Teaching About Domestic and Dating Violence

Britain is Leading the Way

As a health teacher, I discuss with my students relationship and dating violence. I use something called the Teen Power and Control Wheel. Here, it's a click away.

http://www.ncdsv.org/images/Teen%20P&C%20wheel%20NO%20SHADING.pdf .

If you asked 100 health teachers in LAUSD if they use this graphic or even teach on the topic, I would guess you might get a yes from 10-20% of them. It is not required nor is it easy material to teach. I have never had an in-service on this topic, I learned of this graphic and ancillary materials from another teacher in my department. I do not go into however, the bigger topic of home or domestic violence.

Showing leadership in this area, England is now mandating that domestic violence prevention be taught in their schools. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8376943.stm . Bravo! Learning from our allies overseas, I hope U.S. educators can start to teach this important topic that unfortunately leaves many physical and emotional scars. Ignoring the problem doesn't make it go away and it's time this serious problem gets the recognition it deserves.

Oops!

A few nights ago I was patting myself on the back for having found on-line from the Occupational Outlook Handbook the "Top Thirty Fastest Growing Occupations". I copied the chart showing the list that included the numbers of jobs expected from 2006 to 2016, percent increase, and the generally accepted amount of education it takes for each occupation.

Of the thirty jobs, about two-thirds were related to providing direct health care (or support) and the others were related to the computer industry. I easily came up with five questions to accompany this chart and it all looked very nice in a Word document.

I have been doing similiar things for 14 years now and I'm a pro ( I thought proudly) - or so I thought.

I passed the sheet out yesterday to my 1st period (very capable class compared to later periods) and we discussed some of the job titles briefly of the ones they might not have known. We had a similiar brief discussion about some of the education required, explaining what a vocational award was, or terms like short-term vs. moderate on the job training.

"Okay, answer the questions on your paper, it should go pretty fast, five minutes or so and then we'll discuss it."

The students began quietly without complaint, interested in accomplishing these 5 questions quickly and efficiently. Five quiet minutes went by, then ten, and at maybe the twelve to fifteen minute mark, I walked through the class and saw that it was taking more time than I thought. At TWENTY-FIVE minutes I began discussion as maybe still 20-30% of the class was finishing the last question.

Oops!

This 5-10 minute warm-up or icebreaker into our lesson had become an onerous, busy-work task, dull and mind-numbing to the point of missing the point(s) I was trying to make.

If I had bothered to answer the questions myself, I would have realized that the students didn't need to write out the names of the jobs related to health care, computer management, or those that took two-years of education or less. Those three questions alone had them writing out the names of over 40 jobs, many of them twice.

My questions should have read something like: What do numbers 2, 3, 7, 9, 12, 14, 18-20, 22-24, 28, 29 have in common?

Though this grievous error was made for first period, I modified the questions for all the later classes so it wasn't an entire day lost. Yet, if I had bothered to really read the questions I wrote and tried them myself, I would have realized the process was unneccesarily tedious.

THE LESSON LEARNED for me is to be more careful now in the future when making up new lesson plans. That's why relying on old tried and true lesson plans are good but we as educators must continually refine old material or bring in fresh ideas for our changing world and students.

Sorry kids, that was truly a first year teacher mistake.

This Man Must be Stopped!

Here's what's wrong with capitalism.

Though I think highly of making money, Howard Gardner must be stopped. The Harvard psychologist came up with the concept of Multiple Intelligences in 1983 about natural (innate) predispositions to learning. These 7, um, I mean 8, er, now NINE multiple intelligences are logic/math, linguistic, interpersonal, intrapersonal,visual, body/kinesthetic, and musical. Well those were the original 7 anyway.

When teaching these ideas over the last few years, I would say in a playful, yet cynical way, Dr. Gardner has now found an 8th way to be intelligent, naturalist, because he wanted to write another book and get a new Mercedes. And now, he's at it again. Introducing intelligence #9, hot off the press, Existential Intelligence! This discovery just by coincidence comes with Gardner having to pay for his daughters expensive wedding in the Spring.

I was with him for the original 7, then I reluctantly accepted number 8, but c'mon Howard, Existential Intelligence? What's next? Intelligence #10, being able to dream in Esperanto, or do Brad Pitt impersonations in French?

I am all for writing and reading books. But should this man profit while pretending to discover new theories which can only be disputed, never proven? It's time for you Dr. Gardner to turn in your IBM Thinkpad and get real, maybe with a job handling returns at CostCo, starting the day after Christmas. That will keep you grounded.

In case you think I am making this up, have a look at all nine. http://web.cortland.edu/andersmd/learning/MI%20Table.htm

It’s great to be back, or is it?

Today is my first day back after an 8 week (off-track) vacation. I couldn’t have been in the main building for 4 minutes before my first sneeze (not a good sign). My classroom was in order except for a printer with no cables connected. Two hours later the internet went down and I had to “kick it old school” and have the attendance office print a roster for me and call roll—which I loathe, preferring to take attendance silently with a seating chart.

Back to this cough, cough, sneeze-sneeze thing. Today, though teaching Life Skills, we read a flyer from the LA County Health Department on H1N1 flu. Of the 200+ students I will have today, perhaps, 20-30 (or more) have no health insurance. We have a community clinic on campus-- a rarity-- and I expect them to get a bit of action as we get into the classic Nov-January flu season.

Until then, cover that sneeze and pass the hand sanitizer.

A Well Deserved Break

At 3:13 today I begin 8 weeks of vacation. I am ready. In the past week I have broken up a fight and caught a girl smoking pot on campus. Kids behaving badly.

But a quick story about the fight. The first fight I broke up, or tried to break up, was in my first or second year teaching. The two girls, doped up on adrenaline swung wildly and the only thing more entertaining for the on-lookers was seeing some 155 lb guy trying to muscle these two girls apart. A few days later one of the students apologized for hitting me (by accident I think).

So fast forward 13 years or so til last Friday. I was driving out of the parking lot when I almost made it to the end of the block when I saw some students wrestling on the ground. I thought they were fooling around. When I realized it was more violent than that I pointed my car at a 30 degree angle to the curb, and blared on the horn from about 20 feet away, hoping the sound would distract the fighting youth. It worked! With about 5-6 seconds of a constant blaring horn, and with me getting out of the car and also yelling at them, the fight broke up with the help of friends.

Maybe I need to carry an airhorn for those on-campus skirmishes that seem to flare up from time to time. But for as much as I complain about kids who don't take school seriously, the majority do... and for those students I enjoy teaching, a lot!

Luis' Suicide

Luis was not a student of mine, he was the gardener and general handyman at our townhouse complex. He worked there for 18 years. I had known him for about 9 years.

Luis Castillo was about 50 years old, apparently in good health, and as people speculate, suffering from depression. Luis, up until the last 1-2 weeks of his life, was always smiling, laughing, talking with my children, playing street hockey with them or throwing a ball when he wasn't taking care of the property.

Last Friday afternoon, at about 1pm, on a nice hot, southern California summer day, he went into the horse stalls on the other end of our property and ended his life with a handgun.

In this last month of his life I was distracted. Starting a new semester with far too many students, and with my family away in Japan, I anesthetized myself and stayed busy with a lot of tennis, lesson plans, movies, and grading. But thinking back about Luis, I remarked to others and they to me, that none of us had really seen him much in the past few weeks. Something had changed in Luis - his behavior, his routines, his temperment, though few were witness to these changes as he had apparently withdrawn; tormented by inner demons.

About every 3-4 weeks while teaching, I get some form in my mailbox from the special education department or from the school psychologist to evaluate how a student is doing in my class. There's always a part there to note any changes in behavior - though rarely do I see any. However, these changes in demeanor signal other possibly more serious changes in the fragile psyche, and tell the caregivers or doctors that special attention must be given to this person.

My cousin Kathy, in the Spring of 1984, about to graduate high school in Bloomington, MN, also ended her life at the age of 17. She too had changed in the months before, running away from home briefly and suffering from depression. Within a month of her death, a friend from college, Paul Boxer, a graduate student in chemistry took his own life, depressed over a failed marriage and trouble with his job. Back then we communicated the old fashioned way- via letters. His mother replied back to me after reading my last letter to him, probably a few days or weeks too late.

They're out there. People in our periphery-- the gardener, babysitter, dry cleaning guy, check out clerk at the grocery store, the Sunday school teacher. Or they are closer to us, like cousins or friends. And there are clues out there too. I wish I had paid more attention to Luis, tracked him down before his death, but of course I was too busy to pay attention. Too much tennis to be played or too many YouTube videos to watch.

Unlike Elvis Presley in My Way, "regrets, I've had a few, a few too many to mention," but most of all, I regret being too busy to pay attention, to pick up the signs. If I was a man of prayer, like I use to be 10 years ago, before I got too busy raising a family and working on my career, I would like to think that maybe God would have had me notice Luis. Then I could have looked into it, and taken him to lunch before that fateful day and that might have made a difference. Not just that one lunch of course, but maybe I could have gotten him to a doctor who could have helped. Maybe, just maybe... But alas, I and others were too busy to notice or intervene in a meaningful way.

________________________________

And on another related, incredibly tragic note, the 48 year old gunman that just shot 8 (killing 3) people in Pennsylvania gave all kinds of clues as to his upcoming behavior, but people were just not paying attention. On his personal website, the date of his death, and the plans for taking others with him were all laid out. If someone had just paid attention. -- here is an excerpt from a news story today about him-- The 4,610-word Web page, on a domain registered in Sodini's name, appeared to be a nine-month chronology of his plans for the shooting, his decision to delay it and the process that led to the eventual carnage at his health club Tuesday.

"The biggest problem of all is not having relationships or friends, but not being able to achieve and acquire what I desire in those or many other areas," said an entry dated Sunday. "Everthing stays the same regardless of the effert I put in. If I had control over my life then I would be happier. But for about the past 30 years, I have not."

The Web site's author wrote of planning the attack since at least November and had tried to do it when the same Tuesday-night dance aerobics class he targeted met on Jan. 6. "It is 8:45PM: I chickened out!" he wrote. "I brought the loaded guns, everything. Hell!"

Authorities are now looking to determine if anyone read his post and did something about it.

_________________________

FEAR and LOATHING, part 2

Sisyphus, doing his thing.

Now after a week of class, I can say things are definitely DIFFERENT! Sometimes different is good, sometimes not. As expected and feared, I do have more students than last semester. Actually I have 104 more but I do have an extra class now, that accounts for about 40 of those extra students.

My average class size is 38, compared to 27 last semester. Last semester, Before Budget Cuts (BBC), my largest class was 37. Now 37 is my smallest class.

Yesterday, I looked at my seating chart to see why my period 5 class was so rowdy. Okay, it was after lunch and a lot of energy there. But that didn't quite explain it. Oh, of the 40 ninth graders, 26 of them were ADOLESCENT BOYS! The 14 girls are silent - having to suffer along with me the 6-7 boys vying for the unofficial title of class clown.

I now have 220+ papers on my desk to grade. If I spent one minute per paper it would take about 4 hours to grade them. I should take 2-3 minutes per paper but am I going to take 9-10+ hours to grade the first assignment? Is Sarah Palin going to vote Democrat?

The first two hours are well behaved, good, mixed classes. They are a pleasure to teach. Periods 5 and 6? Like Sisyphus, it will be an uphill struggle all year long. A colleague of mine has 51 in his last period of the day. Fifty one 9th graders. Maybe the Superintendent or Governor should teach that class for a week and then maybe some extra $ will be found to keep class sizes where they need to be.

It's obviously harder for me to deal with all these kids, but what about for the student who needs extra help? In a class of 20-25 it's harder to hide. In a class of 37-40, many of those that need help don't get it, they hide. They don't ask for help. They appear to be working but what they start many don't finish. It is a lose-lose situation; for the students, for the teachers.

Stay tuned.

Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles

A new school year starts in a few weeks, July 1 at my "year around" school. Some of my colleagues will be looking for work, and others like myself, starting a new year with potentially monstrous increases in class size. I currently have 5 classes averaging 27 students. With budget cuts classes will be "normed" at 42. At forty-one, it would be a 50% increase in class size. Never mind I only have 36 desks in my room. What is it like teaching five classes of forty-one 9th graders? Picture paper training 10 puppies while doing your taxes, on an iPhone, in heavy traffic.

I told my wife yesterday if my class sizes average 40 it will change the way I teach, and not in a good way. Far fewer days will be spent in class discussion and far few assignments with short answers or short essays. It will mean more tests with feedback existing only of a red number correct on their "scantron" form.

This budget crisis insures even more children will be left behind-- and this in a district, like most urban districts across America, already has a 30-40% + dropout rate.

It almost makes you wish we could go back in time, to the late 90's where we could have regulated and watched the mortgage industry, and fund managers a lot more closely. And perhaps we didn't need to spend a trillion dollars looking for non existant weapons of mass destruction and the cost of subsequent wars. With the savings of all that squandered money maybe there would be more now to support children at this critical time in their lives. But it's okay, we can always float a bond to build more prisons.

Ahh, if it were only that easy.

TOLD YOU SO!

Seems like the LA TIMES must be scanning my blog in search of article or story ideas. (my blog from Jan 30-- http://allthingsschool.blogspot.com/2009_01_01_archive.html
Yesterday's LA TIMES had an article on the difficulty of firing an incompetent teacher. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-teachers-landing-html,0,1258194.htmlstory

An interesting line from that article is that (implied) while teachers have a too powerful union to support them, "students have no union."

LAUSD is not the only district facing this problem, many if not most are. This is another area where private schools are likely at an advantage, since I don't believe those teachers are (over) protected by a union.

Merit Pay for Teachers... sounds good but...

President Obama said a few weeks ago that he supports merit pay, essentially bonus' for teachers that are doing a good job. However, the reason why many teachers and unions oppose this measure is that the way teachers are evaluated -- who is doing good, bad-- is that their student's standardized test scores are measured. Test scores are as much a reflection of how the teacher does as much as how much TV, MTV, YouTube videos, video games, etc. the students tune into for the week.

Would it be any surprise then that the "best teachers", the ones deserving more merit pay under the proposal, would generally be teaching more AP (Advanced Placement) students. Those students generally come to the teachers as smart kids and leave generally about as smart as they came.

I agree that better teachers should be paid better relative to those that are barely doing the job, but there must be other, more effective means to measure this. Of course, that would take more time and scrutiny, to do class visits, look at lesson plans, etc. and while that is a more effective way to judge a teacher, it is time consuming and costly so it is the exception to the rule in evaluating teachers.

When Teachers Act Up

I cannot come close to doing justice to this story, so I will describe it briefly and allow you to follow the link if interested.

When teachers misbehave (severely) or are accused sometimes falsely of doing so, they are sent to a kind of teaching purgatory, where they sit day after day while someone investigates just what happened. This can take weeks, months or years. In the meantime they sit and do nothing all day long except collect their full pay. This "rubber room" is a holding room (or actually series of rooms) where teachers play cards, read, argue, sleep, just do whatever they want.

This 23 minute news radio program is produced by NPR and if you advance the arrow at the bottom to the 7:25 mark this story will begin. Los Angeles also has a room like this where a colleague of mine was just released after several months. He was released because it was discovered a student of his had made a false accusation about inappropriate contact. http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/player/CPRadio_player.php?podcast=http://www.thisamericanlife.org/xmlfeeds/350.xml&proxyloc=http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/player/customproxy.php

Mentoring New Teachers

An Old But Effective Concept

Unfortunately in the span of two days, I have learned of two first year teachers that are packing it up and calling it quits. The first one is the godfather of my oldest son. Jasper left the world of acting and went back to school around age 30 and got two masters degrees. This year he is teaching in Riverside, CA at a Christian high school and has two preps-- one for Bible and the other for a drama class.

What would have softened his burden is only to have taught one class, as a first year teacher spends as much time figuring out what to do for that day/week (making lesson plans) as much as she spends on grading, or perhaps more. However, unless you are teaching PE, it is fairly common to teach more than one class, but as noted earlier, this makes a first year teaching job even harder. What did Jasper in though, was classroom management. He is on to another advanced degree, a PhD so he can teach at the college level where he believes it will be a better fit. Though he didn't say it, it sounded as if his students weren't quiet and well behaved and that this bothered him. That bothered me a lot at first but after 13 years now I have learned ways to structure the learning that helps them stay attentive-- unfortunately he is leaving before he figures those things out. Jasper teaches at a smaller, private high school and did NOT have a mentor teacher helping him along. Even at my high school of 175+ teachers, when I began in 1996, I was considered "low priority" for help as I had my teaching credential. Those receiving the most support were the teachers teaching on an "emergency credential". That's basically any college degree holder that wanted to give teaching a try for a year (or two) before enrolling into a college program to continue their education and commit to the teaching profession.

The other first year teacher is a nephew of a person I play hockey with. He got a job in (cue scary music...) South Central which is not supposed to be called that anymore, but now euphemistically South Los Angeles because the former name carries too much of a stigma for gangland. The only details I got from his uncle was that "the students don't care and neither do the parents." Pretty hard gig for a first year teacher. It's like going straight from Army boot camp to the worst part of Iraq and being told "good luck." The odds of succeeding are already difficult for a first year teacher, add an environment where their dropout rate is probably over 40% (I'm guessing), and the difficult odds become almost insurmountable.

As I posted a few weeks ago with a link to the article about states receiving low marks (actually a D-) on teacher recruitment, retention and firing, these two cases (like hundreds or thousands across the state) could have been handled better and supported in a way to make it more likely they would have been around to develop into fine classroom teachers. You hear of mentor teachers from time to time but the practice, like most practices in education, seems to rise and fall with the whims of budgets, parent councils, new research, and so on. This old standby of mentoring falls by the wayside and with it, many promising careers. Too bad.

It's About Time...

Did I actually hear this last night from Obama?

In the end, there is no program or policy that can substitute for a mother or father who will attend those parent/teacher conferences, or help with homework after dinner, or turn off the TV, put away the video games, and read to their child. I speak to you not just as a President, but as a father when I say that responsibility for our children's education must begin at home.

I only wish we had been hearing this for the last 30 years. Now if we can just do something about the abysmal divorce rate that is dividing and diminishing our families.

Nicer but Dumber

Every year friends will ask me at the start of a new school year, how are the new students? At first it was a joke I would answer with-- nicer but dumber, but you know, it's really true. And what can account for this observation or phenomena if indeed it is true?

I think there are many reasons to account for this and one of the suspects is the internet and the vast entertainment media that kids are continually plugged in to. They are socialized early, with media images encouraging them to grow up, as many of us lament, far too fast.

Now kids have always been social, playing with toys or making up games ever since time began. Today though with reality tv, kids are use to being on display; they can't wait to see their picture on a digital camera and are confused when grandma takes a picture with a camera where you have to develop the film first (what's that?). Shoot video, watch yourself on You Tube minutes later.

I think on the positive side, due to more working parents, more kids are in day care and in pre-school and that this early socialization by all kinds of caregivers results in children learning early how to play-talk-communicate with others, young and old.

Also, as everyone has noticed, children today-- as young as 3 or 4, call you by your first name - a change that took only a generation or two to occur. This use of first names of adults by children breeds familiarity and (possibly) a blurring of authority. My older son is 6 now but at age 4 you could see him at the playground ignoring kids his own age to talk to the teenagers he didn't know or even adults. Today, while the neighbors 3 year old calls me "Paul", I still call my parents friends Mrs. Engstrand, or Mr. Fjelde though I am almost 50.

Dumber? Overall...probably. They come to my 9th grade class with maybe 3000+ text messages written and received in the past year and during that same time, maybe 6-8 badly written essays. However, the ones not carrying around too much baggage or attitude, are really nice, fun students. If I could only give passing grades for personality.

Watering Down the Requirements

Sometimes LESS is MORE but in this case, LESS is LESS. Santa Ana, a community about 10 minutes NE of Disneyland, is planning to do something about their lackluster high school gradutation rates. Instead of requiring 240 credits to graduate, they are proposing eliminating 4 classes and make them electives rather than requirements. The four classes are Health, College and Career Planning (Life Skills), World Geography and Earth Science (I teach the first two on this list). Now the burden to graduate is about 10% less.

Hum... Let's say you are manufacturing engine parts for Boeing and the widgets you produce are allowed a .05% failure rate. But would it be okay to increase that failure rate to .15%? What about the doctor who is about to do life saving surgery on your child, or sister/brother/parent. Is it okay that the medical school where she graduated relaxed it's standards by 10% and now allow students to take 10% fewer classes or pass with a 2.6 GPA rather than a 2.8 GPA?

Now those are dramatic, life and death situations but what about for the rest of us where life is not on the line at our workplace. What about me as a teacher? Is it okay for me to start making 10% more mistakes in entering grades in my computerized gradebook? Is it okay to have 200 mistakes in grading out of the 2000+ grades I have to enter every semester?

Santa Ana Unified School District, if they go through with the relaxed standards, will be sending a message, one that most of their graduates will remember for a lifetime. Can't quite cut it, just change the rules. Is that the message we want to give to 18 year olds as they enter college, work, marriage,and life?

And once you begin to make excuses for certain classes, can it's cousin cheating be far behind? Dumbing down the standards is bascially institutionalized cheating. We need to keep standards high and think of new ways to can help students succeed.

LA Times Santa Ana Unified School District article: http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-me-graduation8-2009feb08,0,7528768.story

Back to the Basics

Give a Person a Fish...

...FEED them for a day, TEACH a person to fish and you feed them for a lifetime.

Something I learned when student teaching in Spring of '96, is not to (just) give them students information. Make them find it themselves. A class discussion or lecture is okay for adults, but for students-- not so good. Even though they may be staring right at you, their attention is elsewhere.

• what was the name of that website I was at last night?


• I wonder if I clean my room this weekend if my mom will buy me that new cellphone?


• I am soooo hungry, I wonder if he'll let me go to the bathroom and then I can buy chips?


• Should I ditch 5th period? I don't want him (the teacher) to give me attitude about not having my homework done again...

Project based learning is the Cadillac of assignments. You give the kids choices of topics, a grading rubric that tells them explicitly how it will be graded, and then give them a block of time and resources in which to create a project. Another term for this is Constructivism, where they are actively constructing meaning out of material. Projects can be done alone or done with others. The best ones are also tied to solving or investigating real world problems.

There are major caveats to this kind of learning however. Many 14-15 year olds think that if they cut and paste well enough you won't be able to tell that they copied the whole thing. You tell me, can you tell which was written by a 9th grader and which was written by a college educated adult-- examples

a) Students are using a new ring tone to receive messages in class -- and many teachers can't even hear the ring. Some students are downloading a ring tone off the Internet that is too high-pitched to be heard by most adults. With it, high schoolers can receive text message alerts on their cell phones without the teacher knowing. As people age, many develop what's known as aging ear -- a loss of the ability to hear higher-frequency sounds. The ring tone is a spin-off of technology that was originally meant to repel teenagers -- not help them.

b) There is this really cool ring tone that you can get now that is to high-pitched for teachers too hear and this way you can text you're friends and your teachers aren't going to know. We can hear it because we aren't old yet, but old people can't, hear it.

Tough call huh? Catching plagaiarized work is like identifying the John 3:16 guy in a rainbow wig at a convention of morticians.

Other problems with projects is that while many will shine and do a great job, some are so daunted by the magnitude of a project that they turn in nothing. They may have worked on it in class, have rough drafts, but at home they are either paralyzed by fear, or just default to their usual M.O., "no mom, I finished my homework at school." Finally, you get some students that fixate on one part of the project (the cover, a chart, etc.) and forget the bigger picture, to make meaning of all the parts and come up with some new insight.

Of course I could do something clever and ask to see their work 3 days before it's due but then it's a chorus of "I left it at home mister", some actually did and others left nothing at home. What's the solution? For me it's vary the types of assignments -- essays, posters, presentations, quizzes, questions from the book, and more.

A World Run Amok

What's Next?

The US Economy has serious problems and now it we realize that the US public education system is also seriously messed up-- no, more than we ever thought.

The article (linked below) discusses how states consistantly get it wrong in the hiring, firing of bad teachers and the retention of good ones. Unions are partly to blame for this but they are not the only guilty parties. Unions, started many years ago, gave workers rights, enforced safety codes making jobs less dangerous, and helped ensure employees were not wrongly dismissed or not given benefits they deserved. However, unions they have gotten so strong that occasionally I joke with my students "the only way I can get fired is if I hit you or kiss you." I can be the worst teacher who just makes you copy paragraphs from a book while I read the newspaper at my desk and yet, I still keep my job.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jNNacuhEXsSnk5r4JrH3ML1G2KdQD960MLPO0

So unions are partly to blame in that they are so strong it makes it hard to remove teachers that are truly "dead weight". However, as the article above points out, in each state, state law decides many rules regarding the hiring, firing, tenure, teacher licensing, and even the number of minutes students are to be in school during the year. It makes sense with their power than they employ some common sense and make decisions that will help school districts not only hire good people, but retain the best and re-train or eliminate the worst.

I can't help but think this is where the private schools should shine comparatively in K - 12. They are much smaller on average and smallness sometimes ensures goodness. Take my school for example, with over 4000 students and 175+ teachers it's a bit hard to make sure that all teachers are doing what they should be doing. All our teachers get evaluated by an administrator on some kind of schedule, but that can vary from a "here sign this form" to a rigorous Gestapo style evaluation that requires two weeks of detailed lesson plans, 1-2 hours of direct classroom observation and more. In my 13 years of teaching I can tell you the former is more common than the latter. In a small, private school I think there is a healthy level of scrutiny and this keeps teachers from getting lazy as they know people, parents, and others will talk if the level of rigor is not sufficient for the students - whose parents many times are paying thousands of dollars for their education.

Public schools deserve the same degree of attention and scrutiny.

What can we do in the meantime? Write letters-- to the editor, to your local officials, go to school board meetings.... heck, consider becoming a teacher yourself! There are worse ways to spend your career.

Fade to black

Hitting Rock Bottom

This morning in discussing managing stress, the subject of using alcohol as a way to do so came up. I introduced this idea as a very bad way to handle stress, as it is just one of many slippery slopes leading to alcoholism. I was surprised to hear a student, a 14 year old girl, say something to the effect "nah, getting faded is the way to go when you have worries."

This shocked me to the extent that I would have been less surprised if she volunteered that she had been born a zebra. First, she said this aloud to the class and to me. Second, apparently she is so familiar with getting "faded" that it has lost any semblance of a stigma to her, and finally, she is practicing exactly what I am warning against.

Now I'm not so naive to think that kids don't drink or smoke marijuana, I know they do. However, it's one thing to do it furtively, and another thing to declare this past-time out loud in front of classmates and your health teacher. Was she trying to be funny? Maybe, but my hunch is no. Was she that much of a stoner that she doesn't care what others think? Actually, while "Ceci" isn't an A student, she has a 2.4 GPA and has very good attendance.

---- 24 hours later---- at 7:25 am-- period 1

"Hi Ceci, do you have another shocking reference to getting faded?"

"Oh Mister, at New Years I was so drunk I fell asleep right next to the toilet and ..."

"And your mother knew about this?"

"She was drunk too!"

A few posts ago -- January 15- The Divine Cheeto-- I subtitled it "Can't blame the schools for this one"-- and it was about the parents sending (some of ) their kids to school without any food and how an empty stomach affects the ability to concentrate. Being hungry and tired is one thing but how many of our students don't even make it to their first period (or more) due to a hangover - of alcohol or in some cases, a 11pm-3:00am overdose of video games.

"Uhhhhh mom, I don't feel very good.... no, I don't have a test today... can I stay..."

In the case of Ceci, I have to report this to a special counseling program on campus called IMPACT - an acronym that I can't recall the words it stands for.

There is a pattern here in LAUSD that is repeated in many shapes and forms. It is a lack of consequences. I know people are motivated by the promise of reward or by the fear of punishment. If you remove rewards and punishments, you are basically left with 14 year old kids with intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation. At 14, they are as rare as an Alaskan governor who is for birth control education and knows her way around a world map. However the few that are self motivated didn't learn that from any teacher-- 99% of the time it's how they are raised. Sure, we as teachers can motivate, but in fighting MTV, i-tunes, Grand Theft Auto games where you can beat up on a "ho", it's a tough battle. I get them 5 hours a week, the world with it's declining values, gets them the rest of the time--- oh, 60-70 hours of free unstructured time in far too many households.

Students in LA (and we are by no means the only ones) have learned that when they fail in middle school, they still get moved ahead to the next grade. It's only in high school where if they fail they have to keep repeating the class. They can be 16 years old and still in 9th grade. But since they have never had consequences like that before-- like being 14 and still making up 6th grade classes, it seems like it is a false threat. I never got in trouble before for bad grades, why start worrying about it now?

I don't want Ceci to hit rock bottom before she learns there are some potentially grave consequences to teen drinking, including fatal car accidents, date rape, murder, suicide and more. In a way it's good that she has a "loose mouth" and that she told me about it-- so some intervention can be done and then possibly a change in behavior and a different fate. However, most kids using marijuana or alcohol don't go bragging about it school in front of adults. For them the intervention may come too late, after tragedy.

Brother, Can You Spare Some Change?

Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009.

Every year in my Life Skills class, I show the film Pleasantville to my new 9th graders. Kids that were a few weeks ago in middle school, now are in 9th grade as a compilation of all their habits, good and bad. Pleasantville is a fantasy in which two modern day people are transported back in time, about 40 years, to a time when things were simpler and well, pleasant. The disease the people have in Pleasantville is that they are stuck in a routine. Now that might not sound like an illness, stuck in a routine, but when that happens, progress and growth is not made, only stagnation.

Even by the start of 9th grade, at the age of 13-14, many students appear incapable of change. Even if their circumstances are bad, they are familiar, a routine, they are use to the conditions. Change as they said is easier said than done. Think about even your own life as an adult. How easy is it to begin a new behavior, a new habit, or change or drop a bad habit?

Obama's inauguration speech-- though I have only seen/heard it once, seems to me to have been a "call to arms", a need for those-us-everyone- to get off our butts and start doing the hard work of fixing things. His reference to Biblical scripture-- Corinthians, about "time to put away childish things" I understand may have been also quoted by Roosevelt at his own inauguration speech, during hard economic times(1933 during the Depression). So even though it's use wasn't original, it was timely again and well chosen for this moment in time. Or as a pop music artist (Elvis Costello) sang about 25 years ago, clowntime is over. The hard work begins now to solve this nations problems.

The Divine Cheeto

Can't Blame the Schools for This One

Five to ten times per year I will ask a student who is sleeping in class (generally after lunch) “what have you had to eat today?” The answer is usually “nothing” or “a bag of chips”. I remind them a car doesn’t run without gas. Forget are they concentrating? The real question is are they conscious?

Heaven forbid they leave home without their I-pod, cell phone, Personal Play Station, make-up, or other nano-device, but food, eh, I can buy some at school mom. If students don't have a backpack or paper it's almost a certain guarantee that they will at least have an I-pod in their pocket. It's the ubiquitous "Don't leave home without it" teen accessory.

Though I have never asked my 9th graders, I would assume that if given a choice of ways to die--- cancer, car accident, being shot, or other, most teens would choose OTHER and then list drowning to death in a tub of Cheetos as their preferred entrance into eternity.

It's actually funny how many 14 year old girls spend an hour (or more) on make-up and hair every morning and then have no clue how (un) attractive they look with orange fingers, lips and teeth after chomping on America's Favorite Bag of Food Coloring between classes. I tell them as a health teacher, me seeing them eat chips as they enter they might as well be smoking a cigarette. They think this is funny. Childhood obesity though, is not funny. When I am talking about it I make certain not to make eye contact with any particular student, but they're there, all over the place. In a typical class of 30 with half male, half female, I will have 5 to 6 boys weight over 175-200+ and 7 to 8 girls weighing 150 - 180 pounds. Did I mention these are 14 year olds?

Seems appropriate that this week a couple had their planned wedding in a Taco Bell. Reminds me of an 80's video title: The Decline of Western Civilization. "Nuff said.

A good article about teen obesity and perception. http://calorielab.com/news/2005/05/30/teens-definition-of-normal-weight-on-the-upward-creep/

The Taco Bell wedding http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1381900/are_the_taco_bell_wedding_and_mcdonalds.html?cat=3

The Biggest Loser

Teaching Environmental Health

The unit number on my family's townhouse is 48. That's coincidentally our Carbon Footprint number of tons of carbon dioxide that our family of 4 produce annually. That's 48 tons of CO2 that is partly responsible for the warming of our planet. That number is just less than half the national average (for a family of 4 of 110 tons) but more than twice the WORLD average of 22 tons. The US have been energy pigs for a long time. It's usually good to be number one but in this case number one is the biggest loser.

I know the right side of the political spectrum might have you believe that global warming is liberal propaganda of democratic tax and spend socialists who just want to run the US into the ground. Yeah, I don't think so. After showing and watching "An Inconvenient Truth" five times in my health classes, I think Gore makes some pretty good points-- but defending him and the movie will probably take another blog in and of itself.

There are many carbon footprint calculators out there. I chose this one http://www.nature.org/initiatives/climatechange/calculator/ and I encourage you to take the time-- maybe 4 minutes if you do it thoughtfully, and see what your impact on the planet is if you have never done so.

Nineteen years ago a book came out called "50 Simple Things You Can Do To Save The Earth". Anyone remember that? At the time it was quite popular and I still have my 95 page copy. Though it's 19 years old, the information in it still holds up pretty well. My 9th graders last week read and discussed #46, Eat Lower on the Food Chain. Then they made some pretty clever posters out of it. Things like "Save Our Planet - Eat Less Meat" and then drew a picture of a half a cow.

If you are not familiar with the idea of eating lower on the food chain it goes something like this. It takes an unbelievable amount of water to support a cow. And we aren't talking about cows drinking water or bathing. Cows tend to eat all day. The food they eat has to be grown and watered. That water runs easily into the tens of thousands of gallons before the cow is led to the slaughterhouse. Moreover, forests worldwide are cut down or burned for grazing or for the cultivation of crops, crops to feed livestock. As of 19 years ago, it stated that one-third of the land of North America is devoted either for grazing or to support food for livestock. That's one third of Mexico, the US and Canada. Holy Big Mac-Attack Batman! Additionally, the worlds 1.3 billion cows (1989 figure) produce 100 million tons of methane gas annually, a molecule that traps 25x more heat than carbon dioxide.

So the phrase "eating lower on the food chain" means simply eating less meat-- less chicken, steak, beef, pork, etc. Not only will the planet thank you, so will your waistline, your arteries, colon, and so on.

---- personal note ----

My 9th grade students marvel when I tell them that my sons (age 4 and 6) have never been to McDonalds, Burger King, KFC, etc. They look at me like I am a child abuser.

My share is $34,852.49., what's yours?

MODELING BEHAVIOR

I knew there was a reason I was feeling so good at the start of this new year, I was so busy I didn't have time to read the newspaper. Today however, I made the mistake of looking at the front page of the LA TIMES while I was burning my toast. There was an idea that the Governator (Arnold) was floating out there about closing the schools a week early to save about a billion dollars. This was an upgrade from an idea he proposed about a month earlier about closing the schools 2 weeks earlier. Don't you just love politicians? They tell the public what they are thinking of doing to see how much hue and cry there is and if there isn't much, it's a done deal.

Anyhow, we are taught as teachers to never lose our temper, lest we be modeling behavior that we DON'T want to take place in the classroom.

The federal budget deficit runs in the trillions and closer to home (CA) we are projected to be around $20 billion. With the mortgage debt crisis, many individuals suffering with the loss of their homes were criticized for making foolish borrowing decisions, though many aggressive mortgage brokers are also to blame. But why blame them or even individuals borrowers? Aren't we just following the modeling of our leaders in Washington?

The federal deficit-- national debt, the giant albatross hanging around our neck - is around $10.6 trillion, give or take a skyscraper. That's $34,852 per person, or so it was when you started reading this blog. By now it's closer to $35,000.

I don't know what the answer is to the growing national debt or the one in my home state. I just wish that long ago, our leaders had the insight to set a proper example, and spend within their the budget and not run into the red. It's a problem that is only growing and at some point we will all have to pay for it, likely with a reduced quality of life. Not sure what that means. I just know it won't be Disneyland.

LA TIMES article about the proposal to end the school year early

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-me-schoolyear8-2009jan08,0,4683190.story

The Internet; Jekyll and Hyde

Hola,

Today was the 2nd day of a new semester and like many new semesters I kind of need to ease into things a bit. Health class. Yesterday we brainstormed a bit about what affects our health- we had answers like stress, friends, exercise, diet, friends, family, genetics, and environment.

Today after reviewing classroom rules again about tardies, make-up work and no personal electronics, we read a one page article from the Internet about how Nicaragua is about to go on-line to power up 19 windmills to generate electricity. This fits nicely with our unit on environmental health which should be in full bloom in about 2 days.

My students are largely from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and other Central American countries. All those lie just north of Nicaragua. However, as we began reading and discussing aloud the article I routinely heard comments like "my dad was born there", often highlighted with sparkling eyes. Though many had never been to Nicaragua, they seemed to have a heightened interest in the subject. I also delighted in hearing the volunteers read and pronounce the names of individuals in the story or even the name of Nicaragua with a Spanish inflection and the pronunciation they deserved.

Now I knew from experience that I could easily find an article from the Internet related to environmental health. That was a given, 15 minutes tops. But to find something about the environment and Central America? I hit the jackpot and that was even without searching for the key words "Central America" and "environment". How far back did this story go? Two weeks. An AP writer posted it on Christmas morning. It took me all of 2 minutes to locate and decide on which environmental health article to share. Grading essays is like doing brain surgery compared to using a search engine correctly.

Of course the Internet is both a Jekyll and Hyde character. Students

(as well as adults) waste countless hours entertaining themselves with unmentionable drivel - from Myspace, cheatcodes to their favorite games, downloading music or movies illegally, to watching pornographic images and more. Today was one of those rare days when the Internet (with all of it's deserved bad press) actually facilitated a discussion about cleaner, alternative energies with a heightened interest. If I had gone to the library to find a magazine or book article about the environment to use in class I might still be there. Forget the Central America connection.

The Internet is a tool that can deliver precise and needed information in a matter of minutes. We can only hope that our students realize this someday. I find it an invaluable tool when I am looking to augment a lesson from our book about a topic we are studying. Of course, being sure about your sources or the accuracy of information is a given, but in many instances, you are trusting legitimate sources-- like the Associated Press, JAMA, or Reuters-- we can only hope they check their sources before publishing.

Article used in class.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081225/ap_on_bi_ge/lt_nicaragua_wind_power

and here is a story about something else positive about the web - http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/12/trend.html#more

Lions and Tigers and Public Schools, oh my!

Hey friends,

Before I get back to reviewing and discussing Daniel Gardners excellent book-- The Science of Fear-- I have to get something off my chest.

How many of us public school teachers have been at parties, events, social settings, etc. with friends and acquaintances (not in education) when the subject of schools come up. Where is Frank Jr. going this year? Really?, they say with a look of 'are you insane?' because you just told them that Frank Jr. is going to a public school. Public schools, of which most of us are products of, have about the same reputation as Paris Hilton or on a really bad day, Britney.

And this reaction is coming from friends who kind of have forgotten that they asked that question of a public school teacher. Are there smaller class sizes in private schools? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Are the teachers better, are the students better? That's hard to say. I know that when I graduated high school in '78 in the midwest that one private high school near by had a reputation for having MORE drug use-- maybe that wasn't true but the last time I checked, drugs cost $$$$ and private school kids tend to have more of that resource, again generally. Hanging out with "rich kids" sometimes buys trouble... just ask the Kennedy clan or the Max Factor heir who is locked up for 124 years for drugging and raping his dates.

In January of 1996, I started my 2nd career and began student teaching at a 7th-8th grade middle school in a part of Minneapolis that was "rough"-- two cars were stolen out of the staff parking lot, during winter! In a typical class of 25-30 you could see kids that were there, calm, prepared, and ready to learn. Conversely, you could see others that were watching unlimited television at home, unlimited video games, who probably lacked parental supervision, and in the classroom had about as much chance of success as a rhesus monkey. What's the point of that charming story? Schools (especially public)get the blame for failure where the real source of success or failure should be what happens at HOME. Is there a relationship between Joshua being the best reader in class and the fact that his parents limit his television and have never purchased a gaming system for him? Or is it a coincidence when Linda pulls straight fails in every class when she has 512 myspace "friends", averages over 400 text messages a month and sees her mother (the only adult in her home) as little as possible.

The question that is important to consider now is how much does Linda (and others like her) affect the learning climate in the classroom? To be honest, at least at my school (a high school in Los Angeles), those students tend to have greater absences so they classroom misbehavior is not that much a factor. You also have failing students that show up everyday, are quiet, but just never complete anything.

Classroom behavior (or classroom climate) is more of a factor of what the teacher does than how the students behave. A teacher without experience or without a system of classroom management will have unruly students, whether they are A or F students. Word.

So stop harping on the public schools - the only thing that still gripes me is that we still have a culture of "social promotion" in middle schools. I know there are problems with "holding kids back" but just passing them on to the next grade, despite F's doesn't teach them consequences for not trying.

Receiving F's never hurt them before so why sweat it in high school? Many are slow to get it that the rules are different in high school where they have to repeat each F. I wish they would learn this before coming to my and other classrooms as a freshman, then perhaps they might take school more seriously and finish work at home rather than just fire up the next Xbox 360 game. 'Nuff said.