Eduwonk Gone Wonk?
Eduwonk, a watchdog of the eduction world and general advocate of charter schools put up two posts that got me way out of the echo chamber and, frankly, got me a little fired up.
Urban Schoolteacher Sabotage: 1 of 2, Starring Steve Buscemi
and
Urban Schoolteacher Sabotage: 2 of 2
The good teachers in High-Poverty Middle and High Schools are mostly set up to fail.
.
That shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, if you’re going to continue to look at school in it’s current paradigm. If you’re going to walk into a school in that situation, stand at the front of the classroom, run your mouth for an hour about why they’re poor (which is what our current curriculum is all about) and expect anyone to pay any attention to it, you’re kidding yourself.
Misbehavior: kids playing with cell phones, chatting, sleeping, etc.
.
Right back to the top there. Do you plan on teaching these students how to change this system? If not then what’s in it for them? I promise taking a nap is far more useful than listening to you blather on about Standard 1.1.10.
Accrued Basic Skills Deficits. If you teach 9th grade algebra, and few kids have mastered fractions and decimals, there’s just no easy way forward.
.
Really? Your students didn’t learn fractions and you know they don’t know it. Here’s an idea. Teach them.
Student Effort. If you assign 20 problems as homework, and few kids actually do ‘em, you face another unpleasant choice.
.
If your 20 questions aren’t directly leading students to how to get out of poverty right now, can you give me one good reason why they should answer them? If you’re answer is “Because I said so” then go directly back to the first quote.
The end of the first part has a nice little jab at administrators (not that they don’t deserve it):
Often a teacher who asks the principal about how to handle accrued skill deficits — not a whiny teacher, remember, we’re talking about the good one who just wants a straight answer — gets either the runaround (some mushy, political non-answer) or some version of “suck-it-up.”.
The answer here is simple. Teach kids. No mushy non-answer here. That’s our job, teach kids. No matter what condition they came through the door. It’s our job to teach them. If you can’t do that and you can’t do that for all kids, well, I hear there are jobs out there that pay a lot more than this one. And, no, that’s not a version of “suck it up”, it’s “teach it up”.
In the second part of this writing, Eduwonk almost saves itself. Almost.
No Excuses teachers (some in traditional schools, like Rafe Esquith and Mr. AB, some in No Excuses charter schools, like KIPP) directly tackle the Big Three: misbehavior, low skills, low effort. .
Off to a good start. Then…
Another time implication: the teacher who succeeds in getting a ton of kids to, for the first time in their lives, actually do all the assignments….is “rewarded” with tons of papers that need correcting!.
Only if your assignments are the same pointless drivel we’ve been giving students for last 100 years.
Our current box is this.
One side wants 60+ hour-per-week teachers who “turn kids around,” with 15 hours a week not on classroom teaching, or lesson plans, or training, but in student and parent 1-on-1 communication.
The other side wants 45-hour-per-week teachers, and who believe the kid-changing work belongs to others: parents, kids themselves, or “society” writ large..
Is that really our current box? Can you tell me which side of this box has to do with helping kids?
Ug, Eduwonk. Look who’s wonking.
Technorati Tags: teaching, online school, eduwonk, administration
This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Belinda responds:
Posted: July 18th, 2007 at 9:45 pm →
This is as bad as the Kindergarten teacher who will never, ever teach anything else, because “I don’t want to have to learn anything new.” Yes, I worked with her, and she and many like her are in the same “box” as Guestblogger MG. I’m glad it fired you up though – as it seems that the reach of the Luddites is truly far and wide. The bottom line is that the only box we teach in is the one we create as individuals – with boundaries as narrow or as broad as we choose.
Larry responds:
Posted: July 19th, 2007 at 7:08 am →
The most important concept of teaching is finding where the student is and where the student needs to be and working on the difference. There is a body of basic knowledge that all people need, the problem is that teacher fail to understand what that is and how to get the student to value that knowledge. A person learns only what is of value to them to learn and often that value has to be instilled. The great teacher understands that the challenge is to convince the student that what they are selling is worth buying.
I always marveled at those teachers who lamented the fact that students could not learn the advanced principles of thier subject matter becuase they did not understand the basics. Rather than make sure they learned the basics they just gave them the “F” and blamed them for being dumb. It is similar to the doctor who only wants to cure those patients who are well.
I know you are all technocrats but it really doesn’t matter how you attack the problem only that you successfully attack it. It may well be with a piece of chalk and a blackboard or it may be with the latest electronic gadget. The real issue is that the teacher identify the where the student is and where he should be.
Belinda responds:
Posted: July 23rd, 2007 at 10:37 pm →
“I know you are all technocrats but it really doesn’t matter how you attack the problem only that you successfully attack it. It may well be with a piece of chalk and a blackboard or it may be with the latest electronic gadget. The real issue is that the teacher identify the where the student is and where he should be.”
Even us techno-geeks know that whether it’s by moving all of the desks to the four walls, sitting on the floor and doing Math all day, eating “Movie Theater Food” or by investigating whether or not we can implement a vector graphics editor in our online courses, the bottom line is that bridging the gap between where they are and where they need to be happens because we care deeply about them as people. Not Play-Doh that we can mold into our own image, but in their own image – only smarter, better and more comfortable with the process of learning as a vital, organic part of life that should never end.