DaveShearon

Catch up

Tyler called today and, among other things, noted that I hadn't posted anything in the last few days.  Nice to know he checks and, he's right!  Busy! 

Kay Brooks, Nashville, and an active home schooler has a new blog that will focus mostly on Tennessee education.

One of the things I've been busy with is setting up a new Dell Latitude X1.  NO FAN!  And, of course, small and light.  Unbelievable.  BTW, PC Relocator Ultra Control does a nice job.  Not perfect, but very helpful.  Even moved the in-house management software we use that requires registry entries!

Chubbily is doing fine and weighs 10 pounds.

I got to talk with another education blogger today, and enjoyed it very much.  Good people in education.  As systems thinkers know, when you've got good people and aren't getting good results, change the system.  We're working on it!

Well, that's it.  Hey, at least it's a post!

Change or Die!

May's Fast Company has a cover article on "Change or Die."  Points include:

• 9 out of 10 bypass patients have failed to change life-threatening habits 2 years after surgery
• 77% of such patients succeeded in a radical life-style change including significant support structures
• A vision of a better life (world?  school?) promotes change better than fear or crisis
• Facts don't drive change; we don't accept, much less act on facts that don't fit our world view.  (Vision helps re-frame.)
• Emotional connection drives change -- vision again.

Let's apply these to efforts to improve schools.

NCLB (which is only one aspect of the test-score based change imperative which has been growing for twenty-five years) uses facts and fear to try to achieve change.  Neither will work.  This is, of course, not a statement that facts are unimportant.  Data can help direct change, but it won't drive it.

At the system level, superintendents and school boards are using programs to try and drive change -- and then are surprised when they don't work.  No new vision, no change.  Minor tweaking -- no change.  Programs lack vision and are (at least as they come out of district offices) just a minor tweaking of "doing school."  Any surprise there's no change?

Change is hard.  But, if students are to learn and achieve more next year, and the year after and the one after that and so on, adults -- teachers, faculties, principals -- are going to have to change their behaviors.  Not easy.  And not helped by either the state and national level "facts and fear" approach, nor by the system level programmatic response.

BTW, this is going in a new, "If Schools Were Run Like a (Great) Business..." category.  I'll come back to this, as I believe the world of business can suggest some ways we can hope for teachers, faculties, principals, system personnels and, yes, even school boards to change.

Competition for the "Elites"

Yesterday WSJ had a front page story with the headline "For High Schoolers, Summer is Time to Polish Resumes."  It told of rising sophomores going to African to work with AIDS victim then to Yale to present a "plan of action", or to Georgetown for a five-week course on medical careers and SAT prep course combined.  Here's the meat:

Getting into America's elite colleges has never been tougher, and now, in addition to grades and test scores, essays, recommendations and class rank, there's this for teens and their parents to worry about: summer.

"Summers are important, big time," says Lloyd Peterson, vice president of College Coach LLC, which charges $3,499 for its college-counseling services. "The more prestigious the school, the more important the summers are."

Admissions officers dispute that. They say that how a youngster spends summers won't make or break a college application. "It doesn't matter as much as what they're doing in the school year," says Richard Nesbitt, admissions director at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass.

But as a record number of high schoolers heads for college, summer is taking on huge importance among super-achieving teens and their parents -- and a whole industry is sprouting to serve them.

Lots of kids applying to the same universities is an ego boost (and tuition boost) for those universities.  It's also obviously a money-maker for some adults.  And it can be a source of pride and competition for high school faculties and guidance counselors.  But, is it of value to the students? 

I suspect not.  Kids don't know they want to go to one of these schools -- they don't have a clue about college as high school freshmen (or seniors), much less which college.  Even the best "college search" is usually ends in a hopeful guess.  And, for the most part, college is what you make of it. 

I have a son at Emory.  Getting into an "elite" university wasn't his goal nor ours, it just happened.  Good fit for a lot of reasons.  And it's been a great experience.  But he didn't focus his high school experience on that goal (ask his teachers!), and he didn't think he had "made it" when he got in.  I think it is a mistake to push kids on external goals that ultimately cannot deliver on the hopes put on them.  Better to push them to engage, to work at what they are doing, to read and discuss and think. 

Now, having said that, I'll admit that Tyler wasn't casual about his passions, and neither were we.  He wanted to play baseball, and he worked at it and we made it possible for him to pursue it at the highest level he could in high school.  And, that was part, I suspect, of what made him attractive to Emory.  But it is what he learned from that effort, including the ability to persist and overcome, that will serve him well at Emory and beyond.  Had he been doing it just to get into an "elite,"  I doubt it would have had the same value.

So, focus on the kid, not the college.  It will work better in both the short and the long runs.

Personal Journalism

I wrote the bottom of this post first and assigned it to the category "media."  Then it struck me that I'd written about this before, so I went looking.  (And why doesn't Typepad have tools for this?  I get the list of posts, but have to go to Google to get the permalinks.  Maybe I'm missing something.)

A Reader-Supported Journalist   5/23/2004

Stand-Alone Journalism  6/24/2004

and

Citizen Journalists 10/28/2004

So, I get to see how my personal screening system keeps letting in this topic, and my take on it.  Interesting.  And probably educational.  So, I'm adding weblogs and education to the categories.  After all, it's my blog, right?  And here's the original post.

An article for the newspaper world gets it:

The newspaper industry has known for a long time that eventually wood pulp would give way to microprocessors. That long-awaited paradigm shift now seems imminent. We may very soon be predominately an electronic medium, and that has many print executives on edge.

Newspapers have enjoyed some of the biggest profit margins of any industry for decades, and it is unclear if those can hold in a Web-based environment.

And,

Moreover, when you no longer need the millions of dollars in capital, the multimillion dollar press, the network of delivery people fanning out across the land, to start a newspaper, the door opens to competition.

ActiveWords as a Knowledge Base

I've recently deployed ActiveWords for the Enterprise in my office.  I did minimal training on it, but the wordbase I had developed was geared to providing standard answers to common e-mail questions.  For example, if someone sends us an e-mail with new adress information, we can hit reply and type the word "address" then hit the F8 key and ActiveWords will erase the word "address" and substitute:

Address Changes:  Please log into your personal area on our web site by clicking on Attorneys under "Site Information Areas." You will need your BPR number and PIN (printed on your ARS).  From there, you can make any desired address, telephone, fax, or e-mail changes to your Personal Information so it will flow directly into our system.  This insures accuracy and helps reduce administrative costs we would incur to hire staff to re-key these changes.  In addition, mailing address changes will be automatically sent to the Board of Professional Responsibility for entry into their system.  You may also change your mailing address by writing to the Board of Professional Responsibility at 1101 Kermit Drive Ste 730, Nashville, Tennessee 37217.  Thanks.

In and of itself, that's pretty slick.  But, today, the new Associate Director in our office who's still learning but is now all the e-mail to our general address asked, "Do we have an ActiveWord for someone who wants inactive status?"  I replied, "I don't think so," and before I could say more, he responded "Shoot!  I don't know what to tell this guy."  The wordbase has become a readily accessible knowledge store that not only speeds communication, but helps disseminate our best formulations of certain replies to those who are new or who may not deal with some subject often.  That's really cool.

Misspelling my way up Google!

Checking my referrers, I found a curious one today.  Following it back, I learned that this post is #3 for "wallmart us".  That's right, I misspelled "Wal-Mart."  However, turns out th misspelling alone isn't enough.  Gotta add the "us".  I'm not in the first five pages for just "wallmart"!

Top students studying, doing too much?

Competitive achieving is not a healthy, enjoyable life style.

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has listed six opinions he holds with little evidence.  Number 2 is:

2. High-quality American high school students study too much and have too many extracurricular activities.  Yes, I am thinking zero-sum game.  It would be better for most of them to go out and get jobs bagging groceries.  They would learn more about the real world.

Although I'd put reading a book for enjoyment or out of interest ahead of bagging groceries (that's what I did!), I agree.  He's talking about that very small fraction who are avidly competing to get into a highly-selective university.  The ones studying, yes, studying!, more than two hours per night all the way through high school, worrying over their GPA and class standing, and joining and doing every extra-curricular activity they can find just to list it on their applications.  A small number?  You bet.  But they're there.  I doubt they will look back and think it was worth it.  Competitive achieving is not a healthy, enjoyable life style.

Good, really good!

asyb:

If you look with interest into the eyes of every person you see hopes, dreams, fears and it is from this base that great teachers teach.

Is that good, or what?

Keepers of the Nightmare

The material below by Harry and Rosemary Wong describes what I have seen referred to as "the keepers of the nightmare" by education writers. But, in light of the recent discussion of whehter it's productive to compare schools to businesses, note that the tendency to blame external factors for lack of success is also a characteristic of mediocre businesses.

Peer pressure severely limits achievement in many schools.  Students who DO NOT do well scorn those who DO well, and these students join together, socially, to limit each other’s success.

You see them at school.  They drag themselves to school.  They sit in the back of the room.  They don’t bring paper or pencil.  Instead of listening or participating, they read a magazine or find something else to do.  They are not motivated and they don’t want to learn.  And the clothes they wear needs cleaning or pressing.

Students?  Oh no.  We’re talking about some teachers you’ll find on every staff.  We call them SURVIVORS.  Read pages 5 and 6 in The First Days of School about those teachers who simply survive from day to day.

These are good people.  They entered teaching full of fantasy, coupled with dreams to make a difference in the lives of their students.  Some of them now have 20 years invested in the teacher retirement system, yet they are only 43 years-old.  They can’t leave teaching, because they are too young to retire, but have too much in the retirement system.  Either way they feel trapped.

So, they sit in the teacher’s lounge

these teachers, who do not do well, scorn those
who do well, and these teachers join together,
socially, to limit each other’s success.

And the new teachers do not even know or recognize the peer pressure that is exerted to severely limit them from learning and achieving.

It is done so subtly.  The survivors sit together in the lunch room with their names “engraved” on their chairs, where they have been sitting for 20 years reinforcing each other’s beliefs.  If one is absent that day, don’t you dare sit in that empty chair.

If you do, they will say to you, “You know what’s wrong with this school?  The kids, they don’t want to learn!”

And because you are a young, new teacher and you want to be accepted and be a part of the staff, you politely agree with the statement and say, “Yeah.”

You have just been manipulated.

They say, “We don’t get any backing from the administration.”  Because you want to be accepted, you say, “Yeah.”  You have just been manipulated.

They say, “We get no parent involvement.”  “The inservice meetings are a waste of time.”  “I wouldn’t bother going to any conference on my own time.”  You say, “Yeah, Yeah, and Yeah.”

Very quickly, you believe that the kids, the parents, the administration, and staff development are all to blame.

And don’t forget to blame the class size, school size, press, national reforms, standards, publisher’s programs, schools of education and the student’s poverty level, national origin, and race, too.

The surest path to decline is to blame others for your problems.  You must become an advocate of what you believe, otherwise you will become a victim of what others want you to believe. (Pages 284-285, The First Days of School).

Put in the effort

From AtlanticBlog, remembering a deceased colleague:

When you teach any sort of mathematics to undergraduate economics majors, inevitably some will come to you with the excuse for poor performance, "I have never been very good at math." Burley told me he always replied with sympathy, followed by this question: "So, what have you done about it?" It usually was a conversation stopper, because the answer was that they had done nothing. Sometimes they had, and Burley was there for them. Sometimes it motivated students to actually do something about the problem. Burley expected his students to put in the effort.