Category: Education

A Natural-Born Teacher

Posted on by Suki

When my son and I went to look at Mount Madonna School as a possible school for him to transfer to, we knew there were a lot of reasons that he shouldn’t go there. It was an hour’s bus ride from our house. The tuition would eat into our household budget such that we wouldn’t be able to do some of the things we’d done before. He wouldn’t have much time left in the day for being home, his favorite place to be.

But all of that lost meaning when he walked into the pre-fab building that would be his fifth-grade classroom. There he met Sri-Gyan James McCaughan—better known to his students and everyone else as simply “Sri”—who he knew would be his teacher.

Sri
Only two years ago, my son was so young and Sri was so healthy. We are so lucky to have had him in our lives.

Yes, there were superficial reasons for my son to be attracted to Sri’s classroom. Sri, like my son, was simply mad for technology, especially beautiful technology created by Apple. Sri based his entire classroom curriculum on filmmaking. He would meet the kids at the bus on the first day of school with the camera running, and the film they made was presented at the first parent meeting each year. The year my son started in Sri’s class, a couple of the kids took over the class. Sri sounded sheepish when he introduced the film at the parent meeting, but the result was clearly the work of a natural-born teacher. Rather than try to push down the conquering instincts of a few boys who were new to the school that year, he decided to nurture them. His camera hand was steady as he filmed the kids leading the class, sitting in his chair….

…OK, he did in fact stop the kid who tried to say, “And this must be my computer!” and open Sri’s beloved MacBook Pro. But that’s understandable.

The year in Sri’s classroom presented lots of challenges to my son. He ended up the year deciding to try homeschooling. But this was not to spite Sri—in fact, perhaps it was in part because of Sri. For Sri, learning was integrated into life. His classroom wasn’t a place where standards held an honored place. This made some parents very uncomfortable. But Sri seemed to know what kids needed. One day at the bus stop a parent was commiserating with me about all the hard math homework. I nodded my head knowingly.

As my son and I got into the car, I asked, “So, do you get math homework?”

“Sure,” my son answered. “I finish it at lunchtime on Mondays.”

Clearly Sri knew not to pile on busywork when it wasn’t needed. My son was focused on his creative side, and it was just fine with him to do the bare minimum in math at that time.

Sri and my son kept in touch now and then during the last couple of years. There was no question that Sri was on the invitation list for his Bar Mitzvah, and Sri accepted. But a couple of weeks before the event, I got an e-mail saying that he had “a scheduling problem.”

The scheduling problem is one that sometimes arises in the lives of people too young to be taken away from us. Sri had been diagnosed with an inoperable cancer. He was given six months, but he died today, only a few months later.

It’s the optimist’s goal to see good in these sorts of things. The pessimist’s to see the evil of the world. I don’t see either. It’s just part of the confusing nature of things that Sri would go so soon, while others who give so much less to the world linger on.

But what I do see in clear relief is that Sri’s was a life well lived. He left behind so many people who truly mourn the loss of his influence in this world. He was a lovely soul, and I am so thankful that he was part of my son’s life.

It’s that happy STAR test season again!

Posted on by Suki

It’s that happy season again, STAR testing time, when kids across California sit in a room and fill in bubbles with #2 pencils. The kid think they just have pencils in their hands. But in this era of NCLB, students actually hold the fate of their teachers, schools, and districts in their sweaty little palms. Parents fret that kids think these tests are too important. Teachers fret that their students might not take them seriously enough. District officials fret if the mix of skin colors that show up for the test tilts too far to one side, and hope that the parents from the wealthy side of their school’s neighborhood haven’t decided to keep their kids home “sick.”

I have strong memories from my years of standardized tests. In the third grade, I took a statewide standardized test that informed me that I should become a mathematician. I was crushed. I knew I wanted to be a writer—did this mean I couldn’t do that? I didn’t tell anyone of my fear, but you can bet I made sure not to like math nearly as much as I did before.

As an undergraduate, I wrote a paper about cultural bias in testing. The theme was suggested to me when, as a volunteer at a local school with a high immigrant population, I administered an “English” test to a girl from Venezuela. One question showed a picture of a girl in ice skates standing next to a sign that said, “Danger: Thin ice.” My sweet little student looked puzzled, and asked me, pointing at her eyes, “ice?” Well, yeah. She’d never seen a frozen lake before. Or ice skates.

Did I mention that this test had been developed for Puerto Rican children in New York? That was in the eighties, when cultural bias was just starting to be understood.

I remember when a few years later, my 100% English fluent boyfriend had to take the TOEFL as part of applying to grad school, since he was a non-resident from a non-English speaking country. He said that the recording they listened to was so bad, he couldn’t understand half of it. And his English was so fluent, few people knew he wasn’t born and raised here.

In case you missed this part, the TOEFL is supposed to test how well people understand English, not how extra-sharp their hearing is.

Despite all this, I don’t hate standardized tests and think they should be abolished. They have a job that they do well, when they are designed well to do that job. The job they do well is offer up a number correlating to how many correct answers a person got on a specific day on a subject that can be tested with multiple choice answers. Subjects that can be tested well are basic math skills (though ambiguously worded word problems are always a problem) and subject mastery (details of disciplines like biology). As long as the test-writers don’t try to make the test interesting by including cultural information (my daughter refuses ever to answer a math problem involving football, a game she has never seen played), some basic picture of the student’s knowledge and skills can be created.

The problem is, Americans have jumped on standardized tests like we built the railroad to the West: full steam ahead, don’t worry about how many Chinese laborers you hurt in the process. We have this idea that the tests can tell us something about how well the students think (impossible), how well their teachers teach (ridiculous), and whether their district should be allowed to continue administering their own schools. On the basis of standardized tests, we are told that our government can fire everyone working at a school (Ed. Secretary Arne Duncan’s pet project), as if having kids turn up to learn from strangers will somehow scare their brains into compliance. On the basis of standardized tests, we think that we can decide which teachers need more pay, and which should be fired.

Furthermore, the different parts of our government are making decisions independent of each other, so they end up using testing like a carpenter who uses a screwdriver to hammer in a nail. California’s STAR test is designed to measure students against each other. It’s designed to put 50% of the kids taking it under the line, and 50% over. When they try out new questions on the STAR test, they don’t want to see if it’s a good question based on whether kids get it right. They want to see if it’s a tricky enough question that the right number of kids get it wrong. So when your child is in the 50th percentile of the STAR math portion, for example, that says that half the kids did better, half the kids did worse.

No Child Left Behind, however, stipulates that all schools must get 100% of their students above proficiency. How do you test proficiency? You give kids questions based on what you think they should know, and if 80% of them get it right, you say, Wow, our schools are doing OK. You don’t say, Wait, we need to make that question less clear so that not so many kids get it right. But that’s what the STAR does. If you don’t believe me, download their sample questions and take the test. You’ll find ambiguities and obscure elements all over it. Any thinking kid takes this test and finds that even in sections that should be clear, such as math, there are ambiguities. The test is not trying to figure out what they know: it’s trying to trick them into failing.

We’ll be doing STAR tests this year. Our district is pressuring our little program (which officially doesn’t have to test because we are happily “statistically insignificant”) to get our testing numbers up. They don’t seem to care about our scores. They care about those cute little tushies warming chairs, grasping #2 pencils, and filling in enough bubbles to make it valid. It’s a silly game. We homeschoolers, if we’re doing our jobs well, know what our students’ strengths and weaknesses are. Last year, I laughed when I saw my daughter’s STAR math results – they were exactly what I would have predicted. Luckily, my daughter actually thinks the tests are fun (and looks forward to the popsicles handed out afterwards), and my son has grudgingly agreed to waste time that would be much better spent on his computer, just to humor me.

But we all know what game we’re playing: We’re not testing them to find out what they know. We’re testing them to make a bureaucrat happy. And if my kids’ good scores help their school and district a little bit, well, I’m OK with that. But these tests, I make sure they know, are meaningless in the scope of things.

Even if they get in the 99th percentile in math, as I did in third grade, I’m not going to announce to them that I know what their career path should be. No test can tell me something about my kids that I don’t already know just by talking to them, working with them, and loving them.

The questions, the answers

Posted on by Suki

I had a very polite conversation today with an adult who learned that I homeschool my kids. She was curious, but respectful, and though she asked the usual set of questions, they were asked with honest curiosity and interest. Homeschoolers always get these questions, and so here they are, with my answers. If you are a non-homeschooler who finds yourself questioning a homeschooler someday, perhaps you can be as polite and positive as my questioner was today.

1. Do you have a teaching background? aka Are you a licensed teacher? aka How can you know what to teach your kids? aka Do you think you’re better than a school teacher?

Notice that all the questions ask largely the same thing, but I liked her phrasing (the first one) the best. It’s a natural question: I am spending my time “teaching,” so am I a “teacher”?

The short answer, which I gave her, is that I was a college English teacher.

But that had nothing to do with my homeschooling, and actually has nothing to do with my qualifications to homeschool. Lots of homeschoolers were teachers—in fact, it’s notable how many homeschoolers were public school teachers who didn’t want to put their kids through that system. Hm. But the really important answer to this question is actually this: I don’t have to be a teacher. I am teaching my kids to be learners. In this day of information overload, no one can “know” everything you need to know in order to become fully literate in our society. This is a huge change from a century ago, when there was an accepted body of knowledge that one attained in order to become literate, then an accepted body of knowledge one attained in order to become educated, and finally a deeper and narrower body of knowledge to attain in one’s chosen field.

Today, the most important thing kids need to be taught is how to teach themselves what they need to know. Some teachers and schools are getting this. But most aren’t. If you look at what’s being taught and tested for in our schools, it’s certainly not how to find the answer. What’s being taught is how to know the answer, which is a whole different thing. The other thing students need to learn is how to evaluate the reams of conflicting information they will be presented with. Critical thinking skills are mandatory in this world.

Both learning how to learn and critical thinking are fundamental to what homeschooling parents do.

2. You must work hard! aka I could never do that! aka You’re crazy—wouldn’t you rather have a real job? aka What’s the point?

Again, she asked respectfully, but homeschoolers get these variations on this question all the time.

My answer was quite simple: We have a very laid-back lifestyle. This morning, for example, was unusual in that I had to get both kids to different locations because I had an appointment. So yes, I did have to call my son a few times (he’s 13, right?) and then he sat there in his pajamas and talked instead of eating. Finally I had to get dramatic on him and say You Have Ten Minutes Before You Need To Be Dressed And Ready To Leave.

The thing is, this could be seen as a replay of our mornings when he had to catch the bus. But this was taking place at….well….8:50 a.m. Our days of having to get up at the crack of dawn (unless we’re getting up to do something fabulously exciting) are over. We have a laid-back lifestyle, and we love it.

The number that homeschoolers cite is that you only have to “school” for about 2.5 hours per day to match how much schooling kids get in the average public school. All the rest of the school day is organizational stuff, getting from one place to another, waiting, waiting, and waiting. Now, I have to admit, I have never spent 2.5 solid hours making my kids do “school.” But over a day, we probably fit in that much of what might be called “school” stuff, as long as you include electives in what you call “school”!

The fact is, you could do that. You think it’s hard because you see that the job of being a schoolteacher is hard. And it is! I am awed by anyone who can spend a whole day with 30 (or more) kids. By then I’d want to go flush myself down the toilet. But I don’t spend my day trying to teach that many kids. I spend my day interacting with my two favorite kids. And it’s really not that hard.

However, I must also say that this is a “real job.” I’m giving my kids a Cadillac education for the price of a used Chevy Neon. When we do our taxes, I see what I do as “income”—finding a private school to do this would certainly cost many times more than we’re putting out.

3. So…do you have time to do anything else? aka Are you wasting your time staying home with kids? aka Are you losing your edge in the job market?

Each homeschooler is different. I know some who are lower-energy people, have higher-energy kids, or just some random combination of life circumstances who really don’t do much outside of homeschooling. But I and many of my friends do a significant work outside of homeschooling. Now, a lot of what we do is in service of homeschooling, such as the board I’m on and the homeschool program whose Site Council I’m on. But we also do things that are both professions and personal callings. (Obviously,) I’m a writer, and my writing only sometimes intersects with my homeschooling. I also sing, garden, and read voraciously, things I would do whether homeschooling or not.

Yes, we have lives. No, we aren’t giving everything up for our kids. We just happen to be in the situation where we think this is the best choice for us. At this time. In our situation. Things can change.

4. My conversation-mate didn’t imply this, because her child is grown, but probably the most frustrating thing homeschoolers get is other parents implying, or telling us straight to our faces, that by homeschooling, we are implicitly criticizing their choice to send their children to school.

Nope. Sorry. That’s your own insecurity. So don’t put it on me. I made the best choice for my family. If you are concerned that you’re not making the best choice, you’ll have to deal with it. But don’t make it my fault!

Homeschoolers choose homeschooling for their own reasons. When other people get defensive about it, they’re simply speaking about their own insecurities. We aren’t doing it to insult you. In fact, you can pretty much be sure that we didn’t think of you at all when we chose to homeschool!

5. Having met my kids, who were both polite and one of whom showed impressive knowledge in our questioner’s occupation, she didn’t even have to ask this one, but I’ll throw it in just for a laugh: What about socialization?

Hahahahaha! Heck, if my kids didn’t socialize so much, we might actually get something done. Believe me, my kids are doing fine, and thank you for your concern.

So there you have it, my answers to the questions that people ask. Please note that YMMV (your mileage may vary) is the motto of every homeschooler offering advice, so someone else may have different answers. I may have different answers tomorrow. But hopefully today’s answers were enlightening!

The best website for your school

Posted on by Suki

For a number of years I had a specialization I didn’t really seek out: designing websites for educational use. It started when I was consulting for the Small Business Development Center at Cabrillo College and created a career-research website for Cabrillo. Then a Cabrillo teacher hired me to make an interactive website for his class. This was in the late-90’s and as far as I know, distance learning was hardly talked about yet.

From there, I started to help the various schools I was involved with create better websites and more efficient electronic communications. Then I started doing similar work for for-profit educational businesses. Until recently, I still had clients hanging on, but since my life has been going off in a different direction, I am now only keeping my pro bono work for schools we’re involved with.

Over the years, I noticed how really awful most schools’ websites were, and how chaotic and complicated their communication systems were. Whenever I could, I’d help a school try to work this out, though there was almost always a lot of resistance. I won’t tell you how long it took me to get one school to use a single calendar that could be jointly administered.

Since I am now officially free of my paying clients, I thought I’d try to reduce my experience to a few tips that educators can use to make their electronic communications better and more efficient.

Websites:

1) Your website is your face to the world.

Perhaps, when I started doing this in the 90’s, a school could say that their website (if they had one) was superfluous. Now it’s almost always the very first contact parents have with your school or program. And it amazes me how many schools leave this very important entry point to uncommitted parents or incompetent semi-professionals. You need to take your website very, very seriously. It should meet the needs of all your “clients”: current parents, prospective parents, prospective staff, and even alumni. And as a journalist, I can’t emphasize how important it is to have good, well-written information on your website. Journalists who get lost in a maze or find outdated information on your website may just choose to feature another school in their articles.

2) Your website showcases the sort of education you offer.

If your website is boring, your school looks boring. If your website has lots of typos, your school looks ineffectual. If your website has outdated information, your school looks like a place where things only happened in the past.

3) Your website is flexible.

Don’t think of your website as one thing: consider all the ways you can use it to reach your community. The front page should have clear links for the different types of users: parents, students, staff, community.

4) Your website does not have to be fancy.

Have you ever gone to an educational website and faced a 30-second flash extravaganza that you had to sit through? Music that blared out of your computer without warning? Lots of pretty pictures but no information? It’s frustrating and off-putting. Get to the point and get there quickly.

5) Your website is informative.

What do people want to know when they go to the front page? Is that information front and center? It amazes me how many schools don’t have their address and phone number on the front page. And schools that, for example, list an e-mail address that no one is in charge of responding to (true story), or have contact forms that don’t work (this on a website for a Cabrillo College program for kids that I tried to use a few weeks ago).

6) Your website is dynamic.

If you aren’t willing to keep the website up-to-date, don’t put current information on it! But really, you need to make the commitment to make your website dynamic. The public is going to use it, whether you want them to or not.

7) Modern web tools are easy to use.

My last paying client was a school that I’d built a website for years before. We built the website at that time in a way that required knowledge of web design to edit it. Last month, I transitioned them to a Google Site. OK, it’s not nearly as pretty as the original website I designed, and it doesn’t have the cute animations an artist mom made for the original site. But now the staff has direct access to all the information. They aren’t depending on remembering to tell me when something changes — they own the site and they go in and make the change. I really encourage all schools to look into Google Apps for Education — the set-up was quite easy and the maintenance couldn’t be easier.

Communication:

There is no reason why a school needs to communicate via the old-fashioned monthly print newsletter anymore. Electronic tools are free, easy-to-use, and can be adapted for the few “off-line” parents you might have left. Here are some tips:

1) Don’t make an e-mail address optional on your registration form. Declare that you communicate electronically and demand an address. Lots of parents will leave this blank if you give them the option. (Of course, always include a checkbox for “I don’t have access to electronic communication and will need paper copies or access to a school computer.”)

2) Create ways for the school to communicate both formally and informally. A blog or discussion list allows parents and teachers to exchange informal information. In these days of budget cuts, a blog by a teacher about an upcoming project might just tweak a parent’s memory that she’s got the materials you need in her garage. Formal communication needs to be teacher-controlled and trustworthy. If you have an online calendar, it must be correct and show schedule changes on a daily basis.

3) Some staff will be very resistant to change. When you make the transition to electronic communication, it has to be non-optional. Resistant staff eventually come around…. or retire! 🙂

4) You can create so much good feeling in a parent community by keeping everyone connected with what’s going on in school. Photos, student projects, descriptions of events… anything you put up there will give them confidence that your school is a vital, exciting place for their kids to be.

5) Online information is free. Nothing you can do about it — free information is here to stay. So rather than fight it, use your website to give away as much information as possible. Don’t make parents come to the office to get a piece of paper they need — make it available online. Recommend web tools. Have your librarian (if you’ve still got one) blog about new books in the library. Draw your community in, and use all these great new tools to build even better education and community for everyone.

 

What’s up with the science fair?

Posted on by Suki

Regular readers will know that we are big fans of the science fair. Ever since the first time we wandered in, having seen an announcement somewhere, we haven’t found any local event cooler for our kids to take part in. My husband and I marvel at the fact that we didn’t even know about science fairs when we were kids, while our kids enter it every year. [See: A few words about scientists and inventors… Science inspirations… Winning and losing… Science Fair… And I’m sure I’ve written more but that’s what you’re getting right now!]

The thing that was particularly interesting about the science fair this year was the lack of high school division projects. We couldn’t find them, and thought perhaps they had split them off due to high demand. No such luck. There were “only about 16 projects (out of an eligible population of about 12,000 high school students)” (from my fellow parent-of-science-fair-kids Kevin, who is also a judge). In other words: we didn’t find the projects done by high schoolers because they were lost in the sea of elementary and middle school projects. Kevin points out that getting 1% of our high school students to do science fair projects seems like a fair goal—and that would mean “about an 8-fold increase over the current situation.”

There are plenty of reasons not to do the science fair. It takes lots of time, parental involvement, teacher leadership and determination on the part of the students. The thing is, I can’t really believe that everyone doesn’t do it—at least at their school science fair. It’s so fun! But apparently I’m a bit out of touch. As far as teens in this county goes, the science fair is nothing special.

At the stream
A future scientific breakthrough in process?

I think this probably reflects the general trend in our society away from a culture that “does” toward a culture that “watches.” It has shocked me to see how few kids are willing to sing these days—they have gotten the message that if they don’t have a hit song, no one wants to hear them. It’s not like science is as dorky now as it was when I was a kid: With cool science-based shows like Myth Busters, it’s possible that more kids now have a positive view of science than before. It just seems to be a general lack of interest in actually “doing” anything. Kids are content to watch.

It probably also has to do with what’s been happening in our public schools (though I do note that in our county at least, it’s the public schools who send the most kids to the science fair). Since NCLB doesn’t test for science, it sends that general “science isn’t important” message right down the line. Teachers in schools under program improvement in this county have pretty much had to cut science from K-8 curriculum, even though studying science improves the scores in math and language arts tests in an enjoyable way.

And for high school kids, it probably has a huge amount to do with our culture of homework which has so bogged down today’s students. (See Race to Nowhere.) More and more homeschooled kids are turning up at the science fair, and it’s easy to see why. We allow our kids the time to relax into science and really be able to explore it. Without hours of worksheets due every night, a kid has time to dream and create—time that is necessary for real scientific exploration. When kids have hours of homework every night, and then more on weekends, how can they possibly follow through on a high-school level project? That takes not only a deep interest, but deep learning, deep commitment, and most importantly, supportive adults who mentor the student through a difficult process.

Today it was finally raining in the way we expect on the Central Coast—steady wet ranging from drips to downpours all day long. Mid-morning, my daughter said she’d had enough of percents and wanted to go for a rainwalk. I could have insisted that the worksheet was not done and that was her commitment to math today, but instead I said, well, OK. I know she loves rainwalks.

And so we went out and splashed down into the redwood forest, where she sang and wandered and wondered about the things we saw. For all I know, that was the time in which a scientific idea coalesced in her brain. For all I know, by planting my boot in a puddle and getting a soaker, I may have planted the seed for next year’s science fair.

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