Post-week musings

First, I understand some of you have wanted to join as followers and have had trouble doing that. If I weren't a techno-idiot, I'd offer a solution: the only thing I can think is that maybe you need to join up with Google first? It's easy to do and does not contribute to your spam. But mostly I'm delighted that you are out there, reading this.

I was too tired to post last night; Thursday nights I'm generally pretty whipped--and I only teach a four day week. I grant you, the four days are pretty intensive, but I have absolutely no clue how people in K-12 do five days, the number of hours a day they do, with as many students and classes as they do. Just standing up and talking that much is exhausting (and--as all you educators know--the teaching part is the easy stuff; it's all the prep and grading and committee crap and other administrative flotsam that takes up most of our time).

And thinking about those in the K-12 trenches, I just read an article in Time magazine about Arne Duncan (Obama's Secretary of Education) and his ideas for how to fix the problems with public education. So often, at all levels, the focus is on teachers. Would-be reformers talk heatedly about how we need to be held accountable for our students' success--and talk about teacher union resistance to that as if it arises from fear of scrutiny. I think I'm going to have to write a letter to Secretary Duncan (and maybe send copies off to various news organizations as a potential op-ed thingy), because this is an issue I have some pretty strong feelings about.

First, of course there are good and bad teachers. And of course the quality of the teacher can affect student learning. We all know the horror stories about classroom praxis that is awful for any number of reasons: it isn't challenging enough, it's the same syllabus the teacher has been using since 1952, or it is too much for the level of student (and I've been accused of that), or the teacher is flat-out hostile to the students--I could go on. And we hear about the brilliant and innovative teachers and wish we could be more like them (if we care at all about what we do, that is). We hear about the wonderful quality of teachers at magnet or charter schools and the "consequent" brilliant test scores. But why why why is the focus always only on the teacher? At an assessment symposium some time ago, one of the deans at NCC was wonderfully honest about the other part of the equation: he called students the "black box" of assessment, as in, we don't know and can't see what's going on in that part of the equation--and it's a big part.

Students have responsibility for their own success, god dammit. And so do their families. When I was at Beach Channel high school, in that dreadfully misguided "College Now" program in 2000-2001, I saw the impact horrific family lives had on the students and their ability to handle school in any way. We see it all the time at Nassau, too: the students who have been kicked out of their homes, who are single parents of multiple children (even at horrifyingly young ages), who have to work 2 or 3 jobs in order to have enough money to get to school. At La Guardia, I had a student who came to me in tears: she had missed class because she didn't have the (at that time) $1.50 for the subway fare. Another wrote about how hard it was for him to study because just getting to his apartment without being robbed, beaten, or shot at was a triumph. How can students in those situations possibly put the kind of time and energy into school that will lead to good outcomes?

But beyond that, students also have to be held accountable. I am sick to damned death of the pandering to their "self esteem," as if young people cannot stand any kind of set back, challenge, or genuine assessment of the quality of their work. We get students who were in their Honors programs in high school who, when evaluated for their genuine abilities and knowledge, are capable of C- work at best. We get students who complain bitterly about their grades because they always have gotten A's before--and yet who have no clue what constitutes a coherent sentence, or a logical argument, or a thought that has any substance. They are trained in solipsistic naval gazing, and when they are asked to actually fucking think, they act like we're demanding something wildly inappropriate and absurdly difficult, as if we expect them to be able to master quantum mechanics without ever having passed basic math.

And, when we get them at NCC, many--most, I'd say--are shocked that a deadline really is a deadline, that an attendance limit really is a limit, that instructions really do need to be followed. Another speaker on campus referred to them as the video-game generation: they expect always to be able to hit the "re-set" button and get extra lives. And they think their tuition buys them the grade they want. And all they want is the grade: they don't stop to think that the grade is merely evidence that they have, in fact, learned something, mastered some area of knowledge or a certain set of skills. Learning? What's that? Who needs it?

Their parents aid them in that feeling, too. I know K-12 teachers have to deal with parent complaints all the time; thank god at the college level, not only are we not obligated to, we are not allowed to talk to parents (assuming the student is at least 18). But the parents only care about their child getting the grades so their child can get a good job. Again, learning? Education? Qu'est que c'est?

And I haven't even gotten into the problem of standardized testing when it comes to testing anything that really matters. Show me a standardized test that can actually measure critical thinking or the ability to structure an argument coherently. One of my colleagues talks about the idiocy of trying to quantify the unquantifiable. But some kind of unified measure has to be found in order to tell whether students really are learning; it's a genuine problem for which standardized tests are not the solution.

Ok, ok, ok. I'll get off this particular hobby horse in just a second here (you can see I can gallop around on that one quite a while; I wish I could ride real horses as well). But all those issues about students and what they bring to the equation are continually overlooked when people talk about reforming education (and even many educators are guilty of this, witness much of the focus of assessment initiatives on the college level). But until we start paying significant attention to both sides of the desk, education will not be reformed: we'll just be engaged in teacher bashing. Teachers can't teach unless we have students who are ready, willing, and able to learn.