Setting Intentions for 2011

It is the first day of 2011. I have never been one for resolutions because I feel they are usually just another way to feel guilt or shame and they are so rarely successful. Instead, I decided this year to set intentions for 2011.  The previous year seemed to be very difficult for most people I know and so part of me thinks that 2011 must be an improvement. Today is the day to start down that path of improvement.

I spent a few days thinking about what I wanted to do this year. My intentions for the year seemed to revolve around finishing a dissertation, writing more in my novel, discovering more ways to be artistic, improving my mental outlook, ensuring I have a job after June 1, and learning to be true to myself. This sounds like a broad scattering of things I would like to do, but I think that all can be classified under one heading: learning to be an artist.

When I was growing up, I thought that artists were people who painted or put together dynamic collages or sewed beautiful quilts or made every meal a beautiful feast fit for a five-star restaurant. None of those descriptions applied to me. I would look at those around me and think "I wish I could be more artistic," but nothing ever happened; I did not even try some things because I thought "I'm not the artistic type." As a teenager, I scoffed at those with artistic temperaments and thought that since that personality did not apply to me I could certainly never be artistic. I wanted stability, I had responsibilities, I could never just float through life on a wing and a paintbrush and expect it all to turn out well.

Instead, I would express my colorful nature through clothes, loud jewelry, bright colors on the living room walls.  This was not artistic, I thought, because it was something anyone could do. I would stay up late at night and write little stories about family trips and just share them with family on e-mail. This was not artistic, I thought, because it was something anyone could do. I would try new recipes and feed the masses of family and friends with the new loaves I kneaded and baked with love. This was not artistic, I thought, because it was something anyone could do.

It was not until 2008 that I started thinking, "Wait a minute. Maybe all of this is art, just not art like I'm used to." And maybe I could be artistic without having an artist's personality. I did not have to be the next Monet or the next Thomas Mann or even the next P.D.Q. Bach: I could be myself. And my self loved (loves) bright colors, good food, craft projects and photographs, writing and reading and gardening and life.

Julia Cameron's book The Artist's Way helped me come to this realization about art.  As I wrote morning pages every day, as I walked the dog and absorbed the fresh air and beautiful scenery, I slowly started accepting myself as an artist, as someone who can be creative. And it really doesn't matter if I'm the next Monet or Mann or Mozart because I am not being creative for anyone else: I am being creative for me.

This brings me back to my intentions for 2011.  I have The Complete Artist's Way -- all three books in the series -- and I have been meaning to work through this in its entirety but I have not started. Or rather I start and then stop and then don't push myself to get back on the Horse of Another Color and keep going.  That is going to change this year.  There are 36 chapters total in this collection of three books.  I have 52 weeks in the year. And so I am going to start my artistic journey and see where I end up in 2011. According to Julia Cameron, I need a Creativity Contract, so here it goes:

I, MCB, understand that I am undertaking an intensive, guided encounter with my own creativity. I commit myself to the 36-week duration of the course. I, MCB, commit to weekly reading, daily morning pages, a weekly artist date, and the fulfillment of each week's tasks. I, MCB, further understand that this course will raise issues and emotions with which I will have to deal. I, MCB, commit myself to excellent self-care -- adequate sleep, diet, exercise, and pampering -- for the duration of the course.

There. It's done. Let week one begin.

Oregon's graduation rate is inaccurate and misleading

It is interesting that yesterday’s new graduation rate (as reported in The Oregonian here) is that it is based on two underlying assumptions:

1) students who graduate in four years are successful

2) those who don’t are failures

Research does not validate either premise.  I am an educator who has spent years teaching in conventional and alternative high schools.  Currently, I am working on my doctoral dissertation and the topic is on success within alternative education, so this issue of graduation rates and how they are calculated is important to me. 

Each year in education, we learn how to accommodate different learning needs so that children can be successful.  Usually we assume that “success” is based on whether a child is learning and progressing toward graduation; we know that children learn at various rates and so while we would like every third, fifth, eighth, or tenth grade student to reach a certain benchmark, the Oregon Department of Education adopted a “Student Growth Model” in 2009 that is much more realistic.  It looks at students as individuals and monitors their progress.

This new way of calculating graduation rates – proposed by the federal government and endorsed by our state – is in direct conflict with the Student Growth Model.  It no longer looks at students as individuals.  Instead, it defines a successful high school student very narrowly – as one who graduates within four years.  I would argue that this definition is inaccurate and may potentially be harmful.  Here are three composites (based on the stories of many students I’ve worked with over the years) to illustrate my point:

• “Mike” was a hardworking student who maintained a B average while playing sports.  Unfortunately, in Mike’s tenth grade year he had a serious health issue that caused him to go in and out of the hospital for much of a semester.  Needless to say, he did not do well that semester, and he struggled to catch up the rest of the year.  Mike was not able to finish his high school experience within four years because of his medical issue – but he finished in four and a half years and is now a hardworking young man with a career and a family.
• “Jenny” was a bright student who worried that she would not be able to afford college.  She heard about a new program (modeled after programs in NYC) that would allow her to receive an associate’s degree and her high school diploma within five years.  Jenny worked very hard, maintained a GPA above 3.5, and graduated at the age of 19 ready to transfer to a university for her final two years of school.  She will have a BS in a science at the age of 21.
• “Kyle” did not do well during his first year in high school.  In fact, he failed most of his classes because of his poor attendance.  His mother enrolled him in his district’s alternative school, which had smaller class sizes and a focus on service-learning and real-world experience through internships and Kyle thrived.  He graduated five years after he first entered high school and the internship experience that he received from his school prepared him for the job market.
• “Anne” was a special education student who was born with brain development issues; doctors did not expect her to be able to learn how to read or write.  Her mother worked very hard to see that Anne had a high quality education and that Anne always believed that she could do anything – her disability was not a limitation.  Anne graduated within four years, but she received a modified diploma based on her IEP (Individualized Education Plan).  Anne now holds a job with a childcare facility and she lives on her own.  Her family is very proud of her and she loves having adult responsibilities.

I doubt that people would consider these students unsuccessful, regardless of the fact that it took them longer than the standard four years to graduate, or that those who did graduate within four years (like Anne) may not have received a standard diploma.  The notion that students who graduate within four years are more successful or more prepared for life than those who don’t is based on a faulty premise.  To the best of my knowledge, there is no research within our state that looks at a large cohort of students for several years beyond high school completion to determine whether the amount of time spent within high school correlates to success post-high school.  The idea that students who graduate with a standard diploma within four years are more prepared for college and/or careers is ridiculous because it is based on this underlying assumption, not on facts. 

In addition, by lumping together the students who take longer to graduate, who get a GED or modified diploma, or alternative certificate into the category “non-graduate,” we are doing a great disservice to our children.  We equate them and their efforts to students who drop out completely and never finish.  Having a high school education is very important; graduating from high school accords an individual with a certain amount of respect.  By categorizing 34% of students as “non-graduates” – whether or not they actually finish high school and become successful – we are telling that portion of the population that they are failures.  We are implying that we do not find them valuable, that their hard work and effort does not count.  This is tragic.  Our definition of “successful student” needs to change.  We can begin that change by demanding a graduation rate that accurately reflects the reality within our schools – more than 66% of students complete high school. 

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.

The truth about textbooks...sort of.

Today I finally had a chance to read an article that my mother brought to me weeks ago. On July 19, The Oregonian published an article by Bill Bigelow, a local teacher, called "Schools foster climate illiteracy." Quite a scary title -- especially for such a green, environmentally-conscious state! The Oregonian must have wanted to catch the eye of its readers and scare them a bit, because this was the feature story of the opinion section of the paper that day. In this article, Bigelow takes textbooks to task for downplaying the threat posed by global warming. He also says that school district leaders who are in districts where these textbooks are used are complicit in the miseducation of our children, at least when it comes to the issue of global climate change, as if there was a national or corporate plot to make sure that the future generations are ignorant of their impending doom. A bit harsh, I must say. Or is it? And who is to say when a newspaper article is educational and when it is just inflammatory?

First of all, like I teach my students, it's important to understand the author when looking at a text. All authors have biases -- that's part of being human -- so it's important to recognize the bias and how it influences what is written. In this case I know that the author has been teaching social studies for as long as I have been alive, that he is passionate about his curriculum, and that his published curriculum is very liberal in its stance on issues (workers' rights, human rights, etc.). I appreciate his passion -- and I own several of his curriculum guides and have used pieces of them as inspiration for my own lesson plans. But I have noticed that there is a "slant" to his works, and sometimes I feel a bit judged, as if what I do to provide multiple perspectives and teach kids not to condemn one side of a situation outright (without being fully educated) would be looked at with derision. Perhaps my feelings about the author have colored my interpretation of the article (of course they have!), but I still take issue with a few points mentioned in the article and would like to call for clarification here.

There seems to be an assumption in this article that classes labeled "Global Studies" and taught in the social science department should focus on the issue of global climate change. When Portland announced that it was changing the name of Global Studies to "Modern World History," in keeping with the textbook chosen and the Oregon State Standards, the author's cry was "Then who will teach about global warming?" My question is a bit different: should just one subject area be responsible for incorporating lessons and awareness about climate change into the school year, or should our approach be more comprehensive? In recent years we have shifted to looking at reading and literacy as important enough to be addressed in all subject areas and classes. Is global climate literacy important enough for us to take this approach?

Oregon State Standards use this language to encompass a climate change standard at the high school level: "Evaluate the impact of human activities on environmental quality and the sustainability of Earth systems. Describe how environmental factors influence resource management." This is a science standard. It also says "Analyze and evaluate the impact of economic, cultural, or environmental factors that result in changes to population of cities, countries, or regions." This is a social science standard. There are several more standards in the social science section that also address the issue of the human impact on our physical environment. Obviously, if we as educators are doing our jobs well, we address all of the standards in our area. How we address them varies, just as how the students learn or interpret the data presented may vary. Yet it is precisely that variety, that range of opinion and interpretation, that makes life a rich and interesting tapestry -- and our ability to listen to differing opinions and learn from them makes life beautiful.

The issue of multiple perspectives brings us to textbooks. Bigelow harshly criticized some of the widely used textbooks (such as those published by McDougal Littell) because of their lack of information -- or sometimes misleading information -- about global warming and climate change. Yet the larger question should be whether we should rely solely on textbooks as our source of information. Textbooks were written by men and women, who by their very human nature must be fallible. A more balanced perspective (on any subject) should be provided, and that can occur through the use of additional material. The claim is that Portland Public Schools encourages teachers to stick with the textbook alone, as if the authors of the textbook have some sort of divine omniscience. If that is the case, then it shows that the district is a bit short-sighted. While it is extremely important to have "everyone on the same page," especially in a large district where students might transfer from school to school during the school year, that does not mean that teachers should have to rely on the textbook alone as their guiding light. Not only does bringing in additional resources into lesson plans provide students with much-needed multiple perspectives, it teaches our students a more subtle lesson -- always question authority, and don't rely on one place for The Truth. Look to many places for information and then make an informed decision about The Truth of the matter.

Obviously, the article caused me to start thinking -- and perhaps that was its sole purpose. If that is the case, then it succeeded. If it had more lofty aspirations, then this editorial, like the textbooks it criticized, is guilty of missing the mark.

When I listen to NPR, I miss my classroom.

Today I realized just how steeped in history I must be when I heard on the news "Today is the 70th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland" and I immediately thought "Oh, it must be September 1 today." My second thought was that I missed being in the classroom. It is the conversations, specifically, that I enjoy -- discussing the why of issues. Thanks to the new Quentin Tarantino movie, "Inglorious Bastards," and the seventieth anniversary of the start of WWII, this fall is a great time to discuss some of these issues on a deeper level. I was listening to an interview with a woman who wrote an editorial on the real Jewish commandos of WWII -- not the fairytale created by Tarantino, but actual people who fought heroically for their cause. In this interview, Kim Masters talks about her father as one of the commados. The reality of his story is so powerful, there is no need for embellishment, no need for bloodythirsty soldiers to scalp the enemy, because the truth of the daily fight was frighteningly real enough. Listening to the interview made me think about when it's okay to create a fairytale versus show something real, how we depict "the enemy" and what that says about us in turn, and what makes violence acceptable (in life or movies or books). As I've told countless students, there is not necessarily one right and one wrong answer to any of these questions. That is why it's so valuable to have conversations in small groups, respectfully looking at various perspectives. We learn to grow as individual human beings and as a community when we engage in friendly critical discourse.