Why Are Teachers So Often Liberal When School Is Anything But?

Consider the military.  Ignoring for a moment the Officer Class (who enjoy perks and benefits to  a ridiculous degree of comfort, safety, and economy), the majority of soldiers survive in a profoundly egalitarian system.  Labor is distributed evenly, as is salary.  Food and housing are provided by the system.  Achievement and reward is merit-based on individual talent, skill, and ability.  Individuality is thoroughly discouraged.  Identity and personality take second (actually, third, fourth, fifth, or more) place to cohesion and function of the whole.  You remember how everyone in China wore the same clothes back in the day?  That wasn’t because they didn’t have clothes or colorful fabric.  I could go on building this case, but there are bigger points to make.

One being this:  If you were looking for a conveniently collected source of Republican-leaning individuals, you’d go find a military barracks and start there.  If you wanted freedom-loving, pro-individual, capitalist thinking, greed encouraging, free market, John Wayne, anti-government purists, you’d find the most stalwart, hard-core, uncompromising idealists in the most communist place in the country.

Now consider School.  Schools are the most Darwinistic, survival-of-the-fittest, merit-based, unequal, capitalist jungles in our society.  On the macro-level they are dependent upon the value and worth of their location for any kind of success at all.  Do you live in an economic desert, someplace sparsely fed with that essential, water-like nourisher of schools: Money?  School life is going to be hard and mean.  Enjoy the metaphorical benefits of water and good soil?  A diverse, thriving school economy, with ample opportunity for growth and success.

In school, everything depends upon your own individual, non-cooperative effort.  Equality in schools is a barely maintained illusion.  For one, you are constantly measured against your peers.  Success or failure always arrives as a comparison against your classmates.  Yes, nominally success in school is supposed to be independent of any variable but one’s own individual talents, but we all know this is nowhere near the truth.  Every class is a competition.  The foundational economy of grades guarantees it.  And as in pure Capitalism (and pure Darwinism) success is a product of inherited traits, not individual success.  Wealth, in schools, is the greatest predictor of future achievement.

School is, despite some modern efforts (and a lot of editorial grousing), intensely, fundamentally competitive.  Conditions change dramatically from environment to environment (from school to school, to grade to grade, to class to class), so success is not merely a product of skill, but adaptability.  As in nature, change occurs over time and distance.  Survival depends on the ability to adapt either as the environment changes in time (as in year to year) or as one moves from one environment to another in place (as in class to class).  School is a daily re-enactment – sped up to impossible levels – of that natural struggle.  Students move from environment to environment, and their success is dependent upon their ability to shift gears, change processes, maximize and minimize specific traits to the landscape.  One class may demand gregarious extroversion while another asks for introverted silence.  One may use logic, the other creativity.

Inherited strength is fundamental in schools, as it is in Capitalism.  Inherited capital has more power than developed.  Success is far more likely if you enter school at a competitive advantage, whether that means you already know how to read, have an aptitude for math, or are the stock of parents who can afford tutors and encourage breakfast.  If your parents are successful, you are likely to be so.

(One might be forgiven assuming that schools are more Fascist than Capitalist.  After all, each classroom is ruled by a dictator with absolute authority.  But a teacher receives so little physical reward from a student’s labor that they can hardly be said to be ‘exploitative’.)

I could go on building this case as well, but there is another point to make, namely:  If you wanted to find the most liberal, socialist-leaning, anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, pro-big government, pro-union, competition-fearing, anti-bullying, marginalized-population-loving, suspicious-of-power  group of people in the nation, you’d find the nearest public school and gather together the teachers.  

Failure Does Not Instruct, Success Does

We’re on a bit of a ‘let’s embrace failure’ trend these days.  Lots of articles across the internets about the benefits of failure, the learning potential, the need for coddled students to experience the wonderfully instructive power of being told they are wrong.  As so often the case, the central thesis comes at us in fairly easy to catch, sensible sounding nuggets of wisdom, which we’ll address in a moment.  More interesting, as usual, is the subtext, and also the actual, usually unstated, intent.  In this case: School is too easy.  People are given too much without needing to work for it.  Pain is not merely instructive, it’s essential to wisdom and moral order.  

So, a few Bromides out of the way first.

1. Yes, it’s true, Failure is a way we learn.  Success has rewards, but ‘learning’ isn’t entirely one of them.  Most learning occurs before success, in the trial and error process, where one is neither winning nor losing, just working.
2. Yes, it’s true, Failure is not unnatural.  Much of our life is spent fundamentally failing in one way or another.  Only those born with exceptional gifts are denied the experience of struggle that is intimately married to failure.  
3. Yes, it’s true, Failure creates strength.  Though it’s not exactly a muscular strength.  The strength of failure is in callous, tendon, cartilage.  The strength one gets from failure is the thickened skin of scar.  

But let’s not kid ourselves.  Failure is not so very often the product of natural disaster, or chance, or unanticipated event.  It’s not so often a blind spot, or an absence of essential.  And when it is, one doesn’t really ‘learn’ anything but to move on, around, through.  The failure that we experience confronting the external world is mostly a kind of failure that we go to great lengths to ensure we never have to experience again, or at all.  If the building falls because of an earthquake, we don’t chalk the disaster up to a learning experience.  The building was not designed as some kind of learning experience; it was designed to avoid the failure of falling down.  Perhaps more importantly, the more we know, the more we anticipate failure, the more we do to make sure it doesn’t occur.  The ‘knowledge’ we gain from the failure of disaster is less about skill or fact or detail as it is about resilience, about moving on after the tragedy.

If failure was so very instructive, so very powerful, most of the world would be a hell of a lot more successful.

But the other failure, the failure of school, most often, lies in Character.  We fail because we lose courage.  We fail because we can’t force ourselves through the present moment’s discomfort, or uncertainty, or struggle, or pain – and not because the pain itself is good.  The pain of work is painful.  It’s boredom. It’s tedious repetition.  It’s sacrifice – of time, attention, pleasure.  It’s embrace of struggle.  But none of it is really related to failure.  We embrace all of it because of success.  We embrace struggle to achieve success, and the fact that we fail really has little instructive value.

We know, most of the time, exactly why we have failed.  We failed because we were lazy. We failed because we are stupid.  We failed because we didn’t work hard enough.  Or we failed because we didn’t really care.  We failed because the task was pointless, or stupid, or meaningless.  Often times, our failure is neither a flaw in our character or an instructive step towards future success.  Often times our failure is a product of injustice – of other people’s moral or character failings – and there’s little lesson there except anger or submission.  We fail because the other side cheats.  We failed, quite simply, because the task was impossible, or unfair, or out of our control.

There’s no ‘lesson’ in that.  There’s no strengthening of our skill, just a hardening of our heart.

Kids don’t really learn through failure.  Kids learn through success.  Failure, a good deal of the time, isn’t instructive at all.  Students don’t make mistakes on a math problem and then ‘learn’ the correct answer from the error.  They don’t write a shitty essay and then fix their mistakes.  Any teacher can tell you that kids glance at the grade, ignore the comments, and move on.  If failure were so very instructive, the most effective education would be guided failure, which it most assuredly is not.  Education is guided success.  We reward the students who succeed.  We only punish the students who fail.  We don’t reward them at all for it.  And rarely, rarely is that failure much responsible for how they improve.

I know, from years of experience, not to mention my own intimate friendship with failing, that nearly all students fail because they simply don’t really do the work.  For some, the absence of effort is extreme, and the failure equally severe.  Most teachers will tell you that it takes a lot of work to fail a class.  It takes consistent and persistent absence, because the system is designed to get them working, to keep them succeeding, in however small a capacity.  The threat of failure, and the actual presence of it, is fundamentally, almost universally, an attempt to get students to do the work through fear or suffering.  The threat of failure is not about learning, it’s about motivation.  But does it motivate?  And more importantly, does failure create learning?

Failure does not instruct.  Failure may drive, it may motivate, but even this subtext is wrong.  Because teaching is about instruction.  Students learn through investment, through care, through diligence and concentration.  The goal is to learn and grow.  And failure, however you frame it, is rarely growth.  The threat of failure will motivate a student to invest more time in studying, or writing and revision, or practice, but it really doesn’t motivate a student to actually learn.  Students learn through the success that stands opposite failure.  Our job as teachers is not to instruct students through failure, but to encourage students through success.

The subtext of all these little editorials we keep reading about the spoiling absence of failure aren’t really about learning at all.  They are about character, and if we want our education system to be ‘teaching’ character, we probably ought to start saying so.

Standardized Reading Tests Really Are Boring, and that’s a problem

(This is a much-needed and fairly thorough edit of an earlier post…just in case it seems vaguely familiar to the few of you who muddled through the original.)

“It’s soo booooring!”

The single specific complaint I hear from every student who struggles with the reading portions of standardized tests – including the SAT, the ACT and the FCAT in Florida – is that the reading selections are ‘boring.’  The readings don’t hold their interest.  They don’t relate.  The passages are dry and emotionless.  On the surface, this is a lousy complaint.  Boring is a relative term, relative only to the one bored.  Nothing is either inherently boring or interesting, and obviously a student who anticipates all experience to be entertaining or otherwise interesting is in for a difficult future.  Still, the universality of the response begs investigation.

It may be that the term ‘boring’ is simply the only word to come easily to the minds of  sixteen year olds.  We often latch on to the easiest answer when faced with obstacles and complications.  There are lots of reasons to dislike tests, many of them complex and multifaceted, but students have little experience beyond school, and to them the tests are simply parts of their lives they must accept.  They lack both the depth of experience to understand how Standardized exams affect their personal lives and the professional experience to understand how the tests are supposed to exist in the larger world.  Sitting in the middle of that experience, uncertain of its purpose, slaved to readings and questions over which they have no control, eager to escape but not exactly suffering in any tangible way, the only answer to their discomfort and confusion is ‘boring’.

But there is also a more profound reason students lack the vocabulary to explain their struggles with Standardized Exams.  The tests ARE boring, and it has nothing to do with the students themselves.  It’s in the nature of the tests to be boring.  Not because they are uninteresting, or dry, or tasteless and bland.  Not because they lack energy or vitality.  Not because they are repetitive, or simplistic, or opaque.  Though they are all those things.  It’s in the nature of Standardized Reading tests to be boring because they deny the reason any reading is engaging in the first place.  Standardized tests break the contextual energy that makes reading interesting.   

‘Boring’ isn’t a simple matter of missing interest – the causes of the disconnect are varied and significant.  It’s difficult to answer a question, to ‘connect’ to it, if one doesn’t know the point of the question.  It’s difficult to connect to an experience if the conditions are unjust or unfair.  And it’s quite difficult for many young adults to perform well at a process which has no clear purpose or inherent value to them.

Reading Is contextual, tests are not

Reading (like most things) is a contextual experience.  The written word does not exist alone, it acts as a bridge between two things in the real world, between the reader and whatever the writing is about.  An automobile mechanic uses the words in his manual to connect his actions to the actions of the engine.  A surfer reads a surfing magazine to connect his interest in surfing to the wide range of complex details inherent to the sport.  Novels provide a link between the reader and the meaning of experience.  When the reader engages in the text, they do so in an environment in which the written words are merely a part.

But the reading portion of a standardized exam provides few, if any, such links.  More to the point, the reading portion of the exam isn’t about the context, it’s about the words and sentences and paragraphs themselves, independent of any larger purpose the words serve.  Students are to prove they understand what the writing is about without any clear connection between the words and the subject of the writing as it exists in the world.  Most often, in fact, paragraphs are lifted from the middle of essays, textbooks, or novels and then students are asked questions related only to that specific passage.  The disconnect here for poor or reluctant readers can be profound.  Intuitively, students understand the purpose of the written word as a bridge, yet the test itself seems to completely ignore writing’s purpose.  Rather than a test of skills, the exam seems to many some sort of trick designed to…well, they aren’t quite sure.  What they do know, though, is that the passages seem to lack whatever vitality it is that makes things ‘interesting’ instead of ‘boring’.

The tests also are boring because they demand students read in a way that is unnatural to reading.  Students will never elsewhere be asked to read in the manner required by the exam, because, quite simply, it’s not the way (or ‘why’) we read in the first place.  Nobody ever reads a passage in order to answer specific questions about it.  There’s always a context, and for most readers the context is fundamental to the understanding.  If, for example, I am reading a novel and I find myself in a descriptive passage about the weather, I instinctively know that the author is likely setting a mood or tone and that the passage is setting the place of the events.  Well designed questions will focus on this kind of reading, but such a focus is irrelevant to a student who doesn’t read many novels, much less one who is either confused by the purpose of the exam in general or – as is so often the case given the sheer pressure the tests create – suffers from test anxiety.  

The actual assessment aspect of a Standardized exam is also different from that which students usually experience in the classroom.  In the classroom, tests related to readings involve specific lessons and details from the recent past, which are reviewed and then built upon (or discarded) for the next lesson.  They are part of an ongoing experience, with all sorts of visible and invisible purposes.  Vocabulary tests, for example, usually concern words studied or reviewed previously in class.  These are lists of specific words defined and spelled.  Students know that learning the words is part of a wider process and purpose, the amassing of vocabulary, the recognition of roots, prefixes, suffixes, and cognates, deeper understanding of a text through its vocabulary, etc.  (To be sure, the absence of clear purpose within a classroom is also one significant reason students struggle.)  None of that larger purpose or extended history is evident on a Standardized exam.  Vocabulary skills on a Standardized test are mostly about gleaning definition from context clues.  While this is no insignificant skill, the full depth of it is lost if the passage has no larger context.  Again, students are asked to prove they can glean the meaning of a word or passage from the very small fragment they have before them, a passage often sliced from the body of a much larger creature.   

Avid reader, poor test taker

Many students who are enthusiastic readers perform poorly on reading exams.  It’s frustrating, particularly since the issue is not skill.  Because the point of a reading exam is so different from the reading they do elsewhere, that student actually ‘reads’ differently.  When we read, we don’t hold all the information the words contain in equal measure.  Without much conscious decision, we evaluate the purpose of the text and group the information accordingly, holding usually only a few common threads and crucial supporting evidence throughout the reading experience. (This is how one can read a 1,000 page novel and not get lost.)  Since a reading exam, however, is testing comprehension removed from context, students don’t know where to start.  As a result, a weak test taker tries to hold every single word of a reading in their minds, to in effect memorize the passage before they get to the questions.  A paragraph into any reading passage and they have lost all track of the beginning.  By the end of the passage, they have to go back and start all over again.

Later, they wonder, ‘What happened?’  The standard answer: ‘It was a boring selection.’  But behind that answer is real damage, for these enthusiastic, avid readers exit the experience being told that they are poor readers.  Many of them lose the passion.  

Moving Forward

There are answers to this nightmare, answers actually discovered by many people some time after they leave school, all those folks who go on to great success despite lackluster academic performance.  Yet presently, the school system relies primarily on testing to mark, monitor, measure, and motivate.  A student might understandably survive their academic years under the impression that the world of successful professional adults operates under the same general guidelines.  To many, the thought of this is enough to steer them towards less professional fields.  The world outside school, however, accommodates everyone to varying degrees, and it does not rely on testing – it relies on individual product.  Like reading itself, the world students graduate into is purpose driven.

Standardized tests do work, of course.  They do measure many student’s reading ability, but in many ways what they actually measure is kind of peripheral to the skill of reading comprehension.  Good students are very often simply more curious than poor students.  Good students are open to ideas, and are willing to gaze past the limitations of a passage to the material within.  Good students also read a lot, and over a wide range of topics; thus, they are more likely familiar with the variety of passages and language that shows up on the test.  Often their ability is not so much their skill as it is their experience.  But it is by no means a democratic or equal measure, and all too many students are not being accurately judged.  The big question, then, is this:  How can an assessment accurately gauge or evaluate the skill of a process that isn’t actually being fully tested?  Is it even an accurate assessment of a student’s true reading skills if the test doesn’t allow the student to demonstrate the skill?

We’ve been evaluating student ability this way for a long time now, but the past does not quite serve as a standard for the present when it comes to standardized exams.  The two big hitters – the SAT and the ACT for college – are relatively new to the scene, and for a long time they were hand-graded essay style tests.  Only recently have the public schools themselves gone full-on with standardized exams.  In other words, these tests are not classics.  Moreover, the model for the standardized exam is drawn from tests that measure advanced academic potential; that is, success in school.  There’s nothing wrong with this approach, so long as it applies to those young adults with an interest in pursuing academic fields.  Those are the ones who do well on exams.  Currently, however, we apply the model to all students, regardless of their interests or abilities, and bemoan the lack of universal success.  The tests are also a product of their time and circumstance.  Until recently, these kinds of exams were the easiest, most efficient, and accurate way to measure large groups of essentially anonymous applicants.  That is not true anymore.  If we so desired, and were willing to undertake the (admittedly strenuous) task of changing direction, we could create an evaluation system that would more accurately gauge ability, not to mention serve – far more accurately – a much wider range of demands.

It may be that the standardized exam is here to stay.  Accountability in an institution as entrenched, bureaucratic, and large as the education system is difficult, to say the least, and consistent, across the board, exams are quite possibly the only reasonable path.  But let’s at least be honest about both what should be measured – not student academic success on a large scale, but possible student strengths and ability on the scale of the individual – and how best to democratically measure those skills.  At the least, we should give the students power over their own destiny.  Let them choose what tests to take.  Give them some choice in the reading.  Let them sense that the exam is merely a tool for direction and proof of achievement.

If we are to use an exam to measure our kids, we should provide as many exams as possible, and allow the scores on those tests to be the badge by which the students earn entry into the work they choose.  We don’t need two exams – English and math – or three – writing – or four – add science.  We should have hundreds, for everything they choose.  And we should not measure them by our choices (which I doubt we even understand), but by the paths they choose.  Our students should not be forced to come to us with a piece of paper that judges them by our standards.  They should come to us with a piece of paper that says, “This is what I care about and what I’m good at.”

How ‘Tolerance’ Undermines Writing Skill

It is sometimes surprising how genuinely modern, even Existential, most students are.  When asked to support an opinion, they fall to that most current of defenses: You can’t judge my belief.  What they believe is what they believe, unassailable because it is belief, from the sacred heart, the pure soul, unique and holy.  Of course, this what we want, what we’ve asked for.  Schools have made it their mission to teach acceptance, to counter prejudice, to expose those isolated lives to the vast world of difference.  We have made it a mission to eliminate prejudism, the cornerstone of that belief being more than tolerance, but accommodation.  

And we have succeeded.

Our youth are now Religious Existentialists.  A glut of cultural difference and a deep penetration of relativism – in movies and t.v. and music and, especially, school – has had the desired effect.  Prejudice is low.  Tolerance, of a sort, is high.  Awareness and acceptance of other religion, ritual, and lifestyle is widespread.  But asking people to tolerate difference does not mean students will question their own belief systems, much less other’s.  Nor should they.  After all, the goal is tolerance and acceptance, not questioning.  It is, in fact, hypocritical to ask students to tolerate everyone who is not like them and simultaneously critically question religious or cultural traditions.  (And if there is one sin that teenagers are sensitive to it is hypocrisy.)  Thus the urge to create tolerance and peace has undermined our desire to create reflective and analytical students.  It’s pretty clear which trait we favor more.

Belief itself demands conviction.  It demands at least an approach to an answer of yes or no, right or wrong.  Belief without grip doesn’t really accomplish what we need it for: among other things, a sense of purpose, an answer to the question of death, rules of behavior in an uncertain moral universe.  The conviction of opinion demands a response.  The stronger the opinion, the more immediate the response.  You can see the dilemma.  If no opinion is more correct than any other, then even reacting to an opinion is divisive; is, in fact, morally wrong, since the only real moral demand is to not judge at all.  But what do you do if powerful opinion demands a reaction you aren’t allowed to have?  One easy solution is to not have powerful opinions.   

What we get from our students are essays whose thesis statements are so bland, so hesitant to make a claim, that they are not thesis statements at all.  They are obvious statements of fact attempting to be ‘opinion’.  When writing about literary technique, for example, students will write: “The author of so-and-so uses literary devices to create mood.’  I used to write, all too boldly I fear, ‘DUH!’ next to such statements on essays, but I stopped because it hurt my students’ feelings.  It also seemed to confuse them, and try as I might, teasing from them an opinion that actually had any bite at all seemed more than simply frustrating.  Students react with more than ignorant confusion – they respond with moral resistance.  How, they ask, can I make a strong statement about ART?  It’s my opinion whether the poem works or not; it’s my opinion what the meaning of the story is.  (The only real opinions they willingly sink their teeth into are those that criticize or point out prejudice.)

Belief also demands support – at least if one has to defend it – which leaves students in another curious quandary.  First, their opinions – being opinions – don’t require support. Culture doesn’t require justification, or excuse.  Who we are, what we believe: nobody is obligated to explain themselves, to justify who they are, what they are.  A person should not be required to support their beliefs, since support implies justification.  Second, and perhaps more impactful, support undermines the primary, unassailable authority of opinion, by actually forcing upon the opinion evidence, by grounding the opinion in reality.  As soon as one does this, the opinion is no longer unquestioningly true.  It has effect, a place, connections to actions and other ideas.   Support makes opinion vulnerable.

As an English teacher, one of the more difficult skills I struggle to teach is Support.  What’s so vexing and perplexing to me is how obvious the skill seems.  Any idea, no matter how insignificant, requires some sort of evidence.  A simple statement of mood, ‘I am sad’ for example, must be followed by specific detail.  In fact, if I should tell someone I am sad and they don’t ask why – don’t seek the support – I would be insulted, since clearly they don’t really care.  Every judgment, good or bad, requires proof.  She is lovely, he is mean, that is terrible – all these demand some form of specific detail for meaning.  This is a basic element to communication, to storytelling and human interaction and gossip and business.   Yet nearly  every weak essay I grade lacks support.  It’s as if students are deliberately averse to supporting their statements with evidence or support.  We often call this, simply, ‘laziness’, but I find even the best and brightest and hardest-working students often struggle with the fundamental concept of support.  

The irony is not lost.  It’s English teachers who push the tolerance maxim, through the literature, the class discussions, the reading selections and essay topics.  English class is where students analyze advertising for bias and propaganda.  English class is where students read and discuss stories that humanize the marginalized, spotlight the bullies, give voice to the hiding and hidden.  Tolerance – and an intolerance of intolerance – is learned in English class.  But English class is also where students are supposed to learn and practice the skill of argument, where they are supposed to strengthen their writing skills, skills that are fundamentally constructed on the use of evidence and support. Forced to make a choice between the sanctity of opinion and the authority of supporting evidence, it’s clear which opinion they choose to follow.