I Wondered Why I Liked Wikipedia...

Here is an article on a study comparing Wikipedia with Encyclopedia Britannica and finding a similar level of accuracy in the sciences. I have to pitch in that I find the articles on history very useful background when I'm about to teach (in high school world history) a subject I know in little depth. I'd like to know how accurate the US history section is!

Civil War Memory: A History Lesson

Civil War Memory: A History Lesson is a nice discussion of some background on the display of the Confederate flag. I recommend it.

My Hometown, Worcester, Tries to Save Money by Paying Teachers Less

My hometown, the City of Worcester is trying to reduce costs by negotiating for teachers to pay a higher percentage of the cost of health insurance. In the long term the city would be wise to continue paying 87 to 90% of health insurance costs for teaching staff.

Worcester’s teaching force is predominantly made up of women, and it includes many instructional aides who are paid considerably less than certified teachers. Because women are usually the decision makers in families when it comes to health care, the quality and cost of health insurance is a major factor in most teachers’ decisions about where to work. This is especially so for those on the low end of the salary scale –new teachers and aides – for whom insurance costs make up a larger percentage of their overall pay.

If health insurance benefits are cut, the Worcester schools will have a difficult time recruiting new teachers and retaining experienced classroom aides. Staff turnover will increase as employees look for work in school systems that offer better remuneration. In a city filled with new immigrant minorities, there would be little incentive for members of these minorities to choose to teach in Worcester.

City government should look elsewhere in the budget for ways to save money, or the Worcester schools will suffer the consequences of greater difficulty recruiting capable staff, especially staff that will reflect our city’s growing diversity.

Your Federal Government is Ruining Worcester's Schools

Usually when people criticize the Feds, it's "the federal government" they criticize -- those folks in Washington, over whom you have no control -- as if you can't influence public affairs. You can. So read; then act.

The No Child Left Behind Act was a bipartisan effort -- Sen. Kennedy was among its many sponsors -- that has had profound effects on the schools in my hometown of Worcester, MA. By one measure, standardized test scores, the city schools are improving. But if you look closely at what teachers, administrators and students are actually DOING, I think you'll find that in many ways the schools are worse.

For example, administrators, to justify the actions of their teachers with respect to state standards (and driven by the need to demonstrate their efforts in the case of low test scores) have demanded that teachers reference the state standards on all their lesson plans. Lesson plans have become more and more over-written as a result, and teachers are either getting disgusted with the whole thing and faking it, or simply wasting time thinking about state standards rather than what they as teachers know their students need.

Another example I can pull from my own experience. When my school, the ALL School was placed on the state's list of underperforming schools, many state functionaries came in to examine the school improvement plan. They didn't like it, although it was the LAST group of state employees that had come through that had helped the administration write it. Back to the drawing board and the administration writes another one. Then another, because the state employees were still dissatisfied. Meanwhile, the normal administrative matters of running the ALL School were neglected. I didn't see an administrator in the classroom or the halls except in the case of an emergency. They were too busy gratifying their superiors from the Dept. of Education. The focus on documentation is typical of the bureaucratic mindset.

Another result of the focus on test results is that administrators develop tactics to focus on SOME kids who can be pushed over the threshold of the MCAS test into "Proficient" at the expense of other kids who might need more points to make it into "Needs Improvement" or "Advanced." Some students get the extra tutoring to bring them up on the basis of their test scores alone, with little regard for other factors (the child is homeless, the mother is a junkie, or an equally deserving kid is in the middle of his rank and less likely to get into the next one because he'll need more points).

Teachers, forced by their experiences in the classroom to be realists even as their idealism got them there in the first place, view these administrative responses with a mixture of disgust and anger. Forced to focus on documentation instead of their students, they burn out or make compromises they would otherwise eschew.

So here's my advice to the few Worcester citizens who really care about public education: Go to your neighborhood school and ask the teachers what they think about education reform and accountability and their effects on the schools. Then write Congress and tell them to nullify No Child Left Behind.

Advice for Veterans

I guess after almost nine years of teaching I’m considered a veteran at this job, but because I’m constantly learning new ways of teaching I still feel like a neophyte. I'm always looking for new ideas from fellow teachers (my department head knows that teachers learn more about how to teach from each other than from any other source).

One thing I'm still learning about is classroom routines. There are certain routines in any job, and sometimes teaching high school can be extremely repetitious. I learned as a musician, though, that if the bandleader never changes the arrangements or the repertoire the musicians will burn out. The same goes for students. No one should have to do the same things day after day; life is quotidian enough. Teachers that like to stick to a strict routine day after day generally start boring their students pretty quickly

Yet I’ve learned (the hard way) the advantages of maintaining certain routines in the classrooms, particularly at times when students are in transition. Just because I’m flexible enough to turn on a dime doesn’t mean that my students can always follow me. So at the beginning of each class, students can expect that I’ll introduce the homework and at the end review the assignment and any other necessary information. And when I’m having students form groups, I follow a consistent pattern.

I often fall short in this, so I revise and introduce new routines as needed. And I’ve learned to be very clear when I’m changing a routine, and with repetition, the students come to know what to expect. To engage students I have to come up with a variety of things for them to do, yet still have a framework of routines within which I can introduce different activities.

So there’s a tension between variety and routine that has to be balanced, and that balance is entirely up to me. A lot of variables have to be factored in, however: time of day, the social dynamic within each class, whether a particularly influential student is having a bad day, or any number of things.

Issues like these are what make teaching a human activity. Perhaps because teachers become experts in dealing with all of these variables, they develop a certain contempt for those who have little experience with them but are in the position of telling teachers how to do their jobs. A colleague told me about a woman who came from the state department of education to give a presentation to a bunch of history teachers about using different methods of presenting materials for different types of learners. At one point she asked for questions, and one teacher asked her: If using such a variety of techniques is such a good thing, why are using a lecture format? She replied that she had too much material to present to do otherwise.

At which point about half the history teachers got up and left!

I guess listening to people who are not teachers tell them what to do is at the heart of the frustrations teachers express with their work.

Asking the Right Questions at the Right Time

As part of a unit of fascism and totalitarianism, I’ve been teaching my students about propaganda this week and last. I started off with a PowerPoint presentation that I’d made shortly after the Iraq invasion was undertaken, in favor of the war in Iraq. I had the kids identify some of the techniques of propaganda I’d used: Assertions, name-calling, card-stacking, glittering generalities, and so on. Then, by way of review, I later presented another PowerPoint, this time ranting that the US get its troops out of Iraq.

And one of my students, a bright kid, and a conservative, who loves history and politics and is always asking questions (the best kind of students always ask the best questions) said after I was finished, “The people who want the US out never ask what happens after we leave.”

I wish that someone with that kind of foresight had been planning the occupation of Iraq.

My student is absolutely right. For all that I deplore the way Bush’s administration has handled the occupation (it’s hard to argue against the initial operation, which was carried out quite smartly by the military, given the manpower it had available, unless you’re a pacifist by principle), I don’t think the Left has much to offer about how to conduct the occupation of Iraq. All right already, so we were misled into the war; NOW WHAT?

Another propaganda technique I taught my students about is called Pinpointing the Enemy. Both sides are doing this relentlessly now, with little positive result. Thinking that we were misled into war makes me a Liberal, and so I get shit slung at me from the Right. Thinking that the occupation of Iraq is now necessary and that we need to do the best we can in the situation we’ve created makes me a Conservative, and I get shit from the Left for not wanting an immediate withdrawal of US troops on a fixed timetable.

If both sides are busy calling each other the enemy and calling each other names, how are we ever going to agree on a foreign policy that makes sense, now that we own Iraq? That’s right: OWN IT. Because we do. We’re now responsible for the whole mess, and if we leave without at least trying to do the right thing there, whatever moral basis we ever had for landing troops there in the first place is null and void.

So I ask my fellow citizens, conservative and liberal, what I think my student would ask them: Now that we’re in Iraq, what do we do so that when US forces finally withdraw, they (and we) can hold our heads up knowing that all that death and destruction had some positive result?

And I’ll follow up with a question of my own: Who is going to pay for what we are doing in the Mideast, and how is the bill to be paid? But I’ll leave the possible answers to that one for another time.