Speakout Columns
A bird’s-eye view
Mar 27, 2008 4:39 PM
Dermot Smyth teaches social studies and is the chapter leader at IS 5 in Queens.
I have always been fascinated by how different creatures handle difficult situations. Some run while others stand and confront the problem. Then of course there is the ostrich. It does neither. When something comes along the ostrich doesn’t want to deal with, it simply sticks its head in the sand. Its way of ignoring or hiding from the problem, I guess. If the ostrich can’t see the problem, then the problem can’t see the ostrich!
Those of us who have been in this school system for a few years have become accustomed to the many different strange and silly passing fads that have at one time or another passed through our classrooms. These last few years the biggest pebble in the shoe is the excessive nonsensical paperwork that is far too often being pushed and peddled as if it were some new, great educational breakthrough.
One of the worst examples of this has to be the distortion of the once innocent conference that so often took place between teacher and student. What was before a simple teaching tool, whereby a teacher and a struggling student sat and discussed an area of weakness, and then together addressed it (sometimes at lunch or after school, sometimes during the class), has now been turned into the recording and documenting of the conference discussion into a binder, often called a TAN (a Teacher Assessment Notebook). It’s the DOE, hence the acronym.
Today these conference notes in too many schools are tightly micromanaged, in some cases even with silly rubrics. The sad truth is that many naive school leaders look on this as an important data-collection tool that is instrumental in the learning process. “My math scores have improved ever since the introduction of the TAN,” one administrator from a neighboring school said to me recently. And with a straight face, I might add.
With mindsets like that, one day soon I do believe that even art and dance and yes, even phys ed teachers, with their huge number of students, will also have to record their conversations in humongous binders. A typical physical education entry will no doubt go something like this:
The class attempted 15 pushups today but Bob only completed six. In my conference with Bob I asked him why he had only done six of the 15 pushups. Bob told me that he got tired and that was why. I asked him why he got tired and he told me that he had “went” to bed late last night and so was tired when he got up this morning.
Before I told Bob to try getting to bed a little earlier, I had to shout to the other 75 students, who were running around going crazy while I conferenced, that they should all go to their work stations and complete the task assigned to them there. That task is to explain how high a basketball net is from the ground and why that is. I don’t think they listened.
But Bob did. He said that he would go to bed earlier next time and that then he might be able to do at least another two pushups. I told him that that would be a good improvement and that when that time came I would sit and conference with him again on why he could only complete two more and not the full required 15.
I then told him to go back to his floor spot and to write in his SAN (a student assessment notebook) what he thought he got from the conference. Bob wrote that he learned that if he stopped watching “SpongeBob” reruns he might not be so tired and that then he might be able to do another two pushups.
Then the bell rang and the class ended. No one could figure out what height the basketball net was off the ground. Now, every day for the next two months I will spend conferencing individually with students, trying to see why each of them didn’t know the answer to that workstation question.
Next time you have a chance, bring this up at a department meeting or at your next staff conference. Ask why your school is still continuing with these silly practices when no one from outside is pushing them and no one from your staff supports or believes in them. If it goes as I suspect, you will learn quickly if you have any ostriches in your building. They will be the ones telling you how good conferencing is, how it drives instruction, how well it works, and how there are absolutely no problems whatsoever. They will be the ones telling you all this with their heads buried deep, like the ostrich, inside a hole.
