The Weekly Roundup 5.10.08
May 11th, 2008It’s funny what happens when you don’t guarantee a student will automatically move onto the next grade. Suddenly, rather than slack, they have to work.
Which really ought to be the point, after all.
In a traditional school, every year starts off with the kids ready and willing to work, and that lasts for the first quarter or so (if that long). After that, kids start to lose the drive—they start falling down, and grades which were high in the first quarter usually slip and fall in the second and third.
The fourth quarter is usually a nightmare; either a kid is slacking because in 35 days or so they will be moved onto the next grade, or they’ve given up entirely because they have the accumulated weight of three quarters behind them and there’s no chance to pass.
All in all, there’s not much work getting done.
MC2 is very different. Because a student has to earn each credit, and not simply sit in a chair and not fail they look around at the end of the year and realize, “Oh, wow…there’s not much time left!” Suddenly there’s a rush of activity, and kids who have not been pulling their weight suddenly realize they need to work a great deal harder if they wish to move forward.
Sometimes, they don’t. That’s as tough a conversation at MC2 as it is at MRHS—though it’s much better to be able to say, “you can make up the work in the fall of next year—or even over the summer” than to need to say, “you’ll need to retake this entire class, and also the next grade as well.”
Of course, that great rush of activity means that I’m looking at more work. I hardly thought it was possible.
I attended Keene State College’s Spring Honors Convocation on Saturday with my wife. It was…mostly it was pretty boring, so I started looking around at the people there. Of the roughly 280 young people honored, only 28 were men.
There could be a great many reasons for that fact. Perhaps KSC has a dramatically female-heavy population. Perhaps not many men show up to be honored. Perhaps there are too many biased professors.
Or maybe it has something to do with much the same situation in college-bound and honors classes in high school. Maybe it has something to do with the students who are not served well in schools.
Nah. Too hard to think about. Next channel!
Thursday was a half-day, which are usually wastes at the high school—to the point where many students don’t bother to show up at all. We had the same problem, admittedly, but for those there, it was a good chance for them to sit down, tabulate how far they were from moving onto the next phase,¹ and then meeting with teachers to make it happen.
I’ll tell you, it was fun working with those kids on Friday. When they suddenly realize that they are in charge of their learning, that they need this much to do in order to move onward, then there’s a change. When a student feels they have ownership over their education, the changes are immediate.
More important—far more important—is the foresight and thought required to plan out goals and steps months in advance. I had one student who needed to do a research project, and wanted me to tell him what to do. I refused, and kept asking what did they want to do and could that happen in the time left.
Ultimately, the student decided that there wasn’t enough time for a video and a movie production. I wish there were—it would have been nice to see that come to fruition—but I think learning to plan and to think about time and projects and accomplishing goals and deadlines is a much more important task.
During the half-day, the school board was kind enough to provide a lunch for the teachers and staff of the district. I’ll throw out a special thanks for that, especially Mr. Gene White, the chairman. I know everyone voted, but hey, I like food. Like most teachers, I’m a bottom feeder.²
Still, I feel the need to point out there was $1500 spent for upwards of—I’m guessing—250 people. The money spent sounds like a great deal, and it’s a very kind thing, and very wonderful—but it wasn’t steak and shrimp.
The only reason I point it out is that, sooner or later, someone is going to cite it as an example of extravagance, of waste, of one more thing those greedy teachers got. Sooner or later, it’s going to be one more thing to justify not passing a contract, or a budget, or a warrant article, or something which is needed.
Am I the only one who thinks it’s upsetting this is the way the district works? Am I the only one tired of living in an environment where fear about what some negative someone will say taints everything?
I don’t think so. We judge a tree by its fruit. We ought to be looking around at what the crop of the district’s fruit trees has really gotten for us.
A moment to applaud KT, one of the first editors of the Pawprint and who is graduating magna cum laude from KSC this year. Kudos—though as I keep saying, I’m not at all surprised. Always one of my best.
I interviewed for Upward Bound this last Thursday. It amuses me greatly that the strongest points on my resume are less than a year at MC2, rather than six years in a traditional high school. The world knows where education is headed, even if everyone in the district hasn’t caught on yet.
1 MC2 has a number of academic and character related criteria which must be completed before students pass onto the next grade, which which we call phases. It’s not as simple as that, but it will work for this context. Academic work can be completed at any time, (mostly) and there are a number of phase specific requirements which must be completed in order to move onto the next phase, a process we call a gateway. It’s much more complicated to explain than it is to see. ↺
2 I’m fairly certain that teachers are the only people in the world who will find random food on a table and start to chow down. The greatest gift in the world is a donut without a name on it—random food is always a good way to my heart. ↺
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Competency Based Education, Education, School Change
