21st Century Learners

Prepare them for the 21st Century, we are told. So that they can solve the problems that haven't yet been posed.

Teach them how to think critically. How to read and write and analyze, but don't teach them how to sing. Don't teach them how to act or paint or, god forbid, how to dance because those things have no value in the 21st century.

Teach them how a multiplication table is the true key to happiness, but don't even attempt to help them understand why a cello's smooth, silky voice can bring them to the edge of tears.

Make sure when they write they are writing essays; and please, for goodness sakes, make certain they know nothing of stanzas or meters. If a student is to mention the name of Shakespeare, let it only be in their own actual trembling at a weapon of war, for words hold no meaning here. What is to be, will be it there shall be no questioning of what is not to be.

Do not allow the colors of the outside world to touch their senses beyond the simple recognition of its name, for we cannot have people in the 21st century using colors, for those colors do not solve those yet to be determined problems.

Make sure this education give them all the things they need to be a worker, but none of the things they need to be a human.For art, music, drama and beauty are not 21st Century issues.

Is that what you want taught?

We The Unwilling

"“We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.” - Mother Teresa.

We.

A group. Us. A collective. A congregation. A group of people with a common purpose.

The Unwilling.

Not those that don't want to do, but those of us who refuse to stay still. To accept the status quo.

Those of us unwilling to go through life knowing that we could be better but will not act.

Led By the Unknowing.

Constrained by people that neither fully grasp the seriousness of the problems we face nor how to begin to solve any of them.

People, "leaders" who use their time bickering over nonsense instead of doing their job.

People ignorant of real life, real workers, real challenges as they sit in the seats by the desks in the offices our tax money provides them.

Are Doing the Impossible

Shed light on for the first time.

Performing the old hocus pocus.

Creating life in what was once thought to be barren.

For the Ungrateful.

For those that think they know what we do because they were a student once.

Part of the mainstream right wing that shakes their finger at any and everybody but themselves when their kids go wrong.

People who decide without education, without experience, with nothing more than a chip on their shoulder who does and doesn't deserve equal pay or equal coverage because of two months called June and July.

We have done so much, for so long, with so little.

We get up day after day with less support, less funding, less supplies than at any time before.

We get less notoriety, less money, more students with less motivation, more children whose parents teach them less and less about what it means to hear the word no.

Less ability to hold people accountable because we know that no child can be left behind even if it is for just one year and even if it would be the best thing that ever happened to that kid in their life.

And yet despite all this negativity, all this rationalizing as to why it is acceptable for teachers to be treated as second class members of the work forrce, despite all reasons we have, and believe me there are more than enough of them, to throw in the towel. To find a more "respectable" profession, we continue.

We continue to provide your children with the education they need and the parenting they lack. We defy the people that believe those that can't do teach because I'd like to see any one asshole who says that phrase spend a week in my classroom let alone 186 school days.

Despite all the noise on the outside, we produce the future. We make people realize how to create, how to question, how to reason, and most importantly how to disagree in an educated fashion.

We do all this without you. So the next time you think about a teacher, I need you to remember what is really true about us.

We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.

Thes-Con & Taylor Mali

A long time has passed and a lot of things have changed since last I wrote.

I am in a new school, yet find a lot of the same battles continuing over and over again. It came to a point in the fall where I was at quite a low point.

Those of you who know me know I teach theatre and the stress of rehearsals on top of teaching can be something that really weighs on me, especially in the fall for one reason or another. I was upset with the world and pretty much figured that everything sucked. School sucked, teaching sucked, my show sucked, high schoolers sucked.

A couple of things have changed since then. First, I got to attend the annual Colorado State Thespian Conference, which is always a huge boost, and that really seemed to refill my tank. I got excited about my spring production and have actually been looking forward to rehearsals instead of just wondering which student I'll have to kill today. So that is on the upside, anyways.

Second, a friend of mine, who is currently going through a very rough time at her school, turned me on to a guy by the name of Taylor Mali.

Before you go any farther, if you haven't seen or heard anything by this guy stop reading this right now and look him up. It's okay, I'll wait and it's that important that you do go look him up.

The first thing she showed me is this piece called "What Teachers Make" and my mind is completely blown.

It's funny how sometimes little things like a link from a friend can rock your world so hard, but this did. It's a nice reminder about how important the work I do is, and yes, we need that reminder a lot.

This isn't a world that values education or the educated any more or else the system in our country and the various comments you see about teachers in the news wouldn't have the tone that they do.

I learn every day that there are two ways you can handle this. You can get bogged down and depressed by it and it's something that happens to a lot of us, even the best of us, on a daily basis because we're human. We want to be valued and we want to be appreciated for what we do by more than just the odd student that says thank you every now and again.

Then again, there's that other way that is a lot harder to do sometimes, but is the thing that will keep you going. The way where you hear those voices of those students, however small, that say thank you. Those parents who look at their kid in a show and ask you how you got them to stand still and focus like that for two hours because they never do it at home. The unspoken moment where you see a child break through to something they hadn't been able to do or didn't know before and both you and they realize that if it wasn't for what was happening right then and right there, that lightbulb wouldn't turn on.

Education is a brilliant profession to find yourself in, but the truth that they don't tell you in teacher education programs is that the world of an educator is one that is full of daily crap. Crap with students, parents, co-workers, administrators and a society that believes your profession is the reason our economy is collapsing. It takes people like Taylor Mali, or that student, or just a friend who is sharing a hard time to remind you how lucky you are to be a teacher, and believe me you are.

At any rate, sorry for the rambles. Just a lot in my head. I'm going to try and write a lot more on here because I've been kind of inspired to turn this not only into a journal but into a bit of a poetry section.

I've never been good at poetry, but I feel like giving it a try. It probably won't be brilliant by any stretch and I don't care if it is, but I am thinking that this is a great place to start putting up some pieces of work that will hopefully be somewhat remotely similar to Mali.

It'll be interesting to see my try slam poetry, but why not?

Same Stuff, Different Place

Once again, it has been a while since I wrote, but it is what it is. I really only write on this one when I have something on my mind or something that I feel definitely needs to be said. So here it goes.

The education world is completely full of it. As you know, I started at a new school this year in my home state of Colorado. And it had me very excited. New place, new challenges, a school that really seemed to have its stuff together and be moving in the right direction. The key word in all of this is seemed. This school, which shall remain nameless, and the district as a whole seems to have missed the boat somewhere between what they have said they want to do, and what they are actually doing.

At my interview, and all throughout orientation, I heard all about the things I would need to learn how to do. I was excited at the challenge. Daily objectives and demonstrations that they have learned what was taught. Strategies to keep all kids involved in the learning process, not just the eager ones. And there is still a decent amount of that. They really appeared to be student centered. Then, last week, the district implemented these benchmark standardized assessments in pretty much every single class, with few exceptions. I'm going, slow down here. These are happening how often? Every 5 weeks? What's the deal? How do I cover everything you tell me I have to cover on this curriculum map in just 5 weeks?

So much for ensuring student learning. So much for student centered instruction. So much for innovative teaching practices. This is pretty much just "shock and awe" but with standardized tests. In a district that claims to go against the concept of teaching to the test, we have been placed in a system that basically demands that all you do is teach to the test. Should I have expected anything else? Probably not. I probably should have expected that the school wouldn't be all they said they were, because it was just too good to be true.

It's weird, because I almost feel betrayed by this whole thing. I feel like I was led to believe something about this school and this district, and had all those pictures and things that were painted for me very unceremoniously stripped away. I know that testing is the reality of modern education in America, but this is absolutely ridiculous. Colorado gives their CSAPs in February or March or something. After 4 of these assessment sets, which take up most of the week, how much do you think these kids are going to care about going through another full week of testing? I'd give you a hint, but you probably don't need it.

I spent most of this whole week just being infuriated by all of this, and it's led me to a rather frightening possibility. If this is the reality of education today, constant testing and blatantly teaching to the test, I'm not certain I want to be a part of education anymore. I don't know. Maybe I just need to find a place that is already doing well enough that they don't have to constantly worry about testing every single stinking month. Maybe I need to just find a charter school, or a private school. Maybe I need a year or two off. Maybe I'm just not fully cut out to be a teacher in the modern day picture of education. I don't know. But I had more clarity and more desire in New Mexico, and that is saying something. Who knows. In the mean time, I just have to keep pushing along and do my best to make as much of a difference as I'm permitted to make.

PLACE Test

Well, since I moved to Colorado, I had to, once again, go through the whole process of having my license transferred to another state. Colorado is pretty easy, but I was, unfortunately, still not "experienced" enough to not have to take the content area test to prove that I'm "highly qualified." I don't have a problem with taking the test, I suppose, but I do have one question, who the hell writes these things?

These tests are supposed to be relevant to what I high school teacher would teach in their classrooms, yet there were questions that I never even heard about until I got into my college theatre history class. Very seriously, there was vocab here that college students might not know, and questions about names that do exist now, but, again, hold no real relevance in a high school theatre classroom. They must have had trouble coming up with questions and just looked at a program from a broadway and included some of the names.

Also, this was the thing that ticked me off the most about this test, they ask very specific questions about topics that are very subjective and probably won't be the same depending on who you ask. They ask what the best way to show certain things, such as passage of time, yet fail to specify anything. A lot is left to the imagination in the answer. We're not told, on a proscenium stage, or we're not told how many actors are on stage, or the style of the show, we're just asked what the best way is to do this. I find that an absolutely absurd questioning process. I picture some guy with a college text book, sitting in a corner of an office looking for questions to put on this high school teacher's test and looking for the most difficult things possible.

Well, at any rate, I got my scores today, and I passed. So it's nice to know that I won't have to spend another 90 bucks to take an 80 question test. Now I just wait for the CDE (Colorado Department of Education) to send me my full license, as I currently just have an interim license. Getting excited for the start of the year!

Accountability

First off, apologies. It has been quite a while since I've written, but I have a good reason! I got a new teaching job! So my wife and I have moved out of Colorado Springs, very close to where I grew up in Denver, to teach at a new school, which actually is what has prompted me to write this post!

Accountability is one of the big buzz words in education right now. That's sort of what the whole concept was behind adding No Child Left Behind, so that people are accountable. Here's my problem, the wrong people, in my opinion, are being held accountable. This new district where I'm teaching does things based off of President Obama's "Race to the Top" edict of education. What this does is changes the way in which salary is paid to teachers, and the way that tenure is decided (at least in Colorado). Pay is no longer based off of years of experience, it is based off of data that the teachers provide that shows that their students are, in fact, learning. At first glance, most people seem alright with it. Naturally it isn't a terrible thing to have this as a bit of feedback into your pay, and if it is clear that your students are not learning, then it is clear that you probably shouldn't be teaching because something is just missing. But here's the problem, there is still no accountability to the student. In my humble opinion, which I would guess might be shared by most teachers, this is merely something that adds fuel to the already blazing fire of just shoveling students along. Any intelligent teacher that knows they aren't doing a great job is going to just make sure that the right amount of people are passing so that they don't get identified as a bad teacher. Now, I'm not arguing that those are the specific people that we are trying to get out of there in the first place, but shouldn't things be focused on student achievement for the sake of the student, and not the teacher?

My mother recently told me a little story about something that happened to a student teacher where she works (my mother works in the English Resource Center of a high school). There was a student teacher who had a tough time with a certain class of students. They gave her a lot of trouble. Other than just the obvious things of misbehaving in class, not doing assignments properly, these students were smart enough to know the ways to really hit her below the belt. The teacher she was working with models his class in a way that he gives the students benchmark tests throughout the course of the semester in order to assess how they are learning. Well, these students know that these things are more for the teacher than they are for them, and when it came time for her to give these students their test, the students asked "If we do badly on this, does that mean that you get in trouble?" THIS, is the exact problem with the above plan. The student know that it affects the teachers and the school itself far more than it actually affects them, so what is their incentive? This is right up there with the assistant principal at my last school, who shall remain nameless, that called one of my colleagues and told her she had too many seniors failing her class and just needed to "bump a few up a bit" even though these were students who had not turned in a bit of work all semester long, or had not even bothered to come to class most of the semester. Again, the things that are not being considered in these plans is what happens if the student DESERVES the F?

Continuously we hear all these same complaints about education. They need to be funded better, we need better teachers, students shouldn't be just shoveled along they need to prove that they have learned the material. Yet, every single time somebody "does something" about education, it never EVER solves any of these problems. Parents come in and argue with their kid's teachers because they want their kid to pass when these parents may have never done a single bit of checking on the kid all year long until they got a report card. You never hear a parent say to a kid, "well maybe you deserved it." It is always, "this teacher is out to get my perfect little angel!!" Again, things boil down to a fundamental lack of respect for education, and educators.

I am all about being held accountable. If I'm doing something wrong, or something that I'm doing could be done better, tell me, but don't dock my pay. That, and we need to start reminding people that part of going to school is proving that you learned something while you are there, and that burden does not lie on the teachers, the students have to prove that they have learned it, not the teacher. So if a kid gets an F, try and think before you sit there and say, well golly, that teacher let that kid down. That is only one of the many possibilities for that situation. Should my pay be docked because Johnny, or Sally never came to class and failed? Should my pay be docked because Billy or Susie never handed in a single bit of work? Should I be denied tenure for these same reasons?

If there is a way to responsibly assess these things, then I'd be all for making it a part of my salary schedule, because then I would know exactly what is expected of me. As it is now, teachers won't know, and many teachers will shovel kids along that need to be failed. It's the same problem all over again. When are we going to learn?

Poll the first!

I would appreciate anybody who reads this responding to it. I want to have some kind of data I can collect. Just leave a comment in response to my question. Very quick and simple.

What is the thing that you are most concerned about when it comes to education in the United States today?

As for me, my biggest concern is that with all of the cuts, schools will be dropping arts programs left and right even though there are many studies that have been done that show that students who have experience in the arts during high school do better in school overall. Your turn!