Moving To A New Neighborhood

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bandar judi cemeThis blog will be a continuation of the old blog, located at http://cwpjasoncourtmanche.wikispaces.com/. I'm just relocating to a new space that will be easier for readers to use. This will also livefeed to facebook. You have to add the networked blogs application. Look for a new posting on Friday, February 6. Hope to hear from you soon.

At Risk Students And Risk Taking Teachers

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bandar ceme 99My wife and I met in a Sociology of Religion class taught at UConn. The most interesting thing the professor said was that “religion is what happens when the charisma dies.” During my eighteen years in education I have often thought of that phrase. It seems that many good teaching practices become fossilized because some direktur or legislator somewhere decides to formalize and mandate someone’s good idea. Once that idea is institutionalized, it loses its effectiveness. Bye-bye charisma; hello dogma.

Several years ago, the high school where I worked went through NEASC reaccredidation. I chaired the Mission Statement Committee and my wife served on the Steering Committee. One of the recommendations from the NEASC review committee was the implementation of an advisory jadwal in which groups of students were assigned to teachers and met weekly to discuss topical issues. The folks from NEASC cited several studies which show that students with positive extracurricular relationships with at least one teacher perform better, are more likely to stay in school, and are less likely to get into trouble than students who lack such a relationship with a teacher. The faculty actually voted against a formal advisory jadwal because most of the teachers questioned the effectiveness of a system that creates artificial relationships between teachers and students, but NEASC gave the school a demerit for lack of an advisory program, and so one exists now.

In the last few weeks there have been several news stories about teachers having inappropriate relationships with students, three involving sexual relationships and one involving alcohol. Cases like these spring up from time to time that make teachers and the teaching profession look bad, and make teachers reluctant to have relationships with students outside the classroom or beyond the curriculum. Teachers can fear personal questions, chaperoning dances or travel, and certainly physical contact, even something as simple as a hug when a student is crying or has gotten into the college of his or her choice. A fear arises that you might be accused of or even witness to something inappropriate. Better to just avoid any personal contact. If this attitude dominates the profession, then it is no wonder that advisory programs are forced upon schools.

Last weekend my wife and I went out to dinner with two other couples. The others teach fifth grade, sixth grade, high school, and college. One couple was teasing my wife and me because their babysitter was a high school girl we sometimes use, and from there we got to talking about the girl in question. To avoid detail, I’ll just say that her home life is less than ideal. She’s a senior waiting to hear from colleges. She’s already been accepted to one and offered a good financial aid package, but she’d prefer UConn because it would allow her to stay close to home, which would enable her to look out for her four-year-old sister, who’s more like a daughter to her. The girl will be the first in her family to attend college. We’re all concerned for her that family pressure or finances will keep her from attending or finishing college. The other couple mentioned that they were considering having her live with them if it becomes necessary, but they already angered the girl’s mother once by inviting her to a holiday dinner when they found out the girl’s family was not going to get together.

The other couple chimed in to voice their support for the idea. They should know; they have a seventeen-year-old girl from the wife’s school living in their basement. She drives to school with our friend, and provides some childcare in exchange for a safe place to stay. Last year the girl and another girl used to spend a lot of time at our friends’ house in the afternoons and evenings and on weekends, but the home situation has worsened, and so now it’s necessary to live with her teacher on a more permanent basis.

Amy and I, too, have had students live with us. We’re close to several former students who have endured very difficult family situations like divorce, disease, and abuse. Somehow, we collect at risk students, or they find us. They call at all hours or show up at our door or in my office. We loaned one a car for a summer so she could work to save money for school. One year we hired two girls to babysit together, not because we needed two sitters, but to get them out of their homes and give them a chance to spend time with each other and with us, as if they were sisters and we their parents. Certainly we and our two set of friends are not the only teachers who have gone to these lengths.

Recently I got a friend request in facebook from a former student. She had dropped out of school after losing credit her freshman year. Her brother had also been my student, and he’d not only dropped out but wound up in prison. She’s doing all right now. She got her diploma, and now has a four-year-old son and manages a dry cleaning business in Manchester. Her brother, too, got his GED and now is an assistant manager of a motorcycle shop in Manchester. I really liked both kids and fought hard with them and for them to try to keep them in school. The brother I even took rock climbing once. I don’t know what part my efforts played, but I’m glad to hear they both found some stability and success in life.

I don’t know why some teachers abrogate their trust and harm students, or why some educators believe that institutionalized solutions will fix at risk students. I condemn the former and have little faith in the latter. Maybe having students live with us is a big risk, but somewhere between betrayed trust and mandated relationships lie countless students who need teachers to risk being human and humane.

I'd love to hear some of your stories of taking risks for students.

On The Death Of A Student

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play bandarqIn last week’s column I wrote about a brother and a sister who had dropped out of school but had managed to return, get their diplomas, and get their lives on track. A few days later I learned that a boy from my former school had just committed suicide. It was approximately the anniversary of a fatal car accident the boy had been in that took the life of one of his friends.

When I began teaching high school, we seemed to lose one student a year to a tragic accident. Sometimes these were the so-called good kids, honors students and athletes who never got into any trouble, and the talk would be about what an injustice it was that such a nice young man or woman had lost his or her life so tragically. As teachers, I think we feel an acute sense of tragedy when one of these kids dies. But often these accidents take the lives of kids who were not good students and model citizens. And that is perhaps even more tragic. These kids’ lives seem to have been mired in misfortune, only to end prematurely and violently. Such seems to be the case with the young man who just took his life.

My wife and I both knew him. Amy had him as a student and I had him in advisory. He was not an easy kid to like. He had moved to Connecticut from the south. Although he had friends, he never seemed to truly fit in. Prejudicial things were said to him because he was a Southerner, and in his youthfulness he seemed to embrace a stereotype of what it means to be from the South. He flaunted a degree of prejudice that I suspect he did not truly possess, and he assumed an adversarial role toward teachers, toward school, and toward authority in general. He insulted his classmates and sparred with his teachers because being disruptive gave him perhaps some of the only feelings of power or notoriety he ever enjoyed. I know I threw him out of advisory on more than one occasion for being disrespectful, and when I did he would smile and tip his confederate flag cap to the class as he walked out the door. The other kids usually weren’t sorry to see him leave, and the couple of friends he had were entertained.

One afternoon I was taking a walk around the grounds of the school during my prep period when I saw him on the athletic track. It was a warm day in early Spring during the young man’s ingusan year. He was jogging in sneakers, jeans, and a t-shirt. I walked over to him. I’m sure he expected me to say something to him or to get him in trouble. There’s no way he had permission to be outdoors on the track by himself during the school day. He had to have been skipping someone’s class, or maybe he’d been thrown out of one once again. As I walked over to him, he slowed down to meet me. I don’t recall who spoke first, but we just chatted about the weather and how nice it was to feel the sun on our skin after a long winter. The whole time we spoke, his demeanor was calm and his tone was friendly. Maybe he was being deferential to me to avoid getting written up, but, knowing how little he cared for authority, I suspect not. I felt I was seeing a more sincere side of him once he was away from the students and teachers he felt compelled to perform for. He seemed like a nice young man that afternoon.

I got around to asking him what he was doing, and he told me he was trying to get in shape because he planned to go out for the football team when they held tryouts later in the spring. I was surprised but pleased. I thought it might be nice for him to be involved in school in a positive way, and to be a part of something which gave him a reason to maintain his grades. We didn’t talk much longer. I told him I had to get back inside to teach my next class. I wished him luck with tryouts. I never wrote him up or told him to get back to class. I never reported him to the office or tried to find out where he was supposed to be. When I left him he had returned to jogging around the track in his jeans.

I don’t think he ever followed through and tried out for the football team. If he did, he didn’t make the cut. He managed to get through senior year despite the car accident that took his friend’s life. He graduated this past June. I never kept track of him after that day. I have no idea what he’d been doing with himself since graduation. After the suicide, the school prepared for the aftermath, identifying areas of refuge and offering grief counseling, but there wasn’t much disruption to the community on the first day back to school. Very few students or teachers seemed particularly sad, other than a handful of kids that may have known him. He just wasn’t popular enough or well liked enough for that kind of a reaction.

In the poem “On the Death of a Student Hopelessly Failing My Course,” George Cuomo writes that the dead boy’s parents were left saying, “‘He could have made it, poor boy!’” But in fact this was a boy who simply had not found a way to make it in life. Cuomo writes, “Poor boy, he/Could not. How little he could do in life!/He lacked whole galaxies of talents, lacked/Quickness of hand or foot or eye or mind,/lacked will and ambition, lacked height and strength,/lacked even hope.” To me, this seems to have been the case with my former student. And that may be the biggest tragedy of all.

Grading And Student Expectations

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bandarqqOn February 17 the New York Times published an article titled “Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes.” I posted a link to the article on my wall in facebook, and received more comments to that posting than I have ever received to any of my blog posts! The article claims that students today have a strong sense of entitlement that causes disputes over grades when the students receive marks lower than what they feel they deserve. A secondary point is that students expect relatively high grades, B’s to be exact, merely for showing up to class and completing the assignments. In general, the people who commented on my posting were other teachers who wanted to share horror stories of students (and parents) with entitlement issues.

I’m sure those of us who teach can all rattle off a few such stories. I had a young man in class at UConn a few semesters ago who would get angry with me when he received anything less than an A on a paper, and at one point informed me that I was going to keep him out of medical school. Mind you, I made him work hard to revise his papers, but ultimately he received a B in the course. Another time a young woman who skipped twenty-one of twenty-eight class meetings stormed out of my office screaming that I had ruined her life when she failed my class.

My worst case occurred several years ago in a high school Advanced Placement class. For the last assignment of the third quarter, two students turned in the exact same essay. I googled it and found it quickly. Both students received zeros for the assignment. For one student, this zero dropped his quarter average to a D-. The other student wound up with an F, which prevented her from participating in athletics that spring. To make a long story short, her parents begged, pleaded, argued, even got other adults from the community to try to offer services to the school in exchange for a grade change. I didn’t budge and my administration left the decision in my hands. Part of the parents’ argument was that grading was subjective, and even with the zero on the plagiarized paper there was no reason I couldn’t reconsider an earlier paper and change a minus grade to a solid letter grade, which would have been enough to pass her for the quarter. My argument was that it was the last paper of the quarter, and if I were going to engage in any grade massaging I’d be more inclined to alter the other student’s grade so that he failed, too.

I felt bad for both students. I liked them both, but I had no qualms about serious consequences for plagiarism. In fact, I think the school could have done more, like expel them from the National Honors Society. But that’s another subject. However, these situations bring up another issue for me, and that is the complicated issue of grading, which I think shares blame with student entitlement.

How many of us have spent a weekend or more slaving over student essays, writing thoughtful and helpful comments, even extensive letters at the end of each paper that address in detail the strengths and weaknesses of the work, only to return the papers and watch the students turn to the last page, look at the letter grade, and then toss the paper in the waste basket? It happens time and again. Or we return papers and every kid who got a plus or a minus grade turns in a so-called revision which has nothing more than corrections of surface errors, and expects to have that B- magically become a B or that C+ magically become a B-. This sort of behavior from students is maddening and common.

What would happen if we didn’t give letter or number grades?

Three years ago, my third year teaching Advanced Composition for Prospective Teachers, I refused to give grades on the papers. I told the students that my experience teaching the prospective teachers told me that they were all good writers and would likely end the semester with good grades. In fact, I had never given below a B in the course during the previous two years. (By contrast, in my American Literature sections I rarely found myself giving A’s and often gave out C’s or lower). I informed them that if the quality of anyone’s work seemed inferior, I would speak with them. Otherwise, papers would only be receiving narrative comments and revisions were expected. The reaction? You’d think I had just taken away the heroin supply of a roomful of junkies. Students with 4.0 GPAs writing beautiful papers for the course would approach me after class, in the hall or in my office, and in hushed tones ask, “Please, can you tell me my grade? Just give me a hint? Is it below an A? Please? You have to tell me!” I’d say that I hadn’t recorded a grade, but if they’d like we could look at the latest draft of the most recent paper and talk about what they might consider doing to improve. They’d say, “Improve?! Oh my God, I don’t have an A, do I?!”

My point is that grades become a narcotic, and in the end don’t tell the student or the teacher much about the quality of thought or writing exhibited in the work. I have to wonder how many of the arguments mentioned in the Times article could have been avoided if there were no grades but only narrative feedback. It’s not a completely alien idea. Yesterday the Norwich Bulletin published a piece on an alternative high school in Lisbon that uses only narrative evaluations. Perhaps I am being unrealistic in my idealism, but I’d like to scrap the current grading system and replace it with narrative evaluation. Of course then we teachers would have to do a lot more writing. It’s interesting to consider how much resistance that would produce.

“No More Pencils No More Books … Out For Summer Out Till Fall We Might Not Come Back At All”

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bandarqI’m not talking about Alice Cooper or the movement toward digital literacy here. No, I’m talking about Governor Rell’s announcement that she is freezing “all nonessential state purchases for the next four months—including pens [and] paper.”

Wednesday’s Hartford Courant reported that Governor Rell has frozen spending on everything from cleaning products for restrooms and service contracts for office machines to pens, paper, and paperclips. This freeze will remain for the next four months, or until the end of the fiscal and school year. This ban includes the University of Connecticut. We can use whatever office supplies we currently possess, but once they are gone we cannot replace them till July 1. Because this decree is new, it is unclear whether the CWP or any other university aktivitas can use grant, endowment, or discretionary funds for supplies. I suspect we will learn that we are permitted to do so within certain parameters and only with administrative permission.

After Governor Rell banned the use of state funds for out of state travel, the university responded by placing strict limits on the use of grants, endowments, and discretionary funds to make up for the loss. The CWP receives state funding through the English Department, but we also receive a core grant of federal funds from the NWP, we generate our own discretionary funds from professional development, and we have access to funding from the Aetna Chair of Writing that is at the discretion of the Aetna Advisory Board. At first, it seemed that we would simply have to rely on these sources for out of state travel, but now if we want to use those funds we have to receive written permission from the English department head, the CLAS dean, and in some cases one of the provosts, as well. This permission is ostensibly to ensure that such travel is essential, but realistically it appears to have much to do with public relations.

What this means for the CWP is that if we want to use NWP funds or our own PD revenue to travel later this month to the New England Writing Projects Conference in Northampton, Massachusetts, or in early April to the NWP’s Spring Meeting in Washington, DC to lobby for reauthorization of funding for the NWP, we have to get permission from three levels of university administration. Ironically, the permission form has not been made available online, so everyone who wants to get permission to use non-state funds to travel outside of Connecticut has to inundate the offices of the deans and provosts with written forms that we may no longer be allowed to use state money to purchase the paper on which to print the forms! We may even find ourselves in a situation where we have to complete written forms to request permission to use federal grant money to purchase the paper to print the forms. Got it? That’s exactly how it has felt lately.

I’m being facetious, of course. I understand the complexity of the current situation, and sincerely believe that the deans and provosts generally are well intentioned, even when I disagree. (Although I don’t think I can express the same generosity of spirit toward the governor’s office). Part of the perkara in Connecticut is an ideological split between the Democratic and Republican responses to the economic crisis. On the one hand, we have a Democratic administration in Washington responding to the crisis by spending money to stimulate the economy, and on the other hand we have a Republican administration in Hartford responding to the crisis by rescinding money and freezing expenditures to tame the economy. The other factor in Connecticut is the Balanced Budget Law, which has been in place since 1992. This law amended the state constitution to require that “general budget expenditures authorized for any fiscal year shall not exceed the estimated amount of revenue for such fiscal year.” So even if Governor Rell were an economic liberal, it could be argued that she’d be violating the state constitution if she authorized spending that exceeds revenue. Now if I’m reading the law correctly, the governor and legislature would not actually be violating the constitution by allowing the state to go into deficit this year, as the authorized spending was based on estimated revenue. Where we’d be in trouble, however, would be next year when the estimated revenues would be much less and the budget would have to enact dramatic cuts in expenditures. It could be argued that Rell sees her current rescissions and freezes as preparation for that likelihood.

However, it seems to me that many of the orders that come down from on high seem short-sighted and ill-considered. I know wasteful spending exists and some cuts have to be made, but what is gained by making us fill out forms to get permission to use non-state funds to travel? Those funds already have limits placed on them. In the case of the NWP funds, there is an Office of Sponsored Programs and a grant manager who regulate these limits. This form just becomes a waste of state funds as we all spend time on the forms when we could and should be doing other things—like teaching. And what is the wisdom of freezing expenditures on things like service contracts or cleaning products? This way, when the copier breaks we’ll have to buy a new one, and when the bathrooms become disgusting after four months without proper cleaning we’ll be in violation of OSHA regulations!

OK, I know I’m just starting to rant. These are difficult times and everyone in an administrative position has had to make tough decisions, the CWP included, but we have to put a little more thought and creativity into how to save money, rather than just make sweeping decrees like across the board cuts and complete freezes, or implement cosmetic and inefficient responses like triplicate forms. There’s just got to be a better way.