Ch 8 of 20: School Size

Have you heard of “a Bank too big to fail”? How about “a School too big to succeed”? I bet you have never heard this one, yet it reflects a sad reality…

Schools became industrial monsters with a mission to input as many students as possible and output them as fast as possible; preferably never beyond four years… what happens in between is a black box…

How do schools do that? How do they enter thousands of students through their gates and make sure that they do not entangle on their way out four years later? Well, this is a very big, well-oiled, machine that uses a huge amount of resources. With years of practice and history of experience, the system runs, technically, quite smoothly, but on the way to efficiency, it forgets its exclusive purpose – educating young people; it loses its human factor. Who has time for that?

Deans of discipline have tens of students lining up in front of their office every single day. Counselors never have enough time to catch up, being responsible for programming hundreds of students and for other endless duties, while their real job, counseling, is at the bottom of the list due to lack of time.

And what about teachers? Teachers at a public school see, typically, two hundred students a day! Imagine, first, trying to learn names of two hundred kids, and this is without counting those who come and leave, especially at the beginning of the school year. A good way to handle it is creating seating charts. It really helps, but it takes a long time to create, and even longer to maintain …

One of my yearlong assignments was teaching algebra to 9^th graders, replacing a teacher who left for maternity leave. It was the beginning of the school year and I had a pretty good start. However, as soon as I created seating charts, a special education teacher came to tell me that they are re-arranging class assignment for their students, and thus, number of students from each class had been replaced with new students… Few days later an administrator said that due to a crowding situation they are moving students around to create a satellite campus… again certain number of students were removed and others joined… Less than a week passed when another teacher announced that he is switching some of his students with mine so that he can continue a program that he started during the summer… By that time I realized that all my good students were replaced with not so good students, my seating charts are worthless, and it is going to be tough. And it was…

Even at classes that do not change that dramatically, sometimes it takes almost a whole semester to master all 200 names. At one school, where I started mid-year, teaching math lab to students who failed algebra, I had a tougher than usual time putting names and faces together. It was a new school, new material, and new students’ population, where, to my inexperienced eyes, many of them looked alike… To make it more confusing, some first names were similar, and even worse – numerous last names were the same. It took me almost the whole semester to learn who is who… At last, when I thought that I had it all figured out, all of a sudden I realized that during third period, there is a student that I could swear I had already seen at first period. I didn’t give it much thought until the next day when I had that same déjà vu. When, at last, I decided to check it out I discovered, to my great embarrassment, that these students were identical twins…

The amount of work that goes into monitoring two hundred students is quite impossible. A weekly quiz of only 5-10 problems, one minute each to check, becomes more than three hours job, without rechecking any. Add few rechecks, several notes and, of course, recording grades, and you have spent well over five hours a week checking just one tiny quiz. What about a chapter test every few weeks, a semi-final or final test? How about a project? An assay? And of course it will be nice to be able to check homework assignments from time to time, just spot checking, only twice a week… It will be eight AFTER HOURS hours!

It might not be the right place to talk about preparation since teachers have to do lesson plans regardless of number of students. It is, however, the place to mention that a teacher is supposed to create three different lesson plans – one for average students, one for the special need students that are probably part of your class, and one for the high achievers who need extra challenge. I don’t know too many teachers who actually do that on a regular basis, but this is what a teacher is expected to do!!! …And if you are in a teaching credentialing program, or some other program to upgrade your qualifications, (and teachers are always in one program or another), you are sure to be required to obey this rule…

So how did the system make this impossible time-frame possible? One of the most genius inventions of the twentieth century was the multiple-choice tests and the beloved scantron.  The happy noise of the scantron machine grading your students’ finals can be only compared to the noise of a gambling machine pouring rain of coins when you hit the winning combination (and they don’t even have those anymore L). Listening to the scantron doing the work for you and thus saving you hours and hours of work is just as exciting as winning big! Real big!

Yes, it is such an efficient tool – yet, with so many deficiencies… We are losing to its effortlessness a big part of teaching and learning. Using it, teachers are unable to see where students are mistaken, what part of the learning needs re-enforcement, and do students know the material or just guess the answers. To make it worse - we created a whole system that trains students in being good at guessing the right answer; a whole industry for teaching students how to work around the need of actually understanding the material, how to fake a knowledge… We teach them how to be successful test takers, not successful learners…

Do you think that students don’t get the message? You bet they do! They learn early in their school life that the main goal is to ace the test. They don’t bother too much with the journey, then, they just want a shortcut to the results. By the time they are in high school they are accomplished test swindlers… Seconds after receiving the test form, they already figure out how many versions the test has, and who is their best copying resource. They have more ways of doing that than we can imagine, including using technology. We, the teachers, joke that if students were only half as resourceful learners as they are swindlers, they would be ‘A’ students. Yes, the system is smart about mass evaluation, but students outsmart the system.

One of my colleagues tried a way to control different test versions. Being a very well organized person, he created color-coded versions. This method might have worked for him, having excellent class control, but it didn’t work quite as well for me. As soon as the students realized what the colors meant, a secret trade started immediately. As naïve as I was I didn’t catch the trade on time, and was quite surprised to find a pink next to a pink and green next to a green. It was not until I saw an actual trade happening in front of my eyes that I realized what was going on… students were making sure they have the same color as their resource …

I tried to outsmart the students by numbering all the tests and secretly coding the version (even numbers, numbers ending with 5). I don’t know that it worked. I suspect that, somehow, they managed to break the code (never underestimate students) but one thing is sure, it didn’t help my reputation with students…

Additional, interesting, comment about copying - it always surprised me that some students would rather copy a test from someone, anyone, and not try themselves …

Another masses nightmare is communicating with parents. To shield teachers from the need to meet with all 200 parents, frequent report cards are mandated, 8 report cards a year!  If you are not a teacher you don’t know how much work it involves. Every single grade has to be well thought and well documented; it is a very time consuming process that has to be done every 5 weeks! Is it a good system? Better than nothing, but the problem is that it cannot replace the value of meeting with parents face to face. For one thing – some parents never see those report cards. Their students have a way of hiding them. Others do not know the whole picture or cannot use their authority to push the student in the right direction, and when at last they realize how poor their student’s performance is, in many cases it is too late…

Some schools use automated phone system to inform parents about students’ absence from school or class. Some schools use automated calls to inform about bad behavior or academic problems… And yes, it is better than nothing… but in order to really solve problems and keep students on track there should be a direct communication between teachers and parents. But with all good intentions, it is not realistic for a teacher to call periodically every student’s home, let alone schedule a10 minutes meeting with 200 hundred parents, because 200 appointments times 10 minutes each, equals 2000 minutes… over 30 hours of extra work…

Ch 6 of 20: Discipline

From: Cubs Pre-School

Picture going to a lecture on your favorite subject, on a topic that you are anxious to learn about. What are the chances that you will comprehend and learn from it if the people who are sitting around you are constantly talking? What if right in the middle of the most interesting part of the lecture your friend at the other end of the hall calls for your attention to something she wears or a good piece of gossip. What part of the interesting lecture would you understand, or even hear?

And, what if this lecture is not that interesting to you? You need to take it in order to qualify for something, but it is not really your favorite subject? What are the chances that you learn anything from it at all?

This is the situation that teachers face every single day in their classroom, when trying to compete for students’ attention… Imagine a history teacher trying to teach about the French Revolution, not a bad subject at all, and can be interesting even to a non-history enthusiasts… But can the history teacher win the attention of a fourteen, or even eighteen years old student who listens to a real juicy piece of news about a classmate, a friend or a teacher? No way!

Now… think about a teacher trying to teach not history – French Revolution, but math… geometry, for example, a mandatory subject for all students…

You would say, it is the responsibility of the teachers to keep the class quiet and make sure the students’ attention is focused on the lesson, and teachers who are unable to do so are “ineffective teachers”. Really!

Well, how exactly does the teacher supposed to do just that – keep the class quiet and focused? In an upper middle class, sub urban areas, there is some leverage for a teacher. He/she may ask students to stay after class or after school and talk to them, appealing to their reasoning. If it does not help he/she may call students’ parents, and if not enough invite them for a meeting. Teachers may assign students extra work, and of course can always use the mighty threat of report card grade. If none of the above helps – the last resort may be used - referrals to an administrator or dean of discipline. Teachers do not like to use that as it reflects right back at them, perceived as not being in control, but it is an option...

But…What are the tools for a teacher who teaches in less favorable areas – in a lower socioeconomic or inner city areas, where many students don’t respond to the usual measures, and a bad grade is not a threat.

I can’t even count the number of times when I asked students to stay after class or come after school and they just did not show up.

So, I would try the next step, contacting the parents. Often I would not be able to reach them because contact phone had been disconnected, or, family had been relocated…  If reached, parents would usually be supportive; however, chances are that they are struggling with basic life’s necessities, working several different jobs, trying to feed kids and elders. They do want to help but many times are unable, and sadly, sometimes, they have little or no influence on their kids…

Teacher’s choices, then, are very limited, and they have to use their last resort - appealing to the help of the school administrators or deans, and thus pay the dreaded price of being labeled by them as “ineffective teacher”, because the other option is even worse – being labeled by the… students as “ineffective teacher”…

When I happily graduated from the teaching credentials program, I knew it is not going to be easy, but no one prepared us, the future teachers, for the ruthlessness of some students, or told us how exposed and helpless teacher really are. It is not that students are necessarily bad or mean; it is just that they know exactly how far they can go without being panelized. They completely understand that the system is a hundred percent behind them while their teachers are practically defenseless.

I used to be very resentful toward the deans of discipline, feeling that they don’t help enough, until I heard, unofficially, a dean speaking his mind and telling how helpless he is when it comes to strict measures of discipline. He was describing situations where students caused so many problems and yet he was just unable to expel them. Every time he did, they would, somehow, be back at school… This was when I realized that the system’s incompetence is far deeper than I thought…

You see, discipline is not only an obedience problem, it is an academic problem! If a teacher tells a student to bring a notebook and a pencil, to open a book or to copy from the board, and he refuses to do so just because he is not interested, this is not a disciplinary problem anymore, but an academic issue that its implication goes far beyond one individual. It influences every person in that learning environment.

Yes, some students, maybe ten percent of the classroom population, will always be able to learn. Some students, maybe another ten percent, will never learn (at least not for now), but what about the other eighty percent?

I am not exaggerating when I say that we lose eighty percent of our students’ population every single day, every semester and every school year, to the disturbance of ten, maybe less, percent of the students. The major part of a classroom population is missing its chance to learn because they are taken hostages by a small number of students whose sole purpose is to divert others’ concentration from the learning, and become the center of attention…

I saw an example of a creative solution in one school, at a satellite campus, where teachers and administrators, enjoying some independence, dealt with the problem in an innovative way. On the second semester of the school year they decided to get rid of the disturbance and removed the failing students (those who failed algebra on the first semester) from their regular program and created a new class for them. Their goal was to give the algebra teachers a chance to progress without the constant interruption, and thus give their full attention to the motivated students. I was assigned to teach the failing students. Not surprisingly, it worked great for the regular teachers. They were able to teach, at last, and kept thanking me for talking the problem students. The real surprise, though, was that it worked well for me, and my students, too. I was not pressured to move in a certain pace and thus was able to go back to basics and concentrate on subjects with which students were struggling. As tough crowd as they were, it actually worked quite fine, and at the end of the semesters students came to me and said that now they are able to understand concepts that they had never understood before. Unfortunately, the program was cancelled once the satellite campus returned to the main campus, and creativity gave way to rules and regulations…

We must realize that discipline is the main obstacle in the way to a better education structure, and that teacher’s “shortcoming” is a direct result of the system’s shortcoming …

I challenge all politicians and “education specialists” to step into one of those schools in an unprivileged areas, where administrators and teachers are losing sleep over students achievements, and to spend only one month there as classroom teachers… Of course, a whole semester would be much better. Few days or even a week, are not enough time to be part of the effort…I want them to experience what teachers are facing every day. To see how a small number of teenagers are holding hostage the learning experience, and how highly educated adults turn blind eye toward the real problem. I want them to feel the frustration of teachers, the essence of education, as the system turns its back to them…

From: Cubs Pre-school

Ch 4 of 20: What is wrong with our education system?

EVERYTHING! Everything EXCEPT FOR … believe it or not… THE TEACHERS…

to teachers with love...

For the past ten years of being in education, I have NEVER met a bad teacher. I met teachers whose teaching methods might have not been ideal, in my opinion. I met teachers with whose opinion I did not agree. I met teachers that were not as organized as I thought they should have been, teachers whose response to a situation was different from mine, but not even one of them was a bad teacher!

All the teachers that I know love their job and try to do their best. They are very intelligent people with knowledge that goes far beyond what they teach, in their subjects and in general. They show up to school when they are well or sick, fresh or tiered, making almost impossible arrangements for their families to take care of their sick children, aging parents, or incapacitated spouses. They come to school early, some of them very early, and often stay late after school hours, long after their learners had gone. They remain at their rooms during lunch to accommodate struggling students, and they come in the evenings to endless required, or even only recommended, meetings.

Teaches spend a weekend after weekend preparing lessons, projects and tests, checking endless amount of papers, and planning new policies and methods in hope that maybe this time their effort will bring better results. They answer emails and phone calls from administrators, parents and students. They are available for anyone at any time, almost twenty-four hours a day, almost every day of the year.

Yes, there might be some CEO’s out there who are responding to communication coming their way at all times, maybe even on vacations and off time, but shall we compare compensations?

A teacher is paid for six hours of teaching a day. Yes, it does include, sometimes, one “free” hour, conference, for preparation time. I don’t remember too many conference hours that I actually used for ‘future’ preparations, let alone “free” time. There is, always, so much to do that teachers use conference hours to catch up on school errands, and they barely make it.

On average, and this is quite an accurate assessment, for each classroom instruction hour there is at least one, out of class, additional hour of work. It means that at the end of every school day a teacher had already worked two school days. It means that by the end of the school year the teacher had already worked for every single day of the summer vacation, winter vacation, and every other vacation. In most cases teachers had “covered” most of their weekends, as well, and probably more than that…

So – what IS, really, wrong with the education system?

NOT the teachers! Yet they are the ones who are being blamed for all the ailing of our education system, and why not? They are the easiest target…

It always reminds me of a joke about a man who is looking for his lost key near the street light. When a neighbor asks him where he lost the key, he points to the other side of the street. “So why are you looking for the key here?” asks the confused neighbor. “Well, it is too dark over there…” answers the man, “it is much easier to look for it here…”

We are looking at the easy place, in the light, instead of looking where is right… The real problems and solutions are not under the comfort of the streetlights, but at the dark corners, far away from the easy and bright…

Yes, we all heard about cases of bad teachers, and yes, there are bad apples everywhere, but if there is one field where it is very rare, it is in education.

Why should a person want to become a teacher? For the money? For the respect? For the support?

No, a person who wants to become a teacher is an idealist (or a fool…), an optimist who just does not know how hard it will be to make his dream a reality; who does not realize that the system will consistently be against him and will continuously stand between him and the dream…

What do I mean? …Where shall I start…?