engaged intellectuals

Shocking Censorship, Banning, and Silencing in Arizona!

stephanie jones — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:21:00 +0000

Many of you already know about the shocking decision to suspend the Mexican-American Studies program in the Tucson Unified School District, well now books connected to those programs are being banned in schools.

Check this out for a list of BANNED books – some of which have been confiscated by school officials during class while students and teachers are present.

And, if we want to take on a more “come on, this ain’t about politics, or race, or power, or fear, or the teaching of one particular history and the exclusion of exploitation and colonization – this is just about closing down the courses and therefore moving all the books used in those courses to central office storage where they will be tightly sealed in boxes and never to be used by youth or teachers again unless they go out of their way and locate one of the few copies we might have available in some of our libraries” stance – here’s the “official” story of book banning reposted from Empty Wheel.

Here’s a message from Rethinking Schools – if you’re on Facebook (which I’m not) you might want to post ideas and messages of support:

Dear Rethinking Schools friends,

Did you see the news last week? On Friday, we learned that our book Rethinking Columbus was banned — along with other books used in Tucson’s Mexican American Studies program, including Paulo Freire’s A Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Rodolfo Acuña’s Occupied America, and Elizabeth Martinez’s 500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures. So we’re in good company.

School authorities confiscated the books during class—boxed them up and hauled them off. As one student said, “We were in shock … It was very heartbreaking to see that happening in the middle of class.”

This is the latest chapter in the rightwing attempt to ban ethnic studies in Arizona. Last week, facing the loss of $15 million in state support, the governing board of Tucson’s schools voted 4-1 to terminate the popular and successful Mexican American Studies program.

On Friday, I spoke to the Tucson school district’s director of communications, who told me that the books had to be seized and carted away, because they were “evidence”—as if the teaching going on there were a crime scene. On Tuesday, the district protested that no books had been “banned”—although district officials admitted that they had been “boxed and stored” and could not be used in class. Sounds like “banning” to me.

Rethinking Schools is talking with teachers, students, and activists in Tucson about how we can help their struggle there. We will let you know as we gather ideas.

Do you have ideas to express support for Tucson teachers and students, and to organize opposition to Arizona’s banning of Mexican American Studies and Tucson’s confiscation of books in their curriculum? Please post ideas to the Rethinking Schools facebook page, or if you’re not on facebook, e-mail me.

We’ll follow up soon.

For more information, check out Jeff Biggers’ Salon.com article, “Who’s Afraid of ‘The Tempest’?” Debbie Reese’s, “Teaching Critical Thinking in Arizona: NOT ALLOWED,” Biggers’ Huffington Post interview with Tucson teacher Curtis Acosta, and my Rethinking Schools blog post.

Thanks for your important work.

Bill Bigelow
bill@rethinkingschools.org

White Trash

stephanie jones — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 03:39:33 +0000

Reblogged from Cooperative Catalyst:

A boy from New Orleans shows up a week and a half after Hurricane Katrina. Being one of only a handful of white kids at our school, he is a little edgy and approaches another white student cautiously. “I’ve never been at a school with so many Hispanics,” he whispers. “It’s Latino. Only the government uses Hispanic.” “Oh.” “Yeah, and if I were you, I would tell everyone that you’re half-Mexican. It’s what I did. There’s a lot of really light Latinos out there, so people will believe you.” “But I’m not.” …

I love this post and wanted it on my blog! Using the term white trash is as racist and classist as you can get. When I hear people use the term…and I regularly do…I ask, “what do you mean?” and when the response is, “oh, you know…” I push them: “No, I don’t know what that means. Tell me what it means…”

When we force people to be explicit about the code words and phrases they use to position themselves as better than others – to create hierarchies of value and worth – we force them to face the racist and classist inside them. And when we ask simple questions that get at the meanings of those code words and phrases, we mark ourselves as people who disagree with their view…and that is important work since they wouldn’t have said it in front of us if they didn’t think we had the same perspective as them to begin with.

Out with classism and the systemic dehumanizing of people with language! A person cannot be trash…what could be more harmful than calling someone this?

–Stephanie

to be unruly

stephanie jones — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 03:04:39 +0000

Donaldo Macedo gave a fabulous talk (passion-filled and fueled, talking like his hair was on fire) at the annual convention of the Literacy Research Association and he made a point of criticizing the scholarly reproduction of knowledge for the sake of reproducing knowledge, and admiring scholars who continue to show up at research conferences to “be unruly.” For the latter claim he pointed to the Goodmans (Yetta and Ken) who could have, Macedo said, stayed at home relaxing and enjoying the good life.

I love this idea of unruliness.

Well, let’s face it, I loved everything the man had to say and the direct ways in which he said these things.

But this idea of showing up to “official” spaces – research conferences, schools, meetings (and more meetings and more meetings), universities, etc. as one way of being unruly…well, I just really love that.

I’m like most people I imagine, I get tired of showing up honestly. I’d rather show up at other places where I wouldn’t be considered unruly at all, but rather quite the opposite, like I fit in with the crowd very well.

But showing up in spaces where people don’t want to hear that things aren’t all peachy, where they don’t want to hear that certain kids and families are constantly getting the short end of the stick, where they don’t want to hear the questions we have – again – about why kids don’t get recess, about why drilling kids with flash cards is still happening, about why kids don’t get to choose what they read and study, about why families have to undergo background checks before they are allowed to volunteer in the school, about why kids aren’t going on field trips, about why every teacher has to teach the same subject at the same time, about why lesson plans have to be submitted in a standard format (why? why? why?). Showing up in those very places and asking those direct questions is a form of activism – a way to be unruly, a way to disrupt – even if only for a few minutes – the comfortable machine that grinds away at kids and teachers and families every day.

So…

Thank you Donaldo Macedo for reminding me that showing up alone can be perceived as unruly in many spaces, and that being unruly in the sanitized institutions of education is one of the most important things I can do.

Long Island, NY Principals protest teacher evaluation plan from state

stephanie jones — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:58:36 +0000

This from “Bridging Differences” – Diane Ravitch to Deborah Meier

Hooray for the Long Island Principals!

Posted: 08 Nov 2011 05:59 AM PST

Dear Deborah,

Sometimes it seems we are living in the worst of times for American education, given the daily news of budget cuts, attacks on teachers, and attacks on the very idea of public education. When good news comes along, we should shout it from the rooftops. So here’s good news that I want to share and celebrate.

Last week, more than 400 principals on Long Island, N.Y., signed a letter of public protest against the state’s new and untried teacher evaluation system. The signatories, drawn from elementary, middle, and high schools, represent two-thirds of all principals on Long Island, which includes Nassau and Suffolk counties.

Their letter is historic. It’s the first time that a large number of administrators have spoken out in opposition to bad ideas. It represents hundreds of educators who are willing to stick their necks out, hundreds of educators willing to speak truth to power, hundreds of educators who put their name on a statement to the state’s highest education officials, with this simple message: “Stop! What you are doing is wrong. What you are imposing on us is untested. We believe it will be harmful to our students. It will undermine education quality. It will hurt teachers and ruin morale. You are treating us like lab rats. Stop. Respect the lives that are in your keeping.”

The principals think the state is moving too quickly to implement poorly thought out plans. They wisely call for a pilot project to determine the real-world effect of the state’s plans, rather than subjecting every public school in the state to an approach that lacks any support in research or in practice. Evidence matters, especially when what you do affects the lives of children.

The current state system requires that every educator get a rating of 1 to 100, with part of that number (20 to 40 percent) based on test scores. This is what New York state proposed to the U.S. Department of Education to be eligible for Race to the Top funds. The state won $700 million, but no one bothered to clear the state’s promises with the men and women who do the daily work of education. The state’s promise was plucked out of thin air.

Now Long Island’s brave principals have joined to say “No” to the New York state Board of Regents, to explain their concerns, and to offer a reasonable alternative. The principals recognize that New York’s evaluation system was politically forged, that it will be a waste of precious taxpayer dollars, and that it will have negative effects on their staffs and students. They know that the state emphasis on test scores will narrow their curriculum, cause them to lose enrichment activities, and harm struggling students most.

For the past two years, we have heard that only self-interested unions oppose evaluating teachers by student test scores. Of course, the advocates of this approach never bother to explain why so many experts on testing and accountability are also opposed. Now we see a huge number of principals—not the teachers’ union, but principals. These are men and women who understand that their schools function best as a community, as a collaborative effort, not as a competition or as a place where some teachers will be named and shamed by a dubious state program.

I have heard, off the record, that the Regents scoff at the principals’ petition. I have heard that the state education department cares not a whit what working educators think of its plans for them. All the more reason to speak up and let them know what “the field” thinks. In a democracy, officials are not autocrats. They have a duty to listen, not to impose their own views no matter what anyone else thinks. The officials and appointed Regents have a duty to listen when the majority of principals in a major region of the state protest their actions.

The state education department created its own troubles. Carol Burris, one of the organizers of the protest, wrote an article in which she described a mandated training session for the new system. Officials showed principals and district leaders a video comparing the new evaluation system to “a plane to be built in the air.” Burris was shocked. She noticed that the men constructing the plane wore parachutes but none of the innocent passengers—teachers and children—did. They were placed in harm’s way.

This is reckless. It’s wrong. It’s cruel. Hundreds of other principals agreed, and hundreds more from other parts of the state and the nation are now signing the Long Island principals’ letter. I signed. I hope you will sign also.

Diane

Senator Tom Harkin submits a draft to overhaul NCLB – very different from Duncan’s approach

stephanie jones — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 13:20:32 +0000

From the NY Times:

A senior Senate Democrat released a draft of a sprawling revision of the No Child Left Behind education law on Tuesday that would dismantle the provisions of the law that used standardized test scores in reading and math to label tens of thousands of public schools as failing.

Enlarge This Image

Brendan Smialowski/Bloomberg News

Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, at the White House in February.

A new Web venture featuring news, data and conversation about schools in New York City.

Times Topic: No Child Left Behind Act

The 865-page bill, filed by Senator Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who heads the Senate education committee, became the first comprehensive piece of legislation overhauling the law to reach either Congressional chamber since President George W. Bush signed it in 2002.

Mr. Harkin made his draft bill public 18 days after President Obama announced that he would use executive authority to waive the most onerous provisions of the law, because he had all but given up hope that Congress could fix the law’s flaws any time soon.

Like Mr. Obama’s waiver proposal, the Harkin bill would return to states some powers taken over by Washington under the Bush-era law, including the leeway to devise their own systems for holding schools accountable for student progress.

“We are moving into a partnership mode with states, rather than telling states you’ve got to do this and this and this,” Senator Harkin said in a call with reporters. The bill is a product of more than 10 months of negotiations with his committee’s ranking Republican, Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming, Mr. Harkin said.

Mr. Harkin’s bill would keep the law’s requirements that states test students in reading and math every year in grades three through eight, and once in high school, and make the scores public.

But for about 9 of every 10 American schools, it would scrap the law’s federal system of accountability, under which schools must raise the proportion of students showing proficiency on the tests each year. That system has driven classroom teaching across the nation for a decade.

States would still face federal oversight for the worst-performing 5 percent of schools, as well as for the 5 percent of schools in each state with the widest achievement gap between minority and white students. Districts in charge of those schools could lose federal financing under the Harkin plan if they failed to raise their student achievement.

“Harkin’s bill would return control to the state departments of education and the local school districts, and they’re the ones that got us into the mess that No Child was designed to fix,” said Grover J. Whitehurst, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who headed the Department of Education’s research wing under President Bush. “Districts and states have not been effective in delivering quality education to children from low socioeconomic backgrounds, so why should we think they’ll be effective this time around?”

Several advocacy groups for minority students and the disabled also criticized Mr. Harkin’s bill, and on similar grounds. By eliminating the law’s central accountability provisions, the bill would represent “a significant step backward,” returning the nation to the years before No Child’s passage, when many states did a slipshod job of promoting student achievement, they said.

Under the Harkin bill, “states would not have to set measurable achievement and progress targets or even graduation rate goals,” six groups including the Education Trust, theChildren’s Defense Fund and the National Council of La Raza, said in a letter to Mr. Harkin on Tuesday. “Congress, parents and taxpayers would have no meaningful mechanism by which to hold schools, districts, or states accountable for improving student outcomes.”

Asked about that criticism, Mr. Harkin said that to round up backing for his bill from Republicans in his committee, he had been forced to make compromises.

“I’d like to have federal targets, but that’s one of the compromises,” he said. “I refuse to allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.”

The chances of Mr. Harkin’s bill becoming law are murky, even if it were to gain Senate passage and evolve considerably as a result of Republican amendments. He said that he intends to open the bill up for amendments in his committee next week, and to get it to the Senate floor for consideration before Thanksgiving.

In the House, Representative John Kline, the Minnesota Republican who heads the House education committee, is seeking to rewrite parts of the No Child law in a piecemeal process. One of Mr. Kline’s bills, promoting the growth of charter schools, passed the House on Sept. 13, but four others, including one dealing with teacher evaluations, face an uncertain future. The House leadership has appeared unwilling to move toward a full rewriting of the law, which could give Mr. Obama a domestic policy triumph going into an election year.

“If we get a good, bipartisan bill to the floor, that will be instructive to the House in terms of rewriting this legislation,” Mr. Harkin said.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 12, 2011, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Bill Would Overhaul No Child Left Behind.

End NCLB – don’t try to fix it.

stephanie jones — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 13:02:03 +0000

The reauthorization of the ESEA is under way, but most of us know this thing called No Child Left Behind is not worth trying to “reform” – it has destroyed children, teachers, administrators, schools, districts, and the integrity of an entire profession and U.S. enterprise (public education) as it openly required that corporations (e.g. testing corporations) take over control of curriculum and assessment in every public school in America. Diane Ravitch writes below about why it should be ended:

NCLB: End It, Don’t Mend It

Posted: 25 Oct 2011 06:32 AM PDT

Dear Deborah,

Have you been following the evolving story of the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind? I have, and it is disheartening. Instead of ditching this disastrous law, senators are trying to apply patches.

Most people now recognize that NCLB is a train wreck. Its mandates have imposed on American public education an unhealthy obsession with standardized testing.

It has incentivized cheating, as we have seen in the well-publicized cheating scandals in Washington, D.C., and Atlanta.
It has encouraged states to game the system, as we saw in New York state, where the state tests were made easier and more predictable so as to bolster the number of children who reached “proficiency.”
It has narrowed the curriculum; many districts and schools have reduced or eliminated time for the arts, physical education, and other non-tested subjects.
It has caused states to squander billions of dollars on testing and test preparation, while teachers are laid off and essential services slashed. Now we will squander millions more on test security to detect cheating.

Because of NCLB, more than 80 percent of our nation’s public schools will be labeled “failures” this year. By 2014, on the NCLB timetable of destruction, close to 100 percent of public schools will have “failed” in their efforts to reach the unreachable goal of 100 percent proficiency in reading and math. Has there ever been a national legislative body anywhere else in the world that has passed legislation that labeled almost every one of its schools a failure? I don’t think so.

Despite the manifest failure of NCLB, the Obama administration proposes not to scrap it, but to offer waivers if states agree to accept the mandates selected by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The secretary has a great fondness for teacher evaluation, having decided (in concert with the Gates Foundation) that the key to better education is to tie teachers’ jobs and tenure to their students’ test scores. This, of course, will raise the stakes attached to testing. Mr. Duncan has already used the billions in Race to the Top to bribe states to impose his unproven policies on their schools.

Happily, the latest version of the NCLB reauthorization does not include the teacher evaluation provisions that Mr. Duncan wants. That’s good, but not good enough, because many states are already well down that path, not only the 11 that “won” the Race to the Top, but others that wanted to make themselves eligible. Tennessee was one of the “winners.” NPR did a story about Tennessee’s teacher evaluation program, which explained why the program is so thoroughly disliked by that state’s teachers; see this article, as well.

When, if ever, will policymakers realize that they should find ways to support teachers, not to demoralize them? I just don’t see how it is impossible to “improve” schools without the active engagement of the people who do the daily work of schooling. There is just so much top-down beating-up that can go on before teachers and principals rise up in protest, especially when so many at the top are not educators.

Lawmakers in D.C. and in the state capitals are not competent to decide how to reform schools and how to evaluate teachers. In what other profession would this kind of interference be tolerated?

The federal government does not know how to reform schools. Period. Congress doesn’t, and the U.S. Department of Education doesn’t.

The fundamental role of the federal government should be to advance equality of educational opportunity. That’s a tall order. Congress should revive the commitments made in 1965, when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was passed: To use federal resources on behalf of the neediest students; to protect the civil rights of students; to conduct research about education; to report on the condition and progress of American education.

So long as Congress tries to breathe life into the moribund NCLB legislation, its members are wasting their time.

Diane

Body Matters in Teacher Education – a Podcast

stephanie jones — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 18:40:53 +0000

This is a podcast of a research talk I gave at the College of Education, The University of Georgia last week. It offers a small slice of a three-year study I’ve been conducting in teacher education and creating “culturally-relevant” spaces for teacher education students. Three findings from the study seem really relevant to teacher ed and have the potential for making contributions to the field:

1 – “Bodies” in teacher education classrooms are often already ‘good’ at the practices and implicit rules in educational spaces/academic institutions, but not often well positioned to be successful in “spaces” that reward different practices and have different implicit rules. In other words, they understand and orient themselves to the “nomos” (Pierre Bourdieu) of academic spaces, and have difficulty understanding people/students who don’t already have this institutional disposition. If we are to help future teachers better understand the most marginalized groups of students and families – those who often don’t acquire or want to acquire the academic institution disposition/practices, then we have to get those future teachers outside the physical spaces of academic institutions and into spaces (or “fields” – Bourdieu) where completely different practices are necessary, rewarded, and challenging to “new” folks in the field. Riding the city bus, doing community ethnography through participant observation in local recreation and leisure, social service agencies, natural and human resources, etc. are all ways to help expand new teachers’ perspectives of “learning” and orient them toward drawing on community resources and family practices to build meaningful curriculum. Bodies, in other words, cannot be docile in teacher education classrooms where they are “taught” to engage the community and marginalized students’ lives - they have to experience new spaces in physical, social, psychological, embodied ways.

2 – Many young women across three years of the study (over 100 participants) expressed issues around their bodies (body image, pressures to look a certain way, pressures to eat/exercise in certain ways). While much “teacher education” is now focused on digging into the complex issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, language, etc. to make school a more relevant space for all students, few spaces deal with how all of these “issues” are related to bodies and how bodies are felt, perceived, and performed. Starting with the young women’s concerns around bodies and engaging them with a critically-focused body curriculum (critically analyzing advertisements, watching videos such as “Killing Us Softly,” reading articles about youth dieting, comparing these issues to the “obesity epidemic” hysteria, and analyzing their own bodily experiences on and off college campuses) can lead to engaged discussions and inquiries into the raced body, classed body, gendered body, sexed body, etc. In other words – if bodies are central to the perceptivity project in education (how we perceive others and in turn respond to them), then starting with teacher education bodies could be generative.

**This is the finding that is the focus of the podcast.

3. Tending to one’s own body in analytical ways and working to position oneself more powerfully in language and bodily interactions can help one assemble more confidence in acting as an advocate on behalf of oneself and others. In other words – if we want to help cultivate confident, critical, advocates/activists for future teachers who will stand up for children and families who are persistently marginalized and left behind, we need to work with them in assembling the analytic practices and confidence to do so. Starting with bodies can help us do that.

Papers coming out soon! Several in press and under review, so I’ll post when they’re ready.

Does jotting down a checkmark every 2 minutes all day long every single day for the school year constitute teaching/learning?

stephanie jones — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 14:43:19 +0000

This is a terrific piece written by a kindergarten teacher in Michigan, a state that did not receive Race to the Top funds but is implementing all the “assessments” RttT districts would.

I would surely be fired if I was required to do all these things with children. This is, as the teacher-author writes, lunacy.

And here’s a response from Deborah Meier:

Re-Learning What We ‘Know’

Posted: 20 Oct 2011 07:25 AM PDT

Dear Diane,

I loved Nancy Creech’s piece from Valerie Strauss’s Washington Post blog last summer. Thanks, Diane, for sending it along. It’s a vital reminder as the nation faces a new federal Race to the Top demand: Start testing at age 3. Or else.

Creech’s detailed minute-by-minute counting of what it means to pursue the latest early-childhood “Reform Agenda” is mind-boggling! Thanks, Nancy, for writing it. I’ve done something similar to show the absurdity of most homework policies. Designing, assigning, reading, thinking about, and responding to 20 to 30 students’ homework accounts for a staggering amount of teacher time—if it’s taken seriously and conscientiously. Not to mention that one cannot observe how homework is actually “getting done,” nor who is doing it!

For these reasons we decided, at Central Park East and Mission Hill, on a different approach—certainly for 3- to 7-year-olds. We made an agreement with our children’s families: You don’t tell us what to do during the hours a child is with us, and we won’t tell you what to do during the hours the children are with you. But we can both make suggestions! We promise to take your advice seriously, and we hope you will accept ours in the same spirit. Taking children’s parents seriously as their child’s first teacher requires collaboration not mandates.

Nancy Creech quotes a distinguished educator who says that teaching what one already “knows” is a waste of time. I disagree. We’re constantly re-learning; it’s how things that we have “learned” get consolidated, and sometimes revised. It’s why I found teaching 4- and 5-year-olds so intellectually fascinating—because I was rethinking facts and concepts I thought I “knew,” but had barely scratched the surface of, or had—in fact—misunderstood. My (frequently retold) story about 5-year-old Darryl convincing his peers that rocks were actually alive neatly captures this idea for me. In looking at the concept of living vs. nonliving he naively he picked up on “the wrong” clues. My scientist neighbor noted that he was therefore actually “on the cutting edge of modern science.”

In fact, of course, as with a lot of instruction, just re-teaching something may only entrench the confusion rather than expand understanding. Watching children “in action,” one learns the most about what they “know” (and don’t know). It’s in organizing the environment so that children are driven by curiosity to make sense of the world that they learn to drive themselves. It’s in organizing the environment and then carefully observing each of those 20 children’s response to it and to each other that we learn the vital stuff—the stuff to “teach.”

If we carefully observe children at play we realize how enlightening their ignorance is if viewed respectfully and nonjudgmentally. They grow dumb (silent) when we fail to acknowledge it because it’s our job to correct mistakes.

Jean Piaget had a big influence for a time on American educators. But mostly by giving labels to stages of development. I found, especially after reading Eleanor Duckworth’s The Having of Wonderful Ideas, something more fascinating. She reminded me that we, as adults, all get stuck at an early stage with respect to ideas that either don’t interest us much or where simplistic theories serve our purposes well enough. My amazement, over and over, at the light rays that came directly to me—and only me—across the lake is perfectly natural and obvious and only rarely requires realizing that it’s an “illusion.” That the ray of light is also coming straight across the water to you—standing 100 feet to my right—is absurd. Who cares? But, once you do ….

Teachers have never figured out how to teach more than 10 new words a week—some of which are soon forgotten, but meanwhile children between birth and adolescence actually are learning more than 10 words a day. Some more and some less, but no normal child doesn’t do better teaching themselves, so to speak, than their teachers do. To turn the education of 3- to 7-year-olds into planned, deliberate, step-by-step “instruction” is to retard their intellectual growth.

The whole idea of prepping for standardized tests as a model of teaching/learning goes against not only what is most amazing about human learning, but especially the part that engages us in the work essential to our modern world. To accept, as young children do, the fact of uncertainty, and to tolerate this state of mind, grows increasingly rare as we “grow up.” Asked constantly to choose: a,b,c, or d—Which is the one right answer?—is bound to retard growth even further.

I’m stuck on the form of accountability that says “throw the rascals out.” Democracy in its many forms is the answer to accountability, if practiced close to where we all live, work, and think about the world.

Best,
Deborah

P.S. I have spent some time observing Zucotti Park, and watching it with my kindergarten teacher eyes and ears helps me see how they have hit upon some very novel but powerful educational tools. Spending time there was fascinating. More on that next week—maybe.

Dear “What to become if you suck at school,”

stephanie jones — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 20:11:41 +0000

I can see phrases used for searches that eventually land people on this blog…I’m often surprised by the searches and I find so many of them fascinating.

This one, “What do become if you suck at school” just can’t be ignored.

So – if you’re out there – here goes:

I have no idea how old you are or how much school you must/will still complete – this part of my response assumes you are in school somewhere right now. If you have anyone at all you can reach out to in school (a teacher, counselor, advisor, administrator, coach, professor, etc.), reach out to that person and tell her or him that you have this question about what to become. Tell her/him you think you suck at school, and ask her/him what things can be put in place to help you to be more successful while you are there. Maybe you can become involved in elective courses, different activities, special co-op work activities, service-learning, or something else that will be more interesting to you – and perhaps you will also become more “successful” because what you’re doing will seem more meaningful.

If you have no one at all you can turn to in school, perhaps thinking differently about school might help. For example, while everyone acts like school is the one thing that is the most important part of your life right now, you have a full life awaiting you outside of school. Focus on “becoming” the things you already like to do and be: Do you like video games? Working on cars? Building things? Growing things from seeds? Do you like something so much that you don’t even realize you “like” it because it’s such a part of your life? Like cooking food, fixing broken appliances, making art? Dancing, running, making clothes? Helping people? Working with youngsters? Making videos? What else might your interests be?

Chances are you might be experiencing “school” as some boring, drill-and-kill experience focused on following directions and test-taking that doesn’t allow you to pursue your passions and interests – or to even figure out what those might be. I promise this is not a good representation of what “learning” means when you decide that you are actually interested in learning something and you really go for it. What are you already kinda good at? Would you like to work on that and learn more about it? Then get going on it yourself – and that might mean on your own time outside of school.

Once you get some ideas, start knocking on some doors that seem related to your interests. Go to community agencies (YMCA, Boys and Girls Clubs, foodbanks, all kinds of places!), art stores, dance studios, computer stores, design businesses, running shoe store, construction business, animal shelter, or any place you imagine might need a “service” you can offer – even for free at first! Get to know people and let them know you. Show them you are interested and motivated – even if it’s a volunteer position – and ask for their advice about developing your skill/craft and yourself.

If you suck at school, it’s also likely that the way school is working just sucks. It’s not supposed to be that way, but sometimes it is. Take your learning and interests and passions into your own hands, and find others to help you.

Become the person who loves her/himself and what he/she can offer to the world. That means not beating yourself up because you think you suck. You have wonderful, amazing things to do – and you might not be able to depend on school to help you get there.

Occupy EDU – The Education version of Occupy Wall Street

stephanie jones — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 13:35:06 +0000

Excellent piece here about how Wall Street and trends in corporate America impact public schools, teachers, children, and the institution of public education.

Take a read!