Judge For Yourself

There are two professions in which fads are most prevalent, fashion and education.  It is obvious in fashion as there are visible and recognizable from season to season.  It is even necessary to the survival of the industry.  

In education, the fads are a bit more subtle as they take longer to implement and stick around for several years.  They are not, however, necessary to the survival of education and may even be harmful to the students on which they are tried.  Not all fads are bad, of course, but it is important to recognize one when you see it and then (and this is important, people) use your professional judgment.  

When I began teaching eighteen years ago, I wondered why my freshmen couldn't spell the simplest words.  For two years, I taught fourteen and fifteen-year-olds who could not spell words like definite or intelligent.  When I asked them what the problem was, they informed me that they had been instructed using the inventive spelling method.    For those blessedly unfamiliar with this "pedagogy," inventive spelling is "the practice of spelling unfamiliar words by making an educated guess as to the correct spelling based on the writer's existing phonetic knowledge." (grammar.yourdictionary.com) The hope is that the student will eventually learn to spell the words correctly by absorption.  It doesn't work, and I can't imagine why anyone thought it would, but my students were subjected to it for three years of elementary school.  These students are now in their early thirties and, based on their facebook pages, they still struggle to spell words correctly.  

My first two semesters of college, I took Calculus I and II - sort of.  I was part of an experimental curriculum, called Discovering Calculus.  The book, which was an anorexic 90 pages long, did not have formulas in it.  We, as college students, were supposed to figure out the formulas by intuition.  The logic behind this approach came from years of students knowing how to perform calculus equations without really understanding them.  While I understand that issue, I do know that students who passed those class could do the calculus they learned while I still cannot.  There's a reason it took from the beginning of time until Isaac Newton for mankind to have calculus.  Every student in my class went to a used bookstore and bought a real calculus book so that we could survive this class.  

Now that I have taught for nearly two decades, I am left to ask myself where the professional judgment was in these teachers.  Was there really an elementary school teacher who truly thought second graders would eventually figure out the spelling of words when the English language is fraught with exceptions to phonics?  My calculus professors were not first-year teachers.  They knew how to teach calculus to physics and engineering majors because they had done it for many years (one of them for decades).  What made them think this would work?  My guess is that in both cases, the people in the classroom didn't have a choice.  They probably had it handed down to them by their administration because someone convinced those people to adopt the latest educational fad.  

Those schools no longer teach inventive spelling or discovering calculus because it proved to be ineffective.  If this were the fashion industry, that might not be a big deal.  We all get to look back at our bow blouses and banana clips with nothing more than a blushing head shake.  This is not true, however, in education.  These fads are experiments, and the guinea pigs are our students.  It is dangerous to try every fad in education without serious thought.

Lest you think that I want our classrooms to stay stuck in the model of two hundred years ago, let me quickly dispel that notion.  I teach enthusiastically in a one-to-one school, and my students learn through the use of internet research, show their learning through video construction, and reflect on their learning through blogging.  They collaborate on projects and review using every online tool I can find.  I have digital textbooks, have flipped lessons, and use youtube so much that I don't know how I taught without it.  There is nothing about me that resists the use of technology.  HOWEVER, (and it is a big however), if a teacher is using technology for the sake of using technology, they are using technology wrong.  

You owe it to your students to analyze your own pedagogy.  The educational value of teachers lies in our judgment as trained professionals.  Anyone can deliver information, but it takes an educator to decide on what to teach (and what not to teach) as well as the best way to teach, reinforce, and assess learning.  When a new fad comes along in education, it may actually be a great new way to teach something, but keep in mind that it may not be.  Ask yourself the following questions:

- Does the new way offer brain engagement in a way that the old way does not?
- Does the new way take away from brain development that the old way offers?
- Is there value to the new tool for more than one curriculum point?
- If the new way doesn't work, what long-term effect will it have on students?
- Does the new way teach a skill or thinking process that students will need in the future?

Sometimes, the new way is the best way, and sometimes it is not.  My students blog because I decided that they would benefit from weekly reflection, that I could expose them to content there wasn't time for in class, and that I could ask them to empathize by using appropriate prompts.  My professional judgment was that these were important enough goals to make grading seventy blogs a week worth it.  My students make videos because script-writing forces them to put learning in their own words, but they do not make stop-action videos (unless they choose it) because I find little educational value to justify the time it takes.  My students have collaborative projects because it is my professional judgment that much non-academic learning happens when people work together.  My students also have solo projects because I believe that there must be times when students create on their own.  The common element in each of these situations is that I do not just passively adopt the newest fad method or technological tool.  I don't just ride the educational pendulum.  Rather, I employ all my training and experience to make the right decision for my classroom.  

Just as importantly, I am fortunate enough to have an administration that allows me to do so.  

My Co-Conspirator

Last summer, I wrote about the importance of your relationship with "the teacher next door."  This time, I want to talk about a different teacher in your school that it is also important for you to cultivate a relationship with - your co-conspirator.

Your co-conspirator is the person who teaches the same kids you do.  It is possible that your co-conspirator is the teacher next door, but in my experience, most schools are not necessarily set up that way.  Mine is in the room that is literally the farthest away you can get from mine and still be in the school building (Was this on purpose?  Hmm.)  She's our 8th grade English teacher.

This is Kellie's first year teaching at our school, but she has been at the school as a parent for three years.  I taught her oldest daughter last year, so I knew she would be a fun person to conspire with when they hired her.  At the beginning of the year, we had a self-imposed meeting to see how we could work together for the good of our eighth graders.  While I also teach physics to juniors and seniors and she teaches some 9th grade English, we both have every eighth-grade student.  They also have the same history teacher, so we occasionally loop him in into our ideas.  We started with a fairly short list of activities which kids could experience using both of our classes, but the more we talk, the more ideas we have.

Our first activity was at a very low level of collaboration.  We asked the students to record a Story Corp interview with someone over fifty.  She followed up on the interview with activities in her classroom, as did the history teacher.  I followed up with blog posts about inventions, comparing their answer on the most important invention to that of the person they interviewed.  It was interesting to see where they lined up and where they did not.  While the students had follow-up activities with each of us, we didn't connect those activities at all.  If you are nervous about collaboration, you should consider something like this because there is little pressure.

We have also had some mid-level collaboration on the 8th-grade blogs.  I will sometimes require that students use a magazine article, video, or image in their post.  When I do that, I require that it be properly cited in MLA format, which is what she teaches them.  Using skills from two separate classes in the same assignment creates an awareness in our students that their lives don't exist in separate unrelated blocks.

Our biggest collaboration so far has been the infamous Mars paper.  I've blogged about this paper before, but this year it provided a great opportunity for cross-curricular collaboration.  She was already going to teach them about persuasive writing and constructing intelligent arguments, so this provided an opportunity to use my topic for that purpose.  They learned argumentative style using They Say . . . I Say technique.  They had debates on the pros and cons of putting a man on Mars, in which more nuances could be brought out (like how it is different if private funding is available through companies like Space X than if we are talking about all taxpayer funding).  They wrote their thesis paragraphs as blog posts and turned in their best paragraph in English so that peer editing could take place.  The final products I got were far better than they would have been without the time spent doing that, and a lot of thinking and reasoning skills were developed.

We are already working on ideas for next year to increase our level of collaboration.  For obvious reasons, this has academic benefits for our students.  However, I think there are benefits beyond the material to this level of collaboration.  First, our students see us enjoying each other while we work together.  We met together to discuss rubrics and schedules, and students saw us laughing together.  I remember thinking that all adults hated their jobs when I was a kid, and I think it is great for them to see that we can enjoy each other.  Also, we are a small enough school that a student can't tell one teacher one story and a different teacher another without getting caught.  That is good for our students.  Finally, I think it is important for students to know that their lives will not exist in class periods.  Good writing matters across all areas of communication.  Math will be part of your life no matter what.  Every day is the history of the future.  Science is everywhere.  Working together in these ways allows students to make connections they might not otherwise make.

If there is a teacher in your school whose student list overlaps with yours, consider making them your co-conspirator on whatever level your school situation allows.  You will enjoy it, and it will benefit your kids.

STEM Majors - Stop This Now

As I scroll through my Twitter feed, I've noticed a disturbing trend.  I've actually noticed more than one disturbing trend, but there is one I feel qualified to speak to.  It is the trend of STEM majors tweeting to everyone else that only STEM majors are tired or have degrees of value.  As a person with a STEM degree, I need to tell you to stop this.  Stop it now.  Stop it immediately.  It doesn't make you sound like a hardworking student (who is apparently not too busy to tweet, by the way).  It makes you sound arrogant and ignorant.

I get it.  I really do.  I was a science education major, which meant that I took pre-med biology, anatomy, and ecology as well as all their labs.  I took chemistry 111 and 112 as well as physical chemistry and their labs.  I took engineering level physics, quantum mechanics, classical thermodynamics and applied thermodynamics and their labs.  I took Earth science and its lab.  I took Calculus 1 and 2 in an experimental course where I was supposed to "discover" it for myself.  I haven't even mentioned the education courses and general ed courses that were filling out the rest of my schedule.  I remember feeling like the busiest girl in the world.  If I had Twitter back then, it's entirely possible that I would have been tempted to post the same things you are.  Here's the thing, though.  I've come to learn that everyone I went to school with felt pretty much the same way.  We were all tired, and we are all tired.  Here's a little perspective.

Let's just start with the obvious.  You think English majors have it easy.  After all, everything they do is graded subjectively.  Let's assume that's true for a minute, even though it isn't.  As a person who likes to arrive at the end of a ten-page calculus problem with the answer of zero, you would be horrified if anything you did was graded subjectively.  You would not think it was easy; you would be paralyzed by not having a black and white idea of what to do.   Have you looked at the reading list English majors have?  If you had to face that stack of books, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't think it was easy.  Now, imagine you had to read those books so thoroughly and carefully that you could write papers with detailed analysis about them.  You really think you wouldn't be tired at the end of that?  You would curl up in a corner and calculate square roots.

While we are talking about writing, let's talk journalism majors.  I know you have been told they have it easy because everything they write is on a fifth-grade reading level.  Have you ever tried to write something specifically to a fifth-grade reading level?  If that is not your normal writing level, trying to get it down to that is actually rather difficult.  Also, everything they write or record as news is different as soon as they send it.  Physics may change some over decades, but it isn't different now than it was when I began this blog post.  Having to keep up with every piece of news in our "fast-paced, gotta have it now" society would be exhausting, and you know it.

I hear you saying, "At the very least, we should be able to make fun of art majors, right?  They can't possibly be tired after just putting down splattered paint on a canvas.  I could do that."  If you could, you probably would have.  Since you haven't, let's assume you can't.  It's okay if abstract art isn't your thing, but let's not pretend that the man who created with the method shown here wasn't tired when he got done.  Have you stood in front of this?  The scale and controlled chaos are overwhelming.  Also, if you'll stop tweeting for a second and go to an art museum, you might find out that about 90 percent of what's there isn't abstract.  It's incredible representations of the things you should be learning to appreciate in your STEM degree.  Every art teacher I've ever worked with knows a ton of science because stuff explodes in the kiln if they don't know the thermodynamics, and many kinds of paint don't work with other kinds of paint because of their chemistry.  Artists are people who create something out of nothing.  God rested after six days of creation, and you think art majors aren't tired?  

What about music majors?  Can STEM people assume they aren't tired?  I can't tell you how tired the ones I went to college with were because I never saw them.  They were always in a practice room in the music building learning to turn air into music, so I'm going to assume they were exhausted.

You might be thinking, "At least let me have the elementary education majors.  Their homework is ridiculous.  They have to practice clear handwriting on the board, make hand puppets out of paper bags, and read children's books."  I will say that I felt that way about them WHILE we were in college.  Here's what you aren't taking into account.  Your STEM degree will likely land you in an office.  You'll be able to go to the restroom whenever you feel the need, have lunch away from your office with other adults, and go home at the end of the day without being concerned about whether one of your clients will have enough food that night.  Elementary teachers may have had it easy DURING college, but they're going to be tired for the rest of their lives; so shut up for now.  

I could go on about people who study political science or anthropology or history, but you are smart enough to get the idea.  On behalf of those of us with STEM degrees, you are making us look bad.  You're making it look like people who appreciate how the world works on a literal level look down on those who appreciate how it works on a symbolic level.  Given the scientific fact that thinking on a symbolic level requires more energy from the brain, it burns more glucose, drops the blood sugar more, and makes the thinker tired.  Everybody's tired, man.  Everyone works hard to get their degree.  Stop thinking you're the only one.