Hmmm, will digital textbooks simply replace traditional textbooks so that the wheels of these entrenched, corporate behemoth money making machines just keep chugging right along?

Let’s look at 9th grade…

Why would I pay for Romeo and Juliet when the full text of the play is already online free of charge in more places than I can even count?

I wouldn’t.

So then schools like mine will just pay for the accompanying lesson plans, right?

Not so fast.

I mean why pay for lesson plans when there are literally a host of INCREDIBLE lesson plans already online free of charge? I mean the Royal Shakespeare Company is pretty reputable, wouldn’t ya say? And they provide SO MUCH material smoking material it feels like it would be an honor to have them help me in my class.

Then add in the resouces being provided at NCTE or the stuff I can find on websites like WebEnglishTeacher.com and I can do some pretty sweet stuff.

Okay, R&J is covered. So what about The Odyssey?

Check.

I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud?

Check.

The Scarlett Ibis? The Gift of the Magi? The Lady or the Tiger?

Check. Check. Check.

And are there resources for teaching these on the web? And good ones?

CHECK!!!

And do I then get to go back to doing what the state wants me to do, teach to the standards in a way that doesn’t come from one myopic source that attempts to be one-size-fits-all but rather empowers me to PICK and choose materials as I best see them working, as most appropriate to the needs of my individual students as I professionally diagnose their academic needs?

Check.

Indeed, my school used to shop for our entire grocery budget at the textbook supermarket — but now, it’s just looks like we’ll just be taking a banana please… and it better be a darn good one in order to justify the expense otherwise… I’ll just get the rest of our groceries elsewhere.

And look at all the money I’ll have left over in my wallet for other household needs. Wow!

And so, will digital textbooks simply replace traditional textbooks so that the wheels of these entrenched, corporate behemoth money making machines just keep chugging right along?

I wouldn’t bet on it.

P.S. For a really interesting view on textbooks which Jim Burke passed along to me, check out this blog post by Seth Godin.

Just found out a freshman of mine, Rosa, up and moved to Texas over the weekend.

No notice. No official checking out of school. No goodbye. Just Texas.

Also, no final exam, no final project, no completion of her last few assignments for my class or anything remotely tied to properly closing down shop. We have two full weeks left of school but not for Rosa. According to her friends, she’s left Los Angeles for good. And why?

Because her sister got pregnant. That’s right, her sister.

See, Rosa’s sister is/was a junior at our high school. Apparently, her mom blew a gasket over the weekend, kicked one or both of them out of the house upon hearing this news (details are fuzzy) and now they are off to live in the Lone Star state with their dad, a guy who hasn’t had any sort of presence in their life for a decade.

Of course the guy who contributed to the Rosa’s-sister-will-be-having-a-baby is a total no-show in all of this as well. Wow, that’s original.

BTW, I just checked my calendar and realized that No Child Left Behind is mandating that all my students are at 100% proficiency by the year 2014. Just how exactly do they expect me to deal with this kind of stuff? I mean Rosa was a C-/D+ student before her end of the year disappearance, struggling to even maintain regular attendance (though she did discover reading this year in my class. The book 13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher really hit a chord with her.)

Now, I’m not sure if she’ll get a D, a D- or an F. (I’ve yet to do the 4rth quarter’s math but it ain’t lookin’ pretty.) And just Friday I gave her the ol’, “It’s the 4rth quarter, you need to finish strong,” speech. However, does her final grade really make that much of a difference anymore? Truly, is there applause and pride to be found in a D-, like “Yo, at least I didn’t get an F!”

Is Rosa even concerned in the slightest right now about school?

Education is an upper level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and when the bottom rung has been threatened, everything up above appears as a luxury.

School has now become a luxury to this 15 year old, a luxury I am assuming she doesn’t think she can afford.

Really, is Rosa going to enroll in school in Texas? And with NCLB ready to demonize schools who are not at 100% student proficiency in the next 4 1/2 years, are schools in Texas really going to be stretching out a set of open arms welcoming in kids who are almost assured of lowering their test scores and aggravating their dropout rates?

The school Rosa just left will be punished for trying to help Rosa because NCLB demonizes us for low bubble test performance. The school Rosa will enter, if she does enter school, will also be punished for trying to help because to think she’s not going to need some remediation, some extra assistance, some academic “love” is incredibly naive.

But she did make progress of some sort this year in my class. How do I know? Because 13 Reasons Why is a book about teen suicide and Rosa, after she read it, told me it made her feel better in a way that told me oh-so-much more.

NCLB may not think Lynwood High School did anything positive for Rosa, and they are certainly on track to take our school out to the whipping shed next year due to our inferior bubbles, but those of us who do this day in and day out know there’s a flip side to the flip side of this coin.

A really interesting report was just published that essentially equates me, a teacher, to a widget. By that they point out that public education views me as a replaceable cog, an indistinguishable influence on the overall productivity of public schooling which assumes that the work I do can be replicated by any other widget who meets the same criteria for being hired that I do.

I am immediately struck by a few things about this report:

–No duh! Everyone who works in our school system feels as though, if we were not to return next year, there would be the sentiment of, “Oh well, we lost a good one there but life goes on, bring on the new guy/gal, keep the wheels a turning please.” Under-appreciation for the work we do runs commensurate with the position. That’s just status quo. In a way it’s good because it means that no one person is any more important than the larger entity, its principles and public education’s societal objective. On the other hand, it breeds a system whereby all I really need to do is enough not to get fired. Once you are a widget, as long as you remain a functional widget, you get to keep on widgeting.

–This report states that 99% percent of teachers receive a satisfactory rating and that only 1% are rated unsatisfactory. Come on, now you have to admit, that’s a little high. I mean 1% — it can’t be that many! Lore is they have what’s called the Dance of the Lemons whereby folks who stink simply get transferred to other schools and not canned.

–Their claim that Professional Development is inadequate. I’d suggest that it’s virtually token if not out-n-out non-existent in many, many schools. (And this comes from a person who works hard to try and provide excellent PD when I go and visit schools.) Conference attendance is at a horrific low, resources to obtain high quality materials are being frittered away (see my recent commentary on textbooks) and hucksters abound in the world of “I’ll come to your school, fix all your problems plus your staff will laugh the whole day long”. A real commitment to PD can change a teacher’s classroom craft for the better but unless real support is provided from above (and in a world of budget cuts, PD always seems like a luxury to oh-so-many bean counters) ain’t no fresh news here.

But the thing is, I like this report. They are advocating for a more sensible system of schooling. I am not bashing them — I am saluting them, even if they are merely statistically backing up what so many people on the front lines know to be as self-evident.

We, the teachers, are being treated as widgets. But that’s not the greatest travesty. The greatest travesty is that we are treating our students as if they are widgets and until we are dedicated to halting this production line, we are gonna go right on widgeting along.

Cut music programs. Give them more math.
Eliminate art programs. Make them follow scripted curriculums.
Slash after school programs. Pretend the time between 3-6 pm isn’t The Witching Hour whereby most teens get into trouble with the law.
Fund more bubble testing. Slash special ed.
Cut school counseling positions. Fire more teachers. (Well, at least they are being fair here.)

Widget. Widget. Widget. Widget. Widget. Widget. Widget. Widget.

The world of television is changing. (No, prime time sitcoms are not being forced to shut down once and for all due to their pervasively mind-deteriorating fare. I mean these shows aren’t just intellectually insulting — I think they actually make you dumber if you watch them. More on that another time.)

Nope, TV is going digital. Or rather it’s gone digital. We are now in the era of all digital broadcasts and for those who did not get with the program, they are being left in the dust.

The FCC tried to warn them. The deadline to get up to the speed with the times was extended. But still, slackers being what they are — SLACKERS — there are guestimates that over 2.8 million American homes will simply get a blank, blue screen if they did not obtain a converter box when they turn on their tube. (BTW, the cost of this box is $40 but there is a government coupon to offset a large part of that fee.)

And why is this important? Because it shows that people often do not change until they are forced to change. Whether it’s a DNA style weakness in the human animal or simply a product of culture (i.e. the nature versus nurture argument) I think the bigger point is that we all recognize that when Arnold Schwarztenegger says he is going to end the age of textbooks, we need to expect that there is going to be whining and moaning and people incredibly reluctant to get with the program.

And they will drag their feet.

And there will be problems in the conversion, too. (I believe the word being tossed around these days is “discomforting” when it comes to adapting to new technologies in our lives.)

But does that mean we should not move on from a very stagnant educational tool which has clearly stopped serving the needs of the students in the way we now need these needs served? (By that I mean textbooks.)

Of course not!

2.8 million homes are gonna go “What the F%$(@?” when they try to turn on their TV this week. And inevitably, there is going to be a huge surge in demand for these conversion boxes because people are going to realize the necessity of getting with the program.

And I expect the same thing for quite some time in education as well. A heck of a lot of folks will be squawking and refusing to want to buy into the idea that technology (while still problematic in so many ways, I agree) is here to stay.

But at some point, we will convert and the tools being considered to replace the 5 pound textbook strike me as exciting, innovative, intelligent and excellent.

BTW, the best ideas inside the textbooks are not being kicked to the curb — simply the tool which delivers these ideas. And once people recognize that Shakespeare, Chaucer, Austen and so on are NOT being thrown under the bus — only the beastly, cumbersome, excessively expensive textbooks are — then I think folks will realize that we are most assuredly moving in a positive, progressive direction.

Will there be problems? Yep. But are there problems now? Immensely so.

Therefore, the stagnant pot of school is about to be stirred by the spoon of innovation.

Like the old children’s game of hide-n-seek, the Governator just cried out, “Ready or not, here I come!”

And textbook publishers have got to be shivering. Disruptive innovation is about to disrupt their profit stream in a crazy way. Just ask the newspaper industry.

At some point — hopefully before my grandkids enter school — America is going to go to growth model assessments.

And once they do, watch out!

As I just blogged about yesterday, Newsweek issued a list identifying our country’s best high schools… but this doesn’t seem to take into account one of the most critical measures of any “teacher’s effectiveness”:

HOW MUCH DID THE STUDENTS GROW OVER THE COURSE OF THE YEAR?

People in schools like mine routinely get kids who are reading and writing at levels years below grade level yet, do we get any credit when we take a 15 year old kid who is at a 4rth/5th grade reading level and elevate them to an 8th/9th grade level (3-4 years growth in one year)? Not when they take 10th grade bubble tests we don’t.

And my school gets dragged through the mud for having scores and scores of kids who don’t “bubble up.”

It’s as if all of us working in these NCLB schools that are sinking deeper and deeper into the throes of probation are a bunch of loafers. A bunch of slackers. A bunch of preposterously over-coddled tenure-ites who live off the fat of the land and do little to nothing over the course of a year.

Newsweek thinks that if more of my kids simply took more AP tests (not performed well on them, but simply took them) and we brought in IB and a bunch of other high fallutin’ acronyms, we’d deserve notoriety.

A teacher named Gary Anderson had this to say…

My school is on the list. We’re 715, up from 958 last year. This is good news for the real estate market around here.

When students who would be better served in a regular-level class are forced into an AP class where they are in over their heads, they are not only a drag on the AP class, but the regular-level classes where they could have been stars are worse off without them.

Wow, huh?

Adults in the world of public schooling are treating education like it’s a game, as if there are winners and losers and rules to learn in order to play well.

I thought the objective was to educate ALL our kids.

How naive of me.

Bring on the growth model assessments!! As my grandfather used to say, “If we can land a man on the moon…”

Newsweek just came out with their annual list of America’s best high schools. On one hand, I really do love this list. Why? Because year in and year out it brings education to the front page of one of America’s most popular magazines. And as the old saying goes, there ain’t no such thing as bad publicity — just no publicity — and our country sure could use some extended dialogue about our schools. Particularly our high schools.

So thumbs up… especially for giving me an inferiority complex.

Though I checked the top 10, and the top 100, and the top 1,000, my own school wasn’t listed. (As Don Adams used to say, “Missed it by that much.”) So of course, before I dared to dispute the rankings, I decided to see how these rankings were determined.

Reading this made me feel better. Essentially, it’s a multi-page document acknowledging how preposterously subjective these rankings really are. Simply put, there is no “objective science” to evaluating a school. For the Newsweek piece, which is sure to make a big splash in Dallas, Texas, they arrive at their numbers through a formula called The Challenge Index.

Read the article for their explanation/justification/rationalization of why their Challenge Index has merit. Whether one agrees or not, it’s interesting to see their perspective on what makes for a school that deserves high praise.

They do raise one other point that certainly deserve a little bit of a chat though. As the article states…

Question: How can you call these the best schools or the top schools if you are using just one narrow measure? High school is more than just AP or IB tests.

Answer: Indeed it is, and if I could quantify all those other things in a meaningful way, I would give it a try. But teacher quality, extracurricular activities and other important factors are too subjective for a ranked list. Participation in challenging courses and tests, on the other hand, can be counted, and the results expose a significant failing in most high schools—SO far less than 6 percent of the public high schools in the United States qualify for the NEWSWEEK list.

As we face questions of merit pay, sanctions against those who are under-performing, blue- ribbon honors for those who do, the impact of socio-economics and community culture on a a school’s AYP and so on and so on, it’s easy to see why people get so down about their rankings. THEY ARE JUST SO DAMN SUBJECTIVE! I mean the fact that my school has a teacher who literally save a student’s life this year by talking them down off the ledge of suicide wasn’t given any points for credit by Newsweek. Go figure.

Ultimately, what our schools are supposed to do and what they being asked to do are, in so many ways, two entirely different conversations. It’d be nice to see Newsweek devote a sidebar to that, huh?

Congratulations to the schools that are on this list. Really, I mean it. It makes no sense to pull others down — we need to be hoisting more schools up. And for those who “missed it by that much” don’t worry, the thorny stick of NCLB will be coming to demonize you soon enough.

At my school, it has already arrived.

3 Years Ago Today My Life Changed Forever. Why? Because that was the day my daughter, Sienna, was born.

What I discovered was that every cliche’ about parenthood was true. And really, I doubt that there’s anything I can truly add to the pantheon of conversation as far as what it means to be a dad. There’s nothing I would not do for my daughter, no sacrifice I would not make, and on and on and on. She is the center of my life’s wheel and I never knew what joy in life meant until I knew what it felt like to have Sienna smile at me.

It melts all the other shenanigans away.

If only we, in our schools, could remember that every kid in every one of our classrooms is someone’s child — and if we simply sought to educate these children the way we would ask that our own children be educated so much of the nonsense would simply fall away.

Let’s all get on the same page about something… kids cheat. Maybe not all of them, but certainly most of them do — for sure.

Oh, you doubt me? Look, I’m not trying to slander anyone here but let’s look at a literal, dictionary definition of the word “cheating”.

Cheating: to defraud; swindle: to deceive; influence by fraud: to elude; deprive of something expected: to practice deceit: to violate rules or regulations: to take an examination or test in a dishonest way, as by improper access to answers

Hmmm… do I have a leg to stand on? (Well, if you are going to get all literal…)

Now obviously there are gradations to the violations here. Some kids simply steal answers outright from their teachers to the tests. Some students mildly glance over at the paper of other students during examinations. Some kids copy homework. Some students plagiarize. Some students write answers on their hands before tests. Some students have their parents do so much work on their homework assignments that its the parents who are most deserving of receiving a project grade.

Like I said though, if we get all literal about it, kids today cheat. Most of them.

Now of course, with cheating comes rationalizations. For example, for the parent who does far too much of their child’s homework assignment, they’ll tell themselves that 1) they are just trying to help 2) this is what good parents do 3) the silly teacher is giving way too much work and my kid needs to get to bed, and on and on and on.

Kids who cheat will also rationalize their deeds. From the pressure of competition to the unreasonableness of the educator from the justification that, “Hey, everyone is doing it,” kids today could come up with a million reasons to legitimize their actions.

And you know what? Those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones because when I was in middle and high school, if you want to go all “literal definition of the word on me” I cheated, too. I copied homework problems, I glanced at answers on the paper of the kid next to me, and so on. Was it wrong? Of course. Do I “regret” it? Let’s put it this way, I don’t live in a world of guilt and remorse thinking my soul has been eternally stained because I edged my score up a bit with the unwitting help of Gary the science genius when it came to memorizing the periodic table I had not fully memorized back in 1983.

That doesn’t mean it wasn’t wrong, though. It was. But life goes on.

So how do I handle cheating? Well, I see “wandering eyes” all the time when I give tests. I usually throw a out very firm sounding, “Eyes on your own tests please” and that suffices. Of course, some of my tests don’t allow for cheating, such as when they write essay responses — but some of them do. Being that I give cloze tests, multiple choice tests, single sentence responses and so on over hte course of the year — and some kids have me for period 1 and some for period 5 — there is simply no way for me to foolproof my assessment system. Kids will have their chances to cheat and I know that I am not going to catch many of them.

But this school just uncovered an epidemic of cheating — and the whole community is paying the price. First, graduation was cancelled. Then the media drags their name through the mud so that anyone associated with this school is tainted. Furthermore, every teacher and administrator on campus appears to be a bumbler, a dupe who should have known.

And the district is dropping the hammer on the non-whistle blowers as if they do not understand how demonized kids who “snitch” are in our modern school systems.

On one hand, it smacks of foolishness and naiveté to think that MOST kids have not cheated in some way, shape or form on their way to a diploma. (And I love when parents take the high road and say, “Not my kid!” Uh, yeah right.)

On the other hand, being that we do not overtly teach values (i.e. they are nowhere in our standards) and we simply list things like THOU SHALT NOT CHEAT in the “rules of school”, why is it that we should expect anything less?

If you want a student to learn something you have to teach it to them and right now, our schools (and our society) are littered with places where we are “assuming” somebody else is going to teach what’s critical. I mean who was Centerburg High School counting on here to teach its student body that cheating would not be tolerated and for those found complicit the punishment would feel draconian if you did not come clean? The parents? The neighbors? Did the Superintendent ever mandate a symposium on cheating for the student body?

Are the kids really to blame? Yes they are. However, could this school not have done a better job in terms of not setting the table for this type of mess to happen?

Of course it could have.

I am sure all of them had detailed lessons in the use of an apostrophe as well as how to find the slope of a Y intercept on a graph, though.

Where are the simple lessons on character? It’s undermining our entire society when we do not teach this stuff.

I spoke at a middle school in Oklahoma last year whereby the school was architecturally designed so that the library was the center of the building, the hub of the wheel if you will, and all the other hallway spokes were passageways to the various classrooms. Thereby for passing periods, all kids on campus had to cross by and through the library.

The library literally was the center of their campus. And these kids LOVED to read. Coincidence or self-fulfilling prophesy? (Do I even need to answer that?) They were all “library users”. It was a real sight to see.

On the other hand most campuses are designed whereby the library is an appendage, a separate place on campus, an isolated part of the grounds. I don’t think it’s by design that the libraries are being thought of in this manner… I think it’s by lack of thoughtful design that architects build schools in this way.

Simply put, they don’t view what’s most important as being most important and therefore they don’t place what’s most important in the center of the action. I mean really, did the architects ever ask the teachers, “Hey, tell us what you think should go where and why?” When I look at the design of my own school — and many of the schools I visit — I clearly see the answer as, “Obviously not.”

If we truly value our libraries (which I believe are emblematic of of the value we show for education itself), we show it to the kids long before our buildings are ever even constructed, And when the next new phase of school building occurs (I think we’re on track for new construction to begin in the year 2198 in California according to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s priorities), I only hope more schools follow the model of Oklahoma. Their library is woven into the fabric of their school and the kids absolutely loved it (and benefited from it as well).

The messages we send to our students are often crafted long before they enter our classrooms. Real teachers know this. It’s why we spend time before the year begins decorating our rooms, thinking through our seating layouts, standing one-footed on desks whereby we risk crashing to the ground and breaking our necks simply because there’s a cool bumper sticker we really want to hang above the fire alarm in the corner (Don’t just do it… do it RIGHT!).

Schools. literacy, and achievement happen by design. Think about that the next time you have to walk on over to the library.

I try not to be a hysteric about the demise of our nation’s young men because it’s almost trite to moan about it. And the truth is, I must admit that when I was a “young man” people were most certainly wringing their hands over me.

(Not that they still aren’t but hey, old habits die hard, right? LOL!)

Like all teens, however, I had role models, people who played a large role in my own sense of identity — even though I had never met them. And being that I love sports, I must admit that there were some star athletes who literally shaped the framework of my own self-perception during that era of my life.

Today our young men do much the same thing. This brings me to LeBron James.

Look, I like LeBron. He’s an amazing basketball player, a apparently good-hearted guy and quite an engaging personality.

But last week when his team lost in their quest for the championship he walked off the court without shaking hands with his opponents. Claims he was too much of a competitor to do such a thing.

I saw this in Yahoo sports and just basically had to copy and paste it. LeBron was wrong. This writer excellently explains why.

(NOTE: I can find the source material on this article as I copied it late at night. But these words below are not mine — they are just spot on and well worth repeating — so I pinched them from the article, and I’d gladly credit the writer if I knew where I got it from.)

“I’m a competitor,” LeBron said. “That’s what I do. It doesn’t make sense to me to go over and shake somebody’s hand.”

But so many athletes are now cut from that cloth. They think the inability to deal with defeat gracefully is a sign of competitive fire, when it’s often a sign of immaturity. A real competitor gives every ounce of effort to win, but is enough of a man to give respect to an opponent who does the same and prevails.

How dead-on is this writer? I just love this line…

They think the inability to deal with defeat gracefully is a sign of competitive fire, when it’s often a sign of immaturity. A real competitor gives every ounce of effort to win, but is enough of a man to give respect to an opponent who does the same and prevails.

Whereas the spirit of competition, the nobility and the passion for sport, used to be the driving force behind the games (well, at least in Greek times), now, the game is all about who wins as if the means justify the ends. (See Dick Cheney and the torture argument for how this twisted thinking extrapolates into warped perceptions during adulthood.)

Are our young men more adrift than they were when I was a kid or am I just more attuned to what is a constant adriftness in young men during this era of their lives now that I am a bit more long in the tooth?

I’d be lying if I did not acknowledge being troubled by the stuff that is going on these days with young men. I mean, holy friggin’ smokes, earlier in the week I had a student tell me she was sexually assaulted by 3 boys on our campus. Now when I was a teen, I was most certainly a hell-raiser. But rape? Gimme a break. My moral compass might have been askew but it hadn’t been completely amputated from my conscience.

What is up these days? And more importantly, is there anything more I/we can to to help fix it.