I’d never heard of H.R. 1895 until very recently. Now that I have heard about it though, I wonder who in their right mind is not going to want to support this thing.

H.R. 1895 is also known as The Stand Up Act. Here’s what it’s all about:

The Safe Teen And Novice Driver Uniform Protection (STANDUP) Act would establish minimum standards for state graduated driver licensing (GDL) laws, which are proven to significantly reduce death and injury among young beginning drivers and those who share the road with them.

See vehicular accidents are the number one killer of teens in our country. Number one! And the fact is, teens are more likely to crash than any other demographic group of drivers. Like it’s not even close.

Matter of fact…

–Teen drivers ages 16 to 19 have a fatality rate four times the rate of drivers ages 25 to 69.
–Sixteen-year-old drivers have a crash rate three times more than 17-year-olds, 5 times greater than 18-year-olds, and two times that of 85-year-olds.
(These stats come from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration — but I am also cribbing a bunch of info from the website they built to support this law.)

I could go on and on pounding the table with data, the horror stories of lives cut short, tales of my own students who passed away in car accidents (or of friends when I was in high school) but it would be superfluous. I mean, do any of us not fear for the safety of teens when they get in a car… especially when they get in the car with another teen driver, getting a ride home from a “party”?

Here is an overview of the STANDUP Act as taken from their website:

States must meet the following requirements under the STANDUP Act:

–Three stages of licensing – learner’s permit, intermediate stage, and full licensure – should be used
–Age 16 should be the earliest age for entry into the learner’s permit process
–Nighttime driving while unsupervised should be restricted during the learner’s permit and intermediate stages, until full licensure at age 18
–Driving while using communication devices (cell phone calls, texting) should be prohibited at least until full licensure at age 18
–Unrestricted, full licensure should occur no earlier than age 18
–Passengers should be restricted – no more than one non-familial passenger under age 21 unless a licensed driver over age 21 is in the vehicle – until full licensure at age 18

H.R. 1895: it’s the thing I never knew which I now know I want to support.

And as an English teacher, the connections to Tears of a Tiger are self-evident.

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.

So yesterday we had walk-throughs. Basically, under the punitive rule of NCLB being that we are a Probationary 3 (I think) school, we have muckety-mucks come in from the… well, I am not sure where this lady came from… to “evaluate” our classes.

So this lady walks into my room with her little checksheet and starts scrutinizing. She checks for things. Mysterious things. Things that are supposed to prove I am teaching and my students are learning.

Having the content standards written on the board seems to be quite important to her. I always have them up but the truth is, I only really do it for the muckety-mucks because in reality, I see virtually no educational value to posting these things on the board. Teaching them is very important. Writing them on the board is practically irrelevant. I mean, it is a reminder to myself of what I am supposed to be doing? That’s kinda like putting a post-it note on my bathroom mirror in the morning reminding myself to “BRUSH YOUR TEETH” isn’t it? And just because the post-it note exists, this doesn’t mean that I will have brushed my teeth. And if the post it note is not there it doesn’t mean I won’t have brushed them either. Writing things on the board such as this strikes me as superfluous… but when you are a muckety-muck with checksheets there are boxes to put X’s through and this seems to be one of the bigger ones.

And how in the heck would she know if I simply put some standards on the board when school started in September and just left the same ones there all year in case muckety-mucks like her popped in for a surprise visit?

Administrators hate those kinds of questions, don’t they?

Overall, I felt “judged” by this woman with all the negative connotation the word “judged” musters. I recall no positive acknowledgement of what I was doing right. (And she walked into a class of high school freshman who were all 100% silent at their desks composing a response to literature based on a novel we were reading — no small feat if you know what it’s like to teach English 9). I obtained no useful feedback as to how my craft could be improved. (But in full disclosure, I sincerely doubt that the input of a muckety-muck who spent a grand total of about 5 minutes in my room would have given her any credibility to comment on my methodologies). And truly, I questioned whether or not she could even step into a high school classroom and actually perform the job she had been assigned to evaluate. She just didn’t seem like she had the verve, the energy, the spirit nor the determination to actually be a real teacher.

But she’s perfectly qualified to evaluate other real teachers, right? Essentially, her short visit left me dispirited.

Then today came and my students rocked a few projects whereby the applied their knowledge of figurative language by creating digital slide shows with musical sound tracks explicating the difference between similes and metaphors through one of 5 themes evident in the novel Tears of a Tiger… and the world was right again.

I mean, I love teaching but the muckety-mucks are like some sort of wet blanket on my fire to do this job. It’s obvious that we, as a nation, don’t trust our professional educators anymore to be professional educators and the fact is, it’s demoralizing. I mean this muckety-muck could have said something positive. She could have tipped her cap to my work ethic, efforts to reach my kids, obvious demonstration of classroom management and on and on and on.

But what did she care about? Her checksheet. And what do I care about? My kids. And you know what, I don’t think they are the same thing.

So yes, I put the standards on the board to avoid confrontation because with so many battles to fight with the muckety-mucks, this seems like one that’s not really worth it. But teaching is not about the checksheets. It’s about the students and I’d venture to say that nowhere on her list were things like “students felt emotionally safe in the environment to express their genuine inner feelings and the educator’s policy of running a Mock Free Zone contributed to a tangible — if ineffable — sense of classroom community.”

Geesh? Why do paper pushers have so much clout?

This is me with my students today as we worked on composing The Digital Simile and Metaphor project (as tied to various themes in the novel we are just finishing, Sharon Draper’s Tears of a Tiger.

Can you feel the joy? The energy? The enthusiasm? This is what real education looks like — at least at certain moments over the course of a school year, but unfortunately far too many of America’s classrooms never have even one spectacular moment of sheer joy for the kids whose butts are in our seats. And if students aren’t enjoying learning, how effective can we really be as educators.

Smile, it’s Happy Friday!! And we are being very productive. (Rigor and enjoyment are not mutually exclusive — when are our schools going to learn this?)