This Is Not News

Three weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend a poetry slam organized by one of my colleagues at Parkway Center City High School, a public high school that draws students from all over the city. I doubt that my English-teacher colleagues missed the irony that while dozens of students stayed after school to watch their peers take the microphone and share their stories of love, triumph, and teenage turmoil, the School Reform Commission was preparing to discuss a budget for the next school year that would wipe out funding for extracurricular activities.

I have watched so many of our students find their voice and a sense of accomplishment through extracurricular activities, including our drama club, our robotics team, and our sports teams. Some of our students have literally run marathons, and many others have figuratively done so to program bots, build sets, memorize lines, or organize a prom. They have helped create the glue that binds us together so that our school is more than a building. It is a community.

My fellow teachers have done a lot to contribute to that success, but as teachers we do not do our work alone. We rely on school counselors, who help our seniors navigate the college admissions and financial aid processes and help all of our students when the pressures of their lives become a little (or a lot) too much to bear. They help our students find programs and mentors to build their skills outside of school, and intervene when they see trouble brewing.

Our students also rely on the aides and staff who walk the halls and keep the school running smoothly. They are ready to step in and defuse a situation before it gets out of hand or provide a supportive nudge to a student who needs it. And that is on top of the often-thankless work that they do to keep the proverbial trains running on time.
So many of these vital resources are gone in the budget that the SRC is currently contemplating. The public school students of Philadelphia face the very real possibility of coming back this September to buildings that are mere shells of the schools they left in June.

So two weeks ago high school students from several schools in the city met after school in front of the school district’s headquarters to rally support for their cause. Students at the school where I did my student teaching, Constitution High School, staged a walkout before classes were over for the day, citing their right to peacefully assemble and air their grievances. They found the budget plan for next year to be unacceptable, and they demanded their voices be heard.

Indeed, this should be unacceptable to every citizen of the city and of the commonwealth, and we should all be making our voices heard. We must demand accountability from the SRC, and ask how they are spending the resources that they have. The district has already signaled that it wants large concessions from its employees. While I hope and believe that the district will move beyond its extreme opening offer to the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, I will be surprised if the next contract maintains the status quo. But it is worth remembering that the District pays its employees less, and provides its students with fewer resources, than many neighboring suburban districts. Unless we believe that districts like Lower Merion and Council Rock are throwing their taxpayers’ money away, we should wonder why Philadelphia is not able to provide its students with a similar level of resources.

We constantly hear that we need to be doing more with less. I realize that necessity is often the mother of invention, but isn’t it just a bit insulting to suggest that Philadelphia educators have been deliberately being inefficient, and now that we’re truly desperate we will somehow find ways to do more of the things we are already trying to do?

Of course, I do not want to sell the creativity and drive of Philadelphia’s students short. One week ago I was once again in the auditorium after school. The officers of Parkway’s student government had taken on the responsibility of organizing our annual multicultural day talent show. As their adviser, I was with them to help out and offer what support I could. But this is their show. It has to be. As I said to the students, I can not carry a tune in a bucket, so it was up to them to organize the tryouts and figure out what they wanted the show to be. It would be nice if we had some music teachers to help out, but the students are getting something done with less.

Today my students have the day off because of election day. I am still wondering how I should vote. The leaders of this city and this commonwealth are entrusted with the responsibility for so many people’s lives, including the students who have worked so hard these past Tuesdays. I am looking for the leaders who are worthy of that responsibility, waiting for them to prove themselves. The clock is ticking; we can not wait until next year to solve these challenges. When another May rolls around, I hope my Tuesdays are just as full as they have been this year.

It’s the last day of a spring break that wasn’t nearly as productive or as restorative as I wanted it to be. I spent a big chunk of it working with my daughter on a science experiment project. It’s a good, ambitious project that unfolds over a long period of time. But it is also a lot of stress because my daughter has to figure out exactly how to design and carry out the experiment, and there’s a lot that can go awry. It was good to experience that from the other side of the classroom; it’s a good reminder that when I design a project I have to provide support structures to help students overcome any concerns about failing or not being sure what to do.

And while we were at it, we got to experiment a little bit with dyeing T-shirts, so in the end I’ll call that a win.

Yesterday I asked the question, “What is it that makes trying to learn about and understand the world so unappealing to so many people?”

While I was writing the post I thought about a lot of things. For example, I thought about what I’ve learned about human beings’ tendency to value the present over the future. The benefits of learning aren’t always obvious. I’ve talked before about how things I learned in high school would come back to me ten or twenty years later when I had had some new experience that gave those things I learned a new relevance. I treasure those moments of rediscovery, but that’s a long time to wait for a payoff. I can understand why someone might not choose to make the effort required to get information into the safe deposit box in hopes that it will become valuable later.

I also thought about our resistance to change and our fear of the risk that comes from entering the unknown and embracing it. When the new things that we learn can not easily be assimilated into the beliefs we had before, we have to make some tough choices. We may have to admit we were wrong or give up beliefs and habits that have provided us security and enjoyment. I know about the links between meat consumption and climate change, for example, but it is really hard for me to incorporate that knowledge into my daily activities. So instead I often get into arguments with myself or expend effort trying to rationalize behavior I don’t complete support. If I didn’t know any better, I could avoid that.

Of all the things I thought about, though, there was one idea that hit me such that I had to write it down, because I don’t think I had ever put the thought quite this way to myself before:

Knowledge requires trust.

I think we all know this, but it can be so obvious that I think sometimes we gloss over it. The pragmatist philosophers like Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey talked about the social nature of human knowledge. No one person personally experiences and verifies everything, so we rely on other people to do it. I have never been outside of the country, so when I talk to my students about Japan’s geographical relationship to Hawaii and China, I am trusting the mapmakers and authors whom I have read. My students have to trust the people who make our educational resources. They have to trust me. We all have to trust ourselves and our ability to make good decisions about where to place that trust.

Well, once again I will state the obvious: trust is hard. And when it comes to knowledge about the world, it is very difficult to establish where to place that trust. There is no one central authority on any subject; instead we are exposed to a cacophony of competing sources and we have to work our way through the noise. I often cite the old adage that you should never ascribe to malice what you can explain by incompetence, but the fact of the matter is that there is plenty of both in the world. And even the people who are competent and well-intentioned make mistakes. If you place the trust that is required to learn, you will get burned. If you try to learn a lot, you will probably get burned more often.

The reason I’ve been going over this in my head is that it opened up a way of thinking about the emotional aspect of learning and knowledge. We don’t just need to be intellectually ready to learn, we need to be emotionally ready. And there are people who, consciously or unconsciously, choose to limit the occasions in which they will make that leap and place their trust in something or someone outside of themselves. Those of us who believe in pragmatism or empiricism or whichever ism you want to call it need to keep that in mind and work on forming the bonds that will help our students and our neighbors go out on that limb with greater confidence and willingness.

At my school we have a couple of senior teachers whose job it is to help guide and direct us to make sure we’re all moving in the right direction. One is a math teacher, the other is an English teacher. I doubt that it is a coincidence that math and reading are the two subjects where standardized test scores substantially affect the way our school is rated and judged. When the time comes to talk about how we’re going to improve test scores, as a social studies teacher my job is pretty much to see where I can line things up with the English department.

Truth be told, this doesn’t bother me a great deal. I like finding ways that the history content that I teach can echo across what students think about in other classes. So if I can break out of the history silo a little bit by bringing in some tools from English (or even math), I’ll take the opportunity. And as much as people like to talk about different ways of learning and technology’s effect on spreading information, it’s hard to argue that you can get very far in understanding either the present or the past if you struggle to understand and interpret the written word. So I have always spent a good chunk of my classroom time on building literacy skills. (The variety and scope of what’s needed for 21st century literacy is a discussion I’m going to hold off on for now.) I spent a lot of time with my students this past marking period on the idea of thesis statements, both recognizing them and writing them. I checked off fewer “content boxes” in terms of the history topics I covered. But I hope that I helped the students think about what we did discuss a little more deeply.

It can be tough tradeoff to make, and it can get tougher all the time. As my English teacher mentor says, people keep writing new books; history keeps adding new events. (And quite frankly that is a problem I would like to continue having.) You kind of have to let go of the idea that you’re going to cover everything. Heck, you have to let go of the idea that you’re going to cover everything important. When I have to make these choices I try to think about the questions the students have asked, and the things that I wish I had known sooner. And I try to help my students prepare for the next leg of the relay, when I hope that they will take what we have done and add it to their base of experience.

I think about this a lot, but the reason I’m thinking about it and writing about it now is because of this Chris Lehmann post that touches on similar themes. Toward the end, he writes:

More than anything else, we need to recognize that too often school fails at the one thing we should endeavor to do more than anything else — instill a love of learning.

With that love of learning in place, the student will be an active and voracious learner even outside the school environment. Even then she will not learn everything that there is to be learned, but she will go far beyond the foundation she built from grades K-12. This is normally the point at which I would point to the Deweyan vision of education, and maybe start thinking about more ways that I could open my classes up to more student direction and more independent work that would allow students to pursue their own interests and their own questions. And all of those are important, and they’re all things that I will continue to strive to do.

But as I come back again and again to that phrase “instill a love of learning,” I pause. I’m going to overanalyze Chris’ words here, not because I’m finding any fault with what he said but because that’s where my own thought process is going. Can a teacher instill a love of anything? Is that something that can be put into someone from the outside? Or is it something that must, somehow, already be in the person, perhaps waiting to be developed or nurtured? If it’s the latter, how do we as teachers build the trust and rapport with our students to find it and fan it, especially if they see us as adversaries piling more chores on them?

Lurking behind these questions is another that poses a threat to the whole Deweyan/pragmatist project of an engaged, learning citizen as part of a democratic culture: What is it that makes trying to learn about and understand the world so unappealing to so many people?

I’m going to be thinking about that over the next day or two and writing more this week, but I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments or elsewhere.