Month: January 2011

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How Long to Make a Teacher?

The “Op-Chart” in the Sunday Times takes a fascinating look at the incubation of “street cops,” “Presidents,” and “Lawyers,” and many other roles and processes. It takes three years to make a good street cop, four years to make a President, five years to make a lawyer and six years to make a friend. I could not help but wonder: How long to make a teacher?

In every case the relationship between formal education and experience is the crucial variable. You can learn everything you should know about the principles of law in three years or the essentials of education in two years of schooling, but applying that knowledge to real cases and real students is the most critical phase of the incubation period.  In fact “Teach for America” made its reputation on shortening the formal instruction of a teacher and intensifying the field experience, essentially making it “on-the-job” training.

You can make a case for a teacher’s learning curve beginning with a year of formal preparation, followed by two years of hard knocks in the classroom, as the TFA model would advocate.  Research has shown that the students of these teachers are performing nearly at the same level as traditionally-prepared teachers at the end of two years in the classroom.  As I noted in “School Reform: the Popular Narrative”

In a follow-up to this study, the alternatively certified teachers registered significant gains in their students’ scores in mathematics after two years of teaching and completed certification.  However, 80% of the Teach for America recruits had left teaching by year four. Only 30% of the traditionally prepared teachers had left teaching in the fourth year (Darling-Hammond 47).

So, by the standards of Teach for America it takes two years to make a teacher and three years to disillusion one.  Arguably the reward system of TFA does not promote longevity in teaching, but I would argue that something else is going on in that third year, based on my own experience in the classroom and the experience of teachers who attend our Summer Invitational Institute for teachers of writing.

As the current Common Core State Standards reveal, there are two kinds of learning in English Language Arts and in the other academic subjects: formal content and “capacities of the literate individual.”  The “capacities” are given cursory attention in the ELA section of the Common Core State Standards. Among them are “independence,” “adapting their communication in relation to audience, task, purpose, and discipline,” “comprehending and critiquing,” “citing specific evidence,” “using technology and digital media capably,” and understanding “other perspectives and cultures” (7)

For most teachers the centrality of these “capacities” or “habits of mind,” as they are often called, becomes evident after three years of teaching to a formal curriculum, i.e. the standards in place in their state or district.  They discover, by trial and error, that students fail to consolidate what they learn in the formal curriculum because they are not acquiring the necessary “habits of mind” along the way. They discover that habits of mind are not casually absorbed in the process of mastering the content of the curriculum, but must be taught explicitly as part of the curriculum.

This is where the Common Core State Standards misses the mark. It treats the processes of learning as incidental to the content of learning and gives the processes, i.e. the habits, short shrift. Every teacher who makes it beyond the second year of teaching eventually becomes aware of the centrality of these “habits,” and it either inspires them to reinvent their teaching or drives them out of the profession.

There are many reasons for teachers leaving the profession, but I would argue this is a significant cause: the discovery that teaching is not only the delivery of content, but the assimilation of hard-won habits.  And I would argue that this is a developmental process. You have to watch students learn and forget before you see the underpinnings of that learning, the habits, the meta-cognitive skills, the conscious disciplines.

Although teacher educators emphasize the so-called “critical” and “meta-cognitive” skills in the preparation of teachers, there is only so much about habits you can internalize without watching students trying to operate without them.  To truly get the meaning of “habits of mind” you need to see what happens in their absence, what is happening in many, if not most, high school classrooms today. This is a late-developing awareness for most teachers. To be frank, my own understanding of the significance of these habits came during my eighth and ninth years of teaching English.  I knew the essential truth of “habits of mind,” but I didn’t recognize their impact on my students until then.

So how long to make a teacher? Four years at best, and for the slow learners like me, eight, nine or ten years.  To think that teachers are made by the straightforward delivery of the formal curriculum is to maintain a short-sighted view of education. It is the unfortunate view of the current Common Core State Standards and the microwaved preparation of teachers modeled by Teach for America.

I think the Chinese proverb paraphrased in today’s Times says it best: It takes ten years to sharpen a sword (New York Times, p. 9).

Darling-Hammond, Linda. The Flat World and Education. New York: Teachers College Press, 2010.

Common Core State Standards Initiative: English Language Arts and Literacy in History/ Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects, 2010.

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The Mustard Tree

The kingdom of heaven  is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches. (Matt 13:31-32)

The notion of productivity is hard to define in education. Should schools be measured by the number of graduates, by the advanced degrees of their teachers, by the scores achieved by students on standardized tests, by independent observations of accrediting agencies?  None of this really captures the productivity of schools.

But the National Writing Project, a federally funded professional development network, has a simple formula for productivity. Invest in the professional growth of individual teachers with an aptitude for leadership and then support their growth and dissemination of effective teaching practices in local schools. The investment begins every summer with a 4-week institute for the development of writing teachers and continues with the graduates (called “teacher consultants”) developing their skills as writers, consultants, and teacher researchers both as an organic group and as coaches and workshop providers in local schools. The investment is $25 million, a mustard seed in the enormous dissemination of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Currently there are 7,000 active teacher consultants disseminating the mustard seed of “effective practices in the teaching of writing” in the schools they serve and in other local districts. These consultants of the National Writing Project reach 120,000 other teachers in a given year and teach 1.4 million students.  This is the definition of productivity: 7,000 teachers reach 17 times their number through professional exchanges and reach 200 times their number in students.

Is the instruction any good? The Local Sites Research Initiative has made eight studies of the writing of students in Writing Project classrooms with the following aggregate results:

The results, taken across sites and across years, indicate a consistent pattern favoring the NWP. For every measured attribute in every site, the improvement of students taught by NWP-participating teachers exceeded that of students whose teachers were not participants. Moreover in 36 of the 70 contrasts (51%) the differences between NWP participants’ students and the comparison students were statistically significant” (LSRI 3)

By every measure, the seeds of the National Writing Project’s investment in teacher leaders have been super-producers, and the production has consistently grown from its modest beginnings in 1974 in Berkeley, California to a 200-site network today.  This is the nation’s longest enduring professional network, a network that has leveraged federal support for the past twenty years to yield this gratifying fruit.

In the weeks that follow, the funding of the National Writing Project, a pittance at $25 million dollars, will be in jeopardy as Congress swings its reckless budget axe.   It is easy to overlook the brilliant success of the tiny mustard tree, overshadowed by the immense orchard of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Not every seed out of that orchard has been productive.

When the axe swings in the neighborhood of the professional development of teacher leaders, let it pause before the mustard tree of the National Writing Project.  That tree is home to teachers, students, and even their families (through the grafted programs of family literacy), and it is one of the great over-producers in American education.

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The Seed on the Path

When anyone hears the message about the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what was sown in the heart. This is the seed sown along the path (Matt 13:19).

The difference between hearing and understanding has been pondered by educators since long before Jesus and ever afterward. It is not limited to the word of God. It is current in our demand  for  “rigor” and “college readiness.”  It is inherent in the notion of literacy as a structure built on a foundation–each year new standards are added to the structure, which ascends toward the gates of the college of your choice.

The notion of “cultural literacy,” that we are what we have read, supports the edifice metaphor of literacy.  Our knowledge is sequentially built upon classical authors, like Hawthorne, Shakespeare, and Ben Franklin, and we are judged illiterate in proportion to the texts we have not read.  Sometimes we mock those who claim to be educated, yet have not read our honored texts. What, you call yourself a high school graduate, but never read Hamlet?

Literacy is more like an organic process, like the body absorbing food for growth. Readers and writers process language selectively, and turn it into living tissue. It is not like we absorb protein at a certain age and vitamins later on. We absorb them as our body requires them and turn them into something living and functional. The body’s demand for iron and calcium very much depends on our age and gender.

“Understanding” a text is the kind of rigor we should advocate. “Understanding” means that we assimilate what we read, as the body assimilates nutrients from food.  You know what happens to the food we don’t assimilate. In cases where understanding is not part of the reading experience, nothing is assimilated. It is all waste.

The point is not what we hear, as Jesus said, or what we “decode,” as cognitive theorists currently say, but of “understanding.”  You can read Animal Farm in sixth grade or Romeo and Juliet in eighth grade, but what do you get out of them? Perhaps a good story and certainly “exposure” to a canonical text, but what about “understanding”?  In many cases you get a lifetime of alienation from allegory and Shakespeare, because the reading was so distant from the understanding.

Many adolescents hate reading, not because they are addicted to visual and social media, but because their understanding of assigned texts is so cloudy. They would give up on video games as well, if their computer monitor lost its resolution or if the enjoyment of the game relied on an extensive background in the canonical games of yore. They can be seduced by reading that addresses developmentally appropriate issues and that challenges their thinking at their own level.

Why do we now have a version of Huckleberry Finn that purges the “N-word?” Because we treat reading as though it were hearing. I am offended by those who use that word in my hearing, and I would demand that they restrain themselves, regardless of their cultural background. But in a book the “N-word” is a portrayal, not an actual event. It is fiction, where characters may display their ignorance with impunity.  If we are offended, we consider the source and learn more about people we might not otherwise associate with.  The same rule should apply to other offensive literary texts, the portrayal of the Jew in Merchant of Venice, the portrayal of the clergy in The Scarlet Letter. We can read without sanctioning the behavior of literary characters or being corrupted by it.

The problem often arises from adult texts being forced on the young. Maybe Huckleberry Finn shouldn’t be assigned in ninth grade.  Maybe Lord of the Flies should not be required reading in middle school. In our relentless pursuit of rigor, we assume that more difficult reading is also appropriate reading for adolescents and pre-adolescents.  Even a young adult text like The Giver can be assigned prematurely, because adults love the notion of collective memory, but young children may not.  Yes, they can read it. But understand it?

As the “Parable of the Sower” teaches us, not all seed takes root and grows to full stature.  So it will be with the scattered seed of the “rigorous” curriculum and the treasured fruit of “college readiness.”

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The Seed Among Thorns

What is sown among the thorns is the man who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke it, making it unfruitful” (Matthew 13:22).

The Parable of the Sower tells us everything we need to know about teaching.  It’s not the seed we sow, but the soil it falls on.  And the corollary to that is: There are no sacred documents, but there are sanctifying and corrupting documents.  So we should stop grasping at symbols and instead preserve the spirit that gives them life.

The U.S. Constitution received a lot of symbolic attention at the opening of Congress, but even more serious scrutiny as we heard Congresswoman Giffords read the First Amendment with great conviction.  We heard  it in the context of a citizen violating her right to speak and assemble, indeed violating her right to live. And then we heard it in the context of a national conversation about how we should speak and the limits of political discourse. That has been an inspiring conversation.

When citizens talk about what free speech means, then we are revering the Constitution, not when we give it a public oration, congratulating ourselves that we have a splendid document to govern us.  We revere the Constitution when we ask ourselves how its seeds fall among us, how they invade and transform our hearts.  Our country has had a period of serious self-examination, because of the events following the reading of the First Amendment, but not from the words of themselves.

The words themselves may sow corruption. Before 1964, the Constitution did not protect the voting rights of all citizens. Before 1920 the Constitution did not protect the voting rights of half of its citizens.  It was good seed, but it fell in bad soil. But some of the seed fell on good soil, and it produced the Nineteenth and the Twenty-fourth Amendments. The Constitution would be sham without them.

The First and Second Amendments to the Constitution have been driven north, south, east, and west in attempts to justify what citizens wanted and believed.   Opponents on both sides of political controversy have invoked the same amendments to their advantage. Corrupting and sanctifying. That is how laws get made and rights are protected. To invoke those amendments as though they inherently protected our political convictions misses their point. They are the seeds sown by our Founders. We are the soil they fall upon. We should be more concerned with the soil, than who owns the seed.

Let’s stop invoking the Constitution as if it were the guarantee of everything we want. Let’s stop demonizing those who disagree with us as though they were the enemies of the Constitution. Let’s stop using the Constitution as a symbol and remember that its value is in how we live it.

Jesus compared the word of God to seed. If the word of God is no more than seed, which is barren without soil, how can we presume that the words of men, however eloquent, can be any more than that? How can we use that word against our fellow citizens, when we are all soil, all the resting place of seed, the producers of fruit?

When we are considering the limits of free speech, we might consider if we are the soil for our treasured documents or the thorns.

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Engfish

Almost fifty years ago Ken Macrorie invented a term for a pretentious and vapid style of writing that secondary and college teachers unconsciously reinforce in their push for formality in student prose: “Engfish.”  It is writing that goes through the motions, but discloses nothing, writing that skims the surface with cliches or empty words. In Uptaught Macrorie describes how a student essay inspired this term:

This girl had given me a name for the bloated, pretentious language I saw everywhere around me, in the students’ themes, in the textbooks on writing, in the professors and administrators’ communications with each other. A feel-nothing, say-nothing language, dead like Latin, devoid of the rhythms of contemporary speech. A dialect in which words are never  “attached to things,” as Emerson said they should be (18).

This style, unfortunately, often gets the “A’s,” because it sounds important and frequently shows a command of mechanics. As Macrorie observed, it pervades all levels of education. E.B. White fought it with prescriptive advice in The Elements of Style and Richard Lanham located it in the upper levels of bureaucracy and called it “The Official Style” (Revising Prose, 1999). It is hardly limited to struggling college freshmen.

Almost exactly two years ago, I confessed to my own addiction to Engfish as a high school student. In that blog, “The Science of Writing” I revealed:

I fancied myself a writer in high school, but when I look back at my preserved fragments I am shocked by the pompous and impersonal style that was rewarded by my teachers. In a series of responses to college admissions questions, I pontificated.

Question #1: Why do you want to go to college?

“The most evident purpose of the collegiate experience is to broaden the scope of education while making it especially relevant to a field of study. I sense the crying need to systemize [sic] the great chaotic whirlpool of information into the universal outlook of college training and impending need to study seriously my chosen field of work.  I expect college to carry me beyond education to the developing of a technique of study.”

One might argue that the first person singular is present in this excerpt, but I refuse to accept that cold, pretentious voice as my own. I want to have compassion on that sixteen-year-old with lofty dreams of college, but I feel completely alienated from that affected style, that pretend academic diction. If I were this kid’s teacher, I would tell him to write about why he loves the New York Yankees or pizza, get him grounded in real language about real experience.  Maybe I could deflate his diction and connect with his passions.

So this is origin of my contempt for Engfish. In high school I was considered one of the best writers in my class, wrote for the yearbook and the school newspaper, won a local essay contest,  all for the publishing of Engfish.  I was a master of saying nothing in the best style.  I shudder to think of what my Freshmen English teachers thought when my beige prose arrived in college.

Ultimately I learned to write as a reporter for the Spectator, the college newspaper, and later I retrieved what was left of my voice in a summer at the Boston Writing Project.  I learned very little about writing in actual writing classes. I felt betrayed by the system that let me loose on the world with nothing to offer but Engfish.

The National Writing Project chopped away at this unfortunate style by declaring that “all teachers of writing should be writers.” This meant we delivered our prose to real readers and heard what they heard. Ultimately this was my cure for Engfish. The summer I attended the Boston Writing Project I was among a host of would-be writers who would only affirm what touched their reader sensibilities. We learned to write what we felt without embellishment, and we discovered how powerful that could be.

Since English teachers are often the perpetrators of Engfish and its followers, I have made it my life’s mission to go after it. Not to punish students for giving in to its seductive rhythmic nothingness, but to help them find the language that still lives in them, what Macrorie has called their “voice.” This term is not without controversy, but I’ll save it for another blog.

For today I offer  the funeral rites for “Engfish” from Macrorie’s entry, May 7, 1964, “The Day We Killed Engfish.”

Not until I heard the third paper that afternoon did I realize that everyone on the grass had quit gazing around and was listening hard. Each student had written a powerful short paper and I had broken through and the students were speaking in their own voices about things that counted for them (21).