On shopping while brown

This is out of control. The discussion always boils down to black and white, but ignores all the shades in between. My mother had to have "the talk" with me back when I was a kid and the pharmacy we used had a habit of following any customers they deemed 'suspicious'. Apparently I always looked 'suspicious' when I went in there, since the so-called security person would follow me like a shark after an injured surfer.
Fast forward to today. I'm too dark to satisfy the ignorant redneck parents, yet lack sufficient melanin to please the African-American families.
Beg pardon, but there are a lot of us on this very broad spectrum, who have had to deal with subtle and non-subtle prejudice for years. Bigotry comes in many flavors.

Of standards, rigor, and 'high expectations'

As I read about the Taliban attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar, Pakistan, resulting in the deaths of 145 people, mostly students, headlines fly around my mind, like

Pakistani gravedigger weeps over Taliban schoolkid victims

The Taliban's caliphate of chaos in Pakistan: Siddiqui

Pakistan militants: Children's massacre was to avenge army strikes

Why the Pakistani Taliban's war on children keeps on going  (7700 articles and counting, as of 8:30 pm tonight)

And then I go into work and try to convince my American students, who are privileged by comparison, and everything I see is an echo of this teacher's epiphany. I could have written what she wrote, if I weren't so beat down and exhausted that clear writing is nearly impossible. I am a textbook example right now of 'Executive Function Overload'. I'm so stressed and worn out I can barely drag myself to work every day.  My school talks a lot about 'standards-based' classrooms, but all the information provided, all the examples given, seem to be focused on the look of the room, rather than the content or quality of the lessons. We've just been treated to a big pitcher of koolaid on the topic of the Self-fulfilling Prophecy and the Pygmalion Effect (Rosenthal, 1968 article here)

I read another piece by a teacher who took her leaders at their word and held her students to high standards, with the consequences that came of not completing assignments despite numerous opportunities, afterschool tutoring, etc. She was called in to account for her pass/fail rate, and was told that if students were failing, then she had failed them. she changed her lessons, with the same result. In the end,

When she talks about the exhortations to set high standards, I hear the echo. When she talks about being attacked for doing exactly that, I have flashbacks. To this afternoon, when a parent chewed me out for asking her daughter to rewrite her plagiarized project. To the week before last, when a parent yelled at me over the phone about whatever she thought were my failings, as if it somehow makes her son's constant disruption of the learning environment more acceptable. To the school year quite some time back when I stopped bothering to grade actual work, but just recorded 65s and 75s in the gradebook, so that the final averages would meet the minimum to pass. I had had all I could take of explaining to parents why their children couldn't earn As without doing exceptional work, but especially why they couldn't earn Cs without doing any work. Because, you see, I don't GIVE grades. Students have to EARN them. And they work very hard to either pass or fail in any class I teach. What I'm wondering is simply this: at what point does the student pick up the ball? The quarterback can't win the game all alone. Right now, I'm feeling like Tim Tebow when his time in the NFL ended. MAybe I should just drop to one knee and pray?

Drowning in KoolAid

We are all familiar with the phrase- "drinking the koolaid". It's a reference to the followers of People's Temple founder Jim Jones, who willingly drank poisoned fruit punch (Flavor-Aid brand) in response to his command that they commit suicide as a 'revolutionary act'. In the end, over 900 people died in the Guyana jungle where Jones had hoped to establish a Utopian community.


Well, in the effort to create a Utopia in our schools, an awful lot of poisoned punch is being served up: data-driven decision making, test-based accountability, 'rigor', high standards, Common Core,  high-stakes tests, 'school choice', charters, vouchers, and more. One of the worst has to be the rah-rah sessions referred to as "Professional Learning Communities". The term comes from the work of Rick and Rebecca DuFour and others. Ostensibly, a group of professional educators comes together on a regular basis to learn and share. They are supposed to set their own agenda, their own goals, and formulate their own plan to achieve those goals.


In daily practice in my district, PLCs are just another meeting with agenda dictated from above and predetermined outcomes. Exchange of ideas is not welcomed, and dissent is actively discouraged. Anyone with ideas or opinions not in line with the agenda and outcomes is to be silenced by whatever means. In other words, drink the koolaid, smile, and be happy about it. Yesterday I just about hit my limit.


Please, sir, could I have some more? NOT