Time to Teach

Six students and how they work after CSAP Tests

Ann — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 03:33:54 +0000

There were the two weeks of nothing but CSAP testing in March. And then there was a ragged week of make-up tests mixed with remnants of projects and curricular themes still remembered that were cobbled together in those four days of the last week of school before spring break.

Returning to school as we turned the page to April, how did our six students restart and recover from this long pause that featured such intense scrutiny of what they had learned?

Mason has been mostly adrift, unable to remember his enthusiasm for the Marco Polo report he started sometime in March. He has spent a lot of time in the puzzle corner, succesfully avoiding the lessons about decimal numbers that I have been trying to give fourth graders. I finally insisted that he attend one, but have not seen any follow-up work or indication that it is on his radar. He has dutifully done his homework and the follow-up writing. In general, however, the fires of interest are eerily missing.

Rosalee has returned to her passion—writing, especially reports. She has a friend about 10 steps ahead of her in terms of both writing and thinking skills, but she eagerly pursues that friend to work with her and sometimes perseveres when the friend tires of the project. Currently she is finishing a report on Barack Obama, having gathered from newspapers and magazines in our files a respectable number of facts about him and organized them in a reasonable sequence. She likes all the parts of preparing a report: collecting facts on little slips of paper, organizing them in piles for paragraphs, writing a rough draft and having me read it with her (and partner, who is still less interested), typing it up, printing it, drawing pictures or collecting things for her poster board, cutting and pasting lots of colored paper together for the display board and the cover of her report. It is no surprise that her strides with the English language are huge. There seems to have been little disruption of this passion. There has been, however, a total loss of interest in math that I thought was just beginning to occupy a little corner of her mind prior to the tests.

Fifth grader Louis has lost no momentum, eager for lessons in math and geometry, abstracting as fast as he can so that he can go on to the next lesson. Even passionage about sentence diagramming, and writing a report that is longer than any he has written before—building confidence in all areas. Much of this may be attributable to the fact that he has been accepted at a prestigious middle school for next year.

Amanda, too, seems to have maintained her momentum, going back to some of the math and geometry work she was doing before the tests, understanding with repetition just a little more each time. Her grasp of math and geometry concepts is tenuous, but she is tenancious about holding on to what she can understand about them and doing some more of the same. Her writing output seems somewhat less, but she has been enthusiastically reading a literature study book that all the fifth grade girls are also reading.

Jonas, sixth grader, stays about the same—putting as little effort into his academic endeavors as is humanly possible while still staying out of trouble. He does seem more engaged when he is working with younger or less capable students, teaching them something he knows. The testing seems to have had no impact. I’m sure he thinks he “aced” it.

Melissa seems more confident than she was a month ago. She has abstracted decimal operations and mixed number operations; she has begun to work indendently with squaring and square root, using materials. She is stalled on a report that was begun before the tests, but more from social distractions than work avoidance. She has scored well on several short tests about the human body, a unit of study especially to help sixth graders get ready for recall tests. In general, the CSAP experience didn’t seem to have much impact.

I am surprised. Mason seems to be the only student whose momentum was seriously compromised by that lost month. Maybe during this coming week I can help him restart his engine and get engaged again. . .with something he cares about. Maybe I can find out if his confidence is shaken and help to restore it.

If only one of six has been negatively impacted by the two weeks of state-mandated testing, then there are probably only about 5 to 7 students in the class who need my attention in helping them recover. I think I know who they are. Unfortunately I have just gotten a notice that next week—-a week from tomorrow and exactly one month of Mondays after the last CSAP test finished, there will be a week of “Benchmark tests” to measure progress since September, when we took the first round of those tests. DPS requirement!

On the Brink of the 2009 CSAPs

Ann — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 18:28:42 +0000

This morning I have a few extra minutes before leaving for school. The administration has canceled all morning meetings for faculty so that we can be ready for the CSAP (Colorado Student Assessment Program) tests, which begin today. NEVER on Mondays! I’m trying not to be cynical, not to think too much about the implications of canceling meetings for these tests. Trying not to dwell on the many many morning meetings that have prevented me from being adequately prepared for the lessons of the day—introducing the Periodic Table, for example. Or organizing my notes so that I can tell the story of the History of Mathematics or setting up the rig that demonstrates the power of movable pulleys or the equipment needed to dissect frogs or the materials for introducing the concepts of phrases and clauses which, in a Montessori classroom, involves many small wooden parts.

So instead, I will review the present frames of mind of my special six students whose stories I have told in small vignettes through this school year.

Fourth grader Rosalee completed her February Portfolio late yesterday afternoon. It described the work samples she had chosen in carefully written cursive. Capital letters were in place, and a few periods—no commas, yet. The sentences still lacked grammatical correctness, but the bold clear writing indicated that she had been thinking clearly about the reasons for her choices and that she felt confident she had done well. She has been checking out lots of books from the library— silly, scary and amazing facts books; she has spent lots of time reading them with her friend and sometimes on her own. She completed her first fraction workbook with help from me and from home; still wonders what decimal fractions are. Yesterday morning I helped her through the steps of solving a challenging math problem that involved area, subtraction, reasoning, and explanation. It was beyond her, but she patiently listened and tried to understand, I think. Only three days ago did Rosalee pick up a CSAP math workbook designed to prepare students for the tests. I have been inviting the students to work with me in small groups on the problems in the math book for about three weeks, but strictly on a voluntary basis. Rosalee was always doing other things. She did participate enthusiastically in my “statistics group,” which has been collecting data from the class and making bar graphs.

Fourth grader Mason has done several advanced math exercises in the past two months including the square of the trinomial (a + b + c) x (a + b + c), using numbers (200 + 30 + 4) x (200 + 30 + 4) rather than the algebraic representation, but understanding it well. He, too, had difficulty understanding the multiple steps in reasoning about the area problem yesterday, but he listened to me and the group he was working with; and, in the end, he was able to help the group present the solution with understanding. Later I showed him another set of materials that demonstrated area, and he quickly made the connections. He has mainly focused on his reading (just completed the Harry Potter series and is onto another big book) and his writing, which has become less tedious work for him. He has written several short reports with different friends and is proud of the cursive writing he has been doing in his journal where he throws in a Haiku poem from time to time. Yesterday for the first time he asked if he could have a CSAP math workbook. He worked for half an hour with it, and then he turned it back in to me.

Amanda, a fifth grader, has been working steadfastly as always, repeating geometric proofs and the squaring exercises with pegs (binomial and trinomial) diligently. She is always enthusiastic about new lessons such as drawing equivalent rectangles or using materials to divide fractions; but when she leaves the materials behind and tries to solve a problem like the area problem of yesterday morning, she is not able to apply what she has been practicing. She finds that frustrating and discouraging. She needs lots more practice with all of the concrete representations that surround her in the classroom before she can use her slowly increasing mathematical understanding abstractly. She loves grammar exercises such as diagramming sentences, and she has written a report or two since the winter holidays; but she mostly stays attached to the materials in her work. Amanda has wanted no part of the workbooks that are provided to prepare for CSAPs.

Louis suddenly grasped the whole concept of squaring large numbers about a month ago, going quickly from squaring the binomial to the trinomial and the quadranomial. He has continued to push the envelope for “new lessons,” so he has been calculating circumference and diameter with Pi, working with percentage, and delving into building compound molecules. He has also been enthusiastic about working in the Math CSAP workbook, meeting with me a couple of times a week for the last three weeks and demonstrating that he can solve most of the problems at the fifth grade level without assistance. He has written several nice essays as applications for middle schools; his sentence structure shows progress, but the spelling continues to be dismal.

Sixth grader Melissa is mostly about her friends and her jade plant which, happily, has turned into a careful study of its growth, systematic measuring and leaf counts; and with a friend, notes about the jade plant that seem to be turning very slowly into a report. She doesn’t feel well many days. In math she seemed to understand operations with mixed numbers without too much difficulty, but I wonder if she could solve a problem she hadn’t seen before without consulting a friend. She has enjoyed the study of the Human Body, especially the coloring book. She tends to go limp during math problem-solving sessions, suggesting to me that she has not really learned to think mathematically, to reason in the linear and systematic way required for solving math problems. Her low energy is an impediment. Pre-pubescent?

Jonas is lazy as ever. Unless he is sitting beside me being challenged directly, he is off making sure that he continues to be the most popular boy in the class, working often on simple report subjects with younger boys. He studies the Human Body, too, and enjoyed making a model of the human cell with a sixth grade girl, but in the end didn’t have the perseverance to label the model and make it a meaningful learning episode. Nevertheless, when the sixth graders take a quiz on their Human Body studies, he always makes 90 or 95% He quickly understood mixed number operations. Yesterday he built a beautiful model of a rectangular prism and calculated the surface area—at my table and at my insistence. When working with a problem-solving group in math, he just sits around until others solve the problem

And so we are poised for the CSAP first round this morning and afternnoon. How well can they read and write? I wonder if the test will tell us anything about that? Of more interest to me will be what effect these two-plus weeks of testing will have on their learning trajectories.

January Report and Looking Down the Second Semester Road

Ann — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 22:24:44 +0000

January, the first month of the second semester at Denison Montessori Elementary School, has ended. It began on the seventh, a week into the month because of the way the Holidays fell this year and because the DPS powers that be who create the calendar decided to give the teachers two days (for something) before the students returned. Our principal scheduled about half that time for discussions of “how to teach writing better,” and gave us the other day to prepare our classrooms. And so, on Wednesday, January 7th, we began the second term.

As always the children needed several days to climb back into the routines. In my class I left the little holiday tree up with lots of presents underneath that the students had brought–and wrapped— to equip the classroom for the second half of the year. I had requested colored pencils and disposable cameras and cap erasers and tissues ( for upcoming runny noses). The children had enjoyed wrapping the supplies they had brought and placed the packages under the little tree, so there was a pile of new supplies to unwrap that first day back, and other closure activities of the first- semester’s work. By Thursday we were writing goals for the next year and finding old projects that could be completed. A class meeting resulted in some new suggestions for improving behavior and daily routines. Friday morning, as usual, the students had art and gym specials, so there was one brief hour to work before lunch, recess, and then an afternoon of play—with new holiday toys they had brought to share. Somewhere in those first three days back we began to work on geography, in anticipation of the National Geography Bee competition that is held schoolwide in the upper grades during January.

The second week of January was awkwardly punctuated with a “late start” day on Wednesday. A new experiment with the calendar for DPS, four late start days have been scheduled during second semester to provide additional time for Professional Development. Our morning was devoted to scoring student essays at every level. Students arrived at noon, in time for lunch and recess before trying to resume teaching and learning at 1:15 pm. They were unhappy that the late start had meant missing their gym period, one of only two during the week. Several students didn’t come because their parents weren’t able to arrange for them to meet the bus half way through the day. On the other more normal days of the second school week of January, I began several “expert” groups, inviting children to become experts in something that interested them a great deal, areas they had targeted for growth in their writing of second semester goals. I met daily with expert groups in spelling, physical geography, statistics, and CSAP math.

The latter group was preparation for the Colorado State Assessment of Performance tests that will take place all over Colorado in March. Many workbooks have been designed to improve performance on these tests, and a set of these workbooks in both math and reading are distributed by the district for every student in 4th, 5th, and 6th grades—every year. Rumors informed me that several teachers had pretty much set aside the regular curriculum to use these test preparation workbooks for the two months preceding the CSAPs in March. Having stored most of last year’s workbooks in the hallway outside my classroom, I decided to make this kind of guided test preparation available to the students. Five fifth graders attended the first meeting to become CSAP math experts, and they have continued to work steadily through its pages for the month of January.

One is Louis, who has become a math addict. He has requested lessons in advanced area work, in squaring and square root, in percentage and ratio work; and I am responding as quickly as possible with those lessons. He attends the CSAP math lessons enthusiastically, always bringing the assigned work completed, though occasionally incorrect. There seems to be a need to “get the workbook done.”

In addition to the meetings of expert groups the first full week of Janaury, I tried to invite more geography work through informal competitions with old National Geographic Bee questions and lots of map displays. Students used them as reference for making their own maps, and we had some good discussions of hot spots on the world map like Gaza and Afghanistan and Zimbabwe.

Week three of January began with MLK, Jr.’s National Holiday. Then followed the inauguration of Barack Obama, which we watched at school together as a class, and most watched with great interest. Many spent the afternoon making poems and collages of the inauguration, a few works of great art. Wednesday began, as usual with art and gym specials, so the week’s official teaching and learning events began at 11:00 am on Wednesday morning. Meeting expert groups, the first readings of a script for an MLK play, and afternoon Geography Bee classroom competition made for a busy 2 and 1/2 day week.

Week four of Janaury. The schoolwide Geography Bee was Monday afternoon. The Sixth graders began their Human Body unit, a traditional “final-semester treat” in the classroom (The lessons come with a coloring book .) Expert groups continued along with Biology study groups in Animal Classification, Animal Physiology, Plant Classification, and the Atoms study group, which began building compounds with manipulatives, a very popular work. As part of Animal Classification, Mason completed a wonderful report on eagles with a friend, his best composition work thus far. He has decided to be a geologist and is enthusiastic about the Physical Geography we are doing in the expert group. He spends time often at the microscope, but also seems interested in fraction operations and the square of the binomial.

Amanda completed a report about the Rose family, preceded last week by a report on Florida. She makes a bar graph or a line graph every other day. Those other days she creates a geometric proof, often ones she has done before, but neater, with better connections and mathematical explanations. She embraced the binomial squaring work the first three weeks of January and was excited to attend a lesson about the trinomial on Wednesday. By Friday I noticed she was looking askance at others doing it, perhaps not sure she really understood. I must help her through another one or two examples.

Rosalee is busy cultivating friendships, but often by doing “projects” together. Currently the project is a report on MLK, Jr. Before that it was a report on Jaguars. She signed up for expert spelling, which seems to be way over her head, but she scored pretty well on the first test of 50 expert words. Next week she was sick and forgot about homework. She joined the statistics expert group at my suggestion and may be understanding how information can be represented on a bar graph.

Melissa has appeared to work competently through the first Algebra workbook, mostly about integers, but seems to be getting a lot of help at home. (Workbook math is usually restricted to homework!) In class she is struggling with division and operations with mixed numbers, especially now with the addition and subtraction of unlike denominators. Her primary interest, outside of her sixth grade compatriots, is writing a report on the jade plant, partly an outcome of Plant Classification lessons, and partly because the jade plant she started in fourth grade has started to grow vigorously.

Jonas continues to sail through all assignments, mixed number operations abstracted easily, a report on the Inca civilization of middle school quality, an understanding of valence and molecular bonding. His primary interest is in drawing, so the illustrations for the Inca report were paramount, his drawings of compound molecules are careful, and his Human Body workbook is becoming a work of art in its color choice and careful detail. He often helps his two best friends who understand much less quickly; and he entertains everyone in his sphere of influence, which is sometimes his table, but often half the room. His Algebra workbook, the homework follow-up to integer lessons in the classroom, languishes half-finished from week to week. Although he could easily be an expert speller, he opted for the short-styled 15-word spelling exercises, also homework.

And so we stand at the end of the first month of the second semester, looking down the tunnel to that ending date in May. It occurred to me several days ago that I could predict with reasonable accuracy exactly what will happen in my classroom in those four months. February will begin with Literature Study groups because it is Black History Month and because historical fiction is a good way to promote interest in the study of American History (our purported history theme for this year.) I’ll start meeting the Literature Study Groups once a week and daily try to further stimulate their imaginations by investigating what is pictured on our new American History Timeline (from Dr. Larry Schaefer at Lake Country School in Minneapolis.) Midweek, however, there will be presentations about our two-day excursion to Balarat, an outdoor education facility of the Denver Public Schools, one presentation for the children and another in the evening for parents. Thursday and Friday we will try to do some teaching and learning despite the excitement of the approaching overnight. The second week of February will begin with the excursion, will continue with mild exhaustion and some writing about the experience, and then it will be over with two mornings of art and gym squeezed in (our weekly specials). The third week of February begins with a holiday for Presidents’ Day followed by a Parent Conference Day, another week that begins on Wednesday, two mornings of specials, and perhaps a nod to the Presidents we honored on Monday. Maybe we will have time that week to think and talk and write about the presidents chosen by Larry on the American History Timeline.

Did I forget Valentine’s Day? And another “Late Start” Day? Teaching/learning time, that offical kind, will be a scavenger hunt in February.

March will be consumed by the CSAP assessments. Because our school has mixed grade levels in each classroom, it takes almost a month for each teacher to properly administer the test to all her students, even though all sixth graders are handed off to the librarian to “streamline” the testing. The whole school will be in chaos because everyone’s schedule of everything is changed. The last month of March is Spring Break.

April will be the best chance for some teaching and learning, but we will have to recover any momentum generated in February. Five weeks is a long time in between lessons and learning. Perhaps we will be able to work on American History projects, regain some of our enthusiasm for squaring and square root, reengage with area and volume in geometry, remember how much fun it was learning to diagram sentences, get back to geography. But there will also be the beginning of a parade of spring events—the Book Fair, auditions for the Shakespeare Festival, a field trip to the Botanic Gardens for the Plant Classification group, and news, good and bad, about which of our sixth graders have been accepted to preferred Middle Schools.

May events include Field Day, the Sixth Grade trip, the final field trip (to the Zoo) for the fourth and fifth graders, the Shakespeare Festival, and probably the last round of the Benchmark Tests—the last wasted week for assessments.

The Sixth Graders will return from their week in the mountains on May21st, half will be absent from exhaustion on Friday, they’ll return for Graduation practice Monday and by Tuesday night we will be playing the Commencement theme.

Knowing all of this as I do, partly because I have been a teacher for more than 40 years, and at this school for 8, I must admit that there will be lots of learning taking place in the second semester, but that most of it will be part of the hidden curriculum rather than the explicit one. Students will be learning what is important by the way we assign their time to one event or another, by the way we talk and think about reserving 5 weeks for assessment (and perhaps even more, given the explicit preparation for tests), by the casualness with which we will interrupt their explorations of the formation of gorges, the marvels of square root, or the intricacies of sentence diagrams. We will be teaching and they will be learning many things. Is this the intentional or the unintentional curriculum? I wonder.

Time Keeper Collects and Analyzes First Semester Data

Ann — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:47:03 +0000

Fifteen weeks of data, with a daily tally of the time available to me, as a teacher of upper elementary students, to teach. Halfway through the semester it became clear that it was “time to learn,” not “time to teach” that seemed to be in such short supply. I retained my designation of “Curriculum and Instructional” Time, but I began to think of it more and more as “learning time.”

The results of 15 weeks of time-keeping: 12.87 hours was the average available time to learn in a week. With the holidays figured in (there were 8 days when students were not at school during the normal 5-day week), the average daily instructional time was 4 hours.

I am surprised. I anticipated a lower figure. Perhaps because those 4 hours are broken up into so many pieces, a half-hour here, an hour there, it seems less than four hours in my daily classroom experience. When the instructional time is broken up, punctuated with an assembly or a “free book” distribution or a schoolwide morning assessment—or even the daily lunch/recess break—the interactions necessary to access Vygotsky’s ZPD for powerful learning simply do not occur in adequate supply.

Gatto decries the way in which school time is constantly broken up into small pieces, 40 minutes to learn something and then move on. He suggests that these constant interruptions of the thinking process run counter to all the habits of learning, and that the schooling schedule for students actually prevents critical thinking or creative problem-solving. Just as the brain starts to engage in the problem, the bell rings and it is time to think about something else. Sustained inquiry or deep thought is thereby squelched. Perhaps this method is not so exaggerated in an elementary school, and I have always believed that Montessori’s emphasis on the “uninterrupted work period” was aimed exactly at reversing this typical schooling pattern. However, when Montessori meets the traditional school schedule, the Montessori minimum of a 3-hour work period (preferable twice a day) is thwarted, rendered impossible.

It is time to stop counting now. I have learned that students have about four hours at school in my classroom each day to learn. Until I think of a way to count the time that they are actually engaged in the learning process, this time-keeping means little.

Moreover, I am beginning to suspect that my teaching actually occurs at times other that the traditional C & I hours—by the way I manage the schedule, by the way I prioritize the activities we DO have time for, and in a thousand other subtle words and gestures. Perhaps above all, by my own attitudes about the relationship between teaching and learning—and assessments.

Teaching with Gatto in mind

Ann — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 23:47:39 +0000

First week back and only three days with the students, but I notice my decision-making is different, each utterance and move I make tinged now with Gatto’s thinking. Over the holidays I read his new “Weapons of Mass Instruction,” which pulls together all of his thinking since that fateful designation in 1991 as New York State’s “Teacher of the Year.”

Gatto’s chapter on the “history of education” presents damning evidence that compulsory education is a highly successful arm of a government determined to control its population for capitalist ends, to use schools to “dumb down the population” so that they will fit nicely into the category of obedient workers, robust consumers and docile citizens.

I have always believed that Montessori education was liberating, that it opened doors to self-actualization, that it paved the way for the natural genius of the child to flourish, that it protected the individual from indoctrination, that its reliance on intrinsic motivation flew in the face of traditional controls, external rewards, and all the other trappings of extrinsic motivators, among them getting high grades and test scores.

And yet within the public institution where I find myself charged with raising those scores, in a “Montessori way” of course, I have come to be part of the oppressor’s system, laying down a set of adult expectations that the students should aspire to meet, emphasizing work plans and balanced days of sustained effort that include “reading, writing, and arithmetic.”

Most will, of course. They come to me with plenty of experience being bossed around, being told what to do, and many are happiest when I give out specific “things to do,” “assignments” that they can complete and then report that they have “finished their work.”

I have returned to school this second semester, however, remembering what I set out to do as a Montessori “directress.” Not to teach, but to facilitate. I am trying to remember the discipline of preparing the environment, making a few suggestions, and then opening up the space and time of the classroom for spontaneous activity. And after two days of that, the weakest, most neglected and apparently incompetent child in the classroom, came to me with a report on cockroaches. Not just a few lines—a report, complete with illustrations, a presentation board, and a request as to when he could present his research.

This is a reminder that it is “time to learn” that is needed, not “time to teach.” Is it possible that we could reform schooling to make time for learning?

Week Fifteen: Time to Teach/Time to Learn Tally of Hours

Ann — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 03:07:05 +0000

November 24 – 25, 2008 Tally of Curriculum and Instruction Time

Monday, November 24 Uninterrupted day = 5 C & I hours

Tuesday, November 25: Uninterrupted day = 5 C & I hours

Wednesday – Friday, November 26, 27, 28 were Thanksgiving Holidays

NOTE: A substitute supervised the class on the two school days, and he reported that students had a moderately productive two days. I surmise that they learned about independence and self-reliance to make the classroom function normally. That’s real curriculum!

Total C & I Time = 10 hours

Week Fourteen: Time to Teach/Time to Learn Tally of Hours

Ann — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 02:55:11 +0000

November 17 – 21, 2008 Tally of time for teaching and learning

Monday, November 17: Uninterrupted day = 5 C & I hours

Tuesday, November 18: Uninterrupted day = 5 C & I hours

Wednesday, November 19: Routine interruptions for art and gym = 3.5 C & I hours

Thursday, November 20: Uninterrupted day = 5 C & I hours

Friday, November 21: Specials art/gym in the morning. Total = 3.5 C & I hours

Week’s Total C & I hours: 22 hours
Personal Note: I am teaching double time this week because I will be gone next Monday and Tuesday before the Thanksgiving Holiday. (My Mother’s 90th Birthday in California!) Getting ready to be absent is always a huge project because one hopes that students’ days will not be wasted if they are well-prepared with good work to do.

Reflections on John Gatto

Ann — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 02:17:35 +0000

Gatto’s definitive theses on education appear in “Dumbing us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Schooling.” It is a collection of speeches given over time after he was named New York Teacher of the Year in 1991. He summarizes his themes concisely in his preface to the 2005 edition. Explaining the overarching lesson he has learned in thirty years of teaching in Manhattan, he writes:

” During that time, I’ve come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us. I didn’t want to accept that notion—far from it: my own training in two elite universities taught me that intelligence and talent distributed themselves economically over a bell curve and that human destiny, because of those mathematical, seemingly irrefutable scientific facts, was as rigorously determined as John Calvin contended.

The trouble was that the unlikeliest kids kept demonstrating to me at random moments so many of the hallmarks of human excellence—insight, wisdom, justice, resourcefulness, courage, originality—that I became confused. They didn’t do this often enough to make my teaching easy, but they did it often enough that I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them down. Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children’s power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addition and dependent behavior.” (pp. xxv-xxiv)

As I reread this book, published first in 1992 just after I had become an assistant professor of education at the University of Houston, I was depressed by the enlarging scope of its truths. My current frustrations with the assessment environment of schools is just another exaggerated element of the same program—a program of control exercised by the vested interests of the institutional school, the publishing industry, (now especially companies that create and publish the tests and all the workbooks to practice for test success), and the power-brokers of government at every level who use the schools as platforms for propaganda purposes. Want a work force that will be content on an assembly line in an auto plant? Teach children how to take orders and do small meaningless tasks over and over. Want massive numbers of employees for menial work at McDonald’s and fancy hotels? Make sure a large majority of students will never even attain high school graduation credentials, leaving school with such low self-esteem that they believe they can have a future in America only if they work in those kinds of jobs. Want a population that is gullible and doesn’t question the government’s decisions or directions? Don’t teach critical thinking. Don’t teach thinking at all! Just give students safe questions with prescribed answers and tell them to memorize those “right answers” for “success.”

One of the great “vested interests” involved in the perpetuation of schooling as we know it is, of course, the people who work in schools. Gatto points out that every institution from the post office on through all those institutions we accept as essential to our well-being, are actually employment agencies first. Schools employ huge numbers of people in every community; and with the added power of teacher unions, the employment agency of school is formidable. Every person who works for or with schools has a vested interest in maintaining—and in fact expanding—schools as we know them. Any drastic reform would upset the apple-cart and threaten the well-known jobs of the institution, from the custodians and lunch ladies up through the professors of the schools of education in colleges and universities. After what I considered to be an inspiring graduate education at the Emory School of Education that concluded for me with a Ph.D. in educational leadership, I planned to pursue a career that would inspire future teachers. I planned to challenge prospective teachers to reflect on their own education with a critical eye to its limitations and help them think critically about how to educate students for a future of active participation in a thriving democracy and a global economy. Instead, I found that my primary job at the University of Houston was to teach aspiring teachers how to prepare their students for success on Texas Standards’ assessments. The stability of the system that employed all the people at the university depended on compliance with what the Texas legislature had deemed important, what they had decided they wanted students in Texas to know. There were no questions asked.

Gatto: “By preempting fifty percent of the total time of the young, by locking young people up with other young people exactly their own age, by ringing bells to start and stop work, by asking people to think about the same thing at the same time in the same way, by grading people the way we grade vegetables—and in a dozen other vile and stupid ways—network schools steal the vitality of communities and replace it with an ugly mechanism. No one survives these places with their humanity intact, not kids, not teachers, not administrators, and not parents.” (p. 51)

“What’s gotten in the way of education in the United States is the theory of social engineering that says there is one right way to proceed with growing up. . . .This theory has been presented in many different ways, but at bottom it signals the worldview of minds obsessed with the control of other minds, obsessed by dominance and strategies of intervention to maintain that dominance.” (p. 68)

Widgets. Why are we trying to run schools like factories? In the land of individuality, why would we promote a standardized product, homogeneous outcomes, sameness in our children? Have we lost faith in the democratic experiment that encourages strong individual voices to disagree and thereby save us from ourselves?

Gatto’s questions have made my argument small, or at least it has reminded me that the assessment oppression I rail against is only a small part of a much larger system with oppressive goals. I perceive the problem as a crisis of time management—no time to teach and no time to learn. With Gatto’s larger perspective, I recognize that this is only a symptom of a failed system, an institution that no longer serves the goals of education. As Gatto says, “it is impossible to get an education at school. Students can only get “schooled.” The habits and answers that they learn in their schooling diminish us all.

Week Thirteen: Time to Teach/Time to Learn Tally of Hours

Ann — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 04:43:41 +0000

November 10 – 14, 2008 Tally of time for teaching and learning

Monday, November 10 Veteran’s Day Holiday = Zero C & I hours

Tuesday, November 11: Uninterrupted day = 5 C & I hours

Wednesday, November 12: Routine interruptions for art and gym = 3.5 C & I hours

Thursday, November 13: Uninterrupted day = 5 C & I hours

Friday, November 14: Specials art/gym in the morning. Total = 3.5 C & I hours

Week’s Total C & I hours: 16 hours

NOTE: Discipline problems have compromised Curriculum and Instruction time very seriously this week. Problems that seemed to have begun the previous Wednesday when a substitute teacher was in the room have worsened. The three-day weekend probably exacerbated the situation, too. It is difficult for many children to be out of school for three days, often with poor supervision and little to do except watch TV or play video games. However, there are eight boys—4th and 5th graders in the class—that have almost no self-control and a severe lack of social skills that often results in physical aggression and other disruptive behavior in the classroom. It is compromising the learning environment for all the students and certainly compromising my ability to deliver instruction and promote curriculum development for all. Therefore, it is only in theory that I estimate the C & I time as 16 hours this week. Moreover, I feel certain that these kinds of problems exist for most teachers, robbing them and their students of Time to Teach and Time to Learn.

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Filed under Time Keeper: Tally of Time to T

Week Twelve: Time to Teach/Time to Learn Tally of Hours

Ann — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 04:22:04 +0000

November 3 – 7, 2008 Tally of time for teaching and learning

Monday, November 3: Uninterrupted day at school = 5 C & I hours

Tuesday, November 4: Uninterrupted day = 5 C & I hours

Wednesday, November 5: Substitute hired for my class so that I could attend the annual Shakespeare Workshop for teachers who coordinate their school’s Shakespeare program aimed at performing at the Denver Shakespeare Festival in May. Unfortunately, the report from the substitute was dismal and I am quite certain that very little curriculum or instruction occurred. Behavior problems trumped. Zero C & I hours.

Thursday, November 5: Field trip in the morning to the Colorado Symphony, which hopefully constituted worthy curriculum and instruction. Total C & I = 5 hours.

Friday, November 6: Specials art/gym in the morning. Students invited to preview the Book Fair (a fundraiser) for half an hour in the afternoon and then called to a 45 minute assembly about a philanthropic enterprise called “Penny Harvest” that a group of parents are sponsoring. Being generous, I could count perhaps 15 minutes of that assembly as curriculum. Total = 2.5 C & I hours

Week’s Total C & I hours: 17.5 hours

END-OF-SEMESTER BENCHMARK TESTS ARE CANCELLED!! An announcement circulated first informally and finally was made official at a grade-level meeting this week that the anticipated (or dreaded) December Benchmark Tests would not be given at our school. In my opinion, this might promote continuous learning right up until the Winter Holiday break rather than cutting it off at the beginning of December. (When a battery of tests is given the first week of December, there is no getting the students back to academics before that break).

The bad news is that the administrative team is now asking us to come up with “alternative assessments” so that they “will know how the students are progressing towards desired Montessori outcomes.” I am stumped and disappointed again that they understand so little about the goals and processes that constitute Montessori pedagogy and philosophy. There just seems to be no way to make them understand how Montessori outcomes are realized by each student at a different rate, in different ways promoted by different lessons and chosen activities, and that they are developed in the mind, in a hidden place. Above all, the best possible outcomes are the result of leaving the mental processing alone, undisturbed and unexamined, for the longest possible time. The secret is to Leave Learning Alone. Not abandon it. Feed it with new lessons, stoke the fires with new ideas and teach skills so that students can pursue those ideas freely. But DO NOT TRY TO MEASURE THEIR PROGRESS until they simply show it—in their work, in their performance, in their projects and their conversation.