Teacher in a Strange Land

Bestseller: They Only Get What They Deserve

I have been fooled before. Back in college, all the girls in my dorm were devouring Love Story, admiring plucky, foul-mouthed Jenny and secretly wishing to find their own Ivy League hottie with a trust fund (which—trust me—was a stretch for girls raised in the flat farmlands of mid-Michigan). By the time the well-thumbed copy was passed to me (with the spine broken at the scene where Oliver-n-Jenny studied philosophy and Renaissance polyphony while intertwined on the couch…sigh), I could not wait to read it.

Major letdown. Not just the insipid, teen-romance writing—it was the sloppy thinking. Love means having to say you’re sorry pretty much daily. And wasn’t it cheating to kill off the main character rather than deal with the inevitable dreary stint in an ugly concrete apartment complex while the formerly flush Oliver IV paid off crushing law school debts?

My roommates thought I was a snob and a cynic. By the time Bridges of Madison County was the book du jour, and the talk of B lunch in the faculty lounge, I knew better than to publicly assert that even Clint Eastwood couldn’t save this turkey. I’m OK. You’re OK?  Not OK, as far as I was concerned. Nobody ever moved my cheese. And don’t get me started on Da Vinci Code. 

Here’s the thing: I actually like romance, mystery, pop psychology, and pulp fiction of all kinds. Maybe I am just Not Like Other People—the book-buying segment, anyway. I’ve developed a reflexive bias against best-sellers and books that are recommended by too many people. And so it was that I decided not to read Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell’s latest foray into looking at patterns and data that reveal unexpected things about our habits and beliefs.

I liked Gladwell’s Tipping Point, but didn’t see it as revelatory gospel. I read his piece in The New Yorker last December which started a mini-tsunami of blogs defending or refuting the idea that teachers were born, not made, so meticulously screening prospective teachers and educating them in pedagogy was a giant waste of resources. I thought he missed—totally—the point of all the research done on “with-it-ness,” the human qualities that make teachers effective. Suggesting that we hire almost anyone to teach, then let them sink or swim depending on their innate ability to give kids useful feedback, keep the good ones and boot the rest, didn’t sound like an outrageous, brain-stretching concept to me; it sounded all too much like what we actually do.

Last week, I found myself with a delayed flight, dead iPod and no reading material. I popped for a hardback copy of Outliers. And I liked it—I really, really liked it. And thought that the key ideas in the book have serious ramifications for lots of traditional schooling practices.

His data on the kids who make the top hockey teams was priceless (and vindication for parents who red-shirt their kindergartner, hoping to make him the biggest kid in the next class). As a musician, I totally get the concept of 10,000 hours of practice trumping identified talent; the most promising kids in the 6^th grade beginner band were routinely outstripped in the 8^th grade by kids who had a stronger desire to be a great players and lugged their horns home to practice every weekend. Gladwell's stories about regional differences and cultural-ethnic heritage are ideas embedded in stereotype—but also observable in data. That differences between spoken words for numbers between Asian and Western nations might impact the way children think about mathematical operations makes perfect sense.

And this:

"Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write people off as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. We overlook just how large a role we all play—and by “we,” I mean society—in determining who makes it and who doesn’t. We could easily take control of the machinery of achievement. But we don’t. And why? Because we cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don’t matter at all."

Gladwell spends most of the book—using layers of evidence and data—proving that point, which has even more profound, even damning, implications for the things we take for granted in American education. All those tests we give to second graders, to figure out who is “gifted?” All the honors classes, the scholarships, the awards, the select choir and the rigorously winnowed travel teams? Not about talent or ability at all, even if we were able to truly measure talent and ability.

Recommended reading, especially for successful people who see their advantages as 100% deserved.

Don't Know Much About History

Our home is built on a double lot--two acres of woodland, in a rolling and heavily wooded subdivision that was once the uncultivated back end of a 300-acre farm. Behind our house, there is a wide path through thick, mature woods, leading to a small clearing. In the clearing, there is an old tree with an odd shape; it's a large tree, but it was clearly bent--nearly broken--when it was young, and it points in a sharp angle away from the clearing. I was walking through our woods with a friend who is an amateur historian once, and she pointed to the tree. Indians used to do that to trees, she said--they cracked  and bent thin new tree trunks in directional patterns, so when the tree healed, it would become a natural marker, pointing the way toward water, perhaps, or a safe route. She was sure our tree had been a signpost at one time. Which might also explain the existing broad path through the woods.

This made sense to me. We live a couple of miles from the old Grand River Trail, an ancient Indian transit route running from the southeast corner of the Michigan mitten, north and west to Lake Michigan. The trail was well-known for centuries, later becoming a plank road, then Grand River Avenue, much of which is still in use. Interstate 96 now roughly parallels the old trail.

This bit of informed speculation was enormously exciting to me. There were Indians here, a couple hundred years ago--and they changed the course of my backyard! I spent some time wandering around in the woods, trying to picture this spot in, say, 1776. It was a difficult task, with lawn mowers buzzing, the wafting smell of grilled burgers and clearly visible vinyl storage sheds in two adjacent yards. Still, it was a thrilling exercise of imagination, much more interesting than the stuff I read in fourth grade about Our Indian Heritage.

Most human endeavors have a long, layered history. There's a wonderful passage in Jack Finney's novel Time and Again, where a scientist explains that time is not linear--that what makes today, February 14, 2009, different from a Valentine's Day in 1922 or 1776 is not the passage of time, since time, as Einstein explained it, is not extinguished. What makes today 2009 is literally the millions of details that have accrued and things that have changed--technologically, physically and in human knowledge and beliefs.

The bent tree marker is there because we liked the woods too much to cut them down, but even if we had leveled our tiny forest to match our neighbors' wide lawns, that tree and its marking function are still there, metaphysically. There are places on earth, including human settlements and edifices, that have changed very little. Medieval cathedrals exist as reminders of timeless human ingenuity in the service of God, even when they're surrounded by glass and steel boxes. Nothing can ever be destroyed--only changed. That's the first law of thermodynamics.

And so it is in education. I think about this a lot, as sputtering over the economic stimulus goes on. Will it be good for education to get an infusion of cash--or will all the work of the group of people calling themselves reformers (think about that etymology) be lost if enough money flows into the system to undo their "efficiencies?" Is the reason that grand reforms don't often achieve their goals due to the fact that there are universal, immortal truths that lie under the process of education--and the rest is just inconsequential layers of change? Are the things we vehemently argue and agonize over, from the value of charter schools to the right way to prepare teachers, just ephemera, in the long run?

Here's what I think, on February 14, 2009 (subject to change, of course):

• Education, the expansion of knowledge and perspective, is a universal good.
  

• Every student I ever had, more than 4000 over 30 years, learned something, which is proof to me that all children can learn, even when they think they don't want to learn.
  

• The conceptual cornerstone under education is that people learn from other people, not from things, programs or policies. This used to be a direct process but we have put layers of technology, from the printing press to the idea of "class size," in the way of this simple idea of knowledge transmission. 
  

• You can never go wrong when you invest in education.
  

• And...buried in every policy-maker, researcher, opinion leader or taxpayer is a student, and what they think about education depends largely on who they were when they were young and in school. Some people see education through a haze of fond nostalgia--school as center of learning, important rite of passage, incubator of helpful life alliances. Others are less sanguine--school was not a place of order or intellectual nurture, life's important lessons happening elsewhere. And some people were just trying to fit in, not giving much thought now or then to what education might truly achieve in a free society, what might be learned from the metaphorical bent trees scattered over the educational landscape. Some of us embrace and build on the things we were taught, as children; others push back.

Who were you, as a student? And how has it impacted the way you see public education today? Even straight-laced conservatives may have been trying out a different persona, when they were young adults. Right, Norm?

Pretty  cosmic questions, I admit. Happy Valentine's Day.

Teach Your Children Well

I’ve been living in Christmasland for the past few days, a place where all education policy battles, not to mention my personal worldly cares, have been swept away by family, music, laughter and carbohydrates. Laissez le bon temps roulez.

But today, I made a trek back to the Core Knowledge Blog, curious to see what CKB commenters, generally a cerebral and rational bunch, had made of Fred Strine’s guest blogger post on December 21: 1984 Now.

I have run across Strine’s seething tirades on the failures of contemporary educational practice before. Whenever they pop up, they’re quickly detected and distributed by a certain genre of ed-blogger—those whose life goal is proving, once and for all, that public education in America went straight to hell somewhere around 1965. For them, Strine is the educational equivalent of a Thomas Sowell: he “gets it” and is willing to sell out his teacher brethren for the opportunity to publicly rant.

In his post, Strine notes that he is an English teacher, with 36 years in the classroom. Two things are immediately apparent; first—and this ought to be obvious to anyone who actually attended school—thirty-six years of teaching may make you exceptionally experienced, but they don’t necessarily make you an effective teacher. You can respect Strine’s long tenure, but there is no guarantee that he is a wise and perceptive observer, or correct in his assessment of what goes on in contemporary schooling.

Second, for a person who spent three and a half decades red-penciling student essays, it’s difficult to ascertain exactly what content points Strine is trying to hammer home in this article, and what evidence proves they’re true. He is apoplectic about so many things—bad grammar, ignorant young teachers, educational jargon, calculators, rampant cheating, self-esteem and progressivism in education, which he dates back more than a century. Even the metaphorical literary reference to Orwell’s 1984 doesn’t really work—I’m guessing that many thoughtful educators today would position federal testing mandates as Big Brother, and handy phrases such as “scientifically based research” or “no child left behind” as newspeak. One wonders: should we simply go back to those good old  pre-progressive days when 12% of the population attended high school, studying Latin, rhetoric and logic?

Comments on 1984 Now ranged from wry verbal chuckling—who is this curmudgeon?—to empathy from those also trying valiantly to uphold time-honored principles of good grammar and composition, to those who see any anti-teacher post as an opening to get in more dumb-and-lazy-teacher digs, exhorting America to wake up. Before it’s too late, of course.

A screed like Strine’s is not required to end with policy implications or suggestions for making American schools better, but an author’s credibility is enhanced when he can sketch out some concrete ideas for addressing such egregious shortcomings. Anyone with a 36-year commitment to teaching surely has thought seriously about changes that would improve education in America. Something better than “let’s get back to a well-rounded, grounded education for all.” Ever met anyone who did not believe that every American child deserves a good-quality, comprehensive education? Me, neither. Nor do I believe that there was once a golden era of educational superiority.

I have known many, many Fred Strines in my own 31 years in the classroom. Some of them were my oldest and best teacher buddies. And I am sympathetic to teachers who pursue an unending quest for structure, rigor, discipline and depth in curriculum and instruction (which are inseparable, in a well-run academic program). With an average class size of 60+ students, I am also a great believer in direct instruction. I just don’t think you raise the educational bar via scattershot attacks on colleagues, students, parents, pedagogical strategies and irritating verbiage.

I went to ratemyteachers.com (the existence of which is proof of the apocalypse to some) to see how Fred Strine fared with his students. I wasn’t surprised to see that he gets pretty good marks—there are lots of students who appreciate a teacher with high standards and strong content knowledge. Most of them see Mr. Strine as a fairly easy grader, too (smiling)—and a couple do not seem to have absorbed his lessons on the use of the apostrophe, or the past tense of certain verbs, such as “teach.” C’est la vie, Mr. Strine. You did your best.