Education

Writer Dad writes that he will be focusing his thoughts on education this week.  His first post for the week got me rather fired up, even before I got a chance to see the video.

Since I haven’t had much to say here for a long time (first busy, then distracted, then exhausted), I thought I’d use one of my comments to Writer Dad as the springboard for an education-related post of my own.  I wrote (slightly edited):

Education is a system, like a computer is a system.  It is a system in the sense that it depends on multiple, interdependent, functioning components to be useful.

Parents, teachers, students, administrators, lawmakers… these form the system that is our educational process.  In my “system”:

• Parents are too focused on their jobs, divorce proceedings, and mind-altering substances to function well.
• Teachers are too demoralized, cynical, and entrenched in dogmatic curriculum to function well.
• Students are too distracted by bad homes, cell phones, and sexual escapades to function well.
• Administrators are too intimidated by parents, frustrated with teachers, and out of touch with the students to function well.
• Lawmakers are too resentful of their educational experiences, ignorant of the real process of educating young minds, and distracted with other political concerns to function well.

Take a computer system — any computer system — and smash its mouse, keyboard, monitor, CPU, and power supply with a baseball bat.  How useful is it now?

With practically every component of a system broken or damaged, the system cannot be expected to operate.  Education systems are no different… and we are all to blame.

Parents

If you are failing to encourage, discipline, and provide learning support for your student at home, you are the reason your child is failing.

If you aren’t putting even more effort into your child’s education than his teachers do, you have failed your child.

Teachers

If you have stopped caring about your students, you are the reason your students are failing.

If you aren’t trying to make your subject matter relevant to students’ lives and to the world in which they live, you have failed your students.  (I know that sometimes this is difficult, and I know that sometimes it’s practically impossible.  I hope to address these scenarios later.)

Students

If you aren’t paying attention in class and making a sincere and total effort to do what the teacher asks of you, you are the reason you are failing.

Whenever you give up or leave things unfinished, whenever you allow your friends to distract you from learning, and whenever you convince yourself that high school doesn’t matter because it isn’t “the real world,” you have failed yourself (more on that last point in a later post).

Administrators

If you aren’t protecting the teachers’ right to insist upon a strict and orderly learning environment, you are the reason your school’s students are failing.

If you are backing down in the face of an angry parent or whiny child, if you are ignoring issues which distract children from their learning, or if you are dealing with children who break the law at school by slapping them on the wrist, you have failed your school.

Lawmakers

If you aren’t personally visiting schools and interviewing teachers from your constituency before voting on each and every education-related proposal to enter your jurisdiction, you are the reason your constituents’ students are failing.

If you don’t have face-to-face conversations with teachers and administrators in a solid and sincere grass-roots effort to thoroughly understand the issues facing education, or if you choose to ignore educational issues because you think you have other priorities, you have failed education in your country.

So…

I’ll say it again:  Education is a system.  The system’s components are the reason the system fails.

Think this doesn’t apply to you, because you’re not in one of the five categories?  Think again.  If you live in a democratic society, you can take part in the lawmaking process at the very least.

Is it futile?  No, probably not.  How hard will it be to change?  Extremely difficult, since it requires major attitude adjustments for parents, teachers, students, administrators, and lawmakers.  Pointing fingers doesn’t help.

Ask any of the five components of education where the problems lie, and they will choose two or three other components to blame.  No one component is willing to admit that all five components are at fault.

We blame, we fail.  We fail, we blame.  Round and round the bottle goes…

A teacher in my building died this week.

The students mostly found out either Thursday evening or Friday morning. They got the word mainly
from family members or peers, since our administrators decided not to make an official announcement.

Today was hard.

Fortunately, we already had a half-day scheduled to kick off President’s Day weekend.
I’m still grieving. He was a good man and a good teacher.

Today reminded me of old Ebenezer getting his ghostly visits. Ghosts from the past, present, and
future have visited my disheveled mind today.

Past

I was in tenth grade — about 15 or 16 years old — when I heard that my first high school art
teacher had died.

She had been one of my favorite teachers. Her dry observations about art, life, and teaching were
equal parts hilarious and insightful. She bore the stupidity of my classmates with many
longsuffering sighs, and she encouraged me to take advanced art, which was taught by her husband.

One day, on the way home from school, she had a stroke. Her car swerved and collided with other
vehicles. She was placed on life support while doctors tried to deal with the severe bleeding
inside her skull. Two weeks later, they pulled the plug.

Her husband — whose class I was taking at the time — was out for about eight or nine weeks.

Present

I don’t react immediately to tragic news. My tears flow when I witness other people’s reactions,
as though I need to empathize with others to express my own pain.

Students walk down the hall with tears streaming down their cheeks. They quietly sob in class.
They try to comfort their friends with inexperienced, ineffective pats and platitudes.

It’s all I can do to hold myself together, to act professional. I look at the grieving ones as
little as possible, trying to focus my attention on the students who were not in his class or who
are better at hiding their grief and shock.

It’s hard.

Future

Someday my time will end.

I hope that it will be many decades from now… my family tends to be long-lived, frequently
reaching the upper nineties while still sound in mind and body.

On the other hand, it may well happen during my teaching career. Looking at students’ faces today,
I know that I am seeing the same shock, the same grief that other teachers may see after I’ve lost
my sight forever.

As with Ebenezer and his final ghost, I see one possible future haunting the faces of my students
today. Like Ebenezer, I hope that this future does not arrive.

Like Ebenezer, all I can do is accept my own mortality and live my life as best I can.

Please

Please pray for the family, the friends, the co-workers, and — perhaps most of all — the students
of our departed teacher.

(Photo credit and license)

Why do I teach?

I could answer this question with some starry-eyed fluffy-footed flannel-pajama-clad tripe about the youthful enthusiasm and innocence that radiates from the eager young minds as they enter my classroom, their intellectual safe haven, where they can express their love of learning and curiosity about the world without fear of criticism from their peers.

I could, but I do like to include a “shred of truth” with every blog post, and such an answer would pretty much close the door to that.

So… why do I teach?

Because sometimes, in between reminding this girl to watch her language and that boy to stop wasting our time and those kids not to throw things, not ever, in my classroom, especially not 1100-page textbooks from a distance of 20 feet…

…in between being harassed by parents because it’s obviously my fault the kids never turned in their essays or returned their books or learned that sometimes the real world kinda sucks and they’d better get used to it…

…in between the parents who think their 14-year-old should still be reading the Ramona books but never, ever, that Harry Potter witchcraft devil’s work and certainly nothing with cussing and the parents who don’t want their child to learn about the Holocaust or the Civil Rights Movement or any of that other wussy liberal crap I’m trying to shove down their throats…

…in between the administrators who want me to monitor the boys’ bathroom even though I could lose my certificate over it and the state officials who think my students need to know exactly what curriculum standards we’re learning today, even though the standards are written in jargon my students would need college degrees to understand, and due to the very nature of English and Language Arts we’re doing about fifteen standards at once, anyway…

…sometimes, more frequently than you’d expect, a student asks a question or makes a comment that, deliberately or not, leaves me laughing my head off, or that makes me pause and consider something really cool that I’d never thought about before, or that reminds me that a precious few really are interested in learning what I have to teach.

Occasionally, in between the your-boyfriend-snuck-off-with-that-girl drama and the I’m-not-reading-because-Shakespeare-didn’t-ride-bulls-like-me apathy, I even have a former student walking in through my door between classes to tell me how much they enjoyed my class and miss me, especially since now they have that teacher for English and I was way cooler.

Those are nice.  The ones I like even better are the ones who don’t say I’m cooler, but instead say I taught them more than most of their teachers.

The times I like most of all, the times that are so rare that I almost forget they happen at all, are when a student walks in on a teacher work day (when no students are supposed to be at school) and thanks me for all I’ve done for them.

I think that’s happened about three or four times in the last three years.

Once, this happened while a parent was whining to me out in the hall about something for which her sweet angel really shouldn’t have been penalized (yeah, right).  The ex-student who had come to visit stood around awkwardly for a minute before walking into my classroom and scrounging up paper and a pen.  She wrote for a while, then left with a quiet wave.

When my entirely calm, pleasant, denser-than-a-neutron-star demeanor completely frustrated the upset parent, who stormed off in search of an administrator (who fussed at her for wasting my time, heh heh), I entered my classroom.  On top of my desk was a note.

Coach Mac, Mr. MacOdys, (sorry)
You taught me more about English than most of my English teachers ever have, and along the way I learned more history than any of my high school history teachers even tried to teach.

You encouraged me to work hard and told me you were proud of me.

Thank you for inspiring me and being the best teacher I’ve ever had.

I think I’ll make it to retirement, yeah.

(Photo credit and license)

Training is key.

There was a fight in my hall today.  It’s the first genuine fight I’ve witnessed since becoming a teacher; most of them tend to happen elsewhere on campus.When I was a student, I was completely nonaggressive.  I never got in a fight; in fact, I never provoked anyone to the point where he tried to start one.  I also never played any sport or took part in any other physical extracurricular activity.  I can count on one hand the number of times I play-wrestled with my friends.

As a result, the prospect of having to break up a student fight invariably leaves me shaking with tension.  Heroically charging in and separating two beefy farm boys who are trying to kill each other doesn’t exactly fit with my personality.

On the other hand, I am more or less obligated to do so.  If I stand by and allow Billy Bob and Jimbo Joe to crack each other’s bones, I could be considered neglectful of my duty to maintain a safe learning environment.

All of this flashed through my mind before I reluctantly charged… er, stumbled… heroically forward.

The blur zipping past me, fortunately, was the football coach from across the hall.

I could say that Billy Bob went tumbling head over heels in one direction as Jimbo Joe slid chin-first across the floor in the other.  I could, but that would be a more obvious exaggeration than I generally like in my writing.

Suffice it to say that all I had to do was escort Billy Bob, now looking decidedly more like a B.B., to the office.

And yet… even so, as I returned to my classroom, restored order, and began writing vocabulary terms on the board, my hand was shaking.

Are you ready for some down and dirty deep-fried fisticuffs? I know I am! — Alton Brown

Two new Wordpress errors:  if you see the “financial advice” post appear in your feed, it’s not supposed to have gone public yet… and if you see this post doing anything weird, it’s because Wordpress is giving me fits with posting at the correct times.

Now that I’ve finished whining, on to the post…

“It wasn’t written like I thought it would be,” he said.

“How so?” I asked, although I had warned him the book isn’t what most people expect.

“I thought it would be written from Dracula’s point of view,” he said. “Instead it’s written from Jonathan’s.”

Written fr… what?

Then I remembered which generation I was dealing with, and it all made sense.

Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series is now at the height of its popularity (the cynic in me expects the books to be “so yesterday” in a year or two). In case your personal world has been teenager-free for the last twelve months or so, Twilight is about a teenage girl named Bella Swan who falls in love with Edward Cullen, who happens to be a vampire.

Part of me is rolling its proverbial eyes right now.

Part of me wants to send Meyer a thank-you note for getting teens to read.

The English teacher in me is taking full advantage of the situation by pushing my students to read Wuthering Heights, which (according to Wikipedia) is Bella’s favorite book, and Dracula, the granddaddy of all modern vampire novels.

So this obliging young man had paid a visit to our school’s media center and checked out a copy of Bram Stoker’s novel. About a quarter of the way through the book, he commented that he was surprised the narrative wasn’t from Dracula’s point of view.

It’s a Victorian vampire novel, I thought. Why on Earth would it be written from Dracula’s point of view?

Then I realized my confusion was the result of a generation gap. From this fifteen-year-old’s perspective, it made perfect sense for Dracula’s voice to carry the narrative forward. After all, teens and vampires have a lot in common.

…Now, after I make that statement, your reaction indicates your age. If you’re old enough, you’re thinking something like, “Did he just say that? Holy crap… he really doesn’t like teenagers, does he?”

If you’re young enough, on the other hand, you’re thinking, “Well, duh, I mean, vampires rock. I wish I could be one!”

Think about it. Vampires get to stay out all night, sleep all day, and wear all black. Vampires captivate their prey with forceful and often rather sexy charisma. Vampires are, like, dark and gothic and wicked. They’re the rock stars of the undead.

On the other hand, Stoker’s narrator (Jonathan Harker) is a bloomin’ lawyer. Not. Cool. At. All.

My student was fully enjoying the novel, however, and I expect he finished it over Christmas break. Too bad I couldn’t be there when he encountered the character Renfield, who is possibly the coolest vampire-groupie ever.

Never read Bram Stoker’s Dracula? As I told my student (and as he discovered), it’s really not what most people expect. Modern vampire fiction is mostly a pale, cliché-ridden, and rather juvenile imitation of the original. Go buy it… or if you’re strapped for cash, Project Gutenberg has text and audio downloads for free. So you really have no excuse.

Likewise, you might be surprised by Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights if you haven’t picked it up yet. Project Gutenberg can help you out again with the text, but you might have to visit LibriVox to get the audio download.

Now, go read.

One thing vampire children are taught is, never run with a wooden stake. — Jack Handey