engaged intellectuals

This story about the lives of elevators in the New Yorker last week is fabulously written and reminded me of how a simple observation in the world “wow - a man was stuck in an elevator for 41 hours” can turn in to an in-depth inquiry. If I had been conducting this research, I would have incorporated more issues around labor regarding elevators (installation, technicians, operators, etc.) as well as some of the challenges various elevator workers have faced across time and in different parts of the country/world. Alas, it wasn’t my piece, so I found myself content with the incredibly engaging style of writing, the movement between technological information about elevators and the urinating man stuck inside one, and my own envisioning of the animal-like organs always at work inside the steel, wood, stucco, brick, and glass structures we have built around us.

Even kindergarteners can turn a simple observation into a lengthy inquiry…we just have to take the observation seriously and recognize the yet-unearthed understandings waiting to be created from it. Well, and also provide the space, time, and resources for allowing students to do such research

Hayden (my six year old) and I were sitting outside tonight eating our dinner when she suddenly said to me, “Mom, all the kids at school have cool lives. But mine, mine’s not that cool.”

“Well hon, all kids have different lives and different families and different homes and different food and different things they do together. But that doesn’t mean one way is cool and another way isn’t cool,” I told her, thinking what a great opportunity this could be to chat about difference in the world and in her classroom in particular. But that quickly changed…

“But mom, I lied to them.”

“To who?”

“My friends at school, cuz I wanted my life to be cool too.”

“What did you say?”

“That I’m half vampire.”

“Okay…” Oh boy.

“And I’m half Indian. Well, but that’s not a lie, I am half Indian.”

“That’s partially true,” I’ve told Hayden about our American Indian heritage on my mother’s side of the family, “Hayden, do you think they really think you’re half vampire?”

“Well, definitely M. does. Definitely. And A. has seven dogs at her house and I just want a puppy and I keep telling you I want a puppy but I’m not allowed to have one. But I told them I have a puppy too.”

“Okay…”

“That might be a lie though. A. might not have seven dogs.”

“Hayden, I know you love to pretend,” this is true - she does…she creates fictional worlds constantly, in fact I’m starting to wonder at this point if this is one of the fictional constructions or if she really did tell her friends these things, “but you know they will learn that you didn’t tell the truth about your life. Is that okay with you?”

The conversation went on a bit, but I share it here to push myself (and invite others) to think about the fictions of lives lived inside school walls and the “cool” factor that was playing out for Hayden in this scenario. How do we encourage imaginative creations (fictional lives) while simultaneously discourage the commodification of lives used to compete with others in school and the larger society? How can this fictional play be aimed toward goals that are not competitive? How can the competition of “cool” lives be diminished?

And just as I put forward these questions for consideration, I think too how brilliantly Hayden - and all children - recontextualize their experiences in such creative ways. Just last week she watched “The Little Vampire” and she has woven parts of this popular film together with another “different” sounding identity of American Indian to re-present herself not as very-White-European-looking-Hayden, but as half-vampire and half-Indian. What fun it must be to reconstruct yourself so imaginatively and perform with such confidence!

And yet such brilliant fictions can still be considered lies…

I was in a kindergarten classroom this morning where children are not allowed to make any noise for two and a half hours each day for three days for fear of disturbing the testing classrooms next door. Instead of their usual greetings, sharing, mingling during their creative projects, and moving about the room - the way kindergarteners and other students need to do - they are watching videos. Instead of engaging in rich curricular work, they sit silently at tables.

Kindergarten is not tested in this school.

But the kindergarteners are. Their experiences are yet another one of the “unintended consequences” of a high-stakes testing regime in our country. And they know the “big kids” are taking a “big test” and everything needs to be silent. So the kids taking tests can’t think of anything but the tests - and the kids supporting the “silence” for the test takers can’t think of anything but the tests.

More “collateral damage” done by the billion dollar testing machine wreaking havoc in our schools and on our future as an educated, engaged democracy.

We know tests are biased and advantage students from English-speaking, White middle-class and affluent homes.

We know schools and teachers have narrowed curricula to focus explicitly on the high-stakes test-preparation areas of reading and math often leaving behind science, social studies, language development, fine arts, physical education, and project-based experiences.

We know children vomit on testing days, teachers have insomnia, and principals are stressed to the max.

We know children, teachers, principals, and parents cry when a score comes back only 1 or 2 points below proficient.

We know test-preparation has dumbed down curricula and bored our students (and teachers) to death.

We know so much  more…

WHY DO WE KEEP DOING THIS?!

I modestly propose three steps toward change:

1. Find colleagues and community members to read and discuss Collateral Damage

2. Contact your local, state, and federal representatives and encourage them to read Collateral Damage (perhaps we could even buy an extra copy to send out to folks - or photocopy the first chapter and mail to them)

3. Start a local, grassroots campaign to “End High-Stakes Testing and AYP Sanctions”

Find some others concerned about the same issues:

No NCLB

Susan Ohanian

Anti-NCLB Legislation

Awesome Anti-NCLB merchandise

Come on Mr. President…do you think a new initiative will disguise the atrocious failure of No Child Left Behind? Despite his (false) claims that Math and Reading scores are higher than ever, George W. Bush continues to search frantically for any potential success story in the realm of education during his administration. It’s time to face the facts, however, and those include:

1. The federal government has never made sufficient funds available to pay for its NCLB mandates in education leaving local districts and state bodies scrambling to pay the bill, often resulting in the elimination of art, music, PE, and other “extra” classes, field trips for children, classroom materials that could be used for hands-on learning experiences, and even in some cases eliminating faculty or support positions. Leaving local schools and states standing with the enormous bill for NCLB mandates is both unethical and unconstitutional.

2. Curricula (ESPECIALLY in schools serving many working-class and poor students and students of color) has been narrowed so much that students no longer have the option of receiving a well-rounded, rich education that can prepare them for being engaged citizens in a democracy. Even in “Math” and “Reading” students are merely being taught to take tests.

3. The testing frenzy is so out of control that even kindergarteners can be found in classrooms sitting at their seats with paper and pencil. For many kindergarten classrooms, long gone are “luxuries” such as recess, rest time, story time, dramatic play, and hands-on exploration.

4. Students are being pushed out of school so they will not bring a school’s overall score “down.”

5. Teachers are pushing every boundary possible, and even some outright “cheating” on tests to avoid the devastating results if a struggling school does not meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP).

6. Teachers are told to “teach the ones who you think can pass” and essentially forget the others. Geesh…that sounds a lot like leaving children behind.

7. Even affluent suburban schools are finding it difficult to meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) because their scores tend to be high to begin with and to consistently increase those scores every single year is nearly impossible. Thus, the testing frenzy and detrimental effects infiltrate all schools with teachers complaining, “everything is about the test!”

Don’t believe me? There are hundreds of publications about the detrimental effects NCLB has had on children, families, schools, teachers, administrators, budgets, test scores, and education. Here’s one of the latest.

No Child Left Behind is up for Reauthorization this spring. Let’s not continue to allow this Act that is designed for inevitable self-implosion to ruin educational opportunities for all children - and most of all for the children who have been underserved by the system for so many generations.

And Pell Grants for Kids is just another way to rape public schools of funding and give public funds to the private and faith-based sector. Yet another attempt to erode public education for all. Can we not see the writing on the wall?

stephanie jones

kindergarten
Methailade. That’s what I remember about kindergarten. The single memory I have that can be conjured up in my mind’s eye at the most surprising moments is screaming at the top of my lungs on the corner across from my kindergarten school as my mom held up my dress and dabbed bright orange methailade all over my skinned legs with that sponge-like, or hair-like applicator that came in a threatening dark brown bottle. I don’t remember where my brother was while I jumped around on my toes, my mom yelling at me to stand still getting more frustrated by the minute. But I know that he was sitting next to me when we were still in the car. The story has been told many different ways and two go like this: 1) I was too excited and anxious about getting to school and I opened the door and fell out before the car stopped; 2) I was excited about getting to school and I unlocked the car then my brother opened it up and gave me a shove. Each version of the story has something about me being “excited” to get to school and every story ends with me holding onto the car door for dear life as my mom slowed the car to a stop. And then the methailade. And the screaming.
My mom calmly walked me into my classroom that morning, my face tangled and wet, my legs missing skin and stained orange. She kissed me goodbye and left me standing there silent. I don’t know what happened between that time and when she later came back to get me. She has told me that her “nerves were shot” after I fell out of the car and she was just moving through the motions of the morning routine when suddenly it occurred to her that she left me at school skinless and silent. Jumping in her blue Pontiac LeMans and speeding back to Sharpsburg Elementary School in Norwood, Ohio, she signed me out and took me home.
I’m not sure where home was, somewhere in Norwood I imagine – maybe living with my great grandmother “Granny” who had the tallest bed with the softest feather ticking you’ve ever seen. We stayed with her some, I do remember that. Maybe home was the apartment on Montgomery Road where my grandmother recently told me she forced my mother to move out of when she came to visit one Saturday morning in the winter and the hallway floors were covered with ice and all of us were cold because the building didn’t have any heat. My mom was a single mother of two. I was four. John was two. She did everything she could to be independent, including working two full-time jobs and dropping me off at school with orange-dyed legs and tear-swollen eyes. She probably had to go to work that morning and the frustration grew as she thought about missing a day’s pay and what would have to be left unpaid as a result.
The year was 1976 and children had to be five years old before entering kindergarten unless they were able to pass a qualifying “test” to enter as a four-year-old. I was four until my birthday in October. I passed the test. Maybe because public school was cheaper than childcare, maybe because my mom thought I was anxious to get to school and that I was (of course) brilliant, maybe because of a complex combination of these two and other reasons. Anyway, I entered kindergarten at age four in a tiny building that was made especially for kindergarteners. The child’s garden. Separate from the other children, separate playgrounds, separate entryways, separate hallways, separate principals. Separate. Protected. A place to grow into a person who might enter the institution of school and manage to climb up the social class ladder – the one missing rungs near the bottom – the one with oil-slopped rungs toward the middle – the one with prickly-thorned rungs on the top.