and another view of the landscape...

This one courtesy of Carol Jago in her 2010 NCTE Presidential address: "To Cherish the Interests of Literature" from February's Research in the Teaching of English. Jago says:

"Speaking in a commencement address to graduates of the Stanford School of Education, Elliot Eisner (2006) argued that, 'Imagination is the neglected stepchild of American education. Questions invite you in. They stimulate the production of possibilities. They give you a ride. And the best ones are those that tickle the intellect and resist resolution.' It is a remarkable message to send to future teachers and school administrators who will be working in a country in thrall to testing. Eisner urges us to nurture questions not answers, most particularly questions without easy answers. Many teachers find it difficult to make time for such questions and imaginary play in a school day increasingly devoted to the mastery of basic skills. I worry that the focus on serious certainties may in the long run only contribute to our nation's continuing hard times. Consider the instructional approach of schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind in Charles Dickens's Hard Times:

'Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!'

Well, you all know how things turned out in Coketown. Reading literature offers ballast to a Gradgrinding, facts-based education. Stories [...] feed the imaginations of young readers and resist narrative resolution. Such literature is compelling because of, not in spite of, its ambiguities."

Thank you, Carol Jago, for this succinct validation of why I teach the way that I do--mired in questions that have no answers, throwing complexity at my students and asking them to wade through it and find their own thread of meaning that they can then communicate clearly to the world, fighting to convince them that reading literature is the only way to prepare them for dealing with the complexity that their lives will present. They must learn to read their lives to write their future.

And how, please tell me, will standardized tests teach them how to do that?
(still dreading the hours I'll spend over the next few days watching a group of 25 sophomores take the state test...)

--M. Shelley

Our landscape

I've finally started reading a book I've had on the shelf for a few months now: Adolescent Literacy: Turning Promise into Practice, a recent edited volume by Kylene Beers, Robert Probst, and Linda Reif. They invited the leading teachers of and thinkers about adolescent literacy to write about what that means now in the 21st century.

In the introduction, Beers shares the letter that the three editors wrote to invite contributors to participate. In this, I see one of the best articulations of the current landscape in education: "globalization means our middle and high school students will increasingly find themselves living in a world persuasively described in Friedman's bestselling book, The World is Flat. It means recognizing that literacy demands are shifting and becoming more complex. It means understanding that automation--a part of our technological world--will change the landscape of the job market (the grocery cashier in the next decade will be the exception and not the rule). As automation expands, different jobs emerge--jobs that require creating, synthesizing, and evaluating. They will be held by those with ingenuity, imagination, and empathy, those who are willing to take risks and work cooperatively. We should be preparing students for such a world, yet the politicization of education has resulted in a different agenda where a prescribed assembly-line curriculum seemingly asks only that students pass a test. The current focus on high-stakes tests produces students who can answer multiple-choice items but have lost the interest and agility to ask probing questions, to conceptualize our new world" (xii).

Yes. This is the challenge before us. And this is where I'm trying to take my students. But as we head here into two weeks mired in our mandated state testing, I wonder how well the current policy wave will get us there.

M. Shelley

Wisconsin...

Just sharing some reading on the situation in Wisconsin and what it says about the state of the career of teaching in our country today.

Diane Ravitch wrote an opinion piece for CNN this week entitled Why America's Teachers are Enraged.

She wrote a follow up to that piece today, responding to the feedback that she got from readers--most of which she said came from teachers saying thank you for what she wrote, but about 1 in 10 responding in anger about teachers. Read it.

I feel somewhat immobilized by all of this. The tide seems so strong toward scapegoating teachers for problems with our schools that we have no control over. What can I do? How can I effect change in the public perception of teachers? And not because I want the world to be nicer toward me--but because empowering and respecting teachers is the best thing for our students. We are professionals and we need space and support to do our job as well as we know we can.

Maybe this: the Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action.

M. Shelley