By Mark

It is wonderful when businesses offer ways to support effective teaching. People can speculate about the advancement of agendas, but anything that can offer opportunities to help teachers hone their craft and thus increase student achievment is a good thing.

I'm sure you've seen these commercials from Exxon Mobil about supporting science and math education:

Let's solve this: I like that. However, one piece of rhetoric is more troubling: "Let's raise academic standards across the nation" (00:15).

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By Mark

An opportunity arose about two months ago. It would have meant less work, more pay. It would have meant not losing evenings and weekends to grading papers and planning. When I sat to do my pro/con t-chart to help my decision making, the list of reasons why I should take the new job was longer than the list of reasons why I shouldn't.

Sometimes quality outweighs quantity, though. More money, more time, less "work": those ought to have been very appealing.

There was but one reason I chose to stay in the classroom and stay in education…and it is a selfish reason:

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By Mark

I do believe that ADD and ADHD are real. However, I do not believe they are as prevalent as the diagnoses suggest. A recent article in the New York Times (online) took this concern to a new dimension, for me at least, with the revelation that students, in response to the high stakes and pressures for academic achievement, have taken to abusing the stimulants typically prescribed for ADD/ADHD.

As troubling as this drug use is, it is a symptom of a much larger problem in our society and our education system: we are test obsessed and we have created a subset of society for whom there is prestige and glory in being over-scheduled and over-stressed rather than in being intelligent.

So here's the question: who is it that makes school so hard that kids turn to these measures?

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By Mark

I'm not quite ready for the paradigm shift to year-round-school. However, like many teachers, I am concerned with that "summer brain drain" that inevitably happens when younguns are separated from the oppressive tyranny of teachers for the months of July and August… I don't know about you, but the "three month summer vacation" is long gone where I live. June is for school.

It struck me yesterday (as my ninth grade students were having one of those so-good-it-gives-the-teacher-goosebumps discussions of how various literary elements and author's decision making influence the manifestation of unversal themes) how incredibly far my students have come as critical thinkers. With four days of class before the final exam–then a long stretch with no regular exercise of that mental muscle–my worry crystallized sharply.

Of course, I encourage my students to always have a book they are reading for fun–fiction preferably, but a good biography or nonfiction tome is equally wonderful. In my close-of-the-year parent mailer, I encourage small bites of learning: car-ride discussions of books, online free math games that actually involve computation not monkeys shooting darts at balloons, setting up routine family trips to the library. As we might assume, the students who get this kind of family support and structure are not necessarily the ones who need it most.

What do schools do, or what can they do, or what should they do to keep the minds of students growing over the summer?

By Mark

At the close of each year, I always come up with some kind of message–like we all do–to the students who are about to leave my classroom. I posted my message to the class of 2010, ruminated about the significance of the ceremony in 2011, and have been mulling what to share with the class of 2012. Here it goes:

This year I want to address the lies perpetuated by this graduation "celebration." 

I'm talking about the blatant lies and excess flattery penned in cliche'd almost-rhymes in the cards you have been or will be receiving from friends and family over the next few weeks. Thankfully, like much of the homework reading assigned in the last several years you won't be reading those either. I know you'll shake them for cash, check the envelope just in case, then hand them to mom for filing in your memory book.

Let's start with the most seemingly innocuous: "Congratulations, graduate! You did it!"

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By Mark

By nature, I am a pessimistic skeptic. I am a glass-half-empty-because-it-is-cracked-and-leaking kind of person. But, if there's one thing I believe, it is that a person should, no must, be willing to adjust his or her beliefs when faced with new information. 

Thus, though I was a TPEP skeptic at first, as I have learned more, my attitude has shifted.

Thus, though I was a PLC supporter at first, as I have learned more, my attitude has shifted.

I think resistance to a new acronym, doctrine, or mandate is healthy and important. The "new" must be vetted, examined, deconstructed, and challenged in order to become worthy of acceptance. The key there, though, is that if something new can be proved to have merit upon close and level-headed inspection, then it can and should be accepted.

Yet, it is staggering how much energy some people invest into resisting: resisting change, resisting what is new, and even resisting learning that might threaten or contradict their initial knee-jerk and not-fully-informed reaction to the "new."

Case in point: making copies.

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