It's freakin' 7:52 AM

And they start in with the jack hammers.I thought they weren't allowed to make that much noise until at least 8AM. I know it's only 8 minutes, but come on! Some of us are still sleeping, and some of us have not gotten enough sleep to want to hear that noise. Where's the coffee????

Life with Dogs

This post has nothing to do with education. It's more about the joys of life.

I arrived home today after 6.5 hours at the university to discover that Kehli (pictured here) had a bit of separation anxiety while I was gone. I should add that she is only four months old, so it's not surprising that she gets a little wacky. But, she's 31 pounds, and getting pretty big.

As, I was saying, I returned home to discover that Kehli chewed up the pile of catalogs on the coffee table. She didn't chew any bills, journals, or work-related papers (as far as I could tell), but she SHREDDED everything else. If I had thought about it I would have taken a picture. Now that I've cleaned up and gone for a run (both with and without dogs), I can laugh. Sort of.

The New School Year

Let's face it. Every new school year starts off with some level of chaos. I had the luck to find a blogger who is an artist (A life in scribbles), who's mom is a teacher. She drew a cartoon, which I think captures the fun of the first weeks of school, particularly the weather we've had so far this week (I had on my purple rubber ducky boots yesterday. I will be buying the matching yellow slicker in the next day or so. I think farce can be a good thing).

The challenge of the new year is not just the nerves (teachers and students have them), it's the changes that happen over the summer, AND the changes that happen in the first few days before and during school. Gotta love it. One thing I can definitely say about teaching is that you have to be OK with chaos and change.

It's just like riding a bike

Once you get back on, it all comes back to you.

First class down, and the nerves are settling. I just hope that the second one goes a bit smoother (and I don't spend 40 minutes trying to park).

In the meantime, I got this really disturbing message from a colleague crowing about how wonderful it will be if we apply NCLB-style testing to higher ed. I wanted to scream, for so many reasons. Part of it was the fact the person doing the posting knows nothing about NCLB "assessments" and how it has narrowed the curriculum. There is also this assumption that the tests really indicate what students have learned, which is far more complicated than a multiple guess test can indicate. And, if the feds (and the states) were to require testing at the college level, in what content areas would we test students? How would that affect choices of majors? Would it result in closing down certain programs? The President and others have gone on record saying that they want to streamline college majors to better reflect the needs of the marketplace. That is very dangerous in my mind, because it will fundamentally change the role of higher education in a democratic society.

I need help on this one, because I need to respond to this colleague. I have a good deal of the research (from both sides of the aisle that point to problems), and I also know about the shady deals individual states have made with the ED. I need to hear from other people what they think before I compose a response.

Any thoughts?

T minus 12 hours

In less than 12 hours, I will meet my first group of students for the semester. The butterflies are there; as usual I don't feel prepared. I'll probably be feeling this way 50 years from now (assuming I'm still breathing). Like most teachers, there are the usual questions that run through my head:

Will they like me (not really crucial, I'll settle for respect and positive regard)?
Will they come back (My syllabus is notorious for bringing about some student attrition)?
Will they get my sense of humor (If they do, class is great fun. If they don't, the crickets are really loud)?
Will I get them to love the subject matter?
Will my breath smell?
Will I make some horrible gaff (like tuck my skirt into my underwear--joke. See sense of humor question above)?
Will the technology work (always a crap shoot, which is why I have a back-up plan)?

Don't let anybody fool you that teaching is boring. If my nerves are any indication, it's like the Indy 500, only you have to race around students rather than cars. Oh, and the crashes are not nearly as heart-stopping.

The new NCLB, or, how can we once again punish urban communities for being, well, urban?

I will not deny the fact that I have been highly critical of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) for a very long time. True, I was hopeful when it was first released in January 2001. A lot has changed since then as I have watched the federal government narrow public education to tests, scripted curriculum, and more tests. I have been enraged at how poor and under-resourced communities have been expected to produce the same results with fewer resources, only to be further financially penalized when they missed the mark. So imagine my reaction when I read this New York Times article this morning.

NCLB is up for reauthorization this year, and a number of different groups have been weighing in on what ought to be changed. There are the “accountability” advocates who say that they will consider no plan that weakens testing. There are those who want to change teacher licensure so that it can be easier for anyone with a Bachelors degree. And now there’s Miller’s latest idea: to ease requirements for suburban schools.

That’s right, folks. Middle class and suburban communities would be held to different standards. Then again, the article notes that states with large immigrant communities would also have different requirements. So why am I not screaming about the changes for immigrant students? It has to do with understanding privilege and language acquisition. This proposal would relax adequate yearly progress (AYP) requirements for suburban schools that have small numbers of students in different groups. What that means is that as long as the schools aren’t failing across the board, it’s OK that a student group or two (as long as it’s small) don’t make it. I thought that was the purpose of NCLB: to ensure that all students are counted. Under this plan, suburban schools don’t have to count all their students.

The changes for states with large immigrant populations are equally problematic. Rather than require schools with large English Language Learner (ELL) populations to test their students in English after two years, schools would have five years. This is good because the research on language acquisition indicates that it takes five years of instruction in English before ELL students would excel academically in an English-only classroom. The downside, of course, is that ELL students will be tested in their native languages for five years, which means that schools need to provide tests in many different languages (in my “suburban” district, that would mean up to sixty different languages). That will be a huge burden to individual districts, to say nothing about the educational impact on ELL students.

So why am I so crazed after reading this article? Because it once again indicates to me that NCLB is nothing more than a shell game to achieve the end of public education. If suburban schools aren’t held to the same standards as urban or rural schools, then the federal government is punishing the students who attend urban or rural schools for being “urban” or “rural” students. And, given the fact that urban and rural public schools tend to have fewer economic resources than their suburban counterparts, the federal government is engaging in a very pernicious form of discrimination. Let me be honest, I am a former inner-city school teacher who is committed to urban education. To have a proposal floated that exempts suburban districts because of their access to academic resources and their lack of “diversity” (read: predominantly middle class and of western European descent) while continuing to punish urban districts is unconscionable.

Less than two days!

Gack (similar to a gagging noise, but not quite as disgusting)!

I'm not ready. I'm not ready. How will I ever be ready?

OK, this is pretty much my state of mind every year before the beginning of a new academic year. I'm never ready. There is always more tweaking of the syllabus, one more manuscript to finish, 100 more email messages to be written and sent, 3 more proposals to review... it never ends.

Wahhhh! I don't wanna go back to school!!!

OK, I'm over it.