Since Bubble Testing Season is upon us, it seems only fitting to talk about the Bubble Tests.

Today is just a link… one that makes me want to vomit when I see the downright farce being perpetrated on American education.

Here are but a few quote from this former “test scorer”. (No, the tests are not machine scored; one of tons of worthwhile reasons to read the link.)

“Test scoring is a huge business, dominated by a few multinational corporations, which arrange the work in order to extract maximum profit.”

“Test-scoring companies make their money by hiring a temporary workforce each spring, people willing to work for low wages (generally $11 to $13 an hour), no benefits, and no hope of long-term employment—not exactly the most attractive conditions for trained and licensed educators. So all it takes to become a test scorer is a bachelor’s degree, a lack of a steady job, and a willingness to throw independent thinking out the window and follow the absurd and ever-changing guidelines set by the test-scoring companies. Some of us scorers are retired teachers, but most are former office workers, former security guards, or former holders of any of the diverse array of jobs previously done by the currently unemployed. When I began working in test scoring three years ago, my first “team leader” was qualified to supervise, not because of his credentials in the field of education, but because he had been a low-level manager at a local Target.”

“Company communications with test-scoring employees often feel like they have been lifted from a Kafka novel. Scorers working from home almost never talk to an actual human being.”

“Scoring is particularly rushed when scorers are paid by piece-rate, as is the case when you are scoring from home, where a growing part of the industry’s work is done. At 30 to 70 cents per paper, depending on the test, the incentive, especially for a home worker, is to score as quickly as possible in order to earn any money: at 30 cents per paper, you have to score forty papers an hour to make $12 an hour, and test scoring requires a lot of mental breaks. Presumably, the score-from-home model is more profitable for testing companies than setting up an office, especially since it avoids the prospect of overtime pay, the bane of existence for companies operating on tight deadlines. But overtime pay is a gift from heaven for impoverished test scorers; on one project, I worked in an office for twenty-three days straight, including numerous nine-hour days operating on four to five hours sleep—such was my excitement about overtime.”

Excuse me while I go puke. (Props to Diane Ravitch for turning me on to this article.)

There’s a teacher in Pennsylvania name Natalie Munroe who has started a bit of a firestorm with her blog posts that certainly take the kids in her school to task. (And the parents, as well.)

Here’s a link to the story.

This is a slice of her blog that has really caught the eye of some. Natalie says:

“My students are out of control. They are rude, disengaged, lazy whiners. They curse, discuss drugs, talk back, argue for grades, complain about everything, fancy themselves entitled to whatever they desire, and are just generally annoying.”

The question is, is Natalie Munroe tellin’ it like it is, violating the sprit of the teaching profession, off her tree, or an every-educator hero who should run for office?

Probably a mixture of all of the above. In no particular order:

1) Natalie is probably telling it like it is in some respects. I mean high school kids fancying themselves entitled? High school kids lazy? High school kids rude whiners who complain? Stop the presses! Natalie, I think you just might win a Pulitzer for uncovering a phenomenon more rare than the Udumbara flower.

2) Natalie is probably violating the spirit – I don’tknow about the law, but the spirit – of the teaching profession in some ways. I mean the point is to educate the little malcontents (I mean darling little children), not belittle them, give up on them and flame them online. (At least not without concealing your identity via an fake name and an avatar like so many other teachers do.) Come on, you gotta know that the unspoken code of teaching is that even if Johnny has all the wattage of tiny-wick tea candle burning in his belltower, you don’t say it out loud.

But I do wonder if Natalie gets a little more latitude because she’s discussing their character and attitude as opposed to their aptitudes. After all, this line of Natalie’s probably rings true with the Tiger Mom crowd a heck of a lot.

“Parents are more trying to be their kids’ friends and less trying to be their parent,” Munroe said.

I think we’ve heard that before. Then again, Miss Tiger Mom called her kids lazy, fat and stupid so pick your poison, right?

3) Is Natalie a hero? Personally, I like blunt folks. And I like that Natalie conveys a sense of being ticked off that her students, as she says in this line, “…get angry when you ask them to think or be creative.” The woman is venting and the air that’s flowing through that vent is coming from a very real place I am sure a lot of teachers in the United States can relate to.

All in all, some really fascinating questions come up…

• How are teachers obligated to behave online?
• Is someone like Natalie actually doing a service by calling attention to a HUGE problem instead of allowing it to be swept under the rug even if she’s being a bit indelicate?
• Is a teacher allowed to vent their frustration via blogging without putting their career on the line or are educators virtually required to go underground and wear a false mask for fear of professional retribution?
• Are the folks who want to flame Natalie as a bad teacher taking their eye off the ball and forgetting that if what she is saying is true, they ought not to kill the messenger and instead focus on the kids? I mean if drugs are as rampant as Natalie implies, shouldn’t somebody be showing a Nancy Reagan video or something?

Lastly, there’s the former student of Natalie’s, Jeff Schoolbraid, who weighs in with this:

“Whatever influenced her to say what she did is evidence as to why she simply should not teach.”

I wonder, is this true?

I have a file in my filing cabinet drawer in my home office titled REJECTION LETTERS.

It’s stuffed. However, I am sad to say that I spent years and years and years throwing out rejection letters written to me by agents who did not want to represent me, publishers who did not want to publish me, and editors who did not want to edit me, publish me or even speak to me. Boy, do I wish I would have kept them. Wish I wouldda kept them all. Instead, I didn’t really start keeping track of all the rejections until well after I began to understand that being a professional writer meant you were going to get rejected. Probably for the rest of my career.

Learning to live with the disappointment, sorrow, angst, anger, bitterness and hurt was just a part of the job. Like baseball, there’s no shame in striking out. Even Hall of Famers do it a few times a week.

That’s why I was ticked to read this. It’s an article on how…

• George Orwell’s Animal Farm was rejected under the premise that “it’s impossible to sell animal stories in the United States.”

• Lord of the Flies was called “an absurd an uninteresting fantasy”

• The Fountainhead was called “unsaleable and unpublishable”

And on and on and on.

Football coaches teach that there is no shame in getting knocked down… so get back up and go make a play.

Basketball coaches talk about how there is no need to pout when your opponent scores on you (that’s what they are trying to do, after all) so take the ball out of bounds and keep playing the game.

But writers often seem to think that rejection is a wall instead of an inevitable speed bump. If Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein, Hemmingway and Orwell can get rejected, so can I… and so can you.

Feel the sting, let it become more coal for your inner furnace and KEEP ON GOING!

(BTW, I think this is a rule for all professions, one we simply do not often enough teach to our young people today.)

So our pal Dubya has offered up an autobiographical reflection of his presidency in the book Decision Points (out just recently).

I have not read the book so reviewing it does seem unfair. But I did live through his presidency so when I saw this line in a review, well… it pretty much summed it up quite nicely for me.

Looking back on his exit from office, Bush recalls, “I reflected on everything we were facing. Over the past few weeks we had seen the failure of America’s two largest mortgage entities, the bankruptcy of a major investment bank, the sale of another, the nationalization of the world’s largest insurance company, and now the most drastic intervention in the free market since the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. At the same time, Russia had invaded and occupied Georgia, Hurricane Ike had hit Texas, and America was fighting a two-front war in Iraq and Afghanistan. This was one ugly way to end the presidency.”

Or begin a new presidency, depending on how you look at it. (Really, I am sure Obama still can’t thank you enough for passing him the torch the way you did.)

Is he trying to whitewash his very considerable candidacy for most incompetent president ever or he just a regular ol’ guy who is earnestly showing how, “Shucks, I did the best I could and dad-gummit, I done pretty good all things considered.”

This guy is forever going to be like some kind of American Rorschach Test where you see what you want to see in him.

And what he left behind is what he left behind. And he left No Child Left Behind behind lest we forget that crowning achievement as well.

Meg Whitman spent over 141 million dollars of her own money trying to get elected as the governor of California.

Wow.

And she lost.

Wow. Wow.

Actually, that second part doesn’t bother me so much. Why? Because here’s a woman who hasn’t voted herself in like 25 years in any election (claims she was too busy) but when she sees the chance to grab onto a very high public office, suddenly she’s got a spectacular belief in the power of politics and elections to do good?

Well, ya know what, Meg. I have a feeling that if you would have spent 141 million dollars not on TV ads and mailers for yourself but rather have done something like build a school, a hospital, a fire station, or so on and said to the voters, “Ya know what… I put my money where my mouth is. I believe in public service, I believe in societal institutions and I am so bleepin’ rich that I am using my money to do something for the good of the people of this state…. And if you make me your governor, I will work hard to do more good things for the people of this state,” you might have scored a few more votes.

Instead, the only impression I ever got was that Meg wanted something for herself out of becoming our state’s governor. She wanted the power, the prestige, the laurel on her biography, whatever.

Meg might have said she was running because she felt she could “serve the people” but a person can say whatever they want – especially when running for office. What she did was show that she was willing drop an exorbitant amount of money in an ego-driven pursuit of glory.

I don’t think this election was about policies so much; I think it was about people not going for the idea that just because you are rich you can buy a public office.

At least not so blatantly.

Now I could be wrong, but if Meg would have built a school or a hospital or so on with her 141 million, at least on November 3rd we would have a school or a hospital. Now, all we have is a few unremarkable media ads.

Meg’s mega-money loss… a loss for what might have been as well.

We’ve all heard about the 5 W’s of writing. The Who, What, Where, When and Why. (Also, there’s the H: the How).

But when I apply the 5 W’s to school, it seems pretty clear to me that there is one W which ought to come before all others.

The Why. As in Why the heck am I being asked to learn this?

In so, so, so many classrooms across our country, the students simply do not have an understanding as to WHY they are being asked to learn the things that are perpetually rolling across their school desks. Algebra, photosynthesis, the people that signed the Declaration of Independence… we “assign” these things under the banner of “you need to know this” and yet, I am not really too sure we are explicating WHY they need to know this.

If you doubt me, do a survey. Ask your kids about the reason they are learning the things they are learning in another teacher’s class. Ask them about WHY they are dissecting a frog in biology? Ask them about WHY they are learning about the great stock market crash of 1929.

And then see the fuzziness. Witness the vague-ness. See the lack of precision in their comprehension of the WHY.

And then (if you have the guts) ask them WHY they think they are learning whatever it is you are teaching them this week in your own class. Try not to give away any clues or hints or answers. Instead, just ask, “Can somebody please tell me – really tell me – why we are learning the parts of speech? Or how to properly use a comma? Or why we are even bothering to read HUCK FINN or this Shakespearian Sonnet?”

So, so, often, I have found that most of my kids really do not clearly know unless I overtly make the point of clearly explaining the reasoning behind me teaching whatever it is I am teaching. (And the lower-performing the student, the less aware of the WHY of learning – that’s another correlation I’ve seen time and time again.)

If a kid doesn’t know WHY they are studying the things they are studying they are, well… adrift. People are driven to pursue things out of meaning. Meaningfulness motivates and inspires our actions. Therefore, if a student doesn’t even know why they are being asked to learn Please Find for X in 3rd period, how well can we expect them to perform at the job of finding for X?

I mean when I think back to my own days as a student in a math class, not once do I ever recall my math teacher explaining WHY it was important that I learned to do things like factor equations.

“Because it is.”
“Because I told you so.”
“Don’t be a smart alek.”

Here’a real story that happened to me when I was a kid in school:
“Uhm, why do I even need to learn this? I know I’m never gonna be a mathematician”
“Mr. Sitomer, would you like to go to the office? Stop clowning around and do your work?”
“But why I need this?”
“That’s it… you are outta here.”

And yep, I got bounced. (Disclaimer: I got sent to the office a lot when I was a kid in school. I think that’s why I’ve always had an affinity for at-risk kids. I sorta see a bit of myself in them.)

It wasn’t until after I had earned a Masters degree that I came across the reasoning for teaching algebra to kids who don’t have any aspirations to be mathematicians.

In short, it’s because Algebra develops the cognitive ability of a kid to think for X. And in life, there are a lot of variables, a lot of X’s, one will eventually have to deal with. It’s like a a boot camp for critical thinking and high level choice weighing. “If this is this and that is that, how do you get X out of a situation?”

If someone would have just taken 2 minutes to explain that to me, I might not have been sent to the office so often.

Alas, I am scared not even my teachers really knew, though. (At least not clearly.) And the thing is, I was a good math student. But I became easily bored when there was no meaning in the work for me. And yet, there was meaning in the school work. I just didn’t know it and no one took the time to explain it to me.

How many kids today are experiencing the same phenomenon?

The WHY… students today need to know.