Gap Year

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Recently The Wall Street Journal wrote about high school graduates who chose to spend a year traveling, volunteering, and/or working before beginning college. This is what’s referred to as a “gap year”.

Parents often worry that gappers will suffer from a loss of momentum and conceivably bail on college altogether. In contrast, I worry that too many over programmed eighteen year olds automatically continue their education without any real sense of self, knowledge of the larger world, or appreciation for the educational opportunities provided them.

I wish far more eighteen year olds took a year off between high school and college to travel; to do service or earn money; to gain financial withitness; to learn about other people, places, and themselves; and to develop an intrinsic (versus parental) sense of educational purpose. Give me a first year seminar full of gappers and I guarantee you our discussions will be even more interesting than normal.

What type of gap year is best, a formal, programmed one, or an informal, open-ended one?

One reader of the piece, Fannahill Glen from Jacksonville, FL, made her preference for informal, open-ended, European-style gap years perfectly clear. I quote:

The traditional gap year is conducive to future success because of its sheer simplicity: You take a backpack and whatever handful of cash you have, and go. It is up to you to forge travel plans, earn cash to live on, and make new friends and travel companions. Teenagers find themselves making industrious choices to do things like harvest bananas for rather small wages, eat fewer meals daily (and only from street vendors) to save money and sleep in hostels where they share toilets and bedrooms with strangers, because it’s all they can afford. Contrast the skills and maturity one gains from such an experience with the American version: Pay a company $35,000, let them find you a cool job in a chic country and work for free for a year, with vacations on the holidays. It’s like the vaunted Year Abroad, without the rigors of a classroom. Awesome, no doubt, but not exactly taxing on one’s intellectual and social development.

The vast majority of American parents are probably too afraid to cut their eighteen year olds loose Fannahill-style. In my thinking, a programmed gap year is preferable to a mindless continuation of one’s education, but like Fannahill, I suspect the loosely structured model provides even more intellectual, social, and educational bang for the buck.

How to Refresh and Keep Going

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In response to my “Causes of Burnout” post, an ace PressingPause reader wrote that the question is how to refresh and keep going.

Nine suggestions:

1) Resist deficit thinking by being intentional about students’ strengths. When I taught high school, I always made a conscious effort to attend student art exhibits, plays, sporting events. And I always left thinking, “What talent, dedication, effort, and academic potential if I tap into those things.”

2) Save notes of appreciation, thank you cards, whatever positive mementos you can. And journal about especially positive interactions and experiences. Sporadically revisit the notes, cards, and journal entries as a reminder of your effectiveness and the importance of your work.

3) Subvert zero-sum thinking about teaching excellence (e.g., your success takes away from mine) by consciously affirming your colleague’s efforts and acknowledging what they do particularly well. Help create positive faculty culture momentum.

4) If a colleague has traveled too far down the deficit thinking road, steer clear. If surrounded by goners, attend local teacher workshops and seminars in order to find and build relationships with more hopeful, supportive colleagues from other schools. Also join professional association’s list serves and blog discussions like this one.

5) Do whatever helps you create energy on a regular basis—spend time outdoors, walk, row, run, cycle, swim, practice yoga, pray or meditate, volunteer, cook healthy meals and prioritize family dinners, read something non-work related, pursue a non-work-related hobby.

6) Be vulnerable with whomever you’re closest to, share your successes/failures and hopes/dreams. Lean on them and let them support you.

7) Be intentional about scheduling events to look forward to, whether a Friday after school get together with with a few colleagues, a Saturday night dinner with a significant other, or a monthly weekend hike.

8) Unplug earlier in the evening, make like the Japanese and take a hot bath, and sleep as many hours as you know you need to be completely rested.

9) Create positive teacher-student professional momentum by continually improving your plans, your methods, and your assessment of student work.

Suggestions for number 10?

Eliminate Schools of Education

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For education reformers, Schools of Education are an especially popular punching bag.

Here are the most oft repeated criticisms: 1) Most School of Ed faculty last taught decades ago; consequently, they teach wonderful sounding theories that are woefully disconnected from day-to-day realities in schools. 2) Higher education faculty always assume a certain superiority. As one of many possible examples, they’re not teachers, they’re “academics”. Arrogance personified. 3) Schools of Ed are resistant to change and clueless that they’re a serious impediment to strengthening public schooling in the U.S. 4) In the end, they do a crappy job preparing teachers.

I’ve always responded differently to these criticisms than many of my School of Ed colleagues. Many teacher educators immediately turn defensive, and consequently, don’t bother honestly assessing their validity. At the risk of committing professional treason, I choose to process the criticisms this way.

1) Most School of Ed faculty last taught in public schools decades ago; consequently, they teach wonderful sounding theories that are woefully disconnected from day-to-day realities in schools. Mostly true. I’d say wholly true if the criticism was “ . . . wonderful sounding theories that don’t have enough to do with day-to-day realities in schools.” I taught high school for five years twenty years ago and that’s longer and more recently than many of my colleagues. And like all of my colleagues, I made a conscious decision to leave high school teaching. Why don’t more pre-service students ask, “If teaching is so important a form of public service, why did all of you quit?” Many of my colleagues would probably answer “to make a larger impact by doing a good job preparing the next generation of teachers,” but that’s putting duct tape on an ever-present tension and credibility problem between our having jumped ship and encouraging our students to be resilient and commit for the long haul.

2) Higher education faculty always assume a certain superiority. As one of many possible examples, they’re not teachers, they’re “academics”. Arrogance personified. Embarrassingly true, way too often. As a result, mentor teachers understandably sometimes develop negative attitudes towards teacher educators, putting interns in an awkward position.

3) Schools of Ed are resistant to change and clueless that they’re a serious impediment to strengthening public schooling in the U.S. Mostly true. Probably because teacher education faculty need to pay mortgages and health premiums. Put differently, they fear for their jobs. It’s evident in how little School of Education curricula change over time and in teacher education profs’ knee-jerk negative reactions to nearly any kind of alternative certification preparation.

4) In the end, they do a crappy job preparing teachers. Depends. There’s an unevenness. Some teacher preparation programs do a solid job; others do not.

What would work better for the tens of thousands of pre-service teachers who are preparing to enter the profession at any time? Giving National Board Certified teacher leaders in each school responsibility for preparing a small number of student teachers each school year would work better. Probably a lot better.

Why don’t we do that then? Because K-12 administrators and teachers have delegated the preparation of their future co-workers to my School of Ed colleagues and me. The profession hasn’t figured out how to carve out the necessary time to prepare the next generation of teachers themselves because they haven’t deemed it important enough.

Far easier for school districts to complain about Schools of Education than figure out how to make them, as the British say, redundant.

The best teacher prep programs are mindful of the most common criticisms and are the ones building close partnerships with neighboring districts; demonstrating genuine respect for the excellent, inspiring work K-12 teachers do; using clinical professors, including current National Board Certified teachers as methods instructors; and using veteran teachers and administrators as student teaching supervisors.

I’m sympathetic to the most common criticisms of my profession; nonetheless, I can’t support the most strident critics’ recommendation to eliminate Schools of Ed altogether until school districts make teacher preparation one of their top priorities and dedicate the necessary time, money, and related resources to doing it better than the majority of imperfect university-based teacher preparation programs.

2011 Resolution

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Resist manic materialism.

I have no one really to blame because I chose to watch MSNBC while preparing for the 2011 cycling season one morning last week.  It was the morning after 20 inches of snow fell throughout the Northeastern U.S. Business analysts worried “How will the conditions affect retailers since post Christmas shoppers will stay home?”

Does everything always have to be interpreted through the lens of economics?

I should have switched to the Zen Cable Network, a mythical creation of mine where a slow, beautiful, non-narrated slideshow with acoustic guitar accompaniment was looping. Slow moving shots of young people up and down the seaboard sledding and having snowball fights while parents sipped coffee and talked against the backdrop of translucent, oddly beautiful cities.

Manic materialism is the increasingly common practice of defining as many life activities and events as possible in economic terms. How does this—a winter snow storm, schooling, an art form, food, healthcare—make people more or less wealthy? It’s the result of our collective idolatry, and as a result, it’s our unofficial national religion. No activity is immune from its influence. Every life activity and event is reduced to whether it generates wealth.

And make no mistake about it, wealth is defined one way—materially. How much money do you have, how big is your house, how nice is it on the inside, how luxurious is your car, where do you vacation?

Schooling provides a poignant example. Why are U.S. opinion and business leaders over involved in reform efforts today? For one reason—our international economic competitiveness is slipping. As a result, our relative wealth is declining. That’s why math and science content is routinely privileged at the expense of humanities and social studies education. The business leaders at the education reform table are in essence asking, “How in the hell is an affinity for literature or history going to translate into more money for more people?”

Maybe I errored in using the phrase “our collective idolatry” a few paragraphs ago. Maybe all of us are exceptions, a fringe minority that believes we’re more social, emotional, dare I even say spiritual beings, than economic ones.

In prioritizing close interpersonal relationships, maintaining work-life balance, and consciously living below our means, we provide a viable alternative to manic materialism and threaten the status quo.

What else can and should we do in 2011 to provide a social-emotional-spiritual alternative to manic materialism?

Homeless Advocate Extraordinaire

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There are 21,000 homeless students in Washington State and 1.3m nationwide.

Whenever I come across an article on homelessness, like a few days ago on the front page of the Huffington Post, I look for a reference to an inspiring high school friend of mine, Joel Roberts, who oversees the largest homeless organization in Los Angeles. The Huff Post article was titled, “Top Ten Advocates for the Homeless.” He has to be in there I thought to myself. Nah, oh wait, he wrote the piece. Cool.

When Joel was one, he was abandoned on a Hong Kong Street. Picked up by an American missionary, he was raised by a loving family in Long Beach, CA. We met early in high school and grew close through our participation in a church youth group.

At fifteen or sixteen, Joel was doing design work for an architectual firm. Driving around Long Beach in his nicer than normal car, he’d casually point to a tall building and matter of factly say, “I drew that.” He was always more interested in volunteering in Tijuana orphanages than architecture though. I helped him move into his Cal Poly San Louis Obispo dorm where he intended on studying architecture. Early in his SLO career he lost interest in architecture and committed instead to becoming a pastor.

After completing a Masters in Divinity, he became a successful pastor at a large mostly Asian American Church in Los Angeles. I think it was during this period that I introduced him to a woman who became his wife. The marriage, a dismal failure from the get-go, ended in divorce. Fortunately, he’s never held that against me. After a few years he left his church ministry to do what he’d always felt was his life purpose, help end homelessness.

Very proud to call him a friend. More than anyone I know, he’s living out the Beatitudes.

The Causes of Burnout

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Teachers, nurses, and social workers start out with wonderful idealism and enthusiasm for making a positive difference in people’s lives.

Why do too many of them lose enthusiasm for their work over time? Why, in worst case scenarios, do some even grow to dislike their work? Why aren’t work environments more encouraging, humane places where employee’s idealism and energy is encouraged, nourished, harnessed, and sustained?

People succumb to burnout as a result of some combination of these variables:

1) They are poorly prepared for challenging work settings. For example, teachers who are unable to manage large groups of students experience tremendous stress day in and day out. Stress that translates into fatigue, which contributes to negativity, which unattended to, leads to burnout.

2) Pragmatic work problems predominate so larger philosophical questions of purpose go unasked. Absent meaningful discussions of mission and purpose, people gradually lose touch with their work’s importance. This leads to a “going through the motions”, and eventually, burnout.

3) In negative work environments, a tipping point occurs when a critical mass of employees succumb to deficit models of thinking. For example, deficit-minded teachers often complain, “These students will never achieve, their families don’t value education, their community is dysfunctional.” Cynicism trumps hopefulness. Co-worker’s negativity rubs off and some teachers begin eating lunch alone. Inevitably, idealism and energy wane.

4) Adversarial relations with superiors and ill-conceived top-down directives cripple many people’s sense of efficacy. Once they conclude, “I have limited control over my school, hospital department, or casework,” their idealism and enthusiasm plummet.

Point two relates to this blog’s updated purpose which reads as follows:

This blog is about slowing down and being more reflective. Pressing Pause is devoted to substantive discussion about education and contemporary life. It’s for people who find meaning in essential questions, ambiguity, conceptual thinking, and nuanced discussions. A virtual college seminar or digital retreat based upon open-ended questions upon which reasonable people disagree.

I have a hunch that lots of people are desperate to rekindle their idealism and enthusiasm not just for their work, but life more generally. My hope for this blog in 2011 is that I can connect with more of those people and that together we can rekindle our idealism and find greater enthusiasm for making a positive difference in our own and other people’s lives.

Seniority-based Teacher Layoffs

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Thanks T for this article, “UW study questions seniority-based teacher layoffs“.

Should school districts facing serious budget shortfalls lay teachers off based on relative seniority? Tough one.

Rather than riff on the costs and benefits of seniority-based teacher layoffs, I want to highlight two underlying issues that education policy makers are ignoring.

First, what does it say about the state of teacher professional development and the profession more generally that many of the youngest teachers are the most effective? Learning to teach well is a challenging and complex process, the same is true I suspect for learning to be an excellent pastor, lawyer, accountant, or legislator. When we choose a surgeon for a complicated procedure we want to know how many times she’s performed it.

At what age do teachers do their best work? I suspect it’s about four to five years in which often means late twenties. This is an indictment on the poor quality of most teacher professional development and the profession. For most teachers there tends to be a dramatic, challenging, and rewarding learning curve over the first four to five years; followed by a plateauing; and then sometimes, a fatigue-based tailing off.

National Board Teacher Certification was intended to address this problem by rewarding the very best teachers with added responsibilities and challenges like mentoring new teachers, teaching methods in local schools of education, and creating exemplary curriculum for others. It’s been partially successful at best. School districts are incredibly conservative and consequently loathe to rewrite National Board teachers’ contracts.

Second, and this may surprise, but with a few important caveats, I’m more open than union leaders to efforts to compare and contrast teachers’ relative effectiveness. A recent front-page article in the New York Times about the Gates Foundation’s efforts to evaluate teachers influenced my thinking. I liked that the system doesn’t rest exclusively on students’ standardized test scores, but on video-tapes, student surveys of their teachers’ class environments, and other variables. Also important, it doesn’t appear to pit teachers against one another. Not perfect, but much better than traditional merit-based teacher evaluation pay plans.

But what Gates and other policy makers aren’t thinking nearly enough about is whether or not their video-tape/value-added-based teacher evaluation proposal is going to convince more outstanding undergraduates to commit to K-12 teaching careers.

Historically, teachers have understood the profession’s primary trade-off—less money, more job security; however, the story of the recent past is one of steadily increasing teacher accountability and decreasing job security. Meanwhile, compensation remains unchanged. Granted these are tough economic times. Numerous states have to make serious budget cuts. Still the fact remains, few of the best undergrads even consider teaching as a career. I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t expect the Gates Foundation’s current work to change that.

Especially strong undergrads who are considering teaching are less concerned about rigorous teacher evaluation systems than they are their modest salaries. And that’s the problem, the Gates Foundation offers no ideas on how to improve all teachers’ compensation.

Contemporary Challenges to Writing Well

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Follow up to the previous post, “Writing Hard”.

When working on their drafts, I ask my writing students to continually self-assess whether they’ve been sufficiently introspective and whether they have interesting ideas to communicate.

Sufficient introspection is tough for an increasing number of students who are unable to unplug for any time of real consequence. For some of my students, not texting for an hour and forty-five minutes is excruciating. I wonder, how introspective can one be when alternating between texting, talking, listening to music, facebooking, tweeting, watching youtubes most recent viral videos, or streaming films?

A second challenge is sufficient exposure to complex and challenging content. This challenge takes two forms—the quality of curriculum materials in school and the personal choices made outside of school.

With respect to the later, young people watch a lot more television and movies than they do read. That’s not inevitably negative, depending on the relative quality of their preferred television programming and movies.

Extrapolating from my students and my daughters and their friends, today adolescents tend to watch television and films that fail the complex and challenging test.

Again I wonder, if they’re unable to unplug and they’re switching between Gossip Girls, Camp Rock, and Legally Blonde (my frame of reference is admittedly female) what can we expect from them in terms of interesting ideas?

Postscript: I’m not immune from these challenges, particularly unplugging. I am too easily distracted. That partially explains why it took me so long to FINALLY finish Franzen’s Freedom. Whew, masterful. Worth noting, he said he worked on it in an office without an internet connection. Currently I’m reading The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. And last night the family and labradude gathered for this excellent film. Fifteen was NOT happy it was subtitled, but she dug deep and read for the whole 2 hours. She’s still not quite forgiven the Galpal and I for subjecting her to this excellent film five years ago.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.

Write Hard

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In high school one of my best friends on the golf team nicknamed me “Birdie”. Despite that moniker, Mike Miles, another teammate, always kicked my ass. That was okay though because he starred in college, turned pro, and played a few years on Tour before settling into a head pro job at a swanky country club. Over the last few years he’s qualified for and played in a few majors.

I remember Mike telling me how he got started. His dad and then first instructor told him to swing hard. That was it. For a long time. Before turning technical, they allowed him to develop a natural swing and feel for the game.

Contrast that with Alberto Salazar, the great American marathoner from the 70’s and 80’s who is coaching one of America’s most promising marathoners. As detailed here, Salazar is completely breaking down and rebuilding his pupil’s stride.

Honing a golf swing, learning to run long distances as fast as anyone in the world, learning to write well. Art and feel versus science and technique.

Public school teachers in Western Washington, and I suspect across the entire fruited plain, are taking Salazar-like scientific approaches to teaching writing. They seemingly worship at the altar of the five paragraph essay. Thesis, three supporting ideas, three supporting details per idea, restating of thesis.

Wake me when you’re done.

Recently, Fifteen finally asked me for some feedback on an essay. In our back and forths, she sometimes said, “But I can’t do that there because I have to state my second supporting idea.” In other words Dad, there’s a template, lines I have to color within. Write by number.

Fifteen goes to an excellent public school and has a well respected honors English teacher. Why does someone with so much literary smarts and sophistication teach writing so mechanically? Why doesn’t she go Mike Miles on her students and say in essence “write hard”. Put differently, let’s not worry about literary devices and discrete techniques until you develop an affinity for the process and a feel for the language.

Three possibilities: 1) Large numbers of essays have to be graded, the five paragraph essay outline expedites that. 2) She’s simply going along to get along by teaching to the test. Standardized exam-based writing samples are expected to be hyper-organized more than they are idiosyncratic, interesting, or insightful. And 3) She’s too busy to step back and truly reflect on alternative approaches. She’s a victim of English/Language Arts groupthink.

Here are the questions I ask my students to continually kick around throughout my semester-long writing seminar:

• Have I been sufficiently introspective?  Do I have interesting ideas to communicate in the first place (meaning original ones)? [overarching aim: developing your voice as a person/writer]

• Do I provide sufficient details to clearly illustrate or explain my ideas (versus writing in vague generalities)?

• Do I organize my ideas within distinct paragraphs, limiting each paragraph to one main idea?

• Do I logically piece my paragraphs together so that the sum is greater than the parts (is there a logical order to the paragraphs and do I incorporate transitional sentences and phrases)?

• Do I communicate my ideas as succinctly as possible by continually working to eliminate unnecessary words, sentences, and paragraphs?

• Do I draw my readers in with an enticing title and engaging opening paragraph?

• Do mechanical errors distract my readers to the point that they have to read my work a few times to fully grasp it?

I’m afraid K-12 English/Language Arts teachers are wining the battle of teaching students to replicate the five paragraph outline in their essays, but are losing the war of teaching them to be analytical and thoughtful enough to communicate interesting ideas in engaging ways.

In their short essays, secondary students routinely pass a “hyper-organized point of diminishing returns”. They have a thesis, three supporting points, three details for each supporting point, and a conclusion, but fail to draw their readers in, fail to communicate anything very insightful, and worst of all, come to see writing as a teacher and test company pleasing game.

What will it take to get K-12 teachers to teach writing to young authors as if its more art than science?

Chinese Test Score Hysteria

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China’s ascendancy is inevitable because they’re willing to work for much less than American workers and American consumers are deeply dependent upon inexpensive “made in China” consumer goods. Thus the unprecedented trade imbalance, and as the recent G-20 meetings made evident, our relative loss of leverage.

My self-image isn’t tied to an accident of birth, living in a country long thought to be the world’s economic superpower. The next few years and decades are going to be tough for Americans whose self-image is somehow tied to being the world’s economic superpower. Asia, and China in particular, will continue to gain leverage and we’ll lose it.

Despite many reasons for this gradual reorientation of global economic and political power, the next few years and decades are going to be doubly tough for teachers because they’ll be blamed for it. U.S. citizens are deeply anxious about their waning hegemony and precarious standards of living. That collective anxiety will be projected onto public school teachers.

For educators, a New York Times article titled “Top Test Scores From Shangahi Stun Educators” by Sam Dillon last week doesn’t help matters. Some excerpts:

With China’s debut in international standardized testing, students in Shanghai have surprised experts by outscoring their counterparts in dozens of other countries, in reading as well as in math and science, according to the results of a respected exam.

The results also appeared to reflect the culture of education there, including greater emphasis on teacher training and more time spent on studying rather than extracurricular activities like sports.

“We have to see this as a wake-up call,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in an interview on Monday.

“I know skeptics will want to argue with the results, but we consider them to be accurate and reliable, and we have to see them as a challenge to get better,” he added. “The United States came in 23rd or 24th in most subjects. We can quibble, or we can face the brutal truth that we’re being out-educated.”

In a speech to a college audience in North Carolina, President Obama recalled how the Soviet Union’s 1957 launching of Sputnik provoked the United States to increase investment in math and science education, helping America win the space race.

“Fifty years later, our generation’s Sputnik moment is back,” Mr. Obama said. With billions of people in India and China “suddenly plugged into the world economy,” he said, nations with the most educated workers will prevail. “As it stands right now,” he said, “America is in danger of falling behind.”

Tom Friedman recently wrote a scathing expose detailing why he thinks the U.S. is falling behind China. Friedman is a fairly predictable critic of U.S. education, but this time, to his credit, he said the primary problem is a broken political system and a parochial, lazy citizenry.

Duncan, Obama, and Friedman not only see improving education as an international competition and zero-sum game, but their rhetoric suggests you and I have to see it that way too. But the genius of our political system is we get to decide for ourselves.

I’m increasingly convinced that Duncan is the one in need of a wake-up. Few educators find jockeying for global economic supremacy inspiring. Like me, they tend to be humanitarians who don’t begrudge the Chinese the marked educational and economic progress they’re making. The Shanghai test scores are only a Sputnik moment if we decide to compete in a zero-sum game with the Chinese (and Singaporeans, Koreans, Finns, etc.).

Educators have to let the Secretary of Education, the President, and the opinion leader know that there are alternative starting points. For example, what can educators in different countries learn from one another and how might we capitalize on what each national educational system does best to solve challenging global economic, environmental, social, and political issues?

Educators aren’t parochial or lazy. They’re quite willing to think globally, just not exactly the way those in the bully pulpit might prefer.