Tag Archives: education

January 6, 2017 · 12:10 pm

Betsy De Vos and the Golliwogs of Education

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I have often said that I don’t really approve of insult humor.  I don’t think calling someone names really adds to the discussion in any useful way, and the real point of humor is to reveal the truth in a way that is palatable because it is surprising enough to make you laugh.  Revealed truth is much funnier than calling someone names.  So when I call Donald Trump the king of rotten cantaloupe rinds, I am really being no more clever than he is talking about Lyin’ Ted or Crooked Hillary.

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Three of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, (from left to right) Famine, Cinnamon Hitler, and the Pale Rider, Death.

So, what in the heck am I doing talking about Golliwogs in this post?

A Golliwog is a Raggedy Ann-type rag doll from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  They were a common doll type for typical little white girls in typical little middle class families.  My Aunt Jean, my father’s sister, had one as a child.  A female one with a red dress with black spots.  You could flip that doll over and underneath her skirt was a different doll, a yellow-haired white girl in a blue and black dress.  The image has become poison in modern culture because the blackface-minstrel roots of the character is now deemed racist and offensive. The Golliwogs in the children’s books of Florence Upton and Grid Blyton, though, were actually quite heroic, good-hearted and kind.

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As much as we vilify people for having them nowadays, there are many people who secretly adore them and wish to collect and preserve them.  I have long been enthralled by the brilliant 1920’s newspaper cartoon, Little Nemo in Slumberland by Windsor McKay.  But there are many who would lecture me sternly about that because there is at least one Golliwog character in the cartoon strip, and it is even debatable that the main character of Flip, the “bad kid”, is just another kind of Golliwog.

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Now, the point of this article is to make relentless fun of Betsy De Vos, the harpy that Donald Trump has put in charge of the implosion of the Department of Education.  There are a number of very bad things about this wicked witch and her policies.  Diane Ravitch does an excellent job of explaining what’s wrong with De Vos and her wicked witch plans in Ravitch’s education blog, linked here.  You should read all about it so you know why I am regressing into vacant-headed teacher burblings about her, and resorting to the kind of insult humor you find me committing in this blog post.

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Betsy De Vos looks at public school children and sees Golliwogs.  She is suspicious of their pedigree and basically doesn’t like them.  Remember, we are talking about public school children, not the children in upper class, rich private schools, the only kind De Vos actually touts.  She wants to give Golliwogs only the minimums absolutely necessary, the spoiled and the spilled milk.  The cream belongs to rich kids.  And she’s not prejudiced or racist, oh, no.  She sees poor white kids as just as golliwoggie as poor black kids, and she would have no problem pandering to Ben Carson’s kids.  Ben has lots of money.  He can be Sleepy McBoing-boing as much as he wants, and take off after phantom luggage whenever he wants, because money keeps you from being the detestable Golliwog.

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But the secret… the revealed truth is… Golliwogs are worth loving and educating.  Diversity and the resilience learned from hardship and poverty are priceless things, resources too rarely put to good use.  Most of the kids I truly loved as a teacher were Golliwogs.  Not just the chocolate-flavored ones, though those were very precious and precocious children, but also the vanilla-flavored ones, the caramel-flavored ones, the blueberry-flavored ones and the grape-flavored ones. (Okay, maybe they were only blue and purple in my crazy old head. And maybe I shouldn’t be making metaphors that suggest I am promoting eating school children.  That was Jonathan Swift’s thing.)  But Betsy De Vos and her boss, Donald Trump, will never understand that, and never see the true value in them.  If we are ever again going to have a fair and just system of education, we have to give value to the Golliwogs.

 

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Filed under angry rant, commentary, compassion, doll collecting, education, humor, kids, Liberal ideas, teaching

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December 7, 2016 · 4:24 pm

Mickey’s Red-State Blues

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I often struggle with depression.  Every member of my family has battled it at some point.  And it is a dangerous disease.  It can kill you.  I don’t like spending quaking, fearful hours in the emergency room.  I have had to do exactly that three times already.  And now Trump has attacked my most cherished issue… public schools.  I gave my life to them for 31 years.  There is not enough chocolate in the house.

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It is ironic.  I was already attempting to commit suicide by not taking my daily medication any more because of high drug prices that health insurance does not help with.  But that suicide attempt has actually failed already.  After two years of not taking blood pressure medication, a thing the doctor feared would kill me, I am now detoxified and actually feeling quite a lot better.  My blood pressure has not been high since 2001.

So, if I am compelled to end it all over the rise of Education Czar Betsy DeVos, I will have to use some of that creative problem-solving that we have not really been allowed to teach since the George W. Bush administration.  Something involving massive amounts of sugar water and thousands of man-eating butterflies would be appropriate, I think.

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If I had to teach this class, I would be tempted to flunk the orange-skinned kid in the middle just on principle, but that would be discriminating against a rich guy, which is against everything this new administration stands for.

Privatizing schools, another way of saying the “school choice” thing that Republicans love to promote, will mean you get exactly what you pay for in education.  Unfortunately, that means you have to be rich to get proper schooling.  Since governmental entities will be shedding the burdens of paying for schools, the good schools will only be able to pay for their resources by charging high tuition and fees, something that limited school vouchers will never be able to fund.  A majority of kids whose families cannot afford anything more than the vouchers will pay for will end up in underfunded discipline mills that will be far worse than the public schools we have now.  Those schools will be set up to prepare students for their future employment making license plates in State prisons even more so than public schools are now.

My Republican friends in Texas (and my birth State of Iowa too, for that matter) like to tell me that, “You can’t solve education’s problems by throwing money at them.”  But I would like to know what studies they base that conclusion on.  When in American history have we thrown money at schools?  Other nations that get better education results do spend more, especially on paying teachers better.  And they are not forced to teach Creationism in Science class to get those funds.

So, managing depression has not been easy since the recent election.  Recount efforts and rumors that the Electoral College may do what they were designed for and vote for the candidate that actually won the popular vote are just pipe dreams, and won’t actually amount to anything.  Betsy DeVos will be the next Secretary of Education.  Maybe I will try bucket-loads of stinky, sharp cheddar cheese and a lighter for setting off explosive cheese farts.  It would be a painful way to go, but the results might also be colorfully amazing.

P.S. – I would never actually commit suicide, and as someone who has spent time in the ER fretting for someone else, I would never really advocate that.  But I am certainly not above using it as a bit of hyperbole to discuss important issues that I really do see as life-or-death.

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Filed under angry rant, Depression, feeling sorry for myself, humor, politics, red States, teaching

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August 29, 2016 · 3:49 pm

Why School Should Be Cool

Cool School Blue

I was a school teacher for thirty-one years, and in spite of the immense amount of brain damage that builds up over time, especially as a middle-school teacher, I think I know what we’ve been doing wrong.

We need to take a look at an education system where things are working better than they are here.

Now, I know you probably didn’t click on the boring video about school.  Heck, you probably aren’t even reading this sentence.  But I can summarize it and put it in easy-to-understand words.  Finland does not have to educate as many poor and disadvantaged kids as this country does.  The video gives five ways that Finland does it better, but all of them boil down to the basic notion that the country is more homogeneous and uniformly middle-class than ours is.  Still, we can learn things from them.

The first of the five ways that Finland does it better is a difference in government.  While U.S. governmental safety-net programs blame people who need food stamps for being lazy (even though some of them work 40-hour work weeks in minimum-wage jobs), Finland gives a huge package to parents of everything they might need as soon as their child is born.  As long as the child is in school, the government does many things to support the family’s efforts to educate them.  Imagine what we could accomplish here if we invested some of the vast fortune we give to corporations in subsidies into educating poor black and Hispanic children instead.  Children have a hard time learning in school when they come to school hungry.  If we could only feed them better, the way the Fins do, we would revolutionize our classrooms.

The second point the video makes is the biggest suds-maker every time I get on my teacher’s soap box.  They don’t give kids homework and they only give them one standardized test when they leave high school.  I have recently covered this topic more thoroughly in a post in which I was able to ridicule Florida governor Rick “Skeletor” Scott.  (Boy, did I enjoy doing that.)  But I won’t go into all of that again here.

The third thing is respecting teachers.  In Finland they treat teachers with the kind of respect that they give to doctors and lawyers.  How cool is that?  In Texas, calling someone a teacher is an epithet.  If a teacher is liked or even loved by their students, administrators are encouraged to keep a closer eye on them to figure out what’s wrong.  Students are supposed to hate their teachers and sit all day filling out mind-numbing test-preparation worksheets.  Imagine what it could be like if teachers weren’t the scum of the earth.  They might actually have students convinced that learning goes on in their classrooms.

The fourth point is that Finland does not try to cram more and more memorized details into young brains so they can spit it all back out on a test.  They take students thoroughly into the subject of study, and at a slower, easier pace.  They dive deep into the river of learning instead of wade through the wide and shallow parts.  All questions get answered.  And by that, I mean, student questions, not teacher questions.  The learning is student-centered.

Finally, the video states that Finland simply has fewer social ills in their country to get in the way of good quality education.  But even though the work is harder in this country, the potential is really there to go far beyond what Finland is capable of.  We have a natural resource that is totally untapped in this nation.  We don’t develop the minds of a majority of our children in any meaningful way.  And I can tell you from having done it, you can teach a poor or disadvantaged child to think.  You can give them the tools for academic, economic, and personal success.  You can make them into valuable human beings.  But you should never forget, they are already precious beyond measure.  We just ignore and trash that inherent value.  So, the information is out there about how to do a better job of educating our children.  We need to follow through.

Here endeth the lesson.

 

 

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August 14, 2016 · 12:34 pm

Getting Schooled on Testing

Florida Parents Sue Over State Testing

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The war has started.  The first shots have been fired in Florida by an irate group of parents in seven different school districts.  Their children were a part of the growing wave of “test-day opt-outs” that are occurring in every State that uses a high-stakes State test to determine students’ fitness for being promoted to the next grade, consideration for accelerated programs, and evaluating teachers for competence, ability, and possible execution.  State tests have developed such power over our learning lives that students and teachers obsess about them to the point of making themselves ill with stress.

The districts being sued have all decided that since the students who opted out did not take the tests, they have therefore not passed the tests, and have no right to be promoted to the next grade level.  So, a whole lot of sweet, pig-tailed little honors students that avoided super-stressful testing are now weeping over the prospects of still being in the third grade as their BFF’s now advance to fourth grade.  180+ days of instruction with a teacher does not apparently count at all towards advancement.  State tests are sacred.

You can tell by Florida Governor Skeletor Scott’s evil grin that he is quite satisfied with how State tests are working out.  After all, State tests provide aggregate data that public schools are failing in Florida.  Emperor Perry and the Crowned Prince Gregg Abbott of Texas have used them for the same purposes in the State where I spent my career teaching.  Low performing schools are taken over and run by a State agency.  Funds are cut to public schools.  Art and band and music programs are dropped in favor of remedial teaching and repetitive basic courses.  More money is given to private schools, magnet schools, and charter schools whose test scores prove they are more worthy of spending it (especially since the wealthier kids with fewer handicaps from their background are the ones going there, while kids from lower-income groups, minorities, special-needs students, and English language learners are generally kept out).

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And, of course, State tests can weed out the teachers that the State deems incompetent, unworthy, and, well… goofy because those teachers who don’t mindlessly engage in test preparation, don’t have students who score well on tests.  The State can use this means to get rid of teachers who are too innovative, popular among their students, creative, engaging and nice.  It can promote teachers who have “good discipline” because students constantly fill out test-preparation worksheets mindlessly in their classes all day.

But the numbers are there to prove the State is right about education.  Test data exists in black and white.  How can anyone argue that numbers don’t tell us which kids are stupid and which kids are acceptable?  How can I argue it?

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Well, it helps to be able to understand the endlessly boring hours of test analysis that teachers are subjected to by school administrators panicking about how poorly they are soon to do on the high-stakes test.  I happen to be smart enough to hear and understand how the tests measure what they measure, and what they actually mean.  For example, the reading portion of the State test emphasizes certain skills over other skills.  Inference, the ability to draw conclusions from the evidence given in the text and determine what is true by logic, is given more weight in the scoring than simpler abilities like factual recall or simple spelling ability.  Scores are not a matter of the percent of questions the student answer correctly.  They are based on which skills and sub-skills the student shows mastery (80% or higher success).  A student can get 80% of all questions correct and still fail the test.  And for some students with learning difficulties, developmental delays, or English-as-a-second-language difficulties, those more valued portions of the test are still beyond their current level of functioning.  I have worked for schools that received commendations for their tests scores.  I led a middle school writing program that topped expectations on writing scores through middle school and high school. I have also worked at schools who were punished for low test scores, and worked for good principals who lost their jobs because the scores were beyond their control.

I pray that the judge in Florida will support the parents and censure both the heartless school districts and the State testing program of Florida itself.  Darth Vader’s education system should not be winning.  We need to go back to the source and learn from Jedi Master Kenobi…. or even Yoda again.

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Filed under angry rant, autobiography, education, humor, marching band, Paffooney, pessimism, rants, teaching, Texas

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September 8, 2015 · 2:36 pm

New Teachers in September

I am going to tell you a story.  It’s a true story.  It’s a horror story.  And it is replaying itself somewhere even now.  It is the story of how human sacrifice is made repeatedly every September, with lots of blood and screams and tears… in the classrooms of rookie teachers all across the United States.

Cool School Blue

You see, the longer this whole misery factory of teaching and learning goes on while under the control of evil, blood-sucking politicians who have never been in a classroom and have no idea what they are asking young, enthusiastic people of twenty-two to twenty-five years of age to do, the more innocent, normal humans are going to be eaten alive by the maniacal, monstrous monkey house.

I started teaching a lifetime ago in 1981.  I was thin.  I was twenty-five.  I had a Master of the Art of Teaching Degree from the University of Iowa, so I knew everything I would ever need to know about teaching.  And I had a class of eighth graders in deep South Texas.   Mostly Hispanic, mostly poor, and I knew they were going to be the greatest kids in the world, especially after I had revealed all the necessary secrets of learning and life to them through my wonderful teaching.

Blue and Mike in color (435x640)

And then, at the end of August, I was standing in front of them, six groups of between fifteen and thirty-two kids.  And they were all looking at me.  And they expected me to know what to do.  And they smelled funny.  And my classroom was the same little windowless classroom where the year before these eighth graders had, as seventh graders, driven the unfortunately named Miss Hilda Fokkwulf out of Texas screaming for the crime of trying to teach English. I tried to learn their names, but they laughed at me every time I said a Hispanic name.  I honestly don’t believe I was pronouncing every syllable incorrectly, but they weren’t going to let me know that.  Not even the white gringo kids who had the same problem and were grateful for someone else to be the focus of linguistic ridicule.  And the names…  The scary looking eighteen-or-nineteen-year-olds in the back of every row were named El Loco Gongie, El Mouse, El Loco Talan, and El Loco Martin.  And a shy girl in the front row whispered to me that those were not their real names and “El Loco” meant “the crazy”.

And these kids had unusual talents.  El Goofy was able to tense the muscles in his face and head to turn his entire head purple.  Wow!  I had never seen that talent before, and, honestly, I haven’t seen it since.  El Boy was cute and charming and had fifteen girlfriends at the same time.  I honestly liked him too.  But he could get away with murder even with the toughest teachers on campus.  And little Emmett Moolazonger, a scrawny little gringo kid, was known for destroying the school’s water fountains by ramming them with his head.  There were girls with talent, too… but that part of the story makes me blush and is best left for another day.  (But don’t get the idea that I’m covering up anything here… I would never… and some of them never covered up anything either.)

By September I was throwing up every morning before going to school.  I had had my life threatened and made the mistake of mentioning that to my mother, who almost came to school to drag me home and make me live there the rest of my life.  I had learned that it is practically impossible to get kids to stop talking.  And even harder to get them to stay seated.  Chalk, spitwads, and boogers flew through the air.  Parents complained to the principal about kids freely using bad words in my class, but the words were in Spanish, so how was I going to prevent that?  And of course, Mr. Wizoll, the History teacher who had sixteen years of experience tried to show me how you made them sit down and shut up, but he could do it just by walking in the classroom door and being present.  Well, what are the steps necessary to get from where I was to where he was in that matter?

“You can’t,” Mr. Wizoll said.

And it is true.  Teachers when they start out are tossed into a classroom without a single “this is how you do it” demonstration.  They are expected to learn it entirely on their own.  Principals say, “I will support you when you have trouble.”  But that really means, “I am going to yell at you for not doing this thing that no one ever actually taught you how to do correctly.”  And you either learn to do it entirely on your own, or the kids are going to peg you down to the floor, cut you up into little strips, and eat you.  Or you could use the Miss Fokkwulf method and scream at the top of your lungs all the way to the San Antonio Airport.  This happens every year.  Every year there are new teachers being eaten in unobserved classrooms.  I saw it with my own eyes when I was still teaching high school in 2014.  My wife was telling me about a young teacher in her school being eaten alive in her classroom this year.  Oh, the humanity!  When will we ever offer a little bit of help and sympathy to a young, enthusiastic, idealistic new teacher, who has no freaking idea what is going to happen to them before this month ends?

Teacher

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August 27, 2015 · 2:13 pm

Badfinger

Yes, there is a James Bond villain who has targeted Texas freeways, liberal politics, and Facebook in general.  He is a bad, bad man who likes to inflame arguments, create racial tension, and fan the fires of road rage.  So, this is my attempt to call this bad man out and make you aware of at least some of what he’s doing.

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First of all, I know a way that you can prevent Badfinger’s minions from driving on Teexas roadways.  You can cut off the middle finger of both hands, and those minions don’t know how to drive any longer.  I saw that in action today as I took my number two son to the oral surgeon to have four wisdom teeth extracted (and yes, I know that is probably a bad idea, but he didn’t really have that much wisdom with the teeth still in, anyway).  To get into the proper turning lane, I chose a spot I thought I could get into.  I pulled up to the spot with my turn signal on so the driver in that lane could clearly see my intention.  He zoomed up to close the opening and gave me the middle-finger-indication of his approximate I.Q. as measured by driving habits.  So, I decided to go behind him.  But he immediately, without signaling, tried to ram his way through to the lane I was patiently waiting in.  I had to back my car up while sitting, waiting for the light to change.  The guy behind me felt he needed to signal his I.Q.   But he was apparently smarter by one than the other driver as it took both hands to accomplish this feat.  When the light turned green, the minion in front of me reminded me of his I.Q. again and zoomed into my lane and passed three cars in the lane he was originally in, then forced his way back into the lane to make the turn.  This bit of gracious roadway etiquette accomplished two things the driver probably didn’t intend.  One, he nearly got his precious BMW dented by the car he cut in front of, and two, his mad swoop left a void in his lane that I could get into so that I might safely round the corner on the next green light.

John Kasich flipping the byrd at teachers.

John Kasich flipping the byrd at teachers.

Another minion of Badfinger is a politician that, until recently, I thought was one of the least evil of the toxic clowns in the Republican Volkswagen, John Kasich.  He proved to be an enemy of mine because recently he put the finger on the entire problem with education, teacher’s lounges.  Apparently it is not enough to take strong union representation away from teachers.  He doesn’t want evil communist teachers getting together to complain about class sizes, increasing teacher layoffs, reduced funding, and increasingly draconian testing rules in bastions of communist union power, which he believes are the insidious teacher’s lounges.  I’m not sure why he thinks he’s punishing teachers by taking that cramped little misappropriated closet space away from us.  What will we lose?  A place to make copies on the xerox machine?  Our departments have no money for paper or ink.  A place to put our lunches in an antique refrigerator which may or may not prevent spoilage at temperatures a little warmer than room temperature?  Most of us can’t afford the slice of our fifteen minute lunch hour to walk all the way to the other side of campus and go up two flights of stairs.  But he doesn’t want us to have a place to bad mouth the government that exists only to make our lives harder. And he doesn’t realize that most teachers save their gruesome and evil plans for rebellion until they can meet together at Hop Xing’s Bar and Grill (now with Karaoke) at a time of day when it no longer matters if they get totally schnockered, or if they burst into spontaneous karaoke versions of Journey songs.  Teachers will continue to do the job even without the lavish teacher lounges that don’t actually exist anyway.

So, what am I proposing we do to combat Badfinger and his multiple minions in the fight for God and country and a little respect?  How about an anti-bloviator ray gun that we can disguise as an ink pen?  It might  prove useful against Donald Trump and other Republicans that are our potential next President and chief vilifier of rogue educators.  How about a secret politeness pill that we can slip into the drinking water and make everybody, Badfinger’s minions included, into nicer people?  I’m sure those things will never get voted for… primarily because we really need them.

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August 6, 2015 · 1:52 pm

Making Mickey Happy

lil mickeyI have to admit to being a little blue yesterday.  Not “literally blue” because most days I look nothing like my Paffooney portrait here to the left.  I said a little blue, as in slightly depressed.  Not weeping and roaring with sorrow depressed… more like needing to softly sing to myself sort of depressed.  I wasn’t depressed for valid reasons.  I was mistaken about the writing contest results.  The dental insurance also covers more of what we are going to owe for the privilege of having teeth than I was at first led to believe.  So my deep blue hole yesterday was imaginary and all see-through-y if I had been sane enough to look properly.  But, Mickeys are like that sometimes, getting all bothered about things they really shouldn’t get bothered about.

So, today, determined to still be sad for a reason, I began to list other things that I could conveniently be sad about.  There was school news about an 8-year-old boy in Kentucky being handcuffed by an officer in school and crying because it was hurting him.  That social media outrage led me to an article about school discipline.  “Schools as Punishing Factories”  Reading that made me bitterly depressed.  I have witnessed the truth of that article in Texas where teachers can get in trouble so easily when they try to advocate for kids, especially black and Hispanic kids.  I have seen talking back to the teacher, throwing spitwads, and disrupting lessons become reasons for students to be escorted away in handcuffs.  I like to pretend it is because principals and policemen and community businessmen can be rather stupid sometimes, and not because there is a concerted effort to use the school experience as training for black and Hispanic, as well as poor kids to prepare for the second part of their life, the life they will lead inside prisons for profit.  As a teacher who loved kids, even the bad ones, I am truly depressed about this trend in America.  I have white friends in both Texas and Iowa that want to tell me that I am the one who is wrong, not the system.  Their conservatives beliefs are stronger than any eye-witness evidence I can give them.  So… even darker blues and more depression.  My contest novel is about a teacher like me trying to fight the way things are and teach the way teaching should be done.  I must comfort myself by telling myself that my book will change peoples’ minds and make the problem get solved.  If I just lie to myself hard enough, like those friends who tell me “throwing money at the problem of failing schools will not fix the problem” lie to themselves… a lie I know is false but want desperately to believe anyway, then I can make it true.

So, how do I make Mickey happy?  Well, luckily Mickey is goofy.  I went to Walmart and finally found the doll on sale that I had been searching for.  I bought Operetta. the daughter of the Phantom of the Opera to add to my Monster High collection for only $9.95.  And Mickey is seriously addicted to doll collecting.  It makes him happy and turns him away from despair when other things probably can’t.  I am not forgetting about the education fight.  Oh, no!  Mickey’s dander is up on that.  And he will bombard you with his writer wrath about that another day.  But forgive me.  I need to be happy a little right now.  And Mickey needs to play with dolls.

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May 16, 2015 · 1:58 pm

Teacher-Wise

So, does this title have more than one meaning?  Of course it does.  This post is about being a teacher and having wisdom.  And I know you will immediately think, “You dumb guy!  I know teachers who aren’t wise at all!  Some teachers are stupid!”

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You are especially saying that if you are a student.

You are not wrong, either.  Some teachers have no business being teachers.  It is especially difficult to find good science and math teachers.  After all, those who are good at math and science can make so much more money in the private sector, that they would have to be born to be a teacher… and realize it, to go into teaching.  There are very good science and math teachers out there, but many of them are wilting under the weight of a difficult job being made constantly harder by social pressures like truly dumb people who say things like, “You can’t solve our education problem by throwing money at it!”  I guarantee no one has ever thrown money at the problem.  If teachers were paid what they were worth so that we could retain good, competent teachers, you would see education make an amazing amount of progress in a very short time.  What Wall Street firm fails to pay their star players what they are worth?  Do bankers and lawyers get punished for doing a good job by asking them to produce more with fewer resources for less pay?  Those folks in finance and law always pay the price for the best because that always produces the best result.  If you want schools to routinely produce critical thinkers and problem-solvers, why would you complain that we are spending too much money per kid?  Of course, there are those with the money and the power (especially in Texas) who really don’t want more students coming out of schools with the ability to think and decide for themselves.   Smart people are harder to control and make a profit from. (Out of Control is a book they don’t want you to read.)

class Miss M2

So now I have totally proved the point that smart people who are looking out for their own interests should never go into teaching.  Still, among the unwashed, unloved, and incompetent that do make the mistake of going into teaching, there is still a great deal of learning and gaining of wisdom going on.  After all, if a fool like me can become a good teacher, anybody can do it.  You just have to learn a few bits of wisdom the hard way that have very little to do with what we call “common sense”.

As Dr. Tsabary points out in the book I plastered on the front of this post, discipline is not what you think.  We all remember that teacher we had that nobody listened to.  She was always yelling at us.  She made threats.  She punished us.  And even the good kids in class would shoot spitwads at the back of her head.  Why did we not respect and learn from this teacher?  Because she never learned these profound truths.

1.  Kids are people.  They want to be treated with respect and even love.  Their ideas matter as much, if not more than the teacher’s ideas.  Good teachers will;

a. Get to know every kid in their class as a human being, knowing what they believe in, what they care about, where they come from, and who they think they are.

b. Ask them questions.  They will never have an original idea if you do not make them think.  They have insights and creativity and strengths as well as weaknesses, bad behavior, and wrong ideas.  You have to emphasize the former and minimize the latter.

c.  Laughing and talking in the classroom is evidence of learning.  Quietly filling out worksheets is evidence of ignorance, and most likely the ignorance of the teacher.

2.  Tests don’t matter.  This is always true for these reasons;

a.  Tests are a comparison, and nothing is gained by comparing kids.  Comparing the scores of my bilingual kids in South Texas with upper class rich kids in Chicago and college-bound kids in Tokyo has no value.  Their lives are completely different and so are their needs.  If we don’t score as well on the tests as the kids in Tokyo, what difference will that make to what time the train arrives in the station in Paris?  (Especially if Pierre has chosen the bullet train that goes south at a rate of 200 miles per hour.  No trains in Texas go that fast without crashing and blowing up.)

b.  If I spend time in class teaching students how to read and making them practice reading critically, they will do just as well as the kids who drilled extensively from specially made State materials preparing for the test on the reading and vocabulary portions.  The only way that outcome changes is by cheating and giving them the actual test questions before the test.  (I should point out that teachers caught doing this last thing are shot in Texas and buried in a box full of rattlesnakes.  Dang old teachers, anyhow!)

I know I started this little post by convincing you that I am not wise, and very probably mentally unbalanced.  And now that I have made my arguments, you know for sure.  But over time, there is wisdom to be learned from being a teacher.  You don’t have to believe me, but it’s true.  (I don’t know how many times I used that phrase out loud in a classroom over 31 years, but I am guessing you couldn’t count them on fingers even if you used the hands of every kid I ever had as a student.)

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April 2, 2015 · 12:14 pm

Doing the Devil’s Dance

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We live in world that is profoundly unkind to non-conformity, weirdness, or even basic differences.  How do you explain to a child that his school doesn’t want him there any more because his uniqueness is too much of a bother, a pain to deal with, an issue too complicated for a school administrator to get their little gray minds around?  I can’t tell you the details of what we are going through right now.   Too many privacy and legal issues get in the way of complete candor.  But Texas school systems do not handle issues of exceptionality well.   They are designed to crush originality and individual differences and grind out a workforce that will be compliant, that won’t complain when they are underpaid or mistreated, that will all be alike in many important ways.  They would also like to turn out students who vote Republican, but it is all right if they turn out to be the type of citizen who won’t or can’t vote.  Your life can be turned upside down over minor infractions.  It is a law that Texas students must be in attendance over 90% of the time.  If not, they are going to hound you, fine you, take you to court and even jail you.  Because students must all fit into the same mold.  No square pegs allowed.  They do make exceptions for health problems… but only the right kind of health problems.  Stomach cancer. okay, panic disorder, not okay…  There are laws in place to protect those of us with special handicaps… but this is the de-regulation State.  The city of West, Texas blew up in a fireball because too many regulations means lower profit margins.  Of course, they don’t hesitate to apply regulations against me and mine.  That is another matter (and the profits flow the opposite direction, offender to State).

So, what will I do now?  I will do the best I can.  I complained about it here to the best of my ability.  The child even remarked that one day he will be wiser and more experienced than others because he went through this.  There are other means of education, even if I have to do it all myself.  And I can take the frustrations and turn them into future funny fables that will ring true, because they are.

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October 27, 2013 · 9:06 pm

Teacher! Ooh-Ooh! Teacher!

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I have the privilege of being a public school teacher.  Or maybe I should use the word “cursed”.   It is no easy thing to be a teacher in the modern world.  Regressive State governments like Texas mandate that teachers do more with less.  We have to have bigger classes.  We have to show higher gains on State tests.  We have to do more for special populations based on race, disability, language-learner status, and socio-economic status.  Of course, we give money to private schools to be “fair” to all, so a majority of the well-funded and advantaged students are removed from the public school system, even though studies show that their presence in classes benefits everyone.  When the majority of students are low-income in a single classroom, even the gifted minority perform less well.  When higher-income students are at least fifty per-cent of the class, then even the low-income and learning disabled make higher gains than the minority gifted in the first example class.  So, there’s my triple-downer bummer for this post.  You might think that I would agree with Republicans in this State that the lower classes are not worth investing in.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

The fact is, my fondest memories from thirty-one years as a public school teacher come from the downtrodden masses, the poor, the oddballs, the disadvantaged, and even the truly weird.

Okay, so here’s the funny and heart-warming part.  I have a Hispanic English Language Learner right now who looks at the beard I have grown and calls me, “my friend Jesus”.  I have to constantly remind him that, “If I were the son of God, my son, then I would be using lightning bolts for discipline a little more often.”  He grins at me and answers, “Yes, my Jesus.”  He’s a sneaky sort, more dedicated to games and messages on his i-phone than learning.  He is more into working with the girls in small groups so that he can come out appearing much smarter without putting out very much actual work.

I remember one particularly challenged boy who didn’t talk in class at all.  He could make sounds, however.  Constantly during classes with this student in them, there would be numerous “meows” and birdcalls.  Grunts and groans and whistles would fill the air.  Most of the noises came from him.  The ones that didn’t, came from those who imitated him.  It reached a point that I was having to teach a classroom full of Harpo Marxes .  When asked about it, he claimed he had a sore throat all the time and just couldn’t talk.  Many of his teachers thought he was merely sabotaging class so he wouldn’t have to do any work.  But just like when you put a harp in front of Harpo, this boy had hidden talents, and just was not being engaged on his own level.  He was really quite bright if you could learn to communicate with him in Harpo Marxian.

I had another student who read all the existing Harry Potter books forward and backwards, and inside out.  He even looked like the actor who played Harry in the movies, glasses and all.  He was treated like a radioactive being by his classmates, and although he was charming and funny and had a natural talent for manga-style drawings of people, nobody seemed to treat him like a friend. (The paffooney picture I drew for this post was inspired by him.)    He was a jovial loner.  I was able to tap into his natural abilities for the Odyssey of the Mind creativity contests we participated in during the early 2000’s.  I helped him find nerd friends who also knew all the words to the Spongebob Squarepants theme. 

I have a Chinese girl in class who shared the Spongebob boy’s fascination with manga-style art.  She’s a different bird all together.  She gets my jokes and thinks I am funny.  But she never laughs.  She never even cracks a smile.  She is so careful and complete in every assignment that it is very nearly painful to watch.  Grades are serious matters to her.  If her grade drops from 100 to 98, she wants to audit the teacher’s grade book to find out why.  She does everything in class in beautifully crafted Chinese writing, and then translates it all word-for-word into English.

I owe my teaching career to kids like these.  When I started my career in 1981 for $11,000 per year, I was employed by a school that had total disciplinary meltdown the year before.  I had to deal with hostility, impossible behavior-modification tasks, fire crackers in the classroom, student fights, bullying, and a language/cultural gap wider than the Grand Canyon.  That first year, I was planning to resign at the end of the year and try to figure out what else I could do with my life when a small Hispanic boy with a Scottish family name came up beside me on the playground one March day and said, “Mr. Beyer, I hope you know you are my favorite teacher.  You are the reason I liked school this year.”

I didn’t let him see that there were tears in my eyes.  I told him something about him being my favorite student.  And I gave up thoughts about giving up.  I lived the next thirty years of my career for him.

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