Things we need you to stop saying 4

I'm scheduled for a Tech conference.  This is one of the offerings:

Really?

I find this amazing, sad, depressing, and it pisses me off.

I find it amazing that any teacher doesn't know more about technology than students; decent and cheap personal computers that can play video and music and run Office software and play games, have been around for 20 something years now.  More basic machines like the TRS-80 and the PDP8 (with punch tape reader!) since the seventies.  The Internet has been a thing since '95 and smartphones since 2007.

What teacher doesn't know tech at this point? Are there really people that backwards and stupid who don't know Office, and video games and .... a concept of programming whether it's macros in word, Windows script, basic, html, php, javascript, excel .... Anything? Something? Do I know any of these people?

Yes, yes I do. And they're teachers.  That's the sad part. Sad because it seems like MOST of the teachers I deal with are technidiots. (Like that? I just made the word up.)

It's 2015 and this conference is charging $200 a day and this is the title of one hour's workshop and the title isn't considered odd or demeaning or out-of-place. That's depressing but not surprising.

Far too many teachers are STILL tech illiterate, even by comparison with their students.

Yes, I said it. The students are not "digital natives" endowed with magical tech-fu. They are mostly clueless about useful tech of all kinds. They're great at plugging in the computer and playing a video game, or installing Candy crush on their phones and mindlessly playing for hours, but that's not tech literate.  Sure, there are some who know more than I do, but not very many, and I'm not setting a particularly high bar.

So what pisses me off?

This:

Holy shit!  I've been told that I can't teach unless I have certifications and continuing education in all forms of my field. I'm supposed to have lesson plans ready and write curriculum and proficiency based standards and differentiate my teaching.

Programming, apparently, doesn't require any of that.

Programming doesn't need expertise.

Programming is something the smart kid can teach for you.

Students helped with instruction and debugging. They addressed multiple languages and "no one knows the entire curriculum" and "all learn basics together".

What is this, an after school program at the Boys and Girls Club?

Teachers: Stop being idiots. Go learn how to program. Do your budget on Excel. Figure out how to center your words both vertically and horizontally in a Word document.

PD Leaders: Stop encouraging the technidiots.  It's not cute. It's not helpful, and we really need you to stop saying it.

A Few Random Thoughts about the Time article.

Maybe you've read it.

A few things jump out at me. Here's a big one:

One research team relied on a "a controversial tool called value-added measures (VAM)" to measure teacher effectiveness, and they "found that replacing a poorly performing teacher with an excellent one could increase students' lifetime earnings by $250,000 per classroom."

That's a pretty big number alright, almost big enough to make you lose sight of the details ... if you're a low grade moron or someone with a axe to grind who doesn't mind being disingenuous.

Lifetime earnings of $250,000 per classroom works out to $10,000 lifetime earnings difference per kid.  Assuming the average person works for about 40 years, that works out to a difference of $250 extra dollars per year, a whopping extra 12.5 cents per hour ... and that's if you replace a poor teacher with an excellent one for all twelve years of schooling.

This is what is known in mathematical and statistical circles as an "insignificant" increase for which we have to use a tool that the Vermont Commissioner of Education (and pretty much everyone else) has said is a "broken measurement system" that "does not work". She went on to say that it would never be used in Vermont because of it's ineffectiveness. "It would be unfair to our students to automatically fire their educators based on technically inadequate tools."

And where, besides a hole in the ground, did that number get pulled from?

Let's not ignore the dubious premise that thousands of "excellent" teachers are just waiting to be hired ... ready and eager to take the place of the losers.


Funny thing is, we're doing pretty well despite the fact that we have been forced to label every single school in the state as "low performing": 

 In 2013, the federal Education Department released a study comparing the performance of US states to the 47 countries that participated in the most recent Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, one of the two large international comparative assessments. Vermont ranked 7th in the world in eighth-grade mathematics and 4th in science. Only Massachusetts, which has a comparable child poverty rate, did better.

So Time magazine interviewed a couple of billionaires about their opinions of public education and teacher tenure. "Shocking!" they said. "You can't fire a bad teacher."

Really?  Have they ever tried? The usual reason that principals can't fire a "bad" teacher is because the principal has no way of knowing which teachers are "bad" teachers - the new evaluation procedures are long on typing every word but very short on actually listening to the teacher teaching the class. If you are focused on typing every word said, then you aren't paying attention and you aren't "taking notes" - the inability to multitask is something I warn my students of constantly. Incidentally, and ironically, so does the principal.

The other reason that most "bad" teachers can't be fired? They're not "bad" teachers. Most of the time a teacher who is labeled "bad" is someone who has spoken up at a faculty meeting, stood up for themselves or others, worked against the desires of the principal.

The truly bad teachers are the ones who don't get noticed because they never improve, who hand out the same worksheets year after year, who don't say anything controversial, who allow students to wallow and get mired in an academic mudpit ... but who somehow get As so their parents don't say anything, who have a degree from a prestigious university but who are universally reviled by their students as lousy teachers, who dutifully fill out the silly paperwork and follow every administrative whim with fervor, never considering the best interests of the students, doing just enough to placate but never enough to teach.

Here's how to get yourself fired in public schools WITHOUT tenure:

• Be gay/lesbian, or any other LGBTQ. (Seen it.)
• Be Experienced in a cost-cutting era. (Big pressure)
• Be Muslim, or Black or Latino or other "minority" who is "uppity" or in some other way "doesn't behave" (actually has an opinion and isn't afraid to say something).
• Get pregnant. (True story)
• Speak up for the Rights of the students/ disagree with admin is any way.
• Actually do something bad or criminal.

Except for the last one of course, that will never be the reason on the form letter. That would be discrimination. Rather, you'll find vague job performance metrics and "documented tardiness issues". You'll find overwhelming but never specified "evidence" of misconduct. You'll find everything but the actual discrimination.

Here are some ways you can get fired from a school WITH tenure:

• Do something bad or criminal.
• Be a bad teacher.

What we have here is a Failure to Communicate.

Education is an awesome thing. What kills it for me is Educrats and Professional Development. Only in Education is it considered a good idea to run a meetings with the following rules.

Did I say "rules"? Silly me, "rules" is such a simple word. What we need here is a more imposing word, one that will make us sound intelligent and wise. You could say we need jargon, but jargon is used in other fields to take a complex idea and substitute one word to represent it, to simplify speech by "chunking" a lot of information into a small package. In education, jargon is used in the opposite way - to confuse and impress through sheer bluster.

I give you "Protocol".

Specifically, there are "protocols" in place for our next little gathering:

There are over hundred different protocols developed in the field for educators, all of which assure us that we will collaborate better, with deeper understanding. "Deeper" is an important word nowadays - we want to eliminate the "mile wide and inch deep" education that we've been apparently delivering all this time. We're changing to deeper teaching. And don't forget collaboration.

We'll have a scribe who writes all this on a piece of chart paper that will never see the light of day, and probably won't survive the clean-up at the end of the session. But we collaborated and we found the essence of the text.

Of course, sharing a single sentence, phrase and word is hardly a collaboration and it sure as hell ain't a discussion, so I'm not quite sure how I'm going to be able to refrain from my usual snarky commentary. It's essentially going to be a long day.

Innovative to the Point of Stupid.

Not completely obvious, though.

Innovation is a good thing. It is a constant desire for improvement and change, but it must be tempered with reality. You cannot change for change's sake and you absolutely cannot change if the end result is worse than the current practice.


This would seem obvious.


The problem is that too many people who should know better but are pressured by time and publishing deadlines, fall into the trap and wind up looking stupid. Case in point is this bit (via Red Lines and Highlights) from Lisa Nielson, who calls herself the Innovative Educator, about Teaching Writing:

The unspoken truth about teaching writing in schools is that few people doing so are published writers themselves.

And, we just jumped the shark.

I have said many times that I feel teachers should know what they are teaching, should major in their subject and should be years ahead of their students. I have not said, however, that being a practicing mathematician is essential to being a math teacher, or that only research physicists should be teaching physics.

You need to know your craft, but the craft in question is Teaching.

In fact, most professionals are the last people you want teaching in high school. Sure, Kurt Vonnegut and others have made great college professors, and there are a few who can publish and teach at the same time, but insisting that ALL high school English teachers be published writers is "Perfect getting in the way of Good Enough."

What we need are teachers. Good ones.

What's worse, the message that students get is that in school they don't focus on writing for real. Let's be honest, how often do you read a book in the real world and think, "Oh! I want to write a book report!" How often do we take two texts to analyze and write a paper that we hand into someone. How often do we research something, then write up a research paper for no one?

How often indeed? Well, in order to write that blog post, the innovative educator researched several texts (i.e., read a couple articles), incorporated some other knowledge and put together a short essay. In order to write this, I did as well. I handed it in ... or rather "published it."

It's not a book report - that would be a critical review, and if I look at Amazon.com, I can see thousands of them. Sure, the ones you do in fifth grade are horrible, but that's not the fault of the format. It's because you're dealing with fifth graders and a book they hated.

Professionals in other fields are not professionals in this one; it takes a lot more than skill in a related field to be a teacher.

Why aren't schools helping students write for real? Why aren't those who teach writing, publishing their work and helping their students to write for real audiences?

They are, but The Innovative Educator can't see beyond her smartphone.

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." Education moves pretty fast, too, Ferris. It would be good if everyone paid attention to it.

Sometimes taste should decide fashion.

§176. Respect for flag No disrespect should be shown to the flag of the United States of America;
(d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery. It should never be festooned, drawn back, nor up, in folds, but always allowed to fall free.

I know Americans are more aware than citizens of most other countries of improper handling or display of the flag, but I still feel this is inappropriate. Certainly, someone should have pointed out that Perry was going to be a huge part of the show, broadcast nationwide and the performer's ego might take a backseat just once to taste.

This isn't a call for a Congressional over-reaction by anti-desecration amendment to the Constitution but rather a request to the broadcast networks to remain aware that tolerance may be a US virtue but that flouting that tolerance shouldn't be quite so obnoxiously visible.

Oh well, I guess this makes it okay. Or not.

I'd be interested to know if gunny "spoke" to him before his commander or after, and if the "conversation" was pleasant.

Data-Driven is Driving out the Good Ones

from Jay Mattthews:

Cotton worked hard. He said his evaluations from classroom observers got better as the year went on. But his students failed to outdo their suspiciously high fourth-grade scores to save his job. Those test results counted 50 percent in Cotton’s final evaluation.

He might have been a lousy teacher, but most first-year teachers need a lot of practice to get this job right. It takes about three years to catch up to the standard. It makes no sense to toss him under the bus.

The data requires me to be 
stupid, that's why.

The test maker sees evidence of cheating in the previous year's answer sheets, for a "suspicious number of wrong to right erasures". A former teacher is fired for cheating, or as the administration puts it, "is no longer at the school" because of  "a lapse of integrity".  What to do?  Fire the new guy because his more honest scores are too low, because you can fire a probationary teacher without cause or reason, because you will be "doing something", because "we will turn this place around".

Decisions must be data-driven instead of intelligence-based, apparently. 

This moron is teaching future math teachers

and giving them extra credit for this:

Unless they changed the rules recently and I never noticed, irrational numbers are still real.

This is the problem with math education in America.

• Not the students who hand in this mistake.
• Not the teachers nationwide who cringe at this mistake.
• Not the schools who do their best with unwilling or unmotivated students.

No, it's the college teacher preparation programs that instill faulty knowledge and reinforce it with extra credit ... these students obviously don't know their subject all that well and this "teacher" is no better. "Hands On Math: Burn The Textbooks, Shred The Worksheets, Teach Math." is the blog motto.

Seems like reading a book and learning a fact or two might come in handy.

Bill Gates and Teacher Spaghetti Sauce

Bill Gates is at it again.  For such a smart guy, it is amazing how dense he can be when it comes to education reform. To wit:

We can “flip the curve,” raising performance “without spending a lot more,” if we “measure, develop and reward excellent teaching." ... of all the variables under a school’s control, the single most decisive factor in student achievement is excellent teaching. To flip the curve, we have to identify great teachers, find out what makes them so effective and transfer those skills to others so more students can enjoy top teachers and high achievement.

SO, Billy, we have to identify great teachers and find out what makes them so effective. Then we have to transfer that to other teachers. That will flip the curve.

Hey !  "Find out what makes them so effective"???

If you don't know WHY the great teachers are great, how in Bloomberg's Bloomers can you say definitively that

1. You can identify these great teachers and find out what makes them so effective.
2. These unknowns are transferable.
3. This transference will raise performance “without spending a lot more."

Sometimes life is like judging pasta sauce.

There might not be a best, only a best for you. That teacher might not be the BEST because you can't define best for more than one type of student. There are more types of teachers than there are types of spaghetti sauce. Go watch the Malcolm Gladwell talk at TED.

Getting in trouble for blogging.

There's an English teacher who publicly said things (link is dead, try googlecahe. Darren's got this which links to this paper's article and whose tech guy found a cached version of this rant and this one. Whew!) about her school, her admins, her students. She faces "disciplinary measures." I found some of it and I'm not surprised that the school took action.

Even if she didn't post from school, public attacks aren't the smartest thing in the world. "But she didn't name any students!" shouts the defense. That may be true, but her face is there, her name "Natalie M." and it doesn't take much for a student to "know she's talking about me." As soon as she found out that folks were reading her stuff, it needed to come down if she wanted to be that direct.

Having said that, one of her posts was "Comments that should be on the report card." Instead of "Not working to potential," Miss M. wanted some new comments:

• Concerned your kid is automaton, as she just sits there emotionless for an entire 90 minutes, staring into the abyss, never volunteering to speak or do anything.
• Seems smarter than she actually is.
• Has a massive chip on her shoulder.
• Too smart for her own good and refuses to play the school 'game' such that she'll never live up to her true potential here.
• Has no business being in Honors.
• A complete and utter jerk in all ways. Although academically ok, your child has no other redeeming qualities.
• Lazy.
• Shy isn't cute in 11th grade; it's annoying. Must learn to advocate for himself instead of having Mommy do it.
• One of the few students I can abide this semester!
• Two words come to mind: brown AND nose.
• Dunderhead.
• Complainer.
• Gimme an A. I. R. H. E. A. D. What's that spell? Your kid!
• There is such a thing as too loud in oral presentations. We shouldn't need earplugs.
• Att-i-tude!
• Nowhere near as good as her sibling. Are you sure they're related?
• I won't even remember her name next semester if I see her in the hall.
• Asked too many questions and took too long to ask them. The bell means it's time to leave!
• Has no business being in Academic.
• Rat-like.
• Lazy asshole.
• Just as bad as his sibling. Don't you know how to raise kids?
• Sneaky, complaining, jerkoff.
• Frightfully dim.
• Dresses like a street walker.
• Whiny, simpering grade-grubber with an unrealistically high perception of own ability level.
• One of the most annoying students I've had the displeasure of being locked in a room with for an extended time.
• Rude, beligerent, argumentative fuck.
• Tactless.
• Weirdest kid I've ever met.
• Am concerned that your kid is going to come in one day and open fire on the school. (Wish I was kidding.)
• I didn't realize one person could have this many problems.
• Your daughter is royalty. (The Queen of Drama)
• Liar and cheater.
• Unable to think for himself.
• I hear the trash company is hiring...
• Utterly loathsome in all imaginable ways.
• I called out sick a couple of days just to avoid your son.
• There's no other way to say this: I hate your kid.

Pretty funny, if it's kept to the teacher's lounge.

What those first three years do for you.

Spencer has this list of things that all good teachers should be able to do without. He heads it with "How to Get Rid of Bad Teachers" but I think that needs to be qualified.

Some time ago, in his TED talk, Bill Gates opined that teachers don't improve after the first three years. He was saying, in effect, that test scores were the only thing that mattered and that brand-spanking new teachers improved their students' scores for three years only.

Okay, so Bill was wrong. (Is that sentence redundant?) What I think happens is that teachers grow into their jobs for the first three years. They start out by knowing very little and by making a ton of mistakes, teaching badly and inefficiently, and using methodologies that were just learned in education school - methodologies that don't work with actual students or anyone who isn't an education school guinea pig. Whew!

It takes about three years for them to figure out some truth. Some snippets are picked up from trade magazines, some from the kids or parents, but most are from the more experienced faculty once the newbie has gotten over his misconceptions about the "Old Guy" and the OG's total rejection of Shiny New Pedagogical Thought. "Old Guy doesn't use learning styles!?! WTF!?!"

That's when he learns what education really is and what it entails.

Excepting with respect to the newbies, I'd like to comment on Spencer's list:

Take away the Teacher's Guides and if they claim that they are unable to teach, they are right. They can't. As long as you're at it, take away the standards and the curriculum maps. Any decent teacher should be able to know what is vital in his or her content area.

Teacher's Guides/answer books are a convenience, not a crutch. Real handy for the repetitive and annoying work of producing paperwork that your building requires. There is probably a set of lesson plans tailored to the standards - photocopy them for your anal-retentive principal to get him off your back. Then go teach the class. Copy the curriculum map and hand it in. Then consult it once a month to stay roughly where you want to be. Taking away the standards entirely seems good in theory but not so much in practice. There needs to be some kind of plan, some kind of guidelines so the teachers don't go off in random directions.  Some of the best programs in the country have been fairly tightly controlled - Escalante's, for example.

Take away the computers. Tell them that there's no electricity. Even if it's a computer class, there's still a lesson to be learned. If they can't teach without the gadgets, then they aren't teachers. They're technicians and they have no business in a classroom.

To make a point, yes. Everyone should be able to "wing it." A blackboard is a whiteboard is a smartboard. But to say that ALL classes could do this for more than a couple of days is denying the use of available tools. Saying "you COULD walk to school, it's only 4 miles" is different from making it a common occurrence. There are topics that make no sense without tech and topics that have been phased out because tech took over.  Like it or not, some things are gone.

Take away the School Discipline Program and have the administrators leave for a day. If they can't lead a class without the intervention of an administrator, they probably need to leave.

Maybe. Maybe not. It seems that all teachers have the need for capable administration at various times although I've never seen one who required help every day.In that rare case, this is a valid point.

Take away the grades and get rid of the homework. Toss out the token reward system and the points and the gold stars. If they claim that they can't motivate a class without these things then they're missing a big part of what it means to motivate.

Homework and grades aren't for motivation. They're for practice and measurement, respectively. The token reward system is often effective, especially for the younger grades. Just because I don't use gold stars doesn't mean it's bad practice.

Take away the classroom for a day and have the teacher lead a group of ten kids. Meet outside. I don't care where. A lake, a river, a mountain, a busy intersection of the city. If the teacher can't see how the subject connects to life and struggles to get a point across without a Word Wall or a chalkboard or a set of worksheets, then the teacher is missing the point of education.

Whatever. I was never big on "class outside" and I fail to see where this ability is all that important.  Many things don't translate outside real well.  To say that the teacher is missing the point of education if they can't move into some random mountain meadow and teach algebra ...

YMMV

Superintendent to CEO.

I read in the newspaper the other day that the Superintendent for a local school district just resigned to become the CEO of a major industrial company.  There was no question she could do the job as she had been running a multimillion dollar school district for more than 10 years.

Okay, I'm lying. That lede wouldn't fool anyone. The idea is patently silly. Of course, a story about someone moving in the opposite direction seems a little ridiculous as well.

If Cathy Black is a good fit as chancellor because she has experience running a magazine, should Joel Klein simply take over the New York Times? Seems silly, doesn't it?

Would Cathy Black be any good at running GM - or would the company, its stockholders and its employees all rise up in anger and reject her appointment on the grounds that she know a lot about magazines and choosing the right model for the front cover but damn spit nothing about cars.

The NYTimes quotes a few experts who are used to looking at industry - none of them has any experience in education. NYTimes

"They held up several examples of corporate chieftains who hopscotched successfully from industry to industry, people like Louis V. Gerstner Jr., who went from RJR Nabisco, a maker of food and cigarettes, to I.B.M, a maker of computer equipment."

Yeah, there's a good analogy ... maker of food stuff to a maker of non-food stuff. Both of which are assembly line type situations where defective parts or ingredients are trashed or recycled.

Oh well. Here's to one more experiment with someone else's kids.

Jargon means something

It's been said before and it bears repeating. Jargon ("the language, esp. the vocabulary, peculiar to a particular trade, profession, or group") is used to make communication simpler and more precise.

Except in education.

Education "experts" use jargon to make simple things sound complicated, to change the inherent meaning of words and to appear (I guess) smarter than the speaker actually is. Education experts further abuse the English language by changing the meanings of simple words to either "be cute" or to obfuscate.

In what other field would a person who was speaking to a room full of professionals, requesting that thoughts and questions be "captured" (written down on sticky notes) and that the sticky notes be then attached to the "Parking Lot" at the back of the room (a large piece of paper decorated with an elementary school cartoon of a car and the words "Parking Lot" in large, multi-colored letters.

Teachers will never be taken seriously as professionals until we cease to find this clever, cute, or anything but demeaning and puerile.

Incentives and my Degree.

Joanne Jacobs has this article on Lower pay for math, science teachers.

Math and science teachers earn less than their colleagues in 19 of 30 large districts in Washington state, reports the Center on Reinventing Public Education. That’s because salary schedules reward only longevity and graduate credits. "The analysis finds that in twenty-five of the thirty largest districts, math and science teachers had fewer years of teaching experience due to higher turnover — an indication that labor market forces do indeed vary with subject matter expertise.

She comments that "Differential pay for high-demand skills would keep more math and science teachers in the classroom."

I strongly disagree. What I see as far more likely is that those math and science teachers would get paid more,and since they don't have a clue as to the particulars of teaching, they'd leave just as quickly. Five or ten thousand bucks can't overcome that. Teaching is TOUGH -- TFAs and other dilettantes aren't going to stay no matter what.  Shoveling money into the pockets of a few teachers solely based on the course they teach is not conducive to cooperation, teacher satisfaction, morale, or the work environment as a whole. 

The fact that those with a STEM degree can and do move on to other options is unfortunate but also a good motivator. "Hey, kids! Look what applying yourself in these subjects can do for you. Mr. Smith just got a job paying  ... "

Importantly, you can never pay those folks enough to keep them in the classroom, if they are chasing the dollar. TFAs are only thinking of a two year commitment and then it's off to the "Real World" of 6-figure salaries.  No school can compete with that. $100k or more -- is this what you want to pay a teacher in their first couple of years before you even know if they can teach? (What is this, some freakin' NBA rookie deal?)

Also, remember that they were not trained to be a teacher. Teaching math and doing math are different. They were trained to build machines, or solve complex systems, or write enormous amounts of code. There's nothing there about dealing with math-phobic 15-year-olds and material you learned easily twelve years ago. My biggest difficulty in the beginning was that, by and large, few of my students was as capable as I -- I had to figure out how to reach all the kids.

I'm a math teacher with an engineering degree, but I'm okay with the salary schedule paying all teachers similarly regardless of course. English is necessary, too, you know. As is art and music and history and science and computers and languages and woodshop and tech program and forestry and, and, and. Only a few students are going to specialize in math -- one could make the argument that the other teachers are more valuable to more students. How can anyone justify paying one teacher more than another based on the job offer that someone else might have gotten?

On the other hand, refusing pay increases doesn't make for a good environment either. My principal can't even visit my classroom more than once in four years and can't understand anything I teach - how is he going to fairly set my salary? I don't work for him; I work for a vague entity called the "District." It's not his money and he has no incentive to save it. This is not the classic "Boss" everyone thinks about.

The pay needs to be enough to keep money out of the conversation. The best way to do that is with the salary schedule. Then, there's no administrative BS, favoritism, stupidity, etc. You don't get worthless teachers (albeit with shiny degree) getting 5-figure signing bonuses and still skipping out after a year or two. Fairness is an issue and the evaluation process is too unclear for people to bet thousands of dollars based on it. You also don't get people comparing notes or holding out for raises in the middle of the year.

For more on motivation, go here: Dan Pink's talk on motivation.

Of course, if you want to pay me more, I won't turn it down. It's not why I teach, though. I had many choices that paid more -- industry, entrepreneur -- but I chose teaching. I'm paid well enough, I get my vacation all at once instead of having every night and weekend free and a couple weeks in August, and I enjoy what I do when I'm teaching. For me, it's a good choice.

Forcing Teachers to Read: Useful or just a Time-Suck?

Scott Macleod, over at Dangerously Irrelevant, wonders if we should require teachers to read the RSS newspaper: Should we require school employees to have RSS readers? He and his reader community created lists of rss feeds:grade-level and subject-specific blogs.

I'm great up to this point. Most of these blogs (I haven't read them all so can't say about all) are good people with good experience writing well and intelligently. But then Dr. Macleod goes a little off the end when he thinks about the next step ...

1. Should we require school employees to have loaded RSS readers (with a concurrent expectation that they spend time checking them and reading in them)?
2. How would the lives of the educators in your school organization be different if they regularly spent time with their loaded RSS readers?
3. How would the lives of preservice educators (i.e., student teachers) be different if they regularly spent time with their loaded RSS readers?
4. Can we figure out how to give educators professional development / licensure renewal credit for time spent with RSS readers, interacting with other educators in social media channels, etc.? We seem to be able to do so for face-to-face training, discussion groups, school book clubs, and so on ...

Thoughts on any of this? Got your own questions you’d like to add to my list?

No,
Not by much,
To brainwash them some more - haven't they already read these blogs as part of their classes?
and YAY! Another meaningless credit for meaningless professional development!
 Then there's time and viewpoint.

Time? I get to school at about 7:15. I start the computer, which takes maybe 15 minutes to complete, and then load a firefox folder of bookmarks - the things I do everyday like check my and the school's calendar for games or meetings, read email (I only do it once at the beginning and once at the end of the day) update the SAT problem of the day, open the gradebook. I am checking that all my first classes are ready - emergency copying, bookmarking the text. I check my school mail box on another floor. I get my caffeine. Classes start. During my prep period, I prep. During my classes I teach. After school I help students, go to a game or go home. When do you suppose I should spend an hour on my school computer reading an RSS feed? How pissed off would the taxpayers of my community be if they knew that I spent that time surfing the internet every day?

Viewpoint? All the blogs listed are definitely opinionated. The viewpoints are not ones that I agree with all the time. I don't care to have my principal, who knows little about teaching and basically nothing about math and less about educational technology, decide what things I must read daily. I would hate to see what he would require I read -  he already photocopies pointless articles (FYI) and forwards joke emails. The upshot is that so much of his correspondence is junk that it lessens the importance of the rest of it.
 Suppose I read Right on the Left Coast, which is not on the list, but not Dy/dan, which is?  What if my blog were required reading instead of this Macleod's?  Or Theo, or Moonbattery, or Breitbart or Malkin?

Overload.  The list for math has 31 blogs on it.  If you overload people with this much new educational thought and trivia during a time when they can't process it, you will lose much more than you possibly gain. "Even though it could yield great results" - but it won't.

I see it far more likely that any time allocated will be spent with BostonHerald's Red Sox feed than on head-in-the-sky education dreamers who can save the world instantly if you only do .... this.  Does anyone really think that updating a facebook profile is a good use of a teacher's time?

Macleod seems to have plenty of time during the day to read, relax and tend to his presence on the web (he lists a Blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Twine, Delicious, Digg, Gmail, Skype, coComment, Technorati, Wikipedia), but I have other interests, i.e., teaching. I have precious little time to browse during the day and I don't care to waste it reading Macleod's recount of some conference he went to.

In the evening, which is when I do my reading, I can read and consider, answer and comment -- but certainly not under my principal's eye. Of course, that's also when I tend to my own life, virtual and otherwise. I volunteer my programming time and server space for a bunch of websites, maintain this blog and my own, keep track of my own facebook account (which the students do NOT have access to) -- have a life, such as it is.

I might even grade papers or (GASP!) watch a game.

Professional Development Hell

I had to do some PD the other day and was once again stunned at the limited knowledge of so many math teachers. TI-inspire had some terrible little app running that didn't really work properly but was purportedly able to help students correct their misunderstanding of some simple math ideas. One of these: what happens to area when you double the radius? Take a 7 inch circle and drag the radius out to 14 inches and see what happens to the area.

"I don't get it. What's that mean -- area = 1.66E+2 inch² - what's the E thing?"

I guess we know why so many students have misunderstandings about math.

College studies.

I can't resist reposting this from Maggie's Farm. It makes no sense to me that parents will actually spend their hard-earned money for this kind of stuff. They should make a deal with the kid: "We'll help with a practical major. If you want to waste your time and your money studying garbage, we won't stop you."

Boo-hoo Studies

Why don't colleges just collect all of the grievance study groups and put them in one department. Fat Studies, Anorexia Studies, Queer Studies, Women's Studies, Hispanic Studies, Black Studies, Indian Studies, Transexual Studies, Lesbian Studies, Klutz Studies, Oppressed Studies, Ugly Studies, Not-Too-Smart Studies, Too-Short Studies, etc.

You could call it Boo Hoo Studies, and in it you could sequester everyone who expects college to cater to their narcissism instead of teaching them about bigger, better, and more important things than themselves. Baby bottles in the coke machine, over in that department.

Eventually, they will need to include one more increasingly marginalized and disenfranchised minority in Boo Hoo Studies - Regular People Living Without Grievance. RPLWG just can't get a break these days, can they?

I figure that you could include all the Education Majors who don't actually get a degree in anything except "Bulletin Boards and Presentation Techniques."

Strip Search for Advil

We have gone from being ridiculous to completely falling over the line. In Safford vs Redding, the Supreme Court is looking at the case of the middle-school girl who was strip-searched for Advil.

MSNBC has a story here.

Consider:
School officials are "looking for drugs" ( Ibuprophen ). Was there really a danger to the school or students? No, even if she had Motrin. "So what?"

What reason to search? Another girl said she had it and had given her some. Did they confirm this information? No. Did they search her locker? No. Apparently, it didn't occur to Starsky and Hutch that Huggy-Bear might be providing false information.

They searched the backpack and found nothing. So they strip-searched her: they told her to remove her clothes and shake out her underwear. This takes an amazing amount of institutional chutzpah and self-righteousness.

• You have to assume that any rumor is legit.
• Anything in pill form is dangerous, even Motrin.
• All 13-yo girls tell the truth except the one who's guilty.
• How do you know she's guilty? she denies it.
• Want further proof? Search her backpack. If you don't find it there, it means she's more clever than that.
  
• It's in her pockets because she's guilty. Nothing.
  
• She's guilty, look in the seams. Nope.
  
• Aha! She must have hidden it in her underwear.
• and Parents don't care if this happens.
• and Administrators are always right.

• Zero tolerance. Zero brains.

The ends always justify the means. Drugs are so scary bad that any rights or reason must be ignored. The drugs must be found even if they don't exist and the student punished severely regardless of guilt.

Once you're identified, you're guilty until proven innocent - and even then we're still not satisfied - you must have swallowed them!

The Supremes are wondering about danger to school in extreme cases and not wanting to set a precedent. I can buy that because that's their purpose.  There's talk of meth and crack and "possibly having other children die while in their care." This is all well and good but the case in front of them remains a strip-search for nothing on false grounds by an over- zealous administration with no sense of reality or proportion. "The school's lawyer argued that the courts should not limit school officials' ability to search out what they think are dangerous items on school grounds."

Really. Even for Advil?

Is this really what makes a good Teacher?

Mr. McGuire in the The Reading Workshop blog laid out these inspirations in a post titled "What makes a good teacher."

1. Interpersonal skills trump professional skills.
2. Give students a job and let them do it.
3. Be open and collaborative, but step in when needed.
4. Be visible.
5. Keep a sense of perspective.
6. Finally, be a decent human being.

I look at this list and can't find "teacher" nor can I find anything that accepts the idea that the adult in the room is supposed to be imparting anything to the teenagers in the room. Everything screams "I am insecure in my knowledge and I doubt that the students are looking to me for anything."

Implicit is the idea that students are the equals of teachers, that their opinions are based on the same amount of experience and understanding. "Give them a job and let them do it" implies the teacher is only a obstacle to student achievement.

I know that some will blast me for saying this, but tough. If the kids were truly the equal of the teacher, why bother with the teacher? Why spend so much time, effort and money getting teachers to write curricula, design assessments and lesson plans, take workshops on classroom management and all the million other things we do? Plop him in front of the technology he loves so much and keep your old-school ways out of his way - yeah, <sarcasm> that works real well. </sarcasm> Just look at how much they accomplished last summer.

Why is being decent, having perspective and being visible, open and collaborative considered the be-all and end-all of good teaching? I think it's because so many of us are lousy teachers who aren't properly prepared, so we focus on our smiles instead of our subject. Being decent and all is important but it is not what makes a "Good Teacher."

When did the adults abdicate their responsibilities to be the leaders, to be the teachers? Why does that old joke about "those who can" still hold so much traction? The answers to these questions are complementary.

But not very complimentary to the profession.

Being a Good Teacher

I ran across a list of 6 things that apparently "made a good teacher." I'll post it in another entry, but one part caught my eye. In it the writer shares his inspiration - that's right, inspiration. In education, you see, we don't learn from experience, we learn from inspiration. Additionally, we don't learn from education exemplars, we learn from business ones.

"Doug Johnson on the Blue Skunk Blog discussed what made a good boss. This list has been adapted from his comments about a great boss.

But Mr. McGuire, wait. A good boss is not a good teacher.

A boss pays you. From the start, you are expected to be capable of doing everything the job requires. Boss expects you to be knowledgeable, erudite, and capable of doing the job you were hired for ... whether that entails good people skills in a cooperative job environment (the whole 21st Century thing which isn't anything new) or a cubicle keep-to-yourself and get the work done kind of job with minimal contacts beyond the check-in and coffee urn. The boss does not expect to teach you. You improve yourself or not. You accomplish your job or not. You get fired or not. You finish for the day and you go home. If you enjoy the work, bully for you.

A teacher does not have the same expectations of his charges - they don't know things. They don't know math, they can't write well, they're ignorant of history ... that's why they are enrolled. A Teacher cannot approach his craft in the same way as a Boss.

Everything about dealing with students is based on the fact that this society doesn't believe they are capable of making appropriate decisions or fending for themselves; everything about dealing with employees is based on the fact that they are and they can. Tread carefully if you try to cross these lines for you risk looking foolish.

Students aren't deemed responsible enough to be allowed to do choose whether or not to do anything - don't blame me for it, it just is.

• choose to smoke (laws)
• choose to drink (laws)
• have sex, (age limits, etc.)
• show up, (truancy laws)
• take an aspirin, (all those restrictions)
• slack off, (we need to inspire them, make learning fun)
• bring a pencil, or materials, (I just give them one if it's the occasional forgetfulness, but I'm not happy when it's a habit. They still get one but I scowl.)
• leave the building, (it's a closed campus)
• go to the bathroom, (without a pass and in some places there's a quota, for chrissake.)
• drive a car (restrictions abound)

A girl CAN get an abortion without parental permission, but that's the exception that proves the rule.

This business model doesn't apply here, Sir, even if it does inspire you.