There but for the Grace of …

 

Earlier today, John Spencer posted this problem to Education Rethink:

The title of the post “See if you can spot what’s wrong …” dares you to see how this is a poorly worded test question.  And it is.  But in putting on my Wizard of the Language Arts hat (because “English teacher” suggests an image I choose not to be associated with), I realized that this goes much deeper than a simple fractions problem about Grace and her bean plant.

You see, Grace was like any other student.  She was tired of having her learning dictated to her and wanted to own it.  So, she sought learning experiences that were authentic.  Rather than learn the facts about the process of photosynthesis and plant growth, she thought it more important to plant a sprout and measure its growth, thinking that the miracle of curiosity and learning is what made the bean plant grow.

So, she asked her teacher if she could plant bean sprouts.  But her teacher was not an innovative educator.  Her teacher was doing what she could to follow orders and not get fired.  She had considered that Grace and her classmates bring their own seeds, but the class parents–with whom she kept in constant contact–balked at the idea because for all of the money that Grace’s teacher earns with getting the summers off, she should be able to afford to buy seeds, sprouts, plants, dirt, and gardening equipment for all of her students out of her own pocket.

Grace’s teacher tried to say that she has been doing a lot more with a lot less, so this is really not realistic.  For Grace’s mother, that was the last straw.  Fed up with the unwillingness of the teacher to teach her daughter outside of forcing her to be compliant within a system designed for a factory-model society, she pulled her out of the school and took her to a gardening store.  They went home and planted the seeds and waited for the miracle of curiosity and learning to occur.

Grace measured the bean plant at the end of each week.  At the end of week 1, the plant was 4 inches tall.  At the end of week 2, it was 4-1/2 inches tall.  At the end of week 3, it was 5 inches tall.  Grace liked how the plant was growing and would come back week after week.  But soon after, it didn’t get much taller.  In fact, it stopped growing and shrank altogether.  She used her savvy as a digital native to find out the answer to her question, but none of the answers that were provided seemed to apply to the problem at hand.

The plant eventually died.

Years later, as a high school student, Grace was back in the public school system–teacher’s pensions had wrecked the economy so she was forced to endure public indoctrination–and when she was taking a chemistry test, there was a question about volume of liquid in a watering can that was being used to water bean plants.  Grace thought back to all those years ago and wrote,  “Clearly, this is an indication of the liberal conspiracy to indoctrinate students.  I have decided to opt out from this test because plants cannot all be expected to require water in order to grow.”  She then left the room.

This story made its way into a rejected application to one college and then her blog where it was reposted and retweeted by a few people, but within a few weeks fell back into obscurity.

Grace is now in her early 30s and unemployed.  She lives at home and blogs about how the public education destroyed her curiosity, quashed her love of learning, and stole her dreams.

The answer, by the way, is c) 6.

The case for and against English textbooks

Based on the plans that I was writing out yesterday for the next quarter (yes, I know that this doesn’t make me an “innovative educator,” but I tend to plan the elements of my course in advance), I realized that I can come in to work on Monday and tell my advanced class that they can bring in their textbooks and sign them back in.

Sounds kind of a mundane set of instructions, right?  But let’s keep in mind that it’s the end of January.  We are barely into the second semester of the school year and the “bring in your textbooks and sign them back in” announcement is what you often hear in May.  But as I have been sketching out plans for the third and fourth quarters, I’ve noticed that I’m simply not going to need the English textbook for the remainder of the year.  So why have it at home?

English textbooks have always perplexed me.  While I know I shouldn’t make the mistake of comparing my current students’ experience with my own, I can’t help but think back and remember what I actually did in my own high school English classes.  Now, I’d had “reading books” when I was in elementary school–in fact, I wrote a whole post about them on my other blog back in 2011–and they had vocabulary and grammar worksheets that went along with them, and I remember actually having an “English” text in junior high, but I don’t remember using it for more than grammar exercises.  When I got to high school, though, there wasn’t a set of textbooks that I remember filling out forms for every year, unless you counted the Sadlier-Oxford vocabulary books we used from ninth to eleventh grade.

No, English when I was in high school was simply novels and plays, starting with Great Expectations with Mr. Valenti freshman year and ending with Ordinary People senior year (which may or may not be true.  I remember that Great Expectations was the very first book I read in high school, but my mind’s cloudy on the last one).  My teachers would hand out the book along with the Sayville High School “book loan card” that we filled out and were kept on file, and we’d be told that we had to read part of the book or the entire book by a certain date.

That’s kind of how I work things with my advanced sophomores.  I give out a copy of whatever we’re reading as well as a schedule of when we’re discussing what (as much as I can, anyway) and reiterate my expectation that they come to class prepared each day.   Most of the material, however, isn’t from our textbook and instead comes via individual copies of novels or plays, or things I have found in various anthologies or from websites that I have photocopied.  The textbook does come into play for a random poem or story here and there, and all of my sophomores read Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which can be found there, but beyond that I have to ask: why is the book there?

Okay, I know why it’s there or at least how it got there.  Years before I started teaching at my current high school, there was a textbook adoption process and whomever was in charge at the time chose the McDougal Littel text, with all of its ancillary exercise books and test prep materials.  In another district I once taught in, the winning company was Pearson-Prentice Hall.  And while those ancillary exercise books have been great for stuff like sub work, I can’t say that it would make a difference in my work.

So do we even need textbooks in English class?

Targeted.

About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

This is the most talked about part of a lengthy New York Times Magazine article from this week called “How Companies Learn Your Secrets” (NYT, 2/19/12).  It was first posted to the Times‘ website on Thursday and I clicked on it while doing my routine perusal of the morning news at the beginning of the day and became so enthralled with what I could manage to read in the few minutes I had that I actually printed it out so I could read it between classes and on my planning period.

The article basically talks about the mathematics involved in getting people to buy particular products and establish brand loyalty; moreover, it’s the mathematics and science involved in studying habits and predicting those habits.  And it was so fascinating that I sent it to my wife, who is in marketing and currently wrapping up her MBA.  She said it was kind of like “Moneyball for retail,” which is a great assessment (even though I’ve never read Moneyball but I have seen the movie).  I mentioned that I was thinking about how this connects to my job.  There’s an obvious connection with my job as a yearbook adviser–I’m always trying to get more sales–but I also thought that you can look at what is in this piece and see a connection to my actual classroom.

About a week ago, I made this comment on this blog post:

Education and marketing are both about making someone think that what you are presenting them is what they want. Even the most student-centered or customer-centered of them are planned carefully to get a desired result.

Make what you will of my comment, but I have been wondering lately if sometimes our focus on students’ humanity is sometimes a hindrance.

And heads exploded.

Okay, not really.

Seriously, though.  Think back to the beginning of a school year, any school year, and how well you know your students when classes start; conversely, think about how well they know one another.  We try a lot to “get to know them” and “build a relationship” and everything that every article and PD workshop and everything else tells us we should do.  But what if we took an effort to get to know them before they even stepped foot in the room?  And what if it was possible to do that without placing a personal phone call or making a home visit to every last one of them (something that’s impractical when your total number of students taught is upwards of 100-120)?  What if we adapted the science of habit study to our classrooms the same way Target did to its customers?