Month: April 2013

It seems that no matter where I go, I hear high school teachers complaining about the same thing: student trips to the bathroom. It seems such trips are always “too long” and “just so they can get out of the room.” I have a couple of observations.

**1.** Yes, they are leaving your classroom for reasons other than going to the lav.

**2.** They are leaving for as long as they think they can away with it.

**3.** They are leaving because wandering the halls is more interesting than your class.

I always feel that if you’re having issues with this sort of thing, you need to spend some time thinking about what sort of engaging activities you are doing in your classroom. Honestly: if walking the empty halls is more fun than what you’re doing, I’d leave your classroom too.

It also seems that the people who complain most about this sort of thing are the same folks who have their class standing by the door waiting to leave four minutes before the bell. That, I’m afraid, makes you a hypocrite. You can’t complain about kids leaving your room for ten minutes when you’re throwing away twenty minutes a week.
Rant over.

There are two ways to look at this: you can either stay in education and help from the inside, or you can leave and try to fix it from the outside. Here’s why that’s a problem:

1. As an educator, you feel as though education is your strength- not policy writing or fund raising or politics. Anything other than education, and we give up our advantage of knowledge. That sits poorly with me.

2. We, as educators, want to help students succeed. That’s what we do. We don’t want to sit in endless meetings fretting about getting re-elected.

3. Politics rewards “good enough.” People aren’t excited to rip apart a functioning system for the promise of a better one. If what’s working now is working, the consensus seems to be to let it be.

Given all this, it’s no wonder that the politicians that decide education policy and the educators that execute that policy have so little in common.

Obviously.

How do you empirically measure the value of art? Of architecture? Of learning?

What does 80% learning improvement mean? How could you possibly measure that?

Why is it so hard to understand that hard numbers don’t attach themselves to some things?

I try to avoid some touchy issues here, but I can’t sit this one out.

The NRA posted it’s plan to “make schools safer.”

It’s just what they’d hinted at- they want an armed officer at every school, and they want laws changed so teachers can be armed in their buildings as well. To qualify as one of the armed officers, you’d need to go through their 40-60 hour training. Then we’d be safer.

Right.

Besides that I don’t think guns belong in school, I’ve got a more pressing issue. Where I teach, you must have at minimum a Master’s Degree to continue teaching beyond the first few years. It’s law. The wording the federal laws talk about “highly qualified” teachers. What they’re trying to do, between the two things, is to mandate that teachers be experts at what they do. In fact, you’re not even eligible for a professional license until you’ve taught full time for three years (that’s 2970 hours in the classroom, minimum).

If you read about the qualities of “expert,” you’ll find much about the amount of time related to becoming an expert- the number most often kicked around is 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. In my line of work, that’s about 10 years of teaching full time. That said, every teacher I know worth their salt will say you’re never an expert at teacher. But I digress.

We’ve established that we want to only allow experts to teach (or work) at our schools. We’ve established that there is federal legislation aimed at this. And we’ve established that it can take (nominally) 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert.

So here comes the NRA saying that a “40-60 hour” course of study makes someone fit to carry a gun in a school and be able to defend that school. It defies logic.

I’ve been taking this course with Dan Ariely from Duke about the nature of how we make decisions and the latent biases inherent in those. It’s excellent- I’m trying to keep up with it, but my life is such right now that I may not be able to do that. Either way, I’m learning tons right now.

One of the points more recently made was over the nature of decisions. Much of what we do (or don’t do) in terms of change is based on an ingrained tendency to keep the status quo. We don’t like change. We resist and avoid it to a very large degree, though we are blind to much of this behavior.

There’s an interesting work around: force a choice. Provide a t-shaped decision fork, where it is impossible to continue on without change. This forces us into a situation where we must consciously choose the direction and choice we make. This explains, by the way, why educators don’t change their techniques or methods when presented with opportunities (and support). If we want to see meaningful change, we must consider the tendency for all of use to maintain the current state- and create situations that do no allow this. An example:

Let’s say you have aging desktop computers in classrooms, and you want teachers to adopt the more mobile solution of laptops. If you offer laptops to the teachers, a number will choose to take them, but the bulk will insist that they also continue to use and keep the desktop in the classroom. Instead, if we stipulate that the desktop computer will be removed from their room and disposed of, and that they must choose between two available models of laptops, you provide a t-shaped decision fork, and the change must be addressed. The status quo becomes an unacceptable choice, and thus the decision becomes the reasonable option.

I’m sure this is relevant to the way teacher adopt (or don’t adopt) technology into their classrooms. It’s something, however, I see precious little thought being put into, and I think that needs to change.