Size Matters

Bill Gates from Wikipedia

Size matters— but Bill Gates seems to think it doesn’t.

I’m talking about education and class size. Recent reports show U.S. students to be average compared to world education rankings. According to Yahoo News, Bill Gates suggests that bigger classes and fewer teachers who are paid more will help solve our educational problems. 

Really?

Gates spoke to the Council of Chief State School Officers on November 19, 2010. (Read his speech here.) He says more teachers and smaller class sizes have not led to increased student achievement. “One of the most expensive assumptions embedded in school budgets is the belief that reducing class sizes improves student achievement...What if we identified the most effective teachers and offered them extra pay for taking on more students, or teaching kids who are behind, or teaching in the toughest schools?”

The thinking of this supposedly smart man has taken on a simplistic tone that is unrealistic to anyone who has been "in the trenches." That kind of thinking is not what I would have expected of Bill Gates. He is only a little right and very wrong. When he says great teachers are vital to student achievement, he’s correct. Teacher proficiency does make a difference. However, even the best teachers will not succeed under certain conditions.

 

I’m afraid Gates is looking at education in business terms. It bothered me several years ago when Baltimore City began turning over some schools to businesses. The theory was that you could run schools like a successful business to produce successful students. “Produce” is a key word here. We are not running a production line. We are dealing with human beings in a complex environment.

Math facts for Bill Gates

However, if Gates, the business man, wants to look at education in terms of numbers, I can throw out a little math:

A middle school teacher—say a language arts teacher—has 5 classes a day. Each class has 30 students. Each class period is 50 minutes. Teacher load = 150 students a day. Let’s look at how this computes: 

30 students for 50 minutes = 1 2/3 minutes of individual attention per student per class period

And then there’s grading. A language arts teacher is supposed to teach writing. If this teacher gives a writing assignment, s/he will have 150 assignments to grade. If s/he gives just one minute attention to each assignment, that equals 2 ½ hours just to minimally assess one assignment.

I don’t want to get too complicated here but where is this 2 ½ hours going to come from? (Don’t get me started on team meetings, parent conferences, phone messages to return and logistics for teachers who have no secretary and who get one 50-minute planning period per day and a 25-minute lunch period—maybe.) And when is this teacher going to plan for tomorrow’s lesson? Don’t forget that this teacher probably has a family and children and s/he is expected to take graduate classes which require the teacher to do assignments for the night class. 

Reality

I’m merely bringing up the math of class size. I haven’t even started on the human element. A middle school teacher might deal with 150 students a day. On any given day, any one student might act like an 8-year-old or a 16-year-old. And on any given day, students within that 30-student class might range in age behavior from age 8 to 16.  Remember, we’re dealing with raging hormones here.

Every middle school student knows that the larger the class, the more s/he can “get away” with. The teacher is less likely to catch shenanigans and bullying because there are just too many children to deal with at once.

And don’t forget the problems students bring to school from dysfunctional family situations and their own volatile emotions.

Bill, before you claim to have the solution to the education problems in our country, why don’t you teach in a middle school for a year? You’ll have a better grasp of classroom math and you might begin to realize that schools cannot be run like a business.

Bill, after you've experienced reality, you will know positively that size does matter.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

More...

Absolutely the best dentist:

http://bloomingjourney.blogspot.com/2002/02/httpwww.html

Encouraging mediocrity:

http://bloomingjourney.blogspot.com/2002/01/2902-pupil-who-is-never-required-to-do.html

Teacher pay:

http://bloomingjourney.blogspot.com/2001/06/teachers-pay-i-for-one-am-sick-and.html

What students remember:

http://bloomingjourney.blogspot.com/2001/06/what-students-remember-now-that-pace.html

MSPAP and student attitude

http://bloomingjourney.blogspot.com/2001/06/mspap-theres-lot-to-be-said-against.html

A look at math in Language Arts:

http://bloomingjourney.blogspot.com/2001/05/look-at-math-in-language-arts-lets-say_3538.html

Stop blaming teachers:

http://bloomingjourney.blogspot.com/2001/05/stop-blaming-teachers-teachers-are-not.html

Teach? I’d love to:

http://bloomingjourney.blogspot.com/2001/05/may-14-teach-id-love-to-teach-subject.html

Danger:

http://bloomingjourney.blogspot.com/2001/05/danger-unseen-dangers-lurk_6671.html

Blood:

http://bloomingjourney.blogspot.com/2001/05/blood-tuesday_803.html

Teaching about gun safety (on top of everything else):

http://bloomingjourney.blogspot.com/2001/05/legislation-about-teaching-gun-safety.html

TGIF:

http://bloomingjourney.blogspot.com/2001/04/tgif-end-of-week-why-do-teachers-live_7645.html

Alternet article:

http://www.alternet.org/story/149232/

American Visionary Art Museum's Educational Goals

Funny thing...no mention of standardized testing or standardized learning.

1. Expand the definition of a worthwhile life.
2. Engender respect for and delight in the gifts of others.
3. Increase awareness of the wide variety of choices available in life for all ... particularly students
4. Encourage each individual to build upon his or her own special knowledge and inner strengths
5. Promote the use of innate intelligence, intuition, self-exploration, and creative self-reliance.
6. Confirm the great hunger for finding out just what each of us can do best, in our own voice, at any age.
7. Empower the individual to choose to do that something really, really well.

Read more about the AVAM's education goals here.

And don't forget to visit one of my favorite places in Baltimore. The Visionary's new exhibit, "What Makes Us Smile," is bound to make you learn something while smiling.

http://www.avam.org

Fear and Learning

 March/April 2010, Neurology Now

Why can’t Johnny learn? Often in looking for the answer to this question, the focus is on teachers and their teaching skills. However, even the best teachers cannot help their students learn if they are fearful. It’s impossible for the brain to learn when it is afraid and stressed.

The March/April 2010 issues of Neurology Now has an interesting article that talks about the science behind fear and learning. Higher learning occurs in the prefrontal cortex but fear leads to the amygdala’s fight or flight responses. 

Goldie Hawn is working with neurologist Judy Willis in this area with an unusual but educationally valid approach to helping students learn.

Metacognition.

Hawn’s MindUp! program teaches children how their brains work and why the right frame of mind is so important to their learning. Then students are trained to become more aware so their can identify their emotions and use the coping exercises they have learned.

It sounds like a reasonable approach for kids who are afraid  and stressed because of tests or being afraid to speak up in class but it may not work if a student is being abused at home or bullied in school.

Educators want to see their students learn and test scores rise. This article in Neurology Now points out that learning will not occur in a climate of fear. Schools must work hard to make sure students do not spend their time in a fearful climate. That means making sure that bullies do not highjack learning.

My doctoral work focused on schools, bullying and empathy. A summary presentation and accompanying notes can be found here. 

Bullying Presentation

http://bonnieschupp.com/Bullying.pps

Presentation Notes

http://bonnieschupp.com/bullyingnotes.doc

The Mind

"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be ignited." - Plutarch




Image from Parallel Lives, Amyot translation, 1565

Creativity and Education

Last week I attended a seminar at AVAM on Arts, Creativity & Outrageous Education Ideas. It confirmed that much of what I did before retiring as a teacher was effective—when I was given time to teach creatively and include the arts. Here are just two examples:

Music in Language Arts Class

During our 7^th grade literature unit that included medieval legends, students were responsible for research and then presenting a special project. Being familiar with Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory, I liked to give students choices of how to present their research to their class. With some units, they created games or puppet shows. Other times they created books or posters.

One of the project choices in the medieval legends unit was to focus on medieval music and to present it in some way to the class. In one class, one boy worked on music. He was a problem child in a number of ways. He was disruptive by antagonizing his fellow classmates. The more they tried to bully him, the more he encouraged it. Of course, I tried to stop it in my classroom, but I’m sure things happened out of my sight.

This boy asked if he could bring in his piano keyboard when it was his turn to present medieval music and I said yes. Something happened in the dynamics when he presented. Instead of playing the role of a bullying victim, he became a teacher. He taught them what he’d learned in his research and demonstrated it with his musical skills.

The class was in awe and asked him many questions afterward. One student summed up the changed this way, “I always thought you were just a nerdy loser. I didn’t know you were so cool.”

Who Am I?

Several years ago while I was still teaching, a former student came to me during Back to School night. He asked if I remembered him. This young bearded adult resembled no twelve-year-old I had taught and I asked his name. This I did remember when he told me his name. I remembered also that he had missed a lot of time from school.

That night he told me that he'll always remember my class, that it was his favorite. Since he had failed my class in spite of all the strategies I tried, I was flabbergasted to hear this.

Out of curiosity, I asked him what it was that he remembered about my class. He said it was the hero/monster book project assigned in my 7th grade class. He told me he still had the bound copy of his group's book and that it was one thing that he really enjoyed in middle school.

Beowulf and Monsters 

That year, after reading a modified version of Beowulf, I had divided each class into groups of four for a special project. Each group was responsible for working together to create a book which would have an original hero story that included a monster. Students were given instructions to include specific elements in their story. Besides the illustrations and main story, other elements included book jacket information, table of contents, and an interview with the Grendel’s mother. (Grendel and his mother were monsters.)

This project, truly an activity which reflected the critical thinking that should be taught in every classroom had captured this former student's imagination. I'm sorry to say after that year, I no longer had time in the curriculum to include this project. It took too long and I would not have had time to do the required teaching for the MSPAP tests. I was responsible for teaching the test jargon and strategy, giving practice tests, doing unit assessments for five classes—over and over again until it was time for the test.

Connecting With School

There was no time for the creative book project. And even so, the time it would have taken to work on the group projects and print and assemble the books might have been in vain anyway because my copy allotment would probably have run out with making so many book copies for the students.

There was no time to teach in a way that I knew turned kids on and connected them with literature, writing and school.

Imagination 

Albert Einstein said that "imagination is more important than knowledge" but those who power the educational system policy must not have discovered this yet. Could it be they lack the imagination to envision what the education of our children could be?

The student who visited me years later during Back to School Night understood the importance of imagination.

Creativity - AVAM

AVAM, the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, is a celebration of creativity. Rebecca Hoffberger, its founder and director, joyously embraces creativity and all those who open themselves to its possibilities. My husband David and I are AVAM members and we share Rebecca’s spirit.

Mind, Brain and Education

Today I attended one of many events at the museum, a seminar entitled “Arts, Creativity & Other Outrageous Education Ideas!” This was in conjunction with the Johns Hopkins University School of Education Neuro-Education Initiative and Council on K-12 Education’s “Learning, Arts and the Brain Summit.”

Although I’m retired from teaching and this program was presented to a room full of teachers, I continue to hold an interest in learning and creativity. So I attended and I’m glad I did.

As I listened to speakers Jerome Kagan from Harvard University, Alice Wilder who is producer of Blues Clues, Keri Smith who has written several outrageous creativity-oriented books and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek from Temple University, I felt good about the way I integrated the arts into my language arts curriculum and the reasons for doing this.

Intrusion of Testing and Content Alone

I can’t say that I did much of this during the last two years of my teaching career, however, because teaching by that time was confined tightly to teaching the language of the standardized tests, practicing for the real test over and over again, assessing the practice tests and then taking the tests. There just wasn’t time to do much of anything else. (You can read unorganized thoughts and rants I wrote while teaching.)

Jerome Kagan passionately made a case for teaching the arts. He spoke about cutbacks in recent years and how this has affected us as a society. He said that without the arts, “subjective feelings become subordinate to logic” and there is a “growing reluctance to anger any group.” You see, arts has to do with pushing boundaries, angering people and making us thing. Without the arts, our school children and their teachers live in a small corral with tight boundaries. This is not conducive to learning. It is not conducive to risk-taking, exploring and making new discoveries. “we’ve upset the balance between correct and intuitive.”

Kagan reminded us of the need for a vacation from the correctness and rank that has been imposed on us.

Keys Changing Hands

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, professor of psychology at Temple, talked about how the “arts and playful activities create opportunities that are pregnant with learning.” She quoted from Daniel Pink in talking about the future of education, “The keys to the kingdom are changing hands toward empathizers and creators.” Things are changing. Needs are changing.

Hirsh-Pasek listed the skills that will be needed for the future—skills and opportunities that we should be providing for students:

• collaboration
• communication
• content
• critical thinking
• creative innovation
• confidence (to take risks)

Alice Wilder, producer of Nick Jr.’s Blues Clues talked about the importance of engaging children with learning and showed examples through Blues Clues, Super Why, and Think It, Ink It, an innovative approach to help children imagine and write books.

I was intrigued by Keri Smith’s talk. She spoke of her disenchantment with school, while at the same time finding creativity when she stayed home. She told of the rewards of risk taking. She shared with us excerpts from her books, Wreck This Journal and How to be an Explorer of the World—truly wild and innovative approaches to creativity. Check out her website to explore some of her ideas.

AVAM

If you haven’t seen the latest exhibit at the American Visionary Art Museum, it’s well worth spending several hours exploring The Marriage of Art, Science & Philosophy. As Rebecca says, "It is a dance between imagination and reality." She also reminds us to find the extraordinary in the ordinary. You’ll find it at AVAM.