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Me Vs. The Textbook Vs. Me

Posted February 1, 2011 By Dave Thomer

I’m going to do a more extended reflection of my experiences at EduCon over the next few days – I’m letting the weekend stew a little bit, plus I want to gather some of the links and resources I found out about into something that might be vaguely useful. But one thing that I know EduCon did is give me the motivation to confront the gap between the teacher I am right now and the teacher I want to be. And I am never going to make as much progress as I want on that front until I come to terms with the three-way battle between me, myself, and the textbook I’ve been assigned to teach.

I feel like I need to apologize for the possibility that I might, at some point in this post, say something positive about a textbook. I feel like I spend much of my day banging my head against the thing, and it’s a 1300 page world history text, so you can just imagine how much fun that is. Reading and answering questions out of a textbook is so disconnected from building something that addresses a real challenge in your own life that the ghost of John Dewey should start warning me that I’m about to get a visit from the Spirit of Education Past. I’ve spent a lot of my time as a high school teacher looking for ways to help my students put some personality into the events of history, and there’s not a lot of personality in a textbook.

So why do I also spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to help my students get more out of this thing?
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Filed in Education

Ten Years Already?

Posted November 2, 2010 By Dave Thomer

It’s my birthday, which means it’s also Not News’ birthday. 10 years ago I uploaded the first articles to a Dellhost server and wondered what would happen. In one sense – not much. I’ve left the site dormant for fairly long stretches, never quite hitting a stride long enough to make this more than a hobby. On the other hand, in the last ten years my wife and I have had a child and bought a house. I’ve finished grad school twice and started teaching high school full time. And those are all pretty good things to put my energy into, so no regrets.

At the same time, the Web has changed. The political blogosphere is full of places to talk policy and politics. There are sites and blogs dedicated to the notion of deliberative democracy that still inspires me, but there’s also plenty of evidence that nurturing the spirit of deliberation takes a lot of time and energy that I will never have as a hobbyist, so I’ve let go of any dream that Not News might be a hub for such deliberation.

Still, I think Pattie, Kevin, Earl and I put some good pieces up here over the years, and I don’t see any reason to take them down. I still have dreams of converting the rest of the Comics section to WordPress posts, and finally having the site’s archive in one database.

And I think it’s worthwhile for me, as a teacher and a citizen, to have a place to work out some of my thoughts on the issues of the day and perhaps engage the dialogue about education in this country more directly. So I think my birthday present to the site will be a promise not to neglect it. Over the next few weeks, let’s see if I can keep that promise.

Filed in Special Order Speeches

The Time It Takes

Posted June 11, 2009 By Dave Thomer

Chris Lehmann has a new post where he discusses the time demands of his job as principal of Science Leadership Academy, how he balances those with his family responsibilities, and the unrealistic expectations for self-sacrifice that are created by media portrayals of educators. Now, I follow Chris on Facebook and Twitter, and I have no idea when he switches his educator brain off to let it recharge. (Case in point – the blog post in question went up around midnight.) So if he’s saying there need to be limits, someone ought to listen.

I also think it’s worth it to zoom out from the school issue a little – is there any profession where the work doesn’t expand to fill all your available time plus, let’s say, 10%? There’s always that one-more-thing that we would like to do if we just had a little more time or a little more energy. We all have to find that line where we say “This is good enough.”

That said, I think there are two big factors at work making this the problem that Chris identifies in society at large and also within education.

1) We are, in many ways, a work-driven society. There’s very little pressure to be a successful person compared to the pressure to have a successful career. So instead of our professional standard of excellence being what you can accomplish in a 40 or 50 hour week, it’s what you can accomplish in a 60 or 70 hour week or more. So the people who meet that standard are the people who either don’t have families or personal lives to sacrifice, or who are willing to curtail the time they put into those areas. Once upon a time this was fodder for the Harry Chapin song “Cat’s in the Cradle,” now it lurks behind our discussions of gender equality in the workplace and a host of other issues regarding the balance between work, family, and personal life.

2) Society at large has so many problems, and so many of those problems have a direct impact on schools and students, that even if the most dedicated professionals like Chris found a way to double the time they spend working, it would not be enough. I think this makes it harder for teachers and educators to feel like they’ve reached the “good enough” point – especially when there are people who prefer to criticize the individuals who are already going above and beyond to try to fix the problem rather than criticize the society at large that has made the problem so daunting. Demanding that someone else fix this – without providing the tools to do so – somehow comes across as leadership. (And of course, there are educators and teachers who do the very same thing to their students or their colleagues, so I’m not saying any group is without fault there.)

Filed in Life in Practice

Learn from Your Successes

Posted May 31, 2009 By Dave Thomer

This is the sort of story that drives me a little bit crazy, because my natural impulse to believe that people have reasonable explanations for their decisions runs headlong into my inability to imagine what those reasonable explanations are.

Philadelphia has been running a program for years where if a school has a large population of poor children, the district won’t require the families to fill out paperwork to apply for free breakfasts or lunches – they’ll just provide the free meals to the entire school. The thinking is, you save time and administrative costs, you avoid kids falling through the cracks, and you don’t place the responsibility for kids being in the program on the kids or their parents. The program began as a pilot program 17 years ago, and last year the Bush Administration suggested that it was going to wind down the program. In the last few weeks, an Obama Administration official has suggested that they plan to continue the phaseout – leading, incidentally, to some botched communication about when it’s ending.

Now, in fairness, there is some disagreement in the article about the documentation for the program, but it seems to me that the major objection people are bringing up is that 17 years is too long for a pilot program, and other districts want to know why Philadelphia’s special and doesn’t have to do all this paperwork. These actually strike me as legitimate concerns. Now, what is the reasonable way to handle them? Well, if it were me, I’d say that you should expand this successful program and take it out of the pilot stage so that other cities get to enjoy the benefits. But apparently that’s not the way the Department of Agriculture rolls.

Now, besides the fact that having students be well-fed is kind of critical to their success, this is important to me on a larger scale. If you believe, like I do, that human beings are capable of coming together, looking at the world around them, learning new ways to interact with that world, and then putting that knowledge to use, this story is a shovel to the face. Because we carried out an experiment here, we got the data, and we’re refusing to implement the good idea that came as a result.

That’s not a good change, and that’s not pragmatism. But that’s a post for later.

Filed in Public Policy

Hitting the Sauce and Cutting the Vinegar

Posted May 19, 2009 By Dave Thomer

I have been trying to develop/find a good barbecue sauce for pulled pork and barbecued brisket for a while now – the thinker sauce that I use to glaze chicken can overwhelm the meat when I want a BBQ sandwich. Tradition appears to call for a vinegar sauce, but I am easily overpowered by the taste of vinegar. Today I mixed 1 cup of apple cider vinegar with 3/4 cup ketchup and about half a cup of Coke and got a pretty good base. I added some molasses (2 tablespoons) and some of my Alton-Brown-inspired barbecue rub (3-4 tablespoons), along with some steak sauce and Worcestershire sauce. I think the last two additions were a mistake – if I’m trying to balance out the strong vinegar, I shouldn’t be adding flavor liquids with a vinegar base. So I think next time out I’ll go with a cup straight of cider vinegar, Coke, and ketchup (or maybe tomato sauce), then add in the rub and the molasses.

I also cooked the sauce a little to thicken it up and let the flavors blend a little more. I’m sure that’s sauce heresy, but it works for me.

Filed in Life in Practice

In Which Dave Misses the Point of the Whole Election

Posted May 17, 2009 By Dave Thomer

I haven’t just been AWOL from blogging for the last few months – I’ve been pretty quiet on the political activism front as well. I sort of took the opportunity of the election being over to say, “OK, I’ve done my hours of data entry – you go ahead and take the whole Oval Office thing and start fixing this mess.” Intellectually I know that this is inconsistent with my own beliefs about democracy and inconsistent with the bottom-up theme of the Obama campaign. However, if you combine the outrage deficit I’ve talked about before with the fact that instead of working to convince citizen voters, the activist task at hand is to convince elected officials with their own bases of power and their own agendas, I start doing a little cost/benefit analysis on the time/effort front and start to wonder what I can really do beyond my work as a teacher and writer.

However, that doesn’t mean I should be totally inactive, so I’m resolving to try to make good use of the summer to improve on both of those fronts. I may even take a crack at adapting my thesis to see what Deweyan reformers can learn from the election of 2008. Hard to believe it was just three years ago I was working quotes from some first-term senator’s memoir into that thing . . .

Filed in So Now What?

Information for DA Primary

Posted April 23, 2009 By Dave Thomer

Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office:

http://www.phila.gov/districtattorney/

Brian Grady for DA:

http://www.votegrady2009.org/

Dan McCaffery for DA:

http://www.mccafferyforda.com/

Dan McElhatton for DA:

http://www.votemcelhatton.com/

Michael Turner for DA:

http://www.turner4da.com/

Michael Untermeyer for DA:

http://www.myspace.com/michael_untermeyer
(Inaccessible from School)

Seth Williams for DA:

http://www.votesethwilliams.com/

Coverage of Candidate Debate from Philadelphia newspapers:

Story 1: http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local/43021167.html
Story 2: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/local/pa/20090423_Lively_debate_for_DA_candidates.html

Filed in Special Order Speeches

PA to Consolidate School Districts?

Posted February 4, 2009 By Dave Thomer

Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell proposed today that PA begin planning to consolidate school operations across the state, cutting the number of districts from 501 to somewhere near 100. The article’s well worth a read, since it also talks about school funding in the current economic climate. Obviously the devil will be in the details, but this sounds like it could be a very smart idea. I know “local control” is often touted as an absolutely essential component of education and other policies, but this is one case where I wish the “run it more like a business” advice would get followed – it’s a lot easier to make changes and get the most for the money when there’s not duplication of effort and numerous competing administrations creating inefficiencies. One thing I will want to see is how the target number was attained – too much consolidation could make districts a little too sprawling and hard to control. But here in the Northeast US, I definitely think we err too much on the side of numerous small municipalities and districts – I’ve read ridiculous stories from New Jersey, for example. So I’ll be interested in seeing if a governor with two years left in his term can get this done.

Filed in Public Policy

Getting Local

Posted January 22, 2009 By Dave Thomer

As the excitement about President Obama settles down, I’ll be interested in seeing whether any of the political lessons of the last two years can percolate down to the municipal level. Philadelphia will be having its first open Democratic primary for the office of District Attorney in – well, as long as I can remember, since retiring DA Lynne Abraham was first appointed to the job in the 80s. Young Philly Politics has already staked out territory supporting candidate Seth Williams, but I’m curious to see how the race unfolds over the next few months. Especially since I’m hopeful that I can use that primary as a teaching tool during my student teaching this semester. We shall see.

Filed in So Now What?

Failing Upwards?

Posted January 21, 2009 By Dave Thomer

I have to say that it does not fill me with confidence that the new chairman of the board at Citigroup is gonna be a guy who thought it was a good idea to essentially sell Time Warner to America Online.

(One of my main images of the year 2000 is Pattie coming into the bedroom while she was getting ready for work and waking me up with some ridiculous piece of news that I was convinced had to be part of some hallucinatory dream I was having. “Time Warner’s merging with AOL!” “There’s a recount in Florida!” “Aliens have stolen our dining room chairs!” I think that last one did turn out to be a dream, at least.)

Always willing to be happily surprised, but that one strikes me as odd.

Filed in Special Order Speeches
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