Soooo.....Where Do We Go From Here?!

“Certainly, attempts by a variety of stakeholders to effectively teacher-proof public school curricula have influenced contemporary notions on the work of a teacher, and the role of a teacher in knowledge sharing and production. An overly cynical view is that the work of an educator is so undervalued, so disempowered, that teaching has been reduced to another cog in the reproductive school-machine. Of course, your blog post can take up this view, but more needed, perhaps, are writings that re-vision and reimagine what it means to teach, now” (Tuck, discussion post, 2011)

Before I proceed any further with my blog post, I must admit something: to some degree, I am one of those individuals who regards the current state of American education with utter dismay and no small sense of despair. I have a few theories about why the state of American education is so dismal, and will discuss them here. I will then propose how the system might possibly be changed and reimagined.

To put it bluntly, one of the main reasons that the public school systems are failing is that, on the whole, education, teachers, and teaching is not something that is truly valued in this country. In America, teaching is work that is more or less considered “easy” and something that anyone can do. Moreover, my personal experience has been that so many Americans feel that since they’ve all been to school and all had teachers, they know how to teach. And yet, on its face, this line of reasoning makes no sense, and is the equivalent of someone thinking, “Hey, I’ve had surgery. That means that I know how to do it! Pass me that big scalpel.”

Programs like Teach for America, while excellent in a number of ways, hold college recruitment sessions in which representatives say, “Don’t know what you really want to do with your life? Why not teach for awhile?” Meanwhile, I’ve heard the statement, “Those who can’t, teach” uttered on more than one occasion.

In my own teaching experience, I’ve had parents express the view that teaching is easy and anyone can do it, along with the proclamation that they personally know all there is to know about the profession. I’ve had parents blatantly and unabashedly interrupt the schoolday by insisting on throwing their child a birthday party in my classroom and I’ve had parents barge into the school during the day with a new family pet so that all the children could see. All such invasions are nothing short of disrupting another person’s work, yet I would be given awfully short shrift if I did the same thing to the offending parents, i.e. “Excuse me, but I know all about law, and I don’t feel that you are arguing this case correctly.”

From a political standpoint, school budgets are always one of the first things on the chopping block and it is always the school systems that can least afford cuts that suffer the most. In New York City, thousands of teachers are losing their jobs, but programs like the New York City Teaching Fellowship and the New York City Teaching Residency are placing young, thoroughly untrained individuals in the classroom with very little guidance, paying them much less than what many of the laid-off teachers made, and expecting them to perform. Though there are many positive aspects to these programs, having unprepared individuals parachuted into a tough, urban school setting has the potential to be a demoralizing experience and has the potential to shortchange both the students as well as the teaching fellow.

Jonathan Kozol wrote his searing expose Savage Inequalities twenty-years ago and has been discussing the problems of “separate but unequal” education for years. Yet there are far too many school systems in this country that exhibit the same appalling conditions that Kozol presented in 1991. How can this be?

While other countries like Finland (which has been able to turn around what was once a poorly functioning system in a matter of decades and now boasts the world’s top rated education), Japan, Canada, and South Korea have been able to consistently produce highly educated citizens, for a developed country, the U.S. considerably lags behind.

How can positive, effective, and permanent change take place? One thing that needs to happen is that teaching needs to be nationally recognized as a highly important and skilled profession, not something that just “anyone can do.”

Since the Finnish school system was in dire straits as late as a few decades ago, looking at the steps that were taken to institute change in Finland is helpful.

First of all, in Finland, parents respect teachers and value education.

Teachers do not begin teaching until they have undergone a certain level of training and all must obtain master’s degrees. The training that teachers undergo does not drastically vary from one person to another and is based on a solid educational approach and foundation. One issue we have here in America is that teachers are entering the field with dramatically different levels and quality of education. While there are definitely many instructors who are extremely well versed in their field and extraordinary at what they do, there are also teachers that did not learn much in terms of exactly how to teach. There are teachers in American classrooms who cannot write well, perhaps cannot read well, do not employ correct rules of grammar, know nothing about classroom management, and think nothing of traumatizing children. This, in turn, does not provide students with the best of role models.

In Finland, there is a set, standard curriculum that was agreed upon and recorded in the Education Constitution. All students are provided with a bi-lingual education and at a very young age can speak both Swedish and Finnish. Children coming from other cultures are taken into consideration in the Constitution and are able to be educated in their own language before fully entering the Finnish system.

Finnish children attend extremely well-run and intellectually stimulating preschools that are of high caliber and available to virtually all citizens. As a result of this, parents do not have to worry about childcare and children officially enter standard school having already been exposed to a certain level and quality of education.

Finally, the educational approach in Finland is one that is dynamic, interesting, and takes into consideration multiple intelligences.

In order for American education to reach its full potential, a massive overhaul of politics, values, and priorities must take place, one that results in a desire to give all American children the best start they can possibly have in life.

Teaching Language and Respecting Language Diversity

My first experience teaching ELL learners came eleven years ago when I was obtaining TEFL certification. At the time, I was preparing to move to France to teach English, and I wanted to specifically be trained in how to teach non-native speakers a language different from their own. As part of the TEFL training course, the students I taught were 70 and 80 year-old Russian immigrants. All the immigrants had been forced to leave Russia for one reason or another and all were quite eager to learn English. None of the TEFL teacher trainees spoke a word of Russian and our students spoke extremely limited English. In addition to following a specific lesson plan format, TEFL trainees were taught that, no matter what, we shouldn’t speak the native language of our students during instruction. This rule was meant to apply not only to our Russian pupils, but also to any students we would be teaching in the future.

The atmosphere of the TEFL training course was extremely convivial, and we as student trainees really loved both teaching and learning from our Russian students. Though we were not officially told to do so, we all were very interested to know about the lives our students led in Russia and learn about their past experiences. I was quite interested to learn some Russian words, and, overall, a very respectful and happy atmosphere was created by all involved. I fully understand why my TEFL instructors taught trainees not to ever bring the native language of our future students into the classroom----not only might students use this as a crutch, but what happens when the teacher doesn’t speak the language of her/his students in the first place? However, above all, though I think we as teacher trainees already innately had the instinct to show respect for the culture and first language of our students, it was great that our teachers also felt the same way. When writing about ELL, Mari Haneda stresses that there is any number of ways that students can learn another language, but she focuses on the importance of literacy practices at home, school, and the community.

In the course readings we’ve read for class this week, whether learning about trilingualism, bi-lingualism, the primitive language myth or bi-culturalism, a common theme in all articles was to always show respect for the first language/culture of students when teaching in language diverse settings. Not doing so has a high likelihood of having a deleterious effect on learners. During the course of my TEFL training, one of the key factors in teaching approach was to show respect for the language, culture, and overall identity of students, despite not knowing much about how to speak Russian. As a result of this, the TEFL teaching experience was successful and fulfilling. I was then able to take what I learned and apply it to my teaching English to French students in France.

I entered into this role with much eagerness and was quite excited to teach young French pupils. I did find that my TEFL training rule of never speaking to students in their native language didn’t apply so well in this instance----because I was now teaching young children, they constantly asked me questions in French. I speak French fluently, and I found that, when working with young children, always refusing to speak in French meant that we often could not move on from an idea. I wound up finding a happy medium of having to speak French when necessary during the course of a lesson. In contrast to my French pupils, my Russian students at the Boston Language Institute knew that one of the rules of the TEFL program was that speaking in their native tongue during English instruction might impede the learning process.

In Chapter 4 of The Skin That We Speak, Judith Baker discusses trilingualism, an English teaching approach that focuses on the idea of students mastering three different forms of the English language: that which is spoken at home, that which is spoken in a professional setting, and that which is spoken with all formal rules and standards intact. The goal of the trilingual approach to teaching is to help students master the mechanical difference between these three forms of English. Of these three forms of the language, formal English is generally considered superior.

Meanwhile, Lomawaima and McCarty introduce the idea of the primitive language myth, a theory that raises the belief that some languages that exist are savage and less advanced in quality when compared to English. Historically speaking, any Native American language, regardless of tribal group, fell into this category. European settlers deemed all Native American languages primitive, and the learning of English and a western way of life was wrought upon Indians by force. In order to learn how to survive in the changed cultural landscape of North America, Native Americans have been caught in a battle of attempting to hold onto their own cultural languages and identity as well as master English. In this blogger’s personal opinion, any indigenous group in any culture theoretically will face the challenges of bil-lingualism and bi-culturalism if they are dominated and colonialized by an outside group.  

Ultimately, and without exception, all articles we read for this week shared a common theme: in order to have the effective teaching and learning of English and literacy instruction take place, not only must the original languages of students not be criticized or labeled as ‘wrong,’ they should be respected, be left intact, and used in an appropriate setting.

Hirsch, Cultural Literacy, Lists----Oh, MY!

In his memoir Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate, former economics professor Michael Yates chronicles the experience he and his wife had when they decided to leave their jobs, sell their belongings, travel the United States, and purposely work at minimum wage jobs, all in an effort to experience the wide economic disparity that exists among various members of American society. A professor emeritus of University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown, Yates begins his book by describing the skill level of students he taught late in his career; though they were admittedly able-minded and intellectually competent, Yates found that his students possessed an extraordinarily limited amount of general knowledge and overall cultural literacy. To make matters worse, these individuals were proud of their limited knowledge. Yates labels these students “willfully ignorant” (Yates, 2007) and teaching classes of students who so blatantly lacked academic and/or cultural curiosity eventually took its toll on him. He admits to becoming disillusioned with teaching after over 25 years at UP-J and, as a result decided to take early retirement.   

As I read the Hirsch text, I recalled Michael Yates’ commentary about the obvious shift that occurred in the “quality” of student that began appearing in his classroom late in his career. After decades of teaching pupils who were quite well read and knowledgeable about a variety of subjects, Yates originally considered the student who was not curious about the world to be something of a novelty. Then, gradually, a shift in student attitude began to take place. Generally speaking, the willfully ignorant individual does not know much beyond his or her own personal experience (including but definitely not limited to important facts about world history, domestic and international geography, literature, language, and, in some cases, life beyond his home town) and does not care to know.

In my experience as both student and teacher, the phenomenon of the willfully ignorant seems to indeed be prevalent in modern America: as an undergraduate English major, I still vividly remember a fellow English major asking an entire seminar group the definition of the word “bigamy” (this was during a class reading of Jane Eyre). In response to this question, another student responded, “that means when you’re racist.”

At the elite Baltimore private school where I taught for several years, I often encountered parents who were quite adamant about the peerless genius of their own children. Meanwhile, it was often the children of these parents who could not find the United States on a map, could not locate Italy on a map, stated that Italy was in France, believed that South Africa was a United State, and did not know the capital of Maryland (the state in which they all lived).

Meanwhile, one academic tutor at this school did not know that Hawaii was part of the United States, while another tutor had never heard of the American Civil Liberties Union. Even as I type these words, though I know the information to be true, I still find it unbelievable.

I can fully identify with Hirsch recognizing that there is something deeply wrong with the font of knowledge that young Americans at the turn of the 21st century possess. To be blunt, the font seems to be rather shallow, and, in some instances, has dried up completely. Hirsch’s call for action and a proposal that all young Americans should grow up being taught a basic foundational cultural literacy is understandable, and on some level, valid. However, the problem in Hirsch’s approach is that he actually attempted to compile a list of what every American should know, and in so doing, really only reflected a white, Eurocentric cultural literacy. Moreover, it is almost impossible to put together a viable and acceptable list of what every American should know, primarily because so much depends on the identity and values of the person making the list. There is also the issue of making a list that reflects a high degree of multiculturalism and acknowledges that there is no one type of American. This is something that needs to be done, yet exactly how long would this list be?

That being said, I am in agreement that many American students today are woefully devoid of cultural literacy and global awareness. When David Letterman and/or Jay Leno send production assistants out in the street for random cultural quizzes, it is not so funny that vast amounts of people walking around New York City cannot name the Speaker of the House, the Secretary of State, or three supreme court justices, but they can easily spout all the lyrics of the latest Lady Gaga album. Why can’t many Americans be able to do all of the above?

If I were to compile a list on what every American should know, I would begin with some facts on the United States. The list would read as follows and is primarily geared towards middle and secondary school students. Please know that this is a very basic list, one that only covers rudimentary information that I have repeatedly seen lacking in students. I feel that kids should not be leaving 12^th grade without the following knowledge firmly intact:

·      Basic rules of standard English and grammar

·      Know the names of all fifty states and have at least a passing knowledge of their capital cities

·      Know the capital of the state in which one lives

·      Be able to locate North America and the United States on a map

·      Be able to locate all world continents on a map and have familiarity with their major cities

·      The purpose and approximate dates of The Revolutionary War, The War of 1812, The Civil War, and WWI and II

·      The history of North America before Christopher Columbus claimed to have discovered it

·      Segregation, desegregation and The Civil Rights movement

·      The Harlem Renaissance (musicians, writers, artists)

·      Major American poets and writers of prose from the 20^th century

Knowledge should include white, black, and Latin American writers

·      Knowledge of the Dewey Decimal system and how to actually find a book in the library

·      How to conduct research

·      How to plan, structure, and write a paper, essay, or article

Again, this is an extremely limited list and does not begin to address much of the cultural literacy I feel that students should possess. For example, I didn’t at all get into the global literacy that is needed. However, in mastering the concepts mentioned above, adolescents would be significantly more prepared and competitive in an academic setting and better able to see beyond their own lives, their own small corner of the world, and life beyond only what they know.