Mr. Smith goes to middle school

I'd post a picture of me with my MSU Tutor name tag, but this sentence along with the title will serve as sufficient description. I am now a tutor in a math class at a local middle school, and wowzers is it - middle school. See, I've been working with high school kids for the past eight years or so and to suddenly jump to middle school kids was darned strange. Middle schoolers seem like high schoolers in some respects: they are very diverse in terms of intellectual development, some of them are forward-looking and others live only in the moment. Unlike many high schoolers though, all middle school kids seem to constantly be in a massive state of flux.

In our last TE302 class period before three weeks of tutoring started today, we did an exercise where everyone posted a word about their middle school experience on the wall of our classroom. Without going into too much detail, suffice it to say that our class didn't have the most sanguine of middle school experiences. Only one person used "fun" as his word and there was sure a lot of "awkward" and its ilk on our walls. I think that that was an excellent reminder of just what we're stepping into with these tutoring situations, on top of all the other contextual bits and pieces we're seeing firsthand.

We have to post tutoring logs every day that answer three questions: what (describe an event), so what (name its importance), and now what (reflect on future implications). I think the compressed summer class format will yield some really intense development inside these tutoring experiences and the resulting discussions, for two reasons. First I think that being in the same classroom four days a week will lend a magnificent continuity not otherwise possible; we will become vital and supportive elements of functioning classrooms and who can resist getting pumped about that? Second, the discursive layer of reading, writing and responding to tutoring logs will be continually fresh in everyone's memory and that feels like just the right set of conditions for an honest-to-goodness three week long conversation between all of us at once. Hooray for the educational possibilities of sustained, reflective, critical dialogue!

Last thought for the day and I'll stop. We had to create a tutoring plan before starting to tutor; I turned mine in this morning, just-in-time delivery as is my wont. I wrote it as a themed paper around my favorite analogy to individual teaching encounters, that of bridge building. So today I wrote this tutoring plan and also my discussion posts for the same class, and the two had radically different tones. When I get my paper groove on I use a very specific voice in my writing: dry, intellectual, wears-big-glasses language like "to form inferential conclusions about aspects of pedagogical practice." When I wrote tutoring logs on the other hand I used decidedly casual, bloggy English like "hats off to substitute teachers!" I think both are authorial in the sense that I really do talk like both of those characters at different times, but I'm fascinated by how naturally I slip into them when the parameters of the assignment demand it. At my first tutoring day today, I used my informal banter voice most of the time, blithely tossing in "y'know" and "c'mon" and even sillier forms like "wassup with you folks?" (To my friends reading this, go ahead and have heart attacks while you imagine Orion acting like he owns this type of language.) What about you, other preservice teachers of America? Do you have one voice or many? Is this something you are (self) conscious about? When you talk to kids do you change your use of English, and if so how much depends on the kid? And the sixty four thousand dollar question - is it good to have different voices for different audiences?

I can't resist just one more, call it the sixty five thousand dollar question. Which of your authorial or conversational voices, if any do you think in?

Kozol, Straw Spaceships and Romanticism

Note: from now on, when a post is about an article my class is reading I'll try to start the post with the citation of the article. To save mental energy I'm going to copy and paste directly from the syllabus instead of re-locating the article, so I do apologize if the citation isn't perfect.

Kozol, J. (2005). Confections of Apartheid: A Stick and Carrot Pedagogy for the Children of Our Inner City Poor. Phi Delta Kappan, 87(4).

I didn't really like this article. Rephrase: I really didn't like this article. Sure, the schools in question were mechanistic and seemed very devoid of soul. I thought during his descriptions of the efficiency/authoritarianism measures taking place in many urban schools that I now know what it might be like to go to school in the Death Star. Clearly not desirable.

Still, I think that Kozol is comparing those schools to a very unclear, very idealized vision of suburban school that feels almost mushy in its romanticism. For example, one of the pullquotes in the article rhetorically asks "How much injury to state-determined 'purpose' would it do to let a group of children have a pumpkin party once a year for no other reason than because it's something fun that other children get to do on autumn days in public schools across most of America?" Go ahead, sympathetically shake your head at the absurdity of disallowing pumpkin parties, you know you want to. I felt tempted, but seriously. This one quote is so rich with troubles I honestly wonder why it made pullquote status. Let's enumerate:

1. Straw person fallacy: actually, the teacher in question had a party, she just had to try to justify its educational value. Me, I probably would have tried to use the pumpkin to talk about the historical origins of Halloween and the agricultural significance of foods like pumpkins, maybe the differences between Halloween in cities vs. towns. What Kozol doesn't say is that the kids in this class didn't enjoy the "multimodal pumpkin unit" the teacher thought up for them; if I had to guess, it was still fun. I would have been more sympathetic if he'd actually tried to justify the argument that fun for its own sake promotes good education somehow. Instead we get to tsk, tsk at an imaginary possibility: what if (gasp) the pumpkin party had never happened at all?
   


2. Bandwagon fallacy: this one's really easy. Yessir, everyone sure does have pumpkin parties in America. Why, just last week I listened to the national radio address condemning all Americans who didn't dance around gourds as unpatriotic. Plus, TE 250 anyone? How is pumpkin worship culturally relevant to these kids, or even "urban?" Maybe that quality of non-germaneness is what makes it educational, but if that's true what's this fuss about fun for fun's sake?
   


3. Sweeping generalization fallacy: to get at this I do need to quote a related phrase. "In some districts, even the most pleasant and old-fashioned class activities of elementary schools have been overtaken..." I would be curious to see the research (or theory, if we are to disdain the "determined emphasis upon empirical precision") that suggests just how pleasant and especially old-fashioned the pumpkin party is.
   

Here's another example that demonstrates the kind of empty contrast I'm having problems with. Kozol describes at length how in mechanized urban schools the bulletin boards are rigidly controlled and only describe perfect work, unlike "the lovingly assembled postings of the work of children that most grownups who attended school in decades past are likely to recall." Well I'm glad that in the good ole' days bulletin boards were assembled with love; did that make them good for kids?

Look, I don't disagree that if urban schools operate the way Kozol describes them that they have lots of problems. Kids regularly and uncritically referring to each other as "Level Fours" is horrifying evidence of depersonalization. Circular-logic methodology appears to be woven into the program such that the system becomes its own undefeatable champion. But indulge me if you will when I suggest the big-picture fallacy Kozol has up his sleeve, that if urban schools are bad then everything that suburban schools do that urban schools don't do must be good.

Well, I was wrong (and right about being wrong)

From what I can tell thus far, TE 302 is definitely different from TE 301. For example, we're not going to be focusing on just one child at a time when we work with kids at our tutoring site. At least, not necessarily; the cooperating teachers are going to divvy us up depending on their needs. This is different from the "child study" concept I've been reading about in Transforming Teacher Education. Our exercises pre- and post- tutoring have to do with at least four different themes:

• School context: we're writing about the "urban"-ness of the school site in comparison with other school settings.
  


• Planning instruction: we have to create a tutoring plan and then see how it mostly falls apart. I predict a lot of falling apart, since we won't know just who we're working with or how once we get there. (Is it fair to call this "planning to fail" on the part of the course designer?)
  


• Working in teams: I suspect that a lot of what we do won't be purely individual; it'll certainly be done in conjunction with teachers and may well be done with each other. Plus, we have to engage in lively discussions on our course website each night.


• Meta-cognition: we're going to be analyzing our own teaching quite a bit of course, though I think this will be omnipresent in all the TE courses from here on out.

Also I was definitely wrong about implications of the book selections for this semester. My instructor is changing the books and we won't be reading the Ladson-Billings book this semester. I might still read it online. Instead we're reading two different books during our tutoring time; I'll try to find out more about those soon too.

Heads up: from now on I will also be posting some reflections on the course reading material. Which sounds really pedestrian, I know; my hope is that I can shed light on what kinds of things the MSU TE program considers important reading for teachers.

Summer Semester 2008 ahoy!

Ahh, what a wonderful week off it's been!

Like many students, I'm not granted the luxury of time free from all commitments after the spring classes finish up. I work in two roles pretty much all year round, and so I worked as usual in the week after finals. Still, I got a great chance to catch up on stuff I've been putting off to survive finals week. What about you? Are you enjoying a summer back home? Are you going somewhere interesting, maybe an internship or a job? Perhaps like me you are taking summer courses here at MSU.

This summer I'm taking TE 302, "Learners and Learning in Contexts" as described by the scheduling tool. While I'm at it, here's the full description of the course from that website.

Role of social context and sociocultural background in learning at the secondary level (7-12). Natural and socially constructed differences among learners. Relationship among subject-specific knowledge, teaching and learning that subject, and the institutional and communal context. Multiple literacies.

I'm definitely curious about what kind of course this will be. I've been reading a book called Transforming Teacher Education, which I would recommend that every MSU TE student pick up at some point. The book describes many of the processes and struggles of changing MSU's Teacher Preparation program in the last 15 years, and some of the lessons learnt by those changing it. Specifically though it refers to the efforts of Team One, one of the faculty/staff teams designed to assist a group of preservice elementary teachers. According to the MSU TE website, it looks like those teams have now been revised or streamlined such that maybe there's one elementary team for the Lansing area, a Detroit area elementary team, and the secondary team.

Anyway, the book describes TE 301 as a course for learning about individual learners and trying to get inside their heads; I figured TE 302 would be the same thing, but swapping in older kids. Well, perhaps that was a bad assumption. Yesterday I picked up the books for the course, and one of the two books I found on the shelf is The Dreamkeepers by Gloria Ladson-Billings. We read a few different things by Ladson-Billings in TE 250, and I had even bookmarked The Dreamkeepers on the fantastic NetLibrary service (login through MSU Library electronic resources) to take a look at at some point. The subtitle of the book is "Successful Teachers of African American Children." So maybe I'm wrong about this idea of the course that I had. From what I understand, Ladson-Billings argues for culturally relevant pedagogy, which situates high expectations in culturally-relative contexts. Perhaps, then, TE 302 will be in some ways an extension of TE 250. I'll try and report back, once I'm into the course a little. I do hope that the time I spent reading Dewey's The Child and the Curriculum essay today will be fruitful given the emphasis that the Transforming Teacher Education book places on it; in any case it was certainly an interesting read, and I am left wondering if in addition to Hegelian dialectic Dewey was fond of Aristotelian ethics. We shall see!

One last note before summer classes begin: the first assignment for TE 302 is a presentation on why I am en route to teaching, a subject I do return to now and then. As a debate coach of many years now I will be presenting in simple oral format. While searching for TE 302 information on Google prior to this post, I came across this ultra-charming video on YouTube that from the date seems to be an end-of-semester retrospective on the subject.

I hope to see you around this summer!