A<\/span> few years ago, my youngest son, in middle school at the time, asked me to edit an essay.\u00a0 An efficient thinker and resourceful writer, he didn\u2019t require much assistance.\u00a0 I suggested he cut a repetitive sentence from a paragraph, but he shook his head.\u00a0 His teacher had instructed him paragraphs must be at least six sentences long.\u00a0 As a writer, I was dumbfounded.\u00a0 Had I missed that chapter in Strunk and White?\u00a0 Had some new style guide replaced it?\u00a0 Had the relationship of style to content suddenly reversed?\u00a0 I had written several dozen paragraphs less than six sentences—some with as few as one.\u00a0 My God, I thought, this is the key to the craft: six sentence paragraphs.\u00a0 Bestseller list and royalties were, finally, there to be had; I was armed for success.\u00a0 Wait, yep, ten sentences; eleven counting this one.<\/p>\n

But as a high school teacher, all I could do is whistle and say, \u201cThat\u2019s some catch, that Catch 22.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe best there is,\u201d my son replied.<\/p>\n

Consider public schools in this country for more than, say five minutes, and you will encounter a Yossarian moment: longer and, like Yossarian, you will find nothing but Yossarian moments.\u00a0 Education is rife with the systematically ridiculous.<\/p>\n

For twenty-nine of my fifty-three years, I have been a public high school teacher.\u00a0 Three of my own children have navigated similar halls and similar systems to those in which I make a living.\u00a0 I make no claim to excellence in the field; I am as strong a teacher as I can be, no more than many of my peers.\u00a0 I have been paid decently and I am confident my peers and students would say I have more than earned that pay.<\/p>\n

In these nearly three decades, nothing fundamental about education has changed.\u00a0 Each year, schools introduce the latest reform designed to meet the latest standards issued by the latest political appointee\u2019s memo.\u00a0 I have been in the business long enough to see reforms make their second laps, thinly repackaged as the newest way to reach kids.\u00a0 They don\u2019t work any better or worse the second time.\u00a0 The lens through which the culture views reform and, more fundamentally, what teachers and students do in a classroom is clouded by a cataract of ignorance and deceit they confuse for a corrective lens.<\/p>\n

One of the facets of Jared Diamond\u2019s work I appreciate the most is his willingness to investigate the most fundamental questions of science without the scale of contemporary and popular perspectives and presumed givens as a starting point.\u00a0 I wish someone would do that for education in this country.<\/p>\n

They might explore, for example, standardized tests.\u00a0 The testing industry has managed to marry into the family of government agencies and all its attendant sycophants.\u00a0 Retired school administrators become political consultants for legislators, lobbyists for the testing industry, test developers, or, on the delivery end, pedants instructing teachers how to match lessons to several hundred learning objectives.\u00a0 These folks don\u2019t work for free; in fact, their salaries often exceed six figures and there are several thousand of them in each state.\u00a0 And we have not even addressed the billions in profits the actual testing companies make on the endeavor.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The only thing that guarantees their continued profits: student failure.\u00a0 If students pass the test, the industry falls apart.\u00a0 As a result they alter the tests constantly which justifies their continued employment.\u00a0 In my state, Washington, several times the scores have been so distressingly high they have been cancelled and rescored.\u00a0 Once they were too low, low enough that they implied a flaw in the test, not the students or teachers; again they were rescored.\u00a0 The state average scores have crept higher recently, so the Superintendent of Public Instruction scrapped the entire program and replaced it with another. Requiring a new set of standards, new training, new tests, and apparently more advice in all corners.\u00a0 Teacher salaries are frozen, classroom sizes have ballooned, school infrastructures are collapsing but the testing industry is growing exponentially throughout the country.<\/p>\n

Not to say that we teachers are blameless.\u00a0 There are too many of us in this business that should never speak to a kid, even our own, perhaps especially our own.\u00a0 These teachers come in several sizes: the two following the most prevalent.<\/p>\n

\u2022The Bureaucrat:\u00a0 Some teachers simply assign tasks that can be scored easily and then assess their students by putting similar problems on a test weighted with more points.\u00a0 They have mastered the bureaucratic capacity to match their test questions and lessons to state or national standards.\u00a0 Typically one third of their classes fail.\u00a0 Upon inquiry, such teachers will say they have high standards.<\/p>\n

These individuals are insulated not by tenure or teachers unions so much as by the misguided bureaucracy which implements common standards that, after billions of dollars of research and years of debate, remain as arbitrary and imprecise as a weather report in Tornado Alley, then requires schools to demonstrate teachers construct lessons to match this litany.\u00a0 This approach to standards emphasizes evidence of curricular standards embedded in a class and assessment of those standards.\u00a0 There is no mention of the quality of teaching.\u00a0 These teachers are very good at lists and documentation and paperwork; they recognize them as both job security and an opportunity to bypass, for reasons of fear or apathy, the most distasteful portion of their careers: interacting with kids.\u00a0 Nowhere in these mandates are they required to actually teach, endeavors in which they are either incapable or uninterested.<\/p>\n

These teachers have no interest in their subject matter, no interest in the kids, and are the least likely to lose their jobs.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because they can demonstrate their work meets capricious standards that have little to do with educating a person.<\/p>\n

\u2022The Autocrat:\u00a0 Some teachers are just plain misanthropes.\u00a0 Don\u2019t accuse them of apathy; they care deeply about power and exercise is it with the joy and vehemence of a prison guard over a chain gang.<\/p>\n

They, too, claim their reason as high standards, though they are more likely to cite discipline and character as motivation.\u00a0 They argue they are shaping young people for future success.\u00a0 Their method is intolerance:\u00a0 Your mother had to be rushed to the hospital last night and you didn\u2019t get your homework finished?\u00a0\u00a0 Well, you get a zero; rules are rules.\u00a0 I hope your mom improves.<\/p>\n

These teachers typically respond to any question of authority or subject matter as personal challenges and they avenge themselves through referrals to the principal for questionable infractions (defiance) and the subjectivity inherent in the system that to any teacher can employ against a student, when he or she sees fit.<\/p>\n

These people are difficult to fire as well, because teachers aren\u2019t evaluated on levels of bitterness or rancor.\u00a0 They often demand unreasonable, impractical amounts of repetitive work to overwhelm the student who may venture toward actual curiosity.\u00a0 They trade every intellectual instinct, any hint of reflection for their highest value: obedience.<\/p>\n

Since obedience is the coin of the realm in schools and athletics, and schools value athletics at least as much as they do academic success (they see the two as intertwined), administrators are often the strongest advocates of such teachers.<\/p>\n

Take these teaching approaches, add standardized tests and rote obedience and you have an excellent recipe for the ludicrous<\/p>\n

In math or science, students are asked to show their work, as a way of judging the thinking behind the answer, but if they solve the problem with a method not prescribed by those assessing the tests, their scores are discounted.\u00a0 If a student employs the proper process and gets the answer incorrect (due to a computation error, usually) he is awarded points anyway.<\/p>\n

Only in the field of education is such thinking logical.\u00a0 Math problems, outside the realm of public schools, are typically self-assigned.\u00a0 They arise from a need for data and an application of numerical principals to gather that information in order to construct a bridge that won\u2019t collapse, let\u2019s say, or a building that will endure and earthquake or to determine the pitch and degree a satellite must travel to maintain a proper orbit.\u00a0 Relying on a formula for such tasks without the capacity to adjust it to your own ends is about as useful as the counting pig at the fair.\u00a0 Yes, it can grunt three times when the ringmaster tells it to add two and one, but ask it to subtract five from eight and it turns half of a good breakfast, and arriving at the wrong conclusion, whether you use an approved method or not, is disasterous; similarly, arriving at the correct conclusion using any method at one\u2019s disposal will allow one to successfully complete the project at hand, and what other practical purpose is there in mathematics?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s get visit my particular rubber room.\u00a0 Instead of navigating the political mid-management administrative labyrinth that ends in a consulting position with no responsibility other than re-organizing fifty-year old maxims into catchy acronyms and declaring them reform, I remain in the classroom and write fiction in my free time (there is nothing necessarily noble about either, I assure you), which makes me witness to such lunacy as well as a part of its system of delivery.\u00a0 My particular corner of the asylum is the English language, however, this discipline\u2019s madness parallels all the others.<\/p>\n

Writing can\u2019t be assessed in in an unassailable way, which means there is no sum or quotient or vector or determined correct conclusion that one can say, without qualification, is the answer and all other conclusions are not.\u00a0 It can\u2019t be assessed in in an unassailable way.\u00a0 This makes the endeavor particularly troubling for education; the most assailed American institution in America outside of Congress is uninclined to add arrows to its critics quiver.<\/p>\n

Instead of laws of physics or mathematical properties, writing is a craft containing rules of thumb: tenets to employ in instances of confusion, though not doctrine one can live by (add to this that some of these tenets are brainless: use a comma whenever you take a breath\u00a0 — what if you have asthma?).\u00a0 Like Oliver Wendell Holmes explanation of pornography \u2013 \u201cI can\u2019t define it, but I know it when I see it\u201d\u2014it is much easier to identify effective writing than it is to identify why it is so.\u00a0 Discussing such requires patience and time and a familiarity with the craft, the two former a difficult proposition when teaching five classes of thirty kids or more; the latter, simply a tool few English\/education graduates, whose programs are typically literature-focused, possess.<\/p>\n

Education addresses this problem by ignoring all the various organic ways writers develop quality prose and, instead, imposes a code that produces consistent results, never mind that those results are mediocre and banal at best.\u00a0 One must adhere to something deemed the writing process, a prescriptive, step-by-step template (not unlike a geometric proof), which doesn\u2019t promote or aim to produce inspired work.\u00a0 Uninspired work, it turns out, is easier to measure.\u00a0 A student can be awarded points for brainstorming, clustering, then outlining, then constructing topic and thesis sentences to hold these diluted notions in place.\u00a0 They are awarded no points and often suffer deductions for unadulterated insights that may add spirit to this otherwise weak concoction.<\/p>\n

Every year, I ask my students how many do their pre-writing after completing their essays in order to get the points.\u00a0 Sixty percent, typically, lift their hands.\u00a0 Though the process prescribed to them doesn\u2019t match the manner in which writers write or in which most children encounter and develop thought, though it casts off the values of creativity, analysis, and critical insight for impersonal regiment, this manufactured process carries the weight of law because it can be assessed simply with a rubric and check marks, despite the end having no purpose and only an occasional and accidental relationship with most organic thought and quality prose.<\/p>\n

Writing is done by writers, not widgets.\u00a0 Despite its constant claims of reform, education seems more committed than ever to turning classrooms into assembly lines and each generation of students into rust belt relics.\u00a0 The industrial model has proven dysfunctional in democratic states and a capitalist economy over the last forty years.\u00a0 Why would anyone continue its practice in schools?\u00a0 Kids can write and they can think, often far better before an English teacher gets ahold of them than after.\u00a0 Education, like factory engines, cannot tolerate original thought, however.\u00a0 Imagine the chaos if the machine\u2019s gears and pulleys try to construct a better motor.\u00a0 On the other hand, imagine the stagnant nature of motors: parts function without thinking.\u00a0 The latter is the school American children attend.<\/p>\n

Good writing in schools, like good teaching or original thought, typically happens despite educational dogma, not because of it.\u00a0 This is a shame, because so many good, generous teachers are diverted from the children in their charge and the inspiration in their minds by an institutional sophistry that leads nowhere.\u00a0 Damn, only two sentences.\u00a0 Well, now three.\u00a0 No, four.\u00a0 Now five.\u00a0 At last, six.\u00a0 No seven.\u00a0 How many missions is it this week, Colonel Cathcart, or should I ask Ex PFC Wintergreen?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That\u2019s some catch, that Catch 22<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2977"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2977\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3073,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2977\/revisions\/3073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}