time that they are forced to be in school, and subsequently, no one wins, not the teachers, not the school, and certainly not the students.

But this will still be in the back of mind, and it will hopefully be a useful consideration for unit design and lesson planning (since I’m about at that stage in preparation for student teaching). If I can answer affirmatively the question, “Is this lesson on the whole more about diversion than education?” then I know that I have some rethinking to do. With any luck, this won’t have to be an issue I grapple with too horribly.