Author Archives: Mark Gardner

“Jersey Shore” is not real.

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Current Affairs, Education, Life in the Classroom, Literacy, Social Issues, Television

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No, I'm not kidding. It isn't real. Those people auditioned, were hired, relocated into that gaudy house, and then filmed. The episodes aren't real, either… No, I'm not kidding. Those episodes are edited together based on a storyline the writers create by putting The Situation and his crew into situations where the writers know how they will react. It isn't "real."

It is amazing how much convincing it has taken to prove to my freshmen that the Jersey Shore is not real. These are the same kids who have no problem suspending disbelief long enough to just accept that Peter Parker can climb walls when he wears the right spandex suit but who cannot just accept that the animals on Animal Farm speak English and build a windmill.

These conversations help to illustrate a critical shift which ought to be happening in literacy instruction in American schools: rather than studying literary works, we need to be studying literary processes.

  • We need to study the process by which 360 hours of Jersey Shore footage gets edited down to 44 minutes for a one-hour weekly episode.
  • More importantly, we need to understand the process of acculturation and normalization which occurs in a viewer when they watch entertainment labeled as reality.
  • We need to study the process by which lighting, angle, score and juxtaposition are used by news organizations to communicate a message beyond the news.
  • More importantly, we need to study the subtle and not-so-subtle biases which shape the decision-making about what makes air and what doesn't.
  • We need to help young readers learn to discern which sources on the internet are valid and which are not, and even what we mean by "valid."

Are these lessons more or less important than Shakespeare or great novels and poetry?

As with the television news, whose producers must pare hours upon hours of worthy news into 20-22 minutes of air time (including sports and weather), when we must choose what literacy lessons to keep and what to cull for our limited amount of instructional time, on what should we base that decision?

 

Building a Hybrid Virtual School

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Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy, Life in the Classroom, Teacher Leadership, Web/Tech

Qbqonw By Mark

A colleague of mine posed an interesting proposition lately. Like many school districts, mine is apparently toying with the idea of a hybrid virtual/brick-and-mortar kind of school-within-a-school. The idea is that the curriculum would be administered face-to-face when necessary and via web interface when necessary, so this colleague of mine was casting out a few lines to see if any of us would bite.

I've voiced interest in participating, but have concerns and questions. 

A few years ago, I was part of starting a small learning community "school-within-a-school" of sorts in my high school, and it is still operating, but that endeavor was small by comparison with what my colleague has in mind. I am wondering what models of this kind of hybrid exist, what are the benefits or shortcomings, and what the best course would be.

I'm definitely in the learning stages here. Sure, I can Google it or read some journal articles, but that only gives part of the story.

So, SFS readers and contributors: what do you know, or what advice do you have about building this kind of educational opportunity? If you are a brick-and-mortar teacher, what concerns would you have for a hybrid or virtual school? What hopes would you have?

Grades

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Assessment, Current Affairs, Education, Life in the Classroom

L0QOcB By Mark

Every grading period, I engage in an odd ritual. I look over all of my classes and tally how many of each letter grade I've posted on the progress reports. This year got me nervous, as there were an awful lot of A's and only about seven F's out of my five classes of freshmen. 

I think this habit of mine emerged a few years ago when I was accused of "inflating" grades when too many of my students were successful (earning B's and A's) and not enough were failing. Ironically, that accusation of inflation occurred immediately after I had begun implementing classroom intervention strategies aimed at reducing the number of students failing my class (which had been the complaint the year before: too many D's and Fs).

This is one of the debates-that-never-end in education: what is the function of the grade? Is it to demonstrate accomplishment of a learning target? Is it to demonstrate compliance with deadlines and classroom expectations? What about the kid who bombs every chapter quiz when we read Animal Farm, but who spends every afternoon for two weeks with me after school preparing for the final test–which he aces? Should he still be penalized for ten abyssmal chapters of poor performance even though he was able to demonstrate his knowledge and understanding in the end? What about the student who bombs the homework assignments in Algebra, but comes in for extra help and ends up flying high on the unit test? 

In a meeting recently, my building principal asked that we teachers consider whether our grades were measuring behavior or achievement. 

Later that same day, a good friend and colleague of mine shared a revelation he discovered from a guest speaker who came to visit with his department. That guest speaker, Dr. Frank Wang, shared many worthwhile ideas, but the one which seemed to resonate with my colleague was the very example I mention above: what if a kid struggles during the unit, logs a few F's in the gradebook, but ends up showing mastery by the time the summative assessment rolls around? Dr. Wang suggested that the constant ongoing entering-of-grades in effect de-values the learning that is the ultimate goal of education but instead rewards kids who "get it" quickly and penalizes kids who "get it" a little later than others–even though they still eventually "get it."

I'm wondering: are the letters A, B, C, D, and F part of the problem in education today? 

The Minutes Add Up

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MvCCs0 By Mark

I was talking to a good friend of mine recently (he happens to be the dean of students at my high school) about a student we were working together to "figure out." 

Being friends as we are, the conversation meandered a bit, and we ended up talking about my oldest son's current experience as a new kindergartner. I mentioned that he already had "homework," which was essentially him reading to us (or us reading to him) which we'd then sign off on and send back to school with him. It amounted to no more than twenty minutes per day, which we folded into the minutes we'd be doing reading with him anyway. 

As a former math teacher and a much more linear person than I am, my friend steered the conversation back to our current ninth-grader: he pointed out that my son was getting two hours a week of outside learning time because he had parents who were willing to set aside the time to read with him and do his "homework" with him. We both lamented the reality that a few kindergartners up or down the street probably didn't have parents who were able to invest the kind of time we could as a family. And then my friend asked the question I hadn't really thought all that much about:

What about the ninth graders who began school nine years ago as those kindergartners up or down the street who had no one reading with them?

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Parent Partnerships

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P5v2IB By Mark

How should a school–or a single teacher for that matter–go about forging meaningful partnerships with parents? For the first time in my life, I'm on both sides of that coin: I'm a veteran teacher and now also the dad to a kindergartner. I have worked hard in the past to make connections with the parents of my students, but if I look closely at those "connections," it comes in pretty basic forms.

I teach high school and I am looking for new ways to engage parents in a meaningful way. While I'll soon be working a booth at my son's elementary school carnival, I don't see that kind of avenue for "parent involvement" in my high school. (And that's not really the kind of involvement I'm thinking of, though a fundraiser for a noble cause.)

At the secondary level, what does it really mean to "partner" with parents in a meaningful way?

The “Culture of Mean”

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V3enKa By Mark

The Associated Press recently posted a story about a string of deaths at Mentor High School in Ohio. These deaths were of teenagers: three suicides and one overdose. Families of all four attribute these deaths to the devastating impact of bullying in the schools and what was coined as a "culture of mean" at Mentor High. 

Parents and critics were quick to admonish the kids who committed the bullying–and were as quick to attack the teachers and administration. Is that justified? I don't know the situation, so despite my gut reaction, I cannot say that teachers or administration did their damnedest to prevent bullying and I cannot say that they were in fact incompetent and unresponsive.

What I can say, though, is that the "culture of mean" is not just a Mentor High issue. Ironically, all you have to do is peruse the reader comments after any of the articles about Mentor High to see that the "culture of mean" doesn't need a high school hallway or cafeteria to rear its head.

What, then, is the role of a school in a case like this? The culture of mean is all but endorsed by how "freedom of speech" is exercised. One poster under an article played devil's advocate: if it is protected speech for the Westboro Baptist Church to stand at the funeral of a soldier and shout ephithets at his grieving family, then why isn't the bully's right to bully in the halls of a high school likewise protected? 

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Someone Please Give the Whole Story

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Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy, Social Issues, Television

CddunUBy Mark

I am just old enough to remember Paul Harvey, and the "rest of the story."

Eve Rifkin, at our Arizona partner Stories from School has helped flesh out the "rest of the story" on that annual USNews "Top Schools" list, and it is as if she was reading my mind.

Between Waiting for Superman, Oprah, Education Nation, Obama's charge to raise the bar, and the resulting present (and I pessimistically argue ephemeral) empassioned focus on education in this country, it is clear that the whole story has not been told in far too many instances. Here is my take on the untold halves of the many stories told in the last couple of weeks…the rest of the story, if you will:

1. Unions oppose merit pay not to protect lazy teachers but because no one can come up with a fair and reliable way to assess teaching "merit." Issue number one: test scores don't work because not all teachers are in tested disciplines.

2. Those other countries who post great education stats? Their systems are different than ours. Some screen out special education kids. Some have separate vocational tracks which are conveniently not part of their data. Many in those systems lament the fact that the kids they produce are test-takers, not thinkers.

3. Weighing myself will not make me lose weight…I've being weighing in for years and the number is only going the wrong way. Testing kids more will not make them learn. In fact, testing actually takes up instructional time, the loss of which not surprisingly has a negative effect on test performance.

4. American schools held up as models of success always have the following by comparison to the mainstream: extra funding or an enrollment screen or both. These models are neither replicable nor sustainable in other schools unless those schools also get extra funding or an enrollment screen or both. 

5. Every child can learn, but not every child will. To blame that solely on teachers or on students is yet another heinous oversimplification of the complex problems facing education, educators, students, and families today. 

The rest of the story? I'm sure there's even more. I'm tired of hearing half-stories in the sound bytes mainstream America turns to as it's source of facts.

Merit Pay is Not the Answer

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Trophy Image 3By Mark

My email inbox this last week has been peppered by NBPTS SmartBrief articles with distinctly contradictory messages. First, there was the report from Tennessee that a three-year longitudinal study on merit-pay in Nashville revealed that merit pay had no impact on student learning. Then, quick to follow, was a rebuttal from an administrator in Texas arguing that merit-pay does impact student performance. And, lo and behold, Friday, I read that the feds ponied up $422 million for use in teacher merit-pay initiatives. Merit pay is certainly a "pretty" idea and a publicly palatable solution, so no wonder we're throwing millions on the bandwagon.

Personally, ten years into this business, I don't want more money for the work I do. More pay won't give me what I really need to be a better teacher. I'm dealing with finite resources here, and despite what Oprah might want America to believe about all educators, I'm not a "lazy teacher" who leaves promptly at 3:00pm to munch bon-bons during a leisurely afternoon and who has nothing better to do than complain about not being paid enough (Oprah, why all the hate?). More pay won't motivate me to work harder…since that implies that I'm not working hard enough as it is. Tempting me with more pay simply won't make me better at my job.

But give me more of something else and I guarantee you'll see a better teacher.

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Banned Books Week

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Books, Life in the Classroom, Literacy, Parent Involvment

Source: American Library Association (click for source site) By Mark

It is one of my favorite times of year… Banned Books Week is September 25th through October 2nd. The American Library Association (click on the photo to go to their site) promotes the freedom of choice by encouraging libraries across the nation to celebrate every American's right to choose not to read controversial books.

Notice that I didn't emphasize "every American's right to choose what they read." When I consider the titles which have been challenged or banned over the years, what I see is not just the loss of a choice to read a book but the loss of the choice to not read. There is a reason I haven't read Mein Kampf and haven't watched Natural Born Killers. These are not the same reasons I choose not to read Twilight or watch, well, Twilight, but the fact is that I have the right to choose not to consume these texts. That decision was not made for me. Sure, I agree that every student's parents have the right to say that a text is not appropriate for their kid and ask for an alternative if a text is assigned in a class. 

But, there are only two parents who have the right to say what text is not appropriate for my kid.

Appropriately, this year's theme for Banned Books Week is "Think for yourself and let others do the same."

It's particularly fun this year that Banned Books Week corresponds with my teaching of George Orwell's Animal Farm. Down on the farm, literacy is wielded like a weapon. Those who are literate easily overpower those who are illiterate, essentially enslaving them by controlling information (hello FoxNews). A great Orwellian theme, and one to which we ought always pay close attention.


As a side note: There's a very intriguing interactive map at the ALA press-kit site which uses Googlemaps to tag exemplars of challenged or banned books. Some of the titles and reasons are rather surprising.

Classroom Management: Fear vs. Understanding

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Education, Education Policy, Life in the Classroom, Parent Involvment

Gman By Mark

I have a three-year-old son at home who is that child whose behavior is my karmic payback for the times I mouthed off to my parents. He's a boundary-tester and an eye-lash-batting innocent cherub for whom consequences like time out and taking away of toys have no influence on behavior. Though I regret it, there have been times when the worst of me has come out, and this 32-year-old ends up shouting at that 3-year-old.

And then he cries and cries and I feel horribly guilty.

But usually it changes his behavior, at least for a while. The same results cannot be said for a stint in time-out.

I was venting my frustrations to my dad this last fourth of July when he mentioned that behavior changes only result from one of two things: fear or understanding. I don't know if he discovered this on his own or if he learned this from some workshop, but it rings very true. My dad is a well-respected educator who taught for over three decades, served in the military, and has even volunteered in prisons to teach math to inmates. He made me realize that if I want to influence my toddler's behavior, I should aim for understanding. My son needs to understand why it's not okay to punch his brother or jump off the dining room table. Sometimes a lesson is learned the hard way (he hasn't leapt off the back of the couch even once since that trip to the ER with bashed-in teeth) but there are many other lessons I'm having a hard time teaching him simply because there are a lot of things a three-year-old just isn't capable of understanding yet.

There are obvious analogies to teaching. 

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