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

NGSS and Achieve

I have been nipping at the heels of Achieve for a flawed draft attempting to push their corporate world-view into public schools. The board of Achieve is made up of "leading" state governors and high level businessmen.

You can squeeze crap into a platinum tube trimmed with gold, but when you squeeze it out, it still stinks.

I may be unfair. It may be that no committee can create the kind of document a teacher needs to effectively teach to a specific group of kids.

Individual teachers, however, create these sorts of documents daily--we call them lesson plans. We tailor them for our classes, playing to our individual strengths, adapting to the real-time assessments good teachers do every minute of class time.


When you're ready to listen, give one of us a call....

 

Here's a list of their contributors:

The Battelle Foundation
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
The Boeing Company
Brookhill Foundation
Carnegie Corporation of New York
The Cisco Foundation
The GE Foundation
IBM Corporation
Intel Foundation
JP Morgan Chase Foundation
The Joyce Foundation
Lumina
MetLife Foundation
Nationwide
Noyce Foundation
The Prudential Foundation
Sandler Foundation
State Farm Insurance Companies
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

More NGSS sputter

The Next Generation Science Standards draft has a mindset error.

We all carry myths. We tend to separate the science myths ("facts") from cultural myths ("stories"), but there are lots of basic science ideas most of us get wrong most of the time even when we can easily observe the contrary evidence.

If you read the above without specialized knowledge, it implies at first glance that we need telescopes to see planets. A careful reading dispels this, since obviously the moon can be seen without a scope, but if you're an elementary school teacher without a background in science you may not be aware that several planets are quite obvious in the night sky.

That we can see Saturn easily in this particular part of the world surprises most folks.

That stars are points of light, and remain points of light even in powerful scopes (excepting a few monsters like Betelgeuse), also surprises most folks. Telescopes add little detail to stars (though the color may be more obvious).

How do I know? We have a sidewalk astronomy club at our school--we go outside and look.

***

So how can we do better?

How do we know a star is a star and a planet a planet? Can a young child tell the difference without a telescope? Does this even matter?

Children learn early on that "knowing" certain things matters in class. The NGSS standards, like the current NJCCCS here in Jersey, perpetuate this nonsense.

Knowing how we know things matters far more in science than any particular fact.

***

So back to our stars--what can a child see?

Go out and find Saturn tonight--now compare it to the stars. There's a difference. Stars twinkle. Saturn does not.

That may be all a young child needs to know to fuel her curiosity.


Now maybe in high school, we can prattle on about discs vs. points, refraction, and all kinds of nonsense, but for a young child, learning how to compare and contrast matters far more than creating a Sherman who can recite facts (and no doubt do well on a standardized test).

Sherman was a damaged child

This confusion about what matters is endemic in the New Gen standards.

Noam Chomsky would have a field day with this document--the language, upon close reading, is both factually "correct" yet feeds cultural misconceptions.The NGSS confounds animals with mammals, electromagnetic radiation with visible light, physical change with chemical, creating an oddly worded document that values its own internal structure more than the universe it purports to unveil to our children.

If we're going to get science right in public education, we need to get it right at the early grades. A child needs permission to observe freely.