Teaching -- Memories

 

Memories are an indication of a life well or ill spent.  Give your heart and soul to what you do and you will be rewarded.  Appreciative school children give back.

 

One morning just before lunch recess I found a twenty dollar bill lying next to a leg of one of the student desks.  One boy had not yet left.  He saw me pick up the bill.

 

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

 

“I’ll take it down to the office.  Maybe the person it belongs to will report losing it.”

 

The next day I asked the school secretary about the twenty dollar bill.

 

“Two boys came by this morning and got it.”  I asked their names.  One was the boy that had seen me pick up the bill.  The other, somebody I didn’t know, claimed to be the student that had lost the money.  The principal suspended them.  I said nothing about the incident to my student upon his return.  His parents had no doubt punished him.  He had been suspended.  Why pile on?

 

Several months later I asked for a couple of volunteers to score and time keep a girls B-team basketball game on one of the outdoor courts.  Because I was the coach of the A-team, which would be playing in the gym, I could not do it.  Nobody offered to help.  At the last minute my student that had been dishonest volunteered.  He did the job well.  I was touched. 

 

One incoming eighth grade group of students had the reputation of being difficult.  The girls, especially, were uncooperative.  Forewarned, many of the teachers chose to be stern disciplinarians.  “Here are the rules.  Woe unto you if you break one!”  I went the other way.  I was open to them.  I tried to recognize and respect their needs.  At the end of the year members of two of my classes contributed money to buy me a pair of jeans, a shirt, and nifty shoes.  I remember particularly one incident.  On consecutive days a girl notorious for not telling the truth lingered to talk to me after the end of class.  The final day she stayed too long and asked me to write a note to excuse her impending tardiness.  I wrote something like “Sarah left here at 10:46.”  She told me that the note wouldn’t do.  She’d get in trouble.  I told her that I couldn’t lie; I hadn’t detained her; she had decided to be late.

 

“What should I do?” she asked.

 

“Tell the truth.  Mr. B---- is one of the fairest teachers on the faculty.  Tell him.”

 

Mr. B---- spoke to me that afternoon.  He was surprised and pleased.  I was pleased also that she had told the truth and pleased that he now viewed her differently.

 

One year fairly late in my teaching career I was teaching two GATE (gifted and talented education) classes.  One was an English class, the other an American history class.  Students eligible to take such classes had to have scored 130 or above on a school-administered intelligence test.  School policy (or maybe the policy of the principal at that time) did not allow any student to take two GATE classes taught by the same teacher.  A mother of a very bright student insisted that her daughter be placed in both of my GATE classes.  The principal refused.  Not the least intimidated, the mother sat conspicuously outside his closed office door.  Time passed.  The principal relented.  The mother had been one of my prize students the second year I taught at the school.  (See my “teaching” post “Getting Better,” Sept, 2, 2014)  I was extremely flattered.

 

Half way through my teaching career I had a student handicapped by cerebral palsy.  He and I would spend lunch recess time “shooting baskets” in my room.  I would hurl a taped, wadded sheet or two of used ditto paper at my desk waste basket from the far reaches of the room.  He would shoot the “ball” five or six feet away.  We had competitive games, replete with hyperbolic, sports announcer-type commentary.    Four or five years later one of his older brothers came into my room during my preparation period.  He handed me a soft, stuffed, reddish-colored, cloth-covered “ball.”  Saying nothing to me, he left.  I realized that my lunch recess friend had died and that his brother had carried out a dying wish.

 

Fairly early during my career one of the boys in my class had been acting out too much.  I spoke with him privately.  He was very unhappy.  His parents were hollering at him constantly.  He was giving them considerable grief. 

 

“What is it they want?” I asked.

 

“A lot.  They want me to do this.  They want me to do that.  They’re so unfair.”

 

I told him rather forcefully that they had the right to expect certain things from him.  I suspected that he believed they didn’t love him.  I said, ”Do what they ask.  See how they react.”

 

A week later he was happy.  “Things are much better,” he told me.  He stayed that way most of the rest of the year.

 

Little things.  A girl, a C student, wrote in my yearbook: “You made me want to learn.”  A much picked-on seventh grade boy that I had tried to protect during the second year I had taught at the school appeared maybe twenty years later in my classroom during our school’s annual May open house. He was there with relatives.  A cousin of his -- or maybe his nephew – was one of my students.  He wanted to say hello.  Years after I retired, a sales clerk in a department store in Eugene, Oregon, looked at my wife’s credit card.  She remarked that she had had an English teacher once named Titus.

 

“Oh?  Where was that?"

 

“You wouldn’t know the place."

 

“Where?”

 

“California.”

 

“What city?  My husband was an English teacher.”

 

“That couldn’t be.”

 

“What city?”

 

“Orinda.”

 

“My husband was your teacher.  Why is it that you remember him?”

 

“He’d have waste paper shooting contests.  He played games with us.”

 

(Late during my career I had two principals that insisted that “time on task” was everything.  Not a minute of class time should be wasted.  My contention was that a little bit of play at the end of a period when necessary work had been completed raised student morale, which, in turn, heightened motivation to learn)

 

And one very serious thing. 

 

I coached boys and girls afterschool sports teams for a number of years.  I eventually limited my coaching to girls, mostly eighth grade, basketball.  Near the beginning of that stretch of time I had difficulty putting together a team.  Most of the athletic girls that year, displeased with their physical education teacher/coach in the seventh grade, decided not to play any afterschool sport.  I knew of three girls who did want to play basketball.  They were not socially connected with the boycotting group.  They were skilled players.  (All three would receive basketball scholarships from division one colleges)  There was also a fourth girl – I will call her Harriet – who was new to the school.  Early in the fall the three girls had befriended her.  She was athletic but not basketball skilled.  These four attended my first practice.  I told them after the practice that they would have to recruit other girls to play, that I would need at least three additional players.  Otherwise, I would coach the seventh grade team.  Three additional girls came to the next practice.  One was fairly athletic, the friend that accompanied her was not, and the third girl, lacking skills, just wanted to play sports.  We had a team.

 

The schools in our league played a short schedule of games – no more than ten.  The season ended with a championship tournament.  We won the tournament.  In the next-to-last game of the tournament Harriet chased after a ball that was going out-of-bounds.  She fell into the wooden bleachers and injured her leg.  That evening I visited her parents.  Her father, an FBI swat team leader, was irate that the host school had allowed the bleachers to be so close to the court.  I listened to him vent; eventually, his temper eased.  Several weeks passed.  The girls wanted to play more games.  Why not? I thought. I added two seventh grade players to our team and scheduled six games against teams outside our league area.  We won five of them.  Afterward, we were invited to play in a tournament hosted by a private school.  We won our first two tournament games.  The next morning a terrible event happened.

 

One of the three skilled girls, Debbie, whom I had as a student, told me that just before the school day had started a car had stopped at the curb in front of the school and an adult in the car had told Harriet to get in.  Debbie was afraid that something bad had happened to Harriet’s father.  About twenty minutes later I received a call from the school secretary.  Harriet’s father had died of a heart attack.  Harriet wanted to talk to me and would call the office during my preparation period.  I hung up the phone.  Debbie and a friend of hers were watching me intently.  I looked at them and nodded.  They burst into tears.  I gave them hall passes to go to the girls bathroom.

 

Harriet called.  She needed to talk.  She had always been afraid that her father might be killed in the line of duty.  She had witnessed at a previous school how a girl had been affected by her father’s unexpected death.  Harriet had noticed an immediate strangeness in how the girl affected and her friends related.  She didn’t want that to happen to her.  Her friends would surely treat her differently.  She did not want to be pitied; she did not want to be viewed as a victim.  Later that day I talked to several of her teammates.  I could see strain in their anticipation of how they would need to comport themselves.  That night we played in the championship game – without Harriet -- and lost.

 

The next day I arranged to take all of the players to Harriet’s house.  They joined her in her bedroom while I talked with her mother and aunt.  Harriet’s mother told me later in the year that this act had helped Harriet considerably.  I am certain that her teammates -- giving their loyalty, solace, and strength – gained as well.

 

I am thankful I chose not to work in a different profession.  Teaching brought out the best in me.  Although I made mistakes, I benefited people.  I was rewarded for it.  I am one of thousands of retired teachers able to say that.  I fear that today’s teachers twenty years later will not be able to.  Corporate leaders and complicit politicians seek to establish conformity in how and what public school children are taught.  “Efficiency,” they maintain, “enables high achievement.”  (Never mind that all the testing they require and the new curricular material they mandate reap substantial profit)  Eliminate the “bad” teachers and hire young teachers who will “get with the program,” they maintain, and the problem of American public education is solved.  I do not agree.               



Teaching -- The Dull Stuff

 

Last April a high school history teacher with 40 years of experience in public education unloaded on his Syracuse, New York, school district.  With much passion Gerald J. Conti declared: “I have truly attempted to live John Dewey’s famous quotation (now likely cliché with me, I’ve used it so very often) that ‘Education is not preparation for life, education is life itself.’ This type of total immersion is what I have always referred to as teaching ‘heavy,’ working hard, spending time, researching, attending to details and never feeling satisfied that I knew enough on any topic. I now find that this approach to my profession is not only devalued, but denigrated and perhaps, in some quarters despised.   … ‘data driven’ education seeks only conformity, standardization, testing and a zombie-like adherence to the shallow and generic Common Core, along with a lockstep of oversimplified so-called Essential Learnings. Creativity, academic freedom, teacher autonomy, experimentation and innovation are being stifled in a misguided effort to fix what is not broken in our system of public education …”

 

“My profession is being demeaned by a pervasive atmosphere of distrust, dictating that teachers cannot be permitted to develop and administer their own quizzes and tests … or grade their own students’ examinations. The development of plans, choice of lessons and the materials to be employed are increasingly expected to be common to all teachers in a given subject. This approach not only strangles creativity, it smothers the development of critical thinking in our students and assumes a one-size-fits-all mentality more appropriate to the assembly line than to the classroom. Teacher planning time has also now been so greatly eroded by a constant need to “prove up” our worth … that there is little time for us to carefully critique student work, engage in informal intellectual discussions with our students and colleagues, or conduct research and seek personal improvement through independent study. We have become increasingly evaluation and not knowledge driven” (Hannagan 1)”

 

In my school district (Orinda Union School District) at the time that I taught (1960-1991), veteran teachers were valued especially for how well they had learned to teach.  Like Mr. Conti, any teacher worth his salt pushes himself.  He learns by being innovative and by not being afraid to make mistakes.  Eighth grade English teachers have always had to teach the dull stuff: rules of capitalization and punctuation, parts of speech, standard word usage, and correct sentence structure.  The challenge has always been to make it palatable and useful.  Early in my teaching career my students scored well enough each year on the near school year-ending, California-mandated, standardized assessment test.  Their success seemed to me, however, artificial.  Teaching students when to capitalize “mother” and when not to, expecting them to identify adverbs that modify adverbs, and insisting that they know the difference between a direct object and an indirect object seemed like instructing dogs to “sit” and “lie.”  I wanted my students to utilize what I taught!  Motivating them to learn and put into practice all that I taught them indeed requires “creativity, academic freedom, teacher autonomy, experimentation and innovation.”  My school district did not stifle me.  It did not cause me to look over my shoulder.  It allowed me to stretch myself, benefit my students more, and experience great satisfaction.  I am very grateful.

 

I would like to tell you how I instructed.  Please imagine yourself to be a normal eighth grade student in my classroom in 1990, not excited about learning dull subject matter but having enough pride in yourself on most days to persevere.  At the end of the school year this is what you might recall.

 

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Capitalization and Punctuation

 

Lots of drill.  Oh my!  Our teacher wanted us when we write dialogue to recognize spoken sentences within narrative sentences.  Don’t use a period before a “he said.” Ever!  Use a comma, question mark, or exclamation point, depending on what the spoken sentence requires.  Confused?  Here are some examples:

            “I saw your brother yesterday,” he said.

            “Did you see my brother yesterday?” he asked.

            “What a great game!” he shouted.

My teacher, Mr. Titus, never wants to see this:

            “I saw your brother yesterday.” he said.

Or this:

“I saw your brother.” he said.  “At the game.”

We have to understand that end punctuation marks (periods, question marks, and exclamation points) are used at the ends of sentences.  That includes spoken sentences!  If a “he said” interrupts a spoken sentence, I have to mark the interruption with commas, before and after.

            “I saw your brother yesterday,” he said, “at the game.”

            “Did you see my brother,” he asked, “at the game?”

Learning to punctuate dialogue was a bit challenging because it was new to me.  It was kind of interesting.  So also was knowing that commas are needed to isolate one-word responses like “yes” or “heck” that begin sentences.  You also have to separate anywhere in a sentence what our teacher calls nouns of direct address.  Figuring out where to put the commas was kind of like doing a puzzle.

“Don’t close that door, Mark.”

“Dad, pass the butter.”

“Stop singing, stupid, if you know what’s good for you.” 

 

Mr. Titus put our names in the sentences we had to capitalize and punctuate.  What he had us say and do in the sentences was funny.  Shy, polite Kenny was a bully ready to kick butt.  Popular, bubbly Hazel was so shy she hardly spoke.  The class brain was stupid.  The class jock was a coward.  We all looked to find our names and read what he had us saying and doing before we started doing any of the sentences.  This is kind of like what the sentences looked like. 

 

            please don’t hit me you bully carl jenkins cringed if you do he said I’ll tell mr. carbunkle

            I’ll do whatever I want kenny jones growled see that you give me double your lunch money tomorrow he ordered

            unhand that little wimp it was the class hero jonathan turner unhand him this instant or I will smash thrash and render you unconscious

            yes please do samantha mason said I plan to invite him to my party which is this thursday and I don’t want him damaged I need him to bake cupcakes you can come too kenny if you promise to be nice

            hey baby how about you invite me the school lover jake johnson said get a load of this he flexed his right bicep

            wow I certainly will Samantha gushed be still my heart

 

After we got pretty good doing the sentences, Mr. Titus assigned us to write a brief short story scene that used a lot of dialogue.  We had to use at least once each of the following to show that we knew what he had taught us.

 

            Noun of direct address

            One word response at the beginning of a spoken sentence

            An appositive phrase

            A series of words or phrases

            A spoken sentence interrupted by a “he said”

            A spoken sentence that asks a question.

            A spoken sentence or expression that is an exclamation

 

Later in the year, Mr. Titus assigned us to write a three to four-page short story scene.  He also had us write about an autobiographical experience.  We had to use dialogue in both assignments.

 

Proper Word Usage

 

After capitalization and punctuation we learned what Mr. Titus called standard usage.  Take this sentence.

 

            The boy (run, runs) fast.

 

Not even a dummy would choose “run.”  It doesn’t sound right.  How about this sentence?

 

            Each of the high-achieving students (expect, expects) a high grade.

 

Most kids would choose “expect” because it also sounds right, but the correct choice is “expects.”  Before we got into subject/verb agreement and learned why “expects” is correct, Mr. Titus gave us a 20 sentence quiz that looked much like these sentences.

 

1.     I haven’t (did, done) that.

2.     I have (laid, lain) here for three hours.

3.     That girl in the red dress speaks (good, well).

4.     None of the goats (was, were) raised by that farmer.

5.     Sally baked the cake.  I (brought, brung) it to class.

6.     That ugly kid is friends with Jack, Carl and (I, me).

 

When we were finished with the quiz, he told us to write in the upper corner of our papers the number of correct answers we thought we would have.  I wrote “18.”  Then he gave the correct answers.  Here are the answers for the example sentences above.

 

          1.     done; 2. lain; 3. well: 4. was; 5. brought; 6. me

 

I got 12 sentences right, not 18.  Nobody did as well as he or she thought.  The odd-numbered sentences had easy word choices.  The even-numbered ones weren’t so easy, even though we thought so.  Our teacher drew two circles on the blackboard.  They pretty much overlapped.  He labeled one of the circles “conversational.”  The other circle he labeled “standard.”  He said that where the two circles overlapped is where what sounds right and what rules determine to be correct give you the same answer.  He said that because most of our parents are college educated and we learn to use words by what we hear, the overlap between the two circles is fairly large.  It would not be with students in the Los Angeles school where he taught his first year of teaching.  He said that “conversational usage” is what you are accustomed to hearing and what you yourself use in normal situations.  “Standard usage” is determined by specific rules.  It is used by educated people whose profession or social status requires it.  It was his duty to teach us standard usage.  He didn’t mean that we shouldn’t use conversational usage when it was appropriate to do so.  But we needed to know the difference between the two usages and be able to use standard usage when it was needed (like on standardized tests, but, more importantly, when we needed to demonstrate in real life situations an educated command of the English language. 

 

Thereafter, we learned the rules of subject/verb agreement, personal pronoun usage, adjective and adverb usage, agreement of pronouns with their antecedents, irregular verb form usage, all that dull stuff.  He never let us forget what we learned.  Every test he gave us included stuff we had learned earlier.  He’d be testing us about using irregular verb usage (“went” or “gone”) and we’d also have sentences that needed punctuation and that had subject/verb and “I” or “me” choices.  We really learned that stuff.  I also had fun correcting my parents when they used “I” in sentences when they should have used “me.”

 

Grammatical Sentence Structure

 

At the beginning of the year I expected I’d have to learn more about parts of speech.  “Wait until you have to diagram sentences,” my mother warned me.  Well, Mr. Titus didn’t do that.  He didn’t even use the grammar textbook.  We did learn a lot about parts of speech when we covered standard usage.  Especially nouns, pronouns, verbs, and prepositions.  There was a real purpose in being able to recognize them.  (You have to be able to spot a preposition to recognize the object of that preposition and not get fooled thinking the verb that follows it must agree with it  -- One of the boys is [not ‘are”] here).  Near the end of the school year we got into sentence structure.  He really went into what he called adjective and adverb modifiers.  I’m talking about phrases and clauses, not just one word modifiers.  He started off by giving us what he called a fact sheet.  It listed all the kinds of modifiers.  It looked like this:

 

            Adjective Modifiers

 

Adjectives of various types – The tall boy thanked several girls for baking those cakes.

Prepositional (adjective) phrase – The boy in the kitchen is making too much noise.

Participial phrase – The boy sleeping on the sofa is late for school.  This novel, written by John           Steinbeck, is outstanding.

Appositive phrase – My friend, a good student, wants to write a short story.

Relative clause – Bill, who is a good student, reads many books.

 

            Adverb modifiers

 

Adverbs that indicate the manner, place, time, and frequency of an action

            Bill spoke slowly.   Jack studies here.  Tom took his test yesterday.  Max plays basketball often.

Prepositional (adverb) phrases that provide the same information that adverbs do

            Bill spoke with a drawl.  Jack studies in a quiet room.  Tom took his test before noon.  Max played basketball for a month.

Adverb clauses, indicating manner, place, time, frequency, and reason

            Bill spoke as if he were afraid.  Jack studies where it is quiet.  Tom took his test before the other students came into the classroom.

            Max plays basketball whenever his friends ask him.  Because he was tired, Phil took a nap.

 

He had us do practice exercises that looked like this:

 

            (adj. – number) (adj. – descrp.) girls (adj. phr.) sang (adj. – descr.) songs (part. phr.) (adv. cl.)

Three giddy girls from Chicago sang silly songs written by several friends because they were bored.

 

To break the monotony of doing these exercises Mr. Titus occasionally had us play a relay game.  He divided the class into three teams, nine to a team.  Each team numbered its players.  He put three five by eight file cards on the blackboard tray.  Each card had nine numbers and after each number a specific adjective or adverb modifier.  The cards were identical.  This is how they would look.

 

1.     adjective phrase

2.     adverb-place

3.     adverbial clause –time

4.     participial phrase

5.     adverbial clause-reason

6.     appositive phrase

7.     relative clause

8.     adverb phrase-manner

9.     participial phrase

 

When Mr. Titus said, “Go!” the number one player of each team ran to the blackboard, looked at the modifier written after #1, and wrote an answer.  The next player of each team could not run to the blackboard until Mr. Titus said that the answer written on the board by the previous team member was correct.  This continued until all of the players on one of the teams were finished.  If somebody got stuck and couldn’t write a correct modifier, after about ten seconds Mr. Titus would say, “Help!” and the team captain would take over.  It was fun watching everyone getting excited urging his or her team on and laughing at how the kids at the blackboard acted.  (It didn’t hurt that Mr. Titus gave each winning team member a Brach candy)  I noticed when we played the game for the third time that we all had gotten a lot better writing correct answers.  

 

We got familiar with the different places in a sentence where these modifiers are used.  We learned, for instance, that adverbs and adverb clauses can begin a sentence as well as follow the verb or verb phrase that they modify.

 

            Cautiously, he drove through the fog.  Before the bell sounded, Jim headed for the door.

 

Mr. Titus really zeroed in on relative clauses. He showed us that if a relative clause has a certain form of be (is, are, was, were) as its verb, we can delete the relative pronoun (that, who, which) that begins the clause and the form of be that directly follows it and use what is left of the clause as an adjective modifier.

 

            The man who is smoking a cigar knows my brother.  Jack, who is my brother, enjoys football.

            The man smoking a cigar knows my brother.  Jack, my brother, enjoys football.

 

The resulting phrases will be either participial phrases (phrases that begin with a present or past participle) or appositive phrases.  If they modify the subject of the sentence, you can place them at the beginnings of sentences.

 

            Bill, who was smoking a cigar, waved to his friends.     Smoking a large cigar, Bill waved to his friends.

            Jack, who is a very good friend, invited me to his party.     A very good friend, Jack invited me to his party.

 

Mr. Titus gave us a lot of practice adding relative clauses and their deleted forms to simple sentence statements.

 

He also stressed the importance of parallel construction.  When you use “and” or “but,” you have to use the same kind of word, phrase, or clause in front and behind it.

 

            Jack likes big and tall girls.

The cat ran across the lawn and into the street.

The man who reads Steinbeck and whom my sisters think is funny was given an award.

After the clouds gathered but before the rain started, Mother brought her lawn chairs into the garage.

Published in 1967 and read by millions, the best-selling novel was made into a motion picture.

 

After all of this practice, we had to demonstrate that we could write complex, correctly constructed sentences on our own.  Mr. Titus gave us bunches of information about a made-up or real person.
 

Mr. Carbunkle
 

1.     is my seventh grade math teacher

2.     writes weird poetry

3.     is a veteran of the Vietnam War

4.     likes Italian food

5.     drove through a picket fence

 

We had to include all the information about the person in one correctly constructed sentence.  I kind of liked doing this because it was a challenge and because it wasn’t all that hard.  Here is how I would write a sentence about Mr. Carbunkle.

 

My seventh grade math teacher and a veteran of the Vietnam War, Mr. Carbunkle, who likes Italian food and who writes weird poetry, drove through a picket fence.

 

Mr. Titus told us that we shouldn’t always try to write long sentences.  Being clear is what is important.  However, there are times when long sentences are useful.  He also said that when he doesn’t like the sound of one of his long sentences, he looks to see how he constructed it.  Almost always he discovers an error in modifier placement or wrong parallel construction.  He said he likes beginning sentences with participial phrases and that we should try to use them.  He wants us to use everything of the dull stuff that he has taught us in our writing and, when we have to, in our speech.  The more we do this, the more our using it becomes natural.  But we will never get right everything we write on the first try.  Read out loud what you’ve written.  If it doesn’t sound right, you’ve probably used too many words or you might have misplaced or misused one or two modifiers or messed up your parallel construction.  Always go over what you write.  Don’t settle for something that is less than what you can write.

 

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Teaching the dull stuff is essential.  The challenge is getting your students to recognize that it is useful and relevant.  Teaching it takes time and ingenuity, imperatives that teacher-bashing “reformers” refuse to recognize.  Teaching the dull stuff helped me considerably as a writer.  I could not have written the following passage from my novel “Crossing the River” without my knowledge of adjective and adverb modifiers, their placement in complex sentences, and parallel construction.

 

Profit necessitated subservience.  Having failed to achieve it first by use of intimidation and then by economic hardship, King and Parliament had resorted to heavy-handed subjugation.  This redcoat invasion of the country, this desist-or-die attempted confiscation of private property, had inspired armed insurgency. Disdained by Parliament, the aristocracy, and the British mercantile class, these compatriots, these commoners, these Massachusetts toilers this day had attacked militarily the master.  …  Yet they had cheered him [Dr. Joseph Warren].  It was true that he had instructed them, encouraged them, in the end incited them.  He, with others, had brought them to the river that could now be called revolution.  They, knowing full well the danger, had, of their own volition, crossed over (Titus 338-339)!

 

Works cited:

 

Hannagan, Charley.  “Goodbye, Mr. Conti: a Westhill High Teacher's Retirement Letter Hits Home with Students, Parents.”  Syracuse.com.  April 2, 2013.  http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2013/04/goodbye_mr_conti_a_westhill_hi.html.  December 5, 2014.  Web.

 

Titus, Harold.  Crossing the River.  BookLocker.com, Inc.  2011.  Print.   



Teaching -- Common Core Backlash

 

In a previous posting I stated that if I were teaching today, I would leave the profession.  One of my reasons is the imposition of Common Core upon public schools.

 

I have read that Common Core is a compilation of national standards designed by “education experts” -- the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, Achieve, and Student Achievement Partners: all non-governmental groups paid for by the Gates Foundation -- to generate high student achievement in math and language arts.   It is part of President Obama’s “Race to the Top” program, which provides financial assistance to states willing to accept specific requirements such as annual standardized testing to be used to measure teacher effectiveness, the closure of failing public schools, and the expansion of charter schools.  43 states currently have signed on to Race to the Top and Common Core, including my home state Oregon. 

 

Advocates of Common Core declare that elementary and secondary school students will be required to develop a deeper knowledge of math, reading, and written expression, to think more critically, and to apply their enhanced knowledge and skills to real world problems.  This year every state that has accepted Common Core will subject its public school students to as much as 10 hours of rigorous testing to determine how many of them meet the Core standards. 

 

Critics of Race to the Top and Common Core are spokespeople of a growing public backlash.  Teachers' unions and educators state that standardized tests are an inaccurate way to measure teacher effectiveness.  Too many factors inside and outside the school are beyond an individual teacher’s ability to address.  This reality has been ignored.  High-stakes testing, which invite teaching to the test, is by its nature unreliable.  Such education reforms -- pushed by corporate foundations headed most notably by Bill Gates, the Walton family, and the Board family – are agenda-driven, critics say, and unproven.  Political motivation wafts.  “ALEC [the American Legislative Exchange Council] has been ghostwriting bills and passing them out to astroturf organizations around the country to put forward legislation that undermines teachers' unions and helps in this effort to restructure education based on test scores,” Jesse Hagopian, a teacher and union activist in Seattle, Washington, has declared (Blaskey and Horn 1).   

 

As many as 70 percent of Oregon students taking this year’s rigorous Common Core-based tests (for the first time) are expected to fail.  One critic, University of Oregon education professor Jerry Rosiek, whose third-grade daughter is in the Eugene School District, states that standardized tests exacerbate a culture of teaching to the test.  “The tests detract from the quality of education she’s getting.  They require resources and time, and they narrow the curriculum” (Woolington A10).  Moreover, the Eugene school district hasn’t been provided enough time for its instructors to teach the more rigorous curriculum.  Rosiek believes students shouldn’t have to struggle for hours taking a test for which they are not prepared and which will cause them unnecessary anxiety.  The primary beneficiary of high-stakes, mandatory standardized tests, Rosiek maintains, is publishing companies that sell books to prepare students for the tests.  These tests also allow politicians to divert public attention away from the real causes of poor student academic achievement: poverty, the destruction of the core family, and the underfunding of public education.

 

More and more parents across the country are choosing to have their children opt out of taking the Core tests.  States allow parents to do this on religious grounds or to protect their learning disabled children.  Eugene parent Heather Kliever has stated that opting out is the only effective way to challenge the tests because district leaders and school board members, she believes, have not looked critically at the tests.  Her eleven-year-old sixth grade son Alden qualified for the state’s Talented and Gifted programs.  He will be opting out of the Common Core tests.  He has his own views on the matter.  Many of his peers will try to avoid going to school on the day of the tests.  He doesn’t understand the point of them.  His teachers give him frequent quizzes or exams to evaluate what he knows.  “Regular tests are fine.  But just having tests on a computer that takes multiple hours and days, I think it’s a waste of money” (Woolington A10).

 

Diane Ravitch, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education and Research Professor of Education at New York University, agrees.  “Frankly, the idea of subjecting third graders to an eight-hour exam is repugnant, as is the prospect of a 10-hour exam for high school students, as is the absurd [projected] idea of testing children in kindergarten, first, and second grades. All of these tests will be accompanied by test prep and interim exams and periodic exams. This is testing run amok, and the biggest beneficiary will be the testing industry, certainly not students.

 

“Students don't become smarter or wiser or more creative because of testing. Instead, all this testing will deduct as much as a month of instruction for testing and preparation for testing. In addition, states will spend tens of millions, hundreds of millions, or even more, to buy the technology and bandwidth necessary for the Common Core testing … The money spent for Common Core testing means there will be less money to reduce class sizes, to hire arts teachers, to repair crumbling buildings, to hire school nurses, to keep libraries open and staffed, and to meet other basic needs.  States are cutting the budget for schools at the same time that the Common Core is diverting huge sums for new technology, new textbooks, new professional development, and other requirements to prepare for the Common Core.”

 

The sooner Common Core testing dies, “the sooner schools and teachers will be freed of the Giant Federal Accountability Plan hatched in secret and foisted upon our nation's schools. And when it does die, teachers will have more time to do their job and to use their professional judgment to do what is best for each student” (Ravitch 1).

 

Meanwhile, many veteran teachers, like I would, will leave the profession.

 

Sources cited:

 

Blaskey, Sarah and Horn, Steven.  “The Other ALECs’ K12 Education Agenda Exposed.”  Truthout.  July 25, 2012.   Web.  November 8, 2014.

 

Ravitch, Diane.  “Good Riddance to Common Core Testing.”  The Blog: Huff Post Education.  July 3, 2014.  Web.  November 8, 2014  

 

Woolington, Josephine.  “Core Meltdown.” The Register-Guard.  October 26, 2014: A1.  Print.



Teaching -- A Disciple of the Devil Teaches Literature

 

I look back upon my years as a public school teacher with gratitude.  They were fulfilling years.  I was dedicated.  I was permitted to excel.  Today, if I were teaching, I would probably leave the profession. 

 

I would resent being handicapped by lack of funding.  I would abhor being told what and how to teach.  I would excoriate the corporate and political toadies who attack school teachers, claiming they are the primary cause of mediocre-to-poor student achievement, hiding their real purpose, the privatization of public education. 

 

These critics maintain that teachers must be “held accountable,” as if in the past they weren’t.  Standardized test scores determine best a teacher’s effectiveness, they declare.  (Never mind the deleterious effects of poverty and parental disengagement)  If your students do poorly, you’re a bad teacher and should be fired  It doesn’t matter to them that experienced English teachers, for instance, can simultaneously activate thought processes and engage souls – essential accomplishments that standardized tests cannot measure. Why should a teacher have to waste valuable instructional time teaching to a standardized test so that he/she can survive?

 

I was extremely fortunate to have been employed 31 years by the Orinda Union School District.  I was a middle school English and occasional history teacher, mostly of eighth grade students.  Posted on the district’s current website is its 2013 California ranking: “On a 1 to 10 scale, all five Orinda schools received a statewide ranking of 10. This is the fifth consecutive year for all five schools to receive a ‘10.’” You would be correct in guessing that Orinda is an upper middle class suburban community.  It is located approximately two and a half miles east of Berkeley.  Parents expect their children to attend college.  Approximately 90% of them do.  Good inherited genes and high parental expectation contribute greatly to high public school district ratings. 

 

Ample financial resources are also a major contributor.  My colleagues and I used reams and reams of copy machine paper.  I created three-hole folder reading material booklets of short stories, poetry, plays, and excerpts of novels.  Standard usage drill, adjective and adverbial modifier placement, capitalization and punctuation exercises, student writing, spelling lists and vocabulary definitions, all sorts of subject matter tests: all of it I printed on copy machine paper.

 

I was able to order the purchase of class sets of hard-cover paperback books.  Imagine any financially strapped school district consenting to do that today!  The district trusted us.  It provided us ample resources that enabled us to excel.

 

I am extremely grateful that my administrators trusted my judgment.  Early in the 1960s, my colleague next door to me (Joan) and I requested that our school subscribe to “Literary Cavalcade,” a monthly publication printed then, I believe, by Scholastic Magazine.  The publication, geared for high school students, provided high quality short stories, plays, and poetry.  Our students read, along with other titles, Reginald Rose’s “12 Angry Men,” Daniel Keyes’s “Flowers for Algernon,” and William Peden’s “Night in Funland,” each a depiction of life that inspires insightful thinking and empathetic realization!

 

“Night in Funland” is an exceptional short story.  (http://www.amazon.com/Night-Funland-Stories-Literary-Cavalcade/dp/B001DKIPP8)  I didn’t think so at first.  Its two characters did not interest me very much and the story’s ending seemed pointless.  A father and his preteen daughter go to a carnival.  He is concerned about her health.  She persuades him to allow her to ride the Ferris wheel unaccompanied.  He watches her several times swing by and disappear into the night sky.  Greatly concerned, he tells the wheel operator to stop the ride.  He does.  She has disappeared.  Because the story had been printed in “Literary Cavalcade,” I suspected that there had to be much more to the story than I had recognized.  Reading it a second time, I discovered a number of clues that suggested an intriguing explanation for the girl’s disappearance. 

 

Each year thereafter every English class I taught read the story.  Beforehand, I told my students about my initial reaction and warned them that they, too, might respond similarly but that they should trust my reason for requiring them to read it.  After they had done so, I asked them to explain the girl’s disappearance.  I received answers that ranged from “she fell off” to “he was dreaming.”  The following day I had them follow along as I read the story aloud.  I encouraged them to speak up when I read something that they thought might be helpful in interpreting the story.  Throughout, I kept my interpretation to myself.  Student responses were such that I usually needed three class periods to complete the second and sometimes a third reading.

 

By the end of the second reading it was clear to most of them that there was more to the daughter’s disappearance than that the father was having a bad dream.  Illness was clearly an important factor.  His extreme concern for her health was repeatedly demonstrated.  Early in the story we were told that he had promised to take her to the carnival after she had recovered from her illness.  Eventually, a student would venture that her disappearance represented her death.  That produced a new direction of thinking.  He had promised to take her to Funland when she was well, but she had become worse.  The Ferris wheel was the wheel of life.  Her rotations between being seen and disappearing represented her final moments of life.  Assuming this to be true, what then was real, and what was imagined?  The trip to Funland, delusional?  Beneath the carnival story, pushing its way through the father’s denial, in distorted forms, the real story?  At the end of the story -- the father’s anguish – recognition at last that his daughter had died?

 

Besides subscribing to “Literary Cavalcade,” the district purchased specific works of fiction that Joan and I wanted.  In the 1960s our classes read Marjorie Rawlings’s “The Yearling,” John Steinbeck”s “The Pearl,” and George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”  Later, our best classes read Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.”  I had the district buy a class set of “Three Plays by Horton Foote” (published in 1962) to use Foote’s adaptation (which I had seen on television) of William Faulkner’s short story “Tomorrow.”  (The adaptation would be made into a motion picture starring Robert Duvall)   Having my students develop an understanding of and empathy for people less fortunate than and far different from their parents and themselves was a primary objective.  Years later, for that reason, my top classes read Richard Wright’s autobiography “Black Boy.” 

 

Additionally, upon my recommendations, the district purchased class sets of quality juvenile fiction including Robert Lipsyte’s “The Contender,” Glendon Swarthout’s “Bless the Beasts and Children,” and Cynthia Voigt’s “Dicey’s Song.”

 

One book that I have not mentioned is Dick Gregory’s autobiography “Nigger.”  I assigned two of my classes to read most of it in December 1972.  A father of one of my students interfered.  I was called into the principal’s office to meet the man and hear his objections.  The first question he asked me was “Are you a Christian?”  He was a strict fundamentalist.  Not only did he not want his daughter reading Gregory’s book.  He didn’t want anybody else reading it.  I told him I would be happy to substitute another book for his daughter to read but everybody else would read the autobiography.  He demanded that the school board stop me.  He submitted examples in the book of what he considered to be inappropriate language and behavior.  I was provided the opportunity to respond. 

 

Dick Gregory was a comedian and civil rights activist in the 1960s.  Because he had appeared on television, white people like me knew about him.  He had grown up in East St. Louis in abject poverty and had managed to carve out a career as a comedian prior to 1963, the pivotal year of the civil rights movement.  Because he was a black celebrity, he had been asked by movement leaders to participate in demonstrations in the Deep South.  I wanted my students to experience vicariously the racism that he had endured growing up and appreciate the efforts of movement leaders to achieve for their race social advancement.

 

The father’s objections were mostly about specific language that Gregory used.  “Goddamn” especially offended him.  I opened my defense with this statement. 

 

“Mr. … has objected to the use of ‘Nigger’ by Dick Gregory in our schools on religious grounds.  For this reason alone his demand should be rejected.  One’s own adherence to a religion and interpretation of scripture must never influence the curriculum of and material used in a public school.  The reasons are obvious and need not be stated here.  Since he may cause some people now to question my judgment in using this book, I will, however, comment on all of Mr. …’s exhibits, the merit of ‘Nigger,’ and the value of one of the two books he has suggested as substitute reading.”

 

The father had provided several “exhibits”: examples of what he believed were foul language.  I answered his exhibits first with questions.  Examples:

 

“Is this scene significant to your understanding of Richard’s condition of existence or is it included only to excite the reader with crude language?”

 

“Are the ‘bad’ words here used unrealistically?  Do they seem part of the natural expression of the people speaking?’

 

“Why is the father, at one time good-natured, then suddenly violent, then remorseful, and then proudly defensive of his wife?”

 

“Which more effectively makes the point – a textbook statement that American society places so many restrictions upon the black father’s attempts to fulfill his responsibilities that many abandon their families and their responsibilities, or this specific example of it and its effects upon the members of his family?”

 

I categorized the words that the father had cited.  The first category included words like “damn,” “hell,” “ass,” and “pee.”  49% of the words the father objected to I placed in this category.  The second category included “bitch,” “bastard,” goddamn,” and “bullshit” -- 35 % of the words the father listed.  The third category featured words identifying the sex act.  16% of the words the father objected to fell into this category.

 

I provided context. 

 

It was “too cold to study in the kitchen so I did my homework under the covers with a flashlight.  Then I fell asleep.  And one of the other five kids must have peed on it.”

 

After a joke that Gregory had told a white audience: “Wouldn’t it be a hell of a thing if all this was burnt cork and you people were being tolerant for nothing?”

 

Thinking of his fear while walking alone through a Southern town at night after a day’s demonstration, Gregory wrote: “And I thought about [what President Roosevelt said] that there was nothing to fear but fear itself, and I said: ‘Bullshit.’”

 

Afterward, I wrote these comments:

 

“Words like damn and hell used 25 times in 209 pages of reading matter seem harmless when I consider the experiences that Mr. Gregory speaks about and the reasons for their use.”

 

“Most of the words in class two are used because of strong provocation or by people who are intended to be looked upon unfavorably by the reader.  How can an author portray accurately a despicable person by withholding part of that which is despicable?  How can an author present an ugly but important condition of existence without presenting the people that make it so or are destroyed by it?”

 

“Class three words appear eight times in the book.  On seven of the eight occasions the people using this language had provocation.”

 

“I am … surprised that Mr. … finds more objectionable a word or expression than the action or condition which caused it or of which it is a part.  Example – p. 171.  Mr. Gregory is involved in a civil rights demonstration in Greenwood, Mississippi.

 

     “The police seemed disorganized.  They tried to break us up again and one of them shoved a woman pretty hard.  She stumbled and smashed her head against a brick wall and fell on the sidewalk.

     “One of the SNCC workers couldn’t stand that, and he turned on the cop.  They dragged him off into a police car, and five cops climbed in after him and started working on his head and stomach.  One of the cops was saying in a loud voice, mostly for the benefit of the other demonstrators; ‘George, gimme ma knife …  I’m gonna cut the balls right off this little nigger, he ain’t never gonna do nothin’ no more.’”

 

“Which deserves more censure – a particular condition of existence or action that is cruel and dehumanizing or a word or expression from a person involved?”

 

Concluding his written presentation, the father gave specific reasons for wanting the book banned.  I answered this way:

 

“Who is Mr. … to say that any person’s life must have at its highest purpose pleasing God?”

 

“Who is Mr. … to say that Dick Gregory’s words and actions indicate he is not following the commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself”?  How can this be said of a man who in the contents of this book tried to help juvenile delinquents in Detroit, performed before convicts in prison, fought against discrimination in the North, co-sponsored the delivery of 14,000 pounds of food to poor blacks in Mississippi, initiated the release from prison of a black man whose crime was attempting to enroll in an all-white university in Mississippi, and risked his life many times in demonstrating his opposition to Southern racism?”

 

“Who is Mr. … to suggest that children be sheltered from what is wrong and unjust in society?  It is a cruel fact that many of our problems persist in large part because of the lack of awareness or apathy of a large segment of our population.  How can you correct much less want to correct problems when you don’t know what they really are?”

 

“It is clear to me that Mr. …’s religious convictions will not permit him to see beyond certain words, phrases, and incidents to assess, as thirteen and fourteen-year-old students do, what is truly significant.”

 

I went on the state what I believed to be the merits of “Nigger.”  The superintendent of schools and my principal were pleased with my rebuttal.  The school board appointed a committee of several objective-minded, respected residents of the community to read the book and present their opinions.  These individuals sided in my favor.

 

This bizarre experience had two ironic outcomes.

 

First, after my classes had finished reading “Nigger,” all of the paperback copies were placed in the librarian’s safekeeping until the school board reached its determination.  The next fall I decided to use the autobiography but found that, due to the dilapidated condition of the books, the librarian had thrown away all but three or four.

 

Second, the father at some point during our dispute stated that he wanted to “bring down the wrath of God upon Mr. Titus.”  In his eyes I was a “disciple of the devil.”  Near the end of the Christmas vacation I strained my back and shortly thereafter contracted pneumonia.  I missed about two weeks of school.

 

Try as I had to divert student attention away from the man’s daughter, I wonder to this day how much embarrassment and anxiety the girl must have felt during those several weeks of strife.

 

Speaking for my colleagues as well as for myself, thank you, Orinda Union School District, for making a career teaching your community’s children such a fulfilling achievement.