I love reading books on teaching by creative, daring educators with a liberal bent, and in that sense this was a great book. Written more formally than
Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire, it was still a fascinating read. Here are a few thoughts upon the text...
1. Inflammatory Language: Have a Little Respect for the Intelligence of the Reader
This book is quite radical in many respects. If I have any objection to the material, it would be
Smith’s use of inflammatory language which certainly will never serve to change
the minds of those who really need to hear what he has to say. When he speaks of
social change and mindless conformity (p 46), he states that individual
relationships between students and teachers has all but disappeared. Not in my classroom, I say! Nor the classrooms of many other teachers I know. Another example of inflammation would be the eugenics example (p 62), which more or less compares educational psychology to the forced sterilization or mass murder
perpetuated by the Nazis in World War II, or when he claims that the induction
of psychology into the classroom eliminated all hope of students learning
values, loyalty, compassion or care (p 590.) In these respects, Smith is insulting certain
sensitive teachers by not giving them enough credit for knowing and reaching
their students. I very much doubt that any teacher is in their position for the
money. It therefore stands to reason that we teach because most of us have a
genuine liking for our students and desire to know and reach them. These types
of examples, though useful as illustrations and in many ways quite apt,
alienate more conservative readers. Having said this, I have to say that my
only other objection to Smith’s writing is that in my case he is preaching to
the choir. His use of inflammatory illustrations is actually quite deliberate.
He
wants readers to be outraged at
the Official Theory of Education. He
wants
educators to be incensed that proponents of the official theory don’t give them
enough credit for knowing how to teach well. He wants us to be so angry about
these issues that we decide to
do
something about them. I might even go so far as to state that those who don’t
understand this point actually deserve to feel a little insulted for their
intellectual capacity. I mean, seriously, who can read about John Watson’s
claim that he could teach children whatever he wanted from birth if he had
enough control over them, and his subsequent career change to advertizing (p.
58) and not find this book vastly entertaining, if not outright amusing at
times?
2. The Literacy Club
Like the Freemasons, I know this club exists because I am a member. I know the secret
handshakes and all the tricks of the trade. I had the great privilege of having
a mother who was a voracious reader, valued education, and went to college
while I was in elementary school. We sat at the kitchen table doing our
homework together. When Mom had to cram for a Biology test, I'm convinced I got
creative bedtime stories such as “The Positive Little Proton.” I went to school
already inundated with vocabulary to the point that my classmates teased me for
sounding “like a robot.” (This was perhaps the beginning of my realization that
not everyone was in “the club” and perhaps didn’t understand it like I did.)
My ex husband, on the other hand, was not a member of the club. Given what I now
know about literacy, I’d say his teachers didn’t realize that he was dyslexic.
He would see the words and read them, but get mixed up and then forget
everything he had read. Perhaps even more detrimental to his education was the
fact that his father did not read, either, and neither parent ever read to him.
Frustrated and unhappy, deciding school was simply not for him (and by Smith’s definition
of what schools are I’d say he was right), he dropped out high school.
Given our
respective backgrounds, we were both very anxious when our son’s Kindergarten
teacher informed us that he wasn’t picking up on his reading as well as he
ought to for his age. Truthfully, we both worried that maybe dyslexia was
genetic. Additionally, I was angry and afraid because I felt helpless about
what was happening to my son in school. At home I did everything a mother
could. Since my children were infants I read to them and around them, and if
they came to me carrying a book, I dropped everything I was doing and sat down
and read to them. I read menus to them, and cookbook recipes, and if they asked
me a question I went to the library and we looked up the answers in a book.
First grade came, and still my son was not “in the club.” In fact, he was put
in the
other club,
Title I reading, and drawn out of the
classroom for the “extra help” he needed. And do you know why he was placed in
Title I? Because he didn’t understand the portion of The Dibles with the
nonsense
words! (Note p. 54 and Ebbinghaus’ laws of forgetting in relation to nonsense
words) Crushed, I watched as my son struggled and feared he would consider
himself a non-reader forever because he was being segregated and opened up for
attacks on his reading ability.
This is where I feel conflicted about what
Smith has to say: My son got better. By the end of the year, he had written and
illustrated his own sixteen paged story about a laboratory mouse, and he won
first prize in the Young Authors and Illustrators competition. Yes, it is
possible for kids to get labeled and to feel inferior, but not if it’s handled
properly. I believe more and more that educators are taking classes where these
things are discussed and they are doing things about the climate in their
classroom that encourages collaboration and peer support. I believe it because
it is what I have been learning in college myself. I'm certain if they're teaching it at a little university like Ferris, they are teaching it elsewhere
3. Testing and Rote Memorization Lead to Forgetting
I hate spelling tests. I think they are evil and quite useless. This is not because I myself
struggle with spelling. Quite the contrary: I was a member of “the spelling
club.” I seldom missed a word, and I
loved
using the words correctly in a sentence, because I knew I was good with
spelling words. I also knew, and so did everyone else in the class, who was
not good at spelling. Worse,
they knew it, too. No amount of spelling
tests or years in school ever changed the nonspellers to spellers. I never
understood this, because I knew that spelling was simply an exercise in rote
memorization. As such, I despise spelling words on principle.
On the other
hand, I love vocabulary words. Vocabulary words are powerful and beautiful. However,
like all powerful things, vocabulary words can be abused. For example, they can
be turned into spelling words.
While I was
teaching reading, spelling tests were a required part of the curriculum and, as
a mere substitute teacher, it would appear there was nothing I could do about it.
I mentioned wistfully to the head of the English department that I thought
spelling tests were pointless exercises in memorization, and received a very
long lecture on the virtues of proper spelling in a society full of pernicious
texting in place of real literature. (This seemed a bad time to mention my
Romeo and Juliet assignment wherein students rewrote the scenes as text message
conversations that they then preformed and had to translate for me by use of PowerPoint
presentations. I learned what “BRB” meant, among other things.) When the
lecture was over, I had the nerve to suggest that there was such a thing as
spell check. At this rash statement, my colleague became positively apoplectic.
The main point is that I had no control over the use of spelling tests in that
classroom. The only control I was given was
what
words were to be spelled. Truthfully, I decided to use the vocabulary
words, and I chose the words from the book we were reading in class. Why did I
do this? Because this was how
I was
taught, and in desperate times when we are backed against walls, we resort to
what we learned, and how we learned it. I hated the spelling tests because the
students who were “good” spellers wouldn’t need to study and the students who
considered themselves “bad” spellers wouldn’t try to study. I was teaching
eighth grade, and they had all already decided which “club” they were in. The
only way in which I redeemed those words was in putting them into a context and
helping the definitions make sense to the students. I used each week’s words as
often as possible in conversation, on worksheets, and in notes on the board. I
gave students extra credit for using the words in casual conversation or
finding examples of how the words were used in our books, on the news, and by
their parents. In Frank Smith’s words, I provided a framework within which the
vocabulary made sense to the students, so that they could remember them (p 33) I
know teaching methods such as this are not dead, because I learned
them from one of my former teachers as
well. And I did not forget.
I remember in the fourth grade that two of my
spelling words were “mallard” and “detergent.” I don’t remember this because
the spelling test helped me learn the words. I will never forget it because I
decided that if I was going to have to use every single word correctly in a
sentence, I should try to make a story out of them. I remember the words
because my story was about a mallard duck who appeared at the door of a
detective (another spelling word) one dark and stormy night covered in suds,
coughed out the word, “Detergent!” and then died there. Thus followed a
harrowing murder mystery in which pollution was the blame. My teacher was so
amused by my story that he had me read it to the class, and from then onward I
was not only a member of the spelling club and the reading club, I was an
author, and such a talented one that my classmates begged for new stories every
time we had another spelling test. I agree with Smith that testing should be about
doing rather than data. I agree that
we should find what makes our students tick and use that to help them discover
and use their talents toward learning that is sufficiently meaningful and
significant for them that they never forget it.
4. The Official Theory Goes Online
Ten years ago I’d
have thought this chapter was ridiculous. Computers replace teachers?! Hogwash!
Now I see with these Apex classes at Big Rapids High School or in New
Directions and other alternative school settings that this is exactly what is
happening. Smith says “There is always more money for equipment than for people
(p 74),” and sadly he’s right. In fact, some schools are looking to get
more of such classes, because they can
pay a paraprofessional less to monitor them than they would have to pay a
teacher. Even more tragically, this is the absolute
worst demographic of students that they could possibly do this to.
The kind of students who need to attend alternative schools are the kind of
students who most need dynamic, creative teaching that inspires them to learn
for themselves. Giving up and just sitting them in front of computers is
telling them that they aren’t worth the money and effort of a good teacher,
reinforcing their exclusion from the learning “club.” I’ve subbed in these
classrooms and I’ve seen it, and it’s heartbreaking. These classrooms are
packed with students who, if you get to know them, are phenomenally talented at
art and music, or mechanics, but there isn’t enough time or money for schools
to invest in the “enrichment” courses at which they would excel. I hate what I
see happening in education but have yet to figure out exactly how to fight it.
Of course, Smith doesn’t just tell us what’s wrong with the system and leave it at that;
he does make an effort to address how to sally forth into battle against the
dragons he has demonized at the continued expense of my peace of mind. He says
that it begins in the classroom. Of course, he contradicts this statement
earlier in the book when he also states that nothing can be done in the
classroom because of the “second-hand smoke” of the official learning theory
polluting our minds and the minds of our students. I want to kick him in the
kneecaps for this pessimistic, dreary illustration, but I have to agree with it
on some level because I see it in their faces. I see it in the faces of my
students as they trudge warily into my classroom and glare at me, waiting to
see what torture will be inflicted upon them next (p. 59). Education shouldn’t
be like this, and yet there it is. They are gun-shy from whatever the other
teachers may have done to them that day, from what their parents may have done
(or not done) for years, and somehow I have to cut through all that and reach
them, teach them anyway. And, surprisingly, I do. I don’t do it in the daily,
perfect way that I strive for, but in fits and bursts of fireworks and
enthusiasm, I see it happening despite all my faults. Because Smith is exactly
right when he says that students have an innate desire to learn. We just have
to give them enough of a chance to see that they
can learn. Smith provides a history of how education morphed from
what was good to what he paints as evil; and yet he doesn’t actually “throw the
baby out with the bathwater” as his inflammatory illustrations might lead one
to believe. In the end, he isn’t making any suggestions as to what constitutes
good teaching that most teachers don’t use already. If nothing else, he leaves
teachers with the question not of whether or not students are learning so much
as what they are learning – and how they are learning it. If educators were to
pay more attention to this, student learning could be taken for granted, and
the standardized classrooms and testing we could all forget.
I'm going to see my sister today.
