Signs and Wonders

(Cleveland Post December 15, 2011)

The children - literate, middle class, mostly elementary age - gathered around the teacher. The teacher held up a poster with a symbol on it and said, "I bet you all can tell me what this is."

The symbol was a circle, line down the middle with two additional lines sprouting symmetrically from the center in the direction (roughly) of five and seven o'clock. It looks enough like a bird's foot to give credence to one of it's names I had been taught as a child.

With the satisfaction of people who know what they are talking about, the children shouted out in unison "The hippie sign!"

All the grown-ups laughed.

It was, of course, the peace sign.

Peace signs do not leave me feeling warm and fuzzy. Nonetheless, I was fascinated by their response. These children have grown up during a war, live in a time when the peace sign is a fashion statement, particularly on girl's clothes. How could they not know its proper name?

Maybe they did know it and forgot it. Maybe they didn't know. Whatever the reason, the symbol showed up enough to need a name. Maybe they used context clues to give it their own label: the hippie sign.

In reading, context clues are an example of what teachers call a reading strategy. When you encounter a word you don't recognize, look at the words around it to see what they can tell you. It can take you far, but isn't perfect. I remember trying to make 'menstruation' into 'administration' in fifth grade.

The reaction of these children made me wonder: what other symbols have they labeled using context clues?

Do the Stars and Stripes, red, white and blue make them think of "Liberty and justice for all" or the July 4th cookout display at the grocery store? Does Santa Claus make them think of sharing a joyous Christmas morning with their families or of how much loot they expect to rack up? Is the swastika a Nazi symbol or a German symbol and do they know the difference?

What comes to mind when they see religious symbols?

The children are not entirely wrong in labeling the peace sign "The hippie sign." Their answer is a reminder that nothing is obvious to eyes that haven't been taught to see.

It is up to us to teach them to see. For one thing, symbols often give meaning to the things surrounding them, rather than taking meaning from them. A cross on the steeple of a white clapboard church states the building has been set aside for Christian purposes, not that only white clapboard buildings with steeples are churches.

For another, the nature of symbols is such that there is nothing to keep their meaning from changing over time or at the hands of different groups. The hooked cross was used in positive ways by a broad range of cultures before the Nazis adopted it and we came to know it as a swastika. Do our children know there are multiple meanings? Do they know which meanings we ascribe to, which ones we reject?

Ultimately, it comes down to teaching our children about our symbols before someone else does it for us. Peace signs were defined for me by someone who held them and their bearers in contempt. Over time, I met people whom I respected who also aligned themselves with with the peace movement. My perspective enlarged and shifted to the point I was as disgusted seeing peace signs reduced to the "in" fashion accessory as I had been when crosses went through the same craze. Respect, not affection.

The holidays are full of "Look! See! Wow!" moments with children. They are also full of symbols. Take advantage of these teachable moments. Talk with your children, find out what they think they see. Laugh. Read stories together. Sing songs. Learn. Love.

Back to School -- As A Parent (Cleveland Post September 8, 2011)

Everybody who went to school has an opinion about education.

It may go off the radar after graduation. As fast as they can, graduates turn their backs on childhood and look to the start of 'real' life, and a chance to earn some money. Perhaps they journey to far off lands, over to the next county, or just down the road.

They take on more responsibilities, maybe get married and start a family. That leads to worrying about the future, the economy, taxes, and right on up to attention to politics. The day comes when they start listening to the news, and education is right there in the middle of it.

The loudest education news is rarely good. In the last sixty or so years, alarms have been raised about students who can't read, teachers who can't teach, 'new math', social promotion, falling standards, political correctness, revisionist history, violence. Popular wisdom is convinced American education is crumbling and has only to point to the education majors on The Tonight Show's 'Jaywalking' segment to prove its point.

Many find themselves thinking, 'They wouldn't have put up with that mess when I was in school!' Or "They knew better than that where I went to school."

For some of us, this is what's in our heads the day we show up to register our child for kindergarten.

And so, a couple of misspelled words later, a counter-intuitive request for information becomes Evidence: Evidence that Education is Going to Pot in a Picnic Basket.

Well, maybe. Maybe not.

By taking deep breaths and listening more than opining (not an easy thing for me!), I have found a lot to praise in my six years' experience with the teachers and administrators in our school.

The teachers and administrators are professionals. They know their stuff. They work in partnership with parents. They are doing creative, informative and exciting things in the classroom that build a solid foundation for subjects to come.

As someone who hated math, the most exciting things I have seen are in math. Teachers show students a variety of ways to come at a problem in order to solve it. They are challenging the myth that "word" people can not be "math" people. This is a good thing.

Discipline and behavior can be particularly sore points when it comes to children and school. I have seen kindergarten teachers bring their classes from enthusiastic cutting and pasting to silent attentiveness in a count of three. I have seen students come into class, put away their belongings and settle into morning work without a word from the teacher. I have seen students who understand they are there to learn and who do their part maintain an environment that makes learning possible.

I have found that schools in North Carolina have significant local control. While the state sets the curriculum and counties have fundamental policies, there are many things handled differently at each school. As an example, one school may allow homemade cupcakes for birthdays, while the one down the road may require store-bought foods to prevent food-borne illness or allergies. Specific discipline procedures also vary. One size does not fit all.

School officials operate under the huge number of constraints we as a society have placed upon them. Everybody knows this. But knowing doesn't always prepare one for how crazy some requirements can be. They may or may not have anything to do with learning. They are frequently at cross purposes.

Legal requirements govern things from the length of the school day to the quantity of peanut butter on a school-provided PB & J. Fiscal constraints reach their tentacles into issues far beyond the availability of technology in the classroom or the cost of more buses. As Johnston County's Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Ed Croom, said during his Kitchen Table Discussions earlier this year, if Federal law states money must be spent on red pens and only red pens, it can't be used on anything else, even if you don't need red pens.

These obstacles leave lots of room for decisions to look, well, less than brilliant. I still, on occasion, wonder what the world is coming to.

But the fact is that I am quite pleased with the things my children have learned and they ways they have grown through attending Johnston County Schools. That first hand experience and personal satisfaction has to be the foundation of any opinion I hold on education. No matter what they say in the news.

They Didn't Do It That Way When I Was in School! (Cleveland Post, August 25, 2011)

"They didn't do it that way when I was in school." This thought passed through my mind over and over again the first year or two my daughter was in school.

It started with kindergarten orientation and a question on the information form about toilet training. Hidden in the institutional jargon was the question "Can your child go to the bathroom by herself and wipe her own bottom?"

I knew potty training was a controversial issue with some parents, but what, I thought, is the world coming to when there are children entering kindergarten who can't go to the bathroom by themselves?

The arrival of the 'Welcome to School' letter from the teacher and assistant didn't ease my fears: it was informative, cheerful, inviting, but sprinkled with bad grammar and improper punctuation. Educational rigor begins in kindergarten, and if the teachers were not rigorous in their own writing, it could only go downhill from there.

But the letter turned out to be a fluke, not at all representative of the conditions in the classroom. The teacher was great, the TA genuinely loving and supportive in the way that builds character, not ego. The classroom was pleasant, my daughter liked school. I took a deep breath, closed my mouth and concentrated on inputs from my eyes and ears.

I did ask questions, but tried to ask them non-judgmentally. That's not easy.

The crux of the matter is that school is something we all know something about. Everybody spent at least nine years and more likely twelve or thirteen years of their life under the direct influence of a school system. It is something we all feel we can speak on with some authority.

But: what is it that we really know?

For starters, we know what it was like at our school, when we were in it -- how many years ago?

Somewhere into my daughter's third or fourth year in school, it occurred to me to calculate how long it had been since I was in school. Yikes.

And then there was location. Reading, writing and arithmetic may be universal, but the schools instituted to teach them are governed by local ideals. Rural, suburban, and suburbanizing school systems each come at education with different experiences. Further, each principal adds his or her own stamp, for better or worse.

Its mind-boggling to think how much the world has changed since my generation started school. Back then, my parents rented black telephones from the telephone company. The phones had curly cords and rotary dials.

Kindergarten was a half day. We had a real piano in the classroom and my teacher played it while we sang. I didn't learn to read until first grade, when I met Dick and Jane. "New math" came along in third or fourth grade.

Our elementary school averaged between two and three classes per grade and went from kindergarten through sixth grade.

We had safety patrols - older students selected by their teachers to receive special training from the county police and deputized to enforce proper behavior on the bus. They got to wear cool dayglo orange belts and badges, and served as color guards for the school flags.

On the bus, the only kids with assigned seats were those who caused trouble.

Junior high school covered seventh through ninth grade. My year was first to attend the brand-new one. It had a "media center" (not a library) and was air conditioned. It was built with "open" classrooms - movable partitions, few solid walls,-- to make the learning experience more flexible and open.

By ninth grade, they were adding walls.

*****

A school system reflects the world around it. Outside the classroom, we had landed on the moon, resisted Communism by sending young men to bleed and die in Vietnam, and integrated classrooms. We watched Richard Nixon create the Environmental Protection Agency, go to China, and resign in disgrace. We had reacted in horror and outrage as the Arabs embargoed oil, gasoline prices rose and Japan addressed the problem better than Detroit, with small, fuel efficient cars they gladly exported for our use. And, with much pride and many worries about the future, we celebrated our Bicentennial in 1976.

And that was all before I graduated high school.

*****

How were your school years different? I'd love to hear about it. Send me an email at ksvolcjak@gmail.com

Actions Speak Loudest (From the Cleveland Post July 14, 2011)

Have you heard about the cheating scandal in the Atlanta Public Schools?

It wasn't the students. In 44 schools, going back as many as 10 years, principals and teachers have changed answers on high stakes standardized tests to improve their schools' performance numbers. Of 178 principals and teachers identified as having participated in 2009, 82 have confessed.

The report was released July 5 and is available through the Atlanta Journal-Constitution at ajc.com. Outrageous only begins to describe it.

The report opens with the obvious, "Thousands of school children were harmed..." The discussion of the harm seems to have been limited to those quantifiable pedagogical and regulatory items: deprived of access to additional help for academic weaknesses that likely would have been revealed by untainted results; deprived of effective teaching because it wasn't necessary to achieve the necessary scores; the cumulative damage of experiencing these deprivations over successive years.

Those things point to the curriculum and what the children didn't learn. But to my mind, the greater damage comes from what they did learn.

School is the first official place embryonic citizens are sent to learn about our society. Through the instruction of the teachers and the management of the principal, they are supposed to learn the things they need to succeed in life.

The best traditions of our civilization have determined that these start with reading, writing, arithmetic, and science. These are the tools of thinking, problem solving, exploration, and discovery. They are activated by personal curiosity and motivation, and lead to the kind of competence, confidence, self-reliance and ingenuity that set the United States apart early on. Education is something the student participates in and contributes to, not something that is done to him.

Competent, confident, self-reliant people can find jobs and feed their families. At the bare minimum, they're good for the economy.

Maybe the teachers and principals in Atlanta believe this in theory, or did believe it at one time. It is possible they never believed it, never bought into it because they never had anyone model it for them. And there is evidence that they had to choose between cheat or get fired.

However they came to participate in this betrayal, they have taught their students something quite different. Worse, they have gone a long way towards keeping them from every learning it.

I can imagine the thoughts of a perceptive Atlanta elementary student, particularly given the contemporary emphasis on self-esteem: "My teachers and principal lied to me. They told me I was smart and could do the work. They told me to be honest. They told me they loved me. But behind my back they changed my test answers. They don't think I'm smart. They don't believe I can do the work. And they're teachers, so they must be right."

I imagine that the thoughts of even the most well-behaved middle school students would require some editing for a family newspaper. Their cynical suspicions have been confirmed: "They say success is about education but its not. Its all about money and not what you know but who you know, and whose butt you kiss. Its all a crock."

If I believed that, I'd want to tax the daylights out of rich people, too.

Why does this story matter to us, to anybody outside of Atlanta? There are actually a number of wonky public policy and statistical reasons, including the fact that school systems compare themselves to each other to get a better handle on performance or efficacy of various teaching methods.

And there's the fact that there are discussions in our state about tying teacher pay to performance. Here is evidence that such a relationship creates an incentive to cheat.

But ultimately, I think this mess serves as a cautionary reminder of the role school plays in our society. Schools convey the values of the communities that establish them and the people who run them. Children hear the actions of those adults far more clearly than they do their words. The older they get, the better they get at detecting the discrepancies, and the less tolerant of them they become.

It makes me wonder: if today's students detect lots of discrepancies, how supportive of the public school system will they be when it comes time to educate their children?

And could it be that those uninvolved parents educators worry about so much just learned the wrong lesson when they were in school?

I Spy (from the Cleveland Post June 16, 2011)

Summer vacation is here! Time to pack the young 'uns in the car and hit the road for adventure, fun and a visit to Grandma's.

And to while away the time, a challenging game of "I Spy," the most life-shaping game I ever played.

I was not always very good at it. In fact, I was routinely whomped by my oldest brother, never mind that he was two years younger than I.

That boy had the keenest eyesight of anyone I have ever known. "I spy something blue" never referred to something so obvious as the sky. Oh, no. More likely it was the tiny blue dot indicating 'cooling' on the air conditioning control on the dash of the car. It was maddening.

His most impressive feat occurred after our "I spy" days had past. We were driving along a country highway and passed an overgrown back yard with a tarp-covered lump up against the fence. The lump had an exposed tail light that caught his eye. That was enough for him to ID it as a 1966 Dodge Charger, without letting up on the accelerator.

His eye didn't just catch mechanical details. Even as a kid, he was a gifted naturalist. Shark's teeth seemed to materialize on the beach exclusively before his eyes, even though my eyes scanned the same stretch of sand. Wading through the creek together, he could pick out frogs and lizards from the vegetation they sought for protection. Literally close enough to bite me, I would never have seen them if he hadn't pointed them out.

He'd show me, and then I would see. Don't just look for the frog but for the places the frog likes to be. I would keep that in mind and look some more, but by then he'd be on to something else: while I was looking for frogs, he'd have spotted a crayfish. I could not keep up.

But I wanted to. Rivalry is not the only thread binding sibling relationships. Yes, I wanted to hold my own in "I Spy" and find as many sharks' teeth on the beach. But there was more to it than that. Our relationship made his curiosity contagious and gave his interests clout. My attachment to him meant his interests had a claim on me.

I see this in my own children. My son isn't particularly fond of horses but he knows his sister is and so keeps an eye out on her behalf. Similarly, she doesn't like trains but he does and so she notices rail cars on a siding and can be counted on to make disdainful remarks about Thomas merchandise they see in a store (he has outgrown Thomas, you see, and doesn't like to be reminded of his childish past).

This kind of relationship changes how you see the world. Not only does it expand the number of things you see when you look, it broadens the nature of those things. The search for wildlife comes to include the search for signs of wildlife.

But even before that, it modifies your attitude. Yours is not the only self on your mind as you peer out at the world. If that other self sees the world differently, that will change what you see. That is the first step away from accepting the world as described by others and towards letting world reveal itself to you.

Even as a kid, I was a heavy reader, so this was a big (if unnoticed) step. To fairy tales, fantasy and history (fiction and non), I added muscle cars and fishing and bluegrass (that one took a while) and various branches of marine science.

Interestingly, bluegrass lead me to my husband. We have been adding to each other's perspective for a number of years now.

So, if you find yourself stuck in the car on a long trip, try a game of "I spy" to pass the time. It could change your life.

Defining the Problem, Inside and Outside of the Box (from The Cleveland Post, November 18, 2010)

Defining the Problem, Inside and Outside of the Box

by

Kathleen S. Volcjak

I love this quote from Donald Rumsfeld:

"There are known knowns. These are the things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."

Learning to figure out which is which is (or should be) one of the main goals of education. I have tutored elementary and middle school students in math on and off for over fifteen years, and it is this skill that trips most of them up. Given 327 x 6, they know what to do (multiply) and what to do it to (327 and 6). No unknowns here.

But what to do when the multiplication sign is taken away and replaced with words?! Sometimes there are extra numbers, too, and the point is for the student to learn to sort through what is relevant and what is not, what is known but not relevant.

Children often provide their own examples of what is known but irrelevant. Consider this problem: "It takes Rick's mother fifteen minutes to drive from their home to his Cub Scout meeting. If his mother leaves at 5:30, what time will they arrive at the meeting?" Adults get to the point (hopefully) that they see it's the same elapsed time problem as 'If Molly puts the cookies in the oven at 5:30 and they bake for fifteen minutes, what time will it be when she takes them out?'

But not children. They make associations with words, like how Mama grumbles about the traffic after school and that time there was an accident and they sat next to Bojangles and smelled the fried chicken for a really long time. It becomes perfectly reasonable for a child capable of calculating elapsed time to say "I don't know" because, for her, the effect of traffic is a relevant known unknown.

The farther we move from being students, the more complex the problems become. We become the ones who create them and the ones responsible for developing answers. Not a comforting thought, considering the groans the mere mention of 'word problems' draws from many old enough to know better.

And so we come to the state budget. $3 billion dollars more scheduled to go out than expected to come in. Governor Bev Perdue has asked all agencies to present budgets showing 5%, 10%, and 15% cuts, and is also putting together proposals for restructuring government all together. Fine, as far as it goes.

But this is where the known knowns, the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns come in to play. We ought to know by now that the biggest known known in the budget is that the good times don't last. "When will they end?" and "Why did they end?" are open questions, known unknowns. But as new technology develops new markets and situations faster than we can identify potential economic hazards, "Why?" is also an unknown unknown.

It should be a no-brainer that the budget should serve all the people of the state and spend their tax dollars in a manner that honors the work and, perhaps, sacrifice that generated them in the first place.

To that end, one hopes the best resources are put to defining this budget - and that our legislators listen to them. Our state motto is "To be, rather than to seem" and our legislators should act accordingly, going for substance, not flash. They should use history and economics to flesh out the knowns and the unknowns into their various likelihoods. They should think inside and outside the box to put together a robust budget that covers the basics, anticipates bumps in the road and provides flexible responses. Then, prioritize what's left and add the high priority items.

Yeah, well.

In the mean time, encourage your children and grandchildren to get up to speed on math. If it was not your favorite subject, keep that to yourself and maybe get some help with it (studies show success in math increases with age!). It is a known known there will be more budget trouble in the future. If our children can't work out the math then, who will?