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 5 of 20: Standardized Tests

Imagine a manager who works very hard, during the day and after hours, on weekends and vacations, and being paid only forty thousand dollars a year, sometimes even less. Imagine a manager who has to buy not only his/her own papers, pens and other office supplies, but has to buy them for his entire staff, from his own pocket, with a very slim chance to ever get paid back. And, how about hundreds of photocopies, paid cash at Kinko's, just because the company’s copy machine is either out of commission or tens of people are waiting to use it?

Picture a manager who is being pressured by the board of directors to increase productivity. He knows his paycheck is not going to be altered as a result, but his performance evaluation depends on it. Of course, he wants to do his best and provide top service to the company, so he asks the board for some guideline on incentives he could offer his employees for doing well and deterrents for an unsatisfying job. The response is – none, neither incentives nor deterrents. “Your employees will be just proud of the company”, he is told. “But if they don’t raise productivity - are they going to be fired?” asks the idealist manager. “No! Not at all! It is not going to affect them; they should do it for the sake of the company…”

Now, think about a teacher who is asked to raise his students’ standardized tests score, and whose performance evaluation is based on the performance of his/her students on that test. There is an enormous pressure on schools that, in turn, becomes an enormous pressure on teachers, to perform well on the standardized tests. I have seen teachers trying to do everything, including the impossible, to get students to perform well on those tests; volunteering endless hours, even weekends, with no additional pay, buying food for every single person in the class, meeting students during the summer to correct their report card grade if they increased their test score (even by ONE point. Even if that teacher’s job is not secured for the following year…)  I have seen schools forcing teachers to spend so much time on the standardized testing preparation that they don’t even have time to teach half of what they supposed to teach…

Why doesn’t it work? The answer is very simple. It takes a common sense of a child to point out to what thousands of sophisticated adults refuse to admit about the emperor’s clothing… that he wears nothing…

Our students know the truth. They know that the entire force of teachers, administrators and district leaders, are armed with NOTHING that can make them do well! If performance is not going to affect their report card grade they are not going to put effort in it… they know that nothing can be done to them!

You see, our students are just as smart as those employees who are asked to raise productivity. They ask – “What is there for me?”

If the employees know that raising their productivity does not come with a raise in their paycheck, and on the other hand, there is no danger of being fired, they are not going to perform – why should they bother? How much do they care about the image of the company?

If student know that the results of the standardized tests have no consequence on their report card grades, and they are neither going to benefit nor penalized for their performance - why should they bother to do their best on a long, tiring, and irrelevant test? What is there for them…? And they raise this very question every single time before a standardized test.

I have many stories about the pathetic hysteria that occurs at a school during the tensed time of the testing. I can tell you about countless hours put by paid and unpaid school employees who are assigned to the job as full time or part time coordinator (…and it is always more than a full time job…)

On my first year supervising a test I caught a student cheating (using a calculator when no calculators allowed). I dutifully dragged that student to the headquarters of the testing and reported him to the supervisor in charge. Soon enough I found myself being interrogated about the nature of the cheating, if I really saw it or just imagined seeing it, was it really a calculator or only seemed to be a calculator, and so on… At last I realized that I’d better cooperate with the nature of the investigation and leave room for a doubt that maybe it didn’t happen… it took me years to realize what scrutiny schools face if they don’t reach minimum percentage of participating students, and what exercises schools practice to reach this percentage…

Another story is about a different standardized test, mandated few times a year by the district. During my first year, teaching full time, it was a periodic nightmare. Without any warning, the department head would come to me and instruct to administer this test immediately, make sure to check the open response answers myself, and submit it on the following day… Then, for a while, I didn’t see that test and almost forgot about it until several years later, when, due to an injury of the permanent teacher, I took over teaching algebra to classes consisting of repeated algebra students. These classes were very tough and challenging; I knew some of the students from previous years and was walking on eggshells dealing with them… All went quite well for several weeks until, all of a sudden, a command came from above – Administer the horrid test! Now, these are very low motivated students, who are so smart and calculated about where and if to put their effort. Certainly, they are not going to do anything that doesn’t pay to their immediate interest. Thus, I had to face an ethical dilemma - do I just let them take it easy, compromising about noise level in the classroom, and letting them pick at their neighbors’ test (stupidly – the test is only one version), or do I act on my conscious (and on the fear that administrator will sure come and check on them, and on me…) So, I started a losing battle, in a desperate attempt to get them to work quietly, as hard as they can, and on their own…  I lost not only that battle but I lost it for the rest of the year… from that time on I could not make them do anything any longer, and each day of the remaining two weeks of school I was praying that the day will be over without any major incident…

A curious finding about that specific test: When I received the tests results, I was surprised to find out that students’ performances were almost in an opposite correlation to their ability, according to my assessment. It took me a long time to figure out why. What I realized, at last, was that students who didn’t care, just marked all the answers without checking them, but did finish the test. Obviously some of their answers were correct. The good and conscious students took a long time to answer and check, but never got to the end of the test, and thus their overall score was lower than of those who marked randomly, but answered all questions… 

That much for standardized tests, their value for assessing students, and even worse, their value in assessing teachers…

Yet, time and again, teachers are being blamed for the failure of their students in the standardized tests. Blamed in the best case; evaluated, penalized and in some cases – being fired, in the less fortunate case. Blamed for something of which they have no control, nor do they have the tools to control it…