The poor wretches are slaves, of course.

“It’s time to have a point of view not just an opinion,” Don Lemon says in “This is the Fire.” In other words, it’s time to take a stand that doesn’t fade away until the next shooting. It’s time to put honesty and fairness ahead of convenience. It’s time to pull down many old bronze statues in our parks.

Eduhonesty: I encourage readers to look at this book: Donald Trump has energized Lemon, as he has energized many others. “You need symptoms to alert you to a disease.” A fave: “Trump was the malignant node in our armpit.” I usually keep politics out of this blog, but if I am keeping the topic of racism out of the blog because of that preference, I may have to revisit my no-politics policy.

Chapter Two’s title is perfect: “We didn’t get here by accident.” That’s the crux of so many attempts to explain away the history we don’t want to see: the idea that it was incidental and unintentional. Yet people didn’t buy or keep slaves accidentally.  Too many statues that have been erected to men who did not acquire their human property “by accident.” Major purchases are never accidents.

Eduhonesty’s educational observations:

As a kid Lemon felt trapped by a black box of low expectations. He looked at his white classmates and could not help but see how much easier it was for them to get ahead. Comparisons are inevitable between people, and comparisons start so early. Preschoolers and kindergartners identify who can draw well, who knows the alphabet and who is good at sports. Little kids are not oblivious to who has it easier, who has more money, and who is getting more support for their classroom efforts. Little kids are not oblivious to privilege.

What are the long-term implications of children’s awareness? I hope readers will find time for this book. Lemon’s life story puts an unusual face on racism because Lemon is without question an American success story, host of CNN Tonight with Don Lemon. Here’s just a snippet of seeing today’s world through his eyes:

“Those on the front lines have no motivation but the stories they’ve been told: myths and legends presented in middle school textbooks that should be subtitled ‘A Redacted History of the United States’ or maybe ‘A Conveniently Selective Memory of What Went Down.'”

Hopeful and passionate, yet willing to address hard truths, Lemon captures truths in history, cinema, and politics with clarity and resolve.

I reached the end of this book and felt more energized to step into the fight than I have in a while. It’s easy to get discouraged, but we should always be seeking justice, always be helping our students to navigate this world. This book felt worth my time for the appendix alone — a list of books, podcasts, other audio and video, and websites.

The thin blue line held in the Covenant School shooting. Six people were killed: Headmistress Katherine Koonce, custodian Mike Hill, substitute teacher Cynthia Peak and three nine-year-old, third-grade students named Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney and Hallie Scruggs — name them, please — but the 28-year-old shooter who picked Covenant School as her target had intended much greater carnage. Only Nashville’s solid police response kept the final tally from exploding into double digits. Once Audrey, now Aiden Hale had intended to go out blazing, leaving bodies throughout the school, as part of yet another suicide at the hands of law enforcement officers.

I wish we hadn’t named Hale. We have to stop naming these shooters, giving them recognition. Naming them posthumously encourages others, even when our Aidens have gone beyond reach. Unfortunately the Hale story was too juicy. It overwhelmed the sense and sensibilities of news pundits. He was trans with recently changed pronouns. Years past, she had once attended the devastated school. He had been quietly and privately stashing guns, hiding his crazy just well enough to escape detection. Well enough is all it takes today.

Eduhonesty: My last sentence captures the point I want to make: well enough is all it takes. It’s easy to be a school shooter, so very easy, and we are scarcely acknowledging this fact.

I could go out and buy an AR-15 today and no one around me would be the wiser.* No one would alert my husband or anyone else. Aiden’s mother was a social media soccer mom who clicked on all the right links to get into the Active Parent and Good Mom category. Mom appears to have been clueless, though, and I’d like to address those online presences who say she must have known or should have known. Ummm… If her child chose not to tell her, how was she to find out?

Eduhonesty: Straight to the heart of the matter: I can buy an AR-15 NOW if I feel like it. My dad might even have one stashed somewhere, making the process easier. How many people have family members with gun collections?

I have no mental health history to raise flags, but if I did and lied about that history, who would find out? There’s no national database of people who have received mental health care, and if there was, I privately suspect it might hold the names of half the country. How many people in the US are using Prozac, Lexapro or some pharmaceutical cousin? I’ve sat through those discussions of side effects, whether to start, whether to change, whether to add yoga and meditation etc., and I’m sure many people reading this post have done the same.

Yet in most of this country, NO barriers exist to planning a school shooting for an adult. Few barriers exist for millions of kids. Our legislative leaders can’t seem to ban or sometimes even restrict the guns. But absolutely nothing else will work — and talk about putting more guns in schools is simply inviting more elephants into an overcrowded room.

Those pundits who claim we need more armed officers in schools honestly appear not to grasp the situation at all: school shootings are a popular version of planned suicide by unlucky cop, deliberately intended to be another horrific story for the national news. Shooters WANT to be shot, want to rack up viewership numbers even when they can no longer see or read the stories, posts and tweets they generate. That Plan B, Go-to-Jail-for-Life, is not on the list of their intended or expected endings. The main effect of more armed guards in schools will be to change a shooter’s chosen point of entry. Details of the masterplan will be altered, and the net effect may be to make the death toll even HIGHER, as shooters plan events they might otherwise have left to chance.

*Actually, buying that gun is a bit more complicated for me because I am in Illinois. If I were in Wisconsin, less than an hour away, all I would need is to be 18 years of age or older. The state would tell the ATF, but no one would tell my family. About the only gun not allowed in Wisconsin is a sawed-off shotgun. Here’s a quick picture of the current situation: There are only ten states where assault rifles are even restricted. https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/assault-rifles-legality-by-state

I’ve written plenty of WHAT. I desperately need to flesh out the picture with HOW. But my attempts at “how” all hit the same barrier. What can we do to make education better without using money? Because the available money is pretty much committed.

Lucky teachers and students live within my nationally-praised district, where parents think backpacks cost $80 — because that’s what they spend. Unlucky others live 17 miles north, where backpacks cost less than $20, and are sometimes even free, after local groups raise money for school supplies and winter coats. Average housing prices are less than half what prices are where I live and industry 17 miles north is pretty close to nonexistent. Hungry? Try the Dollar Store or the remnants of the fast food dollar menus.

In a system based on property-tax based funding, those schools to the north have been hurting forever. What is the process for fixing these schools? No one knows, Administrators throw globs of half-formed hope at the fan and then try to explain the mess that results.

Eduhonesty: We all keep writing WHAT. We are honestly not writing much HOW — not much realistic how, anyway. Because even dedicated educational professionals are ignoring the elephant in the room, the elephant that is the US property-tax-based school funding system.

This system has traditionally favored those in areas with big houses and upscale malls.

Still true. Still hidden on the backburner when we talk about fixing schools. Still discussed only rarely.

I worry that the fight against vouchers and charter schools is sucking energy away from this issue — even as I worry that those vouchers and charter schools are being used to do an end run around fixing the inequities that allowed those schools to muscle into the educational landscape in the first place.

Sometimes when the plane goes into its nose dive, there’s no magic lever that will prevent the coming crash. I wanted to put this idea out there today because … well, because reality is real and we are enamored of stories of the kids who come from behind to succeed. Some kids do manage to clamber and claw their way back up to join the pack of grade-level classmates.

So… potentially useful advice:

Parents:

1. Get a tutor as soon as that dive begins. If you can’t afford a tutor, lean on the school district for extra help. Consider bartering goods or services in return for tutoring. Or be the tutor. I will observe that some kids work better for outsiders than parents, and as children grow older, an outsider may be necessary because not everyone remembers — or even took — that second algebra class.
2. Find books or software to tackle detected learning deficiencies. Here is a place to start: https://www.prodigygame.com/main-en/blog/reading-websites/
3. Limit screen time not directly addressing any academic losses. Screen time can become a black hole, sucking away social connections, stealing sleep, and exacerbating anxiety, stress and depression. Emotional states may have EVERYTHING to do with an academic dive.
4. If you are concerned about ADHD or other medical conditions, go in search of a formal diagnosis. This search is rarely simple, frequently demanding multiple attempts. But schools often require a diagnosis and medical input before providing accommodations, whether informally or in the form of an IEP or 504 plan. That diagnosis will help target therapy and any related medication regime.
5. AND PLEASE, PLEASE don’t plan to pull out of an academic plunge “LATER.”

“Later” never comes for so many kids. One reason the achievement gap has proved so intractable is we don’t acknowledge this truth often enough: In numbers, if Jenny only learned 80 days of last year’s 160-day curriculum (I chopped off 20 days to account for days lost to testing), then to catch up she has to learn 240 days of knowledge in her next 160-day year. How does that happen? An extra 80 days of learning on top of a full year’s curriculum represents a soaring, academic mountain to climb, especially if Jenny has special learning challenges such as ADHD or depression. That climb can happen, but seldom without numerous outside interventions — such as evening and week-end tutoring, long sessions with remedial software, or targeted therapy and/or medication.

US test scores amply document that many of our Jennies NEVER recover once the plane starts going down.

Teachers:

I know you are swamped with work, bureaucratic excesses, and an avalanche of meetings, making it hard to leap onto more documentation. But Jenny or Joshua’s learning deficiencies must be documented. Because despite our love of comeback stories, comebacks don’t always happen. In fact —

Whatever our students’ challenges, once they fall far enough behind, the hours required to make a full academic recovery may not exist. This is especially true for students who have fallen behind in reading, since reading is a source of learning as well as a result of learning. An IEP or 504 plan can be part of a rescue but, like all saves, the rescue has to come in time.

Eduhonesty: In the movies, the damaged plane rarely explodes into an expanding ball of wind-blown flames and debris. In the learning landscape, though, crashes are happening everywhere right now. That’s what our far-too-numerous testing days are telling us.

I’d like to reach parents more than teachers today. If Jenny is getting lost, Jenny needs immediate help. Don’t blame her teacher. Her teacher is probably teaching as fast and as furiously as she can. But she has a room full of kids with individual needs and only so many minutes in one day.* A curriculum that works for most kids will hardly ever work for all kids, and I suspect that teacher is trying to strike the best balance she can with the materials she has been given.

Besides, blame will not help Jenny; it may do the exact opposite. Blame can become an excuse not to try. To share a quote from a student that has resonated with me for years: “Don’t expect me to do much. I have low self-esteem.” Kids will take excuses and run with them.

If Jenny has fallen behind, she requires extra hours of instruction outside the classroom. Today’s curricula NEVER leave enough time for remediation. We pack, pack, pack in new learning targets. The problem of remediation time has been worsening. But that’s a macro problem. The microproblem is Jenny’s confusion, and one by one, we can help our individual Jennies.

Hi, fellow teachers, especially the newbies! The start of the year craziness is underway.

I unlocked lockers yesterday, lots of them, as I walked through a school filled with confused, new sixth graders. A few I failed to unlock and someone with a key stepped in. Lock combinations can be tricky. Remembering which lock to try them on also seems tricky for a few. I stepped into a funny dispute over which locker belonged to which student.

I listened to many announcements and picked out the ones I thought mattered most to emphasize. The open house matters more than the upcoming pep rally. We’ll get to the rally, but parents must receive ample warning for that open house, especially since many parents work swing shift in less-affluent areas. They need notice to change a shift or take an evening off work.

I promptly got buried in papers. The physicals and concussion warning forms are being turned in so kids can participate in sports. Other forms are trickling in as well.

Homework and classwork had to be sorted and will have to be graded. Motivationally-centered artwork is being prepared for walls. Stick to it, the work emphasizes, keep going toward your dreams. “You can do it!” Students design bold posters on this theme– maybe because they are a little afraid that they cannot do “it.” A great deal of semi-familiar and even unfamiliar material has begun coming at them fast, leaving sixth graders and others juggling as they try to keep up with the sudden shift away from the lazy days of summer.

Eduhonesty: I can get lost in papers. Many kids are certainly lost in papers. They will be more lost in those Chromebooks if limits don’t get reinforced immediately and regularly. Students WANT to get lost in the Chromebooks. They are itching and twitching to find the games and fun activities now at their fingertips thanks to yesterday’s tech roll-out.

A suggestion for fellow teachers?

Make a list, a handwritten set of items on a piece of paper about what matters most right now. I’d put students who appear to need extra help at the top of that list so they don’t get lost in the paperwork, meetings, more meetings and other bureaucratic thieves of time. Then tape that list in a private place where you will be able to see and update it regularly. I prefer paper to devices for this. Computer files and phone notes tend to get lost in the sheer bombardment of new bytes at the start of the school year.

Then find or make a date for wings with friends and coworkers– or nachos or tempura or whatever you prefer. You might have to be the first one to say, “Buffalo Wild Wings on Friday?” Everyone is swamped at the start of the new school year. If no one else is planning time for fun, teacher-reader, just tell yourself one more time: 

The old research on why boys are much less likely to read recreationally than girls: what is the current status of that research? Did we completely drop the topic because of COVID?

What is the status of checking for lead in our school water fountains?

With school security eating a much bigger piece of the pie than in the past, how are districts allocating funds without harming instruction? That number is no doubt hard to nail down, since it includes both personnel and equipment, and is funded by all sorts of grants as well as district allocations. Still, the number is unquestionably up at a time when COVID protection measures have also eaten chunks out of school budgets. How are school districts coping with these huge, new financial burdens?

It’s hard to get information, too. There’s simply too much information. And who is checking our many sources? The first thing that came up multiple times when I was looking for the cost of school safety measures:

“One ballooning school expenditure is the vast amount of money allocated to school safety. US schools now spend an estimated $2.7 billion.

That would seem clear but it is according to one source — a source that seems mostly to want to sell charter schools. (School Security Is Now a $3 Billion Dollar Annual Industry. Is There a Better Way to Protect Kids? – Foundation for Economic Education (fee.org)) The idea is that if you feel unsafe, then you could go to another school. FEE seems an appropriate name for the organization selling this charter school idea.

Don’t you just love all the helpful, objective sources out on the internet? I am unclear how charter schools are inherently safer than traditional neighborhood schools. Our school shootings are not happening only in “bad” schools. The young shooter who took a rifle to the Highland Park parade went to schools with solid test scores and excellent funding — although he was home-schooled for a while I understand. Middle class schools regularly experience shootings in these times. Truth: People repeat what one website says and then the new sites become part of search engine results until we may all be saying $2.7 billion without the slightest idea as to whether or not that number is valid or its source reliable.

Eduhonesty: I’m wandering today, but I do want to get one observation out to readers: All those issues that were raising flags in 2019? Many of them are still here, and the fact that they have been supplanted does not mean they have been solved.

We shouldn’t just move on to the new issues of our time while leaving the boys who don’t read and the broken or even toxic water fountains behind.

Social media posts are peppered with teachers’ comments about disengaged students this past year. We frequently blame remote learning and COVID protocols, two obvious targets, but I must observe that frustrated posts about student apathy predate COVID. COVID makes an easy answer; that does not make COVID a correct or complete answer.

I’d like to put out an alternative for consideration: SEARCH ENGINES. Cell phones are ubiquitous in high school and are becoming so in middle schools. Fears of school violence contribute to the proliferation of phones. Parents are afraid to be out of contact.

But what is the effect of having Alexa or Siri always at your fingertips? The phones obligingly answer any and all questions. I can find out in seconds when Queen Victoria reigned in England. I can find out the size of the Philadelphia police department and get a list of all Spike Lee movies. An obliging source will tell me most cats have between 6 and 8 nipples, and it’s uncommon for cats to have more. I can find the chemical formula for formaldehyde, shown in pictures if I choose.

When I was young, students often memorized facts, filing away “truths” from various disciplines. Having no Google, we engaged with new material in real-time. The price of ignoring teachers’ explanations was high. A unit test was certainly coming, and we didn’t have a back-up learning option other than reading a textbook, going to the library, or finding a teacher who would repeat what we had missed. Back-up options were untrustworthy, too. Sometimes that test was based almost entirely on lecture that barely touched the content of the book.

Here’s a rough description of today’s problem: Xavier tunes out the day’s discussion on the Industrial Revolution because he wants to text Laura. Or he has any of a number of alternative interests that have nothing to do with the Industrial Revolution. Xavier knows he can catch up later. If he doesn’t, it’s likely his school requires his teacher to give him a retake when he fails the upcoming test. Depending on the topic, he may be certain a good Wikipedia article or two is all he will require to stay afloat.

Experienced teachers know that we always had those kids who tuned out the teacher; I’m sure those kids were once sitting in one-room schoolhouses on the prairie. In my school days, these were the kids who blew off their lessons and then crammed the night before the test, burning through textbook pages and friends’ notes. “Can I borrow your notes?” they asked, sometimes before suggesting a study date.

Cramming has simply gotten light years easier. “Hey, Siri. Tell me when Richard Nixon was President?” “Hey, Siri, get me information on Stephen Hawking.” “Hey, Siri…”

Here’s where the scenario goes sideways for the whole classroom. In the past, Xavier might have listened with a sense that listening now could make for the most efficient use of his time later. And when Xavier actively listened, he became curious. He became engaged. He wanted to fill in the holes in his understanding. He asked questions. When he asked questions, he inspired others to raise their hands. Sarah might add a new question to the discussion, and soon questions would be popping out all over the room, becoming part of the automatic flow of that classroom. That’s maybe the greatest fun of teaching: Inspiring and answering student questions — inspiring the fun of learning.

But cramming itself has gotten so much easier that I believe we are sometimes witnessing what happens when students decide to put off learning new content today because they are certain they can pick up that content tomorrow. They don’t engage in real-time. (Or maybe they never intend to engage at all, but that’s another issue.) They only half-listen in class, doing the school equivalent of distracted driving. They are present enough to notice red lights and make turns in proper places, but mostly… they are drifting. Maybe it seems more important to learn when Laura’s parents will be home than to understand the Industrial Revolution.

Eduhonesty: What happens when there’s never a sense of urgency about learning because Siri or Alexa is always there? That’s a topic I might choose to research if I were selecting a research area today. The ultimate study buddy may be no buddy — nobody — at all.

But Siri is so convenient. How do we manage this problem? I honestly have no answer yet; I wanted to write this post, however, to identify and put a face to the problem. Our distracted drivers are driving off the road all over this country, leaving their classrooms behind. We have to help them find their way back to the engagement and enthusiasm they lost.

P.S. Whether for academics or distractions, research into use of search engines also must take into account that we are talking about children and adolescents. Kids are not little adults. Some typical middle school questions: How do I become one of the richest gamers in the world? How can I make millions in cryptocurrency? What is a cryptocurrency? Can you mate a horse with an elephant? Is it dangerous to drop your TV in the bathtub? Here’s a favorite: If I eat myself, will I get twice as big or disappear completely? If you put this last question into a search engine you will get pages of answers, most of them sarcastic or crazy, but a number with a genuine scientific bent. I don’t know the origin of the question, but it honestly sounds like something one of my students might ask. The what-if-I-eat-myself question was even posed on Quora.

“Hey Siri” is a marvelous shortcut when seeking new knowledge, but concerned adults have to make sure that an overarching plan — a curriculum — is at least sometimes guiding Siri’s choice of direction.

I

Twice in my teaching life, I lost it. I completely lost control. I screamed in those classes, a little woman in a towering rage. Maybe I even cursed, though I can’t remember that, but cursing was probably at the bottom of the list of student concerns at that moment. I’m sure people heard me down the hall and on the floor below. I silenced all my students.

In the first case, some students apologized to me later, but they did not owe me an apology. No one should scream at kids for lack of homework compliance. I took a sledgehammer to the wasp on the wall that day. Across the years, I will always regret that one class.

I give myself a partial pass on the second event. I was addressing a specific instance of racism that had taken me by surprise, and I suspect casual racism never again felt casual to the student responsible. Letting my students know that racism fell outside of any category of acceptable behavior — well, that’s not so bad, although my loss of control remains in my memory. I briefly hammered that kid, and that was far from my best response. I lost a huge, teachable moment.

But here’s the thing: I am actually an exceptionally patient woman. On the patience scale, I give myself at least an “8” and maybe a “9” or “10.” You can push so many of my buttons before I get angry. When I do get angry, I may raise my voice, but I won’t throw the plaster apple on my desk. I won’t overturn desks.

Reader, try a few YouTube searches on topics like “teacher throws desk” or “teacher hits student.” Those videos are out there. So are videos of students attacking teachers. Another sobering search as we discuss arming teachers: “teacher committed suicide.” Sources claim there are 3.2 million teachers in the United States. Even if only a fraction of a fraction of 1% of those teachers have the potential to throw a desk, those teachers are out there, scattered all across our country. Some are even veterans with PTSD.

And then there’s the issue of the student who steals a gun. Theft is a common category on school referral forms. I spent hours once trying to help a teacher recover the new cell phone her husband had bought her, all without success. My strongest memories from that day: 1) My administration blaming the teacher for having had her phone upon her desk; 2) Watching as students who clearly had seen what happened chose to say nothing.

Eduhonesty: We have to pull in the guns. Adding more guns can and will increase the loss of life. And we have to stop talking about mental health care as a solution.

I live in a state where one of the biggest medical networks SHUT DOWN talk therapy a few months back because there were no available therapists. I’m sure a person could bump the line by threatening to kill themselves or someone else, but the idea that increased mental health care will somehow address the problem of school shootings — that idea crosses the line from disingenuous into manipulation and pure evil. Because the politicians calling for increased mental health care are not that stupid. They KNOW that preventative care is not out there. In many locations, crisis care is barely available. They know that preventative care would not stop the shootings, even if that care were available — even if those angry loners somehow sought therapy instead of revenge on their grandmothers.

Sometimes desperate educational leaders simply go too fast. As Lily Tomlin said, “For faster relief, try slowing down.”

What happens when you are trying to fix six impossible things before breakfast, while writing standards and lesson objectives on the board, and helping students with mask anxiety while other students are blissfully throwing their masks-optional face coverings into the waste basket? What happens while you run, run, run to get everything done?

Things get lost. Big things. Little things. Long-term and short-term things. Items on the list that matter simply disappear. It’s math really. If you have 14 hours of things to do and only 5 hours available, then 9 hours will remain undone. And if every day is about the same, the negative numbers will simply pile up. Nothing else is possible.

5 School hours for active learning (which does not include lunch, gym, recess if applicable, positive behavioral interventions, and other weird, random interruptions) take away 14 hours of useful, academic things to do = -9 hours of goals accomplished.

Eduhonesty: If kids have fallen behind, picking up the pace is EXACTLY the wrong thing to do. Lost kids deserve a chance to catch up — and that requires slowing down until they understand the content they missed. In math especially, switching to hyperdrive produces black holes and flattened kids who are spewing out weird numbers to try to make their teacher happy, if they are doing any work at all. And we shouldn’t be giving first graders four-syllable or maybe even three-syllable words on spelling tests. Yes, a number of kids can spell those words. But the fact that we get away with those spelling lists sometimes does not justify those lists.