Apathy Doesn't Help Students

Back from my three-week hiatus, end of the semester craziness has finally come to a close!


When you walk into a classroom you can immediately tell whether this is a place of learning for students or a holding cell for the down-trodden, waiting to age-out or drop-out.  Anyone with experience in education has seen their fair share of both of these types of classrooms.  However, it is important to realize the fundamental difference between the two and its probably not what you'd expect.

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Recently, while doing observation hours in an urban school district, I came across a teacher who said he could only accomplish so much because the students did not have support from home, had unstable and terrible home-lives, and were unmotivated to learn.  He made the honest and humble claim that he was not a miracle worker.  Surely, this teacher cannot be faulted if he does not have the drive and motivation to go the extra mile to engage these disenfranchised students, they're already counted as lost causes by society.  Which one of the two classrooms I mentioned earlier do you think this teacher had? Why?

Flip to another observation experience (it took four years but I've realized 20 hours a semester has begun to pay off), this time in a suburban school district, and the teacher is not only a teacher, but a coach for one of the school's athletic teams.  Motivator? Oh you know it, he could motivate someone to think that derivatives in calculus was entertaining!  However, this classroom of mostly middle-class students is sitting idly unfocused and unmotivated to learn while the teacher shows a video on the topic that day.  What's this teacher's reason for having disengaged students?

One more anecdote from an observation experience: this time in another urban school district.  It is a co-taught mathematics class and the general ed teacher and special ed teacher are working hand in hand to get this class of 30 students to understand how to graph a line using slope-intercept form (talk about BORING).  About 25 % of the students are on IEPs and there is a student who has a auditory deficiency and has an interpreter.  Every student in this classroom is engaged.  Every student is participating. and at the end of the lesson every student leaves with the satisfaction of having learned a new skill.  Oh, I forgot to mention that many of these students come from the troubled home-lives mentioned in the first scenario.  Why is this classroom any different?

Educators must understand that all students have an innate desire to learn, to better themselves, to improve their situations.  If the educator gives up on the student, who is left to look out for them?  Teacher apathy is what stands in the way of educational success and is what marks the major difference between a person who is teaching, and a person who is a teacher.  Teaching is a life-long vocation, not a 40hours a week job. No student deserves being given up on, and every student can be motivated to learn.  It's just a matter of finding their trigger and taking the time to form a relationship.

As I look forward to my student teaching experience, I hope to keep the energy and drive alive because students feed off of the energy of their teacher.  If the fire burns out, find a new profession because students need teachers who are motivated, driven and have a passion for learning.

-MB

Thanksgiving and the Pilgrims

While it is always fun to talk about how Squanto and the Native Americans helped save the colony in Plymouth and celebrated the first thanksgiving, it would be beneficial to students if they learned the real story of where thanksgiving came from and why we celebrate it today.

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Yes, the colonists in Plymouth celebrated a Thanksgiving feast with the Wompanoag tribe, however, this tradition did not stick with consistency through today.  During the Revolutionary War there were sometimes several thanksgiving days in a year marking key victories or achievements.  The "holiday" of thanksgiving didn't become a reality until 1863 when Abraham Lincoln declared the last Thursday in November to be a national day of thanksgiving.  However, it was not until 1942 that a federal law declared thanksgiving as the 4th (and typically the last) Thursday of November as a national holiday of Thanksgiving.

So as we teach our students the history of thanksgiving, it's perfectly ok to mention Squanto and the Pilgrims, but lets not forget to give credit where credit is due and give Thanksgiving to two of the most influential presidents in our history, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Happy Thanksgiving!


-MB

Where Does Bullying Come From?

When people start talking about bullying, everyone always starts with the schoolyard bully who is there taking your lunch money.  Now, with the attention being given to suicide victims in high schools and colleges especially, the bully is the student or group of students who are bigots and base their hatred on sexual orientation.  Then, of course, there is the focus on cyber-bullying, because as things go in the 21st Century, technology is a part of all aspects of life, even the negative ones.  But all of these conversations are related to bullying occurring with children, teens, and young adults, what about the bullying that happens in the professional world?

Here, bullying doesn't exist, or so people would have you think.  Adults no longer get accused of bullying unless they fall into one of these categories: sexual harassment, discrimination (racism, sexual orientation, gender) or slander.  Sure, these are really bad forms of bullying, possibly some of the worst in the adult world and are punishable by law, however, what about all of the other bullying that happens that ISN'T quite this bad and doesn't get prosecuted.  I'm just going to mention a few instances of professional bullying that I've witnessed in the past year... I know there's more so feel free to add your own experiences in the comments.


Teachers: According to many conservatives, teachers are overpaid, under-worked and ungrateful people who don't deserve any of the credit they are given.  People are allowed to say "people who can, do; people who can't, teach" on national television without any flak whatsoever.  This is bullying, however subtle.

Muslims: Remember the mosque and community center that was supposed to be built "within the shadow" of ground zero?  Remember how it was ok to say that they had no right to build a mosque so close to ground zero  because the 9/11 attacks were carried about by Muslim terrorists.  How can people be allowed to have such utter disregard for our First Amendment right of freedom of religion?  Why is guilt by association ok simply because a terrorist was from a specific religion?  Are all Christians terrorists when one person kills 85 people in Norway and has a religious reason for it?

image - politicalhumor.about.com

Politics: The presidential campaign is the #1 source of bullying examples in the United States every four years.  The candidates hire hundreds of people to "dig up the dirt" on their opponents and then go on million dollar smear campaigns to make the other person look as terrible as possible for whatever reason they can find.  If you are putting someone else down in order to make you feel better about yourself you are the classic bully.  So why do we accept it as a normal part of our electoral process?  What lesson does this teach kids? (if you're the best bully, you can be president)

According to Bandura's Social Learning Theory, children can learn behaviors simply by observing it.  Students are encouraged to watch and participate actively in society especially in the political process.  Put these two statements together and you are encouraging students to observe bullying therefore exacerbating the situation.  Let's put an end to bullying in the adult world because we can't ask our students to accomplish something we can't ourselves.

TIME in school IS MONEY well spent

With all of the talk of shortening school days, moving from the traditional 5 day school week to a 4 day school week, even shortening school years to save money, one thing strikes me as odd: How can ANYONE in their right mind think that this is going to benefit students?

Consider this -

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• The average school day is about 6.5 hours long and  divided into anywhere from 4 to 7 blocks/periods.

• In some schools these blocks/periods rotate so that students who perform badly at a certain time of day have an equal opportunity to succeed in all of their classes, however, this means not every class meets every day

• Each class is either 60mins or 90mins in length (with some variation)

• Students generally take about 5 mins to get settled in each class and attention is typically lost for the final 5 mins of a class bringing the teachable total down to 50 or 80 mins

• This means in a school with 5 blocks per day, a student loses about 50mins of class time getting settled, that's 250mins (or just over 4 hours) per week.

If you shorten the school week to 4 days do you increase the productivity of students for the brief time they're there?  Most likely not.  While teachers might benefit from a long weekend every week giving them ample time to charge their batteries, get papers corrected and plan for their next lesson, students will be more likely to forget information and need to be retaught each Monday in order to prevent regression.  All teachers no that Monday mornings require them to be on their "A-game" as students will be lethargic from having two days off.  Now give those same students 3 days off and see what happens...

Understandably with budgets becoming increasingly difficult to balance, school districts are being asked to make hard decisions in order to preserve the quality of education for their students.  But making a decision that reduces the amount of time a student is in school consecutively sounds like a terrible plan.  If anything the school day should be longer (perhaps with a longer lunch period) so that students can have even more "teachable" time.  Low-income students would benefit from increased school time as their families wouldn't have to worry about spending as much on child-care and they would have less unstructured time which could get them into troubled environments.

The old adage "Time is Money" could never be more appropriate than speaking about educating the youth of America.  The problem we seem to be having is forgetting that time in schools, LEARNING, is money well spent on our future.

-MB

Teachers Are Overpaid: Really?!

This post is a response to an article posted by U.S. News and World Report Education read the article and feel free to post YOUR response to the study in the comments.

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Wow. What value is a child's education? Can you place a dollar sign next to a child and say, "That is how much their education is worth to our nation." It is a common fact among college students aspiring to become teachers that we say to one another, "teaching will be my first job, not sure what my second job will be yet, but I'm bound to have one."

Sure, the hours sound great, all of the major holidays, and not to mention you'll never have to work on weekends... That is, unless you're so passionate and dedicated, like most teachers are, that you spend countless hours preparing for the next days lesson, correcting tests and papers, and spending hundreds of your own dollars to make those students' experience in school as excellent as possible.

The next study they should do would be how many hours the average teacher spends outside of the normal school day doing work-related activity and add it on to the amount of hours they work in a year. Then take their salary and subtract all of the money they invest back into their classroom (usually on essentials like paper and pencils, not extra, unnecessary materials). Now divide that salary over the number of hours and see how much the average teacher is REALLY making per hour. Compare that to the "market average" and then, look a hardworking, exhausted teacher (who works another job all summer) in the face and tell them, "You're overpaid."