Where we go from here

I've been reading a few things recently:

Turning Learning Right Side Up by Russel L. Ackoff and Daniel Greenberg

Reflections on the Sudbury School Concept edited by Mimsy Sadofsky and Daniel Greenberg

and lots of other stuff too, but those two have been interesting, to say the least.

I heard about the Sudbury Valley School from my sister, as she considered it as an option for my nephew who is apparently doing very well in a public school near their home so I won't get to hear about it from them. Not yet anyway.

So I poked through their website, ordered a couple books, and found that I am not the only person who finds fault in the current system of public education, even in one of its supposedly most successful and "best" school systems.

One of the major concepts of both books is the conflict between democratic society and our major systems of education which are almost exclusively autocratic in nature. The authors in both books often ask the question: How is it possible to help young people to learn to function effectively in a democratic society by training them in an entirely autocratic one for the duration of adolescence?

Good question.

I'd argue that it works very very well, depending on what your goals for that "education" are. Today I was sitting in the classroom with another class where Freshmen were more than willing to send out the troops to quell a rebellion if the lower classes got upset about the concentration of power and wealth in the ruling class. They were giggling about it. "SEND OUT THE PANZERS" one of them yelled. Clearly something is working...

Another post for another time perhaps.

I decided that I'd like to create a more democratic environment within my classroom, but it will be interesting to see how much of that is possible given the constraints of the autocratic system within which all of us function.

The first task, I decided, was to try and figure out exactly what the students in a given class are expected to learn by the end of the year. Getting this information is not difficult, but actually figuring out what is meant by the curriculum writers can be a tad more complicated than you'd expect.

Maybe you'd like to take a shot at interpreting it.

Here are the goals for the English IVH class:

Students will employ sophisticated ideas, specific and illustrative content, precise language, and logical organization as a speaker in forma l and informal settings.

Students will demonstrate responsiveness and engagement while listening in formal and informal settings.

Students will read and evaluate texts for literacy value and personal application through detailed elaboration and extension of ideas, insights, and reflections.

Students will identify, analyze, and evaluate writer’s intent in non-fiction.

Students will make challenging individual reading selections, complete books on their own, and demonstrate through understanding of what they have read, extending beyond the literal to the personal, critical, and/or evaluate.


Students will consistently and independently identify and employ an appropriate writing mode to engage a specific audience, address a specific purpose, and arrive at a product assessed at highest levels of the PA Wr5iting Assessment Holistic Scoring Guide.

Students will consistently and independently apply writing conventions through composition, personal revision, and peer editing/criticism to arrive at a product assessed at highest levels of the PA Writing Assessment Holistic Scoring Guide.

Students will independently choose and thoroughly research a topic of personal significance and synthesize information in order define, verify and present a point of view.

Attendance

Today I was reminded via email to submit attendance for a class that ISN'T EVEN HERE! The seniors are out of school to do their senior projects but we still have to take attendance. We mark that they are all here.... I happened to be working on this for another presentation:

Schools are all about numbers. Especially public schools. Numbers determine how many teachers you hire. Numbers determine how much funding you get. Numbers determine whether your teachers are effective. Numbers determine whether your school is passing or failing. Numbers even tell you how much your students are (or aren’t) learning.

The most vital part of a teacher’s job is to collect these numbers. They are equipped with planning books, attendance sheets, the latest in software programs that track student progress in numeric form. They are trained during their in-service meetings on how to use suites of new software, which constantly evolves to get the numbers right, to say nothing of giving software engineers that didn’t get to design games something to do.

One of the most important numbers teachers gather is attendance. If the students aren’t in school, the school doesn’t get paid for them. If the students aren’t in school, they are likely involved in some illegal activity and their parents are responsible for them, the last thing anyone wants. So over the years, one of the most common things for every teacher in every classroom was to take attendance. It may have involved chiseling marks onto a stone tablet,. It may have involved taping a sheet to the door once attendance was taken. It may have involved punch cards or scan-tron sheets, and often nowadays it only takes a few clicks of the mouse. No more chiseling for us!

Technology makes everything better but in this case it wasn’t really making any difference. It allowed for attendance to be sent to the main office electronically, but the results were no more impressive than when a student collected the sheets and they were compiled by a secretary. Now reports are run and teachers have to pore over excel spreadsheets to check up on students that might be gaming the system, no time has been saved, errors are still made, and the Numbers are not happy.

Enter RFiD. This is bound to make all the numbers and those who celebrate them stand up and sing. Oddly enough, teachers might be excited too, though that should generally only be used as an inverse function of success.

With doorways equipped with RFiD scanners, students need only wear or have their student ID’s on them at all times and they the system will automatically be aware of their location within the school. It will also record if they leave the building. If a student leaves their RFiD at home, luckily we will have a second one implanted in their laptops so there will be a backup system. As we’ve seen with EZ Pass, even if students run down the hallway at full speed, we’ll still get them

Suddenly incompetent teachers can’t get in the way of numbers. Overburdened secretaries can’t delay their triumph each and every day. Substitutes won’t be fooled by Jane calling here when Kristen’s name is called. Debates about who was tardy and who stayed in the bathroom too long will vanish, the numbers don’t lie. The numbers can’t lie.