An Assault on My Conscience

There's something I've been needing to get off my chest.

Last week, I went out to dinner after class with three of my very dearest friends; we were catching up after not having seen each other for a while, and celebrating the return of one of them from a 14-month tour in Iraq. All in all we had a great time, but there was one part of our conversation that bothered me, so much so that it had me feeling ill the next day.

I was talking to my friends (none of whom are teachers) about some of the issues I've written about on this blog, particularly the difficulties of teaching students who behave abominably on an everyday basis. At one point I related an incident from a few years ago in which a particular student had exhibited borderline-psychotic behavior on several occasions, and when I had made a poor choice of words in describing this child's behavior to a family member on Open School Night, the mother misinterpreted my meaning and complained to my supervisor. The result, and the point of my bringing it up, was that the issue became my unfortunate word choice and not the need for this child to correct his behavior and/or receive professional help, thus eliminating any possibility of actually helping this kid.

At this point one of my friends proceeded to tell me, after prefacing with a set of boilerplate "I know you have a tough job, but..." platitudes, an unbelievably depressing story about an acquaintance of his who, at the age of about 17, had his parents go through the most contentious and ugly divorce imaginable, with one parent becoming a crack addict and the other a violent criminal, or somesuch embellishments to that effect, and others, which I cannot remember with any specificity because I found it all so upsetting. This story was so over-the-top horrific that it dwarfed anything I've ever actually heard about any student I've ever taught in 12 years in this profession. The point, apparently, was to criticize me for, I guess, "failing" to take this ghastly scenario into consideration.

I remember feeling ill all the way home on the train, and coming to school the next day in the most depressed state of mind I've experienced in years. What was my friend, whom I have known for almost 20 years and love like a brother, trying to tell me? That I should go easier on my students and be more tolerant of their despicable behavior because there might be a story like that behind it? That I am wrong to discipline kids when they misbehave, for the same reason? Was he accusing me of injuring this unfortunate kid myself, by proxy, because of the way I uphold standards and discipline kids in school? Or was he accusing me of injuring every kid I've ever disciplined in all my years as a teacher, because they all may have had a story like that to tell? That I should now have to re-think and mitigate every disciplinary referral I've ever written up, every punishment I've ever meted out, every standard I've ever upheld, every consequence I've ever imposed, nigh every comment I've ever made, to a misbehaving student?

I've written on this blog before about the dilemma all teachers face between being sensitive to students' out-of-school "issues" on the one hand, and maintaining order and consistent academic and disciplinary standards on the other. When I started teaching, I would have leaned toward the former; twelve years later, I lean hard toward the latter. I do so not only because I've just become so thoroughly disgusted with the way kids behave in school, a fact for which I refuse to apologize, but because I think it's more important that we not feel sorry for kids and thus teach them not to feel sorry for themselves. One cannot help but feel sorry for a kid in the predicament my friend described, but he is the exception rather than the rule; of course his story has to be taken into account, but not every kid is that kid. Is it worth it to undermine discipline across the board just to protect the one-in-10,000 who are in that kid's shoes? If we treat every kid like that kid, or like he may be that kid, then school will become one giant, chaotic pity party. Where is the social benefit in that?

No one can define precisely where the line must be drawn between the kind of "sensitivity" my friend seemed to be advocating, and the need to maintain consistent, universal standards of conduct for all students. No one can explain the difference between a brutal tragedy like that for which we should feel sorry and might mitigate discipline, and any other unfortunate circumstance in a student's life for which we should not and would not. As with so many other issues, the tension is between what is good for the individual and what is good for society (i.e., the school) as a whole. The only way to deal with it intelligently is to treat everyone equally and fairly, and be very careful about when, how and why we make exceptions.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: We do students no favors by teaching them that nothing is ever their fault. There is a reason why there is essentially no "excuse" defense (as opposed to justification) in criminal law. I have always been an advocate of clear, consistent, universal standards of performance and conduct in school. I have always believed that students have a duty to know, and follow, reasonable school and classroom rules, and if they choose not to do so they act (or forbear) at their own risk. I've never believed that a student's out-of-school "issues" should be a blanket excuse or justification for antisocial behavior in the classroom. I've always believed that we need to teach kids to persevere, not self-pity or self-indulge, and that we serve them better in the long run that way. Of course much depends on how we go about it. But I just have a hard time reconciling these principles with that story my friend told me.

I honestly don't know what I would do if I had that kid in my class and he was acting out in a substantially disruptive, or destructive, way. As far as I know, I've never had a student with such an extreme backstory. Obviously the school has resources to deal with that kind of situation, but that's not the point. My inclination is always to hold students accountable for their actions no matter what motivates them. Is that wrong? What happens to principles in the face of a tragic situation like that?

I don't think my friend would disagree with most of what I've written here. Yet this felt like an assault on my conscience. My friend basically used an anecdote I had told, to make a different point, as an impetus to attack me relentlessly for something I didn't even do, to someone I've never even met -- and I can't figure out why he did it. This is going to weigh on me for a while.

One Step Up and Two Steps Back

Another thing that occurred to me recently about "differentiated instruction" (which I've decided to refer to from now on as "discriminatory instruction" until someone can explain to me why it isn't) is that it, like so many other fads that have drifted in and out of the high schools in recent years, is just another way of making high school more like elementary school and less like college.

I don't know exactly when this happened, but some years ago the thinking, at least here in New York, with respect to the high schools was that the best way to improve performance and achievement in high school was to use elementary-school methods in high school classes. Kids complain that school is "boring" and "dull" and "not fun" and they don't like reading or writing or listening to a teacher speak or taking notes or anything like that, so we in turn have to try to make school "fun" by turning academic subject matter into games and physical activities and entertainment, cover the walls with posters and colored paper and fancy borders and cutesy slogans and all manner of colorful eye candy, and of course student work with little gold stars and happy faces on it ... you know, "fun" stuff. Add that to the reflexive blaming of teachers for failing to "make it interesting" or "make it fun" and presto! we turn high school into Romper Room.

(For those of you too young to remember, here's Wikipedia's page on Romper Room. Wonderama is another good one from the same era.)

Using elementary school methods in high school has its occasional utility, obviously. But when the concept of "making learning fun" in this fashion becomes doctrinal or ideological, to the degree that we actively try to make high school as much like elementary school as possible, we approach the point where we defeat the ultimate purpose of upper secondary education. Private high schools are typically called "prep schools;" "prep" as in "preparatory." Public high schools are generally not referred to as prep schools, but their underlying essential purpose is the same: to prepare students for either (a.) higher education, or (b.) employment/entrepreneurship in the real world; or both.

It is just possible that making high school more like elementary school and less like college is a tacit acknowledgment that certain public high school students are not expected to go to college so they don't need to be prepared for it. The implications of this are obvious, and of course no one will ever publicly admit to such a mindset. But even if that's true, for those high school students who do not go to college, high school is the last stop on the educational train before they have to go out into the real world and try to make a life for themselves. I can think of nothing less like the real world than elementary school.

I've always believed that high school should be as much like college as possible, particularly in the upper grades. The intellectual and personal-responsibility skills that one needs in college (not to mention the workplace) do not magically appear out of nowhere on one's 18th birthday or the day he shows up on campus; they need to be in place when he gets there. Or do we really want to send kids to college or out into the world thinking they can abstain from doing required work because a professor (or employer) "didn't make it fun?"

What happened to the idea that students come to school to study? That high school should be a place for serious intellectual inquiry and academic rigor? These are supposed to be institutions of learning, are they not? Are there no serious academics left among secondary-level educrats?

Those who believe that we should make high school more like elementary school and less like college are not serious people. They cannot truly be concerned with creating anything like a serious learning environment, let alone the long-term prospects of these kids. If our job is to prepare them for what lies ahead, then no purpose can be served by looking backward.

Differentiation vs. Discrimination

One thing I would like to ask the Grand High Inquisitors when they come here for the Quality Review later this term is: What is the difference, as you see it, between "differentiation" and discrimination? Assuming there is a difference, at what point does the former become the latter? And if there is no difference, then isn't it illegal?

"Differentiation" still strikes me as essentially meaning: Teaching different kids different things different ways, to get them the same grade in the same class for the same credit. If we think of the grade and the academic credit as a "government benefit," i.e., something of value which the child receives from the state in exchange for meeting certain criteria, then having different criteria for different people to receive the same government benefit is illegal; that's textbook discrimination. It is manifestly unfair for me to require one thing of one student, and something entirely different of another, if they are both to receive the same thing in return.

This is true whether the grading standards are objective or subjective. Under an objective standard, the grade each student receives has the same relative value as any other student's grade, in that all grades are based on a comparison between the same objective standard and the work the individual student actually produced. Even if Johnny gets an 85 and Susie gets a 65, if they were evaluated qualitatively relative to a single objective standard (and by extension, relative to each other), then they each received the same value in return for what they produced. If the standards are subjective, i.e., if we 'handicap' the students based on ability, then Johnny and Susie both get an 85 even though Johnny's work is of objectively higher quality. That just makes it more unfair if what Johnny had to do to get that 85 is different from, let alone more difficult than, what Susie had to to to get the same 85.

My job, as I see it, is to differentiate without discriminating. I don't actually plan to ask the Inquisitors the question of if, when, how and why "differentiation" is not discrimination. I'm going to play it close to the vest as I don't want to say or do anything that will hurt the school on this Quality Review or moving forward. I hope the topic doesn't come up. But at the same time, I won't teach or evaluate my students, nor claim that I am doing so or will do so, in a way that is plainly illegal, immoral, and unconstitutional.

Race to the Bottom

Here's the official meme from the Grand High Inquisitors with respect to the tragicomedy they call "differentiated instruction." The following is quoted directly from a memo we received last week about the upcoming Quality Review:

-----

Reviewers understand differentiation as:

"...modified instruction that helps students with diverse needs and learning styles master the same challenging academic content...through the use of varied material, varying instructional activities and varied assessments.

Additionally, Reviewers will observe that teachers are demonstrating the skill of differentiation when they:

"differentiate the method of instruction by utilizing: flexible, skill-based groupings, cooperative groups, etc., group investigations, learning stations/centers, learning contracts and independent studies, modeling/demonstrating, think alouds and meta-cognition... visuals, varied questions and strategies to promote thinking such as: compare/contrast, categorize by characteristics, hypothesize & experiment, predict, evaluate using criteria, etc."

"differentiate the content by: providing supplemental or levelled materials at varying degrees of difficulty, offering multi-option assignments, allowing student to select..., creating simplified and/or extension activities, etc."

"differentiate the products by varying, modifying, and/or offering student choice..."

(emphasis in original)
-----

Allright...does any of this make sense? The first paragraph, the supposed "definition" of "differentiation," seems to be somewhat innocuous. It does not suggest, however, that the use of "varied material, varying instructional activities and varied assessments" has to be carried out simultaneously, at the same time. It is perfectly reasonable to interpret that "differentiation" implies that these various materials, activities and assessments will be presented to students at different times throughout the course of a school year. How this definition necessitates any of what follows is beyond me.

The second paragraph, concerning "method of instruction," is naught but gobbledygook, a litany of buzzwords and euphemisms that bear no meaningful conceptual relationship to one another, are not presented in any sort of coherent sequence, and don't really add up to a larger point. Each of the ideas presented is, by itself, worthy of consideration, but unless a "Reviewer" observes a teacher for a long and continuous period of time, he cannot assess whether or not a teacher has "differentiated his method of instruction." That is, unless the Reviewer expects to see several of these things being practiced simultaneously.

The third paragraph, "differentiate the content," introduces the idea of letting students select what materials they want to learn and what assignments they want to do. I think there could be some value in this and have actually done it before, giving kids two or three options to choose from when producing a writing project. I can't really do it anymore, since all of my writing projects are now Regents-based. I've done independent readings too, in the past, where kids select the book they want to read, although when I do that I always have several students pick nothing at all. But during literature studies, all the kids read the same book. I cannot and will not teach multiple titles simultaneously.

The last paragraph, with respect to differentiated "products" provides nothing of use or value; it only repeats the vague concepts of "varying, modifying" and "student choice." If we think carefully, though, about what "differentiated products" means, it is probably the closest to what I do. The "product" that the student produces in my class is the individual response to the reading. Each student writes his own response, can choose which of the provided Guiding Questions to answer, and there's really no "right" or "wrong" response. In other words, every product which my students produce is unique to the student who produced it; no two notebooks or essays can ever be alike (unless they're copying from one another, but that's a separate topic). However, they're all graded on the same Volume-Comprehension-Response rubric.

Ultimately, I don't see much to this "differentiated instruction" business; the material provided here suggests that the Reviewers don't really understand it either, let alone have a clear or workable idea for how it might be practiced. The key will be whether the Reviewers approach this from a pragmatic or an ideological standpoint. A pragmatist will look at my classroom and find students writing their own responses to readings and their own essays, and find me basing my writing lessons on their previous work, and conclude that my instruction is adequately "differentiated." An ideologue will look at the same class and find that the students are writing responses to the same reading, or doing the same Regents essay writing assignment, and being graded on the same rubrics, and that will not be satisfactory.

This was the problem I had at the phony, corrupt Queens "Arts" high school, and the psychotic demented gargoyle who was principal there in 2002-03. When it came to pedagogy, and particularly his ill-considered "Humanities" idea, he was an ideologue, not a pragmatist. He wanted two things: (1) "student-centered" instruction; and (2) that the English curriculum consist entirely of Social Studies content. Rather than go on a lengthy dissertation about this arduous and ultimately heartbreaking experience, suffice it to say that everything I did fit reasonably within the definitions this creature had given us for what he wanted. Yet nothing I did seemed to satisfy him; whatever it was, it was not sufficiently "student-centered" or did not sufficiently involve the Social Studies content.

My sense right now at my current school is that the administration has taken a pragmatic approach to "differentiated instruction," not an ideological one. That is good. Who knows, it might even work if it is approached pragmatically rather than ideologically. Whether the Reviewers will do so remains to be seen.

The problem with "differentiated instruction," as either an ideology or a pragmatic concern, is that it will encourage what economists and legal scholars call a "race to the bottom." The term is usually used in the context of federal regulations, in that where the federal government does not regulate a particular business, the states will then compete to have the fewest rules and the lowest, most lenient regulatory standards, in order to encourage businesses to go there. In the school context, not only does "differentiated instruction" remove the student's incentive to learn and improve, it actually gives the student an incentive to become, and remain, as unintelligent, uninformed and incapable as possible. It punishes the smart and industrious in order to reward the dumb and lazy. Instead of competing with one another for high grades under the same high standards, as they should be doing, students will instead be competing with one another to get the easiest, least challenging assignments and the lowest, most accommodating standards.

As it stands today, Special Ed students each have something called an IEP, or Individualized Education Plan. These may include, among other things, testing modifications such as extended time, physical accommodations like reading aloud or scribing, and specific enumerated learning goals. The expectation is, however, that if a Special Ed student with an IEP is in a regular academic class, that the teacher has to accommodate that student by giving him separate materials and teaching him on a different level from the rest of the class. This, of course, is impossible in most circumstances. The only practical way to accommodate Special Ed students in a regular class is to lower the entire class' content and standard to the Special Ed student's grade level.

This is the point I'm trying to make. "Differentiated Instruction," as it's been described to me, essentially seeks to give every student in the system an IEP. I'm starting to believe that this is where we are truly headed. Within five years, every student in the New York City schools, and beyond, will have an IEP. The whole idea of an academic "course" on the secondary level will completely disappear, as every student will be allowed to choose his own materials and set his own standards in every academic class. Ultimately, the lowest standards and least-challenging content will become the norm. Hence the "race to the bottom," for students, teachers, and schools. Students will compete for the easiest work and the easiest path to an "A", teachers and schools will compete for the highest number of passing and high-average students and hence will have to pursue the lowest possible standards.

I don't see any other alternative. "Differentiated Instruction" is just another way to make high school more like elementary school and less like college. It's another avenue to the subjectivization of content and standards that I've criticized and lamented so often on this blog, an attempt to codify and mandate this "race to the bottom." The objective standards I've been advocating are going to disappear completely from our educational lexicon. When that happens, it's over. Thankfully, I won't be around to see it.

Education is dead. Long live "differentiated instruction."

It's Official: Education Is Dead

I've been reporting here on the slow, gradual, painful death of American secondary education for almost two years now. Its demise has been largely self-inflicted, the product of a severely misguided effort to cater to the self-esteem of students and parents at the expense of objectivity, pragmatism, accountability, efficiency and common sense, not to mention actual learning.

The death of education was confirmed to me last week in a department meeting, as we reviewed the various practices which the Grand High Inquisitors (or whatever they're called) will be looking for when they come to our school later this spring for our annual Performance Review. The culprit: A new euphemism I recently heard for the first time, something called "Differentiated Instruction."

I'll try to explain as briefly as I can what this latest disaster entails. It starts with the reasonable concept, which I don't dispute, that all students have different intellectual capacities and learning abilities, and they need to be "met where they are" when they come to school. However, the concept of "differentiated instruction" takes this simple premise and does the exact wrong thing with it. What "differentiated instruction" essentially means is that my teaching, my lesson planning, and my standards, need to take this into account by actually teaching a different lesson, with different materials, and assessing performance under a different standard, for each individual student.

In other words, when the Grand High Inquisitors come into my classroom, they don't expect me to be teaching one lesson to the entire class. They expect me to be teaching multiple lessons simultaneously. They expect me to have the students seated in groups according to their different individual ability levels and different learning styles, and teach a different lesson, with different materials, using different grading standards, for each group. If they catch me teaching one lesson to the whole class, and using a uniform objective grading standard for all students, the school will be in danger of receiving a poor rating.

I wish I was making this up, and I wish I could contain myself in discussing the MONUMENTAL STUPIDITY of this idea. It's as if these people read Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" and thought that setting might be a good blueprint for education, even though the point of the story is the complete opposite. Let me briefly touch on some of the many, many things that are wrong with this:

- First of all, logistically speaking, it can't work. I am only one person and cannot split myself into seven pieces to teach seven lessons to seven groups of kids in the same classroom at the same time. Do these people seriously expect me to give out seven different literature titles and teach all seven of them in the same classroom at the same time? If I have two preps, am I supposed to teach 14 different titles simultaneously? Do I need to keep seven separate Excel spreadsheets for each class, since I'll be using seven different sets of standards and seven different grading formulae?

How complicated do they really want to make it? I cannot think of a more inefficient way to run a classroom, even if it were logistically possible. What do these people have against order and efficiency?

- Second, as I've described repeatedly on this blog, the only way learning can occur is if there is one single objective standard for all students. Last year's performance review for my school indicated as a criticism that "the same standards apply to all students," or something to that effect, as if that's a bad thing. HELLO??!!?!! That is the whole point of having grades in the first place, to determine how students do with the same material, based on the same standards and expectations. The Regents exams, particularly the English Regents, do not have "differentiated" standards. And do I really need to reiterate that if we lower the standards for kids with lesser abilities, they will have no incentive to improve and therefore WILL NOT LEARN?

All this is just another variation on what I've discussed several times on this blog, which is subjective assessment. There is no intellectual or experiential rationale for this; its only purpose is to preserve the self-esteem of those children who are less intelligent and less capable. If I had any doubt that education officials are out to destroy objective standards, that doubt has been dispelled.

- Third, like most really stupid ideas of this nature, it mistakenly gives kids the benefit of the doubt that they will essentially do what they are supposed to do most of the time. No classroom, "differentiated" or otherwise, can function if the teacher cannot control it, and if students are not inclined to behave properly and do what they are told to do, which most of them are not, a contrived scheme like this will never work.

Nothing makes me happier as a teacher than to design a really interesting and useful activity which requires kids to work on their own and/or together, and watch them actually do it. It's very gratifying to see kids who want to learn actually take steps toward learning. But the reality, as most teachers know, is that if kids see an opportunity to use class time to socialize or do whatever else it is they want to do besides learn, they will. It is always a mistake to assume that kids will automatically do the right thing.

- Finally, the more I think about it, the more I believe that "differentiated instruction" is, in fact, UNCONSTITUTIONAL. It violates the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; i.e., it's a form of discrimination. Teaching different kids different things under different standards, to get the same grade in the same class for the same credit, is manifestly unfair and discriminatory. If Johnny is smarter than Susie, he should get better grades. But let's say we lower the standard for Susie; we give her a less-challenging book to read, a less-intensive writing assignment to complete, and a lesser standard of performance (say, the ELA Regents' 4 standard) to get an A. So Susie is assigned to read Island of the Blue Dolphins while Johnny gets Lord of the Flies; Susie only has to write a simple book report, while Johnny has to write a detailed critical analysis, and Johnny has to meet the 6 standard to get an A.

Now, let's say Susie's book report scores a 3 on the ELA Regents scale, which for her would be a B, and Johnny's critical analysis scores a 5, which for him would also be a B. They both get the same grade in the same class for the same academic credit; the 85 looks the same on Susie's transcript as it does on Johnny's. But what Johnny had to do to get that 85 was substantially different, not to mention more difficult, than what Susie had to do to get the same 85. "Differentiated instruction" therefore discriminates against smarter, more industrious students by making them work harder to get the same grade.

IN NO UNIVERSE IS THIS SENSIBLE OR REASONABLE.

And I'd still like someone to explain to me how I'm supposed to teach Island of the Blue Dolphins to one group of students while simultaneously teaching Lord of the Flies to another, The Call of the Wild to another, Ulysses to another.....

I'd also like someone to explain to me what possible academic benefits (i.e., besides self-esteem boosting) can anyone derive from teaching different kids different things in the same class at the same time.

I find it exhausting to even continue thinking about this. I've been over this ground so many times on this blog I don't know how else I can say it. If this is really where we are headed, if educrats really expect teachers to prepare and deliver multiple lessons simultaneously in the same classroom at the same time, and establish 150 separate courses and 150 separate standards every semester and every year, if the teacher's job is really to 'handicap' students in this fashion instead of challenging and expecting all students to meet the same high standards, if educational decisionmakers really believe that it's a good idea to abolish objective standards altogether, then there is no hope for American education.

"Differentiated instruction" is just the latest in a long line of ideas and policies whose goal is not to generate actual learning. Its goal is not to educate, if we take that word to mean impart new knowledge and improved skills; its goal is to validate what the child already knows and can already do. Further, it constitutes yet another misguided yet concerted effort to shift the burden of learning entirely away from the learner. If we are to adjust standards and curriculum on an individual basis, not a grade-wide basis, and make the work or standards easier for some students instead of challenging them to improve, what exactly does the learner have to do to ensure that learning occurs? "Differentiated instruction" places the burden of learning not on the learner but on the thing being learned, and on the means of its delivery; the learner himself bears no burden at all.

It's really very simple: "differentiated instruction" is NOT EDUCATION. Any school or school system that employs it cannot seriously call itself an institution of learning.

Regents Week Ruminations

It's Regents week and I've got a couple of things on my mind.

A couple of years ago, my school changed its policy on how to handle Session One of the English Regents exam. For those of you not familiar with the exam, I won't go over the whole thing here, but Session One starts with a listening passage which is the basis for the first task (Part A). Part B consists of a nonfiction article and infographic which are provided in the test booklet. What we did in the past, here and at all of my former schools, was instruct the students at the beginning of the exam to start working on Part B, then we would interrupt the exam about 45 minutes in to do the listening section. The purpose of this was to accommodate students who came in late, so they wouldn't miss the speech.

Two years ago, I convinced my then-AP to change this policy. For one thing, this created a great deal of confusion on the part of the test-takers, who not only would write their Part B essays in the space designated for Part A, but would get interrupted in the middle of their work on Part B, shift their focus to Part A, then have difficulty getting back to Part B whether they did it right away, saving Part A for later, or waited until after finishing Part A to get back to Part B. If this sounds confusing, it is. What is supposed to be a two-part test becomes, logistically, a three-part test. In some cases, students would blend together the material in parts A and B and put parts of each in both essays, write a single essay incorporating both sets of information, neglect to write one of the essays, or produce some other result different from what the test intends.

In addition, the "DIRECTIONS FOR TEACHERS" that come attached to every Regents exam clearly intend that the listening passage be done first. The text of and procedure for the speech are incorporated into the starting instructions.

It never made sense to me that, in order to accommodate the few irresponsible kids who could not be bothered to show up on time for an exam they must pass to graduate, we should not only alter the state-prescribed procedure for administering the exam, but in doing so make things significantly more complicated for everyone else. It took some doing, but I managed to convince my supervisor that the problems outweighed the benefits, particularly when the only real "benefit" is to reward negligence.

Of course, my preference would have been that if a student missed the speech, he missed the speech and would therefore be unable to write the essay, probably fail the exam, and have to re-take it six months hence. As I've pointed out repeatedly, it never seems to occur to anyone that if we continue to bend over backwards to accommodate kids who either refuse or neglect to do the right thing, they will continue to do the wrong thing and have no incentive to learn, change their behavior, or get their overall act together. There is, and should always be, a price to be paid for negligence. The dangers of sending kids who are accustomed to being accommodated out into a very un-accommodating world are real, are serious, and are lost on many educators and parents.

As a compromise, my supervisor and I came up with an idea to have a separate room for latecomers, where the listening section would be done later in the same fashion we used to employ for everyone. We have done that, and so far we've had few problems. This would obviously be more problemmatic in a larger school giving hundreds of exams at once, like the first high school where I taught from 1997-2001 (3300 students, in a building built for 2500). But even then, once the doors close and the exam begins, no one should be allowed into the exam room.

Testing, 1 - 2 - 3 . . .

I'm sure I've covered this ground before in one way or another, but I was thinking about something today. A lot of people, of all ages, like to complain about what they feel is an inappropriate and excessive emphasis on "testing" as a modus operandi in schools. No one likes the idea of using standardized tests to make consequential decisions about students, and certainly about teachers, and "teaching to the test" is one of the worst things a teacher or school could be doing. "Teaching to the test" could not possibly result in actual learning.

I think the value of standardized testing in general, and the New York English Regents exam in particular, is a topic for another day; I'm not talking about standardized testing. I'm talking about something more fundamental: the emphasis on testing to determine students' academic course grades.

I know I've discussed performance-based assessments before, so anyone reading this blog will know that I don't even use traditional testing to determine my students' grades. But for some reason it occurred to me today just how much opposition I've gotten over the years from supervisors and from other teachers, as well as kids, to the idea that students should have to actually produce work product, let alone that they should be required to do so on an everyday basis and be evaluated and graded just as much, if not more, on that everyday work than on some sort of cumulative "test."

Throughout my teaching career, I have based a significant portion of my students' grades on their everyday work. In one form or another, I have required students to write in a notebook every day, whether in class, at home, or both, and submit those notebooks periodically to be graded based on a performance rubric. The notebook is worth 40% of the grade; a student cannot pass the class without it.

Of course, high school students in most places are not accustomed to doing everyday work. They are only worried about passing the test at the end of the unit, and don't really bother to do the everyday work (classwork or homework) in the meantime, because they figure they can probably do the former without doing the latter and the former is the only thing that "really matters," and what's more, they usually turn out to be right. Even I managed to get by in school without doing the everyday work, for the same reason, even though I probably could have been a straight-A student if I had actually done the everyday work.

In fact, the only subject I consistently aced in secondary school was French, in 6th through 8th grades. My French teacher, Mrs. Dutacq-Benson, gave a graded written test/quiz/assignment in class every single day. Monday, vocabulary French-to-English; Tuesday, vocabulary English-to-French; Wednesday, dictation; Friday, sentence test (there was no French class on Thursdays). The next week, same thing. The cycle repeated itself as we worked our way through the textbook. The only homework was to prepare for these activities. There were no mid-terms or final exams to cram for, no papers or other long-term assignments, just everyday work. I never got such consistently high grades in any class in any subject on any secondary grade level.

While it is true that college and graduate school grades are based on one or two major assessments (mid-terms, final exams, papers), I really believe that high school kids should have their grades based primarily on everyday work. Testing has always been the easiest method of assessing accumulated knowledge and skills, but one cannot truly acquire knowledge and skills by cramming for a test the night before and then forgetting everything the next day. Neither can one acquire the study habits one needs for success in college, graduate school or professional (e.g., law and medical) school without becoming accustomed to doing everyday work, and engaging with large-scale tasks in small, incremental steps. In high school, kids are still very much learning how to learn. The end result is, I think, less important than one's engagement with the process.

I like to think of the school year like the baseball season; 162 games, each one as important as any other, and while even the best teams lose 1/3 of their games they approach each game as if they can and must win it. While one loss may not seem like a big deal at the time, in the scheme of the whole season, any single loss in April as well as September can be the difference between making the playoffs and not (just ask a Mets fan...) Very few people, kids or adults, think of a high school class as a course, in the truest sense of the word. One of the reasons kids don't learn is because they don't approach each and every assignment as if their grades depend on it. They view the everyday work as a nuisance, as just a means to an end (the end being the test), even, in some cases, as optional. They know that they can pass the test, and by extension the class, without doing the everyday work.

This is one reason why I don't give homework. As I've pointed out previously, I've always had about 1/3 of every class fail, sometimes more, rarely less, in part because I require kids to actually produce the everyday work and submit it for a grade, I set up the grading formula so that they can't pass without doing it, and about 1/3 of any random group of kids of any background in any place simply won't do the everyday work. Since I stopped giving homework, the failure percentage has declined.

The problem with homework is that it is essentially a Catch-22: If we make the homework so important, i.e., such a large percentage of the grade that the kids will fail if they don't do it, at least 1/3 of every class will fail. If we make it less important, i.e., a smaller percentage of the grade, then kids know they can pass the class without doing it and therefore won't bother to do it. Neither outcome is particularly desirable, and the possibility of failure has proven time and time again to be an inadequate motivator for students, especially when they know that the teacher, not they, will be blamed if they fail. In addition, very few teachers truly and properly scrutinize and assess each and every homework assignment, because not only do they not have the time but they don't consider it worth the effort.

Homework is therefore self-defeating; it either leads to widespread failure or becomes so insignificant to the final course grade that it can't be all that valuable to begin with as a learning tool. It only works for the kids who "get it;" the ones who truly want to learn and are already inclined to dedicate themselves to their studies. Yet we continue to give homework because for one thing, like so many other secondary-school conventions, we've always done it and long ago stopped asking why, and also because we like to give kids the benefit of the doubt, which as the two or three people who read this blog know, I don't think we should ever do. I think it is foolish and dangerous to assume that teenagers will be naturally inclined to do the right thing most of the time, especially in this day and age.

I suppose it was my experience on Long Island, and to a lesser degree at the phony, corrupt Queens "Arts" School of Narcissism and Dishonesty, that really drove this point home. These were the only places where supervisors openly and explicitly blamed me for the students' not doing their work. On Long Island, I was basically told that if more than one or two kids out of 150 failed, then I was surely doing something wrong. I wondered if it ever occurred to anyone that students have little, if any, incentive to learn or do their work if they know they can't fail. This was where the English chairwoman told me that the kids weren't doing their work because they "didn't get it," meaning I must not have explained it properly, if at all. She seemed mystified by the idea that kids would not "get it" and would not do their work if they knew they didn't have to, i.e., if they knew they would not be blamed, faulted or sanctioned for not doing it, or if they could be relieved of the obligation by simply claiming that they didn't know or understand what they were supposed to do.

It is a tremendous burden for a teacher to be responsible not only for planning and delivering his lessons and assessments, but for the individual decisionmaking processes of 150 teenagers over whom he has little or no direct control. Again, this woman was operating on the assumption that these kids were naturally inclined to do their work unless there was a serious and insurmountable impediment to their doing so. In other words, if a student did not submit an assignment then, res ipsa loquitur, he was unable to do the assignment. But what is a teacher to do when that non-performance becomes a choice? What is a teacher to do once students realize that all they need to do is claim they "don't get it" and they're off the hook?

Whether we give kids the benefit of the doubt or not, it is still unreasonable to assume that anyone will be automatically inclined to do anything if there is no meaningful consequence of not doing it. The fact that some people are so inclined does not change this basic logic. If we want everyone to do the right thing, we have to provide adequate incentives, even for those who don't need them. The only way to require anyone to do anything is to create an undesirable, and inescapable, consequence for not doing it. No teacher wants a significant number of students to fail, but we also don't want to teach kids that it's OK to decide not to do their assigned work. Yet a great many administrators and teachers continue to insist on disincentivizing work, whether by letting kids pass their classes without doing the everyday work, blaming teachers when kids choose not to do it, changing grading formulae to reflect what kids are willing or unwilling to do (as opposed to what they actually do or don't do), or some combination of these.

So much of the law, especially in the civil context, is about incentivizing behavior. We use the law to encourage people to make the right decisions, to act reasonably and allocate their resources efficiently, in order to encourage desirable behaviors and outcomes and discourage those which are harmful to society or to the individual. All this emphasis on "testing" in schools, whether we're talking about standardized tests or academic classes, has a highly undesirable side effect that I've never heard anyone mention: It causes kids to neglect their everyday work to the point where they become unwilling and/or unable to engage in any real learning process, and thus prevents any real learning from occurring.

A lot of teachers probably don't care whether or not kids do their everyday work. That's fine. But I do, and I will not apologize for it. I have five more months, one more semester, left in this profession, and I will continue to insist not only that students do their everyday work, and be evaluated on their performance in doing that everyday work, but also that one of the keys to improving education is to shift the emphasis away from testing, on both the state and school level, and toward an insistence that students take the time and effort to do their work and learn each and every day they are in school.

Antonymous

I've been trying for years to find, or think of, an antonym for the word resourceful. Dictionaries and thesauri are not much help in this regard, although I usually don't feel the need to consult these sources when it comes to the meaning and usage of words (thank you, Jeff Kraus). I don't think resourceless is actually a word, but even if it is I don't think it works as an antonym for resourceful.

What resourceful means, as I understand it, is: having the ability and inclination to find ways to acquire, discover or accomplish something when the easiest, most convenient and/or most obvious way of doing so is foreclosed or unavailable. In other words, the resourceful person is able to do what he needs to do, find what he needs to find, get what he needs to get even if it's not easy or convenient, if conditions are not ideal, if he has to go out of his way to do it, or if his initial strategy fails. (Resourceless doesn't really work as an antonym because it implies that resources aren't available, don't exist, or that the person simply doesn't have them, not that he is disinclined to use them or seek them out.)

As someone who has spent most of his adult life dealing with various inconveniences, unforeseen obstacles, sudden changes of fortune and sundry annoyances both large and small, I have learned to be resourceful and appreciate the value of resourcefulness. What I haven't been able to do is find a word, or even a descriptive phrase, that would describe someone who is the opposite of resourceful; someone who sees the easiest, most convenient and/or most obvious way of doing or finding something as the only possible way, and when that way is foreclosed or unavailable, leaps to the conclusion that it cannot be done and either relieves himself of the obligation or seeks to be relieved.

I bring this up for obvious reasons; because so many of the students I've encountered in my years of teaching are the opposite of resourceful, whatever word or phrase one might use to describe them. I've touched on this to some degree in previous posts, for example:

- The "printer-related excuse" farce. Even though "My printer doesn't work" is an obvious lie, even if it were true the resourceful student would either get it working, such as by reinstalling software drivers or replacing ink cartridges, find another printer, whether at a friend's house, parent's workplace, public library, school computer lab, etc., or as a last resort hand-write the assignment. Most kids don't do that. Their own printer is the easiest and most convenient means of producing the assignment, and if that fails, they "can't do it."

- The "no Internet"/"no PC" nonsense. I had a student the other day who lost the assignment packet I had previously distributed, which was one of the tasks on last June's Regents exam. Since I make it a point to make one, and only one, copy of the assignment for each student, and put their names on them in advance so I know who got theirs and who didn't, I did not have another one to give her. I suggested she download the exam from the Internet. Her reply? "My Internet isn't working." Again, an obvious lie, but even if true does not foreclose any and all possibility of acquiring the needed material, nor relieve the student of her responsibility to do so.

- The absent-from-class-on-the-day-of-a-listening-section travesty. This happened earlier in the semester with the presidential debate; the student was absent the day I showed the video, I suggested she find and watch it online, but she never did. This week it happened again. I had a guidance counselor e-mail me that a student was going to be "out for a couple of days" and the mother had requested her teachers e-mail her the child's assignments. This was a bad time, since the students were doing the listening portion of a writing project (Regents Session One, Part A) on Thursday. They just finished studying Citizen Kane and I was using Roger Ebert's commentary from the Still Gallery on the DVD as the listening passage. I e-mailed the mother and suggested she rent the DVD. I never heard back from her. The child came in yesterday and told me that she and her mother "didn't know where to get" the DVD. I suggested Netflix or Blockbuster, or wherever else they normally rent movies, but the child replied that they "didn't know where to get this movie." Again I suggested Netflix or Blockbuster but it seemed lost on this kid that it could be that easy to get the DVD of Citizen Kane. I suggested she come in after school to do the listening section, but she didn't come in. This kind of thing happens all the time whenever I do something like a listening section that can only be done once, and kids are absent the day I do it.

These are all examples of students trying to get themselves off the hook by claiming that the easiest, most convenient and/or most obvious way of doing or finding something is unavailable to them, which in their minds means, res ipsa loquitur, that they can't do it and therefore shouldn't have to do it, be expected to do it or be held accountable for not doing it. Somehow after all these years I am still amazed by the absolutely stunning and utterly complete lack of resourcefulness on the part of high school students. This has been true everywhere I've been, in urban schools both large and small, and in the suburbs.

I don't know if this is the result of simple laziness (coupled with dishonesty), an actual inability to solve problems and accomplish tasks beyond the use of obvious and convenient means, moral hazard (knowing one won't be held liable makes one less inclined to act reasonably), or some combination of all three. Obviously, given the opportunity, kids will seek the path of least resistance. They would much rather be excused from the work than be required to find a way to get it done even if it's not convenient. The question is, what causes it, and how should we as educators deal with it?

It's hard for me not to reach the conclusion, as I have so many times before, that this is the result of students growing accustomed to adults accepting their excuses, believing their lies and letting them off the hook. It's the result of our not teaching kids to be resourceful by not requiring or expecting them to be resourceful. It therefore starts with moral hazard, which cultivates laziness and dishonesty. Kids learn not only that they should simply stop trying when things become inconvenient, but also that it is more desirable to falsely claim an insurmountable obstacle in order to get a reprieve than to seek and utilize alternative practical solutions. The end result, an entire population of young adults who actually do not know the difference between what is impossible and what is merely difficult or inconvenient, is the most troubling part, but it seems that secondary educators don't want to deal with this. It's "not our problem."

I think it is. I think our problem is that, in spite of everything, in spite of how far we are willing to go to praise kids up and down for anything and everything they do, as much as we're always telling them how wonderful and fabulous and special they are, we really think very little of our kids, because we expect so little of them. We really do.

The Secret of NIMH

I'd like to start this post with a question for the two or three people who read this blog: What percentage of the population, would you say, is crazy? I'm not talking about those institutionalized or adjudicated mentally ill. I'm thinking in more general terms; people who are out there, who walk among us every day, who are just plain flat-out straight-up dyed-in-the-wool nut-bag bat-crap insane?

I had a parent come in on Friday, after I called her on Thursday at her request, angry as all get-out at the fact that I gave her daughter a 65 in my class. I explained that the child's writing skills are not particularly good, Level 2 on the ELA Regents scale, and that she tends to arrive late and sleep in class. This was, in her words, "unacceptable," in the sense that a 65 was too low a grade for the child to receive based on the mother's conception of her daughter's academic ability. According to the mother, the child was a high-honors student at her well-regarded middle school and had "never had any problem with writing;" indeed she aspired to be a journalist. On the phone on Thursday and in person on Friday, she went on and on loudly about what an excellent student her daughter had been at what an excellent middle school she had attended, how "f***ed up" this high school is, how "ridiculous" it is that I do not give homework and that my assessment of the child's work was "unacceptable." She also chided me for not having called her on the phone immediately to let her know that the child was late or was sleeping in class, made the standard claim that the child "doesn't like your class anyway," and even went so far as to accuse me of being "too busy getting [my] law degree" to care about her child.

Thankfully, it is rare for a parent to be this abusive and insulting. Nevertheless, it was fairly clear fairly quickly that this person did not intend to listen to a word I had to say; she only came in to yell, and she most certainly did yell. I attempted to speak calmly to her and not engage her abuse or respond to her accusations, but nothing I said had any effect. I attempted to show her some samples of the child's writing, which I had photocopied alongside samples of student writing that had received higher grades on the same assignments, but she was only interested in that to the extent that she grabbed it out of my hand without looking at it (or even asking for it) and demanded to see the principal.

The recurring refrain in this person's ranting was that her child had done spectacularly well in her former school, particularly in writing, and when I asked her how the child was currently doing in her other classes, she replied, "Excellent!" Obviously, the implication was that this child is a straight-A student, a brilliant scholar, and if I'm giving her a 65 I obviously (a.) don't know what I'm doing; (b.) have a bias against her; (c.) am so wrapped up my legal studies that I cannot or will not teach or evaluate her properly; or (d.) all of the above.

Well, here is the reality. Later in the day, I went to talk to the Assistant Principal of Organization about this, and we took a look at the child's records. She was a mediocre student at best in middle school, and when I looked at her current report cards, I saw all I needed to see. For both the first and second marking periods of this semester, while she did receive a 90 in Dance, in her academic classes she received 55's and 65's across the board. I don't even recall seeing a 70. I was both surprised and unsurprised when I saw this; surprised because the mother had actually had the audacity to claim that this child was valedictory material and was receiving "excellent" grades in every class but mine (and surprised that I had not seen through this), and unsurprised because, pardon the conceit, I am so seldom wrong about kids when it comes to their academic ability and performance.

The fact is this child is a poor writer and a poor student. She has difficulty even assembling coherent sentences, her ability to understand what she reads is limited, she does not ask questions or participate in discussions, has literally nothing to say when called upon, is late to class half the time and sleeps through it half the time. She has demonstrated neither any interest in nor enthusiasm for learning, for any of the materials we have been reading, or for improving her skills. Frankly, this child is not especially intelligent. I've been teaching for 12 years and I can tell when a kid is just not very smart. Unfortunately, we can't say that to either a child or a parent, because the result is the kind of irrational affrontery to which this parent subjected me and, as I later found out, the principal, guidance counselor and at least one other teacher.

The sad part is that this is the primary reason why a child like this performs so poorly in school, and continues to perform poorly year after year. If a teacher like me points out that the child's work is of low quality and needs to improve, and the parent reacts to this by getting angry with the teacher, and the entire school, accusing everyone of incompetence and bias, then the child obviously learns, inter alia, that her work and abilities are just fine the way they are. Not only is there no need for improvement, there is no possibility of improvement. If my writing is so good now that I deserve an A for everything I write, how could I ever possibly write any better? How could anyone?

I had a long talk about this with the principal later in the day, and it was refreshing to discover that she essentially agreed with me, not only on this particular child and parent but on the more fundamental concept of objective academic standards. I had given her a copy of the writing packet I had assembled (comparing this child's writing with that of students who had received higher grades on the same assignments) the day before, which she did find useful in the meeting with the parent. To make a long story short, she essentially told the parent, "Your problem is not with my teachers. Your problem is with your daughter not doing her work." She even encouraged the parent to follow through on her threat to pull the child out of the school.

I can't tell you how refreshing it was to hear a principal talk like this. It gives me so much hope that maybe the school system can be saved, that maybe education in the U.S. can get back to doing what it is supposed to do, if we have more people like this running the schools. The deplorable, demented gargoyle who was my principal at the phony "Arts" school in Queens where I taught in 2002-03 would undoubtedly, automatically have taken the parent's side in a case like this. So would the strange, flaky hypocrite I worked for on Long Island the year before that.

Before I write my book, it appears I'm going to have to do a lot more research. It seems to me, although I don't actually teach middle school, that middle schools have in a wholesale fashion adopted subjective academic standards and are unwilling to make objective qualitative distinctions between different students' work product. This is what I want to know; this is the question I want answered: WHY are so many educators today UNWILLING to OBJECTIVELY distinguish high-quality work from mediocre or low-quality work?

Dishin' on Tenure

One of my favorite blogger/commentators, Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic, blogs here about teacher tenure. Teachers respond here. Quality stuff.

Election Eve Ruminations

Is it me, or does it seem that as this interminable 2008 Presidential race draws to its long-awaited and highly-anticipated conclusion, that one candidate and his supporters have run the adult campaign, while the other has run the teenage campaign? I commented earlier about a similar phenomenon in the primaries, and throughout the election season, I have seen all the worst behaviors and thought processes of teenagers that I have observed in my years of teaching in the campaign of one of the candidates. I won't say which one, because again this is not a political blog and I don't want to use it for political advocacy. This is just an observation, nothing more.

This is what I've seen from this campaign and its supporters that remind me so much of teenagers:

- Arbitrary nastiness and hatred.
- Unintelligent, unsophisticated, ultra-simplistic declarations about complex, important matters.
- The automatic and uncritical belief and acceptance of any statement which makes them feel better about themselves and their own positions, and the concomitant automatic skepticism and rejection of any statement which does not promote that self-esteem.
- Lying.
- The self-serving distortion, de-contextualization, misinterpretation, over-simplification, over-generalization and twisting of their opponents' words, and the propagandization of same.
- The belief that their failure can only be the result of an irrational and persistent bias against them by the arbiters of public opinion (in their case, the media; in kids' case, their teachers), that they can only lose/fail as the result of a deep, widespread, insidious, evil conspiracy by dark, nefarious forces, not as a result of their own shortcomings or any objective assessment of themselves by unbiased observers.
- The absolute, unequivocal, unshakable belief in their own goodness, the truth of their beliefs and the correctness of their positions, the rightness of their actions and the affrontery of those who disagree.

Go vote.

The Internet, circa 2008

Can we please, finally, once and for all, get rid of this ridiculous notion that it is still somehow unreasonable, in the year 2008, for teachers to require students to use the internet to complete assignments? Can we please stop allowing parents and kids to use the excuse that "I don't have a computer" to absolve them of their academic responsibilities?

I first put up my website at www.mrbraiman.com in 2000, maybe even 1999, I can't remember. I don't update it now as often as I used to, but that's mostly because just about everything I need to have up there is already there. The website has always been intended as a supplementary resource for students; I've never required students to use it, but students who are having trouble doing the work or knowing what the class procedures and requirements are, or who join the class in mid-semester, have a place to go which explains, in detail, everything they could possibly need to know. This was one of the main reasons I set up the website in the first place. Between the class handbooks, material presented in class on the board or out loud, and the copious material on the website, there is no reason whatsoever for any student in my class to not know what she is supposed to do, not know what the standards or requirements are, not know what is expected of her. Any student who "doesn't know," doesn't know because he did not take steps to find out.

I've written at length in the past about this issue of "not knowing," so I won't go back over that ground again, except to reiterate that students actively try to "not know" because no one expects or requires them to know anything or find out anything on their own. But as I mentioned in my previous post, this issue came up in parent/teacher conferences when an irate parent, clinging to her daughter's assertion that she "did not know" she had to keep a notebook in class and write in it every day, and thus it was OK for her to do no work for two weeks, when I mentioned my website threw back at me the assertion that "not everyone has a computer." The implications, of course, were that (a.) neither the student nor her family has a PC at home; (b.) the student thus has no means of accessing the internet; and (c.) it is unreasonable for me to expect or require students to have internet access.

I don't want to seem insensitive or anything, but I have a hard time believing that any family in the year 2008 does not have access to the internet, or an internet-connected PC in the home. I can accept that the poorest of the poor and others in dire straits may not have them, but let's face it: The PC has become as ubiquitous as the telephone. Basic desktop PC's are very inexpensive; a five-year-old PC can be had second-hand even cheaper and would be more than adequate for just about anything a student might need to do, online or otherwise. (My desktop PC is six years old and does everything from web browsing to video editing.) Even if a person does not have his own PC, he can access the internet at any public library, and also in many commercial locations such as Kinko's. Eight years ago I might have accepted that an appreciable number of students didn't have internet access at home, but not now.

The point is that, as a general principle, it is not unreasonable anymore for teachers to expect students to use the internet to find important information, whether for academic assignments or class requirements. Even if the student truly does not have a PC at home and his family cannot afford one, he needs to pursue another option, be it a public library, school computer lab, parent's workplace, friend's or relative's home, Kinko's outlet, internet cafe, etc. The claim that a student does not have a PC at home cannot by itself be accepted as an excuse for not doing schoolwork.

It must also be pointed out that anyone living in the United States in the year 2008 who CANNOT access the internet is at a substantial and very serious disadvantage. Given the internet's ubiquity in terms of both access and range of use, anyone who can't get on the internet is going to be a great many steps behind those who can in terms not only of access to information, but in communication, time management, opportunities for advancement, social interaction, and more, not to mention college applications, research and coursework. Certainly all these things existed before the internet age, and there are many people who choose not to use the internet for whatever reason and get along just fine in their own lives. However, the point is that practically everyone can use the internet, most people do, and those who can't or don't are severely handicapped in a 21st-century world.

Never mind the fact that this particular parent threatened to "address" me further via e-mail (which she still has not done), which tends to belie her claim that the child could not have accessed the internet to visit my website and get herself up to speed. Often, the same students who claim they have no computers and can't access the internet when they are assigned to, are the same ones who cheat and plagiarize off Wikipedia or SparkNotes.com and spend more time on their MySpace pages and instant messaging than on their studies. In this individual case, it was obviously an empty and dishonest excuse. The parent phrased it as a generalization, "Not everyone has a computer," rather than make a specific claim that she or her daughter did not have one, but in a way that is even worse. It's not a lie, but it's still dishonest. It implies that it is unreasonable for me to expect students to use the internet to catch up on what they missed if they join the class in progress. In the year 2008, that is just simply wrong.

I wonder, for how long were students and parents able to legitimately avoid schoolwork or school responsibilities by claiming that they did not have a telephone? Or a television? Or a radio? Or mail? At what point does it become reasonable for educators to assume and expect that students have access to ubiquitous modern technologies?

Once again, I don't deny that people who are desperately poor or otherwise substantially burdened may not have PCs or internet access at home. But in the year 2008, the internet is no longer a novelty; the PC is no longer a luxury item. You have to be able to use the internet if you intend to compete and succeed in the 21st Century. Students who walk around the school halls with cell phones and BlackBerrys cannot reasonably claim to have no internet access because they are too poor. I'm sorry, but I don't buy it. If they can't access the internet at home, they need to go to a library.

This is not so much about the internet as it is about the student's responsibility to do what she needs to do, get what she needs to get, find out what she needs to find out. In short, students need to recognize the difference between what is impossible and what is merely inconvenient, and not claim the former to avoid the latter. And, as with every other example of irrational teenage behavior, parents need to stop enabling them.

Trousers in Conflagration

I really used to enjoy Open School. I enjoyed meeting my students' parents and talking with them, sharing my philosophy of education and of English Language Arts and meeting minds on how best to help their kids succeed.

Now I can't stand it. While it's true that most parents I meet are very congenial, reasonable and supportive of academic accountability, I find that more and more come into my classroom with giant chips on their shoulders, who cannot fathom why I would regard their children as anything less than stellar, and demand that I start doing so or else face the consequences, i.e., they will either make sure I start giving the child her due, or do whatever they can to put an end to my teaching career.

It's incredible how one angry, unreasonable nutcase can ruin an entire Open School experience. This year, I had two. The first was livid that I had failed her daughter (not, of course, that her daughter had failed) and demanded to know why. The student had signed into my class about two weeks into the term, just over a week after our programs were finalized, hence I was about six days into my syllabus and we had already begun reading Lord of the Flies. I had already given the students the spiel about notebooks and daily responses. I told this student, as I do every student who signs in late, that she needed to read the handbook (a copy of which is on every desk in the classroom), visit my website (the address of which is written prominently on the board, as well as the cover of the handbook), and talk to her classmates if need be, to get herself up to speed. For the next two weeks, this student did no work, asked no questions, showed no interest; she just sat there chewing gum and socializing, day after day, even as I instructed the students to read the text and "write your responses." When it came time to check her notebook, there was no work in it and I gave her a zero. She also did not submit the take-home quiz I gave the students in late September. She did do some work after receiving the zero on the notebook, but I had not graded it yet because I have not done the next notebook check yet, so it has not yet counted toward her average. Mathematically, she had simply not earned enough points to pass.

The mother would hear none of this. Aside from the obvious anger and hatred, she repeated over and over again that the child had signed in late and "didn't know" that she had to keep a notebook, write in it every day, and leave it in the classroom to be periodically checked. All this, of course, is on the first two pages of the handbook, which the mother insisted the child could not have had an opportunity to read. When I noted that the handbook could be read and downloaded from my website, she repeated the age-old canard that "not everyone has a computer," implying that it is completely unreasonable for me, in the year 2008, to expect students to be able to access the internet. (Note that the mother later said she would e-mail me to "address" me further, which puts a bit of a hole in the no-computer claim.) She basically assumed that I had not done enough to inform her child of what she had to do; as I discussed previously in The Great Failure and Hypothetical, the burden was on me to prove that I had adequately informed the child of her responsibilities, with the concomitant presumption that the child would have done the work and received a high grade if I had done so. Ultimately, having no reasonable or logical recourse, this woman was left to complain about my attitude; "You need to learn how to talk to people," and walk out of the room threatening, as I mentioned, to "address" me further.

Admittedly, I did grow increasingly frustrated over the course of the discussion with this woman's seemingly inherent nastiness, and with the bile she directed my way without even considering, or having any intention to consider, what I was saying. She simply could not handle not being told what she wanted to hear; she wanted contrition and deference from me, an apology for treating her child so unfairly and a promise to immediately raise the grade to whatever she felt her child deserved. She kept repeating, "This is my daughter we're talking about," as if that by itself meant something. When I stood my ground and endeavoured to help her understand my grading process and arithmetic, and explained that the student does have some responsibility to know what's going on and get herself up to speed when she signs in late, she became even nastier. So, as nasty people often do, she accused me of being nasty to her and resorted to threats.

Three days later, she has not e-mailed me yet. What I surmise is that she complained to the principal, who noted that the student has used this excuse (signing in late due to a program change) to justify not doing work in other classes as well. Having spoken with the principal, who is new this year, at great length about educational issues, I gather that she fundamentally agrees with me on this. Obviously it remains to be seen where this will go.

The second incident was even worse, although this one actually took place over the phone, not in an Open School in-person conference. The mother called me and demanded to know why I had failed her daughter, and accused me of doing so for purely personal reasons. In actuality, the student failed because she did not write the ELA Regents essay which was our first, and so far only, writing project of the term and hence constituted 40% of the grade. The assignment was to watch a 10-minute segment of the first Presidential debate, which I showed in class, take notes, and write a report on its content, much like the first task on the ELA Regents. The child was absent from school on the day I showed the debate, and was also absent on the day we wrote the final essay. Since she had a valid note for the first absence, I gave her the option of coming in after school to watch the debate, or watching it on her own on the internet. She did not do the former and I don't know if she did the latter. She provided no documentation for the second absence, and never submitted the essay. She also did not submit the take-home quiz.

According to the mother, the girl told her that her "notebook was up to date," and there was therefore no reason she should fail. I told the mother that the child had received a C and a C- on the first two notebooks; the mother said, "She told me different." This turned out to be a harbinger of things to come. The mother called me back a few minutes later, with the child conferenced in, and the child said, "I wrote the essay in my notebook, you graded it, and you gave me a B." This was, in every conceivable sense, an absolutely incredible, outlandish LIE.

Obviously I did not say this to the mother; I knew it was a lie, but I simply said that I would check the notebook. Of course, there was no essay in that notebook. Forget the fact that the statement is a pure and outright falsehood. It absolutely CANNOT be true.

First, I don't grade essays written in notebooks. Notebooks are for daily quote and reading responses, notetaking, and drafting. Final essays are always written in class on separate, pre-printed forms; students who legitimately miss class on those days also write the essays, whether by hand or computer, outside the notebooks. I have never, ever, ever, not once in twelve years of teaching, graded an essay as a writing project that was written in a notebook.

Second, I don't give letter grades for these essays. I give numeric scores that correspond to the ELA Regents scoring rubric (holistic scoring, on a scale of 1-6). While those scores translate into letter grades and then back into numbers for averaging purposes (i.e., a score of 3 = a grade of D = 26 points out of 40; 4=C=30; 5=B=34), the student would not have seen a letter on her paper, only a number.

Third, I had not yet given back the papers to the other students; there is no way that she would have gotten her grade and feedback when no one else did. I had given them their scores on the stickers I put in each notebook at the end of each marking period to explain the arithmetic, but again, she would have seen a number, not a letter.

Fourth, in order to have gotten a B on this essay, she would have to have scored a 5 on the Regents rubric. NO ONE in either 11th-grade section, 65 students, scored that high. A few scored "5/4," meaning it might score 5 or 4 on the Regents, but that's a B-, not a B. She would have had to produce the best essay in either class, and knowing what I know about this child's writing ability relative to the other kids, there's no way that happened.

I don't know where this is going to go, because as I mentioned the parent did not come to Open School. She will probably come in this week and demand that the child be taken out of my class. I have already briefed the Assistant Principal of Guidance on this issue and shown him the notebook. I also spoke to the student's guidance counselor, who not surprisingly has had issues with this child's blatant and self-serving dishonesty, and the mother's uncritical acceptance of the child's word, on several occasions. It is abundantly clear that this child is a pathological liar. She may not even know how to tell the truth, or distinguish the truth from a lie.

Neither do I know how we can fix this sort of thing as a general matter. Children will lie so long as they know they can get away with it; like politicians, they will lie if they know they will be believed and supported no matter how audacious the untruth. And neither I, nor a principal, nor a guidance counselor, nor any other adult in the school, can tell the parent what she most needs to hear:

"MA'AM, YOUR DAUGHTER IS A LIAR."

It is probably worth noting here that these are two of the most despicable kids I've run across in recent years, the latter more so than the former but only because I've known her longer. One thing that comes out of this is something I've been observing for a while: That the most despicable kids are frequently the ones whose parents believe their lies, accept their excuses, blindly advocate for them regardless of the facts, and thereby enable their appalling self-indulgence, narcissism and dishonesty.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Throughout my eleven years of teaching, I have been consistently astonished by students' staggering inability to follow even the simplest instructions. Whether I speak them aloud, write them on the board, print and distribute them on paper, or some combination of all three, it amazes me how many students somehow manage to not do what they are specifically instructed to do, do what they are specifically instructed not to do, or do something in a way which is clearly and obviously different from how they are instructed to do it.

The simplest example I can think of is the mundane task of writing their names on their papers. It's one of the first things one is taught to do in school: Write your name on your paper. Yet year after I year I receive paper after paper, or notebook after notebook, with no name on it, even when I tell students before they hand it in, "Make sure your name is on your paper." I have reached the point where I pre-print essay forms, assignment sheets, and labels with the students' names already on them. In cases where I instruct the students to write their names in a particular place, e.g., the upper-right corner of the page, many of them manage to write it in the upper-left, lower-right, at the end of the essay, etc.; anywhere except where they were told.

Conversely, when I tell them they do not need to write their names or other headings, such as in their daily notebook entries, and that they only need to label each entry with the date and the letter "Q" (for quote response) or "C" (for class work), they still write the full header (name, school, class, teacher, date) anyway. When I instruct them not to copy the quote off the board and just write the response, they copy the quote down anyway.

I'm giving my final exam this week. It's an extended "critical lens" essay, in which the students are instructed to select a critical lens from the list in their handbooks of all the ones that have been used on past Regents exams, excepting the ones we've used already, and use it to analyze all of the texts we have studied this year.

The students are writing their essays in Regents Essay Booklets. I have affixed labels to each booklet with the students' names on them, and I told them they did not need to fill in their name, school and date in the spaces on the booklet. Nearly everyone did so anyway.

I gave the students comprehensive printed instructions, which tell the students to select a critical lens from the list, and where to find the list. From the early results I have seen, at least two have instead selected quotations used in class which are not critical lens statements and thus not on that list. At least one chose one of the off-limits statements (the ones we used on prior essays).

The instructions also tell students not to include the title/author/genre (TAG) of all six texts in the essay's thesis statement, but rather to refer to "The six literary works discussed herein..." At least a dozen nonetheless wrote thesis statements containing all six TAGs. Others wrote thesis statements containing fewer than six TAGs. Three contained only one TAG, that of the book we read most recently. Several have no thesis statement at all.

Sometimes things like this happen because students are just too lazy to read instructions, let alone think about, understand, or follow them. The instructions clearly state that students may write about the texts, which are listed on the instruction sheet, "in any sequence," yet I have been asked at least a dozen times if they "have to be in this order?" I've also been asked a few times who the author of one of the texts is, even though all six are printed on the instruction sheet. (Note that the instructions also state that students "may not ask any questions.")

Sadly, this happens on Regents exams too. Students who are told to bring pencils bring pens, and vice-versa; or, if told to bring both, they bring only one; or, they bring no writing instruments at all. They bring things like food and cell phones into exam rooms even though they are told not to. They neglect to write their names, sign affirmations, fill out information on forms, write their answers in the appropriate spaces, etc. I had a student fail the Regents two years ago because he did not write his multiple-choice answers on the answer sheet. This after I spent the entire year reminding my 11th-grade students to do that very thing.

I've been thinking for years about doing an experiment with a class: Instructing them to draw on a sheet of paper, from left to right, a circle, a square and a triangle, and nothing else. I would be willing to bet that in a class of 30, 5 would not do it at all, 5 would draw the shapes in the wrong order, 5 would arrange them vertically, spatially or one-inside-the-other instead of horizontally, 5 would be unable to do it for lack of paper or writing instrument, 5 would write their name, school, class, teacher and date on the page along with the shapes, and the other 5 would spend so much time agonizing over and asking questions about how big the shapes needed to be, whether they had to be the same size, whether to orient the page portrait or landscape, whether lined or unlined paper was OK, whether pen or pencil was OK, whether red or green or orange or pink pen was OK, whether the circle could be a different color than the square, whether they had to put their name on it, whether it would be graded, whether they could do it later and hand it in at the end of the day, etc., that it would render the whole exercise pointless.

CELL PhONES 4 JESUS, Redux

In having my students read and study the decision in Price v. N.Y. City Bd. of Educ., 2007 N.Y. Slip. Op. 27214, 16 Misc. 3d 543; 837 N.Y.S.2d 507 (Sup. Ct. N.Y. Cty. 2007), this week as part of a mini-unit on the law, I discovered that the decision was appealed to the Appellate Division (New York's intermediate appellate court; the highest court in the state is the Court of Appeals) which just recently handed down its decision.

As discussed in CELL PhONES 4 JESUS, infra, the New York County Supreme Court upheld the Schools Chancellor's regulation banning from public schools the possession of cellular phones and other communication devices by students. The petitioners in that case, a group of parents and an advocacy group, had claimed that a ban on use rather than possession would be sufficient to address the schools' interest in avoiding the distractions, disruptions and sundry nefarious behaviors associated with having cell phones in school, but the court disagreed. The court found that the possession ban was reasonable, and that a ban on use would be too complicated, too costly, too difficult to enforce, consume substantial resources which are very limited to begin with (including pedagogical, budgetary, staffing, equipment, facilities, &c.), and could not be applied universally and uniformly to every school in the city.

It's important to note that the petitioners in this case were not arguing that students should be permitted to carry and/or use their cell phones while they are in school. Students often insist that it is necessary to have their cell phones in class "in case of an emergency," but the petitioners in Price did not argue that. Their concern was for their children to have their phones on the way to and from school, but the court found the distinction unpersuasive. The court also rejected the various hypothetical emergency scenarios proposed by the petitioners, finding none of them compelling enough to overcome the schools' substantial interest in avoiding cell phone-related problems.

The court also held that neither the parents nor the students had a specific constitutional right to carry or use cell phones, whether in school or before/after school. The petitioners claimed that the right fell within the ambit of "parental liberty interests," but the court disagreed. The interest was simply not important enough to implicate "strict scrutiny" under the 14th Amendment, nor to outweigh the value and legitimacy of the rule.

The Appellate Division has now upheld the lower court's ruling. The full opinion can be read here. Some relevant excerpts from the decision:

...the cell phone activity identified by the Department as threatening discipline in the schools goes far beyond the occasional errant ring. The very nature of cell phones, especially with regard to their text messaging capability, permits much of that activity to be performed surreptitiously, which the Chancellor rationally concluded presents significant challenges to enforcing a use ban. Certainly the Department has a rational interest in having its teachers and staff devote their time to educating students and not waging a "war" against cell phones.

...

The Parents describe cell phones which have no other capabilities than making and receiving calls and assert that certain phones permit parents to restrict the numbers children can call and from which they can receive calls. They claim that these phones can be programmed to be operative only during certain times of the day. The Parents fail, however, to demonstrate that such telephones are widely available and owned by students. Furthermore, the Parents offer no way of assuring that the phones would uniformly be used in the manner necessary to guarantee that school decorum will not be compromised.

...

By implementing the cell phone ban policy, the State is not depriving parents of the ability to raise their children in the manner in which they see fit. The ban by necessity will prevent children from calling their parents or receiving calls from them while commuting to and from school. However, scrutiny of the individual Parents' affidavits does not reveal that any fundamental child-rearing function is being taken from them. ... The Parents characterize the need for cell phones when the children are outside of school as a safety issue. However, the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment "is phrased as a limitation on the State's power to act, not as a guarantee of certain minimal levels of safety and security" (citation omitted) ... To the extent that the Parents argue that if children have cell phones they will be safer should an emergency arise in the school, we note that the Parents appear to be amenable to the Department installing lockers in which the children could store their phones during the day. This solution would obviously limit the students' ability to use their phones in that type of an emergency.

...

The cell phone ban does not directly and substantially interfere with any of the rights alleged by the Parents. Nothing about the cell phone policy forbids or prevents parents and their children from communicating with each other before and after school. Accordingly, the only analysis that need be applied is the rational basis test. That is, the policy will stand if it is rationally related to a legitimate goal of government (citation omitted). Here, the Chancellor reasonably determined that a ban on cell phone possession was necessary to maintain order in the schools. The goal of discipline is unquestionably a legitimate one. Accordingly, the policy withstands rational basis review and is not constitutionally infirm.

...

I don't know if this has been appealed to the Court of Appeals or not. What I do know is that students and parents who complain about cell phone confiscation, or put forth specious and frivolous "what-if-there's-an-emergency" arguments to justify their ignorance or defiance of the rule, no longer have a leg to stand on. It's time we started enforcing the ban.
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