Emotions in School?

Much of what passes for pedagogy, as future teachers are instructed in "schools of education" at contemporary American universities, contains a hobbling internal contradiction.

On the one hand, the importance, even the supremacy, of the "affective domain" is preached to those who would become teachers. The professors, isolated in their ivory towers, far from the daily reality of an actual school filled with actual children, stress that it is important that the pupils "feel good" about being in school.

But on the other hand, the ideal archetype of a teacher is presented as someone who either never has strong emotions, or who keeps them perfectly concealed.

Inconsistently, emotions are presented as being simultaneously the centerpiece of the school and something undesirable in a school.

Current notions of "classroom management" routinely instruct the teacher never to be angry and never to project anger. The teacher is to remain calm and simply implement consequences, disagreeable or pleasant, for behavior good or bad.

To be sure, there is something appropriate in this guidance. One does not want a perpetually angry teacher with a "hair trigger" - one who's ready to begin yelling at students for minor infractions.

Professionalism dictates that a teacher deal calmly with students, explain what they've done wrong, and show them that the consequences that they receive for these actions are both natural and logical.

If we are preparing these students for higher education, for citizenship, or for the work world, we should, however, help them to understand that there are limits to this dynamic. Which employee will long survive the habit of deliberately angering his boss?

There is, at the margins, a place for a teacher to express a healthy anger. Indeed, the failure to appropriately manifest emotion is a mark of the type of dysfunction which the modern or postmodern pedagogue claims to want to avoid in the school.

The measured and professional expression of anger is a mature response to egregious behavior. Yet it is precisely this response which teachers are instructed never to make.

An adult employee in a reasonable workplace knows that it is unwise to deliberately insult or anger his colleagues or his boss. A rational employee has some unease around his employer's anger.

A student who delights in consistently provoking his fellow pupils lacks a healthy respect for the anger of others. This lack will handicap the student in current and future endeavors.

The failure to set an emotionally healthy tone, including a measured and appropriate expression of anger, limits what can be achieved in schools. By prohibiting teachers from a mature and professional expression of anger, we keep students artificially infantile in their emotional development, and allow for a student to inflict negative behavior on other students.

The results in both academic and social progress are visible.

Managing the End of the School Year

The last few weeks of the academic year in a high school present challenges to maintaining the desired school climate.

Unlike university students, who understand that the semester’s work gets more intense at the end, high school students often feel that they can begin to relax toward the end of the semester.

To be sure, there is a form of ‘senioritis’ at the college-level, but it is most severe at the high school level - and not merely among seniors, but among all students.

A high school can take several different approaches to the final quarter of the year. Whichever tactic it takes, however, must be taken by a unified faculty and staff.

One strategy is to celebrate the final weeks of the year with pizzas, field trips, classroom parties, and movies.

A different strategy is to emphasize the intensifying academic work, avoid all those fun and social events, and instead assign ever more written work, reading, and lectures.

Both of these approaches have advantages and disadvantages, but the key to both of them is that they must be embraced uniformly by the teaching faculty.

If different faculty members are using different strategies, then a consistent school culture at the end of the year is not possible.

The administrators should present both of the above options, along with other tactics if they exist, and work to build faculty consensus around one or the other of them.

Different Sorts of Achievement Gaps

The phrase ‘achievement gap’ is often used to describe statistical differences between African-American students and other students. But gaps exist between many various demographic segments.

At Huron High School, an administration of the M-STEP standardized test during the 2014/2015 academic year yielded results which manifest several gaps. The test was given to 11th-grade students.

For the moment, we’ll table the question of exactly what the M-STEP test allegedly measures, and the question of how well it measures it.

In each subject area, the M-STEP categorizes students as advanced, proficient, partially proficient, or not proficient. Students in the top two categories are aggregated as ‘advanced or proficient,’ and the total fraction of the student body which places into that category is supposed to be the measure of the school’s, and the individual’s, success.

One obvious and consistent gap displays itself across every portion of the test. In Science, of the 359 juniors tested, 69.7% of the Asian students measured as “advanced or proficient.” No other demographic group performed as well. Of the entire group, including Asians and all other demographic groups, 51.5% were “advanced or proficient.”

Similar numbers appear in other content areas: 81.8% of Asians were ‘advanced or proficient’ in Mathematics, compared to 54.9% for the entire group.

In English Language Arts, 80.3% of Asians were ‘advanced or proficient’, a significant number light of the fact that for many of them, English is not a native language. The average for the all students in the sample was 66.3%.

In Social Studies, 84.9% of the Asians were ‘advanced or proficient,’ while only 66.9% of the total population was ranked at that level.

But the ‘Asian gap’ is not the only statistical chasm.

In Mathematics, 55.6% of all females were ‘advanced or proficient,’ while only 54.0% of males were so. This cuts across all racial or ethnic groups, and constitutes therefore a ‘gender gap.’

The ‘gender gap’ is even clearer in English Language Arts, where 73.0% of all females were ‘advanced or proficient,’ while only 59.2% of males scored that high.

These numbers, by themselves, constitute too small a sample, and are derived from too unreliably a measuring instrument, to justify a general conclusion.

But these numbers merely reflect a larger pattern, seen in standardized tests from ACT to SAT to AP. The ‘Asian gap’ and the ‘gender gap’ are real, measurable, observable, and quantifiable.

Getting into College: How Many Clubs Did You Join?

In January 2016, Frank Bruni wrote in the New York Times, describing a report about college admissions. Students who graduate from high school and seek admission to a university face a multidimensional and multifactorial system.

Various metrics are used to evaluate applicants. Some metrics are more relative than others; some are more susceptible to manipulation than others.

Letters of recommendation are subjective. The meaning of GPAs vary wildly from one high school to another: at one high school it’s relatively easy to earn a 3.5, while that same number represents a Herculean effort at another high school.

Standardized testing represents more reliable and more objective measurement, but such tests - e.g., SAT and ACT - do not fully capture a student’s ability to carefully examine and analyze text, or to synthesize ideas from two different philosophers.

The report also addresses the frantic effort on the part of high school students to compile a long list of extracurricular clubs and involvements. Bruni writes:

The report also suggests that colleges discourage manic résumé padding by accepting information on a sharply limited number of extracurricular activities; that they better use essays and references to figure out which students’ community-service projects are heartfelt and which are merely window dressing.

Many questions emerge. One is that the admissions process needs to reflect the purpose of higher education. Because that purpose is not monolithic - some attend college to master an academic discipline, others to gain employability - the process retains a somewhat split personality.

A second questions surrounds the manipulation by students of their ostensible academic profile. Standardized tests, while leaving much to be desired, are not nearly as malleable as letters of recommendation and high school GPAs. The methods by which students can scam a GPA, or cajole a teacher into writing a letter, are numerous.

The report which Bruni describes is nonbinding in its recommendations, but nonetheless offers a chance to reconsider the process.

School Policy or School Culture?

It's relatively easy to change a school policy: a conversation and stroke of the pen will usually do it.

For an entire public school district, it might be an executive decision, or a board decision.

But changing a school's culture is more difficult and more complex. It requires leadership, teamwork, time, and lots of concerted effort.

Changing a school's culture is also more powerful than merely changing its policies.

A leader needs to do a lot of preliminary work behind the scenes before rolling out measures intended to alter school culture. A leader must have a careful discussion with the teaching faculty and other staff.

Policies can be tools toward changing a culture.

Culture will change only when the policy changes are kept consistently in place over a longer period of time.

Babbling about the 21st-Century High School

Huron High School and Pioneer High School are not only among the state’s best, but among the nation’s best. Yet one reads continuously of calls for “reform” in America’s public education system. Can those calls properly be construed as extending even to Huron and Pioneer?

These two schools produce not only a large number of individual high achievers (students with stellar ACT, SAT, AP, PSAT, PLAN, and other standardized scores), but also significant average scores: as was recently demonstrated, the average scores among the lowest thirty percent of students in these schools is above the statewide average score for all students.

The word ‘reform,’ meanwhile, as it applies to American public schooling, has become as common as blades of grass on a golf course.

For all of this century (so far), and for most of the last, the phrase “call for reform,” applying to public education, is an automatic reflex for both politicians and journalists. This language is used as a reaction to perceived flaws in the system, real or imagined.

Correspondingly, reform efforts and initiatives have multiplied, some of them with sincerely good intentions, none with lasting results.

How can the word ‘none’ be used so confidently here? Because “lasting” does not describe any aspect of our public school system. The chant of “reform” ensures that as soon as any attempted reform is implemented, it becomes part of the status quo and a target of the very demand for reform which gave birth to it.

It’s the French Revolution of education, where the revolutionaries, who finally wrest power from the monarchs, are instantly seen as the new monarchs against whom the rebellion must fight.

In a K-12 educational system, any hypothesis would reasonably require, at a minimum, thirteen years of implementation before one might even attempt any preliminary evaluation of it. Yet most reforms have only a year or two before they are jettisoned in favor of the next reform.

Further confusion is created by the fact that the discussions of educational reform are conducted on a national level, which to some extent by its very nature cannot account for the wide variation among local schools. According to the U.S. Department of Education, there are approximately 37,100 high schools in the United States.

Consider the diversity among the nation’s approximately 14,000,000 high school students: the variables include religion, size of community, ethnic heritages, native languages, attitude of parents toward education, income levels, etc.

Any single nationwide reform movement is bound to be inappropriate for some set of schools somewhere, and the number in that set is likely to be quite large. This thought nudges us toward the consideration of local control.

Until the creation of the Department of Education in 1980, schools were largely the jurisdiction of cities, counties, and states. Certainly, the federal government was increasingly encroaching on local control even prior to that year.

Education is currently the object in a three-way tug of war between cities, states, and the federal government. The chances of all three agreeing on a policy, or having a consistent view on school matters, are small.

States are often threatened with a loss of federal funding if they don’t comply with some Department of Education policy; yet the federal government still imposes unfunded mandates on local schools, despite a 1995 congressional effort to eliminate this practice.

There are reasons to suppose that a significant reduction in the federal government’s role in education, and a corresponding shift to local decision-making, would benefit students. The reader may catalogue such reasons.

A different question, however, is this: whether reducing federal intervention in education would be good for Huron High School, Pioneer High School, and AAPS students in general. Because Huron and Pioneer are statistical outliers, what’s good for education in general might not be good for them.

Whence this perpetual tumult of “calls for reform”? Many problems confronting our schools can be traced, directly or indirectly, back to John Dewey. He was a professor at the University of Michigan from 1884 to 1894, and died in 1952.

Dewey either reconceptualized schools so that they had little to do with education, or he reconceptualized ‘education’ so fundamentally that the word obtained a very different definition. Mortimer Smith writes:

Much of modern educational thought has its roots in the past, in the reformers Rousseau, Froebel, and Pestalozzi; but I think it would be generally agreed that the philosophical godfather of the movement is John Dewey. Traditionally, philosophers are scholarly, bookish individuals who are happy to idle in quiet backwaters, avoiding the mainstream of the life about them, content in the hope that whatever small contribution they may make to the total of the world's thought will make itself apparent to future students examining a past age; but a happy exception to this tradition is Professor Dewey, whose long life may rightfully be called a useful one, and whose thought has had the most direct and potent sort of influence on the society in which he has lived, and in the one field of educational theory has been the dominant influence in America during the past fifty years.

Whether we say that schools no longer have much to do with education, or we say that the education which schools offer has been redefined in such a way that it has little to do with all prior education, Dewey influence has much to do with this transformation.

It is now de rigueur to scoff at the notion of curriculum as a body of knowledge, or to dismiss the idea that text is a centerpiece, if not the centerpiece, of education.

Instead, “life skills” and “hygiene” replace text, and “self expression” replace “self discipline.”

There is nothing new about this: Dewey’s effect on American education is almost a century old. The quote from Mortimer Smith, above, is from 1949. The malaise is long upon us. In that same year, Bernard Iddings Bell wrote:

American education is so defective in theory and practice as seriously to threaten the long continuance of the way of life to further which this nation was founded. We have become, largely because of what schooling has done to us, a people incompetent to function as free men, which is something else again than flattered and manipulated robots. What is the use of abundance if we are trained to use it with the intelligence of children who never grow up? Quite a few observers of the American scene have lately been speaking their minds concerning this. Even I have said my two-pennies' worth about it. We fault-finders vary in the way we put things but we agree in being mighty dissatisfied, alarmed.

To return to our local situation, we ask whether, or in which ways, Huron High School and Pioneer High School can be improved.

Those who toil daily in the classroom might address this question: a Math teacher points out that work habits and study skills empower students to succeed; those who have the self-discipline to attend to daily homework master concepts and score better.

A Spanish teacher notes the intellectual fragmentation caused by the constant use of handheld electronic devices. While they can be, at times, useful in the learning process, they cultivate a habit of allowing one’s mind to dart about, rather than work on a topic reflectively.

A History teacher wrestles with curricula which have been rewritten repeatedly, and in which History as a body of knowledge is unrecognizable. The skills (“know how”) have been retained and expanded at the expense of mastery (“know that”).

A German teacher works belatedly to instill rigor and abstraction as skills used in thinking about language, because they have been purged from the curricula of the primary years.

These examples show that there are points of contact between Ann Arbor’s statistical outliers and the other high schools in America. These examples are by no means exclusive to the Ann Arbor Public Schools, but rather typical of the nation.

There is a paradox lurking in this situation: on the one hand, Huron and Pioneer are producing excellent, world-class students, who achieve at stratospheric levels. The preparation these schools offer is amazingly good, as their graduates discover during their freshman year at whichever college or university they attend. On the other hand, despite these superlative academic offerings, there are also areas for growth.

This rambling bit of prose is intended primarily to stimulate the reader’s thinking about these topics. Sadly, it cannot offer definite solutions or proposals. The reader is encouraged to do so.

[Andrew Smith is a German teacher both Huron High School and Pioneer High School. Although the topics here discussed can be controversial, there is intention neither to irritate nor to advocate, but rather merely to think. Andrew Smith reserves to the right to change his mind about any or all of what is here written.]

IB in the AAPS: MYP

One possible interpretation of the IB materials is that each student will have enrolled in classroom sections of two different world languages by the end of tenth grade:

For this reason, it will be important to ensure that sufficient numbers of teachers are available to teach German, Latin, and other languages.

[Andrew Smith is both a Huron High School teacher, and an Ann Arbor Pioneer High School teacher placed on temporary assignment for at Pioneer for the 2014/2015 academic year. Although based out of Huron High School, Andrew Smith may continue to teach a class or two at Pioneer in future academic years as program needs dictate.]

As the AAPS explores and adopts the International Baccalaureate program, the teaching of World Languages (Foreign Languages) will assume a more central role in the curriculum.