Palin-free in February

I began writing this post a few weeks back, and then the Arizona shootings occurred and the context seemed outdated:

Am I making Sarah Palin popular? Gasp--the thought is irksome to the extreme. But I think that I am unwittingly doing just that by adding traffic to any Palin-centered news article. I confess--I find her gaffes (death panel distortions, notes on hand, Vice-Presidential interview disasters, etc, etc.) mesmerizing. I'm fascinated by her. It's like watching a train wreck--I can't pull myself away. I, with my self-righteous disdain for reality television, am riveted by the ultimate in reality T.V. spectacle--the Sarah Palin 24 hour news cycle. And so when I see she's made another one of her gaffes, I can't get enough. I have to read it!

New 2011 resolution: boycott Palin news.

So today in the Washington Post, I saw this editorial:

Amen, brother! I'm going to try it.

Dropping Out

I had a student drop out of high school today. Most students who drop out of school are, frankly, not missed much by the teachers. I always fight to keep these kids in school and help them get through their academic troubles, but the unfortunate truth is that by the time they get to that point we're both usually fed up with each other. I work in a system with the resources and the philosophy to help virtually any student without major cognitive or behavioral issues get through school. In other words, for students who want it badly enough, we'll help them find a way, and if you get someone who is dropping out, it's usually because that person is fed up with school. A perfect example was a student last year who did no work in my class and muttered unkind comments about other students under his breath. Saddened as I was by his decision to drop out, it was a relief to see him go.

Today's drop out was so different. This guy was fun to have in class: he contributed interesting ideas to discussions, he helped less proficient students, he he was talented and had great potential. I started to fear he would drop out a few months ago, but the counselors, administrators, and social worker have been doing a great job trying to help him with a dental issue and his financial difficulties. Needless to say, I was very sad to see this email his counselor forwarded me today:

HI, MR ____________ !!
THIS IS __________ ______________ _____________
THE REASON WHY I' M WRITING YOU IS BECAUSE I DECIDED TO LEAVE THE SCHOOL .
YOU KNOW , THIS IS SAD BUT I DON'T HAVE OTHER CHOICE
BECAUSE I HAVE TO SUPPORT MY FAMILY TOO IN MY COUNTRY AND I HAVE TO WORK HARD FOR IT .
I CALLED MY FAMILY IN ______________ AND THEY TOLD ME MY FATHER IS SICK AND I HAVE TO SEND MONEY FOR HIS MEDICATION .
I FEEL EMBARRASSED TO LEAVE THE SCHOOL ,BECAUSE U HELPED ME A LOT WITH MY TOOTH AND WITH YOUR GIFT CARDS , I HAD GREAT HOLIDAYS WITH THE MONEY THAT YOU GAVE ME, I KNOW YOU ARE A GREAT PERSON AS MRS. STOCK AND THE WHOLE SCHOOL
YOU ARE A REALLY NICE TEAM OF EDUCATION , I FEEL VERY PROUD TO WENT TO ________ ____________ HS .
I THANKFUL FOR EVERYTHING AND GOD BLESS YOU !!
THANKS YOU SO MUCH !! I WILL NEVER FORGOT YOU

What can you say to this? He's trying to do the honorable thing, and I hope and pray that he'll make it back to school some day when his family circumstances allow it.

Free as a Bird . . .

In my beginning ESOL class, I asked students to use a metaphor to describe how they feel at the end of the school day. Here are a few of my favorites:

"At the end of the day, I am a bird that can fly everywhere."
"At the end of the day, I am a prisoner who got free from prison."
"When I leave school at the end of the day, I'm a crazy dog in heaven."
"At the end of the day, I am flying in the sky until I get to paradise."
"At the end of the day, I am a deer jumping in the grass." (My personal favorite. I think it's time to teach this kid the word "frolic"!).

The most common response was some variation of number 2, the released prisoner. You can see what great love of learning I transmit to my students! I do confess that I work them pretty hard, and with bigger classes this year there is no room for goofing off and I run a tight ship. The prison thing might be going a bit far, however. . .

The Power of Numbers

Why is the civilized world so mathematically impaired? And why do people who would never dream of admitting illiteracy feel no embarrassment as they claim, "Ha ha, I'm horrible at math," or "I'm not a math person"? I'm no Einstein, but some basic arithmetic skills in basic situations, please! I was recently in a meeting where my very articulate, very professional boss's boss's boss was discussing data from our school. At one point, she laughed and said, "Ha, ha, I think there's some math thing going on here!"

Wouldn't it be great if people aspired to mathematical literacy with the same drive that they do to having a great vocabulary or having read the classics? I hear people say things like, "Well, stats can prove anything." That's true, if you're using faulty data or deriving inaccurate conclusions from them. But if you are presented with the data used to achieve those stats, you can see where the holes are. You can recognize improper methodology or where correlation was assumed to be causation. You can understand how a sample size too small might skew the data (this is one which happens ALL THE TIME in public schools, but unfortunately many of the people using these skewed data--and telling us we should use them--don't understand this).

Knowledge is power, right? Want to know who's trying to pull a fast one? Go back to math class.

A Day in the Life

5:30 Wake up, shower, get dressed, eat breakfast, read a bit of the paper, make lunch.
6:30 Leave for work.
6:45-7:15 Set up classroom for the day, answer early arriving students' questions, update classroom website on Blackboard.
7:15-7:20 Stand in my doorway as mandated by the principal to greet students.
7:20-8:54 Teach intermediate ESOL class: introductory lesson on plagiarism, half the class researches pros of animal research, the other researches the cons. Both paraphrase information and cite sources.
8:54-9:29 Student Assistance Period (flex time): 3 students come in to finish Powerpoint projects using classroom laptops. One student wants help editing his homework for Drivers' Education. Another has questions about an upcoming test.
9:30-10:05 Meeting with Special Education department chair and a student's mother regarding the student's progress in school and plans for the future.
10:10-10:52 Finish planning Science lesson, make copies, shovel lunch.
10:52-10:57 Stand in the door as mandated by the principal.
10:57-12:31 Teach Beginning ESOL Science class: 3 remaining groups present their Biomes projects. Teach vocabulary and concepts for "predator/prey; mutualism, commensalism, parasitism". Students complete graphs showing the relationship between wolf and deer populations and answer questions about how the increase/decrease of one population affects the other.
12:45-2:15 Sit through an instructional council meeting to discuss the "homework" reading about Professional Learning Communities, hear how Social Studies and World Languages departments are planning curriculum for upcoming years, chat about principal's priorities, and discuss procedures for long-term substitutes.
2:15-2:30 Discuss ESOL with P.E. department chair and the Assistant Principal.
2:30-3:00 Meet with a colleague to discuss a referral for special education for an ESOL student.
3:00-6:30 Create detailed sub plans with instructions on how to assist two brand new students who speak no English and have limited literacy in Spanish during class while I am out.
6:40--Heading home!

Prague!

Blissful, less highly-scheduled, slower-paced summer has ended, and I am back to my wonderful, frenetically paced job as a high school ESOL teacher. The highlight of my summer, which I have shamefully postponed sharing, was a long overdue visit to Prague.

There are many places I have visited whose most celebrated panoramas are indeed beautiful, but then they are somehow smaller or dingier or more mundane than anticipated. That's not necessarily a disappointment, as I always feel that a real place is more 3-dimensional and therefore more interesting, even with ugly sections and cheesy tourist traps, than what I'd imagined.

Prague, however, is widely reputed to be one of the world's most beautiful cities--and it absolutely lives up to the hype. The hilly west side of Prague includes the leafy Petrin, complete with a monastery and meandering paths, and Prague castle, with a Gothic cathedral in the center and surrounded by layers of the castle as added through the centuries, including the ancient halls where jousting tournaments and feasts were held. The view of the hill is also crowded with spires of baroque churches and red tile roofs. It is more beautiful in person than in any photo. From the hill itself, you look down on the eastern part of Prague, across the Vltava river. The same baroque spires and red tile roofs fill the skyline, with occasional Gothic turrets and bizarre modern architectural curiosities, like the Zizkov tower covered with plastic black crawling babies!

The view, of course, are the first things that you become aware of as you arrive in Prague. I spent my first day walking joyfully past all the major sights, which can be seen relatively quickly. I found my beloved restaurants and cafes--idyllic spots with quaint lighting and cozy corners-- and made sure to taste my favorite pastries, chocolates, and snacks (it was fortunate that my trip included lots of walking!). I wandered through Prague's meandering streets and across the picturesque and ancient (and, regrettably, tourist-packed) Charles Bridge. I felt my tongue stumble over Czech words again--and I remembered the same frustration felt years before as I became familiar with the impossible-seeming strings of consonants.

I took the train from Prague to nearby Karlstejn to visit its castle and beautiful countryside. How I love Czech trains! The stations are dingy in an inexplicably quaint and charming way. The trains themselves feel old but comfortable, and there is nothing to compare to the rhythmic clatter of the train over the tracks as you roll past lovely villages nestled in the hills.

My trip included visits with old friends: I had two reunions with classes of formers students, met a friend to go salsa-dancing (yikes, for someone who loves dancing so much, I am a really miserable salsa dancer!), and spent an afternoon at the park with a friend and her two kids, both born since I last saw her.



Words cannot describe the nostalgia and joy I felt. I felt like I had rediscovered a part of myself that had been lying dormant for the past 6 years. The lifestyle in Prague was so well suited to me: I worked hard, but for about 9-10 hours a day (less than now), commuted by public transport and thus never had to worry about cars, had lots of time for reading, walked everywhere. I felt so happy, healthy, and alive--my days were filled with new discoveries and interesting interactions, and the unexpected was around every corner.

I am happy in my life now. I have a job I find rewarding and meaningful, a wonderful group of friends, a comfortable place to live, a family I adore, and I always seem to make time to travel. Life is pretty good. But I can't help wondering if it will ever be so magical again.

Challenge Index

Fairfax County Public Schools has recently been hyping the inclusion of all of its high schools in Newsweek's list of the top high schools:

http://commweb.fcps.edu/newsreleases/newsrelease.cfm?newsid=1501

The obvious next question is, why are these high schools listed as the best? What are the criteria? One would hope that such criteria would be thoughtfully considered and statistically sound since they aim to measure something as complex as a school's effectiveness in teaching thousands of kids from diverse backgrounds with highly varied educational and career goals. But here's what the release says about the ranking system:

"A school’s ranking is determined by dividing the number of Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB), or Cambridge tests given by a school to all its students by the number of seniors who graduated in May or June." This system was devised by Jay Matthews, an education reporter for the Washington Post.

Side note on Matthews: I am not a fan. I often ask myself why he has been allotted as much power as he has. He has written entire pieces based on incredibly poor logic, as in (I'm paraphrasing) "most Americans speak foreign languages poorly. Therefore, foreign language programs in high schools are a waste of time." Huh? So the fact that we are so linguistically backwards means that we should scrap foreign language programs altogether? That's not the conclusion I draw.

But I digress. The purpose of this post is not to criticize Matthews, but rather how the entire Washington region, and now Newsweek (and by extension, thousands of readers) have bought into Matthews' ranking system. If I seem disproportionately angry, it's because I have seen how this system has actually driven policy in Fairfax County, where students who may not be adequately prepared, or even interested, in taking AP level courses are shoved into classes to increase the school's percentage of AP takers. More troubling to me is the possibility that other important factors in a school's effectiveness may be ignored in the frenzy for more APs. For years Fairfax County has footed the bill for all of the AP tests its students take (often woefully unprepared students who achieve a 1 or a 2) even as ever-tightening budgets force increased class sizes and salary freezes. (Although with the budget situation as dire as it is, the AP test fee will likely no longer be paid).

I certainly don't have the perfect formula for evaluating schools. But here are some factors that should at least be considered:

1. Drop out rates. What happens to the at-risk students? With Matthews's system, getting poorly performing students to drop out actually adds to a school's value, as those students will now no longer be included in the graduating total. Statistical magic: now a higher percentage of graduates will be recorded as having taken an AP exam. Any quality measure of a school's effectiveness should evaluate how the school educates ALL of its students, and having a high drop out rate is a major indication of failure.

2. Career/Vocational options. I repeat my previous statement: any quality measure of a school's effectiveness should evaluate how the school educates ALL of its students. Not all students are college-bound. Not all careers render a college education desirable. One of Fairfax County's biggest assets is its Academy program, where students can take courses, and even get certified, in everything from catering to auto mechanics, from fashion design to film and video production. The Challenge rating system completely undercuts the value of such programs simply because it fails to consider them.

3. Pass rates on the AP exams. I understand the argument that encouraging more students to take AP/IB courses and exams increases the academic rigor that the students are exposed to and discourages the harmful practice of tracking; those in favor of the Challenge Index claim that actual pass rates are secondary. That sounds plausible. But what it means is that schools are not accountable for the quality of their AP courses any more. I have talked to AP teachers who bemoan the diminishing standard of their courses: what was once the expectation and standard of an AP class has become impossible to maintain with the increased enrollment of ill-prepared or weakly motivated students. Follow this thread of thought to its extreme: an unscrupulous administrator could theoretically rename all classes "AP", pay for the ensuing exams, and voila: highest challenge rating ever. I'm not suggesting that cheating this egregious could really pass undetected, but you get the idea.

So, Jay Matthews, I am no expert. I don't have a golden formula that is a perfect alternative to the challenge index, but at least I am aware of the potential pitfalls of elevating any system to such prominence, particularly one that highlights only one measure.