The Line

Tom Hoffman sent me a link to the Finn’s national standards for education in response to a post I put up recently about searching for higher purpose in English. I didn’t even get to the Finn language arts standards. I arrested on five pages describing “cross-curricular themes” that apply across all disciplines in Finland. These themes are clarified, in the most firm language, before anything at all related to specific curriculum is addressed.

I’ll just quote some of them here. They are verbatim: 60% of Finnish adults are English-literate. Read these. Take some time to ponder them. Chew on them.

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The need and desire of students for life-long learning must be reinforced.

Cooperation, interaction and communication skills must be developed by means of different forms of collaborative learning.

Upper secondary schools must develop students’ abilities to recognize and deal with ethical issues involving communities and individuals.

Education must help students recognize their personal uniqueness.

Education must stimulate students to engage in artistic activities, to participate in artistic and cultural life, and to adopt lifestyles that promote health and well-being.

Students will be capable of facing the challenges presented by the changing world in a flexible manner, be familiar with means of influence, and possess the will and courage to take action.

An upper secondary school community must create prerequisites for experiencing inclusion, reciprocal support and justice. These are important sources of joy in life.

Human beings must learn how to adapt to the conditions of nature and the limits set by global sustainability.

Upper secondary schools must reinforce students’ positive cultural identity and knowledge of cultures.

Technology is based on knowledge of the laws of nature.

Students will observe and critically analyze the relationship between the world as described by media, and reality.

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I feel as if I have been handed something which, in this climate of national standards development, needs to be on Arne Duncan’s desk tomorrow, and I’m going to be messing around with my blog and personal contacts to see how far I can get with this ridiculous and lofty goal. Suggestions, comments, forwards, and general publicity from readers would be most welcome.

The whole Finnish document can be found here.

I’d rather read this series in the Christian Science Monitor than cute but ill-informed pieces by pseudo-scientists. (Don’t get me wrong, though– I love Malcolm Gladwell’s books.)

One of my best buds David (amongst many others) just got his iPhone. As a computer geek and technical writer, it was only a matter of time for him; as it seems to be for, well, just about everyone on the planet, according to Apple. After my Palm Pilot blew over Spring Break, even I was eyeing it. Sleek as a seal, literally a jewel of a thing, no question; and with apps that can balance your checkbook and recognize snippets of music over the radio, what are we all waiting for?

I think I might be waiting for a spring breeze. And just what I mean by that, I am still figuring out.

For example, you can’t argue with me about the iPhone’s appeal to the naturalist, because I agree. Peterson’s Guide to North American Birds smaller than your hand? Identify constellations from the photo lens? I know. With so many places it could slip unobtrusively into my backcountry pack, it’s hard to contain the drool.

And yet, and yet. Isn’t there a time when even bringing a book along on a hike– much less a book on crack like the iPhone– actually draws your attention away from…simple…observing?  From simple, visceral experience? The cataloging, the identifying, the compartmentalizing, the defining; doesn’t the din of the mind move us away, at last, and maybe permanently, from the fundamental reality of our senses? When I rush to pin my virtual map up against the stars, doesn’t it, in the end, block them out?

Schooling comes into this in several ways. One (and again): an uncritical love affair with technology does nothing for our students. If we do not give them the tools to see that every gain we make with technology takes something else away– something we may need very badly– then we leave them mired in the worship of what Neil Postman called “the god of technology,” a Faustian bargain at best:

Ask anyone who knows something about computers to talk about them, and you will find that they will, unabashedly and relentlessly, extol the wonders of computers. You will also find that in most cases they will completely neglect to mention any of the liabilities of computers. This is a dangerous imbalance, since the greater the wonders of a technology, the greater will be its negative consequences…

Perhaps the best way I can express this idea is to say that the question, “What will a new technology do?” is no more important than the question, “What will a new technology undo?” Indeed, the latter question is more important, precisely because it is asked so infrequently.

Ask it, friends. As educators, we must ask it.

(This quote  from what should be required reading for every educator, Postman’s mind-blowing lecture “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change.” )

Second, we must recognize that school, in its very essence, also moves us inexorably away from visceral experience. Simply by placing a premium on reading and writing, it does so. This is not my thesis– that honor belongs to David Abram– but it is my belief, confirmed in experience, and it bugs me more and more with each passing day. Yes, this is the English teacher talking.

Yet hopelessly and irrevocably in love with words, I actually wonder if this doesn’t put me in the correct place to criticize their overuse. For if our education becomes a serpent biting its own tail– reading and writing about, well, reading and writing– then what are we actually reading and writing about? What are we really learning?

The whole thing seems to crumble, like a coal self-consumed; one push with a stick, and the ash collapses and blows away.

This is a lot to pile on the poor little iPhone, and you’ll note that I’m not actually placing the fate of the world on its delicate silver shoulders; that, too, would be overestimating its importance.

But there’s that spring breeze, though, moving through the room, or my daughter’s laugh. Hip-deep in apps, I may easily miss them both.

And it just gets easier and easier, doesn’t it.

Your teacher pay check stub ever make you weep? Mine did yesterday, but not for the reason you might think.

I’m deeply aware– some might say obsessively so– about the moral dimension of teaching. Far more than irregular verbs or how to construct an engaging summative paragraph, I work to teach my students how literature can help ask and answer the questions that make living meaningful. And then I kind of kill myself trying to model such living in my own behavior, with varying degrees of success.

Why? Middle school kids notice. In fact, they have an eagle eye for justice that many adults lose. They notice when I slough something off, break a promise, or unintentionally flout my own rules, and have no compunction about calling me out. Some teachers call this disrespect, but I encourage and treasure it. The kids keep me sane and honest, especially when I feel the habit of rigor that they inspire, spilling– necessarily, I believe– into extracurricular areas. Ultimately, I can never forget that my integrity may be the only promise of consistency that some of these kids see. (Thanks, Kant. Some days I wish I never met you.)

So in this spirit, I committed personally to a strict adherence to contract regarding my paid leave use. This depleted my bank of personal days, while leaving a substantial bank of sick days untouched– and unusable for family emergencies. Imagine, then, my reaction yesterday to the fallout from the fact that I had to take nearly four days of unpaid leave in order to be with my dying parent.

(For you rule-mongers out there, The National Family Leave Act only legislates unpaid leave; and in my district, sick time may not be used in its place.)

I don’t publicize this as some kind of “how great I am” moment, or a snotty revenge against my HR department. I hold no grudges there; they’re just doing their jobs. Nor do I mean to whine about the lost money, although this is undeniably part of the steep price I am paying now.

Rather I remain reeling– as usual– in the moral realm; stunned at the message of a system that punishes me– never mind the folks not as luckily endowed with benefits– so swiftly and concretely, for doing the right thing.

And the first thing I wonder is, “How am I going to prepare my students for this inevitable disappointment? How will I ever begin to help them understand?” Because for some of them, an experience like this has the potential to knock them clean out of principled living forever, and make no mistake.

Anyone have some suggestions for pre-teen fiction where the protagonist is left at the end with only the satisfaction of a clear conscience?

“What is honesty worth?” my students ask. They ask this, explicitly and implicitly, every day. My answer today is tangible, secret, and unsatisfactory. It is not the touching and uselessly ephemeral Mastercard sentiment: “It’s priceless.” Today, honesty is worth a tired teacher, some tears, and eight hundred and thirty-nine dollars.

The kids are so excited to get outside to do their sensory writing exercise today that I give them a bit of a momma-teacher lecture on sticking with me mentally for the directions. It almost makes me wish that we brought them outside so often that they were completely bored with the idea.

“Can we write about the dumpster?” says my posse of three boys. I agree under the condition that they don’t go in the dumpster, which they concede grudgingly; I leave them bending in half over the edges, flashing their boxers, writing on their clipboards and saying things like “Is that a RAT?”

Another boy approaches me. “Are these trees dead?” he asks, in the annoyed tone of seventh grade boys that indicates the presence of a genuine inquiry.

“See those buds?” I point out. “They look dead, but in a few weeks these trees will be covered in leaves.”

The next fifteen minutes are peppered with further wondrous questions:

“Can you smell mud?”

“I heard a train whistle. How could I hear that? There’s no tracks near here.”

“I licked a tree. It tastes like butter.”

“It does not.”

A swarm of students attempt to prove the tree-licker wrong. While I’m simultaneously laughing and hoping desperately that my principal is not looking out her office window, I hear the dull thud of a semi-inflated ball being kicked around. The posse has obeyed the letter of my law, but not the spirit.

“Can I keep this?” one of them shouts joyfully. He pops the dirty, half-dead tetherball into the air with his knee; I remember that the basketball coach has said that he drops baskets with total command. Then my Iraqi student takes over, and we have a demonstration of a different kind of grace. He’s told me that streetball and soccer helped his spirit survive as a refugee in Syria.

The class’ concentration is shot now, so we sneak back into the building along with the tetherball. As they add details to their sensory charts back at their desks, we talk about birdsong; I pull up a recording of a red-winged blackbird– they’re all over the marshy hollows that surround the school.

“OH,” several shout, “I’ve heard that.”

A student turns in his seat, sporting a demeaning arch of his eyebrow. He is an inveterate talker in my class, but he spends hours outside every day on his grandfather’s property. “Who HASN’T heard that??” he demands.

At the bell, as the kids file out, I stop Tetherball Boy. “I want a kick-butt poem about that ball,” I say.

“For extra credit?” he says eagerly, forgetting altogether about bragging to his friend within my earshot this morning about his stupidly low average.

“Done,” I tell him.

“All right,” he rejoices. He shoots off to his next class, laying plans with his buddies to paint the tetherball red and silver when they get home.

I taught immigrant students for eight years, and boy, does this gladden my ESL heart. Enjoy.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2009/01/obama-speaks-ve.html

Please humor me in a ten second (I swear to God, I just timed it), two question, yes/no survey I’ve set up here on adolescent psychology training for teachers. I’m percolating on whether educators of adolescents are getting enough training in this area. I sure didn’t. Did you?

Click Here to take survey

Your responses are totally anonymous, even to me, and will never be used in the Russian crackdown on rebel independents. Feel free to Twitter/forward/publicize this link as well. The more responses, the more solid the data, etc etc.

More to come soon on this topic and others. The year gears up for me next week.

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.

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.

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.