If You Teach or Write 5-Paragraph Essays–Stop It! | The White Rhino: A Chicago Latino English Teacher.

Best of luck to you from The Paper Graders on finishing up the school year! We’re less than a week from graduation here and about a week and a half from that moment when we walk out of the building for the summer…

for the love of learning: Teachers eat their young.

Better yet, we should abandon altogether the multiple-choice tests, which are in vogue not because they are an effective tool for judging teachers or students but because they are an efficient means of producing data. Instead, we should move toward extensive written exams, in which students could grapple with literary passages and books they have read in class, along with assessments of students’ reports and projects from throughout the year. This kind of system would be less objective and probably more time-consuming for administrators, but it would also free teachers from endless test preparation and let students focus on real learning.

Read more here: Teach the Books, Touch the Heart – NYTimes.com.

What Automated Essay Grading Says To Children | Bud the Teacher.

I’m holed up today at a cafe. My view through the wall of windows is of the sparkling sunshine, the breeze gently caressing the baby spring leaves on the trees, and the mountains towering just there on the edge of town. I’m imagining all the people I cannot see from this distance who are winding their way along the trails that weave through the trees on those mountains.

The view quietly reminds me that in five more weeks, I can spend my Saturdays (and my Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays and Fridays and Sundays too for that matter) playing outside in the sunshine instead of here at the cafe attempting to get through the work my stressful week at school made impossible. (Ok, I do have some responsibilities over summer break that I’ll have to attend to, but certainly not within the first couple of weeks when I’ll be recovering from another break-neck paced school year.)

Now to that work I need to do…

I went to some of D.C.’s best schools. I was still unprepared for college. – The Washington Post.

Here’s my response:

Was this student’s elementary education in charter schools in DC too heavily focused on test prep for high test scores so the school could claim it was doing a better job than the public schools in the city? And that’s why he grew to believe that doing well in school was about memorizing stuff?

By the way, a public high school can absolutely prepare students for the critical thinking rigors of college. And many do.

I work in a high school that emphasizes critical thinking for our students. We have one of the lowest remediation rates in the state for our students who go on to state colleges (meaning, we are preparing our students well for what colleges are asking of them).

Now, back to the stack of grading I’d like to polish off this afternoon…

Why do we continue to think that privatizing the nurturing of our children is going to work well? Is it working in your health care system?

Schools Matter: Charter Schools Spend More on Administration and Less on Instruction.

I completed my doctoral degree in 2009. Three years later, my dissertation (for the most part–there have been a couple of articles from it) remains unpublished. I’ve sent out four proposals to book publishers and  heard back “no” four times–”no” for different reasons each time. I was expecting this as I know that getting a book published is not an easy feat.

One “no” was actually a “no-but,” meaning that the publisher was willing to look at it again if I did a bit more writing with specific suggestions for teachers about how to manage the classroom tensions that my story unpacked. What I’ve written identifies a few specific moments of tension in the classroom, excavates all around them to figure out where they came from, and then makes an argument for why those moments of tension are critically important to transformative classroom experiences for students. This publisher wanted me to go that one more step to tell teachers how to manage the tension, how to respond to it, how to deal with it.

For a year now I’ve been thinking about this request from this publisher because I’m just not sure if that’s the direction I want this work to follow. I’ve had this all percolating in the back of my mind (waaaaaaaaaaay in the back of my mind) for months. I’ve just been totally unsure what I wanted my dissertation work to become–a book for teachers? a book for academics? a book for people who don’t know much about what actually happens in classrooms but need to?

In our conversations this weekend at the Colorado Day of Writing, we talked about why teacher stories are important, why our stories about our classrooms are important. They are important to other teachers of course because we can learn from each other through the stories we share. But right now with the status of public schools in America and the way that teachers are being vilified for the perceived failures of the system, we need to share our stories not just with each other but with all those people out there who have particular ideas about what happens in classrooms but who don’t actually know because they aren’t there.

Stories are powerful. It is through story that we understand our lives. If someone were to ask my students who I am as a teacher, they would respond with stories about their experiences with me to define who I am. We all carry stories with us–stories from our experiences we hold to define who we are, stories we hold to define the other people in our lives, stories we turn to when we need to make sense of something or someone new or unfamiliar to us.

If the world tells a certain story about you, that story defines you. The media have been telling a certain story about public schooling in America, and that story has defined it so fully in the minds of policy makers that we have ended up on our current path, a path that we here at The Paper Graders have written about again and again and again because we believe it’s damaging to our schools and our students.

At times I feel totally powerless against all of this. What can one public high school teacher do to enact meaningful change and reform to such a huge system?

Our introduction to you about the newest Paper Grader, Mr. B, was something he said to us recently:

If you really want to change the system, you need to think like a virus.

What’s more viral than a story? The most powerful stories get told over and over and over. People pass them on. In fact (warning: English geek moment approaching), this is why we even have something like The Odyssey all these years later. Homer traveled around and told the story and eventually someone wrote it down and now we make high school students read it. Usually in ninth grade.

So my mission has been clarified.

I wish to tell stories from the classroom, stories that will (I hope) work to redefine the world of public schooling in America. I’m starting by taking a story from my dissertation and reworking it toward that goal and then I’ll send it out and maybe someone will publish it in a place where people will read it.

Join me? Tell your stories!

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Read more about the power of stories:

• The work of Maxine Greene
• Poetic Justice by Martha Nussbaum
• The Call of Stories by Robert Coles

Deepening the Debate over Teach For America: Responses to Heather Harding – Living in Dialogue – Education Week Teacher.