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Been offline for quite a while. My apologies for the lack of posting / commenting.
I’ll keep this post brief — just two topics that have got me thinking lately.
1) Ups and downs about how we’re doing in this world. I was elated to read about Northern Ireland – the leaders of the Irish nationalists and the Ulster unionists have met face to face for the first time. They were killing each other for 20 years, now they figured out a way to work together (slowly). Somebody needs to figure out what happened over there and share with the world.
So then I read about a blogger who writes about technology feel threatened for her life (first read about it on Salon), and I get depressed again….brought me back to a piece from the “This I Believe” series about our capability for brutality (each one of us).
2) A story about the Colorado football coach responding a parent’s concern about practice (click on the video link on the page). General agreement from the commentators — this is football people. Damn, wish we that same sort of commitment to academics.
Just in case anyone needs a good laugh at my expense, funny thing happened last week in school.
So I’m teaching the types of reactions in chemistry, and describing what happens in a double replacement reaction. I have a demo for the students, and am pumping them up, getting them excited to see something cool (teaching is all in the setup and presentation)…so they’re ready to go, students are drumming on the desks, eagerly awaiting the demo.
I added a solution of potassium chloride to a solution of lead nitrate, which mix to form lead chloride and potassium nitrate…lead chloride is insoluble while the other three chemicals are water soluble…so you get the effect of pouring two clear liquids together and suddenly a cloudy white solid appears. Quite dramatic.
Except when I did it, NOTHING HAPPENED. Ohhhhhh shit (fortunately I didn’t say that out loud)…but I certainly heard it from the students. Booooooooooooooo. Why do we have to learn this if it’s not true?
Turns out my solutions were too dilute…I tried it again in the stockroom after school with more concentrated solutions and it worked fine…damn it all.
Well, there you go. Lesson learned.
Atlanta magazine publishes a guide to Atlanta area schools every January – always interesting to see. I am skeptical of any approach that tries to rate schools through analysis of numbers and statistics (U.S. News and World Report college rankings, for one), but on the whole, I have to say that I am pretty impressed with Atlanta magazine’s coverage. Sure, they list things like “most AP courses offered” and “average SAT score” and other dumb stats that parents tend to overemphasize, but they also try to give parents an idea of special strengths or programs at certain schools. Good stuff.
So I had picked up the magazine for that part, but I was actually most impressed with the article that followed about the high anxiety and pressure of schools today. Many, many parts of this article that are fascinating–I’ll just throw out a few observations.
- Sure, this article takes place at Walton High School in Cobb County, but the setting here is really affluent suburbia anywhere in America.
- So does this exist at my school? Hard for me to say — unfortunately I teach almost all freshmen and underclassmen, so I don’t teach any of these high-achiever upperclassmen. I wouldn’t doubt it though.
- My one small critique of the article — this is definitely a subculture within the school. Not all students try to take 6 AP classes, play 2 sports, and work a part-time job.
”Can kids go out and play and run around and shoot hoops? Yeah, as long as they don’t feel their whole life rests on performance. Parents have to understand why that’s so damaging. If a kid feels his parents’ love is conditional on performance, that means he’s always anxious, always waiting for the other shoe to drop. You lose creativity when you’re constantly evaluated; if all your energy is going into pleasing everyone around you, nothing’s happening inside of you. These kids come in with pills, with razors; they come in crying, in all kinds of disrepair, because of their parents’ disappointment.”
- My last point on the quote above: how do some young people develop self-confidence and inner direction so early, and others seem never to have it throughout their lives? This psychologist seems to be placing the burden on the parents. Meanwhile, Ayn Rand’s characters in The Fountainhead seem to either have it (the egotists) or not (the second-handers), as if they were born that way or can’t change.
This question interests me because I’ve always felt self-confident and self-reliant. Could I have been admitted to a “better” college? Maybe, though I never applied to the ivy league schools. Emory helped me grow in so many ways. Could I have done “better” in my career choice (i.e. med school)? Hell no, I want to teach.
Some of those thoughts are ultimately why some of this article seems so familiar (the hard classes, the extracurricular activities) and yet so unfamiliar (the drugs, competitive fashions, cars, the student discussion about money).
I’ll start the post with a hypothetical situation here: you have two classes that you can take. You can either take 1) a challenging course with a tough teacher and risk earning a lower grade (say, a C or a B) but learning a lot, or 2) take an easy course with a babysitter teacher who gives everyone an A but you learn nothing.
Which would you take? In college, we definitely get that choice, and we all know students who decided one way or the other. I know that I would choose the first choice. But what about earlier on in my education? I didn’t really choose — my parents chose to live in a school district with a strong academic program, and encouraged me to take tough classes. In other words, I don’t hold my high school students responsible for their decision here…I believe that a child’s commitment to education is strongly influenced by the family’s values.
In other words, I would like to direct my wrath to parents here. I am very worried that too many parents value their children’s learning too little and their grades too much…to the point that I know that these parents would look at the options above and pick #2 without hesitation.
My evidence comes in the form of recent parent conferences (not with me, with other science teachers). After talking for a while, we discover that these children are failing because they do not have the study skills to succeed. We uncover the reality that they never did anything in previous years. They played cards all day, they just got a review the day before a test, and they got an A.
And then we try to help these parents see the problem here. You knew that your child was learning nothing, but you did not complain then. And here you are now, complaining to us that grades are falling!
Now I do not want to completely blame parents here, because I think teachers have the responsibility to report progress and grades authentically and honestly (I’m sure I will be posting about grade inflation here soon…RAMPANT…that’s all I will say for now).
But at the same time, what’s the goal of education? I sympathize with the obsession about numbers — I know that college admissions are intense. But numbers cannot hide a person in the long run…high school will be impossible without a middle school foundation, college will be impossible without a high school foundation, real-life work will be impossible without possessing basic skills.
Also reading a bit over the break myself. Max Brooks writes a fictional history of the zombie war — an apopcalyptic war set in the present day that nearly destroys mankind. As indicated in the title, the historian presents a series of oral accounts from survivors of the war. The story is told chronologically — so we learn what is going on it occurs.
For those unfamiliar with zombies — zombies are part of the “living dead”, always trying to hunt and kill the living. Humans who are bitten by zombies die and then reanimate and become another zombie. Zombies feel no pain, no emotion, and can only be killed by destroying their brains.
Before some of you roll your eyes and move on, I should add that Brooks is not writing a science fiction book here — the zombie premise is used to examine our society and culture. And he does a wonderful job of creating a believable history here — the outbreak spreads throughout the world as terrified refugees flee to other countries (even infected people). Governments refuse to believe the truth until it is too late, and their response is ineffective. Eventually, the entire human race is threatened until drastic action is taken.
I won’t give away too much. But as I said above, Brooks’ social commentary is on target (in my opinion), and he also has a very clever ear for language — new words and acronyms are used in the postwar world that make this “history” all the more real and believable. And some of the vignettes are just cool (the blind Japanese old man kicking butt, the female air force pilot who escapes zombies after crash landing, just to name a few).
The only major weakness that I’ll complain about is the lack of interest in exploring the scientific and medical aspects of the zombie virus. Surely there must have been interest in understanding how the virus affected the human brain in the scientific community — even if wholly implausible, I still think the author should have included the story of a scientist. But small potatoes.
I’d rate it an 8 out of 10 — and would recommend it to anyone.
My first thread here. I’m posting from school here as my first period class works through their semester exam. Remember exams as a student? Stressful times for many — you should be reviewing all of your old notes, working through study guides, cramming in information for the test, spending a good 60/90/120 minutes working through the exam.
Well, I’m finally getting to experience exams from the other side now — as a teacher. Let me tell you, it’s awesome. I get to kick back, relax, this is the student’s time, not mine. All I have to do is run the scantrons through, grade a few free-response papers (SHORT answers), and record the grades. And these last three days are half-days too! Life is good.
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