Some Sad School Stories

There are forty students enrolled in my third hour class.  Thirty showed up today: one had been suspended, nine others were truant. 

For the previous two classes, their homework—as explained at the beginning and end of each class and posted on the board—was to get a copy of a novel from a list I’d given them, and merely to bring it in to class today.  The list included authors such as Mark Twain and Ray Bradbury (and, for that matter, J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer) among two dozen others, the only other requirement being that the book they choose be at least 250 pages long.  I told them that our school librarian had a copy of the list and could help them find a book.  Obviously, they had a few hundred books to choose from.

Out of the thirty students in class today, only ten had a book.  A few others probably had a book but left it at home.  However, the vast majority of the unprepared twenty clearly hadn’t put forth any effort at all, hadn’t bothered to write down or remember the assignment, and had lost or thrown away my handout list.  They didn’t even care enough to try to do it.  Keep in mind that the assignment was merely to have a copy of the book with them.  That was it. 

And only one-fourth of the kids in that class will get credit for it. 

Is this a remedial class?  Far from it. 

The First Four Weeks

The first four weeks of school are over.  Some thoughts:

• As students transition into using new vocabulary words in their own writing, they seem to have an instinct for using unfamiliar words as adjectives.  I find myself reviewing parts of speech much more than I’d like to at the high school level.  Most teens need to be reminded that parts of speech are not interchangeable.  The first word of our first unit is “adulterate,” the verb meaning “to corrupt or make impure.”  Without closer guidance, they’ll just use it like this: “He was a really adulterate guy.”  Of course, if they’re talking about Bill Clinton, I guess I could give them half credit.
• I usually don’t like open house, the annual night where parents come in to meet their kids’ teachers.  I never know what to do up there, not that it ever makes any difference, anyway.  Life goes on as if it never happened, and I forget everyone I met as soon as I go home.  This year, though, one parent thanked me for assigning  a list of options from which students have to choose for their independent reading this quarter.  “If you hadn’t assigned these,” she said, “the kids would never read them.”  It’s nice enough to get a compliment, but it’s even better when a parent understands the reasoning behind what I do!
• Yesterday, a college student called me to say that he’d missed the last two weeks of class because his grandmother died.  He offered to bring me a note from his parents.  I told him that was unnecessary. 
• Every year I notice this: before our morning announcements, kids in an honors class will all stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance together.  Kids in non-honors classes rarely will.  It’s a very stark, and very absolute, difference.  This begs a chicken-or-the-egg question: is a student’s citizenship influenced by their academic performance, or is their academic performance influenced by their citizenship?  Or are both, perhaps, shaped by the same factors in the home environment…

Our Greatest Double Standard

It still always surprises me when a student blithely declares anything unfamiliar or which requires sustained concentration to be “boring,” and then dismisses it, as though their snap judgment is all the criteria necessary for rejecting something as unworthy of their effort.

What is it about us that we’re so accustomed to labelling something “boring” so quickly, and then so definitively putting it behind us and never looking back?  Why don’t we consider this trend, which developed fairly recently in our society’s history but which now has roots as deep as any cherished value, with any more scrutiny? 

Think about this: when we call something boring, what are we really saying?  What we usually mean is not that it is too inherently dull, but that it is too difficult to comprehend.  (Certainly, that’s what students mean.)  But when did it become such a virtue to announce that we are incapable of handling something?  Why do we now feel that it’s acceptable to ignore anything that taxes us? 

Imagine someone going into a gym and trying to lift five pounds.  They find it very hard.  Any normal person would think, “Wow, I’m really weak.  That’s awful.  I need to exercise until I’m stronger.”  But if we approached this situation the way many of us approach mental tasks, we’d think, “Wow, that’s too heavy.  This is stupid.  This is for losers.  I’m out of here.” 

And thus we become a society of intellectually flabby brain-wimps.  Worse, we become a nation of brain-wimps that prides itself on its ignorance, doing so in an unspoken compact where we pretend that our weakness is a virtue, so that we can reinforce each other’s desperation to ignore it.

New (School) Year’s Resolutions

On this eve of yet another glorious year of teaching, I want to set three goals for myself to improve my work.  After reflecting on what my strengths and weaknesses are, and what I want to achieve, I’ve settled on these basics:

1.  More time for independent readings in class.  Each quarter will start with a good book chosen by each student from my lists, and I’ll set aside a couple of class days to read and take notes and/or fill out a log.  After that, they might bring in their own stuff for a few more days of reading here and there.  We read plenty in my classes, but it’s usually from the textbook, with most of their other reading being done on their own.  That doesn’t cut it.  This will pack in more quantity of reading, which kids desperately need.

2.  Speaking of desperate needs, we’ll do more short, spontaneous compositions with instant editing and feedback.  I always want to do more of this, but never get around to it, and it’s so essential.  Quick writing workshops with paragraph-or-two compositions that they’ll peer edit / I’ll edit and they revise in another quick draft, all in one day.  This will benefit their mechanics better than enything else I can think of.  This must be done every other week, at least. 

3.  Finally, I’ll be nicer.  Not in class, I mean, where if anything I should be more strict and where my ability to act enthusiastic when “on stage” serves me well, but outside of class, when kids come in for help or make up work, or when I see kids outside of school.  As it is, my painfully shy, introverted side takes over there and I tend to mumble dismissive one liners and look the other way.  As much as I hate to admit it, a more engaging personality from me does improve classroom performance for them, so here’s one to work on…

Summer School Follies

First of all, I like summer school. Its compacted time frame forces it to be rigorous, disciplined, and serious. Tardies and absences get hammered pretty quickly, daily quizzes and grade updates keep the kids on top of their game, and the fact that they (or their parents) had to pay for it creates an immediate investment that improves their own efforts. These kids may have messed up, but their desperation now brings out the best in them.

 

However, this summer I’ve noticed that too many kids come into summer school in an entirely wrong state of mind.

 

And I don’t just mean the stoner who asked to go to the bathroom about an hour and a half into the first day of school, and who never came back.

 

One boy just this morning looked at his failing grades in my class and rattled off his list of excuses, clearly a well prepared and rehearsed litany that he’s used comfortably for years. I can only surmise that he started this class, as he may start all of his classes, intending to “see what happens,” and fall back on his excuses if and when he fails. I just can’t get people like this to be more proactive, to overcome the fatalism that got deeply instilled in them somewhere along the line.

 

In June, a girl with special ed problems gave me two papers that had been due the week before, both very poorly done, and without any discussion with me about it first.

50 More Things New Teachers Need To Know

“Don’t hit the kids and don’t hit on the kids.”  If I had to summarize my best advice about teaching in just one saying, that would be it.  However, last summer’s post, 50 Things New Teachers Need To Know, went into a bit more detail and has now garnered thousands of hits, making it this blog’s most popular post.

During the school year between then and now, I’ve made some more notes and now have this new collection ready.  As I say at the end, take it all with a grain of salt, but I have no doubt that this list is more useful than a bachelor’s degree in education.  Furthermore, I like this list even more than last year’s.  Enjoy!

 

1. Cover any windows on hallway-facing doors to your room from the inside with paper. If administrators complain about it, just cover as much as you can at eye level.  You don’t need lollygaggers out there distracting students by making faces at their friends in your class.

2. PC Myth #5: “Your teaching skills are more important than content knowledge.”  In my own undergrad days, an early class taught me that I wouldn’t need to worry about subject knowledge because I already had more than the students would, and I should just focus on methodology, classroom management, etc.  As a result, I spent my first couple of years as a teacher watching all those college theories go down in flames, and desperately playing catch up on the English facts that I needed to know to teach well. 

3.  Always remember: administrators are politicians. 

The Great Grade Bailout

There is a great inequity in justice in our public school systems.  I refer, of course, to the fact that some students have higher grades than others.  This can only be the result of institutional disenfranchisement, and must be corrected by government intervention.  Besides, our nation’s future faces catastrophic academic failure if we don’t artificially prop it up now.

By which I mean, the failing students need a bailout.

All of those kids who are only half as likely to do any kind of studying or homework as they are to even show up at all will be granted a special dispensation from the Department of Education, something in the neighborhood of, say, 800 billion points.  (Though, what with corruption, unforeseen needs, and poor management, that total will likely exceed a trillion points.)

So every slacker who sat there and chose to finish a class with a 2% grade will now get to graduate, which is perfectly fair.  Uncle Sam will guarantee the success of every student in America.  After all, what with the obesity epidemic, most American kids are “too big to fail.”

On Effective Education: Why Don’t Students Like School?

I read this fantastic book review this week in the Wall Street Journal (courtesy of a link from Arts & Letters Daily–let’s give credit where credit’s due).  Daniel Willingham’s new book, Why Don’t Students Like School?, gives the perspective of a cognitive scientist reviewing the research on the psychology of education.  Among his assertions (as reflected in the book review) are:

• “When we confront a task that requires us to exert mental effort, it is critical that the task be just difficult enough to hold our interest but not so difficult that we give up in frustration….The challenge, for the teacher, is to design lessons and exercises that will maximize interest and attention and thus make students like school at least a bit more.”
• On drilling: “research shows that practice not only makes a skill perfect but also makes it permanent, automatic and transferable to new situations, enabling more complex work that relies on the basics.”
• “He advocates teaching old-fashioned content as the best path to improving a student’s reading comprehension and critical thinking.”
• And my favorite part, on multiple intelligences: “No one has found consistent evidence supporting a theory describing such a difference. . . . Children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn….At some point, no amount of dancing will help you learn more algebra.”

I added a comment to the WSJ article commending this book for deflating the vacuous trends of politically correct schooling today.  My professional development classes and meetings drive me bonkers.

 

This book isn’t in the local library system’s inventory yet; better put in an order.

 

Progress At West Prep

My first year teaching, during the 2000-2001 school year, was at West Middle School, which was arguably the worst school in Las Vegas.  Located in one of the oldest, poorest parts of the city, I remember one staff meeting we had that January, so the police department could brief us on the gang war going on in that neighborhood, which had taken the lives of several people within a mile of the school within the last few months, and which had plenty of ties to kids on campus. 

Not surprisingly, West had over a 90% teacher turnover rate each year, and I admit I was one of those who left as soon as I could, bound for greener pastures where I hoped my skills could be more appreciated, and more than a little out of fear and intimidation at what overwhelmed me as a profoundly hopeless situation.  I’ve always had mixed feelings about my cynicism, and have secretly hoped for something to prove me wrong. 

Now, a glimmer of hope comes.  A story in the Las Vegas Review-Journal this week chronicles the improvements made at West, especially a dramatic increase in passing the state’s proficiency test for this year’s juniors (West is expanding to become a K-12 school). 

Things that the article suggests contributed to the improvements are:

• extra per-pupil spending from the school district and federal sources

Email About A Truant Student

The following is an email I just sent to a parent of a student.  The young man in question was caught leaving school with some friends by another teacher on his prep period.  Sadly, this kind of communication is not especially rare in my work experience: I send emails like this one at least a few times per semester, and could send several times as many more, if more parents even bothered to request “make up work.” 

(This parent must have “appealed” [read: demanded, begged, threatened to sue] the school, so his blatant string of skipped classes have all been “excused.”  This was the second time this week a [nominal] student of mine had such an array of ditched days excused, though the parents of the other boy didn’t have the effrontery to ask for “make up work” for two months of voluntary truancy.)

Mrs. _______, A request for make up work for your son _____ has come to my attention. Since starting to come back to class recently, _____ has shown little engagement in class work, much less motivation to discuss making up what he missed during his absences (on one vocabulary assignment that he did do–writing example sentences to illustrate the meanings of words–the majority of his sentences simply said, “________ is a big word”).

With 14 absences at this point in the semester [in my class alone], and the majority of those within the last few weeks, he has a staggering load of “make up” work to do. Add to that the fact that practically none of that work is just a simple worksheet that can be handed out; most work involves examples, class discussions, and extensive reading. Such work can be made up, but it is difficult and requires a commitment of time in here outside of school hours. Further, he has missed a few quizzes on material that he was not here to review; making those up with any kind of quality will obviously be very difficult.

That being said, he’s welcome to try, and I’m certainly here to help him do so. What he would absolutely need to do is come in with at least ten or fifteen minutes set aside, before or after school, to get started on some of this “make up” work, but that’s just a start. Hopefully he can get some of this work turned in for some credit when we return from Christmas Break.

_____ got a 50.9% first quarter, and currently stands at a 20.4%. A productive thing to do at this point is to start planning for how he will make up the credits he will probably lose this semester, especially since the long block schedule, with its two extra classes per semester, may not be available next year.

_____ has potential and doesn’t seem to have any academic problem in his way, so certainly next semester could be very successful. I wish you both good luck and look forward to seeing him in class regularly, where I’m sure he can do very well.

Clearly, I’m trying to introduce a dose of reality to this situation, without being quite confrontational enough to warrant any ire directed at me.  I don’t need any more grief this close to Christmas.

I think I’ll keep this email as a form letter for future use.  Please tell me that other states aren’t like this.

Bad Parent Stories

After my most popular letter to the editor appeared last year, a letter venting frustration about the lack of rigorous, involved parenting in Southern Nevada and the subsequent failure of students to achieve, I wanted to compile a book of bad parent stories for teachers to enjoy.  I planned to collect anecdotes about the clueless, the neglectful, and the flat out moronic.  As we tend to say around here, the apple doesn’t fall far from the idiot tree. 

I put queries and invitations on several places online, but never got a string response.  I’m still interested in doing the book, though.  In fact, if anyone sees this and wants to share a “bad parent” story, please let me know. 

Here are six of my favorites:

1. A couple of years ago, a high school counselor I knew had
an irate father come into his office at the beginning of a
school day. The father announced that his daughter had
come to school with inappropriate thong underwear on, and
demanded to know what the counselor was going to do about
it. The counselor was momentarily stunned, but replied
that there was really nothing that the school could do.
Fuming, the father left. He never explained how he knew
what kind of underwear his daughter was wearing, and we
never asked.

2. My first time teaching summer school, I sent a girl to
the office for a clear dress code violation: her shirt had
strings for shoulder straps and a neckline that plunged
halfway to her waist. As soon as the school day ended, the
girl came striding into my room with a smug smirk on her
face, and her mother storming in beside her. The mother
demanded to know why I was looking at her daughter’s
chest. I stammered, then told her that she had to discuss
this with an administrator first. Since then, I’ve had
trouble enforcing dress codes.

3. In one parent conference, a mother was presented with
evidence that her son had skipped every one of his classes
for two weeks.

“Could these records be wrong?” she asked.

After a pause, during which the teachers gave each other
confused looks, I asked, “You mean, did all six of us
mistakenly mark your son absent? Every day? For two
weeks?”

She didn’t miss a beat. “It could happen.”

The Kind Of Day This Teacher Lives For

Friday was productive.  I didn’t plan anything special, but by about the middle of the day, I realized that it was a really good one. 

After a simple error identification and correction exercise on the projector for a warm up (courtesy of Yahoo!), most of my classes were studying Oedipus Rex, which I’d perform aloud as they read along and stop two or three times per page to summarize in my joking, pop-culture heavy style (“So Oedipus is getting all paranoid and Tiresias just keeps throwing down sarcastic one-liners,” or “‘Get hence, ye scurvy, pockmarked, wrathful knave’? I didn’t know Paris Hilton lived in ancient Greece!”).  Most of this goes over reasonably well.

The middle of the day was just a few minutes spent correcting an assignment from last week in class and a brief quiz over today’s Oedipus reading, then I checked that they had brought in novels for this quarter that fit my length and difficulty requirements (almost all did).  The last half hour was given to letting them read on their own (a grade being given for staying on task), and those without books were given the first chapter of Anna Karenina to copy–the rationale being that copying work of such terrific quality is a decent exercise in itself (a language arts version of tracing, really; an elementary activity which we too often ignore because it’s not jazzy enough for the postmodern classroom), it’s the only way most of them will ever get to encounter this famous classic (“Every happy family is alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”), and the farily boring nature of the work should be an incentive to bring a novel in next time (though this sometimes backfires: some of the lowest achievers–those who tend never to bring books–actually love basic skills work, cherishing its lack of higher thought and engagement.  Some remedial students would jump at the chance to copy the dictionary all day, every day, if it meant never having to think or do real work.). 

Anyway, it was during the silent reading time of one of these classes that, as Mozart’s overture to The Magic Flute was playing over king.org (which my computer speakers waft into the room most days), I realized what a pleasantly productive day this was.  In class after class, nearly everybody was engaged in useful mental training.  Too many educrats these days chant their lemming mantra that a class must be noisy and rowdy to be learning something, but I find that kids today are overstimulated, and creating a calmer environment is a necessary antidote; if work is mature and challenging, they’ll usually respect it and rise to the occasion. 

More On (Moron?) Staff Development Days

An excerpt from an email I sent to some school district administrators earlier today:

 

Perhaps the best idea I have for tightening the belt around here is to drastically streamline our staff development days. 

 

In a ninth season episode of The Simpsons entitled, “Lost Our Lisa,” the children feel sorry for their teachers, because the kids get to have fun on a day off while the teachers have to be “cooped up at school” on a staff development day.  The scene then cuts to a close-up of the principal mumbling to a bored-looking teacher, “Well, here we go again,” after which the camera pulls back to reveal the staff of the school on a roller coaster at an amusement park.  The joke is on the writers, though: their irony turns out to be quite realistic.

 

From the presentation by a company selling “edutainment” software that we neither need nor could afford, to the breakout sessions with no leader or coherent goal, to the condescending silliness at the start and end of the day, Tuesday’s staff development was a laughingstock failure.  I don’t say this to indict any certain individuals responsible for its planning, but when we face budget shortfalls and a lack of student achievement, it’s almost criminal to continue having these inservice days with the philosophy that they’re for “entertainment” and “team building.” 

 

In the interest of the quality of the education that we provide, I need to suggest that we radically alter staff development days in the district.  Shouldn’t staff development days be devoted to reviewing effective teaching strategies and curricula, and letting departments communicate with each other about immediate concerns specific to their campus and department?  Not to mention, letting teachers have some extra planning time?  What else could a staff development day legitimately be for? 

 

Budget cuts have to be made, and isn’t it reasonable to start with the catered lunches, silly technology-heavy presentations, pointless professional guest speakers, and trophies that cluttered up this most recent staff day? 

 

 

 

Classic Letter: Bad Parents

Education-related posts are a little harder to come by in the middle of July, but here’s something that’s never far from my mind.  This letter ran in the March 13, 2007 issue of the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

 

Bad parents

To the editor:

Your recent editorials about school grades rising in the face of failing test scores, and Jim Day’s Friday cartoon about grading parents, have opened a Pandora’s box of irritation. I can no longer politely shrug when we wonder why Nevada children lag so far behind the rest of the nation.

Our schools do not teach in some backward fashion, while other states use fancy methods we can’t find out about. Here’s the elephant in the room: Our children disproportionately fail because Las Vegas is home to some of the worst parents in America.

I’ve seen too many educations ruined by parents who let kids take two or three vacations during the school year; who spoil their children with so many electronic toys and negative fashions that apathy is the obvious result; and who excuse, ignore or even encourage today’s ubiquitous sex and drug use (to say nothing of those poor students being raised by their grandmothers, who still dress like hookers), to say anything else.

There is an epidemic in our schools of parents who demand that the bar be lowered for their kids, who huff and puff about any poor grade or referral to the office and threaten their way into special treatment, who bully the schools, but who won’t keep up with their kids’ grades or check their homework.

Too many of you see yourselves as little more than landlords whose greatest vision for parenting is just to keep children alive and out of jail.

Stop modeling attitudes that will only be counter-productive for your children. Teach them that you expect results and that you will take the school’s side when they screw up. Don’t let them beg for a schedule change or lamely demand “a sheet of make-up work” to atone for three weeks’ truancy, or skip a class because they can make it up online. Kick them in the butt and take their iPod away. Ground them, for heaven’s sake.

Frankly, my colleagues and I are getting tired of cleaning up your mess.

 

I’ve had letters similar to this one printed before and since (see, especially, here), but none has ever had such an impact.  Within two days of this letter appearing, I received about thirty emails, mostly from other teachers in my school district, and mostly from complete strangers.  Every last one was not only positive, but praised me for saying what they had been wanting to say for years.  Some of the writers even told tragic stories of their own emotional abuse at the hands of a system that officially places them between a rock and a hard place, assigning us to teach young people, but tying our hands with a hundred knots and ignoring the things that actually hold students back.

I’m told that the principal at another high school posted it on that school’s email bulletin board for the staff to read.  At other schools copies were made and passed around among the teachers, samizdat-style.  A local AM radio station used it as a starting point for discussion.

That was the best thing about this letter–it really seemed to help release some pent up tension for a lot of good people who needed it. 

Wanting to go further with that, I thought about compiling a book of stories from teachers about their experiences with clueless parents, both the hilarious and the depressing.  I batted the idea around on some online bulletin boards and got a tepid response, at best.  Oh well.  At least it did some good.

And the backlash I expected never materialized because, I now see, nobody would want to identify themselves as the kind of parent I was griping about!

Review of Gatto’s “Dumbing Us Down,” Chapter 2

After reading endless superlative references to him in the columns of Las Vegas Review-Journal author Vin Suprynowicz, I have decided to read a book by renegade educator John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling.  Read the first part of my critique of this book here.  This essay covers chapter two of the book.

Gatto calls the public school model psychopathic, describing it with phrases like “a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class,” and “move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong.”  Never mind that the first is exactly how people choose to group themselves in normal adult life and that the second is a jaundiced version of what more objective observers would call organization and time management, rather than insidious tools in a soul-crushing, brain-washing conspiracy.

 

Gatto’s crude caricature of school fails because he never connects his vision of school—with its routines and schedules—directly to the academic malaise he bemoans at the beginning of the chapter. 

 

That being said, I’ll agree with him on one point.  Children are institutionalized at school.  Gatto would probably say because of school, but I merely share the observation that kids tend to mindlessly shuffle through their routine.  For example, I’ve lost count of how many students ditch school or neglect their work to the point that their grade barely registers as a percentage, but who show up on the last day for the final exam and work their hearts out for hours.  There is, of course, no chance for them to pass the class and get credit at that point, so why do they do it?  My only answer is that they must be very well programmed to follow the overall conventions of the school-centered life.  

 

But I see that “programming” as evidence of being spoiled, not brainwashed.  It’s the product of an entire childhood of being coddled, of being ensured a safety net—by entitlement-minded parents set on auto pilot, by a media that indulges their every hedonistic whim to a degree that Caligula would have thought excessive, and only partially by a school system that inflates grades and promotes them socially.  Ironically, the cure for the apathy that Gatto sees isn’t to make school far different in form, but to make it more strict—and therefore more effective—in its current form.  But that would only work partially, because the other aspects of a young person’s life which influence him or her far more than school—home and media—are beyond our control.  (To his credit, Gatto does admit that television has a greater effect on children than school, but neglects to propose solutions to the problems that causes.)

 

Gatto labels this malady “dependency,” and he’s absolutely right to do so.  But this dependency on “the man” to tell you how to live isn’t created by schools—in fact, it’s well in place before most students step into Kindergarten—it’s merely enabled by a school system that fails to combat it aggressively enough.  The structure of school isn’t broken, it just isn’t employed rigorously enough.

 

Higher standards and expectations would raise achievement like nothing else.  I know because that’s what worked for the colonial and pioneer eras that Gatto so adores.  He seems to imply that there was some radically alternative method of schooling back then that we’ve lost.  Sadly, he never gets around to explaining what this is (he doesn’t appear to have a very good conception of the old-fashioned one-room schoolhouse—where do rulers and paddles fit into your paradigm, Mr. Gatto?), but, yet again ironically, that system which was corrupted by the Industrial Revolution (another point on which we agree) was not individualistic, it was regimented, mechanical, and authoritarian.  (This truth is perhaps best laid bare in Dorothy Sayers’ classic essay, “The Lost Tools of Learning.”)

 

Perhaps the best argument against Gatto’s “school is an assembly line that only produces government-worshipping drones” thesis is this: where’s the beef?  Where do we see hordes of public school graduates whose eyes zone out at the very mention of school and robotically chant, “I love Big Brother”?  In actuality, school does the opposite of what Gatto claims: many, if not most, students, drunk on the intoxicant of countless media models, reflexively combat the school system via apathy, truancy, and shallow work, most often to their own detriment, and usually solidifying a lifelong hatred of school in the process.  To me, a hundred hostile parent conferences prove this. 

 

Gatto also decries the “loss of private time” foisted upon students by school.  Is he suggesting that less time drilling in algebra and more time staring at caterpillars under shady elm trees would boost math scores?  If so, he forgets to clarify it, much less document it, though the existing research (see my earlier post on this subject) and common sense dictate otherwise.  (Though perhaps Gatto would agree with Lowell Monke’s excellent essay, “Charlotte’s Webpage: Why children shouldn’t have the world at their fingertips,” which shares his concerns about the degradation of independence, interaction, and imagination, though Monke lays the blame squarely at the doorstep of electronic entertainment technology parading as educationally valuable.  Amen.)

 

Perhaps I’m not being charitable; in all fairness, Gatto does emphasize a loss of social and imaginative development in his comments against the unstructured time vampire that is school.  However, he does not account for the fact that much of today’s schools are disproportionately engaged in group work or “cooperative learning” or some similar counterproductive fad.  More than a few truculent students have told me over the years that the only reason they don’t drop out is because school is where they see their friends, which would seem to rebut Gatto’s school-as-Gulag position.  But at least it demonstrates that institutionalizing isn’t the only thing keeping our kids in school!  J

 

At one point, Gatto lists eight distressing facets of the identity of modern young people (all quite real), but in his zeal to blame them on school, he takes logic to a brave new world—how in the world do the bells between classes invariably lead to a dearth of curiosity?  Mr. Gatto, it’s not just the time spent watching television that hurts children, it’s the amoral content.  They get it there, not at school. 

 

I’m also confused when Gatto criticizes the doctrinaire public education system of “the last 140 years.”  All of the problems we see—mental and emotional—are products of the post-WWII period, less than half of the time the current models of public school have existed.  Perhaps Gatto ignores this because it would invalidate his anti-school thesis.

 

Gatto’s suggestions for solutions near the end of the chapter amount to engaging in a national “debate” (about what?) and, especially, letting children do more independent study.  I agree that ultimately a well-educated person must be an autodidact, but it is foolish to think that students who have little self-control or study skills, much less goals or ambitions that they can articulate, would benefit from being set loose to do it all on their own.  Also, Gatto’s scheme of encouraging ad-hoc apprenticeships would do little to inculcate literacy or computational skills.  Is he seriously suggesting that America’s intellectual deficit is the result of not enough unsupervised field trips? 

 

The most disturbing thing in the chapter is Gatto’s assertion that time needs to be taken away from school so that students might have “large doses of privacy and solitude,” when by his own accounting, students spend far more time watching television (55 hours—far lower than the actual 2008 total) than attending or preparing for school (45 hours—far inflated).  Such poor selection of targets makes for irresponsible reform.  By ignoring the media and lacerating school, Gatto is tilting at windmills.

 

Gatto’s call for a “curriculum of the family” is honorable, but in the age of day care, not practical.  I can’t believe that he would have us campaign for family-involved public education (this would certainly pose controversial problems for the large percentage of students with missing, uninterested, or otherwise unavailable “families”!), which assumes that we can count on community factors far beyond our control, yet he declines to include a head-on campaign against the abuse of electronic entertainment media, which is obviously the major culprit in America’s mental decline, and a goal for which we can conceivably make progress.

 

Or is it just easier to blame the big bad bogeyman of school than it is to ask America to reform its media-saturated lifestyle?