I began this three-part blog by comparing the creation of a
school from scratch to cooking from scratch.
In part one I presented the process I used to link the two and reveled
the main ingredient in my school recipe:
people. This ingredient was
explained in detail in part two, where I laid out my vision for the student and
staff structure of my school. However,
upon rereading part two today it became apparent I strayed a bit from my food
analogy that was presented in part one.
Part three, therefore, will refocus on the idea of cooking up a school
from scratch by sharing some ingredients used by many schools which I consider
additives, preservatives, and artificial flavorings that would only diminish
the wholesome, natural health of my school.
To begin, my school from scratch will not have:
GRADE LEVELS – I touched on this in part two. Why do we place a student who reads 20 words
a minute a “grade” ahead of a student who reads 120 words in the same
minute? Grade levels are an artificial
flavoring that moves kids through school buildings without providing any
measurable health benefits. With respect
to behavioral and academic needs, assigning kids to grade levels has enough
abstractness to be completely meaningless to the students and their
parents. We tell kids to “act like a
second grader” – yet do they, or we, even know exactly how a second grader
should act? To expand this category a
bit, my school will also NOT have…
LABELS – We will not waste resources determining if a
student is Title I, SPED, ADHD, or any other useless label that does nothing
but give students, parents, and teachers an excuse to lower expectations for
results. Labels are akin to
preservatives, which allow us to let food sit unused longer than we would leave
unpreserved food untouched. All students
will carry the same label:
“learner”. Some learners will
achieve performance levels faster than others….but all will achieve. Without labels, our school will need fewer….
COMMITTEES – Teachers carry a large enough burden trying to
meet needs inside their classrooms; placing committee additives upon them only
lessens their ability to provide healthy instruction. And without committees we will waste less
time in…
MEETINGS – Collaboration amongst staff to discuss reading
instruction, math centers, or classroom management techniques? Powerful.
Sitting around a table to figure out which days we should have potlucks
and wear school colors? Somebody shoot
me. Meetings are the processed food products
of schools; everything about them seems real, but in the end they leave us
feeling empty. We make agendas, we get
department reps, we follow protocols, we take notes, and at the end of the
meeting…somebody is tasked with doing what he/she could have done alone without
having to meet and gotten it done in less time than the meeting took. If we could turn even 50% of meeting time
into collaboration time, we could also eliminate another processed product my
school will not have:
INSTRUCTIONAL SERIES – My school will NOT waste tens of
thousands of dollars on a tool that decreases the flavor of a classroom. Anyone can blandly turn the pages of a teacher’s
manual, regurgitate the script contained within, and call himself a teacher;
teachers in my school will chart their own courses towards standard achievement. Breaking away from “the series” was one of
the most powerful decisions I made as a classroom teacher. It forced me to plan better, think harder,
and create more than I ever had to as a page-turner. More importantly, my students were forced to
do the same. Instructional series are
written for the average student; I prefer teaching to produce exceptional
students. Which means we will also
eliminate most….
TECHNOLOGICAL GADGETRY – I am not sure I can condense my
entire argument against this monetary black hole in education into a
paragraph. My school will be extremely
careful about the type and amount of computer technology we use in our
instruction. There is no bigger
artificial flavoring in schools today, yet I know there is potential for
academic growth via technology. My
concern lies with the vast amount of education our youngest students miss when
staring at screens. Consider this
graphic on skills graduates will need to land a job:
I see at least seven items in each list that absolutely
cannot be developed by staring at a screen, items that revolve around human interaction. And with the way technology rapidly changes I
often wonder why we immerse our young students into technology that will be
obsolete by the time they reach high school.
My school will teach how to work, play, argue, and problem solve with
other humans. We will give interpersonal
skills the same importance as academic skills.
We will teach kids to appreciate the world they actually live in. We will be physically active. In short, it will be hard to justify using
machines that inhibit our basic philosophies about education. Speaking of inhibit, a final ingredient our
school will leave out of the batter is…
TEACHER UNIONS – I will continue for the three of you that
have not just disgustedly spat on my blog.
Unions are an antiquated preservative that exist to preserve one thing –
the unions. An entity created to protect
an uneducated workforce has managed to dupe an educated workforce into thinking
we still need a union to take care of us.
Unions are not concerned about students, nor are they truly concerned
about teachers. Unions exist to keep
union leaders in power and in money. My
money, your money, our money. To keep
themselves powerful the leaders hold the rest of us back, looking down upon
outliers who work long hours or (gasp!) collaborate with administrators. I have watched our local union invade my
school building over the last five years, slowly eroding the spirit of teamwork
and effort that used to make us a great educational facility. We are now mediocre, with fewer and fewer
staff willing to give without being guaranteed a give-back. My school from scratch will fight against
unionized mediocrity by striving for collaborative greatness. We will work long hours and collaborate with
administration to produce better students.
We will work with a spirit of giving more than we expect to get, the
spirit that our country was built upon and has been protected with…..no thanks
to unions.
And with that I will call my school from scratch
officially……condemned, probably. It concerns me that the list of things I would not
have is longer than the list of what I would
have; does it speak to my vision being incomplete or to the current
state of most schools? I suppose it
doesn’t matter much, seeing as how this was supposed to be just a fun
exercise. In the end I feel as though
most of the subjects I touched on could have had their own blog – and perhaps have come across as under-described. I hope
you enjoyed reading this, and I really hope you have done some thinking, or
will do some thinking, about what does and does not make a school.
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