“Is Our Children Learning?” - Yep, They Is

I was waiting for an Egg McMuffin at a McDonalds one morning in a barrio neighborhood of Brooklyn, where I lived and worked. The guy in line behind me had a hideous skin graft on his face the size, shape and color of someone’s leather boot. He asked me if I was the manager. I guess he was making an inference, as we educators like to say, based on my necktie.

            “No.” I said. “I’m a teacher.”

            “Yeah?” He said. “Teach me something.”

            “It’s not like that.” I said.

            “I bet I could teach you something.”

            My Egg McMuffin arrived, and I said goodbye.

The truth of the matter is that he could teach me something. He could teach me a lot. But what do I have to teach him? What could I teach this man with the hideous skin graft standing in line to get our colon cancer happy meals? The only thing I could think of at the time was to show him the trick of how to multiply by nine using your fingers, but there is other knowledge he could make better use of. Maybe if he had said, “what can you help me learn,” then I may have thought of a better response. Yes, blame the student.

I have nothing to teach him, or anyone else. I am a teacher, and yet what do I really teach? A noun is a person, place, or thing (or idea). Uh, and Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth president of the United States. What knowledge could I impart to him? What could I cause him to know? What new attitude could I accustom him to? How could I guide his experience? How dare I guide his experience? What does it mean to teach? What does it mean to educate? Is it simply training and discipline?

How many teachers use external motivation like candy and gold stars with their students as if they were training dogs? I did. I taught my dog and my students to sit, through a combination of bribery and fear. Is teaching just a sick power trip disguised as goodwill?

You don’t have to be a teacher to everyone all of the time to consider yourself a good teacher. I am not always in teacher-mode. I don’t force my rhetoric on people who don’t ask for it. What’s the point? Could I change his habits of mind? Could I change my own?

Moral of the story: never eat at McDonalds, but if you do, never wear a necktie.

So, what is teaching? It’s more than obedience training, though that is indisputably part of it. It’s more than depositing facts. It’s more than passing on a political agenda, isn’t it?

I truly appreciate the ideas and work of Paulo Freire, and I intend to read Pedagogy of the Oppressed in its entirety the first chance I get. Critics like Richard Miller reveal the flaws inherent in putting Friere’s theory into practice. Such arguments make us witness to a polarizing debate between extreme political agendas regarding education.

This debate is important to appreciate and continue. I fear too many of my fellow graduate students and future teachers do not take to heart the great human struggle at the center of this discussion, and sadly, predictably grown about being asked to formulate their ideas on these essential issues of the teaching act while seeming ironically obsessed with issues of format and word count, scarcely uttering a concern about the thinking behind the content.

How would such a person teach others to write? How could such a person release the writing anxiety in others? Now you know how I feel about my peers.    

The root question is; what do we do to make the activities in our classrooms authentic?

It is imperative that we do so. Individual teachers should be allowed to do this in their own ways. Teachers not only deserve autonomy, but it is essential to a student-centered classroom. Each class has its own chemistry, dynamic, and personality. The teacher must be allowed to shape the moment-to-moment activities in the classroom by allowing lessons to flow from the learner. Certain ideas catch with certain groups, and with other groups they don’t.

My first-year teaching, I improvised a Halloween activity involving a witch puppet and a short story about the Salem Witch Trials. We wrote stories about the witch one-day, then later read about Salem, and rewrote our stories with a more refined understanding of the witch’s point of view. She became an honorary member of the class and stayed propped up in the room for the rest of the year.

My students the next year never related to her, nor put themselves in her place as my students did the year before. The lesson flopped, though I did everything the same way I did the year before. Perhaps, the first year we stumbled upon this experience together, and the second year I had an agenda of teaching social equality using a puppet and a page in our workbook.

One can’t force an understanding. The teacher must make discoveries also.

Regarding my own political prejudices at work in the classroom, I’m afraid that there is much to say. During the 2000 election I facilitated in my fourth-grade class presidential debates and we followed the recount very closely. We read the paper everyday and watched speeches on the news. All but one of my students was a Gore supporter.

My students would always ask me “Who did you vote for?” And I’d say, “I can’t tell you. It’s a secret ballot” (what a jerk). They had no idea that their near unanimous opinion on the candidates clearly revealed my political bias and how I shamelessly shaped their beliefs.

My students wrote excellent essays on the presidency, but could they be called critical? Did they really construct their own meaning, or just reflect mine? The answer is that I clearly influenced their thinking, while never revealing my personal beliefs. That is a troublesome combination. I tried to encourage my students to form their own opinions, but how could they when I provided the material that they based their judgments on? What did I teach them?

I manipulated these impressionable young people for my own ends. I wanted them to dislike the republican candidate and to distrust the system that put him in power, not simply question it. I told myself that I was engaging them in our democratic process, and fostering a healthy cynicism toward the government.

I wanted them to fight the power, and I played Public Enemy’s song of that title to give them a thumping bass to accompany that ideology. I warped the system to my own ends and abused the authority that I was invested with in order to do it.

I’m not proud of what I did, but I’d do it again.

I know that I engaged them with the material. How many nine-year-old kids could write a two-page rant about Katherine Harris at 8:30 in the morning? Mine could. But for what? What good did I do? What harm did I do? I don’t pretend to have an answer for that.

Will these kids continue an engagement with current events, as they grow older?

Will they all register to vote when they turn eighteen? Will one of them be president someday? Of course not. So, why did I do what I did, and what could I have done for that guy in McDonalds with the horrible skin graft?

I bet he got that graft at Woodhall Hospital.

It was the neighborhood hospital, famous for stories of babies being dropped out windows and other graphic images that capture the imagination and fears of people in the neighborhood. So many of my students had an ugly experience at that hospital that I asked the to write for me everything they heard or knew about that place. I wish I had saved their work.

So, why would I have them write down the lies they’ve heard about this institution? Why would I lead them to believe that our chief executive is a cheater? What do I have to gain? What do they, or society in general, have to gain from such an exercise?

My answer is, I don’t really know.

I don’t have a rationale for every act in the classroom. Just citing a few words from Bloom’s taxonomy would usually end any argument about my teaching practices. Could this be called intentional teaching if I don’t know what the outcome will be? My intention? To incite a peasant uprising.

You’d be a fool not to believe that teaching others to read and write has political consequences. The alphabet itself is perhaps the most powerful tool that humanity has ever created. It’s ability to transfer human experience and knowledge into a concise and easily retrievable series of symbols has greatly affected how human beings interact with the world around them.

I would not want to introduce my students to racism, but once they have discovered how screwed-up the world is by around age ten, then I think it’s acceptable to begin exposing them to the experiences of those who have fought and suffered to combat such issues.

I couldn’t help but notice that the vast majority of the students I had contact with in the elementary school where I worked could only name two US Presidents.

You guessed it... George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

Why is this? The reasons are obvious, but also obscure. I won’t take the time to speculate why that is, but I would never speculate that this reveals some ideological leader worship fascist propaganda.

The unanimous uncomprehending daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance is a little creepy, and glorying to the bombs bursting in air song is perhaps not as necessary as we make it in the public schools. Of course, to openly challenge this coerced mass chanting would be un-American.

Well, I love my country and I think I would do a disservice to our national heritage and our historical philosophy, by that I mean the work of Jefferson, Franklin, and Emerson to name a few, if I allowed myself to be habitually uninformed. I would do a disservice to our philosophical present and future if I allowed my students to be programmed by the state, of which I am a representative.

I like to stir things up. In that sense, I’m not conservative. In terms of public conduct and behavior, my experience as a teacher has made my view very conservative. There is a way people have to conduct themselves in a pubic forum. I actually had a new tolerance and understanding of police brutality after I had struggled to maintain control of students and myself in the unpredictably hostile environment of the urban jungle public school system. People should be free to think as they please.

When the year was over my students knew more about Washington and Lincoln, a bit about Jefferson, Nixon, and we studied the Kennedy assassination inside out. I never asked permission to do so. I’ll admit that studying the Zapruder film with fourth graders may have been excessive, but I also have to admit that they were genuinely engaged. Our children should know about Ruby and Oswald. They should know about Watergate. They should know about Florida.

When the World Trade Center that they had lived in sight of since they were born was destroyed one morning, these already premature young people grew up even more.

I don’t regret introducing them to Malcolm X, Adolph Hitler, Albert Einstein, and Aretha Franklin on class time. Our world is worth understanding. We’ll never understand it if we don’t try. Just because you’re ten years old doesn’t mean you can’t understand Gandhi. I did what I could.

Did I tell them about Strom Thurmond and other great American conservatives? No, I didn’t.

We saved and sent money to the children of Afghanistan, but the President stole our money, as one student put it. Ten-year-olds are the best to talk politics with.

My student’s opinions on the spy plane that went down in China had simple logic that was hard to argue with, equating the situation to losing a ball over someone’s fence. Those kids were more up on current events than their parents, or most other grownups in the school were I assure you. I love that word grownup.

I was so excited when one of my students came to school telling me about the “phoenix memo” and “connecting the dots” after watching the news one night.

When one little girl told me she wanted to be the first woman president, you know I wanted to do everything I could for her. I was a sucker for any kid who wanted to learn.

Yes, I see teaching as a form of social change. I wouldn’t do it otherwise.

As revolutionary pedagogue Richard Miller says, if we aren’t in the business of uplift toward a better social world, what is it we’re doing in our classrooms?

Yes, I think schools should build a person’s character. The school has to value something, whether it’s standardized tests, military discipline, or football. I value critical thinkers and active citizens. That’s how I felt on my first day of teaching and I never wavered in that belief. That is my goal when I teach. Culturally expected factual knowledge is just a piece of the puzzle.

I guess that it is only fair that when I teach my students about Thurgood Marshall that we should also learn about Clarence Thomas. Robert Kennedy and Jeb Bush. Hey, I’ll do a unit on Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond for every unit on Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

Somehow the accomplishments of these conservatives don’t seem to measure up, but I’ll leave it to my students to draw that conclusion. If I mention the NAACP, then I’ll be sure to talk about the KKK. When the next school shooting occurs, I will remind my students that gun ownership is protected by the second amendment. How could anyone say anything biased about the great Ronald Reagan? What can we say about J. Edgar Hoover? The CIA? No. Let’s stick to regurgitating sound bites from the I Have a Dream speech.

Two teachers, each from different ideological backgrounds, in every classroom might remedy the problem. How about surveillance cameras in every classroom to monitor the teacher’s ideology?

Maybe there are certain words that we should not be allowed to use in the classroom.

These are public schools and no one in the community should ever be forced to confront an unpopular idea.

The real solution to this problem is obvious:

A two-ton statue of the Ten Commandments in every classroom will keep radical teachers in line. Nothing says cultural plurality like a giant granite engraving of Judeo-Christian laws.

A combination of teacher surveillance, strategic hiring practices, forbidden topics, and the Ten Commandments will make our schools a safe place for children to learn about freedom.

Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance once every hour would help us love our country more as well. Mandatory ROTC at the elementary level would be a step toward preserving our freedoms overseas.

If only there were some way to make people more like robots. It is a national security concern. These radical leftist teachers are a threat to American values.

Where is Joe McCarthy when you need him?

President Bush’s education secretary was right to call the teacher’s union a terrorist organization. All these wacko teachers should be taken to Guantanamo and shot. Every left of center classroom is an al Queda training camp.

Homelessness can be solved though mass arrests. Overcrowded jails can be cleared out with mandatory death penalties. But let’s not forget who the real enemy is, the environment. The ozone must be destroyed before it causes anymore interference with corporate profit.

Current events should never be discussed in the classroom until the administration has defined the terms and the outcome of each discussion. We need one teacher for the entire country whose voice comes over a loudspeaker in each schoolhouse, while school employees simply maintain discipline and take out the trash. Problem solved.

Yes, I am the conservative’s nightmare in the classroom.

I can’t reveal to you how deep my counter-culture credentials run without getting myself in trouble. I’ve been in very difficult situations of a great many varieties, on the other hand, I probably can’t name three world leaders, yet I am in a position to teach others at the elementary through college levels.

Most of our teachers don’t know when the Civil War was or how many planets are in our solar system. Maybe our students don’t learn these things because the teachers don’t understand them either.

Is this an accident, or is it by design? Coincidence or conspiracy!?!

There is a lot of talk these days about discrimination against conservative viewpoints on college campuses. Perhaps we should redefine how diversity is measured before we dictate what points of view are to be espoused. We cannot mandate a universal point of view, nor exclude exposure to alternate perspectives.

We can foster a plurality of methodologies and perspectives by battling ignorance, not by preaching an ideology. We can have our personal freedom and still appreciate the rights of others. There are healthy ways to have this debate, in which all views can be appreciated.

College campuses are among the best places in America to have those discussions.

I believe the following passage, written by one of my fourth-grade students, reveals, in the worst way, the effect my ideology had on the perceptions/truths/opinions of those in my care:

I think they should Algore for the presdent not Bush because he did bad thing like killing people but my teacher he was supose to killed because the person that Bush kill they killed people and He or She when to jail to See if they were gilte and if they is they will getkilled by Bush

This student seems to be reflecting on candidate Bush’s record as Texas governor regarding capital punishment. The word Bush becomes almost synonymous with killing. This clearly reflects what the child heard in class from his teacher.

It is revealing that I, the teacher, am implicated in the passage in a mysterious way in the phrase “but my teacher.” What right do I have in talking about the death penalty to those children? What right do I have to apparently foster such a close connection between Bush and killing?

I have no way of knowing how something I say, even in passing, may affect one of my students. I try to be conscious of what I say and honest in my remarks, but perhaps I go too far. I could say that in helping my students understand the importance of our class rules, the larger social debate about capital punishment helped us make connections to the real world.

The classroom is also the real world. The classroom is the place where children are socialized. It is extremely political. To imply that school is not political is to politicize it in the worst way by making it secretive and deceitful.

There are many levels of education, but I think a certain frame of mind is behind the ideological debate we seem to constantly be having about education. College should be a well-deserved oasis from the benign dictatorship of grammar and secondary schools. Mass control and standardized assessment is the rule in a compulsory schooling environment.

Let’s allow the university to be a step into a larger world, rather than... oh, I can get so lost on an idealistic tangent. It’s no wonder I’ll be such a danger to the establishment once I’m inside its doors again.

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Forcing my twisted views on unsuspecting students!

So few members of our society go to college. Why do they go? To get better jobs? Is that all there is to it? There is certainly no guarantee of big bucks for a sheepskin, kid. Maybe the university is a place where people go to be exposed to new ideas and to improve their abilities and understanding of the things they enjoy.

Compulsory schooling is lockdown USA. It is not fun. By the very nature of mandatory attendance, it is a place of control and confinement.

College, on the other hand is a place where people choose to attend. Its definition is more liberal in contrast to elementary and secondary levels.

The standardized test reveals its major flaw by its name. While the powers that be give lip service to diversity and multiculturalism, they hold people to a uniform standard of accomplishment or fail them until they are old enough to drop out.

There should be benchmarks in education. The diploma should mean something, but what does it mean now? I

t’s not a ticket to middle class bliss, as it had been perceived before. It is more a record of one’s ability to comply with the compulsory attendance laws. It should be more. I doubt there is any one thing that I, personally, could do to change that or make things better.

We, in the public school system, do not prepare our children for the real world. We do not help them develop their thinking processes in a way that genuinely helps them in life. Learning to count and read is only part of the picture.

Individual teachers have the power to change how America raises its children, to turn apathy into interest, but we will burn-out fast (every 2-years or so) and need constant replacement.