Good at Reading, or Reading is Good?

Today, I had a half day of professional development that focused on close reading and writing from sources. All tied to Common Core, of course. While I could see how someone who is new to the gig of teaching could get some good information from this, what I fear the most is the message being sent about teaching reading. Everything when it comes to close reading needs to be text-based. One of the videos we watched today is this one on writing text-dependent questions. On the surface, I see the value in close reading and having students respond to text-dependent questions, but the more I thought about it, the more upsetting it became. Here's why.

Here is how this strategy is supposed to work.

Kids are given a text to read. Let's say they are reading a short story, or even a magazine article. Close reading means the text needs to be read three times. Each reading is done for a different purpose and should allow the student to delve more deeply into the text. Then having students respond to text-dependent questions will be their way of demonstrating their depth of knowledge of what they learned. We are told this will help our students become good readers, they will be able to master challenging texts. Lord knows teacher bemoan the fact that kids aren't good readers. This close reading thing sure does sound like a great way to develop our kids into readers.

But I can't help but wonder if while we are trying to make out kids good readers, they might end up not thinking reading is a good thing to do. This process of close reading has the potential to be overkill, making kids dread having to read something over and over and over again. Asking only text-dependent questions has the potential to make talking about what they read very clinical and meaningless all while trying to make the text meaningful. If you watched the video I linked to above, then you know that posing questions that ask the students to find ways to personally identify with and connect to the text is not a good thing; remember (as said at the end of the video): "It's what's INSIDE that counts...stay inside the text!"

While we work so hard to make out students good readers, are we killing any desire they might have to read for fun? Because close reading doesn't seem to be at all about reading for fun; it's all about making meaning.

The crux of my teaching philosophy is that I want to help students make their education meaningful to them personally right now. It's hard to make thirteen-year-olds see why prepositional phrases and mythology are meaningful, but if I want them to care about prepositional phrases and mythology, I have to help them connect to those topics personally right now. It does no good to constantly hit them with threats of high school, college, or jobs. Those things all seem a lifetime way when you're in 8th grade. But close reading -- and writing from sources -- eschew those personal connections in favor of a focus on understanding the text as it is presented, not from a personal perspective.

It seems to me that the harder we work to make out students good, critical readers, the less success we have because our students learn pretty quickly that reading isn't fun and it isn't personal.

And that is really sad.

Why I Stick Around

I just saw this article posted this morning, contemplating why some teachers decide to stay in education despite the immense challenges faced in this field right now. I thought I'd add my two cents for anyone who's interested.

I have been teaching since 1991 and I don't plan to leave it. I admit that over the past 5 years, I have contemplated leaving teaching. Some of the reasons I thought about getting out included

• the way Common Core has been implemented
• the implementation of PARCC testing and other high-stakes testing
• the general attitude of hostility toward teachers from the media and general public
• administrators and parents who are unsupportive of what teachers do (caveat -- this does not mean ALL parents and ALL administrators; it only takes 1 or 2 to make an absolute mess, trust me)
• decreasing autonomy
• increased workload
• flawed evaluation systems
• workplace politics

I'm still here, though, and I have no intentions of leaving. Why do I stay?

• I love education.
• I love kids.
• I love seeing the ways kids' faces light up when they finally "get" something difficult that they have been trying to learn.
• Education is not a job to me -- it is a calling. I always wanted to be a teacher for as long as I can remember. Always.
• Did I mention the kids?

The reasons to leave this field are easily quantifiable and identified. The reasons to stay, not so much. It's something that is in my blood. It is just part of who I am. The reasons I stay in teaching are based in emotion, not tasks. When I am teaching in a classroom, talking with, laughing with, and guiding my students, I am at my happiest, professionally speaking. The times when I am miserable are rarely when I am with the kids. They are when I am in a meeting or when I am reading an email or when I am on a phone call.

Why do I stay in education? Because I am a teacher and that's all I have ever wanted to be.

No Walk in the PARCC

Not long ago I read with glee about Chicago Public Schools saying they were not giving the PARCC test to about 600 of their schools. To me, it was a strong message being sent -- we aren't ready for this test and we won't force it upon our kids until we are ready. But today, it was announced that they would indeed be administering it starting next week. State Superintendent Christopher Koch held them hostage with money, threatening to withhold funds if PARCC wasn't administered as the law states it should be. Sadly, money talks and CPS had to cave.

But now two things make me raise my eyebrows. One of them is the late notice to the 600 schools who didn't think they were administering the PARCC test. I have helping teachers for the past month work with their kids on how to navigate the test -- how to use the online tools available to them during the test, looking at the different kinds of questions and how to answer them (there are single answer multiple choice, multiple answer multiple choice, fill in the blank, highlight, drag and drop, drop-down menu, constructed response, graphing, and equation editor questions -- all requiring different methods of inputting the answers). We've practiced having the kids log in and out as well as flag and review questions, too. According to the directions in the script, once the students start the test, teachers are not allowed to help the students answer the questions or use any of the online tools unless there is some sort of technology malfunction, so it is important that the kids know how to move around the page, move from one question to the next, and how to answer questions. Some of the navigation of the test is intuitive for these "digital natives", but some of it is not. And kids who might not have a lot of access to technology might also find the navigation challenging. How are the kids in those 600 schools going to get properly acquainted with the tools they need to know to take this test in the short amount of time they now have -- less than a week? Maybe they have been prepping the kids in case this whole thing fell through (exactly as it has).

The other thing that makes me concerned is that students in Chicago Public Schools in grades 3 - 5 are taking the paper-pencil version of the test. The bulk of my assistance has been with students in grades 3 and 4; in our district, all our students are taking the online version of the test. During practice sessions, kids have had questions about how to use the tools and navigate the test. More than one student forgot how to move to the next question. Had this been the actual test and not a practice session, nobody would have been allowed to tell the student how to go to the next question, so either that student would sit there and not move on or figure it out on his or her own. Hopefully the latter can happen and in a timely manner because if the student takes 20 minutes to figure it out, that is 20 minutes of testing time lost, meaning the student will likely not finish the test. Kids who are taking paper/pencil tests probably won't have to worry about not knowing how to move on to the next question. Also, students taking the online test will have to do their constructed responses on a keyboard as well as use the equation editor, meaning they use a keyboard and the buttons on the screen to develop their responses for math questions. This is going to be a much more cumbersome process than it will be for the kids who are handwriting their responses. Kids who don't have a lot of keyboarding experience, as kids in grades 3 and 4 tend to be, could be at a real disadvantage with the online version of the test.

So when you consider that within the entire PARCC partnership of 10 states plus Washington, D.C., some kids have been prepared for navigating the online test but some haven't and some don't need to, and that some kids have good keyboarding skills but some don't and some don't need them, and some kids have plenty of access to technology in and out of school but some don't and some don't need the access to technology for this test, how can ANYONE hope to come up with STANDARDIZED scores on a test that really isn't STANDARDIZED for everyone? How fair will it be to compare the scores for 3rd graders taking the test on a computer with limited keyboarding skills and computer experience to the scores of 3rd graders taking the test on paper?

Please tell me I'm not the only one who feels like this makes no sense.

It's All About the Book

I read this article this morning about how students are lagging behind in what they should be reading. Apparently students still favor fiction over non-fiction, and they are not reading as many challenging books as they could be -- many students still choose books below their reading levels. To be honest, I read this and thought it was no surprise whatsoever.

My experience teaching English language arts to gifted students in grades 7 and 8 absolutely reflected this. And I encouraged it. Here's why:

The books.

Since I was teaching gifted students, it was not uncommon for them to have Lexile reading ranges starting in the 900's and 1000's. Finding books with Lexile levels that high is tough to do in a school library! I encouraged my students to use the Lexile website to find books within their Lexile range, especially non-fiction texts. The most common experience doing this included finding books on the suggested list that were quite frankly boring, and not having those books available in the junior high school library.

The dilemma: do I have the kids and their parents search high and low for a book that is in their Lexile range? Do I "force" the kids into reading a book in the range that is going to be a miserable experience for them?

My answer to both questions is no. Making kids work that hard to find a book that ultimately ends up being a snoozer is counterproductive. It's a terrific way to make kids resent reading and ultimately quit doing it for pleasure.

So I allowed kids to choose books they WANTED to read. I encouraged them to find books as close to their Lexile ranges as possible, but even that can be an exercise in frustration. Take these three examples -- I got these Lexile scores directly from the Lexile website:

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury -- 890
Hatchet by Gary Paulsen -- 1020
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie -- 570

If you haven't read these books, let me "rank order" them in terms of difficulty from my personal perspective and from anecdotal information from the students I've taught these books to:

Easiest: Hatchet
Next hardest: Fahrenheit 451
Most difficult: And Then There Were None

I know that Lexile scores are determined by all sorts of fancy statistical measures, but I challenge you to read those three books yourself and tell me that Hatchet is the most challenging of the three. If I asked my gifted 8th graders to read Hatchet, every one of them would plow through that book in a matter of hours. It would be an insult to their intelligence.

Maybe I don't know how Lexile scores really work, and if I don't, then I hope someone will teach me about how to effectively use them. But the bottom line is I can't in good conscience engender a love of reading in my students by forcing them into a genre that is still lacking in engaging reading or making them stay within a particular reading range with drab material.

It's All in the Spin

Saw this on Twitter this morning. A parent was arrested for disorderly conduct at a school board meeting where he was protesting a book his daughter was reading. Let me get this out of the way first -- I think having this man arrested was ridiculous. There is certainly a news story in his arrest because of how utterly ludicrous it was to arrest him. That being said, I wish that someone (and I know damn well it won't be Fox News despite how "fair and balanced" they are) would pick up the sub-story, which is censorship.

The novel being questioned, Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult, is one of my favorite books. It is the first book I read by her and it knocked the wind right out of me. As a teacher of junior high aged students and as someone who is active in the anti-bullying work in my district (for me, specifically I work on cyberbullying education), I was riveted by the topic of the book and the issues it raised. It is a great companion book to another novel I loved the moment I read it, Give a Boy a Gun by Todd Strasser.

Nineteen Minutes is a book written for adults; it is a mainstream novel. Give a Boy a Gun is considered a young adult novel, written more for teens. I'm not sure there is an agenda in Nineteen Minutes beyond realizing that there are always many facets to any story; there is a clear gun control agenda in Give a Boy a Gun. I taught Give a Boy a Gun to my 7th graders for many years; I did get parental permission because I was working with 12 and 13 year old students. All parents except one allowed their children to read the book. When I taught my own daughter in 7th grade, she read Give a Boy a Gun. Until I started teaching the novel House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer, Strasser's novel was the students' favorite and it generated some of the best discussions about bullying I've ever had with students. I suggested to many of my students who got a lot out of reading Give a Boy a Gun that they read Nineteen Minutes, but I also cautioned them that it is a grown-up book and that they shouldn't read it of their parents preferred they didn't read adult books yet. Because remember, I was dealing with 12 and 13 year olds.

High school kids are a different breed. Many controversial books with adult content get read in high schools because the novels have value and worth in their theme or purpose. Just check out this list of the most challenged books of the 21st century. High school is where social consciousness in students -- who happen to be on the brink of adulthood -- really starts to flourish, and reading novels that raise awareness of issues helps this social consciousness develop. Nineteen Minutes is definitely a book that can help students become more aware of themselves and their behavior and their treatment of others as well as find ways to help others who need some care, concern, or assistance.

I'm betting neither Megyn Kelly, Trace Gallagher, nor the parent at the board meeting bothered to read the entire book. Instead, they chose to focus on page 313 and take that one page and that one snippet from the scene that is on page 313 and castigate the entire book. In fact, Gallagher encourages people to read just that one page and make their own judgment on the value of the content of the book. Why should I be surprised that people are so willing to lift something small from a larger work and take it out of context to twist it to fit their own personal agenda? People love doing this.

If the student wants to opt out of the book or the parents want their student to opt out of the book, I'm betting the teacher would be fine with that and come up with an alternate assignment. That's what I did for the one student who wasn't allowed to read Give a Boy a Gun (my favorite thing about that incident was how the parent told me what a dreadful, harmful mother I was for allowing my own daughter to read such filth). I have no issues with opting out; however, I would have had an issue if that parent wanted to remove the book from the curriculum. This makes me think of what Captain Beatty said to Guy Montag in Fahrenheit 451:

"Colored people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator. Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too. Five minutes after a person is dead he's on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by helicopters all over the country. Ten minutes after death a man's a speck of black dust. Let's not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn them all, burn everything. FIre is bright and fire is clean."

Let's get rid of anything that offends anyone. Once we do that, there won't be anything left to read.

AI: Artificial Intelligence or Appallingly Idiotic

Here it is, another article that talks about using computers to machine-score student writing.

I spent more than 20 years teaching English language arts to junior high students, so I know exactly how cumbersome writing assignments can be.  I have graded more than my fair share of essays, research papers, short stories, poems, and written exam responses.  It always takes a long time to evaluate student writing -- IF the evaluation is done thoroughly and well.  Feedback on writing should be designed to inform the students where their strengths and weaknesses are and what can be done in the future to improve their writing skills.  That kind of feedback requires more than just a cursory reading, a grade at the top of the paper, or checks or circles on a rubric.  (And on a side note, the sad thing is that far too many students read the feedback then ignore it.  They pitch their papers or put them in a folder or portfolio, never to be looked at again.  So all that meaningful feedback is wasted.)

Writing needs to be evaluated for many things -- format, spelling, punctuation, grammar, usage, structure, clarity of thought, depth of understanding and analysis, quality of information, bias (or lack thereof), level of detail used, and style, and I'm sure I'm leaving things out.  Some of those elements -- grammar, spelling, maybe even structure, can be evaluated by a computer.  But how can any of those other elements actually be evaluated by a machine?

Machine scoring of writing can scan for things like key words or phrases to attempt to assess a level of detail or analysis, but it truly can't be determined without context, and a computer can't evaluate context.

Machine scoring of writing can scan for number of sentences in a paragraph, number of words in a sentence, and advanced sentence structures, but it can't necessarily determine of all those words and sentences strung together actually make sense.

Machine scoring of writing certainly can't find things like bias or evaluate style, and those things can have a deep impact on quality of writing and information being conveyed in that writing.

To have a truly meaningful response to writing is going to require human eyes.  Period.  Sure, a teacher can use his or her own actual evaluation in conjunction with machine scoring, but how many teachers are truly disciplined enough to do that? Far too many are sadly willing to leave the evaluation up to the computer because they read articles like the one above and start to believe that artificial intelligence can get the job done -- at the very least -- adequately.  Companies prey on teachers by promising great quality feedback and dangling more free time in front of them, all while making money off those teachers and allowing a gross disservice to be done to the students who really need good feedback on their writing.

Machine-scoring of student writing isn't the least bit intelligent.  It's ludicrous, lazy, and irresponsible.

Dress for Success?

So, I just read this article about schools implementing dress codes for teachers.  My overall reaction includes an eye roll and some head shaking.

First, let me address what should be the bleeding obvious.  Of COURSE teachers shouldn't be coming to work in clothes that are revealing cleavage, bare midriffs, or underwear.  Anyone who argues that they should be able to wear those clothes to work is also worthy of an eye roll and a head shake.  As far as clothes that are excessively tight, light exercise or yoga pants, well, that's a trickier topic.  Personally, I think they are unprofessional.  When your pants are so tight that I can answer the questions, "Panties or thong?" without having to ask, it's unprofessional.  Beyond unprofessional, it's gross.  But I understand that this is the style, so I guess I can just let it slide, much like the low-rise jeans fad (which enables me to often answer the question, "Panties, thong, or nothing?" without having to ask) and hope it goes away soon.  But it sure won't stop me from saying things behind someone's back, as women are wont to do at times.

Shoes?  I don't care about shoes.  Wear flip flops.  Wear gym shoes.  Wear stripper heels.  Teachers are on their feet a lot, so I really feel that shoes can be whatever the person feels most comfortable in.

Now let's get to the items that are likely to cause the most controversy.  Let's start with hair color.  Personally, I think it's ridiculous to dictate to a teacher what hair color is appropriate.  How long until hair color guidelines lead to makeup guidelines?  It's just hair.  Get over it.  If the hair doesn't pose a danger to the students of fellow employees, then leave it alone, and I can't see how hair color can pose any credible danger.

Next, jeans.  I wear jeans to work usually once or twice a week.  I tend to pair my jeans with a nice top or some sort of school-related spirit wear.  The jeans I wear don't have holes in them and they aren't skin tight (or low rise!).  They are just jeans that I can't believe would draw attention from anyone.  Yes, jeans can look unprofessional, but they also can look just fine for a teacher at work, too.  Jeans are a staple in the American wardrobe; I see no reason to ban them outright.  Let teachers be adults; they know which jeans are okay for school (the dark blue ones with the buttons on the back pockets) and which ones are not okay for school (the ones that have a 2 1/2" zipper, a hole over the right cheek, shreds down the fronts of the thighs, and make my ass look fabulous!).

How about tattoos?  As a teacher with a dozen tattoos, of course I have an opinion.  On average, only 2 - 6 of may tattoos might show.  The ones that always are visible are the ones I have on my wrists -- my daughter's name in Hebrew and a bracelet of pink and yellow roses to recognize my mother and me.  Clearly tasteless and vulgar.  The other ones that might show include a cross on the back of my neck if my hair is in a pony tail (another one that is horrible inappropriate), a strawberry on one ankle and a bracelet around my other ankle (these show if I am wearing capris or a dress or skirt).  Those are also pretty naughty for school, don't you think?  I also have a flower on my upper left arm that sometimes shows if I am wearing something with a really short sleeve.  Horrors!  The other tats are always covered because I don't dress like a tramp for work.  That means nobody sees the parrot on my upper thigh or my tramp stamp or the opening line from The Prayer of St. Francis on my upper back.  In fact, nobody ever really sees the green heart on my left ring finger because it's covered by my wedding ring, or the number 3 tucked far behind one of my ears.  If I DID decide to get any ink that might be considered inappropriate for school, then it would be inappropriate for the general public, so I'd get it someplace that it would always be covered.  I wonder how many teachers actually have tattoos with swear words, alcohol logos, naked people, or references to dugs or sex AND have them visible to students.  I'm betting that number is astronomically LOW.  So cut the crap on tattoos.  The only reason someone would want to label tattoos inappropriate for school is due to a personal bias.

If a staff member is dressing unprofessionally, the administrator should deal with that individual personally.  Why come down on an entire staff for the actions of one?  I suspect that's because it allows for a blanket statement to be made without having to single anyone out, which can make for an uncomfortable conversation.  So a dress code based on the inappropriate dress of an individual is the coward's way of handling it.  Applause, applause.  Way to step up and be a leader to your staff.

The lip service that is paid to teachers always amuses me in a sad way.  "Teachers are professionals."  Yes, we are.  But really, that's a load of hooey.  Nobody really thinks of us as professionals.  We have to have a four-year degree and to be licensed like other professionals -- doctors, lawyers, accountants -- and we have to engage in professional development like other licensed professionals, but nobody sees teachers in the same light as doctors, lawyers, and CPAs.

And if you want teachers to dress like "professionals", in "professional attire", then please pay me a salary that will allow me to purchase that wardrobe.  Until then, I'm going to continue to wear my khakis and polo shirts.  I might even throw on my fleece jacket with the school's logo embroidered on it when I get chilly!

Imposing a dress code on teachers is the passive-aggressive way of saying, "You're too damn stupid to know how to dress yourself."