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No Blinders on US History Curriculum

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US history or US histories, that is the question.  Is my story your story?  Is there a single story?  Can there be multiple stories woven into a broader telling of a national history?  What role do blinders play in our history?  What should we teach our children?  Who says?

What do we know about US history?

The course title reads United States History.   I taught this course and supervised its instruction.  Our classic US History textbooks told our national story beginning with European exploration and colonization, revolution and establishment of a constitutional republic, westward expansion, civil war, industrialization, world wars, civil rights, and, depending on publication date, some contemporary stories.  All supplemental materials used to teach our history to children supported this chronicle of our American pride and spirit.  US history was Eurocentric and comfortably fit the concepts of our 20th century nationalism. 

We taught and students learned what Winston Churchill meant when he said, “History is written by the victors”.  Our history curriculum in school has been the story of how English-speaking people spread across the middle of North America and established a government, economic system, and society to sustain the victor’s heritage.  The victors place the blinders.

https://slate.com/culture/2019/11/history-is-written-by-the-victors-quote-origin.html

My family lineage parallels traditional US history.  We immigrated from Holland, intermarried with English colonists and fought in the Revolutionary War.  As the settled frontier moved west, so did we.  In 1849 a great-grandfather joined the California Gold Rush and returned to Wisconsin with enough riches to buy land and establish a growing family on multiple farms.  By 1900 we were college-educated and mobile.  We worked in FDR’s federal agriculture department and fought in WW2.  We thrived as the Silent and Greatest Generations and Baby-Boomers.  We are middle-class America personified and we find our story told and explained in a US History text.

But our story does not mirror that of almost 50% of Americans today.  Many of the children I taught and learned from cannot find their family story in a US History text.  “I do not see myself or my family represented in US History” is a complaint that educators knew existed for decades and only recently have begun to address.  After all, we say to children, “This is the history of our country”, the first thing children do is to look for faces, names, and stories that are like their own.  As soon as we ask children to find themselves in our national history we recognize multiple stories within our history.

As examples, our history text tells that enslaved African labor created the southern plantation culture and economy.  The Civil War was fought to free the slaves and resulted in amendments to the Constitution.  Reconstruction brought Jim Crow laws and segregation in the south.  Martin Luther King led the civil rights movement and was assassinated.  Jackie Robinson was the first Black player in Major League Baseball and Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods each transformed their respective sports.  And Barack Obama was our first Black President.

For a century the only mention of American Indians in our texts was Pocahontas, Squanto, Sacajawea, and Sitting Bull.  Pocahontas saved John Smith and married and introduced tobacco to London.  Squanto taught the Pilgrims to use fish as fertilizer and sat at the first Thanksgiving.  Sacajawea guided Lewis and Clarke’s expedition over the Rocky Mountains.  Sitting Bull led the Sioux in the Battle of Little Big Horn and the death of Custer. 

The story of Hispanic people in the text is one of losses.  The Alamo and Mexican War of 1846-48 led to the annexation of Texas and all the territory between the Louisiana Purchase and the Pacific.  (A student needed to visualize the states formed by the Purchase to understand this.)  Simon Bolivar was the George Washington of South America.

Asians get equal short shrift.  Chinese workers built the Central Pacific railroad from California to Promontory Point, Utah, to join with the Union Pacific and form our first transcontinental railroad.  And Japanese Americans were interred during WW2. 

A traditional US History text fit the political-cultural realities of our pre-civil rights eras.  That text conformed to the victors theory.  Times changed.  This is a woke story but a reality story.  The Declaration of Independence acknowledged certain unalienable rights held by all (men according to the Founding Fathers).  Stories of how Americans came to share their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness cannot be blindered in their telling.

Historical versions

If you don’t like what is showing on your media screen, change providers.  If it is television, change channels.  If it is a history text, change texts.  Even among the victors there are different tellings of the same stories.  Depending on your state, the adopted US History text is selected according to the telling that appeals to state legislators who make the ultimate decisions regarding school text adoptions.  In the textbook market, California and Texas spend the most money on state adoptions.  US History in these two states reflects how they want US History to be taught to their school children.  These are state-approved blinders, and they contradict the rights of all Americans to understand their stories.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/12/us/texas-vs-california-history-textbooks.html

How does the story of our history fit our nation today?

We are no longer white/European.  Our population mass is shifting from white/non-Hispanic to a reflection of the melting pot our nation was destined to become.  So says the plaque at the foot of the Statue of Liberty written by Emma Lazarus, daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants.

“As of 2019, the current distribution of the U.S. population by race and ethnicity is:

  • White/non-Hispanic: 60.1%
  • Hispanic: 18.5%
  • Black: 12.2%
  • Asian: 5.6%
  • Multiple Races: 2.8%
  • American Indian/Alaska Native: .7%
  • Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander: .2%”
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-u-s-population-by-race/

Within the next decade White/non-Hispanic people will no longer be the majority race/ethnicity.  The aggregated majority will be people of color.

More importantly, all in our census are citizens of the United States.  In the collective, we are Americans.  This is true of the census of our people but not of the US History of our people.  Our history curriculum does not tell the stories of our American people.

Cognitive Dissonance

What do we do when we know disparate things to be true?  Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance.  We experience discomfort and angst when confronted with dissonance.  In this case, our textual history does not accurately reflect our real histories or our histories does not tell the story we want to be told.

https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-cognitive-dissonance-2795012

Dissonance can cause us to

  • learn more about conflicting ideas in order to resolve a best understanding.
  • affirm our version of a story and attack anyone who holds a conflicting version.
  • create new versions that further strengthen our ideas and attack any other version.

And this is where we are today.  These three actions are taking place in and around our classrooms as adherents deal with their own and our societal dissonance. 

Some use the attack strategy claiming that any story other than the mainstreamed story written by the victors is unAmerican.  They make the issue partisan and divisive.  Texts and materials that do not support the victor story are suppressed and removed from school.  Blinders abound.

Some use the revision and new version strategies.  They cite the Founding Fathers wanting decisions today to be based on the ideas and constraints of the 1700s.  The Fathers truly were a narrow slice of the census of their time – wealthy, landed, Christian, white, and male.  Or they rewrite history to give the victors a moralistic superiority over the vanquished.  Our history is a natural selection and progression process.  More blinders.

And some understood one of the concepts they were taught in their school’s US History class.  The United States is a melting pot of peoples.  There is no dominant story to support one group of citizens over the interests of others.  To be understood and celebrated, the good, bad, and the ugly, history cannot have blinders.

The Big Duh!

The motto of the United States has been and is today e pluribus unum.  It is Latin meaning “out of many, one”.  US History taught to children today needs to be the truthful telling of the many stories that represent all the people who make up our one nation.  The melting pot is only getting larger and more complex.  Any child who does not hear and learn from the many stories is condemned to a severe dissonance problem.  A nation that does not learn from its history is condemned to repeat it.  We are smarter than that.

We Are Short of Licensed Teachers Who Want to Teach

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When you don’t plan for your next generation, you are assured you will evolve into obscurity if not extinction.  Aspects of our culture go missing over time.  Then existed then, over time, their need dissolved and poof!   They are no more.  Consider these areas of employment – telephone operators, elevator operators, gandy dancers, phrenologists, redsmiths, scissor grinders, telegraphists, lamplighters, soda jerks, lectors, town criers, film projectionists, log drivers, and milkmen.  The need for these employments once was and is no longer.  They drifted to obscurity then elimination.  Evolution in the world of work and the elimination of fields of work is real. Our teaching crisis is that we are short of teachers who want to teach.

Extinction takes many forms.  For the dodo bird, extinction meant elimination – there are no dodo birds today.  Through a combination of hunting, deforestation, and purposeful destruction of dodo nests, these birds that were first identified by explorers in the early 1500s were gone by 1681.  Poof!  While the existence of the dodo was in human hands, not the bird’s, they continue to be a landmark in the reality of extinction. 

Obscurity then extinction – will public education teachers be next?  Obscurity is when the primary function of school is day care for children; extinction is when any adult can be a day care provider. 

What do we know.

We know these two facts:

  1. More people are leaving the educational profession than are entering.  The profession has a current gap of almost 70% in the number of teachers quitting, retiring, and moving on compared to the number of new teachers beginning work in the field. 
  2. There are more persons in Wisconsin with valid teaching and other educational licenses than the number of educators currently employed PLUS current and anticipated job openings.  We have an abundance of licensed educators.  However, licensed educators do not choose educational employment.

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/education/our-insights/k-12-teachers-are-quitting-what-would-make-them-stay#

Hence these questions.  If we have an abundance of dodo birds, why are we experiencing a shortage of dodo birds?  Why do we have an abundance of licensed teachers and a shortage of teachers in classrooms?  Why do people spend the time and resources necessary to gain an educational license and then choose not to be employed as educators?

Why is this thus?

Teaching in public education is on the drifting list.  There is a shortage of teachers in most states leading to either larger and larger classes for an employed teacher or increased numbers of students taught by an unprepared teacher.  There is a clear shortage of teachers with specific licenses, special education being the teacher hardest to find.  Math and science and computer technology are close followers in the shortage market. 

Why?  Compensation has been and continues to be a real downside to teaching.  The source of teacher pay in most states is through legislative funding and state funding is always political.  Legislators balance state budgets by controlling educational spending, one of a state’s largest annual expenditures.  Clearly, teacher pay was not keeping up with the cost of living prior to our current national economic inflation woes and suffers greater discrepancy now.  Teachers chronically lose spending power.  Teachers are choosing to leave classrooms for employment that pays more.

Second, education is being beaten up politically.  Politicians are making education a partisan campaign battle topic.  Conservative legislation dictates what teachers can teach and cannot teach, how they may address children, and threaten teachers with prosecution and loss of license for teaching unapproved subjects.  Some teachers are being bullied out of their profession. 

Third, the deficits of student learning loss in the pandemic put teachers on the hot seat for an impossible speedy recovery of lost learning.  The financial cliff of federal pandemic dollars to schools will cause many recently added school positions to be discontinued due to no continuing local funding.  Tutors and interventionists and additional teaching positions will be terminated.  And the pressure for current teachers to make good on all mandates, all requirements, and all political entreaties within the historical structure of school is causing more teachers to seek other employment. 

Finally, teachers suffer from the “pile on” effect.  75% of departing teachers cite their being overworked and under appreciated as their real reason for quitting teaching.  Piling on happens in many ways.

Going back two decades, No Child Left Behind began a trend of government mandates with the expectations of “do this or be replaced”.  State assessments in reading and math became a school’s annual report card.  Art, music, PE, shop, marketing, technology, computer science, agriculture, and world language teachers all were told to incorporate ELA, reading, and math in their daily instruction in order to raise school test scores. 

Across time family and school relationships have drastically changed.  The number of homes with two working parents struggling economically has significantly increased parallel to a decrease in parental supervision of children doing schoolwork at home.  This is not a complaint about parents but a statement about new realities.  Classroom teachers spend more daily time with a child than the child’s parents.  Teachers have become frontline care takers and surrogates for parents. 

Teacher shortages mean teachers in school needed to assume additional assignments and responsibilities.  The most egregious of these are non-instructional duties, such as recess, lunch, and bus duties, but also more before and after school tutoring for students who need extra time.  These are things that absent teachers used to do.  Every extra duty subtracts from teachers’ workday time for planning, correcting and grading student work, professional meetings, and communication with parents.  Planning, correcting and grading, and communicating are essential work so teachers do these from home.

A teacher’s time for home and family life has been greatly eroded by piling on.  What is billed and contracted as an 8:00 am to 4:00 pm job, now is a 7:00 am to 9:00 pm job.  There is the 8:00 to 4:00 school day with seven or more hours of assigned duties and there is the before and after schoolwork at home necessary to be a complete teacher.  Work life reduces home life for teachers.

Teachers’ resignations are not equally distributed.  Resignations are greater among:

Young teachers.  They are lowest on the compensation scale, carry undergraduate debt, face housing scarcity, and are not seasoned to the realities of teaching today.  They also have the least to lose in a career change early in life.

Teachers in low-income districts.  Resources matter.  When the common response to an inquiry is, “We don’t have that in our district” or “We cannot afford to do that”, it does not take long for teachers to seek employment in districts with needed resources.

Teachers in districts with high diversity.  Diversity equals educational challenges.  There are more non-English languages spoken, more cultural nuances, more special needs students, and more non-educational struggles.  Teaching in high diversity districts requires more than teaching from teachers.

Resignations create the greatest havoc in districts that have the greatest difficulty in recruiting new teachers.

Where schools and classrooms are empty due to diminishing enrollment, there also will be schools and classrooms empty due to diminishing numbers of prepared teachers.

What can we do about this thusness?

  • Compensation is the easy yet wrong answer.  Teacher compensation needs to keep pace with costs of living.  No more and no less.  Why would those in charge argue differently?  Well, there are reasons but that is for another day.
  • Beyond compensation, restructure the work so that the right work, causing all children to learn, can be accomplished.  Do these:
  • Maintain class sizes of 20-25 children.  Although the STAR studies indicated class sizes around 15, there was no compelling research to support such small class sizes.  A class of 20-25 gives school leaders enough flexibility to manage enrollment.  More importantly, a teacher can effectively instruct 20 to 25 children, create positive daily interaction with each, understand the individual learning needs of each, and still utilize whole group instruction as appropriate.  The “paper” load for 20 – 25 is manageable.  The parent contact requirements are manageable.  In many urban schools, 20 – 25 reduces their current daily student assignment by 40% or more.
  • Invest in classroom teachers for initial instruction and level two interventions.  Assign current interventionists to classroom teaching.  Too many dollars are spent in correcting and filling in after-initial teaching.  The hiring of interventionists assumes failed initial instruction.  With proper class sizing and planning time regular teaching can resolve student lapses in learning.
  • Make planning and prep time real and inviolate.  Assign each classroom teacher a minimum of 90 minutes of daily prep time.  This does not include before and after school time as that is when professional meetings occur.  Before and after school time also must be reserved for student and parent access.  90 minutes of uninterrupted prep time allows a teacher to ensure clear and targeted lesson plans, quality feedback on student work, and planning that accommodates all student needs.
  • Extend the annual teaching contract to include 20 days of summer curriculum and teaching development time.  Inserting PD as stand-alone days in the school year is absurd; it is lip service to the school board’s obligation to provide PD.  We wouldn’t expect children to profit from a stand-alone day of essential teaching and learning.  Summer PD provides accountable educational in-service as administrators and teachers have adequate time for professional training, collegial interaction, and practice/reinforcement of new training.  Everything we know about teaching children should be applied to teacher in-service.
  • Assure that teaching is politically agnostic.  There is no place for partisan politics in the education of children.  Our goal is to cause all children to have the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary for each to be an informed and problem-solving adult.  In the now, we need to stand against partisanship that would tell us what to teach and what not to teach based upon political positions and political retribution. 

The Big Duh!

These are seven bullet points that make a difference between a teacher being in the classroom and being in another profession.  Much like the dodo bird that what made extinct by how people and the culture of the time treated it, classroom teachers are responding to how people and the culture of today treat them.  We can leave things in the current status quo and watch the number of qualified teachers dwindle until public education is truly just day care or we can change the culture to ensure public education continues to be our nation’s most important continuing institution.

The Hard Work Is The Right Work

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Being responsible for the education of children is not easy.  The speed, complexity, and complications of 21st century life is making this responsibility more and more difficult as every day we hear of a school controversy and crisis somewhere.  A board meeting in Timbuktu easily becomes headlines on national nightly news given how a social media post can explode sensationally.  And what is done in Timbuktu becomes a burning issue at a local meeting where most people cannot spell Timbuktu.  Being responsible requires leaders to understand the essential issues of their place and time, to sort the here and now from the Timbuktu, and not be afraid to tackle the hard stuff – the right work – of educating children.

Why is this thus?

There are several givens whenever we gather to talk about our local schools.  Our Constitution ensures our right to speak freely.  Wisconsin’s Open Meetings Laws ensure that school board meetings are open to public attendance with an opportunity for the public to speak to the school board.  And because almost everyone in the community attended a school of some sort, many people speak to their school board with the expertise of their personal school experience.  In summary, we are free to express our opinions about school and the school board is obligated to listen.  These are good things.

From the moment we labeled it public education, people felt compelled to express their opinion about how children should be educated.  Any adult who has or can biologically create a child feels authorized to explain how children should be raised and educated.  Today they express themselves standing at the lectern in front of the school board and from the screens of their computers, IPads, and smartphones while sitting at home.  This guaranteed exchange of “you speak, and we listen” is now part of posted school board agendas.  This is a healthy thing.

All board agenda items are not of the same importance.  The annual and daily operations of a district school require boards to consider, discuss, and approve items of routine business investigated and proposed by administrators.  These are the usual business of the board that once approved in the committee process need only a cursory airing in public and a vote.  It is true to say that many boards of education live on a steady diet of usual business agenda and shy away from controversy.  That said, the usual business is easy stuff and the controversial is the hard.  The hard points a board to the right work it must do.

Lastly, there is nothing inherently wrong with controversy; controversy being a voicing of oppositional points of view.  Good leadership understands that important educational issues will raise differing points of view and it is the work of the board to resolve conflicting points of view for the prosperity of the schools.  Best leadership does not shy away from controversy but tackles it honestly.

What should we know about this thusness?

Controversies abound!

The pandemic gave most school boards a rude awakening to the hard stuff.  As experienced ad nauseam, no school boards were educated or trained to deal with either pandemic education or the controversies of how schools should behave during a pandemic.  Few boards, if any, escaped this public crisis and the argument of battling points of view.   In fact, seated board members resigned, did not run for re-election, and were recalled by their electorate because of pandemic controversies.  The board table was not for the faint of heart when spittle and spite flew from impassioned parents and residents who knew best about public health and public education in an emergency.

Concurrent to the pandemic, other controversies brewed and erupted in school board rooms.  Events of police violence went national.  BLK begat an introspection of systemic racism that begat renewed white nationalism that begat a legislative rewriting of US history that could not be taught in public schools.  Speakers, despite historical fact, are making CRT their argument and the board room their arena.

Quietly then loudly gender identity and the evolving status of children claiming non-conforming gender expression forced the public, like tug-of-rope teams, to dig in their heels regarding who can use which bathrooms and locker rooms in schools.  Parents care more about this issue than their children.  The parent who cries “Protect my daughter!”, claims the media headline while distorting issues of discrimination and fairness. 

There are quiet controversies afoot.  As federal pandemic relief monies expire, school districts everywhere face financial crisis.  Usual school funding is not adequate to sustain the technologies and school staffing wrought by the pandemic.  While inflation diminishes family spending, school boards are proposing increases in local school taxes.  The controversies of cuts to school programs and school closing will clog the school board agenda for years to come.

A second quiet controversy is teacher shortage.  Teacher preparation programs in colleges and universities are dying for lack of enrollment.  As baby boomer teachers retire school boards are hard put to find qualified replacement teachers.  The controversy is this – state legislation is lowering the standards for a teaching license, persons who are not fully prepared to teach children to high standards of learning are being hired to assure a teacher in every classroom, student academic achievement is diving, and someone is to blame.  Hello, school board member!

What is a board to do?

Do these three things to succeed.

  • Grab each controversy by both ears, look it in the face, and deal with it.  Ignoring a controversy builds anger in the partisans and they will damn you for your lack of action.  Pussyfooting around a controversy allows it to grow constituent bases who demand action.  If you cannot provide the action, constituents will find someone who can.  Deal with it!
  • Know that school governance is not a democracy; it is representative government and only board members vote on school decisions.  As provided in law, the public has the right to speak with the school board and the board is obligated to listen.  Do not take anything said personally, even from the most spittle mouthed.  Do not take anything said as expert opinion or fact.  At the end of the meeting everyone else goes home and only board members vote on how the district will respond to a controversy.  Discuss and decide; that is what school boards do.
  • The board speaks for the education of all children in the district not for the happiness of parents, residents, and dissidents.  Self-interest, though denied, is the primary motive of every person who addresses the board – this is fact.  A board member’s only self-interest is the best education for ALL children, with ALL in capital letters.  A parent speaks for her child and her child’s peers.  A teacher for her grade level or those in her class.  A coach for her team.  The business manager for the budget.  Board members must consider ALL children, not just some, while ensuring that each child is provided an equal and equitable education and school experience.  This is the rub.  How to advance the cause of all while protecting the rights of the one.

Being responsible for the education of children is not easy.  If it were, anyone could do it and we don’t want just anyone to be responsible for the education of ALL children.  We want board members who can look inside the issues they confront to find humane, high ground, child-centered resolutions for tough questions.  I would like to think that if one of the two women claiming the child in the Bible’s Solomon “the wise” story had not said to spare the child and thus created a true claim as mother, Solomon would not have cleaved the child in two but adopted it as his own.  Board members consider ALL children your own and be willing take the forsaken child to your home.  This is your school board standard.

Lessons learned at recess

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We learned a lot in elementary school.  Mrs. Wogen and Miss White taught us to read and to add and subtract.  Mrs. Wendlendt taught us to love good stories and Miss Blaine taught us to write complete sentences.  Miss Lubbock taught some of us to stand tall and smile and try to blend in because we could not carry a tune.  And Miss Phillips taught us that respect is earned.  We were taught well, and we learned many academic lessons in the early grades, but our elementary schooling was more than what our teachers taught.  It also was what we learned from each other.

Grade school for kids is time in the classroom and time on the playground.  Ask any third-grade boy about his day at school and you are more likely to hear a story from recess than what happened in his reading group.  The classroom and playground are essential for a childhood; they create a balance in a kid’s life, if we let them.  That balance is achieved because teachers make up and enforce rules in their classrooms while on the playground, kids make up and enforce the rules for recess.  With unspoken agreement, kids set the standards of how to play and how not to play, who wins and who loses, and how to treat each other.  In hindsight, recess rules ruled us when we were young, and they became unwritten, indelible rules for our entire life.

These are ten recess rules I learned and have practiced for more than half a century.  They applied to me and my friends when we were running and playing across the playground, and they applied to me in my career and in raising a family.  You may have rules from your youth that have served you well.  Consider these and remember your own.

  • There are my guys and there is everybody else.  The law of magnetism says likes repel and opposites attract but those rules do not apply on the playground where likes attract other likes.  We were 300 children spilling out the school doors for recess when we grouped ourselves in “likes”.  Generally, boys grouped with boys and girls with girls and the dozen or so boys I found myself with were those who loved any game with a ball that required movement, throwing, and catching.  Also, we all lived within a radius of several blocks from each other, so games on the playground became games after school and then Cub Scouts and summer swimming classes.  Other kids on the playground found their “guys”.   Guys back then was not a gender thing.  We referred to other boys and girls as “you guys”.  There were more than 100 children at my grade level and I knew everyone by name and face and considered them all to be my friends.  The guys, my special friends, were spread across the three classrooms in our grade level.  When the bell sounded recess time, we rushed down the stairs from our separate classrooms and gathered at the place where asphalt became a field of grass.  That is where the recess games began.  A real game for guys back then was football or softball or keep away.  The games that mattered were my guys against any other group of guys.
  • Things happen with, for, and against.  Even then, I could categorize what happened at recess in three ways.  I played with the guys.  I did all I could for the guys.  Together, the guys and I played hard against the other guys.  Those prepositions were involved in every story we told about recess.  Later, the same words applied to our junior and high school sports.  I played with my teammates.  I did all I could for my teammates.  Together, we competed against other teams.  And, later still, with and for applied to how I approached my work life. 
  • Be on time and be ready.  When recess started, the games began.  If you dawdled in the hallways or restroom, no one waited.  In fact, the guys sized up who was ready to play and started almost before the ringing bell stopped echoing.  Joining a game in progress was not easy.  If you were not on time and ready, you were a spectator until the next recess.  When you were late or not ready, you knew who to blame – yourself. 
  • Don’t knock down a girl.  It was easier then; boys wore pants and girls wore dresses.  You never ran into, threw a ball at, or knocked down someone in a dress.  This is not to say that guys didn’t get carried away and sometimes a game crossed into where girls played.  It happened and there was hell to pay if you were the one who knocked down a girl.  There were phone calls that night between parents and when parents got into talking about recess, that was a bad thing.  You could get sidelined for nothing more than mud on a dress.
  • Fast is fast; you can’t get faster, but you can get better.  Among our guys, I was not the fastest runner.  It used to pain me that, try as I might, I could not pick up and lay down my feet any faster than I did.  I was not slow; just not fast.  Early on it was clear that if I could not improve my foot speed, I needed to find things I could improve.  I worked on three ways to be better than faster: catch the ball and keep the ball, look for the smart next move, and, if someone runs into you, make that person feel the pain.  Learning how to improve upon what genetics provided proved a good lesson for recess and good for high school sports and life in general, even the idea of physical collisions.
  • Know your role.  Somedays you lead and somedays you follow.  Every recess you have a place and role in what is happening.  The games gave each of the guys chances to step up and step aside.  Of course, being young boys, we sometimes did not do either gracefully or needed one of the guys to tell us.  Knowing when and how to lead and how to follow was part of being with the guys and we had plenty of opportunities to learn to be a role-player.
  • Leave it on the playground.  Because you win some and you lose some, it was important to leave the games of recess on the playground.  Miss Blaine did not care which guys won a softball game during the lunch recess when she called on kids to talk about the plot of a story in afternoon language arts class.  By the same token, the kid who put the hurt in your bruised shoulder sat two rows to your right and neither you nor he wanted anyone in class to know why he smiled, and you frowned.  It was best for everyone when what happened on the playground did not enter the classroom.  And there will be a recess tomorrow, Bruce!
  • Competition breeds respect and respect builds new friendships.  Some of the other guys lived in distant neighborhoods.  We did not see each other except at school.  Some lived in bigger and some in smaller houses than mine; that was a way of knowing something about a guy.  Bigger house guys had newer Chuck Taylor Converse shoes with good tread and the gym shoe tread for guys from smaller houses usually was worn off.  Tread mattered back then.  Recess, though, gave every group of guys an equal chance to shine.  While I wasn’t fast, I admired guys in other groups who were.  Some had better hands or better throwing arms.  After a while, I knew which of the other guys hit the ball harder or ran faster.  I also knew what I had to do to beat them, if I could, and when we each tried to do our best, I wanted to know them better.  They weren’t one of my guys, but they became some of my good friends. 
  • Games are games not life; know the difference.  Miss Phillips, our principal, watched us at play.  Although she looked like someone’s grandmother, she had a quick eye that twinkled when she talked with me.  “Nice catch”, she would say.  Nothing more; just enough to let me know that she was watching.  More importantly, she also said, “I saw your ITBS scores, and you did very well” and “Miss Knapp told me you held the door open for her when she had her hands full.  Being a good student and well-mannered won’t score runs but they win the games that matter”. 

  • Memories of the playground live forever.  It is not surprising that the first people I look for at our high school class reunions are the guys.  After elementary school, we went to the same junior high and high school.  After high school, we split and went separate ways.  Some to college, others into the military, and some into adult life.  Years passed and life happened.  Yet, when the Class of XXXX gets together, that old oppositional magnetism works again.  We find each other and talk always wanders back to the playground.  “Do you remember ….?, starts our first and last conversation. 

My elementary school has closed.  Across the city, school enrollments decreased over the years and the economics of public education regrouped fewer children into fewer school buildings.  My elementary school stands empty, windows dark and doors locked, but the four acres of playground are filled every good weather day with youth football, soccer, and softball.  Younger children climb the jungle gyms and gather for rope jumping on the asphalt.  A playground calls children to play and children will always answer that call.

As I watch, I see children still are learning some of life’s essential rules on the playgrounds and I wish them well.

When it comes to study skills, “You are on your own, kid.”

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Because teaching children how to study is not in our curriculum and teachers are not taught how to teach studying skills in their teacher preparation programs.  Inconceivable, you might think, but true.  As a result, the random ability of a child to self-develop personal study skills becomes a highly reliable predictor of academic success in high school.  And it is a random ability.

Check it out.  Ask any group of high school students to explain their study habits.

You may find a child who enjoys virtual photographic memory.  This child reads or sees something one time and on test day recalls that initial intake with astounding reliability.  This child, though an outlier and rare, obscures our concepts of studying.  We cannot generalize about their uniqueness.

Most students will report they reread pages of their textbook and review their notes of what the teacher said in class.  A second “most” will report they do a reread and review one or two nights before a scheduled test.  Usually, they cram!

A few will say they reread text material and “rewrote their notes”.

One or two will say they “reread the text and their notes, identified key words and ideas, made flash cards of these and tested themselves on their flash cards until they memorized this information”.  They add, “I start several days before the test”.  When asked, “Who told you to study like this?”, none will say “My teacher”.  This is metacognitive studying.  Sadly, we do not teach children how to do this.  You will not find it in any publishing guide or in a baccalaureate teacher prep curriculum.

Want to hazard a guess as to which children get high grades and which children do not?

What do we know?

The slope of responsibility for independent study starts as a flat line in the primary grades, approaches 45 degrees in the intermediate grades and then goes vertical in the secondary grades.  The degree of responsibility for independent study is not met with explicit instruction teaching children how to study.  We literally tell children what to study and then say “go study” thinking effective study techniques are in each child’s genetic map. 

Observations of K-4 classrooms show teachers telling children what to know, practicing what to know, and reteaching when children are not successful in initial knowing with good regularity.  This good practice has not changed much over time.  Parents will remember their teachers using the chalkboard to write out new words, ideas, and arithmetic strategies.  Children today see their teachers doing the same on smart interactive screens.  The “write it, say it, explain it” pedagogy works well in the primary grades for teaching all subjects.  The amount of information or skills being taught/learned is controlled by the teacher who uses repetition as drill and practice to drive home daily learning.  Teacher guided repetition works well until the batch of new information increases in volume or the degree of complexity increases in middle school.  There is little independent homework in the primary grades; mostly children do projects at home and bring them to class to show.

Intermediate teachers traditionally tell their students “The amount of homework you will be assigned in middle school is significantly more than we are doing.  Be ready!”.  Fair warning, but children need more than just a warning.

The following describes what middle school students are told to do to be successful in their homework and independent study.  I hear these “keys to doing homework” repeated annually in middle school classrooms.

  • Establish a study area at home.
  • Communicate with the teacher.
  • Keep assignments organized.
  • Avoid procrastination.
  • Take notes in class.
  • Highlight key concepts in the reading materials.
  • Prepare your book-bag before going to bed.

https://www.kumon.com/resources/7-important-study-habits-for-school/

Why is this the state of study skills?

These hints are like telling children that brushing their teeth daily promotes dental health.  Once told, no one checks on their brushing practices.  Likewise, once we provide the above hints for homework success.

The real culprit lies with teacher preparation.  A review of our state’s college and university teacher preparation curricula shows not a single course unit devoted to teaching children how to study.  Our required curricula assure licensed teachers possess content knowledge, pedagogical skills, understanding of human relations, and informed dispositions about the diverse students they teach, but there is not one mention of how to teach student study skills.  In essence, teachers are prepared to teach children what to know but not how to learn it.

Helpful but not complete practices

Some schools insert a unit in study skills in the middle school curriculum.  The dominant study skill taught is note taking and the predominant technique for taking notes is the Cornell system.

The Cornell Note Taking System

However, study skills and note taking, once taught are seldom if ever checked afterward.  We treat the initial instruction of study skills like a vaccine, once given then forever safe from the fate of poor study habits.  Nothing is further from the truth.  One month after the Cornell system is taught to children, I do not observe any teacher explicitly checking each child’s note taking.  There is no follow-up and that is on us as teachers and principals.

A second practice that has merit is providing students with a study guide.  Teachers who do this hand each student a preview of what will be tested.  A study guide looks like an outline of the teacher’s teaching notes.  For some students, the study guide helps them to check the validity of their note taking.  Notes should reflect the guide.  Study guides are great, but they also revert to the issue of how to study.  A student who just reads and rereads the study guide is only a tad better off than a student who reads and rereads the text and personal notes.  They achieve familiarity with the material, not a usable understanding of it.  There is no metacognitive practice is giving a study guide without teaching how to use it.

What do we need – to teach all children a metacognitive study strategy and hold children accountable for using it.  The following is one example.

There are several strategies for moving a student from familiarity with information to a usable understanding.  Part of these strategies are organizational, and part is repetitive memorization and practice.  The following strategy can be applied to every subject, all academic content, and all skills.  It is time tested.  It is a discipline for successful metacognitive learning.

  1. Teach all children to:
    • Read the text material to identify new key vocabulary and ideas, cause and effect relationships, questions that are posed and conclusions that are stated.
    • Use a note taking system to listen to a teacher’s lesson noting key vocabulary, new ideas and skills, and how the teacher displays those skills (math strategies).
    • Reread the text material for familiarity with it – “I know what it is about”.
    • Make flash cards of the key vocabulary and ideas, cause and effect relationships, steps in a problem-solving strategy, and conclusions the text or teacher make in the lessons. Key words on one side of the note card and definition on the other.
    • Either partner with a parent or classmate using flash cards. “Show me the word and I will define it. Check me. If I am wrong, tell me the correction.” Children should repeat this until they can respond correctly to each flash card prompt.
  2. Prior to a math or science test, teach all children to:
    • Do the problems in the textbook or on teacher assignment sheets again, as if they are a new assignment. Do the entire problem. Show all the work, as if you are explaining it to the teacher.
    • Repeat the scientific process related to recent lessons. What is the hypothesis, what is the evidence, what is the conclusion? Flash card this material.
  3. DO THIS! Commit class time to personally checking each child’s study materials.
    • Check their note cards for accuracy in identifying key vocabulary and ideas, relationships, and questions/conclusions.
    • Check their reworking of math and science problems.
    • Tell each child what is right and what is wrong in their study materials.
  4. DO THIS! Commit class time for children to practice their flash cards and to rework math and science problems. Observe them studying and reinforce/correct their study strategy.
  5. DO THIS consistently for several units and them randomly during the remainder of the school year.

The Big Duh!

There should be no mysteries in the education of a child.  Our goal is for all children to be successful and to do that we must give them the tools, the strategies, and our help in perfecting those.  Success in school should not be left to the random insights of a child into how to study.  Our success as teachers should be when every child demonstrates strong study skills, and every child achieves high grades.  We are not successful otherwise.