are the disabled a minority?

I haven’t done the readings yet, but this is what strikes me after watching the module (as a preface, I realize these views are not exactly PC, but I take the struggle I have with them to be at least honest) The notion of lumping people with disabilities in with other minorities is a misleading generalization, in my opinion. The reason why: people with disabilities are truly at a disadvantage that cannot directly correspond to cultural insensitivities, unlike people of a different race or ethnicity. The module asks us to look at the question: why are people with disabilities disadvantaged? But we know why they are struggling: they are blind, they have trouble learning to read, they can’t modulate their feelings. I don’t mean to be coarse here, but ignoring that these conditions set up roadblocks to success, and looking to blame SOCIETY for their plight, this is not doing a favor to our students with disabilities. Are the statistics for adult success among people with disabilities shocking, depressing, maddening? Yes. Could we be doing more as a society to take these people under our wings and give them increased chances for success? Of course. But the reality is that these kids have not been dealt a great hand, and that they might need to work HARDER than Joe Plumber. To blame society and our lack of “cultural responsiveness” is to take that locus of control away from a student who might instead need the message: “You may not have the gifts that make success easy for you, but you will outwork those who have more advantages than you, and thus achieve the greater victory.” Sorry to rant, and to drift into sports analogy (I could be a Dustrin Pedroia speechwriter maybe). It always makes me uneasy to make inflammatory statements, but it’s also sometimes a compulsion for me to take a stand that might be challenging for me to hold, and for others to consider. Anyway, I make the statement in the spirit of debate, and I truly welcome your comments. Sam

so how should we pay teachers?

My buddy and I had a conversation yesterday that started with Al Shanker, who is credited with reinventing the American Federation of Teachers, and with bringing collective bargaining to the table.  I think of that step as an essential one in the history of teachers because it is so hard to quantify how well teachers perform, and thus hard to reward them fairly.  Even now, with all the data out there in education, I think the teachers’ unions will die before giving in to merit pay; there are just too many variables.  Should we measure students’ performance or their improvement?  How do we level classrooms’ playing fields throughout the country?  NCLB has targeted schools this way, but I think the vagaries inherent in classrooms make it impossible to reliably and fairly link students’ success with teachers’ performances and, thus, their pay.

So what do we do to pay teachers fairly and yet improve our schools?  I have said in other places that I don’t think the tenure system works; there’s simply no reinforcement for good performance, either positive or negative.  Teachers don’t get raises and they don’t get fired.  And in my experience, that system works for a majority of teachers, because they are good people, hard workers that want to do well by their students.  But some schools have simply too many hurdles for good teachers to overcome.  What are those hurdles?  Poverty, meaning a lack of a supportive community, a tax base, and students who are ready to learn.  The very schools that have trouble attracting many good teachers.  The answer: find state and federal funding for teachers’ salaries based on areas of need.  Pay bonuses to teachers who teach physics in New Orleans, math in Houston, and special education in New York.  Do what sports teams do.  You want to change the fortunes of a school district: attract the best players for positions you need to fill.

does income affect disability?

I’m taking an online class called “career development” that teaches teachers about the importance of giving students with disabilities a chance at gainful lifetime employment.  Here’s the stunning statistic I found in the first week of readings: 8% of Asian adults report having disabilities, as compared to 17% of Hispanics.  The article didn’t have any comment about the coincidence of poverty and disability, but I can’t help but think that this is the reason for this divergence among the races.  What could be the cause(s)?  Nutrition?  Toxins in the environment?  Parents’ level of literacy?  Exposure to vocabulary as toddlers?  I’d love to know!  Whatever the reason, I can’t believe it would be due to genetics, and therefore we must be able to do something about it.  I’ve got to believe that many disabilities can be prevented, maybe half, if we are to believe that Asians have the same genetic disposition that Hispanics have.

how do you individualize curriculum for 20 students?

It’s a tough time of year to feel good as a special education teacher.  I always look with envy at the classrooms of math and science teachers who know what they’re doing for the next 6 months.  Me, all I know is what’s been written in the student’s ed plans.  I beat myself up for not having a teaching plan beyond the obligatory introductory lessons about classroom community, and principals frown when they look in my planner and see no lesson plans beyond week 1, but what else can I do?  My job is to meet the students where they are, to teach them the next thing they need to know.  I have no curriculum, save the mandate to get each one of my students ready for the real world. How do I know when they’re prepared?  Preparedness is different things for different kids: for some, it’s being prepared for college; for some, it’s knowing how to balance a checkbook; for others, it’s being able to follow 3-step oral directions.  And there’s bound to be one of each of those kinds of students in my classroom at one time; it’s an extremely lucky special ed teacher who has a class with like abilities.  Try to imagine a math teacher who has to teach the concepts of multi-digit multiplication, fractions and algebra at the same time, and you get a picture of my curriculum.

So what do I do?  I assess the kids’ abilities, and find some middle ground to start with: a theme of some sort to focus their attention.  I give them each one of them specific skills to focus on, and I try to stay away from the front of the classroom: it’s their show, not mine.

Maybe I’ll figure out what I’m doing next week.

do we need teachers’ unions?

On a hike the other day, my friend asked me about my feelings about my teachers’ union, and I quickly discovered how difficult it is for me to defend my union. One would think that a strong union would mean good working conditions, yet things are not pretty in my district, I told my friend. Despite a recent state audit that told us to diversify programs for those who have special needs, our district continues to cut any program that looks anything like vocational instruction in favor of staffing the four “core” subjects. Our class sizes in the middle and high schools often approach 30, a number that very few districts in the country would consider enviable. The district is doing everything it can to cut costs because, even with these efforts, the budget keeps growing, to the point that some of the towns in this regional district had to approve an “override”, which requires that a town approve by super-majority (2/3) a budget that raises property taxes above a certain percentage, more and more a common occurrence in our state. This is a town without a lot of industry to boost revenue, and so the residents continue to shoulder the burden and watch their property taxes increase, despite the fact that their properties’ values are decreasing.

And where does our union stand? We demand continued yearly pay increases without changes in working conditions or health care contributions. And most of us have been in the district for more than 3 years, which gives us the almost complete job security of “professional status”, more commonly known as tenure. Despite that many of us are taxpayers in the district, what our union likes most is the security of knowing that same raise is coming every year, regardless of the quality of the jobs we do. And so we have done everything but strike this year, because we consider it an outrage that our raises are not rubber-stamped.

I know that many unions are fighting for more reasonable concessions from their districts. But in looking back to the origins of unions, we aren’t exactly fighting for livable working conditions and wages, we’re fighting for more comfort. And when I like at the national organization of our union, I think about how close we are to the AARP, the NRA, the tobacco companies, and the arms industry in lobbying for nothing but our own self-interest in the name of the public good.

So how do we fairly fund schools and pay teachers to ease the burden on towns and encourage excellence in teaching? Another day’s work…

how do I supervise my kids?

I wanted to pick up on my friend Brian’s comment on “what happened to the mall?” (8/5/08). He sees no evidence in his personal experience of an inverse relationship between supervision and delinquency, for lack of a better word. Neil Swidey seems to agree with Brian in his article “Spying on the Texting Generation” (link below) in the June 8 edition of The Boston Globe Magazine. Swidey sees dangers in the overprotective parent, because trust isn’t built between parents and children, and because children become too reliant on parents to set limits, never allowing them to establish an “internal locus of control” (a buzz-phrase in middle and high schools, especially in special education). Swidey also brings up how distasteful full disclosure can be; how much do you as a parent really want to listen in on the inanities of adolescent conversation?

Returning to our discussion about the mall, I guess part of my revulsion to the mall scene stems from my concern about the sexual promiscuity of today’s adolescents. Oppressive supervision is not the answer, as both Brian and Swidey point out. But whether the method of relating to others is IMing, texting or flirting, some sort of phantom parental presence is needed. One parent that Swidey interviewed neatly personifies the spectre: “Calling it his ‘fear of God’ speech, Greg warned (his children), ‘I can know everything you’re doing online. But I’m not going to invade your privacy unless you give me a reason to.’” Ahhh, the beauty of the threat that deters without deployment. And who knows, those kids at the mall might all have the “fear of God” in them, they just needed to act like teenagers, which naturally is distasteful to me (nasty creatures, those adolescents).

The Swidey article is pretty fascinating, especially to somebody like me who is looking forward (?) to guiding his children through adolescence. Many good tips on how to keep tabs.

Sorry, the link to the article is below in the first comment.  Rookie!

how do you teach physics?

As I came home this afternoon, I spied a boy of about 13 out in the neighboring backyard, obviously having been assigned the task of taking all the smaller branches farther into the backyard out of sight from a maple tree that was cut down.  I love watching teenagers try to figure things out. His preferred method seemed to be standing the limbs up, and then letting them drop onto his shoulder so he could carry them as you would a sack of potatoes.  It was completely ungainly and hilarious to watch, a situation-comedy scene from real life.  He was lucky he didn’t poke an eye out!  But I was happy to be witness to one of the real-life lessons that children should be exposed to.  How wonderful to learn and appreciate the strengths and limitations of one’s own body!  You can’t teach this kind of thing in a science class.

It’s one of the reasons that I’m quite comfortable paying tuition to a Waldorf school. The students in one of the grades built a shed, and the children in the pre-K program don’t stay in for recess EVER (the temperature rarely gets above freezing for about 3 months around here).  At public schools, it’s often the paraprofessionals who decide whether the weather is good enough for recess.  No disrespect meant to them, I’m sure I would have a hard time staying out on the coldest days for the amount they get paid, but the point is they aren’t the ones who should be making the decisions.  And often times they make decisions in their own interest rather than the children’s.  Just one example of how our public educational system ignores nurturing a child in favor of training a worker.

It’s no joke, we are training some excellent desk-workers in the public school.  For my children, I want to make sure they play and work with their bodies, so that they can enjoy a life outside their minds.

why so many apostrophes?

Something I am sure of: I hate how often apostrophes are misused. When and why did we get to be a nation (is this phenomenon happening in other English-speaking countries?) that puts in an /’s/ just in case? I have a tendency to believe that mistakes like this are symptoms of the country’s drift toward slovenliness, but if we’re so lazy, then why are we putting in the extra pen- or keystroke? Maybe it’s just a symptom of Curmudgeon Onset Syndrome, but all you teachers and parents out there can help me fight off this deadly disease and teach your children one simple lesson: If in doubt, leave it out. Save the keystrokes! We’ll all look (at least) much more intelligent. It’s for the good of the country (and my health). Thanks for reading this public service message.

what happened to the mall?

Oy, things have changed since I last went to the movies at the mall (probably about 10 years ago). Living a new area, I used to walk to the indy theater in a small touristy town, and now I drive to the local “Dead Mall”, though it certainly has helped me to be more economical with my entertainment dollar. “The Dark Knight” was the fare I sucked in my pride to go see. Worth the price of admission, both for the eye candy of the movie, and for the culture shock of the mall. What a meat market for the early teen set! Nothing but 8th graders scoping each other out. The girls wear nothing but the tightest fits, and the boys do nothing but ogle ostentatiously.

And the prologue on the screen was just as bad. I was in my seat 10 minutes early, and the commercials had already started. When did that begin? Insidious and slick, I kept thinking that THIS one must be a preview (no, there were FIVE of them still to come), but the product kept showing up at the end. I can’t help but think that this might be a glaring example of how we’ve abdicated our responsibility for our children. In my day (not SO long ago), adults still controlled the mall. This mall was more like Studio 54. Conspicuous consumption undeterred by any mediating influence (read: parents) that might point out that they’re all a little young to critically parse through these messages of sex and commercialism.

It might be a little naive of me to think that parents should be there with their kids, but I’ll have to figure out something else for my kids, because this setting scares me to death. My grand idea would be to teach my children to be involved in the world, but not PART of it. A little vague? Maybe. I’ll have to tell you more about my choice of schools for my children….

Why so many questions?

As a veteran of parenting (3 children) and teaching (more than 10 years), I have a lot to say about education, both public and private, across all grade levels, among many curricula, but not a lot of conclusions about what education should be. I certainly have a political slant that will become apparent, but politics define things much too clearly to suit my taste. As opposed to ranting, I prefer to break down how complicated are the pressures that face American schools. And as you can guess and probably empathize with, those philosophical complications serve to make the practice of parenting and teaching difficult. No news here, it’s rare to find people who have clarity of purpose, and most of them are truly frightening in my opinion. So, no answers here, just questions that can at least help us to focus the dialogue.