The Flat World and Education – Recommended Reading

Posted on November 29, 2010 by Mike

I am currently reading The Flat World and Educatioon by Linda Darling-Hammond. Actually, I have been currently reading it for some time. I began it in October on the train to and from Minnesota.  I have laid it aside from time to time to allow other books and periodicals to “play through.” Therefore, I am still currently reading it.

I will concede at the outset that it is not a quick or light book to read. Her arguments and the material that she presents to support them are plentiful, voluminous, and dense. You may want to “warm up” on another excellent book: The Death and Life of the Great American School. It is shorter and moves faster. Both are rather critical of “reform” as advocated by the “Reformists,” The Politicians, Pundits, Polemicists, and all too many Professors Who, of All People Should Know Better, and members of The Billionaire Boys’ Club (Ravitch’s term). Both approach the problem from different directions.

Darling-Hammond arguments follow two main lines. She laments great disparities in American schools and recognizes it as being a very real problem. She attributes this largely to the consequences of disparities in funding, not just rich-district, poor-district, but deliberate disparities within the same district. This is ground plowed by Jonathan Kozol in Savage Inequalities (1991), but, further laments Darling-Hammond, after a brief period of improvement in the 1990s, things are getting worse again and any gains are being lost.

But the main thing that distinguishes this book is that Darling-Hammond looks at countries such as Finland, Korea, and Singapore that are vaunted by the Reformists as out-performing American schools.  She looks closely at what, specifically, schools in these countries do that accounts for much of their success. And it is anything but what the Reformists would have you believe. She also looks at what some schools in the United States are doing that seems to be making a difference.

A brief review like this one is necessarily very superficial. I think that in future posts,I would like to share ideas as I come to them – sort of like reading notes.

Posted in Education Reform | 1 Comment

Forty Seven Years Ago Today

Posted on November 23, 2010 by Mike

Nov. 22, 1963, I had no early classes, so I was poking about my room, getting ready to walk to campus, the other side of downtown. I had the radio on, but was paying no attention. I heard a shriek from downstairs. After a moment or two, I decided I had better go investigate. My landlady was quite a drinker and not always steady on her feet. I thought perhaps she had fallen and needed help. Just as I started out the door, the radio programming was interrupted. The DJ or whatever – I forget what I was listening to – said the station had gotten word that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. He allowed that if it was a joke, it wasn’t very funny. Almost immediately, he interrupted again and said that it had come over the wire service and must be authentic. I never got downstairs. My landlady had seen it live on TV; that was what I had heard.

I listened for a while and then set forth for campus. Downtown Reno was surrealistic. Even then, the place never shut down. But on this morning, downtown was empty. There was no traffic. There was no one on the street. The clubs’ doors were open, but they too seemed empty. Even the gaming tables had been deserted by their dealers. It was like some science fiction movie – Quiet Earth, perhaps. Actually, the clubs weren’t completely deserted. All the people had gathered at the bars where there were TVs. Campus was deserted too, and all classes had been canceled.

A few days later the clubs closed for the first time in many years for the official day of mourning. But it was just like Sunday anywhere else, not half as strange as the 22nd

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Performance Reviews

Posted on November 21, 2010 by Mike

This summer, 7-9-2010 to be exact, on NPR, I heard a review of Samuel Culbert’s book Get Rid of the Performance Review. Although Culbert’s book is aimed at the corporate world, I was struck by how many of his points seem relevant to the knotty problem of teacher evaluation. A summary of the story and further comments by Culbertson can be found at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128362511&ps=cprs

A touchy issue at the best of times, teacher evaluation has become an occasion of outright paranoia in this era of education “reform,” when Politicians, Pundits, Polemicists, and more than a few Professors, who of all people, ought to know better, seem united in the same chorus of “solutions.” Their ideas of “teacher accountability” seem to consist mostly of “slap those teachers into line, kick their butts, and fire more of them – a lot more of them.” Understandably, may teachers, even – especially – good ones become concerned, even fearful, wondering “How will I be evaluated, by whom, upon what criteria? Will I be set up to fail”? After all, as Culbert says, “employees … have a lot at stake – from a raise or a promotion to the general arc of their career.”

The point of relevance between the corporation and the public school system is that both are hierarchical organizations of bosses and the bossed. I must say that I do not see how all forms of evaluation should be abolished, nor should they be. And when Culbert says the performance evaluation should be abolished, that “nothing is better than something,” I think he means the evaluation as it is all too often practiced: a misguided institution that is “just plain bad management” and is often counterproductive.

Culbert calls the process “fraudulent.” It becomes a game, in which the employee tells the boss what he wants to hear and shows him what he wants to see. The employee is in a defensive position. The “boss” plays intimidation games to enhance his authority, because that is what he perceives that his boss wants to see. Employees are insecure about their careers; managers are insecure about their authority. This discourages the employee from speaking his mind, and it discourages the kind of “candid discussions about problems in the workplace – and their potential solutions,” the honest discourse that the organization needs to develop the new ideas necessary for improvement and progress.

I have seen how this works. For example, some years ago while I was a Building Representative, a distraught first year teacher came to me about her poor year-end evaluation. She had had her share of rookie problems. I had advised her to go to her supervisor for advice and assistance – of which she received little. Now, every Needs Improvement was “documented” with the comment “by her own admission.”

“Don’t get me wrong: Reviewing performance is good; it should happen every day. But employees need evaluations they can believe, not the fraudulent ones they receive. They need evaluations that are dictated by need, not a date on the calendar. They need evaluations that help them improve…”

As for using statistics (such as test scores) to evaluate performance, Culbert says “…one dimensional measurements can bring a new set of problems….Once you set up the metrics, that’s the only focus for the employee….not what … is necessary for the company [or school] to get the results that really matter.” Such narrow-spectrum evaluation can actually dumb down a curriculum by discouraging teachers from venturing out of safe (required) channels. It can partially absolve an administrator of the need to know an effective teacher when he sees one.

I know it is politically correct to look only at “output,” i.e. test scores and disparage “input,” i.e. things like funding, adequate physical plants, textbooks, curriculum, and, not least of all, what the teacher actually does in the classroom. I have observed that it is these inputs that are all-important. Without them, output – across the entire program – is unlikely to accrue.

So, if we do not do away with the performance review, exactly, let’s do away with the one-shot, year-end performance review as it is too often practiced. It is too easy for a lazy principal (they are at least as common as lazy teachers) to pay little attention to what his teachers are doing most of the year, as long as it does not cause him bother. Then, at the end, when he must pull a performance review out of the hat, it is too often based on a single observation and some arbitrary criteria, such as scores on this particular test or that. That is what needs to be abolished. It doesn’t serve “Reform,” much less the on-going business of the school. That is what we are better off without.

Posted in Education Reform, School Program, Teacher Accountability | Comments Off on Performance Reviews

Pay to Play

Posted on November 17, 2010 by Mike

Recently, I went to the John Best High School Orchestra Festival at the Morrison Center on the Boise State University campus. Eleven high school orchestras from around the valley  represented their respective schools. There were 190 young musicians on the large stage. It was impressive in every way. But some serious problems are lurking in the wings, problems that endanger the very music programs that make such performances possible.

I don’t think it is news to anyone that the recession has cut into school funding. As tax revenues decline, legislatures are faced with the choice of cutting budgets or raising tax rates. The latter not a politically viable option in most places, certainly not in Idaho. For a time, public schools were sheltered from the heaviest cuts endured by other public agencies. But as state “rainy day” funds and district reserves are depleted and federal stimulus funds run out, the inevitable occurs: hiring is frozen, teachers are laid off, class sizes increase, and whole programs deemed not essential are pruned from the tree.

Thus it has been in Idaho, thus it has been in many other states, and thus, it appears, it will continue to be for the foreseeable future. According to Dan Popkey of The Idaho Statesman, legislative leaders anticipate that the economy will continue to deteriorate, and even more stringent cuts will be necessary in the coming session.

In addition, many small districts are facing the problem of raising test scores to satisfy the Adequate Yearly Progress timeline mandated by No Child Left Behind. Schools that fall behind face draconian sanctions. Ultimately, the survival of the district as an independent entity is at stake.  Different districts deal with the pinch in different ways. The district must direct diminishing resources toward the most pressing problem.  Because extra-curricular and co-curricular activities are not tested and are expensive, they are seen as a good place to make cuts, both to save money and to free up time for instruction that directly supports these high-stakes (for the schools, if not the teachers) tests.

Cutting has begun and there will likely be more before there is less. The Melba, Idaho, school district has discontinued its entire music program. Athletic programs seem safe for now, but may eventually face their turn on the chopping block.

What to do? What to do? A commonly proposed solution to such a dilemma is “pay to play.” The sport, activity, or program is supported by fees paid by participants, sort of a user fee. What could be fairer?

At first, this seems a simple solution to a knotty problem, but it poses its own dilemma and raises some serious questions.  Are activities, extracurricular and co-curricular, sports, music, theater, etc, “frills” that may be enjoyable to participants and spectators, but which serve no educational purpose, or do they address the school’s educational mission – are they  part of the educational program?

First, and not least important, extracurricular and co-curricular programs keep some kids in school and engaged in school. For these marginal kids, a whole boring and –to them – day is made bearable by one activity they can relate to and participate in with real enthusiasm. It is a connection. Call it “coddling,” but it seems to work. Sometimes, this will happen with a class, also. Years ago, I had a student who showed up faithfully to my Creative Writing class. After some weeks, I learned that he had been expelled and wasn’t even supposed to be in the building. Granted this is anecdotal and I have no hard data at hand, but I have seen it virtually every  year.

Do these activities have an effect on classroom performance? I think so. It is easy to explain the essay, with its thesis and support, to a debater. Just say “affirmative case.” The connection is immediate. The benefit of other activities is less obvious, the links less direct, but I think it is there, especially music and theatre. Again, my “evidence” is subjective observation, not hard data. I have read references to studies that show a connection between learning a musical instrument and mathematical ability. It seems that music and math are both centered in the same areas of the brain and share some circuitry. Has anyone done formal studies of the connection between activities and academics? I would like to think so and would like to know of them. If not, here are dissertation topics aplenty for doctoral candidates.

This brings us to the problem with “pay to play.” If activities benefit academics, then they are part of the total educational program of the school, and to make the student pay to participate in them would seem to violate the principle of a free public education. Participation in these activities might, in fact, actually work to raise those test scores. If not, they are indeed frills, pleasant amenities, no more.  If they are not educationally germane, we might ask if they have a place in the school at all.

Either way, “pay to play” sounds a lot like “perks for the privileged,” antithetical to the purpose of the public school, historically the most egalitarian of American institutions.

http://www.idahostatesman.com/2010/09/19/1345532/dire-talk-about-2011-legislature.html

http://www.idahostatesman.com/2010/05/20/1199431/melba-pulls-plug-on-music.html

Posted in Curriculum, School Program | 1 Comment

Teacher Evaluation, contd.

Posted on November 5, 2010 by Mike

A friend writes concerning the problem of employee evaluation in her field, nursing. But I suspect that evaluation is less of a problem for nurses if only because I imagine that in nursing there is more general agreement on what the best practices are. In the school world, there is little such consensus. In fact, the whole question of “best practice” can be highly politicized.

For example, long ago, in a hypothetical school district in a distant galaxy, a new Superintendent hired a new high school Principal and appointed a new Director of Special Education. We had always thought that our special education department was pretty good and that our colleagues there were more-than-competent people. Suddenly, they were all being hammered in their evaluations, being rated incompetent in all categories. What had happened that they suddenly went from being a good department to being bad, from being good teachers to being bad? Mostly, the instructional model, and therefore the evaluation criteria, changed, effective immediately, with the change in management. The existing model that had been in place for many years called for highly individualized instruction. The new model was “Direct Instruction.” Suddenly, everyone was doing essentially the exact opposite of “correct” practice. The implication was that they had been doing everything wrong all along. Some were fired. Some went elsewhere, disgusted. A few outlasted the madness. Nothing had changed except the criteria. Nobody saw it coming. It was purely top-down.

As it turned out, Direct Instruction did not work very well, and after everyone had turned themselves upside down and inside out to embrace it, it sort of went away again.

So what was going on here? I have my own, admittedly cynical, analysis. The Superintendent was brought in by what I call a “True Constituency,” a small but vocal and influential group with strong ties to some of the Board members. These people had philosophical issues with the Principal of the high school and certain of the more outspoken faculty. I am convinced that he was hired, at least in part, to “clean house.”

One way he accomplished this was by “evaluating” the high school. He hired a consultant (and crony) to conduct an “Effectiveness Audit” to show that this school was badly run, with an incompetent Principal. Teachers, and other employees I suppose, tend to be anxious whether a new evaluation system will be honest and fair, or whether it will be contrived to “punish” them. In this case, one example was the consultant’s conflating the per-capita income of a model district that was chosen for comparison with the mean household income of our district. The comparison district was with an affluent suburban district, Oak Park, Illinois, or some such. The demographics were apples and chickens, not really a fair comparison. I did not realize this until later when I got hold of a copy of the report and read it carefully.

One of an administrator’s talking points, when he is interviewing for a new position, is problem solving. That requires identifying a problem that needs solving. The candidate who said, “this is a well-run district with well-run schools; I will be a careful steward and make incremental improvements as needed,” would be “dead on arrival.” He identifies a problem, and then he “solves” it his first year on the job. If there is no problem, something must be made to look like a problem. “Solving” it frequently involves some “house cleaning.” It worked. The Principal went to administrate in a neighboring state. A targeted teacher (a national Teacher of the Year finalist, by the way) left the classroom to write a book.

Furthermore, with a new high school in the works, the new Superintendent had reason to cast the existing school as the “bad” school so that the school that opened on his watch could be the “good” school. We got a new Principal to slap us into line. The result was that new teachers were bullied mercilessly, poor evaluations being one weapon used, and several of our better, more experienced teachers left for less hostile environments.

I am trying to suggest why employees are right to be concerned with how they will be evaluated, by whom, and according to what criteria. Teachers are probably especially concerned about evaluation because of the complexity of the educational enterprise, not only its size and organizational complexity, but its methods, its goals, its constituency, its clientele, and because if its susceptibility to politicization, both from within and from without.

What came of this bad time? For one thing, we started to develop a new model for teacher evaluation. This was as much the union’s initiative as the district’s, and it is negotiated into the master contract each year. The district likes it because it is a framework for teacher accountability. The union likes it because it is a way a teacher can document what he does. The old year-end checklist, although quick and easy, could be very much a ‘tis-‘t ain’t proposition if a teacher didn’t agree with some rating. It was sort of a mash-up of Charlotte Danielson and NSSE best practices. As I wrote my beginning-of-year professional development plan and my year-end summary, these criteria gave me focus. Although I don’t necessarily do day-by-day lesson plans, when a visitation is scheduled, I do a lesson plan and e-mail it to the administrator in advance so he will know exactly what he is seeing. Then there are also unscheduled visitations. This sounds like a lot more work than in the good old days, and it is. But if I am not doing my job, I will have a lot harder time hiding it from the administration. And if I take the process seriously, it will be a lot harder for a clueless or vindictive administrator to blindside me with arbitrary or capricious actions.

I have never taught in one of those really bad schools that I read about all the time, although I recognize that all too many of them exist. Their failures should be a cautionary tale to all of us. And there are brilliantly achieving schools which surely have practices worthy of emulation. Good teacher evaluation can drive real improvement. But if I seem to be suggesting that the union is not the problem, but part of the solution, you read me right. Never mind that the Politicians, Pundits, Polemicists, and all too many Professors Who Know Better would have you believe otherwise. They have their own various agendas which, I have decided, have to do with everything but the actual improvement of the nation’s schools.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Good Teachers and Bad

Posted on November 1, 2010 by Mike

I taught for 44 years. The bulk of that experience was in public high schools. I was fortunate that in all that time, I never taught in a truly bad school, such as are depicted in the media as being typical, if not universal. I think I was also fortunate that I never taught in a top-tier public high school such as seem to be found primarily in affluent suburbs. Nor did I ever teach in an exclusive private school of the sort that many of our Politicians seem to have attended, and such as virtually all Politicians’ children seem to attend. The two schools that I worked in the longest were a smallish high school in a small town (10 years) and a largish high school in a small city (28 years). Both of these schools served the majority of their students reasonably well; a few were served very well indeed; and a few were served not so well at all, alas.

In spite of my experience, or perhaps because of it, I recognize there is a wide range in the quality of American public schools. There are public high schools that rival the most exclusive private prep schools and “broken” schools that can most charitably be described as dysfunctional. I think I taught somewhere in the center; I think my experience is fairly typical.

I am disturbed that these days all public schools and the very concept of public education are being tarred with the worst-case brush. There is a veritable media machine pushing this agenda. Although I haven’t seen it yet, Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for Superman seems to be a case in point.

Likewise, there is a wide range in the quality of teachers within those public schools. Hollywood shows us brilliant, charismatic teachers who instantly and dramatically transform the lives of each and every one of their students in two hours. Although I have never seen such a “star” in action, I have worked with a surprising number who come close. The majority of teachers I have seen are qualified, well-meaning, hard-working professionals who do (subject to a bewildering degree of internal and external factors) more good than harm. There are also some who no doubt do more harm than good, usually by virtue of not doing much – whether because of not knowing what, or how, or simply not being so inclined. And at the far end of the continuum, there are Toxic Teachers whose classes are an overwhelmingly negative experience, often destructive  for many of their students.

I am disturbed that all teachers these days, and especially those who belong to unions, are being tarred with the worst-case brush as incompetent if not outright malicious. I am not talking about the traditional Hollywood stereotype of non-stellar teachers as petty tyrants and/or clueless boobs. I am talking about such anti-teacher campaigns as the Los Angeles Times publishing teachers’ “value added” ratings based on district-provided test scores. New York City schools want to do much the same thing. This is being done in the name of “transparency,” but strikes me as being more of a mean-spirited “outing.” You know, like the recent incident at Rutgers, and with similar results, in L.A., anyhow.

The perennial problem with this good teacher/bad teacher business is telling the difference: what criteria, what instruments, what methods, what persons doing the evaluating and to what end. We all think that we know a good teacher or a bad teacher when we see one, and at the extremes of the spectrum, the difference is probably obvious enough, but in the great, gray middle, the difference can be very much in the eye of the beholder.

Posted in Education Reform, Teacher Accountability | Comments Off on Good Teachers and Bad

Grading the Teachers, part 2

Posted on October 4, 2010 by Mike

The L. A. Times published the school district’s test scores by teacher, by name, on or about August 14, 2010. The picture accompanying the article was of John Smith, a “bad” teacher. This struck me at the time as being gratuitous teacher bashing. After all, no Politician ever lost a vote, no Pundit ever failed to gain circulation or air time, no Polemicist ever lost devotees, no Professor ever lost his bid for tenure by denigrating the nation’s public schools and by bashing its teachers for their own respective political and career agendas. Perhaps it has moved beyond that and become a favorite sport, like cyber-bullying seems to have become among youth.

September 28, 2010, the Idaho Statesman reported the apparent suicide of a teacher who, according to friends and colleagues, was distraught since the publication of his rating as a “less effective teacher,” based on his students’ math test scores.

The L. A. Times defended its publication of teacher ratings because “”because it bears directly on the performance of public employees who provide an important service, and in the belief that parents and the public have a right to judge the data for themselves.” “…the type of teacher rankings published by the Times, known as ‘value-added,’ shouldn’t be used as the sole criteria to measure effectiveness,” said district Superintendent Ramon Cortines. Boys and girls, can you say “disingenuous?”

To borrow a turn of phrase, for what it’s worth, “There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.”

Read more: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2010/09/27/1357650/union-low-ranking-a-factor-in.html#ixzz11Lfbpt5s

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-teachers-value-20100815,0,2695044.story

Posted in Education Reform, Teacher Accountability, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Grading the Teachers, part 2

Teacher Bonuses

Posted on September 29, 2010 by Mike

The Politicians, Pundits, Polemicists, and even some Professors who, of all people, should know better, keep telling us that teachers, especially union members, keep up a mindless litany of “no” at any suggestion of progress. Well, there are some proposed reforms that we are skeptical about. And there are others that are downright insulting, if you think about them a little.

One sacred cow of Reform is Pay for Performance, or Performance Pay, or Incentive Pay – essentially what used to be called Merit Pay. Merit Pay developed a bad reputation among teachers as they thought about some Administrator, with who knows what agenda, deciding, based on who knows what criteria, who has merit and who does not. It probably seemed a bit like having a pastor, appointed by who knows what hierarchy, make the decision of who in his flock will be Elect and who will be Lost. Most Ps don’t use the term Merit Pay anymore. But Pay for Performance? What is wrong with that? What could possibly be wrong with being paid a bonus for doing what was supposed to be your job in the first place?

Where to begin? It has been my experience that most teachers (what to do about the exceptions is a topic unto itself) do what they can with what is available to them, within the administrative structure of the district in which they teach. Teachers seldom have much say in configuring the fields on which they play.  Of course they expect to be paid for what they do, but that is a separate issue, in most cases. In many states, teachers’ unions are restricted by law to negotiating salaries and insurance only. Structural matters and school governance issues are off-limits. If teachers feel hampered by a weak or non-existent attendance policy, for example, resulting in poor attendance and out-of-control truancy, that issue is non-negotiable. At least it was where I taught. In lean budget years, there may be over-sized classes with an unfavorable student/teacher ratio. In lean years, there may be no budget to replace lost, damaged, or obsolete books.  That is what I mean when I say that most teachers feel that they are already doing all that they can, with what is available with them, within the system in which they teach. Most teachers find the implication that they are deliberately holding back, but might actually do their jobs if paid more, insulting.

Many teachers have problems with the terms used to define performance. The American public school is a most complex institution with a complex constituency, a complex student body, and a complex mission. Teaching is a complex enterprise placing many often competing demands upon the teacher. In Reformist parlance, performance equates with test scores. Test scores are an indicator of a teacher’s performance, for sure, but one of many.  Furthermore, test scores are dependent on many underlying factors beyond the classroom teacher’s control. . Over-reliance on scores trivializes the educational enterprise in general and any individual teacher’s job in particular, many teachers feel.

But the  biggest problem with  basing teacher pay on student performance as measured by standardized tests is that it may simply not work that way.

The Nashville, Tennessee school system offered teachers of grades 5-8 bonuses of $5.000, $10,000, and $15,000 (funded by a private donor) for meeting goals in annual test-score gains, as part of a Vanderbilt University study of teacher compensation systems. The experimental group was offered the bonuses. The control group was not. There were no other variables such as professional development or mentoring between the two groups. In the end, there was no measurable difference in performance between the two groups. The conclusion was that the bonuses failed to motivate teachers to increased performance simply because teachers do what they can with what is available to them, within the administrative structure of the district in which they teach.

I am not surprised. Teachers are skeptical of at least one piece of Reformist ideology for good reason, it seems. Reality trumps ideology every time.

http://www.idahostatesman.com/2010/09/21/1348328/study-teacher-bonuses-dont-affect.html

http://www.idahostatesman.com/2010/09/21/1348627/study-bonuses-for-teachers-dont.html

Posted in Education Reform, Teacher Accountability, Teacher Compensation, Teacher's Unions | Comments Off on Teacher Bonuses

Figurative Language

Posted on September 21, 2010 by Mike

A friend recently sent me this list of examples of student writing. You have probably seen it before. It follows the comments.

We English teachers (and perhaps others, if they assign writing) have always had our little chuckles over student bloopers and clunkers. And some of these do clunk! This list is an old friend to me. This is the severalth time I have been sent it in recent years. These are golden  oldie-moldies by now. I assume they are real. Perhaps they are urban legends. It doesn’t matter.

But I am no longer so easy about laughing at it  as I used to be,  for there  is some bad news implied here and some good news, although it is probably not what you think.

The bad news: Politicians, Pundits, Polemicists, and even some Professors who really know better love lists like this. They present them as proof that today’s kids are a bunch of dummies who can’t write, and today’s teachers are a bunch of dummies (or worse) who can’t (or won’t) teach kids to write. The 4Ps never wrote anything this stupid, that’s for sure! Just ask them.

The good news: At worst, these kids are starting to explore the possibilities of figurative language, even if they aren’t using it very skillfully, yet. After you have taught writing for a while, you learn to be careful how you critique bad writing. You learn the value of tact.  Rest assured, that as soon as a student gets the feeling that his attempt is being ridiculed, he will not try anything like it again soon. We have taught a kid to be safe, to write only safe (and dull) stuff, a poor lesson. At worst, these that we see here represent someone’s baby steps.

But the really good news is that some of these were probably intended to be funny and in that  succeeded very well. We don’t have the rest of the composition for context, so we can’t know.

So much for my point. Now the list:

Bad Analogies Collected By High School English Teachers

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a ThighMaster.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.

18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long it had rusted shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

Posted in Education Reform, Teacher Accountability, Teaching Literature | Comments Off on Figurative Language

Teachers as Writers

Posted on September 15, 2010 by Mike

Once upon a time, a decade or few ago, the constituency of public schools considered it important for us English teachers to teach kids to write coherent, meaningful, and reasonably correct English prose. In those halcyon days of yore, we had standardized tests that evaluated the quality of students’ writing by having them actually write essays on assigned topics, and these essays were hand-scored by specially trained English teachers, reading them under controlled conditions. An excellent example of such a test was the Idaho Direct Writing Assessment, 1979-20??, which Idaho Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna has proposed discontinuing permanently. “As we move toward the next generation of assessments, we have to look at the value of the assessments we currently have… The Direct Writing and Direct Math Assessments have served their purpose. Now, to continue moving student achievement forward in the future, we must focus on improved assessment tools,” says Superintendent Luna.  http://educationidaho.blogspot.com/2010/04/superintendent-luna-announces-plan-to.html These “improved” assessment tools seem to be the current crop of standardized tests that assess “writing” by bubble-sheet questions about writing and about error-based proof-reading.

A quaint notion in those olden times was that teachers of writing should actually themselves be writers. Many books and articles were written to foster this notion. Some of this professional literature went over the top. One Pundit (an academic Pundit, not a political one) went so far as to suggest that mere reports, memos, newsletters, and journal articles didn’t count as real Writing. “Through a Cynic’s Eyes: The Teacher As Writer,” Inland: A Journal For Teachers of English Language Arts, Spring/Summer 1998, was my cry of “Enough, alright, already!” You will find it in From the Files.

Quaint as the idea may have been, I think it was – and is – a sound one. If I presume to teach others to write, then not only should I be a competent writer myself, I should do a bit of it. Since I retired, I have continued to reflect upon myself as an English teacher who writes (or makes a brave show of it). What does an English teacher write in the course of a rather lengthy career? What did I write? Thus, I peruse my filing cabinet and the files on my hard drive. My reflections on what I find there provide the rationale for From the Files. (Yes, it is a journal article.)

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