Hong Kong Protestors Fight for Critical Curriculum

I really admire the thousands of concerned citizens in Hong Kong who marched this week in protest of a nationalistic, "brainwashing" curriculum.    Soon, I will be posting my thoughts on Rousseau's Emile.  For all his faults, Rousseau strongly believed that the a curriculum should be designed with the student's interest in mind.  Sadly, that is still a radical notion.

Thousands Protest China's Curriculum Plans For Hong Kong Schools

What Happens After High School?

I am trying to stay away from policy talk, but I have long been interested in studying the real effect of a high school education on students.  There is remarkably paltry data on this subject, and I'd appreciate any leads here.  I have recently come across two reports.

Here, Anne Hyslop of Education Sector lays out the problem, and its impact on teachers:

Data That Matters: Giving High Schools Useful Feedback On Grads' Outcomes

And here is the most in-depth report I've found on the subject and its impact nationally:

Promoting Economic Mobility By Increasing Post-Secondary Education

My one idea on this subject is that high schools need to be working much more closely with colleges, rather than "passing the buck" in both directions.  Perhaps more on this later.

Does reading teach us sympathy?

You cannot blame the humanities for being on the defensive.  As many English majors can tell you, the economy does not always have ready use for the humanities.  In this article, Sarah Skwire gives her take on why literature is worthwhile:

Reading Each Other

Yet, the argument that literature makes us more sympathetic, more humane, seems facile to me.  First of all, as the author of the link below shows, we are often off-base in our understanding of characters as adolescents.  Our own missing information is reflected back to us in our interpretation of the text, and so misconceptions linger.  Secondly, good literature often alienates us, and that can be good, too.  Lolita comes to mind.  Or Crime and Punishment.  My own (current) thesis is that while books can evoke emotion, that is not why they are good.  Their value to us, and to our students, has more to do with what they let us see, which is a related but different thing.  Great authors can see an emotion you have had, but never been able to describe, or the way two people act around each other when they are mad, that you have known but never noticed.  The pinnacle of this for me is when students understand that well-crafted sentences are carefully-aimed cameras, and then use this purposefully in their own writing. Of course, the whole idea hangs on a questionable axiom:  to see better is to act better.  Which brings me back to Lolita.

Are "teachers-as-artists" going extinct? Should we care?

Teachers who consider the profession an art are often our most memorable teachers.  They also may be blowhards who accomplish very little in terms of student gains.  Weighing in on this debate is Garret Keizer, with a refreshingly artful essay about teaching today.

Getting Schooled: The re-education of an American teacher

On Failure

On SportsCenter, the quarterback of the losing team explains the problem.  “There were plays that were ours for the taking and were not made.  This is not acceptable and we will certainly be working on making sure that it does not happen again.”  In sports – games that by nature produce losers - failure is unacceptable.  Progress reports, transcripts, consumer ratings, user reviews.  We moderns are accountable for performance and results, and the possibility of success is a given.  The world, it would seem, has exorcised its devils.  Success is expected, despite a pesky fifty-percent failure rate among all quarterbacks.

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During college, in a fit of youthful daring and idealism, I interned as a prison chaplain in a youth detention center.  Sitting in classrooms learning about all the systematic injustices of the country made me yearn to do something that felt real.  I wanted to know if I had what it took to work at the emotional heart of these problems, to jump into the messy middle rather than join the administrators and policymakers a safe distance away.

I learned quickly that I did not.  My heart thumped with anxiety each day as I walked in, and I flinched visibly around the inmates.  I was a nervous journalist, asking lots of questions, observing scenes and recording facts.  But the more questions I asked, the more tangled the problems seemed, and none of my analytical resources seemed of any use.  And so the days passed. I became tenser and more hopeless about the world’s problems.  Everyday, I felt more inferior compared to the social crusaders I so admired whose lives had led me here. 

Then, one day, through the alchemy of thought, a message materialized.  As I punched in my access code to the center’s inner gate, I heard,  “These problems were here before you came, and they will be here after you leave.”  It played like a mantra inside my head until the end of the day.  After that I knew I was not there to fix things; I was a witness.

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At every stage of our life, we learn that the world will disappoint us.  Teenagers feel it acutely. 

My friend told me when he got a bad 8^th grade report card, he went home to his room and cried.  He did not know who had let him down, he only knew he felt a gap between what should be and what was.  Whether he, family, teachers, or life itself were to blame remained indistinct and impossible to know.  But the sadness of non-fulfillment was real. 

Adults are often no better at understanding why we disappoint ourselves and one another than teenagers.  Nevertheless, we try to explain it.

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My students are hot-tempered, low-skilled, world-weary, untrusting and emotionally fragile.  They each contain a corner of the city and carry its stresses.  About half of them graduate.

One student has stubbornly and consistently refused to do any work since the beginning of September.  We have sweet-talked him, punished him, called his parents, given him counseling, suspended him, encouraged him, ignored him.  So far, nothing has worked.  Once, after he had cursed at a teacher who pushed him to do work, I found him sitting in the teacher’s office with his head down.  His legs were shaking underneath the table.  “Luis,” I told him, “I don’t know much about your life, but I bet there is a good reason you make the choices you do.  I hope someday you find someone you trust enough to tell.”  He lifted his head up at me and said with more conviction than I’d seen before: “I don’t trust anyone.”

He is still not doing any work, and I feel like a failure.  I imagine he feels like a failure too.

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Some problems can and should be solved.  But while charity salves our conscious, it is not a salve for the world’s pain.  The quarterback was right – losing is unacceptable.  Yet, educators need the strength to live in a world where it is also inevitable. 

Introduction

The impulse to teach is a natural and wonderful impulse.  You do not need to goad a parent to preach their favorite life lessons, or a master to lovingly describe his craft.  Our desire to prepare the next generation to exceed our own is a natural desire, and as a teacher, I feel lucky that is also my profession.  But today, the core interaction between teacher and student is beleaguered.  Multiple and often contradictory policies create a frustrating and bizarre political landscape for teachers, and their performance within this labyrinth is a topic du jour of squabbling journalists and politicians.

In this blog, I want to try to strip these layers back, and think about the primary experiences of educators and students, today and historically.  So much of the conversation around education is shaped by policymakers trying to push their agendas, or educators trying to keep their jobs.  My hope is to clear a passage for fresh air by asking the question:  How would we talk about education if we weren’t trying to protect ourselves or court politicians?

If you have any writing that fits this profile and you would be willing to share, please contact me!  The best version of this blog would include many voices.