by Brian

This is inspired by Taylor Mali's poem What Teachers Make. 

For a long time I don't think I had a good explanation for why I teach.  I started teaching when I was already in my thirties.  I had done a lot of things, and I was working as a carpenter building a house in November in the Pacific Northwest when I decided I wanted to go back to school to get my teaching certificate.  If you've ever lifted a bundle of wet cedar shakes out of the mud and carried them up a ladder, only to repeat that action a hundred times, you'll understand why.

I remember meeting someone early in my career who asked what I did for a living.  I said "I'm a teacher now."  She said what do you mean now, and I explained that I had been many things and now I was a teacher.  It was what I did, not what I was.  I remember the odd look she gave me.

But as the years went by, and the first class that I had as freshmen graduated and went off to work or college I started to feel a change.  Every so often one of them would write me a note, or send me a card, thanking me for helping them in some small way.  Sometimes they came out of the blue, years later, describing some small but meaningful thing I had done; often a thing I had no memory of.

I've been here 27 years now, and I have kept all those notes.  When I get a little low I pull them out and read them again.  Some of them were written by students who are now the parents of my students.  When I see them at Back to School night, they tell me how glad they are that I am teaching their son or daughter.  Often neither one of us can remember exactly which subject I taught them, but there's a warmth.  We like each other.  I helped them grow up.

So now the answer to what I do is unequivocal:  I am a teacher.  I make a difference!

By Tom

For me, it's the minutia. The trivia. The day-to-day cycle of planning, teaching, assessing and reflection. Doing it all day long. And doing it all over again the next day.

Take last Wednesday, for example. My third graders are learning how to count money. We started our math lesson by reviewing the value of each coin. Then I presented them with a page that listed the prices of a bunch of school supplies. They picked partners and took turns being the customer and the shopkeeper. The customer picked two items, the shopkeeper added up the prices, the customer counted out the cost using play money, and the shopkeeper checked their work. Both students recorded the whole process on their papers. Then they switched roles for the next round. It was a tricky lesson to teach. I had to model the process several times; enough to get them to see how it was done, but not so much that they'd grow bored, stop listening and not know how to do it. During the partner work I had to make another critical decision. At just the right time, I wanted to stop it to see what they could do on their own. It meant watching the clock and watching my students at the same time, ready to call them back to their own seats as soon as they seemed to get it and with just enough time before lunch for them to play a round by themselves.

That lesson went perfectly. I ended up with 27 kids knowing exactly how to count out bills and coins to make exact change. Of course, the last thing we need is a whole generation of shoppers holding the rest of us up at the checkstand while they count coins out from their little rubber coin purses.

For the sake of the rest of us, these people needed to know about making change.

That, then, was Thursday's lesson. The activity was similar, but this time the customer paid in bills only, and the shopkeeper had to count back the change. Counting on with change, however, is harder than counting up; you have to use pennnies first, to get to an "easy number," then nickels and dimes until you can start using quarters. While I was modeling the process, I got the impression that they weren't quite getting it. I decided we wouldn't go into the partner activity on Thursday; they just weren't ready. I made a decision to keep practicing as a whole class and stretching the lesson into a second day.

Good call. They got a little bored with Thursday's activity, but they were totally ready for the partner work on Friday. And when I called them back to their own seats to do a round of "counting on" by themselves, they all demonstrated mastery. I couldn't have been more pleased.

Those three lessons illustrate the complicated dance of teaching. Negotiating the variables of time, curriculum, pacing, and student engagement to maximize learning. It takes detailed planning, good curriculum, careful observation and experience.

It's not easy, and it to an outsider, it might not look very exciting, but when you get it right there's nothing else like it. It's the most fun thing in the world. It's about helping a group of children understand how to do something worthwhile. Effectively and efficiently.

That's teaching. And that's why I teach.

by Brian

Jay Mathews recently wondered if one of the reasons our students do so poorly on high stakes tests in math is because of a poor education in middle school.  I taught math in our middle school for 10 years before returning to our high school, and I have been hesitant to play a blame game with my colleagues.  I think they work just as hard as I do, and in my district I think the teachers are highly qualified. But I think Mathews may be on to something.

He points out that even though the middle school students are required to take state exams there are really no consequences for poor performance.  The 8th grade students who do not meet standard on their math test still end up in my Algebra class the next year.  If we're serious about this accountability issue why start with high school graduation?  Why not tell them they have to stay in 8th grade until they meet standard on the math test?

Or for that matter, why even let them in to the middle school until they are proficient at 5th grade math?  A student can stay in the public school system until they are 21, so what's the hurry?  It's pretty clear that social promotion isn't working in the era of high stakes tests, so let's make them repeat the grade if they don't pass the test.

So I'm with Mathews on blaming the Middle School, but not for the same reason.  Teachers at the middle school level deal with the same issues we all do with regard to student motivation and parental support.  But if I keep getting students who don't have the skills necessary to learn Algebra, then I am going to start blaming the practice of social promotion. 

 
By Tom

I've been back from Pakistan for almost a week now, and as I reflect on some of the differences between us and them, I keep thinking back to a conversation I had with a guy I met outside a conference room. He had these cool shoes on, but they didn't look comfortable.

"I like your shoes," I said, "Are they comfortable?"

"No, they aren't; not after the first hour."

"That's kinda what I thought, just by looking at them."

Then he took the conversation up a notch. "I heard you speak during the panel discussion this morning, and I've got a question about America."

Uh-oh.

"How did you make it across the gap?"

I wasn't really sure which gap he was talking about, but after a few minutes I learned that he was a medical doctor, interested in education and he was talking about the gap between a largely illiterate nation where teachers don't make a living wage and a country where everyone can go to school and where the teachers are well-paid professionals.

This went well beyond conference-hallway small-talk, but I hung in there.

Continue reading →

By Tom

I’ve been in Pakistan now for almost a week, conducting workshops and attending an international education conference. The conference was hosted by Beaconhouse Schools, a private school system based in Lahore that has branches all over Pakistan, as well as several other countries. In the past week I’ve learned an amazing amount about Pakistan in general and their education system in particular:

•  There is no pre-service teacher training in Pakistan. None. You learn it all on the job. Nobody goes to college to become trained as a teacher. In fact, teachers may or may not have gone to college. Most likely, they’ve only been through high school.
• You cannot support a family on a teacher’s salary in Pakistan, which is about $75-$100 per month. If you’re a teacher in Pakistan, you’re a woman who’s either married to a guy who makes good money, or you’re living at home with your parents.
• Unless you teach in a high school. High school teachers make a living wage. But there aren’t very many of them, because there aren’t a whole lot of high school students.
• There are basically two school systems in Pakistan. There’s the private system, which is fairly progressive, or at least heading in that direction, and the public system, which is apparently vastly inferior.
• The public school system is not free. It doesn’t cost much, maybe five bucks a month, but it is prohibitively expensive for a lot of people. Either 5% or 30% of the children go to private schools, depending on who you talk to and the point that they’re trying to make.
• There’s also the Madrassa school system, which nobody likes to talk about.
• Only about 40% of Pakistan’s children actually go to school. Forty percent. It might be twice that high in the bigger cities, but Pakistan is primarily a rural country.
• I met a guy named Muhammad Ayub. He started a school in Islamabad. He teaches at night, after work, during his free time. He was sick of watching kids with nothing else to do, digging through the garbage, trying to help their families survive. His school has no buildings, no desks, no chairs, and no books. It’s a teacher standing in front of a bunch of kids who are sitting outside in the dark, on the ground, writing information onto notebooks. And they’re happy to be there. Some of them have gone on to college. When he spoke at the conference I started to cry. If you want to join me in donating some cash to this guy, his email address is muhammad_ayub13@yahoo.com.
• The Prime minister also spoke at our conference. The attendees were polite and attentive, but they were primarily waiting to hear about the government’s support for education. Nobody cried.
• Writing bulleted lists is a lot easier than real writing; you don’t have to worry about connecting ideas with transitions.
• Teachers complain about the same things in Pakistan as they do in the US: The kids don’t pay attention, the curriculum is too prescriptive, the curriculum isn’t prescriptive enough, there’s not enough time for collaboration and there’s too much time spent collaborating.
• The biggest concern among the teachers at this conference was finding a balance between accountability and a teacher’s freedom and responsibility to teach lessons that are meaningful to his or her specific students. Hmm.
• The food in Pakistan is delicious. Absolutely delicious. Imagine Indian food, only better and slightly spicier. My favorite was the goat brain stew. Be careful, though, because it doesn’t taste nearly as good on the way back up. Trust me.
• The traffic in Lahore is unreal. It consists of cars, trucks, three-wheeled taxis, bicycles, motorcycles and donkey carts engaged in a 50 MPH free-for-all. It literally took me several minutes to figure out which side of the street the traffic was supposed to be on. (It’s the left) I have never seen bolder driving. I actually saw a guy getting a ticket, and I can only imagine what he did to attract that kind of attention.
• I have never worked so hard in my life. Before the conference even started, I spent three full days training 30 teacher leaders. During the conference, it got even more hectic: I presented a two hour session on brain-based learning, I hosted a two-hour discussion session on the future direction for the school system, and I was involved in three panel discussion, one of which I moderated. It was exhausting. But fun.
• Pakistanis are the most beautiful, warm-hearted, hospitable and generous people I have ever met. They are appalled and sickened by the recent violence in their country.

By Tom

Last August, completely out of the blue, I received an invitation to speak at a conference in Pakistan. After I accepted the invitation, my hosts asked me to come a few days early to work with some of their trainers. Long story, short; here I am in Lahore, trying to figure out the cricket game on TV, after a long day of teacher training.

My session today was on different instructional theories; comparing the relative merits of empiricism, behaviorism, progressivism and constructivism. My audience – thirty teachers and administrators – all lined up on the side of constructivism. Constructivism is what they like and it's where they want to go. And apparently, Pakistan views the US as being a constructivist country. Student-centered and relaxed; a place where schools respond to students' natural pace of development. They think we don't rush our children, or force them to do academic tasks that they aren't cognitively or even physically able to do.

That's what they think.

I sadly disavowed them of that notion. America, I told them, used to be a place like that. We used to respect the children we teach and the place they were on the growth continuum. Not anymore. Now we try to cram as much learning as possible into their tiny minds, spending three months teaching what should have taken three years.

And why?

We're moving toward test-centered education. Not student-centered. At least at the systemic level. And why is that? Partly out of reaction to, and competition with, the education systems in other countries. America is racing to become Japan, Finland and Singapore. And Pakistan. Pakistan, meanwhile, is racing to become America. At least the America they thought they were racing towards when the race began.

In Pakistan they have teachers who are trying to tell parents that their children need to learn math at the concrete level before they memorize the times tables and division algorithms. In America we have math trainers preaching less manipulatives and more worksheets.

Weird. Maybe ten years from now, after their curriculum has become totally child-centered and ours totally test-driven, they'll like what they see in our country and we'll like what we see in theirs. And then maybe we'll invite some third grade teacher from Pakistan to come over here to tell us how to become what we used to be ten years ago.

And that poor guy will have to try to figure out baseball.