I get bored during tests, and I tend to get restless. ("Dr. D, you're making too much noise.")
Kids like routines, and here's mine:
1) Pass out the test bunnies, giant cockroach, praying mantis puppet, and a half dozen felt mice. (Talismans in science class, who would've thunk?)
2) Pass out tests.
3) Pass out pencils. ("It will cost you 5 points." Dr. Deeeeeeeee, no fair..... "Have I ever taken a point away?")
4) Get out the magic pipette.
The magic pipette started out as the magic wand ("magic's" a bit redundant, I suppose), then transmogrified into a magic pipette when I misplaced my wand.
During a test, each child gets to use the magic pipette for one question--it will mysteriously land on the right answer.
It started out as a gimmick by a very bored teacher, but I've kept it because it gives me good information. God forbid, it also gives a few kids an extra few points.
What have I learned?
The most confused kids won't even use it--a hard lesson for me to learn. Children feeling defeated will not take help.
If everyone's using it for the same couple of questions, something's likely wrong with the question.
Kids hate it when they already picked the right answer, even if it was chosen completely at random.
My magic pipette won't ever rival Madeline Hunter, but for a few kids, giving away an answer serves as an act of kindness in a world that increasingly frowns on such.
Mr. Duncan is going to take a lot of flak for his Katrina komment, joining the Brownie School of Fixing by Diaspora, but he's already getting blog-flogged for that.
No, I'm more interested in the psychology of Duncan Dogooder, trying to anticipate how much damage this poor little rich kid is going to inflict on public education before he rides into the sunset, reading The Little Engine That Could to budding embryos in a Chicago church basement.
There are going to be a lot more losers than winners. I know my popularity's going to plummet.
While I agree, Arne, that your playground popularity right now rests on the dollars you're tossing on the asphalt, I find it telling that your popularity plays into this at all.
We don't need hurricanes and poor little rich kids to fix our schools. We need communities.
Community is an old word, and a good one. Communis. Shared by many.
New Jersey's RttT application is flawed enough to catch the Washington Post's attention. While we could certainly use the money, I am proud we did not completely capitulate to the whims of a manchild whose life has been framed by a fishbowl.
Until Arne can tell me how many squirrels live on the Bloomfield Green, that poor little rich kid can kiss my arse. He's taken class warfare to W's level.
We are awash in strings of vague capital letters--and it's easy, so easy, to gloss over them like names in a Russian novel.
BPAs, PCBs, PBDEs--yawn....
The PBDEs get the stage this week--flame retardants found in just about everything. Now while I am (mostly) rational, and while I frown on babies in flaming pajamas, seems that the PBDEs designed to protect the little people may prevent the little people from ever arriving.
My sister knew PBDEs were a problem years ago, worked hard to get them banned in Michigan, and she (with many others) did just that.
"The Mary Beth Doyle PBDE Act" got two forms of PBDE banned in Michigan back in 2004, not long after she was run off the road by a devout Christian missionary, who later assured me her death was all part of God's plan; this week the Michigan assembly added a third form of PBDE to the act.
Mary Beth was not a professional scientist, but she was a keen observer. She danced through life. If I could teach anything in science class, it would be how to open your senses to the world. She did just that.
So here's a Mary Beth story, lifted word for word from a friend of hers, Darrin Gunkel. She changed a small corner of the world by her sheer will and her fearlessness, and this story serves her memory well.
Twenty years ago today, Mary Beth and I arrived in the fabled Hunza Valley, the model for Shangri-La, in northern Pakistan. We stayed in a town on a cliff 4,000 feet above the valley floor, in a hotel that cost about 5 bucks with a view of 4-mile-tall Himalayan peaks. The poplars lining irrigation canals – brimming with pearly and opalescent glacier runoff, feeding stone terraces of apricot wheat, mulberry, grapes – had just come to full flame. An orange and yellow hearth fire lapping at the feet of the mountains 18,000 feet high, capped in blue glaciers.The altitude started getting to me. So, Mary Beth took a walk.
A few hours later, she came back, her fancy scarf from the Sindh – the one with real silver threads, presented to her by relatives of the mayor of the town of Khaipur – traded in for one of the rough cotton veils Hunza women wear working their terraced fields.
“I traded my scarf! And got some presents!!” She was carrying a huge bunch of grapes and a loaf of bread that smelled like a fire place and was so dense, huge, and nutritious it took us a week to finish off.
“I met some farmers! Check it out!” She’d spent the afternoon in the compound of a Hunza family, a rare privilege. “They all thought I was insane once I got them to understand I wasn’t lost. Kept asking ‘where’s your husband? (in this medieval world, it was just easier, and more sensible, to claim we were married) Why did he let you come here alone?’ How the fuck am I supposed to explain I’m the one who dragged my ‘husband’ to Pakistan.” (Coming here was Mary Beth’s idea. That’s another story.)
She was glowing from the encounter. Not a lot of people are served tea in the kitchens of Hunzakot matriarchs. Not a lot of people are like Mary Beth. Travel is like being a rock star in that to succeed,it takes a certain talent – the kind Mary Beth possessed in spades, wheel barrows, truck loads full.
Later, we shared this experience: that evening, Hunza was celebrating an Ismaili Muslim festival. After sundown, people scaled the surrounding mountains and set bonfires. As the peaks faded into the night, the whole valley – dozens of miles long, and thousands of feet deep – came alive with bonfires. The sight left even MB speechless. Unforgettable stuff like this made Pakistan her favorite location of the whole year we spent in Asia.
Mary Beth, who I miss more than life itself, was thrilled I decided to become a teacher.
She was no Pollyanna, and knew as well as anyone where we're headed in our current madness, but she danced easily knowing she was part of this wonderful whatever were living through, and she did what she could to make it better.
We have been bombing tribal villages using drones, aircraft without faces.
If one student of mine wanders happily around this planet because of something that happens in Room B362, I'd say I've done good. I'm not Mary Beth, but I was her big brother.
Who knows who I may be shepherding in class....
"Who's That Girl" was written by Dick Seigel for Mary Beth. And I'll be poking Darrin for permission when I get roundtuit,
"It has always seemed strange to me," said Doc. "The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our culture. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second."
John Steinbeck, Cannery Row
My kids can use electronic media--I get that. They have access to tons of information--I get that, too. The Finns are kicking our educational buttocks--no need to keep screaming, I hear you.
I teach biology, but more importantly, I teach kids how to see. How to listen. Touch. Sniff. (I draw the line at licking, for safety reasons.)
Arne's Race to the Top presumes a narrow (and ultimately destructive) world view. A decent course in biology, if it focuses on the art of observing life, presumes a wide open (and ultimately unknowable) universe.
It's tough impossible to reconcile the two.
The hero of Cannery row is a scientist. Steinbeck saw the world as a scientist. I would love to introduce Steinbeck to my lambs.
Because of constraints on time, time spent honing for the state test looming in May, I cannot.
Take a look at what we are doing to our children in public schools, and tell me which qualities we are promoting. I'm not looking to create "products." At 15, kids are still human.
One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition.
Alvin Toffler
In two seemingly unrelated news items, we learn that kids spend about 7 1/2 hours plugged into media every day, and that corporations, blessed with the same rights of more corporeal citizens, will be allowed to run ads directly influencing federal races.
Alexis Tocqueville, the data is in, and the experiment has ended.
I get a little bit of flak when discussing evolution. Not a lot, but it's real, and I address it. It works well, and essentially explains everything in biology except the source of life itself
Meanwhile, my AP class today stuck the GFP (green fluorescent protein) gene from jellyfish into E. coli, a major poop bug in our gut. No complaints, no oohs and ahhhs. No recognition of the power of what we did.
We transferred genes from one species of one domain (Eukarya) into a species of a completely different domain (Bacteria) in a high school classroom.
Big news around here is that our school met the state's requirements for NCLB this year. Unless brain surgery becomes more advanced, though, we're doomed by 2014, as are all public schools.
We got the expected slew of emails: "commitment" led to "lofty dividends," we have "pride" and "satisfaction," and for the administration, this must be one heap of steaming relief after a long streak of just missing the cut-off.
It's a heap of steaming relief for me, too--it means that for at least one more year, I can teach unscripted lessons based on real observations, real science, real thinking.
We've gotten so ingrained to AYP we've forgotten just what it is that we accomplished--most of our kids passed a test designed by God knows who to measure God knows what.
Our property values are preserved. Our administration will avoid "Ring Around the Rosie." The townsfolk believe they're getting their money's worth. The budget gets passed.
Any thrill beyond "Whew, that gets the state off our backs," however, is misplaced. No sense giving the AYP nonsense any more gravitas than what it deserves. The emperor has no clothes. There, I said it.
It is nice, though, not to have to explain to my neighbor why we don't suck.
The image is from a woodcut, so I figure it's well past copyright issues. Who does woodcutting anymore? Who grinds flour? Who reads these acknowledgments?
Very briefly a longshoreman, briefly a lab tech in a booze plant, more recently a pediatrician in the projects, now a high school teacher in my hometown.
A few children chasing butterflies, mucking in the pond mud, and otherwise doing their best to confound our educational system remind me teaching matters.
The usual disclaimer: these are my views only, and I have days even I don't agree with them.
Posts
