This is what high-stakes testing feels like, part two

A student asked me if her score went up, and when I had to tell her no, her face fell. There were tears in her eyes as I told her that her score had gone up a lot between September and January, and that she had made a lot of progress. More heartbreaking than her tears was the brave face she put on as she smiled and nodded.

I feel reassured when the literacy coordinator not only tests them, but also gives them a survey with questions about their reading habits. In that class, students who came in saying they hate to read are leaving saying that they love it.

I was looking at the comments to see if there are any (there are not), but I was happy to see this old one from my brother: "One good teacher inspiring even one kid for a year can make a lot of difference."

Thanks for reminding me.

This is what high-stakes testing feels like

I couldn't fall asleep last night. I did what you are not supposed to do: I kept looking at the clock--10:30, 11:30, 12:30--and thinking about how much sooner Steve Inskeep would wake me up. 6 hours of sleep. 5 hours of sleep. 4 hours of sleep. If I get up and take half of a Tylenol PM, will I be groggy in the morning? Will I have time to drink extra coffee tomorrow morning so that I can make it through the day on 5 hours? 4 hours?

I teach what my mentor has called "both ends of the spectrum" at this school. This morning, the seniors in AP Literature are taking the AP exam. Last period today, the 9th graders in the "struggling readers"* class are taking a reading assessment. In 10 days, as a sign tells me when I walk in to school, all 50 9th graders I teach will take a practice ACT test.

Since my AP class meets first today, followed by a prep, I have 3 hours free this morning. I am wandering around my classroom, flitting from one task to the next--I keep getting distracted and thrown off course. This is, I admit, my normal mode, but it is turned up several notches: I take the longest route to get from point A to point B. While teaching yesterday, I would walk to the back of the room and forget what I had gone to retrieve. In the supermarket I turned my cart 270 degrees counterclockwise instead of 90 degrees clockwise. Then at the checkout I discovered that several items were not ones I had picked. Someone put stuff in my cart by mistake! No, wait, half of my items are missing--I took someone else's cart.

I decide to clean the desks (a weekly task--teens can be smelly), and I discover that dust has collected on the countertop where my homework in- and out-boxes and supplies live. I start to actually dust the countertop, then stop myself. I really do have a lot to get done with this free time.

When I taught at a private school, I never worried about my students' performance on standardized tests. But now, only seven months into teaching at a "reformed" public school, I have already experienced the thrills and frustrations of student "data." Today I feel the familiar excitement of performance anxiety, the eagerness to be measured, that I have felt over many years of test-taking. But mine are the feelings of a high-achieving student. What do my 9th graders feel? I saw the trepidation on their faces yesterday. Will I be good enough this time to get out of this class?

At the private school, standardized tests were a chore, a capitulation to the college admissions regime. We submitted, but it was widely held that these tests couldn't really measure our students. It never even occurred to me that my students' performance might be tied to the "effectiveness" of my teaching, and thank goodness--even now I feel ten times the teacher I did then. Why, then, did my ineffectiveness as a teacher (and lack of certification) not result in low "achievement" for my students, in that notorious half-year of "growth" that builds into the achievement "gap"?

Yesterday I talked to a colleague who also teaches struggling readers. "It never goes away," she said.

We came back from spring break just ten days ago; the dread that has been with me ever since makes it feel like a month. But for the last two days my mood has been lighter. The thoughts keeping me awake last night were not nightmares of stricken students, but dreams and ideas for all that I will do with the seniors in these four glorious post-AP weeks.




*Students who scored at or below a 7th grade reading level at the beginning of the year (on a norm-referenced test) were placed in an English class whose focus was geared more toward intensive reading development, rather than literary study.

On irony

OK, I haven't posted in a long time! I am not making any promises, but I have had several post ideas and I'm going to try to roll out a few of them over the next few weeks.

This one is brief. When I was in high school, I had an English teacher who I loved and who really taught me a lot about how to analyze literature, how to write an expository essay, and how to be a journalist. The year I finished high school, he left teaching to become a full-time editor for a newspaper, and he always gave the impression that teaching was something that he didn't really want to do. What he really wanted to do was talk about books. (More on that another day.) The other thing about him is that he was absolutely hilarious, and that his humor depended largely on his deftness with sarcasm. In fact, many of my favorite teachers were the ones who were cynical and funny. The cynical teacher whose #1 tool is a wit that depends almost entirely on the use of sarcasm has become a common stereotype in our culture--we see it all the time in movies, on T.V., and in literature. (Think Tina Fey in Mean Girls, Paul Giamatti in Sideways, etc, etc)

It was surprising, then, when I learned that Charlotte Danielson (THE Charlotte Danielson), in her exhaustive rubric of teaching, "Framework for Teaching," lists "sarcasm" as among the attributes of an "Unsatisfactory" teacher. But here's the thing. Adolescents really don't get sarcasm. I teach both freshmen and seniors, and neither group can reliably and predictably detect irony*--the seniors are an AP group and they still have a really hard time identifying irony. Irony requires us to understand language or ideas on multiple levels simultaneously, and most adolescents are only beginning to develop the ability to think abstractly when they begin high school. It's really amazing to watch this happen. But what it also means is that they just don't understand sarcasm.

For adolescents, sarcasm is likely go to one of two ways. 1) The child understands from your tone that you're being mean or insulting, and her feelings get hurt, or 2) The child doesn't understand that you don't mean what you say, and takes your statement at its face. (A student asks you to go to the bathroom, and you say, "Well, OK, I guess you really want to get a bad grade.") Either way, it's not doing what you want it to do. And, chances are, you really are being mean. Adolescents have really thin skins. That's not their problem, and it's not our job to make their skins thicker by hurling darts at them. It doesn't mean we have to stop trying to be funny, but maybe we should try to invent better ways.

*Irony, by the way, is when (1) you mean the opposite of what you say, as in "Yeah, Einstein was a real dummy," (2) when you know something that the people in the story you are reading don't, and they really need to know, as when Romeo doesn't know that Juliet isn't dead, or (3) when what you expect to happen is the opposite of what happens, like when you get a free ride when you've already paid.**

**This is the only situation in the catalogue presented by Alanis Morissette in her song "Ironic" that is actually ironic.

Lead Teach #1 is over!

I finished my first four-day lead teach, in which I take over all of the classes without any help from my compatriots. It was rough! Anyone who has ever compared teaching to a three-ring circus wasn't wrong. I felt like a clown juggling on a unicycle more than once. Phew! Fail better, fail better...

One day a friend and I started coming up with our favorite metaphors for what it feels like when you're in the middle of a class and you know it's going straight down the toilet. I like to think of it as being on a ship that is sinking in the middle of the North Atlantic. There are not enough lifeboats. You know the ship is sinking, but you have to just keep on playing that violin like there's nothing wrong.

Not too long ago I came across this Slate contest to build the 21st century classroom. The contest is now over (check out the results), but it also led me to this website that collects students' photographs of their own schools.

Did the good guys lose the culture wars?

OK, I've been meaning to write this post for over a month now, but it has been brewing and stewing, and tonight's whuppin' at the hands of the Tea Party has me sleepless and over the edge.

The Great Backlash
In the last few years, I've been thinking a lot about the Republican echo chamber and the way that it has strategically pushed an agenda that--sometimes implicitly, sometimes overtly--exploits the latent racism of many white voters and convinces them to vote against their own economic self-interest. This is basically what Barack Obama was getting at in his historic speech "A More Perfect Union" (a.k.a. the "race speech"), in which he defended earlier remarks that these voters "cling to guns or religion" because, basically, their lives are incredibly tough economically. This is a rehearsal of an earlier argument in Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas?" (and surely also creditable to countless other people) about how people cope with the cognitive dissonance produced by a society in which you are taught your whole life that anyone can do or become anything, only to learn that you actually can only do those things if you are lucky, that there is a really big pie that's big enough for everyone, only someone else has taken your piece because of affirmative action.

Seeing how so many Americans have reacted to the Obama presidency has me even more convinced that we are in serious trouble if we let so much unreconstructed racism go unchecked. The fact that so many people--millions of people--can believe (falsely) that the president is a Muslim AND also believe that this is a bad thing; that hundreds of thousands of Tea Partiers parade around with signs that unabashedly proclaim that they will "take back America" (from whom? for whom?) has me really, really worried. So, to make a long story short, I have become increasingly troubled and convinced that we are living in an era that will become known by historians as the Great Backlash.

What does this have to do with teaching?
Lots. But the one topic that has been weighing heavily on my mind of late is the question I started with, and when I say "culture wars" I should probably be more specific and call it "the canon wars." Here is my capsule version of the canon wars: what people read matters because it affects their attitudes, which affects politics. If people only read texts about how great white people are and how evil non-white people are, then that is what they will think. Conversely, if people read a wide variety of viewpoints and are taught to examine how works of literature fit into a society that oppresses women, people of color, and the poor, then they will become more ethical human beings.* Yes, that is a base summary. But that's basically what it was about. What I've been discovering in numerous conversations with current and former high school English teachers, university professors, English graduate students, and college English majors, is that we are definitely, absolutely NOT ON THE SAME PAGE about how things turned out.

In postsecondary English departments, everyone pretty much agrees on two points:
1. That the old canon is over. We now more or less have a much bigger, more inclusive canon. This means, for people writing literary criticism, that you can almost** never assume that anyone has read what you are writing about, whether that's Longfellow or Gwendolyn Brooks.

2. That canons in general are bad. Any kind of list of books that people can be expected to have read in order to be considered learned, educated, sophisticated, or whatever, whether that list includes or doesn't include Wright, Dickens, Cisneros, Faulkner, DuBois, Anaya, Shakespeare, Morrison, Hawthorne, etc, etc is designed to separate people into the in- and the out-crowd, better and worse, elite and common. Now, it must be said that this second point undercuts the first while also undercutting the existence of university English departments, whose job historically has been almost solely to decide what should and shouldn't be in the canon.

These are the two points that most university professors and graduate students more or less agree "won" the war, whether they like it or not, unless they are over 70 and/or named Harold Bloom. But here's the problem: many, if not all, college English majors may get point #1, but more than likely won't be taught point #2 well enough to understand it. Case in point: one of the major reasons I went to graduate school for English was that I wanted to become yet more expert in literature--I wanted to feel like I had "read everything." In other words, I wanted to master the canon, and to change it to include more African American authors. Only later did I find out that this goal didn't make sense given the arguments that were being made both about what canons are for and about whether or not arguing about canons actually changes anything. So that's why you find me writing this blog as someone trying to become a secondary English teacher.

But, on to my second point. Many, if not all, high school English departments are still very much working on getting to consensus on point #1, or may have sort of compromised on that point and want to put it behind them. I know people personally who still routinely have to justify book selections to departments that want to see more Dickens and less bell hooks.*** Meanwhile, many, if not all, university professors and graduate students have moved on from these arguments, which raged throughout the 1980s and 1990s, because they are believed to be passe.

So, to sum up: most of the people (high school English teachers) who teach most of the people (everyone who attends some high school but does not become a college English major in spite of the numerous and well-known advantages) most of what they learn about literature and culture never really came around to either of the two views. And is it a coincidence that we are living in the era of the Great Backlash? And is anyone talking about this problem anymore? In my training so far, it seems more or less settled that one wants to teach "the classics" in some form to all high school English students. This is what I must learn more about. So, to be continued...

*For a brilliant argument on why this was never going to work in the first place, see here.
**I say almost because there are still plenty of books that are more or less required, and most of them are still by dead white men. Did you notice how I could just say "Longfellow" but I had to give Brooks's first and last name? Surprise!
***Let's leave aside the question about whether or not a high school English student will glean anything from either of these authors.

Getting Good at Getting Better

I first jotted down some notes for this post about ten days ago...or maybe two weeks? Time gets warped in this profession...it's dense. It moves fast, but feels slow.

I had a teacher in high school who loved to quote Samuel Beckett, "No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." At the time, I thought that this statement was defeatist and pessimistic, a perversion of "try try again" that was, to me, representative of his personality. But after my first few attempts teaching in front of my mentor, it was ringing in my ears. 

First time: I was about five minutes in to teaching students on my own, with my mentor and co-res sitting in the back of the room. Then, unexpectedly, she stopped me and told me to try a think-pair-share. Flustered, I did as told and tried to throw in a T-P-S. Pretty soon she was standing next to me at the front of the room, and we were taking turns speaking to the class and having them work in their groups while she whispered tweaks in my ear. I felt chagrined; in my head, I knew that I should take this "real time coaching," as they call it, in stride and keep on keepin on, but in my gut, I felt a vague, nagging feeling of disappointment and anxiety for the rest of the day. I wrote down the phrase that is this title's post to remind myself that getting better is something that one has to be good at. I have to be willing to take advice and adjustments as ways for me to improve, and not as criticism. It is hard, though.

Now, two weeks later, I feel good about how things are going. I have a lot of energy, though I have been getting less and less sleep, and I feel like I'm getting better at anticipating what my mentor wants me to do. But this feeling of success means that new hurdles are just around the...what? Bend? You don't have hurdles around corners, right? The point is, there are constantly new pieces to master. Champion teachers aren't made overnight, after all!

First day of school!

Today was the first day of school with students. Phew! It was fun and I definitely observed a lot of stuff--particularly around two dozen "Do It Agains" for the Lemov followers. That's when the teacher gives directions, then if the students don't follow the directions EXACTLY, she stops them and makes them do it again, from the beginning. They definitely got better at following directions after a few of these. The kids are terrific. The tough thing is, even though I spent all day observing and taking notes, by the end of the day I had a hard time remembering anything that had happened. Observation fatigue--and it was only the first day!

My mentor is great; she's been teaching for a long time but is also always trying new things. And my co-resident (there are two of us with each mentor) is also great. I know I'm going to learn a ton from both of them.

Since the start of the school year is a time for new goals, I am setting a goal for myself: I will post at least once a week. I'd like to keep more frequent track of my thoughts as they progress over the year. We'll see how that goes--I already spent most of the evening working, though I did spend some QT with the dog and the SO. My brain is fried, and my feet hurt! Time for bed.