Letters from Lisa

I will be SO GLAD when elections have passed. I wish we could all just vote and get them over with. I happened to be walking through a room with a TV on when I heard a political ad - as you may know, there is a heated senate race going on here in NJ - and this got my attention:

“Stop the Menendez plan to give YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY MONEY to ILLEGAL ALIENS!”

Yup. I’m sure that’s what the plan does. It’s obviously referring to HR 194.4, the “Give Social Security money to Illegal Aliens” appropriations bill. Thanks for that public service, TV ad. You just SO make me want to vote for the jerk whose campaign paid for that brainless waste of airtime.

I’m so sick of this political climate. Let’s stop the War on Everyone Who Disagrees With Us. We need people in Congress who can actually work together, who are just as successful at making decisions and brokering compromises as they are at slamming their opponents with misleading truthy-esque campaign-speak talking points.

In my previous post here, I ended by asking:

Why have we set up an educational system that limits the amount of time that kids spend learning? What are the implications for kids whose development does not fit the natural timetable of the mainstream educational system? And what would an alternative system look like?

Let’s take these questions one at a time.

Why have we set up an educational system that limits the amount of time that kids spend learning? This isn’t the place to go into a treatise on the history of American education - there are entire scholarly works for that - so I’ll just point out a few relevant aspects. The first is that, up until the very recent past, children had to work alongside their parents. Until the advent of labor-saving devices, there were exponentially more tasks both in the home and in workplaces that required human hands. Our present day school schedule with all of its breaks and vacations was originally designed to revolve around harvests and plantings, so that the children of farmers could join their families at crucial times of the year without sacrificing their schooling (and without the school closing from lack of pupils). As the demographics in America have changed, institutional schedules have not necessarily kept up. Other considerations, such as the expenses of heating a school in February or cooling it off in August, have crept in as replacements for the original reasons for scheduling vacations. And finally, there are a huge number of people who count on schools continuing the summer vacation tradition. I don’t necessarily mean teachers (my first teaching job was in a 12-month program) though I do not deny that I take advantage of having pooled vacation time through my various trips and projects. Rather, I mean the summer camp industry, which has ballooned out to gargantuan proportions, and the manufacturers and retailers who count on the late-August, early-September “back to school” bonanza to lend their sales a needed boost. This isn’t to pin the problem on summer camps or Staples or Target - rather it’s just to point out that all of society has adapted and responded to the school calendar, and that if the school calendar were to change, it would be a huge adjustment for everyone, including people whose jobs technically have nothing to do with schools.

If we were to shorten summer vacations or eliminate holiday breaks - and speaking as a teacher, the latter possibility especially fills me with dread - we would be adding about 800-900 hours to a child’s school career. That is a significant amount. Parents know this, which is why, if they have the means, they send their children to the aforementioned summer camps, hire tutors, or take educationally minded family vacations. And some kids DO go to school, either because they’ve failed courses during the school year or because they need to fill their summer with something productive. When I was a teenager, I voluntarily attended summer school during the years that I was too old for camp but too young for a summer job. I took Algebra 2 - a course I knew I was going to have trouble with once school started - and learned the flute so that I could play in concert band. Later on, one of my summer jobs was as a resident advisor in a dorm for high school kids who were taking “pre-college” courses at Brown. This phenomenon, along with the always-booming trend of sending teenagers on volunteer trips and guided travel, shows that parents and kids want to use those extra hours productively. I think this is great - and I wish everyone could afford to do it.

Another way we limit the number of hours kids spend in school is by starting and ending school at the specific times that we do. This varies enormously from school to school, of course. My elementary school started at 9 am and ended at 3, while the elementary school where I work now starts at 8 and ends at 2:45. Schools do all sorts of things to maximize their time, such as by scheduling extra-curricular classes before and after official opening and closing times - my high school experience is a perfect example. I would go in at 7:30 for debate team practice on Mondays and Thursdays, then go from there to my first period class, attend chorus or band practice at lunch time, hit the afternoon classes, go to a rehearsal at 3:00, then a second at 5:30, and sometimes a third at 7:00. People participating in sports or clubs did versions of this, too. Again, the hours left open by the school schedule are quickly filled with enrichment by the people who have the means to do so.

Finally, we have the number of years that kids spend in school. As I said in Part 1, we have done things here and there to lengthen these years, such as adding preschool and kindergarten and college and graduate school. Some of these additions are available basically across society, while others - college and beyond - are still reserved for those who can either afford them or are willing to take out loans, or who are able to demonstrate skills valuable enough to warrant a scholarship. While more and more people are pursuing advanced degrees while in the workforce and raising a family and attending to adult responsibilities and milestones, successfully swinging higher education DOES often have the effect of delaying one’s entry into adulthood. More and more of us are getting married later, moving back in with our parents and staying there longer, and slogging through several entry level positions - possibly in different career areas - before hopefully alighting upon our “dream jobs”. This is a life trajectory that means a lot for middle-class folks, who aren’t wealthy enough to avoid having to support themselves through work, and means nothing for people who don’t have the luxury of putting off responsibilities for a few more years. This used to be much more pronounced than it now is - kids either didn’t go to school, or went for a few years - perhaps just long enough to learn to read, or went until they were called up for war as teenagers, and so on. To summarize what has suddenly become a rather long-winded paragraph, people once saw school as interfering with adult life and adult responsibilities. Therefore, it didn’t make sense to keep kids in school once they were legally adults. Not to mention that it would be a huge financial burden to have the government take responsibility for kids’ education after they have legally ceased to be kids.

So this is where we stand now. Kids are entitled to go to school until they reach a cutoff age. Then they’re either free to apply to programs for continuing their education, or they’re done and go into the workforce. (Or not.) If they can get everything they need in the amount of hours provided, great. But as I mentioned in my previous post, the time pressure creates a bottleneck. We’re limited as to what we can cover and when we can cover it. And because of that, we’re shortchanging our kids.

I’m going to pause here to address an objection that I know is coming. Some of you, many of you, are probably thinking, “Why should we make school any longer than it is? When I was in school, I spent most of my time wishing it was over. I’d much rather have the free afternoons and the long summers to do fun things with the kids, and let them be kids, rather than make them slog through yet more boring stuff in the classroom.” To that I say, point taken. My thoughts are about how to avoid wasting people’s time. What I’m arguing is that because we’ve set up school hours and schedules the way we’ve set them up, we are basically forcing our instruction into an artificial, inherently less exciting and stimulating format.

This will be continued in part 3.

I am a teacher, and I think that our present educational system has a fundamental flaw.

It isn’t that teachers are paid too much or too little, or that we teach about too many dead white men or we don’t teach enough about them, or that we do too much phonics instruction or not enough of it. It isn’t our lack of standards or our over-emphasis on standards. It isn’t that administrators don’t understand what teachers need or that teachers don’t understand what students need. It isn’t that school is boring or too bent on fostering self-esteem at the expense of intellectual growth. And it isn’t that kids have too much or not enough homework. Any and all of these may be important issues, but in my view, they all miss the essential flaw in the system.

The flaw is the school year itself. The fact that we have school years. More specifically, a certain number of them, each lasting a defined period of time. There isn’t enough time to cover all of the content and skills that children must have before they can be considered educated - assuming we even agree on what content and skills constitute a necessary body of knowledge. (Which we don’t.)

As I’ve said in this forum before, TIME is the limiting factor in a child’s educational experience. Much of what is contentious about education boils down to arguments over how to harness, manage, and parcel out this limited time. We wouldn’t be arguing over which dead white men to teach, or which reading skills to focus on, or whether to teach the concepts that will be on the test or to focus on how to finagle the test itself, if we had time to teach everything.

But instead of addressing the issue of time directly, we end up arguing over how to split it up. And when you look at raw numbers, you can see why. A child attending public school for 12 full years (1st grade through 12th grade) for 180 days per year ends up with 2,160 days of classroom instruction. Period. Total. This, of course, assumes that the child (not to mention the child’s teacher) is never absent. This calculation also does not subtract minutes and hours lost for things like lunch, recess, fire drills, school concerts, holiday celebrations, test prep, or test administration. It’s truly frightening to think that the average child has less than 2,160 days - the equivalent of about five full years - to learn EVERYTHING that s/he needs to know in order to be able to enter the workforce.

We have acknowledged this problem in tacit ways, such as by adding additional hours to a child’s educational day through homework and tutoring, and even more so by adding more, currently optional, school years to a child’s educational career. I’ve heard it said that college is “the new high school”, meaning that for many sectors of the workforce, you are not considered educated or right for even entry-level positions if you do not have a college degree. College, once considered the province of only the most educated and perhaps most elitist, is now commonplace, and young adults who don’t attend are considered to be at a disadvantage. Sure, there are occasional success stories of people blowing off college to start very lucrative businesses, but parents, teachers, and guidance counselors certainly aren’t falling over themselves to advise kids to skip the Ivy League so that they can go be the next Bill Gates (who left Harvard in his junior year to focus on Microsoft). College, by and large, is now considered an essential component of a full education.

Children are also beginning their school years earlier. First it was kindergarten, then preschool. There are calls for “universal pre-K”, in effect extending public education so that it begins at age 3 for all children, not just those whose parents choose to pay to enroll them in private programs. And speaking of that, one sure way to gauge the level of anxiety surrounding time in education is to witness the panicked frenzy surrounding admissions to top private PRESCHOOLS. Not high schools, not colleges, not PhD programs… preschools. This is another indicator that people worry that their child won’t have enough time to get educated if they don’t start early. This entire phenomenon can actually be summed up in two words: Baby Einstein. (shudder)

Now, of course, some of this frenzy is due to competition. Everyone wants their child to have every advantage in life, especially if their child is going to have to eventually compete with all the other children in her age group for admissions to schools and for eventual jobs. To some extent, competition is the American way, given that we live in a society without an aristocracy (though as it turned out, both candidates in the last Presidential election were distantly related to both each other and to the British royal family) and that theoretically an American citizen has full mobility in society, assuming s/he works hard enough and has a good accountant.

But in my view, much of this competition is actually based on panic. “If I don’t get my child into a good preschool, then she won’t get into a good private school, and then forget about admissions to the best high schools, and then goodbye Princeton!” Those four years of college have now become the repository of every parent’s hopes for their child’s future success. Part of that is the mythos of what the college experience does, part of it is real opportunities to network and intern in one’s chosen field, and part of it - the part that no one really talks about - is the conviction that children leave high school fundamentally unprepared for life in the so-called “real world”. Clearly whatever is taking place during the 2,160 days of mainstream childhood education - 2,340 if the child attended kindergarten, 2,520 if you add a year of preschool - is not enough.

So, what do we do? Clearly there is a limited amount of time. So we research to find out which teaching practices produce the best results (because we don’t have time for anything else), and we test kids to see if they have mastered what they’re supposed to have learned (because if not, we need to pressure the administrators and teachers to do a better job, so that they don’t waste the kids’ time). Some of these well meaning initiatives actually turn out to be time wasters, such as when districts jump on the merry-go-round of introducing various curriculum methods and programs because the new trend is to do X or Y approach, wait a year or two or (if we’re lucky) three and then revoke the program because it hasn’t produced results, only to do the exact same thing with another curriculum or approach. Another huge time waster: administering standardized tests. Aside from issues of preparing for the tests and teaching to the tests, there is an even more obvious waste of time here - taking up what eventually adds up to weeks of a child’s instructional time in school just to administer these tests. Maybe that sacrifice of time is worthwhile in the long run, though I tend to doubt it - in any case, it’s clear to me that we are running ourselves in circles to somehow maximize the little time we have to educate kids, without ever questioning the logic of that limited time in the first place.

So let’s address this fundamental flaw. Why have we set up an educational system that limits the amount of time that kids spend learning? What are the implications for kids whose development does not fit the natural timetable of the mainstream educational system? And what would an alternative system look like?

That’s all in Part 2. Stay tuned.

Today’s valuable lesson: on the Internet, nothing ever dies. Ever.

This afternoon I received an email from good ol’ Earthwatch - they periodically publish updates and promos for their volunteer projects. This month they chose to highlight several projects that I am familiar with, since I have volunteered with them at one time or another. First up, my most recent expedition in Peru, Archaeology of Peru’s Wari Empire. You may remember that one from this summer’s posts. (I never finished writing about that experience, by the way… expect an update on that shortly.)

Next up was Hawksbill Turtles of the Great Barrier Reef, which was the focus of my Australia trip in 2005. My mother was standing nearby as I excitedly shouted, “Hey, that was my project too!” only to then scroll down a bit more, and discover something even better.

“Hey! That’s ME!!”

There it was, glistening white words in a bright orange box - “Solo traveler Lisa Fischler” and a link to my article about the volunteer experience.

There’s nothing like unexpectedly finding yourself online. Good thing it was something I’m actually proud of, like saving endangered species, and not an incriminating video or photo of my hair in 7th grade. Not that such things exist, especially not photos of my nasty strung out perm (cough).

I clicked “random page” on Wikiality.com, the grassroots Colbert Nation parody of Wikipedia, and got this:

Educator: Someone who brainwashes children into the evil intellectual socialist commie atheistic point of view. They claim to want to help people learn, but everyone knows that the only real learning is from the Holy Bible.

Maybe the “random page” isn’t random at all. Maybe, just maybe, Mr. Colbert really does have “super-duper ESP”.

The hallway between the 8th Ave. and Broadway subway lines is a veritable showcase of New York performers. There’s the accordion player obsessed with the Godfather theme, the synthesizer guy who does nothing but jazz chords, the Peruvian pan pipers who play more Simon & Garfunkel than Peruvian music (and occasionally they branch out to a mournful Andes-tinged My Heart Will Go On), the creepy harmonica guy in a muumuu and bare feet, and the Stomp! wannabee banging the pots and pans. Maybe he just hates cooking implements… maybe he lost money due to Martha Stewart’s alleged insider trading. But these folks are amateurs compared to the evangelists who stalk that hallway.

Today they were out in force. One guy shouting at the top of his lungs, alternating English and Spanish, another lady whipping out pamphlets, and a third lady whispering to the passersby, “God loves you, he wants to save your soul.” There may have even been a fourth standing there.

When one man tried to evade the God Squad, the male pamphleteer indignantly called out, “Hey! Why are you hiding from God?”

And the answer came:

“Why, are you Him?”

Harried commuter: 1, Jesus Whisperers: 0.

I would cordially like to wish a happy birthday to everyone who shares this day with me, especially Paul Simon, who today turned 65. I never knew that we had October 13th in common before.

And it was Friday this year - even luckier. I have always told my students that Friday the 13th is lucky, since my birthday falls on it every six years. Just to prove my point, the last Series of Unfortunate Events installment came out today.

Now if you will excuse me, I am going to go back to ogling Colbert’s lightsaber skills on YouTube. ‘Night!

This is all my father’s fault for DVR-ing the Colbert Report every night, since it’s on far too late for me to watch it. I am now officially obsessed with Stephen Colbert and his Green Screen Challenge, which he explains here:

And now, because I can’t go scouring through YouTube every time I want to watch these clips, here are my favorite ones:

Continue Reading »

After returning from my trip this summer, I filled out a survey from my tour company letting them know how I felt about the arrangements they had set up for me. I was complimentary but honest - there were parts that went smoothly, and a few things that didn’t. I don’t think I sounded negative - but certainly less than glowing.

Today I got a huge heavy package from them, containing a very pretty hardcover coffee table book about Peru and a letter detailing how they followed up on my comments and apologizing for the aspects of the trip that I found less than ideal, etc. etc.

So now I am feeling really guilty.

Which I know is a weird reaction. I gave the feedback I did because
a) I was asked for it, and
b) I thought it would behoove them to know what a customer experienced, given that others might be in the same position as myself

Given those motives, it made me uncomfortable to get such a nice gift from them. I didn’t want an apology or a resolution to what I experienced - it was simply part of the trip. It sounds like they were worried that I wouldn’t recommend them to others or might even be sour on some of the places I visited, which is certainly not the case. My attempts to be honest and straightforward registered as displeasure. And that displeasure was apparently communicated to the people who accommodated me and tried to take care of me during the trip. I’m really uncomfortable with that.

There’s an appropriate Monty Python sketch for every moment -
Continue Reading »

I am going to see a lot of college kids today on my Amtrak ride down the Northeast Corridor, all participating in the same Long Weekend Migration that I did when I was a student. Columbus Day, at least around here, is less about some guy with three ships and delusions of grandeur, and more about schools giving everyone the day off so that they can sit on overcrowded trains.

Actually, I enjoy train rides. I always have. I like them much better than flying in airplanes, and not for any reasons of safety but simply for the ground level scenery and pleasant background noise. I get writing done on trains. I have room to stretch my legs out without impaling the seat in front of me. And I enjoy trains on pseudo-holidays like Columbus Day much better than on actual holiday weekends, like Thanksgiving. Getting home on Thanksgiving used to be a nearly insurmountable challenge. Some years I had to sit or stand in the aisles during four hour train rides (which inevitably stretched to five, since a general rule of transportation is that the amount of time it takes to get somewhere is inversely proportional to the number of people who don’t have seats) and one year Amtrak actually put me on a shuttle bus because their trains were so overbooked. (Got my money back - otherwise that might have been the most expensive bus ride in history)

What a relief it is not to have to travel for hours just so I can be somewhere when something important happens.

(That was sort of a delusional thing to say just now, since my commute to work is really long and I spend a LOT of time on buses and subways every day. Try about 15 hours a week, or longer.)

Ah well, at least South Station has a good selection of reading material. And I just bought tons of new yarn to play with!

I’ll have to look through my journals and records, but I believe that this may actually be a late start for me - waiting all the way until October until starting to contemplate where I’m going to travel next July or August. I’ve been quite immersed in work and in wedding details (and now, with my sister’s wedding in the works, that does not seem likely to change) but at the same time, I would really like to get going on where I’m going!

I’ve decided to do approximately 3 weeks abroad - not the mind-melting six weeks that I did this past summer. I’ll probably be working for part of the summer, as well as throwing my sister a wedding shower. This past summer my mother was able to help me with a lot of the details for Christine’s shower, but now my mother will be the mother of the bride, and she’ll be neck deep in planning the actual reception. So I won’t go hide in China for six weeks while she tries to field RSVPs alone.

Keeping in mind the 3-week time constraint, I was thinking perhaps some of the bigger trips on my list should wait - I can’t see doing China in three weeks, for example. Instead I may opt for something a bit more relaxed - like maybe Spain and Greece. Or possibly an archaeological dig and national parks trip here in the US. (Horrors, not leaving the country at all? I don’t know if I could take it)

If I don’t do China this year, it’ll probably have to wait until after the 2008 Olympics. I definitely don’t want to be there while that’s going on. But maybe 2007 is not a good time for China either, if everything’s going to be under heavy preparation. Plus I still have the same concerns about environmental problems and disease that I had last year, which caused me to switch destinations (without any regrets I might add)

It’s still early, so time will tell. Stay tuned!

This morning I sat down and read Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled–and More Miserable Than Ever Before by Jean M. Twenge, from start to finish. This book pulls together concepts and studies that I have encountered separately in many other books I’ve read recently, from Born to Buy to Authentic Happiness to The Nurture Assumption. It also quotes extensively from books about people my age (such as Quarterlife Crisis: The Qnique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties) and from my favorite Broadway show, Avenue Q, which is essentially a quarterlife crisis set to snappy tunes. Basically, the book’s point is that the current group of 18-35 year olds, and their young children, grew up in a culture emphasizing individuals and individual rights in a way that no other previous American generation did, with consequences both predictable and not-so-predictable.

I was born in 1977, which places me solidly in the book’s demographic (which ranges from 1971 to just about the present day, rather larger than a single generation as it is traditionally defined). I wouldn’t say, though, that my upbringing reflected any trend towards revering the individual above the community, particularly not when I was a younger child. In third grade, for example, I was in a reading group by myself, because I had already finished the textbook and set of leveled readers that most of my classmates were using. The school, in its clumsy way, tried to accomodate me by sending me to the special ed teacher (who finally said Look, I’m here to teach kids who need extra help, not to do enrichment with a kid who’s doing fine) and then to the ESL teacher, who couldn’t exactly teach me reading either. So they finally decided to let me hang around and read books and do workbooks on my own, with the theory that this was giving the rest of the class time to “catch up”. So I guess this was an in-between stage - they tried to provide differentiated instruction as long as there was at least a small group of us who were roughly on the same level, then they found that they didn’t have the resources to provide individualized instruction and gave up. My parents accepted it, as did I. I don’t remember anyone getting angry at the school or arguing that I’d be bored or stifled in class. (There may have been some talk of me skipping a grade that I wasn’t privy to - in any case, it didn’t happen.)

Maybe it’s a sign of the times that I would do everything possible not to have a repeat performance of that sort of benign neglect with my own child. I would certainly insist that she was put in a reading group, and I would be irritated at the notion that she had to remain in place and not get too far ahead so that others could catch up. This is an individualistic mindset that I think many parents would share. Working in the education field, I basically operate under the assumption that kids are going to proceed at their own pace, and that you don’t stop them from going ahead and learning more just because the rest of the group isn’t there - and you don’t penalize them for going slower, just because the rest of the group has already finished. I just don’t see the value of promoting that sort of group conformity for its own sake. In fact, I’ve often told people that if I were to design the school system from the ground up, I would go back to the idea of the one room schoolhouse, in which kids of all different ages and levels are in the same environment working at their individual levels. It’s only because school is now mandatory for every child that we divide kids into grade levels based on chronological age - otherwise it would make more sense to have a fluid system in which kids can drift towards whatever pace they need. Think of it like this - is the kid born on January 1st so developmentally different than the kid born on December 31st, the cutoff in New York? Does it make sense for the January baby to wait an entire year to start school if he’s ready, and does it make sense for the December baby to get pushed into first grade if he’s not ready? What we have here is an artifact of the system, not a developmental rationale.

Of course, in my parents’ generation, none of this would have been an issue, because the focus was not on the individual to begin with. Group conformity was valued much more highly, authority carried much more - well, authority - and it was better to go along than to question “the way it is”. If the school said that my class was reading textbook #4, page 75, on Thursday afternoon, then that’s what I would be doing, regardless of whether I was capable of reading page 75 three years ago or not at all. Our entire society has shifted its focus now, from the group to the individual, with a whole host of results. One positive result, in my view, has been an increased awareness that not all children are the same or learn the same, and that they thrive if they are given instruction and scaffolding that meet their needs.

I do think that sometimes people misjudge. These days, I think people tend to see themselves as more unique and unusual than they really are, and perhaps likewise for their kids. This applies both to talents and abilities (witness the number of American Idol contestants who mistakenly think they can sing) and to problems and disabilities. Most people, whether “normal” or not, have a huge amount in common with other people. The number of support groups and books about diseases and issues testify to the fact that almost nobody goes through a human experience that someone else hasn’t already gone through. Especially on the anonymous internet, I’ve seen people get into pity fights, with each insisting that their situation is the more horrible and dramatic - as though, in the end analysis, everyone doesn’t feel the same basic pain. This, I feel, is attributable to the rise of the individual as the basic unit of our culture, without a corresponding rise of awareness of how individuals interrelate and connect.

The book draws together many points that I’ve encountered - how people are today less likely not only to display “good manners” but also to run stop signs and cheat in business and on tests, how parents often defend kids when they’re accused of misbehavior by teachers and neighbors without getting the adult’s side of the story, how people are having sexual contact earlier and focusing more on individual gratification than on developing a partnership or commitment, and how societal factors such as housing prices and job shortages and college loans are increasing pressures on young adults and delaying their achievement of adult milestones. And then there’s the self esteem movement, telling kids that they can do whatever they want and be whatever they want in pursuit of their own happiness - totally ignoring the constraints that operate in the real world, and therefore setting kids up for huge disappointment and disillusionment later on.

I don’t agree with every point the book makes, but it was a thought provoking read - and pulled together many different aspects of the same fundamental issue in a way that I found very interesting.

Christine and Joseph got married yesterday! It was a bit of an adventure - a longer post about it will follow soon. The ceremony and party were amazing!

I posted an album of wedding photos from yesterday onto Webshots. Here are a few highlights (click them for larger versions):

Me in my bridesmaid dress

The walk down the aisle

Bride and groom