Every year some nurse from the school district lectures me, telling me and a few hundred colleagues to avoid our student’s bodily fluids. Frankly, we don’t need to be told not to touch the blood and vomit. Does the whole school district have to hear this talk every year? How about photocopying a page with the highlights, and then attaching that summary to bags of rubber gloves and band-aids? The bags could be placed in mailboxes, the whole matter handled by trusty mailboxes.

Eduhonesty: We waste too much time in unnecessary meetings.

We have finally finished days of meeting and professional development. The students have finally arrived. We did not get a single, dedicated hour for classroom preparation. This is more of a problem than it seems. Computers are not connected and cords cannot be found. People are wandering around in search of hardware, scavenging if they can. In particular, the disappearance of smart board cords is a conundrum that has some teachers frustrated. They may or may not have been stolen over the summer.

I have no computer. I have an online attendance and grading program that I can use — once I scrounge a computer. In the meantime, I’ll copy onto paper and do this work at home. I have no desks. I have no BOOKS except a single copy to take home, provided by the woman in charge of supplies, who reassured me that the other teachers did not have books either.

Rather than trying to motivate me with cheery speeches in endless meetings, I would have liked to solve my supply problems. But whenever I had time — lunch, that is — no one was around to help, so I went to lunch too.

Why did this happen? I suspect the endless attempt to improve me simply got out of hand.

Eduhonesty: Far too often, we waste a lot of time fixing teachers who are not broken. We should try getting them books instead.

A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kickboxing.
~ Emo Philips.

We work relentlessly to get our bullies into line. We don’t always succeed.

Eduhonesty: Kids are like plants. Plants grow toward the light. Kids grow in the direction of their most likely successes. Unfortunately, for some kids, their best chance of success is in a fight on the bus.

Or at least, that’s how they see it.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
~ Albert Einstein

Eduhonesty: True, but imagination works better when there’s knowledge to back it up. You can visualize a car without understanding a car, but you can’t build a car until you understand a fair amount of physics, materials science, metallurgy and chemistry.

The Illinois Constitution tests are exit tests. Students must pass tests on both the U.S. and the Illinois Constitutions in order to pass on to the next grade. (They take the tests during different years.) Retakes are allowed, but passing is required.

I got most of a Civics class to meet me in the library in the evening to study for their constitution test. I frankly love Constitution tests because motivation levels are so high. After-school study sessions may get nearly perfect attendance. Students don’t need to be reminded to take or highlight notes. They stare attentively at new information displayed in front of the class.

Eduhonesty: The threat of failure is a wonderful motivator. We should use it more often.

One of my paraprofessionals told me that he had gone to school in Honduras. In Honduras, students did not pass third grade if they could not pass the third grade exit test. Fail the test, you repeat the grade. Period.

I like the idea.

Eduhonesty: Pundits keep demanding that teachers be held accountable. That’s fine — at least, when rational standards are used to judge those teachers — but we also need to hold students accountable. Right now, it’s often all on the teacher to produce academic results. I believe this is part of the reason why we have so many passive, undermotivated kids. When failure is not an option, kids know they won’t fail.

Not failing is NOT the same as succeeding, though — not by a long shot.

Teachers are told not to enable students. “They need to learn to do their own work. Don’t rescue them all the time.”

And if they are not doing their own work?

In these times when teachers are also told that “failure is not an option” we have a real problem. No work is not allowed to result in failure. No work is not supposed to result in rescues or enabling. The only acceptable outcome is a student who is doing their own academically-acceptable work.

This situation led the second largest school district in Illinois to propose a grading system for this school year that started at 50%. If you did no homework at all, you had a 50%. The following is taken from an email about this change:

Concerns About the New U-46 Grading Policy
It is very concerning that many U-46 stakeholders may not be fully aware of the implications of the new grading policy which is to be implemented this fall, or the ultimate negative effect it will have on the overall quality of the education of our students in this district.
The first topic of concern is that people may not realize how drastically some grades will be inflated when all low scores are bumped up to 50%. Under this new grading policy, a student could conceivably get a 70% C- average on half of his assignments, and still pass the class without even completing any of the other half of the requirements of the course. Understand that the average of 70% and 0% is 35%, which is what this student earns. However, when all of his zeroes are inflated to 50’s, he passes with a 60%, the average of 70% and 50%. In this case, the student’s average increased by 25%. It is crucial that everyone is fully aware of the fact that hundreds of students who would have earned failing grades in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s, will now pass their classes under the new policy this fall. [For evidence, please refer to the May 2013 Grading Committee Report PowerPoint, Slide 27, which shows what happens when a student with a 28% has all of his low grades changed to 50’s. In this example, though the student’s average is increased by 24.5%, he still gets the failing grade he deserves with a 52.5%. A similar student, however, with just a couple more passing scores, can pass the class with a percent in the 30’s. With only 3 passing scores out of 12, a student could receive credit for the class.] Students who have demonstrated such low competency should not receive credit. The commonly accepted minimum competency accepted in this country has been 60% for over one hundred years. Why should U-46 lower that minimum competency expectation to 35%?

Eduhonesty: Madness. Complete madness. When I left off, the Superintendent was backtracking furiously. I doubt that the district made the change to this grading system, but if they didn’t, the reason was that some teachers raised holy hell about the plan. Originally, this scheme and a similar version were presented for a vote — without the option of continuing the traditional grading system. The idea behind the 0 = 50% idea was that students would not become discouraged and quit. Teachers were also expected to accept all late work up until the near end of the grading period for the same reason.

Reality: Some kids don’t work. Phone calls to parents or guardians don’t change the situation. Even afterschool tutoring sessions don’t get the work done, at least not consistently. Trying to get around this fact by stripping away the penalties for late work, while giving half-credit for no work at all, will not solve the problem. For one thing, many students will then copy returned papers belonging to their friends. Cheating is already endemic in our schools. For another, those students who find a “C” or lower acceptable will then do LESS work since that 50% makes it possible to nail the “C” grade with a fair number of missing assignments.

I’m sorry, but failure HAS to be an option. Why do we have illiterate and innumerate high school students? One reason is that we kept passing these kids when some of them had done almost no work. Rewarding students for doing no work, a schlock job, and/or late work will not benefit our students. I don’t see how anyone benefits, except for a few administrators who don’t want to explain failures to parents or other administrators.

From http://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter/2011/02/us-department-education-big-winner-2010-bunkum-awards:

“The Bunkum Awards each year acknowledge reports on education issues from think tanks and other sources that represent the worst of the worst when it comes to research quality. Past winners have been lauded for their shoddy methods, evidentiary cherry-picking, and tendentious reasoning.”

I suggest reading all the bunkum awards, but here is one of my favorites:

The ‘Plural of Anecdote is Not Data’ Award. Our first award went to the Reason Foundation for its report Fix the City Schools arguing for “portfolio” school districts and citing improvements in student achievement in New Orleans in the post-Katrina era. The report relied overwhelmingly on attention-grabbing anecdotes yet ignored reasons unrelated to the portfolio approach – such as the massive exodus of low-income children from the city, plus a significant increase in resources – that could explain those improvements.

That’s the problem with so much educational research. People with an agenda pick the “facts” that support their position. They ignore facts that don’t. Worst of all, I suspect they sometimes don’t even recognize that those counterexamples matter.

I have been told repeatedly in the past few years that research supports not penalizing students for turning in late papers. They should be allowed to turn in their homework pretty much any time before the end of the grading period, because then they will at least do the work. That research points out that this no-late-penalty system results in students doing better in school.

Help! Of course student grades improved when we let them turn in a bunch of junk at the end, pushing their overall average up. But how much more do they know than before? Especially since a great many of them just borrow friends corrected papers and copy the work, I suspect they learn little or nothing much of the time. The research says we kept them from giving up. Well, we did that too. But what did we really teach?

Eduhonesty: I think we taught students that you can behave irresponsibly, even dishonestly, and the world will let you get away with it. The world may even reward you. That’s what we taught. I’ll be interested to see how that approach works out in the work world. I expect a number of these kids to be stunned when they are told to clean out their desks. I can just hear them stuttering, “But I was going to turn it in next week!” as they are escorted off the premises of their former jobs.

They look up answers that they barely read. They cut and paste the answers into documents they barely edit. They even copy whole essays off sites designed for that purpose.

If our students were using pen and paper, at least they’d have the reinforcement from writing what they copied.

A small subset of our students are using technology to avoid learning — and some of them are doing it rather successfully. I caught one student this year because about two-thirds of the way down his essay, I saw the word “whom.” Up to that point, I had been impressed. But I knew the kid and that kid was never going to use “whom.” I put a line from the essay into a search engine. A site offering essays popped up. I put in a line from another part of the essay. The same site popped up. If he had changed just a few words, he would probably have gotten a high “A” instead of a “0”, though.

Food for thought as so many bureaucrats and administrators leap on the technology bandwagon: I’m honestly not sure but we might get as much learning from hand slates and chalk if we subtracted the cheating.

Eduhonesty: Technology allows for plagiarism in particular, as well as other cheating. To prevent this dishonest behavior, a great deal of monitoring is required. In many places, this monitoring is not happening. Our already overloaded educators don’t have time to check the originality of all the work they receive. Sometimes there’s no way to check. A quick phone search during a test or quiz can slip right by. Students today are linked together 24/7 and help from friends in cyberspace has become part of the academic landscape.