Beyond School

It’s in the air — and in this economy, it’s no surprise.

I felt it here, noticed Paul Krugman touching it here, and now Seth Godin here:

[W]hen we ask you to look people in the eye, be creative, brainstorm, be generous, find a way to satisfy an angry customer, work with a bully, learn a new skill or bring joy to work, suddenly the excuses pile up. Is this a different sort of work? Is raising your hand in class too much to ask of you?

The jobs most of us would like to have are jobs like this. And yet we put up a fight when given the chance to do them well. [whole post here]

I started to bold print certain phrases, but really the whole thing deserves emphasis.

The people who haven’t caught wind of it? In my experience this year in the classroom: students.

It needs a name — maybe even a whole class. How about “Recession Skills 101“?

Holidays are happy now, vacation having begun. I’ve wanted to share this one for the past few weeks. It concerns a wonderful teach-in by an evangelical Christian professor of biology to a group of what I gather to be creationists, possibly from his church.

A bit of historical background makes it all the more interesting. I mentioned in my “back from the dead” post that I’ve been reading a good bit on the history of science, and that one of those books, Richard E. Rubenstein’s Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Middles Ages, zoomed in on the re-discovery of Aristotelian philosophy by Aquinas and other churchmen in the first European universities beginning around 1100 c.e. It traces the twisting relationship of scientific thinking and religious authority from that time forward through the next two or three centuries, with Aristotelian thought and thinkers sometimes embraced by the Church and sometimes condemned and declared heretical by it, depending on the politics and personalities of the day.

One important take-away from the book is its demonstration that religion and science weren’t always at loggerheads, and that many Christian theologians were instrumental in laying the foundation for the ultimate ascendancy of the scientific viewpoint in the 16th and 17th centuries. It’s a refreshing thing to realize in this age of headlines endlessly pitting religion versus science.

That background made all the more refreshing the discovery, via the excellent blog, Science and Religion: A View from an Evolutionary Creationist/Theistic Evolutionist, of the lecture on Youtube. The writer of that blog, the nicely-monikered “Jimpithecus,” introduces the video thus:

In his post on Focus on the Family’s “Truth” Project, Steve Martin had a link to some videos done by Dennis Venema on how a Christian can accept evolution. Dennis teaches biology at Trinity Wesleyan University and was faced with a situation where his church began to use the “Truth Project.” He felt that he needed to respond, so he gave a series of lectures on evolution. He has graciously posted these to YouTube….

I watched the full seven- or eight-episode lecture on YouTube and was thoroughly impressed not only by the tour-de-force “slam-dunk” of the case for evolution — based simply on genomics, only one of evolution’s many lines of overwhelming evidence — but also by the Q&A between Prof. Venema and his audience of creationists willing to listen to him, and think about what he showed. The patience, humor, and civility on both sides was a breath of fresh air.

Venema respectfully explains that he was once one of the first to dispute evolution with its adherents in the scientific community, until he honestly confronted the evidence for evolution made possible by the Human Genome Project. Better still, he — like “Jimpithecus” — underscores the possibility of being a Christian without being an evolution-denier by giving a much-needed mini-lesson in more sophisticated ways of reading and thinking about the Bible.

Regardless of your theology or lack thereof, the lecture is well worth watching on its educational merits alone. He really does a great job of translating the genomic evidence into lay terms, and unpacking the force with which it demolishes the anti-evolutionary position.

I’m embedding the first lecture below, and adding below that a few screenshots of the entire lecture as a teaser for those who need motivating to watch the entire thing.

Screenshots:

The Scientific Method

The Genomic Evidence

Overview of Arguments Based on Genomic Evidence

More screenshots below the fold… Read the rest of this entry »

Forty research papers. Then 100 China and Western Civ exams, all with essays. All in the last five days. I need a massage.

I also need a Do Not Go to Doghouse pass.

The birthdays in the last two weeks:

1. My wife.
2. My Dad (Happy  Birthday, Dad! You’re just waking up in Alabama while I’m hunched over my desk at school with eyestrain and red ink-stained fingers at 6pm here on the other side of the world! But I’m thinking of you! Thanks for making me, even though that makes you partly responsible for the nightmare that is semester exam week! I forgive you!)
3. My sister! (Ouch! Sorry! Totally forgot! You have to understand that December in Singapore isn’t December! It’s every other month! It’s Groundhog Month!)

Am I complaining? No! I love them all.

And am I complaining about the old teaching buddy and his wife who visited last week as I was trying to make the exams? Or about the four Korean in-laws I really do love so much who arrived just an hour ago for a (very Confucian) *cough* three-week stay in our apartment?

No! I love them all too!

But still. New Rule: Teachers are above all social laws and norms, from this day forward, during the last two weeks of the semester.

Also: No birthdays or anniversaries during this time either. A two-week grace period is hereby declared.

Let the word ring out across the land. (And seriously — if you’re mad at a teacher over stuff like this, cut ‘em a break. You have no idea what a SCUBA experience this time of year is. Give him or her time to surface, and things will be fine.)

I mentioned in my “back from the dead” post that I’ve been swimming, on alternating days throughout this closing semester, in the history of China and the history of “Western Civilization” (irony quotes due to the fact that it really starts in Mesopotamia, Persia, the Levant, and Egypt, none of which are “Western”), and what a mind-party it’s been for the constant pricking of our so-often over-inflated opinion of Europe. I just want to throw a couple of examples that have been the life of that party — for this teacher, at least. My students haven’t had the good fortune of taking both classes, so they missed these lovely juxtapositions.

1. Myths of Pre-History

The Monotheistic West: The world was made in six days. A man and woman were created in a garden with magical trees and talking snakes. They didn’t have to work until they broke a rule that made all of us die in the end. Then they had to start farming.¹

Non-theistic China: Long before the Shang Dynasty (c. 1600-1150 bce), during which the Chinese invented their writing and Chinese history begins, there were five dimly remembered “Pre-Xia Emperors” (the Xia is a so-far legendary dynasty due to the lack of solid evidence it existed; the same was said for the Shang until the last century, so we may be in for a surprise if an archaeologist gets lucky in the future). Those legendary emperors just ruled, and presumably they had even more dimly-remembered ancestors stretching back into oblivion. What these emperors did to make them remembered, according to legend, was to give the following “gifts” to Chinese civilization: “fire, agriculture, animal domestication, calendrics, writing, and flood control.”²

The party moment? Those five legendary emperors are some seriously impressive, reality-based myths. They commemorate nothing less than the major accomplishments of our species that brought us out of caves, into farming villages, and finally into civilization. Call them the mythological history of the Paleolithic and Neolithic ages. Then ask if Western monotheism’s foundational myth comes even remotely close to that sort of scientific accuracy.³

2. Moral Frameworks

The West: Zoroastrianism and Christianity (and later Islam) both posit a Manichean, dualistic moral framework. The universe is a “cosmic battlefield” between the forces of a “good” god and the forces of an “evil” one. Humanity’s job is to choose sides in this war, and suffer the punishment for choosing wrongly. It’s a black and white world.

China: There’s the Yin, and there’s the Yang. While the Yin is primarily black and the Yang primarily white, they each contain a seed of the other in their cores. They also merge in a harmonious whole. Humanity’s job is to behave in harmony with both of those forces, neither of which is “good” or “evil,” but merely natural. There are no gods outside of this order and no sides to choose. There’s just a Way — a Tao — to follow to try to keep things balanced. There’s a lot of gray in this world. I think they must scratch their heads at the easy moral and metaphysical certainties of many Westerners.

The party moment? One of the most remarkable aspects of life in Asia — for this Westerner, at least — is the absence of holy wars, holy warriors, suicide bombers, abortion doctor assassinations, and so forth. Airports in East Asia are much easier to travel through, with few-to-no soldiers patrolling for terrorists.

3. Political Frameworks

Obama is surely thinking, “At best, I’ve got eight whole years to make my mark and turn this country around.” The Chinese response to the Tiananmen Square protesters, by contrast, was to say, in essence, “Don’t be impatient. The Party has had only eight years to turn this country around.” The Chinese see politics from the perspective of their 3,000-year dynastic history, in which it was not unusual for rulers to hold the Dragon Throne for decades. To them, eight years is just getting started — and that’s what Deng Xiaoping seemed to want the protesters to understand when they were demanding radical (for the Chinese) political reforms after “only” a decade or so of China’s economic reforms.

Maybe the Chinese taxi drivers I chatted with in Shanghai during my six years there were trained to say, after learning that I’m American, “We’re a 4,000 year old country. America is very young.” Training or no, what they say is true, and Westerners don’t get this. Because of that history, in which the average age of a single dynasty is 300 years — longer than the entire age of America, in other words — the Chinese have the Long View. Deng Zhou Enlai gave us an example of that when, asked if he thought the reforms brought on in 1789 by the French Revolution had worked, he answered — 200 years after that event — “It’s too soon to say.”

It’s all just so hen hao….

1. Though this might offend some, it really is the basic plot of Genesis, looked at objectively. [↩]
2. Rhoades Murphey, A History of Asia, p. 45. 1996 edition, I think. [↩]
3. I’m aware of the myth of Pan-Gu, of course — the cosmic giant whose corpse morphed into trees and rivers and mountains and so forth, and from the maggots infesting which evolved human beings. But I don’t think most Chinese, outside of the most back-water peasant old wives, ever believed that. And even if they did, it just shows, among other things, that the Chinese have a sense of humor about the importance of humanity. And we could stretch it and note there is a hint of evolution in that “maggots to man” detail. [↩]

I just stole a moment from grading the stack of research papers and semester exams to watch the first few minutes of the TED Talk embedded below on “The Art of the Interview.” The speaker discusses the importance of having interviewees  who have not only intellect,  but also “energy” (what he even called “Life Force”), and moreover, who throw “modesty” out the window in favor of the desire to acknowledge the extraordinary  and to unabashedly try to illuminate it. And all of this connected, in this teacher’s head, to an experience I had last week in my classroom.

So let me steal a couple more minutes from my gradebook deadline and share it. It’s this:

Single semester courses at my new school give Academic Excellence awards at semester’s end. One award is given per 50 students or so, and I have only 36 combined in my two Chinese history classes — a semester course.

So: given that a good six or seven students from those two classes all qualified as “academically excellent,” how choose one over the other?

Highest grade point average wasn’t the magic bullet, since the few tenths of a decimal point separating several of the students were surely as attributable to the performance of the grader — me — as to the performance of the students (that will be a revelation or a scandalous idea only to those who have never taught, read the research on, or thought for five unbroken minutes about the imprecision of grades as a measurement of student quality).

Long story short, I looked at the little canned script the school gave us teachers to read (optionally, bless their hearts) when presenting the award. It had a blank list of “five accomplishments” we were encouraged to fill out. I played along: 1) likes history; 2) good thinker; 3) good writer; 4) good speaker; 5) reliable and accountable, yadda yadda. Again, that still described at least five or six students.

Then it hit me.

Our Past is not Your Future — And Why That’s Bad News

What separated one from all the others was this: social intelligence. Call it “energy” or “life force,” if you will. It’s what the vast majority of “academically excellent” students are lacking. As  I tried to explain it  to the class when presenting the award:

The Dow topping the 10,000 mark aside, many economists are arguing that the U.S. economy may take years to recover to pre-crash levels in terms of something more important to most people than stocks — I mean jobs. Employment and production continue to decline, and many say those jobs may never come back.

High school students are so stuck in the myth that grades will lead to jobs — and so stuck in the textbooks about yesteryear — that they’re oblivious to this. The evidence for it pervades the classroom daily in the “I’ve done my work and I’ve got a high GPA, and that’s enough” attitude. I can slouch in my chair during class, use my mouth during discussions only as an oxygen-intake port, foul the collective sound- and vision-scape with complaints and sighs and sour looks, promote complacency by refusing to put any imagination or energy into improving the group experience, on and on. Again, my GPA is enough. It will get me into college, and college will get me into a job, because I have no inkling how much more difficult my future may be due to the several gathering clouds on the horizon — have no inkling, for example, that for every single vacancy in the professional job-rolls today, there are between five and six very qualified people seeking and needing that job.

The Only Thing Worse than a Suck-Up….

So in deciding how to give that award, I gave it to the person I wouldn’t only hire for being academically capable, but would promote for qualities of character: a person whose body language said “I’m awake and alert,”  whose facial language said “I’m not sour,” whose actions said “Let me help improve the class” instead of shirking that option — who was, in short, “energetic,” positive, constructive –  neither a “suck-up,” as I put it in class, nor, as importantly, a “suck-down.”

In a sense, by giving that student the award, I did “promote” her. That honor might, after all, be the tipping point in a favorable college application decision down the road.

I don’t know where I read it — and now that I think about it, I believe I saw it on a TV interview — but somewhere I saw a headhunter or executive type respond to a question about how the new economic landscape was affecting his hiring decisions, and his response should be posted above the gates of all schools for the privileged (such as mine): He didn’t care, he said, about an applicant’s academic pedigree, regardless of how ivy-covered it was; in fact, he went on, such a pedigree can even be a red flag and a demerit. Because the last thing he was looking for, he said, was people whose backgrounds led them to believe they were entitled to the best things in life. He wanted people who see  privilege as a thing to be earned.

This is something American students, especially, may need to hear, since they’re less able to compare themselves to their English-speaking peers from India and Asia — perhaps India especially, since it has two advantages over both East Asia and America: the presence of native English literacy skills equal or superior to those of American students, and the absence of the Confucian submissiveness and rote learning habits of many East Asian countries.

(The short version: watch out for India. It’s confident, it’s capable, it’s talkative; it’s hungry, it’s not spoiled, and it’s socially intelligent. This is made abundantly clear in my international school classroom every day.)

Psst…Your Code is Showing

In any case, in this age of the interwebs, this teacher once again shares with the rest of the world what he shares in his classroom, hoping it’s of value to students anywhere, whether they’re in his gradebook or not. What I hope you’ll take away:

First, your grades might get you in the door, but they won’t get you up the ladder. (And in this Age of Defining-Down “Success,” even getting in the door shouldn’t be taken for granted. Having a job at all, in other words, may be the “new” success. Just ask the 1-in-5 Americans currently unemployed or under-employed.)

And second, we don’t see you as a GPA, because we see the rest of you daily. How you walk and who you walk with, how you sit and how you compose your face, where your eyes go and don’t go, what comes (and doesn’t come) out of your mouth — all of things things are very obvious codes that we decode daily. And when you leave us, others with the power to pull you up or keep you down will take our place, and they’ll read those same codes.

I know this sounds crazy authoritarian, and that maybe one or two of you might be possessed of the type of genius that can beat the odds and conquer the world without an ounce of social intelligence or maturity of character. But — to share a dirty secret — I, like most teachers, really do want you to succeed. And I write this because I think it may help some of you.

Now here’s that TED Talk:

Just a quick share of some resources I made optional for the “In Google We Trust” students I mentioned last time.  Transparency is all, so enjoy, quibble, supplement, whatever:

Optional Media Literacy Readings:
1. Think Peer Reviewed journals are no better than blogs? “How Stuff Works” gives a good overview that will (I hope) make you think again.
2. Shocked that even peered reviewed journals can can be *gasp* imperfect? (To which I say good, so you should think even more about what you read.) This article might interest you (hint: some peer reviewed journals are better than others, and it’s up to you to know the Big League ones).
3. Still think “popular media” journalists — TIME, Newsweek, NYTimes, etc — are as “expert” as scholars, historians, and academics in respected journals?
–Treat yourself to Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi on mainstream newspaper journalism. (His style is snappy and hilarious.)
–See Bill Moyers’ “Selling the War” (transcript here, or you can watch the documentary online there) on how the mainstream media chose inaccuracy and disinformation due to all sorts of political pressures leading up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Oof. It’s Sunday afternoon. Since returning Friday night from a skipping-rock of a flight home from Koh Samui, Thailand – departed 6 a.m., layover and transfer in Bangkok, another layover in Hong Kong, a refueling layover in Taiwan, an arrival at Incheon (Korea) at 9 p.m., and an airport bus and taxi to enter the door at 10.30p – we gasped at the two-week-old dust bunnies bounding across our apartment, unpacked, and then I slept a few hours before driving through the brutal cold (oh Thai sun, please shine up here) to my radio job at 6.30 the following morning. Home again, write a post for Education.Change.org, sleep, more radio this morning, and finally, though sleepy, here to write a bit – *inhale* – about….

The Wonderful World of International School Hiring Fairs

It was wonderful, in a weird way. Talking for hours for four straight days to school leaders around the world about our views on teaching and learning (and most interestingly, though probably most damning for many of my job prospects, about technology in education) is an interesting way to spend the time.

Without naming names of schools or interviewers, here’s a random and sleepy-eyed report of lessons learned from the experience.

1. Bad interviews are good things

No matter the reputation of the school, the people sitting across from you in the hotel room asking you questions in that school’s name are a stronger indicator of how it would feel to work at that school. I talked to English department heads whose questions – and my answers – made it clear to both of us that we would, or would not, make a happy marriage. There was an unsurprising correlation between this marital element and the offering or non-offering of a position at each school. Schools touting themselves as “21st century schools” and banging their laptop program drums – and during interviews with which I expected flower petals to descend from on high – on an occasion or two turned out to instead voice sentiments belonging to, um, people who’d obviously never experienced the literacy magic that happens after a few months writing and conversing behind the wheel of a blog. No rose-petals there – instead, many mental leaves of wet cabbage fell, probably, in both our imaginations. Marriage for the next two years? We think not. Thank goodness for the bad interview, and for the “We’re sorry we cannot offer you a job at this time.” No apology necessary, really – good luck.

2. “Energy is eternal delight” – so its opposite is….?

(h/t to William Blake who, though dead, deserves eternal credit for the eternally delightful maxim.) If, like mine, your own heart seems to pump more espresso than blood, then it may be important to consider the energy coming from those interviewing you. I’m not saying interviewers need to be manic or anything; I’m just saying a lack of excitement, of a sort of buoyancy – of even a decorously restrained intensity – when discussing educational vision while courting for a temporary professional marriage may be, well, a screaming red flag. Granted, the interviewers are stuck in their hotel rooms interviewing candidate after candidate for many more straight hours than the candidates themselves, but still – we’re all teachers, current or past, so we should be pretty good at keeping our energy level up whenever a professional client enters the room, be it classroom or hotel room. The short version? Beware the droopy interviewer, and put a gold star by the inspired/inspiring one. You are, after all, bound to be sitting in many more meetings with them if you sign the contract to work with them. If they’re sleepy, chances are you’ll be a sleepy worker with them. But if they’re exciting – in a way that rings true (and we all have what Hemingway calls a “shock-proof sh!t-detector,” don’t we, to distinguish real from fake excitement, yes?) – then consider fishing your pocket for that ring, and dropping to your knees on the spot.

3. Interview questions make the interviewer.

By the end of the first of my four days of interviewing, it struck me how different interviews are based on the questions asked (and not asked) by the interviewer. Some of them seemed as stilted and scripted as the worst end-of-chapter questions from the worst textbooks (redundant?). They felt less like interviews than exercises in checking off the questions boxes. It wasn’t quite “schooliness,” so can we call it “interviewiness”?

The best interviews, on the other hand, were more free-flowing and responsive, characterized by give-and-take expansiveness as one party or the other heard something no script could predict.

4. Being yourself is better, come what may, than trying to be someone else.

Think about it. Not only does pretending to be what you’re not cheat your interviewer – it also cheats you. Show your true colors now, so you’ll know whether it’ll be okay to show them over the length of your contract. I love the fact that, at my second interview with the two interviewers for the school I chose, Singapore American School, I replied to a question by saying something to the effect of, “There’s no denying that people’s first impression of me is often, ‘Damn, Burell, you’re too intense!’ But after a while they see the rest of me, and realize I’m also mellow in my own way.” “Damn” is a soft enough word these days – and I certainly don’t toss out higher-level potty words like rhymes-with-fit or ends-many-limericks-about-Nantucket or leads-to-supposedly-eternal-damnation in professional company – and I wondered about the wisdom of the utterance after it escaped my mouth (and this was in like the middle of the second hour of the interview), but somehow the fact that the offer was still made left me feeling even happier than otherwise about accepting it when it came in hour three.

5. Check your ego at the door.

I got about an even mix of offers and rejections from the schools I talked to. One school in particular seemed so right after two interviews that getting the rejection note broadsided me with the force of a turbo-powered school bus. I bumped into one of the interviewers later, and he told me that choosing my competitor over me was the hardest decision they made the night before, and that it took them over an hour of group deliberation to make it. A rejection can happen for all sorts of reasons – maybe they needed yearbook experience you didn’t offer, or needed that administrator whose spouse happened to be a less-qualified candidate for the position you want. So don’t take it personally.

6. Remember to research.

I’m sure I blew one interview by expressing my desire to get experience in a program they didn’t offer, and expressing my distaste for the one they did. Oops. I’d mistakenly thought they did offer that program.

7. Benefits, preps, class sizes, and student mix.

You don’t offer a flight home after the first year? You don’t cover dependents? 70% of your student population is Korean? You laugh off the notion that four preps is too much for new (or old) teachers?

8. Courtesy is cool, good will is good stuff.

When it came down to thinking I’d be choosing between two very attractive schools, I told one of them how I hoped that saying “no” this time, if the decision went that way, wouldn’t close the door to a “yes” next time in years to come. The gentlemanly answer of the man I said this to was so winsome, I don’t know what to say, other than that it made me want to work in this man’s school even more. The answer was no less impressive for its simplicity, which was, simply, “Your saying no to us will offend us no more than we’d want to offend you if we said no to you. It’s the nature of the beast, and we understand that, so no doors will close at all.”

9. Remember to check yourself in the mirror before you leave your hotel room for the day’s interviews.

I can’t believe I forgot my belt. At least my fly wasn’t down.

That’s about it. Hope it helped, and fyi, Mr. Utecht, consider the assignment done

Ben Grey’s “21st Century Confusion” post asks a simple question that I’ve often toyed with too:

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills believes demonstrating originality, communicating, being open and responsive, acting on creative ideas, utilizing time efficiently, accessing information, etc. are all 21st Century Skills.  I’d retort that in reality, these skills have always been in existence and of the utmost importance.  They don’t need to have the 21st Century moniker on them to make them significant.

I’ve often wondered the same thing: “What’s all this talk of ’21st century literacy’? (Ben somewhat conflates “literacy” and “skills” in his post.)  Is there anything really new here?  My comment:

The only uniquely “21st century literacies” I can think of involve the web.

Students need to be able to evaluate information on screens upon which any sage, charlatan, or idiot can publish. That’s new (sort of. Books really are open to the same range of authors).

They need to learn “online identity management,” and I would argue that’s a new literacy. New because they’re publishing themselves, and that means reading/writing/speaking/filming/photo-ing (literacy), and 21st century because privacy has never been so porous as now. They need to know how to keep Big Brother, Big Employer, and Big Google from knowing too much.

They need to learn “social reading” online. By that attempt at a cute label I mean the ability to evaluate communication acts by strangers in social networks, emails, comment threads wherever, and the whole range of places people can attempt to connect to us individually now. They need to be able to “read” a phish, for example, and a fraudster, and yes, a p&rv.

Hm. What else. Co-writing might be new. “How to participate in collaborative writing communities.” Wikipedia, for example. I know I don’t know how to do that.

Could we even go so far as to say that social networking online is itself a “new literacy”? That networking is (or may be) an essential skill for adulthood in the 21st century?

Hm. Searching. That’s new, yes? How to effectively search for good, timely information online, and do so efficiently. I know I’m still not great at that.

I’ll stop there. Thanks for the prompt. I agree the “21st c.” buzz can be as tiresome as the “2.0.” But I think the Berners-Lee Revolution has created some unique changes, just as Gutenberg’s did. Can you see any I missed?

Who is Arne Duncan and how will his choice as Secretary of Education affect education in the US (and, for better or worse in this hegemonic age, much of the rest of the world)? I’ve spent so many hours since the announcement reading reactions online that both my eyes and my brain cells are fried. (Enjoy the Diigo bookmarks if you’re masochistic.) All that reading will have to steep for a while before I can serve it as tea.

Until that happens, I’m going to focus on one controversy surrounding Duncan, and toss out some thoughts on it. That controversy is performance pay for teachers.

Bill Ferriter’s excellent recent post on this issue at the Tempered Radical got me thinking. I replied there,

Thinking about it a little more, this is what I can come up with so far:

We’d have to define “merit” to include the higher-order thinking skills – analysis, synthesis, evalutation/critical thinking, creativity – that the best learning projects require. This is not the opposite of the “fact-based, right/wrong, multiple choice” testing that NCLB and the College Board/AP/SAT pushes, but what you might call the upward extension of it. Mastery of facts is the beginning, not the end, of the assessment for meritorious teaching and learning.

If we start there, that means teacher merit is measured by the types of projects that are assigned in the classroom – not by the standardized testing industry – and by the performance of students who complete these projects. This further means that said teacher measurement is performed not centrally, but locally – or perhaps by boards consisting of local and central judges. (I know that “central” is vague.)

My thinking is that if teachers were rewarded for designing learning activities that measured positively against a checklist of such higher-order thinking traits – and crucially, that the measurement was based not on a single unit, but on a portfolio of all units assigned throughout the semester or year (this eliminates the dog-and-pony show liability of single principal evaluations) – then the best teachers would be rewarded with higher pay, while the worst ones would have an incentive to change their practice for the better. Teaching to the test wouldn’t be the goal any more; teaching to higher instructional standards would be.

As for what those higher instructional standards would look like, we need look no further than Linda Darling-Hammond for answers. Her presentation linked in an earlier post lays the groundwork for such guidelines.

As I commented on Will’s post about the Duncan pick,

Since Darling-Hammond led BO’s ed transition team, she may have had his ear long enough to fill it with good sense on how to reform NCLB’s assessments for the better – so that they align with better teaching-and-learning.

And I just discovered Bill Ferriter posted a follow-up to my comment, so off I go to fry a few more cells. Bill’s worth it.

[Update: Oh my goodness. Seems the student writing below is, shall we say, not entirely original. I'm still thankful for the gesture, oddly.]

Call me slow. I’m spring cleaning in December. Old papers may as well follow old leaves.

And I come across this, which a 15-year-old student,  who never said much of anything (in a “still waters running deep” way) during his year in my Asian history class in Shanghai, gave me at mid-year.

Why he decided to re-write me as a character who’d been a poor villager in Nazi-occupied WW II, I’ll never know.

Before tossing the paper, I had to scan it. Call this post part of an “open file cabinet.”

My question: Why can’t I show this to prospective employers as a recommendation letter?  And my caveat: I can only hope he was serious. It’s hard to tell.  And my mis-giving: how much “light-reflecting into dark places” can you do in school – especially if you shine that light in places too close to home?

"This is the meaning of my life."

Life is interesting.