Shiny Happy People

Optimism in general, I'm fine with it.  Stiff upper lip, look on the bright side, and all that good stuff.

Optimism in education, now that I can't stand.  One of the major commandments in the Church of Education is "Thou shalt not find fault with any child, no matter what."  Doesn't matter what the child is doing (or more often, not doing), you has a teacher are supposed to find something to complement.  "Oh look, Johnny is showing off his creativity by setting fire to the classroom.  Let's give Johnny a high five for his imagination as we line up to evacuate."  More than one administrator has admonished me for not giving 8 positive comments for every negative one.   What a bunch of bullshit!  Nobody in the real world does this.  Okay, not true, there are people in the world who do this.  They are called brown-nosers, suck-ups, yes-men, and other fruitier phrases.

It has gotten to the point where teachers cannot say anything negative to their students out of fear of permanently crushing their egos.  Let's get one thing clear, egos are not made of spun glass.  They will not shatter if spoken to critically, loudly, or even (shudder) harshly.  Egos are made of far stronger stuff.  Even the egos of children.

How do I know?  Outside the classroom, these same precious snowflakes participate in a myriad of activities, including highly competitive sports.  The coaches and tutors these kids interact with give plenty of constructive criticism; they want to get the highest performance out of their players.  As a private teacher, most of my comments are critical, but highly constructive.  "Play softer to get a better sound." "All quarter notes in one piece are the same length.  You made your life difficult by making these quarter notes into eighth notes." "More air.  Twice as much air as you think you need." Are a small sampling of the ones I used last night.  Do you think parents would hand me thousands of dollars per year if I was making their children miserable?  No, I don't either. 

And let's face it, kids see right through all the forced compliments and always have.  Remember Holden Caulfield? 

Extra Credit Bonus: Ask a Music Teacher

Larry Cuban is taking his sweat time blogging the story of how he reached enlightenment.  Don't bother with the first two parts in the series, they are just set up.  The third part the link goes to has the punch line:  Teaching "thinking skills" devoid of content and context is worthless.

Well Duh!

If, in his youth, Mr. Cuban was wise enough to walk his posterior over to his school's music department, the band/orchestra director would have been happy to explain the facts of life to him.  (And considerably shorten his path to enlightenment.)  Transferring a skill to a brand new situation is the last step on the road to knowing.

Every student musician in a high school band or orchestra knows the meaning of all the symbols on each piece of music in his folder.  Yet it takes hours upon hours of rehearsal to make each piece ready for performance.  Why?  In each piece all the symbols are in a unique context, and young musicians do not understand the symbols well enough to grasp how they work in the new environment.  They need to be assisted in learning the new environment and shown how the symbols work.  Thus, lots of rehearsal. 

Take eighth notes.  In the Standard of Excellence method book (read: textbook), eighth notes are introduced on Page 13.  Now a beginning band practice and practice to make Page 13 sound like a heavenly choir.  Then when they turn the page, they will revert to back to sounding like fifth graders who picked up their instruments yesterday.  Why?  Because all the eighth notes on Page 14 are different than the ones on Page 13.  The idea of eighth notes is so new that the students can only play them in the EXACT, SPECIFIC piece which they have been taught.  In order to play eighth notes anywhere (ie. generalize), students need to be guided through dozens and dozens of different pieces containing eighth notes.  Which is why in Standard of Excellence, eighth notes appear on each and every subsequent page.

Good teaching goes from the specific to the general.  It's bad teaching that tries to go the other way.

Hey, it ain't rocket science, Batman!

Calling All Amateurs

Once upon a time, I plunked down $135 each year to be a part of the Music Educators National Conference (or MENC).  Under some bizarre arrangement, each of MENC's state affiliates set the membership dues for its members.  My state has had the highest dues in the nation until this year.  Now this wouldn't be so bad if this so called "professional organization" actually provided any services to its membership.  Guess what?

They don't.

Okay, that's not entirely fair.  They provide two services.  They run local band/orchestra/choir competitions every year.  But these are nearly totally impossible to get into.  Twenty-four seconds after registration is opened the damn things are full.  Yes, we're talking about a school band festival not a Justin Beiber concert.  So that's one real great service right there.  The second service is an annual conference, held during the school year in the state's second least attractive city.  I went a couple times, and well, not impressed.  The workshops?  No, not so great.  For the majority, it would have been more cost effective (by a factor of 10) to stay home and read a book on the subject.  The networking?  Nope.  Unless you are one of the good ol' boys or their fair-haired proteges, forget about it.

Now the MENC itself supposedly provides all sorts of services.  Print publications written at the fifth grade level and full of puff pieces or really crappy research studies.  An online database of random lesson plans submitted by teachers that are neither organized nor screened for quality.  Online forums which were good, until MENC executed the worst website redesign I've ever seen.  No one was told of the move and the old posts were archived in such away as to render them inaccessible.

That's what $135 per annum pays for.  Not exactly what you'd call value for money.

Education, a New Religion?

A thought occurred to me while walking to the mailbox this morning.  Educators believe in processes that are not backed by evidence, but rather by hearsay.  Educators believe in methods that are not backed by science, but rather by faith.

Aren't these the principal characteristics of religion?

We are trusting the future of civilization to these people?

Are you scared yet?  I'm scared shitless. 

The more I think about it, the better the analogy works.  Education has high priests distributing the gospel: Ken Robinson, Michelle Rhee, Lucy Calkins, Dan Meyer, and that Khan guy.  These priests tour the land preaching, claiming to have found The One True Answer to all your educational problems.  All you have to do is follow their lead (by paying them $$$$), and you will find educational salvation.  It doesn't matter that they have not set foot in a classroom since the Ford Administration (if they ever did). 

Education has prophets who tell us the way things will be if just believe hard enough and pay the priests exorbitant fees.  Dewy, Bloom, Skinner, Rousseau, Gardner et al.  Don't worry your pretty little head that all their philosophy and/or science has been discredited by a mountain of more recent experiments.  Just keep dreaming that their utopian vision is achievable if you work very hard implementing all of the high priests' ideas.

Educators are dogmatic.  They are terrified of rigorous questioning and open debate.  It does not matter how much evidence (in the form of scientific studies or personal experience) you bring to the discussion, if you do not agree with the prevailing dogma, you are in big trouble.  Don't believe me?  Read E.D. Hirsch's story about teaching an education class in The Making of Americans.  Talk to any senior teacher in the cities of New York and Washington D.C. where oppressive evaluation systems are designed to punish and squash dissent.

Educators ignore effective teaching practices.  Case in point: Direct Instruction.  Forty years after Project Follow Through demonstrated Direct Instruction's superiority over other teaching methods, few teachers even know about it, let alone use it.  Subsequent research shows Direct Instruction works with all kinds of students in a myriad of settings, yet educators actively work to hide it.  Why?  Because it directly contradicts all of the Progressive prophets and priests of education.

Education has become a cult.  A dangerous, destructive cult.  Be afraid, be very afraid.

In Memorium: Mr. Teachbad (2009-2013)

Friends, teachers, citizens. 
I come not to bury Teachbad (he's not dead yet), but to praise him.
The evil that men do lives forever on the Internet
The good is oft done only in real life, and is quickly forgotten.
Let it not be so with Teachbad.
The earnest educators hath told you Teachbad was cruel,
If it were so, those teachers of knowledge would hardly flock to his blog
And despotic administrators would never have run him out teaching
Here, without leave of anyone in particular,
For I care not what earnest educators
And despotic administrators think, should they think at all.
Come I to speak in defense of Teachbad.
He was a comrade in arms, a defender of rational thought
But earnest educators say he was cruel;
And earnest educators are always right.
He saw the world as it really is, cutting through the layers of bullshit jargon
He called those who refused to work lazy.
Is this the mark of a cruel man?
When his students showed up, Teachbad gave them meaningful lessons
Hateful teachers do no such thing:
Yet despotic administrators say he was hateful;
And despotic administrators are always right.
You all did see Teachbad do the unbelievable;
He named the names of those who made the moronic education decisions.
Yet earnest educators say he was spiteful;
And earnest educators are always right.
I cannot make a mockery of every earnest educator and every despotic administrator,
I can only speak what I know.
Teachbad dared to speak truth to power, regardless of the cost.
And we love him for it!
Many fear the wrath of those fools who rule our working hours,
Doing jobs in quiet despair, silent regret
Never to rise up and bear witness to the lunacy.
Who among us has the courage to do as Teachbad has done?
To keep the fire to their feet?
Shining the sunlight of truth in the roach infested corners of education.
Only then might things change for the better!

No Love Among the Ruins

This is the final in a multipart series.

I did not stay for Year 5.  I told the principal exactly what I thought of him and slammed the door behind me.

The school had become a total wreck.  Completely unrecognizable from the place I had fallen in love with just a few short years prior.  The few others who remained and cared left as well, including the assistant principal and the experienced teachers who were not close to retirement.  The most experienced teacher in the school left to become a car salesman!  The art teacher became a stay-at-home mom.  I do what I do.

What follows is hearsay.  I still tutor some students who attend the school.  Their stories, and those of their parents are depressing to say the least.

• The French teacher is no longer allowed to teach.  He is forced to use sub-par language teaching software in all his classes.  This teacher is a native French speaker who knows nothing about computers and loathes them.
• I was replaced by a lady who knows nothing about teaching music.  She's a singer who chooses truly awful repertoire, and has no budget because the dreck she gives her students is in the public domain.  My students tell me what they are learning in class.  All of it is developmentally inappropriate, and contrary to the way humans learn music.
• A mother saw my copy of Story of the World in my trunk and asked me about it.  When I explained that it was history written specifically for children, she told me about her attempts to fill in the gaps in her daughter's education.  Gaps like history and writing. 
• The art teacher told me the school was redesigning their curriculum based on Understanding by Design by Wiggins & McTighe.  This mess of a book is the antithesis of the founder's educational philosophy and vision.  It is the apex of illogical thought and educational fad.
• One client (who has since left the school) was forced to hire a tutor because the school failed to teach his son to read.

Looking back on it now, years after the fact, makes me sad.  An oasis in the vast educational desert choked with sand all due to the incompetence and machinations of one small despot.

The fish indeed rots from the head. 

The Fall of a Great School

This is part three of a multi-part post. 

Year 3 ended with a mass exodus of teachers as a result of the precipitous decline of student discipline and the removal of teacher authority.  Something in Denmark was starting to smell.  The rot that started with the hiring of a new principal was now rampant.

For me, Year 4 opened during the summer, standing in the workroom making copies and eavesdropping on office conversations.  The one I remember involved the assistant principal, a hold over from the previous principal, and one of her friends.  The assistant principal was not a happy camper.  She was vociferously complaining about the now not-so-new principal's demands.  Regretfully, her door closed before I could hear details.

For everyone, Year 4 saw a push to be accredited.  The founder and previous school leaders purposefully eschewed accreditation because it forces a school to conform to a lot of dubious education school theories.  And it takes a lot of time away from teaching in order to create useless documents.  But the not-so-new principal thought accreditation was important, so we did it, lead by one of his sycophants on the faculty.  To make matters worse, this erstwhile leader (who couldn't lead her arse out of a paper bag) was absent in mind and body a good deal of time because she was dealing with a personal matter.  Another, highly competent, much more experienced teacher had volunteered to lead, but was turned down on the weakest of excuses - her children attended the school and therefore created a "conflict of interest."

At first I tried to ignore accreditation, but it got me in the end.  In a fit of madness, my fellow arts teachers and I decided to develop a strategic plan for our department.  Other departments had developed plans of their own which were being included.  As the best writer of the group, I took everybody's ideas and over the course of an evening, wrote up a plan.  Which I emailed to the principal for review and inclusion with the accreditation documents.

Guess what happened at 7:30 the next morning?  An angry principal showed up at my office.  As I struggled for consciousness, the principal went on and on about how he could not possibly include my plan as written.  Why? I asked.  He could not provide a coherent answer, something about building consensus.  Other departments are having their plans included verbatim and no consensus was built around them, why can't the art department?  Again, no coherent answer, only jive talk about how he supports the arts.  My fellow arts teachers were incensed (Both quit within the next 18 months).  Our plan ended up on the trash heap. 

The other theme of Year 4 was incompetence.  Over the summer, offices were supposed to be added to the multi-purpose room.  Except the administration wrote the construction contract wrong, so the work actually took place during the first 10 weeks of school.  In the room I was teaching in.  While I was teaching.  Ever try to teach in a construction zone?  I don't recommend it.

Because I worked in the multi-purpose room, I was booted out every time someone else wanted to use the room.  Because I'm a music teacher, I have 200+ pounds of teaching materials.  Guess who is responsible for moving the gear every time I was evicted?  Yeah, that's right.  By Year 4, I was wracking up injuries at an alarming pace.  One of my arches fell requiring 8 months of wearing shoe inserts.  I bought a back brace and began using it when I knew I had to move gear.  The worst was a torn quad muscle which took 2 years to heal, and required me to sleep on my couch for 6 months.  Yes, I reported all of these incidents in person and in writing.  Never did the principal offer so much as an apology, let alone relief from the hell I was experiencing.  He also never apologized to the art teacher, who was given so many extra duties she nearly had a nervous breakdown -- twice!  Her doctor's note got her relief only for two weeks when the principal was out of town. 

I could go on and on about Year 4.  The students and the parents and the sycophants.  It was living in a car wreck.