The internet hasn't necessarily increased communication. Perhaps it's shed light on how many people are willing to write without ever being read, or just on the chance that they might be. For some of us, the blogosphere is the equivalent of Emily Dickinson's dresser drawers. Who has space for all that paper, these days. Even if you do, who wants to go to the Container Store and organize it.
I'm always surprised when someone knows of my blog, or just knows of it as part of a sector of 'x' kinds of blogs. Used to be, this was an angry anti-establishment blog. Now this is meant to be just a chronicle.
This past year was, perhaps the first time, that I had to actively speak with colleagues about what was "official" or "unofficial" and about actively playing the polarizations in action throughout the DOE. For many years, I've been aware of the politics. This year was the first time I actually had to try to "play" it. Usually, I go about my business in earnest and that makes me too risky for either side to try to use. This year, the winds shifted so many times, that just to phrase a sentence, required sliding my words through the unseen lights of multiple alarm systems.
The kind of political shapeshifting required by the DOE, I think demands several years of training. It's a combination of diplomacy and intelligence work. You never insult anyone, but you try desperately to understand his/her agenda and its roots. While you do this, your administrators switch agenda. Finally, I found myself doing what people have told me to do for years -- DOCUMENT EVERYTHING. By the end of the year, I found myself with, at least, ten written reports on student behavior a day. This doesn't count the numerous emails on various topics, some meant to clarify the ones just before them. Pressure just to prove what was going on where forced all the teachers I knew to write down practically everything they saw. And then at PD, the discussion was about moving away from this kind of practice. Since I'm not part of the school's future, for me it was just interesting how the thought processes in one part of the school were so different from the practice in another. I myself don't like writing down everything I see in this way, although the sheer volume of reporting began to have an effect, if only that the people enforcing consequences had bodies of information to support them. If you were to place your heart in any one method, you'd've earned yourself a metaphorical heart attack this year, anyway. Policies do need to evolve, though you hope to stay in the same philosophical place in which you began. I don't know, truthfully, what I can say about the latter as I found it bet just to roll with things. I think we all learned to distance ourselves from decisions, processes, anything but the students' work on paper and how the students could improve. We only began possibly to distance ourselves from the latter in those last minutes when it was clear that some studens weren't going to submit work no matter how much they didn't want to go to summer school. Worse, that many students hadn't really changed their patterns over the year. We had, in our many shifts of shape, adjusted to them.
The pressure to shift comes from the pressure to produce -- which comes from our Mayor and his Dept. of Education. If you were training a team of competitive athletes, you could never do what the DOE asked. You can't do "muscle and skill recovery" in the last two weeks before the playoffs. That's why you just put kids on the disabled list or take them off the team when they aren't able to meet the standards of competition.
But, I'm not a person concerned so much with the "competitiveness" of our students as I am their interest and investment in their own learning. It's possible to be competitive, but narrowly trained. I don't think we can produce schools and schools of "Closers." What I'm concerned about is that students see school as a kind of meeting place. Some of the people they meet are caring, adult and students alike. They don't see it as a place of learning -- not the learning they recognize. They learn more by doing at home and even watching tv -- at least, according to them. Nor do they often take pride in what they do. I have seen students who recognize their work as part of the development of their minds, ideas and creativity. That still doesn't mean they take care when they do all of it.
If there is one pressure perhaps we can "push back" at the DOE, it should be the pressure to differentiate instruction and outcomes. Since we know we are going to have to make adjustments based on the needs of our students, why don't we argue for multiple ways of testing and more curricular choices. We always know we are going to find students whose written work may excel even their ability to answer canny reading comprehension questions. The kind of literary/critical thinking which goes into exams is not necessarily that of most writers' processes. Couldn't students submit creative work which presented skills in craftsmanship and in using language?
Many private schools provide independent reports on students and some provide only these as their evaluations. I think we force ourselves into a continual shell game every year, the more we demand students excel in one way on a "shared set of standards and curriculum." We all know you can hand two teachers one set of guidelines and that they will be interpreted slightly differently. It's the ability to be different than someone else which does give us an advantage in a capitalist economy. Half the country pays twice as much for an MP3 player than it needs to, not completely acknowledging the monopoly that company has on music sales, because that company claims it is "different" than the company which usually has the monopoly on other areas of the market. It's true that there are certain "uniforms" and dress codes for business. Isn't the person we admire most the one who makes the best of the restrictions? We put a tremendous premium on conformity in a way which I think only serves to sell the items we label as "standard." How many people have spent more time thinking about "the right interview suit" vs. the right "fit" for the job and later, the right, "life plan."
Perhaps one benefit of the internet is that it is a testimony to how much people want to express their individual ideas. If we thought of our students as people who probably have and read blogs, who communicate via social networks, and take the time to, at least, organize their music so that it will support their days, we might view them more as differentiated pre-adults than clans of age groups to train. Whole markets are geared to them, and they know it -- and they use them. But, we offer them perhaps a small percentage of what they could be learning and an even smaller one of ways to show this. Then, we wonder why they find school boring.
They wonder, too, why we look so tired. The gap between what we are asked and how we work and the way they live the rest of their lives is too wide to begin to explain it.
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