Letting Math Students Drive the Car

One of the most amazing experiences I had, once I started driving, was getting lost on routes that were very familiar to me. I quickly realized that sitting in a passenger seat and observing whether the route was correct, or not, was not the same skill as driving the car, myself, in the correct sequence.

When I began to have the opportunity to teach regularly, it occurred to me that the same was true of the difference in comprehension behind analyzing questions--and constructing them. I began to ask middle school students to construct test questions, in lieu of answering them, or to create the questions for a unit quiz. I often ask students to work in teams because they teach each other as they demonstrate their individual approaches to completing a task. It's always better to have more tools in the toolbox.

Currently, I'm providing remedial support and enrichment in an after school program funded by the state. During their regular daytime classes, my elementary students are working on learning how to do two part math problems, problems that require two different operational steps. This is what happened this last week.

I teamed students up in threes. We wrote down all the possible pairs of the four operations on the board and I asked them to choose a pair and work together to write their own two part math problem.

Each small group presented their problem to the class for solving, and I wrote the equations on the board, as the class articulated them. We got done, I thought it was enough, especially for the first time and the time of day. It was nearly 5pm! "Nooo!," they yelled out, "This is FUN!" "We want to do MORE!"

So, they wrote more and better. I said that one of the operations had to be multiplication, this time, and this time the team also took over writing the equation, as they presented to the class. They learned quite a bit when the equation would reveal an error in their writing, or a lack of clarity.* They were very creative, including their own names and interests in the problems. I shared with their daytime teachers and their faces lit up--let's try that!

I felt that constructing their own problems would help them to more easily distinguish the separate steps and the necessary vs. unnecessary information in the problems they must solve. It's the difference between sitting in the back seat, and finally driving the car.

*This is also a language arts assignment that naturally supports the development of detailed and accurate writing, something they are also currently working on.

Who Owns Your President? Who Owns Your University? Who Owns YOU?

Globally, it is more than likely that organized crime is buying elections, police, and university administrations via the banks.*

Organized crime now has the capacity to do this because we began to deregulate banking with the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis#Tax_Reform_Act_of_1986), followed by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm–Leach–Bliley_Act).

The result was to make banking insanely profitable for globally operating organized crime groups--groups which are in turn, highly liquid, making them very attractive to the banking system.

Here is proof that it is of global concern:
The US Declares War On The Yakuza (July 27, 2011)
http://www.japansubculture.com/2011/07/president-obama-declares-war-on-the-yakuza-go-get-them-barry/

And, more proof:
How a big US bank laundered billions from Mexico's murderous drug gangs (Saturday 2 April 2011)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug-gangs

Consider also: the independent professional military organizations, such as Blackwater (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xe_Services), with deep connections to national militaries around the world, that are now for hire.

If we do NOT re-regulate the banks, we will never get out of this mess.

We are in more danger than we realize of losing our democracies, and control of civil society.


* (http://www.jpmorganchase.com/corporate/Home/article/ny-13.htm)

Open Letter to UC Faculty Upon UC Walkout

Dear UC Faculty,

Although I can be polite and diplomatic, I haven't the time or energy. I'm a single parent and a laid off public school teacher. I have a sophomore on one of your campuses and I'm under tremendous stress, so I'm just going to speak plainly.

The UC Walkout? I love the newly discovered (rediscovered?) sense of altruism among you. I hope it's real and that your sudden solidarity with public school teachers under the brunt of Prop 13 is not simply a conveniently played "empathy card."

It's been over 20 years since Prop 13. The universities and colleges of California, and the nation, have been complaining about the decline in skills among the students we send up to you, but you haven't lifted a finger of solidarity on behalf of the public school educators below you, until now, when you face what we've been dealing with for the last 20 to 30 years. As in historical dictatorships, you watched us "carted off" and failed to raise your voices in our support, and now you face the same.

You failed to address the undermining of public school education nationwide in the aftermath of post sixties' social and educational enfranchisement for the poor and those of color. Did it never occur to you that the threat of enfranchisement, to established power at the top, was responded to by undermining the bottom? No longer facing barred doors at the top, the students are now, instead, crippled at the bottom of the staircase. We have been rendered incapable of sending you the quality of students you need.

If you provide universally low education at the public school level, not everyone suffers. Families that already have power and means can make up the difference by providing enrichment experiences (travel, music, sports teams) and tutoring to their children. The poor (and now the middle class) are stuck with what they get in public school. That means the number of income disenfranchised and children of color capable of applying to your universities has been diminished year by year. It also means that those who do manage to arrive are more disadvantaged than their peers of means from the same school. That is a lifetime deficit for which a university experience doesn't always provide remedy. After 30 years, a generation, it is not just our public school students who are undereducated, but now, many of our colleagues, as well. Today, we have a multi-generational culture of low education. This is the new way that power maintains exclusivity in the face of Affirmative Action.

I know you must have discussed the various systemic problems plaguing public school education. But, I want to scream that, over the thirty years of its development, you never seriously addressed this, never set your students on it as a primary research project, never worked at creating the statistical and political means of changing it. What blinded you? Why weren't you curious?

We are your colleagues in education. There is a lot you could have done for us that would have prevented the situation in which you now find yourselves. We needed you to study and report on the hidden "furloughs" we face. We needed you to study teacher turnover and the number of teachers who don't stay beyond their first years, and why. We needed you to survey our health: the level of obesity and prescription drug use amongst us, our rate of counseling use and family problems, our divorce rates, and how these things have climbed. We needed you to document the dwindling amount of time we spend with our families during the school year and how that affects all the facets of our lives. We needed you to assess the amount of money we spend out of pocket, annually, on goods our districts don't cover, but our students need, and what that means. We needed you to go beyond asking what happens to children in overcrowded classrooms and ask what happens to us, their teachers. As colleagues, we needed you, not our unions or faculty senates under their own pressures of self-preservation, to have our backs.

We matter as much as the students; we were students once. And now, we are you.

One Book a Year / #OneBookaYear

It'd be great to leave a bequest or fund a scholarship at the high school from which each of us graduated, but most of us don't have the means.

However, we can send one book a year to the library at the high school from which we graduated. It doesn't take too many participants, from just a handful of graduating classes, to enrich the offerings of their former high school, on a yearly basis.

Multiplied by ten or twenty years, it becomes a profound contribution.

It's a way to share a piece of yourself with students like you, where you started out. Who knows what windows you may open with just one book?

October is International School Libraries Month. It's the month to send the book.

If you're on Twitter, tweet your book's name and the high school you sent it to, with the hashtag #OneBookaYear. Use the hashtag to look up what's being sent and get some ideas, if you need them.

I've also started a FaceBook group: One Book a Year. Join us, and then post the name of the book you sent, along with your high school's name. Not sure what book to send? Get some ideas there...and go for it!

Keeping the Power in Few Hands

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/opinion/13kristof.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

I'm going to come back to work on this piece, believe me. What's got me provoked is the idea that the nation's education problem can be fixed by investing resources (excellent teachers, money), in our lowest schools.

I agree that this would be the remedy.

However, I don't think we can get there from here. There needs to be an intermediary step, and that step needs to be a recognition of why we are invested in poor education in the first place. We can say we want it to improve, but our actions, as evaluated by our persistant results, reflect a much stronger will to keep it low. Somewhere, there's an incentive to maintain poor education, otherwise, we'd have continued the upward march.

In counseling, when you meet someone who knows what "the answer" is, yet doesn't pursue it as a solution to their dilemma, you start asking what function "the wrong answer" has in their personal system---what are the incentives, and most times the very real needs, being realized through a less than adequate, and often destructive, course of action? This makes me ask what the hidden incentive is in maintaining poor results in the area of education.

The conclusion I come to is that if you educate everyone rather poorly, the only people who can make up the difference, through tutoring, parental involvement, and enrichment activities --are those who already have means. Everyone else is stuck with what the public schools offer, nothing more.

This guarantees that those in power stay in power, and that those who do not have the means but are nevertheless able to vault into power, will be very few and probably not well-equipped enough to compete over the long haul. Poor education is about guaranteeing the place of the haves, and making sure the have-nots do not get a voice.

Take a look at the places where poor education rules and then take a look at the history of power in those places. I think you'll find an enduring history of high disparity between haves and have nots and maybe some history of conquest, as well--an enduring gap between the wealthy/powerful and the poor/not powerful that is almost impervious to narrowing, without the contribution of a quality education.