This Is Not News

Started up another batch of education classes this week. Reflecting on the week, most of what I learned appears to be technical terminology for things that are pretty obvious with a few minutes’ thought. Indeed, many of the ideas I’ve encountered are things that have been in the back of my head for a while, and I can see them manifested in some of the exercises I use. But the weird thing is that, somehow, pulling these tidbits into a systematized body of knowledge, jargon and all, has helped me bring some things into focus a little more clearly. In and of itself that might be a useful discovery for down the road, but I don’t want to get carried away. One of my textbooks refers to hypothetico-deductive reasoning, and I think I might hurt myself trying to say that.

Barack Obama was in town to speak to the National Education Association convention and said something to the effect that he supported a concept of merit pay for teachers, but not anything that’s actually been proposed under that heading. (In fact, looking at the text of the speech, the word “merit” doesn’t appear at all, but the use of “accountability” makes clear what Obama’s talking about.) This was portrayed in the Inquirer as a fairly daring move of telling a major Democratic Party constituency that he supported something they very much opposed, and as TPM Election Central reports, rival presidential candidate Chris Dodd wasted little time in establishing his anti-merit-pay bona fides.

At risk of using anecdotal evidence here, I think this is one of those issues that seems like a complete no-brainer to most people who aren’t teachers. Why shouldn’t people have to do a good job in order to get bigger raises? Isn’t that a necessary incentive to get people to do their job as well as they can? Aren’t performance reviews a pretty standard part of many people’s employment?

From my midway-between-inside-and-outside perspective, I think the historical resistance to the idea of merit pay comes from a few sources. Many teachers are concerned that a merit process would be abused by principals and administrators to punish teachers who don’t get with the program, whatever program the authority structure may have. This is probably a valid concern, and one that I don’t blame any union from fighting for, although it’s not one that’s likely to get sympathy from anyone who has to deal with an unpleasant or demanding boss. I think that the feeling on the part of many teachers that they are underpaid and underrespected leads them to value whatever autonomy they can get. And there’s the very real problem of how in the world you can figure out who would deserve “merit pay� and why. Right now, especially with No Child Left Behind, it seems like the job of teachers is seen as getting students in position to get certain scores on standardized tests. And most teachers appear to hate that job description with the intensity of a thousand suns. So if you put more pressure on them to get those results, as opposed to building children’s thinking skills or building up their self-image or inspiring them to see new possibilities in the world or any of the things that teachers like to think they do, I’m thinking they’re gonna stay crabby.

On the other hand, Obama does say the following in The Audacity of Hope:

There’s no reason why an experienced, highly qualified, and effective teacher shouldn’t earn $100,000 annually at the peak of his or her career. Highly skilled teachers in such critical fields as match and science – as well as those willing to teach in the toughest urban schools – should be paid even more. (162)

So he’s definitely offering some carrot to go with the stick.

I went to an open house at the neighborhood public school today – Alex will start kindergarten this fall, so we registered her there. I got to look at the kindergarten classrooms, and the kids there seemed enthusiastic. Lots of projects and signs were hung around the room, and while it wasn’t the brightest of environments – the kindergarten classrooms are in the basement – it seemed like a place where kids were learning. I was a little late to the opening discussion, so I stayed later to talk to the principal, who asked me if Alex would be continuing at the school after kindergarten. A large number of kids in the area apparently go to the public school for K and then switch to parochial schools for first grade and up. (The Archdiocese of Philadelphia runs a huge network of schools – there are two parish grade schools within a ten minute walk of my house and a third about 20-25 minutes away.) I said that while Alex won’t go to the parochial schools, I don’t know whether she’d stay at the public school. The principal offered to show me a first grade classroom, and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. I have heard so many horror stories about the public schools from my classmates at Temple, and I had my own memories of grade school in the front of my mind. But in this classroom, there were no rows of desks with kids expected to sit in them all day. It looked a lot like the kindergarten classrooms, and I mean that as a compliment. Round tables for students to sit and work in small groups, a large floor space for kids to gather together with the teacher, colorful student projects all around – it looked like the students were getting the attention they needed and participating in their learning process. It was a considerable relief, to tell you the truth. The principal seemed pretty proud of the work they were doing given the resources they have, and I can’t really blame her. Now if we could only figure out how to replicate that success.

Are you pondering what I’m pondering?

Probably not, unless you’re pondering the best example of Alton Brown’s Good Eats series to show in a philosophy class tomorrow. But I think I need something to visualize the pragmatist idea of education being connected to life, and while we’re at it, maybe we’ll learn something about ice cream.

And hey, the show earned a Peabody Award. So there has to be some value to it, right?

If this seems like a frivolous post, my apologies. My neck is killing me – I think this storm waged an indirect attack on my spine along with the direct assault on the windows.

I’ve always been concerned about a disconnect between my college teaching and the Deweyan ideals I have in mind. I open every semester by telling the students that I want the course to be a dialogue, but if the students don’t feel like talking on a given day, things veer more toward monologue. (And in weeks like this, where I’m fighting a cold and losing my voice, that’s decidedly not good.) I use various assignments and examples to try to help students make the connections between philosophical texts and the contemporary world, but I’m not sure if it always clicks. I’ve really been thinking about this a lot since I started taking the education courses – in a fairly Deweyan way, they’ve been helpful in getting me to think about ways to implement some of the ideas I’ve absorbed from books like Democracy and Education.

In light of those concerns, I think this essay in the Harvard Crimson is a well-done use of Dewey to criticize the reading/lecture approach that marks so much of higher education. Here’s the closing paragraph, but I’d say the whole thing is worth a read:

It is a telling truism about undergraduate life at Harvard that we learn more from our fellow students than we do in class. It certainly describes my experience, particularly when assessed against the classes I took in the Core. However, it is not simply that peer learning often trumps academic learning, but that the two so frequently exist in entirely separate spheres. A truly revitalized undergraduate education would adopt methods that more strongly involve undergraduates as collaborators in each other’s educations; to this end, the Task Force on General Education’s final report should mark the start of a larger conversation about how Harvard can ensure that its teaching methods are every bit as enlightened as the canon of knowledge it endorses.

Chris Lehmann at Practical Theory recently wrote a post titled “School 0.5,” about the frustration he feels when he realizes that Philadelphia school just don’t have the resources to implement the technology-driven reforms that he and other education bloggers and thinkers refer to as School 2.0. He also has a follow-up post where he discusses the reasons that a strict comparison of the dollars a district spends won’t tell you what resources they have available to them. In addition to the cost of living issues I’ve mentioned before, there are also issues like interest on debt which mean that missing resources from the past have a negative effect on the present. It’s an interesting set of posts, and they tie into a concept that one prominent urban educator called the “education debt.” I get disheartened sometimes just hearing from some of my colleagues in the certification program about the conditions Philadelphia public schools face. I can’t imagine what it must be like to try and run a school in those conditions.

It’s been a crazy week – midterm wek for my students, which means I’ve been putting review material together and getting tests ready. Way back in the 90s, when I had to walk five miles to class in the snow uphill both ways, this was the time that students would flood professors’ office hours to try and figure out that which confounded them. This week, only one student has stopped by office to ask a question. (Since I don’t have an office at one of the schools where I teach, this is probably a good thing.) Instead, every night I’ve been answering e-mails and holding instant messenger sessions with students who want to go over material.

Now, especially since I’m an adjunct, this is a great help for my students and for me. I spend a lot of the working day running around from one campus to another, so I don’t have as much time as I’d like to make sure that I can be avilable to students at the different times that their schedules allow. (If you have a class during the window I’m able to schedule office hours at a particular campus, you’re pretty much out of luck.) But this way, I’m actually available at the time when, let’s be honest, many students are actually realizing “Holy crap, I don’t get this and the test is tomorrow!”

It really is amazing how much technology has changed education in just ten years. When I started writing this post, I tried to remember if any of my professors had e-mail, and I don’t believe they did. Most of the campuses I teach at have built new classroom space over the years that include built-in audio-video systems with DVD players, PCs, and high-resolution projectors – a far cry from the VCRs-on-a-cart of days gone by. And I love all the new toys, don’t get me wrong – I get a kick out of showing scenes from Monty Python on a big screen and calling it work. The one thing that it does make me wonder about is, the more technology we build into the educational experience, the more expensive education becomes. And given the issues we have in this country with education affordability, that does give me some pause.

I’ve added an education category to the site. Given how much time I’m spending on the topic, I figure it’s about time. There will continue to be some crossover with philosophy, but this section will be more about the nuts and bolts of teaching.

I did a brief “microlesson” presentation in one of my education classes tonight – about 30 minutes on Descartes and the hyperbolic doubt thought experiment. Just as I got rolling my time ran out. One of the other students felt like I had left the class on a cliffhanger – setting up the experiment, but not having time to actually talk about Descartes’ findings. Leave ’em wanting more, I suppose.

But it got me to thinking about something that’s been occupying my thoughts a lot lately – there seems to be a real tension between the Deweyan approach I say that I want to take, and the way I actually teach. I try to initiate class discussion a lot, and I think I’m reasonably successful there. (Although I can get better.) But in order to to try and give the students a shot at understanding some of the admittedly cryptic texts we read, I spend a lot of time doing lecture and boardwork. I’m starting to wonder if I should try and be less text-centered, to push the students to develop their own approaches. But that might mean giving up on exposing them to some really thought-provoking material. I dunno. I’m still muddling through this.