The Line

So where do we get off, really, thinking that we are beyond the accountability measures we impose on our own kids? Seriously. If they get a quarterly review, then that’s the least we can ask of ourselves.

I’m also tired of waiting for my employers to walk in here– be that a supervisor, a principal, a superintendent, or a parent– and ask me questions about my practice that I am unprepared to answer because my implementation is generally solid, but my documentation stinks. Bill Ferriter talks a bit about the disconnect between his own sense of accountability and that of his district’s here.

I want a TEACHER REPORT CARD. Something I can pull out next year and say, with confidence, “This is a snapshot of me as a professional at this moment.” And since this thing does not exist, as my last major thinking for the 07-08 year, I’m going to draft my own.

Here’s my top ten items, in I’m-just-blathering-order. And I’m going all out here. The idea is to make things as sexy as possible at first, and cut them down to manageable size later.

1) Observations, one per quarter in my class. My two scheduled observations next year count– and then I’ll go two more. Two additional observations, I undertake of other classrooms. One should be out of district.

2) Professional Development. New York State requires me to complete 175 hours of this every five years. The district’s supposed to keep a record of this for me, but it’s probably a good idea to keep a tally of this myself.

2a) Membership. Somewhere. (Well, maybe not here.) Unions don’t count. NCTE has served me quite well. ASCD rocks too (and not just because they employed me this year). AERA is good for hard-core geekiness.

3) Reading. A periodical subscription or at least one professional book per year. Inspired by Slate Magazine, in 08-09 I’m contemplating blogging the Handbook for Adolescent Psychology. Yeah, yeah, I’m a nutjob. Leave it in the comments.

3) An independent evaluation of the quality of my written Plans. Not the daily attack, the six-box-to-a-three-inch-line that couldn’t be deciphered by a Navaho windtalker, but something that shows in black and white these four things (heavily influenced by The Science and Art of Teaching, Robert Marzano): a) one or two overarching academic goals per unit, grounded in the power state standards, b) differentiation up and down, c) an assessment, formative or summative, tied directly to every goal, d) a plan for what the heck I do for every goal not achieved the first time around.

3a) Reflection on those plans. Again, in writing. Yes, this worked. No, this stunk. What I will keep, what I will change.

Someone of note should be an independent reviewer for 3 and 3a. Since theoretically we’ll be filling this report card out four times, it could be a rotation through my principal, a mentor teacher, the Literacy Coach for our building, and the English director for the district.

4) Hard evidence of learning. I should be collecting this, in a systematic manner, for every unit I undertake. For the report card, though, I think this ideally should involve three small snapshots:an academically talented kid, a middle of the road kid, and a kid who struggles. What would the snapshots be? It could be a quiz taken a few times, a packet of revisions to an essay, a hard data growth chart on 10 minute weekly homework identifying parts of speech, running reading records. Lots of possibilities.

5) Collaboration. Participation yearly in at least one major academic-based project between me and other teachers in the building/on the grade level. I’ve been batting around the idea of a poetry slam run simultaneously with a teacher in the other middle school in our district. Stay tuned.

6) Autonomy. Deliberately vague, for the moment, while I continue to experiment with autonomy in the classroom. But I want to be able to show how I involve kids in at least one instance of substantive investment, direction, and evaluation of their own learning. I think one of the best and simplest ways to do this is some kind of quarterly course evaluation from the kids, with tallied ratings. Working on what questions I might ask.

6a) Care and Feeding. How I make a concerted, documentable effort to honor a child as an individual, celebrating her successes and supporting her in her challenges.

7) Evidence of supporting literacy as a citizen. Volunteering at another school. Helping out at the public library. Keeping up the blog. Writing and publishing on education. You get the idea.

8 ) Home involvement. At base, this would be a detailed log of regular phone calls, emails, and conferences. At best?…well, I continue to attempt to convince my team that we should do regular home visits with our neediest kids. In between could be any number of things.

9) Getting stuff. By this I mean acquiring bit by bit, by grants, organized events, slyly worded and well timed budget requests, garage sales or begging, the items on the wish list that every teacher keeps somewhere in their head. In mine is two more laptops for editing, about 2000 book titles for a decent classroom library, and a hot chocolate machine. But I’ll be happy with the dozen or so subscriptions to kid-friendly magazines for my room next year, if that goes through.

10) And the usual vanilla icing: showing up to meetings on time, turning papers back within a week, returning messages within 24 hours, fulfilling my extraneous administrative duties in an organized and timely fashion, blah blah blah, and not allowing my desperately fidgety kids to run a race in the sunshine on the front lawn directly after their torturous two hour Social Studies test block, in full view of about eight classrooms. Oh, sorry– that was three days ago. Oops.

So what am I missing? Tear it up, people.

UPDATE: I was going to put this in another post, but decided against beating a dead horse, although the question is worth addressing: how would I rank these ten items? I think I’d stick to something a little more graphically oriented, like concentric circles. Plans, Reflection, Evidence, Autonomy, and Home Involvement seem to me to be the solid heart, something which then Observations, Reading, and Professional Development/Membership nurture and inform.  Stuff and Collaboration can be more readily expected of teachers with a little more experience, while Vanilla Icing, like spelling and punctuation in writing, should be emphasized in all things, yet unto itself is the least important aspect of the ten– certainly not the make-and-break of tenure that it can be.

My union’s gearing up. Without getting into details, I am ambivalent.

Unions are indispensible (check this out for what they’re doing for the service workers in Las Vegas– fascinating stuff.)

And, I believe there is credence to the argument that educational unionization as it now stands has contributed to the deprofessionalism of teaching.

Unions do the dirty work– negotiations, protection, grievances– and they do it well.

And, I’ve been concerned from the beginning about the fact that should I or any of my colleagues choose not to join the union for considered, thoughtful reason, in New York and 18 other states one is legally forced to pay them nonetheless. Additionally one is therefore tied, however indirectly, to union involvement in politics, which may or may not have anything to do with one’s own personal political convictions. (Try this for a thought-provoking criticism of teacher unions.)

Yet there is no power for justice, whisper Gandhi and ML King Jr on my one shoulder, unless it is the power of the unified.

And, I sleep at night with Thoreau and the Sierra Leone Refugee All Stars whispering on the other.

watch?v=eWcQFrJeEOc&feature=related

Why the All Stars?

One of my first ESL students was a tiny girl from Sierra Leone. And frankly, once you’ve met a kid who’s lucky to not have had her limbs macheted off, you can’t help but place the increasingly and inexplicably fraught contractual negotiations of your First World union and privileged school district next to the message of the All Stars: peace, in the face of arguably some of the worst violations of human rights on the planet. It makes you think hard about what real “diplomacy” is.

So yes, I’ll listen carefully to my union. But there is a deeper reality I must honor first, deeper than unified stances, worker’s rights, or socialist utopia: the human being’s inalienable right to think for herself. I’ll be thinking of this.

05-big-lesson

The whole All Stars documentary (and related lesson plans) are available here.

“I am not letting you fail. Even if that means coming to your house every night until you finish the work. I see who you are. Do you understand me? I can see you. And you are not failing.” — Freedom Writers

Yeah, right.

Dan has some knifing things to say about teacher portrayal in film along these lines: that the heart-attack-inducing martyrdom of the protagonists is merely a sob story excuse for the absence of what real teaching should be: intelligence, ruthless truth-telling, and rigor.

Chris Lehmann agrees last week on his blog, but with a twist. To him, the application of this same rhetoric is what excuses our schools from improving themselves. He asks in turn: why haven’t our best and brightest figured out how to solve the horror of our working conditions already? His answer is to cite this dreadful survey (reading it feels a bit like rubbernecking at a car wreck) as a snapshot of a energy-sucking system that doesn’t leave practitioners enough time to eat and sleep, much less think critically about change.

Myself, I keep going back in my mind to this article by Linda Darling-Hammond in February’s Time magazine on the way teachers are supported in Singapore, and wondering why the edublogosphere didn’t go crazy over it.

Is it indeed because teachers prefer a mythology which camouflages their incompetence? It is because we have no mental or physical resources left to combat the mythology?

Or is there something else in the mix?

I wonder if we are looking at the birth of a new psychological evil. We might call it the Plymouth Syndrome.

A hybrid of the famous Stockholm Syndrome and the against-all-odds, paradigm-resistant Protestant work ethic which carved out our country in the first place, the Plymouth Syndrome causes teachers to make the day-to-day decisions that align ourselves with our “captors,” swallow the global rhetoric of “whatever it takes,” and enable our broken system: in otherwords, to welcome, not challenge, the teacher-martyr mythology.

Why?

For the simple reason that fighting not to change the dysfunctional system, but fighting within the dysfunction, is what actually gives us a sense of purpose. In this scheme of things, if there is no dysfunction—even if the dysfunction is being actively replaced with health– there is no sense of purpose.

Thus the expending of one’s energy running the gauntlet of public education is, in the end, more immediately satisfying, and therefore more desirable, than expending energy to get rid of the overarching dysfunction itself.

I’m not proposing that this is a conscious decision—after all, who says to themselves, “I’d rather teach 165 kids at a pop, thanks”? I mean rather that an educator who cannot find meaning within the system might instead, at a subconscious, bedrock level, embrace her microcosmic struggle itself as the meaning of what she does. Once she does this, she needs only the struggle—not the resolution of the struggle.

The means becomes the end. So why bother with real change?

I have no data for this (and actually find solid sociological research on teacher culture pretty scarce anyway. Ideas, anyone?) So my theory is a conjecture, based on informal observations and the vaguaries of my own heart. But I wonder very much about its prevalence.

For example, the first reaction of my own heart is not to congratulate, but condemn, every time I forgo a completely unmanageable assignment such as weekly dialogue journals. (These would require me to spend five minutes minimum responding to each of my 88 kids every week, for a whopping total of over seven hours of grading. If I spend a thoughtful ten minutes on each journal? Fifteen hours.) Yet why do I react this way? Because I find that partially lose my bearings, my sense of meaning, if I am not mightily struggling with something related to school.

This same heart can feel deeply uneasy without the exhaustion of an 11+ hour work day. It elevates me—indeed, in my silliest moments, elevates me above my own co-workers. (”Where are they at 6:00 in the morning? I must be doing something right.” Insane, isn’t it?) Such toil gives me purpose. It is a symbol of my worth.

I’m not saying this attitude is healthy, or (on the flip side) my entire motivation. But it does exist.

So I find myself shaking my head a bit when it comes to both Dan and Chris’ assessments. Can they be right, and not entirely right? I wonder if they might be missing the Plymouth Syndrome, a much more subtle sociological dynamic than either fatigue or fatuousness– and one to which intelligent and motivated individuals might be particularly susceptible.

I remember a conversation I had with a colleague last year. We were discussing the working conditions of a private school in a neighboring town, where teachers have weekly half-days dedicated to reflection and collaboration, adequate pay, and no teacher load over twelve students.

“Cushy,” she said, disparagingly.

And I agreed.

1) Why all educators should tar and feather anyone who mentions schools and “competitiveness in the 21st century” in the same breath.

2) Why “high flyer” schools that defy poverty might not be doing anything of the sort.

3) Tell me NCLB measures something concrete. Tell me standardized exam scores reflect teacher prowess. And then tell me why New York State gives its English exam in January, smack between two teachers’ interaction with a cohort of kids. Please. Tell me. I’ve been asking for seven years now.