Teacher in a Strange Land

Contented Cows

My favorite professor at Michigan State (known locally as "Moo U") was fond of telling his grad students that researchers should just explain what they found in their studies, and resist the urge to add specific policy implications. Good research should stand on its own, he said--and determining What It All Means was the reader's job. 

Cynic that I am, I would add that readers should draw their own conclusions without input from research funders, as well--whose strategic fingerprints often turn up in the policy implications section of glossy, graphics-laden reports.

Public Agenda's fascinating new report, Teaching for a Living: How Teachers See the Profession Today, divides teachers into three loose groups--the disheartened (40%), the contented (37%) and the idealists (23%). Discussing the report with a group of teachers in New York this week, one teacher noted that she is frequently idealistic, disheartened and contented in the space of a single day--but we generally agreed that the data and characterizations squared with our prima facie impressions about our teacher colleagues. Some are passionate believers in using education to change the world, some have settled into situations where they have support and resources, and feel confident that they're efficacious. And some, unfortunately, see little to be optimistic about--poor working conditions, poor leadership, and poor results.

What struck me in the Education Week article about Teaching for a Living was the summary of policy implications:

Are the Idealists the best prospects for high-needs schools and for reinvigorating the profession, and what do school leaders need to do to retain them in the field? Given the Idealists’ passion for improving their students’ lives, how can administrators ensure that they have the skills and support to fulfill that goal? More than a third of Idealists voiced a desire to move eventually into other jobs in education. How does the field respond to those aspirations? The Disheartened pose a different challenge. Some may be ill-fitted to the job and ready to move on, but how should the field encourage and support their transition? Others may be good teachers trapped in dysfunctional schools and, in the right environment, might change their views and become Idealists.

Which group is missing in this analysis?

Why would we want to convert disheartened teachers into firebrands, especially since idealistic teachers in the survey were overwhelmingly young and frequently admitted that they weren't interested in teaching as a long-term career? The thing about idealists is that they burn out--or they become pragmatic, understanding that changing the world happens slowly, but is worth the effort.

Maybe giving the satisfied and confident teachers a bovine label--contented--was intentional. 

Public Agenda has a reputation for solid, non-ideological research and thoughtful analysis. Here's the teaser for the report, on their own web page:

Two out of five of America’s 4 million K-12 teachers appear disheartened and disappointed about their jobs, while others express a variety of reasons for contentment with teaching and their current school environments, new research by Public Agenda and Learning Point Associates shows.

Compare that to Education Week's opener for a similar report published in February--the "MetLife Survey of the American Teacher: Past, Present and Future:"

Teachers’ views on their profession have become markedly more positive over the past quarter century, at least partially validating the widespread school-improvement efforts of the period, concludes a retrospective survey report released this week by MetLife Inc.

Sixty-two percent of American teachers said they were "very satisfied" with their job in the MetLife survey, taken in 2008. When you add up Public Agenda's idealistic teachers and contented teachers, you come up with 60%--about the same number, actually. The difference? Policy suggestions for what to do about teachers who are dissatisfied. Maybe we should be providing them with the resources and support that they say they need, turning their discouragement into realism.

Contented cows give better milk, after all.

Image: dali, Flickr Creative Commons

Artsy Smartsy

First, read this--Claus von Zastrow's brilliant, poignantly hilarious treatise on why public schools and teachers just can't win, posted last week on the Public School Insights blog. It encompasses the entire range of criticisms--building yurts with tongue depressors!--and skillfully illustrates the "painted into a corner" nature of being a public school advocate these days. No matter what you believe, no matter how thoughtful your research-based educational practice, someone disagrees. Probably viciously.

Conflict over the role of the arts in intellectual development and public schooling is one of the oldest of these squabbles. As a music teacher, I was pink-slipped six times in 30 years and shifted to a new position 17 times; I've spent a professional lifetime defending the necessity of the arts in school curriculum, from every angle. As human beings, we were created and designed to make representations--in sound, drama, movement and image--of the things that matter most to civilization. 

People who believe that children do not need well-designed experiences with the arts to be fully educated are wrong. The evidence comes from the fact that children naturally create art, music, dance and dramatic play all by themselves, with no education whatsoever--and that all aspects of human communication, from political to religious to commercial, revolve around artistic expression. Developing aesthetic discretion is a useful skill for children, not to mention a lifelong pleasure.

Yesterday, in the Washington Post, David C. Levy, former director of the Corcoran Gallery and founder of the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, takes on the challenge of flaws and gaps in K-12 arts education in America. The piece starts strong--but then Levy jumps on the knee-jerk Teacher Blame Bandwagon, claiming that  art education is suffering because school art teachers are lousy artists--"many of them can barely draw." He attempts to soften this indictment by mentioning that art schools are guilty, too: they require a "smorgasbord of classes in unrelated media," making rigorous training and serious specialization impossible. Then, he asserts that the situation is vastly better for prospective musicians (who have a range of "elite musical ensembles" with a "demanding meritocracy" to sharpen their skills).

Really?

Levy's irritating and erroneous assumptions about arts education pile up; he claims that schools don't stress artistic skill development, preferring to let kids just "express themselves"--and that most children begin playing musical instruments early enough to have ten years of instruction with a competent professional before pursuing a music degree. Perhaps in some major cities--but not in my neck of the woods. Levy may well know a great deal about the professional art and music world, but he's clueless about the vagaries of K-12 scheduling, hiring and programming and regional support for the arts--not to mention the nature of teaching large groups of children, where a jack-of-all-trades artistic sensibility comes in handy, as does a bagful of tricks for keeping "media" on the table, rather than in the hair or on the clothes.

The vast majority of kids learn to understand the making of art, and to sing, dance and play an instrument, in a classroom. While there is certainly variance in the quality of teaching, most arts teachers want nothing more than to develop skills and excellence in their students, to ignite a musical or artistic passion that burns well past graduation.  Only three or four in 100 students will pursue a career in the arts, but all of them need to learn some basic skills, as an entry point to enriched taste and enjoyment. College-bound high school students in traditional public schools have no room in their schedules to take a variety of arts courses--even if their school offered them.  Elementary schoolkids who get a 45 -minute art class once a week are lucky, indeed. The picture, as Levy notes, may be gloomy--but let's not point fingers at teachers.

It's not only wrong-headed--it's counterproductive.

In one of my district's financial crises, a high school art teacher who taught jewelry, pottery and graphic design was shifted to an elementary art job (13 weeks apiece in three K-4 schools). As Fine Arts Department chair, I was sent to make sure he was "doing a good job," since he was vocally disappointed when jewelry-making and graphic design courses were dropped from the school curriculum. I watched him teach perspective to first graders, their first art lesson with the new teacher. He used words like "foreground" and "horizon," explaining as he went along. They drew houses. Amazing, realistic houses. They were incredibly excited, and couldn't wait to show their drawings to their parents.

I was beyond impressed, but he was nonchalant.

"Just basic art," he said. ”Anybody can teach perspective."

Image: Flickr Creative Commons, Jansen Mann

Used Teabags and Other Fertilizer

On the day after Labor Day, the Tea Party Express rolled into town, more than an hour after their scheduled, synchronized and programmed arrival time, to hold a totally spontaneous, grass-roots rally on the front lawn of my church. Although several of my friends called and asked me to make an

appearance, I'd already made a considered decision not to attend for two reasons: #1, I was afraid that whoever does the people-counting for unrehearsed, impromptu media-ready events like this would somehow include me in the numbers of Tea Party supporters, unless I carried a sign saying "I believe health care is a human right" (a decidedly dangerous move). Other items I might display--a button saying "Who are these morons?" or my bible, which I keep handy in the choir room at said church--could inadvertently cause the counters to think I was associated with the Tea Partiers. Reason #2 was even more compelling: it was raining like crazy.

I should mention that my church just happens to be in the center of town, situated on a lovely historic millpond, not surprising since it was built in 1881 when water was key to transport, power and civilization. People built communities around millponds, joining together to help and support each other, in good times and bad, sickness and health. A former governor and numerous state and local dignitaries lie quietly in the adjoining cemetery behind a wrought iron fence (which fell down, when the totally spontaneous protestors climbed on it, something we don't let the Sunday School kids do because it would be disrespectful). The Spontaneous Tea Party Express was simply looking for a scenic and central location--and nothing could be more white-picket-fence and photo-op perfect than my little church.

Since the bus full of paid organizers was late, the volunteer locals who turned up had to wait for marching orders before beginning their completely spontaneous demonstration. They stood around keeping their birther billboards and guns (unloaded, one hopes) dry. Bored, they proceeded to decorate the front lawn of the church with Obama-as-monkey and Obama-as-Joker signs. As their constitutional scholarship was apparently limited, the church secretary had to remind them of the legal prohibition from putting overtly political signs within ten feet of church property. You know, separation of church and state, one of those annoying and evidently now outmoded concepts.

Later, the Youth Group came to church for their regularly scheduled American Friends Service Committee peace training after school, and were witness to a lot of wet, free-floating hatred. What bothered them most was adults putting vile signage in their tomato garden, the in-town patch that represents the larger, hands-on church project to feed the local hungry and homeless, which has yielded about a ton of fresh produce in 2009.  The bus finally came, and disgorged Teabaggish Headliner Joe the Unlicensed Plumber; Joe gets $10,000 per speech, these days, which means he doesn't have to worry about health insurance any more. Or plumbing, for that matter.

The youth group kids are still trying to process it all, including Joe the P's remarks about Hanoi Jane, which were inscrutable to them. I'm trying to process it, too, in terms of Thoreau, civil disobedience, and just whose country has been taken away, and from whom. I am always for civil liberties--freedom to write, speak, worship, love and grow vegetables. I did plenty of marching and sign-carrying in the 1960s myself, and I'm not sure how much good it did. Trying to equate the bombing of Cambodia with a political initiative to provide health care for all Americans feels a little schizophrenic, however.

Perhaps Buffalo Springfield's semi-immortal words are right. Nobody's right if everybody's wrong.

 

There's something happening here--What it is ain't exactly clear.

There's a man with a gun over there, telling me I got to beware.

There's battle lines being drawn. Nobody's right if everybody's wrong.

What a field-day for the heat--a thousand people in the street,

Singing songs and carrying signs. Mostly say, hooray for our side.

Image: ND_estuary, Flickr Creative Commons

What Matters Most

This is a tough one. A blog that must be written with infinite care. People I love are involved, and the subject is painful to think about. The overarching essential question: What are our real purposes in educating children in America--what are we preparing them for?

Applying that question to my personal circumstances at the moment, however, it comes out like this: Are we increasingly focused on the wrong goals in our schools? Have we stopped paying attention to the qualities and competencies that really matter in shaping healthy adults, in favor of empty credentials, data targets and media spin?

Last week, my son's good buddy, Erik, died of catastrophic injuries sustained in a car crash. Erik was more than Alex's confidante, cruising companion and photography partner. He was a long-time Friday night basement dweller, chez Flanagan--part of a tight-knit group of "car guys," who survived and thrived in high school by creating their own society (and making my basement smell like Teenage Boy for approximately five years). When Alex was in 10th grade, he spent $50 of his own money to buy a huge, ugly sectional sofa at a garage sale, which the guys creatively re-arranged into a kind of subterranean bunkhouse for six. I gave up making them pancakes and smoky links on Saturday mornings somewhere around the time they got driver's licenses, also the point at which they began sleeping past noon. These boys are like brothers to each other and sons to me; many of them were also my students in middle school.

Erik played the trombone in my middle school band. His wonderful parents (and often, his grandparents) attended concerts, traveled with the band on field trips and supported Erik in all his academic and extra-curricular goals.  Erik was affable, genuine, kind and responsible--he took care of our dogs when we went on vacation. The accident occurred the day before Erik's 22nd birthday. He was living at home. He was tight with his older sister, traveled with his family, and hunted and fished with his dad. He took photography classes at community college. He also held a variety of jobs since high school.

Erik never failed to first say hello to us, Flanagan's parental units, when he was over. Last summer, he stopped en route to the basement for a little chat while I was working at the computer. He told me he was currently employed spreading asphalt, part of a construction crew. "That sounds hot and boring," I said. He stood up and struck an Abercrombie pose--thumbs in the  belt loops, jaw extended. "But haven't you noticed how buff I'm getting?" he said, and broke into a grin. A job was a job--and I had to admit that he was lookin' good, all right.

The worst part of losing Erik is what he will not become: a great husband, a terrific dad, a good neighbor, a productive and reliable career-employee. All of the best parts of Erik's adult character were already established; he just needed more time. It was painful to see the sad and stricken faces of his friends, home from their current lives at school and work, shockingly adult in their dark suits. What lessons can they take away from this loss? Quoting Jackson Browne: Nothing survives, but the way we live our lives.  And as my Lutheran pastor friend says--grief is the price we pay for loving someone.

It's a cliché to ask what you would do today, if you knew you had only 24 hours to live--but that thought ran through my head constantly over the past week. If you knew your child's life would be rudely cut short just as he approached adulthood, what would your priorities be? Would it be pursuing the traditional school model of success--grade points, honors night, stress over the right competitive numbers to leverage his place in the next academic institution or workplace? Or would it be spending more time with friends, sharing family events and stories, working and playing, enjoying and exploring life's possibilities?

When we work with children, we have no idea how they will turn out--a truth that ought to be both obvious and humbling, but is routinely ignored by educators. We don't know who will be rich, who will be malicious, who will have great power and influence--or who will unexpectedly be lost to bad fortune. All we can do is try to stay focused on what matters most. Tonight, I am thinking that a joyful life, no matter how short, is a life well-lived. The rest is unimportant, in the long run.

Image: Alex (l.) & Erik (r.)

Bridges Over Troubled Water: Songs for Teacher Leaders

 Help me out here, teachers. When you're weary and feeling small and so on--where do you turn for musical inspiration? What songs and artists ring your good-teacher chimes? If you never use music in this way, preferring chocolate, text-messaging in the lounge, or watching "Freedom Writers" on HBO again, I'd like to suggest that music has tremendous power to leverage personal and systemic change. What music is your personal door to hope and sunshine?

I have painted this verbal picture to my students many times:

Imagine a well-dressed, prosperous man and woman from an earlier generation, he in topcoat and fedora, she in leather gloves and a coat with a fur collar. In this black and white film, they are looking almost rapturously off into the distance. Between them is a little girl, holding their hands, her sweet face framed by a hat, tied with a big bow under her chin. They all appear to be speaking, looking excitedly at something far away. As the camera moves back, we begin to hear the soundtrack. The family of three is singing--and soon we see and hear that they are part of a large throng of people, all of whom are singing with great fervor and pride. The perspective widens; the crowd is massive, and they are all focused on a single man standing on a balcony. 

The man is Adolph Hitler. The song they are singing is Deustschland Uber Alles ("Germany Above All").  Songs are powerful, I tell my students. Songs can unify nations (or 100,000 Michigan fans in the Big House, something that many of them have personally experienced)--or send men willingly into battle. A good song can bring tears to our eyes, stir jubilant memories --or make us get up and dance. Hitler, using cheap crystal radios, effectively turned patriotic music into a terrible and authoritarian social movement. I saw the film clip described above at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

How about a more benign and progressive movement: music to honor and inspire the work of teachers? Music to lift their spirits and help them find their common joys? I will be meeting with a few educators next week to work on a teacher leadership project, and I want to bring them a mix CD of songs for teacher leaders.

Songs that I have considered: If I Were Brave, Have a Little Faith, and One Love (from the Playing for Change CD--where all the songs could be considered germane to teaching, learning, believing in the power of the human spirit to educate). My friend and fellow traveler Mary Tedrow sent a link to Born Again American, a rallying cry if there ever was one. I wonder: is it too political to be included in a CD of songs for teacher leadership? Then I decide that teacher leadership is all about politics.

Help me out here. Please send suggestions for the very best music--a little jazz, a little country, a little rock and roll--for teachers.

 

Thanks to my friend Rosemary Woods for the wonderful image, shot a couple days ago in Tucson.

And the Livin' is Easy...

It's time for the annual round of teachers-in-summer blogs. These come in several flavors: Ambitious (with a side helping of enrichment). Justification (a.k.a. "I work harder than you know"). The traditional, obligatory Reading List for Teachers. (This one blew me away--three books involving Nazis, Charles Murray of Bell Curve fame, and...Daniel Pink? ) A Snarky Saga of the Last Days of '08-'09 (where someone almost gets punched out, speaking of tense and irritable...). Plus two new cable TV shows for your summer viewing pleasure, featuring garden-variety, nice-guy teachers. One manufactures and sells high-test meth to build a nest egg for his family (since he's dying of cancer), and the other sells his own substantially endowed body since he doesn't make enough money teaching to keep his children happy and a roof over his head.

Moral of all the stories: Teaching is an undesirable low-prestige, low-salary, high-stress job--and teachers can no longer publicly say the three best things about teaching are June, July and August.

The answer to all these trials seems clear to me. The traditional school calendar is way past its expiration date, and should be abandoned. Its flaws are well-known:  too much time off in the summer, too much review needed in the fall--not enough well-used time, crammed into too few days. The agrarian calendar represents a wildly inefficient use of resources, and the folks who support it do so for reasons that have nothing to do with education. All of the barriers to changing the calendar--busing, sports, vacations, staffing, summer camps, cheap labor for summer businesses-- can be effectively addressed. 

My personal preference would be a modular calendar, with four- to six-week curricular units, offered flexibly, year-round--through both in-building residencies and on-line. Students would be required to be "in school" a minimal number of days (say, 180) but could select additional modules to attend school 200 or 220 days a year. Short vacations would be scheduled between modules. Students could enter the system at multiple points in the year (September, January, June) and finish when all the modules were successfully completed. Nobody would "fail a grade," because a module could be re-taken if material wasn't mastered. There are dozens of ways to improve the school calendar.

I find it amazing--and get huffy and defensive--when I am reminded that a significant chunk of the general public still thinks that teachers are working only when there are students in front of them. The first step in changing that perception is not going to be strongly worded blogs, however. It will be banishing the lazy, crazy 10-week summer vacation.

A few years ago, a local reporter interviewed me for a story on what teachers do in summer. I ran through the usual agenda: planning, reading, looking at new music, cleaning the percussion cabinet, taking a class, directing the community band. They sent out a photographer for a photo. We had coffee on my deck--and he persuaded me to stretch out in our backyard hammock with my own summer professional reading. The photo (below) made the front page of the paper. 

And---I got a call from a School Board member, that evening. He was dismayed that I would agree to a photo suggesting that I was "laying around" [sic] all summer, doing nothing. The Board wished another shot had been chosen. Perhaps a glamorous pose of me cleaning out the spit-valves on the school-owned euphoniums?  I declined to give him the brief lecture on Urgent vs. Important that came to mind. But we have a long way to go before teaching is a real profession in the public's mind.

Images: Livingston County Press-Argus; k.l.macke

Talk is Cheap. But Meaningful.

I was sitting in a meeting last week, planning a major teacher leadership initiative with some smart colleagues, when I had one of those moments in which the correct word--the word I needed--got stuck in the murky recesses of my (admittedly aging) brain. I wanted to describe the process of distributing work...dispersing work...a starts-with- "d" word... in which tasks are dispensed, doled out, delivered, or disseminated to others. Duh. *&^@#! What was the word?

Kathy, sitting next to me: "Delegate?" Bingo! And then she suggested that the reason I couldn't retrieve the word immediately is because it's not part of my habitual thinking process, not a word I value or use constantly. "Language is truth, you know" she said, shooting me a Meaningful Glance.

Well. I've been brooding about this for a couple of days now, trying to recall other tip-of-tongue words that have eluded me lately. The only example I could remember was talking with my husband about burnished language used to obscure less-positive meanings-- pre-owned vehicles, red-shirted kindergartners, not-yet-proficient, that sort of thing. The word refused to pop into my mind...it starts with an "e"...  Right. Euphemism.

There are actually terms used to delineate this impaired word-retrieval phenomenon. Dysnomia--or dysnomia's more serious cousin, anomia--or (my personal favorite) lethologica. Psychologists refer to it as "Tip of the Tongue Syndrome" (TOT). And Kathy was right--it does have something to do with one's shovel-ready vocabulary versus words and ideas used infrequently. Perhaps I am not particularly good at delegating--or willing to put a good verbal face on an objectionable concept.

In education, it's hard to draw a bright line between the specific language of professional practice, sloganeering, genuine words of inspiration, and loose, habituated-in-lazy-thinking speech. I was reminded of this in a recent conversation with an amazing young teacher, working in one of the poorest schools in Alabama. While she was pursuing an undergraduate degree in education, several of her friends whose majors were in other fields were applying for highly selective "teaching fellows" programs. Some of them are teaching in at-risk schools now, and feeling underprepared and overwhelmed (a condition mitigated by the appealing prospect of a full ride in grad school).  "What makes me different?" she asked. "Aren't I 'teaching for America,' too--even though I don't get scholarship money or prestige?" A poignant question.

Language matters--especially the things we say without thinking, the concepts that embed themselves in our brains via the readily accessible words, idioms and metaphors that shape our collective judgments and beliefs.

Race to the Top.

Relentless Pursuit.

In the Trenches.

Widgets. Outliers. Core Knowledge. Bolder and Broader.

 And now we're being asked to rethink the branding and glossary of No Child Left Behind, a kind of corporate flush to rid us of the unpleasant whiff of whole cities full of left-behind children, scientifically-based curriculum kickbacks, and yearly progress that isn't even close to adequate. Most teachers I know think this is the ultimate pig-in-lipstick PR blah-blah. (Although it will be a relief when they take down the insulting, red plastic NCLB Schoolhouse thingie--which looks like someone grafted a Bob Evans on the great, gray Department of Education building.) Still, language matters. And so does change.

Retrieving the right words for the new name may be tricky. We are out of practice in using the vocabulary of empowerment and developing human capital. Building Capacity. The Audacity of Thinking We Can Do Ed Policy Better. I'm still working on my suggestion, but the word that keeps popping into my head is: Investment. Nations whose systemic education results are uniformly impressive invest continuously in people. And we should, too. No euphemisms, but lots of hard work.

I need some time to think about a new name. I'll be hiking the Appalachian Trail.

Images: NCinDC and OhioNewsHound

Warped Soul of an Old Machine: The Technology of Tracking

 

Tracking is a technology. You can't plug it in, but--like 3-ring binders, twelve grade levels, and the agrarian calendar--tracking is an educational technology. A device dreamed up for the purpose of making schooling more "efficient."  A tool.

And just as a man with a hammer sees every problem as a nail, school technologies are often considered the "obvious" solution to every dilemma we face in schools. Many of these durable cogs in the vast education machine date back to the era when poor immigrants were flooding city schools at the same time the industrial age promoted a technical approach to everyday tasks. Everything from traffic management to measuring the intelligence of army recruits could be done better through science--and many of these efficiencies were translated into educational practice as the system expanded.

We seem to have a national compulsion to sort, identify, select, test, standardize, compare and compete in our schools. Intellectual growth, unfortunately, does not automatically thrive via classification or homogeny. Human learning is neither predictable nor controllable, and doesn't happen at a consistent rate. Students respond in different ways to varying content, disciplines and instructional models--not to mention different teachers and emotional states.  Lots of bad education policy has been created by people who assume that uniformity is a great virtue. And even more bad policy has been instituted by folks who believe that the way they learn best is the way all people learn, or should learn.

And so it is with tracking, the technological solution to the non-problem of having a roomful of learners who don't know precisely the same things.

Here's my worst experience with tracking, from the early 80s, when I was teaching one section of 7th grade math. The 7th graders were divided, using reliable assessment data from 6th grade state tests, into five tracks: Honors (which was Pre-Algebra), Advanced, High/Low Basic, and Special Education. I taught Low Basic. Every 10 weeks, we gave a common assessment (from the math text) and moved kids from track to track, based on their scores-- in theory, a system that would allow us to continuously fine-tune our stratified instruction, and use the "motivation" of quarterly opportunities to move up to higher tracks. Even though students were not studying the same topics at exactly the same time, the assumption was that since we were all following a sequenced curriculum, but differentiating the pace and amount of practice, kids who mastered something in September (or 6th grade) would still know it in January. That turned out to be not true.

After the first 10 weeks, 16 of my 30 students qualified to move up--two went all the way up to Honors--and I got 16 new kids who'd struck out in the higher tracks. With every 10-week shuffle, I got dispirited kids whose math egos had taken a beating, and had to convince them that they could indeed re-master ratios, probability, negative integers or whatever had stopped them in their tracks. Approximately a third of the kids got moved around every quarter. By the final quarter, I had only 6 of my original kids (one of whom confessed that he deliberately blew his quarterly move-up tests so he could stay with me).

It was hard on my Basic kids, who felt that they'd been written off, early in the game. But it was hardest on the kids who started out in Honors, then drifted downward all year, ending up in Basic. Tracking did much more than impact egos and the social system--it made a muddle of instruction. My Basic kids were constantly saying "I already learned this"--even when their tests indicated that they were clueless. In each of the four quarters, my group--scientifically selected for uniformity-- had superstars and laggards. And students continued to need different ways of learning critical content and skills.

There are a number of education critics who believe that differentiating learning in mixed-ability groups is not truly workable. I know that it is, because I've done it, for decades. You start building equity by demanding excellence from everyone, rather than trying to figure out who might not be "capable" of excellence, or how to stretch achievement data over a curve rather than pushing everyone as far and fast as possible. Everyone should get the good stuff--the most rigorous content, their teachers' confidence that high levels of learning are within reach for all. There are more insidious beliefs hidden by the practice of tracking. But let's not go there--because that would be giving the creaky obsolete technology of tracking more power and attention than it deserves.

Imagine There's No...Imagination

Two weeks ago, I spent a Saturday traveling to the century-old District Library in Jackson, Michigan, one of more than 2500 beautiful public libraries--on three continents--funded by industrial magnate and innovative philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. The draw was a workshop on using research in writing, plus a luncheon keynote featuring one of my favorite authors, Diana Gabaldon. Gabaldon took questions after the workshop and the keynote--and both times, someone in the audience asked her who Jamie (a character running through most of her novels) looks like. As in--which living person, preferably a star, served as model for your hero?

Both times, Gabaldon gently demurred, saying that while she had an image of Jamie, readers should create their own vision. This was not an answer that pleased the audience; there was the sense that they wanted a name--or better yet, a color photo. And at my table, a Gabaldon reader confessed that she starts all books by turning to the last pages--to see (her words) "who died and who got together." Only with that concrete information could she start reading.

There's plenty of evidence that students in this media-saturated world are losing their capacity for rich imagination.  One of my favorite instructional strategies in teaching middle school music is structured role play. Assigning students a character to inhabit-- rock star, entertainment lawyer, singing monk-- is a powerful way to force them to "think different." There's always a subgroup of students who resist, claiming they don't know what to do or say-- "Can't you just write it down, so I can read it?" Explaining divergent thinking--or the endless possibilities for changing one's narrative-- isn't always helpful. They're looking for the right answer.

Turning kids on to different kinds of music--every music teacher's #1 goal--is an exercise in developing the imagination, particularly for band and orchestra teachers who can't use lyrics as a means of illumination.  I remember one stunning moment back in the 80s, rehearsing a sensitive passage with my 8th grade band.  A young man raised his hand and said it might be easier to play the piece if we knew what it was about. I replied that people didn't ask Beethoven what his fifth symphony was about, but he persisted, saying "You know, like on MTV, where you can see what songs are about?"

That comment sent me on an enduring quest to embed the ideas of imagination and inspiration (literally, "drawing breath") into my classroom pedagogy. Musicians use a range of non-visual and non-literary tools to represent emotion, story, purpose and occasion. Part of musical imagination is craftsmanship--having the knowledge and skills to create. But another part is the willingness to be playful, to recombine familiar elements into something new, to take a risk or wait on inspiration. My students had some rudimentary knowledge and skills. What they didn't have was permission to honor or evaluate their own interpretations and images.

As much as I would like to pin my worries about diminished imagination in children on MTV and a thousand other always-on media sources, I can't. Media, whether brilliant or boring, is only the product.  Imagination is a process. A process fed and honed by comprehension and competence--but also the ability to delay gratification, to fool around with ideas. The women at the library who wanted to see the definitive picture of their fictional hero, or know how the story turns out before reading, were lacking the capacity to suspend fulfillment and tinker with possibility. They wanted the answer.

Einstein is famous for  declaring that imagination is more important than knowledge. Here's the rest of that quote: "For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

Imagination is a real thing. It belongs in every vision or proposal for what our children should learn, preparing for their 21st century lives.

Tell Mama

My cumulative student roster, after 30 years in the classroom, includes more than 4000 students. I talked with most of my students' parents at one time or another, and in a large majority of these conversations, parents expressed a combination of pleasure and relief (even surprise) at hearing a positive description of their child's behavior and temperament in class. I grew accustomed to parents of my middle schoolers saying "I'm glad he's OK at school, because it's no picnic to deal with him at home."

To me, that is an indicator that mom and dad have done some constructive parenting: home becomes the place where kids feel secure enough to release their frustrations, fears or anger. You hope your kids have learned the skill of presenting a courteous face in social encounters, and you want them to trust you enough to be themselves at home.

When the situation is reversed, and the child is egregiously disrespectful, oppositional or disengaged at school, and parents challenge the teacher's report with "he's not like that at home," it generally means that somebody in the equation is not perceiving or acknowledging reality. In my experience, that's fairly rare--even parents who mistrust the school or teachers are usually willing to admit that their child's conduct or effort could use improvement, although they may argue--sometimes persuasively--about why their child is misbehaving in a particular classroom.

Parents who are flatly unwilling to accept true but blunt descriptions of their kids' exploits can cripple their children by shielding them from the consequences of their own actions. When a parent refuses to believe that their child might need to change her behavior before she can function in a group or learn effectively, the dysfunctional party is the parent. The word "co-dependence" springs to mind here.

A friend recently asked me how to approach a teacher with a serious concern about her son. This was my advice:

Begin with the idea that teachers are all different, and will bring unique things to the learning process. There is no such thing as the "best" kind of teacher for any grade or subject; resist projecting conceptions of your ideal teacher on the real teacher. The hip, poetry-loving, twenty-something guy with the ponytail will never be Sister Grammaria who taught you to love diagramming sentences, but he may turn your child on to reading.

Ask open-ended questions, such as "what's she like in class?" A good teacher is able to share observations that instantly tell parents valuable things about their child as well as the teacher. A teacher who says "he's crazy about cars and sketches them in his math journal" is paying attention.

Teachers often stress to parents that "we're working together, for the child,"  but too many parent-teacher chats are about how  they can join forces to raise a child's grade. That's an empty goal that may not yield any real change in the child as learner. If a teacher begins a conference with numbers from a grade book, it's fine for parents to interrupt and share their real hopes or concerns.

Avoid the word "bored" when describing a child's reaction to a class or teacher. It's offensive and says more about the child and parents than the teacher (even when the teacher actually is boring).

Ask your child's teacher about his talents and strengths, which you may be too close to recognize. You might be surprised at what emerges at school. Teachers can help parents get a rough sense of where their child fits in the social and academic order at the moment--but keep in mind that very few people turn out the way you think they might when they're in the 7th grade.

Some of my former students are now in their forties. One came to school for Career Day in a powder blue BMW. He advised our 7th graders to pursue a lucrative career like his: cosmetic dentistry. When he sat in my trumpet section,  back in the 70s, his chief talent was acting like Mork from Ork. His parents were convinced he's never be a serious student. Who knew?

Image: frenchfrye/flickr creative commons