Superman is tired

Today I came across a review of the new film, Waiting for Superman, at Pajiba, one of my favorite movie review sites. Go here for the review and all of the comments http://www.pajiba.com/film_reviews/waiting-for-superman-review-hey-teachers-leave-them-kids-alone.php#comment-419002 Of course, the discussion turned to what exactly is wrong with education today, and here is what I said:

1. NEA is not a union; it is a professional organization. In my state, we are not allowed to form unions, so I have to rely on NEA for my professional insurance (which I pay every month for). I have to have this insurance in case a student's family wants to sue me directly, so please don't bash the NEA. It has its flaws, but it has essentially no influence or power in my state.

2. Tenure is also not an option for me. Again, in my state, I have to renew my certification every five years. Don't assume that just because a teacher has been at it for a while that she (and it usually is a she) is sitting on her ass doing nothing.

3. It is extremely difficult to measure what makes a good teacher, and test scores do not tell the entire story. Last year, my students' scores were off the charts amazing. I only had 6 out of all 100+ of my students not pass the end of course test that my state requires. My AP Language students' scores were also 10 points higher than the national average. However, my students this year are much, much lower than my kids last year, so if my abilities as a teacher were to be measured simply by test scores, it would look like I have gotten worse.

Most proposals for merit-pay are tied to measuring a teacher's worth through test scores. This is the easiest way for administrators, parents, etc. to measure a teacher's effectiveness and value, but it should not be the only way. It is very difficult and time consuming to measure what makes a good teacher, and most states aren't willing to create a reliable way of doing this that doesn't only go by test scores.

There are also some serious concerns about the effectiveness of merit pay based on this recent study from Vanderbilt. We should be very cautious. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/21/AR2010092103413.html

4. Bad teachers should be canned. I know I said that it's hard to determine what a good teacher looks like, but it's pretty easy to determine what a bad teacher looks like. Teachers who only give out worksheets, never push their students with challenging assignments, constantly yell, etc. are probably bad teachers. When I can hear a teacher two rooms down from me and across the hall yelling at her students every day, I think I can pretty safely say she is a bad teacher. When I hear the teacher next door to me finish the day's lesson (which is usually a worksheet) with an hour left in class and the students just sit and talk with one another, it's safe to say she's a bad teacher.

5. Parents and students have very little responsibility in education today. If a student does not do well, the blame is put on the teacher. The "unofficial" policy at our school is that no student fails a class without the teacher notifying the parent before the end of the semester. I guess the three progress reports that the school sends out and allowing parents to electronically access their child's grades at any point in the school year isn't enough notification.

6. The entire system needs to be changed. As much as I enjoy American literature, I know that the majority of my students aren't interested in it. Frankly, I find it hard to justify why they need this class to graduate. It would be much more beneficial if I could teach a writing class to my students and let the literature part of the current curriculum be an elective. As it is, there is so much pressure to get through a certain number of novels and short stories each year that writing is put on the back burner. As a result, many of my juniors come to me not able to write a complete, coherent sentence, but they know all about one or two particular pieces of literature. We need to have a serious discussion in this country about what it means to be educated and what skills and abilities we should require of our students. Our current curriculum is too focused on content rather than skill.


That's about it for now. I've gone on for far too long, and I'm getting very tired of making these points again and again whenever conversations about education come up.

Interesting teacher post

Hey, check out this post from another teacher's blog. I hope I'm doing this link the right way.

http://jtspencer.blogspot.com/2010/08/thought-provoking-video.html

What to do with this blog?

Now that the theater grant with Toby has ended, I'm stuck with this blog. I really don't know what to do with it. Should I try at humor? My personal life? That seems boring and overly done. Also, I'm really not sure if anyone is actually reading this thing anyway. Just in case anyone is, I would appreciate your suggestions.

Here are some things I've thought about including on my blog:
-stories about studying abroad in St. Andrews
-stories about living in Brazil
-trying to learn Portuguese
-teaching (there's a ton to talk about here, including funny, sad, mundane, pedagogical stuff)
-running the 5k in October (I'm not a runner....yet)
-stories about my wacky (to put it nicely) family and pets

If you have any ideas or suggestions for me, leave some comments!

100 Saints You Should Know

We saw our final show a few months ago, 100 Saints You Should Know, and I was completely blown away by it. Finally, we had an original piece that was written for the stage. No adaptations from books, short stories, or interviews. This was what I had been waiting for- an enjoyable, straightforward play.

When I studied abroad in St. Andrews, I would see the weekly student shows for free. Some were certainly better than others, but going to the shows was something fun to do with my friends. It was free and only a mile walk into town (we also had plenty of time since taking two classes was considered to be a full course). After I came back to the states, I hadn't been to any plays until Toby started this project. I suppose it was because I was too lazy to look up shows in Atlanta and couldn't have really afforded them anyway.


One of the questions that Toby asked us when we first began if it was important to cultivate theater audiences, and I'm not quite sure what the answer is to that. Overall, I had fun going to these multiple shows and seeing some plays that I would not have seen on my own. I think I probably will see more shows in the future. In fact, I saw Kristin's awesome play a little while ago, and I head on NPR that Rita Dove's new play just opened. I'm still not sure if cultivating theater audiences is a noble, worthwhile goal, but I will be paying more attention to Atlanta's theater scene.

Women + War

What an awful show. Truly, horribly, awful. In my first post, I tried to reserve criticism of Around the World in Eighty Days, a mediocre show, but I cannot hold back on Women + War.

I was excited to see the show (it's based on interviews from Atlanta-area women who have had experiences in various wars). I was expecting a thoughtfully produced play, something akin to The Vagina Monologues, but what we got was confusing and laughable. There were a few powerful moments in the handful of monologues, but the rest of the play was composed of choral readings, interpretive dancing, and black rocks being passed from actor to actor. It's not the actors' faults; I'm sure they were only following what the director told them to do. However, I do have to wonder what the director was thinking. Why put in superfluous "artistic" touches to stories that are already powerful enough on their own?

I'm reminded of a student I had who would write long, nonsensical sentences with vocabulary straight from the thesaurus. When I asked him why he did this, he admitted that he didn't know what he was trying to say either, but he thought it sounded good. He hadn't thought that his readers might be equally confused and frustrated; he just thought they would be impressed.

Directors, high school students, and everyone in between, aim for clarity in your artistic endeavors.

Edgar Allan Poe

Our class recently saw the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe performed at the Center for Puppetry Arts. Now, I'll admit my love for puppets. I've been a lifelong Muppets fan, and I often put on my own puppet plays from the staircase balcony in my childhood home. However, my views of puppetry were very limited. I was excited to see the show, but I was expecting something along the lines of hand puppets or marionettes moving about a tiny stage with the actors hidden behind a piece of scenery. How wrong I was.

Rather than hiding, the actors moved freely about the stage along with their puppets. I never once, however, felt like the actors were overshadowing the puppets. The show was so incredibly seamless, and the actors became an extension of their puppets. It was a very clever way of performing Poe's works, many of which contain little dialogue. The actors became the narrators while the puppets performed the actions of the stories.

I also liked that they used several of Poe's short stories and poems and blended them into one longer performance. It became a riveting mash-up of his works. Mash-ups are quite popular these days in music, and the T.V. show Glee uses them frequently. It would be a fun and exciting exercise to have my own students create a mash-up of their own and perform it for the class. The students would have to find common themes or ideas that tie the various works together, and this would give them a chance to see how the same author, or different authors from the same movement, have common threads that run through their works. I could easily see taking several Harlem Renaissance poems or Flannery O'Connor short stories and creating a longer work to perform in front of the class.

I might even make them use puppets.

The Canterbury Tales

After our class workshop, Toby took us all down to see the Canterbury Tales at the Shakespeare Tavern. I had been to the Tavern before and enjoyed their production of Romeo and Juliet, so I was looking forward to the Canterbury Tales.

What we saw didn't disappoint me; the play was funny, energetic, and well produced. Some of the tales were more enjoyable than others, but overall I enjoyed myself. What really stood out about the play, however, was that fact that they took several of the tales and updated them into various modern settings.

The idea of adaptation fascinates me. I'm not one of those purists who deplore the idea setting Romeo and Juliet in modern L.A. or turning Julius Caesar into a Western (Harold Bloom, I'm looking at you). I think it's perfectly fine to allow directors their creative licenses, and changing the setting of a familiar story often brings a new understanding to the work. The version of The Canterbury Tales was interesting to watch. I like the disconnect between the Middle English coming out of the actor's mouths while they wore business suits or carried a machine gun because it forced me to think about the tales in a new way and see the connections these older stories have with more contemporary books, movies, and plays.

Updating and and adapting a story into a new setting can be incredibly helpful for our students, allowing them to deepen their understanding of the play. Reading a play can be incredibly difficult, especially Shakespeare. With only dialogue and a few stage directions, the students often have trouble visualizing and comprehending the action of the play. It's perfectly fine for students to act out Caesar's death with foam swords if the purpose is to give the students the chance to see how Caesar is killed and the betrayal of realizing Brutus is there. It is not a "dumbing down" of Shakespeare (again, Harold Bloom, I'm looking at you). Likewise, seeing a familiar play in a new setting forces the audience to re-think their perception of the play and make new connections and understandings of the material. It's Intertextuality at it's finest.

Improv

We recently saw a show at the Alliance Theatre from the Second City acting group. It had an extremely long title (something about peaches dropping and rolling everywhere), but I'm not going to bother with that right now. Part of the show was scripted and part was all improv. Although the show was overall very enjoyable, the best part was definitely the improv. It was fun to see the actors make up hilarious situations on the spot.

The whole point of the grant Toby got is to figure out how to use what we are seeing in the theater in our own classrooms. Naturally, I had no idea what to do. I thought about using improv techniques to teach indirect characterization or to have students imagine a character from a book in a new situation while still retaining the character's traits.

Both of these ideas seemed profoundly lame.

Today, however, Randy from Dad's Garage came and spoke to us while we workshopped at ASC today, and he gave us several, useful ways we can incorporate improv in our classrooms. The one I'm most excited about is the story telling one word at a time. Here is an example:
Person 1: The
Person 2: cat
Person 1: ate
Person 2: some
Person 1: Doritos
Person 2: and
Person 1: then
Person 2: barfed
Person 1: it
Person 2: all
Person 1: up.
As you can see, it's not exactly great or intellectual story-telling, but it can help students think creatively and get them to think critically about how stories are told (and incorporate exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution in their own works). I'm leaving today hopeful and excited about using improv techniques in my own classroom.