The Line

Chris Lehmann at The Faculty Room writes on Cheektowaga Middle School up the road from me, profiled in the New York Times for its hard-line disciplinary tactics.

My colleague Joe Henderson suggested a post on it, in light of some stuff I talk up regularly on the blog in regards to the massive and irreplaceable value of intrinsic motivation in school. I thought I would respectfully request the originator of Self-Determination Theory himself, Dr. Ed Deci, to comment instead.

Dr. Deci, in case you don’t know, is the author or co-author of much of the motivation research used by major education experts in the field, including Alfie Kohn and Robert Marzano. Very kindly, he agreed to help out.

I pitched to him three possible arguments for the idea that Cheektowaga Middle School is taking the appropriate approach to their problems. Here’s his responses.

Statement: A highly disruptive and dysfunctional situation such as the one at Cheektowaga requires initial Draconian measures. Once order is restored, then perhaps a more autonomous approach can be adopted, but not before.

Dr. Deci: A highly disruptive and dysfunctional situation is a tough one to deal with, that is true. But my inclination is to avoid Draconian controls. They are most likely to exacerbate rather than help. In troubled situations, it is necessary to reach students, and it may take “big measures” but control and force are not the methods most likely to work. How about some restructuring that allows teachers and students to interact
in more meaningful ways, for example. I agree it is not easy, but it is important to try to understand the students’ perspectives in order to work with them toward meaningful change. The Cheektowaga situation is one where students’ perspectives seem to be being run over rather than understood and acknowledged.

Statement: Middle schoolers, and children in general, do not have the developmental maturity to handle an autonomous management approach. Because of their youth, they require “carrots and sticks” to facilitate the internalization of societal values.

Dr. Deci: This is utter nonsense. It is possible to have elementary students who are relatively autonomous in their self-regulation and who do not require carrots and sticks to any significant degree, so to say middle school students are not old enough (or mature enough) to be autonomous is inaccurate ideology.

Statement: The minority population of the school (35% Latino and African-American) would respond positively to authoritarian, teacher-centered management, as this is a cultural norm for them (as Lisa Delpit argues).

Dr. Deci: First, I doubt that that minority students respond positively to authoritarian approaches. If that is what they are getting at home and elsewhere, and if they were responding positively to it, there would not be the problems that are apparently being faced in Cheektowaga.

Second, whenever we have looked at our data in terms of differences in majority vs. minority participants, we have not seen meaningful differences in how they respond to autonomy support. It has positive effects for minority participants and for low-income participants just as it does for “majority” participants. Autonomy support works for females as well as males (some people say it is a male thing); autonomy support works for eastern cultures as well as western (some say it is a western thing); and it works for low-income individuals as well as high-income individuals (some say it is only a high-income thing). So, there is no solid empirical basis for the Delpit view that I have ever seen.

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Thoughts, readers?

“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.

As I get further into A Day No Pigs Would Die I’m discovering, quite by accident (or maybe not), a wealth of nature-related wisdom packed into it. It does take place on a Shaker Vermont farm, after all. So despite my initial woes, not only is Pigs starting to work well as an example of a banned book, but it makes this unit a shoe-in for the one just before The Leopold Education Project next year. We could collect Pigs axioms (I’m already getting kid-generated questions like, “Is it really true that pigs and cows can’t be penned next to each other?”) and research them, while relating them to excerpts from Sand County Almanac. Perfect springtime stuff, perfect high quality literature, perfect dovetail between fiction and non-fiction. I can’t wait.

I’m reflecting on this while my kids and I are wildcrafting in the backyard this evening– this is the absolutely lovely word, I’ve learned, for harvesting uncultivated edible plants. Today we’re hurrying to get four packed cups of violet blossoms before we cut the lawn. We’ll boil them down with sugar into a deep-hued, fragrant syrup, great over pancakes and near heaven with vanilla ice cream. My daughter is tweezing the flowers with her little fingers out of the long grass, singing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” at the top of her lungs.

We’re doing double-duty by also weeding the garlic mustard that’s spread into the yard. One of the worst spreading non-indigenous plants of New York State, it was originally brought over by European settlers as a fast-growing herb for flavor in stews. My daughter offers to help me pull up the shallow root stocks, which complain by letting loose their characteristic pungent smell.

“But why are we pulling these up? They have pretty white flowers on the top,” she comments.

“Well, we don’t really want them in the yard,” I say gently.

“Why?”

I’m suddenly faced with explaining the concept of invasive species to a five year old. This sort of thing happens a lot.

I hunker down to her level in the grass, try to put it in language she’ll understand. “See how it grows so fast, and goes all over the place? When it does that, it takes the light and the soil away from other plants. It doesn’t want to share.”

She processes this, then nods.

“Oh,” she says solemnly. “It’s like people.”

Thanks to Doug Noon for introducing me to all of the following, woven together in a lovely post that summarizes much of what I have been wrestling with this year:

• The new think tank The Forum for Education and Democracy and their report released last week, Democracy at Risk. Stars such heavyweights as Linda Darling-Hammond, Gloria Ladson-Billings, and Deborah Meier.
• Wellford Wilms’ disturbing piece on reform in a California high school, Liberating the Schoolhouse, cataloging the systematic destruction of a bottom-up, autonomous management model. Far more editorial than report, but still leaves one wondering. I wonder in particular what Ed Deci would have to say. Pair it with Henderson’s piece on hierarchical hard-wiring in the brain, and you may want a drink.
• Structuration Theory. This is extremely tough going, only for die-hard intellectual freaks, but fascinating. (Try the user-friendly approach at Theory.org– I mean, you have to love an organization who makes trading cards and Lego figures for famous sociologists.) Stephen Smoliar succinctly applies one of ST’s central ideas to schooling with some scary implications. I have to do some more reading on this.

I got two emails today, hard on each other’s heels, from Ph.Ds I’ve been badgering for information communicating with on classroom issues that have come up.

Harry Brighouse sends a sneak preview of a chapter in an upcoming edited collection of essays– see the attached file controversial-issues.doc– on the topic of navigating controversial philosophical topics in class. I’ve only skimmed it but it reminds me right away of a dialectic classroom approach which hasn’t gotten nearly enough press called The Paideia Seminar.

Sue Sing of the Open University U.K. sends her views, based on her dissertation research, on whether we can legitimately expect adolescents to know how to use apostrophes. This is thanks to Nigel Hall, whom I mention here. It’s worth quoting at length.

“In the UK, children begin to learn about punctuation at
school during the primary years. They are taught the omissive
apostrophe in Year 3 (aged 7), though they are highly likely to have
encountered it much sooner than this through their reading. In Year 4,
children then learn about the possessive apostrophe. Two years later,
by the end of primary education they are expected to be able to use the
mark for both its functions, easily and competently. However, as you
have found with your students this is often rarely the case.

Through my analysis, I learnt that while some children may appear to use
the apostrophe correctly (for either or both functions), they may not
always be using it for the right reasons. However, without exploring
children’s thinking behind their punctuation decisions this fact will
simply go unrealised and therefore what may appear as sound knowledge
and usage in fact disguises a host of uncertainties and confusions. In
addition, children draw on a range of information sources to help them
decide where to use punctuation marks - some of these being
linguistic-based but equally, some being for non-linguistic reasons.
This is not to say that children are not able to understand how to use
such marks; on the contrary, through our research it became quite
evident that our participants were thinking deeply and intensely about
the subject and were really working hard to try to work out what mark to
write and why.”

These guys are great.

I suppose you could put such generosity down to my excellent criteria in choosing Ph.Ds to badger (snort), but the same thing happened several years ago while I was looking for someone– anyone– to give me a crash course in Haitian Creole for an ESL kid who was coming into the district. I got someone on the phone from a midwestern university and we talked for near an hour.

I think there’s a message here to be had about vertical alignment, that lovely educational buzzphrase that usually means the woefully prosaic “we shouldn’t teach the same material seven years in a row,” but should mean “Let’s make it an institutional priority to talk on an ongoing basis to any university researcher who can help us teach better.” Maybe I should have titled this post “They Don’t Bite.”

You’ll note that I choose the words “institutional priority” with great care. I can call every professor at Harvard until their Nobel Prizes come home, but until intellectual partnerships between school practitioners and university researchers are institutionally supported, they will remain the myopic crazy email fun and pet projects of, well, geeks like me.

Do we do enough of this? Are we scared to do this? What does this say about how we conceive of ourselves as professionals– and how we hold ourselves accountable for effective practice?

Check this out, on the high-philosophy blog Crooked Timber. Harry Brighouse is one of my heroes– his deceptively slim and devastatingly crystalline book On Education has kept me sane this year. I’m immensely grateful for his link back to The Line, which only happened because of the truly shocking success of this “send your heroes fan letters and ask for feedback” policy I seem to have developed for 07-08. Try it. It works.

More overarchingly, credit for the introduction to Harry Brighouse, and multiple other theorists who are now staples of my educational philosophy, is once again, and rapidly becoming as always, Joe Henderson’s.

“The spring over there takes you by the throat, the flowers blooming by the thousands over white walls. If you strolled around for an hour in the hills surrounding my town, you would return with the odor of honey in your clothes.” — Albert Camus

My students know this instinctively, and I’ve been in a bit of awe this week at the teacher-class relationship which has apparently also so blossomed, in spite of my multiple missteps this year, that instead of dragging in and disengaging in favor of honey in their clothes, they throw their cards right on the table: “Ms. S, can we go outside?”

Truthfully, they know they have a sympathetic ear. I try to honor this request whenever I can justify it academically, which is fairly often– one of the joys of teaching English. Nothing like honing the powers of observation while outdoors. Additionally, by happy accident, the novel we are about to embark upon, A Day No Pigs Would Die, begins and ends in April. We are tracking its content under the essential question Why was this novel 17th on the list of Top 100 Books Banned for the decade? as a continuation of our unit on the First Amendment.

The unit I’ll try next, as it turns out, is going to really offer my throat to Spring: it’ll be based on a workshop I’ll take in August through the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, called the Leopold Education Project.

For more and more I am convinced that this is a fundamental need of children that I am (frankly) morally bound to address immediately: In content, to be able to negotiate decent scientific nonfiction with confidence. In communal responsibility, to understand the finite, fragile, and internconnected nature of our resources. And in plain ol’ to get the heck outside– especially in the face of continued and ever-widening acceptance of physical digital isolation.

Such a unit cannot be solid milk chocolate sunlit meadows and daffodils, though. One of the first “wilderness texts” I read and loved was Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and it comes to mind with a vengeance now. Its first image is one of a frog being liquidated from the inside by a preying water bug. Yummy.

I have to square this with the inimitable sense of belonging I can find nowhere else but out in the woods– the same impulse that drives my kids to bombard me with “Can we go outside?”I struggle with it, as Annie does throughout the entirety of Tinker Creek. The late Stephen Jay Gould, the brilliant Harvard biologist, terms this aspect of nature “non-moral” in an essay that uses similar gruesome examples of predator and prey– I don’t know about you, but bugs seem to have cornered this market.

It’s what causes me to balk when folks suggest that a complete moral code, or system of meaning, may be found entirely with nature or nature’s metaphors. Sorry– I can get with cycles and our bodies being made of elements that are only created within stars, but the bugs. You’ve got to explain the bugs. CS Lewis had to write several whole essays on the problem of pain in the animal kingdom to try and do it.

Beyond that, I know well that if I break my ankle in the Adirondacks backcountry winter with no survival equipment, the mountains will look upon me in their loveliness, unmoved, as I fade away. Funny, perhaps, that this might also be the source of my sense of peace. The trees will never say anything as mean-spirited or abusive to me as I will to myself. Such as how I overphilosophize about my units.

Anyway. These are the things I will somehow have to repackage for profitable consumption for 7th graders. Maybe in a pill? Nah– someone’s tried it already.

Dear Lupe,

Did you ever wish that you could save the world?

Awhile back a student of mine, in seventh grade English, turned in an assigned poem. I loved its simplicity, its rhythm, the way the lines broke on the page. What made my heart even more glad was that it was from a kid I’ve been trying to reach for several years now.

Anyway. I was so proud of him that I posted the poem on my teacher blog earlier this week. And that’s where I found out he hadn’t written it at all. He had plagiarized “Kick, Push,” and confirmed that he had done it deliberately when I asked him about it. And not knowing your rap until this week, I had no idea.

It’s been an interesting journey, these past few days. I’ve cried once or twice. I’ve rethought how I give and support assignments for second language kids. I’ve been surfing your sites, pulling up your stuff on Youtube. I’ve fallen in love with your work. And I’ve rejected completely the punitive coercion that could serve as the consequence for plagiarism in my school. That stuff won’t work. This kid is too smart.

The only thing that will work, I’ve come to realize, is if, somehow, he talks to you.

This might strike you as overkill. What is plagiarism, after all, next to cheese heroin addiction, or teenage pregnancy, or gang bangs? But I would argue that it’s just this kind of tiny, critical choice, and how it’s handled by the adults involved, that can tip the balance in a pre-adolescent kid. Towards a life that is ruled by a living sense of the dignity of human beings, or suffocated with the stale mediocrity of selfishness. Towards a life fortified against amorality, or one that invites it in—in small ways now, and perhaps much worse ones later.

So now is the time.

I don’t really know what I am asking you for. Five minutes on speakerphone would do it. Perhaps a letter. Something that makes you real to my kid. Something that it is not yet, or may never be, within my power to do– try as I might.

Because you see, it’s not enough that you’re like a god to him; it’s not enough that he listens to you constantly and can recite your raps with passion and accuracy from memory in the middle of class. None of it matters—not the poetry, the positive role model, or the message—unless he internalizes it enough to know that in the destructive habit of taking the short, easy way out, he cheats everyone. You. All of us. And most importantly, himself.

I can’t guarantee that this will save the world. Maybe not even this kid. But it might. Will you bank on hope, with me?

Please give me a call.

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I’ll be sending this via snail and email to Lupe’s production company, 1st and 15th Entertainment. Anyone else got any bright ideas? Contacts I can use? How much does a full page ad in the Chicago Times cost?

So I’m out crazy sick yesterday– fever, aches, nausea, the whole nine yards. This, of course, occurs right at the key point of introduction in a unit I’m creating from scratch based on the First Amendment. Students bring in favorite “statement” T-shirts and analyze them in writing– first for their presuppositions, and then as protected (or not) free speech. It’s challenging for everyone involved, and weird, and genre-busting, and full of little steps and student-centered discussions and teacher as guide and I was very nervous about my ability to carry it off to begin with– never mind that the products are going to be displayed for parents next week.

I’m in at 6 AM before I retreat to my bed, plugging through the haze of my aching bones, writing out what I am sure are completely unintelligible sub plans for a person I’ve never met– probably certified in math 25 years ago. I’m positive I’m going to come in the next day and find shreds of t-shirts, note cards, half-finished background packets, and a charred overhead projector, with a one word message from the sub in red pen: WHY?

Instead I find this note.

“Hi! The kids were great. Most of them got a solid start on their drafts. We had some wonderful conversations. My undergraduate degree was in Constitutional Law, so I think I fielded most of their questions well.”

It was almost worth being absent.

Again, I can’t really express my gratitude for the quality and quantity of comments on “Seven Questions.” Thank you.View this Post

Here’s a few points that jumped out at me.

So…Um…What Was That Content Standard I’m Supposed To Be Teaching Again?

Responding on her fine group blog and at a sister post, Alice Mercer worries that teachers don’t know that tech can actually fit beautifully into their content standards– and you’re absolutely right on that, Alice. Your example of the Listening and Speaking standards grabbed me because I taught ESL for eight years prior to going mainsteam, and ESL folk often joked about Listening and Speaking being “mythical”– that is, completely overlooked. I don’t think there is a state Speaking assessment anywhere in the US outside of ESL, come to think of it. (Anyone? I’d love to know.)

Without a doubt, the massive potential of Web 2.0 in the classroom is precisely this– the marriage of voice and authentic audience. However I have to say that if you’re working with teachers who don’t even know what their content standards are, my impression is that the central pedagogical problem to be solved has nothing to do with tech.

Anything that Fred Astaire Did…

Arthus and others think that an absence of tech in a school is suffocating. Similarly, Bill Ferriter, who is graciously assisting me while I develop my classroom’s first blog, feels that much of tech’s promise is in its inherent motivational factor for kids. While I have witnessed this and agree, I also think that it’s a red herring. A sparkling, glitzy herring in high heels dancing backwards, but a herring all the same. If I scan a page of a vocabulary workbook into the computer, convert it to PDF, and add digital fill in the blanks, my kids may be “motivated” to work on it– but it’s still the same workbook that has no basis in effective teaching practice, flexible problem solving, or language acquisition research.

And let’s not forget the infinitesmal puddle in which this motivational herring is swimming: novelty. Kids tell me they love using tech in school in large part because, admittedly and sadly, its effective integration is still so limited. But trust me– this won’t last for long. What do we have when we all get our 1:1 laptops in the end (as we will), and this novelty wears off (as it will)? Without decent tech that passes the Seven Questions, we have eight-track cassettes. Cue Barry Manilow.

Cortez and the Lost City of Student Investment

This what was bugging me, I finally figured out, about the logic of the several who pointed out the need to have kids invested in their own learning (ostensibly via tech). I mean, heck, yes– this is the El Dorado, kids invested in their own learning. I can’t agree enough. And surely tech provides an avenue to the Golden City. But folks– and I can’t emphasize this enough– I will not buy my kids’ investment with podcasts and then pretend that I’ve helped them care about poetry. That’s cheating.

In otherwords, enthusiasm for the former (tech) may be a powerful vehicle for the latter (understanding the transformative power of good reading and writing), but it sure ain’t always the same thing. If I can’t create a path to investment via the only path there is– a meaningful, personal connection between content, community, and self– then I’m not doing my job.

Could Someone Please Consider the Spotted Owls?

I did notice an absence of comments on the observation that tech has profound effects on the environment and our interconnectedness within it. This is not going away, guys…

And You’re Just Plain Wrong About This Next One, Dina.

And finally, I got some seriously thought-provoking comments on what a “digital kid” actually looks like (thanks Jeff, Jeffreygene, and Tom.) They prompted me to do a little digging, and a little asking, and a lot of rethinking. So next up: What the Heck Is a Digital Native, Anyway?