CURMUDGUCATION: The Human-Proof Classroom

CURMUDGUCATION: The Human-Proof Classroom:
The Human-Proof Classroom

I am a big believer in having a teacher toolbox chock full of many and varied tools. I also believe that just because a tool doesn't work well for me, that doesn't mean it can't work for someone else.

            Nevertheless, there are some approaches that simply don't belong in a classroom ever.

Take scripting. Scripted lessons have been with us for a while, even before the folks at EngageNY decided that having teachers travel in lockstep through units was somehow a good idea.

            Scripting has always had apologists. Way back in 2007, Georgia teacher educator Michelle Commeyras took to the pages of the Phi Delta Kappa magazine to make a half-hearted case for scripting. Commeyras traces the modern scripted lesson back to Siegfried Engelmann and Carl Bereiter, "who in the 1960s developed the direct instruction method of teaching reading to raise the academic success of inner-city children." This is unsurprising; rich school districts will be looking for teachers who know what they're talking about, not those who need a script.

            Commeyras shared my attitude--at first. But she insisted that the more she watched teachers work from scripts, the more she saw good teachers who made individual choices. In other words, they worked over and above the script. Beyond the script. Off the script. Which is kind of my point. If you need a script to work in a classroom, you don't belong in a classroom.

            Commeyras was writing in 2007, before the newest, biggest wave of reformsterism hit the beach like a tanker full of whale carcasses, each one of those carcasses stamped "teacher-proof." Publishers promised programs that could not be bollixed up by a teacher. Just open the box, hand out the materials, read the script, and deliver the content.

            Commeyras offered an analogy that has been oft-repeated--it's just like having an actor read a script, bringing the character to life through the actor's choices, movement, reading, and action. Different actors can still make different choices; Ryan Gosling and Mel Brooks would make very different Hamlets.

            But the actor analogy doesn't hold up. Actors and playwrights collaborate to bring a character to life, to put a living breathing human in front of the audience. Manufacturers of teaching scripts are doing the opposite--doing their best to erase every tiny piece of real, live human from the teacher's performance. Shakespeare wrote lines and it makes all the difference who reads them. But it's supposed to make no difference at all which "actor" delivers a Success for All lesson.

            But reading Edushyster today made me realize just how much worse things have gotten.Amy Berard's account of being coached in the No Nonsense Nurturing school of schooling is CURMUDGUCATION: The Human-Proof Classroom:

Winning International Competition

Hey, look! According to reporting in the New York Times and the Washington Post, some jobs are coming back from China. I wonder why that is.

The NYT piece by Hiroko Tabuchi focuses on the textile industry. Currently some Chinese companies are opening plants in the American South; the piece is anchored by a look at a worker from the Chinese plant training American workers to do her job in a highly automated plant that may use as few as 500 workers.

Why is this happening? Are the heads of these corporations saying, "Wow! Now that a generation of workers have grown up with the Common Core and had their educational achievement certified by high stakes standardized tests, we totally want to come employ these workers who are clearly bastions of international competitiveness." Or perhaps the bosses are saying, "These Chinese workers just don't have the deep level of educational achievement that

Well, no. They're not. From Ana Swenson's piece in the Washington Post:

Even when adjusted for productivity, Chinese manufacturing wages have risen by 187 percent over the decade. Industrial electricity costs have grown 66 percent, while natural gas costs are up 138 percent.
 
In the same time frame, U.S. wages have risen only 27 percent, while natural gas costs have fallen 25 percent, according to Boston Consulting.

Yes, shockingly, the international competition is about what it's always been about-- money. Having textiles manufactured in China by workers who work for peanuts in the cheapest of manufacturing conditions used to be the winning formula. Now Chinese want more pay, and demand has pushed up the cost of running manufacturing facilities.

Competing for those jobs is not about having the best public school educational standards. It has never been about that. It's about mustering a competent work force that will work cheap in cheap 

Winning International Competition