Fun Little Moments

It's been too long since there has been a post! I will be updating a little more regularly the next couple weeks, thanks to a couple bigger things I am a part of with some high school students. More on that later, but for now I thought I would share some of the highlights from the past few weeks with band students I work with.

The sixth graders are a quality group that have continued to loosen up as the year has worn on. They are always polite, and have shown bits and pieces of personality more often:

• One girl showed up with flashy purple and orange shoes a couple weeks ago. I thought they looked really cool, so I complimented her on them after class. She thanked me, and we started talking about how much we like the color orange (it is my favorite color). Apparently her whole bedroom is orange, and she made it clear that it was a bright orange. I asked her how she sleeps at night with such a bright room, and she said she is used to it. It's kind of like a night light.
• One of the flutes showed up with shutter shades the other day. I noticed them on her music stand before class, and commented on them. She said I could try them on. So I did, and I noticed quite a few grins from the students around. One of the clarinets spoke up and said it was a good look for me.
• This week was teacher appreciation week. I was oblivious to this until Thursday, but then one of the clarinets gave the band director and me little bags with goodies. The girl has exquisite taste (Starbursts, Hershey's nuggets, and a Lindt truffle!), but her demeanor was the best part. She walked up, handed me my bag, and said it was for teacher appreciation week. I thanked her as warmly as I could, which was easy, because it was such a heartwarming surprise. Even though she had taken the time to make the bags, she wanted to get the moment over with quickly and head back to her seat. I think I can relate - I was one of those students who always felt awkward in those situations where you wanted to show some sort of appreciation, but keep that professional distance that's hard to keep when you give someone a token of appreciation.

Now, on to the endlessly colorful fifth graders:

• I usually get to fifth grade band well before class starts, to monitor the kids in the hallway. They are bused to the junior high, and have to wait for a zero period class to finish up before they can go in the room. As I entered the hallway, one of the saxes zipped by me, and when he got to his friends just ahead of me, I heard him exclaim, "I beat Mr. Chalberg!"
• I recently did sectionals with each section over the course of several band periods. The flutes ended up being the last group, and long story short, they had to wait a while due to some scheduling complications. They were quite happy when they finally got their turn. In particular, one girl (who comes up to about my waist) started bench pressing her flute as we waited for one of the flautists to grab something from the band room. Several players in the section felt the urge to flaunt their flute-lifting abilities after that. For a couple minutes, we morphed from sectional to weight training, but it was a good time for a quick break anyway :)
• One of the fifth grade french horn players told me that he picked the instrument to improve his chances at college scholarships. How's that for thinking ahead?
• One morning a week ago, it seemed like show-and-tell. One girl came up to me, and made sure I saw her super cool pair of socks. A minute later, another girl came up and showed me a couple faces she had painted on her feet. I asked if they had names (no). I noticed they were a boy and girl, so I asked if they were a couple (not yet).
• Probably the quote of the year here. The most outspoken girl in the band (without question), burst into the hallway, came up to me, and yelled, "Junior high boys should NOT wear cologne! They are stinky enough already, and all they are tying to do is pick up girls!!" I couldn't help but laugh, and I told her I agreed with her. I also told her that I wasn't wearing any cologne.

This year, many of my favorite moments have been before and after class. Those aren't areas where much formal teaching takes place, but they are the best places to find out who the students are as people. I love getting to know the students on some sort of personal level, because they are great people. I also think it helps me get more out of them when it is time to learn.

The Power of Curiosity

A couple days ago I read an article about a remarkable fossil found. The fossils are part of a "new" species called Australopithecus sediba. I put "new" in parentheses because the species is estimated to be around a couple million years old. It probably would be more accurate to say it was recently discovered. Anyway, the big hoopla over the fossils is that they are really old, quite complete, and may help bridge the gap between apes and humans in evolution.

I have now shared everything I know about fossils. I'm not up for a creation versus evolution debate today, either. In fact, I'm not as interested in the first half of the article as I am in the second. The story behind the discoveries is fascinating. It starts out usual enough, with a paleoanthropologist (Lee Burger) and a graduate assistant. However, Berger also brought along his nine-year-old son, Matthew. The rest is now history:

Google Earth's satellite and 3-D capabilities provided the technology and the ability to share information with other scientists. Berger and geologist Professor Paul Dirks discovered approximately 130 known cave sites and 20 fossil deposits in the area.

Once the sites were identified, it was time for Berger and his team to begin looking for fossils. But neither he nor his team were responsible for finding the first sediba fossils.

Berger's 9-year-old son Matthew made discovery.

Two years ago Berger took Matthew out to the site along with a graduate student and their dog. Like all curious little boys Matthew ran off to explore, and after traveling about 15 minutes outside of the site Matthew ran back and yelling, "Dad, I found a fossil!"

(source: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/fossil-hold-key-evolution-show-apes-humans/story?id=10320180&page=2)

That's right, after all that research and education by the grown-ups, it was the kid that wandered off in whatever direction for whatever reason, and made a discovery that he probably can't wrap his head around yet. He wasn't actively looking for anything. He was just being a nine-year-old, looking for a good time while Daddy did his job.

That's probably a little romanticized. How many nine-year-olds can identify a fossil in the wild? The kid has some knowledge, and probably has accompanied his father on other explorations. It's still a super cool story though. Matthew was simply curious to see what was out there, and when he found something he thought was cool, he had to show his Daddy!

I'm a little jealous. I think the coolest thing I ever showed my dad was a bee hive I spotted on the eave of our roof. My dad didn't have any troubles containing his excitement. ABC News didn't report on it either.

Anyway, I'm not bitter. I salute Matthew, and I have already filed away his story in a safe place. It will come in handy some day.

One thing that constantly frustrates me when I tutor high school math is how math gets portrayed. Virtually every student sees math as a tangled web of equations, formulas, and functions. Everything is rehearsed repeatedly in homework. It's so mechanical, and it seems to drain the students.

It drains me to watch it.

Also, it's not just in math. For instance, I learned chunk writing in high school. Just about every basic skill learned in school has been broken down into a basic, repeatable, learnable, process. I don't think that's a problem by itself. Actually, it should be very helpful.

What frustrates me is that processes should be tools. Somehow, they have become more than that though. Education, far too often, is zapping students of their natural curiosity.

The current system seems to engrain in students that success is solely about sticking to the specific path outlined by the processes learned in curriculum. It's an assembly line approach. A student comes in, one teacher gives them this, another that, and at the end of the year they come out the end altered as desired, and altered in the same way as every other student. Or, as education likes to put it, things are "standardized."

The story of Matthew and the ancient fossil is a powerful metaphor. The adults took an assembly line approach. They had specific strategies, a carefully devised method, and in general were using the processes they had learned and acquired. Matthew, on the other hand, had no approach at all. All he had was curiosity. Fifteen minutes later, Matthew was the one screaming "look what I found!" while the adults were sifting through dust.

Now, I'm not promoting educational anarchy. Matthew had a much better chance of finding something thanks to his father's strategies. It was his father's research and strategic exploration that put him in position in the first place. However, old-fashioned curiosity, with no learned method or strategy attached, is what finished the job. In the end, it was a blend of knowledge and curiosity that brought forth a great discovery.

Education can't lose sight of curiosity. Curiosity needs to be fostered and promoted, but I think standardization tends to suppress it. A nine-year-old can find a missing evolutionary link with it. Curiosity is pretty powerful.

Favors

I worked with a high school student yesterday on their math homework. I had not worked with this student before, and the first words out the student's mouth were, "I'm no good at math." That's not the first time I've heard that out of a student's mouth, and I'm sure I have many more times to look forward to hearing that too.

As I started working with the student, I found out a little more about him. He is an athlete, and was quick to talk about football. This student was quickly gravitating towards the jock archetype in my head.

By the way, "jock" isn't necessarily a bad title in my head. I am a big sports fan, and I was interested to hear about this student's football career. I think sports can be very powerful and educational, and often they are. However, with the fame and glory around athletics, they are also prone to corruption.

In particular, the student I worked with yesterday might have already experienced a taste of it. About halfway through the worksheet, he told me his math teacher last year was a big supporter of the football team - so big that the student thinks the only reason he "passed" is because he is on the football team.

I don't know the teacher, and I didn't see any of this student's math work from last year. I have no idea what really happened. That doesn't really matter though. Perception is reality, and this student perceived that he got a favor because he plays football.

In the end, all I really did was point at a helpful formula in the student's textbook, and that's almost all he needed to figure out the assignment. He was incredibly thankful though. He said it is the first time he has got an assignment done in a long time. There were fist bumps after every other problem or so (he is an athlete after all). This student was clearly enthused to get his math homework done, and to do the work himself. He even flashed remarkable mental math abilities, commenting that he doesn't like to take shortcuts with his work.

I worked with the student for maybe 15 minutes, but it was fascinating. I am inclined to believe that this student was passed through the system for some reason, and perhaps it was football. It also seems reasonable to assume that the math teacher thought it was better to pass him through than not.

However, the strategy backfired. Is it that surprising this student had no confidence in his math abilities, when he thinks he didn't earn the math grade he got last year? Furthermore, I don't have a great feel for how much the student likes math, but he clearly demonstrated a good work ethic, a desire to learn the material, and the potential to master the content. That doesn't sound to me like the type of student that needs to be passed through any class.

I think anyone would say that a teacher isn't doing a student a favor by giving free rides. However, I think people tend to assume that the alternative meets some resistance from the student. Clearly, at least in some cases, that isn't so.

Unpaid Internships Exploited

Quickly becoming a staple of undergraduate college experiences are internships. At first blush, this is a good thing. It gets a student's feet wet in a career path they are interested in, and will have the skills to go into after graduation.

Not all internships are created equal though. In particular, some are paid, and others are not. You would think paid and unpaid ones to look different, and you are right.

There are problems in the differences though.

Moreover, there are problems with unpaid internships, as this New York Times article discusses. It should not be too surprising either. A for-profit company is still looking to make a profit, even when they offer internships.

In theory, an internship is an educational opportunity for a student. However, if a company is primarily worried about making a profit, what stops them from exploiting unpaid interns for labor? Interns have absolutely no experience or seniority, so they aren't likely to cry foul. Interns could jeopardize their entire career before it even starts by speaking up. Advantage: company, in a landslide. In fact, given the leverage companies have over interns, what's stopping a company from making interns do the jobs nobody else wants to do? It's not that far-fetched to see a board of directors incorporating unpaid internships into their business model.

Unpaid internships could easily be used by companies to increase profits. Anecdotal evidence screams loud and clear that it is happening too, and may have been accelerated by the slumped economy.

This is what happens when worlds collide. On one hand, we have colleges and universities concerned with giving their students an educational experience outside the classroom that helps them when they enter the "real world." On the other, we have future employers constantly looking for ways to increase their bottom line. Their motivations are not going to change, even when a university opens up their student body to them.

That's not to say that companies and university don't have some shared goals. There are benefits on a company's end to letting students get a taste of what working at their company is like. If all goes right, that student will be a more qualified employee when they hit the work force, and the student will  perhaps prefer to work for that company over others. In a perfect world, this is how internships work. They should benefit everyone involved.

However, a business is still a business, and it seems the invisible hand shoves unpaid interns towards menial tasks the company does not want to pay someone minimum wage to do. To me, the easiest solution is to only let organizations with non-profit status offer unpaid internships. It may not fix everything, but it would go a long way towards limiting the exploitation going on now.

It is disheartening how easily education gets tossed to the wayside sometimes.

Speaking of Gaps....

First, my sincere apologies for being very absent-minded lately. I will be trying to post more regularly on the blog to help create a more continuous dialogue.

Second, Tim's post about the poor teachers "feeding" the achievement gap was really interesting. The first Newsweek article was fascinating! I can begin to understand this concept and the difficulty in defining what is a bad teachers. Additionally, it is unfortunate teacher unions do not place more emphasis and/or encourage skills development for improving teaching performance. I would think, being in the business of teaching, that teachers would need to meet some union standard or participate in career development or evaluation standards. But then again, how do you implement this? How do you enforce it without inserting more government bureaucracy? Hmmm....

What has prompted changes in the teaching profession, where recruited teachers are not up to the previous standards? It was a surprise to realize that weaker teachers were often paired with weaker students. Somehow this does not seem reasonable. Teachers should be held to a high standard with strict consequences. Teachers are responsible for future generations!

Tim, what are your follow-up thoughts? What do you think about charter schools?

Well....as a parallel to the educational system, there is also a gap in the criminal justice system. I think I am going to research and find some supporting facts and data for this concept. However, for now, I will begin to explain my perspective. First, I do not believe the gap exists on the law enforcement level. This stage is simply acting upon the commission of crimes and their influence more or less ends after suspects are booked into jail and perhaps lasts into a trial. I believe the majority of the gap occurs between the court and the method for corrections.

Prison and jail are simply no longer deterrents. Recidivism is on the rise and many "repeat" offenders are continuing to commit many of the same crimes with little evidence of stopping. In the State of Washington, shorter prison terms seem to be a popular trends among courts, for example, in a particular case, a drunk driver who was travelling 50 mph in a 25 mph zone who hit a pedestrian, killing them, and left the scene only to be arrested by detectives 24 hours later, recieved seven years in prison. However, what is not often revealed is only 2/3 of the sentence is served while incarcerated. Often times, the last 3rd (or more) is servied while in community custody (probation or parole).

Since this post is beginning to ramble on....my final thought is the need for creating programs geared to changing behavior through other means than incarceration alone. I support skill development programs, labor-intensive programs, counseling, and substance abuse education. More to come....

The Role Teachers Play In The Achievement Gap

I've been meaning to get to how teachers impact the achievement gap. They are arguably the most influential group, considering that teachers are the ones directly interacting with hundreds of students every day. Everyone else largely provides the scaffolding teachers and students work in. Obviously, bad framework makes it harder to progress, but not even the best-designed skyscraper will stand in the rain if it's made of cardboard. That's kind of what it's like to have a bad teacher.

A couple articles passed along to me highlight some of the problems with teacher accountability right now, and how painfully hard they are to fix. The first (available here) highlights how little accountability there is in teaching right now. There is practically no way to weed out bad teachers right now, and statistics back this sobering fact up. The second (available here) digs into the struggles with teacher unions.

The bottom line is that ineffective teachers are feeding the achievement gap. They are arguably the biggest culprit, and also arguably the most realistic area for improvement.

While I understand that it is a union's responsibility to protect its worker's rights, I wish teacher unions better recognized how badly it reflects on the good teachers when so the bad ones continue to pass through unchallenged. I believe it is in a teacher union's best interest to explore teacher accountability too, though that does not seem to be the mainstream thinking at the moment. There are sporadic glimmers of hope from time to time though.

Typical Morning

My mantra, especially with the fifth graders I work with, is "always an adventure." Here is a sampling of what I'm talking about. Actual questions and quotes from about 75 minutes of action with fifth grade band students this morning:

• "I'm usually at the bus stop at 6:45, but I woke up at 6:47 so I had to hurry out of bed and get my clothes on. I didn't have time to go to the bathroom or anything.  I ran to the bus stop, and it was just about to leave when I got there! Is it okay if I go to the bathroom?"
• "You should have brought your saxophone today. It sounds WAY cooler...It sounds like jazz."
• "What was the first book Dr. Seuss wrote?"
• "She's scary!" (accompanied by a finger point, and hiding behind my back)
• "Who invented the printing press?"
• "I broke my foot...(I ask about it)...Yeah, it hurts. It feels like it's burning."
• (I ask if this student had a Mountain Dew this morning) "NO! PEANUT BUTTER!"
• "Can I go to the bathroom?"
• "Can I get a part for Nottingham Castle?"
• "I left my book here last time. I think someone took it by accident."
• "Can I get a part to Star Wars?"
• "SHE'S SITTING IN MY SPOT!"
• "Can you fix my reed?"
• "My clarinet doesn't sound very loud today."
• "Is it okay if I go to the bathroom?"
• "My ears hurt!"
• (I complement a student on being ready for class) "HE KNOWS MY NAME!"
• "Can we play number 55 after this?"
• "I can't hear myself play."
• "Is it alright if I go to the bathroom?"
• "Can Mr. Chalberg play Star Wars at the end of class?"
• "It's my birthday tomorrow...(I ask if the student came down just to tell me that)...Yeah."

Always an adventure.