Accountability & Activity Success

I think that right now the single biggest question in education is "Who is held accountable for student success and failure?" To most of us, the answer feels obvious. How matter of fact could it be? But who is it you think? Why, the students of course. They are the ones taking the tests, the ones who decide how much to study and how much they wish to commit themselves to the material.

Well, yes and no. Other voices will proclaim that it is in fact the teachers who are responsible. I am reminded of an example of Plato, where he taught a young slave boy geometry. Initially the boy failed to grasp the concepts and Plato acknowledged the failure was his as a teacher and not that of the boy. By changing how he was teaching, Plato showed the boy how to find the measurement for the shortest side of a triangle when the other two sides were unknown. This is not a small task, considering the child had minimal at best reading, writing and mathematics skills.

Does the burden of proof then lie with the administration to set things right? After all, if they assigned students to teachers who could work best with them and responsively facilitated student and faculty needs, there shouldn't be any worries, right?

And so on and so forth as this issue gets more and more tangled.

My own opinion (and this blog is in many ways nothing more than that, my own thoughts on education) the responsibility lies between students and teachers. If a student is adamantly set against success, there is little a teacher can inherently do to help. Yet it then falls to the teacher to learn why a student is so defiant and reluctant to learn.

In a lot of ways, I view teaching as something more than just a job or even a career. It is something I have Afición for (a Spanish word blatantly appropriated by Hemingway for The Sun Also Rises and now appropriated by me in grand literary tradition). Afición means passion, but the type that goes beyond the normal or reasonable. Those who are fans of bullfighting are all well and good, but those with Afición know the bullfighters, know their records, connect with the bulls themselves as the fight goes on, etc. Teaching to me is something that is crucial to everyone, and I think that many teachers lose their Afición as time goes on. I might yet as well, but when I'm in the classroom I feel energized. A little shaky, a little nervous, but also so full of energy I can barely sit still. I have been working on becoming a teacher for about six years now.

Yesterday I had two big successes. In my first class, I lead a discussion on news sources. I handed out copies of a news story from Tuesday about Muntazer al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who throw his shoes at George W. Bush last year. He was just released from prison and has said he was tortured. CNN initially didn't report anything about torture, but the BBC did. Then when the AP news story came out later in the day, CNN changed their story to match. I mixed up the stories, so that every four students had different stories and once everyone was done reading it, I asked what the headline was. Unfortunately it took long enough for everyone to read it that many students noticed they didn't have the same article.

If I were to do this assignment again, I would either find a different news source for each student or put them together in small groups and have them read and then discuss the stories. I also wish instead of using the BBC, the AP News and both copies of CNN's story, I'd just used both copies of CNN.

I learned something about accommodations in this class. While working with a deaf student, I should have provided the student with the material first before anyone else. This would have given the student a chance to read it more thoroughly and let other students read and catch up.

During my freshman block, I had a great opening activity. Mrs. C told everyone that I was going to be administering a test. Everyone grumbled but then I segued into telling them "Now Mrs. C and I have agreed that we're going to change around some classroom rules, and we're going to do so by voting. You all each get one vote, but we want only the best votes to count. So I've got a little test for you. If you get two wrong, you fail. If you talk once I've finished passing out papers, you not only lose the right to vote but I will also crumple up your paper."

After one student asked a question aloud after I put down the last test, I just walked silently over and crumpled his paper. After that the room went dead silent.

What I'd like to have done differently in this case was make all the students stand and then read the question and then the answer aloud. If it is wrong, have the student sit down. Instead I rushed the answer process because it was a foregone conclusion. The students were seething, and I then tapped into those feelings of anger and unfairness. We really started up a great conversation about the type of literacy tests African-Americans had to take in order to vote - and once I mentioned that anybody who actually passed the test had to pay me ten dollars per vote, they went wild! It was a really great success and I think I engaged with a lot of students who might otherwise have tuned out or just not connected with this type of lesson.