Well, I’ve been sitting on my back porch with the laptop for days now, trying to figure out what to write about the last four years of my teaching existence, and I think I’m stuck and rambling. I don’t see this as a bad thing, I think I just haven’t done the heavy intellectual introspection required to process what I have experienced these past four years. I know that climbing in the mountains will fix that, but even that is on the horizon. So here I sit.

I can say that I am tired. Ultimately, I think the current system has worn me down, and I’ve only just started thinking about the myriad of ways. A few off the top of my head, with pithy comments:

1. Schooling favors compliance.

When learning remains dependent upon grading as a measure of “success”, compliance will be rewarded. Parents are used to the grades. Students are used to the grades. Teachers find comfort in the grades, even though they are rarely a valid indicator of learning. See Robert Fried’s excellent work on this subject for a more thorough analysis.

2. Regents curriculum requires rote acquisition of knowledge.

When you are forced to give an assessment that preferences isolated bits of factual knowledge, lower level learning occurs. I have seen this time and time again. The kids that do best on the Regents are the ones that can remember terms like “least resistant” and “abundant” and know how to access such terms on their Reference Tables. Mafic and felsic are my favorites though, mainly because they are just oozing with relevancy for 8th graders.

2a. Scientific process is lost when the value of learning is placed on Regents success.

It’s hard not to give preference to that damned exam. In our district, it was 20% of the final course grade and students need to pass it to “earn credit” for the course. The Regents exam frames much of the dialogue when it comes to learning. I tried extremely hard this year to promote engaging Earth Science as a means of learning how to exist on our planet. I am not sure how much of this the students internalized. One of the saddest moments of my career occurred on a field-trip to Letchworth State Park when a researcher friend (who accompanied us on the trip) asked the kids to explain what Earth Science meant to them. Over and over he reported that the kids answered “using the Reference Tables to take the Regents Exam”. I tried extremely hard this year to make process a central theme in my teaching. That’s what science is, after all. But again, what gets tested gets taught. And the tests get taught.

3. Students and teachers are like bulbs in a garden planted on the moon.

This is perhaps the thing I will remember the most. Almost all of our kids, and many of our teachers are truly amazing. Many of the teachers engage in epic battles in their quest to impart and share knowledge, and much of this time is spent shielding students from the immense crapstorm that rains down from above. It became very apparent to me that socially democratic school decision making needs to happen in order for real reform to happen in a school system. When both students and teachers have no say or buy-in with the curriculum or assessment process, disenfranchisement runs rampant. It’s no way to run schools and ultimately I believe it’s harming children. Perhaps another blog post on this at another time, but I think it primarily comes down to a problem of scale: schools and school systems are simply too big.

3a. I still can’t shake the Sudbury model of schooling:

At Sudbury schools, the curriculum is life itself. Rather than resisting human nature, we work with children’s innate curiosity, their drive to master the world around them. Sudbury students from kindergarten on up are given responsibility for their lives, and supported in engaging both the wonders of the world and the myriad challenges of finding their way in it. In full-fledged school democracies, Sudbury students plumb the depths of human interactions. They learn to navigate groups of various sizes, and not only see but also practice the business of keeping an institution running. Initiative, judgment, respect, responsibility and persistence become key values.

That seems to just make sense on a gut level.

Anyway, I’m getting restless after that last one. Time to move on to something else. As I said earlier, I’m sure I’ll have more to say after I do some climbing. Play me out Nietzsche:

“On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.”

That’s about right.