Walkers

Jejak PandaSelamat Datang Di Blog Kesayangan Anda Dan Selamat Membaca
bandarq terbaikI was going to start this first post of the year by complaining about this or that educational proposal. And there certainly are plenty of goings-on to critique, but then I thought that, rather than set a negative tone by beginning the year tilting at educational windmills, I would try to begin on a positive note. So here goes.

I was saying to my wife the other day that I really don’t like summer, and I don’t know why I ever pretended I did. It is too hot and too humid. I burn in the sun in a matter of minutes. There’s too little structure for me. I like fall, and I’ve always liked fall. I like the sunny days without humidity and excessive heat. I like the cool nights with a window open and the air conditioner off. I love to jog down the street and watch the sunlight fall through the golden leaves of a slowly turning maple tree. I love to feel a slight chill in the air and to need a sweater. I love the smell of wood smoke. And I love school. I always loved school.

I have wonderful memories from kindergarten and first grade when I walked to school with a pack of neighborhood kids that slowly increased in size the further along we marched and the closer we got to school grounds. My neighbors Gary and Walter and I would start out together. Walter was Gary’s older brother, and he received fifty cents a week from my grandmother for walking with me to and from school each day. I would walk six houses to Gary and Walter’s and then we would proceed up Fenway Drive, picking up Walter’s best friend Michael, who would run across the street to meet us, then David on the corner at the top of the hill, and finally Reggie and Joyce at the intersection. Joyce was our only female walker. From there we would cut through a neighbor’s yard, running alongside his garage, and we’d pop out in his side yard where he had an apple tree we sometimes stole apples from. Most of our neighborhood was post-WW II construction, and the area had been covered in orchards before the war. Many of us had fruit-bearing trees in our yards, mostly apple, but I had a pear tree and two plum trees in my yard, and my grandmother and aunt spent the fall baking apple pies and pear torts. We always cut through that one neighbor’s yard because his house fronted a T-intersection, and we would walk along the intersecting street to where it met School Street. From there we turned right and marched onto the grounds of Ridge Hill School, which had been built in 1969, the year I was born.

I know my memories are idyllic, and I know that my experience with this walking pack of boys wasn’t always so bucolic and idealized. We argued and fought. I hated Walter’s friend Michael, and resented that Walter, who was usually good to Gary and me, could degenerate into a bully around Michael. And we were yelled at and chased on more than one occasion by the neighbor whose yard we cut through, but mostly I have good memories of the time, and wish I had been able to continue to walk to school after we moved out of the New Haven area when I was seven.

This fall my daughter has begun preschool and my son has begun first grade. We live two houses down from his school and have a crushed stone sidewalk in front of our house. He’s a walker like I was, though he doesn’t have a pack of neighborhood kids to join. Most of our neighbors are older, grandparents now, and the few little kids who live in the area take the bus or are dropped off by car by parents who can’t or won’t enjoy the walk I cherish. School doesn’t begin for my son till nine, and he wakes up around 6:30, so while the weather remains warm and pleasant we are spending our mornings exploring the neighborhood.

My son turned six earlier in the week, and he received several new books on dinosaurs, fossils, and wildlife. He usually tells people he wants to be a scientist, an archaeologist, or a paleontologist. He was reading one of his new books this morning and asked if we could go look for fossils later. I reminded him that this would have to take place in the late afternoon or early evening since we all had school. He was a little disappointed by this, so I put down my paper and we put on our shoes and headed outside. It was eight and we had close to an hour to ourselves, so we walked up to a field behind a neighbor’s house where there used to be a pig farm. Cormac and I scoured the ground looking for fossils. We found lots of cool rocks, some charred wood, old scraps of pottery and porcelain, and three small bone chips, the spongy remains of the marrow calcified into a hard, porous substance. He was delighted; he had a treasure for show-and-tell. We hurried home to change into dry shoes, wash our hands, and then walk down to school. We were early enough for Cormac’s teacher to find him an old butter tub to put his treasures in, and I left him there at his seat waiting eagerly for the time when he would be able to show his finds to his new friends.

I walked home slowly along our sidewalk, beneath the old maple and oak trees that line our street. It was foggy rather than sunny, and I walked a little slow, reluctant to get home and break my reverie. I enjoyed the oddly pleasant mix of early morning autumn air—dampness and leaf-smell intermingling with diesel exhaust from the school buses—and then got into my car and drove to the university.

Less Is More, Or The Big Paycheck

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judi bandarqI wrote a nostalgic piece last week, but I can’t do that two weeks in a row. Today, I have to comment on a conversation I had with a dishwasher repairman.

My dishwasher may be dying. It still washes the dishes and it isn’t spraying water across the kitchen floor (it did that once before and I had to change a filter), but it has been making this god-awful high-pitched screeching sound, which is why I have been doing dishes by hand all week. The repair guy was scheduled to come today, but like the cable guy, he gave me a four hour window of time during which he might come, and then he called with about twenty minutes left in that window to say he’d be arriving in thirty minutes, and then he arrived fifty-five minutes later—not that I’m bitter, as my colleague Gina would say.

OK, so Tim was a nice guy as appliance repairmen go, and while he tinkered around with my dishwasher he struck up conversation, and he asked me if I had to take the day off today to be there to meet him, and I said, “Sort of.” Now, I like the fact that my job allows me to be able to take a day like today for things like meeting a repairman coming to my house, but I hate being asked about it because I know what’s coming. It’s like when people ask teachers what they do and as soon as you say, “I’m a teacher,” they make some comment about all your time off and how nice and easy it must be to get out of work so early each day—yadda, yadda. You all know the conversation. Fact of the matter is, I rarely take days, and I only take days when I have things like repairmen who give me four hour windows of time and then arrive an hour late, or doctor’s appointments, weddings, funerals, that sort of thing. Otherwise, I’m a workaholic. I check my email in hotel lobbies on vacation. Heck, I’m writing this at 11 PM. So I know what he must be thinking, and I don’t want to get into it because I fear that I’ll sound like Hamlet’s mother, protesting too much. But then he surprises me by saying his mother was a first grade teacher, and I’m thinking, “All right. I can probably talk about education with this guy without the misperceptions and the innuendos.” But then he says, “Hey, can I ask you about something? What do you think of the dedication of teachers today? Is it the same as it was years ago?”

Well, I don’t know how to answer this question. I’m not THAT old, and I haven’t been teaching even twenty years quite yet (18 or 19 if you go back to student teaching), so I say something along the lines of how teacher preparation is much more rigorous than it once was, and the standards are higher, and the required content knowledge is greater. But he says, “No, I mean dedication to the field. Are they willing to do the things teachers used to do?” So I must be looking at him with a funny look, you know, my head tilted sideways like a dog does or something, and he proceeds to clarify that it was his opinion, gleaned from his mother, that teachers were more dedicated back in the day, and that these days they’re just in it for the paycheck. OK, now I don’t know where to begin responding. So I say, “Are you suggesting that in the good old days teachers worked harder because they were paid less?” And I’m thinking, Would you have gotten here about three hours earlier than you did if I paid you less? But I bite my tongue. He clarifies by saying no, not exactly, but that he thinks that when the pay was low only the truly dedicated went into the profession, and these days too many teachers just want the big paycheck. That’s what he said. The BIG PAYCHECK. He then proceeded to tell me a second-hand story about some student-teacher his mother had years ago who refused to do all sorts of unspecified things she was asked to do and how she just wanted the short hours, the vacation time, the pay. Et cetera.

Once again, I don’t know where to begin with this guy. For one, if the paycheck was so great and all, why do we have shortage areas in just about every area? At the secondary level, I believe Social Studies is the only non-shortage area. Two, why do so many teachers I know have second jobs tending bar, waiting tables, running a Christmas tree farm, or selling perfume in a department store? Don’t get me wrong. I know we’re paid well and that tenure, even though it is intended to ensure our professional rights, also functions to give us a great degree of job security. But most of the teachers I know work their asses off and usually spend their vacations (and weekends and evenings) grading and planning. If we got paid a decent hourly wage we’d make significantly more than our salaries. I’m sure everyone knows the old joke about getting five dollars an hour for babysitting your students. If you had 100 students and saw each one for an hour a day you’d gross $90,000 at the end of a 180 day school year. How many of you make that?

The New York Times ran an editorial today by Timothy Egan titled “Lesson Plans, 2009.” It’s a cynical piece that the Times staff chose to highlight with a box that says “It’s back to school with bad teachers, bored students, and baffling parents.” In it, teachers are accused of being overpaid, selfish, incompetent, insubordinate, lazy, and—to beat all—drunk. Nice. I finished reading the column and I thought to myself, “Well, maybe if they paid us all less …”

Journeys, Innocence, And Suffering

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daftar bandarqEach Fall I have been teaching American Literature To 1880, where I can teach Hawthorne, but this time I was given a section of the companion course, American Literature Since 1880. What’s more, because budget cuts have made it necessary to fill seats, I have a section of forty students rather than my customary nineteen. I was initially concerned that it would be difficult to have a decent discussion with so many students, but so far the class has been going well, and I have a good dozen students who participate regularly and intelligently.

This past week we have begun reading Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! I love the novel, but I had to wonder if interest in the book would fall along gender lines. I’m pleased that it hasn’t. Anyway, one of the reasons I love the novel so much is that it is deceptively simple yet filled with many seemingly insignificant lines that, upon closer inspection, are simply pregnant with meaning and significance. My favorite line in the book, and perhaps my favorite line (or at least one of my favorite lines) in all literature is uttered by a character named Carl Linstrum. Observing changes that have taken place on the Nebraska prairie during his long absence, Carl observes, “there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before, like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.” I like to throw that line to my students and ask them what they think the two or three human stories are, and then to ask them to identify those archetypal stories in works from different periods, right up to the contemporary era.

Over the years I have gotten lots of good responses to this question, but the students’ initial answers are usually pretty generic. They suggest things like Rags to Riches or Coming of Age, which are fine answers, but I press them to be more specific. Inevitably they want to know what I think the stories are. I preface my answer by saying that I don’t think my two or three are THE answers, but I tell them that there are a few stories I see recurring in literature more often than any others. To me, these are the stories of Odysseus, Adam and Eve, and Christ. To phrase them generically, I could say Life is a Journey, Loss of Innocence, and Deliverance through Suffering. One could even say that the generic examples I gave above from students are versions of these three stories. Coming of Age is essentially the story of Adam and Eve, and Rags to Riches is a materialistic version of the story of Christ.

Nonetheless, it’s a great question to use as a framing device for the course, and in fact the selesai paper the students have to write is on a version of this question. I began this fall’s course with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884, and I use the line from Hemingway that “all modern American literature comes from” Huck Finn. I said to the students that I agree with Hemingway to the degree that I think Twain is using one of these three basic human stories (the story of Odysseus) but that he is telling a modern American version of that one human story. (I might argue that thirty-four years earlier Hawthorne had done the same thing with the story of Adam and Eve and The Scarlet Letter, but that’s an argument for another day). So for the selesai paper, after we have read nine major works of late-nineteenth and twentieth-century works, the students have to tell me an American version of one of the two or three basic human stories. They have to name the human story, identify its manifestation in at least two of the works we’ve read, and then connect it to a contemporary text (which can be fiction, nonfiction, print, film, whatever).

Half way through the second book of the semester, the students seem to be getting the hang of it, and this is, in part, because O Pioneers! is such an exemplary text for what I’m talking about. We had a great discussion this past Wednesday about how Cather was alluding to both the stories of the Garden of Eden and Pyramus and Thisbe, and treating them as versions of each other. At one point there is a beautiful description of an orchard (the apple tree from the Garden of Eden) bordered on one side by a Mulberry hedge (like the Mulberry tree from Ovid’s tale of Pyramus and Thisbe) and on the other side by a new field of wheat (good old American ‘amber waves of grain’). I asked the students if they could see how this one paragraph of description gives readers a tableau that provides an interpretive image of Cather’s idea of a singular human story and three permutations of that story—one Biblical, one Classical, and one American.

I was especially pleased the following day when one of the students from my class stopped me in the hallway outside my office to tell me that her professor for her Milton class came in and wrote just the word “typology” on the board, and then proceeded to explain to the students what typology was and how Milton was using it in Paradise Lost, and, as the student said, she suddenly realized that I had been talking about basically the same thing without using the word itself. And she was right. Nice when that sort of thing happens.

For Tuesday, I have an invitation from a colleague to sit in on her Beat Literature class. They’re discussing The Catcher in the Rye and its possible influence upon Kerouac’s On the Road, two books about disaffected male youth—another human story that seems to repeat itself as if it never happened before. Can you think of a Biblical or Classical precedent?

Common Sense (?)

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bandarq terpercayaHave you seen the big, full-page ads of Linda McMahon’s head? If you’ve missed them, she’s running for Senator, hoping to unseat Chris Dodd. Now I’m no cheerleader for Dodd and I won’t even begin to be an apologist for the sweetheart real estate deal he received that has gotten voters so disgruntled recently, but McMahon’s campaign bothers the heck out of me. If you recall, McMahon is the wife of Vince McMahon and past President and CEO of the World Wrestling Federation. She was involved in a federal investigation of steroid use by WWF wrestlers back in 1993 and prides herself on being the force behind the WWF’s literacy and voter registration campaigns. Earlier this year Governor Rell appointed her to the Connecticut Board of Education, citing her business acumen as her defining qualification. Most recently it has been revealed that the senate hopeful has been rather lax in exercising her own right to vote. She was forced to admit on her campaign blog that she has missed many votes, notably the 2008 Republican primary and the 2006 general election. Yet she has given very generously to both Republican and Democratic politicians, as well as to many political causes. Both Joe Lieberman and Jodi Rell have been the beneficiaries of McMahon’s largess.

I was outraged by Rell’s appointment of McMahon to the Board of Education because she has no qualifications. She has never taught and never served on a local school board. Other than the WWF’s literacy campaign, McMahon has no claim to qualification, and Rell’s citing of her business acumen is specious, at best. One, education is not business. If education were run like business the first thing we’d all do is fire our raw materials providers and get new ones that would send us higher quality students to work with, and then we’d layoff most of our teachers and outsource our teaching services to a second- or third-world country with a so-called emerging economy (that means they have weak labor and environmental laws and a low tax rate). And two, if we were to run education like the WWF, we’d pump the teachers and students full of steroids, dress up everyone in sexploitational clothes, and beat each other up. And all the matches (read, tamat assessments) would be rigged for entertainment value and not for the assessment of the actual performance skills of the participants. No. McMahon was appointed to the board because she donated a ton of money to Rell’s campaign. Period. I’m not naïve; I know how this is how government works on both sides of the aisle, but I get particularly upset when these political behaviors end up affecting education.

And now the woman is running for Senator, and she doesn’t even vote. Of course, she doesn’t have to vote. She exercises her political clout by waiting to see who is nominated or elected and then giving them lots of money. To paraphrase Leona Helmsley, only poor people vote. If the Republican Party of Connecticut has any sense or sense of decency they will at least put their money and hope on Rob Simmons. At least he has served in the House of Representatives and is married to a public school teacher (who happens to be a Teacher Consultant of the CWP-Storrs, by the way). Unfortunately, Simmons probably doesn’t have enough money.

One of my students stopped by my office a few days ago to chat. She was upset because three of her five professors this semester are not very good teachers. One has yet to give an assignment, and the student has heard from others who have taken courses with him that he never returns any papers anyway. They just get an arbitrary grade at the end of the semester that is based on they-know-not-what. Another professor up and assigned a book that was not on the syllabus nor ordered and stocked in the book store, and then spent all of ten minutes discussing it but still assigned a paper on it. Part of my student’s visit was to ask if she could talk to me about the book so she at least had someone to bounce ideas off of. The third professor is four weeks into the semester and hasn’t gotten out of chapter one of the first book yet. The other day he realized how far behind he was and so assigned an unreasonably large amount of reading for the next class so they could all catch up. It wouldn’t be so bad if the students had a syllabus and so were ahead in the reading, but he never handed out a syllabus; he just tells them daily what to read for the next class. (I should note that the same student had similarly critical things to say about a couple of her high school English teachers, including one who spent thirteen weeks reading a play!). My student said to me, “You’d think it would be common sense after all these years of teaching certain books to know how to teach them and when to move on to the next chapter.” And I said, “Well, that’s one of the big problems with public education and the public’s perception of education. Everyone thinks teaching is easy, that it is common sense.” And when you see or experience a teacher who does it really well, it seems easy, it seems like common sense, it seems like anyone could do it. But we know it’s not. This is why great teachers are so rare and memorable.

But this prevailing public attitude is why Governor Rell can appoint Linda McMahon to the Board of Education with little public outcry and a 34-1 vote in the Democratic-held senate and a 96-45 vote in the Democratic-held house. People think that if anyone can teach, certainly anyone can serve on the Board of Education. Who needs training, experience, or credentials? Those are for medical doctors and lawyers—maybe. Certainly not for teachers—or politicians, for that matter.

What Children Can't Read

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bandarq onlineI was reading Susan Campbell’s piece earlier this week in The Hartford Courant on banned books. If you didn’t already know, this week (September 26 to October 3) is Banned Book Week. Susan grew up in a Fundamentalist Christian home, but, as she says, even in her home there was no ban on what the children read. Books were seen as too central to learning, and the children were permitted to read whatever they wanted and encouraged to talk about their reading with the adults in the family.

My rather secular Catholic home was essentially the same in its approach to reading and books. My mother and grandmother were proud of me if they discovered me reading something ‘too adult’ for my age. I don’t remember reading anything especially racy, but I do recall an incident in the second grade. The students took turns bringing a book from home to read to the class on Fridays. My turn came up in early December, and I brought in my copy of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which I had just received and devoured the previous week. I remember Mr. Brucker taking me aside to tell me I could read it to him some afternoon. I also remember reading The Red Badge of Courage and A Tale of Two Cities in the sixth grade. The former I finished and understood, but the latter I just slogged through because I didn’t want to admit defeat, and really understood very little. In the eighth grade I somehow got hooked on Herman Wouk and read The Winds of War and its sequel War and Remembrance. I suppose someone would tell me that these books were inappropriate for a boy my age, but, to paraphrase Susan, I nonetheless grew up to be a law abiding adult who votes in elections and sleeps with my own spouse—and only my own spouse. Go figure.

In my years teaching high school English I endured several book challenges. I witnessed a couple of challenges at our middle school to Nightjohn and The Bridge to Terabithia, among others. The Bridge to Terabithia, as you can guess, was objected to because of the elements of magic. Nightjohn was objected to because some parents were sick of having their children being forced to read about slavery. They felt that the students were being made to feel guilty for something they were not responsible for. Never mind that such thinking would rule out reading history of any kind.

At the high school I was at the center of a challenge to Romeo and Juliet and at the periphery of a challenge to Ragtime. The parents who challenged Romeo and Juliet objected to the sex, of course. Why is it so often the sex and not the violence? No one seems to care much that Tybalt kills Mercutio or that Romeo kills Tybalt, or that the lovers commit suicide, for that matter, but all the sexual innuendo in Mercutio’s and the Nurse’s lines get some parents up in arms. The objection to Ragtime was also over sex, and this case was especially odd because the text was being read by seniors in a section of UConn English—17 and 18 year-old students taking a college course in a high school—but one boy’s mother got upset about the scene in which Mother’s Younger Brother is hiding in an armoire and watching Emma Goldman undress Evelyn Nesbit. We had a principal who, despite being a former English teacher, was afraid to get into a confrontation with the parent and so was ready to accede to her demand to remove the book from the curriculum. It took having the whole English department faculty confront him to get him to back off from this position. At the time, I had never read the book, but I was so upset on principle that the principal was going to allow the ban that I went home that night and read the whole book, and then wrote a concise defense of the book and that scene, in particular. My colleagues in the department voted to have my statement read aloud by the principal at a board meeting, which he reluctantly agreed to do. But once the mother of the boy heard somehow that the members of the English department were unified in their opposition, she no-showed the board meeting and the challenge was tabled.

Lately my wife and I have been reading Roald Dahl books to my six-year-old son at night before bed. We read The Fantastic Mr. Fox last week, and are about halfway through Danny, the Champion of the World this week. He’s loving them. We have already read a couple of Harry Potter books, as well as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The War of the Worlds (he’s into science and monsters and such). So far, no apparent detrimental affects on his character or morals.

Last week he had a funny incident at school. He’s in first grade, and his school is listed as a failing school, so there are all sorts of intervention programs to try to bring up the CMT scores. One agenda they have is Reading is Fundamental. Basically, some people from RIF come to the school once a month, and each child gets to choose a free book. My son loves this program, but he keeps picking third grade books, and the RIF folks keep telling him that he has to choose a first grade book. I suppose they must have a limited number and that they bring books at grade level according to the numbers reported to them by the school. So, last time, my son refused to take a book because the first grade selections were ‘baby books.’ I told him next time to offer to read a third grade book to the person to prove it’s at his ability level. Meanwhile, I’m left wondering why so may adults expend so much energy trying to tell kids what they can’t read.

How Meritorious Are You?

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judi ceme onlineThe other day I was exchanging emails with my friend Jon, who like me was a high school English teacher for more than a decade before making a move to higher education. Both of us have school-age children and spouses in education. We were cynically commenting on President Obama’s and Secretary of Education Duncan’s Race to the Top program, which was announced this past July. According to its website (http://www.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/index.html), Race to the Top “provides competitive grants to encourage and reward States that are creating the conditions for education innovation and reform; implementing ambitious plans in the four education reform areas described in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA); and achieving significant improvement in student outcomes, including making substantial gains in student achievement, closing achievement gaps, improving high school graduation rates, and ensuring that students are prepared for success in college and careers.” Jon made the observation that the phrase “Race to the Top” “conjure[s] images of students scrambling up ladders, stepping on fingers, a few triumphantly cheering from the precarious high perch, others clinging for dear life midway, and many, many more having fallen off completely.” I suggested that we hold a competition for a renaming of the act. My suggestions were Mission Impossible; Operation Assessment Overload; Waiting for Merit; The Few, the Proud, the Adequate Yearly Progress; or Testing: Yes We Can! Jon suggested that I spend too much time thinking about these things, which is probably true.

The problem, of course, isn’t that the federal government is trying to improve public education nor is it the five billion dollars in available grant funds. It’s the strings that the government is attaching to those funds. Yesterday’s Hartford Courant ran an article by Grace Merrit that discusses the State Board of Education’s first meeting to begin grappling with Connecticut’s application for funds from the Race competition. Merrit’s article points out that “To be eligible for [funds], applicants must prove that performance assessments for teachers and school administrators are linked to student and school performance.” This will have to entail the evaluation of teachers, and this will most likely result in some form of merit pay for teachers tied directly to student performance, and we all know that such performance will be measured not by grades but by standardized test scores. The short-hand version is that, for schools to get federal funds, teachers will have to raise CAPT and CMT scores. Or, to paraphrase State Board Vice Chairwoman Janet Finneran, we will have to sell our souls and abandon our teaching philosophies.

I can’t help but think about merit at UConn. I know I have written about this before, and it’s dull to go into detail, but suffice to say that it is one of the most contentious subjects at our department meetings. Professors end up quibbling about whether or not administrative work (like running a writing program!) is equivalent to the publication of scholarship. They quibble over the relative merits of a poem compared to a scholarly essay. There is concern that the process is too subjective. And really, the money is paltry, maybe a few hundred dollars. It’s not that. It’s that people work hard and they get upset when a committee of their peers gives them a modest merit rating. It’s like the tale of the boy who writes an essay on his grandmother and gets a C+. He walks away not so much upset about the grade as he is upset about the fact that you just told him he has a C+ grandmother.

Well, the good news about this (and I am being completely sarcastic here) is that if you teach in the suburbs you’ll dodge the bullet, at least this time around. Your district won’t be getting any of that Race to the Top money the state receives and you won’t have to deal with teacher evaluations, either. The state is targeting twenty urban school districts for these funds (and the necessary teacher assessment component). They are Hartford, East Hartford, Manchester, Bloomfield, New Britain, Bristol, Middletown, Meriden, Ansonia, Bridgeport, Danbury, Hamden, Naugatuck, New Haven, New London, Norwalk, Stamford, Waterbury, West Haven, Windham, and the Technical High School System. As I write the names of these towns I picture teachers I know from each district and their various reactions of fear, anger, disbelief, and resignation.

As I was processing my own emotional responses to this, I was thinking about how hard if not impossible it is to devise a fair and accurate assessment system for teachers. And I was thinking about another article I had read in the Courant a couple weeks before, by James Starr and Mayra Esquilin. They were writing about how successful Hartford’s schools have been in the wake of reorganization and reform efforts throughout the district. Starr and Esquilin point out that CMT scores have climbed by 25% since 2007, and graduation rates are up to 42%. (They don’t say it in the article, but graduation rates were below 30% just a few years ago). This is wonderful and encouraging news. But just two days later a letter to the editor ran that lambasted Hartford teachers and administrators for graduating only 42% of their students. Can you imagine the public outcry if those teachers and administrators received merit pay when only 42% of Hartford’s students were graduating? Conversely, can you imagine the discouragement and anger among teachers if after achieving such improvement they received no merit recognition?

It’s simply a Catch-22. And really, as much as we’d all like to be paid better, I suspect it wouldn’t really be about the money for the teachers. Honestly, once those federal funds trickled their way down to the teachers they’d never get much anyway. It’s about being recognized for our hard work. Most of us, I suspect, would be damn happy with a letter from our administration praising our good work, or a prominent article in the Courant or elsewhere reporting positively on our meritorious efforts.

Write Your Own Papers; Take Your Own Tests

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ceme online terbaikLast week Ed White came to campus and met with writing faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates. Ed is semi-retired now but still works as a visiting scholar at the University of Arizona. His most well known and critically acclaimed work deals with writing assessment, including Teaching and Assessing Writing: Understanding, Evaluating and Improving Student Performance, Assigning, Responding, Evaluating: A Writing Teacher's Guide, and Writing Assessment: Politics, Policies, Practices. Teachers from the CWP-Storrs might be most familiar with him from work he has co-edited with Lynn Bloom, including Composition in the 21st Century. Over three days Ed gave a few workshops and was feted one evening at Lynn Bloom’s lovely home, where I had the privilege of talking with him at some length. The following day I was his cross-campus escort, making sure he got to the Center for Undergraduate Education on time. The lunch-time workshop at the CUE building that day was well attended and interesting. There were actually people sitting in the hallway where they could hardly see but could still hear what Ed had to say. The discussion took one of its most interesting turns when Ed told the roomful of Freshman English instructors, Writing Center tutors, and Education graduate students that the best way to assess the value of an assignment was to complete it themselves. “Have you ever tried that?” asked Ed somewhat rhetorically and with a knowing smirk. Everyone looked at one another a little oddly, as if to confirm that they weren’t the only ones in the room who had never done that.

I think many if not most of the writing project folks write with their students, though I still wonder how many of us complete the larger writing assignments we give, like portfolios or term papers. I know I didn’t when I was in the high school classroom. Coincidentally, a few days later (this past Tuesday, to be exact) I was running a professional development workshop at Lyman Memorial High School for its English Department members and a few Special Education teachers who co-teach English classes. Ostensibly we were working on CAPT and how to improve CAPT scores, but more broadly we were looking at the research that had informed the original design anjuran for what became the CAPT, and how to allow that research to inform our teaching practices. The original anjuran included the short responses to a story that are familiar to all of us, but extended well beyond those four (originally six) written responses to include response groups, revision, teacher conferences, more revision, and ultimately the completion of a portfolio to be assessed. So what I had the teachers do in the latter half of our workshop was complete a full CAPT-style lesson. They read Colette’s “The Other Wife” and responded in writing to the four CAPT questions, but then they met in response groups of four and used Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff’s Ways of Responding guidelines from A Community of Writers to give one another feedback on their responses. After this, each teacher went back to his or her desk and spent a half hour crafting the short responses and peer feedback into a single, coherent essay. At their October 21 department meeting, the teachers are going to look at these and continue the process.

A great deal was learned from treating the written responses as drafts to workshop into a longer essay, but I think just as much was learned from actually taking a CAPT test. I know there were young teachers in the room (including one who had been my student in high school!) who had taken the CAPT themselves as high school sophomores, but none of the veteran teachers had ever taken a CAPT test before, and doing so was enlightening—though not necessarily in the most positive ways.

Many of the teachers discovered that one or more of the questions were difficult to say anything insightful about. Just about everyone took too much time on the first question and left themselves little time to respond to the more sophisticated third and fourth questions. Some found that they just wanted to respond but weren’t sure which question their response conformed to, and so just randomly put it under one or another. Another teacher found he really wanted to jot down ideas and an outline but felt too pressed for time to do so to his satisfaction. Yet another teacher had an interesting experience for all of us to learn from because she based one response on a misreading of a line from the story (does everyone remember the now infamous story about the girl who was undergoing chemo treatments and the hundreds of students around the state who misunderstood what chemo was, thinking it was the dye she had used to turn her hair purple?) but then had a really profound insight into the story in her response to one of the other questions. How should that be scored? I don’t know if anyone walked out of the room that day with any certainty about how to better prepare students for the test, but at the very least everyone had greater empathy and insight to build upon when we meet again in January to continue planning.

On another note, I hope everyone saw the article on Ken Cormier in Tuesday’s Hartford Courant. Most recent CWP folks are certainly familiar with Ken. He’s a writer and a musician who is a PhD candidate in the English Department. He hosts a radio show on WHUS called The Lumberyard and in 2007 made audio recordings of the Summer Institute Fellows, some of which made it into an episode on his program. He’s run writing workshops for teachers at the 2008 Summer Institute, and was our keynote speaker at last year’s Student and Teacher Writing Conference. Anyway, Ken just released a new album, his third, called Nowhere Is Nowhere, and the Courant gave him a good review. Check it out.