Memphis Snow Day 3

We had a snow day today, our third this year. I woke up early, still, and had the morning to drink coffee, watch CNN, and get in some reading. Then, around 9:30 or so, I figured I'd take a walk.

Overton Park being nearby, it makes a likely destination for some snow on tree action. I put on my heavy snow boots, courtesy of my 6-week winter stint in Wisconsin in 2008, and set out. There weren't many people out, but some kids were around making snowmen. A few folks who aren't so accustomed to the weather were out in t-shirts taking pictures.

I felt a bit soppy walking around with my camera, even though I kept it hidden beneath my coat. Many folks were out taking photographs, trying to find some hidden meaning in the footprints punched into the old forest floor. Separately, the things are not that meaningful: snow, trees, a winter day, footprints, but somehow when they all come together the amateur photographers take to their boots and go out in search of fragile beauty.

I sought some metaphor in the environment to explain life, or my life, or the city, or the world, but in the end it's cheap to slop metaphors on top of a perfectly good reality. A park, a walk, some trees, no more.

Memphis - Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia

Memphis - Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia: "Memphis (colloquially Membabwe) was founded in 3102 B.C. by Pharaoh Menses I who was killed in battle by Keith Richards and B.B. King, the leader of the Egyptian conquest of Tennessee. Long one of the world's centres of civilisation, Memphis declined when it was conquered by Alexander the Great, and Egyptian power shifted to such other cities as Cairo, Illinois and Alexandria, Louisiana. Memphis rebounded during the 19th Dynasty with the invention of the steamship, including some local examples which used early versions of the external combustion engine and...."

Just discovered Uncyclopedia. Am thinking about sending my students to it and seeing if they get it.

Savage Inequality Reloaded

Just finished another book and thought I'd drop a few thoughts about it.



First, it's important to note that this book was published in 1991, ten years before No Child Left Behind. For better or for worse, that legislation has changed America's schools drastically.

Kozol wrote beautifully, but it was difficult to discern any overarching concept in this book other than redistribution of funds around current districts or, at times, the elimination of school districts all together. The book is divided up into chapters that loosely correspond to cities in the United States and in each chapter he describes some of the schools that he's visited through the words of students, teachers, and administrators.

All through the book Kozol references the disparity in funding between rich and poor districts. His main argument, it seems, is that if some of the money from wealthy districts is distributed to poor districts, then those districts will have a greater chance at equality and hopefully better results.

Memphis City Schools spent $10,394 per pupil in 2009. In the same year, Shelby County Schools spent $8,198, yet that district's test scores far surpass ours. The figures are from the Tennessee state report card. I would argue that the facilities in Memphis are far better than those described in Savage Inequalities (where some students were going to school in polluted bathrooms), but for some reason this city's students still don't perform as well on standardized tests as do the suburban children. Urban kids have certain needs that suburban kids don't, and I'm not sure if the extra money per pupil that Memphis spends makes up for those needs or not. Still, it gives me pause.

Most of the locals are quick to blame the parents and kids' laziness and disregard for authority. That's an easy way out, because words are cheap and most of those people don't work for the schools. After they blame the parents, they blame the superintendent, who personifies the school system. Nobody ever stops to question the socioeconomic system that the kids find themselves in. Nobody blames history. Nobody blames blatant racism. Nobody blames hegemony. Nobody blames marketing schemes that exploit some of the weaker members of our economy.

While the book did touch on some of these other issues, everything was framed around money. Clearly, more funds do not necessarily mean more student achievement. Reading this book now makes me think about what shortfalls exist, if not for funding shortfalls.

The inequality is, indeed, savage. It's just about much more than money.

Driven by Demand

I spent a good portion of this past long weekend thinking about supply and demand in urban education. Yes, I am the life of the party.

All teachers can speak of student apathy. I was the most apathetic student in the world in my classes. I often slept in class, rarely did my homework, and never really cared. Theatre, chess, computers, and certain aspects of philosophy did gain my interest, so I spent my free time studying them. Not surprisingly, I remember much more from those extra-curricular studies than my regular ones. I'm sure I gained capacity and certainly some skills from those classes, but I'd be hard-pressed to say exactly what.

You can probably see where this is going. Modern methodology books speak of authentic assessment and instruction. The idea is that teachers are supposed to frame instruction around real world issues and problems. Tying these issues and problems into the students' real lives is a bonus.

Still, no matter how much cute encapsulation a teacher can dream of, he is still pushing the content to the students. The class is supply-driven. The teacher owns a large supply of stuff (the curriculum) and it is his business to push that to the students. He may try to make the students pretend to be ethnographers, cartographers, biologists, or poets, but at the end of the day he is talking to students, plain and simple. Students who have potential, but students who yearn to focus on their world and their experiences rather than applying their skills to hypothetical constructs.

I imagine a second model, one that is driven by demand. I read Passion for Projects, which describes just such a school. Project-based learning proceeds from standards and is thus supply-based, but the students craft their learning experiences around those standards and their own proclivities. Students find a way to tie their absolute real lives to the educational content and then they (hopefully) demand the learning necessary to achieve their self-set objectives.

Sounds like a pipe dream, right? Especially if you teach in an urban setting, where discipline concerns drive teachers batty and kids come to you unable to read at grade level. Questions to address include:

• Do the students want to learn?
• What do they want to learn?
• What do they need to learn?
• Who am I to tell them what they need to learn?
• How can I join what they want to learn to what I think they need to learn (or what the district thinks they need to learn)?

Frankly, not until these questions are answered do I imagine that today's student is going to create any meaningful knowledge. In many cases, we have to start very small. Ask your students to identify the five most important things in their lives, then compare their lists. If your experience is anything like mine, you'll find that most of the lists are frighteningly similar.

What is the cause of this similarity? Apart from certain regional and cultural concerns, our students are the products of mass marketing, marketing that they are not equipped to critique--just accept.

This presents a problem and an opportunity for a teacher seeking to create a demand-driven classroom. First, the opportunity. Since many students share so many common interests (for better or for worse), it is not difficult at first to find something common that all students can share, which is important in stimulating demand. No student will want to go it alone, but they'll want to conform. The problem, of course, is in finding a way to relate the War of 1812 to basketball or Spongebob Squarepants.

Information communication technology goes a long way in stimulating some of this demand and opens doors to authentic research in an environment where the library may not be universally accessible. Teachers can also use ICT to create different educational tracks in the classroom, which would allow for multiple routs of access to the same info. Another pipe dream, but I could imagine this as a secondary step.

The final step in demand-driven education, of course, is when students decide what they want to do to meet the standards. Read Passion for Learning to get an example of this. It is possible.

There's more to say about this, but not here.

The best dinner of my life

I was walking around Paris, in a daze, and came upon this place:


View Larger Map

A waitress bounced out, peeped "Bon Soir," and I was hooked.

Is that the class with the Mexicans in it?

Today, I heard a teacher out in the hallway talking to a kid who had apparently said something about my room. I heard the teacher yelling at the child about a poster on my door.

I stepped out to investigate the issue and the teacher told me that the child had asked, "Is that the Mexican classroom?" The teacher tried hard to explain what ESL was, even though I am not certain this teacher quite understands. I turned to the child in question and asked about the meaning of ESL. The student replied, "Uh, English, Logical, uh...You teach them to talk."

This got me thinking about how misunderstood ESL is. Here are some things that ESL is NOT:

• English for Hispanics
• Remedial Language Arts
• Coloring Class
• Special Ed
• Spanish Class
• English Conversation Practice
  

All of these things, by the by, are things that I have heard people call ESL. The mission of ESL all across the English-speaking world is to help students who don't have sufficient proficiency in all areas of language use.

One issue that the current ESL paradigm, as I understand it, has not caught up with yet is long-term ESL. The increasing numbers of long-term ELLs in the system cause understandable confusion for those who don't understand the testing requirements of ESL. I've got students who are more comfortable speaking English than their L1, yet they are in ESL. The problem is usually in the reading scores, but that can be said of many kids in America.

ESL is about all the four language skills (reading, writing, speaking, and listening). Since most ESL students are immersed in English daily, teachers really spend most of their time on reading, writing, vocabulary, and grammar refinement. Much more than, "teaching them to talk."

Unesco World Heritage Field Trips

Holy Cow. This is made of awesome. Google UK has Street View links to many of the UNESCO World Heritage sites all in one place. I just took a virtual walking tour of Pompeii. The US version has a healthy Hawaii offering and an Obama tour, but the UK version owns!

Great possibility here for social studies teachers who want to give their students a new point of view on history.

UK version

US version