Posted in Education, tagged teachers, teaching on April 16, 2013 |
Last week I sat down to record in one place every user name and password I have for work.
I have fourteen for my day job.
One gets me on the desktop in my classroom.
Another gets into a laptop / projector system for class use.
Others get into my email, my grade book (Easy Grade Pro), our school’s program for recording grades and attendance (ClassXP), and another grade and attendance program (ParentLink).
Posted in Education, tagged analysis, college, Common Core, effective teaching, essays, Mark Bauerlein, teaching, UNLV, writing on February 26, 2013 |
This was the advice I wrote in the margin of a couple of dozen college papers I returned to students last night. I put the directions for their recent assignments back on the projector and showed them again that they both called for evaluating an author’s evident strategies, based on things like structure and style, for effectiveness. Nothing in their assignments asked for personal reflection about the topics of their texts, and yet, that’s the majority of what I got.
Coincidentally, I just read this excellent essay by Mark Bauerlein, which perfectly echoes my experience. In short, students need to be guided to write analytical work, not fluffy reactions. Amen.
At one point in the discussion, Coleman paused to note a problem in the teaching of writing in English classrooms: the dominance of “personal writing … the exposition of a personal opinion … the presentation of a personal matter.” (more…)
Posted in Education, tagged teaching on July 24, 2012 | 1 Comment »
While student teaching during college, an older veteran complained to me about something I’ve wondered about ever since. She said that years of teaching basic, remedial English had atrophied her own higher thinking skills. Bitterly, she said that she could no longer remember how to analyze things like she could in college, because she hadn’t had to use any mental ability more complex than explaining simple grammar in decades.
That scared me. But it’s wrong.
It may have been true in her case, but it’s a choice she made. Why didn’t she read more, or exercise her mind in other ways?
“Because teaching takes too much time!” might be implied.
But that’s a choice, too. (more…)
Posted in Education, Language and Literature, tagged English, grammar, teaching, writing on June 14, 2012 | 1 Comment »
Posted in Education, tagged administrators, history, retiring, teachers, teaching on March 13, 2012 | 3 Comments »
A few months ago a veteran teacher and administrator I know retired. When she left, she sent out a wonderful, long message to the staff, sharing a lot of experiences and feelings. I thought people might like to see some of these, so below is an edited version of that email. Impossible to read this and not respect good teachers:
Posted in Education, Language and Literature, tagged Mark Bauerlein, teaching, writing, writing process on January 25, 2012 |
The brilliant professor Mark Bauerlein scores yet another direct hit in a recent post about the value of those old-fashioned writing assignments:
In my classes I include both types of assignments, short, one-page writings and longer 7-page papers (I rarely go over 10 pages these days, but I try to make the class have 25-30 pages of finished writing overall.) I also make students bring in their rough drafts so that we may go over them sentence by sentence, word by word. (I’m lucky to have small classes.) It is a novel experience for many of them. To have a reader pause over the placement of a modifier, and to have to think about such things as a writer, is altogether new. The deliberation simply doesn’t go along with digital communication habits. Until we see students paying closer attention to diction and syntax, we should keep traditional writing assignments as a good portion of the work.
Actually, this quote is more of a defense of revision than word count, but it’s still the money quote in a great piece. By far the single biggest factor holding back anyone’s writing is lack of sustained effort–we naturally feel that a simple first draft gets the job done, and that’s that…and we teachers all too often reward such sloppy work by letting it slide by. Teaching students to care about and focus on every word is the best writing training we can give.
Posted in Education, tagged effective teaching, teaching, technology, writing on January 3, 2012 |
A couple of months ago, a student at my school came in and asked my opinions about student writing. I thought she was just writing for the school newspaper, but a couple of weeks ago her story ran in the local paper, the Las Vegas Review Journal. It’s quite good. She got some good material from a couple of other teachers, and put it together very well. Alas, she spelled my name wrong, though. Here’s my contribution:
However, technology cannot be blamed entirely for the decrease in writing quality over the past 20 years.
Jamie Houston, an English teacher at Las Vegas Academy, argued that technology does not affect composition as much as it de-emphasizes sustained focus and this shift in emphasis is part of society’s penchant to prefer visualization to the written word.
“School has always been like going to the gym because you do things that are repetitive, simple and uncreative, but not remotely realistic,” Houston said. “You are never going to do a pushup in the real world. You do pushups because they develop real-world muscles.”
“No one is ever going to put a gun to your head and say, ‘Quick, what’s a gerund?’ School develops thinking and communicating for the untold realms of the real world and for new technologies and innovations that haven’t even been invented yet.”
Posted in Education, tagged English 98, remedial classes, teaching, UNLV on December 20, 2011 |
I had some spectacular deja vu two weeks ago as my college classes were studying for finals. I took them down to the building’s huge main lobby, where I hung butcher paper on the walls, with titles I wrote in the center, based on the major units of the semester. I broke them into teams, gave them markers, and asked them to make diagrams of major points, themes, and other relevant information from throughout the last few months. They spent a few minutes at each station, and then rotated to review and build on each other’s work.
My classes this semester were English 98, a remedial class for those whose test scores don’t qualify them to start school with English 101. They are all freshmen. Now, many of these students are decent, responsible, talented young people who go on to have great college careers. But many are not. And it is during activities like this that I hear grumbling and whining. Actually, I hear that in almost every class almost every day.
Here’s where the deja vu comes in. During this review session, a group of four upperclassmen walked by and, observing what we were doing, came over to talk to me. (more…)
Posted in Education, tagged effective teaching, productivity, teaching, work on November 8, 2011 | 4 Comments »
In my first few years of teaching, I tried to be one those Hero Teachers–the guy who stays at work ten hours a day, who goes in sometimes on Saturdays, who takes tons of work home and grades while he tries to unwind at night.
During that third or fourth year, a scary thought hit me: what if I only did half as much work? Would I get half the results from students? Would they only learn half as much? I tried cutting back on the intensity of grading papers and fancy detail of planning classes and, even after several weeks, it was obvious: my extra efforts had made no difference at all. It was a sobering epiphany, and much of the next several years were heavily influenced by it. I didn’t stop caring about the quality of my work, but I did try to trim anything extraneous that didn’t seem crucial.
I’ve seen a lot of teachers who think that unless they’re beating themselves to death, they aren’t doing a good job. Some of them are convinced that we have to read and grade every line of every paper in copious, minute detail, or we’re cheating children. Now, I’m all for feedback and revision, but except for that, so much of the time we spend grading and planning is frankly wasted. There’s a law of diminishing returns that applies to teaching as much as anything else. After a point, ongoing work is fruitless, or even destructive. The goal of anyone who would do their job to maximum effectiveness is to find the point at which energy stops yielding results, work up to that point, and then clock out.
Some of us may have a Puritan streak to us that demands that visible suffering and sacrifice are requisite virtues in a teacher, but that’s baloney. What matters is student learning. Achieve that, and you’ve done your job well, regardless the hours you stayed late. The time and energy you might have wasted being a volunteer martyr can be better spent on your students during the day, anyway. Or you might even put more into enjoying your life, which will also increase your productivity at work. This is one case where it truly does help to work smarter, not harder.
Posted in Education, Language and Literature, tagged English, National Review, teaching, writing, writing process on November 5, 2011 | 3 Comments »
A post at National Review, and some great follow up comments from readers, offers some great ideas about teaching writing:
The only way to address writing is to give line-by-line feedback. We cannot assume that students know what good writing looks like. Every time students pass a written assignment at any level with subpar writing, such poor performance is reinforced as acceptable and the poor writing ability become the next professor’s problem.
One of many astute reader comments notes:
Absolutely crucial, if we want students to improve, is that they be required to draft and revise. If they only receive comments — no matter how comprehensive and excellent — on already graded work, they simply won’t attend to them. Why bother if it isn’t going to make any difference on that essay? And they don’t always have the understanding to apply comments on one essay to the next; but if they revise *this* essay by the comments given, then it sparks some realization of how to apply those comments to other work.
Agreed.
This is the single most important thing that students need to learn about writing: every word counts. (more…)
Posted in Education, tagged educational standards, No Child Left Behind, student achievement, teaching, testing on August 12, 2011 |
Today, the Las Vegas Review-Journal ran a letter from a teacher about standards and testing. It was both touching and practical. Her story ends like this:
Let’s get back to studying science, teaching cursive writing, the stock market, great literature and history, and a remarkable thing will happen: Teachers will love to teach again and students will be a bit uncomfortable. They will stretch, be nervous and learn determination. Then, ten years later, they will still remember the requirements of an assignment that changed their lives and share it with their aging teacher.
I sent her an email thanking her for this letter. Wise words as we start a new school year.
Posted in Education, tagged Chronicle of Higher Education, City Journal, phonics, reading, teaching on August 9, 2011 | 1 Comment »
From Sol Stern’s “A Solution for Gotham’s Reading Woes,” City Journal, Summer 2011:
Noting that SAT reading scores nose-dived in the 1960s and have remained flat ever since, Hirsch blames the nation’s education schools. “Our teachers and administrators are taught brilliant slogans like ‘rote regurgitation of mere facts’ which make factual knowledge sound objectionable,” Hirsch writes, “and they are told that a deeper, better approach is the ‘how-to’ scheme of education. Don’t give students a fish; teach them how to fish. Don’t tell them what to think, teach them critical thinking skills. Don’t teach them factoids, teach them comprehension strategies.” To the contrary, it is precisely the accumulation of facts—whether in history, science, the arts, or civics—that enables young readers to move from the foundational skill of decoding the written words of the English language (that is, phonics) to a deeper comprehension of complex texts.
From Alan Jacobs’ “We Can’t Teach Students to Love Reading,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 31, 2011:
Posted in Living well, tagged boredom, children, family, parenting, teaching on August 5, 2011 | 1 Comment »
I used to love it when my children would come up to me and ask me to play with them. This is what it’s all about, right? Quality time, giving them your full attention, responding to their needs.
But after a while I began to realize what was really going on. Most of those requests for play time weren’t coming from a desire to be close or because they missed me. They were just bored and wanted me to entertain them.
My kids, like most children, I’m sure, frequently complain of boredom when they aren’t being actively entertained by something electronic. As much as we limit their TV and computer time, they still yearn for them as their go-to way to pass the time in life. Once their allotted time for those things has run out each day, I can often see a dull fear come over their faces, a lost and lonely cowering that says, “Now what?”
And that’s when the pleading for more Daddy time comes in. See, they never want Daddy time when they can watch TV or play a computer game; just when they don’t want to figure out what to do for themselves.
Posted in Education, tagged classical education, Educating the Saints, educational reform, effective teaching, Hugh Nibley, philosophy, teaching on August 2, 2011 | 5 Comments »
Below is the text of Hugh Nibley’s classic 1970 essay “Educating the Saints” (copied from this online source, with fair use in mind), including my notes on what we can learn from it, as teachers and students, about education. I submit that, though Nibley was writing for and about Mormons, this is the best work of fundamental values in public education ever written, and should be required reading for anyone who would be a good teacher, in any capacity.
I’ve put in bold the segments of Nibley’s text that seem particularly pertinent and powerful, followed by my 21 notes in brackets and italics. My notes are meant to interpret the ideas in the essay into general classroom policies and strategies. Looking back on these notes about a decade after I made them, when I was still a new teacher, I’m pleased to see that my work has largely been consistent with the ideas here, as I understand them.
Nibley uses Brigham Young as his model for effective education techniques, and well he should: Young took thouands of poor, illiterate, disparate immigrants and made them the foundation of a society whose descendants are disproportionately well-educated. Though one would benefit from simply perusing the bold and italicized sections, reading this whole essay would be valuable to anyone; reading it from my source will also allow you to enjoy Nibley’s 200 footnotes!
