Author Archives: Jan Kragen

About Jan Kragen

I'm a National Board Certified Teacher. I am also on the Executive Board of the Washington Association of Educators of Talented and Gifted (WAETAG). I've been a teacher since 1977, in public and private schools, in third through eighth grades, in California, Colorado, New York, and Washington. In 1983 I started specializing in gifted education. I now work in North Kitsap, teaching a self-contained Highly-Capable 5th grade class. I also teach teachers. I've written science and social studies curriculum units for our district, resource books for teachers, and educational articles. I've presented at national and state science, social studies, and gifted conferences. And I've done in-service training, both within my district and as a consultant through other districts and my ESD. Many of the things I have written and many of the materials I have developed for my own classroom use are available for free off my website, kragen.net.

Measles and Vaccinations

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Current Affairs, Science

My mother caught the measles when she was in the second grade. Her overwhelming memory of the ordeal is one of boredom. She had to stay inside the whole time (which could have been up to three weeks). Even worse, in her day, she had to stay in a darkened room, so she couldn’t even read to entertain herself. Of course, there was no television yet.

She didn’t get that sick. She didn’t have any long-term effects.

No big deal.

I have another relative who caught the measles. Robert Dudley Gregory fought with the Union Army during the Civil War. At one point his whole company came down with the measles.

Before I go any further, I want you to consider that the average age of a Union soldier was 26 years old. These were young men in the prime of life who caught a “childhood disease.”

Many of them died. Those who survived were damaged for the rest of their lives.

The minute my mom was diagnosed, a quarantine poster was slapped on the front door of their house. When her dad came home from work, he wasn’t allowed inside his own home. That’s how seriously they took quarantines in 1938.

Back in the 1930s people had a more intimate understanding of measles. They knew from experience how contagious it was, how swiftly it spread, and how deadly it could be. They were not prepared to take any chances.

Once the measles vaccine became available in the 1963, it was considered a godsend. Measles went from being as “inevitable as death and taxes” to a 95% immunity rate after the second dose. Cases plummeted. By 2000—in less than 40 years!—it was eradicated in the United States.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t been eradicated in the rest of the world. Measles can be contagious for days before any symptoms appear, so visitors from other countries can bring the disease and spread it here, affecting students, families, classrooms, and school districts.

How is that possible if everyone here is vaccinated? As you’ve seen on the news, not everyone in America is vaccinated. As fewer people vaccinate their children, more catch the disease. So now Washington State is moving toward vaccinating more of its students.

My students sometimes ask about that. They ask, in particular, about measles and autism.

I tell them there was a one individual doctor (see The Panic Virus by Seth Mnookin). He noticed that signs of autism started to appear in some young children after measles shots. After studying a handful of children, he published a paper making the claim that the shots might be causing autism. It raised alarms, as any such allegation should.

Then other doctors around the world tried to replicate his experiments.

(We talk in science about how the ability to replicate experiments is crucial in order to confirm the results of those experiments.)

None of the other doctors or scientists could replicate his experiments. In fact, study after study showed no link between measles and autism.

Then I ask my class, “What should the doctor do, as a good scientist?” They think he should figure out where he made his mistake.

I tell them that’s not what he did. Instead, he went on the internet to tell the whole world that he was right and every other doctor and scientist was wrong.

Now the kids have two lessons they can draw on. They know about replicability in experimentation. They also know that anyone can post anything on the internet. Having a site doesn’t mean the information on it is authoritative. (After all, I teach them how to make sites of their own. They know they are not authoritative! We always ask, “Who sponsors the site? Who vouches for the information posted there?”)

They agree that the American Medical Association and the Center for Disease Control are more authoritative than a single doctor, especially when his studies contradict everyone else’s.

What is interesting to me is how much tension goes out of the room after discussing the issue in those terms. Science. The internet. They feel like they know how those things work. It puts the question in a context they can understand.

Abraham Lincoln Again

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Current Affairs, Elementary, Social Issues

Last week I did a series of lessons on “argumentation in reading.” I told my student that I analyzed their STAR reading test data and found their lowest subcategory was in this particular area. However, I confessed to them, I wasn’t sure what the phrase meant. I mean, I teach them argumentation in writing, along with informal logic and fallacies of reasoning, but what was argumentation in reading?

I told them the story of how I investigated my question all the way up to the national STAR testing organization. They replied with their definition and sample test questions.

I shared the results of my research with my class, “You know how I teach you how to use good, logical, well-reasoned arguments in your writing? And how I teach you to use evidence to back up your reasoning? This STAR business is different. When they say ‘argumentation in reading,’ they are talking about bad argumentation. Not using evidence. Appealing strictly to emotion. Manipulating audiences.”

For the next couple of days, I defined terms and showed examples from print advertising and from commercials. Several times I mentioned that they could find examples of this kind of bad argumentation in other places—political speeches, letters to the editor, editorials on the opinion pages. As I wrapped up the final presentation, I quipped that I was just showing them the more entertaining examples of argumentation in reading instead of also pulling in political speeches and the rest.

One of my boys said, “Maybe that’s a good thing, to avoid sharing anything political.”

Maybe I can get away with something from 164 years ago.

The American Party was prominent in United States politics from the late 1840s through the 1850s. More commonly known as the Know-Nothing Party, its members formed a secretive group, answering questions about their beliefs with the phrase, “I know nothing,” which is where they got their more popular name. Most members were white middle class or working class men who strongly opposed immigrants, especially Catholics. Earlier waves of immigration to American had been strongly English-speaking and Protestant, but by the early 1800s people began to arrive from Germany and Ireland, upending cultural expectations and stirring up resentment and fear.

How did Lincoln react to the Know-Nothings? In a letter written to Joshua Speed in 1855 he said,

I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we begin by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.

In the middle of the Civil War, at the national convention that nominated Lincoln for reelection, the committee members noted his justice and protection to all men employed in the Union armies “without regard to distinction of color” as well as his liberal and just encouragement of foreign immigration to “this nation, the asylum of the oppressed of all nations.”

Lincoln believed in our national motto, E Pluribus Unum—Out of Many, One.

What do you think? For Presidents’ Day, do you suppose I can get away with talking about how Lincoln supported immigrants from all nations?

Let’s NOT Have Guns In Schools

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Current Affairs, Social Issues

10:54 am. February 28, 2001.

We had just dismissed to recess. I had students still in the classroom, some on the outside stairs leading down to the playground, some already out on the playground, some in the hall going to the library, and some in the bathroom.

The Nisqually earthquake struck. A 6.8 quake.

At first it sounded like a giant garbage truck rolling into the parking lot, but it just kept coming. The room began to shake. Startled eyes turned to me.

“It’s an earthquake,” I said. “Duck and cover.” I stood in the doorway so I could watch the students in the classroom and the ones in the hall. Everyone did what they were trained to do.

After the ground stopped shaking, we evacuated the building and gathered on the big field.

Later, once the school was inspected and we could go back inside, everyone shared where they were and what they were doing when the earthquake hit.

No matter where they were in the school, each child had followed the directions for how to stay safe during an earthquake.

I counted that day as a success, not just that the children knew what to do and did it, but that they could each debrief so easily, they could each share their story freely. As I had told them earlier in the year—once you are safe—you should pay attention during an earthquake and observe it because they are interesting.

At the end of the day, one of my students commented to another teacher about how interesting the earthquake was.

(“Good for you!” I thought.)

That teacher was horrified. She told him earthquakes were dangerous. They were not interesting.

Clearly adults react emotionally in different ways to high stress situations.

A 6.8 earthquake is impressive but not murderous. Try to imagine just how ramped up emotions are during a school shooting.

The first issue is, that extraordinary level of emotional response impacts the effectiveness of the police, not just the school staff. In the Parkland shooting Sgt. Brian Miller, who arrived first on the scene, was excoriated in the public and in the press for not entering the building immediately. But the official Broward Sheriff’s Office active shooter policy at the time specifically said deputies may go in and confront a shooter. It wasn’t a requirement.

More importantly, his was not the only failure that day. Colleagues described Captain Jordan as “disengaged and ineffective.”

In fact, in spite of their training—as police officers—the deputies were ill-prepared to react to a school shooting.

Several sheriff’s deputies said they remembered little if anything of their active shooter training.

Even police, with all their training, seldom face an active shooter. It’s hard enough to respond according to training when a shooting erupts right in front of an officer. It’s even more difficult—and more emotionally debilitating—to respond to an unseen shooter or shooters roaming within a school. What if you miss? What if you accidentally hit a student? What if you kill a child? Those questions can paralyze even a trained police officer.

Then comes the second issue. What happens when you take police, who are trained to deal with shooters, and add another shooter in the mix?

November 11, 2018, Roberson, who hoped someday to become a police officer, was working as a security guard at a bar in the suburbs of Chicago. He detained a shooter, pinning him to the ground, with his legal gun drawn. The police chief called him a “brave man doing his best to end an active shooter situation.”

But that night the police shot and killed Jemel Roberson.

Why did he get shot?

It seems like in the confusion of multiple people yelling “He’s security! He’s security!” Roberson may not have heard the police yelling, “Drop your weapon!”

So he died.

Roberson was both an armed security guard and a good guy with a gun. He risked his life to apprehend a shooter. And police killed him anyway.

Thanksgiving night Emantic Bradford Jr. went shopping in an Alabama mall with a cousin and two friends. He had a permit to carry a weapon. According to his family, Bradford was trying to help people during a shooting. He had his gun in his hand when a police officer saw him and shot him.

Here’s the problem. HB 1038 would allow school districts to authorize permanent employees to possess firearms on school grounds under certain conditions.

If trained police officers have a difficult time handling school shooting situations in general, and if they don’t always respond well to “helpful” adults in crisis situations who are also armed, why on earth would we put additional guns into schools? In the hands of everyday school staff?

Imagine that you are that armed teacher. Maybe you have hours of target shooting. Maybe you hunt. Maybe you are very comfortable with your weapon.

Have you had training in simulations where you have to identify friend or foe with split second timing? (Even high-quality military combat training will not fully prepare a soldier or sailor for war—only real live combat experience can do that.)

Have you ever had a gun pointed at you? Has your life been in danger?

If the police came in and yelled to you, could you be sure you would react fast enough not to be shot yourself?

(Especially if you are a person of color, as both Roberson and Bradford were.)

Even more to the point, have you actually served in combat in areas where children are present? Or have you served in the police in violence-ridden communities with children?

According to military personnel I’ve talked to, having the daily experience of having to deal with the direct threat of violence—in the context of children—is the best preparation for handling school shooter situations effectively.

Here’s a possible solution beyond arming random school personnel.

It may be that every school in the country needs a combat veteran as a school safety officer. At the very least, as individual schools decide to hire safety officers, they should specify combat or similar experience as a requirement.  Even further, interview questions should demand details about how candidates handled high stakes circumstances with children as part of the situation.

Playground Victory

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Elementary, Games, Life in the Classroom

A few years ago I dragged my husband to a playground in Illinois near my grandparents’ house. I was eager to show him my favorite piece of playground equipment, a unique contraption that spun around like a merry-go-round. It had bench seats you could sit or stand on. There were bars connecting the seating arrangement at the bottom to the armature at the top, and there were swivels at the top and bottom of each connecting bar. On those hot summer days we could run around and get the system rotating, then we could rock it to make it swing back and forth, all at the same time. It was glorious!

After some exploring, I finally brought my husband to the right spot. All we found was a worn circle in the grass.

Horrified, I set off to find someone in charge. I finally found someone who could answer my question. I described the piece of equipment and said, “I don’t know what you’d call it.”

The man said, “Our lawyers called it a liability.”

I’ve been through multiple playground renovations at public schools. Every time we ripped out equipment pieces that were deemed unsafe. In their place we installed increasingly bland structures.

I remember earlier deletions from the playground and how the principal at the time explained there had been a broken arm. That’s all it took to make items disappear—to make them unavailable for everyone.

I should tell you another story. When I was a toddler, my grandmother shopped for a couple of ottomans for me to climb on. Before she made the purchase, she asked the salesman if they would be safe for a two-year-old.

He said, “Lady, I don’t know from safe. One nephew of mine was walking on a two-by-four on the driveway, fell off, and broke his arm. Another nephew rode his tricycle down the stairs to the concrete floor of the basement and walked away without a scratch. I can’t say what’s safe!”

(I have to admit, I grew up in the era of “let them get hurt—that’ll teach them not to do it again.” I didn’t see a bicycle helmet until I was in college!)

Over the years I’ve watched increasingly safe equipment make recess more boring and less of an outlet for our high-energy kids, giving them little room to run, few things to climb, and nothing to lift. The motto for the Olympics is “Higher, Faster, Stronger.” It seems like the motto for playgrounds became “Stay lower, Go slower, Take your turn.”

Here was my lament—We keep making things safer and safer so our children never got hurt, so they never experience pain. They end up with no existential association of risk with physical danger. Then they grow up and go out for extreme sports! By protecting our children in a layer of bubble wrap until they turn 18, ironically, we make them less prepared to make considered choices as adults.

Meanwhile, as our playgrounds became less and less appealing to children, the number of office referrals for poor behavior during recess steadily rose. At one point the solution that was proposed in multiple states was nothing short of draconian—no recesses at all.

Over the years some backlash arose against the sea of bland. The Adventure Playground movement, which began in Europe after WWII, spread to Washington neighborhoods. Mercer Island has their own Adventure Playground where “in eight years … they’ve only had a few nails in shoes and one broken arm.”

U.S. playground design … [has] long prioritized safety over adventure.

Once our school started imagining what a new playground might look like, I got involved immediately.

At the very least, I argued, an elementary school needs a track around the perimeter of the playground so kids can run laps or compete in foot races. (My grandfather was born in 1904. That’s all the boys did for recess at his school. They ran foot races. Every day. Every recess. He did really well in track at college!)

Faster!

I wanted things kids could push or pull or lift. Can you imagine having really heavy disks kids could push over the tarmac to play tic-tac-toe or checkers? Or giant Lincoln Logs made of 4x4s? Or why can’t the really little kids build with big, loose parts such as Imagination Playground blocks?

Stronger!

And I added that there had to be stuff for kids to climb on. I know, if kids are even a foot off the ground, they can fall and get hurt, but climbing is a physical need for a lot of children. We must find a way to accommodate that need. I’d rather having them climbing on things during recess than during class time!

Higher!

At a class meeting my students added their input. They wanted a dome with rope nets for climbing. They wanted a spinning toy. They wanted a Gaga Ball Pit.

They wanted swings.

“Hold on,” I said. “Swings got removed out years ago because of liability issues. So did all the merry-go-rounds. I’m all for brainstorming, but we do have to be realistic.” (Sigh.)

Nevertheless, I carefully wrote down each idea and conveyed the list to our playground committee. The poster wish list hung in our principal’s office for the rest of the year as we worked on grants and fundraising.

I have to admit, my expectations were low. I’m delighted to say I was wrong!

We got the track.

The spinning toy.

The dome with rope nets.

The Gaga Ball Pit.

 

We even got the swings!

(I never thought I’d see swings at a public school ever again!)

The whole school is thrilled with the change in office referral stats. There have been almost none since the new playground was installed.

If your district says it’s not possible to have this type of equipment at your school, you want to go to work on changing some people’s minds.

One of my over-arching goals in school is to have fun. It’s absolutely fabulous to see kids having a whole lot more fun out at recess.

The Lazy Teacher’s Guide to Conferences

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Elementary, Life in the Classroom, Parent Involvment

Frank and Lillian Gilbreth were early efficiency experts who did motion study work. The book about their family, Cheaper by the Dozen, explains the technique they used. “A lazy man … always makes the best use of his [time] because he is too indolent to waste motions. Whenever Dad started to do a new motion study project at a factory, he’d always begin by announcing he wanted to photograph the motions of the laziest man on the job” (Gilbreth and Carey, 94).

There are lots of tips and tricks for having effective parent-teacher conferences, from the NEA and KidsHealth to a collection of materials from Edutopia.

But how to be efficient? How to make the best use of your time?

Let me share some ideas. See if there are ones you can adapt to use with your students and your parents.

I have students write in a journal nearly every day. At the beginning of the school year I ask them to write short pieces about gifts or talents they have, ones they wish they had, and ones they are willing to work hard on this year to develop as skills. Often those responses have little or nothing to do with school. They have to do with sports teams or drama classes or art classes. Which is great — I learn a lot about my students’ interests. I have them type those pieces and print them. I hang them on the bulletin board in the hall.

(I also use the discussions we have to drive home the point that there are multiple kinds of gifts and talents, not just the ones that get kids placed into self-contained classrooms. And we talk about how everyone has to work hard to improve skills.)

About four weeks into the school year I narrow the focus. I ask students to write in their journals about what they do well at school. I ask them to think specifically about academics and behavior inside my classroom. The next day I ask them to write about what they need to improve. We’ve had a month of school. By now they should be able to pinpoint some areas of success and areas for growth.

The third day I ask them to write about how the adults in their life can help them—parents, grandparents, teachers, whatever grownups they rely on for help.

Once again, I have them type up what they’ve written, but this time I don’t have them print the pieces. They save them into the Kragen classroom folder into a subfolder called “journals.”

Meanwhile, I have a template for my conferences:

In the week before the conferences, I copy the template, one for each student. I add the student and parent names. Finally, I import the paragraphs each student wrote into their page.

As parents and students arrive for conferences I greet them. I ask the students to collect their most recent papers to go home. I give the parents the STAR test results and any other paperwork from the office.

Just that quickly we are ready to start the interview.

I sit at the computer, facing my student. Parents listen while I conduct an interview. (It’s really hard for them to be quiet and listen, but I ask them to wait to talk until their child is finished.)

First, I ask, “What are you good at? I see you wrote that you are good at math. Are you good at other things too?” As we talk, I add to what the student initially wrote. Sometimes I say, “May I add something? May I put down that you are extremely well-behaved?” or “You do really well in group work.” I’ve never had a student turn me down! It gives me the chance to reinforce the idea that behavior and teamwork are valued skills in the classroom.

Second, I ask for what they need to improve. Usually they have a really good handle on what they need to work on. My contributions are less likely to be additions and more likely to be suggested solutions.

Third, I throw them a curve ball. I ask, “What are your goals for school, for your life? What do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want to accomplish?”

Some children have vague ideas. “I want to get good grades.” I sometimes suggest, “I want to be well-educated?” They usually smile and say yes.

Others have definite plans. “I want to be a veterinarian.” “An entertainer.” “I want to work with robots.” “I want to be an author.” “I want to be an inventor.”

Those responses can lead to a brief but rich conversation.

1.

During the conference I Google the top ten colleges in the field and recommend to the student and parents that they contact the schools to find out what their requirements are. What would the child need to do in high school in order to be a good candidate for the program? Plan ahead!

(My dad did hiring for Lockheed. He told me once that they looked at candidates from only five schools in the US. I always thought that if it was your life-long dream to work at Lockheed it would really be awful to find that out after you graduated from school number six!)

BTW, also look into financial aid at each school. How will you start planning to pay for the college now?

As families take summer vacations, I recommend they visit any of the top schools they might pass. See if they can get a tour.

2.

Find mentors or interview subjects. Can you tour the robotics department at UW? Can you job shadow a scientist?

I won’t take the whole class on a field trip to visit such specific places, but I recommend parents take their own children on personal field trips.

Last summer a girl did field work with a biologist.

“The last question you ask is, who should I talk to next? Daisy chain connections. You may end up finding an area of interest that you don’t even know exists because it’s not something we talk about in a fourth or fifth grade classroom.”

3.

“What’s stopping you? If you want to be an author and write about your travels, start now. You’ve traveled across the country several times. How do you pack for long trips? How do you amuse yourself on long drives?”

“If you want to be an entertainer, start now. Read poems aloud—with GREAT enthusiasm—to the kindergarten classes.”

“Do you know about inventors who are young people?” I suggest the TED talks with Richard Turere and Boyan Slat. “And you should also watch Slingshot on Netflix because you will love it.”

Fourth, I ask each child how the adults can help. By now we may have answered that question within the other sections, but I always like to double-check that I haven’t missed anything.

About this point I turn to the parents and ask, “Is there anything you would like to add? Do you have any questions?”

Virtually every time, the answer is no. Parents tell me the conference feels very thorough.

What you need to notice is that the student has done about 85% of the work. I’ve done some copy and pasting, I’ve added comments into the document, but mostly I’ve had a great time talking to each of my students.

I print a copy of the page for the parents that they can take home immediately. They LOVE not having to take notes!

Of course, I have an electronic copy of everything. In the spring we can pull up the fall conferences and review how well the students are doing.

(In my next post I will share more ways I save time doing conferences!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reading From the Ground Up

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Education, Elementary, Literacy, Science

Last year my district bought a brand-new ELA curriculum for the elementary grades. It has short stories, poems, and even a handful of class sets of novels for teachers to share. There are also nonfiction materials integrated into the standard social studies and science topics of the different grade levels. For example, since fourth graders across America often study Native cultures, the fourth grade ELA curriculum has booklets about Native tribal history and a traditional Native story. In addition, there are booklets about money management, economics, and innovation. For science, the booklets include topics ranging from earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, skeletons, and porpoises. There is also a short biography of an early paleontologist.

Our school day is scheduled around lunch, recesses, specialist time, a set period for math, a set period for reading, plus additional WIN times for math and reading—WIN standing for “What I Need,” whether it’s reteaching, extra support, or enrichment. Last year our fifth grade teachers complained that they had 20 minutes a day to fit in all the district-adopted science and social studies curriculum. “But you are teaching science and social studies in your ELA curriculum, right?” was the response they got.

Well yes. To a degree.

This week I attended a full-day curriculum workshop on the Next Generation Science Standards. The presenter at one point blurted out that he wished that one subject would be dropped from the school day altogether—reading.

Publishers would love to have you believe that they have provided the tools needed for integration by teaching science and social studies lessons within the ELA curriculum. But that’s exactly backwards for how true integration works.

In fact, this backwards system of integration may explain why reading scores have flatlined since 1998!

According to The Atlantic, “Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia … writes about the science behind reading comprehension. Willingham explained that whether or not readers understand a text depends far more on how much background knowledge and vocabulary they have relating to the topic than on how much they’ve practiced comprehension skills.”

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute says improving reading and writing instruction in America’s schools requires teachers taking the lead. “Teachers should tackle the content-knowledge deficit. In particular, they should take the lead in adopting content-rich curricula and organizing their lessons around well-constructed ‘text sets’ that help students build on their prior knowledge and learn new words more quickly.”

For real integration, I maintain that you need to start with your content-rich subject. Start with science. Or start with social studies. Figure out the main topics you will teach over the course of the year and decide how you will organize them. I teach either science or social studies, one at a time, alternating them. I am starting this year with Explorers and then Mixtures and Solutions. Next will be Colonies followed by Space. Finally we will study the Revolution and Constitution, and we will end the year with Living Systems.

Continue reading →

OUR Mandy Manning

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Current Affairs, Teacher Leadership

It’s been a whirlwind couple of weeks. I got moved out to a portable this summer, and the new carpet didn’t get installed until August 27.

By that week, of course, we were doing teacher work days, so I did trainings and meetings all day Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday; afterward I stayed late each night working in my room. Then I worked in my room all day Thursday and Friday and Saturday and Sunday and Monday. The day after Labor Day we had more meetings and that night was Back to School Night.

Of course that week, last week, was the first week of school. I think the earliest I made it home any night last week was about 7 pm.

This morning I got up early and worked on school work until about noon.

I talked to my mom. I did some cleaning.

I decided late this afternoon I could sit down, put my feet up, and do some reading. I picked up the neaToday, which I hadn’t opened since it arrived.

About five minutes into my relaxing moment, I saw the headline for the article “Meet 2018 National Teacher of the Year—” and said, “Wait a minute! That’s OUR Mandy Manning!”

Holy COW!

National Teacher of the Year!

I am so impressed, and so proud of her!

She’s OUR Mandy Manning. Washington State National Board Certified Teacher, Mandy Manning.

I immediately tore out the page so I could share it with everyone I know.

She’s OUR Mandy Manning. Regular contributor to “Stories from School.” Inspiring writer. Voice for us all.

I called my mom back so I could share the news with her. She’s a retired teacher, and she loves hearing good news about teachers.

She’s OUR Mandy Manning. Teacher extraordinaire. Compassionate advocate for students.

I want to be more like her. And isn’t that what the National Teacher of the Year is supposed to be—a model for all of us?

Congratulations, Mandy! I’m excited that you get to share your ideas with the rest of the country!

Put Down Your Phone and Pick Up Your Room

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Elementary, Life in the Classroom, Television

I’ve been reading a lot lately about children and adolescents and young adults having trouble managing their behavior and emotions.

  1. Psychology Today had an article “Crisis U” about the rise of mental health issues, particularly anxiety, in college students. Many students haven’t had to deal with much disappointment in their first 18 years. “In their overparented, overtrophied lives, many have not learned to handle difficulty.”

Simple frustration becomes a trigger for overwhelming emotional responses. “For increasing numbers of students all across the United States, disappointment now balloons into distress and thoughts of suicide. Lacking any means of emotion regulation and generationally bred on the immediacy of having needs met, they know no middle psychic ground: Mere frustration catapults them into crisis.”

Over-exposure to social media sets up unrealistic expectations. If everyone posts just happy, smiling pictures and glowing reports of vacations and accomplishments, then what is wrong with me? Older adults generally have more perspective than college students about their peers’ public personas and their private lives. Kids can feel like abject failures just by looking at their phones.

Unrelenting competition, both to get into preferred schools and to maintain the desired GPA, is another issue. A solution from Psychology Today? Stop grading on a curve. (I was lucky enough to have teachers and professors who gave out the grades we earned. We could all get an A. Alternatively, we could all get an F. On the other hand, if we all got an F, our profs realized their teaching was at fault. They were willing to come back and reteach, even in my college classes. That attitude has informed my instruction throughout my career.)

  1. Nina Parrish’s Edutopia article on “How to Teach Self-Regulation” provides tips to teachers on how to move beyond instructions in academics. Her exhortation to observe problem behavior with the goal of figuring out why it is occurring and their addressing that behavior once the child has cooled down really resonated with me. I confess I don’t manage to do that all the time. I’m still working on it!

She also recommends setting clear expectations and overtly teaching study skills, which I start from the first week of school. On a side note, virtually our entire teaching staff went to the AVID training in Seattle this summer, where we were inundated with the power of focusing on study skills.

  1. NPR’s piece “Why Children Aren’t Behaving, And What You Can Do About It” claimed we face “a crisis of self-regulation.”

Even for younger school children, their access to technology and social media is a culprit. For one thing, there is too much seat time already for students K-12. If they go home and spend endless additional hours on the computer, on the phone, or in front of the TV, that’s exacerbating an already existing problem. Young kids can have the same reactions as older, college students as they see that everyone else’s life looks perfect on social media. They can stress about what is wrong with them, or what is wrong with their family. Finally, news reports tend to focus on the negative. If young children watch the news, they see everything that is wrong with the world at a point in their lives when they can do little to effect meaningful change. It can contribute to a “mean worldview” vision of the world, and can leave them feeling out of control.

Lack of play is another issue. Not having time to play is a big part of the problem. Then not having unstructured playtime is another. In my school last year we were down to two recesses a day and PE two or three times a week. I would love to give kids PE every day and three recesses a day: morning, noon, and afternoon. Budgets and master schedules and limited numbers of specialists make my wish list impossible, at least for now.

So here’s what I can do. At parent conferences in the fall, inevitably I have parents who tell me that they require their child to get their homework done immediately after school. Only then can they go out to play. I always say, “Please don’t do that. By the time your children get home, they have been working for hours at school. They really need to go outside and run around before they sit down to do more work. Besides, we have such short days here. I’d like the kids to get outside in the sun as much as possible.” Parents and students both seem to relax once I say that.

The last point from NPR had to do with chores—any household job that children do to contribute to the well-being of the family as a whole. If kids aren’t pitching in, they are “underemployed.”

It’s part of the work of the family. We all do it, and when it’s more of a social compact than an adult in charge of doling out a reward, that’s much more powerful. They can see that everyone around them is doing jobs. So it seems only fair that they should also.

I have to say, I found this argument to be highly persuasive. Translated into the classroom, I like the idea of “we do the work to keep the classroom clean and organized because we are all part of the community” so much better than “we do the work just because Mrs. Kragen gives us a reward.”

Of course, I grew up doing chores. I had to clean my room every Saturday morning before I could watch TV or play—put all my stuff away, dust, and vacuum. (I took forever to get that done each week. I was not an organized child.)

As soon as we were done with our bedrooms, we had to do an inside job: dust the rest of the house, vacuum the rest of the house, clean the two bathrooms, or mop the kitchen floor. I always had last pick. I finally complained to my mom. She said the first person down got first pick. Oh.

Then we had an outside job which could be anything from sweeping the patio to helping put up a fence. We did get paid 50 cents or so for the outside jobs.

I tell my students about that regimen, and they act as though my parents were committing child abuse. Many of them have no chores at all. They think they shouldn’t have any. (I wonder if their lack of chores fosters a sense of entitlement.)

At our Curriculum Night next week, I’m going to share this article and suggest to parents they might want to institute some “household jobs” with their own families!

Another School Shooting

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Current Affairs

I read those words and felt like I’d been punched in the gut.

A girl at Santa Fe High School in Texas said she wasn’t surprised. “It’s been happening everywhere,” she said. “I felt — I’ve always kind of felt like eventually it was going to happen here, too.”

After the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and after all the student–led protests, it felt like we might be building some momentum. Just this week I got an email from David Hogg, one of the student organizers for the Never Again movement, asking if I would help with high school voter registration at one of our district’s high schools.

I was feeling optimistic. Not for the immediate future. But at least for a few years down the road, when these kids start to vote. (And run for office.)

But for now, the thousands of high school students who just want to go to school safely get outvoted by the handful of unhappy students with guns.

The news stories impact the kids at my school.

Just a week ago an announcement come over the intercom, “All students on the playground must come into the building.” Moments later we heard, “We are going into lockdown.”

After school I heard stories from other teachers of high anxiety with their students. One teacher dealt with the rising panic by having the kids barricade the door to the room they were in. One fifth grade teacher had a student who threw up. There were tears in multiple classrooms.

Even our little kids watch the news. They know what’s out there. They are afraid.

When the announcement came on, my kids went into high alert. So I talked to them as I moved around the room. “I’m checking to see if there is anyone in the hall. Nobody. You all know I keep my door locked so all I have to do is close it. I undo the roll of paper to cover the window so no one can see inside.

“Oh, by the way, check this out.” I pushed the wooden wedge under the door and kicked it tight. “That’s an extra lock.”

They laughed. “It’s old school, but it works!”

“What about the other door?” a student asked as I moved across the room.

“It’s always locked,” I answered as I rolled down the paper strip over its window too.

As I was taking care of the doors, one of my boys—on his own initiative—closed the shades on all the windows in the room.

Then I went back to the front of the class and said we could go back to the lesson we had been working on.

Kids said, “Wait! Aren’t we supposed to get under our desks or hide or something?”

I reassured them that the announcement hadn’t said anything about a dangerous individual. And it started with getting kids off the playground.

One student said, “Yeah, at one of my schools we had a lockdown because a bear got on the playground!”

I nodded. “And I worked at a school where we had a lockdown because the neighbor’s bull got loose and it got onto the playground.”

We got back to work. Even my high-anxiety students did fine.

A few minutes later, the lockdown ended.

Shortly after the Florida shooting In February, we had a lockdown drill at our school. I wrote a brief note to parents after the drill:

We had a lockdown drill yesterday. I explained how we keep the doors locked and the windows covered. I said in a real emergency the most important thing for kids to do is to listen and follow directions.

It’s my job to take care of them.

Then I reminded them all that I have been thinking about students’ safety and planning and preparing for how to keep them all safe since before they were born.

(And you should know the district is continuing to plan and implement additional security measures.)

They’re not just your babies.

Jan

Continue reading →

It’s Bad. And It Keeps Coming Back.

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Current Affairs, Education Policy, Social Issues

Eugenics.

It’s the idea that we can create better human beings by encouraging the breeding of the higher class people and discouraging the breeding of the lower class people.

There are all kinds of pseudosciences. Eugenics is the one that makes my blood run cold.

In the early 1900s eugenicists in the United States focused on weeding out “undesirables”—poor, immigrant, minority families.

Sound familiar?

Fast-forward to 1994. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray wrote a book called The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Now, more than a decade later, the book has gotten a new and highly critical write-up in The Vox because of the influence Murray is having on current US policy. There’s a lot not to like in The Bell Curve, but I’m going to focus on one aspect that has an impact on teachers in the classroom.

Here is one quote from the book:

The technically precise description of America’s fertility policy is that it subsidizes births among poor women, who are also disproportionately at the low end of the intelligence distribution. We urge generally that these policies, represented by the extensive network of cash and services for low-income women who have babies, be ended.

Basically, stop any program that gives assistance to low-income families. Because that just encourages them to breed. And we don’t want any additional poor, unintelligent people being added to our population.

That’s eugenics rearing up its ugly head again.

It’s not just a theory in a book from the 90s. The bad political philosophy of eugenics (it’s not a science) is being applied to governmental policy right now.

That’s why you have leaders in the federal and state levels of government attempting to roll back Medicaid expansion, tighten eligibility requirements for and reduce enrollment in the Department of Health and Human Services, and make it harder for individuals to access Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.

Here’s the truth. Eugenics doesn’t work.

What does work? Giving moms good pre-natal care. Making sure moms and their children get good nutrition. Making sure they have a healthy environment, free of lead, pesticides, mercury. Making sure children are in a safe environment, free from sexual and physical abuse. Providing children with a warm and nurturing home.

Parents who have plenty of money have the means to provide all of the above. That doesn’t guarantee they necessarily have the will or the character to provide them, although The Bell Curve assumes they will.

What the authors ignore is that moms in general want all those things for their children, whether they can afford them or not.

I’ve seen some of those “poor” moms. The dads are gone, leaving the moms on their own with the kids. The moms are working full time. They’ve gone back to school to try to get a better job. They’ve maybe had to declare bankruptcy. I’ve seen them standing in the grocery store trying to figure out the most nutritious food that they can afford to feed their children. They are doing everything they can on their own. And they still need help.

Let me tell you a personal story. My husband graduated and interviewed for a job back at the beginning of the 80s. He was hired on a Thursday afternoon. He called the next day to get the details about starting. They said, “So sorry. We just got a call from corporate. There’s a hiring freeze. We can’t give you that job after all.”

I had already quit my job. I was pregnant. We spent eight months without work. We applied for work in multiple states. There was no work to be found.

In the end, my husband got a job with a friend of his father’s, and we moved back with his family.

That’s not the main point of the story. The real point? I was visiting with a woman a month or two later, sitting in her kitchen. She made a comment about a man she had seen by the side of the road with a sign “Will work for food.”

“Oh,” she said. “Those people just annoy me. Everyone knows you can get a job if you really want one.”

I had to take a really deep breath before I could answer her. And, bless her, she was willing to listen to me.

I wonder if the authors of The Bell Curve ever heard from people like my husband and me? Both of us with MA degrees. Both of us out of work for eight months straight. Both of us wanting work, and neither of us able to find work.

I wonder if some of the current policy-makers have any understanding of “poor” beyond the stereotypes they’ve been fed.

All right, now consider all the things we are learning about Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). Multiple major stressors in childhood rewire the brain to an almost continuous “flight or fight” response, which makes it difficult for the child to function in a school setting.

The more we, as a culture, invest in prenatal and neonatal care for the poor among us and the more we support mothers with young children, the fewer students with ACEs we will have in our classrooms. Then in the long run, the more likely it is that those children will grow up to be well-adjusted, civic-minded, and contributing members of society.