One Day I'll Fly Away

Just wanted to share a bit of myself in this post as up until this point they have all been somewhat impersonal and, of course, related to education which is my passion (but not my entire life). This evening my husband (of 20 years whom I love more than life)  said, "You talk about school too much."  So here it is- my post about me. I am very sentimental and cry very easily. My favorite food is bread, and my ideal daily menu would be: smoothie for breakfast, big gourmet excessive lunch, and bread, butter, wine and cheese for dinner.  I talk too much and listen too little. My daughters know me better than I know myself and I wish I were more like Ghandi and the Dalai Lama. I love to read religious texts. I love animals and small children and my favorite recent movie was Moulin Rouge. I wish I went hiking more and driving less, although having lived in LA and DC I am very used to driving and really don't mind it at all. I love to travel and I hope I am remembered by my students as someone who loved them and had high expectations and was fair.  I recognize how far I am from enlightenment and yet I strive for it everyday. I love Lou Reed and David Bowie and Madonna and the Beatles and Dave Alvin and X and the Sex Pistols and Johnny Cash. Sometimes I see a glow around things in nature. My children are completely awesome and I wonder how on earth I birthed them. I love to sit in the hot tub and drive fast cars and go to the library and drink coffee and eat sushi and travel in foreign countries and watch my son set up StarWars lego wars. Thanks for reading, and I promise my next post will be about education.

Our State Report Card

It was reported today that the state of NC ranks 30th in the nation for math and reading proficiency scores.  Apparently, the state lawmakers have a few ideas about how to fix this problem, such as more charter schools, more options for high school students, merit pay for teachers and of course, the omnipresent more testing. While I don't necessarily disagree with these ideas, they seem to be missing the point. According to the National Center on Education, Disability, and Juvenile Justice, "the seeds of failure are sown early in life; children who do not read by the fourth grade have a very low probability of ever learning to read."  The statistics from the state report cards bear this out. If you compare the reading scores from the 4th and the 8th grade, only four states have scores which go up. Seven states had scores which remained static and 39 states, including North Carolina, have reading proficiency scores which went down. That means that if you can't read well in the 4th grade you are reading even worse by the 8th. What does this mean for our state? According to the state report card only 66.6% of North Carolina students graduate from high school. Have you seen the unemployment rates lately? Not surprisingly, the highest rates are for those who haven't graduated from high school. What does this all mean for education? That first and foremost, we should be focusing our resources on teaching children to read. Teachers need the ability to sit down in small groups, or even one-on-one, to teach decoding skills to our most at risk students.  A student who cannot read is more likely to drop out, be on welfare, and go to prison. When state lawmakers try to increase our state ranking, they should be thinking about real solutions to the underlying problems. Intensive, small group, individualized phonics-based reading instruction works, but at this point it is not widely available in our public schools. Identification of a child's learning style, recognizing the early signs of dyslexia, and the time to immerse children in a language rich environment at school, to make up for a poor one at home, are considered luxuries when they should be necessities.  Instead of applying band-aids which are too little too late, those 4th grade reading scores should take top priority. At our school this means that we allow young children time to play and hear stories and talk and listen to books on tape. They are given reading instruction starting in kindergarten which is fun, low pressure, and targeted to their individual needs.  If they haven't learned to read by the middle of second grade they are given one-on-one tutoring until it is mastered. In this way, no child really IS left behind, and this is an opportunity that every child deserves, not just those that can afford private school or tutoring.

Inauguration Day

I want to tell you about a once-in-a-lifetime experience, which I hope I won't experience only once. Yesterday I stood in the freezing cold for 5 hours with two million other people and had one of the happiest most positive days of my life. I have been in crowds before, we all have, but this was completely different. Though the subways were so packed you could hardly move, and the only toilets were port-a-johns, everyone was completely joyous. There was literally no anger, no resentment, no complaining, no whining. Just happiness, hopefulness, and the most positive kind of pride. On the subway we sang and joked and passed the time by naming all the fifty states and capitals, and by helping our neighbors name all the countries with four letters (apparently there are ten).  When we exited the underground we were greeted with a sight I have never before seen: every street, block after block in every direction, was completely full of people walking toward the mall. It looked like some sort of apocalyptic movie (except everyone was happy!)  When we got to the mall it was a sea of people as far as you could see. We wandered around for while, got a glimpse of the Capitol, then chose a spot near the Washington Monument and a jumbotron to camp out and wait. We had a picnic lunch and tootsie pops, and there was nothing to do but observe the scene. It was AMAZING! Black and white and Asian and gay and straight and young and old and women in fur coats and people wrapped in blankets, everyone was there to celebrate.  People talked and made friends with the people standing next to them and shared food and were polite and thoughtful in a way that I have never seen in a large crowd. I have been trying to figure out exactly what made it so different. I think one thing is that everyone was there for the same reason. You know how you go to a festival or a concert and some people are there to listen to music, and some are there to dance, and some are there to eat, or drink, or find a date? Well yesterday every single person in that crowd was there to celebrate this historic moment. No one had any other agenda. We were all on the same page. It really felt like we were all connected by our humanity. Being in that crowd made you feel like you could do anything. It made you feel like America is still the best hope that the world has for peace and prosperity and good will toward all. It felt like you were a resident of a city where everyone was positive and energetic and confident of success all the time. It felt the way life should be. When President Obama finally spoke a hush fell over the crowd and two million faces were turned, quiet and focused for over 15 minutes. Later my children said they had no idea the speech was that long. Time stopped, and as corny as it sounds, we were one.

Judgement

A friend likes to tell the story of being in the grocery store before she was a parent. A child in line in front of her was whining and squirming and complaining. Sherri couldn't take it any longer and finally said to the woman, "Why don't you take that child home and give her a nap?" Ten years and three children later, Sherri says that comment haunts her to this day. She now has two rowdy boys who NEVER behave in grocery store lines. I have a similar story. When I had only two "perfect" little girls who were calm and easily separated from me, I used to sit in judgement as my friend's son jumped on my couch with a sharp pencil in his hand, or at events where boys sat in their mother's laps while my girls confidently sat down in front enjoying the show. Then I had Frank. Though he is calm now, as a two year old we called him "Bam Bam" and he is a momma's boy supreme.  But that's what you get. Call it Karma or simply getting what you need to learn most in life.  One thing I have learned having three children is that each of them, though raised in the same household with the same biological parents, is an individual. They each have strengths and weaknesses, and while I would like to take credit for their strengths, I certainly don't want to be blamed for their faults. Of course you can't have it both ways, and that helps us at school as we strive to help our students grow.  If a child is struggling, rather than looking for fault or assigning blame, we look for solutions. We believe that everyone is doing the best that they can, given their present circumstances, and this includes both students and parents. It is easy to judge. It is hard to reserve judgement and focus on solutions. The bottom line is it doesn't matter why Johnny is rude, or Susie cries when she gets "out", or Billy hides under the table when he gets upset. What matters is that we help that child overcome those issues so that whatever their genetic makeup, and whatever their home environment, and however crazy their parents may be, each child can become their very best.

It's Not Rocket Science

The debate over what to do about the sorry state of American education has been raging for decades and what seems to be missing from this debate is common sense. Teaching a child to read, write and do arithmetic is not rocket science. With a few books, a pencil and some paper all three can be accomplished quite easily for the majority of children. You don't need expensive curriculum, highly trained teachers, or computer software to teach the ABC's.  For the last few thousand years, and right up to the present in developing countries, children have learned their ABC's with a stick drawing in the dirt, and they have learned to add, subtract, multiply and divide with pebbles.  So why are so many children failing and dropping out of American schools? Because educational policy does not reflect this common sense. Rather than focusing on the relationship between the teacher and child, the natural curiosity of young children, and the hands-on approach to learning which is natural to a child, American schools put children in large classrooms and even larger schools where they are dehumanized, tested, categorized, micro-managed or ignored. For example, educational research has been done for years and years showing that smaller schools and smaller classrooms work, but instead of taking this research and DOING something about it, American policy makers simply layer on another gimmick.  A perfect example is the plan that one of our local public high schools has to get a grant for every student to have a laptop. While this is a nice idea, especially for students whose families cannot afford to buy them one, research shows that computers do not increase academic achievement in reading and writing.  High school graduation rates peaked in American in  1969 and have been going down ever since. Instead of layering programs, gimmicks and technology on a weak foundation it is time to use our common sense to restore that foundation.

Twelve Levels

Here's a trick question for you. How many different levels are there in a classroom with twenty third graders? Three? Four? In contrast, how many levels do you think there are at our school, which has only twelve students per class but they are in third, fourth and fifth grade? The answer is actually quite simple:  the number of levels in any given classroom is the number of kids in the room. While teachers often put children in reading groups, and there are IEP's for some kids and the AIG program for others, the reality is that every child is on his own level. Dr. Mel Levine,  author of "A Mind at a Time" divides educators into two categories- lumpers and splitters. Lumpers like to lump kids together in groups ("They all have ADHD, they are in the gifted program...") whereas splitters see each child as an individual. We are definitely splitters. It is the recognition of the fact that each child is on her own level that drives our individualized education. In our 3rd-5th grade class we have children who are reading "The Call of the Wild" and children who struggle with the Magic Tree House Series. We have children who are adding and subtracting and children who have mastered long division and have moved on to fractions. We have children who can barely write a sentence and children who can pen coherent paragraphs and yes, you guessed it, some of the advanced readers are in third grade and some of the struggling math students are in the fifth. So where does that leave educators? If the only change that a school made was to give each child a SHORT math and reading assessment at school entry and to then tailor their reading and math instruction to those needs, we would see huge gains. One year a girl came to us in the fourth grade and she literally couldn't add two plus two. Because our program is individualized we were able to take her back to that level and she was able, for the first time in her life, to make slow but steady progress in math. When she finished her first math book her classmates clapped for her, and the self-confidence she gained was infinitely more valuable than the math skills she learned. I remember this when I walk through our classes, and I am so happy to see each individual child getting exactly what they need. 

Thirteen

Do you remember what it was like to be thirteen? This week at school is Academic Break Week for the middle and high school students, so I have had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with thirteen (actually 11 to 15) year olds. They are an incredible bunch of kids and I have so enjoyed hanging out with them, and it brings up a few things that I see over and over again with young teenagers. First of all, they are all struggling in some way. Even the straight "A" students with lots of friends and great extra-curricular activities are struggling with adolescence, even if from the outside their life looks perfect. Second, in order to navigate puberty everyone needs a few crucial things, like unconditional love and support from their parents and teachers. Though they sometimes act like adults, adolescents need us now more than ever. But they also need space. If you haven't had a teenager in your house yet here is a tip: when they slam their bedroom door in your face, walk away! (Trust me on this one). They also need to be challenged early and often. Chores, a heavy load of relevant academic work, and the responsibility to practice their instrument or sport keeps them busy doing positive things so that they don't have much time to dwell on the negative. I got an email from a friend yesterday whose child is in 7th grade at a local public school. She complained of gangs, drugs, and an almost exclusive focus on dating. In contrast, yesterday our kids baked cookies and walked down to a park to play soccer together, and the day before that we rode the bus to the Grove Park Inn to see the gingerbread houses.  The teens at my school don't have perfect lives. They stress about school work and dabble in dating, they get their feelings hurt, make mistakes, get angry, and make bad choices. But they are in an environment of empathy and support, where they call their teachers and principal by their first names (and maybe even follow her blog :).  When I was thirteen my parents were divorcing, and I relied almost exclusively on my friends for support. Thirty years later they are still my best friends. I hope these kids know that no matter what happens in their lives they can count on us, because no matter what, it is tough to be thirteen.