malvasia bianca

Ken Robinson’s TED talk on “Do schools kill creativity?”

You can also watch it at its web page; I like the chapter markings on the full-screen version of the video player on their page. (Not the embedded one here.)

I heard about this talk via two separate routes: Presentation Zen and Evolving Excellence. Two blogs which don’t normally have much in common, but in retrospect it makes sense that you’d see this in both places: in particular, the lean folks know as much as anybody about the value of encouraging creativity at all levels of your organization.

Lots of good stuff in the talk; some ideas I particularly liked:

• Students who are in school now will still be working half a century from now, yet we have a hard time predicting what the world will be like half a decade from now; can we afford to do anything other than do anything other than encourage their creativity and capacities for innovation?
• To be creative, you need to make mistakes; yet schools punish you ruthlessly for making them. (They could take a lesson from Super Mario Galaxy: feedback doesn’t mean punishment. Or, for that matter, from more sandboxy games: you don’t need pervasive feedback, either.)
• Different people have different strengths, yet schools focus on an obscenely small portion of those. If somebody is fidgeting in your math class, perhaps discovering that they’re a dancer is a better idea than putting them on ADHD drugs.

As always, I’m very glad that we found PACT. It’s not perfect, but it’s worlds better than what I hear of schools elsewhere.

Some things that have passed through my earphones recently:

• In a recent lean blog podcast episode, Norman Bodek talked about how great mistakes are, because making a mistake is the best way to learn something.
• In an episode of The Cranky Middle Manager that I just listened to, Patrick Lencioni talked about how one of the signs of a bad job is that you can’t tell whether or not you’re doing a good job at it.

Everybody wants to do things right. But if you make a mistake, don’t freak out about it: notice that you made a mistake, figure out how to do things right the next time.

This has two hard parts: you have to notice that you made a mistake, and you have to not freak out about it. Which points at a problem with our educational system (among other aspects of our culture): it’s designed to get you to freak out about making mistakes, without giving you nearly enough tools to help you notice that you’ve done it. As math teachers all know, telling students to check their work isn’t sufficient support; helping students develop the skills to notice when they’ve made a mistake is hard, and I suspect that attacking them when they screw up probably isn’t the best way to go about it.

Of course, while making mistakes is all well and good from a learning perspective, we don’t want to go too far with that. Which is why, as Bodek continues, we should distinguish between mistakes and defects. Making mistakes is all well and good, but we don’t want other people to suffer from them. This is where poka yoke devices come in: they help improve quality by making it as easy as possible for people to notice when something is going wrong.

The big news around here for the last week has been the oil spill in San Francisco Bay. The news coverage has been all about whether or not it was the fault of the pilot or of a machinery malfunction: train wreck management, or at least train wreck news coverage, at its best. I have no idea what really happened there, but I hope the actual investigation is focusing more on learning about what went wrong and preventing this in the future than on figuring out whom to point fingers at.

(I can’t remember where I read this - Gerald Weinberg somewhere, maybe? - but if you really feel a need for a rule on how to point fingers, here’s one: if you aren’t authorized to sign off on a purchase for X dollars, then you’re not ultimately responsible for a mistake that costs your company X dollars. Again, I don’t want to excuse defects, but people higher up in the company should be growing an environment that minimizes the chance of defects happening at an unacceptable frequency.)

I got a look at my school district’s new report card. Most of the items are now grouped under the heading “Lifelong Learning Skills”; specifically, the group contains the following entries:

• Listens in class
• Follows directions
• Works independently
• Works neatly
• Completes work on time
• Accept [sic] responsibility
• Respects classmates
• Respects authority
• Uses time wisely
• Communicates effectively
• Works collaboratively

A quiz for my gentle readers (or, even better, my snarky readers): which of these items

1. Support life-long learning?
2. Actively work against life-long learning?
3. Are neutral towards life-long learning?
4. Could be interpreted in ways that either support or hinder life-long learning, but guess which way teachers are going to interpret them?

Background: Miranda’s school recently changed its chorus time from lunch to after school. This means that Miranda won’t be able to participate in chorus this year, which makes all of us sad.

I was going to rant about this on the PACT mailing list, but I’ve gotten chastized recently for complaining there near the start of the school year, when there are so many new families around who still aren’t sure if they want to be in PACT or not. (Which is, I think, a sign of mild dysfunction in PACT: we should be constantly discussing things we like, things we don’t like, and ways for improvement. Go retrospectives, or something.) New PACT parents, if you’ve clicked on this link: PACT is super-tiptop-wonderful, and Castro’s actually a pretty nice place as well; neither of them are perfect, but That’s OK.

Anyways, since the point of having a blog is to be able to rant, I figured I would just move the venting part here. But I did want to warn my regular readers that they might be missing some of the context. The part of the message that I did post on the mailing list is a report of a discussion that I had with the principal on the matter. (I should emphasize that I’m quite impressed with the principal; I think she probably made the wrong choice here, but, well, that hardly makes her unique in the world.)

Context ends; rant begins:

The one thing that really bothered me about our discussion was her presenting this as a choice between curriculum versus convenience. The assumption underlying that statement is that chorus is not a natural part of the curriculum, and the only reason to hold it during school hours would be to save parents some driving. I’m not sure it’s a matter of mere convenience for parents, given the realities of work schedules, but setting that aside, I very much object to the notion that chorus should be considered a second-class member of the curriculum.

Certainly when I was growing up, chorus (and related activities, orchestra and band) were held during school hours. It’s possible my experiences were unusual, but I don’t believe they were too unusual at the time. One of the frequent laments triggered by the loss of school funding over the last decades is that arts/music programs are being pared to the bone; one of the reasons why it was supposed to be a good idea to close Slater was that it would free up more money to fund arts/music programs. So I don’t believe that I’m alone in believing that chorus (and related activities) have historically been part of school curricula, and rightly so.

I also see no reason why music should be considered so much less important than, say, reading/writing and math that we can’t spend a couple of hours a week of school time on it. I’m an ex-mathematician, so my experiences in that regard are very far on one side of the spectrum, but I nonetheless spend much more time in an average week listening to music than doing math, and I’m pretty sure that I spend more time creating music (singing, whistling, playing the piano) than doing math. Admittedly, I spend a good deal more time reading, or even writing, than either, but music is wired extremely deeply into our brains.

And, while I don’t have evidence one way or the other, I would be surprised (not shocked, but surprised) if it proved to be the case that students who participated in chorus (or other similar activities) did less well academically, or indeed didn’t do better academically, than students who didn’t participate in such activities. And, of course, our schools’ focus shouldn’t be solely on academics, but should be geared towards helping our children become the best people they can be in a broad sense.

So, from my point of view, this is not a choice between curriculum and convenience: it’s a choice between two different views of curriculum. And the wrong view won.

Then there’s the whole program improvement thing. (Context: Castro is a “program improvement” school, which means that our test scores didn’t pass muster by the powers that be.) I don’t really understand what pressures the Castro faculty are under because of this, but I’m sure they are considerable. This situation seems to me to exemplify one of the evils of our nation’s current zeal towards test-driven schooling: rich schools, where the kids do well on tests, are free to provide a broad curriculum for their students, while schools that are already less well-off have further pressures to narrow their curriculum beyond what funding constraints would force them to do.

So I can accept that, because of Castro’s PI status, some people might feel that the pragmatic thing to do would be to reschedule chorus and spend more time on the basics. But, if we’re going to do that, we should be clear what our reasons are for not holding chorus during the school day. Are we doing it because:

• We think that chorus shouldn’t be part of the school curriculum, irrespective of test-imposed pressues, or
• We think that chorus should be part of the school curriculum, but regretfully bow to external pressures?

If the former, then PI status is irrelevant, and it makes me sad that teachers at my daughter’s school feel that way. If the latter, then we should think hard about whether more courage would be appropriate here: do we really believe that chorus students do worse in school or in life, and what messages do we want to send our students?

One unfortunate aspect of the current situation is that either the decision makers haven’t consciously thought about whether the decision is made out of principle or as an accomodation; or, if they have, they haven’t communicated that to the rest of us. Or they have communicated it to the rest of us, and the communication is that they’re doing it on principle. Which I fear might be the case, as much as I would like to believe otherwise.

Another thing that bothers me: I think people should be able to choose their educational priorities whenever possible. So I’m quite happy to accept that music isn’t as important to other people as it is to me: those people may well prefer to have school time devoted to other matters. In which case, great: that’s why chorus is optional! Why not let parents vote with their feet in this matter: parents can choose to either send their child to chorus or to let their child have 25 or 40 minutes (depending on the grade) more of educational time each week? Instead, we have teachers and a principal telling us that such a choice is an inappropriate one.

(Admittedly, that argument has weak points (as of course do all my arguments): in particular, my preferred solution would make it impossible for parents to choose to get the extra instructional time and also get the chorus time by sending their child to chorus after school.)

At the end of last school year, all the schools’ choruses put on a performance. Some schools, including Slater (Miranda’s late, lamented school) had more than fifty students there (it might have been closer to a hundred than fifty). Almost all schools had at least a few dozen students there. And then there was Castro, which had a grand total of six students present at the concert, or approximately one percent of the student population. At the time, I thought that was a bit weird, but at least PACT’s presence at Castro would change that. Now, it looks to me like it wasn’t a fluke at all.

In Jonathan Kozol’s earlier books, I’d already been appalled by the horrible physical condition of schools serving nonwhite populations. And, in The Shame of the Nation, we see that too:

In the years before I met Elizabeth, I had visited many elementary schools in the South Bronx and in one northern district of the Bronx as well. I had also made a number of visits to a high school where a stream of water flowed down one of the main stairwells on a rainy afternoon and where green fungus molds were growing in the office where the students went for counseling. A large blue barrel was positioned to collect rain-water coming through the ceiling. In one make-shift elementary school housed in a former skating rink next to a funeral parlor in another nearly all-black-and-Hispanic section of the Bronx, class size rose to 34 and more; four kindergarten classes and a sixth grade class were packed into a single room that had no windows. Airlessness was stifling in many rooms; and recess was impossible because there was no outdoor playground and no indoor gym, so the children had no place to play.

In another elementary school, which had been built to hold 1,000 children but was packed to bursting with some 1,500 boys and girls, the principal poured out his feelings to me in a room in which a plastic garbage bag had been attached somehow to cover part of the collapsing ceiling. “This,” he told me, pointing to the garbage bag, then gesturing around him at the other indications of decay and disrepair one sees in ghetto schools much like it elsewhere, “would not happen to white children.” (pp. 40–41)

During the 1990s, physical conditions in some buildings had become so dangerous that a principal at one Bronx school, which had been condemned in 1989 but nonetheless continued to be used, was forced to order that the building’s windows not be cleaned because the frames were rotted and glass panes were falling in the street, while at another school the principal had to have the windows bolted shut for the same reason. These were not years of economic crisis in New York. This was a period in which financial markets soared and a new generation of free-spending millionaires and billionaires was widely celebrated by the press and on TV; but none of the proceeds of this period of economic growth had found their way into the schools that served the truly poor. (pp. 43–44)

I don’t mean to be picking on New York here: he gives examples from elsewhere, here and in other books.

But the differences in teaching style are a good deal more chilling:

“Taking their inspiration from the ideas of B. F. Skinner…,” [...] proponents of scripted rote-and-drill curricula articulate their aim as the establishment of “faultless communication” between “the teacher, who is the stimulus,” and “the students, who respond.”

The introduction of Skinnerian approaches, which are commonly employed in penal institutions and drug rehabilitation programs, as a way of altering the attitudes and learning styles of black and Hispanic children is provocative, and it has stirred some outcries from respected scholars. To actually go into a school in which you know some of the children very, very well and see the way that these approaches can affect their daily lives and thinking processes is even more provocative.

On a chilly November day four ears ago in the South Bronx, I entered P.S. 65 [...]

Silent lunches had been instituted in the cafeteria and, on days when children misbehaved, silent recess had been introduced as well. On those days, the students were obliged to stay indoors and sit in rows and maintain silence on the floor of a small room that had been designated “the gymnasium.” The school still had a high turnover of its teachers [...], but the corridors were quiet and I saw no children outside of their classrooms.

The words “Success For All,” which was the brand name of a scripted program used within the school, were prominently posted at the top of the main stairway and, as I would later find, in almost every room. Also displayed throughout the building were a number of administrative memos that were worded with unusual directive absoluteness. “Authentic Writing,” said a document called “Principles of Learning” that was posted in the corridor close to the office of the principal, “is driven by curriculum and instruction.” I didn’t know what this expression meant and later came back to examine it again before I left the school.

I entered the fourth grade of Mr. Endicott, a man in his mid-thirties who had arrived here without training as a teacher, one of about 15 teachers in the building who were sent into this school after a single summer of short-order preparation. [...]

On the wall behind the teacher, written in large letters: “Portfolio Protocols: [...]” To the left side of the room: “Performance Standards Mathematics Curriculum: M-5 Problem Solving and Reasoning. M-6 Mathematical Skills and Tools…”

My attention was distracted by some whispering among the children sitting to the right of me. The teacher’s response to this distraction was immediate: His arm shot out and up in a diagonal in front of him, his hand straight up, his fingers flat. The young co-teacher did this too. When they saw their teachers do this, all the children in the classroom did it too.

“Zero noise,” the teacher said, but this instruction proved to be unneeded. The strange salute the class and teachers gave each other, which turned out to be one of a number of such silent signals teachers in the school were trained to use, and children to obey, had done the job of silencing the class.

“Active listening!” said Mr. Endicott. “Heads up! Tractor beams!”—the latter meaning, “Every eye on me.”

On the front wall of the classroom in handwritten words that must have taken Mr. Endicott long hours to transcribe: a list of terms that could be used to praise or criticize a student’s work in mathematics. At Level Four, the highest of our levels of success, a child’s “problem-solving strategies” could be described, according to this list, as “systematic, complete, efficient, and possibly elegant,” while the student’s capability to draw conclusions from the work she had completed could be termed “insightful…, comprehensive.” At Level Two, the child’s capability to draw conclusions was to be described as “logically unsound”—at Level One, “not present.” Approximately 50 separate categories of proficiency, or lack of such, were detailed in this wall-sized tabulation.

An assistant to the principal remained with me throughout the class and then accompanied me wherever else I went within the school. Having an official shadow me so closely is a bit unusual in visits that I make to public schools. Principals who feel relaxed and confident about their teachers typically invite me to sit in on classes without constant supervision and to visit classes that have not been pre-selected. Also unusual, I realized later, was that Mr. Endicott, whom I had met before, did not say hello to me until nearly the final moments of the class and didn’t actually acknowledge I was there except by stoping by my desk and handing me the worksheet on perimeters.

[...] It is one of the few classrooms I had visited up to that time in which almost nothing even hinting at spontaneous emotion in the children or the teacher surfaced in the time that I was there.

I had visited classes that resembled this in Cuba more than 20 years before; but in the Cuban schools the students were allowed to question me, and did so with much charm and curiosity, and teachers broke the pace of lesson plans from time to time to comment on a child’s question or to interject a casual remark that might have been provoked by something funny that erupted from a boy or girl who was reacting to my presence in the class. What I saw in Cuban schools was certainly indoctrinational in its intent but could not rival Mr. Endicott’s approach in its totalitarian effectiveness.

The teacher gave the “zero noise” salute again when someone wihspered to another child at his table. “In two minutes you will have a chance to talk and share this with your partner.” Commuication between children in the class was not prohibited but was afforded time-slots and was formalized in an expression that I found included in a memo that was posted near the door: “An opportunity … to engage in Accountable Talk.”

Even the teacher’s words of praise were framed in terms consistent with the lists that had been posted on the wall. “That’s a Level Four suggestion” said the teacher when a child made an observation other teachers might have praised as simply “pretty good” or “interesting” or “mature.”

There was, it seemed, a formal name for every cognitive event within this school: “Authentic Writing,” “Active Listening,” “Accountable Talk.” [...]

These naming exercises and the imposition of an all-inclusive system of control on every form of intellectual activity consumed a vast amount of teaching time but seemed to be intrinsic to the ethos here: a way of ordering cognition beyond any effort of this sort I’d seen in the United States before. The teacher, moerover, did not merely name and govern every intellectual event with practiced specificity; he also issued his directions slowly, pacing words with a meticulous delivery that brought to my mind the way the staff attendants spoke to the Alzheimer’s patients at my father’s nursing home.

[...]

I remember, too, another aspect of my visit that distinguished this from almost anyother class I’d visited up to this time: Except for one brief giggle of a child sitting close to me which was effectively suppressed by Mr. Endicott, nothing even faintly frivolous took place while I was there. No one laughed. No child made a funny face to somebody beside her. Neither Mr. Endicott nor his assistant laughed as best as I can recall. This is certainly unusual within a class of eight-year-olds. [...]

When I was later looking at my notes, I also noticed that I couldn’t find a single statement made by any child that had not been prompted by the teacher’s questions, other than one child’s timid question about which “objective” should be written on the first line of a page they had been asked to write. I found some notes on children moving from their tables to their “centers” and on various hand-gestures they would make as a response to the hand-gestures of their teachers; but I found no references to any child’s traits of personality or even physical appearance. Differences between the children somehow ceased to matter much during the time that I observed the class. The uniform activities and teacher’s words controlled my own experience perhaps as much as they controlled and muted the expressiveness of children.”

Before I left the school, I studied again the definition of “Authentic Writing” that was posted in the corridor. Whaever it was, according to the poster, it was “driven by curriculum…” That was it, and nothing more. Its meaning or its value was established only by cross-reference to another schoolbound term to which it had been attached by “drive” in passive form. Authenticity was what somebody outside of this building, more authoritative than the children or their teachers, said that it shall be. (pp. 64–71)

There is a huge amount of education inequality within our nation, within our states, within our school districts, within our individual school buildings. Which raises the question: am I part of the problem, or am I part of the solution?

My daughter is part of a special program which is housed within one of the schools in our local school district. I’m all for different schools having different educational programs: I don’t believe in uniformity, since different students, parents, and teachers have different goals, different philosophies, are simply different people.

Having said that, different programs is one thing; different resources is quite another. Some of the resources I don’t feel guilty about: parents volunteering is one thing, grant money is one thing. And donations in kind can be fine, too. (Not always, but in certain contexts: I would be bothered by rich parents giving dozens of computers, but I wouldn’t be bothered by, say, people bringing in food to some sort of get-together.) But asking for a financial donation from parents who participate in the school? It’s not required—I hope that requiring a donation would be forbidden by law—but even the suggestion very much strikes me the wrong way.

The next question: how do I act on this in a responsible fashion?

I would seem to be in a quiet mood these days. Not feeling much like blogging, not feeling much like programming at home. Maybe because I’ve been programming a fair amount at work; I was worried that, with the new larger group, I’d have almost no programming time, but now that things have settled down (pleasantly!), that is fortunately not the case. (Incidentally, H.264 is charmingly eccentric. Or something.)

Part of the reason, too, is that Okami is tiptop stunning excellent. So I spent all of last weekend playing it, several evenings playing it, and am doing pretty well this weekend so far. I don’t think I’ll quite finish it this weekend, but next weekend certainly. So I guess the game isn’t going to fill the gap until the Wii launch after all; what next? Lego Star Wars II?

Another possibility: I could just not play video games for a month and a half. I would seem to be in a bookish mood these days; or I could spend more time programming. Or spend more timing thinking about stuff and writing about stuff. (Combined with the bookish bit above.)

The latter is increasingly attractive. My thoughts on some of the matters that I’ve been obsessing on over the last few years are starting to settle down. And I’m being reminded (e.g. by helping out with the PACT Parent Ed classes) that there’s stuff that I used to spend a lot of time thinking about that I haven’t recently revisited. So maybe it’s time to, say, go through the complete works of Alfie Kohn (who has a new book out, I should read it) and John Holt and see what, if any, points of contact they have with what I’ve been thinking about recently. Or maybe I should try to actually put some thinking tools into action. Or maybe I should spend every waking hour reading about lean. Or maybe I should spend time thinking about whether my actions are congruent with my stated beliefs and, if not, why not.

Or maybe I should play video games. That would certainly be easier…

I saw four kids playing patty cake on the playground at school last week. I hadn’t realized that you could do that with more than two people: basically, whenever you would clap the other person’s left hand, you instead clap the left hand of the person to your right, and whenever you would clap the other person’s right hand, you instead clap the right hand of the person to your left. (Unless hands are crossed, in which case things get a little harder for me to describe.)

The other interesting thing about this particular grouping was that two of the four kids were boys. (All around fourth grade, I think, plus or minus one year.) And their hands were flying just as fast as the girls’ hands: clearly they’d done this before. The particular chant they were doing, lemonade, has a “freeze” bit at the end, and they were more into the competitive aspect of that than the girls were, but not so much as to harm the game for anybody else.

During recess at school today, I saw three kids playing together. One of them was a kindergarten girl from Miranda’s class; another was a first-grade boy from Miranda’s class. The third was an older boy (fourth-grade, maybe?) whom I didn’t know; I kind of think I might have seen him at a PACT function, but I’m not sure, so he might or might not be in PACT. I have no idea how he knew the other two - maybe he met one or both of them in an Arts Focus class, maybe he knows them another way, maybe he’d never met them before.

They were playing with a hula-hoop: the older boy sent it spinning along the blacktop, while the other two ran after it. The girl usually got to it first; I don’t know if she just had more energy (she clearly did, but that might not have been sufficient), or if the other boy was just being nice and making sure that she was getting it her fair share of the time.

This went on for several minutes; all three were clearly enjoying themselves.

I am happy that my daughter goes to a school where this sort of thing can happen. And if PACT has anything to do with it, then go PACT! PACT may or may not have anything to do with it, actually: the school in general has many nice features.

I don’t want to paint it as the norm: in general, kids of about the same age (not exactly the same age, doubtless helped by the mixed-grade classrooms) and of the same gender play together. But this isn’t the only exception I’ve seen, though it is one of the more dramatic ones, in its own quiet way.

Last year, Miranda had a couple of pieces of homework each weekend: the red bookbag, where we were supposed to read some books to her and she was supposed to draw and write about them, and the yellow folder, where she was supposed to read to us. This year, the red bookbag continued, but the yellow folder turned blue and comes home most weekdays.

On the surface of it, this is reasonable enough - who could complain about having Miranda practice reading and writing at home? But the second night of the blue folder, we already ran into problems: the book was a little harder than her reading level, so while she could struggle through it with help, it took quite a while, and wasn’t something we’d want to go through every night. Fortunately, the next day was my classroom day (I got to meet the kindergartners in her class; fun), so I asked the teacher about it. The teacher said that she didn’t want it to be a big time sink - Miranda should either read the book three times or for 10-15 minutes, whichever comes first.

And 10 minutes an evening sounds pretty reasonable; who could complain about that? It turns out, though, that the answer is “I could”; here’s why.

We wake up around 6:45am. From 6:45 to 8am, we’re trying to get ourselves fed, dressed, showered, lunches packed, etc. Then we bring Miranda to school; she’s at school and daycare all day. We get home a little after 6; we have to walk the dogs, examine the mail, check answering machine messages, take tupperwares out of backpacks, etc., so assume it’s 6:15 by the time we’re done with all that.

Miranda starts getting ready to go to bed at 8:15. So, in a weekday, I have at most 2 hours of unrestricted free time to spend with my daughter. But it’s actually a lot less than that; for one thing, cooking and eating dinner take about an hour of that time. For another thing, I usually want to spend a little bit of time relaxing right when I get home, instead of playing with Miranda. And, for that matter, Miranda frequently wants to spend a little bit of time doing something, too. So 30 minutes a day is a more realistic estimate. (For weekdays; weekends are much better.)

And all of a sudden, taking 10 to 15 minutes a weekday to do homework looks flat out insane: who, in their right mind, given 30 minutes a day to spend just hanging out with their 6-year-old daughter, would give up half of that to homework? I for one am not willing to do so.

I’m sure that her teacher hasn’t worked through these numbers (she’s fresh out of school, for one thing). We have a parent teacher conference coming up, so I’ll talk to her about it, and it will doubtless be fine. And, even if it isn’t, this is a situation where we can simply say “no”. But it really scares me: for one thing, I doubt situations like this are at all uncommon, especially with the ratcheting up of “standards” that is infesting our country, and I can’t imagine that the results are good. And, for another thing, 30 minutes already sucks; I hadn’t realized the problem was so bad.

And school can already take some amount of blame for the latter. Of course, there’s only so much that can be done: Liesl and I are going to spend most of the day at work, so even if she didn’t go to school at all, she wouldn’t be hanging out with us. But if Miranda didn’t have to be at school right at 8:10 every day, then mornings could be a little more relaxed, bed time could be pushed back a bit, and bed time could be more flexible if we wanted to do something later in the evening some day.

Given the situation, I’m not even sure what the next step should be from a tactical point of view. At first I was considering asking that the blue folders be moved to weekends instead of weekdays, like last year, but, thinking about it, I think just working through the red bookbags is probably a bit more time than I’d ideally prefer to spend on homework even on weekends, though I’m willing to do so. So I’m leaning towards explaining that we simply won’t be doing the blue folders (at least regularly; Miranda may want to do them sometimes), and leaving it at that. Liesl and I will have to think about that before the conference.

Yesterday was the last day of Kindergarten. Very sad (well, not very sad, but certainly poignant): no more Wednesday mornings in classrooms, I won’t see the other kids and parents for a few months, and even once next year starts, I won’t see the current first-graders much at all. And Sue Lampkin, Miranda’s fabulous teacher, is retiring. Sigh. I can’t say I’m thrilled about having to make Miranda’s lunch every morning over the summer, either, though not having to get out of the door early on Thursdays will be nice.

At least PACT manages to ease the blow: Miranda’s brought home a lot of stuff this week that she did over the year, and we had a very nice class potluck on Monday evening, where we all got to see each other one last time, do some celebrating, and look at stuff. The first graders had been doing autobiographies; I got to look at a couple of them, and they were great! Also, they handed out CD’s with a few hundred pictures (and some movies, I think) on them. So lots of stuff to remember people by; who knows, maybe I’ll even put some of the pictures on my home page, so people will be able to see pictures of Miranda without, say, a pacifier in her mouth…

I heard back from Alfie Kohn in response to my question about John Holt and homeschooling. His anwser was that he likes a lot of what Holt said, especially in his earlier works, but he wouldn’t go as far as Holt and recommend homeschooling for two reasons:

• Public schools are an important democratic institution, one worth preserving and working to support. (And improve.)
• Kids learn a lot from collective intellectual exploration and knowledge testing and construction.

Which makes sense; I can’t say either of those reasons are show-stoppers for me, but they’re both good ones nonetheless.

Fortunately, we have several years to figure all this out. (And perhaps to improve Mountain View’s post-fifth-grade programs.)

I went to a couple of talks by Alfie Kohn this week. I’ve been a big fan of his ever since I ran into an article of his in the Emacs distribution back when I was in college. His book No Contest was a big influence on my teaching when I was a grad student and postdoc. (I wish that Punished by Rewards could have been more of an influence, but it takes more bravery than I have to avoid giving grades at a school like Stanford, though I did at least spend time thinking about when I was doing so and what values I was demonstrating by the methods I used to assign grades.)

It’s been a little while since I’d read any of his books (though I had recently bought his next-to-last one, still sitting on my books-to-read stack): he’s mostly been concentrating on schools, while I’m out of teaching, and he’s saying things that, while quite sensible, aren’t opening up as much new mental ground for me as his earlier books did. But I was excited to see that he was giving a couple of talks locally, so of course I went to both.

He’s a very lively speaker, it turns out. Or perhaps I should say very lively: not gospel revival meeting lively, or anything, but he provides a quite entertaining theatrical experience. He makes just as much sense in person as he does in his books; takes a few more pot shots against people he disagrees with, but not so much as to be distasteful, especially since the evidence really is there in the footnotes in his books.

The first talk was on schooling (”Progressive Education”, I believe the title was); I didn’t see much there that I hadn’t seen in his books (though maybe that’s because I don’t think as intently about teaching now that I’ve been (quite happily) out of the teaching business for a couple of years), but it did get me thinking about ways in which Miranda’s classroom, while quite good, is less than ideal. (No disrespect intended towards Miranda’s classroom; if you know of an ideal classroom, good for you, and Miranda’s classroom does an awful lot of things right.) I sat next to one of the other parents from Miranda’s classroom; she’d recently discovered Alfie Kohn on her own, and I’d lent her my copy of Punished by Rewards; I think she’s planning to pass it on to Miranda’s teacher, with certain bits emphasized.

The second talk was on parenting; it turns out that he has a new book out on the subject, which I picked up a copy of. This talk struck closer to home: I may not be a teacher these days, but I’m certainly a parent! And it pointed out some areas where we could try to improve: we don’t use rewards a lot, for example, but we do use them a little. (And some things that are a bit borderline: from my point of view, the reason why we don’t let Miranda have dessert if she hasn’t eaten a reasonable amount for dinner is because we don’t want her to eat dessert food at the expense of a more balanced diet, but obviously one could analyze that as either a reward or a punishment as well.) Or there are areas where we tell Miranda she has to do things where we could certainly spend more time listening to Miranda and trying to find a solution where our desires (assuming they are reasonable) are met but where we do that in a way that meets her needs better as well. Good talk; I’m looking forward to reading his latest book.

I was hoping to be able to ask him what he thinks about homeschooling, especially the John Holt-inspired versions: it seems like he and John Holt would have agreed about a lot of things, but John Holt came to the conclusion that schools in general are harmful, while Alfie Kohn hasn’t come to that conclusion. Unfortunately, there was almost no time for questions at the end of his education talk, and he was too busy / jetlagged after the talk for me to feel comfortable asking him any questions. I’m e-mailing him the question, though; hopefully I’ll get a response.

For the last month or so, Miranda’s been really into helping out with cooking dinner. I’m not quite sure what triggered it; part of it, I suspect, is that with her current bed time, she doesn’t get to spend much time with us in the evenings, and the best way to maximize that time is for her to help us with dinner, since we certainly can’t play with her while cooking! Also, the week before she started helping so much, the cooking segment at school involved her using sharp knives; this may have given her more of a sense of power and accomplishment. (We don’t let her use sharp knives at home, for what that’s worth.) (Once of the many nice things about PACT is that kids get to do stuff like cooking - basically, whatever parents are interested in teaching, kids get to do!)

Actually, though, she’s been cooking for a while, and doing it much more creatively than Liesl and I ever do. She designs her own desserts, and they can be quite distinctive. The basic model is ice cream, chocolate sauce, marshmallows, and a couple of colors of sprinkles, but she quite frequently substitutes in other ingredients (chocolate bars, cookies, fruit, whatever else she thinks of). Not always the most coherent of dishes, but they’re fun to eat (and fun to help her with), and I’m really impressed with her desire to design them.

The board finally voted last night. Actually, they voted on two things: they changed their vote of a month ago, and agreed to not close any school this year. And they voted on which school they would close next year: they’ll close Slater (my daughter’s school), PACT will move to Castro, but the rest of Castro will stay as-is (instead of moving the dual immersion program away from Castro or closing the neighborhood strand). They’ll try to get a third magnet program at Castro eventually.

All in all, I think the vote went about as well as I could imagine. I’m obviously quite happy that they’re not closing any school last year. I’m sad that Slater is targeted for closure a year for now; but I can’t honestly say that the proposal they approved isn’t the best one for the district as a whole. In particular, it’s the only proposal that actually had a positive vision for Castro, that didn’t treat Castro as a problem to be swept under the carpet somehow.

I hope that something will happen over the next year to remove the need to close any school next year, either, though I can’t say that I’m optimistic. So I’ll have to do what I can to make PACT’s probable move to Castro a smooth one. But first, a break; it’s been a busy last couple of months.

(A busy one for many people: I have been extraordinarily impressed with the way the Slater community behaved throughout this process. A lot of people worked very hard to get us this result; my heartfelt thanks to all of them.)

Another meeting at Castro last night. Not too much excitement in the community comments. I did admire (?) the chutzpah of a certain group of parents in the dual immersion program who talked about how horrible it was to close a school in that community, and then floated a plan which would turn the school into a collection of magnet programs, closing down the neighborhood program that kids in the community actually attend. (Not that they couldn’t attend the magnet programs, they just wouldn’t get priority.) I liked the guy who talked about how nobody is talking about closing Huff, despite its being as segregated as Castro, even though leaving Huff open mainly helps about a hundred kids in its neighborhood, all of whose parents have multiple cars to drive their kids to school anyways…

I actually missed the most interesting part, which was the budget discussion and voting. The district’s finance director now no longer believes that they’ll be able to rent out a school next year if they close one. So the new budget doesn’t include any actual revenue from closing a school, and is mum on the issue on whether or not they’ll reduce costs by closing a school (and, for example, eliminating jobs).

Which is a ray of hope. If they close a school, I still tend to think that they’ll close Slater. (And I can’t say I have an informed opinion about whether it would be less harmful to close Slater or Castro.) But maybe the budget news will give one trustee an excuse to shift her vote away from closing a school next year…

At the last school board meeting about school closure, they put forward a plan where the school to be closed would be Castro instead of Slater. (The latter being the school that Miranda goes to.) They wanted to give Castro parents time to complain about this, so they’re holding a couple of community forums at Castro, the first of which was Thursday. (Excellent idea - if only they’d done the same thing at Slater…)

Pretty interesting. About 30 minutes into the forum, there was a huge flap set off (mostly) by the fact that the board wouldn’t allow bilingual speakers to do their own translation. They were providing translations of everything into whichever of Spanish and English the speaker didn’t speak in; and they insisted that all speakers go through the provided translators. Which lead to an argument which ended with a five-minute break being called in the meeting. Apparently (I’ve subsequently learned) the genesis was that, in the past, people’s own translations haven’t always been accurate (and, in particular, have contained derogatory comments in the Spanish versions but not in the English versions), but the current policy seems like serious overkill to handle that issue: as it is, they’re guaranteeing that the translations are inaccurate. I would feel that way even if the translators were doing an excellent job; I’m sure they were trying their best, but they left a lot out, explicitly resorting to summarizing much of the time.

Anyways. A few people complaining about us Slater whiners. A lot of people talking about how wonderful Castro is. A lot of people talking about how awful an idea it is to close any school. (The last few weeks have seen the district’s financial officer say that she can’t count on being able to rent out a school next year if they close it, and have seen more projections of increasing student enrollment in a couple of years.) Several charges of discrimination. Right before the end were two very strong speeches by Slater teachers. One of the speeches might not have been the most politic in the world, but was interesting to me: our school district, the Mountain View-Whisman school district, got its ungainly name from the merger of two school districts three or four years ago; according to that teacher, the current behavior, motivated by budget fears and No Child Left Behind fears is much more characteristic of the Whisman school district’s pre-merger behavior than of the Mountain View district’s pre-merger behavior. (And it’s not a coincidence that PACT, the program that we’re part of, came out of the Mountain View district.) The other speaker did a great job of pulling all our points together, switching seamlessly between English and Spanish, and bringing the whole room to their feet with a standing ovation at the end.

One more community forum on Wednesday; a school board meeting the week after that. I think the decision is supposed to happen then, but I could be misremembering, and of course we’ve already seen that decisions don’t happen when scheduled.

I was sure that the school board was going to make a final vote on the school closure issue last Wednesday. The school board, however, has managed to surprise me at every other meeting on the issue; I don’t know why I expected anything different this time.

They did vote to close a school. Which, I think, was a mistake: it looks like there’s enough money in the budget to keep a school open next year, and I think there are good reasons to do so. They did not, however, vote on which school to close. They had set their sights on Slater, my daughter’s school; last night, however, they decided to explore the idea of exploring another school, Castro (which I, not entirely coincidentally, used to live half a block away from). It’s a school with a huge proportion of English-language learners, in a neighborhood where families frequently move in and move out (as we did); unsurprisingly, the school dosen’t have as high test scores as others in Mountain View, and the board has been trying for years to figure out how best to help the students there. And it looks like some board members are ready to throw up their hands and send the Castro neighborhood kids to schools with more native English speakers.

So closing Castro is now a possibility, but no decision has been made. To their credit, the board is behaving well with regards to this new twist: they’re putting the final decision off for a month to give the Castro community time to respond, and they’re holding a couple of community meetings at Castro. So that’s all to the good. I’m mad at them for closing any school at all, though. And if they can hold community meetings at Castro, why can’t they hold community meetings at Slater as well? (The demographics of the neighborhoods aren’t all that different, after all.) I honestly don’t know which school would be less harmful to close: I’d prefer that they close Castro instead of Slater, but obviously I’m biased. And I don’t really know what’s going on with this plan: maybe it’s (intentionally or not) more of a ploy to act like they were listening to the issues that Slater parents raised, but handled in such a way as to guarantee a community outcry in support of Castro, causing them to end up closing Slater like they wanted. And, at this point, the last thing I’m going to do is try to predict what the board will do a month from now: I’m completely incapable of predicting what they’ll do a week from now, let alone a month from now.

There are some other twists and turns, the most bizarre of which is that the “close Castro” proposal was actually put forward by some parents in the Spanish/English Dual Immersion program, which is currently located at Castro! Which might sound like a good argument for closing Castro - if current families there want to close it, then why keep it open? - except that I don’t think that the families proposing the plan actually live in the Castro neighborhood, so they wouldn’t be losing their neighborhood school. (Though I don’t live in the Slater neighborhood, and I, like all other families I’ve heard of with kids attending Slater, certainly don’t want Slater to close.)

My apologies if this drama is a bit boring to those of you who don’t live around here. (As opposed to my other blog entries on other topics, which are of course fascinating to all!) You’ll have to bear with me for another month or so, I’m afraid…

The school closure saga continues, and it gets stranger every week. Two weeks ago, I liked the school board but was mad at the superintendent. Last week, I was mad at everybody: the school board was just letting the superindentent and her staff talk, without (largely) seriously questioning any aspect of the report and its proposals. (I’m biased, but trust me, there’s stuff in there worth questioning.)

But yesterday was just plain bizarre. First, it turns out that the school board will almost certainly have a few hundred thousand dollars available each year than they thought; at this point, I can see no financial reason for them to close a school next year, and there may not be any financial reason for them to close a school after that, either. At this point, it suddenly turns out that we’re supposed to believe that closing a school, instead of a necessary evil, is actively good! That Slater (the school my daughter attends) is a disaster and the presence of PACT (the special program she’s in) is hurting the neighborhood kids (largely poorer, with lots of English-language learners), but if PACT gets moved to Castro (another school attended by poor kids who are English-language learners), then all of a sudden PACT’s presence will be a huge blessing! That the school district is completely confident that it has suddenly found exactly the right teacher training program to cure all of Castro’s (long standing) woes, despite the fact that we have no actual experience with the program, and that in fact teachers were first exposed to it in a training session two days ago! That, despite the fact that PACT is nothing other than the reification of a particular educational philosophy, it must be the case that, if we disagree with switching over to this newfound gospel, it must be because we’re bigots! Oy.

Anyways, I’m more favorably inclined towards the Superintendent than I had been: I still think she’s pushing a harmful program, but she is doing a fair job of evaluating some of the possible evidence that speaks against the necessity of school closure. I’m quite impressed by two of the trustees (Rosemary Roquero and Fran Kruss, for you local readers), I get angrier every time one of the trustees says anything (Ellen Wheeler), and am disappointed but not giving up hope in the other two (Gloria Higgins, Fiona Walter). At least this soap opera should be over, for better or for worse, by next Wednesday: the discussion has suddenly gotten a lot more heated and serious.

The full report of the school closure task force came out last Tuesday, so I’ve been busy writing to the school board, and I spent almost six hours at the school board meeting last night. I actually was pretty impressed by a lot of things that I saw there. Members of the public (including your humble scribe) spoke for three hours; people made a lot of good points, and repeated each other remarkably little given the length of comments. I also liked what I saw from the school board: they were clearly paying attention throughout the comment period, following along in the report when people referred to specific aspects of the report’s evidence or logic. After the public comment, the school board members clearly felt that they needed a lot more information than they had, so they decided to devote next week’s meeting to investigating evidence and digging into issues that people had raised, instead of proceeding to a vote as planned.

I can’t say that I was too impressed by the superintendent, however: in particular, she seems to have a habit of defining words to mean what she wants them to mean, instead of what the rest of the world thinks that they mean. The best example of this is in the press release that her office issued about the report: it says that

the over-arching goal was to make a closure decision that was the least disruptive

(emphasis in original) and then proceeded to outline a plan that wouldn’t simply close a single school (as was the plan, and as the rest of the task force thought they were deciding) but would, in addition, gut a second school, and ensure that students at that second school would have to change schools in third grade for the indefinite future, unlike all other schools in the district. She tried to ease the disconnect by following the above quote with

- meaning that it promoted the best learning environment for all students

but of course, as laudable as the latter goal might be, it simply is a completely different goal from minimizing disruption. (And I am personally not at all convinced that her plan met the latter goal, either.)

This curious use of language wasn’t confined to the press release, either. In response to complaints about the facts that the task force at times held their discussions in closed sessions, she explained that, in fact, the meetings were always open sessions. At this point, my jaw quite literally dropped, and I let out an involuntary squeak (which earned me a bit of a glare); while I’m aware of the expression, this is the first time in the life that I’ve had that involuntary physiological reaction myself. She then further explained that, by “open meeting”, she meant that people were allowed to speak in public for an hour before they were all ushered out, the doors were closed and windows covered, and the rest of the meeting proceeded in private. Which is, I think, not the way that most of us understand the phrase.

Anyways, I guess I’m attending school board meetings for the indefinite future; seeing how they work, I’m actually rather interested. And, as I said a while back, I’d been feeling that I should get involved with local politics a bit more…

Thursday, a week and a half ago, we had our monthly classroom meeting (for Miranda’s kindergarten class). And we learned that Miranda’s school is probably going to be closed next year. It was public knowledge that one school was going to be closed, but I had kind of been in denial over the issue - even if Slater were the school chosen for closure PACT (the parent participation program that we’re in) would move to another school, and I can’t imagine that very many people want their kid’s school to be closed, and what reason do I have to think that Slater deserves to stay open more than any other school?

Confronted with the likelihood that Slater actually will close, however, I quickly realized that I didn’t think Slater should close; besides PACT, the principal is great, and Liping Ma is working with the teachers to improve their math teaching, which really excited me when I heard about it.

Anyways, Thursday night’s sleep was interrupted by Miranda puking. Then, on Sunday, it was my turn to get the stomach bug. Then, that evening, I heard some dripping in the fireplace; at first I assumed that it was raining outside, but when I walked the dogs, it was dry out. So then, the question is “what is above the fireplace that could cause dripping?”, to which the answer is “the water heater!”. Fortunately, I was staying home on Monday anyways (both because of illness and because of MLK day); it took a little longer than expected, but we now have a new water heater. Actually, it’s just as well that it was replaced now: it turned the old one had its pipes hooked up backwards, which was why the hot water only lasted about one shower’s worth, so I’m glad that’s fixed. (And I’m also glad that it failed with a slow drip while I was at home instead of in a more catastrophic fashion.)

On Tuesday, I went to a school closure task force meeting and had my say in the public comment period. (The actual deliberations were closed to the public, which rather bothers me - I thought California had a law forbidding that?) On Friday, it was Liesl’s turn to get the stomach bug - I devoutly hope that it’s the same bug instead of an exciting new one that Miranda and I will get to go through ourselves…

Still, we’re all on the mend now. We’ll learn on Tuesday what the school closure task force recommends; no matter what, I expect that I’ll be going to school board meetings the next two Thursdays. (I’ve already sent a long e-mail to the school board; I’ve also been pleased at the attention the press is paying to the matter.) And, if Slater is closed, we’ll survive; PACT will probably have a somewhat bumpy year next year, but I far prefer a bumpy year of PACT to a normal year in a normal classroom…