Because Daylight Saving Time

A day an hour shorter makes for a longer week... 

"...[T]he shift to Daylight Saving Time (DST) results in a dramatic increase in cyberloafing behavior at the national level."

DT Wagner et al, J Appl Psychol. 2012 Sep;97(5):1068-76

A quarter of the world's population will be groggy tomorrow. A few people will die traumatically. Students' test skills will deteriorate. A few more people will die of heart attacks. The stock market may crash.

And yet we still do it.

Stonehenge time

You cannot save time.

You cannot add an hour of sunshine to your day.

You can, though, manipulate human conceits. If nothing else, Daylight Savings Time is an excellent way to demonstrate to children the folly and the real consequences of humans believing they control more than they control.

***

Tomorrow my 1st period lambs will trudge through before dawn through blackened banks of snow to get to school. Broad Street in Bloomfield will look like the zombie apocalypse. We'll tell them to keep their heads up (or at least wipe the drool of their desks before they leave), but we are bucking millions of years of evolution.

Photo by Eugene Ter-Avakyan, cc-2.0

Humans need sleep. Adolescents (still considered by most to be a subset of humans) need more than the 97 minutes my kids average on Sunday nights.

And why not? What better way to prep for college and career readiness in the global economy than making students take life-altering assessments while comatose? Have kids knock down a few Xanax pills, and chase it with gin and Adderall cocktails to make it really authentic.

Arne says: "Students exist To Serve Man"

"About 1 in every 6 high school seniors in the United States has ever had some exposure to prescription stimulants, either medically or nonmedically."

Stonehenge photo by Resk, released to PD
Yep, a repeat--I ilke cycles....

Why teach biology?

Wheat grown on our classroom windowsill.

Right now you are making water, the real stuff, not some abstraction, from the oxygen you breathed in just moments ago combining with protons and electrons stripped from the the peanut and butter sandwich you ate.

You are breathing in oxygen stripped from water molecules broken apart by the dandelions you tried to poison with Round Up two months ago.

Your food was alive not so long ago--even a Twinkie came from a plant.

Biology is mandatory in public schools in New Jersey. Mandatory anything is rarely a good thing, and mandatory what-passes-for-science in high school is, well, predictably disastrous for many of my lambs.

But if I succeed in getting a young adult to see the connection between what is real and the food in her belly and the air in her lungs and the water she drinks....

• To ponder more than a moment why she, a mammal, must chase abstract ideas that churn the "global economy" in order to guarantee that she will be able to eat in a few years when she is an adult
• To question how the few real things in her life that matter have been so removed from her world that we judge who we are more by how much we extract than by how much we create
• To ask her local politicians why incinerators are built in dense but poor neighborhoods
• To wonder why her in our own town tons of potential carcinogens were pumped into the air just a mile from our school.

Well, I'll have helped create another functioning citizen in this fine land of ours, Arne and his abstract economy be damned.

And who knows, maybe she'll go on to be a scientist, too.

Seeds of civilization

We're still up to our butts in snow here, with more coming, but today I plant the first seeds of the summer.

Peppers take their time crafting baby peppers, and given a voice, would not be here in Jersey at all.

The story of planned planting is the story of civilization, a word that evokes complex (and for me mixed) feelings. Music without guitars, foods without farms, travel without cars--for the brief times I am walking along a mud flat hunting quahogs, civilization recedes.

I will clear out a small space for my pepper plant seedlings. and kill many beings I do not see (and a few that I do) in order to create an orderly, human space for my pepper plants. We forget the inherent power of our words, our thumbs, our sheer size, as we tear up the earth for what we need, and more for what we want.

Civilization is dangerous enough when we remember our connection to the earth, when we acknowledge our limits, when we still recognize sin or hubris or whatever word you care to use that defines the moment we forget our connection to something bigger than ourselves.

Lose your land, lose your power--there are not enough mulberry trees or mud flats or dandelions to keep my family alive, so we barter our services for what we can find on the shelves of our local grocery stores. In education we sell this as career readiness, and some of us use the threat of joblessness and starvation as motivation to get a diploma.

And we wonder why so many of us are sick....

So I plant. I share seeds with others, and we plant and plant.

• I do not want my students to topple civilization--I just want them to know that it starts in the dirt that does not recognize deeds.
• I do not want my children to covet their neighbor's land--I just want them to realize the costs of living landless, depending on strangers for food.
• I do not want my lambs to lack career readiness--I just want them to learn how to live once their bellies are full and the rent is paid.

I believe in the land, in the sea, in the air I breathe, and the remnants of  the Constitution of the United States. I trust the patterns of the natural world, while recognizing much of it will remain impenetrable. Most of all, I trust that the seeds I plant later today will reward me with food, and more seeds for whatever March holds for me next year.

That's why I teach.

Education exists To Serve Man?

The clams and the pepper plants will be here long after I am gone, and, if we teach our children well, so will this great land of ours.

We need to take it back.

Yes, it sounds like an idealistic dream. This country was founded on dreams.
Hops photo  from the backyard.

A cautionary tale

 This originally was written in January, 2009--nothing has changed.
Got a little help from Clay Burrell, too.

Prince Arne declared himself the Learner. He decreed all children shall become learners, too.

And the people rejoiced!

"We must incentivize schools to learn them everything!"

So the children were taught this and the children were taught that, then that, and some more of this. This and that and that and this.

And the children took the Pearson and Gates National This and That Learner test and...gasp...most of them failed!

Prince Arne thought and thought--why he knew a "this." And he knew a "that." He thought and thought and thought some more.

Towers fell, and poppies grew, but Prince Arne continued his thinking of this and of that.

"We shall teach them more this and thats! We will raise this this bar and that that bar, and they will pass!"

And the people rejoiced.

And now the children did double this and double that. They called a this a triple this that, and a that a triple that this! Oh, they learned and learned and learned some more!

The children then took the International National This and That Learner Exam, upgraded and revised and validated at much expense and stamped with the Official Seal of Pearson.

And they failed again--except in the district of Here and There.

"Oh, Super Supers of the Here and There, how did you do it?"
the people asked.

We dipped them in lard, had them stand on their heads,
Made them study real hard, fed them bennies and reds,
We stapled and folded and creased without end
Our methods are valid, we've got proof can defend

The key to success is to put Thissing First
And now our children are no longer the worst.
We are the Miracle in Houston, the success in Chicago
We even topped scores of some school in Wells Fargo.


(But hear's the real sekrit, come listen and learn
We gave them the answers, left no test unturned
If the test is the point, why bother with facts
We gave them the keys, our students relaxed

We give each a scantron, the dots clearly bubbled
Then they filled out another, completely untroubled
Using authentic skills learned in the finest of schools
Now the students are ready to be corporate tools.)

So each district bought the Thissing First program, a billion dollars was spent. The kids were drugged and dipped in lard and forced to study without end the thisses and thats and the thats and the thisses.

A month before the Interplanetary Universal This and That Plus Learner Exam, upgraded and revised and validated at great expense and stamped with the Official Seal of the Universe, each child meticulously bubbled their own individualized scantron--some used crayons, some Play Doh, some used ink, and a few traditionalists still fumbled with Dixon Oriole Number 2 pencils. The people were pleased to see that the new education recognized different learning styles.

And every child passed (except a few in Gotham who refused to play) but that's OK, because "all" means 97%.

And the people rejoiced.

The End

Scantron image from Greene County Public Library.

Puck Arne, Eli, and Bill

I used to play a little hockey. I was never really good at it, but I was decent at defense for two reasons:

I was quick (which is not the same as fast)--a gift, true, and in hockey, a huge one, and...

I learned that the only thing that mattered was watching the puck on the stick.

Motivations, feints, needs, dekes, desires, wants--all of that ultimately translated to watching the puck on the stick. Where was the stick, where was the puck.

Via Wikipedia, CC 3.0, Hockey1993

I do not care what Arne or Eli or Bill say--I am focused on the puck.

And right now, the puck is aimed right between the eyes of your young child entering school this September. The puck is flying towards the temple of a young woman headed for community college in January. The puck, if not batted down, will smash the nasal cartilage of your young adolescent, still dreaming of a life lived well.

I am not sure what the motivations of the ed reformers are, but I am aware of what happens to schools and children when the "reformers" get the reins, and if I am aware, yet accept this complacently, then I am complicit.

I did not raise two children to become part of the global economy. I raised them to be happy, thoughtful, loving people who care about their community, the concrete one. It's ridiculous, ridiculous, that we're even having this conversation, that Arne or Eli or Bill, three men who all exhibit signs of psychopathy, even matter.

Take care of the children you know, as well as you can. Do not do anything you feel will harm them. If we all do that, ferociously (as we should), fearlessly (or at least with all the courage we can muster), then these strange men lose their power.

It's really that simple.

Do the right thing...

Top Five Predictions for Edumacation, 2013

M.C. Escher

Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and Arne Duncan will pose in spandex as Edumacation Superheroes, spouting off aphorisms for the ages-- Every Toddler's a Tool! Glorify the Global Economy! Truth, Justice, And The American Corporate Way! They will launch an action figure line--each figurine will include a bleaching kit and testosterone injections, so you, too, can look like a real human.

Teachers will continue to contribute millions to national union leadership who will remind us how much we love evaluations and testing, because getting a seat at the table is all that matters, especially a table with century old Reed and Barton flatware and rich white men eager to disseminate their, um, ideas.

Hungry kids stressed by frequent midnight gunplay as they shiver themselves to sleep will be saved by an ambitious, cute pale woman, and teachers will be required to take voice training to mimic her soothing, reaffirming voice.

Teacher will be told, in various conferences, to place their student desks in neat rows of 5 while grouping them in three's, making a big community circle of love and empowerment, until next week, when desks are banned, and then unbanned 3 weeks later.



The latest Marzano study will show that if you stack desks in the shape of a pyramid, your school's Scoville Heat scores will rise 37% when adjusted using the Marzano Research Laboratory's Creating An Aligned Desk System (and he'll even send someone to your district and demo it for just a few thousand dollars).

***

John Spencer added one:
In the name of being "brain-based," schools will take an Oxford University study about electric shock impulses and memory retention to heart and teachers will be armed with tazers and shock centers. Kids who fail to learn will be shocked harder. Those who question the practice will be accused of low expectations.

Feel free to join the Pernicious Prognosticators!

We'll check our results in a year!

Summer vacation matters

Education, ironically, suspends itself in a web of easily falsifiable myths. There's a reason folks selling snake oil flock around school administration buildings.

Summer is winding down. One of the big myths in education is that summer vacation came about for agricultural reasons. That we even believe this shows how far removed most of us are from the land. Arne himself chirps in:

"Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today."

Arne Duncan, The Daily News, 9/29/2009

Few of us even know any small farmers today, for good reason. Hardly any left. But I do. He's pretty durn busy in the early spring, and he's just revving up now to be busy again as harvest begins. July, though, he spends more time with his slide guitar than with his pitchfork (or whatever tools farmers use today) while a couple of his friends literally fiddle alongside him.

Few of our children (or adults, for that matter) have any sense of the agrarian calendar. Remnants can be seen at local farmstands as strawberries morph into peaches then apples, asparagus into tomatoes then Brussels sprouts as the daylight dwindles.

The children who attend church still hear the seasonal stories of agrarian life, but those stories lose meaning as we lose touch with the plow.

In high school, there are no seasons in a classroom.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of summer vacations for children, and here's why.
 
I believe that summer vacation has as much to do with creating lifelong scientists as any scheme Arne might scrape together. Few things fuel curiosity as well as free time out under the sky, and for the cost of a few scrapes, maybe a broken bone or two, and muddy footprints in the kitchen, we get young'uns who learn enough about the earth under their feet to care to learn some more.

Until we transform our schools into homes of learning instead of the factories of facts many are today, children need time away from the inanities of modern educators.

"Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play."

Heraclitus "The Obscure" of Ephesus, ca 500 BCE

I did not raise my own children to be "career and college ready"--my goal was to help guide them become sane, happy adults interested in the world.

Arne has yet to convince me a child deserves any less.

An ally in the White House?

I have been reading Herman Melville and it's August--so, yeah, this needs editing....

Sir Ken Robinson is a superstar in the education world--he wows audiences with his humor, his wisdom, and (no small thing) his alluring accent. He's quite entertaining, and earns a comfortable sum making the rounds at various conferences.

I just returned from a wonderful conference, the Siemens STEM Institute held at Discovery Education in Maryland. We didn't see Sir Robinson, but we did see Dr. Steve Robinson, who will ultimately have a much larger effect on my classroom.

There's a subtle schism in Federal education policy, subtle enough to survive, big enough to give me hope.

***

A lot of teachers are losing hope, or at least say as much--a teacher without hope is like a frog who can't hop, and survives about as long.

Arne, Bill, and Eli got me gnashing a bit, but long as I got more than a handful of quahogs left to rake on Richardson Sound, despair shuns me. Clamming lets you see things you forget you care about. Clams are in no hurry to escape; the only urgency is the rising tide.

Even the madness of Arne Duncan's edutheocracy fades as the edge of the sea licks my toes--no evangelists on a mudflat. Still, teaching pays a bit more than clamming around here, and as much as "educators" complain, we have a pretty good gig.

The other Robinson (Steve) has not been knighted, a plus here in the States. Unlike his counterpart Arne, Dr. Robinson was a high school science teacher and taught in a real classroom for years,  because, it seems, he wanted to. (He earned his Biology degree at Princeton, his PhD at Michigan (GO BLUE!).

The Siemens STEM fellows got to spend an hour with Dr. Robinson in the Indian Treaty Room--he's brilliant, he's nuanced, and (I think) he gets it. He used to work under Arne, now he has a more direct pipeline to the President sitting on the Domestic Policy Council. He and Mr. Kumar Garg explained the President's STEM Master Teacher Corps, then took comments and questions.

Kumar Garg and Steve Robinson--our best hope?

And here's where it gets interesting--the current push to improve STEM education in the lower grade levels competes with time dedicated to enabling kids to pass tests prescribed by various Race to the Top programs adored by Arne and his cronies.

I pointed this out to Dr. Robinson, perhaps a bit bluntly, and got an intelligent, nuanced response that acknowledged the concern without tipping his hand, which, after years of inane soundbites from Arne, was enough to get me a tiny bit excited. This guy, at a minimum, gets the issues. He's not an evangelist.

Robinson pointed out that trying to transform science education from the Federal level is like trying to perform surgery with big mittens. He demonstratively held out both of his hands--he's still got the teacher in him--and I thought (and this may be an over-read) that his expression was asking for a little breathing room. He's in a tight spot--he would not be feeling it if he was comfortable with Arne's action plan.

 It gets better--I looked up this Robinson guy when I got home. He used to work under Mr. Duncan, but moved from Education under Duncan to the White House closer to Obama in 2009. Folks noticed:

What's interesting about Robinson's shift is that it further signals that STEM is a really big issue for President Obama, but perhaps not as significant for his education secretary.

Michele McNeil, Politics K-12, Education Week, September, 2009

Oh, Ms. McNeil updated the article after getting some noise from the DOE, and she added some updates, but she saw the same thing I see now. She even calls Robinson a "STEM guru".

I now got hope for the change that needs to happen if Mr. Obama is serious about transforming education in this country. I have hope that Mr. Obama sees the inanity of trying to implement mutually exclusive goals.

But I'm not naive. An hour with my Chatham scratcher working a back bay flat reminds me of what matters, and so long as I can rake clams, I can teach. Mr. Robinson, you're welcome to join me--just don't tell Arne.

Ken Robinson photo and quote from his website here.

The clam chart is from the State of NJ.

NGSS: The first "S" means "science"

As I sink deeper into the morass of words that pretends to advance science in the name of economic security (which is like asking a flower to open in order to fulfill an order for FTD), I find comfort in reading  Walt Kelly's Pogo, a document at least as sophisticated as anything "managed" by Achieve, an organization of governors and business folks working to push "college and career readiness" as the primary purpose of public education. (They are starting to pay lip service to citizenry now...)

When you mix a corporate agenda with "science," you get oddly unscientific practices:

"Obtain and communicate information about..."

The above phrase appears nine times in the performance expectations of the prepubescent crowd (4th grade and under) in the draft of the Next Generation Science Standards. You could look it up.

Obtaining and communicating information is what business folks do. Science is not in the business of information, it's in the business of grasping how the natural world works. It starts with observation.


We're talking about children. The committee might consider renting one out, and setting it up on a beach somewhere. Observe what a young child does as she runs, crouches, runs, then crouches some more. She's observing. Sure, it's undirected, and yes, she'll need context and language and technological tools to help her along--but what she doesn't need is a formal education that confounds science with obtaining and communicating information.

We don't need science teachers and business leaders leading the charge here, we need child development specialists, we need pediatricians, we need Mommies and Daddies. Heck, we need could use a few children on the committee.

We got too much  Howland Owl, a pedantic pricklish sort, and not enough Porky Pine, a wise, if cynical, denizen of the swamp. I'd make Grundoon the chile woodchunk or his sister Li'l Honey Bunny Ducky Downy Sweetie Chicken Pie Li'l Everlovin' Jelly Bean the chair.

Francis W. Parker had a few words to say about this long before public schools fell prey to the agenda of careerists more interested in the dubious concept of "global economy" than the interests of America and its children:

I wish to earnestly protest against making school-children wander though a long desert and wilderness of words before a few of them, who intellectually survive, can have the inestimable privileges of direct observation found in the laboratories of universities. When pupils in the lower schools study science throughout the course there will be a hundred students in our universities where now there is one.

Francis W. Parker, Talks on Pedagogics

Maybe, just maybe, elementary school teachers know a tad more about the Grundoons of this world than do Eli, Bill, and Arne. Maybe, just maybe, they'll do what they have always done when faced with nonsense imposed from on high.

Put a nice poster of George Washington on the window, close the door, teach and explore the world together.

Yes, of course, communication is a huge part of what scientists do--

but it's what they do after the science is done, to share their observations, to keep them honest.

The Walt Kelly cartoons used without permission, but hopefully fall under educational use.

I hope the Kelly family agrees. Let me know if you don't--we've chatted before. =)

What we risk losing

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

"The Second Coming," W.B. Yeats

I watched a grackle along the edge of our ocean yesterday.

It gallumphed down the surf's edge like a drunken sandpiper, got smacked with a wave, then fluttered back to the top of the now receding wave.

Over and over again.

I sat on the sand with Leslie, and we chatted about our grackle as it battled the wash. I love grackles, hands down my favorite bird, and this one was being particularly grackly. What would possess a bird to challenge the edge of the sea?

After a few minutes, the grackle answered my question--it nabbed a writhing sand crab, then picked it apart a few feet away. The grackle got its reward, and we got our story.
The sand crab did not fare as well.

***

There is a risk challenging those who hope to transform public education into data farms feeding the intricate morass we still call economics. 


Look at the humorless smiles of those running the show, the lupine grins of Arne Duncan, of Bill Gates, of Eli Broad. They may even believe what they are spewing--it takes a certain lack of humor to get to reign over the destruction of things that matter.

They can hurt you, and will if you pose a threat to their goals.

But that's not the risk I am talking about. As much fun as it is to pretend otherwise, a few words shared among a very small community of teachers poses no threat at all to the ed "reformers" who value power over democracy.

• The risk is falling into their language, into their world, into their ethos. 
• The risk is spending too many hours poring over their dull documents (Next Generation Science Standards, anyone?), trying to parse out meaning of individual phrases when we should be calling out the process that created such a document.
• The risk is weighing an offer to make real money sitting at the table breaking bread with them under the hum of fluorescent lights.
• The risk is not losing the battle--I am not so blind not to see that any remnants of "public" and "democracy" are likely to be crushed for the foreseeable future--the risk is losing ourselves.

I am a happy person, blessed with the grace of a grackle wrestling with the ocean for its food.
I am a mortal person, as doomed as the sand crab picked apart by the grackle.

A grackle will still be wrestling with the ocean long after I am gone. So long as grackles continue to be grackles, our children will have larger stories to learn than the ones foisted on them in the name of the global economy.

It takes little courage to tweet in an echo chamber. 

Live well, be part of your community, grow some food, use your hands, love.

Bill Gates from Seattle Weekly. 

Grackle from Wikipedia via CC 3.0 by mdq

Et tu, College Board?

"The College Board was founded with a deep commitment to equity and must play a critical role in helping all students achieve high academic standards to thrive intellectually and to compete in a global economy." 

David Coleman, new CEO for the College Board

We. Are. Screwed.

I am resisting a very obvious, funny caption here--

David Coleman, the "architect" of the Common Core standards, has made a career at pretending that public education is about making careers. He's gotten very rich doing this.

He's never taught in a public school classroom.
He's never "competed in a global economy."
He's never raked clams.

The College Board may well be committed to equity now, but that was not its founding goal. You can read its founding goal on the College Board website:

In 1900, the College Board was created to expand access to higher education. Formed by a handful of colleges, our purpose was to simplify the application process for students and college admission offices.

The SAT replaced it in 1926.

I do not know much about Mr. Coleman, and he knows even less about me. But I know a bit about public ed, and I when someone's fibbing.

Arne Duncan loves him. So does Jeb Bush.

He also said this:

[A]s you grow up in this world you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”

Maybe that's true in his world. Maybe that's why the College Board needs to pay over $600,000 $1,000,000 for its CEO.

But I do, and so do a lot of others.

Your in my space now, Mr. Coleman, and you're screwing with my kids, kids who currently pay $87 a pop to support your salary.

I suspect you'll be hearing more from me.

There is a very short list of people with whom I'd never break bread, even if I were offered a million dollars for my trouble.. 

A former President is one of them. Mr. Coleman is on the list. 

The good life

We have never worked harder and have never enjoyed work more, because, with rare exceptions, the work was significant, self-directed, constructive and therefore interesting. 

Helen and Scott Nearing  

The Good Life

Grown by a student in B362.

 
Our children are not working for themselves. They are working for the global economy, for corporations, for efficiency, for tests scores.

This is not an idle thought. Our Secretary of Education has stated that the purpose of art in school is to promote the global economy.

Money is indeed a powerful thing. In our culture money gets you food without dirt, water without lifting, a roof without hammering.Science and art are pushed by Mr. Duncan because they contribute to the global economy.

If I'm a kid, this is what I am hearing: the only kind of work that matters is the kind that makes money, usually more for someone else than yourself. We're asking them to do things in school so that they can "compete" in a "global economy"--what does that even mean?

You know what my students are most proud of in school? The kind of pride that has a kid come to me before class and say "Look at this!"?

• A shirt designed, cut, and sewn by her own hands.
• A cookie mixed and cooked by his.
• A silly riff on a ukele composed while meandering between classes.
• A simple paper certificate for winning a drama competition.
• A carrot grown in class.

 Significant. Self-directed. Constructive.

My students are younger than the idea of a global economy. They're still genetically human, and they behave, for the moment, as humans have for thousands of years.

Learning about levers back in '75

How much longer will we keep trying to tear the human out of them?

On a good day I feel like a teacher.

On a bad day, a colonialist.

Arne on the Arts

The arts are an important part of a well-rounded education for all students. All of the arts – dance, music, theatre [sic], and the visual arts – are essential to preparing our nation’s young people for a global economy fueled by innovation and creativity and for a social discourse that demands communication in images and sound as well as in text.

Arne Duncan

United States Chief of Edumacation

The are the words of Mr. Duncan, the man in charge of education here in the States, from Homeroom, the official blog of the US DOE.

Homerooms, by the way, are disappearing--in our quest for über efficiency, we no longer have 10 minutes to spare each morning taking attendance, making classroom announcements, saying hello to each and every one of our students as they come in to the building.

Mechanicsburg Area Senior High School in Pennsylvania lost theirs just this year:

Principal Dave Harris said the decision to eliminate homeroom gives the district a chance to add a minute daily to each instructional period.

West Shore Community News

And to be fair, if Arne's right, if the purpose of public education is to prepare young adults for the global economy where efficiency and standardization matter more than what matters at home, homeroom is a colossal waste of precious minutes.

Frederick Winslow Taylor would be proud.

Thankfully, the Edumacator in Chief has found a loophole for art, the same one he uses for science. We teach it because it helps sustain his twisted worldview, where some abstract ideal of global trumps human.

Without art, without science, we lose a part of being human,
Without human, we lose the point of both.

Yes, Arne spelled "theater" with his pinky fully extended. What an arse.

Inspired by Stolen from This Brazen Teacher--"The Day They Value Art… I’m Leaving." 

She says she says this in jest. I hope so. We need her brazenness back in the classroom.

Zip codes and cortisol

 
Suppose you had a child who had sustained a moderate head injury in a car accident, how would you assess her her first few months back?

Her memory may be wobbly, she may be prone to bouts of inattention.

You'd be kind, no? You'd work with her to help her get through her material. You might even whisper to her that there are bigger things in life than this week's homework assignment.

You certainly would not blame the child for the extra work you both need to do to get her through the curriculum.

***

Suppose you had a child who's just returned from home instruction after a particular rough bout with treatment for his brain tumor. He's doing better now, thanks be to God, but he's not quite as sharp as he was.

A colleague mentions to you he had brain irradiation. You get a vague 504 notification that he needs more time to complete his tasks, that he needs an outline of all class activities. You'd be more than glad to take on the extra duties. You're a teacher, and like most teachers, frequently take those extra steps for children who need them. You do not need a 504 reminding you to be human.

You certainly would not blame the child.

***

Now imagine you have a child who has been exposed to a drug during early childhood, a drug known to shrink a portion of the brain called the hippocampus.

You do a little research on the hippocampus, a critical component for new memories and for spatial awareness. You ponder what it must be like for a child facing challenges in an increasingly competitive and unloving school system.

You can predict how such a child might do in today's schools.

The drug? Cortisol.
The source? A child's own adrenal glands, a response to stress.
The cause? More often than not, poverty.

I worked for years as a pediatrician in shelters and public housing in some of the most stressed neighborhoods in New Jersey. I saw plenty of love, strength, and beauty under conditions that crushed souls. But I was putting band-aids on the gaping wounds of systemic neglect that continue and continue and continue.

A child who lives under constant severe stress has, literally, smaller hippocampuses than a child not exposed to the same stress.

I sat a table's width across from Governor Christie last spring as he spouted off one of Arne Duncan's soundbites: "Zip code is not destiny."

And I agree. As brain tumors and moderate brain injuries are also not destiny.

But if you think any of them have no effect on a child's education you are simply not thinking.

Would it had made a difference if I screamed at the smugness that accompanied the remark?

A remark by the most powerful man in our state, speaking of the least.

Et tu, Zappa?

There's seems to be some confusion about my role.

I am, of course, an agent of the government, of the public, of my town. I am a science teacher, which should mean I teach science.

Arne says it means I am the linchpin of our economy.
Einstein said I have the power to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
Governor Christie says it means I'm a lazy ass lapping at the public trough. His sidekick Cerf says I'm an ankle-biter.
Walt Whitman said I should be destroyed.
Cicero said I am pretty valuable to the state--even used the word "noble."
Frank Zappa advised children to avoid me lest their minds rot.

Frank Zappa might be right....

 
All kinds of noble and ignoble nonsense spews from the mouths of those who would judge me.

Teachers are fair game, and understandably so--we're involved in a process no one truly understands honing our varied skills on the most impressionable among us. That these impressionable folk happen to be the result of sexual unions among adults who (mostly) live in the same town I teach only adds to the fun. Add to that that they're paying me out of pocket to do this, well, I expect a little noise.


I'll make it easy for you.

• I teach children science because I want them to see the world outside of humans--infinitely fascinating.
• I teach science because I want my republic to survive the nonsense spewed by those who'd stomp on their children to push a career--a nation still worth salvaging.
• I teach children because their fresh views help me see better--and as my senses fade in my twilight, I need all the help I can get.
• I teach mostly because I love it--I'm selfish that way.

Frank Zappa photo from The Rebel Kind. 

Teachers are not (yet) professionals

A scorpion, being a very poor swimmer, asked a turtle to carry him on his back across a river. "Are you mad?" exclaimed the turtle. "You'll sting me while I'm swimming and I'll drown." 

"My dear turtle," laughed the scorpion, "if I were to sting you, you would drown and I would go down with you. Now where is the logic in that?" 

"You're right!" cried the turtle. "Hop on!" The scorpion climbed aboard and halfway across the river gave the turtle a mighty sting. As they both sank to the bottom, the turtle resignedly said: 

"Do you mind if I ask you something? You said there'd be no logic in your stinging me. Why did you do it?"

"It has nothing to do with logic," the drowning scorpion sadly replied. "It's just my character." 

Joe Hill

I belong to the Bloomfield Education Association, the NJEA, and the NEA--none have behaved admirably the past couple of years, but they have done what unions are supposed to do. I pay them a lot of money to do this, and I'll just smile here and pretend everything's hunky-dory. That's how the rank and file are supposed to roll.

A lot of teachers are frustrated, but that's part of being in any profession that deals with embryos that pretty much do what they do, no matter what the President, the Pope, or the PTA say.  We can handle frustration.

What we cannot tolerate is our erosion of autonomy.

The union fights for dollars, benefits, hours (ha!), and reasonable working conditions. It does not fight for the kids. Not saying it should (though if the NEA could grab $15/year/kid I bet it would), but let's be clear on what the union does. It serves a clear and necessary function, as do septic tanks and sergeants.

If a colleague of yours is accused of doing something unseemly with a student, the union lawyers will defend him, no matter what the circumstances. We pay the scorpions to be scorpions, and I'm OK with that.

Just don't expect them to be anything they're not.

***

In medicine, I almost got to fisticuffs twice--and I still regret not punching a particular colleague in the nose (/me waves to Barry).

Cooler heads prevailed, and instead we tossed journals at each other. P values, corroborated studies, prospective vs. retrospective, controlled vs. anecdotal, meta-analysis vs. multiple studies. A lot of medicine is as mucky and murky as Chicago politics, but we worked with what we had, and we had a common goal: fix the kids.

If a child died, we all lost.

I don't get the sense that my current profession fears damage to children more than damage to ourselves. We say the right things, but our behavior is what matters.

If a hospital administrator ever tried to pawn the stuff masquerading as "research" in the ed world, we would have simply laughed. Despite organizational charts on paper, we knew as the ones directly giving care that we held the power. Laughter has a way of democratizing a workplace.

Instead I get a union that put this on the cover of NJEA Review last September:

Mikey don't play that way.....

A profession can survive a crisis in faith, as long as our faith is shared. It cannot survive a lack of vision.

A profession can survive bad research, as long as the research can be assessed honestly. It cannot survive bad research used dishonestly.

We're either professionals. or we're not. It's our behavior, not our words, that matter.

***

The union is designed to protect our jobs, not our profession. That's up to us.

I have an idea. Why not develop guilds to complement our unions?

• We have a common cause, educating our children.
• We have common methods, subject to peer-reviewed research.
• We have common goals. Within a building we know who's got game.

No more fear. No more fear. No more fear. No more fear.

***

In two weeks, licensed NJ professional high school teachers will proctor the HSPA, our alms to NCLB. We will grumble, we will bark, and we'll still hand out the tests.

Arne has not earned our love.

 

Some of us might even feel dirty, though most of us will just do what we do because we're told to do it.

That's not professionalism. 

***

I'd like a colleague to be passionate enough, mad enough, care enough to punch me in the nose if my actions endanger a child.

Look at your classroom. Look at your students. Look at your actions.

Here in New Jersey we are in real danger of losing our union protections within the next two years. A few of us will lose our paychecks no matter what we do.

I propose that we work together to do what's best for our kids. We can hash out just what that might be privately, and a few noses might get bloodied. The only hard rule is that we act what we believe matters for our kids, not ourselves.

Isn't that why you got into this profession?

If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands....

Jose Vilson and Ken Bernstein got me going today. Tom Hoffman deserves some blame, too. How far are you going to take this?

The turtle and the scorpion story is well-known, lofted verbatim from Snopes.

Proust effect

 

If we could teach science by shoving a funnel up a child's nose then pour in "knowledge" as a slurry of data, vocabulary words, and equations, I've no doubt that we would--for the glory of our nation and our economy.

That we cannot does not keep Arne from trying to force us to use bigger, shinier funnels.

Arne and his crew will see progress measuring the internal diameter of the nostrils of our students, No Choana Left Behind.^* With enough time, our children will have nostrils at least as wide as the Koreans, perhaps even as large as the Finnish. Our economy will hum as every child has the opportunity to master the dismissive sniff of the 1%er.

***

The world outside the fluorescent hum of my classroom reminds me what matters, and though I have as big a collection of funnels as any teacher could want--SmartBoards, Mobis, digical cams, and 1:1 netbooks--I think a nose has a finer purpose.

I keep the skeletal remains of last summer's basil in a bag--brown sticks with rosettes of seed pods, each pod holding several tiny black specks, each a potential basil plant. I spend a little time each week picking at  the pods to collect the seeds, using my fingers, as fingers were meant to be used.

I keep a Petri dish on the teacher's desk to hold the seeds I gather.

Yesterday some students saw me take a deep whiff of the bag holding the seemingly dead plants, and they saw the pleasure that it gave me.

A few children will take a dried, broken branch of last summer, and sniff. A few children will take some seeds from the same broken branch and watch a new plant grow from a speck.

 ***

This past week, a child was upset that his carrots, grown from seed, were not doing well. He had planted several dozen seeds where one would have done. He was trying to save them all.

I suggested that he thin the plants. He plucked the first plant, and held it a moment. I could tell it bothered him.

      Crush it, then smell it.

He looked puzzled, but then did just that. His surprised smile lit up the room.

     It smells like carrots!

I'm not sure where this particular child falls along the norms of the internal diameter of choanae, and, like many children, he's a bit resistant to funnels that stretch his nostrils for no reason that makes sense to him.

The pleasure of the aroma of a freshly crushed carrot seedling in the middle of winter's dark days will not help him pass the New Jersey Biology Competency Test, and his results are not likely to bolster my career. The economy will not be helped by children who find pleasure in using their noses well.

But that's not why I teach.

*I had no idea that the word "choana" came from the Greek χοάνη ("funnel") until after I wrote this.

Watch the wheels....

I've ridden motorcycles on and off (always better on than off) for over thirty years. While a few things are annoying--bugs in the teeth, bits of rotting roadkill kicked up by a car, the unexpected downpour--the joys far outweigh the negatives.


The one thing that threatens to tilt joy to despair are the folks in the 4-wheeled cages who simply do not see bikes. Live cars sitting at intersections make me wary.

When I see one, only one thing matters--its front wheels. Are they moving?

Only that, nothing else matters, nothing.  Riding gets down to the bare physics of things.

If it creeps forward, react. Do not waste time looking amazed, or yelling, or flipping the bird.  All are useless
The motive of the driver does not matter. At all. It cannot be changed even if you knew it.

You'll hear a lot about how Arne cares for kids, how Gates humanitarianism saves thousands of children, how the new nationalized standards and multimillion-dollar tests are good for our children, and a few misguided souls may even believe it.

When the front wheels are moving, it doesn't matter what the driver thinks. We need to react.

The front wheels of the edu-plutocrats are spinnning so hard they're leaving patches of rubber. React

Arne photo from Colorlimes.com; motorcycle photo (no one hurt) from lowellsun.com.

Clam up, Arne

 Tomorrow I am going on an adventure!

Despite predictions of a 30 knot breeze with rain tossed in, I plan to grab my rake and wander out to a mudflat to grab a handful of clams for tomorrow's dinner, and when I'm done, I'll be glad I did.

I have yet to regret a single moment outdoors. I have yet to regret an adventure.

***

I won't be adding much to the nation's economy. The license only cost $10, which averages to less than a nickel a day. The money for the rake exchanged hands two generations ago, though I did spend about a buck on hardware to sturdy up the tines. My pail was headed for recycling anyway before I drilled a few holes in the bottom and called it a clam bucket.

Unless I manage to impale myself, have a heart attack, or drown, the only thing I'm contributing to the GDP tomorrow will be the 80 cents worth of gas I'll need to get there and back.

I dream of teaching my students how to clam. It's a local activity that will never be part of the national standards because it's a local activity. That may sound innocuous enough, but it gets to the heart of the sickness in education today, our love of the abstract.

We teach to what few love, the few with the money, the few with the power to dictate what matters.

***

McNuggets are abstractions, fresh-killed pheasant are not.
A dressed whole chicken falls in-between.
Our source of food has become abstract.
 
Electronic calculators are abstract, abacuses are not.
Slide rules fall in-between.
Our sense of quantities has become abstract.

Digital clocks are abstractions, sun dials are not.
Analog clocks fall in-between.
Our notion of time has become abstract.

There is no in-between on a late December mudflat.
There is no in-between watching a honeybee work her way among dandelions in your neighborhood.
There is no in-between when an elementary teacher takes her students to a local nursing home, to hear the particular and peculiar stories of their aged neighbors, stories that may have a universal theme, true, but stories that matter because of the particulars.

I want my children to grow up in a world they believe matters to them, the one in their neighborhood.I want my students to know the world, the one outside the door. I want my students to be happy, and to contribute to the American experiment, an experiment that starts at Town Hall.

 ***

Arne Duncan wants to use my children to better the economy, to improve our international economic competitiveness--he says so over and over again. He awards hundreds of millions of dollars to states who share his views.

Arne and I have a fundamental difference of opinion in what matters, why children matter, and what it means to live a good life.

Mr. Duncan's vision of the world is fundamentally flawed, as are his attempts to manipulate education away from serving the public good. I suppose he'd think the same about me if he had any idea I exist. Individual lives are an inconvenience to abstract views, and Arne Duncan does not tolerate inconveniences.

Still, if Arne happens to be in North Cape May tomorrow, he's welcome to stop by for the freshest batch of clams he'll ever taste, local ones scratched up and eaten before the next high tide rises. Nothing abstract, just good food and decent home brew.

I promise I won't talk shop, Arne--I'll let the clams do all the talking. Then you can go back to your more important business telling children what matters more than the grace of God right here under our noses. And I'll go back to teaching children about quahogs, democracy, and yes, the real American way.

Yep, I played the America and the God card--the America of local neighborhoods and the God of grace.

Last photo is of Dave Keeney's boots, a slide guitarist extraordinaire--but I have no idea who took the photo.

Dagnabit! Looking like an inch of rain in the newest forecast--which means runoff, which means closed beds. I use 1/2" as my guideline. *sigh*