cairns

Friday Afternoon: We have been without power, Internet, land line phones, or cable since the ice storm came through the first of the week. Finally drove over to my daughter Ashley’s apartment to check emails and get ready to submit IWU grades tomorrow.

Sunday Afternoon: Power is finally back on, trees cut out of driveway, new generator and power cords put away, and I have to admit that I am a child of my culture.  I want to do something about greenhouse gasses and global warming.  But, if they said, “OK, we will shut the power grid back down until we find something cleaner!”  I would decline.  I want the power company to run cleaner equipment and methods, but I can barely pay the bill for my utilities now…

“Life ain’t easy.  Whoever said it should be?” Dr. Hook

peace

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The second major fallacy of the current testing  movement is that all children learn, grow, and are ready for the exact same tests at the same rate and time.  This is just as absurd as claiming that we could standardize the clothing industry and expect all children of the same age to fit into the same size clothes and shoes.  We are different genetically and develop along individual patterns of readiness and ability across wide ranges of skills.  We are also different environmentally with some living in learning rich environs and others trying to survive.  There is no logical reason or published evidence to support the assumption that we should all be learning at the same rate and all in the same material.  Those who use the old nationally normed tests, can fall into the same trap if they are improperly used and interpreted.  Every child is NOT ready for the same topics or levels of abstraction and complexity at the same time.

To put it rudely and way outside of political correctness, some children in each setting are smarter than others.  Critics of IQ tests have very correctly pointed out that the tests themselves have contained racial and cultural biases.  However, no valid research, or even well presented pseudo-science, has ever claimed to disprove IQ theory.  We learn at different rates.  We have different capacities for total learning.  There are tests which measure the growth over time of each student as an individual learner, but the movement rejects those and insists that every child is ready for the same material based on chronological age, or grade level in school.

I do recognize failures in our past which led us to be vulnerable to these charlatans.  Too many schools and teachers in city neighborhoods functioned (and still function) as if their children are identically unable to learn instead of helping them to develop resilience and believing that the same range of natural ability is present in each of those classes.  Too many times we measured IQ and then labeled children, and limited what they could learn by what we offered rather than what they could do if given appropriate opportunities and hard working teachers who believe in them.  And, what effort have we made since LBJ to do anything about the broader social context in which they live?  But, the current obscene educational movement does not fix those, it treats all children that way.  You are bright, too bad, dumb down and be like everybody else.  You have to work harder and take longer to grasp the same content and are not ready for the same assessments as everyone else your age?  Too bad, we don’t believe that, so we will add lazy and unmotivated to your list of problems.

This produces amazing results in materials and instruction.  The reading series we have adopted locally claims to teach all children the same vocabulary and skills by providing easy, on-level, and advanced workbooks for the same content.  Well, if they cannot read the words that normally surround the selected vocabulary, they cannot use it meaningfully.  And the state exam will give no such options.  Many of them cannot even read the directions or questions.  In math my fourth graders are moving rapidly into algebra, a topic many many people are not ready for until adulthood, while many of them are unable to do basic math functions of single digit multiplication or addition and subtraction.  Some in the room are flying through it, love it, and need to be taken even higher.  But they are all to learn the same standards and take the exact same test because if we keep measuring them on the same scale they will eventually weigh the same!?!?

For those unfamiliar with the system, even a non-English speaking student who has been in the US for one year is expected to be able to test at the same level, in English, as all other students on all subjects and is expected to be able to score the same as them on English skills.  If that is possible, there is nothing to learn.  We just all can, because the government says we can.  It is an absurdity that should have educators, parents, and employers screaming.  But, that would put one outside the current realm of correctness and acceptable answers.

Students who do not know the basic facts of science or history are not prepared to do meaningful higher level thinking in those subjects.  Testing their opinions and saying they score well if their answer appears to match the picture or graph used as a question prompt is to deny the very nature of the academic disciplines.  Students who cannot grasp basic math concepts are not ready for algebraic applications and problem solving. We are knowingly engaging daily in meaningless activity and going along because it is career threatening not to do so.

To put it in the terms I use to provoke my grad students; if IQ theory is still true and a school teaches every child to reach their true potential, the gap between the top and bottom will grow larger every year.  The current accountability movement claims just the opposite.  Do an excellent job of teaching and everybody will be at the same level every year.

If what we want is drones to do the garbage jobs we have not shipped over seas and accept whatever level of pay and benefits we choose to give or not give, this movement is perfect.  Time to look again at who brought it to us and how they marketed it.  They are the same people who have made the anti-abortion movement the only social issue that matters, by calling it pro-life while they trash the planet, ignore the lives of children in our cities, refuse to pay living wages or give health benefits to full time workers, and support every war because we are right no matter what.  Pro-life indeed.  Educational excellence indeed.  We have been lied to.

Children are individual and unique.  Their proper nurture and support requires recognizing and honoring their differences and helping each one to become more than they or we imagine.  You cannot do that with a system based on cookie cutters for humans.

peace

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The false supposition at the base of the entire accountability and testing movement is that you can force improvements in teaching and learning by testing.

To get a little too Dr. Phil about it, you cannot increase the weight of a hog by repeatedly weighing it.  You must feed it!  Children learn by engaging in meaningful learning opportunities.  Tests do not teach.  They take time, money, and teacher attention away from helping children experience those opportunities.  Now we are doing constant ongoing (and purchased) assessments in order to track progress in raising the test scores.  Note that repeated emphasis on test scores, may raise test scores.  But, it is a giant leap of faith to assume that those scores represent anything more than focusing on the specifics of the test rather than real learning opportunities.  The current movement requires blind acceptance of the assumption that numbers going up on what the test company produces and sells means children are learning.  Any quick survey of their writing or conversations will show you the opposite.

Of course there is the contention that because the teacher knows the children will be tested, the teacher will be more devoted, harder working, more professional and accountable, and will better prepare the children.  The first problem with this assumption is that no valid research ever established that properly trained and supported teachers were the problem in the first place.  The horror stories of educational failure are overwhelmingly from places where the children come to school from and in environments of poverty and violence.  The teachers do not create those conditions.  They pour heart and soul into helping children rise above them.  And to assume that subjecting the child of that world to a high stakes exam and threats of failure will eliminate the harm from neighborhoods we should never have allowed to exist is comparable to an educational war crime.

What the tests cause teachers to focus on is the tests.  The trainers and bosses come around to make sure you do not miss the message that you are to focus on what is on the test, and only what is on the test.  This is not educational accountability.  It is idolatry at the temple of the testing industry.  To say that the area of knowledge the student discovered on TV, in a book, on the computer, or in their travels is insignificant and must be kept out of the classroom is lunacy.  But, that is exactly what the current movement is saying if the child selected topic is not on their current standard list and frequently translated to questions on the test of them!

I said before that I support the use of nationally normed tests to provide the teacher with valuable information on local strengths and weaknesses.  I also support deciding what you will assess students on and making sure you provide meaningful learning opportunities that will prepare them to do well on those assessments.  That is basic ethics, and it is the core idea of my Masters program’s design model (Understanding by Design).  But, those assumptions should allow freedom to deviate to pursue the interests of a child, to “differentiate” content and approach to match the areas that give energy to the child’s efforts to learn and grow.  I do not want to focus on the minimum children can do, I went into this profession to help them fly.

One example for non educators would be the testing of writing skills.  Indiana’s test uses the six trait writing model for the basis of its grading rubrics.  This makes grammar one sixth of the score.  So, schools under the gun to raise scores on the test found that teaching other traits of writing, even if the children cannot produce grammatically correct sentences, raises scores.  The result is that teachers are directed to stop teaching grammar and focus on the other aspects of writing.  I now have teachers in Master’s classes who have come through that system and cannot write a simple sentence with noun-verb agreement, or maintain parallel tense or person.  They beg for help to edit and correct their work, and to learn how to produce written materials which will not be an embarrassment when sent home to parents taught under the old “un-accountable” system.  But, they could score points on the test by having a beginning, middle, and end; by showing creativity and voice, etc.  Problem that is they and the students they now teach are and will be illiterate in the basic conventions of our language.

Keep weighing those hogs, train better hog weighers, insist on nothing but better hog weighing, and the hogs will starve when it was their basic nature to eat all along.

peace

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The current emperor of American education goes by the aliases of Standards, High Stakes Testing, and Accountability.  He struts across the nation proclaiming how he is saving all the children while locking all educators from pre-K through grad school into lock step content, procedures, and tests.  Widely promoted by the same president who took us to Iraq to get rid of non-existent weapons of mass destruction while continuing Reagan’s trickle-down economics right into the current financial abyss, this movement enriches test companies and consultants and is destroying the last expressions of anything resembling education in America’s schools.

This week’s faculty meeting was to inform us that we will now “map our curriculum” and do our lesson plans online courtesy of a “wonderful” company that not only gives us unlimited web storage but allows all users worldwide to view the lessons of all other users.  This way the state can hold us accountable for meeting its “standards.”  If anything is not in the standards, we were reminded again, then it is not worth teaching and must be put aside and no longer taught.  So, one more company gets rich, teachers lesson plans become more homogenized, and teachers spend more time focusing on tasks and lists instead of children.

I have so many objections sputtering through my head that this may become several posts.  So, let me start with what I agree with!  Teachers should have standards and work to help all children achieve.  Standardized tests are valuable tools for making sure what is done locally is keeping pace with what other children are achieving nationally.  Test data should be disaggregated to ensure that all sub-groups present in the classroom are being served successfully.  I have been doing all of those things since long before the current movement began.  But, my standards, testing, and research have always been focused on the real children sharing my room for the year, and my methods and behavior have always been expressions of living out the Gospel.

What I disagree with:  This movement has nothing to do with any of that.  We have stopped using nationally normed tests.  We have stopped focusing on children as the center of what we do (or adult learners in grad ed, or of Jesus in Christian ed).  We focus on the accrediting agency’s latest pronouncements of what every classroom must look like, and the latest list of what standards and methods will raise the number of kids who score high on the minimum competency exams based on the narrow standards lists in use until the next revision.  We do not aspire to inspire children to excellence in either academic pursuits, expressions of humanity, or lives of grace.  Those are not on the test even if they are given lip service in the standards.

I have watched the real ability of students, from elementary school through practicing teachers pursuing graduate degrees decrease as each year of this movement goes by.  But the test companies are doing great!  The bureaucrats who have left the classroom to pursue careers of personal ego and influence have incredible power. The consultants are rolling in money.  The accountability industry is funneling obscene amounts of education dollars into the pockets of people who never spend a single moment with children in a classroom.  And the students’ reading ability is lower, their writing ability is becoming non-existent, and their sense that learning matters for anything beyond the test is almost gone.

American education has been sold invisible clothes.  Our leaders know it, but dance down the street singing the tailors’ praises anyway because that is the current path to successful careers.  Veteran child-centered teachers are leaving the profession in ever increasing numbers.  Rich people are getting richer.  Schools are doing a worse job, not better.  And what the children are exposed to is as obscene as an emperor exposing himself in full knowledge of his sin.

peace

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Global Warming Permanent

Looks like if we are determined to keep building a hell rather than a heaven, we are succeeding marvelously.  Praying today, like the Hasidics, that each choice I make is to tip the scale to good.  Remembering Pastor Trocme in that other evil time, and trying to make little moves where I can.

Not driving back and forth to Dearborn this summer to do a camp involves a lot of reasons.  But, this one is on the list.  Time to NOT make multiple high mile trips, or local, if there is not a compelling reason to go.  They will do camp just the same without my body buzzing my little SUV up there and back.

peace

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or anybody else more widely read in the frontiers of man’s impact on the rest of life,

Here is the latest and maybe strangest thing my mind has been chewing on lately:

(Wait, first promise not to actually have me committed, OK:)

Over the past couple of years, I have been puzzled by some disturbing articles on animal behavior. One concerned chimpanzees, not just fighting over a particular food source or area, but going to war against other groups of chimpanzees. The other dealt with a group of male dolphins repeatedly having rough sex with a female dolphin trapped near the shore.

I had never seen anything of this sort before. Of course, we have always known that carnivores kill animals and herbivores kill plants in order to eat and live. But, do these represent a whole new level of cruelty, of depravity, of human like commission of violence? I wonder what has happened.

Have we observed long enough to get past our childlike view of “cute” animals living in an idealistic pseudo-Eden so that we are finally recording newly observed but old truth?

Or is it just possible that the evil of man is spreading further and further though creation? Either by powers of animal observation and mimicry we only recently have come to appreciate, or by the general conditions of evil, are we doing more than kill the animals? Are we teaching them to be rapists and murderers in our likeness?

OK, remember I asked you not to have me committed, but is there scientific evidence that the fall is deepening?

peace

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first period, teaching math, my cellphone rings, screaming, only screaming on the other end.  Sounds like one of my daughters.  Finally able to hear “crashed and can’t get out.”  Finally able to find out that she has crashed hard enough to be stuck in the car about two blocks from school.  Frantic arrangement of coverage and fly up there to see emergency workers everywhere, another lady standing outside her smashed car, my daughter sitting inside my crumpled 96 RAV4.  Then taking too long to make sure police have everything they need and wrecker knows where to go, rushing downtown (nearest hospital not on our insurance, close by one that is on insurance is not a trauma center) to find daughter who left on a back board, made to stop at desk and fill out registration and insurance forms, then wait in lobby for permission to go back, finally find her sitting in exam room with neck brace removed waiting to go for X Rays and MRI, bruises already turning colors on her elbow and knee…

Looks like everyone is OK today.  Still waiting to hear if both cars are totaled.  But, daughter doing amazingly well for the force of the hit, only has bruises and sprains and is going back to work tomorrow.  (Had me take her by work before pharmacy for pain meds to give a birthday present to a little boy who just lost his grandmother!)  Went to repair shop to clean out the car and it looks even worse than at crash scene — broken inside and out from force of hit, I want to throw up again thinking about how close she came.

Meanwhile my kids do NOT behave at school for my other daughter who rushed in to cover for me (she is excellent subbing, it was just too much for them with me already missing days for illness and then the frightening excitement of it all) and I spend all day today trying to get them going again.

Have finished a couple months of antibiotics and still feel horrible.  See the ENT tomorrow to get rec on whether its time for sinus surgery even though I have been told to consider dying first.

Mom says she is in bed most of the time now.  I haven’t been out there since the holidays both because of schedule and my own lousy winter health.  I know why her parents headed for Brownsville, TX every winter!

Every daughter struggling to deal with what life is currently offering.  One who had wreck has no health insurance now, no car, and after reporting that she blacked out before the wreck and a court date coming up, maybe no license.  None of them has a full time job with a living wage or acceptable benefits.  Youngest daughter’s high school still not safe, but she has another year to go…

I would really like to see one of these know-it-all, so sure how life and faith work, evangelical mega preachers TRY to do a reasonable sermon on what happens when Jesus appears to roll over and go back to sleep, (or worse yet –hit you over the head for bothering Him), while the boat goes right on under!  There are days when none of the bumper sticker easy truisms are sufficient.  There are days when an honest soul just has to say like CS Lewis, “I am afraid there IS a God and that I do not like Him.”  Not said as a blasphemy but as a deepest fear of the soul that seeks to know Truth, not be sold soap.  Ask Paul, sometimes the message is the shore is just ahead, sometimes the ship goes down, sometimes you escape in a basket, sometimes you are beaten and left for dead.

Yesterday, it felt like my boat went to the bottom.  But, we’re all still here and remarkably well considering.  Wonder if Jesus can recognize worship in singing along with the Beatles, “We all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow…”  Under water but hanging on.

peace

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you already know, to those who don’t my words will not suffice.

But, I have waited for this day my entire life,

Since I saw JFK dare to call us to greatness and then die,

Since I saw MLK dare to call us to our true selves and then die,

So many miles marched,

So many nameless dead,

So many promises waiting to be fulfilled,

Thousands of years of European power and power in the hands of Euro descendants,

So much accomplished and so much damage done through hubris,

So many mistakes and lasting mistrust,

So hard for others to believe it is possible for all to matter,

Finally a son of another continent,

European descent as well its true,

But, a son of hope and promise,

An identification point for the disenfranchised around the world,

A day of vindication,

A day of prayers answered,

A day of possible new beginnings and ending excuses,

A day to dream again of what we can be and do,

If we care about greatness,

It we care about righteousness,

If we care about living out the Gospel,

If we care about our global family and our immediate neighbors,

I have lived and worked among those outside of power most of my life,

Today, we are looking up not down,

Today, a man of intelligence, literacy, and faith is a hero,

Today, I love my country.

[I do not care if you agree with his politics or mine, or secretly resent his color or background, or trust his words to be true.  Our actual way forward will be worked out in compromise within a system of government like no one else on earth has known, resilient and sometimes cumbersome, but carefully designed to allay your fears.  If you think today is a dark day, my words will seem like raving to you (but examine the content of the very phrase.)  Today is about something so much bigger, an affirmation of all people, a celebration of nonviolent transfer of power, of hope in the face of crisis, of celebrating the victory of both ourselves and the other!]

Today, I am weeping, laughing, singing, dancing, praying, praising, hoping, and loving.

I have waited long for this day.

Thank you, Jesus!

peace

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CNN just quoted large numbers of blacks as saying these words in response to tomorrow’s inauguration.  Well, me too.  I grew up believing in an America which would value all its citizens enough to listen to their voices, care about their lives, and invite their input and effort to build a better country than we have yet been.  I pulled these two pictures off the web as evidence of the apparent impossibility of that day coming.

This was Grant Park 40 years ago.

When I was a young man, I watched as people outside of political power and opposed to the current actions of our government (note these folks are white!) demanded to be heard.  They were beaten and jailed.

This was Grant Park 2008.

This time the people were invited to dance, sing, and cry.  The world is singing with us.  I wonder what we will do with the opportunity to hope.

But, I have lived to see the day and I am very happy.  I hope my fourth grade students understand tears of joy when we (white, black, Chinese, Brazilian…) watch together.

peace

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For me the story has little to do with fear at all.  Concern for fellow man and the world God left us to care for, yes.  Fear no.  Its about seeking the living experienced presence of the One Who is Holy.

I have reached a point in my life where I say along with Paul that “to die is gain.” and with Job, “Though He slay me, I will trust Him.”  It really isn’t about fear for me at all.  Whether the boat floats or sinks, I just want to be with Jesus.  I guess maybe the test would be whether we are just as likely to say, “Hey Jesus! Look at that scene of beauty, act of mercy, or moment of joy!” That doesn’t mean I didn’t scream like a baby and nearly jerk both my wife and my own arms out of socket when she held onto my hand (when I am startled, I swing!) and woke me from deep sleep to announce the water was back on! LOL Only that once out of the realm of dreams, my life is not dominated by fear.

So much of our western theology has become about what we get from God, including both prosperity and personal health and safety.  It isn’t strongly Biblical.  The true desire of the heart is for God.  We are distracted by our humanness to focus on the needs and requests of our heart which we rightly bring to place at the throne.  But, the bottom line is not whether we get any of the other things we want.  It is whether we are with God. The disciples were not there yet that day on the boat, or on crucifixion Friday.  But, they got there through resurrection and Pentecost. In the end, death had no hold on them by boat and storm, or cross, or fire.  They only held to Him.  Then, yes “true love (for Him as a gift to us given by Him) drives out all fear.”

“I’d rather have Jesus than anything…this old world affords today.”

That’s at least where I am headed.  I believe that is where this trail leads, to a total desire for communion with the Savior who is also Creator and Sustainer.  Then He will guide us in the works He has prepared for us since the beginning of time in proper reverence for both Creator and Creation.

peace

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