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.
_

Mark the Date

Today I finally received the first of what are sure to be many similar inquiries in the coming two-plus weeks until classes end. One of my students, who has basically done no work since October and whose grade average is somewhere in the mid-teens, came up to me this morning and asked, "What can I do to bring my grade up?"

"Let me make sure I understand you correctly," I replied. "Today is the 29th of May. You've spent the past nine months doing no work, sleeping through every class, coming in 20 minutes late, chewing gum, talking to other students, showing no interest in anything we've been doing. And you are coming to me now to ask how to bring your grade average up?"

"Well," came the inevitable platitude, "I really need to pass your class."

I told him bluntly, "You are not going to pass this class."

Most teachers, I imagine, would not have been so frank. Many would probably be inclined to actually give this student a chance to pass the class for the year, even though he did almost no work for nine months. I myself have never been inclined to do that; neither am I any longer inclined to give students like this the illusion that they have a chance to pass (in order to get them to keep coming to class and maybe do their work from now on) when in fact they do not.

I have discussed in earlier posts the fallacy of students thinking they can make up for nine months of inactivity and willful negligence by writing one essay or taking one test in June. Take another look at the Twenty Questions Common-Sense Quiz, particularly Question 18. It is high time students are compelled to accept that the choices they make from day to day are what determine their academic outcomes. Where kids are conditioned to believe that they can do nothing for nine months and then "make up for it" in June, they have no incentive to do their work throughout the year.

I had another student like this three or four years ago, a senior, who came to me with tear-filled eyes on the next-to-last day of school, while I was taking my posters down and closing up my classroom, and said, "Umm...Mr. Braiman, umm...Can I talk to you about my grade?"

"I don't see what there is to talk about," I replied.

"See, umm...I really need to graduate, so, umm...is there any way I could get a 65?"

"You came to class seven times this semester. You wrote a grand total of four entries in your notebook. You did none of the four writing projects. Your actual grade average is twelve. You are not going to pass."

"But..."

"End of discussion."

Some readers will surely accuse me of being insensitive, cruel, cold-hearted, etc. Others will immediately demand to know what I did over the course of the semester to get this student to come to class, do her work, and pass, and will doubtless be dissatisfied with my answer and tell me I should have given her what she wanted, or at least given her "another chance."

Nonsense.

Even disregarding the fact that this student had been in my class the previous year, and therefore knew precisely what the requirements and expectations would be, she chose not to meet them, or attempt to meet them. She chose not to come to class and not to do her work. That is, and should be, the extent of the discussion. She made the wrong choices, and those choices led to the bad result. Same for the boy who approached me this morning.

Students like this need to have their bad choices come back to bite them. I have never accepted and will never accept that every student should have a chance to pass the class right up until, and even after, the end of the school year. Some students choose to fail almost immediately, and continue to make that choice day after day after day until they reach the point of no return. No good can come from rewarding such bad decision-making by rendering it moot.

I've been saying for years that most students only care about their grades on the day they get their report cards. Students should care about their grades every minute of every class, every day. Anything less than that, and they forfeit the right to complain.

Of course there are apologists out there who will tell me I'm wrong, that I'm being mean and unfair and I should be more "understanding" about the children's "issues."

Please.

Maybe it makes me a bad teacher. Maybe it's better that I am leaving the profession, so kids don't keep getting their feelings hurt. Fine. But as long as I'm here, I refuse to feel sorry for kids. I refuse to coddle them, to tolerate their self-indulgent excuse-making, to un-do their mistakes for them, to send them the message that it's OK to make irrational, counter-intuitive, negligent, destructive and downright stupid decisions from day to day throughout the year, as long as they wake up at the end and pretend to care.

Just recently I finally saw the highly-regarded Brad Bird animated film The Iron Giant. One of the central themes in that film is, "You are what you choose to be." Students need to be much more conscious of, and much more careful about, the choices they make. As I've written previously, we do them no favors by teaching them that their feelings matter but their choices don't.

Sorry, but I can't take it anymore...

I never wanted to inject politics into this blog; there are far too many blogs out there dedicated to that topic, and far too many nut jobs with opinions who are far too eager to share them. But the behavior of one particular candidate, that candidate's campaign and supporters, has become so infuriating that I just had to bring it up.

Put simply, this candidate's behavior reminds me of petulant teenagers and their parents, making up the rules as they go along and changing them to suit their desires, even when they agreed and understood in advance to a different set of rules; deciding for themselves what is right based on what is best for them in that particular moment, not on any objective sense of fairness or propriety. In their minds, only a rule or procedure which leads to their desired outcome is "fair" or "right." And their solution to an undesirable outcome is not to address the behavior that led to it; it's to complain, argue, seek the intervention of another authority, and in some cases flat-out lie, to get it reversed. Parents and students spend inordinate amounts of energy trying to overturn grades and disciplinary outcomes, to un-do reality and re-make history, to do whatever is necessary to obtain the outcome they desire and to which they feel they are entitled. (See, e.g., CELL PhONES 4 JESUS; Hypothetical, infra.)

This candidate's words and actions are thoroughly despicable, and infuriating to me as a teacher who has spent my career trying so hard to dispel the notion that students are somehow entitled to the outcome they desire in both academic and disciplinary contexts; indeed, that anyone is ever entitled to a desired outcome. This candidate and campaign are reinforcing this abhorrent kind of self-indulgence and sore-loser narcissism by continuing to insist that the rules should be whatever will suit their present interests, or that the rules are whatever they say they are because they say they are; that only the results favorable to them are valid and/or meaningful (like a student claiming that only the high grades should count, not the F's and zeros for the work that wasn't done); that they should be declared the winners even if their opponents actually win; that anyone who denies this or disagrees with them is unfairly and arbitrarily mistreating them, doing so out of some horrible, sinister ulterior motive.

What irks me even further is that this candidate is a lawyer, and therefore should understand legal principles of contractual agreement and estoppel. Under both contractual (promissory) and equitable principles of estoppel, a person cannot agree to something in advance, allow the thing to happen and allow other parties to act in reliance on that agreement, then afterward change one's original position to benefit oneself to the detriment of those who have already relied. Every campaign (including those of the candidate in question and all the others, not just the one remaining opponent) agreed in advance to a set of rules and procedures that would determine the outcome, and every campaign and every voter in those disputed states, including those who voted and those who stayed home, acted in reliance on that agreement and made their choices based on the knowledge and understanding that things would be a certain way. For this candidate, now that things are done, to change positions and endeavor to un-do the agreement upon which everyone relied is completely and patently unfair to absolutely everyone except that candidate.

I just can't stand listening to this anymore. I hear this sort of nonsense every time I argue with a student or parent over a grade, and it sickens me. I can't stand listening to people argue at the top of their lungs that they must get their way when any definition or understanding of logic, reason and fairness demands that they must not. With respect to the campaign, someone has got to put a stop to this. Someone has to call this campaign out on its indefensible, self-indulgent behavior. It has gone entirely too far; this candidate is becoming more unhinged and more irrational by the day. I can't stand it. Please make it stop.

UPDATE: About 5 hours after posting this article, I read the following online, by Guy T. Saperstein at The Huffington Post:

"[The candidate and campaign] are not acting like leaders, they are acting like self-absorbed adolescents, thinking that if they whine loudly enough people will accommodate them. This is not leadership, this is petulance."

Guess I'm not the only one.

Twenty Questions: The Full Quiz

Here's a copy of the 20-question "common-sense" quiz I give students at the beginning of the school year. For entertainment purposes only:

---

[For questions 1-4, "late bell" means the actual time the class period is scheduled to begin, regardless of whether there is an actual ringing bell in the school building.]

1. When the late bell rings, you should
a. walk to class from wherever you are in the building.
b. walk into the classroom from the hallway outside the door.
c. sit down in your seat and begin working.
d. already be in your seat and working.
e. wait for the teacher to instruct you to sit down, stop talking and begin work.
f. continue talking, socializing, or doing whatever you're doing regardless of what the teacher does or says.
g. immediately ask for a room pass.

2. You are late to class if
a. you come into the room several minutes after the late bell, with no excuse.
b. you come into the room any time after the late bell, with no excuse.
c. you come into the room any time after the late bell, regardless of why.
d. you come into the room after the late bell, but only if it's a really long time.
e. you come into the room after the late bell, but only if you did it on purpose.

3. Assuming you arrive after the late bell, you are not late to class if
a. you have an excuse.
b. you have a written, signed note from guidance, dean, SPARK, principal, etc.
c. you are coming from gym.
d. you are coming from your arts studio.
e. your previous class ran long or let out late.
f. you come into the room less than a minute after the late bell.
g. you were in the room before the late bell and then left.
h. your belongings are at your seat, even though you are not in the room.
i. you are standing just outside the doorway when the late bell rings.
j. any of the above.
k. none of the above.

4. If you have something you need to do right at the beginning of class, such as retrieving an item from your locker or asking another teacher a question; assuming you can't do it later in the day, the best thing to do is
a. come in, sit down, begin work, then immediately ask to leave.
b. come in and immediately ask to leave before sitting down.
c. take care of it before you come in, and as soon as you enter the room tell the teacher what you were doing so you won't be marked late.
d. take care of it before you come in, but expect to be marked late if you arrive after the late bell.

5. If you are late to class regularly because you are coming from gym or studio, and you really can't help it, you should
a. expect to be excused fo your lateness and not marked late, because it's not your fault.
b. take your time getting to class, because if it's not your fault you're late and you will be excused, then it doesn't matter how late you are.
c. get to class as soon as you can, but expect to be marked late, and understand that you will need to make up for it in other ways (behavior and participation) to prevent it from affecting your grade.
d. come in late and act as if class hasn't started yet, such as by talking to other students or making comments out loud, and taking your time settling in.

6. If you have a first-period class but find yourself arriving late to school because of traffic or transit delays, the correct thing to do is
a. leave home earlier so as to arrive earlier.
b. expect to be excused for your lateness, since the delays were not your fault.
c. expect to be excused for your lateness, since you can't leave home any earlier because you would have to get up earlier, and you need your sleep.
d. expect to be excused for your lateness, because if you leave earlier you might get to school too early and have nothing to do.

7. If you are absent from class, then you should
a. do nothing, because you're not responsible for that day's work.
b. provide an excuse, because if you have an excuse you're not responsible for that day's work.
c. do that day's work in class the next day.
d. make up the work outside of class, either during the extra period at the end of the day, or on your own time.
e. expect to receive a lower grade on your notebook if entries are missing.
f. d and e.

8. When submitting a permission form for a school trip to the teacher, you should expect
a. that the teacher will approve (check "A") and sign it.
b. that the teacher will approve (check "A") and sign it, but only if you are currently passing the class; if you are failing, the teacher will deny permission (check "D").
c. to be allowed to go on the trip even if you are failing, because it's really important and you really want to go.
d. to be allowed to go on the trip even if you are failing, but only if you promise to do all your work from now on.

9. If you are absent on the day a final essay is written in class, such as for a writing project or midterm exam, the correct thing to do is
a. nothing; if you're absent, you don't have to write the essay.
b. nothing; it's not that important and it won't affect your grade very much.
c. wait for the teacher to tell you what to do, but don't ask about it and don't mention it.
d. write the essay, have it with you the next time you come to class, and offer to submit it to the teacher even though he may not accept it.
e. provide an excuse for your absence but don't write the essay, because if it wasn't your fault you were absent, you don't have to do it.
f. provide an excuse for your absence but don't write the essay, because the teacher might not accept it.
g. provide an excuse for your absence but don't write the essay, because it has to be written on the printed form given out in class.
h. provide an excuse for your absence but don't write the essay, because it's the teacher's job to tell you when and how to make it up, and until he does you don't have to do anything.
i. wait until the marking period ends and you get your grade, then act indignant and insist that you were in class that day and the teacher must have lost your essay.

10. At the end of the period, you may stop work, put your belongings away and prepare to leave when
a. you decide that the class is over.
b. you decide that you are finished with your work.
c. you see the time approaching the end of the period.
d. you feel like it.
e. the time reaches the end of the period, and the teacher indicates that the lesson is over.
f. the time reaches the end of the period, whether the lesson is over or not.

11. If you ask for a room pass and are denied permission because it would exceed the limits of the room pass rules, the correct thing to do is
a. wait until after class.
b. politely respond with "Please, it's an emergency," or words to that effect, with the understanding that any exceptions to the room pass limits are duly recorded and may affect your grade if they become unreasonable.
c. argue about it with the teacher, and keep arguing about it until you get permission.
d. get up and walk out, because you're entitled to go if you need to.
e. a or b.

12. On the first day of school in September, before the course begins, before any assignments or grades are given, your grade average is
a. 100.
b. 65.
c. 55.
d. Zero (0).
e. whatever your grade in English was last year.
f. whatever you think it should be.

13. If you do just enough work in your notebook to meet the requirement, and the quality of the work is adequate, typical, average, etc., the grade you should expect to receive is
a. A.
b. B.
c. C.
d. D.

14. When you leave entries in your notebook blank, or don't use the writing time to write, or only copy things off the board without writing any responses or notes of your own, the grade you should expect to receive for your notebook is
a. A.
b. B.
c. C.
d. D.
e. Zero (0)
f. F.

15. If you find yourself disappointed or dissatisfied with a grade you receive on a notebook, essay, project, or other assignment, the appropriate thing to do is
a. complain to the teacher.
b. complain to your guidance counselor.
c. complain to the principal.
d. complain to an assistant principal.
e. complain to a parent.
f. complain to a friend.
g. nothing.
h. cut class the next day.
i. try to get the grade increased by claiming the work was too hard.
j. try to get the grade increased by claiming you didn't know what to do.
k. try to get the grade increased by claiming that you were absent.
l. try to get transferred out of that teacher's class into another teacher's class.
m. give up, because you're just going to fail again next time.
n. give up, because the teacher obviously hates you.
o. consult the assessment rubrics, standards, work samples, online resources, classmates who received higher grades, and/or the teacher to thelp you understand why you received the low grade, and discover how you can do better next time.

16. If you find yourself having difficulty understanding the material discussed in class, sich as quotations, readings and Regents writing tasks, the proper thing to do is
a. nothing.
b. put your head down and go to sleep.
c. start a conversation with another student about something else.
d. do whatever you feel like doing, such as drawing, reading a magazine, looking through photos, playing with electronic devices, or homework for other classes.
e. expect to be given a passing grade for the class, because the work is too hard for you, so you can't do it, and that's not your fault.
f. announce to the teacher and the class that you "don't get it."
g. raise your hand and tell the teacher that you "don't get it."
h. demand that the teacher explain it to you and refuse to do any work until he does.
i. think about it, form an idea, then raise your hand and ask a question which indicates that you've thought about it but need some help developing the idea.

17. When you're confronted with a difficult, challenging project assignment, where you find yourself having difficulty doing it or even understanding what to do, the best way to handle the situation is
a. don't do the project at all, because if you don't know what you're supposed to do, you can't be expected to do it and it won't affect your grade.
b. don't do the project at all, because if an assignment is too difficult for you, you can't be expected to do it and it won't affect your grade.
c. don't do the project at all, because it won't be any good anyway, and if you're just going to get a bad grade there's no point in doing it in the first place.
d. don't do the project at all, because it might not be exactly what the teacher wants, so it's better not to hand in anything than to hand in something that's wrong.
e. don't do the project at all, then when they're handed back or when you get your report card, act indignant and claim that you did do it, and the teacher must have lost it.
f. don't do the project at all, then when they're handed back or when you get your report card, and the teacher mentions the missing project, say you didn't know about the project and have no idea what he's talking about.
g. wait until after the project is due, then tell the teacher you're having trouble understanding what to do, and ask for help and more time.
h. wait until after the project is due, then complain to the teacher about how hard it is, so the teacher will make it easier, give you more time, or tell you that you don't have to do it.
i. wait until after the project is due, then complain to a parent or administrator about how hard it is, so that person will force the teacher to make it easier, give you more time, or tell you that you don't have to do it.
j. do the best you can to come up with a really good reason why you couldn't do it, because if you have a really good reason, you'll either be excused or get another chance.
k. do the best you can to avoid mention of the project for as long as possible, and hope the teacher will forget about it.
l. do the best you can to complete the project based on what you know, making educated guesses and decisions on what you don't know, ask questions and come in for extra help well before the project is due, and get it done either on time or as soon as you possibly can.

18. When the end of the marking period or semester is approaching, and you find yourself with a failing average, what you should do is
a. ask to do "extra credit" to make up for the work you didn't do.
b. promise the teacher that you will do your work from now on if he will give you a 65 for this marking period.
c. claim that you didn't understand what's going on in class and/or don't understand the material, so you shouldn't fail.
d. claim that you were absent for an extended period, so you shouldn't fail.
e. give up and stop coming to class, because you're just going to fail anyway.
f. try to get transferred out of that teacher's class into another teacher's class.
g. wait until after the report cards come out, then complain to a parent, guidance counselor and/or administrator that the grade is "unfair."
h. accept the result, acknowledge and understand why it happened, and resolve to do better in the next marking period.

19. Some of the arts studios do not allow students to participate in end-of-term performances if they are failing any of their academic classes. If this happens to you, the only thing you can do about it is
a. ask the teacher whose class you are failing to let you perform anyway, because it's very important to you.
b. ask the teacher whose class you are failing to raise your grade so you can perform, because it's very important to you.
c. ask the teacher whose class you are failing if there is anything you can do now, such as "extra credit," to raise your grade and be allowed to perform, because it's very important to you.
d. promise the teacher whose class you are failing that you will do all of your work from now on if he will let you perform, because it's very important to you.
e. ask the studio teacher to talk to the academic teacher and convince him to let you perform.
f. ask a parent to talk to the academic teacher and convince him to let you perform.
g. tell the studio teacher that you are actually passing and the academic teacher must have made a mistake.
h. nothing; you should have taken this into consideration during the school year when making day-to-day decisions about whether to do your academic work.

20. Which of the following statements is true?
a. A failing grade (F) is better than a zero (0).
b. A zero (0) is better than a failing grade (F).
c. There is no difference between a failing grade (F) and a zero (0).
d. If you think you're going to fail, you might as well not do the work at all.
e. The first marking period does not count toward your final grade for the course.
f. It makes no difference when an assignment is done, as long as it's done.
g. If you didn't mean to do it, or if you didn't mean for the outcome to happen, then it's not your fault.
h. All of the above.
i. None of the above.

Plagiarism

Well, this one was inevitable...

A couple of weeks ago while I was checking notebooks, I discovered that a student had copied his entire notebook word-for-word from someone else's. It had been a while since I caught a student plagiarizing, but it does happen with some regularity. Last year, I had students downloading old Regents Anchor Papers (samples which the State gives teachers to help illustrate the different scoring levels) and copying them, sometimes right in front of me during an in-class essay writing. Of all the things students do with respect to their schoolwork, cheating and plagiarism I think are the worst. I'd almost prefer a student do no work at all than be a cheater and a plagiarist; at least the former is honest.

I've reached the point now where I essentially never give students anything to write outside of class. Their notebooks stay here, on the tables; they are not supposed to take them home. Final essays are written as in-class exams. On those occasions where I do assign long-term writing projects which the students are to produce on their own outside of class, there are always a few which have been cut-and-pasted from the internet, whether from Wikipedia or some other source, or in some cases, multiple sources. I can't remember the last time I gave such an assignment and did not find at least two or three that had been plagiarized.

I've mentioned several times on this blog how my former principal at the fraudulent, corrupt "School of the Arts" in Queens where I taught in 2002-03 and coached baseball from 2003-05, let my students off the hook for cheating and implicitly encouraged them to keep on doing it. Instead of reading the text and writing their own responses, as they were assigned to do, they chose instead to go online and copy the chapter summaries word-for-word from SparkNotes.com (or Pinkmonkey, in some cases; I've had students over the years copy from Monarch Notes and other sources but never, oddly enough, Cliffs Notes). Some students who were not copying from SparkNotes were copying from each other. One of these put on a tear-filled, Oscar-worthy performance of denial and indignation before sheepishly admitting what she had done. I've seen many of these performances over the years, and they all unfold the same way.

The first time I saw this, I was obviously angry. I am always angry when students cheat, especially in a manner like this which is not only easy to detect, and entirely defeats the purpose of the assignment, but can actually take longer and require greater effort than simply reading the text and writing one's own response. The problem was that, even after a whole slew of students received failing grades for their fraudulent notebooks, things did not get any better. In fact, they got worse. Students were warned that if they did this again, they would receive a zero, not an F; I gave them some credit the first time, for having at least done something (even something so loathsome), but made it clear that in the future this sort of craven dishonesty would not be tolerated under any circumstances. Sadly, maddeningly, but perhaps predictably, a good proportion of these students who were explicitly warned not to do this again, did it again.

The nadir occurred after a large number of students, particularly those in one class section, failed the marking period because of the F's and zero's they received as a result of this brazen, shameless cheating. The principal was obviously perturbed by the high percentage of failures in that class, but when I explained the situation, his response was absolutely unfathomable:

"Well, you must have made the work too hard, so they had to cheat."

My jaw dropped to the floor. I couldn't believe what I was hearing, that a high school principal was actually standing there telling me that it was perfectly OK with him that the students were LYING, CHEATING and STEALING, because it was MY FAULT that the students were lying, cheating and stealing. (For the record, once again, the assignment was: Read a chapter of the text, 10-12 pages or so, think about what you read, and spend 10-15 minutes writing a response to the reading, i.e., about the text and your ideas. If this is "too hard" for high school students, we are all in a lot of trouble.)

The worst thing about that school, aside from the corruption and filth at the top, was this intractable and widespread epidemic of cheating (including theft of exams from teachers' files) and plagiarism by students, enabled by the administration (whose modus operandi seemed to be to kiss the backsides of students and parents until their lips were raw, metaphorically speaking). Once I discovered the problem, and realized that the administration had no intention of supporting my efforts to eradicate it, it quadrupled the amount of time and effort I needed to mark, grade and return student work. Every entry in every notebook, and every paragraph of every essay, had to be checked against online and print sources, as well as the work of other students, for plagiarism. As easy as it is to find sources online, when the problem is so widespread and insidious that everything the students submit is under suspicion of plagiarism, grading notebooks and papers can become incredibly difficult and, more significantly, inefficient and time-consuming.

I suppose some students count on this, i.e., that teachers will not bother to take the time and effort to seek out and uncover academic dishonesty. Some students may actually think their teachers will not notice or be able to tell that the work is plagiarized. Others may count on their parents and administrators letting them off the hook and blaming the teacher for "making the work too hard" or providing inadequate instruction. I had one student at that school complain that since he always received low grades on his essays he had to cut-and-paste his entire essay from SparkNotes, because in his words, "My work is never good enough for you." The parent and principal promptly fell in line with this reasoning.

As I discussed in Toxic Truths: A Closer Look, infra, it never occurred to either of them that (a.) the student had received low grades on his essays because his writing was not very good; and (b.) the way to get a better grade was to pay attention to classroom instruction, and to the specific, individual feedback he received on his prior work, and learn to write better essays. Once again, the parent and administrator preferred to teach him that he was entitled to a high grade no matter how good his work was, and that if I wouldn't give him one, then he should cheat. A parent or administrator in this instance might also contend that the instruction and feedback must have been inadequate if the student's grades have been low; the student's own effort and attitude are not part of the calculus. Once again, the student, not the teacher, receives the benefit of the doubt (see The Great Failure, infra).

Regardless of the specific reason, students cheat and plagiarize because they do not perceive a risk in doing so. They have either gotten away with it in the past, or have been absolved for it when caught, so by the time they reach high school it becomes in their minds not only acceptable, but routine.

I've heard all sorts of excuses from adults for why students cheat, why they read and copy SparkNotes instead of actually reading and writing about the literature they're assigned. I've had other supervisors besides that odious principal, not to mention parents, excuse and blame me for the students' dishonesty. I even mentioned all this recently to some of my law school classmates, who laughed it off and dismissed it as "what kids do," implying that I was the one who had done something wrong by taking exception to, refusing to tolerate, and punishing this behavior. Again, I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Doesn't anyone realize that this is why they do it? Doesn't anyone realize that if we, as adults, make it OK for students to do the wrong thing, they will do the wrong thing?

WHY IS NO ONE WILLING TO TEACH KIDS THAT IT IS WRONG TO LIE, CHEAT AND STEAL?

From Deadline to Lifeline

April 15 is a date of treble significance to me: The anniversary of the Titanic disaster, Jackie Robinson Day in Major League Baseball, and of course, the significance it carries for everyone else in America: the deadline for filing tax returns.

I thought today might be an appropriate occasion to examine one more fundamental concept which I somehow left out of Toxic Truths, and which has also gotten hopelessly lost in the school system: the importance of the assignment deadline.

By now I've told the story several times of a student submitting a marginal essay a month past the due date, and three weeks after the "late deadline" (more on that shortly), and my supervisor not only forcing me to accept it but not allowing me to penalize it for being submitted so late. I've had many students and parents over the years complain about lateness penalties, and have had several supervisors either encourage or compel me to accept work weeks, even months, after it was supposed to have been done. And I have heard many times the same refrain from students, parents, and supervisors: "It doesn't matter when it gets done, as long as it gets done."

Excuse me?

If that is true, what is the point of having an assignment deadline in the first place? What is the point of having a course sequence, or syllabus? Do these people really believe that a due date is meant to be just a suggestion? That this is an appropriate lesson to teach kids?

As a general matter, when I give students a brief-term (or long-term) assignment such as a writing project, which they are to produce outside of class, the final product (and each intermediate product such as a draft or revision) will be due on a particular date. The idea is to provide a reasonable amount of time to complete the work but not so much time as to encourage procrastination and neglect. Naturally, many students will procrastinate and neglect to finish the work on time, thus missing the deadline. My policy is to allow several days after the due date to submit late work, subject to a penalty of one full letter grade (i.e., a B+ becomes a C+; students who submit work after their class period on the due date are penalized a minus-grade, i.e., a B+ becomes a B). The time to submit late work is limited, however; there is always a "late deadline" after which no work will be accepted under any circumstances. The late deadline is usually about a week after the due date. After that, it's a zero.

I always take great pains to inform and remind students of due dates and late deadlines, but three things always happen: (1.) They act surprised every time I mention it, as if they were hearing about the assignment for the first time; (2) they still hand in the work late; and (3.) they cannot understand why or accept that late work will be penalized and I will refuse to accept it after the late deadline.

Why should late work be penalized? The most oft-cited reason is that it would be unfair to those students who did hand in the work on time, but why is that? Because completing the work within the allotted time is part of the task, and part of the assessment. The quality of the final product is obviously the primary element, but the ability to perform and complete a task and manage one's time to meet a deadline is also an important skill which needs to be assessed, not to mention an indispensable professional and life skill. Students should all be held to the same objective standards. Students who have the skills, take the time and put forth the effort to meet the requirements should receive full credit; those who do less than that, should receive less than that.

Moreover, the timeliness of the work must be part of the criteria, because otherwise there is no point in setting a deadline; it would be, as mentioned above, merely a suggestion. We want to encourage students to hand in their work on time, and discourage them from handing it in late. If handing the work in late has the same outcome as handing it in on time, where is the incentive to hand it in on time?

There are several other reasons why late work should be penalized. For one thing, it can be terribly inconvenient for a teacher to be grading work which, in terms of the course sequence and syllabus, is long past its shelf life. Teachers set deadlines so they can plan and set aside time to mark and grade the work, as well as determine an appropriate occasion to return the graded work to the students and maintain course continuity. Having to keep track of and grade various past assignments along with current ones creates inefficiency. Grading work, particularly performance-based assessments, can be an arduous task; it is most efficient for a teacher to be grading the same assignment on the same rubric at the same time. It is unfair to the teacher to have to grade past assignments long after her attentions have shifted elsewhere.

Most importantly, the idea that deadlines are ineffectual and that "it doesn't matter when it gets done" flies in the face of how things work in the real world. There are inflexible deadlines and limited grace periods in just about every meaningful aspect of life, mostly involving financial or legal matters. Rent payments, mortgage payments, credit card payments, car payments, monthly bills, and of course taxes, all have to be paid by the due date. Penalties, late fees and interest are among the consequences for late payments; so are collection calls, repossession, foreclosure, and in extreme cases, criminal sanctions. Many other important matters, such as college and job applications, licensing and certifications, insurance contracts, court appearances, voter registration, and even insignificant things like sale offers and store return policies, have deadlines, time limits, expiration dates, etc. More importantly, banks, creditors, tax auditors, licensing agencies, etc., not to mention employers, are substantially less interested in why you missed the deadline, and substantially less forgiving in that regard, than teachers are.

Students have a million excuses why they don't (or in their minds, can't) submit work on time. "My printer ran out of ink" is my favorite. I used to warn students in advance to be on the lookout for a mysterious computer virus that somehow knows when my projects are due, and causes every printer in the city to run out of ink the night before. It is their responsibility, I tell them, to make sure well in advance that their printer has ink and is working. Printers in general are among the most reliable devices ever invented; they do not break down or fail to function nearly as often as students would have us believe. Complaints about the cost of ink also fall on deaf ears; owning a printer necessitates and requires the occasional purchase of ink and paper. And, if all else fails, there is always pen and paper.

(Not to go on and on about the whole printer-related-excuse farce, but the option to hand-write brings to mind another incredibly stupid decision that students often make. In the face of a printer failure, whether real or imagined, students will rarely even think of the hand-writing option, and those who do will decline to exercise it. Most of them simply operate on the assumption that the printer failure in and of itself will excuse the lateness or non-submission of the assignment. Others, when asked why they did not hand-write the assignment, reply, "I didn't think you'd accept it." This is a common excuse for not taking initiative under less-than-ideal circumstances. But think about it: If you have something to hand in, there is a chance that I will accept it. If you have nothing, then there is no chance I will accept it because there is nothing for me to accept. In other words, they'd rather hand in nothing and have no chance of a positive grade, than hand in something and have some chance. Is it laziness, entitlement or stupidity that causes kids to make this wholly irrational choice?)

Of course, I am willing to make exceptions and forego the lateness penalty in exceptional cases. Sometimes a student simply cannot meet the deadline, and I have no difficulty with that idea. However, in my class the student bears the burden of proof that the late submission was not the result of his own negligence; that he truly could not submit the work on time because of circumstances beyond his control which were impossible to anticipate or overcome. Similarly, if a student is absent from class on the day of an exam, she bears the burden of proving that she was absent by necessity, not by choice or negligence. I believe students should bear this burden. Anything less would give them a perverse incentive; i.e., they'd be more inclined to find or create an excuse than to do the work and meet the deadline, or come to class on the exam date. Students should be allowed some latitude, but there have to be reasonable limitations and, more importantly, it should not be automatic. Students would be wise to take the advice I always give them: Never assume that an excuse will be accepted.

They would also be wise to understand that yes, it does matter when the work gets done.

Same Old Story.

Teacher tells student to "sit down and behave herself."

Student violently attacks teacher as other students cheer, record incident on cell phone camera and post on MySpace.

Principal blames teacher.

Video here.

Gee, I wonder why.

From the April 4 New York Times:

About a third of the nation’s eighth-grade students, and roughly a quarter of its high school seniors, are proficient writers, according to nationwide test results released Thursday. . . The results were released at the Library of Congress in Washington. The host, James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, drew laughs when he expressed concern about "the slow destruction of the basic unit of human thought — the sentence," as young Americans do most of their writing in disjointed prose composed in Internet chat rooms or in cellphone text messages. "The sentence is the biggest casualty," Mr. Billington said.

"American students’ writing skills are deteriorating," said Will Fitzhugh, founder of The Concord Review, a journal that features history research papers written by high school students. . . “The only way to assess the kind of writing that students will have to do in college,” he said, “is to have them write a term paper, and then have somebody sit down and grade it. And nobody wants to do that, because it’s too costly.”

More here. And somehow they're all getting straight-A's...
_

The Great Failure

"The persistent weakness of American liberalism is its fixation with rights and procedures at any cost to efficiency and common sense." - Jonathan Chait, The New Republic

This is not a political blog, and I don't like to think of education as a political issue because, as any of the two or three people who have read this blog can attest, I don't think politics or politicians can fix it. In fact, I don't think it has anything to do with which political party is in power, or whose candidates we vote for, and nothing written here should be construed to advocate the support or denouncement of one party or the other. But when I read this quotation in TNR I immediately thought of the schools. Replace the phrase "American liberalism" with "American public education" and the statement would still hold true.

I really believe that public secondary education, as I have described it throughout this blog, is the great failure of modern American liberalism. I discussed this idea in some detail in an earlier post: Conservative Pedagogy, Liberal Assessment. Subjective standards, entitlement grading, the ceding of teacher authority and expertise to parents, the bending-over-backward to absolve students of the consequences of their poor choices, the emphasis on self-esteem over actual learning, the suffocating limitations on permissible school-based discipline; these are all the product of abstract liberal ideas and ideals.

"...fixation with rights and procedures..." Look at the scenario outlined in Hypothetical. The idea that a child's failing grade can and must be overturned because of a procedural dispute with a teacher is a perfect example of this. It presumes (wrongly, in my view) that a student has a right to a passing grade, and that right cannot be infringed without "due process." Parents today seem singularly obsessed with rights and procedures. Administrators are therefore required to share that obsession in their policies and directives to teachers. Again, as I pointed out previously, procedural formalities become more important than the student's performance; the grade can be based on the former as well as, or instead of, the latter. This of course creates inefficiency; the more different factors that can be used to determine a child's grade or passing/failing status, the more resources are expended upon those factors and, necessarily, diverted away from actual instruction and assessment. And it defies common sense, in that a child's grade should reflect her performance, and the teacher's assessment thereof, with respect to standards and expectations.

In our pre-Open School departmental conference last week, our principal emphasized the importance of procedure and "due process," and having evidence thereof, because as he put it, that's what parents always insist upon knowing and, inevitably, will try to challenge. I would wager that the majority of parent complaints and challenges with respect to student grades are procedural rather than substantive. In other words, a parent is far more likely to insist that a child's grade should be raised or overturned because the teacher supposedly neglected some arcane procedural step, rather than because the student's work was actually better than the teacher's evaluation and he had actually earned a higher grade.

Students have a right to competent instruction, they have a right to know what the rules, regulations, requirements, standards and expectations are, they have a right to have their legitimate questions answered, they have a right to receive extra academic help when they ask for it and it is available, they have a right to be treated fairly, equitably, reasonably and honestly by teachers and other school officials. They do NOT have a right to pass their classes and advance to the next grade, nor to receive high grades, nor to be praised for their performance regardless of whether it is praiseworthy. They have a right to the opportunity, not the outcome.

The presumption that a student must be given a passing grade based on alleged procedural inadequacies requires a presumption that the student would have passed had the procedures been followed; again, that the student is entitled to a passing grade. In other words, we are willing to presume, absent any evidence, that the student knows the material and can do the work. We are not, however, willing to presume that the teacher followed procedure and provided the student with all of what is listed in the above paragraph. The teacher must prove that she provided adequate information, instruction and notice, and must overcome the presumption that she did not, but the student does not need to prove that he has learned, or done, anything.

This defies common sense. The whole point of a student taking an exam or doing an assignment is for him to demonstrate what he has learned. The grotesque inversion of logic described above goes back to the idea of not trusting teachers and giving students the benefit of the doubt in disputes of this nature. All a student has to do is claim that he did not know about an assignment or did not know how to do it, and automatically it is presumed that he could have done it and would have done it had the teacher told him about it and explained it to him. The parent therefore demands that the child be given the grade that he would have gotten under those circumstances, and that imaginary outcome be substituted for what actually happened (or, in less extreme cases, that the student be given "another chance" to do the work). In the end, the child does not have to actually do the assignment, let alone do it well or demonstrate actual learning. The parent demands a passing grade, the system obliges, and the child learns nothing.

It has, in fact, become so easy for a student to evade responsibility for assignments by claiming ignorance that teachers are compelled to take extraordinary measures to make sure students know about assignments, test dates, and the like. A teacher is practically required to tell the students about it in class, write it on the board, give them a printed handout, put it on the internet, e-mail every student personally, call every parent personally, then directly ask each child individually if he knows about the assignment and intends to complete it, and keep doing all this every day until the assignment is due. Anything less, and a child can claim that she "didn't know" and the parent will demand restitution. Is this really an efficient or reasonable way for teachers to expend their time and resources?

Claiming ignorance and accusing the teacher of incompetence is certainly easier than actually studying, paying attention in class, asking meaningful questions, and completing assigned work. The trouble is that this is essentially what today's kids are being taught to do. Not only do they have no incentive to pay attention to instructions, keep track of assignments and seek help, they have an incentive to ignore instructions, disregard assignments and not know what is going on in class; they actively try to not know. In a way, they're trying to create plausible deniability for themselves, but it only becomes plausible when adults accept and enable it. We should not. Students must have a duty to know what their responsibilities are; to know what is expected of them, to know what assignments are and when they are due, to listen to and follow instructions, to know what is going on in each of their classes. Teachers should not have to bear the entire burden of maintaining students' awareness of assignments and requirements.

How can the school system function efficiently, let alone generate actual learning, when it gives kids all these perverse incentives? For how long will we be willing to cast reason and common sense out the window, making the educational process far more complicated and less efficient than it needs to be, just to make kids feel good about themselves, while producing a population filled with self-esteem and empowerment but bereft of knowledge and skills?

"The persistent weakness of American public education is its fixation with rights and procedures at any cost to efficiency and common sense."

Sounds about right.

Toxic Truths: A Closer Look

As a follow-up to my previous post, Toxic Truths (which you might want to read first; this is a very long post), I'd like to examine each of the individual concepts separately, to show precisely how parents and educators have convinced themselves and others to believe the opposite, how such belief manifests itself in school and in the classroom, and why it is ultimately counter-intuitive and counter-productive.

Before I begin, allow me to reiterate that any criticism of student behavior and attitudes which might come up here is intended as an indictment of the adults who accept, enable and encourage such behavior by teaching kids that it's OK, neglecting to teach them that it's not, or giving them the benefit of the doubt when their behavior or its propriety come under dispute.

So...

- Not all children are smart.
- Not all children are talented.

These two basically go together. This was part of George Carlin's riff which I cited previously; the idea that "every child is special." What this morphs into is the idea that children who perform poorly in school, or in particular subject areas, must be good at something, so it's our job to find what each individual child is good at, create a curriculum and standards based on that for that one child, and be sure to compliment the child as often as possible on how good he is at that particular thing.

Perhaps another way of putting this, albeit a blunt and over-simplified way, is that if the child's schoolwork is poor we still have to say that it's good, so we have to find something good about it or, barring that, make something up. There is certainly nothing wrong with praising a child for what he does well and criticizing what he does not do well, but that's not what I'm referring to here. Somehow we've bought into the idea that every child must be smart and talented, so if that is true and they nonetheless do poorly in school, then there must either be something wrong with the assignment, something wrong with the instruction, or something wrong with how we assess their performance. This, inevitably, leads us into subjective standards, which I discussed at length in Raising Grades, Not Achievement.

Let me be as clear and straightforward as I can possibly be: A lot of kids are very, very stupid. Many of them don't know anything, can't do anything, are not interested in anything, and have no desire to do, or to be, anything. There are a lot of kids out there who have no intellectual assets whatsoever. I'm sorry, but it's true.


- Some children are smarter than others.
- Some children are better than others at certain activities and skills.

It might seem that these two belong with the first two, but collectively they express a separate concept. There's a difference between the idea that "All children are smart and talented" and that "Every child is just as smart and talented as every other; no one is 'better' than anyone else." This is another driving force behind the subjectivizing of academic standards. We cannot allow any child to perceive that we, as adults and as educators, think that some other child is "better" than she is in any respect. This is why, as Carlin pointed out, there is no more dodgeball in elementary school playgrounds, and why there are Little Leagues in this country where every game ends in a tie (by virtue of the trailing team being summarily awarded the difference in the score).

It's ironic, really (some would say hypocritical), that we go so far as to subjectivize academic standards and instruction in order to promote the uniqueness and individuality of every child, yet simultaneously enforce this contrived and phony "equality" to make sure not that everyone is treated equally, but that everyone is made equal by fiat. My favorite literary exploration of this phenomenon is Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron." It has also been satirized on The Simpsons and was the main undercurrent of the animated film The Incredibles.

Here are the facts: Some kids are better than others. Different people have different degrees of brain power, different abilities and different degrees of skill within those abilities. That's simply how life works. Human beings are the most diverse creatures on the planet. Even if it weren't hypocritical to enforce this egalitarianism and promote individuality at the same time, it would still be absurd to pretend that all kids are "equal" in this way, to remove competition from their lives and thereby remove any and all incentive they may have to improve themselves and learn.


- Very few children are legitimate "A" students.

Kids I know from Camp Pontiac, who go to school on Long Island and other suburbs, tell me that most or nearly all of their classmates get A's or A+'s in any given class, or straight-A's in all their classes. Take a look at this article from 2006: ". . . of the 47,317 applications [UCLA] received for this fall's freshman class, nearly 21,000 had GPAs of 4.0 or above. . . The average high school GPA increased from 2.68 to 2.94 between 1990 and 2000. . . Almost 23 percent of college freshmen in 2005 reported their average grade in high school was an A or better. . . In 1975, the percentage was about half that."

Some of this has to do with the self-esteem movement and some of it has to do with competition over college admissions and related parental lobbying, and teachers and administrators caving in thereto. One Long Island high school junior told me, "There's a lot of pressure on kids to get A's, and there's a lot of pressure on teachers to give A's." So now we are at the point where A's are being given because of pressure, not earned because of merit.

I've been saying for years that an A is not an achievement if everyone in the class gets one. An A should be the highest grade in the class; whoever produces the best work should get an A. Everyone else should get something less than that, on a sliding scale. Of course, if you have an objective test and everyone gets all the answers right, that's one thing. But on performance-based assessments, not every product will meet the standard of excellence. That cannot happen. This is one reason why teachers and administrators like to either avoid performance-based assessments, or avoid actually assessing them objectively, which I discussed in detail in Raising Grades, Not Achievement.

Regardless of the type of assessment used, I find it impossible to believe that such a high percentage of any random selection of youths of any background can actually, seriously be called high achievers. The whole point of having a grading system which distinguishes an A from a B, a B from a C, and so on, is to distinguish excellence from mere competence; to distinguish those with exceptional skills who produce exceptional work from those who are merely adequate. One cannot strive for excellence if whatever he does will be labeled as excellent regardless of its objective quality.

Whether we want to believe this or not, most people are merely average. Very few people are exceptional, otherwise the word would have no meaning. Students whose work is merely average or adequate should get a C, not an A. Above-average work should get a B. Those who meet the bare-minimum requirement and nothing more should get a D. Only truly exceptional work, and nothing less, should get an A. The only alternative is to abolish the A-B-C-D-F and numerical grading paradigms altogether in favor of one which allows everyone to be labeled as excellent without the system defeating its own purpose.


- Smarter children should get better grades.

A few years ago while I was coaching baseball, I had a conversation with my players at the batting cage about the difference between objective and subjective grading standards, arguing as I always do that a C paper is a C paper no matter what the student's individual ability or intelligence. One of the boys, a ninth-grader, said to me honestly and sincerely, and not at all in an obnoxious manner, that this "would give an unfair advantage to the smart kids."

My response was simple: You're darned right. Except for the "unfair" part. Smart kids should have an advantage in school. Why? Because they're smarter, that's why. They can remember more information, solve problems more efficiently and intuitively, make connections more readily, express themselves more clearly and accurately, and generally produce higher-quality work. There is no logical reason why students who have these abilities should not get higher grades than those who don't. Smarter kids who produce work which meets a higher standard than that of their peers should have that higher standard reflected by higher grades.

What about the kids who are not so smart? Well, obviously, they have to work harder to keep up, and endeavor to improve themselves so they, too, can eventually meet those higher standards. There's nothing wrong or unfair about that. And they may not ever get straight-A's. I'm sorry, but that's how it goes. That's not unfair; that's life. To use a baseball analogy, if a child can only hit the ball 150 feet, and the fence is 250 feet away, they will not move the fence 100 feet closer when he comes up to bat, nor award him a home run if he hits it 151 feet into the outfielder's glove. That would be absurd; absurd to do it, and absurd for the child or parent to expect it. The child has either got to get stronger and improve his swing so he can hit it that far, or learn to hit line drives to the gap, bunt his way on, steal bases, etc.

I'll tell you something else: It is possible for a person to actually become smarter. There are things people can do to exercise and develop their intelligence and learn how to solve problems, process and retain information, and express themselves with precision. And here's a hint: giving them A's in school regardless of the quality of their work is not the way to do it.


- A child's grade should be an objective measurement of his actual ability and performance.

I have often found myself wondering where children and parents think their grades come from; what they think that number or letter means. Just as they decide for themselves what the rules and standards are, as discussed previously, students often decide for themselves what grade they should get and what it will be based upon, and jump to inductive conclusions when the grade they actually receive is less than that. Usually they complain as if they believe the grade is or should be based on only one single thing. For example, a student will indignantly wonder out loud how she could possibly have received a lower grade than the boy sitting next to her, when he comes to class late every other day. Another will point to his most recent notebook or essay grade and demand to know how his report card grade could possibly be lower than that. Others will assume that they failed because of a single missed assignment or minor behavioral infraction, or that the grade reflects nothing more than the teacher's subjective personal dislike of them.

(Do I really need to explain these?)

What's basically going on here is that the child and/or parent decides in advance what grade the child should get, and then, when the grade turns out to be lower, works backward from there in deciding what it must have been based on. This is inevitably followed by an indignant claim that the teacher "can't" base the grade on that alone, and a demand that the grade be based on something else and increased.

Another phenomenon I've been seeing is the determination of grades (or, more to the point, passing or failing status) based on administrative or procedural anomalies. One example, discussed at length in Hypothetical, is the idea that if a teacher does not inform the parent in advance that the child is in danger of failing, then he cannot fail and his failing grade must be overturned. A colleague told me recently about a policy in his former school, where if a teacher's course differed even slightly from the contract given to students at the beginning of the year (for example, if he gives four quizzes when the contract said there would be five), then the student had to pass.

Between all this and the ubiquitous entitlement grading model (discussed at length in Fish Story), it seems that parents and educators have sought and found every possible factor on which to base a student's grade other than the one thing that it should be based on: the student's performance, in its entirety. Nothing more, nothing less.


- Children who cannot do the course work or who cannot understand the course material should fail the course.

Today's students actually believe that they should pass if they can't do the work or understand the material. They can't fathom why they would receive a failing grade on a reader-response notebook in which they wrote no responses because they "didn't understand the book." I've discussed this tortured logic in previous posts, and again it essentially traces back to the subjective-standard argument: the standard, i.e. the starting point for assessment, should reflect the individual child's ability, as opposed to the grade reflecting the child's ability in relation to an established, universal, objective standard. As I've pointed out repeatedly, the former leaves the child with no incentive to learn or improve.

The idea that a student should pass a course whose requirements he cannot meet, because he cannot meet them, may be one of the most absurd and counter-intuitive notions I've ever heard. It's mind-boggling that so many people actually believe it.


- If a child makes a conscious choice not to complete and submit required course work, he should expect to fail the course.

I have had students in the past who, in the same breath, refused to do the work and insisted that they should not and could not fail the course as a result. One girl in particular whom I will never forget, in the most noxious, sneering voice imaginable, said to me, "No, I'm not doing your stupid reading notebook, and you can't fail me, because you're a psycho." (Fortunately this sort of extreme behavior is rare. This individual was one of the five or six most despicable kids I've ever met in all my years of teaching; a true sociopath. She and two others like her were in the same class in the Long Island school where I taught in 2001-02. It makes me ill just to think about them.)

There are a million reasons why kids don't do their work, but regardless of the reason, they either don't perceive the risk in making that choice or don't care about the consequences. Some kids who don't do their work do expect to fail. The ones who don't have somehow been conditioned to believe that work is optional, that they cannot fail the entire course based on one missed assignment (regardless of the accumulation thereof), or that they will somehow eventually be accommodated as long as they had a "good reason" not to do it (e.g., they "didn't like it" or it was "too hard"). The trouble is, they often turn out to be right. Adults in schools bend over backward to make sure that kids do not suffer for their poor decision-making. Parents and administrators force teachers to make accommodations, reverse their decisions and defy their own policies. Students don't perceive risk because in many cases there is none.

I had a dispute once with my supervisor at that Long Island school, who insisted that the kids weren't doing their work because "they don't get it," meaning that I must not have adequately explained the requirements. Their forbearance was therefore proper and acceptable, and they certainly should not fail the course because of it. I replied that they didn't "get it" because they knew they didn't have to. It is far easier and less time-consuming to simply say "I don't get it" than to actually undertake and work through the task. If "not getting it" means you don't have to do the assignment, then you have no incentive to "get it;" in fact, you will actively try not to "get it." She disagreed, without explaining why.


- Children with long-term absences who do not actually attend school, do course work, take and pass exams, etc. should not pass their classes.

In that same Long Island school, I was forced to pass a student whom I had seen maybe twice the entire year. She was out with either a long-term illness, injury or family problem (I can't remember which) and had not done any of the coursework. But I was told to pass her because it was "not her fault" she was out, and she should not be "punished" for it (again, the false perception of academic failure as punitive action; see Redefining Failure). At my current school last year, I actually had a student insist, loudly and with great indignation, that he could not fail the first marking period because, in his words, "I wasn't here!!"

While I won't go so far as to suggest that this policy encourages kids to injure themselves or become gravely ill, we need to get away from the idea that just because a situation is not the child's "fault," we should pretend it doesn't exist and create an artificial outcome for the child's benefit. This has nothing to do with sensitivity; it's simple logic. There is no rationale for declaring that a child who has not actually taken a course, has not actually completed the coursework and thus not actually demonstrated proficiency in the course materials and skills, has in fact done so, because she was deprived of the opportunity by circumstances beyond her control.

We want kids to pass their classes, but we also want them to learn. If the latter is not a precondition of the former, if indeed they have nothing to do with one another, then what's the point?


- If a child receives a low or failing grade on an assignment, project, exam, or overall course, it means that his work is insufficient or substandard and needs to improve.
- If a child wants a higher grade, he must produce better work.

It is stunning to me how these have become foreign concepts to kids and parents. The last thing in the world anyone thinks of when a child receives a low grade or fails a course is that his work may not be very good, or that he might have chosen not to do it. Either the standards are too high or insufficiently clear, the assignments are too difficult or too numerous, the weighing of different elements into the average is wrong or unfair or ill-defined, the teacher is either incompetent or is persecuting the student because he doesn't like her . . . the list is endless. I've had many students who do little or no work at all, or who cannot write a single clear, correct sentence in an entire essay, and then are shocked - shocked - to receive a low or failing grade.

In addition, the last thing anyone ever thinks of in terms of how to get a better grade is to work harder or produce better results. Complaining, arguing, procedural nitpicking, parental or administrative lobbying, transferring to another teacher's class, and in some cases threats and blackmail, seem to be the preferred methods.

To students who complain about their grades, I always say the same thing: You want a better grade? Do a better job. They have no idea what I'm talking about.


- If a child wants an "A", his work must be the best in the class.

See above discussion on what an "A" means, or should mean.


- Teachers are experts in their respective subject areas, in pedagogy, assessment and measurement, and they should be treated as such.

Here we get into an entirely different area, one which I have touched on earlier and may discuss in greater detail later. A good deal of what I've discussed above concerning grades is also affected by the fact that people in general do not trust teachers anymore. No one seems to believe that teachers know their subject matter, know how to assess and measure student performance against objective standards, or even essentially know how to teach.

What I'm talking about here goes beyond the simplistic blame-the-teachers mentality that the public and the media employ to explain the decline in the quality of schools and the academic performance of students. Of course there are incompetent teachers out there, but I would venture to say there are probably not very many. The certification requirements in New York are substantial, not the least of which is an undergraduate major and standardized content exam (i.e., demonstrated expertise) in the certified subject area. Teaching is a demanding profession and those who are not up to the task typically do not last very long. No; what I'm talking about here is what happens after the child under-performs and is dissatisfied with a grade.

If it was generally understood that teachers are experts in their respective subject areas, as well as in pedagogy, assessment and grading, we would not have all these challenges to grades and all this caving in to parental pressure. We would not essentially allow parents to decide for themselves what grades their children should receive, let alone allow them to pressure and threaten us into giving them what they want. Teachers and administrators who give students the grades their parents demand instead of the ones they have earned are essentially ceding their expertise to the parents. In other words, I can't be considered an expert if the parent and the child know better than I do what grade her paper should get. I'm supposed to be the expert; I'm supposed to know the difference between an A paper and a B paper. And on top of that, I've been doing it for years. I read scores of papers at a time, hundreds of them every semester, many thousands in my career. I think I can tell by now the difference between the A, B, C, D and failing papers.

It's rather like the 4th Amendment warrant requirement; the police need a neutral magistrate to determine if probable cause exists. The police (and, for that matter, the defendant) have too much of an interest in the outcome to make that determination for themselves. If I'm the judge, I'm supposed to be able to tell the difference between probable cause and mere suspicion, and more importantly, I have no stake in the outcome, which is why I get to make the decision.

I would argue it is extremely difficult for children to learn if their grades are pre-determined by their parents, who are indisputably interested parties. They are much better off being evaluated by a neutral, expert instructor.

Of course, students and parents don't believe teachers are "neutral" either...


- Children who misbehave should be punished.

This goes without saying. Or so one would think. There really is very little that a school or a teacher can do to punish misbehavior, even egregious antisocial behavior. Practically anything one could think of is somehow construed as "corporal punishment" (including a favorite of my elementary-school teachers, writing 25 or 50 times "I must not..."). The only punishment left is suspension from school or in-house detention, which as any student will tell you, is no punishment. Especially when they're absolved for whatever class work or exams they miss; after all, it's "not their fault" they weren't in class that day.

In early 2003, when I was teaching at that despicably corrupt, fraudulent Queens "Arts" school, a group of students stole hundreds of dollars worth of merchandise from theme-park gift shops while on a school-sponsored performance trip in Florida. The parents of these children insisted that the school should not punish them at all. The principal (vile creature that he was) reluctantly meted out a nominal punishment, which in part excluded these children from Spring performances, but in the end even that relatively minor sanction was lifted.

I must confess I can't think of a disciplinary and punishment scheme which would be effective at maintaining order in the schools but which would not ultimately rely on the good faith of educators to avoid abusing their authority. I guess the question is, all else being equal, who should get the benefit of the doubt, the adults or the kids?


- Teachers should be annoyed, and should express that annoyance, when children misbehave.

This obviously refers to something that kids are guilty of more so than anyone else, although again the parents and administrators enable it. Children seem to believe that the teachers owe them "respect" but they do not owe their teachers any sort of deference. I've actually had students tell me that: "You have to respect me, but I don't have to respect you." They do not feel obligated to behave in any particular way nor to treat teachers in any particular way, but the teachers must be careful what they say and how they say it.

Two years ago I politely asked a student twice to get out of the doorway, where she was standing, holding the door halfway open, having a conversation with someone in the hallway, after the class period began, and take her seat. After being ignored both times, I had to raise my voice and instruct her, rather more forcefully, to comply. This produced a melodramatic tirade from her about how "No one talks to me like that" and "I'm not your child" and "Don't you disrespect me" and on and on and on. (For the record, this was another one of the "five or six..." mentioned above.)

This is the sort of thing I should not have to explain. No one is entitled to a polite response to an antisocial act, particularly when that act is repeated. Kids need to get over themselves. I'm not going to waste time pondering the adolescent concept of "respect," which is simplistic and one-sided, nor explaining in any great detail the reasons why students do, in fact, owe teachers their respect, deference and best behavior. Suffice it to say that it's almost impossible for learning to occur, let alone for the schools to function, otherwise. A teacher has every right to be annoyed when children misbehave or interfere with their teaching, and every right to scold them when they do.

--
How can so many people be so wrong about so many things that are so important when it comes to school? How did we reach this nadir? Make no mistake: This is why our school system is failing. It's not a lack of funding or the influence of teacher's unions or the absence of Christian prayer in the classroom. It is a fundamental misunderstanding on nearly everyone's part of what teachers, students, parents and administrators are supposed to do with respect to the education of children; what their respective roles are supposed to be. And the schools will never be fixed as long as people think this way. Never.