Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Lousy Teaching Materials for Robot-Teachers


As the above suggests, this post may be about lousy teaching materials. I'm not going to say the teaching materials teachers must use are unhelpful, just that they are often inadequate.

They are adequate from the perspective of uniformity and teaching to Common Core Standards or state standards perhaps. That often appears to be the aim of the consultants or curricular experts, to provide teachers with minimal subject matter competence who are at a loss in being able to compose their own unit plans something to rely on.

In fact, you don't need to be competent in the subject matter really anymore. This is why there are Masters in Teaching, but less emphasis these days in Masters in Subject Matter (Math, Science, English, History, Art, etc). With the Masters in Teaching, you can teach anything with competency so long as the instructional materials are adequate. You are trained to do one thing well: TEACH.

That's the goal (gall) of the program provided by the school texts, according to Peg with Pen. Worried that her Writer's Workshops would be mauled by having to follow the Springboard script she wrote:
 Best practices, such as Writer's Workshop, will be destroyed at the hands of Common Core because it simply will not fit into the mold needed to create measurable data.
Of course, by now, she is probably using the texts just like any other teacher, which is fine, because any other teacher can use the texts and replace her if need be, which might be one of the unstated goals (galls) of corporate drive to control all aspects of public education:

There will be more tests - many more tests - as Common Core infiltrates our schools and profits billionaires while privatizing public education. The expense will be immense and will assist in the profiteers' plans to starve the public schools while using our tax dollars to dismantle what is left.
 Some students test well, and others don't, but mastery learning is the rage. I don't mind Common Core Standards per se. The standards appear to support cross-curricular standards, learning, enrichment, and uniformity in thought-development. But what about the fact that students are individuals, and individuals think and develop at different rates and in different capabilities?

The best teachers choose and craft unit plans to meet their students needs and interests, not cram unit plans down their throats as swiftly as they can in order to quiz them and generate hope-for test results.

Unfortunately, in Bozo School District, the drive to uniformity has reached an all time high this school year. So far my observations include, as other entry has already noted, no real recess.

Schedule for secondary schools is five class periods (8:00-9:00, 9:00-10:00, 10:00-11:00, 11:00-12:00, 12:00-1:00) are scheduled before lunch at 1:00pm. There are 10 minute transit times to walk between class periods. There might be a fifteen minute transit time instead of 10 minutes 10:45-11:00. Administrative staff uses intercom at 11:00 to offer flag salute and pep-talk. Class resumes at 1:30pm after a half hour lunch. School is officially over at 2:30pm, but most schools have clubs or extracurricular programs between 2:30-3:30pm.

All the security guards at all the secondary schools wear bright polo shirts and drive around in golf carts. The gates are locked at 8:15am and stay locked until 2:30pm. At some schools there are separate gated entry to teachers' parking lot.

What's not to like about school, after all the meals are free?

Just be forewarned you can't go to the bathroom except either before class (you better pee quickly) or ten minutes after class starts but not ten minutes before class ends.

Back to the uniformity of lousy teaching materials. They are pretty much forcing all K-6th teachers to use a set of standard unit plan materials that basically teach to the tests. So for reading, you may be forced to use a 12 page packet of readings with all kinds of comprehension exercises (spelling, matching definitions, fill-in-the-blank, sentence composition, paragraph composition, tests on multiple definitions, synonyms, and antonyms, and summarizing). These exercises are sandwiched between every two pages of reading, and the 12 page packet must be completed in an hour.

So a 5th grade teacher, never mind if she has thirty students or more in her class, never mind if about ten of them are struggling with the most rudimentary reading and spelling challenges, has to work through that packet. That's her goal (gall), she can't slow down, she can't say, well, let's just do half of it, she has to go through the whole packet, and talk the entire class through it.

Do you see what I am getting at here? In the (mad) march to instill uniformity and meet competency levels, the teacher is being forced to do exactly what the district orders them to teach. She has no choice in choosing a different lesson or slower pace to meet her students needs. This is what every teacher in the school uses are these pre-prepared packets and lessons ordered by the school.

Now these packets are based on Pearson texts (developed by them), and if you have ever been forced to buy Pearson texts for college, you know what I am talking about when I say information overload.
 These ridiculous compendiums usually costs nearly a hundred dollars brand new, and no matter if the professor only teaches about half the book, you are stuck with buying that text, because every two years Pearson is sure to come out with a new edition, just different enough you can't do without.

In a Special Education resources class, the pace is slower, but the workbooks are inadequate for a different set of reasons. If they are English language development, they usually appear replete with teacher guidance, unit suggestions, all kinds of (meaningless) exercises, and lots of repetition. Who the mystery writers are often are deliberately obscured but the stories are often filled with baseless claims and of uncertain moral aptitude. For instance, there is the story of "Chee the dog" trying to get a job at a "brick factory" but being turned away. If it's math, the level of arithmetic is maintained at a piteously slow pace that supports attention deficit disorder. Your 3rd math student will have done the same number line exercises at the beginning of the workbook as at the end. Identical number line exercises; count-the-coins and add-the-sum; tally up the lines and group the boxes. These exercises guarantee that even if your math student had more innate ability, by the end of the semester, he will most likely still only be able to barely count to one-thousand and not know how to solve anything but the simplest multiplication problems. The teachers work through such books one at a time, of course.

At a higher level of Special Education, such as English Language Arts Development with technology use of zero, for 9th grade, the class might be taught by special education instructors who double as P.E. teachers. These are usually the most half-hearted teachers when it comes to special education, since that's just something they are filling in for. As such, for instance, if your teacher is given an English lesson with a reading from Kathleen Barlow, like "Coming of Age Ceremonies" with Dutch anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep, he will have no idea how to juice it up at all. Instead, his limited understanding encourages a formalist reading and writing approach, which is sure to alienate the students. Most trained English teachers would realize that these kinds of readings, coming from the Victorian era, are filled with colonialist perspective; the explorer was selling his exploits; he could barely contain his disdain for the peoples he wrote about; he would never disclose the abuse or savagery of the Dutch in taming these colonies.

A trained subject-area teacher often brings to their specialty an idealism and enthusiasm that cannot be simulated by a robotic imitation who has merely passed the credential exam. Because they love the subject that they teach, they hope to transmit their knowledge and understanding; it goes beyond simple testing and rote-mastery. In contrast, the teacher who is only trying to enhance their responsibility and pay level does not care if his students perceptions become warped. They will use the Springboard book as an authority without any effort in providing historical context, background reading, alternative perspective, perspective looking back, or the feelings of people of color.

Just as Peg with Pen expressed her anger about having to use "nonthinking, soul destroying worksheets such as these," Storm also conveys concern over the loss of autonomy---not being able to use the units one takes time to develop over the summers:

I think many of us who are or were teachers have a sense that what we are losing is a kind of "risky autonomy," a space of possibility that can prompt the wholly untutored "self-discovery" by the students (and that reveals an opportunity for growth in the teacher as well).

The scripts are simply getting tighter and tighter and straying from the script is no longer acceptable and instead is punishable.

So, what this, again, as you know, is another method of control to reduce the "unknown" that might happen in a classroom, in a relationship, between student and teacher.

The blog entry was written in 2012, and with a contracting middle-class, with more temporary teachers than ever, and the education mill cranking out Masters in Teaching experts, we are at saturation point. With so many part-timers, maybe it is time we think about guaranteed Basic Income and time-share arrangements. We don't all have to aspire to do the same thing when what they really want are flesh-covered robots.