Do Our Schools Wound?

If you don't do anything else today, please read the article, Are Schools Wounding Kids?

In it, writer and teacher Kathie Marshall describes her experience returning to a remedial classroom after being a literacy coach for eight years.  She describes how her middle grade students think of themselves as failures, only good at things like graffitti and acting up.  She tells how bored and frustrated these kids are by the scripted "No Child Left Behind" teaching methods now used to "help" struggling learners.

She cites a new book, Wounded by School by Kirsten Olson, that brought back memories of her own humiliations as a student.   She looked around at her students and recognized in them Olson's descriptions of how schools can hurt.  And not just at-risk students.

Wounded by School delineates a dozen different types of school wounding and their effects, including:

• Feeling you aren’t smart and your ideas lack value.
• Feeling you don’t have what it takes to be successful in school.
• Feeling ashamed of your efforts.
• Suffering a loss of ambition, self-discipline, and persistence when faced with obstacles.

In a section called “wounds of rebellion,” I found my intervention kids and their defensive symptoms:

• The only way to protect yourself is to rebel.
• In response to being unsuccessful or told we are unworthy, we become hostile.
• We are unwilling to see another point of view.
• We act out, as an adaptive response and it becomes fixed, maladaptive, and self-destructive.

Life, even for kids, can offer hard lessons.  Teachers, like parents, are far from perfect, certainly not immune to the stress of difficult life experiences and overcrowded classrooms.    

So, discounting the normal slings and arrows of living, has your child ever had an episode that has caused him or her to freeze up intellectually?  Not by a stupid thing some teacher said once, not by one unfair grade or unearned punishment, but by more insidious circumstances, like boredom,  social exclusion, conformity, or lack of respect for a different learning style. 

Are Montclair schools wounding or healing?  If some kids thrive here, and some don't, why?  

Getting an Educational Buzz On

You know those images of water-deprived people lost in the desert, crawling with their last remaining strength in the sand toward the watery oasis ahead?  

Well, that's me, dragging my you-know-what up to Montclair State yesterday.  In this case, MSU was the watery oasis and I was the person in the metaphorical sand, deprived not of water but of intellectual vitality.  

I'm back today, against all odds, having temporarily jury-rigged camp and childcare schedules, not to mention the paving of Grove Street and torrential downpours, to get here.  I know, I know: A month ago I was "freaked out" by thoughts of scratchy professor clothes and getting out of the house before 11.  But that was then...

Today, I have a meeting with an academic advisor.  But mainly I just wanted to be here again, surrounded by grad students and other adjuncts, reading the various department bulletin boards for interesting education news, perusing new publications by professors I know, and absorbing the cerebral buzz through my pores.  I won't get much accomplished--my summer plate is too full (and not, unfortunately, with barbecue).  But I will get that little electric charge I need to anticipate the Time for Me that is only 49 days, 20 hours, and 15 seconds away.  Better yet, being in an innovative environment makes me want to create, improve, and think hard about The Future.  

Looking around at this very moment as I sit in MSU's ADP Center for Teacher Preparation and Learning Technology, I see people banging at computers, meeting in small groups, checking out various resources, collaborating, thinking.

I wish K-12 educational environments were like this by mandate, not just because some have successfully partnered with agencies like NASA or have links to corporations with deep pockets. Schools should be places where kids--even the little ones--are engaged in supervised intellectual pursuits and research most of the time. And why not?  After all, the technology exists and most of us use it every single day.  

With wider, more efficient use of technology, we could start teaching kindergartners how to find out stuff using books, the Internet and other digital tools, each other, and teachers-as-guides.  Couldn't our aim be that by, say, third grade, students would be independent authors of their own educational agendas?   We could provide the structure for those agendas; well-engineered state standards are crucial to having an excellent national school system.  Then we work out with children--using those ever-important problem solving skills we are trying to foster--how they will not only fulfill those goals, but prove they've done it.

Here's a cool video about a kid named Cameron, all of eleven years old, who uses technology in every aspect of his life--to educate himself, to educate others, to prove what he knows.  Tell me this cannot be done more widely in Montclair.  Or tell me where it's already happening.  (Not in the elementary schools that I know of.)

In my next entry, I'll write more about Montclair's commitment to technology in education.   In the meantime, read here.

This Is What a Blog Looks Like on Summer Vacation

Unbelievably, we have been busier these days than during the rest of the year, when I am working a lot more and my kids are in school.

How did that happen?