My "kids" are the best in the world!

Today I was having a minor crisis.  This happens every time I have to look for a job, which, unfortunately, is more often than I would like. (Note: if you think you can change the world for the better, you may not be well-liked in some education circles, especially if you are effective in what you do. At least that has been my experience.)  In looking for a job I thought, why don't I just go back to teaching high school? I loved it and it was easier and had better hours than my current job, and sadly, it would actually pay a lot more. (Note #2: When the meager pay of a high school teacher is an improvement over your current salary, you are in the wrong job.)

Confession: I have two Facebook profiles.  One is locked and secure and is for my family and very close friends.  The second is for my former students.  Once all of those former students turn 21, then I'll probably combine the two, but until then, things are separate.  This has to do with my paranoia.  I have a deep-set fear that some 19 year-old would happen to see that Honey makes wine and then somehow it would spiral into a statewide newspaper story about how a teacher's low morals is corrupting the youth.  No thank you!

This afternoon, I posed a modified version of my dilemma on my "student FB": I'm thinking of returning to the classroom while I figure out what it is I want to do with life.  The responses made me laugh and cry and made me incredibly proud of my wonderful, intelligent kids.  I decided to keep these responses here on my blog so that I always remember.  If I'm tempted to think about this in the future, I'll have the voices of my kids running through my head.  (Ignore any grammar issues, as I have learned to do -- I am convinced that if I had four years with any of these kids they would now have proper grammar, but as it is I was only in various schools for a few years at a time.)
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KC: You were one of my most memorable teachers even though I only had you in my freshman year. Good luck with the search and I hope you find something you love, you are an amazing educator! Thank you for keeping in touch with me over the years :)

JH (Not a former kid -- the mother of one of my kids!): Just your presence in the classroom makes the school a better place! People of every age KNOW when someone cares for them (or not), and you DO. :)

FN (who asked if I gave up on becoming the Superintendent of Public Instruction for my state, and when I replied that it's no longer an elected position and I didn't have the connections to get appointed for the next term (four years from now) said): So what you're saying is you gave up before even trying??? Lol yes connections would be a huge advantage to getting closer to the job, but who says that's the only route to take?? If it _IS_ your dream then why quit? I mean what would have been the point of becoming Dr. B-- if you're just gonna go back to teaching social studies to high school students when you did that before you even had that title? Lol don't get me wrong, you were a really great teacher, but I feel you can do even more for us all as the Superintendent of Public Instruction for --- :) dreams don't die Ms. B--, maybe altered, but still with the same concept... [a few comments later] Honestly, I felt some of the staff at our school were a little careless about us lol most were great but even then, when it came down to helping us succeed, only a small amount actually tried..
Its not so much that I'm trying get you to feel guilty :) I'm just trying to help you see that the things you have done in the past as just a teacher were great and influenced us to become better young adults, but now that you have a new title you should aim higher and help a larger amount of students and even teachers to reach their full potential by improving schools across ---.. and say that the Superintendent of Public Instruction is not the place that you were looking for, then search for the next best thing and along the way you're leaving us with a great example of someone pursuing their dreams when not many people can truly do that... remember how you use to push us to reach our full potential? Do you think becoming just a teacher is your own or in a way your limit of potential? Cuz I feel you can do sssoooooooo much more :)

SK: [FN] you make lots of good points. I agree and Ms.-- I truly believe in you and know that you can do whatever you put your mind to I believe you will somehow drastically change the face of education. You were the only teach who ever pushed me so hard and you know I always succeeded and I have you to thank for pushing me and helping me understand I was capable of things I didn't know I could do. Somehow you knew my potential and even though you may not know it or see it I believe in you, I want my future children to know your name and somehow have a better education because of you. GO MS. ----!!!

 My response: My children, you are all amazing and so encouraging! Really, you are incredible and I am so proud of each and every one of you! I was reading your comments to -----, who said "I agree with your kids." He's been trying to get me to see these points for a long time, to push for something truly worthwhile and help a lot of people. I felt that I was able to do that to some extent this past school year -- I worked with teachers to help them learn how to improve their own teaching and I worked with a student teacher to get him to see how much more he could do to help students. Honestly, it's a lot easier in a high school classroom because as a high school teacher I could see improvement in all my students as the weeks passed. Working with teachers or soon-to-be-teachers means that I have to work in a much larger system, and the larger a system is the more problems it generally has, which is rather frustrating. But I guess more problems means more areas for improvement and I do love improving systems.

There are a few things that I've thought about doing:
1) Open a school (I'm actually working with a friend on this idea right now, so we'll see if something opens by 2012).
2) Teach pre-service teachers in a college (so they actually understand what it's really like and push themselves and then in turn push their students to succeed so that we have fewer of the teachers who just let kids slide, as F---- noticed happened when he was in school)
3) Doing some sort of professional development work with teachers to help them improve their practice (which is what I've been doing this year but my current job goes away in July)
4) Create some sort of business that goes into schools and looks at their systems and helps them figure out how to fix them (of course like I pointed out earlier, this requires adults who acknowledge the need for change)
5) Become the Superintendent of Public Instruction for ----, or, similarly, do something that would allow me to work on a national level (Secretary Arne Duncan, I have some ideas for you!).

You are right, my wonderful children, I would never accept anything less than your absolute best, so I will keep pushing forward myself and see where that leads. You are all amazing and I expect to hear that you are incredibly successful in life. Thanks for your encouragement!! :-)

SK (again): You know as I wrote the last comment I thought to myself how odd it felt to be giving you of all people encouragement but I guess we all need it sometimes! And I will be the best dental assistant I can be and you can be the best at what ever calls you to action in education. Ps I really hope you can come to my wedding next week it would really mean a lot to me. 

FN (again): nice! great plan, now lets see some results in the future =] 
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I do tend to hear nice things from former students and I keep in touch with quite a few of them.  Perhaps that's one of the reasons why I considered returning to the classroom -- I do love it and I can see results almost immediately.  But my kids are right: I need to push myself and be the best I can be.  Where or what that is, I don't know exactly.  But I will learn.  And then I will share with my kids. 

Reach for the stars

I think that I may be missing out on some interesting editorials by not having a subscription to The Oregonian. Today I read yet another article provided by my mother, this one entitled "Time for Oregon schools to stretch" by John Tapogna, published August 2, 2009. This article tackled the issue of the Obama Administration's school reform plans. Recently the focus has been on health care, and the idea of education reform has quietly tiptoed toward the back of the stage, perhaps hoping that it can avoid becoming a hotly debated issue.

I must admit, I have not had a chance to look over reform proposals in detail. In fact, I am having a bit of trouble finding concrete evidence and examples of these proposals, but I do know that reform is in the educational air -- and it is about time. What was once effective and beneficial to the majority of students is now not good enough -- especially since we see evidence of American school children falling farther and farther behind their counterparts in other industrialized nations. John Tapogna is a "consultant" on educational issues, and since I don't know what that means nor what his background is, I am just going to take his word for now on some of the things that he says in his article (with the plan of researching things a bit more). It appears that the Obama Administration has a few core beliefs regarding education, at least according to Tapogna:

• School districts do not engage in enough evaluations
• School districts change course too frequently
• Because of the first two points, it's hard to determine what is actually proven to impact achievement. We do know that "high-quality preschools," reading tutors, and small class sizes (at least in younger grades) have some impact.

Honestly, that is not much -- three bullet-points? But the more I engage in educational research, the more I find that our information about what is truly effective in producing results over the long-term is sadly lacking. There are thousands of books and articles and guides for education, but looking for genuine research and replicable results is like trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack. It has been done to some extent by Marzano & the people at McRel, who publish meta-analyses that are extremely useful. But other than that, what research-based evidence do we have on what it takes to close the achievement gap? (And why, might I ask, do districts continue to ignore the few traits that we know for sure make a difference -- like smaller class sizes?)

One of the directions that the Obama Administration wants to take is toward evidence of teacher quality. The Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, thinks that mining test data might be a good way to begin the discussion around improving teacher quality. (I, for one, think that if he wants this battle he is going to have to fight uphill the whole way, but that opinion is perhaps best left to another blog.) As I was reading the article it brought to mind several other pieces of information I've gleaned over the years: there are many teachers who fail basic tests over and over and over again and have still been in the classroom instructing students, and the difference between having a good teacher and having a poor teacher can be measured in student achievement results. (One lecture I attended pointed out that most children improve their achievement at least slightly from year to year, just by growing older and being more exposed to life, so if the student's achievement declines in a given year, what should we learn from that information?)

Teacher quality is definitely an area where we should focus, but sadly I see so many areas in need of improvement that it is hard to determine where to go from here. There are reports of the Department of Education offering grants to programs who seek to revolutionize education and find radical new ways to instruct students (of course I did a bit of searching and still haven't found how one applies for said grants). This is, perhaps, a decent way to get people together, brainstorming how to reform our current out-dated and ineffective system. A few questions I have had:

• Why are we still on an agrarian model for a school year? Most students are not out harvesting wheat and other crops in the summer.
• How much time is necessary in school each day or week?
• Have studies been done on schools that are year-round, meet more (or less) frequently, or use credit-by-proficiency models instead of seat-time based models of instruction? If so, where are these studies, and if not, why not?

I think that looking at the education system can be so overwhelming at times. It works well for a good portion of kids. But what about those that fall through the cracks? How can we help them? And how can we close the achievement gap among our own students and the achievement gap between the United States and other countries? I obviously don't have the answers right now, but I am looking.