Tim Fredrick's ELA Teaching Blog

Motivation is not the problem

There is another article in The New York Times about the incredibly misguided incentive (pay-for-grades) program being implemented in some NYC schools in the fall.

What strikes me about this program is that it is a solution to the wrong problem.  This (in addition to merit pay for teachers) implies that motivation is the problem in our schools.  The students aren't motivated, so let's pay 'em.  The teachers aren't motivated, so let's pay 'em more. 

Motivation is not the problem.

Students want to learn.

Teachers want students to learn.

Dangling money in front of either or both parties is not going to help.  This is where people whose experience is in corporate America (Joel Klein) or economics (our newly minute Chief Officer of Equality,  Roland G. Fryer, who's the man behind the incentive program) show that they just don't get what education is all about.  It's not about money or profit.  Those of us involved in education realize that the techniques used to improve sales is not what is going to improve teaching and learning.

The problem is that our focus is completely wrong and getting more and more wrong as we go.  If you really want to help solve the education problems we are supposedly facing (problems which are not new by any means), the first step is to get rid of standardized testing and/or the implications the results of those tests have on students and educators.  Assessment of this kind drives instruction and this kind of assessment drives instruction right into the ground.  Instead of the carrot approach of the incentives, it offers the stick of bad grades.  It makes life in the classroom boring, useless, and foreign to everyone's real motivation.

What is the real motivation in schools?  To learn and to teach.  Children of all ages (and, frankly, adults) have a natural curiosity about the world around them.  We want to learn about what is going on around us.  Schools should foster and encourage this kind of learning.  Then we won't need carrots or sticks.  The motivation will come from inside the learner and teacher. 

Offering rewards and punishments has never made anything better. You may temporarily get what you want, but the spirit that will sustain change will disappear as soon as the carrot or stick disappear.  We need to foster this spirit - the desire to learn about the world around us - in order to create real education change.

Bronx students blogging from China

Students from the Bronx Lab School are blogging about their trip to China.  Well worth the read.

Since when did I teach swimming?

Last Thursday morning, when I came into the classroom I stepped in puddles ... of water ... inside my classroom.  There was a leak in the ceiling and the rain from the previous night had found its way in.  It wasn't horrible, but there were a lot of puddles and some of my posters got ruined.

As I sit here now, with it raining outside, water is literally POURING down the walls and DRIPPING all over the place.  (How ironic that the latest appeal in the CFE case has been underway!)  There was a quick response to figure it out (one of the guys asked me if I had had the window open - apparently not seeing the streams of water coming down the walls!).

I don't want to do the usual thing and complain about how it is horrible that we have such destroyed schools in this city (and about the two holes in the floor).  What I do want to say is that I can still teach.  With drips and water and all.  And my students will still learn.

They just now informed me that they are going to have to shut power off in the room because there is water in the light fixtures.  I'll take pictures tomorrow morning!

Pictures of my classroom

First Day

Today was the first day of school for students in NYC and the first day of students at the local university where I teach a methods and student teaching course.

My high schools students are so nice!  I love them.  Looking at some of their writing, I can tell I have a lot of work ahead of me in helping improve their ELA skills.  But, they seem like really good kids who are happy to be in this new school.  I can't wait to see them tomorrow!  I was really nervous this morning about starting in a new school and having no reputation among the students.  I had worked hard in the last school to develop a reputation about being a fair, hard working teacher.  Starting from scratch had me really nervous, but at the end of the day everything had gone smoothly.

For the first time, my university class started on the same day as NYC students.  It has been an exhausting day.  I wrote my university students an e-mail after class.  It is excerpted here.  I think it is important for all of us to remember.

I just wanted to say that I was very happy to meet you all and begin what I hope is a great semester.  I think we got off to a great start - first, there were very few special and complicated situations that took away from classtime.  Second, you laughed at most of my jokes.  The last speaks well of you.

I know that you are all anxious.  It is completely normal.  I would be worried if you weren't.  Many of you seemed worried about logistics and I'd like to float the idea that your anxiety here is really anxiety about what is going to happen in the classroom.  Student teaching can be very difficult and there are a lot of unknowns.  We will get through them together.  It is okay to be anxious.

One thing I always try to work with my student teachers on is optimism.  If you are going to last in public education, you need to see the bright side of things.  There will always be bad stuff - some principal will be annoying, a colleague may be inept, you don't have books, the copier is broken, there's a mouse in your room.  The bad stuff will change, but it will never go away.  The same is true with student teaching - the university didn't tell you something, your cooperating teacher is inept, your supervisor is out of town.  There will always be something.  The perfect experience you have in your head is just not going to happen.  It is rare to have a student teacher who finds his or her placement perfect.  It is even rarer to find a teacher who finds his/her school perfect.  In order to survive, you need to acknowledge that there will be this bad stuff, but focus your enery on the good.

This is especially important in dealing with students.  There is always one (sometimes, more) student.  He doesn't have his homework.  She curses you out.  He hits.  She hits.  And so on and so on.  But, there is something positive about every student and they need you to see that. Your energy is best spent on the positive.  This will ensure your students' success and your longevity in the profession.

I hope everyone in NYC had a good first day!

Keeping bad administrators and bad teachers

There have been a few articles out recently about NYC Department of Education Chancellor Joel Klein and his complaints about having to keep teachers and assistant principals who don't have placements at this point in the year (the students come back on Tuesday!).

I want to start off my comments by saying that I'm sure that in these groups (and there seem to be many people in these groups) there are really great educators who, for whatever reason, deserve a job but don't have one.  But, let's be honest.  Those of us in NYC education know that there are people in there who don't deserve to be educators.  Maybe at one point they did, but not anymore.  They have achieved tenure and have lost that original spark they had for helping kids.  Education is now a job to them and they are waiting out their time to get their pensions. 

But, because of union rules, it is really hard to get rid of them.  This is a shame to me.  I say that if you haven't added anything to children's lives or education you should not be an educator ... no matter how long you've been doing it or what your intentions were when you began.  The justification for the rules that keep bad educators in the field is that there are circumstances when a perfectly good educator - one who has added positive things to the field recently - is denied a job either from plain ole bad luck or from incompetent superiors.  These people, of course, should keep their jobs.  But, because there are people caught in this situation does not mean that we have to keep the dregs of education.

Certainly, there are ways around this situation - a way we can keep the right educators and get rid of the others.  Let's say that if you don't have a position, you are put in front of a panel (make them administrators, teachers, union officials, etc) and you are re-evaluated.  If you can demonstrate that you are a benefit to the system (meaning that you have added something to the education of the youth of this city recently) then you can keep your job.  If, on the other hand, you can't demonstrate this through testimonials and hard proof, you are let go.

It can't be that difficult.  There has to be a way we can protect those people who deserve to be in this field and get rid of those who shouldn't.  Until we figure this out, educators will never get the respect that we deserve.

Back from Blogging Break

After a three week break from blogging, I'm excited to get back.  I don't handle school vacations well since I'm sort of a workaholic.  I'm happy that we are back to work next week.

This year is going to be a big year of changes for me in terms of the way I work.  I'm transferring do a different school.  This one is a new high school program in Brooklyn,  which is an expansion of a middle school.  This year is the second year, so we will have 9th and 10th grade.  This school has some very progressive values and I really think I'm going to be able to push my teaching in the direction I want it to go.  The other ELA teacher and I get along well and have many similarities philosophically.  Working with him has been a real pleasure and has helped in my preparation.  Just sitting down and talking with him about ideas and coming to conclusions has been helpful.  Part of my hesitation is that I don't know the students all that well and he knows them better.  But, I also think the act of talking and collaborating is very useful.  Putting ideas out there and tossing them around.  Other people see things in a different light and it is so useful to have different lights on an idea.  I'm really looking forward to meeting and planning with him.

Collaboration is definitely going to be a theme for me this year: not only do I have a new partner in my full-time high school teaching position, but I also have a new partner for my night-time methods and student teaching class at the local university.  She's been a great help in bouncing ideas off and moving the course in a direction that I wanted it to go in, but couldn't figure out how to take it there (or was scared to do it, actually).  I wanted to model this basic methods class after some ideas from the National Writing Project, namely having students share what they have done in their classes.  The student teachers so much want the supervisors and professors around them what to do or give feedback that they don't realize that they are each other's best resource.  I also feel this method - sharing and discussing what has worked best - will help them acquire skills that will benefit them when they are teaching full-time.  My partner and I are also working with a doctoral student at the university to incorporate a blog into our classes.  I'm sure I will be writing about this more in the future once we get it up and running.

In the past years, I really haven't had much opportunity to collaborate or work with others.  I'm very excited that both my jobs this year will be pushing me in that direction.

Just what we need: More rules!

From the NY Daily News: Schools tackle new threats

Yes, more rules is what we need.  We definitely need to further take the focus off learning and put it on stupid stuff like cell phones that aren't cell phones, MySpace, and those deadly PSPs.  The only good thing in this whole matter is the idea of it being required to contact the state if parents don't make their kids get to school.  That's more of what we need, but you see that it's not the main focus, right?

We don't teach anything to students by banning and forbidding things.  If anything, that just makes them want to do it more.  Want to make NYC schools safer?  Improve the education they get.  Teach students to resolve conflicts appropriately.  Banning and forbidding teach absolutely nothing!  What's going to happen when they leave us?  What tools are they going to have when they are in the real world and have a conflict with someone?  If we teach them how to deal appropriately with issues - the REAL issues - they will learn something.  Banning and forbidding only turn them into criminals and the quickest way to get criminal behavior from our students is to treat them like criminals.

Schools are for teaching!

UPDATE:  Okay, so I actually read the proposed changes instead of just rushing to judgment based on a NY Daily News article.  Some of it is a waste of time.  Banning PSPs and other electronic entertainment devices seems as useless as banning cell phones.  Shouldn't we be teaching them to use them at appropriate times?  And, why is lying to teachers a Level 2 (Disorderly Disruptive Behaviors) infraction? What kid hasn't lied before?  The problem with some of the infractions is that there are varying degrees of severity of all this stuff.  Is a kid telling you his dog ate his homework really a Level 2 infraction?  Or perhaps we teach students why one shouldn't lie and that there are different kinds of lies.  Just a thought.

Extensive suspensions - from 30 to 90 days - are added to the most disruptive behaviors.  I'm not sure how much this helps solve the problem.  In effect, it may actually make the situation worse by further alienating the student from the educational process.  I agree that severe circumstances warrant removing a child, but I don't think I share the same definition of severe.  I've had several students who were suspended and they never get/do the work assigned.  When they come back they are further behind and even more angry.  Again, punishment doesn't always offer solutions.

What does seem kind of promising are the "Guidance Interventions" that are to be used in addition to the "Discipline Response".  This is what I'm talking about.  I like the idea of the Pupil Personnel Team - which works with students who are having trouble fitting into the school culture appropriately.  But, I fear that this will be like other DOE strategies - a good idea lost in the bureaucracy.  People will focus on the "Disciplinary Responses" and ignore the "Guidance Interventions", when really the "Guidance Interventions" should come first.  This is the difference between teaching and forbidding/banning/punishing.  Let's see if the DOE offers sufficient support to schools so they do this.

Teachers Teaching Teachers Webcast: Last Day of School

The gang at Teachers Teaching Teachers is having another webcast tonight, Wednesday, June 29, 2006.  I'm going to try to take a listen and see what it's all about - maybe I'll even blog about it in real time!.

Low high school graduation rates

The New York Times:  High School Graduation Rates Unacceptably Low, State Says [registration required]

Among boys, the numbers were even worse, Mr. Mills said, calling them "particularly disturbing." Statewide, 59.4 percent of boys graduated on time in 2005, compared with 69.2 percent of girls. In New York City, the gap was more pronounced, with 37.3 percent of boys and 49.8 percent of girls graduating on time last year.

This is beyond disturbing.  A little more than a third of boys graduate from high school on time and policymakers and city administrators are talking about how much improvement we've made.  That's not improvement.

There is a serious problem in high schools now.  Too many students don't feel like they can succeed in school.  Who's to blame?  Schools.  We haven't made school relevant to students or made them believe that we believe in them.  If students felt some kind of success in school and felt engaged in what they were doing, the numbers would not be this low.

Any bright ideas?  Leave a comment.