Encouraging Mediocrity and More

(Warning: This is a disjointed blog from a frustrated and time-challenged teacher.)

The pupil who is never required to do what he cannot do, never does what he can do. (I don't know where this quote came from but there's an odd logic to it.)

We should be helping kids set goals rather than encouraging them to make excuses. I'm sure the original intent of special education legislation was to push kids with disabilities to do what they really can, but it has not turned out that way.

We have encouraged an attitude of mediocrity with students and we're getting what we have reaped.

* Student cannot copy a sentence from the overhead. Teacher gives student a printed copy

* Student cannot remember to bring a pen or pencil. Teacher gives student a pencil.

When 20 special education students are placed in a class of 30 students, the challenges affect all students.

Average students have difficulty with ordinary thinking skills. For example, when given a research topic, students cannot form questions about the topic. The teacher must tell students what the questions are and what specific answers to look for. Life today requires us to recognize the questions that our problems lead us to and to know how to look for the answers. I try to teach this skill in my classroom but it's a struggle. Students have lost their ability to question anything but authority.

Teaching students small things such as following directions, a skill required in real life of filling out tax forms and driving, remains a challenge. Students are told to write their first and last name, write out the date, and write their class period number on three lines in the upper right hand corner of each paper. Some students are still not doing this! Students are told to use only dark blue or black ink...not gel pens and peacock colors...some students continue to do this in spite of getting no credit for it. (Those strange colors tax my failing eyes, especially when I'm grading 150 papers.)

If we are to remain a strong nation, we need people who can reach for the impossible and do what they can.

We are turning out students who say:

* I can't do that because my IEP (individual education plan) says you have to do this for me."

* "I don't want to do it that way. I can read orange gel pen on notebook paper so you, the teacher, have to read it and give me credit."

* "Why did you take off points for not dotting my 'i's'?" The teacher explains that most of their vocabulary words were "qui" words and if the student doesn't dot the i's, the teacher doesn't know if the student wrote "qiu" or "qui." "But you know what I meant."

* "Why did you take off points for my spelling in my assignment? That sucks. What difference does it make?"

Parents now tell their children they don't have to serve detention because they disagree with the teacher.

Parents tell teachers to change the grade because their children deserve a higher grade.

I give students a grade on merely coming to class and trying to learn! That's what education has boiled down to! I give them credit for bringing their notebooks and pens and making an attempt to do their work no matter whether the answers are right or wrong. Students come to me, very proud..."I brought my notebook today." "I did my homework last night." They look at this as behavior that should be rewarded...behavior that should automatically be expected...

When I was in elementary school, I was given textbooks and told to cover them at home. Now, not only do we provide them with book covers (with advertising), but we take class time to instruct them in how to cover their books. If teachers do not do this, the next day half of the students will come to class:

* "We didn't have any bags (newspapers, etc.) at home to cover the book."

* "I can't cover books."

* "Why do we have to cover our books? That sucks."

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I've been grading papers this afternoon and am still amazed at how slow these kids are! Example: They have to read the Shirley Jackson story "Charles." Sometimes students fail to make even the simplest connections in their thinking.

In "Charles," Laurie is the main character. When students first saw the name, they assumed Laurie was a girl, which is understandable. However, students did not connect the pronouns to adjust their thinking. For example, the first sentence begins, "The day Laurie started kindergarten, he renounced corduroy overalls with bibs and began wearing blue jeans with a belt. I watched him go off the first morning…He came home the same way…" Also, one of the test questions asks, "How would you handle a boy like Laurie?"

Some students failed to connect that there was no Charles and that Laurie made up the name as he told his parents about a bad boy named Charles in his kindergarten class. They didn't see a parallel between Laurie's new bad behavior at home and fictitious Charles. Finally, when at the end of the story, the teacher tells Laurie's mother that there is no Charles in kindergarten, some students didn't recognize that this was significant while others didn't understand why the teacher would say this after all the stories that Laurie told.

This is the slowest bunch of kids I've ever taught--and the most apathetic. I can take genuine low IQ kids and work with them but the attitudes ("That's stupid taking giving me a low grade for not spelling right. What difference does it make?) that go along with it are frustrating. They don't even bother to copy correctly. I've even tried giving them answers to see what they would do and they don't care enough to take advantage of that gift. These are 7th graders who misspell words like mouther, whent, etc. They don't know what syllables are or that the pronoun I should always be capitalized. Sometimes when I correct them, they respond, "But this is the way I do it" as if that justifies doing things wrong. They don't understand cursive and don't follow directions. I tell them that I (along with the other teachers on our team) want them to head their papers a certain way and, instead of just doing it, they question it and want to know why. I explain that when teachers are dealing with a lot of papers to grade, it makes our job easier to be able to identify information quickly. Now, when the questions continue, I've resorted to saying, "Because your teacher told you to." (something I always said I wouldn't do!)

We're supposed to be teaching students higher level thinking skills when they don't even have the academic and social foundation necessary for success!

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I started teaching in 1967 in Baltimore City, left in 1975 and returned in 1988 to teaching in Anne Arundel County. During this span of time, I've seen many changes in education and students. One thing that really distresses me is that every year I'm able to do less with students because they don't come to me with necessary skills. Every year it takes longer to cover the same material and much of it I have to drop because students are not able to handle it. Every year, I have to water down content and use more and more scaffolding. Right now I'm teaching the 7th grade unit on humor. My students are able to understand slapstick only for the most part and I'm trying to elevate them to understanding verbal humor, etc. They complain that they have to think too much.

Much of this problem I blame on the mindset of our society. Seventh graders today have grown up in an instant gratification society where if they don't receive instant gratification, they won't bother with it. Teachers know that learning is not instant gratification, but a long and sometimes painful process that unfolds very slowly sometimes. And I blame the mindset of our educational systems that has taken the responsibility for learning out of the learners' hands. By doing this, we've removed a crucial element in the process of learning.

School Testing

A posting from George Curtis from MDK-12@UMDD.UMD.EDU:

I have this old political cartoon on my wall from THE BAY TIMES newspaper on the Eastern Shore it shows a large pig on a scale. There is a picture of a farmer and a scientist standing next to the pig.

The farmer say, “Weighs the same as an hour ago...maybe if we feed him?”

The scientist says, “No...No...No...Just keep testing him until his weight increases.”

The bottom of the cartoon reads, “If agriculture were run like the Department of Education.”

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A posting from Peter Donahoe which appeared 5/10/01 on MDK-12@UMDD.UMD.EDU:

It might interest you to know that Maryland’s eighth-graders, on average, appear to know a little less math and science than eighth-graders elsewhere in the United States and a lot less than children in many countries, including Hungary, Bulgaria, Australia and Slovenia. I’m not even mentioning places like Singapore, South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong, which lead the world in math and science?

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A 5/10/01 posting on MDK-12@UMDD.UMD.EDU from Jim Morrow wrote:

I’m REALLY surprised... especially with all the testing that Maryland does..Maybe we should start giving the tests weekly.. I’m sure that if we give the tests often enough our results will improve..

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This is the article from the Washington Post:

Maryland Math, Science Learning Dip, International Test Shows

By Karin Chenoweth

Thursday, May 10, 2001; Page HO21

It might interest you to know that Maryland's eighth-graders, on average, appear to know a little less math and science than eighth-graders elsewhere in the United States and a lot less than children in many countries, including Hungary, Bulgaria, Australia and Slovenia. I'm not even mentioning places like Singapore, South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong, which lead the world in math and science.

I know this because Maryland participated, as if it were a separate country, in an international test of eighth-gradestudents in 1999. So we now have important data to help us think about what children should know and how our schools are doing. The 1999 test was a repeat of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) administered four years earlier.

Because of TIMSS, we realize that American fourth-graders know, on average, as much math and science asmost in the world, while our eighth-graders are about in the middle of the pack and our 12th-graders can barely compete with students in the poorest and least developed countries.

The 1999 retest, known as TIMSS-R, was done partly to test the notion that some special characteristic of fourth-graders who took the test in 1995 would keep them at the top. No such luck. Kids who performed so well then were just average in 1999, seemingly on the same downward path as their older brothers and sisters.

This confirms much other data indicating that something begins to happen in our middle grades that retards the pace of learning for most kids. It isn't that they aren't learning math and science, but they tend not to learn as much as children elsewhere in the world, as evidenced by how the 38 participating countries did.

If Howard County had participated as a separate country, it probably would have performed better than the whole of Maryland. Part of the reason lies in demographics. In general, the wealthier the jurisdiction, the better its students did on TIMSS-R, and Howard is wealthier than most of Maryland.

All of the 13 states tested performed at about the national and international averages. But the wealthy school districts in those states performed much better and the poor ones much worse.

The biggest exception was probably the Michigan Invitational Group, a collection of diverse school districts that demographically match the rest of Michigan. Those districts have been working closely with the National Science Foundation to develop high-quality math and science programs, and they performed much better than Michigan as a whole.

This is an exciting finding because it demonstrates that attention to teacher training, a strong curriculum and high-quality materials can make a significant difference in student achievement. Howard can also look at neighboring Montgomery County for an idea of how it would have performed. Montgomery County was 10th in math in the world and 26th in science.

Like Howard, Montgomery has been pushing more students to take algebra in eighth grade. About 40 percent of eighth-graders in both counties take algebra, compared with about 33 percent statewide. So my guess is that Howard County, like Montgomery, would have been in the top 25 percent.

All of the participating states and districts deserve a lot of credit. It isn't every school superintendent who wants his or her district judged against world standards, and all who agreed to do so should be applauded for their intellectual courage. This is especially true for urban districts that participated.

It is tough, for example, to explain to parents in Dade County, Fla. (Miami), why their children scored way below national and international averages. But Dade, and Rochester, Chicago and Jersey City, which also participated, are determined to help their kids learn at high levels, and this is one way they're proving that.

The TIMSS-R provides a rich source of information about our expectations of children today. For example, American kids performed badly on a rather simple problem asking for the area of a shaded rectangle within a parallelogram. Only 34 percent of Maryland students and 45 percent of Montgomery students answered correctly.

In this country, we tend not to teach geometry until high school. In Singapore, where geometry is woven into the math curriculum more consistently, 83 percent of eighth-graders got the right answer.

There's a lot more information that can be mined from the TIMSS-R, because students, teachers and principals were also surveyed about interesting issues. For example, if anyone thinks that kids today don't realize that it's important to do well in school, forget it.

More than 95 percent of the 3,317 Maryland students surveyed said it's important to do well in math, science and language. But 98 percent also think that it's important to have fun and 84 percent to be good at sports. While students also overwhelmingly said their mothers thought it important that students do well, only 76 percent said their friends do.

This contrasts sharply, for example, with what students in Singapore believe about their friends. That might be one small factor in why Singapore's eighth-graders lead the world in math.

Here's another interesting fact: 40 percent of Maryland's math teachers report that they majored in mathematics and an additional 35 percent in math education, fairly comparable with the rest of the country.

But here's the kicker: 92 percent of Maryland's eighth-grade math teachers say they feel well prepared to teach eighth-grade math. This high level of confidence, and the lower level of training, contrasts sharply with that of the top performers in the world.

For example, in Singapore, only 66 percent of eighth-grade math teachers say they feel well prepared to teach eighth-grade math although a higher percentage of them were actually trained in the field. It appears that the more you know, the greater your appreciation of the complexities of the field -- and the less confident you may be that you are prepared to teach it.

By the way, if your kids complain they have more homework than others, they now have some evidence. According to surveys filled out by teachers, 73 percent of Maryland eighth-graders are assigned math homework three or more times a week. That compares with 63 percent of eighth-graders nationwide.

TIMSS-R provides a wealth of information, and I've only skimmed the surface. For more, go to www.timss.org, where half of the 300 test questions are posted. It's kind of fun to see how you and your kids stack up against Singaporean and Japanese students.

Homeroom, which appears every other week, is a forum for you. Send questions, opinions and issues that you would like to see discussed to Homeroom, The Washington Post, Howard Extra, 10490 Little Patuxent Pkwy., Suite 650, Columbia, Md. 21044. The fax number is 410-772-2330; the e-mail address is homeroom@washpost.com. To see previous columns, go to www.washingtonpost.com, click on the Education page and look for Homeroom under Education Columnists.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company

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Smoky Mirrors

Posted 4/28/01 by Jim Morrow
University of Maryland Listserv

Does anyone else hope the smoke will clear and the mirrors will crack so people can see and recognize that teaching and learning is a cooperative enterprise; that giving students what they want is not necessarily what they need; that just berating teachers and their methods without addressing students and parents and their responsibilities in the cooperative process amounts to abuse?

Some thoughts of education today about why so many teachers are leaving the public schools....

I have noticed lately, in my 30 years of doing this wonderful thing I called teaching, what I call the “Lake Wobegon Effect.” That- all the children are now above average. When I was a child my father used to take me when we bought steamed crabs to Gordons of Orleans Street... Up on the wall were three crabs... the sign said “small—“medium”—“large”.., The other day I saw those same three crabs, -- listed now as.. “#1Large”, “Jumbo” and Texas Jumbo”

At my schoolð Our crabs now read..(oops I mean our courses of study) are scheduled to become..—instead of B course and A course .. we are now “TA DA”--- “College Preparatory and Advanced Studies (AP or IB”). We ve gone through calling it “Special” College Prepèthen that “EVERY” student at City was an HONORS student, rename after rename to make OUR students appear to be the best in Baltimore City.. Now we are no longer offering honors coursesðOur “Honors” courses are being disbanded since the EOC (BCPSS “End Of Course” exams) and HSA’s (High School Assessments) do not distinguish between honors and regularð So why should we? We will be offering Pre-AP and Pre-IB coursesðto 9th and 10th grades.. Could it just
be to force students to take AP or IB. and enlarge our new “ADVANCED STUDIES PROGRAM”?

Statistics and data are now manipulated to make the results say anything we want. For example... over the past 5 ç(FIVE) years we have had (whoa) 35 total students take the AP calculus exam (AB). In 96- 0/15 passed (3 or higher) or 0%..., 97 -1 out of 7 passed or 14 %, 98-1 out of 12 passed or 8%,---- BUT in 1999- 1/1 passed.. That’s 100%. A chart of this was created stating our 5 year trend was 100%. .... the people at the State and City must be impressed!. Our percentage passing went from 0% passing to 100% passing in just 5 years. We are a National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence and a MD State School of Excellence.. Nancy came by personally to help raise the flag and join in the celebration.

But a recent Brookings Foundation Report suggests “that the 18çyr old program is too often an award for impressive paper work and fashionable teaching methods and too infrequently a measure of academic achievement” (çJay Matthews, Washington Post, Sept 6, 2000)

Of course OUR average SAT scores are in the 800’s.. We’re Blue Ribbon (with the flag to prove it.), but this allows the powers that be to claim the fame, and the Abell Foundation to give and additional $30,000 grant to PROMOTE our new excellent curriculum. (the AP-IB Advanced studies program), on top of who knows how many $100,000”s (seriously) to fund the “International Baccalaureate Program, for 50-60 kids out of close to 1300.

Isn’t education wonderful?

Our principal has never taught in a public high school. He has his doctorate, and is a lawyer. Most definitely, he, Ms. Grazmick and other powers that be need to go back (or for the first time) to the classroom and teach. NOT to the Montgomery Blairs, and the Centennials, but the everyday High Schools, Teach a full load for one full year, with Portfolios and MSPAP and all the other Bureaucratic @#$%. Only then will their suggestions have meaning or relevance. (Did you ever want to be the Principal at a school that was marked for “STATE TAKEOVER”? To ask our State superintendent to bring herself and her “staff” and demonstrate how it’s to be done..? Let them take over the school for a year, WITHOUT additional funding, outside intervention, privatization, additional staffing, etc, and implement THEIR policies of “how WE should do it”.

I doubt they would last for 3 months let alone a year, My students are wonderful kids.. but typical kids.. bright, lazy, energetic, happy, angry. good days-bad.. I love teaching them.. I feel bad, dirty about the immorality of inflating them to believe that mediocrity is excellence. I get angry that people who haven’t, don t or no longer teach, just change the names of courses to make them sound better, more advanced, more elite. Ashamed that it does such a disservice to them as future adults and will never address the roots of the problems they face, we face.. (but it does make the upper powers look good, feel better about who they are and justifies their job and salaries I guess)

But alas like you and others.. I am cast aside as a lowly veteran, who’s not up to date with the latest jargon and statistics data trends and practices of which none address the parent or student's accountability for their on actions or inactions.

As long as our “Lake Wobegon” society ans system wants no failures and all excellents.. and no one seems to remember or understand about the Bell Curve of normal distribution, theywill continue to just change the names, and manipulate statistics to prove that mediocre is excellent.

Hang in there sports-fans. We’ve done (DO) a good job, fought (FIGHT) the good fight, and have taught and provided students the skills and abilities to accomplish great things.. (even though we never bothered to count and manipulate the data, correlate and extrapolate future trends, shamelessly self-promote or rename ourselves to look better.