SpeEdChange

blogging at change.org this week

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 05:27:00 +0000

change.org is a national conversation about the American future, and thanks to Clay Burell, who leads the site's education policy blog, I'll be part of the conversation this week.

My first post there Counting the Origins of Failure looks at the basic need to completely re-think the American educational system (why start small?).

"Our American public education system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It is separating “winners” from “losers” and it is reinforcing our economic gap. The system was designed in the 1840s and at the turn of the 20th Century to separate society into a vast majority of minimally trained industrial workers and a small, educated elite. It was designed to enforce White, Protestant, Middle-Class, “Typically-abled” standards on an increasingly diverse American population."

Please come join the conversation.

- Ira Socol

Refusing Free, Depriving Students

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:21:00 +0000

On one of the Becta lists a conversation broke out regarding solutions for visually impaired students who use Microsoft's Internet Explorer. CleanPage was suggested, and Keyboard Shortcuts noted. And this was all good to see, good to know.

But I commented to a teacher on the list that I still thought FireVox, the 'blind browser' add on to Firefox, would be a more effective solution for her students, because it is a full, robust browser which can be operated without sight, and with the many other supports available in Firefox.

"Yes," others told me, "but Firefox just isn't available in many schools, libraries, etc."

This is undeniably true. True in the United Kingdom, in Canada, Australia, New Zealand (to name a few English-speaking nations), and even 'more true' in the United States (to name another).

Firefox - entirely free, totally accessible, far 'safer' in terms of web browsing, far more supportive of differentiated instruction - remains a rarity on the computers used in schools, in public libraries, in adult education programs. And thus students, and others, are denied the ability to learn and use essential tools such as FireVox (the blind browser), Click-Speak (FireVox's cousin for dyslexia and other print disabilities), gTranslate (right-click translation), Dictionary Switcher (a fabulous tool for ELL students, Second Language Acquisition, and all those who communicate outside their home nation), and many more.

The result? Students do worse in school than they need do, they struggle more, they even drop out more. All because schools won't take the two minutes to download something free.

Google Apps for Education - entirely free, with no advertising - is available to every primary, secondary, and post-secondary school. It provides a highly accessible and organizable email system, student calendars which teachers may share, word processing which can be used singly or collaboratively, spreadsheets, presentations, and much more. Combined with, say, Click-Speak (above) it provides reading and writing support for a wide range of struggling students. But most schools refuse to use it, choosing to spend (at least) cumulative hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars (quid, Euros) operating third rate email systems.

The result? Less money for the important technology investments - netbooks and wireless, high-level disability supports and alternate keyboards, tablet PCs and polleverywhere licensing. And thus, higher rates of student failure and disengagement, all because schools won't send an email to Google.

From Ghotit (the world's best English-language context-based, text-to-speech Spell Check system) to WordTalk (turns Microsoft Word into a talking word processor), from OpenOffice to Linux (stop paying for Microsoft licenses), from Google Earth to GraphCalc (free complete graphing calculator), from Click-N-Type (the best virtual on-screen keyboard) to PowerTalk (reads presentations outloud), schools could be providing their students with a world of software and supports at zero cost, but are refusing.

The result? Rich, white, Protestant, normally-abled students get what they need at home, and vulnerable students fail.

Why?

I keep struggling with this. I can really no longer accept the answer, "ignorance." At some point being completely ignorant of the tools of your trade becomes either "willful ignorance" or simple "stupidity." These tools have now been available for too long, are too easily 'discoverable' for this excuse to hold water anymore.

And I won't accept the answer, "fear" anymore either. If an electrician was too afraid of electricity to touch a wire, he'd be an electrician no more. So if an educator is afraid of the information and communication technologies of his/her age, then he/she can no longer be an "educator" in any meaningful way.

I have come to suggest that the answer is actually political, that too many in charge of education do not want universal success, do not want the increased economic competition which might come from those who are currently excluded from educational success. Many people have been shocked when I suggest this, but few have offered a coherent alternate theory.

So, why?

Why, when schools cry about a lack of funding do they spend more to exclude students? What is it about administrators, policy-makers, educational technology workers, which causes this bizarre, and socially destructive, behavior?

Not a rhetorical question - I'm getting desperate to begin to find an answer to this question, so we can start to work on a solution...

- Ira Socol

next up: Why would schools purchase the iPod Touch rather than (less expensive) netbooks? Why would schools propose Apple-based handheld solutions rather than universal solutions which could be used on the students' own phones in school and at home? (a related question)

Social Change and the American School

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:52:00 +0000

With the NECC Conference running in Washington, I've been inundated with thoughts on Twitter. But this morning a couple of things ran together. UrbanEducation sent me a question: "@ShaySzu I teach in an urban school [without] much technology. How do you use technology in your classrooms without breaking the bank?" Then Greg Casperson, a colleague at MSU said, "Arguments for public online schools dismiss issues of working families that rely on schools for places of learning and child rearing." Asked regarding the question of "bricks and mortar" schools v online learning.

And once again I thought, "Damn, the United States is one very weird nation."

Americans really do not believe in their government as competent or capable. It is not just that they've elected anti-government capitalists to the Presidency, Governorships, positions in Congress consistently over the past generation+ - America's election system is so flawed and antiquated that this could mean almost anything. Rather, it is a deep seated set of beliefs - "Well, I wouldn't really want just a government health insurance system." "I'm not sure the government is the best group to try to run - the trains, the power system, the universities, whatever." It is a belief that government in the United States is clearly less competent than that of most other "developed" nations - France, the UK, Canada, Germany, Italy...

But then we get to schools. Schools, we believe, can do everything.

I've seen many tweets, for example, spreading the "gospel" that only education can solve poverty. I find this odd because if there is one overwhelming predictor of school failure in the US, it is poverty.

But we expect it. As Greg points out, people depend on schools to feed their children, to control their children, to babysit their children so American parents can work longer hours than almost anyone. We even expect our schools to provide athletic recreation and sport training. In other words, we've invested most of the American social safety net in one poorly funded set of government institutions, and insisted that they solve all of our problems.

And when this absurd plan inevitably fails, we blame our teachers, our administrators, our parents, our students, and often, we begin to argue that only privatization can solve this.

And now we bring the next issue into play: Schools must solve the digital divide. They must reinvigorate American creativity as well. All righty then.

I want to take you back in time for a minute, to the United States at the turn of the 20th Century.

At this point in history the US had an almost unparalleled wealth divide. It was filled with students from non-English speaking homes. Communications technology was changing rapidly - people were getting their information from films, and from a vast collection of new and unreliable newspapers. Too many parents of impoverished children were both working long hours. Schools were physically in no condition to handle the flood of students. There was insufficient teacher training.

There was a vast response to this at the time. No, very unfortunately, nothing changed the basic pedagogical or physical forms of the classroom that had been established a half century before, that was the missed opportunity, but let's look at what was tried:

Libraries were built across the United States, by both governments and capitalist philanthropists. There was one in every neighborhood in New York City, for example, and Andrew Carnegie fitted out almost every town in America with this 19th Century equivalent of free broadband access.
New schools were built everywhere, equipped with unheard of things like auditoriums and gymnasiums to both help engage student learning and to make schools true community centers.
Teacher Training colleges - "Normal Schools" - spread across the country.
In New York City and California universities were made free.
School nurses were introduced to support child health in poor communities.
U.S. Labor Law was changed to protect workers - and thus parents and children.
The curriculum was radically revamped in an attempt to make school relevant to the needs and technologies of the new century.

Now, what are we doing today?

Consider what might change if those who spend a fortune daily promoting charter schools and Teach for America were to instead fund - Andrew Carnegie-style - free broadband access across America?
Or if our governments poured money into finally constructing schools NOT based in Henry Barnard's 1848 advice?
Or if teacher training institutions became completely free? And were completely re-thought?
Or if graduates of our public schools were guaranteed free post-secondary training?
Or if every school was paired with a local health system to help students get and stay healthy?
Or if U.S. Labor laws were changed to require "Family Living Wages" and paid time off so parents might spend time with their children.
Or if we finally threw out that "Committee of Ten" curriculum and adopted a project and interest based approach to education?

The problems plaguing American society are very deep. These problems stem from a mix of an awful economic system (which leaves tens of millions in poverty), an awful health care system (which strangles innovation by making business start ups prohibitively risky and expensive for most), a bizarre education funding system (which gives the most money to the wealthiest students), incoherent transportation and communications policies (which blocks movement of people to jobs and information to students), and a completely antiquated government system (modeled on 18th Century Britain).

So schools can be a part of this solution - if properly funded and supported, but they cannot be the solution. Without the other changes, the change in education will have just minimal impact.

However, let me get back to Greg Casperson and Shayna Szumach. I'm going to suggest two paradigm switches, one as to what a "learning place" means and the other as to what "educational technology" means.

For Greg, I want schools open 24/7. I want their libraries, their gyms, their auditoriums, their computers open round the clock. It baffles me that I can buy liquor, or marijuana for that matter, almost anytime in most American cities but getting into a library is much more doubtful. In the town I live now, and this is not unusual, the library is open less when students are out of school during the summer!

Schools need to be learning places that are the heart of every community in America, offering adult ed in the evenings, community ed, yes of course, but mostly offering access to information, ideas, knowledge, and socialization.

And so, perhaps, kids should be attending school on flexible schedules as well. Why is education the last "fixed time" service in America? Why can't high school schedules, even primary school schedules, look more like those in universities?

For Shayna, well, technology surrounds you. I can link you to the ideas of used computers (or cheap netbooks) and free software, or I can suggest that most kids carry great tech tools in their pockets - maybe the solution is Blackberries for all? (costly, but still cheaper than what most schools throw away on bad networks and hardware.) I can tell you that schools buy the most expensive solutions (from Apple computers to Clickers to Kurzweil3000) for everything when cheaper is often better. I can ask if your school still pays for an email system when Google Apps for Education is free?

But mostly I can tell you that you need to start where you can. One good tablet PC with a mobile internet card can light up your classroom even with zero building tech support. Polleverywhere can turn any group of cell-phone toting American kids into an interactive classroom experience. A bunch of downloadable and online software, from Firefox with Click-Speak and gTranslate to Ghotit, to WordTalk to Google Earth to Diigo, will make those couple of classroom computers into universal design workstations.

But I'll repeat. We can make schools better, but schools will not fix American society. And individuals crying in the dark won't fix it either. Americans, as a group, must start to believe that they, through their own government, can improve life in these United States.

And in the hope that will happen, schools need to get better as best they can, so they can ride that new wave.

-Ira Socol

My best teacher

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:38:00 +0000

By the time I reached Alan Shapiro's ninth grade English class, I was ready to be done with school. Yes, I enjoyed the lunch periods. Sure, I had lots of friends. And no question - I had loved learning to arc weld in eighth grade. But there was nothing going on for me in any class. I usually managed, after just a few weeks, to pull a desk away from other students into a back corner by the window, and just sit there staring out toward Long Island Sound or drawing in the big sketch pad my art teacher had given me in exchange for no longer coming to his class.

By the time I reached Alan Shapiro's ninth grade English class he had plenty of reasons to have given up. He had already taught for 15 years in an urban Junior High, had risen to become head of the English Department there, then lost that job after leading his AFT local out on a strike the year before - a strike primarily based in the teachers' desire to innovate.

Now he was teaching lots of classes of kids like me.

But Alan Shapiro did not give up. In fact, he became the "teacher who saved my life" by convincing me that there were all sorts of things I could do well, and giving me the chance to do those things. I came into his class a couple of weeks into the school year after I was thrown out of another teacher's English class. I came in sullen and angry. I left in June with an entirely different view of education, of writing, of books, and with a note from my teacher I'll never forget: "To my No. 1 crap detector," he had written, "just go out there and do it."

I've written about Alan Shapiro before, in terms of the alternative high school he began the next year with his friends Neil Postman and Charlie Weingartner (please read the comments there), but as an old classmate pointed out there, Alan knew how to change school wherever he was.

That old classmate put it this way, '"Shapiro always said that "regular" schools didn't allow students to fail - that they always had someone else to blame - bad teachers, bad schedule, bad books, bad assignments, boring classes, etc. He said that thus they never owned their failures and thus didn't own their successes either. When all those typical student issues have become student choices - failure is the student's."

"Shapiro had used this in his regular English class before the 3Is. In our 9th grade class, we voted on a grade for the report card, but he supplemented that grade with an individual evaluation. I'll always remember the final he gave us. True/False; multiple choice; short essay and the part where he gave us the 'answer' and we had to come up with the question: Answer:'I didn't do it" question: 'Where's your Romeo and Juliet paper? Shapiro's comment was, "Feeling guilty?" That made an impact on me years later. I got a "w" on the test." [just for the record, I received an "11" - all grades were random symbols]

But there was much more to the class than that. Every book we read was presented multiple ways. The reading list was those dystopia novels, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, etc, and in every case we watched the movie, we listened to him read it (or to albums from the early audiobook creator Spoken Arts) and we had the books to read on paper. Every concept was presented multiple was as well - none of us in that class can forget him skipping around our desktops singing "death is here, death is there, death is around us everywhere" to illustrate how the rhythm of a poem could be opposite the textual content emotionally.

And we could always respond any way we wanted - writing things, speaking to the class, drawing pictures, or just talking with him. He never cared how we expressed ourselves as long as we did express ourselves.

There was something else - the class was this comfortable oasis in a miserable school. We sat where we wanted, or didn't sit. We talked or didn't talk. We drifted off without that being viewed as a crises. Entering that classroom was like being able to breath.

And so something remarkable happened in that room that year. With the risk of failing grades removed, with any competition for grades removed, with all the typical classroom absolutes removed, this strange group of academic losers became the most productive secondary English class I have ever seen. We wrote so many poems and short stories across the year that our "best of" collection, printed out via dittos for us to share, was 100 pages huge.

Something remarkable happened to me in that room that year as well. Oh sure, all the other classes were awful, save for the aforementioned art, which consisted of me wandering around with a sketchpad, but in Mr. Shapiro's room I came alive. I began to think then that writing was something I could really do, and I began to think that all those books might have things in them that I really wanted to know. Hope and possibility.

I remember him sitting with me that year, listening to me talk about 1984, hearing me compare it to the school itself, and letting me know, in a way I had never known in that school, that I was all right, that my thoughts mattered, that I had things to contribute.

No grades, multiple representations, multiple ways to express knowledge, no competition, the chance to be who you were as a student and a person.

Later, in his alternative school, he would carry me through high school, and let me glimpse a real future. And I can say absolutely, whenever I have considered giving up on education, he has been the person I've thought about.

He remains a force in educational thinking through the essays and curricula he writes for the Teachable Moment website. He is an educational thinker who respects teachers and students and public education and knows how to bring these things together in ways which really, really work.

So, I've written of Junior High School horrors, but now I'm glad to talk about a Junior High School wonder. And to say that it is from this experience that my view of teachers being as life-or-death important as doctors comes, as well as my belief that great public education is possible anywhere and everywhere.

Thanks Alan, and thanks to all the Alan Shapiros out there, who carve out these places of excellence and opportunity despite it all.

- Ira Socol

Hey, I struggle with Wikipedia. If anyone out there can help me edit the Alan Shapiro page to make it effective, findable, and create disambiguation from other Alan Shapiros.

MITS Summer Institute 2009

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:00:00 +0000

On the shores of Grand Traverse Bay, Michigan teachers gather for the Summer Institute put on by Michigan's Integrated Technology Supports.

I'll be presenting three sessions today, and the SlideShares are right here...

First, a session on evaluation for technology, which begins with a redefination of technology to bring the use of the term in education in line with the actual definition:

Evaluation for Assistive Technology

View more OpenOffice presentations from Ira david Socol.

Second, a look at the use of free, ubiquitous tools to create a Universal Design for Learning environment in your classroom:

Free Tech Universal Tools

View more OpenOffice presentations from Ira david Socol.

And third, a workshop on Toolbelt Theory:

Toolbelt Theory

View more OpenOffice presentations from Ira david Socol.

- Ira Socol

What Teacher Education needs to be?

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 22:57:00 +0000

More "laboratory" work, more doubt, more diverse, more complex, and more flexible.

Chad Ratliff, a twitter colleague from Virginia, routinely challenges my thinking (a direct refutation of Larry Sanger's claims about web 2.0). Chad believes in Charter Schools (a rare thing in the Old Dominion), and Chad believes in alternative teacher certification, and I think Chad believes that at least some market forces can improve education. As an ex-teacher from a very high-needs impoverished community, and as a guy who studies education closely, I don't take his stances lightly.

First, let me say that I am not against Charter Schools. I believe charters and university lab schools are critical to educational invention in the public sector. My kid attended a great charter school. What I oppose are for profit chain-charters which steal money from children and do nothing to re-invent anything except, too often, racial and disability segregation.

Nor am I against alternative teacher certification. I am desperate to find effective ways to take experienced adults and convert them into great teachers, and equally desperate to develop strategies which turn committed adults from high-needs communities into lifelong teachers and community role models. What I'm against is Teach for America - a program that gives poor kids untrained, non-experienced teachers, while giving rich kids a resume boost.

Yes, I am pretty much against market solutions for public service. In my view market-based strategies have, for example, made American health care the most expensive in the world while also making it clearly less effective than the systems of other nations. And market-based strategies in the US military have given us Halliburton profits and Blackwater murders. I hope for better for our kids.

But let's go back to Teach for America. What's the problem? Well, it starts with a bit of cognitive dissonance. Teach for America claims that going to school to learn something is not just completely unimportant, it might be a negative. This is the heart of their argument (and the arguments of TFA fans like Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and The New York Times), that there is not just no difference between teachers who have attended education schools and those who have not, but that those who have not might even be better. This seems a story I wouldn't want presented to any child who I hoped to keep in school. "My teacher says school is worthless," is what I'd say if I had a TFA teacher.

But the bigger problem, even skipping my opinion of TFA as a classic colonial project designed to oppress, is that I see no reason why if rich kids get only "trained, certified" teachers, poor kids deserve something less. That's not, in my opinion, a gap-closing path.

If there is a teacher shortage in certain places, then maybe we do need a small "market solution." Would those districts attract top teachers if the pay was $150,000 or $200,000 a year? If the schools were properly equipped and maintained? If the necessary supports for student achievement were in place? I think the TFA Foundation should be raising cash to try that set of solutions out.

But yes, we all know that Teacher Education across America is not what it should be, and Chad wants to know where and how to start. And its a great question. And in trying to answer, I start outside the field.

Back when I was an NYPD cop, we used to describe certain rookies as suffering from "Starsky and Hutch Syndrome" (I believe the term now might be "Jack Bauer Syndrome"). "Starsky and Hutch Syndrome" cops inevitably came from the distant exurbs of New York, Suffolk County, Rockland County, Putnam County, and beyond. They had led these white bread kind of lives, and all they knew about the City of New York and its diverse population were the "horror" stories told by older cop relatives who had moved their families as far east or north as permissable to escape the "nightmare" of the city, which in their minds looked a lot like the film, Escape from New York. These cops arrived as crusaders who would "clean up" the city. They were totally earnest and sincere, determined to recreate the mythic New York City of their parents' childhoods'. They were also unbelievably dangerous. They could not understand street dynamics, our community standards. They could not comprehend that different people might behave differently on a hot summer Saturday night. They got into endless fights, they made stupid, worthless arrests, they damaged police community relationships, and they hurt members of the public and other cops through turning small problems into huge crises.

Here's an example of typical "Starsky and Hutch" behavior - from a much more recent time - thankfully captured on video:

The moral is, beware saviors, beware crusaders, and go for training.

The reason I start here is that for 6 months, that is, 26 weeks, the NYPD worked diligently in Police Academy courses to eliminate this syndrome. Through sociology and psychology courses, through Constitutional Law courses, through simulations and role play, through awareness training. New York cops learned all sorts of things during those 26 weeks, but the hardest thing to get across, almost every instructor said, was the notion that nothing in the past lives of these suburban 'pre-cops' or their educations (which were often quite impressive), was of any real value in terms of helping those in New York's struggling neighborhoods.

And so, after 26 weeks of 45 hours per wek training, New York's rookie cops are typically supervised heavily on the street for another six months - that's all considered part of their training. And still, more than a few Starsky and Hutches slipped through.

We compare that to the guy on the left, who now runs Teach for America in the San Francisco Bay area. He went through TFA's five week training program, and then taught for two years. I'm just saying...

So, issue one is that it takes a lot of training, and a lot of actual time, to make people effective public servants when dealing with people unlike themselves.

You know I tend to make fun of, and even to bash, my school, Michigan State University, but honestly we do do somethings quite well, and here's one: Our future teachers have typically spent time with as many high-needs diverse students before they begin their internship year than TFA corps members will in their entire "career." And we use that. From the first 100-level ed course on our students work in high needs classrooms. They do this in almost every course. And they come back and we - the instructors - get to work with their reactions. We do that for most of four years, and that makes a difference, because this is very difficult stuff to learn. We don't want missionaries, we don't want crusaders, we don't want saviors - we want teachers who, before they begin "student teaching" are starting to understand that their experience is not their students' experience, and that they are not superior humans for having had better luck in the birth lottery.

Now, Michigan State is no Ivy League institution. It is a Land Grant University (the very first Land Grant University) in a desperately struggling state. Yet our students are the elite, they have made it to one of our top universities in a place where attending any post-secondary school is a minority position. Their knowledge of the struggles of underclass children or children who struggle in school is typically highly limited. And if we, in the College of Education, did not push them out into the City of Lansing's schools or poor rural districts, well, the only times they'd actually get into Lansing itself is going to World Market in the Frandor Shopping Center for beer (sorry Spartans, MAC's Bar doesn't count, it is technically in Lansing Township). In other words, if they were not education majors, they would likely know little of this - even on a campus far more diverse in economic origin than those East Coast elite campuses.

We do something else pretty well at MSU, which is deal with issue two, creating and understanding doubt, which is essential to developing teachers who can differentiate instruction. We do not teach students "one way" to do anything. Our faculty could hardly agree on a group of five or six ways. I say to those in my team-taught course, that even in that single course they will hear three views, often at odds. If you take any sequence of MSU College of Ed courses you will hear lots of ideas, lots of possibilities, lots of suggestions - and as you go out into the a real classroom, and meet any collection of students - you will need every one of them.

Obviously, this also takes time. You cannot dump 50 strategies on a bunch of pre-service teachers in a semester. You can only offer that variety if you give everyone the time to process and compare, to test in actual teaching moments, then process and compare again.

We also have a highly diverse group of instructors at MSU, which is issue three, getting fully comfortable with diverse perspectives on the notion of education itself. I don't mean diverse in skin color, though we do have lots of people from lots of continents. I mean diverse by economic origin, by family origin, by systems of primary and secondary education. The "Brit" group comes with a set of views, as does our "East Asian" group, our "South Asian," and "African" groups have a "Brit plus" view set. Then we have our Americans. There are instructors wth every "disability," and instructors with every kind of language issue, and instructors with every type of political stance. This really does make a difference as new teachers learn to navigate communities which do not share their values or histories.

Issue four is all about complexity. In any class of students, but especially among "high needs" students, there will be real issues you must deal with. In Linda Darling-Hammond's study of TFA this is the place where the untrained teachers really fell apart, they had no exposure to any of this, and it showed. What, I recently asked a man on Twitter who seemed to be suggesting that anyone with good content knowledge would be a good teacher, does (his example) film maker and history buff Ken Burns know about dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, ELL, AAC, CAPD, ADHD, EI, Autism, Aspergers - to name a few issues likely to confront every teacher. These are complex issues with no set formulas for answer. These take time too. You must move past the labels, past your "declarative knowledge," to true "operational knowledge," or you will not only not help these students, you will injure them.

My fifth issue though is about flexibility. Because I am a fan of alternative certification. When someone like @spedteacher chooses, after a lifetime of diverse experiences with people, to become a teacher, that is a fabulous thing. And so I want to be able to entice great people, in their 30s, 40s, 50s into education, and I want to leverage the human skills they already have. I want them to be able to study to be teachers while being paid. I want them to have shorter, year round courses, that fit their lifestyle needs. I want them to be merging their past experiences with the curriculum, and I want them in classrooms in a secondary role almost immediately. I especially want these people if they come from the kinds of communities which suffer teacher shortages, because I want to develop a community-based faculty which is lifespan dedicated to that community and its children.

In my battle over teacher training I surprise myself. I have a ton of problems with how we train teachers, just as I have a ton of problems with how we train doctors. So, I might think I'd be on the TFA "No Training" side. But I'm not. I consider these both to be critical, life and death professions. Who kills more in a year? I'd guess bad teachers over bad doctors, really. A disastrous education too often leads to a disastrous - and short - life.

So my solution to bad teachers and bad doctors is not to minimize training, it's to reconstruct it. To make it really work the way it should. That's my start - let the conversation begin...

- Ira Socol

Bloomsday and the value of alternative paths

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 12:57:00 +0000

Is it the greatest novel written in English? That's open to debate, of course, but there is no doubt that James Joyce's Ulysses is an essential book. It's deep exploration of narrative forms alone makes it crucial to the study of literature. It's invention on top of ancient narrative makes it vital reading for writers. And rarely has a piece of literature been so wholly 'of a place' as Ulysses is 'of Dublin.'

But Ulysses is a very difficult read. "YES BECAUSE HE NEVER DID A THING LIKE THAT BEFORE AS ASK TO get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting to that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me all her ailments she had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end of the world let us have a bit of fun first God help the world if all the women were her sort down on bathing-suits and lownecks of course nobody wanted her to wear I suppose she was pious because no man would look at her twice I hope I'll never be like her a wonder she didnt want us to cover our faces but she was a welleducated woman certainly and her gabby talk about Mr Riordan here and Mr Riordan there I suppose he was glad to get shut of her and her dog smelling my fur and always edging to get up under my petticoats especially then still I like that in him polite to old women like that and waiters and beggars too hes not proud out of nothing but not always if ever he got anything really serious the matter with him its much better for them go into a hospital where everything is clean but I suppose Id have to bring it into him for a month yes"

from the tower, where "STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently-behind him by the mild morning air."

Ulysses challenges "great readers," adult readers, the way the texts you hand out in school challenge struggling readers.

Today is Bloomsday - the 16th of June, and Bloomsday is when the literary world and the Irish celebrate this book. The novel is set in Dublin on the 16th of June, 1904. The novel follows the wanderings of Leopold Bloom and his friend Stephen Dedalus on that day, in a modern recreation of Ulysses' journey in Homer's Odyssey.

Now, on Twitter, CESNational asks "am curious: why should we read Ulysses?" And I can say, it is an essential part of our literary canon. It is a basic guide to narrative techniques in the English language. It teaches - quite effectively - the differences between the oral and written traditions. Few books have ever mastered the art of recreating a text so well. It will liberate you from the confines school writing courses often encourage.

Plus, it, perhaps combined with Dos Passos' U.S.A. Trilogy, will explain how modern writing broke away from artificial writing norms and embraced a new paradigm for working with human communication. Joyce begets Dos Passos. Dos Passos and Joyce beget Kerouacet al, Kerouac, et al, beget the kinds of fiction and narrative we find online today. Those who bitch about the loss of what they perceive as language skills - if they were well read - would know that blaming technology is ridiculous - Joyce started it.

But, as I said, it is very difficult to read. So, what do you do to access this difficult text? You do what you should have your students do. You should find the right path.

The first three times I read Ulysses I listened to a remarkable reading of it on cassette. I think there were 48 or 60 cassettes. Oh, but it was beautiful. The next few times I have listened to it on CD, via LibriVox download, or, for more detailed study and interaction, via Text-To-Speech, either a WYNN version I've created, or a Microsoft Reader version, to using Click-Speak with on-line text versions.

I've supported that through period recordings, through online tours, through online criticism.

In other words, I have found my supported text which has enabled me to read and work through one of the 20th Century's essential books, even though I could never read it on paper. And you can too, and so can your students.

Joyce is the perfect author to use to describe why digital text is superior for most learners, for even most teachers have trouble accessing the ink-on-paper version. And so, even if you doubt it's ranking among English-language novels, if you are in education, please give it a try, if only because you might engage a bit of empathy with your students, and you might discover the true value of the flexible text delivery which technology offers.

"O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Happy Bloomsday to one and all... - Ira Socol

Evaluate that!

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 15:26:00 +0000

My son went to a great high school. Among the things they did was combine grades with long narrative evaluations. This allowed me to see the great conundrum of educational evaluation in a unique way.

For at the end of his 9th grade year his Latin Class evaluation read (in part) this way: "[He] was the best student in the class, he completed both Latin I and Latin II this year. He will need to take future courses at [a nearby] college in order to continue his advancement. Grade C-"

"What grade," I asked the teacher, "did the second best student get?"

I was told that my son got a bad grade because he did not do his homework. "Apparently," I said, "he didn't have to." But, you see, this teacher had a rubric. Homework was 25% of the grade, and apparently there was no block in the rubric for doing two years of work in one.

I didn't really fight. I didn't care. The next year he was sitting among college students reading Ovid. That's what matters.

Except, that is not what matters.

"Can I write "Dear parent, your son has greatly improved on things not considered important by the school [reporting] system"?" Tomaz Lasic asked on Twitter today. Mr. Lasic is a teacher in Western Australia dealing with "troubled" children, and a brilliant observer of the system. He followed up: "in my 'low achievers' class. Where's "halted [self]abuse", "began to smile" box to tick?" And: "Every time a particular kid (totally socially inept past) walks in our office and says please, or gives a hi-5, we say: "Evaluate that!"

What is our national standard (whatever nation you are in) for getting a child to smile? For getting a child to publicly ask a question? For getting a child to confidently present an idea? For getting a child to be willing to ask for help? Or to ask to play with another child?

What is the national statistical trend line for feeling safe in school? For picking up that first book of interest? For solving an interpersonal problem for the first time? For absorbing an unfair call in athletics without going off?

There are so many things we hope children get from their education, but when we discuss "data driven decision making," or "accountability," or "standards," or "merit pay" for teachers we become complete reductionists, assessing (very badly) a tiny fragment of all that expected learning. And in doing this we tell children they are worthless, and we assure that success in school is a matter of socio-economics and playing the "those-in-power" game, and nothing else.

See, it does not matter if a child is rushing ahead or struggling to keep up. We do the same thing to anyone who doesn't measure up to our fictional "average." We crush them, demean them, and sneer at their accomplishments. And in doing so, we prove our worthlessness and lack of credibility to virtually all students.

So when people talk about measurement in education, I always get angry, because I know that neither Arne Duncan nor Michelle Rhee would give a dime of merit pay to Mr. Lasic for helping that kid learn to smile, nor even to that Latin teacher for letting my son rush ahead. And I know that schools which must spend years making their children simply feel safe will always be rated below those in wealthy suburbs. Because you can not discuss "standards" or "evaluation" or even "accountability" until you adopt some kind of legitimate sense of what counts in the education of each individual child. And we are nowhere close to even having that conversation.

Perhaps, as usual, The Simpsons says it most coherently...

"These tests will have no effect on your grades. They merely determine your future social status and financial success. " Edna Krabapple tells Bart Simpson's class in a legendary Simpsons episode in which the essential indifference to 'direction from average' in schools is demonstrated. "Do you often find yourself bored?" the school psychologist asks, "All the time" replies Bart.

- Ira Socol

The Reading List

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 14:40:00 +0000

What if everyone in a literature class didn't read the same book? What would happen if, say, during Great Gatsby month, a third of the class read that, a third read Dos Passo's 1919, and a third read Sinclair Lewis's Dodsworth?

What might the class discover? What kinds of discussions would develop?

It's not that I have anything against The Great Gatsby. In fact, I think it might be the best written American novel ever. And there is surely no clearer refutation of the myth of 'The American Dream' ever put on paper.

And this isn't just about fixing terrible teaching. Sure, I read in shocked horror as supposedly "top" high school students misread the novel so badly that a whole New York Times article could be devoted to their complete missing of Fitzgerald's point, '"My green light?” said Jinzhao, who has been studying “Gatsby” in her sophomore English class at the Boston Latin School. “My green light is Harvard.”' (say goodbye to Harvard, Jinzhao). Bad teaching is bad teaching no matter what you read.

But it is about suggesting an alternative to our basic pedagogy. It is about creating student choice. It is about empowering peer teaching. And it is about exposing students to far more literature.

Two of the basic components of Universal Design are student choice, and the empowering a wide range of expertise among students, so that a classroom becomes a community of learners rather than one leader and a roomful of passive receptors.

We can start doing this by allowing alternate learning tools - this students reads the book on paper, that student listens to the audiobook, this other student uses text-to-speech. We can continue by allowing one student to sit in a chair, another to sit on the floor, and a third to stand. And we can even allow one to express their knowledge through writing, another through creating a painting, a third to create a video. And all those things are good, but I do not think we are quite there yet.

Getting there requires distributed knowledge and community cognition. And distributed knowledge and community cognition means we offer truly different paths to the knowledge we hope to share.

So when we teach Gatsby, what are we teaching? We should be teaching language, yes, and the structuring of thought and image. We should also be teaching the role of literature, how fiction shapes what we know. And we should be teaching a social history - what did Fitzgerald capture in Gatsby? What did he challenge? Why did he challenge those things? or my favorite... Would an American high school English teacher have assigned Gatsby to his/her class in 1928? Why or why not?

If we mix a room of students reading the other two books, how might these lessons change? The three writers are all inventive - all rule breakers - but they all break the rules in radically different ways. They are all angry, but they are angry in different ways. They all doubt the basic myths of America, but they attack them in different ways.

Imagine the conversation as students compare the end of Gatsby to the "Body of an American" end of 1919? Where does the Gatsby character come from? Surely not just Princetonian frustration.

Given all these options, I would imagine that students might compare, debate, challenge, doubt, and, in every way be less prone to seeking the "right for school" answer. They might even want to read one of the books they hadn't read - maybe outside of school.

This isn't just an idea for lit classes. Spreading out the research, spreading out the work, letting peers teach peers, seems a way to expand both the knowledge base in the classroom, but also the number of experts in the room, and I think that's always a good idea. The best classes I have been in are those where students carried in significant, relevant outside knowledge, and the "not completely common curriculum" approach might just help you get to that in every class.

Just a thought as you start your summer, and start dreaming about what your classroom will look like next year.

- Ira Socol

Great Schools: 3. Profession without Competition

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 10:35:00 +0000

I'm going to discuss two schools here, post-secondary schools. Intense, professional training schools. Radically different schools.

These two schools both had incredibly high standards, both had very demanding professions, both needed to train an amazingly level of personal responsibility because doing either profession irresponsibly created a real risk to the lives of others.

Both also had no interest in fostering traditional academic competition among students.

The New York City Police Academy and the Pratt Institute School of Architecture might seem like odd institutions to link together, but since I attended both, I can, and will...

They did things very differently. At the Police Academy we all wore uniforms. At Pratt we wore anything and on occasion nothing. At the Police Academy punctuality was a big issue. At Pratt, ummm, not really. At the Police Academy we called instructors "Sir." At Pratt we called them whatever we wanted to. At the Police Academy we had a rigid exam schedule. At Pratt, the one time I remember an exam being given, a friend of mine locked the prof out of the room and we did it together. And, counterintuitively, at the Police Academy we went to school is a beautiful Manhattan neighborhood, on a block shared with the School of Visual Arts. At Pratt we lived in a despairing neighborhood that would later be immortalized by Spike Lee in his film, Do The Right Thing.

Perhaps most dramatically, at the Police Academy we were constantly aware of our grades, while at Pratt's School of Architecture we had none. Yet, I will argue here, that both had excellent assessment systems.

But that's just part of the story. Both excelled by being radically different than most US post-secondary institutions. Both really worked to bring out the best in diverse people. Both utilized surprising faculties, which were highly effective. Both combined comraderie and very high expectations, in a way which created communities of learners.

What Worked (Police Academy)

The New York City Police Academy is an unusual program in this field. It is worth a ton of SUNY credits, all earned in six months, including three hours of law, five days a week, for those six months, half of it Constitutional Law (yes, I know it does not seem like that from, say, actions during the Republican National Convention in 2004, or during Critical Mass bike rides, but NYPD cops have every reason to be a lot closer than most to being 'constitutional scholars'). There is a lot of psychology and sociology, and diversity training, in addition to what you'd expect - procedures, physical fitness, weapons training, self-defense, etc.

That's a wildly demanding academic program for a very diverse group of students, and yet, almost every incoming cadet graduates. It is a stunningly successful operation.

Why? First, think, "whatever help you needed" was always there. I needed books on tape, and they instantly provided me cassettes which, dumped into an early generation Walkman, read me to the Academy on the subway every morning and back every night, read me through lunches, and read me to sleep every night. If you needed tutoring, you got it, from peers or faculty, you just had to ask. I know I ran remedial swimming sessions and second, third, and fourth chance CPR certification testing - the stuff I was good at. If you failed something the first time, you got a chance - or two - to do it over. Most people there had never studied law before, or used a gun, some had really never driven before. Which is second, they seemed to understand that we might not all learn all of this at the same rate.

Third, no one seemed 'ahead at the start.' One of my good friends at the Academy had a father who was the Chief of Bronx Detectives. This meant nothing in terms of how he was treated. Others came with significant knowledge, they might have worked for the department in 'civilian' capacities. That made no difference either. It was not just the sameness of the uniforms, it was a sense that we all had a way to go.

But fourth, and maybe most importantly, it was a community of learners. I did extremely well there - I finished second in my class (why didn't I finish first? funny story) - but that was never a focus of anything. The guy who barely passed the exams had no less status. He was a really good friend too. Our goal, company by company of cadets, was to make sure everyone succeeded. Competition did not exist.

None of this is to imply that standards were ever lowered. They weren't. But different things had different standards. You could pass most exams with a 75% mark. Except for one, on the use of deadly physical force. Passing for that was 100%, as it damn well should be.

What Worked (Pratt)

"How can you have an engineering course without grades?" an anxious parent asked at a School of Architecture information night. He was addressing the question to Y.S. Lee, who taught the steel structures and concrete structures courses, and not an engineer to mess with - among his works, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and Madison Square Garden in New York. "It is simple," Lee responded. "No one leaves my class knowing 95% of what makes a building stand up."

There were no grades in design studios either, how, exactly, do you grade a design?

Yes, Pratt's Architecture School now has grades, but it didn't then. Everything was pass/fail and that worked, one way or another, for all courses.

There was also a lovely flexibility. On the first day of a landscape design course I decided that I could not handle the mix of students, professor, and room. And I never came back. But I had the syllabus, and I worked with the course information, and I did the final project. I did it big, and left it in the professor's mailbox. My evaluation said, "I have no idea who this student is as he never came to class, but he did hand in a magnificent design as his final project which clearly indicates that he has mastered the content of this course. Pass." Thank you.

And in a Concrete Materials course, fed up with books, we, as a class, decided instead to build a pre-cast concrete structure. We designed panels which could be used vertically (for walls) or horizontally (floors/roofs), designed connector systems, created forms in a basement storeroom, where we tried and rejected a number of reinforcing schemes before settling on one which provided sufficient strength. We scaled the 8'x24' panel design down to 1/3 size, and went to work, casting about 48 of these things. Then we carried the panels out to a sunny campus lawn, and assembled a gigantic structure. Believe me - I know concrete. And as I watch a classmate spec a massive concrete building in New York, I know he does as well.

And in design studios we went wherever we wanted. I tended to craft either Prairie designs based on the work of Marion Mahony or Beaux Arts work, which I illustrated with vast drawings in which the building was inevitably presented against a storm sky. People admired the contextualist approach and the craftsmanship even if they knew I was making myself unemployable. Others were modernists, still others post-modernist followers of architects like Robert Venturi. Didn't matter. We all sat and drew and argued together, and pulled inspiration from each others work.

The other component was that almost all "instruction" was via projects. You worked on buildings which taught you skills. You didn't learn skills, and then work on buildings.

In Common

In professional training the relevance is easy. And these schools kept learners engaged through relevant experiences. But, the key things, the comraderie, that creation of the learning community, was every bit as strong at Pratt as it was at the NYCPA. And that is what ultimately brings these stories together. Both gave students what they needed. Both treated students equitably, not equally, and both developed intelligent assessment structures designed to support, rather than rank.

- Ira Socol

Some of the colleges I think are America's best...
St. John's (Annapolis and Santa Fe)
Evergreen State College
Bard College at Simon's Rock
Landmark College
College of the Atlantic
Prescott College
University of California Santa Cruz
Empire State College
Hampshire College

Finding the Learning Network

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:39:00 +0000

For a few years at the start of my doctoral level education I attempted to engage the widest range of conversations with the widest range of people in my College of Education.

On both my course websites, and on college-wide lists - Education Grad Students, and International Education Students - I posted links (or full copies) to (of) interesting articles I had found. I asked provocative questions. Eventually I began making outrageous statements, all in a series of increasingly desperate attempts to get the conversations to expand beyond the narrow limits of our classrooms.

It did not work at all. Oh sure, people would whisper to me in the hallways or men's rooms that they loved what I posted. A few times conversations began, but were quickly silenced when some wondered if we "should be talking about this." Most often I was admonished for (a) being controversial, (b) wasting people's in-box space, and (c) using a list designed for announcements in the "wrong" way.

I haven't posted to either college-wide list in more than year. In the few remaining courses I have taken, I am much more reluctant to bother to begin online discussions. My personal learning network has shifted.

Harnessing the Power of Social Networks in Teaching & Learning

View more Microsoft Word documents from Alec Couros.

Social Networking in Education from Dr. Alec Couros

Now that network stretches from Israel to Ireland, from Australia to Saskatchewan, from The Bronx to British Columbia, from Virginia to Scotland. It does indeed include many grad students and education professors, but they are no longer principally (or even significantly) at the university I attend. These vaunted "face-to-face" relationships failed me, and the world stepped in to solve my problem.

Now I debate my big questions, collect my reading lists, struggle with research issues, with a world of people similarly interested and similarly passionate. They might disagree with me 90% of the time, they often call me on my language or extreme conclusions, they may be in education or another field entirely, but they are engaging with me, and my intellectual development.

This network leads me to fabulous online conference presentations, to books I need to read, to research I must evaluate, to opinions and actualities that I have to struggle with. they challenge, inform, inspire, doubt, demand, ask, and answer.

Twitter and blogging, UStream and SlideShare, Elluminate and Skype, Google Docs, and Diigo, have opened my education, allowed it to stretch much further than even the very best doctoral program possibly could.

Consider that when you wonder if you should bring social networking into your classroom.

- Ira Socol

Summer Reading

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:48:00 +0000

Summer book lists are always interesting. I could recommend books in many different interest areas, but for this blog, I'll make them "education important" titles:

Fiction

Peter Høeg's incredible novel of inclusion gone wrong Borderliners is equally fascinating and terrifying. It is also a must read for every teacher who works with students, "on the borderline."

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon's novel of Asperger's and aspiration is the kind of stunning view of a difference I think only fiction can offer.

I'm "probably" biased, but I think The Drool Roomhas a lot to say about special needs education, dyslexia, and attention issues. Plus, it's a pretty easy read.

Education

Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Cultureis a truly essential book, which won me over in the introduction when the author talks about, "Somewhat counterintuitively, I enrolled in graduate school i education. I was trying to crack - at least in my own mind - the genetic code of the institution, one that seemed so stubbornly, intractably resistant to change..."

Surely the recent book most quoted (the title) without being read, James Gee's brilliant What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacyexplores how games teach vs how schools teach, and why one method engages why the other typical chases students away. (You could also read my blog on this, but Gee has much more to say)

More than a debate about a single technology, David Crystal's Txtng: The Gr8 Db8is a fascinating look at technology, communications, politics, and generational battles. Plus, he explores the structure of texting linguistically, in English and other languages.

John Willinsky's Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire's Endis that kind of essential look at the purposes of education in a capitalist/imperialist world.

Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorderby David Weinberger is one of the best descriptions of how learning is changing.

And Clay Shirky will tell you why those changes are so important in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

Theories

Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (October Books)might make you re-think many things: how you see, your understanding of history, among them. Not an easy read, but well worth it.

Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disabilityseems like important stuff to me. Great essays on difference and what that means.

Challenging everything about education, Teaching As a Subversive Activityby Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner remains the crucial manifesto about changing schools, 40 years later.

Free

Finally, free downloads:

Norbert Pachler and the University of London assembled this fabulous look at Mobile Learning: Towards a Research Agenda. A must read for educators.

And from FutureLab

Transforming Schools for the Future

Designing for Social Justice: People, Technology, Learning

Perspectives on Early Years and Digital Technologies

Social Software and Learning

- Ira Socol

Great Schools: 2. Environment and Choice

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:00:00 +0000

The little Lincoln Park neighborhood of Michigan's City of Norton Shores is known for two amazing things - Marcel Breuer's brilliant Saint Francis de Sales church, and Lincoln Park Elementary School.

Now, I have not checked in on Lincoln Park in a few years, but I want to describe the school I knew.

The school serves a strange neighborhood. Million dollar Lake Michigan homes, small postwar tract homes, and a couple of the poorest trailer park communities I have seen. It is located just south of Muskegon, Michigan, a community whose economy has never recovered from the collapse of the auto industry in 1973. (The county once had two of the three largest auto parts foundries in the world, and built tanks until Vietnam ended.) It is just one public school in a district which spans urban, suburban, and rural communities. The students are racially and ethnically diverse. There is even a Catholic elementary, a very good Catholic elementary, about five blocks away, competing for students.

But Lincoln Park Elementary was (I'll use past tense for academic certainty, but I'm guessing things haven't changed much) a great school. It is great for the students, and it tends to score as well as any primary school in the state on standardized tests.

Environment and Choice

Lincoln Park did two things right from the very start. First, it controlled the school environment long before any student entered the building, and created a very safe, controlled building in which student academic freedom could be maximized. Second, it created different options for students beginning in first grade. Traditional age-based grade classrooms, two-year looping classrooms, and a 1-5 multi-age program.

Environment

I can go all the way back to Henry Barnard's 1848 book describing multi-classroom school design to see that observant educators understand that the school environment starts long before a student reaches the classroom, and Lincoln Park Elementary made this obvious. Clothes which indicated the great wealth disparities among students were not allowed. No student could ride a bicycle to school without a helmet. Behavior on the sidewalks surrounding the school was monitored by the principal and teaching staff every morning and every afternoon.

This matters. At Lincoln Park students were getting into "school mode" from the moment they dressed in the morning. I find it hard to believe that I am about to say this - given my childhood attitudes - but this is one reason I have come to favor school uniforms, it establishes the school day from the time you walk out of your bedroom. Now, Lincoln Park didn't have uniforms, but it enforced a pretty comprehensive dress code, and yet, never made that dress code Anglo-Centric or the enforcement abusive (I was in a high school two weeks ago when girls with "skirts too short" were called down to the office by PA announcement, to show the other side).

Behavior in general was expected to be really good. And this was so consistently maintained, with all students regardless of social status, that the school simply functioned really well. No, it was not at all silent. All through the building you'd find groups of students working on projects in the halls. Students went to the library whenever they needed to. At first glance, in fact, it appeared noisy and chaotic, but it could be that because the social structure, by being clear, allowed freedom.

Choice

I always know a terrible school when I see classes which seem to be the same. Why, if you had two third grade classrooms, or two 11th grade English courses, would these be, in any way, similar? The only reason would be that you have bought in completely to the idea of education as industrial processing, and the idea of students as interchangeable raw material waiting to be stamped into pre-ordained form.

If you have more than one of anything in a school, you should be creating choices for students and parents. Meaningful choices. And helping students make those choices. Would this child be better with this teacher? or that? With this reading approach? or that? With this classroom environment? or that? With this syllabus? or that?

Lincoln Park created those choices, and helped students and parents make intelligent decisions. The wildness of the MultiAge room, 120 students and five teachers in an immense open space, was fabulous for many, but surely not for all. So students could be in relatively traditional environments, or in fully "open classroom" environments, with teachers who had also chosen their environments. It was quite amazing how well all these rooms seemed to run.

Multi-Age

The school's "star" was the multi-age room, with it's fully inclusive, grow-at-your-own-rate structure. But the whole school embraced flexibility and peer mentoring. Literacy projects, such as plays based on books, were created and performed by teams which included students from every grade. Fifth graders provided math help for younger students, playground times allowed different age groups to mix. In that situation far fewer students are ever "behind."

Celebrating all kinds of achievement

You played on the basketball team? That was very exciting and celebrated. You played in the orchestra? That was very exciting and celebrated. You were part of one of the 20 or so Odyssey of the Mind teams? You got a giant pep rally to send you off to the event. Whatever you did well, Lincoln Park was behind you, whether a school thing or something else. This created a sense that everyone could learn from everyone in this building.

A Model

Lincoln Park Elementary had no more money than any nearby school. It was not a charter, "freed from bureaucracy." It did not pay teachers more. It did not screen out any students - directly or indirectly. It was not at all without competition. It succeeded, succeeds, because it created an effective and open place which welcomed all students and encouraged them in their differing paths to learning.

As I always say, great schools are hardly impossible. They exist all over the place. We just need to expect more. Everywhere.

- Ira Socol

Great Schools 1: Changing Everything

Great Schools: 1. Changing Everything

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Thu, 28 May 2009 04:35:00 +0000

People ask this all the time, “What would a great school look like?” They do exist you know. All over the place there are isolated schools doing fabulous things. This is why listening to fake reformers like Arne Duncan, Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and the KIPP/TFA folks is so maddening. We actually do know what works, we just have to be brave enough to embrace real, systemic, change.

This is a story about one great school, one I was lucky enough to attend.

“The Program for Inquiry, Involvement, and Independent Study,” the “3Is” sprung from the minds of three brilliant educators: Neil Postman, Charlie Weingartner, and Alan Shapiro. Postman and Weingartner were the authors of the book on radical educational reconceptualization, Teaching As a Subversive Activity. Shapiro was a frustrated junior high school English teacher and leader of the local American Federation of Teachers. They came together in a struggling old “inner suburb” of New York City called New Rochelle.

New Rochelle, about 75,000 people in 10 square miles, might be best known as Rob Petrie’s home on The Dick Van Dyke Show, but it was (and is) a complex old east coast city, with vast wealth disparities, a troubled core, and an extremely diverse population. It had, in the mid-1960s, been the first northern US city to experience court ordered school desegregation.

It did have some unique advantages at the time. It did not, for example, have an elected school board and it did not have public votes on taxation. Schools were a part of the city government, the board was appointed by the mayor (the state legislature later changed this). It also fed all students, rich, poor, black, white, etc., into one enormous public high school, meaning the school had much of the full diversity of the city, despite the existence of four Catholic High Schools and two private high schools within the city’s borders. And it had a brilliantly enlightened union.

So, when the schools seemed in crisis, the union fought for educational change – briefly went on strike for educational change – and the board, not having to face voters, decided to go along with teacher demands. This meant a vast increase in open classroom and multi-age efforts in elementary schools. In the high school it meant the creation of separate schools-of-choice (or, yes, perhaps recommended choice would be a better description, this was somewhat European in strategy) within the building – including nursing, cosmetology, construction trades, performing arts, and, the “3Is.”

The 3Is was designed as the alternative school, the place for the kids who were not functioning within the standard school environment. But the first brilliance lay in the idea that "not fitting in" could be described as almost anything. There were geniuses. There were crazy dyslexics. There were those with "behavioral issues." There were those who'd been suspended, etc. There were those who had simply been bored. this was true inclusion. There was no special ed at all, or rather, it was special ed for everyone.

The second brilliance was in the overall rejection of standard educational assumptions:

"Most school curricula are based on a set of assumptions which the experimental program rejects. For example, most school programs assume (1) that knowledge is best presented and comprehended when organized into "subjects," (2) that there are "major" subjects and "minor" ones, (3) that subjects are things you "take," and that once you have "had" them, you need not take them again, (4) that most subjects have a specific "content," (5) that the content of these subjects is more or less stable, (6) that a major function of the teacher is to "transmit" this content (7), that the practical place to do this is in a room within a centrally located building, (8) that students learn best in 45-minute periods which are held five times a week, (9) that students are functioning well (i.e., learning) when they are listening to their teacher, reading their texts, doing their assignments, and otherwise "paying attention" to the content being transmitted, and (10) that all of this must go on as a preparation for life. "This memorandum is not the forum for a serious and thorough critique of these assumptions. Hopefully, it is sufficient to say that contemporary educational philosophy disputes most of them, in part or whole, and that few teachers would deny the merit of experimenting with programs based on an entirely different set of beliefs."

A quote from Thoreau and the authors are off...

"we are assuming (1) that learning takes places best not when conceived as a preparation for life but when it occurs in the context of actually living, (2) that each learner ultimately must organize his own learning in his own way, (3) that "problems" and personal interests rather than "subjects" are a more realistic structure by which to organize learning experiences, (4) that students are capable of directly and authentically participating in the intellectual and social life of their community, (5) that they should do so, and (6) that the community badly needs them."

Let me describe the school they created. Most students were rarely there. If you were studying science you were probably at the City's greenhouses or the local hospital or at the heritage farm we created in a City Park. If you were studying journalism you were creating the school's weekly newspaper or maybe, spending nights chasing news with a local radio station's overnight news guy. If you were studying urban design you might be in the planning department at City Hall. Psychology? How about interviewing Grand Central's homeless population after midnight. Great literature? Sitting around a teacher's living room one night a week sharing tea and ideas. There were, of course, classes - but they were different kinds of classes.

UP THE HIGH SCHOOL AND DOWN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL An analysis of current responses to recent problems in education.
ENCOUNTER Survey of group technique with particular reference to methods of small-group therapy.
SCAPEGOAT: STUDY OF THE NATURE OF PREDJUDICE Psychological study of causes and impact of racial prejudice.
LANGUAGE AND REALITY To study how language influences our perception of the world and to determine the language "environments" of politics, black-white relationship, science, (etc.)
MATH SEMINAR Advanced math curriculum, including theory of functions, logic, calculus, non-Euclidean geometry, set theory, probability.

There was no required schedule, no required classes, no sense that you were in one "grade" or another. There were no grades, and there were no "failures." The grading system was "pass/no-record." You either got credit or the "course" or project did no exist anymore. At the end of each course or project the student wrote an evaluation of their own work, then a teacher wrote their comments.

There were no real administrators. Decisions were made in "Big Meetings" or by a student steering committee. Students interviewed potential teachers and voted on hiring. Students called teachers by their first names, argued with them, ate with them, played with them, helped them.

Yes, this was New York State, so your credits had to somehow (often quite creatively) match up with the required high school curriculum. You had to take the Regents Exams. Which we did, and which we passed, if not always with flying colors.

But the key thing was, students were known, in every way, by what they were good at. There was no deficit model at work. Not that most of us didn't really struggle with some things, but in this environment you led from your strengths. Everyone pretty much helped everyone in one direction or another.

Despite that we didn't just focus on our own stuff. You couldn't. You were around other influences. Did I, for example, read a book in high school? Well, part of Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's, for a history seminar remembered mostly for our field trip to see The Last Picture Show- which had something to do with a conversation about the 1950s.

Despite that, I played basketball with guys in Great Books and listened to conversations about Siddharthaand other masterpieces. I hung out at breakfast with musicians and learned both music and math. I got lectures about history and art in evening "social situations." We were told to engage in the world, and we did, and thus the world came at us at full speed.

The school changed "everything," and in doing so liberated us to learn. Stripped away our excuses. And turned us loose to make the world our classroom.

How did this school do by traditional measures? Very, very well. A 99% graduation rate with a wildly diverse population. Most went to four year colleges, including every SUNY campus, but also places like MIT, Brown, University of Michigan, Kenyon, Hampshire (of course). Years later we are lawyers and teachers, museum administrators and scientists, diplomats and artists. All from a group which might have seen a stunning drop out rate without this program.

It lasted over 15 years, and fell to conservative trends in education and budget cutting. Where once schools like this filled cities from Philadelphia to, at least, Ann Arbor, few now exist. Of our "Alternative School Basketball League" only one survives, the Village School in Great Neck, NY.

What made it work? First, choice. New Rochelle High School offered students real choices at the time. Vocational programs, traditional academic programs, arts programs, and this. Sure, paths were strongly suggested, but ultimately there were options. Students began each day knowing they had some level of control, they had put themselves into their situation. Second, a real belief in students. No 3I teacher ever looked at a student and saw "failure." They might have seen problems, but they also saw opportunities. Third, a belief in the power of adolescence. These adults knew kids would screw up, but they also knew that failure is how people learn - and that teenagers want to learn. So they dropped the cost of failure to almost zero. And people tried just about everything. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. But things were always learned along the way. Fourth, they embraced universal design before the idea had been described. "Do it the way that works for you," was the idea. If I sat in a chair and talked while my friend John typed newspaper articles for me, that was fine. If I didn't function well in the morning, I didn't do much until after lunch.

So, did I actually "cut" school every morning from ten to noon to have breakfast with my friend Bob? No, because no one cared that I wasn't "there," so we weren't really cutting. Did Glenn and I really design a massive idea for downtown reconstruction? Yes, we did, and now he's one of the world's leading experts in architectural restoration. Did we really spend all night in Grand Central interviewing the homeless? Yes, and while I became a cop others became psychologists. Did I really take a course called "Monday Morning Quarterback" and bet on football games? I did. I think I called it "Math." Debbie though, took it and became a sportswriter.

- Ira Socol

Merit Pay?

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Wed, 27 May 2009 16:02:00 +0000

A decade and so ago I was a member of a sports club. We had a lot of football (soccer) teams. I coached youth teams for years and years. And I was thinking about this experience as I listened to one more sad attempt by one more US Secretary of Education to insist that merit pay for teachers is the most critical change we need in our education system.

When I was coaching we usually had enough kids to create two, three, or four teams at any given age class. Unlike many other clubs we did not try to create A, B, and C teams. Rather, we tried to create somewhat even teams where the "better" players might demonstrate their leadership.

Each year we'd split up these boys, and each year we'd end up with one team that seemed, ummm, "challenging." These kids were in special education services at school, or had families in trouble, or somehow just didn't fit in. We ended up with that team because every year I'd just say, when others complained about trying to coach "kids like that," I'd say, "put him on my team."

You know, usually, the other teams would do better in the league than we did. Sure we kept getting better, yes, we had a lot of fun, but problems perpetually struck, and we lost many, many games.

Now, none of us got paid, but in Arne Duncan's world, if we had been paid, I would have been paid less. This is because Duncan combines a terrible assessment system (the standardized test) with a terrible assessment period (a school year) to come up with a terrible way to assess. As if I would have been paid based on games won in a U-12 season.

See, in Duncan's world it would not matter that when they got to high school it was "my" kids who led the team to a conference championship. Nor that they stayed in school. Nor that they learned to work with other kids around them. Just as Lehman Brothers brokers walked away with massive bonuses without a thought regarding long-term results, my fellow coaches would have been rewarded, and I punished, based on short term nonsense.

And maybe I would have chosen not to coach "those" kids. Maybe "those" kids would have gotten scattered among other teams and forgotten. Maybe "those" kids would have gotten the least experienced coach every year. Maybe... because that is what is being incentivized if you create merit pay for teachers without completely re-thinking educational assessment.

We can laugh at Arne Duncan. Yes, he is the only person in Obama's cabinet who thinks that bonuses based on short-term results are a desirable "reform." But it is not funny. Merit pay creates all the wrong incentives. It will ensure that the kids who need the most help get the least.

I supported Barack Obama, and continue to. But he never indicated any real sense of what education in America needs, and his choice of a Secretary of Education has proven disastrous. Please email the White House and ask that Arne Duncan be fired. Please. Or we will remake our schools in the image of George W. Bush's Wall Street. And that is something America can not afford.

- Ira Socol

The Width of the World

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Sun, 24 May 2009 15:29:00 +0000

Do new forms of social networking help us or hurt us as humans?

Larry Sanger wrote a blog on this, and sent out the link on Twitter. Larry notes his disillusionment with "web 2.0," with his concerns being (a) "Facelessness. Frequently, we find ourselves in conversation with people we don’t know. We have nothing invested with them socially", (b) "Groupthink. The second reason Web 2.0 is becoming obnoxious to me is that I really, really hate groupthink," and (c) "Such a godawful waste of time. The first time we see a shiny new Internet toy, we are all oohs and aahs. But, OK…isn’t it time to stop it with the “Which Star Trek character are you?” quizzes on Facebook? ... Seriously, to my way of thinking, there are worthwhile Web 2.0 projects — like, of course, the Citizendium and WatchKnow (not launched yet) — but it seems like the vast majority of the websites, and many attractive and popular features within more worthwhile sites, are a waste of time."

Larry sees the creep of technology as the essential problem. When I challenged him on this, suggesting a much longer term historical arc, he said he was dating his concerns back to the early 1990s.

Now Larry, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is no Luddite, but I suspect that Larry misunderstands the role of communications technology in humanity. He told me to answer him in a blog post, and so here I go...

Socrates was right

Socrates was right. When you start to write things down, when humans embraced literacy, they moved away from the natural forms of human connection. Literacy not only limited the need for memory, as Socrates suggested, it debased human learning by separating the content from the person transmitting that content, as he also suggested. [Orality and Literacy. Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. The Consequences of Literacy.]

In Socrates' world human communication was directly humane. You knew the speaker and you knew the listener. You had known them, most likely, forever. You looked in their eyes, you smelled their breath and their sweat. Your informational (and social) trust was built on a very complex, and very ancient, system of clues. Think of it this way, you know a lover is lying in ways very different than you know an author is lying. Socrates opposed writing and literacy because he didn't want to lose that intimacy.

This is a crucial human question, going back to the very beginning. The first time humans drew on cave walls, and thus created the possibility that some might see this description of the hunt who had not heard the first hand account, technology began to both support, and intrude on, human communication. Is looking at the description of an unknown person's hunting party a waste of time? Is it disconnected trivia or a way of understanding yourself as part of the world?

Today in History

165 years ago today Samuel F.B. Morse sent the first public telegram. And today when I woke up I sent this Twitter message, "Something remarkable, almost tidal, watching the flow of tweets from my friends around the world, as some wake while others sleep."

Morse's invention appeared at one of those moments in time when technologies were radically reshaping human communication. His telegraph, for example, combined with the new technology of the steam-powered rotary press and machine-made wood-pulp-based paper, to completely alter how humans received information.

Suddenly news of the world, and eventually - via Steam Ships and less expensive telegrams and trans-Oceanic cables - personal news, could move rapidly around the globe unfiltered by the elites who had controlled this since the end of the 15th Century. Other things happened as well: photography began to appear. The railroads began to enable travel. The world, or, as Socrates might have suggested, a disconnected, unreliable, undefined sense of the world, was now available whenever people walked out of their doors, or opened their mail.

Something else was happening as well. People were flocking to cities. Suddenly people were surrounded by others they had not known all of their lives, by people they might never know. This altered social networks dramatically, and people began to organize themselves along somewhat superficial lines. The sports club and football club began to arise in England, for example, fraternal and service clubs in the United States. And social information thus began to spread differently, with a new communication level created between "back fence" and pub communication (on one hand) and news from the pulpit (on the other). People began to desire crime news and odd tales of strangers, things which would never have been deemed worthy of publication when publication was expensive. The first version of "blogging" began as writers penned serial stories or experiences which masses of people could waste time on, day after day.

All of these activities - all of these things - separated humans from the most "natural" communications experiences. Yet all of them also created new forms of human connectivity.

The Bookworm

When I was a child "the bookworm" was a commonly derided child. Why waste your whole day with your nose in a book? "they'd" ask, instead of going out into the world and living? Yes, parents - back then - told kids to put down their books and go out and play. Yes, they did.

This was one end of the spectrum. The other, as an historic echo of Larry's complaint about Star Trek quizzes (which I have actually never participated in), was the concern that students were wasting their time and their minds on inappropriate reading. "A closer look demonstrates that the concern was not so much to interest children in reading as to interest children in reading the books that parents, teachers, and librarians wanted them to read, books that would provide class- and gender-appropriate role models and instill socially acceptable values in both boys and girls," Suzanne Stauffer writes of the 1880s-1920s period when "sensational fiction" was seen as a critical danger.

The wrong reading could cause groupthink, apparently, "then" as now. In the 1940s Comic Books were blamed for juvenile delinquency. Stauffer again, "Again, librarians and others proclaimed that this type of reading was not only inferior to reading “good books” but was a corrupting and degrading influence."

So the media forms which arose between 1840 and 1950 were (a) disconnecting people from actual human touch experience, (b) creating groupthink in dangerous ways (think about the United States and the Spanish-American War), and (c) creating massive wastes of time - reading comics, watching movies, listening to crappy radio shows, reading true crime stories and trashy novels, sitting around playing records.

Of course that was also true of the media forms which arose before 1840, and those which came after 1950. As soon as Gutenberg created movable type it was being used to provide sensational stories of strangersto the public. And speeches in ancient Rome may have created groupthink on occasion.

The Flip Side

I don't really need to go all Clay Shirkyon Larry to make my point. Each revolution in communication technologies moves humans in two directions - away from the tactile human, yes, but also towards a global understanding, a global connection, a global knowledge.

So, no, I will not tell Larry about the people I've met online who've become close, personal friends in person. I don't really think this has happened for me. Most of my closest friends I knew as a teenager - in person. Yes, we connect constantly via online tools, yes, our relationships are stronger now than they have been in decades because of those tools, but that's not the point.

But I will tell Larry that my blog, Twitter, and list-serve relationships are not faceless, they do not create groupthink, and they do not waste my time.

"Something remarkable, almost tidal, watching the flow of tweets from my friends around the world, as some wake while others sleep."

These are real people. We agree and disagree. We share and we argue. I may learn their "group identities" first - teacher, technologist, politico - but then I discover more, be it their poetry, their children, their eating habits, their fears. It is a fully human thing that I help @jonbecker find a parking spot in Park Slope at 1230 one morning, and that I worry about his car parked in the dark alongside Prospect Park. It is fully human frustration when I can not get @chadratliff to understand my argument. It is fully human fun I have with @damian613 over the plight of Newcastle United. And it is fully human friendship which I feel for bloggers from Karen Janowski to Enda Guinan. Bill Genereux has become an important "classmate" though we've never physically met, and I worry about Goldfish's health. They are only "faceless" if we think it is impossible for, say, a blind person to know faces.

Power

More critically, we are a group - or groups. We have powers that humans have not had before. And we've been waiting for these technologies to offer us these powers for a long time. Humans have been trying to lower the costs of collaboration and knowledge transfer since time began. And now we can do that. Sure we waste time. Humans always "waste time." Sure we become "gangs." Humans always have. But we now have social choices - powerful social choices, which are shifting power in dramatic ways. Democracy could not have spread as it did in the past two centuries without the communications technologies of those times. And neither could knowledge. Both will spread further, faster - are spreading further, faster, even in the United States - because of Web 2.0.

Learning

But technologies take learning. It isn't easy. Early adopters look kind of crazy. "Really, you strung wire from Washington to Baltimore to send a Bible quote faster?"

So we need to learn these communication tools, and make them our own. And we need to help others, especially our children, find their own paths within these structures. Because it is indeed human, and is indeed humane.

I woke up this morning to birdsong outside the window and the smell of encroaching summer. And that tells me about the the preciousness of the planet. And I woke up with the Tweets of Aussies saying good night and Brits eating lunch and getting ready for the last day of the Premier League season. And that tells me about the width of the world.

I'm not wasting time. I'm as fully human as the people who came to read the cave paintings at Lascaux 20 years after they were drawn. I am engaged in humanity.

-Ira Socol

Solution Sunday

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Sun, 17 May 2009 13:12:00 +0000

On Twitter this morning, I just started reacting to "overnight posts" and found myself making ten statements about truly changing schools. Please, add your own, agree, disagree...

I've linked these to SpeEdChange posts.

Solution Sunday: (1) Grade level expectations fail all who develop at different rates (almost everyone) Multiage is way to go.

Solution Sunday: (2) Subject divisions kill natural learning instincts. All subjects need to be integrated.

Solution Sunday: (3) School time schedules prevent education. Flex time according to student needs.

Solution Sunday: (4) Individualized Education for all. All Students are gifted, all have special needs.

Solution Sunday: (5) All students need to start learning contemporary technology from the start. Especially those from less rich communities.

Solution Sunday: (6) Treat your students equitably and bullying will drop. It's a fact - schools encourage bullying through of adult actions.

Solution Sunday: (7) Text-To-Speech systems help all readers, should be in use right from the start (build sightword recognition, teach the value of what reading offers by providing access to content).

Solution Sunday: (8) Teacher training needs to change. Probably via interning in University Lab Schools. Learning better ways, not old ways. (and unlearning the systems of social reproduction)

Solution Sunday: (9) As long as there are high-stakes Standardized Tests, differentiated instruction is a fraud.

Solution Sunday: (10) More learning opportunities, less explicit instruction before age 8. Don't make young kids hate books and math. Stay flexible and tolerant, and natural curiousity will lead to learning.

- Ira Socol

The "People First" Conundrum

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Fri, 15 May 2009 13:26:00 +0000

That old question of language - who it empowers, who it injures, who makes the decisions: Amy Bowllan, school librarian in New York City, Twitter-pal, and blogger for School Library Journal did an e-interview with me recently for her blog.

Is people first language a positive step? Should we continue to encourage it? Read the interview, and for a balanced view read Goldfish (a favorite/favourite blogger) on The Language of Disability.

All your thoughts are welcomed. At Amy's blog or here.

- Ira Socol

Information Literacy

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Tue, 12 May 2009 17:42:00 +0000

A couple of Twitter conversations merged. With @gippopippo I was discussing ink-on-paper v. digital. With @derrallg I was discussing teaching kids the media skills they will need to survive.

@gippopippo bemoaned the loss of the ability of students to read books and newspapers. @derrallg noted how colleges search FaceBook as part of the admissions process, but schools rarely teach this (see @willrich45).

Another issue from that day, if you teach students that they can not blindly "trust" the internet, must you not also teach them that they can not blindly trust textbooks, libraries, books of any kind, newspapers, teachers?

A bit of history: In the lead up to America's invasion of Iraq, The New York Times unleashed a torrent of false information. Fiction spun from the mouth of Dick Cheney as effortlessly as if his wife was writing her soft-core porn. Now, many blogs were telling the truth. But if, thirty years from now, a historian were to go back to "the newspaper of record" from that time, they would find almost nothing true.

Other things The New York Times has gotten wrong? A couple of years ago they repeated a joke from a cartoon on The New Yorker's cover as a front page news story. Just this week they declared a big difference between "practicing" and "non-practicing" Catholics on the issue of President Obama addressing the commencement at the University of Notre Dame. 46% of "practicing Catholics," The Times said, opposed Mr. Obama speaking. 55% of "non-practicing" Catholics favored his giving the address. Now, I'm no math major, but...

In other words, The New York Times can be wrong. Yes. Print can be wrong, despite John Calvin's firm belief in the societal value of fixed text. We all know that information on the "internet" can be wrong, and we warn our students about this. If we are good, we tell them to check authorship, credentials, the source of the website, the motivations, and we ask them to find corroboration and/or dissent. But do we do this as actively when a student pulls a book or newspaper off our school library shelf? What about when a student reads a textbook? What about when a student listens to a teacher?

The technology of communications and the forms of communication are symbiotic. Without the development of charcoal and ink writing would never have taken off. Stone carving being very slow and difficult and writing in the sand is, well, writing in the sand. Without various paper technologies (be it papyrus, sheepskin, or paper), reading would not have taken off, since only so many people can crowd around a single temple reading hieroglyphics.

Similarly, the novel is a development which could only have followed the technology of Gutenberg. Prior to this easing of publication problems, stories had to be in memorable form for oral transmission - thus poetry or song or drama. And without the popularity of the novel, press technology and paper technology would not have advanced to a point where journalism could begin. No Ben Franklin or Thomas Paine without Thomas Malory and Daniel Defoe. And without the growing popularity of journalism there might never have been the call for steam-powered rotary presses and machine-made wood-pulp paper which allowed the "penny newspaper" to become both popular and highly profitable, and thus allow journalism to reach the masses.

In each case, an emerging communication form creates a demand for a new medium or method of publication. The new medium or method of publication, in turn, creates an opportunity for new communication forms. When Samuel Morse introduced the telegraph with "What hath God wrought?" he was using new technology to send an old phrase. But his technology, and the way in which it was paid for, quickly created, "Meet in Phila Tue Noon at Sta Stop" - and how far away are we then from "C U 2nite"

Still, at every point, old forms adapted. When literacy was introduced to Greece Homer's tales were written down. Yes, this changed them. They no longer flexed with the time and place, the armaments described became set at the moment of writing - they are completely inaccurate for the time of the Trojan War - and the vast library of locally associated characters - what my son describes as the 8th Century BC's equivalent of the "How you doing Pittsburgh?" in today's concerts or political speeches - also became locked in. But the stories spread more widely than the original poets ever might have imagined.

All these technologies give and take. Gutenberg's destroyed many European languages, and enforced all sort of evils. But it also spread knowledge and literacy and allowed thought to flow in remarkable ways. We can imagine that post-Gutenberg technologies will do the same.

What has not changed is the key question of cognitive authority. What allows us to begin to trust a source? This is essential for every level of education. But we are handicapped here, especially in northern Europe and the United States. As Protestant societies we have inherited a belief in "the book." Not just the Bible, but "the book" in general. Because Calvinists and Lutherans controlled the printing and distribution of books, it was logical that they would promote the notion of the truth of ink-on-paper. Catholic culture, of course, did something similar where they "reigned," but with a critical difference. Texts in Catholicism were not intended for the masses, and were always considered open to interpretation through localized debate and retelling.

So it is indeed, in the U.S., in Protestant Europe, an "article of faith" that text is true, "If we agree with this premise, (that the Bible is divinely inspired) we must then consider the fact that ‘these writers themselves, with considerable unanimity, agree in ascribing their religious insight to the grace of God’."

Over the half millennia since Gutenberg the imprimatur of authority has expanded from the church to the crown, and then to "crown authorities" - authorized publishers - and then to publishers which carried various forms of perceived authority - whether academic - Cambridge University Press - economic - think Pearson or Bertlesmann AG - or, and here we see the beginnings of our present world - those who have won their authority by being reliable - think The New York Times. The Times did indeed win its authority in a chaotic environment. Turn of the 20th Century print journalism was as wild as the internet seems now, but the giants fell because because they were not very good - consider The New York World and The Journal competing over fabricated Spanish threat stories - and The Times was better (there are those who will argue that the turning point was the sinking of RMS Titanic - only the NYT, of New York dailies - got the story right).

In other words, The Times built its reputation, its authority, as bloggers do today, as members of social networks do. They gave accurate, useful information when more "important" rivals did not. Then they re-inforced that authority, through years and years of "being better than..." But then, because of the nature of that Protestant culture, "we" began to think of them as right not because they were right, but because they were The New York Times. They had that imprimatur.

But now we have other choices. We need to know, for example, that when the government speaks, we still should have doubts. When our most "authoritative" newspapers speak, we still should have doubts. Say, the London Metropolitan Police declare that a man has died of a heart-attack during a G20 protest. Say, that is reported as true by The Times of London, The Telegraph, even The Guardian. Now, line that up against the word of one anonymous American businessman. Yes, an American businessman who decides to communicate through the left-wing newspaper.

According to all our traditional understandings of cognitive authority, Ian Tomlinson died of a heart attack. Except, of course, he did not. He was killed in a random, unprovoked, police assault.

And non-traditional "citizen-journalists," and less authoritative sources, proved that. This is vital. If you fully subscribed to the traditional, the taught-in-school" understanding of cognitive authority - that is that reputations are won through approval of those who already hold authority (the PhD system, as an example), Ian Tomlinson would have died of a heart attack and The New York Post of Alexander Hamilton would be New York City's dominant information source - no matter who might manage to own that brand.

So what do students need to know? They need to know that cognitive authority does not come with a job title, or a publisher's mark. Just as they need to know that the actor wearing the white coat in a TV commercial may not be a medical authority. They need to be able to discover, in the non-linear form of real life (and the web) how to assess information - no matter the source. You can start in your classroom. If you aren't lying to your students, give them laptops or mobiles and let them look up what you tell them. True? Sometimes true? Debatable? Biased? Help them make the arguments.

You can do this with books, even novels. What can they discover about the world in which Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby? Why would he have described himself as "a member of the lost generation"? Why did he write a novel proving both the allure, and the fallacy, of what we call "The American Dream"? What did other writers of the time say? Was Fitzgerald particularly popular? A best selling author? Were English teachers requiring this novel in 1927 classrooms? Why not?

Need to build Fitzgerald's authority? Perhaps do this via his short stories. Build up his "street cred" for your students, just as he built it up with America's literati of the 1920s. No, let your students build up his reputation, by giving different stories to different students and letting them recommend them around the room. Don't think of this as "chaos." It is not. It is how humans construct both knowledge and society outside of imposed hierarchies.

You can do this with newspapers. Why would a story about the same thing read differently in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New York Post, The Daily Mail? Why might a search with Google's blog search produce differing things? How might they decide what's accurate? Listen, if you are not training this kind of information literacy, all your talk of an "educated citizenry" rings hollow. Without these skills, your students are in trouble.

Along the way, of course, you get to introduce your students to the wide world of literary forms. Every one has its purposes, its truths, its fictions, its powers, and its flaws. Why did Homer create the poetry he did? Who was he serving? Why? What counter narratives might exist? Aeschylus? Virgil? Ovid? Scott? Dickens? (Dickens, of course, was a blogger when it comes down to it). Who publishes Toni Morrison? And why? Why would that same company sell you Tom Clancy's books? Why would they hide that fact from you by using a different name?

And certainly, who is writing right now? And how? Can they find new fiction on line that they love? Can they share it? Why do they like it? Is it being "sold" to them in a variety of ways? Or are they discovering it? Novel, history, textbook, newspaper, blog... what motivates the author, the publisher? And what does that mean to them as readers, as consumers?

What this all means is that we're honest with our students, and that by being honest we create better readers, more engaged readers, more critical readers, and readers more appreciative of the best work of the writer's art. They'll know why, faced with same series of events, one writes poetry, another a novel, a third a news story, and how those all contribute to our knowing.

And I think they just might learn to love them all.

- Ira Socol

Adult Communities and School Bullies

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Sun, 10 May 2009 15:08:00 +0000

A few years ago while I was the soccer coach at one American high school I was doing a technology project at another. The two districts were next to each other. One was a fairly wealthy and very small district with a reputation for great results on state achievement tests. The other was a much more diverse and much larger district with a middling reputation.

What I noticed, walking the corridors of both, was something very different. I noticed a radical difference in social and especially bullying behaviors.

Twitter can often get me thinking, and @nsharoff did this recently posting thoughts on her readings on school bullying. I responded to her thoughts by suggesting that perhaps the biggest impact on bullying behavior is created by the environment built by the adults who work in and surround the school. That is, the teachers, administrators, and parents.

And I said this because of what I saw in these two schools.

The bigger, poorer, less acclaimed high school was the far safer environment for kids perceived as "different." And this has no connection to size, or wealth, or academic achievement in my observed world. I've been in terrible big schools, and great small ones. Great diverse schools and awful diverse schools.

So, what makes the difference?

First, yes, environmental control. Better schools control stress environments better. Schools that are "safe" always have faculty in the corridors when kids are. Not just there, but "actively there," engaging the kids around them. Schools that are "safe" often also control noise, carpeted corridors seem really important, so that the din does not build its own chaos. They also often have natural light, and fewer student traffic "choke points" - those narrow doorways and stairwells which create chaotic physical places. In this case the big school had something else wonderful - a full 10 minutes between classes - which made the whole class changing experience a "safe time," rather than a desperate rush. And one more thing, the big school had its cafeteria at its core. Rather than being "off somewhere" everyone moved through this space, which was bordered by the office (the principal's office actually looked down on the cafeteria from the second floor), and the library. All of this meant that adults were far more engaged with students at leisure, and that students were far less stressed.

The small school had none of this. No carpets in the hallways which were lighted with buzzing and flashing old fluorescents, no teachers in the corridors either. A cafeteria hidden at the far end, far from everything, and many tight choke points that produced insanity on the stairs.

Still, none of that mattered most - at least in what I observed.

Now, this being the American Midwest, both schools had enormous football stadiums and very large gymnasiums, and both strongly celebrated their varsity athletics. But there were huge differences. The school which was "safe" also had a dramatic "performing arts center" and a huge library, these features held equal status architecturally with the sports facilities. The "unsafe" school had a small hidden library and no space at all for its acclaimed music and drama programs to perform (they usually did so off campus).

In the "unsafe" school only three of the district's many sports were celebrated - Boy's football and basketball and girl's volleyball. Before every one of those games parents would come into school and decorate lockers and there were frequent school time pep rallies. In the "safe" school every athlete pretty much got the same treatment, wrestling, soccer, the golf team. And there were also pep events (usually in the cafeteria during lunch periods) for the band, the Odyssey of the Mind team, Science Olympiad, etc.

I can't tell you that equal crowds watched boy's football and girl's soccer at either school, but I will tell you that at the "safe" school the principal and many teachers attended almost every sports event, and came to the OM competition as well.

In four years of coaching boy's soccer the principal at the "unsafe" school was at one half of one game. No one came to the Odyssey of the Mind event (I coached a team there as well). Teachers avoided "minor sports" events as well.

These might seem like small things, but they are not. Adolescents pick up their social clues not just from their peers, but heavily from the adult environment which surrounds them. In one school the adult message was all about social hierarchy: the district began this in Kindergarten when photos of those boys on the youth football teams and those girls on the youth cheerleading squads were put up in the primary school's entrance. And it reinforced the message constantly that some students were more prized than others. In the other school a very wide range of accomplishment was celebrated at every age level, and this was made very clear at the high school level.

Adults, when speaking of bullying, love to discuss peer pressure and child and adolescent communities. In my view this is much like those running America's educational system choosing to blame teachers, students, and parents - it is blame shifting - away from those who create the matrix - to those who must live within it.

Bullying behavior among those of school age is based on children reading - accurately - the adult world around them. If the President of the U.S. gets to bully smaller nations which he dislikes, if adult bosses are allowed to bully employees, if people on adult reality shows are celebrated for their role as bullies, kids imitate those behaviors.

And if the community of adults surrounding a school declares that certain students are more valued, more prized, than others, a template for bullying has been formed.

It is a fascinating observation that in a survey of bullying in Toronto students noted that they were twice as likely to be bullied in a supervised school situation as they were in unsupervised locales. That survey also noted that the further into the school year the students traveled, the less likely either other students or adults were to intervene. In other words, school seems to encourage bullying, and to develop an acceptance of bullying.

Of course. Education-as-we-know-it is about building hierarchies - among athletes, with grading, via teacher preferences, according to inherited wealth and parental power. When schools rank students, schools create unbalanced power relationships among students, and unbalanced power relationships are the cornerstone of bullying.

Making safe schools for all is not the work of children. It is the work of adults. And the most effective way to limit bullying among students is for adults to build a world which does not model that behavior.

- Ira Socol

Margaret Soltan and Jim Crow

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Thu, 07 May 2009 13:51:00 +0000

I need to begin this by saying that Dr. Margaret Soltan of George Washington University is probably a brilliant teacher and a lovely woman. A perusal of her page on RateMyProfessor and her circle of friends suggest both. I also think that she is a fairly strong and effective writer.

But I stopped reading her blog and her column long ago, and I would never take a class with her, despite the fact that we share many similar passions in the literature of the English language. I consider her a person who actively discriminates against people based on immutable characteristics of their humanity, a person who divides the world into first and second class citizens based on their similarity to herself. And I find that repugnant.

Dr. Soltan is hardly the only member of a university faculty I place in this category, but by making herself a spokesperson for her position she has effectively become a George Wallace standing in the doorway.

This is not an attack. It is an explanation. And I bring it up now because of a blog conversation inspired by Dr. Soltan at Easily Distracted. The blog at Easily Distracted starts with a typical Soltan hit-and-run against technology in the classroom. In this case quoting another prof who was incensed because a student in his class used a mobile to look up a word the prof had used in a lecture (yeah, really). Now, I'm historian and ethnographer enough to fully understand why a conservative Protestant theologian would object to any variation in the carefully linked structures of Calvinist Religion, Capitalism, and Gutenberg Technology. That's a received faith in authority and the unquestioned role of immutable text. And I understand that Dr. Soltan also teaches at a "private" university (though it is a "public university" by definition of Section 504 in terms of discrimination against students with disabilities because it receives - substantial - federal funds) and students have choices both within and without GWU...

But I'm not speaking of the legal complexities here, I'm speaking of morality...

I came to the Easily Distracted conversation because Carl Dyke at Dead Voles brought me in by referencing a blog post of mine on Technology and Equity in the conversation.

Now, 18 months or so ago I challenged Dr. Soltan on this. I told her how allowing technology into the classroom as universal design made people with "disabilities" far more equal. How it eliminated the humiliation of unwanted and inappropriate disclosure (all said in detail in my post Humiliation and the Modern Professor). And how her anti-technology stance bordered on illegal re: the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504. She responded that, "of course," she would offer accommodation to "documented" students.

Sew on that yellow Star of David

That is not an acceptable response. When we adopt Dr. Soltan's attitude we make it very hard for a lot of students. Students are forced to choose between disclosure and using the tools they need, and I can tell you, from much evidence both 'scholarly' and personal, that many, many students will choose to avoid the tools which come with disclosure. And that many of those students fail.

So, here's the impact of Dr. Soltan's opposition to the general use of technology in her classroom: (1) The further students are from being 'just like her' in abilities, learning styles, and learning preferences, the less likely they are to succeed in her class, because she requires that only her own technological tools be used. (2) Students with "disabilities" or significant learning differences are forced in to perhaps unwanted disclosure by her rules, which may have important consequences for their futures. (3) All students will be prevented from learning how their preferred toolbelt intersects with the world of English literature. Bad for all, disastrous for a specific class of students. Just as racial segregation was at the University of Alabama.

And I am done with this - Dr. Soltan might be horrified if, in order to use 'the facilities' at a meeting, everyone had to get up and declare their gender and sexual preference. She'd possibly be offended if, in order to enter a restaurant, she was forced to declare her medical record. Perhaps she'd be bothered if we did not let her drive to campus without publicly declaring that she was too unfit to walk. In all these cases, we assume that people in society can make personal and tool choices without needing to announce personal information or beg permission from authorities.

But Dr. Soltan is willing to do the equivalent to her students - not only that - she's willing to encourage others to do the same - in other words, she is willing to stand in the schoolhouse door and call the TV camera in to watch her block access.

That's shameful.

- Ira Socol

A blog commenter asked why it was wtong to make all these issues public: I replied -

"What I don’t want is anyone forced into unwanted disclosure in this society, especially in the US, where disclosure of disability can limit job opportunities and even access to health care. So, it is not important to me whether you take notes on a laptop because you have dexterity issues or problems forming letters, or issues with attention. I don’t need to know if you have digital books because you are dyslexic or have MS and can’t carry physical books, or even if you just prefer those.

"We can talk preferences and diversity, absolutely. But I do not insist that students proclaim their disabilities, their sexual preferences, their gender, their racial make up, or even their birth socio-economic status. That information is welcomed and greeted without judgment when offered, but I do not teach - or live - in a world so perfect that I am sure no harm will come from these revelations.

"Listen. I’m a doc student in a “Top Ten” School of Education’s Special Ed program (not a Prof -sorry), and there are still situations where I would rather appear insolent than disabled. So if asked why there is an earbud stretching from my laptop to my ear I might say, “I’m listening to music instead of you,” rather than, “the computer is reading to me.” Because I know that with certain university faculty, the former is sadly preferable to the latter."

Suicidal Ideation

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Fri, 01 May 2009 04:01:00 +0000

Blogging Against Disablism Day 2009

At a recent presentation I did for instructors in my college I told the story of being an undergraduate student in a creative writing course. First I said that the course was really good, and that one of the stories written for that course eventually became a 'chapter' in my novel. But I told my assembled colleagues that what I most remembered was my first day in the class.

"Everyone come up to the board and write the title of a short story you'd like to write," the professor said. One of those innocuous ice-breaker activities creative instructors are so fond of. I stayed in my seat. "C'mon," he said, looking at me, "everybody." I still stayed. I do not like to introduce myself to people through my hand-writing. It creates an immediate impression that is often impossible to recover from ("I have a four year old nephew, he makes letters just like you." "What are you, dyslexic or something?") He looked at me again, "I really need everyone to do this." I groaned, got out of my seat, walked to the board, picked up a piece of chalk, and drew an "X." And then I sat down.

I told this story, at the end of a presentation on making online courses accessible, to illustrate a key point about making all courses accessible. I referred to this as "humiliation from the start," doing things which, on first meeting someone, humiliate by forcing undesired, unplanned disclosure of differences which impact how someone might be seen by the group. Later, in the elevator, a prof said, "I really learned something about those ice-breaker exercises, I never thought," he paused, "and I should, I teach our diversity course."

If you're a regular reader here you've heard this before, and you've heard the story which follows as well.

Recently, flying Delta Air Lines back from London, walking (badly) with a cane, I fell at US Passport Control. Other travelers, not the US Officer, ran to my assistance. A bit later, at the luggage area (with no seating) I fell again. This time my Delta flight crew literally stepped over me in their rush to get out of the airport.

What makes one feel a part of the world, a part of a community, a part of a school, a part of a place?

Since I wrote for BADD last year I have a lot of things I feel very positive about. I'm in a wonderful relationship with a wonderful woman. My kid is doing great.My family in general is doing great. I've made some big progress in my PhD program. I've presented internationally, and successfully. I've taught pretty decently. My Toolbelt Theory gets used more and more.

But still, I rarely am comfortable in any way. I rarely feel a part of what has become my world. Often, too often, I am uncomfortable enough that the thought of leaving creeps into the corners of my mind. Why is that? And, if I feel that way - and I'm pretty damn lucky - what about others?

This isn't about the anger I expressed when I wrote of "Retard Theory." And it is not about getting even with anyone. It is, instead, about all the ways we choose to divide ourselves, and to hurt each other.

When I sat in that class above, or in many others - including some in my Special Education PhD program - or as I lay on that floor at JFK airport, I was being separated from humanity. And when you are separated from humanity, life looks pretty grim.

In my education I read too slowly, even with literacy software, and I struggle staying on task, sticking with schedules, meeting the artificial deadlines of semesters. This makes me "a problem" for the school. Got to finish in a certain number of years, you know - the rules. Now I walk too slowly too. It takes me too long to get from here to there. If I wanted to get food during a 15 minute break in a three hour class I probably couldn't make it there and back. Outside of school, the guy in the DIY store races away from me trying to lead me to the door hardware section. Half the area's restaurant's have no handicapped parking spots. Other car park spots are too narrow to allow me to fully open my door, which is the only way I can get out. "We're too small," I'm told, "It would be a burden."

And with each of these I am diminished as a human, I am separated from the herd.

The instructor for a required course runs her classroom like a frenetic TV game show, setting off both panic and a migraine in me, driving a woman with a visual impairment to despair. I flee after session two, but the gap on my transcript remains an issue. The airline offers me a choice of a wheelchair or being accompanied through the airport by my companion, I choose to walk, and I fall, requiring numerous new medical experiences.

about 7 minutes in, you begin to see the classic school experience for struggling children

With every step then, the labels descend: dyslexic, ADHD, handicapped. I'm not against labels. Labels can confer interesting information. But when labels are used primarily as a method of discrimination...

I look around. I have been preaching the word of assistive technology in schools for a dozen years now. During that time the technology has gotten better and better as well as cheaper and cheaper, and yet, if I walk into a school I will not see it. I will instead see "special" students begging for handouts from schools which seem committed to the prevention of independence.

I look around. I see counters too high. I see elevators far away from traffic patterns. I see clueless clerks in banks. I see police and legal personnel untrained in human diversity. I see non-readers virtually unable to apply for aid. I see "standardized tests" and a "commitment to accountability" being used as an excuse for acts of terror against children. I see governments doing 'the legal minimum.' I see no enforcement.

I see a normalist culture, an ableist culture. A culture which wants faux diversity - where people might look different, and eat different foods, but really all do things the same way.

Do I see a future? I don't know. On my good days I imagine employers who will welcome me for what I can offer. On my bad days I see people looking at me and seeing nothing but problems. I have wandered among jobs, among places, among nations, among interests, searching for the place where I did not feel "stuck outside." A place where success would not come with the qualifier, be that, "Super Retard," "Super Gimp," or the only slightly crueler, "that's great for you."

What would that place really look like? I remember, as a kid, walking down streets, looking in the lighted windows of homes in the night. Wondering, is that family normal? What does normal feel like? What's it like to be like 'everyone else'?

What would that place look like? I don't know. But I'm guessing it would be the place where the "Exit" sign no longer lit a corner of my brain. Where it's red light no longer interrupted my sleep.

- Ira Socol

Real World Math

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:11:00 +0000

Nancy Stewart, a teacher I have come to have great respect for, asked for help through Twitter. She has two students heading for eighth grade next year. Both are "Special Needs." Both are very far "behind" in their math skills. "Any ideas?" she asked the learning network that has sprung up in the world of 140 character microblogging.

I said, "get them out of school." Figuratively if not literally.

Let me back up and start with this story. I have perceived myself as terrible with math all of my life. And surely almost every teacher I've had would agree with that perception. But I'm really only bad at math in school.

My son, who has a Bachelors Degree in Mathematics, tells this story. "I never could figure it out," he says, "Ira [he has always called me by my first name] can't subtract a two digit number from a three digit number on paper. I've seen him end up with a bigger number than either trying to do that, but when he coached my baseball team he'd know everybody's batting average as each at bat happened." And I tell this story. It was only as my son broke past the standard high school math, and got into conceptual stuff, that what he was talking about made sense to me. "How do you get this stuff but not division?" My kid would ask. "Division is just too hard," I'd answer.

But here's the thing. I can't subtract on paper, but I could do really well in architectural engineering courses. I can figure out sports statistics. I understand the mathematical concepts behind statistics well enough that I can tell you why most statistical analyses used in the social sciences is fiction. How's that work? And how might that help Nancy's students?

Math (or Maths, depending on your side of the Atlantic) is a series of ideas. These ideas are important. In fact, not understanding them can be disastrous in many ways. Arithmetic, on the other hand, is simply a tool set for expressing some math concepts. Arithmetic is to math as forming letters is to writing. Traditionally, a tool set you needed, but perhaps not anymore.

The problem is that we use arithmetic as a gatekeeper stopping kids from getting to math, just as we use alphabetic decoding as a wall keeping kids away from reading. "Math" thus becomes, in the minds of many kids, a nightmarish battle with a bizarre symbolic code, just as reading does. They never get to what's important, what's useful, or surely, what's fun.

The Telling Time Joke starts at about 8:30 in

Telling Time and Negative Garbage Trucks

All right, I'm no math teacher, but I know a few things. One of the things Ms. Stewart told me is that one of these boys "can't tell time." She immediately followed that up by saying that this didn't matter, he has his phone in his pocket.

Issue 1: Problems of decoding shouldn't be mistaken for problems of concept.

Ms. Stewart knows that this boy does indeed know "how to tell time." His phone has a clock on it. He can look at that clock and, apparently, know what point it is in the day. So, he can tell time. What he can not do is interpret a strange antique system for displaying time. While it might be nice if he could, there is no reason to waste a minute of school time on this. It would be nice if I could tell the month by watching Stonehenge, but I can't, and its no big deal - I have ready alternatives.

Which brings me to the question of how we teach everything to do with math. We all too often create fake issues, fake circumstances, fake problems - which strip all motivation from the subject. We say, "you need to learn to tell time," when we are already quite good at that. The "clock face" of yore is a fake issue. And fake issues drive kids away.

Issue 2: Reality or Not.

When I finally passed "college algebra" I initially really struggled with the course. In an early week we had to graph this problem about finding the optimum number of garbage trucks for a community - you get the idea, productivity goes up as you start to add trucks but then it drops off if you add too many. I did the graph.I got 50% of the credit. "You didn't do the left half of the graph," the professor told me. "The left half?" "Yes," she replied, "the negative garbage trucks."

"What the f--- is a negative garbage truck?" I yelled. "Does it come and dump sh-- on your lawn early in the morning?"

This brought up the biggest issue with much of math education - dumb story problems. Don't mention garbage trucks if you're not dealing with reality. Don't send the train east from Tokyo to collide with the submarine headed west from Denver. Nothing drives kids away faster than this kind of nonsense.

If you want to use real world examples, go outside. Make them real. Make them relevant.

Real World Math

What's your batting average? Your on base percentage? Your earned run average? Your goals against average? Your yards per carry? Your shooting percentage? What's the mean of batting averages for your team? What's the range? Whatever the sport that gets your kids going, if you can't teach a world of math ideas through that sport you may not be trying.

I laughed last year when I watched a bunch of educators struggle with this simple question: There are 65 teams in the NCAA Basketball Tournament. It's single elimination. How many games in the tournament? I asked, and people pulled out pencils and papers. They were trying to do arithmetic, and I was asking for a math concept.

What's great about sports is, you need to grasp very specific statistical rules, rules, in this case, which the kids usually know. What are the rules of batting average? This matters because every system of math is based in a set of rules which allow it to work. Change the rules, or misunderstand them, and your answer will change. That's such a basic idea. Two apples plus two apples equals four apples only if we accept the rule that every apple counts as "one" no matter what size or quality. So sports stats teaches that rule idea clearly. Once you've got the rules, you need a formula - in batting average we've got hits divided by at bats. If you know how to find the rules and where to find the formula, you've got it. The rest is punching numbers into a calculator.

Issue 3: The Calculator.

Of course you use calculators. We're humans. We use tools. As I mentioned on Twitter, if you ban calculators you should probably require mittens as well. Don't want them counting on their fingers.

How much will it cost to buy a car? Buy that guitar? That drum set? How do I figure interest? If I spread the payments out over 12 months what will it cost? What do those "cost per unit" stickers in the grocery store mean? How do I know my gas mileage? If I spend this much driving to school when gas is $1.92 a gallon (or £0.94 per liter) and it goes up 30% how much will it cost to drive to that concert?

Money matters to kids. Money is real. Most teachers know that when understanding decimals gets hard, we just need to put a currency sign in front of it (we'll not deal with Great Britain or Ireland before 1971). Why not start with that currency sign. Money gives you so many real examples of the need to find unknowns from knowns (how many payments, how much per payment, how much interest are they charging) that you could run with this for years.

If you are building a roof, how do you know what size lumber to use? How many bricks do you need to build that wall? Can you carry this many pieces of concrete in that truck? Construction takes you from the simple math of area and quantity to the complexity of bending moment and shear diagrams. But unlike the way these math skills are usually taught, these are real - even get dirty - issues which attract kids. I once coached an Odyssey of the Mind team, most who struggled in math, to a medal in the structure competition.

How far did you run? How fast can you drive? Why do different gears on a bicycle switch the distance traveled per pedal turn? How long will it take to get there? Distance and speed, when connected to real life, are essential to kids. Throw out those stupid story problems - your students have their own.

If Henry V's longbow archers at Agincourt could shoot 17 arrows per minute while the French with their crossbows could fire only four times per minute, and the French had 5,000 archers and the English just 1,000, who had the advantage? Integration of math into everything is a huge part of the solution. How far did that book's character walk? (Google Earth, Google Maps) What does a "marginal tax rate" mean? What does "4gb" of memory mean?

The biggest problem with most math in school is that it is taught as a disconnected skill. No wonder no one is interested. Math is really part of everything we do, and if we demonstrate that, we will motivate our students.

Issue 4: Solve non-math problems.

So kids can focus on the learning. If writing the symbols is a problem, use Equation Editor (in Microsoft Word) and stop writing. If arithmetic gets in the way, drop it. Pick your cognitive loading carefully.

A few tricks:

Use calculators which integrate with taking notes and recording answers. Graph-Calc is free and everything can be copied to Microsoft Word or Google Docs.

Beware using b, q, d, p as symbols, beware of using Greek symbols too close to our alphabet. Many of the "math disabilities" I see are really reading disabilities. Switch to distinct symbols and use those consistently. Math textbooks like to switch things around, but that just drives students crazy.

If you need to, eliminate the reading (see paragraph above), if a student can not get to the question because of reading problems, they can not demonstrate what they know about the concept.

Those are my thoughts, but I am not a math teacher, so I'd love to hear yours.

- Ira Socol

Twitter or Not

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 15:23:00 +0000

Through Twitter I found this article from a student in Allendale, Pennsylvania. A high school student journalist with some fine writing skills.

Alex Groves, in The Morning Call, thinks, "As a social network, Twitter is a pointless dud."

Social networking in general is a wonderful thing when not abused or used in excess. Most social networking sites have the potential to connect people around the world and are almost always valuable tools in communication. That being said, there are always things in this world that are kind of pointless, and social networking has its own pointless duds, Twitter being one of them.

Twitter is just another fad based on popularity, similar to MySpace and Facebook. The only difference is it doesn't relay information quite as well as other social networking sites. But it still detaches us from reality and lets us become absorbed in what we are doing rather than what we should be doing or what we want to do. It's pointless and ultimately brings those of us who already have Facebook and MySpace to the point of excessiveness.

For those who haven't heard a lot about it, Twitter allows members to post blurbs or ''tweets'' about what they are doing in no more than 140 characters. These tweets are subscribed to by followers, often friends or fans of the person tweeting. The followers receive the tweets online or via external services such as cellphones.

Twitter has attracted the attention of celebrities like John Mayer, Soulja Boy Tell 'Em and Britney Spears. Politicians such as President Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain tweet as well.

The only problem with all this twittering by celebrities and politicians is that they are on Facebook much more often. Their Facebook walls are loaded with more information than their tweets. Anything they tweet about is usually also on their Facebook walls. So why spend time on both Twitter and Facebook?

By spending more time on social networks and the Internet than we need to, we enable ourselves to become reclusive, sheltered from family and friends.

How does one know if his friends are OK? We also miss the world around us. We don't get to enjoy a crisp, clean-smelling spring morning. We miss being involved in fun and recreational things. We miss the important things our family and friends do. We don't get to open an actual newspaper and enjoy it if we're constantly online. So, why have people become so fascinated with finding out what celebrities and politicians are doing rather than what they, themselves, could be doing? With all the good we can do online, including disseminating information and spreading knowledge, why do we become obsessed with Britney Spears tweeting about playing with the boys on tour?

When do we utilize technology for positive change? When do we use the Internet to our advantage, rather than as time-killing entertainment? Call me old fashioned, but I think that Twitter is unnecessary in a world already too obsessed with social networking.

Alex Groves is a sophomore at Emmaus High School, where he is a writer for the school newspaper, The Stinger.

I read this, then I looked at my Twitter feed.

willrich45 Please say hello to IT Directors from across the SW. Why should we use social tools in schools?

shareski @willrich45 Because learning is social. If the only thing we use the internet for is to look up stuff, we're missing the best part.

courosa @willrich45 Hi Directors from Canada. Social tools serve only to amplify & accelerate existing processes. Proper use in schools vital.

jameshollis @willrich45 Hello from Aurora, IL -Social Netwrking provides access 2 the knowledge-base of ideas & resources of people w/ similar interests

haretek @irasocol Agreed, what makes twitter an effective learning tool is I get to use and practice skills in real time and real life w/real people

willrich45 Join us live in 15 mins here: http://bit.ly/163yCz Model the network for some IT directors across the SW.

And then I wrote Alex this reply:

Alex,

As a PhD student and educational researcher, I can tell you that for me, Twitter is a continuous stream of incredibly valuable information. The people I choose to follow are not celebrities, but other researchers, professors, teachers, web developers, software developers, and global thinkers. All day long we exchange articles, resources, and ideas. We ask questions and cast doubts. We debate and challenge. And, through Twitter, we do this instantly, across continents and time zones, via a tiny window in the corner of our computer screens.

Is it all work? Of course not. Just as much conversation in my College of Education building is personal, so is much of Twitter, but that's because we are humans.

In the end, every communication system is only as valuable as the user makes it. Most of the books on the shelves at your local Barnes & Noble are "trash." Most phone conversations are nonsense. While there are great newspapers, most are worthless intellectually. Honestly, the majority of classroom time is useless. But all of these "tools" can be incredibly valuable if the producer and the user make them so.

With Twitter, you are producer and user, so the value lies almost entirely in your own capabilities. You make it what you want it to be.

I am not suggesting that anyone must use Twitter. It is always a choice. But I am suggesting that this kind of stripped-down instant social networking is, through the collaboration of a vast group of remarkable people, serving as a transformational tool in many ways. In my field it is changing classrooms, changing teachers, changing teacher preparation programs, and changing research paradigms.

In other words, we are indeed "utiliz[ing] technology for positive change." And we are using, "the Internet to our advantage." Our tool is Twitter, yours might be something else, but attacking the tool makes no sense.

- Ira Socol

book recommendation for Alex: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

Learning Video Games and The Cost of Failure

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 12:08:00 +0000

I often hear some variation of these two quotes coming from teachers and school administrators, and even parents:

"He can spend hours learning a video game, how come he can't do the same in school or with homework."

"He pays much more attention when he is interested in something."

Yes, these are "duh" quotes And these are part of a ridiculous, if typical, search for a way to demean children by pointing out that they are disappointing "you." But they are also symptomatic of why schools fail.

Schools fail because they do not connect learning to the learner. And schools fail because they have made the cost of a student's failure so high, that most students will simply not try. and all but a very few (the ones who would do fine without school) will choose to never "take a chance." And schools fail because they make student failure public and permanent, stopping students who otherwise might persist in their learning.

Why do kids learn video games so easily? Why do they persist in the task of learning the game far beyond anything they do in school?

I'm not here (right now) to talk about video games in education, that's a different idea. Instead I am, like James Gee, talking about what schools can learn from video game learning.

What do video games do?

The learning is self-directed. When a kid sits down in front of a video game he or she is in charge. They make the decisions in the game. They accept the consequences. They take breaks when they need to. They don't have to stop when a bell rings. They make themselves comfortable. They collaborate if they want and compete if they want.

There are no age-based grades in video games. It is fully accepted that a ten-year-old might be ahead of a 16-year-old on this game or that, and that the 16-year-old (or 30-year-old) can learn from the ten-year-old. In the world of video games all are teachers and all are learners.

There are multiple paths. Every good video game allows you choices, empowering the learner. The fastest route might not be the best route, or, at least, might be no better than others. You can choose different weapons, different strategies. How different than textbooks or the dreaded "middle school planner."

Speed of learning is never an issue. So it takes you five days to get through level five but only two to get through level six - no one cares. You are neither behind, nor ahead, you are doing it as you need to.

The learning begins with interest. Video games are (well, good ones) interesting. They are also varied. And learners choose what to play. They (for the most part) might be teaching the same things, but you enter through your interests - cars, spies, World War II, wild fantasy worlds. "He pays much more attention when he is interested in something." Duh. Don't we all? (Funny, I can do sports statistics and had no problems with architectural engineering courses, but totally struggle with academic maths and statistics - there are paths of interest, and there's the route to boredom.)

Video game learners collaborate and scaffold each other. "Let me show you." "Here's how you do this." There is an amazing amount of peer-tutoring in person and online. In school, of course, we usually call this "cheating."

Failure can be private. The video game does not call on you to publicly humiliate you. You can be public or private as you choose. Thus practice "costs" much less in social terms.

Failure has almost no cost. What's the worst thing that can happen? You die, either dramatically or in a cool explosion. The game doesn't send a note home or call your parents. The game doesn't yell at you or separate you from your friends. When the cost of failure is low, humans are willing to try again. Raise the cost, and people stop trying. Example, you try to climb a fence and fall, getting a scratch: You'll try again. You try to climb the fence and get a massive electrical shock: You won't try again. Simple psychology. If Edison had tried to develop the light bulb in school, he would have been labelled a failure after the first 50 filament failures, and we might still be lighting gaslights.

In other words, learning in video games is opposite - in almost every way - learning in the traditional school. So, if students are learning, and persistently working on learning, with their games but not in your school, you might want to spend some time considering why this is.

- Ira Socol