Where I need to be

The image on the right was one I found on FaceBook. I think it tells a good bit about my life. Problem is, each time I find "where I needed to be" something happens and I have to move on.

To catch up a little since my last blog post back in October, I was actually glad that I didn't have a job all fall, because there were a lot of family things going on (my husband was very sick, so we moved to a new house without stairs in a neighboring town, and there was a birth and a death that moved us all.)

But in January, I was asked to return to the tiny charter school in Hesperia, where I completed my credential. It was like coming home. I knew all the colleagues except the new Dean of Students, who has been invaluable, and I knew about half my students and they knew me, so we didn't have to start at square one.

I am also teaching the same subjects, Biology and Integrated Science, although different parts of them, since the teacher they had in the fall had taken a different part of the curriculum than last year's teachers. But the most important aspect was that I have learned a lot about Guided Inquiry and Reasoning and Sense Making since then, which turned out to be the right way to address the needs of pretty much all of my students.

Most of our students have come to us because they just couldn't make it in the regular public high school. Some had tried a variety of other charters, home schooling, etc. Many have a great difficulty concentrating, and get easily distracted. If I had been trying to do whole-class teaching, I think I would have lost most of them. But I put them in 6 groups of about 3 students, and provided lots of hand-on labs to introduce topics. I also made many worksheets, often finding illustrations and text on line, and then guiding them with questions to the illustrations and concepts. It took a while for the kids to understand that they were to work TOGETHER in their groups, and that I wasn't going to be standing up front with a PowerPoint, but coming around to each individual group to ask them questions, and guide them on their way (I like the word, facilitate!)

I am more than half-way through the "University Induction Program" at UCLA Ext, to clear my credential, with interesting courses and "Inquiries" into my teaching about what sort of strategies will help my ESL students, and now my students with IEPs. I've also just completed a fun course at CGU in ways to teach Physics hands-on, which gave me a lot of tools and ideas for the Physics part of Integrated Science, and an online course in working with students with ADHD, which is much needed to learn to reach our many "wanderers" and "blurters." And I've also earned a certificate as "Green School Professional." (I've been taking more classes than my students, to learn to teach them better!)

But the tragedy I alluded to in the beginning is that our little school is too little. We need about 20 more students to release some important funds and make us viable. So the charter has been pulled, prospective students are being turned away, and our students are trying to figure out where to look again to continue their education. Some of the students are looking forward to going to a "real" high school, with all the amenities we can't offer, although we do offer gym, a couple of sports, classes in art, music, sign language and astronomy. But many are going to try the individual learning of home schooling or computer-based learning, away from any social aspects of school. Some of my students are sure to get lost, students I was just getting through to. How sad! My younger colleagues (one just got married) need jobs to support their families, older ones aren't ready to retire yet. Our special ed teacher, who isn't much younger than I am) is working on her EdJoin application for the first time ever. She was the life-blood of the school for most of its existence, but is left in the cold like the rest of us.

So far the only jobs I can see for me are even further away than my trip through the Cajon pass to Hesperia. I can manage without a job, but I hate inactivity, and I have discovered that I have much to give my students. So I'll just have to see where life will take me next, and know that that's where I'm supposed to be for a while again.

On Saturday, I will be walking in the graduation ceremony at Claremont Graduate School, with cap and hood and all. I'll post a picture to prove it after it's happened!

Can our students all be geniouses?

I discovered this great video on education on YouTube while looking for the cartoon that follows. I've seen others by this group RSA. It's a look at education - why, for whom, etc. - and creativity. Are we educating creativity out of our students?



Here's the cartoon I saw on Facebook. I can't figure out what the original is.

 

We're theoretically supposed to be providing diversified teaching, but it's hard with a classroom filled to the window-sills. But politicians evidently don't want students to be creative.

Doing the impossible is harder than I imagined!

I stopped writing here because this thing about getting a credential has become much more difficult than it was when I got the idea to do so. Neither the school I have studied at Claremont Graduate University, or EncorpsTeachers, who have also been supporting me through all of this past year with workshops, study guides, and good advice, had imagined what school administrators already suspected, that they would be hiring very few teachers. In many districts, classes are being filled up to 40 students, even in Middle School, eliminating the need to hire a new teacher, and making life difficult for both teachers and students at the same time. That means that secondary teachers have to get to know 200 students (and their families) and that classrooms built for 25 have desks squeezed in, with no space for separate activity areas, or a way to even access the walls of the classroom.

In the meantime, however, I have completed all the coursework expected of me, except for one course I'll take this Fall (in Statistics) and a concluding course next summer -- if I manage to find a job to complete the Internship training this year. I am hoping that the new government money will open up a job here or there, which may provide me a job (as well as this year's interns) and make classes a little smaller, so that it will be easier to use more creative methods for students to learn as well.

I also took a series of courses at UC Riverside Extension this summer on Science Education to supplement the Teaching Skills tests in Science (CSET) I've been taking this year to expand what I can teach.

So far I've applied for over 30 jobs this spring. I'm hoping that all the credentialed candidates have landed a position by now, as school is starting, and that schools will be more open to taking an Intern as they discover a need for just one more teacher.

Please wish me luck!

How to Remake Education

The New York Times Magazine today is devoted to education. I have already written about one article on my other active blog: Inner City Boarding School. A short collection of entries called How to Remake Education caught my eye as well, but only one entry really made immediate sense to me. Since it is so short, I quote it in full:

Beyond Testing
The single biggest problem in American education is that no one agrees on why we educate. Faced with this lack of consensus, policy makers define good education as higher test scores. But higher test scores are not a definition of good education. Students can get higher scores in reading and mathematics yet remain completely ignorant of science, the arts, civics, history, literature and foreign languages.

Why do we educate? We educate because we want citizens who are capable of taking responsibility for their lives and for our democracy. We want citizens who understand how their government works, who are knowledgeable about the history of their nation and other nations. We need citizens who are thoroughly educated in science. We need people who can communicate in other languages. We must ensure that every young person has the chance to engage in the arts. [My italics]

But because of our narrow-minded utilitarianism, we have forgotten what good education is.

DIANE RAVITCH
Ravitch is a historian. Her book ‘‘The Death and Life of the Great American School System’’ will be published in February.

Ms Ravitch is participating in an alternating blog with Deborah Meier called Bridging Differences on the Education Week Website, where they are trying to find what they have in common in their otherwise divergent messages about what matters most in education.

One of the other commentators goes on against BA degrees, ranting that they are not worth the paper they are printed on. I think he should read Ms Ravitch little piece - and her coming book - because I don't think he really understands why we educate our children. We are not educating them for that first job they get out of college, but to make them participating citizens in this country and the world.

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Another touching story in the magazine is The Lost Student by Michelle Kuo, a Teach for America teacher in the Mississippi Delta for a year.

Greg Mortenson in Afghanistan

I usually quote Thomas Friedman in my blog Sustainable Rays about environmental issues, but in today's New York Times he is reporting in Teacher, Can We Leave Now? No, on a trip to Afghanistan to join Greg Mortenson and Adm. Mike Mullen, the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to open a new school for girls in Afghanistan.

Since their previous education had been in the mosque, which would have precluded their desire to become doctors and teachers, this is one of many big steps that Greg Mortenson is providing in Pakistan and Afghanistan. As he says:

“When a girl gets educated here and then becomes a mother, she will be much less likely to let her son become a militant or insurgent,” he added. “And she will have fewer children. When a girl learns how to read and write, one of the first things she does is teach her own mother. The girls will bring home meat and veggies, wrapped in newspapers, and the mother will ask the girl to read the newspaper to her and the mothers will learn about politics and about women who are exploited.”

Admiral Mullen was visiting, because, as Mortenson says, the military finally "gets it." They realize that winning in Afghanistan (and Pakistan for that matter) has to be through building relationships, not imposing power, which is what Mortenson's work has been all about. Friedman concludes that if this is how we're in Afghanistan, then we can't leave yet.

So there you have it. In grand strategic terms, I still don’t know if this Afghan war makes sense anymore. I was dubious before I arrived, and I still am. But when you see two little Afghan girls crouched on the front steps of their new school, clutching tightly with both arms the notebooks handed to them by a U.S. admiral — as if they were their first ,dolls — it’s hard to say: “Let’s just walk away.” Not yet.

I'm wondering why it has to be the military doing this. It should be a big UN humanitarian effort instead involving NGOs and grassroots. But I guess since the Taliban is armed (initially by us) then they have to be kept in check?

Coming back to our own world, how many little girls would clutch a notebook as if it were their first doll? What are we doing wrong when girls think that having a baby is a prerequite for becoming an adult, instead of having a good education? In our classes at Claremont Graduate University, we talk often about "Social Justice," but we have a big job ahead of us not only providing a good education, but even more, motivating the students to want it. These Afghani girls need no motivation.

Education in this country has become more motivation than the three R's. We are trying to teach the students to think as well as to know facts, but they have to be dragged to the trough. "Why do I need to know this?" one of my more directed students asked. "I'm going to cooking school. All we need is to know measurements and ratios, not all this algebra stuff." Another one informed us that she was going to marry a rich man, who, we reminded her, would leave her with four kids and no money, if he was anything like most of the other fathers in her neighborhood.

I just created what I hope qualifies as an "Authentic Assessment" (not test, mind you!) in which students can show that they really understand how to simplify rational expressions with cognitive deepness. It was really difficult to relate those skills to "authentic" real life.

But we are trying to use math to teach thinking, logic, organization, steps to solve a (any) problem. Math is brain exercise, just like the exercises athletes use long before they get out on the field to play a game. But I think it would be delightful to teach students who so eager to learn as those Afghani girls!