By Mark
I look with envy at my peers in the math department.
Sure, I know they have the same issues I have as an English teacher: kids who don't turn work in; hours of planning, prep, and grading to do; a state standardized test looming over our heads.
But, there's one thing they have that I really want.
You probably won't find many Algebra II students who cannot do basic work with monomials and reverse order of operations. In Geometry, the kids are all likely equally confounded at first by the mysteries of Pythagorus. In Algebra I, more often than not I think the kids at least have basic number sense.
Or, perhaps it is better put this way…
In that Algebra I class, there's probably not a kid sitting there running advanced differential equations through his head while everyone else solves for x. If that kid were spotted, you better believe that his teacher would bump him up to somewhere that he could be both more challenged and better served.
But in an English 9 class, just because their birthdays fell within a given year, a kid who can immediately spot the nuances in Scout's narration in To Kill a Mockingbird and by the end articulate how the novel is a coming-of-age tale about the collapse of childhood illusions is sitting next to a kid who still thinks Scout is a boy and Atticus is African-American.
The prevailing paradigm in the Language Arts (and in most cases History and Science as well) is that if is kid is a certain age, they are to be seated in a classroom only with students of that same age.
That's why I have a freshman who I just assessed to have a grade 3 reading level sitting next to a child who consumes college-level texts with the voracity and hunger of a would-be literature professor.
Brilliant! you'd say. Well done pairing those two! The mere presence of the stronger student will elevate the weaker one, and all will succeed! Hurrah!
Except that in order to keep the wheels from falling off in that class, I have to aim to the middle and end up underserving either end. Student #1 has an effortless A and Student #2 can barely muster a D with all her might.
Why cannot the Language Arts follow a more leveled sequence of courses, akin to mathematics, in a high school? Why cannot all the kids ready to tackle rhetorical analysis do so at the same time, rather than wait until they're "of a certain age." I'm getting ready to teach the argument structure of Toulmin and basic Aristotelean rhetoric to my sophomores, and I keep finding myself having to consider those kids who still lack the cognitive development to discern author's purpose in even basic texts. To expect them to be able to not only discern this in real-world arguments but also be able to break down claims, warrants, rhetorical fallacies…that's just cruel. But, wouldn't it also be cruel to deprive this experience and teaching from those kids who are ready for it–even at age 15–and who populate that room as well?
And to me, honors or Pre-AP is not enough. A kid who can do advanced mathematics at age 15 is not simply placed in "Honors Algebra I." They are placed–at least in my building and in others I know of–where their skills will be stretched and they will grow as learners, regardless of their year of birth.
Am I wrong?
I read this article with understanding, wondering how different my highschool years would have been if students where placed by their level of English. But then I play the devil’s advocate for a few minutes…
While I have always been the bored one in Language Arts, wishing the teacher would go further, I am septical about a leveling system. Would it mean that each student would have a different reading and writing level at the end of 12th grade(even more than the existing gap)? If so, wouldn’t it make the college preparation harder?
According to me, the main difference between Math and Language Arts is that speaking, writing and reading English is used everyday of your life. Calculus is not.
Makes me glad I teach kindergarten (at least for a moment). Even my most academically advanced kids are new to the whole social skills thing and can benefit from a fairly homogenous curriculum. The lower end of the curve stands a decent chance of picking up their abc’s from their classmates during choral recitations and so forth. It only gets tougher from here though.
Kristin, you’re right that the model isn’t even perfect for math. A good friend of mine in the math dept shared that she still, even with her Algebra II kids, encounters students who are dramatically unprepared but yet have been “moved on.”
AND, it goes back to the idea that much of what we do in education is done because of ease of administration. In my building (before my time) I hear we had a bunch of elective literature options for the 11th and 12th grade, rather than the standard English 11 and English 12. However, it became difficult to get kids matched with schedules, since if four teachers are teaching English 11 three periods, that gives the counselor twelve options for where to place a kid, but if I teach three periods of Poetry, Mrs. K teaches three periods of Sci-Fi, Mr. G teaches The Great American Novel, and Ms. W teaches Technical Writing, it gets tougher for the counselor to match the kids to where they “want” to be. Sure, it get tougher, but if we want to make the system better, we need to take on the tough stuff… It can be done.
You’re right. There’s no easy answer, and the reality is that the tracking in math isn’t working either, except for the most skilled kids. In my building there are children who have taken the same math for five years because they can’t master the skills and move on. It’s not taught differently, no different materials are used, it’s just the same old “do the odds on page 177 tonight” because the answers to the evens are in the back of the book that I had in the ’80s.
At least I don’t have to teach “House on Mango Street” to a kid for the fifth time because he keeps failing Language Arts. I get to try something new.
The other issue here is that as long as we are overwhelmed by sheer numbers we will never be able to effectively assess where our students are in time to give them a schedule that meets their needs perfectly. 1,300 kids show up, our 3 counselors try to schedule them, and boom, I’m dealing with 150 kids on the first day of school.
So, the possible solutions. More support staff. Better kids to teacher ratio. The first week of school to be spent assessing. A week off for scheduling? THEN, not plugging kids in to the same old schedule, but assigning them by skill level to mixed-age classes. “Writing a Narrative,” perhaps. Or “Mastering the Art of the Short Story,” or “Critical Literary Analysis, American Literature.” Or something. This would require money to pay for the assessing, and solid assessments. A bigger challenge would be to have staff willing to be flexible with their teaching loads. Who wants to learn in September that, because of the population, five sections of emerging writer classes are needed when the teacher was counting on Critical Analysis kids? Teachers need to be more flexible, and rise to the situation.
The tragedy is that public schools are under siege. All of our talent and skill is spent keeping things going, keeping kids engaged, reaching the child who might otherwise be on the streets, grading 150 essays over a weekend while planning for the next week and also maybe cleaning out one’s gutters that have been clogged for a year.
If there was a little breathing room, the luxury of change might happen. You can’t change shoes while running up a hill away from a tiger. You might say we’re doing the best we can scrambling up that gravel with the tiger snapping away at our four-inch stilleto heels. Or, since there is no tiger, hill or gravel, maybe we should all step up and insist the course catalog be thrown out, and courses created to fit the students. Surely we’re smart enough to do that?
Very well said!!