Bike

This post really has nothing to do with the blog I established. It has everything to do with getting a picture of my stolen bike online so that I can post it to mplsbikelove.com stolen bike forum.

Testing

We just got finished with week 1 of 3 for standardized testing. Some portion of our students are testing three days of the week. It's an extremely institutional and sterile process: students are in a silent room, are not allowed to have any materials with them other than testing materials, can only go to the bathroom one at a time escorted by a staff member, etc. It literally sucks the joy out of learning. I understand the need for some level of assessment of students, and I'm not saying that I have the answers on how that should be done, but I do feel that relying 100% on standardized tests is not the way to go.

As to how this fits in with textbooks....well, at a certain point, if schools have to meet certain standardized testing benchmarks, they are going to begin teaching to the test. And if standardized tests include lots of short, choppy, unrelated snippets of text followed by multiple choice questions, that is what schools are going to begin looking for in text materials. And if the complexity and coherence of a lengthy text are not sought after in the classroom, I am concerned about the thinking skills that we are teaching. As one teacher in Savage Inequalities is quoted:

The result of this regime is that the children who survive do slightly better on their tests, because that's all they study, while the failing kids give up and leave the school before they even make it to eleventh grade.....They have learned that education is a brittle, abstract ritual to ready them for an examination. If they get to college they do not know how to think. They know how to pass the tests and this may get them into college, but it cannot keep them there. We see students going off to Rutgers every year. By the end of the first semester they are back in Camden. So we teach them failure.

Top Four

So, someone named Courtland spearheaded a study of Indiana's textbook adoption process. Here are the top four factors the study found that textbook selectors used in making their decisions:

1. "Personal teaching style" of the selector
2. District curriculum objectives
3. A "flip test" for "eye appeal"
4. Publishers presentations

(Note that these were found to be nearly identical to the factors identified in the Texas textbook selection process, which is of course significant because of Texas' behemoth status as a textbook purchaser)

Missing from this list? Here's the top five that I can think of:

5. Current research supporting instructional style
4. Readability
3. Engaging to students
2. Emphasis on cultivating critical thinking skills
1. Accuracy of content

There are clearly lots of factors to account for in selecting textbooks, but choosing texts based on what looks pretty or appeals to personal teaching styles should not be among them.

'Nam

When I was in middle school, I was seriously convinced that God had made some colossal cosmic mistake that I was not living in the 1960s. I was certain that I was meant to be a flower child. This poster hung on my wall for years, and I would stare at it for long stretches searching for the wisdom of the hippies. Since I wasn't living the '60s, I placated myself by learning everything I could about the era. Music, movies, books....I was all over anything having to do with the era. The epic tragedy of the Vietnam War was naturally a focal point of my obsession, and I would endlessly pick my dad's brain about his experience as a hippie opposed to the war. The first time I saw some of the iconic photographs from the war feel indelibly burned to my brain for their striking power and the hold they had on my imagination. Even today, a simple Google search for "Vietnam" turns up some of those haunting images:





Now, I realize that not everyone shares this same fascination. But the Vietnam War is certainly a major part of American history, worthy of exploration in our history classes. Yet, according to Lies My Teacher Told Me, the average history class in the 1980s devoted only *4.5 minutes* to Vietnam. Coverage from textbooks sounds something like this:

Because some of the enemy lived amidst the civilian population, it was difficult for U.S. troops to discern friend from foe. A woman selling soft drinks to U.S. soldiers might be a Vietcong spy. A boy standing on the corner might be ready to throw a grenade. --The Americans

OMG! For real? What a disservice to an incredibly complex issue which still lives with us today. There are a lot of issues from Vietnam that can be debated and studied, but it is hard to paint America in a positive or even sympathetic light in this conflict with so many crystal clear instances of dishonorable U.S. actions that were just plain wrong. If textbooks are trying to paint America as the hero, it's hard to include Vietnam on the canvass.

Hero Making

I may have talked about this already, which probably means it is a theme of my studies.

U.S. textbooks shun complexity. America=hero. Anti-America=anti-hero.


Except that humans are messy, and so are nations. There's really no such thing as a perfect hero, and America is certainly no exception. Instances of U.S. wrongs examined by James Loewen in "Lies My Teacher Told Me" include:


The 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba (above), leader of the Communist faction in Zaire. The CIA backed Joseph Mobutu as Zaire's next leader; he was forced to flee in 1997 amidst civil war, corruption, and suffering of the people.


The 1973 CIA-initiated coup to bring down the government of democratically elected Salvador Allende (above), who was killed in the coup and succeeded by the notoriously corrupt and vicious regime of CIA-backed Augusto Pinochet.


1970s covert bombings of Laos during the Vietnam war, which were denied by the U.S. even as Laos became the most heavily bombed nation in history.

It is no wonder that elected officials like Michele Bachmann get away with blatant lies about U.S. history. If we don't hold U.S. Representatives to a standard of truth in analyzing history and applying its lessons to today, what do we expect of students in our public schools?

Glee rocks so hard

This episode is a couple of weeks old, but I think that Glee totally nailed it on sex education. Since this is one of the top issues facing censorship in textbook, I was especially interested in how they approached it. The educators clearly have differing opinions on how sex ed should be delivered, but the show clearly comes down on the side of empowering teens with information to make their own decisions and to protect themselves.

Big bad Marx

I just listened to episode #424 of This American Life, "Kid Politics". Like all episodes of This American Life, it was fantastic, but particularly so to to me because it focused on various incarnations of democracy in education. The first act got me especially riled up in terms of how we help students build knowledge. Do we didactically tell them what to think? Or do we give them information and help the build the skills to form their own opinions on issues? Obviously I favor the latter; the teacher from the program's first act certainly did not. She took her students on a field trip to the Ronald Reagan Museum's Discovery Center--in and of itself, a very cool field trip. It sounded like a pretty freaking awesome experience for middle schoolers (I think it was a class of 6th graders): a replica of the Oval Office, Air Force One, a "Command Decision Center", and the Press Room. Students were divided into teams of presidential advisors and press corps, with one lucky student serving as President Reagan himself, and role played the Invasion of Grenada.

I was really excited as I listened to the set-up of the activity; what a great way to explore different issues of leadership, decision making, and international conflict. But as the activity progressed, I became more and more frustrated at the disservice the teacher was doing to her students. Leading students through rote recollection of which countries were Communist and which were Democratic, she posed questions like:

• Why is Communism bad? (Because people don't get to have freedom, etc.)
  
• Do people in Communist countries get to keep all of their money? (No)
• Who gets all of the money in Communist countries? (the government)

Whoa. Talk about over-simplifying a very complex political topic. And posing such leading questions that clearly had a "right" answer....well, I just consider that to be completely unprofessional.
Yet, complex economic and political issues are often presented in such simplistic or skewed fashions in textbooks because....go figure.....publishers are "afraid of being labeled Marxist" as one top social studies editor told James Loewen in "Lies My Teacher Told Me".



The answer to being "labeled Marxist" is apparently to omit any reference to class struggle, present America as a flawless hero, and eliminate any debate about the course of history. When the student playing Reagan made a different decision than Reagan himself did, a buzzer went off and lights started flashing, clearly indicating that he had made the "wrong" answer. How are students supposed to truly build their own decision making skills if we insist on just thrusting information at them, and expect nothing from them but regurgitation of those same facts?