Posted by: cornvillenutmeg | February 20, 2013

Shared (Classroom) Spaces

Unless you are in Public Education (or, alas, in much of  Independent Education as well), if someone were to ask you the meaning of the word consequence, you might say something close to the following:  “Why consequence means something that logically or naturally follows from an action or condition.”   Or, let me see, you could say, “A consequence is the relation of a result to its cause.”  Or, to put it yet another way, “A logical conclusion or inference.”  For the dictionary hound, those three definitions come from the American Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin).

Those in Public Education know that consequence really means punishment.  Observe.

Place: Mr. Assistant Principal’s Office.

Day:  Thursday.

Time:  11:27 A.M.

 

Mr. Assistant Principal:  Come in, Tom, have a seat.

Tom:  (saying nothing, shuffling into Mr. AP’s office.  He sits in the chair in front of Mr. AP’s desk.  He’s been here before.)

Mr. AP:  Do you know what I have here, Tom?

Tom:  No.  (He does know, but he’s not going to participate in the process any more than he can help.)

Mr. AP:  It’s a Discipline Referral from Mrs. Leary.

Tom:  So?

Mr. AP:  Does that help you remember?

Tom:  How can I remember what I don’t know?

Mr. AP:  Last Monday, when she sent you to the office?

Tom:  Not ringing a bell.

Mr. AP:  For using inappropriate language…

Tom:  That was bullshit, she….

Mr. AP:  …after warning you repeatedly.

Tom:  She accused me of not doing my homework?

Mr. AP:  You couldn’t produce it.

Tom:  What?

Mr. AP:  You didn’t have it with you.

Tom:  How does that mean I didn’t do it?

Mr. AP:  Did you do it?

Tom:  What?

Mr. AP:  Had you done your homework?

Tom:   Honestly?

Mr. AP:  Yes, Tom.  Honestly.  Had you done your homework?

Tom:  No (pause.  Mr. AP is about to add something else)  But she didn’t know that.  She said I was lying.

Mr. AP:  Well, it sounds to me, from what you just said, that you were.

Tom:  How do you like it when people call you a liar?

Mr. AP:  If that were to happen, which it doesn’t, I’m sure I wouldn’t like it at all.

Tom:  See? 

Mr. AP:  Do I see what?

Tom:  It was bullshit.

Mr. AP:  (deciding the interview has gone on more than long enough)  The Consequence for your being removed from Mrs. Leary’s class is Saturday School?

Tom:  No way!

Mr. AP:  It’s in the Student Handbook, under Disciplinary Consequences, p. 47.  (reading from the handbook)  Infraction:  Removal from Class.  Consequence:  Saturday School.  Sorry, Tom,  my hands are tied.

Tom:  What if I don’t show up?

Mr. AP:  (reading again)  Infraction:  Failure to attend Saturday School.  Consequence:  One day in-school suspension.

Tom:  I’ll take that.  At least I won’t have to listen to Leary’s bullshit.

 

Had I not heard conversations indistinguishable from the one I imagined above, I would not have taken the time to illustrate the point that way.  But I have, too many times, in fact.

Now remember my last post on Food for Thought?  No?  Well, okay.  That was my fault.  I said I’d write more in a few days and a few days has turned into a couple or three weeks.  So if you need to refresh your memory, I’ll wait while you look it over.

 

Right, now the last line was “[Shared Spaces is] saying you’ve got to put responsibility back on people, not on the government.”  Reread that line, but, (1) change people to students, (2) add the word teachers, (3) change government to administrators, (4) begin the sentence at put, and (5) delete the word back.  Now we have:  Put responsibility on students and teachers, not on the administrators.

 I hope I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure most public school teachers would howl at the very idea.  Teachers, most especially those who went to teacher college, will talk your ear off if you want to hear about their approach to Classroom Management, but Discipline is something handled by Administrators so Teachers can concentrate on the import work of Educating Learners. 

 

To save myself time, I checked out Shard Spaces on Wikipedia and found this:

Risk compensation (also Peltzman effect, risk homeostasis) is an observed effect in ethology whereby people tend to adjust their behavior in response to perceived level of risk, behaving less cautiously where they feel more protected and more cautiously where they feel a higher level of risk. The theory emerged out of road safety research after it was observed that many interventions failed to achieve the expected level of benefits but has since found application in many other fields.

 

Peltzman, by the way, is Dr. Sam Peltzman.  You can find him speaking about the Peltzman Effect on YouTube.  He’s interesting.

Rooting around on Google, I discovered the following from Dr. Gerald G.S. Wilde in a discussion of Risk Homeostasis.

People alter their behaviour in response to the implementation of health and safety measures, but the riskiness of the way they behave will not change, unless those measures are capable of motivating people to alter the amount of risk they are willing to incur. (Wilde, 1994)

 

I shall paraphrase to suit my purpose:  Students alter their classroom behavior in response to the implementation of different consequences ( or perhaps I should say negative or positive results) for enumerated behaviors, but the appropriateness of the way they behave will not change unless those consequences are capable of motivating students to alter the amount of risk they are willing to incur.  In the imagined conversation above, Tom’s consequence is an acceptable result of his behavior in Mrs. Leary’s class.  As the saying has it, if you do the crime, you do the time.  The result of Tom’s blissfully spending his day suspended from classes will certainly be a repetition of the behavior that got him to be suspended in the first place.  Being suspended will bring about no chance Tom will mend his ways and (a) begin to do his homework, and/or (b) stop lying about doing his homework.  Nor will his vocabulary improve.

Educators allow themselves to think that motivation is exclusively a positive term, but it is not.  People young and old can be motivated by unattractive alternatives, too.  New to Arizona and not wise to the pleasure the local gendarmerie take in strictly enforcing traffic laws in this part of the state, I ran afoul of a motorcycle policeman whom I now think of as Officer Bonaparte due to the fact that, once he had dismounted and arrived outside the driver’s window, he and I were looking deeply and directly into each other’s eyes.  I had indeed done the crime (although to be fair to myself, it was due to my unfamiliarity with the eccentricities of the town’s ideas of from which of three lanes one may or may not make a left hand turn rather than my anarchic driving habits) and so unhappily I accepted the time, so to speak.  As a result, I am highly motivated not to go through yellow lights, squeeze out in front of on-coming traffic, go faster then 25 miles per hour in a residential zone, 15 mph in a school zone while school is in session, or make a turn from a lane not explicitly created for such a turn.

It used to be that a managed classroom was one in which acceptable and appropriate behavior was expected by the teacher;  conversely. inappropriate behavior was not accepted.  Appropriate, by which I mean good, behavior was rewarded in myriad ways.  A smile, a pat, a note sent home, encouragement, praise, a congratulatory comment, gold stars.  Bad behavior was also responded to.  A frown, a sharp word, a note sent home, what a former colleague used to call “the hairy eye-ball,” detention, removal from class which sometime led to rustication§ .  The latter was the last and least favored, for in such cases, teachers understood clearly that they were admitting failure and turning their problem over to someone else who, by virtue of hierarchical position, was more authoritative and intimidating.

In Middle Schools across the country children learn, of course, many things.  One of the most momentous lessons they learn is this:  almost nothing they do, write, or say is  less than wonderful, astonishing, marvelous, splendid, great, super, incomparable, excellent, and/or outstanding.  Don’t believe me?  Do this:  if you are still young enough to have held on to the journals you wrote in Middle School, look through them.  See what words your teachers used in comments about your efforts.  If you are parents of Middle School children, look at their journals.  If you are a Middle School English teacher and you don’t write such comments, congratulations!  You are an uncommonly sensical person.

To return to the Shared Spaces concept and applying it to the classroom:  what might be the eventual result if next day after Labor Day, teachers were to remove from their bulletin boards the Rules for My Class; e.g., (1) Be On-Time, (2) Bring Appropriate Materials:  book, paper, pencil or pen, assignment book, (3) Be Courteous,  (4) Raise Your Hand.  (5)  Keep Your Eyes on Your Own Work, (6) Do Not Leave Your Seat without Permission?  In other words, what might happen if the principles of Shared Spaces were applied to a classroom? 

Given a teacher with the requisite courage, students would bump up against results (consequences) of inappropriate and unacceptable behavior that made them feel not wonderful, astonishing, marvelous, splendid, great, super, incomparable, excellent, and/or outstanding in any way whatsoever.  On the other hand, they would also discover a number of behaviors that resulted in their feeling good in any number of ways.  These behaviors they would fairly quickly come to understand as ones that are appropriate, acceptable, appreciated, and rewarding.  Does this sound familiar to you at all?  Do you recall the term Behavior Modification?

Once upon a time, teachers made use of what eventually became known as Operant Conditioning because it worked for most all of their students.  Then the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers cast their spell, and Public Education committed itself to Improving and Reforming itself every five to seven years or so, thereby credulously throwing the babies out with the bath water.  In the end, Shared Spaces is a return to doing things that makes sense.  Where the concept of Shared Spaces is applied and ends up making for happier, healthier, safer places, it will have been because behavior in those places has been modified.  There will have been enough positive and negative consequences to people’s actions that the people will have chosen those behaviors that were rewarded and eschewed those that were not. 

  • § You’ll recognize this word as meaning suspended or expelled if you happen to have had the pleasure of seeing the Spencer Tracy film, Captains Courageous.  I used it because I may never have another chance.

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Posted in Administration & Supervision, Behavior Modifcation, Classroom Management, education union history, Not Making Sense 101, Operant Conditioning, Public Education, School Discipline, Shared Spaces, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , ,

Posted by: cornvillenutmeg | January 28, 2013

Madrid Shared Space_Oct09-mk

Madrid Shared Space_Oct09-mk (Photo credit: EURIST e.V.)

English: Illustration of road furnishing accor...

English: Illustration of road furnishing according to ‘shared space’, a traffic concept by the Dutch traffic scientist Hans Monderman. Nederlands: Voorbeeld van weginrichting volgens ‘shared space’, een verkeersconcept bedacht door verkeerskundige Hans Monderman. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This morning I offer food for thought.  I am reprinting (reposting?) a portion of today’s “Morning Jolt” by Jim Geraghty.  The Jolt in its entirety can be found at National Review On-Line (http://www.nationalreview.com

)  I’d like to know what you think about this, and in few days I’ll let you know what I think.  For now, I’m mulling notions of ideas pertaining to how Shared Spaces might be integrated into Public Education in interesting and ameliorative ways.

 

Two years ago, Gary Toth and several other staffers from the Project for Public Spaces traveled to the Netherlands to look at intersections. A handful of towns there have embraced a radical idea, originally the brainchild of the late Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman: Remove all the traffic lights, signs, curbs and lane markings from roads, and people will share them more effectively.

Drivers, bikers and pedestrians will make eye contact with one another. They’ll cooperate. They’ll move through public space with a greater sense of its communal utility. In Europe, the result has proven to be safer and more efficient — and more social — for everyone involved.

This concept, known as Shared Spaces, contradicts pretty much all conventional thinking about traffic engineering, and partly for that reason, it has never caught on in the United States. Slowly, though, a growing cast of advocates like Toth, a 34-year veteran of the New Jersey Department of Transportation, want to seed it here.

“If you put stripes on the roadway, speed limit signs, stop signs, crosswalks, and tell everybody what to do, then you’ve removed the responsibility from the human beings who are moving around that space, they have no responsibility for their actions anymore,” Toth said, channeling Monderman’s philosophy. “The light turns green, I go. The sign says I go 25, I go 25. The crosswalk says I walk here. [Shared Spaces is] saying you’ve got to put responsibility back on people, not on the government.”

Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty, National Review On-Line

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Posted in Public Education, Shared Spaces, Traffic Regulations | Tags: , , , ,

Posted by: cornvillenutmeg | January 18, 2013

Did You Know?

The Centers for Disease Control publishes each year the “National Vital Statistics Reports.  All data below is taken from Volume 61,  Number 6:  “Deaths:  Preliminary Data for 2011.”

 

     Did you know that in addition to the 34,677 people who died in automobile accidents, an additional 952 died in other land transport accidents?  And 1,647 died from water, air, and space, and “other unspecified transport accidents and their sequelae?”  That would be 37,276 people who died as the result of accidents with things on average under less restriction than the purchase and ownership of firearms.

Did you know that accidental discharge of firearms killed 861 people;  but 3,555 died from accidental drowning and submersion, 2,621 from accidental exposure to smoke, fire and flames, and 33,554 from accidental poisoning and exposure to noxious substances?

     Alcoholic liver disease killed 16,634 people.

     Malnutrition and other nutritional deficiencies were responsible for the deaths of 6,170 people.  Salmonella, shigellosis (dysentery caused by any of various species of shigellae, occurring most frequently in areas where poor sanitation and malnutrition are prevalent and commonly affecting children and infants), and certain other intestinal infections carried off 11,022.

     38,285 people committed suicide;  Of those, 19,766 shot themselves, and 18,519 found other means of carrying themselves off.  There were 11,101 homicides caused by discharge of firearms, and 4,852 people were murdered by “other and unspecified means and their sequelae.”  2,580 people lost their lives as the result of complications of medical and surgical care.

     40,239 people died from drug induced deaths, and alcohol took care of another 26,256.  Enterocolitis due to Clostridium difficile, a nasty bacteria that causes severe diarrhea in people whose native population of gut flora has been eradicated by antibiotics, killed 7,994.

 

The following information pertains to Wisconsin.  I did not specifically select Wisconsin.  It was simply the first state to come up on an internet search of laws concerning the sale of alcohol.  For gun laws, I stayed with Wisconsin.

 

     Top obtain a license to sell alcohol in Wisconsin, you have to be twenty-one and have lived in Wisconsin for at least 90 days.  You need to have a seller’s permit issued by the Department of Revenue and have completed a responsible beverage server training course.  It’s probably better if you do not have a criminal record, but in the end, whether to issue an ex-con a license or not is up to the given municipality.  The municipality will look at your record carefully.  If you have been convicted of, say, selling liquor without a license or tax evasion, the relevant officials may have some trouble with that.  On the other hand, a conviction for auto theft won’t automatically deep six your chances.  They will look closely at the nature of your violation and take into consideration your overall record in the community (www.dor.state.wi.us/faqs/ise/atlicns.htm).

     Wisconsin apparently has some of the most liberal gun laws in the United States.  Nevertheless, it does seem to pay more attention to who may and may not own a gun than it does to who may or may not sell alcohol.

     Felons are prohibited from possessing firearms.  Now it is true that federal law and some individual states may restore to felons their civil rights, which would include being able to own a gun, but Wisconsin only does that if a felon receives a pardon from the governor.

     Wisconsin law prohibits minors from possessing firearms, but it does make exceptions for long guns used for hunting or firearms used during adult supervised activities such as target shooting.  But, minors judged delinquent based on a felony may not own any type of gun.  Not only that, school districts must suspend pupils found in possession of a firearm either on school property or while under the supervision of a school, which of course would not really have applied to Adam Lanza. 

     Nor would the restrictions imposed on the mentally ill have applied.  The mentally ill may not possess firearms, under certain fairly particular circumstances.  If a person was charged with a felony but found not guilty or not responsible due to mental illness, that person may not possess firearms. Also a person who has been involuntarily committed for treatment of mental illness, drug dependency, or developmental disability, should the court deem the person to be a threat to self or others, such a person may not possess firearms.  In addition, when a person is involuntarily committed as delineated above, that person’s firearms are to be seized or stored until the person is judged no longer to suffer from the mental illness and no longer likely to be a danger to himself or others. 

     If you have a restraining order on you, you may not possess firearms and you are required to surrender your firearms to the county sheriff or a third party approved by the court. 

     In addition, even if you are not one of those classes of people prohibited from possessing firearms, you may not anyway possess machine guns (not to be confused with what some call assault rifles;  a machine gun is fully automatic such  that depressing and holding down the trigger causes the machine gun to fire non-stop until its magazine is empty or it jams.  A machine gun is difficult to control as the uninterrupted firing tends to cause the barrel to rise unless it is held down firmly.  Typically, a fully automatic weapon specialist – think military or SWAT – becomes expert at firing bursts of three to four rounds at a time rather than emptying the magazine in seconds).

     One may not own a sawed–off shotgun or similarly modified rifle. Armor-piercing ammunition is banned by federal law, as are plastic firearms that cannot be sensed by metal detectors.

     It is illegal to use firearms in armed robbery, burglary, or carjacking.  (What might a law abiding robber be able to use other than a firearm in an armed robbery, do you think?)  Discharging a firearm from a vehicle is prohibited as also are drive-by shootings which you might have thought would have been covered by the previously mentioned prohibition, but I guess Wisconsin is just leaving nothing to chance.  You may also not shoot into a vehicle or building.  You may not provide a firearm to a prisoner.  You may not steal a firearm.  You may not use a firearm negligently or while intoxicated.  Furthermore, discharging a firearm near a residence, a public park, at trains or near highways and roads all are prohibited.

     Carrying or displaying facsimile firearms is prohibited.  Imitation firearms are prohibited.  And to avoid any confusion, using those prohibited armor piercing bullets is also prohibited.

     It is illegal to sell, lend, or give a firearm to a child, and if you do that and the child shoots someone, the punishment for that will be greater than it might have been, except for that particular prohibition doesn’t apply to rifles and shotguns used for hunting or target practice under adult supervision.  If you leave or store a loaded firearm “recklessly,” and a child under the age of fourteen gets her hands on it, displays it in a public place or uses it to injure or kill someone, you will be considered guilty of a misdemeanor. 

     Wisconsin law, as do the laws of pretty much every state including Connecticut,  prohibits the possession or shooting of a firearm within a school zone.  Such zones are called Gun Free School Zones.  And everybody who is disposed to be law-abiding obeys that law with perfectly predictable results when someone not so inclined and in possession of one or more firearms invades such a zone.

     Wisconsin requires anyone born after January 1, 1973, to complete a Hunter Education Program before being issued a hunting license.  The program includes instruction in the commonly accepted safety principles for handling hunting firearms. 

     Recall that Wisconsin’s gun laws are considered liberal, in the sense of not strict.  Do you think it’s fair to say that getting a license to sell alcohol which accounted for the premature deaths of 42,890 people in 2011 is easier than buying and keeping guns, which can be said to have been the second-hand cause of death (you know the saying, guns don’t kill people, people do) of 31, 728?

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Posted in Alcohol Related Deaths, Causes of Death, Columbine, Firearms Deaths, Gun Bans, Gun Free Zones, Reform Gun Laws, Sandy Hook | Tags: , , , ,

Posted by: cornvillenutmeg | January 16, 2013

The President’s Proposals for Gun Control

 The President has put forth his proposals for making sure that another calamity like Sandy Hook never happens again.  (They apparently include recommendations from the Vice President on improving mental health.  The irony there is self-evident, no?)  Mr. Obama’s proposals are as predictable as they are political:  banning rapid-fire, “assault type weapons,”  eliminating loopholes for background checks.  Can anyone cite an example of a mass shooting that would have been prevented if the authorities had only known the details of the background of the killer?  I’m not claiming there isn’t one or more, only that I’d like to know.  And by the way, to my knowledge, semi-automatic rifles, pistols, and shotguns, pretty much all fire at the same speed, irrespective of the appearance of the gun.  So is a ban on “assault type weapons,” as opposed to, say, semi-automatic hunting type rifles meaningful or political?  What group of voters do you think such a ban will satisfy?

     Go to http://www.browning.com/products/catalog/firearms/finder.asp?f1=002B .  You will see before you the various models of the Browning BAR hunting rifle.  Scroll down till you come to the one that looks to you like an assault rifle.  The difference between this one and the others is a matter of a shorter barrel and a pistol grip.  Both these features have to do with the type of hunting the rifle is designed for.  That is, hunting big game in heavy cover where a longer barrel is more likely to get tangled in brush and the animal one is hunting will seldom if ever be more than seventy-five yards away;  no need for the greater accuracy of a longer barrel.  Being able to mount and hold the gun quickly and steady improve the odds for success.  Without doubt, that model can be used in an assault on children or adults anywhere, although statistically, such an assault is more likely to occur in a “gun free zone;”  but so also can all of the other models of that rifle.  That this and other guns like it can be misused does not make them truly assault weapons as in the weapons with which trained soldiers and marines are armed.

     The discussions the Vice President held with the various groups he included in his information gathering efforts were born of the horrified emotional responses of virtually everyone across our country and beyond when they learned of the horror Adam Lanza visited on Sandy Hook Elementary School.  Those reactions were appropriate and right.  In the face of such hideousness, empathy must be our first response;  we likely need to grieve for the children and the adults, their families and friends, teachers and colleagues, and Adam and his mother.  Later on, when our ache is diminished and no longer steering us, what to do can be the focus of the efforts of all of us, legislators and the rest alike. 

     Sorry to say, the exertions the Vice President and others put into the search for a solution happened  too soon,  for the grieving is not over.  How could it be?  Even for those of us far, far removed from Sandy Hook, can we say that our anger is assuaged?  Don’t many of us engage in fantasies wherein we would offer ourselves if that were to spare the children?  Doesn’t the remembrance of what happened in that school still depress you?  Who of you can say you have come to terms with Adam Lanza’s terror and have moved on?

     Tomorrow I will offer some food for thought that, I feel, ought to be taken into consideration when anyone, including and most important, the Congress, deliberates what can be done to mitigate the odds of the next Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, Columbine from happening.

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Posted in Columbine, Grieving, Gun Bans, Obama's Proposals for Gun Reform, Reform Gun Laws, Sandy Hook, School Shootings, Tragedy On-Campus, Vice President Biden's recommenations | Tags: , , , , ,

Posted by: cornvillenutmeg | December 19, 2012

On Sandy Hook

  

I didn’t much want to write about Sandy Hook, but I’m going to.  I decided I should.  I told myself that since I’ve committed to writing about Public Education, I need to say what I think about what happened there.  Before I sat down to write, however, a dear friend posted her response to her blog (An Expatriate in Rapallo | musings on life in a new culture farfalle1.wordpress.com) :  a reasoned and heart-felt plea to us in this country to do something about guns and the people who would turn them on the innocent.  I responded to her posting.  I’ve used what I said to jumpstart my own deliberation.

 

 

 

Last I knew, Avon High School, my former and last place of employment, had a detailed plan for what would happen were someone like Adam Lanza, Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, Thomas Hamilton ( Dunblane Primary School, Dunblane, Scotland, March 1996), or Tim Kretschmer (Albertville-Realschule  Winnenden, Germany, March 2009) appear in its hallways.  A Code Red emergency would be declared.  In response, any teacher with a class of students would lock the door to his classroom, move his students to an area of the classroom not visible from the door or windows (a maneuver far easier to write down than to pull off), and remain in place until such time as a Code Green were announced or an emergency responder had unlocked (with a master key) the classroom and instructed its occupants on what to do next.  (So-called un-assigned teachers would make their way to the office, take shelter in their own classrooms, or join a classroom before its door was locked.)  That is, I’m fairly sure, essentially what happened at Sandy Hook.  Those actions probably saved lives. 

 

This morning’s Wall Street Journal featured a photograph of a single young boy on a school bus.  The photographer, John Moore, took the picture as the bus passed by.  I’m going to quote the caption:  “A bus, carrying children to school for the first time since Friday’s Connecticut shootings, passes (the) funeral for 6-year-old Jessica Rokos.  Sandy Hook Elementary school…remained closed.”  Do I need to say more?

 

Avon’s plan, like the plan for Sandy Hook and, I suspect, those of virtually every school public and private in our country, cannot prevent a tragedy, it can only mitigate one.  Each future tragedy will be followed by funerals and memorials and calls for doing something so such a tragedy will never happen again.  Until one does.

 

As my friend said, wouldn’t it be nice to think the world had evolved so that such things won’t happen anymore.  My response is that the world has evolved, but for now and perhaps forever, it has not evolved enough to prevent tragedy.  On the same day the papers were reporting what had happened at Sandy Hook, there was also a report of an attack at a school in China where sixteen people were hurt.  None died, at least as of the time of writing.  The attacker had used a knife, which, of course, he never had to pause to reload.  In parts of our world, children are routinely slaughtered – and I use that term advisedly – the butchers use guns, but also bombs strapped to their bodies, IEDs, landmines – some newly planted, others left over from past wars – machetes, baseball bats, poison gas, swords, knives, AIDS (and, yes, I do mean that; see The Lion Sleeps Tonight by Rian Malan). Those children, innocent as all children are, ought not to die, but they will, as will innocent women and men here and elsewhere. Nothing, save a Gestapo-like effort wherein homes are searched and weapons confiscated will change that.

 

Calls for legislation are coming from everywhere, particularly by elected officials whose offices are no longer in jeopardy now that election season is over.   Let’s imagine the calls are successfully persuasive.  Let’s say the Federal Government passes legislation, and each of the fifty states and District of Columbia follows suit.  To solve the problem once and for all, the legislation would necessarily make illegal the ownership by anyone of guns (except, of course, for the military and police so guns will continue to be manufactured and paid for the taxes off all of us whether we are opposed morally to the existence of guns or not). People being people, not all will line up meekly to turn in their guns thus necessitating the passing of laws permitting the invasion of homes for the purpose of confiscating weapons. Whether we call those who make those raids – best carried out in the middle of the night when most people are at home and thereby more easily encouraged to reveal hiding places – Gestapo or SWAT or ATF or NKVD or Special Deputies matters little. For once you have them, they will be always with you.

 

For now, the schools of Newtown are coping as well as they can.  Organizations like the Connecticut Psychological Association have encouraged their members to offer assistance to Newtown.  In the face of tragedy, that is both what should be done and all that can be done.  If tragedy were preventable, like small pox it would have been eradicated long ago.  Today we go on, making the best of what we have.  We are at liberty to do that.  Liberty, the condition of being free from restriction or control, is not much subject to modification.  Like so many things – health, sobriety, kindness, wealth, poverty, consciousness – which one either has or does not, freedom can be lost.

 

ps.  For an interesting and disinterested take of this issue, check out John Fund’s “The Facts about Mass Shootings” at National Review On-line.

 

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Posted in Administration & Supervision, Gun Bans, Public Education, School Shootings, Tragedy On-Campus, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , ,

Posted by: cornvillenutmeg | November 20, 2012

Schools as Business

     A letter in the Wall Street Journal the other day got me thinking.  It was in response to an op-ed piece making the point that Public Schools ought to be run more like businesses.  The letter writer took the challenge.  She said, okay;  if a school is a business, it has top-level executives, whom she identified as administrators.  Then the managers would be the teachers, and the students the workers.  Having set up the trope, she posed questions such as, how successful would a business be if it increased the workers any given manager was supervising from 25 to 35 or 40 or more?  How successful would a business be if it didn’t reward its managers with adequate compensation and benefits?  Or how about if it required its managers to work with fewer resources and support?  If it required its managers to provide out of their own pockets the material their workers need to do their jobs?

     Okay, yes, I got it.  The answer for each question posed was the same:  not very successful at all.

     I took her point for what it was worth, only it would have been worth much more were there a real world equivalency between business and education.  What militates against the equivalency is the purpose of business: to make money;  while the purpose of education is, well, education.  I suppose the letter writer would argue that what education produces is educated citizens, but then we’d need to identify who or what the consumer for that product might be, and how much might the education industry expect such a consumer to pay for an educated citizen. 

Part of the data states require from each public school system is in effect an annual price tag for each student.  According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, per pupil expenditure in Connecticut for 2009 was $13,959.  Let’s round that up to $14,000 and say then that the cost to educate a high school student from 2009 to 2012 was $56,000.  Add four years of college for another $100,000.  So the price tag on the product education is selling – adding fairly modest amounts for text books, commuting, or rooming and boarding costs – is on the order of $200,000.  Who or what is going to pony up that for each young man or woman who our colleges and universities graduate each year?  According to CBS News, in 2010, 5.9 million people were awarded post-secondary degrees.  Say that 2.9 million where either foreign students or post-graduate students.  Then the cost to the as yet unidentified consumers of the newly minted and educated citizens for one year would be six trillion dollars.

     If you would argue that Public Education should be run like successful businesses, you must also be willing to see the end result as the artifacts those businesses are producing.  As the paragraph above makes clear, however, the notion is preposterous.  Still, suggesting there are practices that successful businesses follow which could be incorporated into Public Education is worth considering, but in that regard, simplicity is best.  How about this?  What doesn’t work needs fixing;  what does work needs to be left alone.

 

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Posted by: cornvillenutmeg | October 3, 2012

Master Teachers as Evaluators

Standardized tests won’t do it (and by the way for a superb explanation of why, check out http://blogs.ccsd.edu/leonardatoschsn/2012/10/03/its-a-crap-shoot/) and supervisors are too removed from actual teaching to do it, teacher unions too paranoid about Management cynically taking advantage of every opportunity to wring every last ounce of work and blood out of teachers without paying them a living wage, students too self-interested, and parent the same.  So, who is left to turn to for a meaningful evaluation of teachers?  Well, how about teachers?

In the rest of the evil, money-grabbing, greedy, unfeeling world – which is to say any country where any rational person might want to live – on leaving school and entering the workplace, a new hire soon gets to know well an old hire who both trains and evaluates the greenhorns.  Such old hires are experienced, respected, and trusted.  The mind turns naturally to the so-called trades:  professions such as plumbers, electricians, brick-layers;  but the practice is essentially the same in virtually all other professions:  think medical interns, newly minted JDs, recent MBA graduates, rookie police officers and firefighters, boot recruits in the armed services.  Any successful enterprise from the Targets of the world to Habitat for Humanity uses experienced workers who are respected and admired by their colleagues to train and evaluate neophyte workers.

 

During the penultimate year of my tenure at my first school, the Headmaster created the title of Master Teacher.  Then he elevated a handful of faculty to be the first corps of Master Teachers. While it was so that all of us in the faculty had always tacitly acknowledged them as the master teachers among, the Headmaster’s actions conferred official status.  Of course, each discipline had its own department chairman, but while the chairmen were often consulted on matters of hiring and letting go, mainly their tasks were secretarial and administrative in nature.  The newly minted Master Teachers, however, were, among other things, directed to take a hand in evaluation.  It was a system that worked well in all respects, for before any evaluating or supervising happened, the Master Teachers took under their wings their junior colleagues.  By the time any criticism of the new teachers entered into the dynamic, the relationship between Master and apprentice had been established as that of trusted mentor and mentee.

Would this system work in Public Education?  Of course it would.  And besides, in a limited, informal, but no official way,  it does already.  Almost any teacher new to a school – freshly graduated from teacher college or not – will gravitate toward an experienced teacher with whom he feels a connection.  (And if he doesn’t  that should set off alarm bells, for it is in the nature of good teachers to want to learn to be better teachers.  Arrogance is not always a bad thing, but one needs first to earn the right to it .)

While to take the informal and admittedly hit or miss de facto system that already exists and make it both formal and official could be simple and easy,  the culture of Public Education would resist that path in favor of a recondite, prolonged, top-to-bottom-to-top approach.  A system wide committee would be formed by the Superintendent.  After school meetings would be held (which are, trust me, the kiss of death to any initiative;  no teacher in his right mind ever willingly or happily or productively sits through an after-school meeting).  Sooner or later what would almost certainly become known as The Master Teacher/Mentor Pre-Tenure Teacher Professional Development and Assessment Initiative (MTMPTTPD) would become part of the collective bargaining process which in all likelihood would mean that it would end up on the bargaining room floor, sacrificed in the interest of adding an extra Teacher Development Day to the next contract in return for a pro-rated additional day’s earnings in lieu of the union’s giving up its demand for a three and half percent raise coupled with no additional days to the  teacher work year. 

But maybe I’m wrong.  Anyone out there in a PTO?  Care to propound the proposal?

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Posted by: cornvillenutmeg | September 19, 2012

The Demise of the Department Chairmen

The Demise of the Department Chairmen.

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Posted by: cornvillenutmeg | September 19, 2012

The Demise of the Department Chairmen

Before Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug, the heads of departments of academic discipline were called chairmen.  From then on, they became chairpersons or oddly, I always thought, chairs.  Today in most public schools there are no chairmen, chairpersons, or chairs.  There are Supervisors.  Supervisors are Administrators.

I myself have a master’s degree in Administration and Supervision.  There was a time before I ever set foot in a public school when I imagined I might like to be a Dean of Students.  When I left my last job in independent education, I opted for taking that degree thinking it might make me a more attractive candidate.  Once I had spent my first semester teaching in public education, however, I got over my administrator aspirations.

Supervisors are not teachers.  They may have been teachers once upon a time, but somehow administration and supervision attracted them more than teaching.  Why that might be I haven’t the least idea.

One of the administrators whose answers were part of my previous two posts began his professional education life as a math teacher.  When we first met, he was an assistant principal.  A few years later, he was hired as the principal.  This was in a high school.  Today he is again an assistant principal but now in an elementary school.  While he was principal, he was also the supervisor of the English and Foreign Language Departments, and the Library-Media Center, and as such ran all department meetings.  Please remind yourself that he was once a math teacher. 

He was the evaluator for most of the teachers employed in those three departments.  He was the head disciplinarian for the entire school, student population when he began, 600 plus.  He was also a Home Room Advisor.  He chaired the Leadership Council, and the School Improvement Committee.  He, of course, ran all faculty meetings and staff development days.  He was a member of the Administrative Council (all the administrators in all the schools in that system).  He also supervised the cafeteria during lunches.  He went to athletic games.  He supervised the students as they loaded themselves onto the buses at the end of the day.  He returned to school for meetings of the PTO, for Report Card Nights, for Open Houses, for Eighth Grade Orientation Night, for school plays and school concerts.  He often ran PPT meetings.  He mediated disputes between angry parents and anxious teachers.  He was at the beck and call of the superintendent, who, believe me, was not someone whose becks and calls one could ever look forward to.  He fielded every single complaint and, when it was possible, absorbed the brunt of whatever the criticism was instead of just passing the problem on.  He worked most of eleven months a year.  No one I have ever known was as underpaid for what he did as was that principal.  And because he was responsible for jobs that, to do well, would take at least five people, he was restrained from doing any of them brilliantly.  But he did do them with competence and in some instances, well.

I e-mailed him the above description of what he did, just to check my recall for accuracy.  I’ll quote his response: 

You have captured the essence of principalship, or the act of juggling many balls at once, and systematically putting one of the balls down, in order to add in another several balls.  It was exhausting, in all aspects: physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual;  if there are other aspects, I am quite certain they were exhausting, too.

My work was pretty much non-stop, even when at home, with calls from the superintendent, calls going back to concerned parents, students, and teachers when those folks could not be reached during the day, which found me at my desk before 6:50 am, and through 6:30 pm, with hustling around the building and district all in between, with lunch, if I was lucky, inhaled in 12 minutes.  Then there were the nights out, which I carefully tracked one year and found to rack up to 90 in the course of 180 school days…well, that counted some “Saturday” mandated appearances as “nights out.”  I had more free time as an independent school teacher-coach (of three sports) and dorm master.

 

 

I am not exaggerating when I suggest how many people it would take to accomplish expertly all the jobs a principal is tasked with.  Take discipline, for example.   As a parent, who would you prefer dispense discipline to your child, a Dean (or Supervisor) of Discipline or a Warden of Discipline?  Here are some of the things that a student can run afoul of in the course of day which end up needing the official attention of the official whose job description includes disciplinarian:  tardiness, absence, smoking (one or the other or both), drinking, taking food out of the cafeteria, misbehaving in the cafeteria, misbehaving in class, misbehaving in the hallway, plagiarism, cheating, using a cell phone in class or in the halls or in the cafeteria; using a PLD (personal listening device) during class or in the library, vandalism, destruction of property, bullying, driving to school without a permit, leaving school without permission, threatening a teacher or other adult in the employ of the school system, misbehaving on the bus, fighting, running in the hallway, theft, possession of weapons or drugs or drug paraphernalia, wearing inappropriate clothing, and using inappropriate language.  There are more, but I just can’t bring myself to think of them now.  All of the above some teacher or aide will “write up” on a discipline referral form which must, therefore, be dealt with by the supervisor in charge of discipline.

In a school of six hundred students, upwards of forty referral forms are submitted each day.  If you are a dean of students, you expect to deal with those pretty much on a daily basis.  If you are a principal, you haven’t the time to do that.  Instead, you end up finding moments between making visits to the classes of the teachers you are responsible for evaluating, or meeting with parents, or calming down an irate teacher, student, or superintendent.  You bring a stack of referral forms to student lunches and the bus boarding area in hopes of catching up with one or more of the referrees.  Pretty much everywhere you go, you carry a folder of referral forms with you, just in case.  Every once in a while, when the stack of forms has grown from merely unmanageable to Sisyphean, you block out a couple of hours and have your secretary summon from their classes the naughty children one after another (you can imagine how happy a teacher is being interrupted by someone who begins by telling him how sorry she is to interrupt you but, Mr. P needs to see…).  That discipline system, for lack of any better way to put it, is far more similar to the criminal justice system than not.  The students do the crime, and when they are caught, they do the time – detention, Saturday School, in-school suspension, or out of school suspension.  (Expulsion is beyond the purview of the principal.)

Depending on a school’s size and the affluence of a town or city, principals have one or more assistant principals to carry the load.  You would think that might help, yes?  Well, not so much.  The difference in administrative tasks in a school of 500 or fewer compared to a school of 1000 is far more than double.  So while the disciplinary tasks can be spread out among the principal and assistant principals, it really changes little.  The larger the student population, the larger the faculty, support staff, parent body, building itself, numbers of committees, meetings, complaints, and so on.  A school with one or more assistant principals is a school with one or more people doing jobs that are not possible to do.

Now, ask yourself, given how truly important it is to evaluate teachers for the efficacy of their efforts, was it in any way a good plan to add to the responsibility of a principal what was once the duty of a department chairman?

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Posted by: cornvillenutmeg | September 12, 2012

Good Teachers and How to Know One

     Sister Myra Paul, all four feet eleven inches of her, stepped in from the hall, turned to close the door, and walked to the front of the room. Without notes, without reading from a text, she began to talk. “Once upon a time, almost ten thousand years ago,” she said, “in a land known as Mesopotamia, lived a tribe of people.” That day was Tuesday, September 5th, 1961, and Edie Petrello and her two closest friends, Evelyn and Kathy, along with thirty-seven other sophomore girls began to write in their notebooks. Sister, who taught World History at St. Brendan’s High School in Brooklyn, New York, went on with her story. Edie stopped writing in her notebook. The story was too good to look away from.

     When the bell rang again, Sister stopped talking. No one looked away. No one moved. “Well, she said, “I will just have tell you about Gilgamesh tomorrow.” With that, she bid them good day and stepped back into the hall.

     In May of 1962, Edie, Evelyn, and Kathy gathered in the library to begin to review for their Regents Exam in World History. They took out their notebooks. There on the first page of her notebook, Edie found the paragraph of notes she had taken on September 5th, and not much else. While I cannot tell you how Evelyn and Kathy did on their exams, I can tell you that Edie scored 95%. Sister Myra Paul had captivated, intrigued, engaged, and fascinated her forty students with what Edie still remembers as the Story of World History, of which Edie learned apparently a great deal.

     Sister Myra Paul embodied the qualities, inherent and explicit, in the responses I received to the question: What is the most significant indicator of a good teacher? Recall that those who sent me their answers are educators, both teachers and administrators, parents, grandparents, performance and graphic artists, politicians, judges and lawyers, broadcasters, business men and women, and medical professionals. Here is the distillation of what they offered:

§ The teacher’s humanity. Yes, content knowledge and intelligence are crucial; (however,) when I think of many memorable moments in teaching, they were about my ability to read students’ needs..

§ …the good ones I remember excited us…they knew their fields, lectured with confidence, demanded top effort…being well liked was surprisingly low on my list of a good teacher….the ones from whom I really learned something were demanding…and generous in their praise…

§ There really isn’t one perfect indicator of a good teacher… One way is to listen to what students and parents say… For example, there was a teacher named Mr. Hook whom all the students and parents loved. And everyone was well aware of this..

§ Confident students

§ A good teacher should never ever for one minute be boring.

§ One whose students learn English, Math, Science and History.

§ The ability to cause students to want to learn more.

§ That students are fully engaged in meaningful learning.

§ Patience. Encouragement. Listening… Looking for the best in students. One of the greatest obstacles to true learning today is that many children don’t want to be (in school); they end up becoming a nightmare for teachers who want to teach and the students who want to learn.

§ If a teacher is respected by his/her students, they can then be inspired to learn.  And the teacher has to want success for students…There are many teachers who just go through the motions. 

§ One who knows how to motivate students.

§ As far as good teacher bad teacher: my two sons had as little talent playing baseball as I did.  My eldest son’s coach said to him, “I’m going to make a 300 hitter out of you.”  And he did, and the team went on to win its division. My youngest son’s coach told me, “Your son is out of his league, and he is off the team.”…That same kind of attitude exists in the classroom.  Good teacher works, bad teacher doesn’t.  One of the teachers I most admired was Fr. Phillip Kellett, SJ.  He would say, “All I want on my tombstone is ‘He Worked.’”

§ That the teacher loves her subject area, as well as learning in general, and does her very best to impart that love on to her students in a supportive, engaging atmosphere — in-class and out.

§ One quality (talented teachers) all seem to share is passion…for their subject, for learning, for teaching, for students…they exude it. 

§ Passion for the content, a keen desire to learn and to help others learn, the ability to communicate both their passion and content to others.

     To return to Edie for just a moment, a year later she and her friends took U.S. History. She does not recall the teacher’s name. What she recalls about that course is memorizing lists of names and dates. She will tell you that what she truly knows today of American History she learned anywhere other than that class.

     We all – I hope –had one or more teachers like Sister Myra Paul during our student lives. I suppose an argument could thereby be made for student evaluations of teachers. Who better to know firsthand whether or not a teacher has helped a student’s progress toward becoming someone who thinks well? The problem in that is no matter what, until approximately the age of twenty-four, the human brain has not fully developed, so relying on Sophomore Sally Go-getter’s appraisal of her teachers has a built-in catch that only time can erase. In addition, teenagers, through no fault of their own, are what they are, so for every honest, accurate, and fair student assessment of a teacher, there would certainly be at least one dishonest, inaccurate, ego-centric assessment as well. Take a random sampling of twenty-five high school students, give them a choice of answering true or false to the statement: “I like school.” Do you think the majority of those twenty-five would answer True?

     The answer above that speaks of Mr. Hook is factually true. Mr. Hook and I were colleagues. He retired two years before I did. What is also true, however, is that Mr. Hook’s colleagues knew he was a good teacher, particularly his fellow math teachers.

     With the possible exceptions of the absurd mega-high schools with thousands of students, teachers who have worked in a school for five years or more know who the good teachers are. They know that in exactly the way a majority of employees anywhere know who the good workers are, and it makes very little difference what the job is. That being the case, who do you think would make the best evaluators or assessors or judges of teachers? I would suggest the Mr. Hooks of the Public Education universe fill that bill.

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