Tell me what you really think.
I think what you wrote is brilliant, and that the situation you describe frustrates me endlessly. I am not sure how to change the world for my daughter, but I do know that I have to try. This all reminds me of a song I loved in high school: (and still do)
The Logical Song - Supertramp
When i was young
It seemed that life was so wonderful
A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical
And all the birds in the trees
Well they´d be singing so happily
Oh joyfully, oh playfully watching me
But then they sent me away
To teach me how to be sensible
Logical, oh responsible ,practical
And they showed me a world
Where i could be so dependable
Oh clinical, oh intellectual, cynical
There are times when all the world´s asleep
The questions run too deep
For such a simple man
Won´t you please, please tell me what we´ve learned
I know it sounds absurd
But please tell me who i am
Now watch what you say
Or they´ll be calling you a radical
A liberal, oh fanatical, criminal
Oh won´t you sign up your name
We´d like to feel you´re
Acceptable, respectable, oh presentable, a vegetable!
At night when all the world´s asleep
The questions run too deep
For such a simple man
Won´t you please, please tell me what we've learned
I know it sounds absurd
But please tell me who i am, who i am ,who i am.
And with the recent "improvements" by the Bush administration, we will all be quoting 1984 before long....or not.
Fabulous, Mamacita. Anything you write sounds good to me. It is sure to be printed, and should be read by every school system in the country.
What never ceases to amaze me is that in spite of the accuracy of your observation, teachers continue to create magical learning in their classrooms.
Kudos to you, Mamacita, and to teachers in your mold everywhere.
Genius. I love it. Tell me when it's published.
wow
bravo
your towering righteous outrage
humbles me
Oh.
Brilliant, indeed.
It should be required reading for all who strive to be educators.
I was thinking along similar lines when I had my son's IEP recently and read the new "guidelines" for scoring the kids with multiple disabilities...written, naturally, by NON-educators.
*sigh* They have no idea. None.
I couldn't agree more. There's no balance in the unyielding behemoth demanding test, test, and more testing.
My kid's been tested since kindergarten.
There's no point, either, in people who can't write teaching kids how to write.
If their suppositions were correct, we'd all be hopeless morons.
Amy quoted Supertramp:
Now watch what you say
Or they´ll be calling you a radical
A liberal, oh fanatical, criminal
Mamacita, I'm pretty sure you're an excellent teacher. Certainly this cri de couer shows that you care deeply for your individual students, which, from where I sit outside the educational establishment, seems to put you head and shoulders above perhaps half of our experienced teachers, and it reflects well on you personally. So take this as coming from a naif in need of your expertise.
Educators railing against standardized testing get my hackles up. I see standardized testing as an attempt to see that students meet the MINIMUM requirements to partake of our modern civilization. If it takes all your classroom time to "teach the test", I would submit that you may not be doing it right (or, more likely, your students were not well served in previous grades). If the tests are truly too hard and force too much regimentation on the classroom to meet MINIMUM standards, make that point, please.
I began reading your post thinking (I admit, on extremely limited evidence) that good teachers who care about their students must realize that standardized testing and the skills it entails are meant to be only part of a scholastic experience. When you began denouncing testing, I (good Republican that I am) began thinking, "could she be a moonbat?" All this about feelings and crushing the souls of innocent children and creativity... No, I'm not writing you off. I can still read your post as a complaint against school administrations thinking it is EASIER to teach only to the test, and lacking the imagination to allow extraneous elements into the classroom for fear they will detract from time spent teaching measurable skills.
You say, "I have problems with people who see creativity as a threat to order". Well, I have a problem with people who want to let kids chase butterflies until they're 18. And we're both right, it is WE who have the problem. I'll admit I've set up a straw man with my butterfly-chasing argument; will you admit that at least not ALL of us who want to impose minimum standards are doing so because "creativity is a threat to order"? I hope so. I think your essay would be improved by some understanding for school boards: they have many constituencies to deal with. Yes, it is wicked to stunt a child's creativity, yea, I'll go farther: if all a child has to say about school is that it is a boring chore, that is evidence of a nonoptimal school system. But life imposes many boring chores on humanity, and it will always be so, and school must reflect life to at least some degree.
The only nod I saw to my side of the argument was your paragraph which stated, "The ability to love, to be loved, to express love: can it be that these are more important than grammar, or math, or social studies? I think they are. I also believe that a good teacher can do both at once, if ever he/she is allowed to do so again." That is a lot weaker than I would hope for. Not just good teachers, but ALL teachers HAVE TO be able to do both. Has it gotten to the point where they can't? I need to know this.
"Civilizations are judged by the arts they leave behind, not for statistics and varsity letters." Umm... go tell the Spartans. Ruthless efficiency is a form of creativity, too. Plutarch would still have readers if he'd chosen his subjects like Zola did, no doubt, but there's a case to be made that we learn more of human nature from observing the extremes of human behavior.
As for facts being the enemy of truth, well, Don Quixote had a go at creative lunacy. "Romeo and Juliet" was a comedy, not a tragedy. I doubt that Erasmus intended _In Praise of Folly_ to be the last word on human nature. The truth is not in us, nor will ever be. Non-Euclidean geometry and similar "outside the box" thinking really are folly until they turn up demonstrable results. Facts, or paths toward them. I would maintain that facts and truths are both unattainable, and I'm glad I "learned" that before someone challenged me to calculate the last digit of pi.
All right, I read your post again and ran straight into, "I believe in testing. I'm no tree-huggin' earth mother who thinks children should sing and dig clay out of the ground for art and eat granola all day long. I believe in math and science and grammar and spelling and history." Sorry, I must have completely missed that the first time. I'll try not to blame my public school education ;P Belay most of the above.
I'll keep your opinions in mind as I debate my county's Republican Party education platform. I'm sure you're right that we have to demand more than just the basics. But... Umm, I don't know, really, how quickly children learn. Where can I put my foot down? I want to be able to mount my high horse and declaim, "If you are sending a child into the ninth grade who cannot read _Don Quixote_, nay, more, if the child is not confident that he can read _Don Quixote_ and learn something from it on his own, your school system has failed that child. Someone has put their opinion of what a child ought to know above that of not only Miguel de Cervantes, but of every literate man since the invention of the clay tablet." I'd like to say, "seventh grade", but I dunno... Help me out, here, I'm not asking for them to read Hegel in German, but am I so wrong to recall that people used to go to UNC-Chapel Hill with only eight years of education behind them, and able to read Latin and Greek?
I know I've gone on too long and too pompously, but this truly is meant as a critique of your post; I think you ought to sprinkle a few more tidbits in to acknowledge the conditio sine qua non: teaching basic skills. If only for us naifs who might otherwise be calling you a radical, a liberal, oooh, fanatical, criminal... BTW, did Socrates die as he did for asking too many questions before ensuring his students could read?
(signed) Your loyal opposition.
"That is a lot weaker than I would hope for. Not just good teachers, but ALL teachers HAVE TO be able to do both. Has it gotten to the point where they can't? I need to know this."
Sadly, Kross, in my daughter's school career so far (she's in 4th grade right now), too many teachers assign 'busywork' rather than bother to teach the class. They don't care about the students as individuals. They've forgotten/not learned how to be nurturing.
They hand out papers and then get angry when students line up at their desks to ask questions about those papers. We must face the fact that SOMETIMES teachers, like so many other professions, just work for the paycheck rather than for the rewards of, well, educating.
Thank God for the good ones, like Mamacita.
I really enjoyed the post.
It's already too late for some kids. Many of my classmates at I.U. can't think beyond concrete to figurative. The other day one of them complained that they hate it when professors ask them to explain philosophical terms, or hate to be asked "What do you think this means?".
The reference to 1984 is apt. Orwell's idea of Newspeak was that we would think less if we learned less words, and with less words we could not think of doing things out of the control of an oppressive society.
Orwell believed that how we used language determined how we thought. Language does not only express thought, it is necessary to express symbols of complex ideas. Keeping kids away from literature that makes them think of larger ideas about the world, more than simply how to pass the ISTEP (Indiana's test to finish high school) teaches them to be duller than a box of mud turtles.
-John
I feel very lucky. Although we're living in a lower income area with a large number of foreign born students, my kids have been getting a decent education from teachers who care. My worry is that many of the younger teachers will burn out or take a better offer somewhere else.
Back in the late 70s, I worked as an aide in a Special Ed class. Most of the children were emotionally damaged, a few were physically disabled. My salary was paid by the state. I was not paid the top level, because, I was told, it was my first year. Then I found out accidentally that the state paid the same amount for every aide at the school. The superintendent, whose wife also worked in the district office, was pocketing the difference. He had it all worked out with the local employment office. I was so young, new to the area, and I needed the job, so I caved and never reported it. That superintendent is probably dead by now. That money doesn't keep his cold bones warm. I wonder how it felt to steal from the state and the underpaid people like me who really cared.
I think you're about to be sued by a nail for hitting it on the head so hard.
kross,
A couple of things: Romeo & Juliet broke loose from the Elizabethan definitions of comedy as a light-hearted love story and tragedy as death and downfall caused by a tragic flaw. The young lovers had no tragic flaw; they tried to do things right (like get married once they had fallen in love). It begins as an Elizabethan comedy, but ends as human tragedy.
As for "people used to go to UNC-Chapel Hill with only eight years of education behind them, and able to read Latin and Greek," I have read (wish I could find the citation) that people who lived in the Middle Ages could live a full and happy life knowing as much information as is now printed in a single issue of the Sunday NY Times. There's a lot more knowledge today -- and when we understand that intelligence and wisdom come from the number of valid connections we can make among all of this knowledge, it becomes clear that the amount kids have to know now is staggering. The growth of necessary knowledge and understanding has been exponential, not linear.
"Inhalers must be kept locked in the office. They're considered drugs, too." Pennsylvania passed a law a couple of years ago about that: "Briefly, all Pennsylvania school districts are now required by state law to establish a policy to allow responsible asthmatic students to possess and administer an inhaler on school property. (Yes, a law actually had to be passed to force school districts to do this.) ...."
Quite the tour-de-force! Inspiring.
Thank you for posting that, Mamacita. It's very forceful.
I recognize parts of it from a past post of yours, and the additional parts only add to the strength of your writing.
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