Teaching and Learning Despite the Common Core: An Inside Job

Today, I work again with one of the most extraordinary students I’ve ever known.  I am tutoring “J”, and helping her to find her way around Juliet’s soliloquies in Romeo and Juliet, one of the plays read in many 9^th grade English classes.

Like many ninth graders, J finds Shakespeare’s language to be challenging.   But unlike other ninth graders – she has not personally (yet) experienced love at first sight, rebellion against parents and authorities, and difficult friendships- some of the resonant themes in the play.  Learning about the world through literature is perhaps more crucial for J than other students: She is a captive audience. Her circumstances have made this so.

J has an infectious smile and a contagious laugh.  She laughs frequently, but she cannot speak.  She is in a wheelchair as a result of an illness that she contracted when she was three months old that has left her paralyzed.

She has minimal ability to move her head…but --she does have the full use of one shoulder, one arm, and one finger on her right hand.

This finger is usually painted with pink nail polish, and it is long and tapered, and gracefully finds a key on the keyboard in a way that my clumsy fingers can’t - I think of it as her Cinderella’s finger, in the same way that only Cinderella’s foot could fit into the coveted slipper offered up by the Prince.

As she cannot speak, I find myself doing my usual monologue- or soliloquy is more appropriate-as we’re reading Shakespeare.  During these soliloquies, I ask her questions, and make suggestions for what to do next.   She is beginning work on an essay about Juliet’s experience with romantic love.   I’m suddenly aware of the way my own voice sounds- and I try to temper the urgency I hear in it, because we are always trying to “catch up” to the assignment deadlines.  I don’t want to begin this session sounding stressed out already.  Nothing good comes from stress.   My job is to peel the layers from her packed assignments.

This assignment asks that she write a four-paragraph essay, using passages to support her thesis and claims.  This “boiler plate” essay requires concentrated effort from a student without disabilities. I’ve taught and coached many ninth graders through Romeo and Juliet essays.   But it frequently takes J twenty minutes to compose three or four sentences.

She is in a Special Ed program at a New York City public high school, on a local diploma graduation track, which is currently the only option her parents have, as they navigate the tangled forest of red tape in searching for a school that is a better fit for her.   In the meantime, J will stay in a holding pattern until a better placement for her materializes.  If that materializes.  

Public School Special Ed programs are now cinched tightly to align with the demands of the rigid Common Core Standards.  We’ll remember here the description of the implementation

of the CCSS by Karen Lewis, the Vice President of the American Federation of Teachers: “We’re flying the airplane as we’re building it.  So we’ll see. Who knows what it will bring?”

Okay then, since the idea of more rigor is touted by the Common Core “airplane” –it looks like J and I are in a two person plane of our own; maybe a little Cessna?

There’s a certain freedom in that, because students like J are so out of the running in “Race to the Top,” she’ll set her own bar, with my help.   But that doesn’t mean that rigor is not a part of J’s learning: Because of that, concepts of rigor, and conversations about it should be kept wide open.   Rigor is not a product of effort, and can’t be pigeonholed into a business model, as privatizers are attempting to do with standardization.  Rigor is a process.

For one thing, rigor takes on an entirely differently form for a student with J’s daunting challenges: In order to reach her curious mind, the essay first needs to be broken down into human bites.

Our process today, as with all days, is very slow.

We both need incentive here.  I move myself into her sight level so we can make eye contact.  “Why do we write essays?” 

Because she cannot speak, I answer my own question. “We write essays to invite people into the way we see things…How does that sound to you?”

She gets it.  When she’s bored or disconnected, her eyes move away from me. But she’s looking straight at me now.  Her eyes send me volumes of information.  It’s true. Our eyes are the windows to our souls.

I’ve worked out a system to give J as many choices as I can think of as we approach writing projects. But it’s also important not to overwhelm her with choices: No more than two at a time. “Which of Juliet’s soliloquies do you want to use as your evidence?  Squeeze my hand once for the balcony scene. Or - squeeze my hand twice for her Act 3 “gallop apace” speech.”

With her “good hand”, she squeezes twice. “ Awesome choice. I love that one too.”

We’re both motivated now.

Her computer, her mechanical armrest, and the pillow tucked into her left side to keep her sitting straight are all basic equipment.  Simultaneously present on her computer monitor are layers of resources.  I have moments of flooding gratitude for those wise guys in Silicon Valley who wrote the ancestor programs, eons ago, of what is presently on her touch-screen.   Without this technology, J would have no chance to interact with the world that is beyond her classroom and bedroom.

The desktop is a collage of sites:  Juno, her homework program, Spark Notes with the play in Shakespeare’s language and in modern vernacular, Kurzweil, (Thank you, Ray Kurzweil.) which reads the characters’ lines back to her, Word Docs, in the wonderful case that J’s ideas are too big to fit into the little Juno boxes, and, her PowerPoint project that we might need to draw from for this essay.  The choices are breathtaking.

I ask her – “Which part of the “gallop apace” speech do you like the most?”

A moment or two pass. (I used to think that this indicated J didn’t understand my question, and I’d rush in to move us along to the next step: I’ve learned to wait.)  Then, like a conductor maestra in front of her orchestra of musicians, she lifts her finger high, and gracefully brings it down to the screen, clicks shut the Juno program, and peruses with her finger the multitude of other choices. She chooses the Spark Notes so we can revisit Juliet’s pensive moments in the dark as she awaits Romeo’s expected arrival.

On some days, this selection process may take J from 10-15 minutes.  In her mind, J is sorting and organizing all the information in front of her. She is classifying her choices.  This process cannot be measured by any big data quants.  Based on her eye movements, I can see that her mind moves faster than her finger.  Additionally, lifting her finger, and swinging it down to click on the correct program is often hit-or-miss.  She frequently hits the wrong one.  But she usually demonstrates an abundant amount of patience, and stays with it until she gets it right. This invites a new definition of rigor, especially on days when her one working shoulder aches from use. 

This next part is complicated, because Spark Notes doesn’t read itself the way Kurzweil or a Kindle can.

“Whoops. I forgot, could you copy and paste Juliet’s horse passage onto Kurzweil so we can hear it read?”

She nods, and, then gracefully conducts the Kurzweil to open.  She copies and pastes the soliloquy onto its page.  Sometimes I’ll read parts of the play, and try to change my voice so J can tell when I’m reading for (peevish) Tybalt or the (goofily effusive) Nurse. –  I usually cringe when hearing the Kurzweil robot woman reading Shakespeare in her stilted emphasis and inappropriate stress on the wrong words - as if this “voice” is having her own issues in wading through the molasses of Shakespeare’s language.

However -it’s important for J to have as much control and choice as possible.  She clicks the robotic read-back - It highlights as it reads, and this is how we roll up our metaphorical sleeves to wade around into the language of Shakespeare as read by this uptight little entity in J’s computer.  Let the music begin:  We listen and follow along:

“Give me my Romeo. And when I shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night.”

 

I’m astonished that the robot with all her vocal limitations is still managing in her staccato to utter the passage in all its beauty, urgency and energy.

“Wow. There’s your passage. You know what to do.”

With her Cinderella’s finger, she swoops it, copies, and then pastes it onto her Word Doc. This is growing the essay from the roots up.

“Terrific. Now give me a sentence or two that introduce that passage.”

Then, clicks up the touch screen keyboard, which then magically appears.    And, with her tapered finger, taps out a sentence.

Juliet is thinking about Romeo. She is waiting for him to come to her.

“Great. That gives some context to the passage – You need to carefully carry your readers so they can follow your thinking.” I’m thinking that we have a long way to go with further developing this paragraph.  But she has this work by herself.

But J is not finished.  With a flourish, she highlights the sentence, then changes the font to purple, her favorite color – this is her signature style.  These flourishes are sometimes dangerous for me because when she swings her good arm up, her metal arm support nearly hits me in the throat. I’ve learned to bob and weave as I sit next to her.  But at the moment, I’m flooded with gratitude to Steve Jobs for thinking of adding color to his calligraphic fonts, and this individual chance for Hello out there, I’m here! self- expression within a standardized technology.

“Ah, purple! Well done.” Her eyes move to the clock, and then back to me, which tells me she knows we’re done for today.

She’s produced half a paragraph to meet the expectation of a four-paragraph essay.  This took an hour.  It’s a rigorous session for us.  Her arm hurts more, and my side aches from leaning in.

“Before I go, I want to know how you think you did today? Did you stay on task or did you get distracted?” 

She pauses, and again, I wait. Dinner aromas waft from the kitchen as her dad prepares the family meal.  She moves her finger to her touch screen and calls up another instrument from her orchestra of programs - She opens her Talking Device – and, with her Cinderella finger, taps out some words:

The robot cousin of the Kurzweil entity reports stiltedly: I am proud.  I am proud.   J smiles.

“I’m proud of you too.” I find her hand with its curled fingers, and hold it up so we can do a fist pound.  

I’m always amazed at her spirited perseverance.  No matter what a student’s challenges or capabilities are – teaching is about starting with what a student can actually do, and cultivating those capabilities, as the student raises her own bar, creating her own standards.  Educators, parents, and anyone who works closely with children, understand that learning cannot be wrestled down to the ground and pinned and standardized into a preferred outcome, nor can it be measured by quants. They know that learning, with all its complexities and uncertainty, its three steps forward and two steps back - is  - an inside job.

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

Follow Staying Strong in School on Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/pages/Staying-Strong-in-School-Jane-Nixon-Willis/
And on Twitter: @ParentsPlaybook

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.

                   

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