My school’s administration would be unhappy with my previous post, I expect. But the state’s interactive report card website documents the problem. The state estimates that less than 1 in 10 students in my district’s high school are ready for college. That’s 9 in 10 who need some alternative option.

I will say our vocational/technical options are better than those of many school districts. Our push to improve college-readiness is inevitable with these numbers and I am certainly in favor of that push.

Eduhonesty: But the current administration’s plan for 100% college readiness is a pipe-dream and I would be fascinated to know exactly what they are smoking. Arne Duncan and Barack Obama need to visit the real world and talk to these students. Many have no intention of going to college, despite the exhortations of teachers and administrators. What are we offering these students instead?

“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly
anyone knows anything about science and technology.”

~ Carl Sagan (1934 – 1996)

How many times this year have I told students to put their phones away? I have sent students to the Dean’s Office for refusing.

Yet these kids might as well be using magic wands for all that they understand the objects in their hands. Technology should be a greater part of the curriculum — not just its use for classroom purposes, which is heavily encouraged, but also the nuts and bolts of the technology itself. The number of kids in our academically-challenged schools who are reliant on devices they can neither create nor repair represents a growing problem. We joke about Ivy Leaguers who can’t fix a toilet. Those Ivy Leaguers will be just fine, thank-you, but my students may not be fine. Many are unlikely to be ready for college — even if they could find the money necessary to go. (This is especially a problem for the undocumented who cannot get loans.) But since we are relentlessly preparing them for college, they are unlikely to be ready to do anything else.

Where are the vocational/technical options related to our new technology? Maybe there is no need for these options since we now seem to chuck the old stuff without a thought. But I wonder if we are neglecting possible avenues for skilled trades in our relentless push to up our math and English scores?

Recently, Emilio skipped an afterschool detention and ended up with an all-day school detention. This is pretty standard practice in America’s high schools. Detentions keep getting longer the more they are missed.

The problem was — Emilio skipped the detention deliberately in order to get a full day of in-school suspension. If you don’t want to work and don’t much care about your grade, why not take the day off?

“I like to be suspended. You get to take it easy,” he said.

Eduhonesty: I’d make them clean the school AFTER school instead so that they missed time with their friends. They could scrub my desks for awhile. I don’t know if that would help Emilio, but it would help me anyway.

For some kids, the current deterrents are no deterrent at all.

A year of minimum wage work might do more to motivate many students to learn than anything the educational system will ever be able to do. We ought to throw these lazy, under-motivated students out earlier — while they still have a chance to come back and change their behavior. When we shelter them while they do nothing for year after year, we help to engrain habits that will lead to possible lifelong failure. Emilio is not learning to work. If anything, he is learning the opposite.

His name is “Emilio” — name changed to protect the guilty.

Emilio explained to me that he wanted to drop out of school. He does not like school. (Legally he could drop out at any time. He is seventeen.) But then, he explained, he would have to go to work and pay taxes. Well, he doesn’t want to work and pay taxes. Given that he has no good options, in his view, he is staying in school, the lesser of two evils.

He’s a likable kid but sometimes trouble for a classroom. Actually, he’s better behaved than most students without goals, but he doesn’t care much if he passes. Failure’s a bit embarrassing, but if he fails, he can stay in school longer. So he models laziness and off-task behavior for the classroom.

There’s something so wrong with this picture.

Eduhonesty: If a kid reaches the point where there’s no way that he or she can get enough credits to graduate in the legally allotted time for high school, that kid should be forced out of school. It takes a lot of off-task behavior to fail classes nowadays, behavior that is frequently disruptive to the education of more serious students.

We have students who are seventeen who still only have the credits of a freshman or sophomore. They interfere with other students learning while refusing to learn for themselves. These students need to be expelled.

“Obtuse angel,” she wrote. She decorated her blue construction paper with flowers. At the end, she caught her mistake and started over, writing about angles instead.

But I kept the original. It’s a bit of a private joke for one thing. All of these students are years behind grade level — as much as six years — and there’s a lot of truth on that blue construction paper. A number of obtuse angels were wafting around my classroom creating words for the word wall that day.

Maybe the word obtuse isn’t exactly fair. This class has kids who struggle with mathematics. It also has kids who simply missed the math bus. The rural village in Guatemala did not have a math teacher. Mom has moved six times in the last five years, not always into the same district. The district bought books that are difficult or impossible to read.

We need a real system of remediation for these kids — desperately.