Governor Cuomo and Chancellor Tisch: Building a Bigger and Meaner APPR Monster....

Eureka!  This new APPR monster is truly awful!  This will surely drive out teachers and bring forth the demise of the public education in our state, at last! ~ New York State Education Department

What an outrage! In 2014, too many public school teachers received Effective or Highly Effective scores on the APPR that was rigged to fail them in an effort to dissemble our public education system. They were doing their jobs too well in spite of all the obstacles that are regularly thrown in their paths. Just when it would seem that you can't keep a good teacher down...

Time to race to action Governor Cuomo and Chancellor Tisch! There must be a more destructive method to trip up and drive out those "upstart" teachers - especially those who so flaunt their skill and talent at this time of "reform" chaos.

Eureka, that's it! Create an even more flawed APPR system that eliminates principals' and local board of ed input. Teacher evaluations controlled from Albany - what an invitation to disaster. What a legacy.

Here is my New York State Resident evaluation of Gov. Cuomo and Chancellor Tisch:

 
Leadership skills: Highly Ineffective
Honesty and Ethics: Highly Ineffective
State Education Management: Highly Ineffective
Advocacy for our public school children: Not there
Intelligence: Not developed
Ability to gauge effects from risky behavior (full development of Executive Functions): Nope

Standardized Tests are the Failures - Not Our Children

How Standardized Tests Do Not Assess Common Core Standards (Part 1 of 2 Parts)

Packaging "Wonder"

The PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) drives the current trend - the Common Core and its Standardized Tests, which bombard American public school children all through the school year.  The College Board's David Coleman and a team of non- educators chiseled out these standards (as in chisel and stone). Coleman claims that this will be instrumental in"cultivating wonder" in every classroom across the country.

The idea of cultivating wonder is a lofty notion. But "wonder" can't be mandated. In the Socratic Tradition, cultivating wonder requires thinking and discourse and investigation - none of which can be measured through standardized testing.

So good luck to any teacher, student, administrator, or parent who tries to find the ways that these assessments actually connect to the standards themselves. Because there is none.

Let's look at the description for the Close Reading standard:

College and Career readiness anchor Standard for reading

Key Ideas and details:

1. Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text. (www. corestandards.org)

Despite the fact that this approach to reading feels like a joyless procedure, I tried to keep an open mind when working with my seventh graders. I have an arts background and would need to lean on imagination and problem solving to work to engage my students and to get them excited about looking at written language.

Our English language is robust and evolved, often strangely, from other languages. New words find their place in our dialogues as they're appointed to everyday use.  Our language is as organic as a rain forest; fluid and changing.  I was eager to work with my students who are also fluid and changing: Seventh graders mostly love to talk and to challenge: We could have fun with this.

This standard includes the study of connotation and detonation.  Different words mean different things to a student - depending on gender, socioeconomic background, nationality, personality, cognitive development, and life's experience.  Depending on who you are, the word HIT - might apply to baseball, a popular song, viewings on a viral You Tube item, or, a slap.

But, there was no curriculum provided. So, burdened by no curriculum, or, re-frame this as unburdened by untried pre-processsed rigid bulleted CC lesson plans, I had a certain amount of freedom to seek out my own resources as I set about to "cultivate wonder" among my students.

No curriculum? Consult with a scholar.

Before outlining lessons, I re-visited Francine Prose' Reading Like a Writer. I had read this book in grad school.  A prolific writer of fiction and non-fiction, Prose is a university professor and a scholar of reading and language.  I love this book - she discusses the explicit and the subtle, and relates how as a student, her English teacher guided her class through King Lear and Oedipus Rex to circle every reference to eyes, light, darkness and vision.  Prose observes: "And searching for every relevant word turned out to have an enjoyable treasure-hunt aspect, a 'Where's Waldo' detective thrill...(p. 4, Reading Like a Writer).

Her book is organized sequentially in the way we approach reading: The chapters are as such: Close Reading, Words, Sentences, Paragraphs, Narration, Dialogue, Details, and the nuanced Gesture. She examines the literal, and how that may be interpreted. There is something for every reader of any age;
plenty for a child who is a concrete thinker to grab onto - and plenty for a child who is moving into higher level thinking to ponder.

Through the rest of her book, which I enthusiastically recommend for anybody who reads/writes and/or teaches any subject she encourages us to roll up our sleeves and immerse ourselves in language.  I wanted to use Prose' book to light the way through this new reading unit, kind of like a powerful utility flashlight - so we could focus on words and phrases through her high beam.

For starters, I brought a few words to the table: Dove, Blood, Hit, and Fire.  Students wrote down their gut response. No correct or incorrect - purely subjective. (that is connotation)

Then we discussed the literal meanings and created a mnemonic for Denotation = Dictionary Definition.

Students' connotations of the words were quite varied:  Another mnemonic: Connotation - Connection: Emotional, Experience.  For the word Dove:  Dove=soap, Dove=bird, Dove=peace (symbolic, higher level thinking here), Dove-venturing bird from Noah's arc, Dove=shy and gentle.
The responses were so individual, which what makes language study fascinating.

Okay, so how does all this kind of reflection and discourse measure up on a standardized test? Before going there, there's another example of student responses to the word Blood.

Blood=hospital, Blood-=relative, Blood=gory, Blood=loyalty, Blood=war

There is no "right" answer for connotation if we have no context around it.  But depending on the context, blood takes on a different shading.  This is a skill to cultivate; it's higher level reflexive thinking -- a good reach for seventh graders.

Later we examined the connotation of the word rain in the Longfellow poem The Rainy Day. In this poem, rain signifies sadness and loss. How different from the joyful rain Langston Hughes celebrates in his April Rain Song.  We spent the rest of the year, until the tests, looking closely at the denotation and connotation of language in all that we read together.

What I had learned to share with my students: Attached to every word we know and use is our whole life's experience, and it's all rich.  I wanted them to keep experimenting with reading and writing and speaking.  They wrote daily reflections, poems, short paragraphs and essays - these were how I checked in on where they were in their understanding.

Fast forward: Test time:

Based on all the sound and fury around the goals of Coleman's Common Core, for some reason, I had
anticipated that a whole new kind of test had been created - one that would suitably measure cultivated wonder.  But on the first morning of the test week, as I flipped through the booklet, my heart sank.  These tests resembled the earlier ones from Bush's failed No Child Left Behind mandate.
These were zombie tests, rolled out from the closet of the undead.

The reading was so voluminous, that many students were unable to complete it. There was no time to highlight or jot notes, as we had slavishly practiced in class.  The writing section asked students to spit out answers - not to craft their writing.  When time was up, my students were frustrated and some were tearful as they threw down their pencils.  All the liveliness of our collective learning was yammered down flat - in a boring and insulting drill.

It was as if I'd coached them to overdress for an upcoming event, when actually all this occasion called for was to dress in a standard uniform that didn't actually fit anyone.

Problem #1: And Now for Something Completely Different.

If you've never perused a standardized ELA test, what you'll notice straight off is that the four or five reading passages have nothing to do wit;h each other.  They are decontextualized. Students read first about the Klondike Gold Rush (content not covered in class - no curriculum provided for this test), answer the questions, then skip on to ingest an unrelated passage about Diamond Veins in Africa, then leap into a disembodied passage from Louisa May Alcott's Jo's Boys (an author and book not familiar to most seventh graders, and developmentally inappropriate for many).

Because of the random quality of passages, students have just enough time to maybe develop a mild interest in the information, but then it's over, and they have to promptly move to the questions without time to process what they've just read.  It's reminiscent of the old Monty Python sketches: And Now For Something Completely Different that roll along with clattering speed.  Students have to constantly switch gears.  It's impossible to pick up on the rhythms and choices the author has made, which are
key points to reading closely, as Prose suggests.

Students have no prior knowledge of the content, so they're immediately placed at a disadvantage. Ramp up the time pressure, and I can't think of a better way to teach students how to dread reading and writing.

Important to note: The reading content (we're not asking for the questions)  of these tests are kept secret and unattainable, kind of like the Holy Grail. (Monty Python context).  That's how the test pushers keep a "leg up" on our kids, as they "race to the top."

Problem #2:  But all the work we've done doesn't show here.

As she guides us through careful word study, Prose provides us with 1 - 3 paragraphs minimally or
even a full page from an author's story so that we are provided with abundant clues as we infer what the author wants us to pay attention to. It's similar to looking at an Impressionist painting: We need as much of the painting as possible to stand back and better understand how each brush stroke is part of a larger image.

But the reading clues in standardized tests are stingy.  There's no room for full-bodied interpretation of a passage.  It's like giving the test taker a portion of a brush stroke and expecting him to "get" the full picture.

Let's have a look at this excerpt from a standardized test passage (2013 - Engage NY - 7th grade ELA exam):

Passage excerpt from Earth and Water and Sky by Brian Bushemi
(note: Brian Bushemi's novels are not on the touted CC Lexile that supposedly matches readers with books.  Students are not familiar with him. He's not Walter Dean Myers or Jaqueline Woodson or Suzanne Collins -   It is likely that Bushemi is a writer employee of Pearson, the British test materials company that has an enormous contract with PARCC. )

My point: Kids are not being tested on authors that they actually read. So why are teachers required  to choose books from the lexile?

(lines 25 - 31)

        "David stood up and continued toward the Thinking Pond. Suddenly, he heard a sharp, whining sound like the engine of a high-flying jet airplane.  It was followed by a crack! like a whip being snapped, only a thousand times louder.  Then a ball of fire roared overhead, followed by a searing gust of wind.
          The shock wave knocked David to the ground, his ears ringing. A second later, he heard an explosive, hissing crash up ahead.  A rush of air and hot steam billowed through the trees, and he covered his head as it washed over him."

And the "close reading" questions:

Which sentence from the passage best shows how powerful the meteorite was?

A "Suddenly, he heard a sharp, whining sound like the engine of a high-flying jet airplane."
      (lines 25 and 26)

B  "Then a ball of fire roared overhead, followed by a searing gust of wind." (lines 27 and 28)

C  "The shock wave knocked David to the ground, his ears ringing." (line 29)

D  "A second later, he heard an explosive, hissing crash up ahead." (lines 29 and 30)

Using Prose' flashlight beam, it's evident that Bushemi spends many sentences describing the power of the meteorite. The test assumes that students know what a meteorite is; earlier in the passage the boy muses on what it might be. A student who has no prior knowledge (we did not study meteorites in class), and thinks differently, might rightfully infer that it is an imaginary object, similar to A Thinking Pond as a magical notion.

Letter C shows that David is knocked to the ground (an idiom phrase - a challenge for an English Language Learner), but what exactly is a shock wave? Do meteorites emit shock waves that can knock people down?

A, B and D are good answer candidates for showing the power of the object, if one closely reads the words sharp, ball of fire, searing, explosive, hissing crash.  The connotation of all of those words is disturbance.  But the students aren't really being asked to work with connotation here, nor denotation, even though the standards cite those as launches to wonder.

Keeping in mind that many seventh graders are literal thinkers, it's easy to get this one wrong. There aren't enough clues. The offerings here are stingy. Thinking needs to be tamped down to it right. It's about navigating tricks, test maker's bias, and splitting hairs.  It not a scholarly exercise.  Alas, the joke was on us because the game was rigged. (casino context)

      
Neither does the reading of the other passages or questions bear any resemblance to reading with care. Many teachers like myself spent so much time "cultivating wonder" in the months before only to be astonished that none of that work can be measured by this test.

What happened?

My students' test scores tanked.

In Coleman and company's zeal to reform public school, they created a slipshod and hackneyed way to measure learning.  Paradoxically, these high stakes tests are insulting in design because the bar is so low.  They don't in any way deliver on the high falutin' dreams of Coleman's Common Core, and
their relationship to these standards is dysfunctional.  Yet, they do have the power to predetermine a child's educational future, to determine which schools are "failing", and the power to destroy teachers' careers.

They flatten what is individual in thinking, they degrade true scholarship, and discourage "thinking
differently"; peculiar to a culture that allegedly emulates "thinking outside the box." (corporate context).  Our children deserve better.

It all demonstrates that Coleman, Gates and the rest of the "reformers" have no idea what they're doing. Let's reform this reform, for starters; trash the tests.  They are failing our children, not the other way around.

                                                                ****************

Coming next: Part 2: Why conceptual thinking is the way of today and the future,  and how standardized tests cannot measure this.

Who are the brightest, happiest, most cooperative, most well-adjusted and resilient children...?

Dr. Peter Gray is an anthropologist who has spent decades studying the importance of play. In this Ted Talk, he shows us the ways that children who live in cultures that allow them to play freely develop into socially skilled and emotionally stable adults.

He also provides evidence that with the emphasis on school, standardized learning and organized sports, our children are not being given the necessary freedom to play, but are directed to "resume building" - and there is a greater increase in anxiety and depression.

Dr. Gray encourages us to "be brave enough to stand up to the continuous clamor of more school."

Yes, And...Embracing the Awkward: Some thoughts on what rigor in school actually means

Improvisation is an edgy, spontaneous art form – and completely unscripted.  This means that you don’t know what will happen next, or what your co-players will do or come up with.  Unscripted is the key word.  When you engage with this, you’re offering yourself up to be thrown off and disoriented, uncertain, and inescapably awkward.

A while ago, I started an Improv Club with some energetic high school students at their exurban high school. The school was surrounded by what were once cow pastures in the furthest reaches of bucolic Westchester County, where kids have to make their own fun.

The club’s numbers grew as kids found they could let off steam in this after-school venue.  Kids who had sat numbly in class all day got to bring their most daring and “outlier” selves into room L207. But, with the exception of the two self-appointed “presidents”, none of the kids had any experience with improv, and had no clue as to how to play without a script.

I enlisted the help of my son, Zack, who is a professional improviser.  This sounds like an oxymoron, but he does earn a living improvising and making people laugh. He introduced the club to the most important principle:  Yes, and… This is the phrase you keep in your head while your co-players verbally lob something at you. 

The basic Yes, and…game might go like this:  Two students stand up:

Student 1 might say: I just got back from Mars.

And Student 2 says Yes and…is that how come you have green skin? …

Student 1 says Yes and…their spaceship is right over there…

Student 2: Yes, and…Can I go too?

At this point two more students may join in.

Student 3: Yes, and…This is my Mom and I would like to send her to Mars. 

Student 4: Yes, and I’m his Mom. I packed a lunch and weapons in case they’re not friendly…

There’s an emphasis on speed: Too much “think” time, and the game falls flat.  And, the second you think or say “No”, the improv dies on the spot. 

Frequently kids would get tongue-tied and go blank, flail around, and occasionally fall on the floor and groan – When it doesn’t fly, you blow your cover and everybody sees that.  But isn’t that the true nature of learning something new?  It’s messy and unpredictable.  The members soon changed the club's name from “The Waxed Beans” to “Embrace the Awkward.” 

Awkwardness? In our school?

In spite of its omniscience, we don’t like to associate Awkward with School.  We’re surrounded by the shrill rhetoric: Succeed! Achieve! Score High!... Stumbling and falling? Not in Our School. 

In reality, school is infused with awkwardness at every turn. Growing bodies are awkward, teachers are awkward, technology does weird things; the day is packed with socially confusing situations. Everybody did the math wrong today and it’s only first period.

As students reach to learn something new, they hear Wrong. Not it. You didn’t get it. Nope:  The daylong incantations of bad news.  “No” stops the learning in its tracks and shuts the door, like a failed improv.  

Yet, we are improvising as we learn.  Zack describes how an improviser approaches the unknown:  He or she is somebody who is willing to commit to a choice – If, say, I were to go onstage and do something funny with my body. The audience might just stare for a bit. But I make a commitment to keep doing that funny body thing.  They start to get it. They laugh. I then make it even more specific and do it harder.  Then I get past the fear of not knowing what will happen next.

All tangled up essays, sciatica, and finding the snakes 

This changed the way I taught writing because I wanted to help my students get over their fear of writing something wrong, and to open up what had been shut down over the years. But here of course, students aren’t doing something funny with their bodies.  They’re doing something “funny” with their writing.  

Aside from a few exceptions, on the whole, my students’ essays are filled with fragments, strange spelling, inconsistent paragraph spacing, disconnected ideas, missing citations. They get all tangled up in words used incorrectly and in the wrong context: It is a festival of awkward writing.  Yet, the effort that students put into a labored-over essay is evident – and the sheer energy of their effort activates my sciatica and fires up foot cramps.    There is something committed about their awkwardness.  

According to Zack’s earlier description, this kind of commitment is needed in order to push further into the unknown.  I began to see writing in a new light, and realized that my students were actually going way out on a limb to show me the insides of their minds, and their thinking processes.  

What a gift to reframe my role in this way:  It was my job to identify the mistakes, in the same way it’s a herpetologist’s job to go up to the mountain and find snakes.  Couldn’t we play with this?  Instead of no, wrong, you have a run-on sentence here, I learned to work with Yes, and - you have three thoughts going on here.  Yes, and- let’s separate those with commas.  Yes, and- this idea is ready for more development…Yes, and- this essay is ready to be organized now…

This became an energizing way to teach.  Students were writing more.  Teaching and writing became more interactive, and more filled with possibilities – like a game.  The principle of improv had opened up the playing field.  Kids were allowed to commit to the “wrong kind” of writing, yes, and – I could guide them toward more clarity.  It opened up our book discussions too – Beginning with the obvious and uninspired student statement: Jay Gatsby was a rich guy… Yes, and – why was it important to him to be a rich guy?  Odysseus took a long time to get back home. Yes, and – what was Penelope doing that whole while? 

If we’re willing to commit to putting it out there, even if it’s wrong and awkward, we’re in a far better position to learn something new.  The opposite would mean to stay cautious, shut down, and “safe.”  Being willing to commit to the unknown and play it harder is the rigor part.  Rigor can’t be thought of as an outcome.  It is a process. Even though it’s a noun, we should think of it as a highly active verb.  Instead of setting rigid and narrow specific outcomes, a rigorous curriculum should invite audacity, uncertainty and mistake making.  The latter is a far more sustainable kind of learning in terms of student and teacher energy.

Without the awkwardness that accompanies new learning there’s no forward movement.

We’re probably engaged with rigor if part of our brain wishes that we were doing something else that will provide some escape from the present task.

What if teachers applied Yes, and…to solving math equations, the narrative of history, and science labs? In what ways would teaching shift?

To become a better coach, I had to become a more patient teacher, even though patience is not included in the criteria on the evaluation forms that administrators fill out during Formal Observations.  Also, in conferences, I rarely hear parents or teachers say – Yes, and – if we’re more patient, we’re going to see Kevin understand this or that concept…Let’s give him more room and time to play with this. 

“Real life” messing up

Not too long ago, I chatted with a friend who has been an insurance attorney for years, but has decided to broaden her career in learning about courtroom law. Similar to my Embrace the Awkward club students, she is deliberately throwing herself into an unscripted situation – or rather – it has a script, but she doesn’t know what it is yet.  And, similar to the improv students, she has to field verbal lobs from other players, including the Judge, on the courtroom floor.   “I don’t know what I’m doing!” She told me. “I think the concepts are similar to insurance law – but the language and terms are so different!  I’m shadowing another attorney, but he had to leave the courtroom and when I approached the bench, I was scrambling for the right terms.  I’m standing there just sort of stammering… looking for my notes."

I commented that learning new things, no matter how old we are, is so uncomfortable. 

“I so get my fourth grader now –“ She nodded. “I get what my son goes through when he’s struggling in school, trying to get something like the math.  Based on what I went through this week, I understand now how hard school may be for him.”   

If we adults are willing enough to stay in-tune with our own awkward learning, like my attorney friend, we become sensitized to the peak and valley experiences that our kids are having throughout their school day.

Recently, I chatted with my lawyer friend again. "How’s it going?" She broke into a smile. "Much better!  I’m finding my way around…its making sense now."

When we watch toddlers who are powered by the commitment to take those first awkward steps, we cheer the falling down as well.  The falling down is part of the rigor in learning how to walk. We praise, we snap pictures, and instantly zip them off to everybody we know.  We shove the furniture out of the way to give him more room to step forward and to fall down.

Can parents and teachers cheer on, with the same kind of enthusiasm, our older kids as they sweat over essays and wrestle with math equations and science labs? Are we courageous and open minded enough to push aside our own “preferred learning outcomes” and instead, embrace the awkward in learning? 

Let’s clear the space so they can play with whatever is in front of them, and follow Zack’s suggestions-- 

Make the commitment, forget about what scares you and throw yourself into it.

                   

                                                                     ***************

Transforming the School Experience for Students

So much energy is invested in Standards and Tests -- There's a better way to introduce our children to the art of higher level thinking.   Parents and Educators need to remember that school can actually be a place of joy and creativity.  What?...Yes - School can be joyful.  Creativity opens the door to higher level and abstract thinking in a way that no standardized curriculum can.

I wish that instead of taking State exams today, that our children were engaged with Imogene Drummond's Divine Sparks program, as these San Miguel students are in the photo above.   She's my guest blogger today - and here she shares her experience working with at-risk students at San Miguel Academy in Newburgh, New York.

She demonstrates how Literacy and Creativity cultivate thinking and creative students.

DIVINE SPARKS ARRIVES AT SAN MIGUEL ACADEMY

Sparking Empowerment through Creativity

by Imogene Drummond

My Divine Sparks journey just got a little more exciting.  Recently, I offered the first of ten Divine Sparks sessions to seventeen fifth graders at San Miguel Academy of Newburgh, NY.  Why is this exciting?  Two reasons:  because San Miguel is a visionary school, and because we share the same goal--to empower young people. 

To understand my recent experience, it’s important to understand San Miguel’s location.  As the fourth most impoverished urban center in the U.S., and the ninth most violent, Newburgh was dubbed the “murder capital of NY State” by New York Magazine.  San Miguel Academy, an independent, faith-based, fifth to eighth grade middle school for boys from under-served families in the City of Newburgh, uses education--and a thoughtful, nurturing, safe environment--to break the pervasive cycle of poverty and violence in which these boys are raised.  Basically, San Miguel Academy is trying to keep these children from being used as drug mules, and to give them the skills and opportunities for a totally different kind of life. This is big picture stuff. 

To me, San Miguel is special because its vision remains intact throughout its multi-layered implementation.  Its president, board, and faculty clearly are doing a lot of things right.  Their sharply-etched thoughtfulness shows.  For example, surrounding the front door is printed in large, yellow and blue, capital letters “The Street Stops Here.”  To an artist who believes in the ability of art, symbols, and design to create change, this signage is powerful.  That these words are written on the “open” transparent medium of glass versus the opaque material of a barrier, adds to the transformative experience of walking through the entrance.

Prior to my presentation (during the lunch hour), I chatted in the hall with Fr. Mark Connell and Mrs. Kerry DiMeo, San Miguel’s president and fifth grade teacher, respectively.  An unusual thing happened.  On three separate occasions, a boy walked up to me, reached out his right hand, looked me in the eye, and confidently said, “Hello.  My name is [Angel, R. N.].  Welcome to San Miguel.” and briefly joined us three adults in conversation. Well!  I was surprised and impressed  by these students’ politeness, confidence, and assertiveness.  Being from the plug-and-play generation, I was taught as a child not to speak to adults unless spoken to. That San Miguel teaches its boys to speak up, be polite, positive, and proactively welcoming, struck me--like the sign surrounding the door--as significant.  

So, now you have an idea of where Divine Sparks will be the next ten weeks!  Let me briefly introduce this innovative multimedia that I wrote, directed, and produced.  Divine Sparks Film + Book sparks empowerment through creativity.  Three components combine in this holistic project to ignite and nurture the child’s creative spark.  The award-winning 30-minute film offers inspiring visual prompts.  The colorful, interactive book delivers an exciting toolkit with stimulating ideas, fun art activities, and delightful exercises that help students access their inner artist.  The project employs an innovative approach often using one’s own story/history/personal mythology as source material.  Each session involves three activities:  View, Do, and Discuss.  

In introducing Divine Sparks to the students, I shared my goal to help them develop their individual creativity, versus teach them art.  First, we discussed what they think “creativity” is.  Their ideas ranged from “being about line and shape,” to “thinking outside the box,” to “being about imagination.”  I was impressed by their ability to think abstractly.  This led to a discussion about how creativity can help us be happier, more satisfied with our lives, learn better, and sometimes even heal physically.  In discussing how creativity can help us become empowered and what “empowered” means, one boy said it means “helping us develop as whole people.”  Now, I was even more impressed with their abstract thinking!  

We then watched the 30-minute film, a whimsical story of transformation and wonder, followed by a Q & A.  I asked my usual questions: What were their favorite parts of the film?  What did they think the film was about?  What did they think the sparks meant?  A dozen or more hands shot up after each question.  Though the term is never used in the film, when one boy said he thought the film was about “the creative spark in us,” I just about levitated!  

Inspired by the film, the boys then did an art activity, “Visualize Words.”  Each student chose two favorite words (from a page in the book--see photo), and painted one word as the background and one as the subject.  A vigorous explosion of activity ensued with lots of paint being drawn, brushed, swooshed, smeared, and sponged.  One child said woefully “I messed up.”  That was my clue to share my mantra: “There is no bad art, you can’t mess up.”  “But,” I quickly added, “you can start over.”  To which he immediately said, “Can I start over?”  

Several boys painted outer space, making their backgrounds black--always a strong color!  Others depicted snakes flying over waves, a dark moon hanging above the ocean, and lyrical stars that look like lilies in front of the sun.  When discussing each boy’s art work, one boy said he chose his two images because they were the only two things he knew how to draw.  Hopefully, ten weeks from now, he won’t think that!  I hope he, and his fellow students, will come to feel increasingly equipped to embark on new paths that are their life, as they leave the street in their rear view mirror. 

****************************************

Imogene Drummond is an award-winning filmmaker, painter, futurist, author of articles on cultural transformation, world traveler, and former psychotherapist. Her experience, talent, and vision converge in Divine Sparks. She has an M.F.A. from MICA (the Maryland Institute College of Art )—one of the country’s premier art schools, and an M.S.W. from The Catholic University of America. Due to her many painting expeditions around the world, she was invited to join The Society of Woman Geographers.

Find her on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/divinesparksbookfilm

And her Divine Sparks Website:

divinesparks.com.
And her Divine Sparks Trailer...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VCDr0Ej1_I

Who are these new educational data companies really serving?

                                            The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss, picture by Crockett Johnson. Harper&Row 1945


Remember when you were a kid and you first discovered that you could buy stuff? And your Mom or Dad would look at the thing you wanted to buy, and he or she would say "Sweetie, I don't think you really need that. You should spend your allowance on something you really need and want." 

It seems like the biggest growing industry in our country now is the selling of data packages - and it's linked arms with the education "reform" movement. And as school begins to imitate science fiction,
here's something that resembles a Ray Bradbury invention: "Knewton" (How about that name? Catchy title? Calculated?...) calls itself "the world's leading adaptive learning company" ("Mom, do schools really need this?") They design and sell data systems to the education industry, so educators
can "better measure student achievement." 

This chart or graph or thing shows "granular understanding of knowledge." The purveyors would like us to believe that this is the answer to everything.  I don't understand how this chart shows how a human student is doing in class, but it does looks like something jokey from a Monty Python sketch that we would laugh really hard at.

Who would benefit from this data measuring system? Administrators? Teachers? Parents? Kids?

Oh! Right!  Knewton would benefit.

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Boys with Heroic Names

                                           The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss, picture by Crockett Johnson. Harper&Row 1945

Deep in the Bronx today
in a school mostly forgotten
except at test time
the third grade exam
was administered
to Tristan, Calvin and Axiom
in the faculty room
with its stained furniture,
odors of discouraging
Tupperware lunches, and
teachers' frustrations over
hazy causes and ancient battles lost-

The whispers 'round school -
High Stakes

Eight year old lives in the balance:
to lose and hang with humiliation?
Or to:
slash the head off this test, only to have
another grow back in its place?

They say a true hero knows he's going down
but goes there anyway -

Legs dangling off the chairs
these three
pencils scratching in circles
yawns - stoical chins
and one runny nose
Eyes on questions
and passages aimed to trick
and crush
like the clashing cliffs
Jason and his Argonauts twisted through -

Then - pencils down -
the tests are ziplocked, sealed.
and carted away in unmarked vans
like so much toxic waste.

Ok now, palms up:
the medals for Valor
are awarded
and they unwrap the foil
from the melting Kisses
that had softened in my pocket
from the heat of the morning.

~ Jane Nixon Willis

Helping Students Stay Strong during Standardized Test Time

   
                                     The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss, picture by Crockett Johnson. Harper&Row 1945

Unless you’ve opted your child out from taking these - Common Core Standardized Tests loom on the horizon for public and charter school kids. As crocuses and allergies bloom, English Language Arts and Math teachers are expected to fill kids’ heads with strategies for taking the tests. Teachers work diligently, as they are graded on the standardized returns, and with consecutive low scores, careers are at stake.  But, preparing for the content of these mysterious and high stakes tests is always guesswork because students are not being tested specifically on content that has been taught in class. It’s all about thinking like the test maker.  Compassionate teachers try to make prep time less tedious and as commonsensical as they can, but it’s likely that your child may arrive home feeling toasted, stressed out and worried.

The test days arrive. Regular instruction is suspended. Kids are shuffled around to any available rooms for testing. (Last year, my ELA students were delegated to the tech room, -an unfamiliar setting - where they sat on backless stools for 1½ hours at a time.) Walls are emptied.  Guides to solving equations or writing a paragraph are taken down or covered. Conference rooms are stacked with teacher packets and bulky bundled tests that many trees gave their lives for, and where many tax dollars are spent.  I think back to the cupboard of dog-eared class novels, many of them falling apart, even with best efforts to tape them back together.  The tests, in comparison, are fresh off the press, in pristine condition.  A monastic silence in the halls is maintained, the regular schedules are disrupted, and the effect is disorienting for everybody – even teachers and students who are normally cheerful.  These days are about getting through these days. 

What you can do to help your child

Here are the emotional settings that (specifically younger) students tend verbalize as they get ready to while take these tests.  Students in upper grades tend to internalize these concerns more.   

I’m not smart. I’m a “1” or a “2”.

I can’t remember everything we did to prepare.

I won’t do as well as everybody else in class.

I’m afraid I’ll disappoint my parents if I don’t do well.

I’m afraid I’ll let (you) my teacher down if I don’t do well. 

Occasionally a student will say: I’m just going to do my best:  That’s all I can do.

It’s pretty clear that a parent has proactively cultivated that mind set. That student already has an advantage before coloring in the first bubble with his number two pencil:  His parents have done the footwork in helping this child put the test into perspective.  He’s more relaxed and is going to have more mental energy while taking the test.  And he’s probably not going to spend time worrying about how he did when he completes it.  His parents have given him a valuable life skill tool with this mantra, and he gets to practice using it. 

Keeping a Broad Perspective:

Before distributing the test materials while looking out at both sleepy and worried faces, I’d think through what I wished I could say: a disclaimer. The test I am about to give you does not reflect your performance in my class. But then I’d need a disclaimer for my disclaimer:  In fact, even though I’m a public school teacher standing here administering them, I don’t buy into these tests at all, hang in there, and we’ll get back to what we were doing in class.  

What I’d actually tell students:

This test has nothing to do with how smart a person you are.

This test doesn’t show all the talents that you may have. 

It doesn’t show that you are a good friend.

It doesn’t show the kind of learning style you have.

It also doesn’t show how hard you may work as a student.

If you want to know how you’re really doing, look at the assignments that we’ve done together over the school year.

This test is about just doing your best, just for today.

For all involved, it’s like spending a sweaty day down at the quarry chipping rocks.

So, when your child comes home from school after prepping and testing, remember that lots of energy (and funding) is being spent on something that is not the culmination of what he has learned from his teacher’s lessons.  He might appreciate your invitation for him to decompress from the intensity of the day by inviting him to talk about it. Or, he may not want to, and who would blame him?

These unsolicited questions are not helpful:

How’d you do? (He probably doesn’t know or doesn’t want to think about that right now.)

Did you get a “3” or a “4”? (This is a reductive way to look at the work a kid has put into something.)

Did you finish on time? (The test is a done deal.  Is this really that important?)

Did you answer all the questions?  (The test is a done deal. Is this really that important?)

Did you check your work? (The test is a done deal. Teachers have already reminded students to do this.)

Shouldn’t you spend time on review for tomorrow’s test? (…Really?....)

If anything, these kinds of questions reveal a parent’s anxiety, so now there are two stressed out people sitting at the kitchen table. In showing your own anxiety, you also may be inadvertently showing your child that you place value on this impersonal and inaccurate measuring device – over the teacher’s day-to-day classroom assessments of your child’s progress. Which is a better indicator? Which form of assessment do you actually take stock in?

These tests in no way determine how successful a child will be in the future. But, layered as they are, they can eat away at a child’s self value, and make her question her capabilities, and that does sabotage future success.  The most helpful comment that will reverberate with your child during tomorrow’s test:  I’m sure that you’re doing the best that you can.  

Instead of spending time on a post-mortem--examining the now dead body of the test, this is the time when it’s most beneficial to invite kids to let their brains breathe and to encourage them relax and replenish.

I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering. ~Steven Wright

It’s a healthy practice to help your child cultivate for herself.  As a culture, we don’t seem to value the process of mind emptying.  It’s all about stuffing it with things. Although, many burnt-out adults fork out lots of money to re-learn how to daydream or step back through self help classes; through meditation or hiking classes to lower fight-or-flight cortisol levels, or some class that will help them channel switch from stress and strokes.

When my eldest was a four-year-old in preschool, the mom of one of his classmates wisely introduced to the rest of us new moms the value of ‘stoop settin’ time’.  She had grown up in Brooklyn, and shared that as a kid, when she and her friends got home from school, they’d set on the stoop and hang out without any particular planned or structured activity; they might play tag, or draw chalk people on the sidewalk, they might just chat; the only time constraint being that they needed to go in for dinner in a couple of hours.

We don’t give ourselves much ‘stoop settin’ time’ until we’re old and we can’t move around and we’re forced to sit and air out.   But it is key to mental health – we all need a breather in between.  Although it’s within a young child’s nature to stop and examine an ant colony, or, throw stones into a puddle, kids can be further encouraged to decompress from a packed school day – to daydream, draw pictures, play with the dog, listen to music, or play a simple game. It’s relaxing to set time aside each day to do “nothing.”

Relaxing and replenishing lead to better endurance.

If anything, the tests measure a student’s endurance.  If your child is taught the value of (unplugged) relaxing, and the importance of replenishing her energy, anxiety over the next test will be more manageable, and she’ll have more energy to continuing to sit for the tests, and then move on to more meaningful activities.

The tension-filled rituals of preparing for the tests and the anxiety of everyone involved can skew perspectives.  Sitting outside, looking up at the sky or over at the horizon, playing a game, daydreaming or puttering around are the best therapies for putting the Standardized tests in their place.

Sit in reverie and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind.  ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 
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