Return of the Rant

This was originally intended to be an email to my friend Dan, who teaches in Brooklyn at a charter school.  But then the email got so long (big surprise, huh?) that I felt it might be better to adapt it for this setting.  I also thought that maybe it had been a long enough time and this thing needed an update.

I recently read an article from last week’s New York Times Magazine entitled, “Building a Better Teacher.”  It was, for me, thought-inspiring, and I’d like to spend some time talking about it here.  I’ll provide a little background for those of you who don’t want to read the article (I’d really recommend it, though, I was quite impressed).  I’ll admit, though, that this is not going to be quite as interesting to some of you as it was to me.

Here goes with the background:  The article, essentially, profiles a man named Doug Lemov who is a former teacher and who now works as an educational consultant.  He has spent a lot of time working on a big project which had him doing in-class observations in order to find out whether there were qualities of effective teaching which might be universal.  This is, in my opinion, incredibly important work because good teachers, for some reason, are often considered to be aberrations–some perfect cocktail of personality, content-knowledge, and communication skills. Implicit in that belief is an assumption that the whole thing is out of our hands–some people will be good at teaching, some will not, and that’s just the way things go.

Anyway, Lemov and his team of researchers eventually came to an agreement that there were, at least, 49 different qualities which were common across the most effective teachers.  Many of these teachers, mind you, are of completely different backgrounds and have different personalities, and yet, in some form or another, their behavior is composed of some of these common qualities.  This set of 49 qualities is called Lemov’s taxonomy (not to be confused with taxidermy, which is the stuffing of dead animals).

Lemov, by all accounts, is very successful, and a very good communicator.  But, he’s apparently very shy and introspective, and he seems like the kind of guy who thinks about what he does and says before he does and says those things.  (I fully realize that I read the words ‘quiet and introspective’ in a description of someone else and projected my entire personality onto him.)

Here are some other things you will need to keep in mind before I start ranting (I don’t have time to cite sources for my assertions, so you’ll just have to take my word for them).

• Michelle Rhee is a former Teach for America teacher who then worked for the organization higher up (I think–she definitely held some sort of big-wig position in the past).  She was recently named chancellor of schools in Washington, DC, which is perennially one of the worst school systems in the country, if not the worst.  She has been on the record with all sorts of inflammatory comments about getting rid of bad teachers and the like.  She is, to say the very least, polarizing.  Her basic idea is that she wants to attract a “different caliber” of person to come teach, and proposes higher rates of pay for better teachers, and axing all the ones who don’t make the grade, so to speak.  These ideas, I think, work to her credit–she sees a problem and is taking steps to fix it; I have just found consternation in her implementation tactics.
• The Holmes Group is some group of academics who were the heads of Schools of Education at major universities.  They got together in 1986ish and decided that schools of education were not even close to adequately preparing their students to become effective teachers.  Remember that this happened in 1986, which is the year in which I was born–almost a quarter century. (By the way–don’t you love how people use terms like decades and centuries to indicate that a lot of time has passed?  Like, if I had said 24 years, it wouldn’t have had the same effect, but since I brought centuries into it, everyone reading took a step back and was like, ‘whoa, that’s a long time.’  Incidentally, the same thing happens with money–a quarter of a million dollars won’t even buy you a house in most major metropolitan areas (at least in the northeast), but it seems like a lot because million is thrown in there.)
• There is this other guy mentioned in the article named Jonah Rockoff.  You won’t need to know much about him other than he is an academic and I make fun of him a little, because I think he’s afraid to move forward, and that’s a big problem when it comes to education–this system is at least partially broken and something needs to be done.
• This last thing is important.  Effective teachers are thought to be the ones which have the most positive impact on student achievement.  This makes a ton of sense, obviously.  But, there are a ton of issues which come along with that simple statement, mostly because social science research methods haven’t quite caught up to the ideas.  That is, education policy people have a good idea now of what they’re supposed to be measuring (student achievement, effective teaching, etc.), but it’s a lot muddier when they try to figure out how to measure that stuff.  It’s not like a chemistry titration lab in which you can count the number of drops it took from the burette for the solution to turn pink.  The mechanisms through which teachers impact students and through which students ‘achieve’ are incredibly complex because, well, there is a huge human element to both things, which is constantly changing, and is very difficult to control for.  It’s hard to run true scientific experiments in applied social settings because it’s really tough to justify giving one group the ‘treatment’ and actively denying another group just for the purposes of having a ‘control’ group.  Let’s say the ‘treatment’ is an effective math teacher for a group of students.  Now think about what would happen if half that class was denied that math teacher and purposely given a teacher who was known to be substandard.  If the two groups of students were relatively similar, researchers could look at them and say, “Okay, the effective math teacher had her students performing at this level after a year and that is some large amount greater than the level at which the substandard math teacher had her students performing at.”  Yes, the researchers would get a good idea of the effect of a quality teacher, but then you’d have 15 kids who are a grade behind in math through no fault of their own.  There are a lot of ethical issues here, and it makes things difficult to study.  Student achievement is difficult to measure as well, but it seems as though the common technique nowadays is standardized test scores.  For some reason, it seems as though the debate over whether those tests actually measure the right things has been settled, but I, personally am not so sure about it.  That will come into play in just a moment.

Here are my thoughts, in (literally) no particular order:

It seems like Michelle Rhee, and the rest of people pushing for ‘different caliber’ people to go into teaching just assume that we can measure student achievement effectively–like, the whole debate about whether test scores, etc. are really measuring the right things has been settled.  I just don’t know how confident I am that tests given are effective measures of student learning.  Are they so well-designed that it’s okay to tie them to pay/job security? It just seems to me that merit pay and ideas along those lines make sense, as long as the ‘merit’ is accurately defined and measured. That is, it’s great to try to find effective teachers based on improvements in student achievement, but I think a necessary first step is to have really precise, meaningful measures of student achievement. I’m just not sure we’re there yet, but maybe we are.

This is, I think, why this Doug Lemov guy has a better idea of what needs to happen than Rhee.  She comes across as an egotistical maniac, hell-bent on ‘shaking things up,’ but I don’t get the feeling that she’s really thought things through entirely. That might not actually be true, but that’s the impression I’ve gotten whenever I’ve heard/read anything about her–and I think that might be her biggest issue.  She rubs people the wrong way, seemingly on purpose.  This is why it’s so frustrating to be American sometimes–Rhee gets all sorts of press for being bombastic and a mover/shaker, and this guy Lemov has been quietly and considerately doing exactly the right things for several years, and very few people outside the field even know who he is (I am relatively well acquainted with the field, and I’ve never heard of him).  In fact, some people within the field, undergoing the exact same type of project that he underwent have never heard of him (there is a professor doing this in Michigan–same exact project but tied only to mathematics teaching).

A consequence of this, though, is that it’s difficult to determine whether Lemov’s work can be implemented on a large scale–it’s also impossible for it to be taken to a large scale because so few people know about it. This is a problem more generally–there is an awful lot of work being done on this type of thing all over the place in America, but, to some degree, it all happens in silos, detached from the other work being done. Academics research and do work on it with the aim of informing the ‘field’, places like I work now also research it with the aim of affecting policy, and then the people actually responsible for running schools, training teachers and teaching kids work on it with the aim of improving their actual practice of this stuff.  But, there never seems to be any cross-collaboration along these lines, at least not until recently.

This is something that’s bothered me since I started school last Fall–why does it seem like everybody is just getting serious about this now? In this article, they talk about the Holmes Group which, in 1986 (yeah, fucking 1986!!!) recognized that professional education schools weren’t adequately training teachers. So, I’m supposed to believe, given that, that no economics professor thought, at anytime between ’86 and like 1998 or something, “Maybe we should start collecting hard data on this to try to understand what’s going on better”? For a group of people that pride themselves on being intelligent and who like crunching numbers, this seems like a fucking no-brainer, right?

There is an entire section of the article about schools of education which I think brings up a great point. Teaching should really not be any different from any other profession, but in almost all others, there is a trial period or an apprenticeship in which the new employee is meant to ‘get up to speed.’  In the traditional school of ed–>student-teacher–>full-time teacher model, the new teacher ends up in a job with only the ‘skills’ one learns in school. I don’t think anyone who’s graduated from college and started working would deny that there are huge, huge differences between school and real-world employment. So, it’s almost as though one has to have certain prerequisite characteristics that make him/her a good teacher, or at least the ability to very quickly figure out what works and what doesn’t (and I think that’s a tall order).   By working for the FTC, I was put in a position which didn’t require much of me, and regardless, if I screwed up majorly, there were always fail-safes in place to back me up. It’s not as though if I did a substandard job for 9 months, the business world would start running amok and making anti-competitive mergers all over the place. But, if I were a teacher and screwed up to some extent, then that would mean 20-60 students who now have to catch up, and who may never do so.  (This actually happened to me in high school Spanish.  I had a great teacher freshman year–Mrs. Tribulauskas–wo was challenging and asked a lot of her students, and who got great results because of it.  But, then I had Mr. Lugo and Mrs. Check, and my last three years of Spanish instruction left me uninspired and feeling incapable of learning the language–if my class had had Mrs. Trib for all four years, I think most of us would be essentially fluent by now.  I, at least, would have taken Spanish in college.)

Generally, this is the problem with academics teaching professionally-focused classes. It’s one of the frustrations I had while at school in Texas, but I think I now am just starting to understand it. My program at UT was professionally-aimed, but was taught solely by academics (with a few exceptions) who had little idea what it was like to do anything but research and instruction of graduate students. The result was this quasi-professional/quasi-academic setting which was entirely frustrating to me. I originally thought I wanted a purely academic school, but then realized later that I would have been perfectly happy with a purely professional one as well. It was the weird middle ground that I didn’t want any part of.

Also, perspectives such as Jonah Rockoff’s are not helping: “While study after study shows that teachers who once boosted student test scores are very likely to do so in the future, no research he can think of has shown a teacher-training program to boost student achievement. So why invest in training when, as he told me recently, ‘you could be throwing your money away’?”  I’m sorry Dr. Rockoff, but there is no research that has shown a teacher-training program to boost student achievement for two reasons; (1) Those studies have not been widely/convincingly done, and (2) The studies which have been done likely focus on the old-world methods of teacher preparation which, according to the Deans of schools of education across the country (in 1986, mind you), do not adequately prepare people to teach. I agree that Lemov’s taxonomy has not been convincingly (to academia) studied for its impact on student achievement, but at least he’s trying something new.

My guess is that if Dr. Rockoff wishes to study Lemov’s teacher training model and produce an empirically-based research paper using that study, Lemov would be more than happy to let him. Would he have us just throw our hands up and say, “Oh well, only teachers who were effective in the past can be effective in the future and that’s the end of the story”? Where else would he have us “throw our money away” to? What else is that money going to do for us? Why don’t we stop complaining about what hasn’t been done and start figuring out if what is being done works?

Like any popular profession, there are going to be stars, middle-of-the-roadies, and bottom-scrapers, but this is not quite the same as having a shitty lawyer draw up your will. The effects teachers have on students are real and serious, and I think that needs to be remembered. I’m not entirely optimistic that things will quickly get to where they need to be (I don’t really even think they’ll get there in my lifetime), but I think we could at least get to a point where certain teachers aren’t setting their students back in terms of progress. Even the worst teachers should, at least, be advancing their kids at an acceptable rate (and I get the sense that there is a rate which is well defined out there). This article heartened my view in this regard; I have some hope that we can at least get to there at some point in the not too distant future, and that’s a good enough starting point.

On a more personal note, this article was really heartening to me for another reason.  It made me feel as though maybe this whole writing thing could be worth it.  Some aspects of the way this article was written just felt like something I might not only be capable of producing, but something which I would want to produce.  What I liked most about it is that the writer was able to pull all these different perspectives in without editorializing.  She, obviously, was  fan of Lemov’s, because otherwise, why spend the entire time writing about him?  And, my guess is that she wasn’t a fan of Rockoff’s, because he got one little paragraph toward the end, and was described as a “more typical educational expert…who looks skeptically upon teacher training.”  But, she gave him credence and consideration, and I think that’s admirable.  I spend a lot of my time writing editorials here, and a lot of time telling my own stories and all that.  I really feel like I need a break from that–if I learn to be more balanced and learn to tell other peoples’ stories, I think someday down the line, good things could happen, and I would be able to return to my story with a little more gusto, and a little more precision.

Plus, the woman who wrote the article is a 2006 Harvard graduate and is now on a fellowship from Columbia–it doesn’t seem like it’s taking that long for her to get her feet on the ground.  I think it’s just proof that if you are good at what you do, are willing to put the time and effort in, and you’re smart, things will happen for you, relatively quickly.  So, it made me feel pretty good about bouncing into school and a career in which there is so much uncertainty, both within and without myself.

Thanks for bearing with me–maybe next time will be more interesting to the non-education policy buffs.

Keep your head down, strive for balance, and keep on putting one foot in front of the other.

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Fever Dream

I know it’s lame to start writings with quotes, and I know I started the second to last post with one.  But, I have to do it to you all again.

In Killing Yourself to Live (sidenote: someone recently unwittingly reminded me that we used to underline book titles instead of italicizing them, back in the era when we would hand-write essays), Chuck Klosterman wrote this: “The events of 9/11 are often compared to the events of a nightmare.  This is a surprisingly savvy analogy, because hearing someone’s memories from the morning of 9/11 is not unlike having someone preface a conversation with the words, ‘I had the weirdest dream last night.’  When someone wants to talk about a dream, you can never say, ‘I don’t care.’  You have to care.  You just have to stand there and listen because people who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves they’d never admit in normal conversation.  It is a way for people to be honest without telling the truth.”

I am not going to talk about 9/11.  I try only to talk about that once a year, or once every five years, usually right around its anniversary.  What I will do to you all is this: I had the weirdest dream last night.  (Are you sucked in yet?  Remember, you have to care.)

Before I get into the dream, I’ll provide a little background.  I’ve been sleeping at least 9 hours each night for the past three or four days.  I’ve been unsuccessfully fighting off a cold/fever, and have been downing medicine like someone who really likes the taste of NyQuil. (I don’t like the taste of NyQuil.)  Thursday night I went to bed at 9:30 PM, and woke up around 7 to go to work.  That, if I have done the math correctly, is 9.5 hours of sleep.  Last night (Saturday), I went to bed at midnight and woke up for the final time at 10:30 this morning.  I’m not going to do the math for you all on that; you can figure it out.  The point being, I’m getting a lot of sleep and I woke up at 10:30 this morning.  Remember that for it will be a theme.

But, before I woke up for the final time this morning, I awoke at several intermediate times.  Right before 4:30 AM, I had my weird dream.  It actually wasn’t weird in content, but in form.  In the dream, certain events happened, I became aware that they were not going well, and had the opportunity to ‘reboot’ and start over.  On my second time through, I did things better than I possibly could have imagined, only to realize that I was dreaming and that if I did not wake up soon, I would likely lose all the details and have no way of memorializing what I had learned in the dream.  So then, still in the dream, mind you, I woke up and sent my friend Cody (I’m not sure if the ‘my friend’ part was necessary there) a text message that said something like, “I’ve figured it all out, life, the universe, and everything!”  (That, of course, is a reference to the third installment of Douglas Adams’s Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.)

Then, I actually woke up, realized I hadn’t actually woken up and text messaged anybody (and, even if I had, it would have done me no good in trying to remember the dream–it only would have helped me think about Zaphod Beeblebrox, Ford Prefect, Trillian, and the number 42) and tried to remember all the details of the initial part of the dream (the part I got to reboot in).  I was able to remember all the details at that point, because it was a very vivid dream and had just happened.  But, then I looked at the clock, saw the glowing 4:30, poured myself another 30 milliliters of Nyquil and returned to sleep only to wake up, for the final time, at 10:30 and have no stinking idea what the dream was actually about.  The only part I could remember was the waking-up-within-a-dream portion with the Douglas Adams reference.  (Mostly, I couldn’t form any thoughts about the dream because my mind, as it processed that my body was full of aches, fever and phlegm, was screaming, “Oh, woe is me!” too loudly.)

After a few groans and a trip to the bathroom, I started figuring that if the initial dream was important enough for me to half-jokingly claim that I had figured out all of life, the universe, and everything, it was probably at least important enough for me to try to piece together some details.  I began to think about it, and then made a few notes on a purple sticky note that was lying around my room.

Here are the notes:

– Control=Hair

– Life, Universe, Everything–>I’ve got it

– Confident, yet inspiring sympathy==>brilliant

Now, if you will all bear with me, I will try to piece these together in a way that makes sense to all of us and not just to me.

Control=Hair/Confident, yet inspiring sympathy==>brilliant

In the initial dream, I replayed an argument that I had with my parents (most notably my mother) last year.  The argument was about the length of my hair.  The crux of it was that my Mom thought my hair to be unprofessionally long, and I thought she was being overly conservative.  The undercurrent driving my side of the argument is that I had been feeling babied, and didn’t want any help or oversight.  In a lot of ways, though, I was really just unhappy and looking for someone to take it out on.  On one hand, I kind of wanted to grow my hair out because I hated my job and it was the only form of expression I could think of to signal to people there that I didn’t care (because, to my credit, my work ethic did not give off that impression–regardless of how little I thought of the place, I worked harder than pretty much everyone there).  (I’m clearly not very creative.)  On the other hand, it’s pretty foolish to get in a serious, relationship-threatening argument with someone about a bunch of dead cells covering your head.

I think, in retrospect, the length and intensity of the argument was rather embarrassing.  My behavior during a lot of last year was kind of juvenile, to the extent that I often made self-deprecating comments about feeling like I was back in high school, and that I was acting like the teenage rebel I never was as an actual teenager.  To a lesser extent, I still feel that way, but I also feel a little more mature nowadays.

All of that is beside the point.  In the dream, I replayed that argument with my mother, and it started out horribly.  (I should note here that, while the argument was similar to the one I had last year, in the dream, it was happening in the present.)  It was escalating, I was digging myself into holes, I was unduly insulting and hurtful.  Essentially, I was handling it the exact same way I handled it last year.  Which is to say, I was handling it very poorly and puerilely.  It was so terrible that I thought, “Hey, this is just a dream, let me start over.”  And then I did.  Upon rebooting, I took another tack while trying to explain my side of things.

I explained, in a considered tone, that my decision to grow my hair out had nothing to do with anti-professionalism or disinterest in my life and what I had to do each day.  Rather, it was a response to how I had been feeling lately.  Namely, I had been feeling like my life was out of control, and that I was doing a hundred different things, and had no idea where they would lead me, and I was really just confused.  My hair, in a way, was representative of the  few things I could control–myself and my attitude.  The desire to let my hair grow long was, in reality, a desire to have a long-term goal that I defined, and to take steps and put in the hard work to make it happen.  It was about trying to keep some semblance of sanity in a life that felt as though it were spinning far too quickly to get a handle on.  So, you see, the hair equaled control.

In the rebooted portion of the dream, I explained all of this to my mother calmly and confidently, and at the proper times, with just enough emotion in my voice to inspire sympathy on her part.  By the end of my explanation, she had no choice but to say, “Okay, Scott, I completely understand, and I’m sorry if I was overbearing in any way–I just didn’t want to see you make any regrettable decisions.”  She said all this, despite the fact that she probably still didn’t quite understand my rationale.  She said it because she knew I had thought it through, and that it was something that was important to me and that it was actually a product of caring rather than disinterest.  I thought, upon waking up at 10:30, this approach was brilliant and that I should have thought of it last year when the whole thing went down (although, back then I was really growing my hair out just to be a subversive dick, not to regain control of my life).  (I am tempted to blame either the residual effects of the NyQuil or my slight fever for my egotism in calling myself brilliant, but I can’t do so in good conscience; I was just being a little cocky.)

Life, Universe, Everything–>I’ve got it

This part was largely already explained.  In essence, I just thought it was so cool that I had sent a text message like that in my dream that I should remember it when I wrote about it here.  But, when I woke up at 10:30, I thought that maybe the message should have read a little differently.  I thought I would say something like, “I’ve figured it out, the hair, the universe and everything.”  But, then I thought, no matter what I sent out as a text message, and no matter who I sent it to, the recipient will never be able to understand it, and then I’m going to end up trying to explain this ridiculous dream in text message length and format, and that’s just going to create a big mess that buries the two of us in unwanted mobile phone surcharges on our monthly bill.  So, I decided I’d just write about it here and save every potential text message recipient the trouble and the $10.

So there you have it, folks.  A dream that actually helped me out, in some way or another.  I don’t know squat about life, the universe and everything, and as I told some number of people after the actual hair argument of 2009, it’s not about the hair.  The hair doesn’t really matter (of course, it actually does matter to me, just not enough to end a relationship over).  But, what does matter is that I am starting to subconsciously develop strategies that will help me deal with life’s inconveniences (like possibly overbearing parents and trying to assert some level of independence) in more proactive, mature ways.  I have to think this is a step in the right direction, but I can’t be sure.

That’s all, but remember–keep your head down, strive for balance and stride with one foot in front of the other.

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If These Bare Walls Could Sing

“Now and then he would wonder what had sustained him through all those years.  He had forgotten the savage, joyless, implacable blind drive which, working itself out, was enough in itself, and which, in its very joylessness, was a kind of joy.”–Robert Penn Warren

The place where I work is housed on the third floor of a brick building within an office park in Waltham.  My office is in a back hallway which includes five other offices, four of which are unoccupied (and the remaining one is occupied by a woman who mostly works from home).  In my office, the fluorescent light runs the length of the wall opposite the side of the office with my desk, and the glow is directed upward from a shade that covers the underside of the bulb.  For whatever reason that light, along with the rest of the building’s interior lights, is just a little dimmer than one might imagine it should be.  In my office, this means the off-white wall has a little hint of gray in it from the shadows.  The effect is at once quieting and calming; the muted light seems to beget tranquil conversation.  I would guess that many people would be put off by this, preferring instead a brightly lit, lively office with un-tinted exterior windows and conversations one can hear through walls.  I am not one of those people.

The start to my job has been full of work which, like the building, I’m sure many people would find off-putting.  It has involved a lot of focus on minor details, and rethinking things which I’ve thought about several times over.  I spend the day in a state of cold composure, staring at a computer screen, typing occasionally, but mostly just thinking, “what’s being said here?” and “how can I make it read better?”

In some ways, this job reminds me of the moving job which, strangely enough, is probably the one I liked most out of all of the ones I’ve had.  While moving, I spent all day repeating the same actions, mindlessly walking up and down stairs and the ramp to the truck, carrying various sized boxes and furniture, just putting one foot in front of the other until I made it home and collapsed on the couch in my parents’ house, with my shirt covered in salt marks and my arms and legs turned to gelatin.  That job required work without question, drive without ambition.  It taught me that endurance is in the mind, and that by detaching my body from my mind, I could push myself to physical feats I wouldn’t have expected.

Mental endurance, I have found, is in the same vein as the physical variety, except it isn’t possible to detach my mind from my mind (now, that would be impressive!).  But, there is a way to detach one’s mind from distracting thoughts.  That way, things like, “This is boring” or, “Look, a Google ad!” don’t gain any sway.  That’s what I do now–I sit at my computer screen, I make notes, I mark changes, I add commas, I correct grammar, and I do that for eight hours with very few interruptions and virtually no distraction, until I get into my car and turn my mind off for awhile (which, by the way, makes driving home a little scary; let’s just say there is some drifting and there are a few delayed brakings).  What’s weird is that I like it.  I like it kind of a lot.

I am not sure a job like this could keep me going forever because, while it does have my mind firing repeatedly, I’m not sure it has it firing on all cylinders.  That said, if all I have these next few months is a drive to do what’s asked of me in the dimly-lit confines of my office, that is enough.

As always, keep your head down, strive for balance, and stride with one foot in front of the other.

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