(Read yesterday and the post before first.)

I know more today than I did yesterday. The special education teacher from yesterday’s post is a long-term substitute on her third gig as a long-term sub. Her references are sub references and she thinks she can abandon this contract and still find another long-term sub position elsewhere. She has discussed this with her husband who is O.K. with her quitting. The teacher’s aide for this boy has also dropped hints she may not finish out the year.

One of those two boys clearly dominates the chaos. He lives with grandma. I suspect he runs his house, even if he is only five. His tantrums are monumental in nature. I saw another one today — more shattered crockery, more thrown objects, more kicked objects (including me once) and more high-pitched screaming. The event was kicked off by ending a board game in favor of an academic activity. That kick-off could have been any transition from a more-fun to a less-fun activity.

I am sorry for all the players in this drama. I am also a little concerned for the other kids in the classroom. Chaos Boy is sucking up crazy amounts of learning time while he runs around at top speed shrieking and knocking things down. So far, the teacher has been the target of his wrath, but I don’t know that the other kids could defend themselves if he focused on them. I know one girl who would be just lost. I expect to be doing a fair amount of communicating this week. That kid’s a danger in my view.

Eduhonesty: The Principal wants to save this Freddie. I sympathize. But I have watched a couple of days of well-thought-out lesson plans die unborn as this sub tries to teach around the screams. I helped when I could. We taught like chamomile trying to emerge from cracks in the sidewalk. This kid is easily stealing an hour a day directly from learning. That does not include the indirect loss from Boy # 2 copying “Freddie.” The only highly productive periods occurred when Freddie’s teacher’s aide took him out of the room to instruct him individually. I can’t speak for what, if any, instruction occurred. I hope she is teaching Freddie. I know that the only time the rest of the class makes real progress is when Freddie is out of the room.

If I were a parent and I visited that room, my child might be in a charter or private school the next day.

Here’s my closing thought for today: Parents should visit their children’s classrooms. Especially if I had a child in special education, I would ask my child many questions about the school day. I would also want to observe my child’s classroom. That observation becomes even more imperative if my child struggles to communicate.

I believe in special education and in separate, special education classes. Too often, placing special education students in regular classrooms makes those students feel stupid, despite educator’s best intentions and efforts. Some students manage regular classrooms well, but others do not. Each child deserves to be evaluated and placed in the safest, most supportive environment available.

That said, while I have known some wonderful special education teachers, and have seen some special education classrooms that would benefit any child lucky enough to be placed in those classrooms, I don’t believe that parents should automatically trust a school district to do what is best for their child. In this case, students with behavioral disorders have been mixed with students with cognitive delays — a combination that is proving lethal to learning.

(For newbies especially. Please pass this on to new teachers.)

I filled in for a young teacher’s aide today while she got lunch, working in a classroom with four special education students. The classroom was notorious. Another sub had already warned me not to take any postings in that room. A nearby teacher said, “it’s always chaos in there.”

Out of four kids, all about five years old, two spent most of the first half of that lunch screaming, running, and throwing and kicking things nonstop, breaking a piece of pottery as part of the performance. I’d will say their teacher was trying her hardest. But she had two, tiny “Freddies” who fed off each other. She finally had to call for reinforcements.

I could make many observations here. I’ll stick to a short one: I volunteered to call home for her since she did not speak Spanish. I will do this if she asks me tomorrow. But that call home worries me. Yes, someone ought to discuss this behavior with parents. Both of these kids are teetering on the brink of being put in a special school. But if I call home, there’s a chance I’ll get one or both of these kids walloped. Something made those kids the way they are. Something or someone made them want to scream and keep screaming.

That someone might be sitting at home with them right now. And they are little boys. I’ve changed my mind on that phone call.  I will pass this one to the social worker instead. Or I will suggest that teacher talk to the social worker. I’m sure she has already talked to the social worker repeatedly, but this special education teacher appears to be drowning, so I will try to help her — before the school has to find a third teacher for that classroom in one year. That teacher has a worrisome deer-in-the-headlights look in her eyes, a help-me-help-me look that pulled me into this drama within five minutes.

Eduhonesty: Are you a new teacher? If so, depending on your background, I may have a warning for you. Those books and articles about not spanking kids? Those books and articles are read by readers. Not all your students’ parents will be readers. In some cultures, spanking remains commonplace. When you decide to make that phone call home, the person on the other end of the line may have a very different value system than your own. I recommend waiting until you are not feeling too frustrated with your student. Be sure to add a few good points about the student as part of any conversation.

And when a kid seems off-the-charts messed up, I always try to keep in mind that his or her parents may be part of the problem.

Han: Lando.

Leia: Lando system?

Han: Lando’s not a system. He’s a man. Lando Calrissian. He’s a card player, gambler, scoundrel. You’d like him.

Leia: Thanks.

Time for another short play to break up all this expository writing.

The Search for Blando Blarney

It’s a windy, cold February day, expected to hit zero degrees by morning. Shasta and Mommy are staying at the Westin in Wheeling for another Capricon, a favorite science fiction convention that mommy attends each year. Mommy has put on her soft, gray owl shirt. The owl looks fried, more stoned than any pet rock. Mommy looks tired and fried, too. She is getting jobs. She added Dagobah #203 after trying to get a long-term sub job. She expects to add Hoth #456 next week. Endor #Whatever may have gotten away, though. Mommy hit send on the app and then failed to pick up a call from Principal Blando Blarney of Pooperscooper Middle School, not finding its traces on the landline for a couple of days. Blarney has not returned two calls. Endor may have slipped through mommy’s clutching fingers.

Shasta is wearing a shiny red spandex outfit, skin tight around her slug’s body. Shasta is an invisible slug, about as large as a medium-sized dog. She has abandoned the usual top hat in favor of a long-haired, purple wig, held on by a copper-colored pair of steampunk goggles covered with wheels and gears. She is resting on a simple, black velvet flying carpet, about five feet off the floor, in the space between the two double bed in the Westin Hotel room. Shasta wonders what mommy is doing.

Shasta: Why do we want Blando Blarney to talk to us mommy?

Mommy: The suburb is right next door. I hear it pays well, too.

Shasta: Do you even like subbing?

Mommy: I don’t know. Maybe I will when I actually get around to it. As far as I can tell, I mostly hunt for jobs for no pay yet. My job is to do job interviews. Just like I write a top-secret blog with 13,703 users that makes no money whatsoever. I seem to have a real knack for not making money.

Shasta: Well, who needs money?

Mommy: It’s good to be a giant, invisible, young slug. I’d like that uncomplicated life. I don’t want to interfere with the purity of your vision, but money is kind of useful. You want a great mystery? I have a graduate degree in marketing from a school that is rated among the best in the country. I know I could market. Hell, I once wrote an article for Home Office Computing Magazine that made a small, software company’s year. I could market. But I don’t.

Chekhov is about to be captured. Oops. Now he is about to have a seemingly catastrophic fall.

Shasta: It’s that “kind of useful” mommy. If you went for money, you would get money, whether you or the owl are fried or not. But I am worried about this subbing thing.

Mommy: It seems like a natural move. I qualify. I like the idea of working a few days a week, days of my choice. It doesn’t pay well but it’s a few bucks more than double the minimum wage and that idea of being able to work or not work whenever I want does appear to be a real perk. Once I find the right classrooms, the job might even be fun.

Shasta: Don’t think too hard. That’s what I always say. But this may be one of those pigs have wings things. We have to do some thinking on this one, mommy, we do. This might be a thinking type thing. This might even be a hell no I won’t go.  Just because the path goes ever onward, doesn’t mean we have to stay on the path. In fact, that “ever onward” might be a great reason to get off the path. Now.

How about that Starbucks? You could get a green apron! I’d rather have a green apron than a badge that opens school security doors. I’d like to hit those security doors with a blaster. And I’d rather have a free pound of coffee every week than an extra couple hundred of dollars after four weeks of hell.

Mommy: You need to have a more positive attitude!

Shasta: No, I don’t. Everybody talks about that dumb positive attitude. Everybody talks about gratitude. And gratitude journals. And how great Mr. Spock is. But that doesn’t mean they are right.

Mommy: They are about Mr. Spock, although I am not sure everyone is talking about him. Not even here, and we may have a biased sample. This is a science fiction convention. They are probably right about gratitude, too.

Shasta: (Looking at Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock on the TV.) I sure hope they save those humpback whales. But you get what I mean. Yes, be positive. Be grateful. But don’t let that control your life. Too much positive and you keep on that forever path. You stay when you ought to go.

Mommy: Too true.

Shasta: That Blarney guy should be an object lesson. Did he make you feel good? No, he did not. I say, make lattes, not war. Or maybe even try to do something practical with the blog. Or another blog. Or etched glass. Or, I don’t know, anything. But something different. Not classroom management. It doesn’t matter how good you are. It’s still tweezing slivers out of festering skin.Classroom management is never as much fun as etching glass or writing blog posts. Especially nowadays.

Mommy: (Smiling, intrigued.) Why especially nowadays?

Shasta: Because we are saving everyone and anyone. Even when you send them out of class, they send them right back unless they smacked someone or lit a blunt in the middle of class. If a kid sliced his teacher’s desk down the middle with a light saber, he would be back within the hour.

Mommy: They never pull out their blunt in the middle of class. Sometimes it might fall out of their backpack while they are trying to find their homework, but that’s different. There’s a real correlation between red eyes and blunt mismanagement, by the way. You don’t see that problem much in middle school, though, and hardly ever in elementary grades. And I’ve never seen a light saber attack yet.

Shasta: But if you send them out, nothing happens.

Mommy: People call their mommies or daddies when they misbehave. I do, anyway, when I can’t help but see the blunt. Or when I know a kid needs help. We try.

Shasta: You all try too hard. The ones who don’t want to learn? The ones who want to disrupt the class, like the big boy in the last class last week? We should not keep inviting them back into class. It’s like leaving the door open to any Imperial Storm Trooper who promises he gave up violence last week. Right. Like that’s going to happen. Blasters are going off all over America’s schools, and no one even puts up a blast shield. And they keep sending them back to class. Why?

Mommy: Public schools are expected to educate everyone. That’s one reason why so many urban parents opt for charter schools. That’s why public school teachers cannot stem that charter school incursion. What’s curious to me is that you see complaints in the media all the time about how charter schools get their higher performance numbers by throwing out kids who are not succeeding. Yeah. But nobody wants to travel the distance from Point A to Point B in those articles. Yes, charter numbers go up because those schools chucked their miscreants out. The numbers for any school would go up if the school did that.

But the assumption seems to be that these schools are throwing out innocent, slow learners. I’d guess that’s almost entirely crap. I’d put my money on the fact that a hard-working slow learner who listened in class and kept trying to master new material would be welcome to stay in those charter schools. Teachers would advocate for the kid, for one thing. Educators and administrators don’t give up on kids who are genuinely trying. Also, those kids tend to get improving test scores. They may not do great on the state test, but administrators can show progress in benchmark testing. Kids who try to learn almost always succeed in learning, even if they may not move as fast as most of their classmates.

Some kids are not trying, though. And I admit you have a point, Shasta. By middle school, a few kids always walk into class with red eyes. Or they raise a ruckus almost every day somewhere, in some part of the school. Like Freddie[1]. One of the special education teachers asked about Freddie yesterday. She wanted to help him last year. So I texted my favorite colleague, Vasco de Gama[2] for a report. Here’s the exact text: “(Unrelated science stuff) But Freddie has been awful. He would have been sent to another school long ago but ROE[3] won’t take him. He had a very good Thursday and Friday, for what it’s worth. Best in a very long time.”

Apparently, Freddie did pass seventh grade despite the fact that he knew virtually none of last year’s material and did not try to learn it. Everyone passed no matter what they knew. I talked to his mom last year about possible special education placement. I’d say he is oppositionally defiant, among other considerations. His behavior has been making learning impossible for him and everyone near him. But he does not want to be in special education and he seems to run his mom, not the other way around.

It’s a mess, Shasta. We have no clue what to do with our Freddies. And idealists want to make sure the Freddies don’t miss the chance to get an education. We have to keep them in school. In the meantime, they harass other kids and their teachers, then take up days of Dean time – and I mean full days in some cases – while regularly disrupting classes. That’s another thing that doesn’t hit the media radar. Sometimes most of a school’s referrals are coming from only a small group of kids. But if the alternative school won’t take the Freddies, who will? They are guaranteed the right to go to school.

Shasta: Mommy, Big Boy in that social studies class last week was a Freddie. You know it. If you sub for that lady again, you will have him again.

Mommy: For one period and I am good with my Freddies. I know them well enough by now. That’s one reason why I can be a good sub.

Shasta: Yes, but it’s also a good reason to go get your green apron. You don’t need that level of crazy. You just want to get out of house a bit, but mostly you like to blog and write. Why set yourself up?

Mommy: I love kids, Shasta. I miss kids. I loved the little drawing that girl did for me on my kindergarten day. And I loved it when that middle-school girl said I was her new, favorite substitute teacher. I enjoyed teaching Spanish. The kids and I mostly had fun while I taught useful stuff. Well, mostly useful stuff. I am not too sure about the capitols of Bolivia and Ecuatorial Guinea. I mean, yes, great stuff capitols and all, but maybe we should work on being able to find the states in the United States. Or the continents. We have fallen a bit behind on the basics. But I guess we have to start somewhere and who knows when someone will suddenly be transported to Montevideo. How embarrassing if that person did not realize that he or she had materialized in the capitol of Uruguay.

Shasta: Mommy, you are trying to distract me, trying to distract us.  Although maybe it would be good if Scotty beamed you to Montevideo. You could use some time to consider your options before you just leap into a classroom. Those two subbing days were kind of stressful.

Mommy: The days will be easier when I get the rhythm of this subbing thing and figure out where to work and where not to work.

Shasta: (Sighs.) Oh, mommy, don’t be so silly. Go get your apron! They are letting the Freddies run loose. You don’t have to work that hard. You just don’t, never again. Especially since nobody even seems grateful anymore. They stick people with Freddies then criticize them for the lack of learning taking place in classrooms with high numbers of Freddies. They are mean to teachers now, meaner and meaner.

Mommy: Yes, I am afraid that’s true, and poor and urban classrooms will always have more Freddies. I’m not sure why some kids become Freddies while most don’t, but I know that missing daddies, mommies in jail, evictions and no food sure can make some Freddies. Too much gunfire outside the window at night creates a Freddie day even in a room that’s normally quiet and attentive.

Shasta: What are we doing today anyway?

Mommy (laughs): Yeah, enough deep thought. At 11:30, I want to go to the panel on antibiotics. I need a shower, first. Then the usual: art show, panels, dealers room, con suite. There’s a Star Wars panel. And that Klingon girl is giving a concert. We are going to have linner at a place with the good pretzels, crab cakes and brussels sprouts.

Shasta: (Doubtfully.) Brussel sprouts?

Mommy: Yumm.

Shasta: Are we really going to pursue that Blando guy?

Mommy: Nope. He ducked two calls. That’s enough I guess. Waste of an application. But we have all of cyberspace. We can apply anywhere! I’d say it’s Endor’s loss, some other district’s gain.

Shasta: If you are smart, it will be Starbuck’s gain.

Mommy just smiles gently at Shasta, who does not get it. Mommy does not mind the miscreants. She likes all kinds of kids. It really is a pity that the nutcase who apparently quit her old district in the middle of this school year drove mommy into retirement. But she did not have another year of incomprehensible tests in her. Mommy spent about 20% of her last year giving obligatory tests and quizzes written by other people, some of them members of an East Coast consulting firm that has since gone bankrupt. Her bilingual students often could not even read those tests. Nutcase kept telling her that it was her fault that students were not prepared for the tests, even though benchmark tests showed the average academic level of her classes was somewhere in the third grade, while the tests were written to match seventh grade common core standards. You need to have faith in your students, Nutcase would say, when mommy pointed out the kids could not read the tests, much less do the math. The schools own benchmark testing completely supported mommy’s contention. No excuses, Nutcase would say.

Oh, Mommy is glad not to have to get up in the morning to go try to do six impossible things before breakfast. Mommy reaches for her shoes, preparing to go out for a fun day.

All’s well that ends well, she thinks.

Eduhonesty:

Han: “I could arrange for you to receive orders to conquer Coruscant, but your only resources would be twelve drunken Ewoks, four malfunctioning speeders, and forty kilos of beach sand.”

Ms. Q: “That’ll take at least two weeks, sir.“―Han Solo and Ms. Q

(The story of education today.)

[1] An alias, probably the first of many

[2] Not his real name. Not in this time on this planet anyway.

[3] ROE is the Regional Office of Education. They run the “safe schools” for a county. In theory, if a child cannot manage public school, that child can be sent to a safe school. Common reasons for placement include drugs, violence, and zero tolerance violations such as a knife in a car or liquor in a locker. But ROE refuses kids regularly. For that matter, I vividly remember one incident in which a student struck a teacher and was sent away to the safe school. The safe school sent her back less than a month later because she was behaving so badly there that they threw her out. But this was a middle school student. The public schools could not expel the girl due to her age. The teacher who had been hit found the girl back in school only a few weeks after she had been sent away. That naturally made the teacher extremely nervous. She vented often during lunch in the teacher’s lounge. I felt profoundly sorry for that teacher, and for the students in that girl’s classes. Off-the-chain students steal learning time from everyone, sometimes huge, jagged chunks of learning time. At least, the girl was not returned to the nervous teacher’s classroom. Despite the shortage of special education teachers, the administration managed to do that much right, at least.

A few posts back, I commented on a weekly spelling ritual from my 5th grade classroom. I’ll leak a secret. It’s been about 50 years since I had Mr. Stocker, an older, white-haired gentleman who always wore a suit. Male teachers wore suits, crisp, white shirts and ties back then. The women wore dresses. June probably had her pearls on all over town. I remember my crazy fourth grade teacher (the former military man who whapped student chairs with a pointer to prevent slouching) saying the best paid teacher in Tacoma probably made about $6,000 per year.

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, then, I had a teacher who gave us ice cream coupons if we got all the spelling words right. I assume he repaid the lunch staff who gave us a choice of a vanilla bar with chocolate topping, a vanilla bar with Heath Bar topping (my favorite), or a Fudgesicle. I don’t know how many weeks I failed to get my ice cream bar. Maybe one or two. But my motivation was high. In a school with many financially-disadvantaged students, motivation was generally high. Kids would do a lot of work back then for ice cream.

Kids still work for treats. I can’t think how much work I have gotten with the promise of Jolly Rancher coupons, redeemable for candies after school. Some good research seems to suggest that rewards are problematic as student motivators, and I find kernels of truth in that research.* But I want to stand up for the occasional reward ritual.

Mr. Stocker never varied. Week by week, he handed out ice cream rewards. I would not be surprised to discover he inspired Jolly Rancher coupons. Each week, we worked to get our treat.

Treats don’t motivate everyone. Some kids just don’t get excited about ice cream. Maybe their freezers are full of tasty, frozen treats at home.  Maybe they don’t like ice cream. Maybe they don’t like work, at least not the work that leads to the ice cream. But I know I worked for ice cream. I admit I had a knack for spelling, but I would go through that list to make sure I was ready for the test. I never wanted to lose my Heath Bar because I skipped studying one word.

I am going to admit I bribed the heck out of my resource class last year while we worked on keyboarding. As typing times went up, I passed out coupons. I can’t exactly measure my effectiveness, but I can say that many boys and girls who might not have taken typing.com seriously, were working as fast as they could to type more words per minute and garner more coupons. The coupon rule was simple: Show me you are typing faster while maintaining reasonable accuracy. I’m sure some students faked their way into a coupon or two by taking advantage of the speed with which I was going around the room handing out future Jolly Ranchers. But participation was high. Enthusiasm was high, even on the part of some boys who were notorious for their lack of academic motivation. In part, I know that the chance to work on the relatively new Chromebooks contributed to my success.

Eduhonesty: Rewards don’t work for many purposes, but in my experience, they will work for shorter-term commitments like those keyboarding classes or weekly vocabulary quizzes. Competitions with prizes motivate many students, especially when students are competing with themselves and their own previous scores. This post is another “see-if-it-works” post. Today’s research might have stopped Mr. Stocker from handing out those ice cream bars, but student effort would have fallen if he did. We students ended up knowing more because of those ice cream bars.

 (Unsuccessful attempt at a Jolly Rancher coupon forgery. I normally printed coupons at home, changing paper and font regularly, but every so often I hand wrote coupons when I ran out.)

*See Dr. Richard Curwin’s article at http://www.edutopia.org/blog/reward-fraud-richard-curwin for a good, short breakdown on problems with rewards.

Have a few minutes and some construction paper?

From VolunteerSpot on Facebook. Facebook users, this site is worth scrolling through. I loved Mom Guilt Bingo.

P.S. The book Mindset by Carol Dweck should be on a teacher’s must-read list.

(A post for newbies, especially, which should be of interest to others.)

I am sitting in a bright, cheerful Spanish classroom. The teacher here does a whole lot of evening and week-end work. I’ve never met her but I only have to look at this schedule. She is teaching Spanish I, Spanish 2, as well as two different social studies classes, and math for English language learners.

I have been there. Getting ready for five separate subjects takes an enormous amount of time, at least for a teacher  determined to do right by her students. You can borrow from colleagues and the internet but, in the end, each day’s instruction should follow from the previous day’s instruction; frequently the only way can happen will require creating original materials and activities.

This room has activities and posters all over the wall. The Spanish/ELL teacher here must love decorating, she does it so well. I particularly like the clock. When I first entered the room, I was impressed with the learning possibilities on the walls. We have the alphabet, numbers, colors, shapes, days of the week, months of the year, various body parts, types of animals, common verbs, greetings and, up on top of the whiteboard, a set of useful Spanish phrases, helping students to tell their teacher in Spanish that they need to go to the bathroom or forgot their homework, among other common daily phrases.

After I had enjoyed looking around the room, I struck by an absence, though, and I’d like to blog that missing piece. Where are the standards? I know they exist. She has a slot for them on the wall. I am sure she provides those standards. But they occupy a small space on her wall. I was pleased to see that almost all the material in this room is for learning — rather than for learning about learning.

This post is for newbies. Maybe you are being told to put all your standards and plans up so that students can read them and know your master plan. Supposedly, this helps students. I’d like to observe that until recently few people — none that I’d ever met — put all this information on the board, but some study indicated that posting standards and plans contributed to classroom learning. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. As I always note, social science studies are often conducted in fairly idyllic conditions which don’t translate well in all classrooms.

But since keeping students abreast of the standards and lesson plan has become all the rage, I will go with this flow. I’d like to observe, though, that all minutes we use in a classroom are taken away from other activities and instruction we might have provided, had we made alternative instructional choices instead. Those missing fragments in our lessons are our opportunity costs. When we spend too much time telling students what we plan to do, we take away from actual doing.

As Yoda said, “Do or do not do. There is no try.” Spending too much time explaining a standard or the flow of a projected lesson strikes me as a version of trying. While our students are learning the content of Common Core standards, they are not actually learning the math the standard requires.

By all means, if administration requires that you post your standards and lesson plan for each day for students to see, do so. Some battles aren’t worth fighting and maybe the standards will help students. (We got along for decades without them, of course, and today’s students don’t seem to be overtaking students of the past, even with the new standards plastered all over the place.) But be alert to the time loss the class incurs from talking about those standards and plans. The time we spend telling students that they are going to learn how to calculate ratios could actually be spent teaching students how to calculate ratios.

I promised a kindergarten curriculum. I found one in a school a few suburbs over, inside a quiet, white, wooden schoolhouse that looks as if it fell through time from some idyllic 1950s street. The school has quiet security. I still had to ring the bell to be admitted by the secretary, a feature of schools everywhere now, as far as I can tell. My little school from the past appears much more contemporary once we peer at its curriculum, however.

Please click on the above picture to get the gory details. R.I.P. naptime, that’s my first response. The first paragraph sets the tone for what follows.

Eduhonesty: I regard this as a completely rational kindergarten curriculum. The question I might ask, though, is did we really need a kindergarten curriculum? This plan has the potential to be challenging and stressful in the wrong, overly-enthusiastic hands. Not all five-year-olds are developmentally ready to take on the challenges listed on this piece of paper.

Feedspot is taking people to this post that does not exist. So I had better create a post, post haste, I guess. I like the above idea: You can have cheap and good, but that will require some time. You can have cheap and fast. If so, what you get probably won’t be particularly good. You can have fast and good, but that product is unlikely to be cheap. If we scour the goods and services in our lives, no doubt we will find exceptions. I happen to think McDonald’s Egg White Delight is cheap, fast and good. But moving away from ADHD breakfast observations, I find a kernel of truth in the idea that getting two of these characteristics together may be easy, but instances of all three together are uncommon at best. I also see a looming problem as we keep trying to find cheap and/or fast ways to get improved academic results.

This being an education blog, I thought I would connect the cheap/fast/good idea to fixing schools. Any fast, good fix will not be cheap. I don’t know that a good, cheap fix is possible. The problem lies in that word, “cheap.” How do you do “cheap” when the livelihoods of thousands and thousands of people rest in your hands? How do you do “cheap” when your buildings are aging, their floors chipping, ceilings leaking, plumbing slowly becoming unplumbed? How do you do “cheap” when access to technology has become a defining characteristic of our best districts?

Like many quick ideas that seem sound on the surface, that “pick two” option above does not help us when applied to Chicago and Detroit schools. Cheap, fast fixes will never fix those schools. I doubt any cheap or fast fix can be good. We can cut costs and trim overhead, but the problems in Chicago and Detroit will only be improved at the margins by these measures.

Returning to a theme, America needs to move away from local funding of school districts. The problem with the current funding set-up is that many districts can only make cheap fixes — and there are no cheap fixes that can be expected to turn out well. Local funding in areas where industry has fled and housing values are falling will result in falling revenues for schools — at a time when those schools require the opposite to stay competitive. Cheap and good together cannot attract the STEM teachers and pay for the technology that will give our academically-disadvantaged students the educational opportunities that they need to prepare for college and today’s work force. Fifty  years ago, lack of technology meant no overhead projector and a lack of mimeographing materials. Students could be entirely ready for college despite those nonexistent overheads and fuzzy worksheets. Now that lack of technology can translate into missed, vital practice and skills, as students without internet retrieval practice, keyboarding experience, or familiarity with modern software fall behind counterparts in more prosperous schools.

Cheap won’t work today. Between aging infrastructures and growing demand for new technology for teachers and students, cheap has become impossible for most districts to manage while still preparing students for college. I’d say fast is impossible, too, since almost all our initiatives today must ooze through layers of government intervention.

If we want good, we will have to shake up the system. Eliminating our piecemeal funding system might be one way to start. I hate to create more possible layers of bureaucracy but, without more equitable funding, I just don’t see how the kids at the bottom will ever be able to get off the bottom. Yes, we can find exceptions. Some kids can learn with a flashlight in a broom closet. But a review of college success rates between districts shows that the kids where I live are vastly more likely to finish college than those kids in Chicago.

We have to tackle that gap in success rates.

Today’s post only obliquely relates to education. If I made a graphic organizer, I’d have to make something like the above. Oh, wait! I did make a graphic organizer. It occurs to me that some comforting home, school and other rituals would undoubtedly overlap alien abduction rituals if the abductee were conscious, but I’m sure readers are clear on the concept.

We have our rituals. Maybe the family goes to Superdawg on Friday. Maybe they stop at their favorite ice cream parlor after baseball games. Maybe they go to the local ice rink on Sunday afternoon. Rituals often involve family and friends. They frequently include food, usually not the healthiest food. The soccer team hardly ever goes out for tofu. The vegetables in that Thanksgiving dinner are  probably swimming in fried onions and mushroom soup, unless they are covered in butter, brown sugar and marshmallows. Our rituals are peculiar to our families, friend groups and classrooms.

I thought I’d write about rituals today because rituals are struggling to hold their place nowadays. We are too busy. Oops! We were going to go out for ice cream, but we had to wait on hold for two hours to talk to the IRS. Oops! We were going to go ice skating, but we had to go to Michaels to get science project materials instead. Oops! We were going to go to Superdawg, but mom has a late meeting at work, dad’s still in Chicago, and the babysitter can’t drive.

I thought I’d take a few minutes today to put rituals on the radar. My girls are grown now. They remember Homers Ice Cream after piano lessons. They remember almond steamers after trips to the bookstore. (Starbucks should bring back that almond syrup.) They remember lunch after Saturday Enrichment classes at Northwestern.

Our rituals are our own. But they form the backbone of later memories and the glue that holds family and friends together. I remember birthday dinners with fried prawns and fizzy Coca Colas. I remember trips to the swimming hole near my grandma’s house. Sometimes the asphalt on the road to that swimming hole was so hot we’d be hopping on the sunny patches of the road. I remember the three-scoop ice cream cones we always picked up on the way to grandma’s, a short stop to break up the long drive. Sometimes we ate them in the car, licking as fast as we could on summer days so the ice cream did not drip on the car. My parents were not exactly neat freaks.

I remember the weekly spelling test with my fifth grade teacher, Mr. Stocker. If you got all the answers right, he gave you an ice cream bar. I remember that former-military, nut case of a fourth grade teacher who whacked your chair with a pointer if you were not sitting up straight. I remember weekly math games in Mr. Marvin’s class.

I remember recess. Who doesn’t? Four-square and swings, climbing and playing baseball or hopscotch — recess was sometimes the best part of the day. Some kids may not remember recess in the future — not the way I do. I subbed for an all-day kindergarten class this week (Fingerprints finally came through!) and discovered the kids’ recess was attached to their lunch, part of the forty-five minute break in the middle of the day. Except for that break, we were working on some version of academics all day long. Oh, they got to color and make valentines for soldiers, but we were working on letters, days, seasons, weather and numbers throughout the day. We had a fun discussion about whether or not the mouse in Mercer Mayer books was a main character. He never speaks, but he is on every page. I’ll post a kindergarten curriculum in the next day or two. Those curricula are becoming formidable in my view.

But returning to my topic, readers, I want to suggest we all pay attention to our rituals. What are they? Let’s define those rituals. I’d ask my kids for their opinions. Which rituals are their favorites?

In home and in the classroom, we should try not to slight our rituals, try to avoid preempting or replacing them too often. Rituals provide security to kids. They provide a sense of order. They also build lifetime memories. Long after the exact details of trips to grandma’s house are gone, pictures of huckleberry ribbons in vanilla ice cream remain.

“An undefined problem has an infinite number of solutions.”
~ Robert A. Humphrey

I want to take a break from big cities this morning and move from the macro to the micro world again. The above quote resonated with me immediately, although I am honestly not sure what Robert A. Humphrey intended to say. I know what I took away from his utterance, and I’ll put that in my own words: Leave the teachers alone and they can solve many of our current problems.

Boxes, boxes, boxes, We are building data, data walls and spreadsheets for administrators. We are changing our instruction to match the new Common Core standards, despite zero evidence that our previous state standards were any sort of a problem, except for the effect of differing standards on standardization of data. We are attending endless meetings to prepare our matching instruction, share our data, and discuss new standards. We have extra meetings to discuss using the new Common Core-aligned books that some students cannot even read. We add meetings or professional development on developing college-readiness and reducing absenteeism. Etc.

All of these problems represent real problems. Some new solutions to these problems are creating their own new sets of problems in my book. But my problems are not Sally’s problems are not Fred’s problems. Why am I wasting my time in the absenteeism meeting if my class pretty faithfully turns up every morning? I may have a useful contribution or two for other teachers, but I’d like to hammer my favorite nail: All of our meetings have an opportunity cost. What could I be doing during that meeting that will have almost no effect on my own classroom? I could be improving my Jeopardy game on the solar system. I could be creating individualized materials for my autistic Anne-Marie.  I could be calling Darnell’s mom to talk about his sudden change in behavior over the last few weeks. I can solve so many problems — but my ability to do so has been adversely impacted for years now by requirements that choose the problems I should address — problems which I may or may not be encountering, problems which may be blips on my personal radar even if they represent an incoming attack for other teachers in other places.

Each teacher has his or her own set of problems during the instructional day. In my classroom, Darnell’s moodiness may be a much bigger problem than statewide absenteeism rates. I should be left to work on helping Darnell. As far as standardization of learning standards and instruction, in a time of increasing diversity and rapidly changing demographics, rather than putting teachers in pre-approved boxes, I am convinced we should leave our teachers alone. Newly-arrived Rima from Syria should not be receiving the same instruction as Kyle from Duluth. Historically, our teachers decided how to teach their classrooms and had a great deal of voice in what to teach as well.

For Anne-Marie, Kyle and Rima’s sake, I wish we could return control of the classroom to the classroom teacher.

Eduhonesty: Some administrators and government leaders would reply that, of course, I ought to be individualizing instruction for my three students above. What those administrators and government leaders seem to miss is that if I spend 220 minutes of meetings during a week — the absolute minimum last year, and sometimes the amount ran over 300 minutes — that’s potentially 5 hours or more lost (depending on the topic) from instructional preparation and individualization during the week if I am a rank and file teacher. If I am a team leader or coach, with extra meetings, that amount may be considerably higher.

My most effective instructional year ever occurred years ago when I had two planning periods and almost no meetings. I was free to spend time figuring out exactly what my individual students needed and preparing individual sets of materials. If we go by annual test scores, my students had an amazing year.

I’d like to rephrase Humphrey’s statement. I believe, “A too-well defined problem may have few or no solutions.” Thinking about this problem mathematically, we can put so many restrictions on teaching and preparation time, that we are no longer creating solutions; instead, we are preventing solutions. As we add more and more terms to our equation, eventually the only solution to our problem may be the null set.

For those whose memory of past math classes has gotten a little hazy, the null set is also called the empty set, the set that contains no elements. The null set can arise naturally when we place too many restrictions on sets. An example of the null set in education might be “the number of students reading at third-grade level who can pass a Common Core-based, mathematics quiz or test filled with story problems designed to stimulate critical thinking in a test written a seventh-grade level.”

I was required to give too many of those tests last year, wasting colossal amounts of my time and my student’s time. I shudder to think of the effect of those ridiculous tests on student motivation and enthusiasm for learning. I’m not sure what problems the administration was addressing with those tests, but I’m sure we’d have all been better off if we’d left my classroom’s problems for me to define. Even if I’d been popping Xanax while talking to tiny, scaly, lizard-like aliens lounging in my bathtub while I created classroom instruction, I could hardly have done worse. Even if I had been arranging aluminum foil on my head to keep the lizards from invading my thoughts, I suspect my instruction would have made more sense. I honestly could hardly have done worse by my students than I did by giving them those tests. At least the lizards and I might have had a sense of humor.