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Leave a comment Posted on journalism, Public Education, public school, student newspaper, students, teachers, teaching

Saying Goodbye at the end of the School Year is Never Easy

Each June I struggle finding the right departing remarks to say to my studentsas the class runs its course (pun intended).

It’s my last chance to hold their attention and leave a lasting impression with them of sage advice.

I fail every year.

How can one encapsulate the meaning of the yearlong learning experience?

I know that the secondary teacher does not have as hard a time emotionally as the elementary teacher in saying goodbye.

In grammar school, a teacher accumulates 180 days of 6 hours each for a total teaching time of 1,080 hours—accounting for a lot of bonding—while upper grade teachers spend only 17% as much time with their pupils. No wonder why people tend to remember a beloved third grade teacher more than an algebra teacher; one is more like a parent while the other an uncle that visits on holidays.

Still, I wish I could stop the clock and hold on to each class a little while longer.

But part of the education business is saying “hello” in August and “goodbye” in June.

For me, saying final farewells to my journalism students is the toughest for these young people have been with me for two to three years, spending their lunchtimes and evenings in room 11202, forging friendships with fellow dedicated kids who recognize at an early age the benefits of a group of people working hard together to produce a publication.

When I first took on the journalism job during my fourth year of teaching, I realized how remarkable it was to work so closely with young people on the school newspaper, finishing it long into the night, then driving the individually cut and pasted 11×17 rubber cemented pages to the print shop. (Now we electronically send the files—faster, but not as fun.)

When that 1993-94 year wound down, I could not imagine having those 18 kids vanish without commemorating and celebrating the work that was accomplished.

So we all agreed to have breakfast at Musso & Frank’s in Hollywood, a special restaurant in order to reflect that special year so that we all could be together one last time.

Thus was born what has now become an annual end of the year tradition, the journalism banquet.

After eating, I suggested a walk along Hollywood Boulevard. Only a couple of students had ever been to Hollywood so many were giddy about seeing in person the Walk of Fame, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre with its forecourt of handprints and footprints in cement, and other famous sights.

As the staff grew to 70 students within a few years, we had to change the venue to eating establishments with private banquet rooms since students would make speeches which extended the event past two hours. Over the years, we have held journalism banquets at the Smoke House, the Tam O’Shanter, and most recently Brookside Golf Club.

Of all the memorable speeches journalism students have given, I will never forget one by a young lady who as feature editor did little work, leaning on others to layout her pages. Yet when it came time to thank everyone, she turned to me and tearfully said how grateful she was for my support during her darkest days, looking up to me as a “second father.” Her kind words touched me more than any spoken by any other student in my career.

It is often said among educators that a teacher will never know with certainty the impact he makes on young people.   This student reminded me of that saying. And that the best way for a teacher to say “goodbye” is to let a student speak on his behalf.

Leave a comment Posted on doctors, Public Education, standardized test scores, students, teachers, teachers' unions, teaching, using test scores to evaluate teachers

Student Test Scores Should Not Be Used to Evaluate Teachers

A lasting legacy of the No Child Left Behind federal legislation has been the notion of tying student test scores to teachers’ job evaluations. Due to the controversy of such an idea, the school districts around the country who have implemented it have limited its impact on a teacher’s overall performance.

Now, New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is proposing to make test scores the primary factor in rating teachers, increasing the weight to 50 percent and downgrading the impact of traditional principal classroom observations to a scant 15 percent.

Teachers’ unions are not happy about this development especially considering that many of the politicians who support this trend are Democrats, the party that teachers financially support.

The question is: Is it possible for students to perform poorly on tests but still have a skillful teacher? The answer: absolutely. Is it possible for patients to be in poor health but still have a skillful physician?

Let’s say a doctor gets paid based on how healthy his patients are. Looking at this nation’s fitness statistics, an awful lot of physicians would be taking a pay cut.

Some aspects of a person’s health are based on lifestyle, while other ailments come on randomly or genetically. A doctor can only control a small amount of the choices a patient makes. And the same concept applies to education.

Yes, brilliant teachers can make a difference in some students’ academic life. But there will remain others that a teacher can’t reach, reasons entirely out of the influence of the educator. Teachers are not miracle workers. Learning is a two-way street.

An Advanced Placement teacher may falsely appear as a master of pedagogy since his students score high while a special education teacher of higher quality could have her job in jeopardy since her students score low.

As noted education writer Diane Ravitch said on her website, “ The majority of the variation in test scores is attributable to factors outside of the teacher’s control such as student and family background, poverty, curriculum, and unmeasured influences.”

To primarily use test scores to determine teacher quality is insulting. Education should not be so finely defined to view academic success as a high score on a test. I have had plenty of hand-raising young people who stimulate discussions, yet who struggle with expressing themselves on paper.

As a teacher, I use multiple measures to determine if my students meet language arts standards.   This includes class participation, speaking ability, writing competency, as well as test-taking skills.   A student can’t be judged solely in one of those areas and be given a grade that meets all the standards.   And neither can a teacher be judged competent on a test that is not even created by that instructor.

Numbers drive our society and No Child Left Behind with its standardized test scores that determine rankings of schools fed into that mentality. Remember when schools were rated according to their Academic Performance Index or API scores? Parents in Glendale bragged about their children attending the La Crescenta schools with the highest API numbers in the district. Did that mean that the teachers up on the hill were better than those in the southern part of the city?

No doubt looking at test results versus having principals make classroom visits takes less time. But it also reveals less information. Having humans observe a teacher live in front of students is a much more accurate assessment tool. The dynamic between teacher and student, the energy level in the room, the enthusiasm of the student doing work all don’t appear in a test score.

Those in charge of change in education, i.e., non-educators, should wake up and realize that there is a growing sentiment among educators and parents to lessen the influence of standardized test scores in classrooms.

Job number one is to attract people to the profession; job number two is to ensure that those good teachers already in classrooms remain there. Teaching already has enough negatives to dissuade people from entering the field. We don’t need to worsen how educators get evaluated to further erode the confidence of this country’s faculty.

Leave a comment Posted on measles, parents, public school, students, teachers

Parents Who Don’t Vaccinate Their Children Are Abusive

What began as a curious story of a small measles outbreak in, of all places, the so-called Happiest Place on Earth, Disneyland, has stretched to nearly 100 cases across 8 states and into Mexico.

With all the health problems that can befall people, the last thing we need is for people themselves to harm each other by not getting vaccinated against scourges that modern medicine has already eradicated.

Parents who choose not to give their children vaccinations due to irrational mistrust of medical science not only put their own children in harm’s way, but allow diseases which should remain in history books to resurrect.

As an educator who works in a public school, I have no choice but to be tested for tuberculosis every 4 years. Why? So if I am infected I don’t pass it along to children. I can’t opt out.

However, parents do have that option by filling out the California Department of Public Health’s Personal Beliefs Exemption to Required Immunizations or PBE. Last year, the PBE was revised to require the signature of an “authorized health care practitioner.” While this requirement was intended to make it harder for the form to be completed, all a parent has to do is check off the “religious beliefs” box which requires no medical employee to sign it.

A few short months ago the Ebola hysteria consumed the nation.   Yet there is much more likelihood of a child catching measles than Ebola in this country, a disease with a 90% chance of transference when in contact with an infected individual.

Luckily, the Glendale-Burbank area has been spared thus far. Glendale Unified School District Health Services Coordinator Lynda Burlison said that in the nearly 20 years she was worked in the district, “the last case of measles that I can recall was back in 2000.”

Very few parents have submitted PBEs. Still, there are some schools which have a significant number of children who do not have all their shots.

By visiting the California Department of Education’s (CDE) website and navigating to the Shots for School link, anybody can type in a zip code and click on a specific preschool, elementary, or middle school to receive immediate information.

Schools with fewer than 70% of fully vaccinated students earn a “most vulnerable” rating by the CDE.   Based on the most current information available from the 2013-14 school year, Burbank has one such school, Walt Disney Elementary (how ironic), with 62.8% of the kids there vaccinated.

Glendale, however, has four elementary schools ranked “most vulnerable” with an “increased risk for outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases”: Thomas Jefferson at 68.7%, John Muir at 63.8%, Benjamin Franklin at 60%, and Columbus Elementary at 56.1%.

Just south of Glendale in the Los Angeles Unified School District is Fletcher Drive Elementary where just 40.4% of children have all the required shots meaning more than half of the student population lacks full vaccination. There is an outbreak ready to happen.

If one occurs, those with waivers would be expected to remain home for up to 21 days, the incubation period for measles. This Wednesday nearly 70 non-immunized Palm Desert High School students have been required to stay home for at least two weeks due to an infected teen.

It is a cruel irony that since diseases such as polio and measles have for the most part been eradicated for so long, there exist few eyewitness accounts of people who have had to battle these ailments, leading some to think they are safe.

Maybe the government needs to blast billboards and websites with photos of children afflicted with measles to get people’s attention.

Ultimately, parents who don’t immunize their children exhibit the highest form of selfish behavior. They are taking for granted that the herd immunity of the community will protect their own children.

These militant parents are more than just anti-vaccinators—they are anti-society. As a parent, yes, job number one is protecting your child. But once a parent’s actions go beyond the boundaries of one’s home and will cause harm to other people’s children, the concept of one’s right to do whatever you want no longer applies.

It’s a small world after all.

Leave a comment Posted on journalism, students

A Student with a Go After It Attitude

I often encourage my student journalists not to feel fearful or intimidated when selling advertisements or speaking to adults for articles.   However, it remains challenging for many of these young people to assert themselves.   A small minority do have a natural “go after it” attitude. One such person is Melody Shahsavarani.

A senior at Hoover High, I have known Melody for three years, first as an honors English student and now as a budding journalist working for the school newspaper, the Tornado Times. She always has a smile on her face that attracts the listener to whatever topic she is discussing.

During winter break, Melody emailed the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team to see if she could cover one of their games as a sports journalist. After not receiving a reply back, she remembered how welcoming new Clipper owner and Microsoft billionaire Steve Ballmer was to the fans so she contacted him directly.

Within a couple of days, she was sitting in the back seat of her friend’s car when she noticed an email on her cell phone with the words “high school” in the message line.

“I thought it was an ASB thing,” Melody said since she is a member of the Associated Student Body serving as Senior Class President.

When she opened up the correspondence, she could not believe the opening words “Steve forwarded me your email.”

“I died right there,” Melody said with an excitable cadence.

President of Business Operations Gillian Zucker responded on behalf of Ballmer and was impressed with her spunk and tenacity so much that Melody was indeed invited to cover the Clipper game last week against the Dallas Mavericks at Staples Center. She would be afforded all privileges of the working press, from the media parking lot to attendance at press conferences as well watching the game from the official press box.

Like a dream, Melody found herself sitting in front of head coach Doc Rivers at the pre-game conference and Chris Paul and her idol Blake Griffin at the post-game conference. While she was unable to ask a question due to a prior selection protocol, she still found the event fascinating.

“I couldn’t believe how tall Michael Smith was,” Melody said of the 6’10” Clipper radio and TV color commentator who does the Clipper games alongside legendary play-by-play announcer Ralph Lawler. “I stood right at his waist.”

She describes the experience as the biggest thrill of her life, with a clearer understanding of “the adrenaline rush of what it’s like to be a sports journalist.”

What these students may not realize is how much more excited I am for their accomplishments.   Few things bring more pleasure to teachers than when students have breakthrough moments.

Hopefully Melody will continue pursuing other endeavors with the same zeal as she did with covering the Clipper game. Her only regret was not being able to take a photo of herself with Griffin.

“They told me that as a reporter I had to be neutral,” Melody said even though she wore her Clipper sweatshirt to the game.

“Honestly, I almost died when Blake Griffin looked at me courtside when he was practicing before the game.”   In fact, she requested that I change her last name to Shahsavarani-Griffin, but that would be inaccurate (at least as of press time).

Leave a comment Posted on Public Education, students, writing

Writing any Book is an Accomplishment

Last week I was invited to participate in the Local Authors’ Showcase held at the Buena Vista Library in Burbank.

For me, the event gave me an opportunity to talk shop with fellow writers, and to meet interesting people such as the executor of famed film director and screenwriter Richard Brooks who made films such as “Elmer Gantry,” “In Cold Blood,” “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” and “The Blackboard Jungle” (whose title I adapted for the title of my column).

Another encounter involved a former long-time substitute teacher who gave me an earful about how awful teaching kids are nowadays.   I stood there with a non-committal expression, politely letting her finish her rant, hoping that by not engaging in a debate with her I would encourage a sale. No such luck.

This wasn’t surprising when you think about it. Holding a “books for sale” event at a library is a hard sell (pun intended) since the people circulating from table to table are those who visit a library expressly because it is a public space with free wi-fi, books, and DVDs.

That’s why it made perfect sense when one elderly looky-loo told a fellow writer that she hasn’t bought a book in several years.

Having plenty of time sitting there watching people pick up my books and put them back down allowed me to ponder the plight of a writer.

While the vast majority of authors present were self-published (I was one of the few there who wasn’t), even the worst book took a certain level of dedication to complete.

If the ultimate goal of writing is to make a pot of gold, then most writers are failures.

Just as with other art forms, only the upper echelon of writers make the real money. That explains why publishers like Scribner pour millions into publicizing established moneymakers such as Stephen King, but will not fund the publicity of lesser known writers.   Why take a chance on a no-name when one can sell even more copies of what already works?

Yet success should not be measured by one’s Amazon sales ranking.

One writer with a walker, after receiving no takers at her table, decided to make the rounds of other writers, figuring she may as well make good use of her time by informing them of her memoir based on seven generations of her family.   This woman clearly poured her soul into this book even if no one was buying it.

By documenting her family’s history, she ensured that their lives mattered.

It’s the old philosophical question: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

If a book is published and no one reads it, does it exist?

Emphatically, yes.

This is the lesson I try teaching my students when they write their short memoirs. They get it “published” by having classmates read it. Knowing that there will be an audience, no matter the size, makes a big difference in the effort they put into the work.

So even though vanity presses and self-published books may be the step-children in the publishing world, there is some value to these works.   And that’s why events like a local authors’ showcase serve a purpose; even if it means no books are bought, stories are shared . . . and are worth hearing.

 

 

Leave a comment Posted on parents, Public Education, students, teaching

Teachers, the ultimate DIYers

Years ago doctors took blood pressure, drew blood, and administered medicine. Today, medical assistants perform these duties.

Years ago teachers took attendance, collected parent forms, and tutored students. Today, teachers still perform these duties.

The teacher remains the sole adult in the classroom working with students even though the job has grown increasingly more challenging over the decades.

Oh sure, there are adult aides in special education classes, and up until a few years ago GUSD used to provide ed assistants in English Language Development classes, but for the vast majority of the country’s three million public school teachers, they go it alone.

Ideally, a new para-educator position should be created, an aide who would assist teachers with the tasks that don’t necessitate five years of college. One para-educator could serve several teachers, so while it would cost additional money to pay them, it wouldn’t be astronomical.

A less expensive and more realistic alternative would be to restructure the clerks already in place at a school, assigning one to be the sole teacher secretary.

Administrators, the smallest employee group on campus, usually have at least two secretaries, the counselors, the next smallest, have one, yet teachers, the largest group of workers with the most student contact, have none.

Here are some things that a clerk could do for teachers that would go a long way towards making the profession more efficient.

Taking attendance, uploading homework and grades. Nowadays parents expect their children’s assignments and grades to be posted online.   Such a task requires hours of work, time outside the teaching day. How helpful it would be to email a secretary this information.

Arranging field trips.   Teachers are required to do all the work involved with organizing field trips, including filling out forms, calling the bus company, collecting money from students to pay for the bus, and beseeching parents to go as chaperones.   With a dedicated teacher secretary, more kids would have enriching experiences beyond the four-walled classroom.

Making photocopies. Up until two years ago, my workplace had a clerk who would make photocopies for teachers. Now, teachers are on their own to take paper to a copy machine, punch in a code, and then remove the paper.   Think of the time wasted for a teacher to do this instead of helping a student in his classroom.

The other day I needed to make 24 copies, an amount that normally would take a few minutes at most.   However, by the time I went downstairs to the copy machine, inputted my code (yes, we have a quota) and loaded my paper, a misfeed occurred.   After removing the crumbled piece of paper, the machine never reset.

Not wanting to leave the machine in that condition, I told a secretary nearest the room about the misfeed.   She told me she wasn’t the correct person to contact and for me to find the clerk in charge of photocopying.

Meanwhile, my 15-minute morning break was now down to 8—and I still hadn’t used the restroom. Sometimes those who don’t work in classrooms forget that those of us who do cannot leave our rooms while students are in them.

Dejected, I returned upstairs without a single copy made. Imagine a school principal or a district administrator using his time in this fashion.

With creative restructuring of the current clerks on hand, even a single employee that serves only teachers would relieve the burden upon educators’ shoulders.   However for this to happen would require a rethinking of the teacher’s placement on the education hierarchy, more of a challenge than assigning a secretary to help teachers.

In the meantime, teachers continue to be the ultimate DIYers in the professional world.

 

Leave a comment Posted on Common Core, Public Education, standardized testing, students, teaching, Uncategorized

Teachers Need to be involved in Decision-Making

In the game of education, there are many players: students, parents, teachers, administrators, district officials, state and federal politicians.   Too often, the group that has the most contact with the students, the teachers, is not part of policy decision-making.

For example, sometime beginning in the late spring, the Glendale Unified School District went ahead with a major endeavor, signing a five-year contract worth $3.4 million with Massachusetts-based Curriculum Associates to use their i-Ready diagnostic testing program, evaluating each kindergartner through 12 grader three times a year.

What was quite startling about all this was how few of the major stakeholders were in the loop, including some administrators.

Glendale Teachers Association President Phyllis Miller said that GTA was not part of any discussions about this program as well.

Just as the Common Core standards seemingly came out of nowhere, so too has i-Ready that no one knows with certainty will benefit students.

The difference between the rollout of Common Core and i-Ready was that GUSD carefully involved teachers in introducing the new standards over a three-year period; the systematic testing came like a “Bam!” a la celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse.   In the past, the district has piloted new programs before committing to them.   Not this time.

Product Marketing Director for Curriculum Associates Susan Arcuri claims that there have been positive results in Glendale.   It’s a mystery how she came to that conclusion considering testing has just begun.

Miller said that many teachers who have used i-Ready say that the test itself is taking much longer than what was expected.

Where I work, the reading test is currently being administered, taking two class periods to complete. If that holds true for the math test, that would translate to a loss of 12 hours of direct instruction in arguably the most important subject classes.

And don’t forget the time it takes school administrators to organize the computer labs and monitor the testing, time better spent elsewhere.

It’s understandable the district wants to do something to help students perform well on the new Common Core based assessments.   The idea of providing teachers with individualized data to help shape future lesson planning sounds ideal.   The problem is that it is not practical.

Any teacher watching an i-Ready presentation espousing its benefits could inform upper management of this.   How are teachers going to find the time needed to analyze the data and then to modify lessons to meet the needs of each student? If a teacher were at the decision-making table, these legitimately difficult questions would have arisen.

One would have to make quite a convincing argument that spreadsheets of colored graphs is preferable to lessons taught by a qualified teacher.

Often overlooked is the analysis already occurring in the classroom on a daily basis facilitated by the expert in that field, the teacher.   Teachers don’t need third party testing results to understand that a student has difficulty understanding a Shakespearean passage.   They discover it through their lessons and assessments.

I have had the privilege of having thousands of students spend time in my classroom. I’d like to make an impact.   But the effect I could have on a child gets further diminished with each hour of standardized testing.

Teachers are very possessive of the time they have with their students so there needs to be a strong reason to justify taking that time away.

Leave a comment Posted on Ferguson, Harper Lee, Michael Brown, Missouri, racism, students, teaching, To Kill a Mockingbird

Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson makes To Kill a Mockingbird Relevant Again

One of the charges of the high school English teacher is to help teenagers see the relevancy of literature to their lives. I’m always on the lookout on how to win over the students to read, in their minds, very old books from long, long ago.

For example, with Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird that focuses on racism against African Americans in 1930s Alabama, it can be a challenging task to involve Glendale adolescents who reside in a community with only 1.3% black citizens as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau.   How do you get them to understand that there are people living today who dealt with segregation, blacks and whites with separate drinking fountains, bathrooms, and schools?

That’s why in a strange way, the killing of Michael Brown on Aug. 9 in Ferguson, Missouri, with a 67.4% African American population, can have a salutary effect on making the issue of racism relevant today in the here and now, not just vague stories from a history book.

When I was in grade school, World War Two ended only 20 years earlier, yet it might as well have taken place in the 1920’s for all I fathomed.   Only until I grew older did I realize how close my lifespan was to that major event.

So when I’m teaching Mockingbird and providing the background to the 1960 novel, namely the Civil Rights movement, I’m aware that for the average 15-year-old I might as well be talking about the Civil War.

In the past I’ve exposed students to the 1955 killing of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old from Chicago who while visiting his great-uncle in Money, Mississippi was killed in the middle of the night for reportedly whistling at a white woman, thinking that at least the fact that they have already outlived Till would raise an eyebrow.  

We make connections from real life to the novel.   It took less than an hour for the all-white jury to declare the defendants accused of Till’s murder not guilty, similar to Mockingbird’s all-white jury who took a few hours to reach the guilty verdict of rape against innocent Tom Robinson. In both cases, justice was not served.

We’ve listened to Bruce Springsteen’s “American Skin (41 Shots)” inspired by the 1999 death of Amadou Diallo who was shot 19 times by NYPD officers for reaching for his wallet (the police shot 41 bullets but over 20 missed). Likewise in Mockingbird, Robinson is shot 17 times when he tries to escape from jail.

The 2012 death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin at the hands of George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida made the book relevant again.   Even though the vast majority of my students are not African-American, here was a kid about their age with a bag of Skittles.

When I asked students to research what was happening in Ferguson, suggesting various newspaper and television websites, several came back excitedly reporting eyewitness videos they viewed on YouTube. One, in particular, showed a protester being carted off like a pig on a spit eerily reminiscent of black and white footage from the 1960s, another connection.

As we study Mockingbird this year, it may not be possible to know for sure how many students will connect with the 54-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner as a result of Ms. Lee’s brilliant prose or Michael Brown’s tragic death.  

All that is known is that what happened in Ferguson should never have happened in 2014, and hope that it leaves a lasting impression on today’s young people who will inherit this society from us very soon.

 

Leave a comment Posted on Common Core, influential teacher, parents, Public Education, students, teaching

What’s Better for Students: Dynamic Teachers or Diagnostic Testing?

This summer has not been kind to California educators with increased deductions from their paychecks to pay for the pension fund, and tenure and job protection ruled illegal by a Superior Court judge.

So it was refreshing to hear good things said about teachers at last week’s district kickoff meeting from keynote speaker Rebecca Mieliwocki, the 2012 National Teacher of the Year who still teaches 7th grade English teacher at Luther Burbank Middle School.

Ms. Mieliwocki spoke about her experiences traveling around the world as the U.S. teacher ambassador. Since so much attention in recent years has centered on how students from other nations score higher on tests than American children, she wanted to find what magic was being performed in other countries’ classrooms.

Ironically, Ms. Mieliwocki discovered that it was the American teachers who “were the envy of every teacher I met.”   The foreign instructors queried her about the methods of her homeland colleagues.

She went on to tell stories about the importance of teachers accepting students for who they are.  

One young girl in her class always wore the same cowboy boots with flowers on them every day to school.   Some students wondered why she didn’t have another pair of shoes to wear.   It turned out that her father had passed away and the boots were the last item they had bought together. When she wore the boots, she felt close to her dad.

Once her powerful message had been delivered, and teachers were inspired, on came the next speaker, a representative from a testing company called i-Ready.   Too bad the district didn’t seem ready to properly unroll this new program of testing all K-12 students three times a year beginning in a couple of weeks.

When Rebecca spoke, she had the full attention of the teacher throng. When the spokesperson for the new i-Ready testing program presented, a sea of LED lanterns erupted as teachers got out their phones, quickly feeling disconnected including one male teacher sitting in front of me shopping for a thong.

I had to go to i-Ready’s website to get basic information of what was behind the new diagnostic testing: “i-Ready provides data-driven insights and support for successful implementation of the new standards.”  

On top of new Common Core standards that teachers are still adjusting to, now we have this intrusive testing schedule that will devour at least 2 hours for each test.

It’s sad, really, that the district folks don’t get it.   Teachers don’t need more information on kids because we are not provided the necessary time to analyze the data we already have. Students march in and out of classrooms day after day.   Except for an hour long meeting here and there, teachers have no regularly scheduled full work days to examine data with their colleagues.

The kickoff meeting was a clash of two conflicting approaches to education: the inspiration of a dynamic teacher versus the top-down implementation of mandatory testing. The latter presentation quashed the excitement of the one that preceded it.

If only the district brass had the foresight to end the all-staff meeting immediately following Ms. Mieliwocki’s speech, releasing them to use the rest of the day to set up their classrooms for the students.

It reminds one of Charles Dickens’ powerful opening to A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

As Ms. Mieliwocki said, people “have to be brave to take on the work of an educator.”

Leave a comment Posted on drivers education, Public Education, students, teaching

Make Drivers Education Classes Mandatory in High School

Knowing that the leading cause of death among teenagers is fatal car crashes, one would think that teaching adolescents how to safely drive would be a national priority—or at least a high school graduation requirement.

Not so.

California Department of Education Public Information Officer Giorgos Kazanis said that out of the 1,100 school districts in the state, only 171 still offer a driving education course

despite California Education Code Section 51220(j) stating that “grades 7-12 . . . shall offer courses in . . . automobile driver education.”

Schools nowadays have plenty of bullying and drug prevention programs, but nothing on car accident prevention.

 Drivers education classes fell victim to budget cuts a quarter of a century ago when money from the Victims Compensation Fund (an explanation that would consume another column) which paid for in-car training was redirected for other purposes, leading schools to stop offering the courses as well. That funding has never been replenished.

Maybe that explains why fewer 16-year-olds have a driver’s license these days.

If you are old enough you may recall taking a class in high school called Safety that focused on the state’s Vehicle Code.   In addition to learning about the rules of the road, films were shown depicting staged and real car accidents. For a nominal fee, students could sign up for in-car driving lessons after school, usually taught by coaches or counselors. Some schools actually had driving simulators.  

One of the enigmas of public education is the dearth of important life skills not taught in classrooms. Part of the state’s secondary curriculum should include knowledge on how to open a bank account, how to apply for a credit card and a loan, and how to drive a motor vehicle.   And all students should be taught how to properly use electronic devices such as smart phones and tablets.

Oh sure, young people can quickly figure out how to text using abbreviations and emoticons, but how many know how to intelligently navigate the Internet or specify their Google searches, important lifelong abilities?

Some teachers on their own may give a lesson or two on life skills, but there is nothing that mandates it.

It’s too bad for what better way to make use of the regular school day than to have at least one hour devoted to things most people need to know when they grow up.  

Now that my son is 15 ½ I am going through the experience of paying hundreds of dollars for a driver’s ed course along with personal in-car training.   The 30 hours of classroom instruction is in addition to his normal school workload. It’s as if the driving class is an extracurricular like a sport.  

Of course Advanced Placement courses are important, but honor students get in accidents, too.

Sometimes those in education have tunnel vision when it comes to what students need to know.   It sounds good to require a student to take academic classes. However, beware: the word “academic” can mean something that is educational as well as something irrelevant. You would have a hard time convincing my son that geometry is more practical than driving.  

Instead of Common Core dominating the education conversation we need more of a Common Sense approach to what kids should know in order to survive in the real world.