Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Ask the Kids How to Transform Education


"Any situation in which some men prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence;… to alienate humans from their own decision making is to change them into objects."

Since my book A Room for Learning came out, I have received numerous calls and emails from fellow educators of all kinds. I have heard from graduate students in California; students just out of college; students in college. Veteran teachers in rural South Carolina. Rookie teachers in west Texas. Kindergarten teachers in South Florida. Public school ESL teachers in the Bronx. School disciplinarians patrolling the halls and stopping fights; former eight-grade algebra teachers; teachers of English and economics in suburban high schools in Massachusetts; parents and grandparents; and librarians in the Champlain Valley of Vermont.

All of them are dying to transform education.

They have thought long and hard about education, about what works and what doesn't. They all care about what happens. They are almost all working "within" the system, or at least they have a deep understanding of the system. They are committed to children, education, their communities, and our greater society. These teachers represent, to borrow the phrase most often applied to America's soldiers, the best of our country.

I would even venture to say they these educators are making sacrifices of themselves on behalf of children. Because, without exception, these educators are doing the best work possible in a system that is inhospitable to the art of teaching.

Increasingly, to be a teacher is to be required to be a mere technician; to prepare kids for batteries of tests that, in theory at least, can measure achievement and "fitness for the workforce."

To be a teacher today is to be a pack-mule in a bureaucratic maze; to be held to strict "pacing" schedules which dictate how much time each teacher spends on a topic; to be a pawn in a corporate structure where demands are passed down from Department Chairs, Principals, School Boards, School Commissioners, Governors, and now the Federal Government.

It has come to this: President Obama's Education Secretary Arne Duncan has recently released Race to the Top, the "new" education "initiative," which is, more accurately, a competitive-ized money grab; each state is allocated an amount of dollars, and each school system can submit proposals aimed at proving they deserve some of that state's money.

The money is being granted primarily to those school systems which can best demonstrate, statistically, that their ideas are working. That is to say, the money is granted based on testing results and the accumulation of data. The grantors reserve the right to define the terms for which data support "success," "improvement", and "achievement." Let the race begin!

The guidelines for filling the application as posted in the Federal Register are 34 pages long. It has been estimated that it will take a school system on average 680 hours to complete a full application. The Administration's plan is simply a refinement of the current system. It is small-ball tinkering with the status-quo. It is nothing more than an inducement to encourage rats running in a metal cage to describe how that cage is working and then, if they are lucky, they may get the money to make the old cage into a golden cage.

If it were up to me the last thing I would do to improve my school would be to spend 17 working weeks filling out an application for an unknown someone in another state to read so that he or she might grant me money, with chains attached.

I have a better idea for transforming schools. Call me naive, call me radically innocent, but here it is: ask the kids. Ask them what they want their schools to be like. Then give them the autonomy to change the school. Let them set the standards. Ask the kids how they would like to feel in their schools, and then let them work toward making the school be a place where they can feel freely things that matter to them. I promise you, they will rise to the challenge. Because shaping the environment is far more interesting and meaningful than being passively shaped by it.

It means making schools into human-sized communities. Something larger than a family but smaller than a system. It means listening to the kids. It means looking them in their faces, listening to their voices, understanding their actions, laughing with them, pushing and cajoling them. It means not repressing them, but letting them be free. It means believing in them.

A student can not be known by his or her test result. More to the point, kids feel insulted and demeaned when they know their progress is being measured by a test. They are diminished and wounded—and, ultimately—their growth is retarded when they are not known as human-beings. Because no test, no matter how well intentioned, can show us the beautiful, nuanced thoughts of a student's mind; no test shows us the contours of a student's heart, or the shape of a child's dreams.

My former students, who were marvelously motivated and inspired when they were in our small middle school, tell me that high-school grinds away the "meat on their souls." My former students think that the high-school feels like a joke most of the time; the highlight, if a student is lucky, is one great teacher occasionally brightening the landscape. My former students tell me that they don't love school, because it is not their school. They tell me they don't like walking through the school-doors; that they are enduring; that they can't wait to get out. They tell me they are bored. They are bored because a system based on testing, control, repression, ever increasing homogeneity of instruction, and a balkanized curriculum is, well, boring, if not patently stupid and counteractive to authentic learning.

The school is a system, a deeply flawed one, and the kids know it. The size of the system requires that it be run like a giant business. Business and economies of scale do not foment the environment necessary for something as marvelously rare as open and free interaction between teachers and students. The system is the creation of well-meaning adults who have wrested control from the kids, because the brilliance of children is messy and wild, and there is nothing school administrators fear more than messiness and wildness. But if you kill that wildness, that questing life-spirit yearning for expression, then you kill the brilliance, and then you obliterate the child.

Transforming schools means admitting that rules, protocols, mandates, tests, bureaucracies, and a system predicated on authoritarian and corporate control is an insult to children and damages them in virtually every respect. It means admitting that if you want to change the schools, you have to change the system, a
nd that means letting the kids into the game.

It may be true that out of all the applications for the Race to the Top money that some success may be found out in the vast landscape of the schools of the land. However, a competitive education funding system modeled after corporate innovation strategies will not deeply or lastingly transform the hearts, minds, and souls of children.

Transformation in education happens between a teacher and a student. It happens when two students get to know and respect each other. It happens when the soul and personality of a teacher can enter into the classroom so that the souls of the students will emerge. It happens when teachers are given autonomy over what and how to teach. It happens when students and teachers realize that the "system" or "units" can be discarded for something more important. Transformation happens when a student has a thought or solution of his or her own and finds recognition and value in that discovery. Such transformation is subtle and impossible to measure. But it is the very heart of the educational enterprise.

A former student of mine once wrote me after she was in high school. She said that finally, in April, after a stultifying year of 10th grade, that something interesting had finally happened. Her substitute teacher had stopped the lesson he had been handed and told them about his experiences in Vietnam. And it was not that this girl was a great student of war or fascinated by history; no, she wrote ecstatically, "It was real. He was telling us about him. For a whole hour we had a real conversation."

She told me she then wrote him a page-long letter thanking him for that class.

I am sure that what he told her that day will not be part of the battery of testing that might demonstrate to a Race to the Top application assessor or funding grantor that my former student's school is closing the achievement gap. I don't know if it will prepare her for the workforce. But I would wager that the conversation she had that day will matter to her for the rest of her life.

If we want kids to love going to school, to be excited by what happens there, to believe it is a place for them, then it must me made into their place. That means letting them name it and rename it, form it and re-form it. It means clustering them into rooms where they can talk about what matters to them. It means allowing teachers the time to listen, to let conversations and ideas grow and mutate and expand. It means getting down on the "floor," as a parent might play with a small child, to understand what it means to be a child, not to only ever think of how we must make them grow up to be like us.






Sunday, December 13, 2009

Breaking the Fourth Wall

...I'm gonna put white hands
And black hands and brown and yellow hands
And red clay earth hands in it
Touching everybody with kind fingers
And touching each other natural as dew...
—Langston Hughes, "Day Break in Alabama"

We discussed the famous artist Allan Kaprow’s notion of “breaking the fourth wall.” Kaprow believed that the “wall” between a person looking at or “reading” a work of art and the work of art itself could be broken by involving the viewer in the work. We discussed this notion as getting to that place of writing where the feelings are so direct and true that the wall between the maker and his story dissolves. We go inside, break through the screen between how we read our thoughts, our past experiences, our fears. We go into the feeling, the time, the place the memory, the thought, and become it again, sit with it, touch it hold it, replay it. And when that happens, and the story is read, the wall between the maker and the listener also dissolves, and we (the listener) can feel ourselves living in the story ourselves. We want our work to be so full and involving that we begin to forget about artifice and separation between what we know and feel and what another knows and feels. The story, written by someone who has embodied his own feelings and thoughts, brings us into the same feelings and thoughts. We can touch their knowledge.

This happens at various points in a story. We called it the “cave of love," the sixth gear, the fifth dimension, cloud ten, and the soul groove. We hear it and feel awe it when it happens. We feel transported. We feel new knowledge opening inside us.

We discussed what should happen in a class, during, say, a project, or a discussion, or a story.

1) Lower order thinking: our base, animal needs. For the time of our learning we must forget about food, cold, comfort, territory. In order to be involved here on a daily basis, we have to learn how to put these aside.

2) Civilized Functional Thinking: to use our well-developed brains to listen, perceive, talk, write back, take notes, put things in order on paper, to ask questions, record and remember data, dates, make observations, work out problems, respond to questions.

3) Higher Order Thinking/ Meta-cognition: thinking about the data we take in. Thinking about our thinking. Reflecting on it, sifting, wondering about it, asking questions about it, extending it beyond the sphere of the classroom and into ourselves; or connecting our own thoughts with the great flow of human thought.

When kids come to NBS, we assume that they can set aside, or not focus strictly on their base needs; or, at the very least, they know how to function and take care of those base needs.

Then, the expectation in class will be that they can all do, to varying degrees, civilized functional thinking. That in class they will do the things that make them be following and listening and being activated by what happens. If a student does this, they they are “doing their work.”—getting along, fulfulling the deal, getting some skin into the game.

The higher goal, with varying ranges of intensity, is to get to the point of being able to think noble thoughts, make deep connections, attach the new information that is encountered to things beyond the matter at hand; to make larger generalizations about ourselves, humanity, or history, based on specific info encountered in class. When this happens, the learning should not stop when class stops, but should be continuing at every waking moment. One’s thought flow carries on continually, while driving in a car, while playing a game, while discussing something at dinner. When this happens the learning is growing and multiplying in a sort of individual Petri dish of thoughts, where all things keep getting reconsidered, re-combined, and new thought combinations keep emerging like a rapidly reproducing virus (a GOOD virus).

Poem read by Isabel

"Advice to a Pregnant Daughter-in-Law"
by Charles Darling

Avoid sharp things like corners, scissor points,
words and blades and cheddar cheese. Eschew
whatever's heavy, fast, and cumbersome:

meteorites, rumbly truck and stinky bus,
hockey players, falling vaults, and buffalo.
Steer clear of headlines, bank advices,

legal language, papal bulls, and grocery ads.
Every morning, listen to baroque divertimenti,
romantic operas, Hildegarde von Bingen hymns.

Evenings, read some lines from Shakespeare's comedies;
do a page of algebra; study shapes of clouds
and alchemy; make fun of your husbands feet.

Practice listening like a doe at the edge
of the earth's deep woods, but learn to disregard
most everything you hear (especially your father

and father-in-law). Learn some Indian lullabies;
speak with magic stones beneath your tongue.
Finally, I wish, avoid all tears—except

that the world and time will have their way
and weep we must. Perhaps enough is said
of grief and happiness to realize

that any child of yours will live a lifetime
utterly beguiled (as my child is)
by your bright smile, your wild and Irish laugh.

We decided that this was a great poem for us: but that the poem was wrong on one count: hockey players should NOT be avoided. We like hockey players.

WE heard a great project on the Great Migration of African American—the two main movements from 1910-1940, and then again from 1940-1970. As a set up Yared also told us about the “grandmother migration,” Harriet Tubman leading slaves to Freedom and the promised land. We learned about this later “Negro Exodus”, the movement of a people set on finding a better life, the movement away from a dystopian situation, the human need to find what is good and right, and the efforts and risk involved in looking for that. From Yared we learned about Mississippi floods, the boll-weevil, the crash of cotton industry, racism, lynchings, Muddy Waters, “Sweet Home Chicago,” “Mannish Boy,” “Sad Letter Home Blues,” unemployment, and how a huge segment of the population went looking for jobs, a better life, education, opportunity, and who also encountered difficult living situations, cramped urban tenements, whites resisting the loss of job security, and race riots.

In addition, we learned about the GREAT things that were born from this migration, such as Jazz, the blues, the poetry of Langston Hughes, the art of Jacob Lawrence, and the Harlem Rennaisance in general. Yared let us read two Langston Hughes poems, the first a very famous one, the second one not as famous.

“A Dream Deferred”

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

“Daybreak in Alabama”

When I get to be a composer
I'm gonna write me some music about
Daybreak in Alabama
And I'm gonna put the purtiest songs in it
Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist
And falling out of heaven like soft dew.
I'm gonna put some tall tall trees in it
And the scent of pine needles
And the smell of red clay after rain
And long red necks
And poppy colored faces
And big brown arms
And the field daisy eyes
Of black and white black white black people
And I'm gonna put white hands
And black hands and brown and yellow hands
And red clay earth hands in it
Touching everybody with kind fingers
And touching each other natural as dew
In that dawn of music when I
Get to be a composer
And write about daybreak
In Alabama.

This poem expresses an exquisitely beautiful vision of a world of harmony and equality. It is about the remaking of the world in the form that a just god would wish: in that dawn of music where all hands touch with kind fingers and no thing is excluded.

In addition, we discussed Education policy in the United States, No Child Left Behind, “the Race to the Top” (the current political administration educational policy); Tal’s view of it all—“No Administrator Left Standing;” the spirit of man in 1984 and Winston’s noble fight; we began writing and plotting our own play, in which we hope to figure out what the spirit of man is; Wislawa’ Szymborksa’s poem “No Title Required,” in which she asks us if we can tell what is important from what is not; and her poem, “The Joy of Writing”, in which she describes writing as “the power to preserve, the revenge of the mortal hand."

And finally, Reed read Pablo Neruda’s “Falling”, which includes these lines.

I am a naked pilgrim
traveling to the church of the sea:
I crossed the salt-encrusted stones,
I followed the discourse of rivers,
And I have felt myself joined to the bonfire
Not knowing what my destiny would be.

We don’t know yet what our destiny will be, but we are going to come close to finding out and we will do it by exercising our power to preserve with our mortal hands.

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Education Revolution

Dear Tal,

I've been teaching for over forty years, in Ohio and currently in Florida. At present, I am teaching kindergarten and, respectfully, I think you are out of touch how strange things really are in today's standards based, test based climate. My children are allowed a whopping five minutes a day for recess. We have no blocks, no dress up areas, no legos, and no easels. I am constantly frustrated by what I call the annihilation of childhood. I am to maintain rigorous instruction from "bell to bell". I would like, before I no longer teach, to have some opportunity to bring children together in a way that you have done. I figure that about one in one hundred politicians and educators think like you. I know what really matters for children, I would love to find a way to do what you are doing, with young children. Is there any hope for me? Is there anyone in south Florida that wants to start something in education that is noble and personal?

Tom Tenerovich (Mr. T.)

P.S. As I read your book I alternately laughed and cried as you and your middle schoolers worked through the process of living and learning. Also, is it possible for me in Florida to both work within state law and start something like you did? I can't wait to try some things out in my classroom tomorrow.

****

Dear Mr. T,

Thank you for contacting me and for your generous words.

I have nothing but admiration for you and your life-long efforts to teach well. I also have hope in the fact that you say that "you can't wait to get in the classroom to try some new things..." That means the hope is alive, and you are doing your work nobly.

My knowledge of the system in FL is limited. But I believe that there must be someone out there trying new ways.

My suggestion: contact Jerry Mintz at "Education Revolution." He regularly visits classrooms around the country to assess what they are doing and how to help teachers like you.

here is the website,

It appears that there is a lot going on Tallahassee.

Keep up the good fight, my brother.

With respect, Tal

****

Tal,

I am overwhelmed that you responded so quickly and with such a good heart. Thank you for your encouragement and links to people that I can connect with to investigate my dreams and desires. I really don't want to complain anymore about standards, rigor, and incessant testing. I long for the chance to be the joy, inspire the joy, learn the joy from humble and sincere growing with children as we explore who we are and what we want to be. If it's okay, I'll let you know what happens. I'm finishing your book now and I wish the chapters never ended.

Yours, Mr. T.


    Saturday, December 5, 2009

    And We Speak Our Names

    ...these recent memories of future dream/ these perhaps who have lost their shadows if/ which did not do the losing specters mime/ until out merely not nothing comes/ only one snowflake(and we speak our names

    —e.e. cummings

    Now is the time when we begin to write our stories. I mean, the longer autobiographical stories, pages and pages, scene upon scenes, some dialogue, some setting, some characters, all set in motion on the page, in the room, in the mind, causing, on many levels, mental transformation, creative stress and energy, sifting, digging, and ordering.

    Though this is the dark time of year, and the sky is gray and we go inside, this is also when the connections between us begin to become more dense and numerous. The future dream we uttered in the beginning is far behind us; we try to lose our shadows. Or step out of them to become embodied. Two dimensions begin to rise toward three dimensions. Winter, and first merely flakes of snow? Our story ideas coming out of merely not nothing? This is how we begin to speak our names. We lose our shadows, we gain ourselves.

    We do this now because we know ourselves and each other better, and because of that we can begin to write what we know into the forms of our stories. Something falls from a white-gray sky. The first snow-flake. White on white, gray on white, white on gray. Black lines on white pages, white pages piling up. If we are lucky, out of many gray days comes a day of snow and morning sunlight, a radiant story that is the Truth.

    On Wednesday Eric took some of the school down into the strata of the OMYA rock quarry where the stone is 190 million years old. We move among those strata and our own. In ourselves, in history, in a pit of the earth. So I ask them: What’s the idea? No, tell me first, what’s the feeling? Where does or did the feeling live. Close your eyes, remember backwards. Go down in the strata, to where thought and actions and circumstance fused together in great heat by time and weight. What was happening there? Where do you seeyourself? On a swing set? Kneeling on the floor with Playmobil and Lego. Staring at a clock at ten minutes before three. Remembering the bones and the stones of an old field. Stacking up pinecones in a fort. A dream of birds eating grain at dusk. Ice clinking in a glass. These are the first places, where we find the seeds of ourselves waiting to be uncovered, resituated, or resurrected and given a little light. There is a lot of talking to ourselves that goes on in this, talking to ourselves and each other, a lot of looking for good answers.

    The seventh graders are reading the poems of Wislawa Symborska, in the collection View With a Grain of Sand. The assignment this week was to have a conversation with a rock, mimicking Szymborska’s “Conversation with a Stone.” After class I sent them out to collect their rocks, which they kept with them during the week. The were to talk to the rock, sleep with it, carry it around, and try not to lose it. One of the kids realized the simple idea in such a seemingly silly assignment.

    “I was talking to my rock last night and I realized that it was not like a conversation with a person who I can rely on to talk back to me. I realized that I had to give the answer, so it was like having a conversation with myself.”

    This is what we are doing. Learning to have the right conversations with ourselves—an ongoing process that takes a lifetime to master. The conversations the seventh graders had with their rocks were filled with innocent and profound questions:

    “Rock, what is the meaning of life?”

    “Rock, I think we should live loving every little thing, because every little thing is beautiful.”

    “Rock, You never make friends if you hide yourself away.”

    “Rock, when I have time to think about all the things I hear from my friends everything starts bouncing off each other and I can’t control it. I feel like I need to shout it all and get rid of it.”

    “Rock, can you impart any great knowledge to me?”

    “Rock: Yes, you can hate. But what do you get out of that? Do you get a good feeling when you have found a new hate? No. But a new love? Yes.”

    “You humans can’t memorize a conversation without writing it down. We rocks remember everything.”

    When we begin asking questions we don’t know what the answers will be. If we know, what would the point be in asking? So we begin asking, an arduous, strange, vexing process. I don’t know how many times I have heard the words, “I don’t know what to write. What should I write? I don’t know where to go. How should I start?” Though it is difficult for them and for me, we have to try to keep ourselves at this outer edge, just a step beyond what we know, but still moving forward to new knowing. We know what we have to do, and to do it we have to learn to shut out the distractions and the clutter and the static. We have to put ourselves in a state of mental solitude so we can hear. Being willing to go into a state of mental solitude can be the most difficult thing we do, because in that self-imposed quiet we may hear things we don’t want to hear, or that make us uncomfortable, or that confuse, that are strange.

    ****

    In the clay studio we made clay orbs, shaped vessels, spheres holding space. We also shoveled sand onto the Labyrinth paths. We made models of the earth and the layers of the earth out of paper and papier mache. All of these hands-on activities mimic what we are trying to do with our stories. Making, holding, containing, digging, turning.

    We heard two fantastic projects, the first on Capitalism as a kind of Utopia/Dystopia, the second on “Utopia as Celebrity, Luxury, Advertising, and Consumerist Culture.” We heard about Charlie Chaplin and Adam Smith, Marilyn Monroe and the Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis, Suburu ads and the tax rates of socialistcountries. We heard about the flow of capital and the flow of luxury goods, the interconnections of economy and the inter-connections of our own soul-hunger and the ways products are marketed to us. Individualism versus collectivism. What Brad Pitt gives us versus what Rumi or Thoreau gives us; Personal wealth versus healthy communities; luxury value versus sentimental value; “needs” versus needs.

    These projects, back to back, gave us an enormous field on which to see our own pursuits, our own inner desires, to compare our own visions of how we should live with images of how we, as a culture, currently live—or how we are encouraged to live by our overwhelming and numerous forms of media and cultural inputs. And following that, or in the middle of all that, trying to grow up in it, we find ourselves writing our stories, which implies a very different set of needs and imperatives, none of which are completed or answered by the material of material culture. Our stories are about the things of the spirit, mind, and psyche. Our stories lead us to a very different place that the one placed before us by executive producers of consumerism. In truth, we find most of what we need in our own unique, strange and single “trufala” trees, which could be said to be our own souls, our most rooted selves, the things that grow up in us that we try to preserve.

    Calder volunteered to read a Mary Oliver poem to the class on Wednesday that Sophie had chosen. But Sophie wasn’t at school so she asked Calder to read the poem, called “The Journey.”

    One day you finally knew
    what you had to do, and began,
    though the voices around you
    kept shouting
    their bad advice --
    though the whole house
    began to tremble
    and you felt the old tug
    at your ankles.
    "Mend my life!"
    each voice cried.
    But you didn't stop.
    You knew what you had to do,
    though the wind pried
    with its stiff fingers
    at the very foundations,
    though their melancholy
    was terrible.
    It was already late
    enough, and a wild night,
    and the road full of fallen
    branches and stones.
    But little by little,
    as you left their voices behind,
    the stars began to burn
    through the sheets of clouds,
    and there was a new voice
    which you slowly
    recognized as your own,
    that kept you company
    as you strode deeper and deeper
    into the world,
    determined to do
    the only thing you could do --
    determined to save
    the only life you could save.


    If we connect Oliver’s poem to our own stories, we may see that sitting down in solitude may be the first good thing that should happen. “But little by little / as you left their voices behind,/ the stars began to burn though sheets of clouds,/ and there was a new voice/ which you slowly/ recognized as your own.” We try to find and recognize our own voices. We try to speak our names. That’s all the stories really are: the boldest, most concrete flourishing of ourselves that we can muster. The stories put us forth into the world. The stories claim territory, assert being, bring shadow into shape.