Does It Matter Where You Go to College?

My son has not shown great preference for one college over another. Where he has expressed a mild like or dislike, it has been for things that are icing on the college cake like proximity to a large city or a pretty campus. His contention is that it doesn’t really matter which college he attends. He believes that he would be fine at any college.

My wife and I have been trying to convince him to look more critically at his choices, but he doesn't know what he wants. Are we asking him to make choices before he is ready? How does he become ready? What if he is correct, and it doesn’t matter where he ends up at college? 

Part of me screams that picking the right college is critical. So much of our college process is predicated on the assumption that matching student and college is a key factor in fostering future success. 

Is it? 

When I am presenting on college writing, I have sometimes asked audiences if they know their physicians' undergraduate schools. They don't. People trust their doctors with their lives, but they don't care where s/he went to school. Most people don't even know what medical school their doctor attended. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

My choice of college mattered. I picked a university where I could study the subjects that most interested me. I found professors and students who helped me figure out both my passions and myself. I gained mentors and friends who continue to shape my life more than thirty years later. 

Is that a function of me or of the school? Would that have occurred no matter where I went? I can't answer that question. I tell kids that the most important variable that affects college success is the student - and that is not a function of a college choice. 

Or is it? We are different people in different settings. We see ourselves differently depending on the mirrors into which we look. One of the most important things I learned from helping my elder child select a college was the importance of the academic match. I am baffled by parents who do all they can to push their children into “stretch” schools. I would never want my child to be the student with the lowest test scores and worst academic record in the classroom. Is the prestige worth putting your child in such a difficult position?

Malcolm Gladwell has even said that it may be detrimental in the long run for high achieving students to go to these prestige schools. The New Republic published an article entitled, “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League: The nation’s top colleges are turning our kids into zombies.” While one may disagree with the conclusions of the two authors, both clearly believe that colleges have long-term effects on students.

There most certainly is a difference in how students experience college. I don't want my child to spend time in a large lecture hall listening to someone drone on and on, or feel he has to binge drink to have a social life. I want a college that will nurture him and help him find and develop his passions. Rather than an impersonal institution or a party school, I hope he will go to a university that will facilitate his discovery of who he wants to become and what he wants to contribute to this world.  

Just any college will not suffice. There are probably many colleges that would be a good match for our child – and some that would be poor selections. The challenge is finding them.

Stop Beating Up The Kids!

Students don’t have a choice. They must be in school, and they are required to do what their teachers tell them or face the consequences. Educators have a choice.  Why do so many choose ineffective and outdated strategies that feel like torture? It is no wonder that kids see the rigor of school like rigor mortis: stiff and dead!

Let’s start with the way that many students receive their precious learning: lecture. While I like a good monologue, I usually can’t repeat more than a few lines even after I’ve just heard it. When so many better methods are available to communicate content to kids, why would a teacher drone and on and on? In high schools and colleges alike, there are countless instructors putting kids to sleep, reading their slides, reiterating the textbook, and missing the point. Educational research is clear: the lecture is the least effective way to teach kids. In small amounts, here and there, it can supplement other strategies, but it should never (yes, I wrote never) be the primary method of instruction. Lecture is the first refuge of the weak teacher who has no other teaching tools. It is the favorite of the self-indulgent teacher, who likes to perform and entertain rather than teach, and it is the sure fire way to kill student motivation and engagement. Shut up and teach!

An NPR story looked at how colleges from Maryland to Harvard are finding that the lecture is not effective even in their science classes. The Arizona University study cited in NPR’s story found that, “The traditional lecture-based physics course produces little or no change in most students' fundamental understanding of how the physical world works.”  The study’s author went on to state that, "The classes only seem to be really working for about 10 percent of the students…[a]nd I maintain, I think all the evidence indicates, that these 10 percent are the students that would learn it even without the instructor. They essentially learn it on their own.” So, lecturers, you are preaching to the choir.

And while we are discussing the lecture, why are many teachers obsessed with filling course with massive amounts of material? The lecture is long because the teacher has stuffed it with too much content. One has to wonder if whoever “designed” the curriculum could make choices, understood the subject well enough to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, or was far more enamored with the subject matter than with the idea of teaching it. In an age when almost any factual question can be researched in seconds using a device smaller than a piece of toast, is it so important to list them all on your PowerPoint slide, professor?

Once the kids have been subjected to archaic recitations of long lists of facts, they are then bludgeoned with tests. These tests are frequently so long that they are not only assessing students’ ability to regurgitate the material, but also if they can do so at breakneck speed. Tests at both high school and college level seem designed to trick and confuse even the most prepared students. Most of us don’t do our best work when we are rushing, yet countless students are evaluated this way.

Alfie Kohn, the renowned author of Punished By Rewards, noted in an article in the Washington Post that tests “are typically more about measuring the number of facts that have been crammed into students’ short-term memories than they are about assessing understanding.” Kohn goes on to note, “That’s why it’s so disconcerting to find teachers who are proud of their student-centered approach to instruction, who embrace active and interactive forms of learning, yet continue to rely on tests as the primary, or even sole, form of assessment in their classrooms.”

As I have noted in the past, grades are also used as a way to beat up students. Students who learn and demonstrate their learning throughout the term will get an averaged grade that penalizes them for learning because they were not proficient at the very beginning of class. Shouldn’t education change us? Shouldn’t we grow from the class? Shouldn’t the grade reflect that?

Assistant Professor Paul Thomas of Furman University sends his students an apology letter at the end of the term. He regrets having to give them a final grade, saying, “In my quest to honor the essential dignity of each one of you, then, I have fought the good fight against what I feel is deeply dehumanizing—grading.”

As the semester comes to a close, I examine each student and look at my record of his or her learning. I, too, wish that I did not have to reduce our wonderful process to a single letter. It devalues and diminishes the educational growth that has happened in our classroom. The best I can do is find a way to make the grade an aggregate of students’ proficiency in the skills we have practiced all the semester. How would you like eighteen weeks of your works to be reduced to a single letter? What does that say about what you have accomplished?

Good teachers work hard to foster their students’ learning. Good teachers carefully craft their lessons and assessments to facilitate student success. Lectures, overwhelming content, and dehumanizing and punitive grading are the antithesis of good education. Once upon a time, a long time ago, they were the only tools we had.  The old quotation (attributed to many) says that, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” Educators, stop nailing your students. It is time to use brave new tools!

Cold Closings - Again

Do two years make a tradition? For the second year in a row, our school has been closed for cold during the first week following winter break. In a school, few things cause as much strong feelings as emergency closings.

When I was in high school, the principal said that he’d only close school if, when he looked from his second-floor office out the window, he could not see the flagpole. We rarely had a snow day. After all, this is Chicago, and winter isn’t a stranger here. The one time I can remember school closing, I had already struggled to arrive and then had to find a way home in a raging snow storm.

On Tuesday, my seniors were almost giddy with anticipation that we might get a belated addition to winter break. They wanted to speculate about what it would take to close school, and how long school might be closed. The formula used to be that we needed at least a foot of snow to fall in the middle of the night to close school. The key was getting buses to the students. If we couldn’t get the buses out of the garage or the drivers to the buses, then school would be canceled.

We have released school early in anticipation of a storm. This has always concerned me. As bad weather is developing, instead of keeping our students inside where it is safe, we send them out into the storm! I fully recognize that many staff members have a long commute and we must let them get home. Yet, there too, the logic seems problematic. Which is better: stuck in a warm and safe school or spending hours sliding and colliding on the streets and highways?

However, cold is now as likely as snow to close school. Concern for students at bus stops, walking, or merely going outdoors is the rationale for our two recent closures. What percentage of our students takes the buses? The line of parents dropping off and picking up students is always fantastically long. What happens in Minnesota or Canada? Do they close just for cold? Now that we have closed for wind chills that are around -20°, does that mean that any time the temperature dips that low, we automatically close? Is it going to be very cold tomorrow…

My wife and I work at our school, so we stay home with our children. It must be very challenging when the kids are home and their parents still have to go to work. While we were home, we did some work. My son received emails from several of his teachers, and I emailed my students with an updated schedule, too.

The truth is we did not spend the whole day doing homework. I got caught up on grading which is a rare occurrence. I planned lessons and worked on a variety of school projects. I also did other tasks – and wrote a blog post. From the work that my students turned in the last two days, I don’t think many of them spent much time on English class.

When school starts tomorrow, I have no doubt there will be teachers wringing hands and gnashing teeth about lost teaching time, upcoming final exams, and the difficulties of making up all that “material”. Yet, in a few weeks, it will be forgotten. Life will go on.

No one was outside making snowmen during these two days, but we enjoyed the extended indoor break. Closing school to ensure that our students and staff are safe is reasonable. So let’s make it a tradition: from now on, two weather closings the week after winter break should be the rule! If nothing else, it makes the transition back to school just a little easier.

Ten Things I've Learned From Teaching in My Children's School

I missed going to open house this year. I needed to play teacher that evening. I may have the “inside track” on all sorts of things, but being a teacher in the same school as my child has its benefits and challenges. The benefits outweigh the challenges, and I have only had a few difficult or uncomfortable situations.

Sharing school with my children has made me a better teacher. When I have staff members’ children, I try to have a chat with them during the first month of school. I ask them to be candid with me. I tell them that I am a big boy, and if they have feedback, questions, or observations, they should not hesitate to tell me. They have a unique window into my classroom, and I want to know what they see. I don’t treat their children any differently than any other student. However, the truth is, when their children go home and talk about class, their parents have a far more complex understanding of what is going on. Hearing that view would make me a better teacher for all students.

Here a list of ten things I have learned from being on both sides of the desk

1. Be predictable. It creates enormous anxiety if students cannot figure out teacher’s behavior or choices. Sending homework to students via email at the last minute is nerve racking. Not knowing what will happen in class day to day creates anxiety that interferes with learning.

2. It is not a sign of weakness to bend or change. If you are tempted to say to a child, “If I do this for you, I have to do it for everyone,” then DO IT FOR EVERYONE! That may be a lot of work, but such flexibility is critical. Rigid adherence to rules for their own sake is unfair to everyone.

3. Homework needs to be meaningful. Why are we giving it? What does it teach the kids? Do they know this? Do you go over this in class? Can they see its value? Can you?

4. Homework needs to be reasonable. I have been the biggest offender in this regard. I can imagine some of my former students reading this and rolling their eyes. Check with kids and ask them how long the homework takes. If the homework is meaningful, this issue is not as problematic as when it is busy work. I have been struggling with homework load for a very long time. Students must practice skills outside of class to achieve mastery. Different kids need different amounts and types of practice. Finding the balance is worth the struggle.

5. Whenever children are on the grade bubble, give them the benefit of the doubt and give them the higher grade. This is my rule. I don’t do this for minor quarter grades or progress checks. However, at semester time, no one -  I repeat NO ONE – will miss a grade by a small amount. What is the price of NOT doing this? Does this somehow damage a teacher’s credibility or authority? Are we that certain of our evaluations and systems? The reward here is great. The cost is zero.

6. Take the temperature of your class regularly. One of my children came home and said, “I go to this class to feel stupid.” The teacher was not a bad teacher, but he clearly did not know how students were feeling and all he had to do was ask.

7. How much should speed matter? Unless we are engaged in an athletic endeavor, how important is it that students get things done quickly? My children have encountered with frightening regularity tests that are too long. Over and over, it feels like we are not testing skills or knowledge, but the child’s ability to perform at warp speed. Is that what we want? How important is racing through the assessment?

8. Teachers must rethink their use of points and averaged grading. What is it really for? Here are my thoughts on why point based averaged grades are not a good choice.  Look here for more information on grading.

9. Be kind with finals. Help kids with finals – even older ones. Give them information about finals early to reduce anxiety and facilitate planning. We sometimes get confused about what is done for our benefit and what is done for theirs. Giving finals early gives us more time to grade and more free time at the end of the semester. It makes their end of the quarter a stressful nightmare.

10. Minimize lecture. Some kids love lecture because it asks so little of them. Some kids like lecture because it allows them to go to sleep. Most kids will tell you that a more active classroom is not only more engaging, but more productive. The research is clear and indisputable: it is time to replace lecture with countless other ways to deliver content. Reading, research, video, experiences, and countless other options are far better approaches. Like salt in the soup, a little lecture here and there is fine. A diet of all lectures is deadly.

Do I do all of this all of the time? Of course! Well, of course, I do it most of the time. And even after nearly thirty years, I am still experimenting, and I still make mistakes. The key is that teachers must be open to feedback and then reflect, revise, rework, and try again – just like the kids!

My Wait Problem

I move too quickly. Whether it is making decisions, sending email or, unfortunately, opening my mouth, I frequently find myself wishing I had waited just a few more minutes or even seconds. Patience is a virtue I am trying to cultivate, and it is extremely difficult.

The more I think about it, the more I think patience may be the cardinal virtue, especially for take action people like me. Yes, we must be kind and loving and giving and all that. However, to me, those are easier because I can do them. Not doing is far more difficult.

As I taught my younger child to drive, I realized that patience is the key to good driving and a lack of it causes many of the issues on the road. Remember that wonderful moment in the movie Starman when, after alien Jeff Bridges nearly causes an accident at an intersection, Karen Allen yells at him, “You said you watched me. You said you knew the rules.” His reply may be the mantra for many drivers. He tells her, “Red light stop. Green light go. Yellow light go – very fast.” Waiting may be the key to safety in the car.

As a teacher and a parent, I must learn to wait. I want my kids (my own children and my students) to succeed! Yet, learning is messy, complex, and most of all time consuming. It doesn’t happen in an instant. I have to be willing to let go, and allow them figure it out on their own, and I must wait.

Sitting at the gate before a flight, looking at the phone expecting a call, refreshing the email screen over and over can feel like wasting time. Speed is a modern virtue, but it is self-defeating. The faster I go, the faster I want to go. The more I get done, the more time I have to do more and more and more. Stop!

“Wait!” has also become a verbal tick, the new “um” or “like”. My students pepper their speech with "wait!" Perhaps the world is moving too fast for them. As I hear their interjections of, “wait,” I am reminded of small children trailing after their parents. Are kids struggling to keep up, and just begging us to wait?

Recently, my younger child was ill. It was not a serious illness by any means, but I had to stop myself from pestering him with questions about how he felt. I didn’t want to wait for the illness to go away. Waiting feels like powerlessness; I am giving up when I am waiting. Surrendering to my own powerlessness, stepping back and not taking action is far more challenging than calling doctors and administering medicines. The truth is that, when it comes to illness, what I really need is – wait for it – more patience!

One of my most challenging wait problems has another name: listening. Listening is not waiting to talk. Listening is not waiting for my turn. Listening  is being in the moment and not jumping ahead. A speaker at school turned wait into an acronym that stood for “Why Am I Talking”. It’s a good question. Often, it is just better to wait.

Perhaps that is why type A planners like me must learn to wait well – and why it is so difficult. We are always figuring out what comes next, and that may mean we miss now. Now is certainly as important as next. Now is all we really have, and next is just a potentially. Why sacrifice now for something that may not happen?

In one of my favorite books, Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein, the protagonist frequently responds to problems with the statement, “Waiting is…” It is just is. It isn’t doing; it isn’t planning. It just is. And that’s why I struggle with my wait problem.

The Teacher is Still Learning

I am still learning. Yes, I have been teaching for about thirty years, but I’m as far from knowing it all as I was when I began. If I didn't know that on November 20th, I would be keenly aware of it after the National Council of Teachers of English convention last weekend. 

Unlike many other groups that meet in Washington, D.C., this body of people will help me make real changes. I listened, learned, and reflected. Frankly, I spent a bit of time beating myself up. The presenters have it so together that they make me look like a newbie! 

I started the convention with a session about digital tools in the English classroom. I was floored by how these teachers, professors, and researchers engaged students with computer technology. They introduced me to the concept of social collaborative reading and annotating. I have done a big paper exercise where my students re-read some chapters and annotate together. What if they could read the book this way? How powerful and helpful! What a great use of student modeling and independence! We are going to try this in Freshman English! 

But wait! There's more! Another presenter talked about mixing genres and digital forms. He presented his book containing narrative, informational texts, video, audio, poetry, and images mixed together to give a more complete account of the war in Sierra Leon and Liberia. What a great option for senior project! And what a relevant, engaging, and important way for students to make sense of meaningful personal research! 

The next morning, I was introduced to the hackjam! The playful and energetic team from the National Writing Project introduced me to the concept of inviting kids to hack: to repurpose, reorganize, reimagine, and creatively collaborate. We had so much fun! We broke into different groups: one group ran down to the exhibit hall, picked up all the freebies they could, and make a construction with them. A second group tore apart children's books and make new ones out of them. A third group performed flash poetry readings throughout the convention. A fourth group took pipe cleaner like stickies and made poetry on glass surfaces (including a wonderful pun on the window of the lactation room: live feed). My group used HTML teaching tools from Mozilla to hack the NCTE website (well not for real - but we did make our own version of it). 

It is one thing to learn from experts like Troy Hicks and the National Writing Project people, but it is a special joy when the experts are my colleagues. My English department chair, Beth Ahlgrim, and two Deerfield teachers, Kristan Jiggetts and Dana Wahrenbrock presented the fantastic work they are doing with mixed genre research papers in Junior English.

Finally, it was a special privilege to listen to a trio of teachers whose blog I have been reading since I heard them speak at the NCTE convention in Chicago several years ago. The Paper Graders talked about the power of writing with your students and sharing your writing with your students.

Of course, there were other benefits to the convention. I got to spend time with my wonderful Deerfield English colleagues. I had two dinners with my delightful daughter, who goes to college in DC. We had a magnificent tour through the Phillips Collection Museum of Modern Art. 

Was I really only away for three days? 

The next step is to keep these ideas alive. By putting them here, I hope to remind myself (and feel free to remind me as well) to keep experimenting and learning in the classroom. Some of these experiments will fail. Some will help me figure out next steps. Hopefully, they will help my students grow and learn – and me, too!

A Class That Blogs Together…

After almost thirty years, one would think that teaching has become routine. It is the opposite. When I began, I met teachers who ran classes by binder: each unit was carefully scheduled and sequenced. Each year, it went the same way; if this was the third day of the fourth week of the second quarter, then we were studying participles. It was that simple. They had the script down, and the students were merely audience.

I cannot teach that way. Each year is different. Every class is unique. Over the summer, I set up units, lessons, activities, and, yes, schedules. I have tried to be a teacher with a perfect plan, but something always gets in the way. Whether it is because of a new book, a great opportunity, or the most aggravating factor of all, the individual  needs of the students in the class, I end up rewriting, changing, and adapting my summer plans all over again during the year.

A few years ago, I decided to embrace that process. I acknowledge my need to plan, but I am not married to those plans. I also find that experimenting in the classroom is beneficial to everyone. After hearing about a new technique, text, or technology, I will come to my class and we’ll play with it. A year later, I’ll try again a new way. It is messy and challenging, and it is anything but rote and routine.

This year, I started blogging with my students. A few years ago, I began asking seniors to blog as they pursued their individualized research projects in their last quarter of high school. These blogs turned into more than learning logs, but became communication vehicles between the students and the many people helping them on their research journeys. They were also a lot lighter to take home than the manila folders I had used for that purpose in the past.

I am trying to incorporate more and more student autonomy and choice into Senior English. In addition, our “thematic” focus with my seniors this year is finding our passions. It thought it appropriate to give them a public vehicle to express what was important to them.

So my students and I have started our own blog. Several times a week, we publish one to three short entries about topics that are important to us. The topics are as far ranging as the students in the class: we discuss make-up, basketball, fantasy football, food, college, and gender. We give advice, review, and rant.

It is a little frightening; I like to be in charge. I am a little bit of a perfectionist. The blog posts are not always completely polished and they are being written and edited by the students. I read them, but they are not “mine.”

I have also taken the little, yet scary, step of telling my Senior English students about this blog, and I am planning on doing some writing that will appear on both blogs! I want to participate, too!

So I invite you to click over to my students’ new blog, Why So Seniorous. Some entries are serious, some are not. Everything is written by seniors at Deerfield High School – with a little help from their teacher, who is still learning right beside them.