It is about one hour after the US Presidential Debate on September 26th, 2016.
I am not going to get into it. I will say this, though: the debate left me with an unerring sense that it is high time to abandon the worst parts of the old ways. This is an education blog, so I will write something about education and not about politics. My forebears have acted like education and politics are inextricably intertwined, but I say that is patently false. Only those looking to hide their own failures as teachers or administrators make the work of educating a child into a political affair.
What do we need to do in order to move forward in public education?
We need to funnel money from the US Military into an educational fund that allows for states to pay for the technology and materials necessary for kids in school to engage in creating authentic, real life work products.
This means that school will no longer be purely a matter of pencil and paper theories. It means that school will be a proving ground for the skills of the young people of the nations of the world.
What does a standardized test examine? It examines the ability of a student to pass that exact, specific test and nothing more.
Lucy and the Menu
I had a student once named Lucy*. Lucy was 16 years old. She was an inner city kid. She was a real pain in the neck 90% of the time. She was loud. She was obnoxious. Still, she really stood up for what she believed in and when I wasn’t tearing her down for being a pain, I was acknowledging her for being an amazing warrior for justice.
We did a unit on Hispanic food; my assessment was a menu. I brought in a menu from a local Mexican restaurant and showed it to the kids. I showed them the way the paper shined. I showed them the way the font tried to reflect Mexican sensibilities. I showed them the sorts of words in Spanish used in the food descriptions.
Then, I set them free on designing their menus with the materials I had in class: some markers, crayons, construction paper, old magazines, etc. You see, there is no real money for schools, so this is what you get—16 year olds cutting out paper like they are five years old. You can blame me, but I was making $11 per hour after taxes, working 70 hours a week to prepare the lessons, fill out the paperwork, manage the classrooms, as well as performing all the other administrative duties common for a teacher. It’s not my fault the materials sucked so much. It’s the government’s fault—but we will get into that later.
After a few days of working on the unit, Lucy comes in early one morning and says to me “I’m done!” and hands me an envelope. I open the envelope and I pull out this shiny, laminated menu with original artwork for pictures, descriptions of food in near-perfect Spanish and a professional aspect and appearance.
I was floored.
“W-w-w-wow…” I stammered.
“Do you like it?” Lucy asked.
“Very much,” I smiled. It was as if seven months of animosity melted away between us. I set the bar high, she achieved and she won the praise that only hard work done with integrity deserves.
I was so pleased with her performance. Her smile was nine miles wide.
As it turns out, Lucy did have help, but I do not mind and here is why: In order to make such a stunning menu, first she went to her Hispanic friends and had them teach her the words she needed to complete the menu beyond what I had showed them in class. Then, she went to her family members and swept floors, weeded gardens and ran to the supermarket to earn the $32 that she needed to pay Kinko’s for printing the menu. She shared with me how she went to an all-night Kinko’s at 10PM (a copy and stationary store for those not from America) and worked with the tech to come up with the artwork, choose materials and put it all together.
I was holding back a tear. This was one of the greatest achievements I had ever seen a student of mine make. She went so far above and beyond the call of duty that it was jaw-dropping. I knelt down, looked her in the eye, and said “Lucy… this is who you are. You are this person who works this hard and does this well and don’t you ever freakin’ forget it!” She smiled at me and giggled. Then I said “I know you will be back to being a pain in my neck again in a day or two so go on… get outta here!” Bostonians are known for sarcasm. A lot of people don’t really like it or pick up on it, but on that day, Lucy knew I was kidding with her because I was so pleased with her performance. Her smile was nine miles wide.
Later that night, the staff went out for a ‘constitutional’ to a local Mexican restaurant. Chips, salsa and margaritas flowed freely. At one point in the evening, I stood up and asked a colleague to grab his phone and follow me. “Film me,” I said. “What?! Why?!” he demanded. “Film me, dude! C’mon. Just do it!” So he turned on his camera and I approached the counter.
“Is the Manager here?”
“That’s me, sir. Is there a problem?”
“No, no. We love it here. I just wanted to show you something.”
The Manager looked at me with a look that said “Please don’t do anything weird….”
I sensed this and said “It’s cool man. I have a menu prototype for a restaurant that might open here in the city and wanted to see what you think. It’s for a new Mexican place and I thought who better to ask than you!”
He smiled and relaxed visibly. “OK…” he said.
I showed him the menu. He took it in his hands and started nodding. “This is really sweet, man,” he said. “Where did you get it?”
“Oh, a friend of mine is a trained graphic artist. She has her degree and everything.”
“Well put her in touch with me, man,” he said and handed me his card.
I couldn’t let the charade go on, so I said “Sir… I hope this doesn’t offend you, but this was kind of an experiment…”
“Huh?” the Manager said.
“Well, I am a high school Spanish teacher and one of my students created this menu. She’s 16. She worked odd jobs to pay for the printing and consulted with native Spanish-speakers to get the food descriptions done. I just wanted to see if a real-life restaurant manager would think it was good.”
“I don’t care who she is, man. I love the menu. Give her my card!”
We need to divert money away from guns and bombs into developing and creating authentic assessments.
This. This is what we need more of. We need to divert money away from guns and bombs into developing and creating authentic assessments, such as the menu project.
There have been programs that use authentic assessments, but they have failed, precisely because they get caught up in the state’s red tape. There are so many different curriculum strands to cite and so many fields to fill in that the kids get lost. The paperwork to submit a lesson is more work than the actual lesson.
So, what do we do?
We eliminate the bureaucracy.
But you can’t do that!!!
Why not? The bureaucracy was invented by someone, right? So, we un-invent it. We come up with a new system where money is channeled into students who are making more than menus for fake restaurants.
Imagine kids making prototypes for new banking systems, new criminal justice systems, new cars, new computers, new translation devices, new clothes, new hair styles, new music… just about everything… except they are not stuck in some building memorizing facts from age 4 to 18. They are working on discovering their life path, their true calling, their vocation, and their value-add to society.
What would that produce? Kids who are 100% ready to take on the world of the 21st Century by the time they are 18 years old.
We do not know who we are in America because we do not spend the time finding out. We let our young people sit like zombies watching PowerPoint presentations in crappy school districts in deteriorating buildings while we carpet bomb the Middle East. We listen to administrators drone on about state standards while the world economy sinks into the toilet.
The best and brightest minds of a generation are being wasted on Candy Crush and no one seems to give a care.
It is time to wake up.
It is time to see that there must be a better way.
It is time to see that we cannot be yet another generation of educators and administrators who mortgage our children’s future for the sake of our own careers.
Nothing is more cravenly low, immoral, and despicable as that – putting your own needs ahead of those of children living in a complex, ever-changing world. Especially children living in hand-to-mouth.
Let’s do the right thing. Put the kids first. Reduce the military by 50%. Still have the world’s largest military. Get the money into the schools. Get the materials and facilities needed so kids can start researching their life’s work and great contribution to society when they are six years old so they can be a doctor when they are 20 instead of 28.
Spaceship Earth is crashing. We need an all-hands-on-deck effort to reset the engines before impact. No time for naysayers, dilly-dalliers, cynics, politicians or bureaucrats. They have proven untrustworthy time and time again. Time for teachers, parents and administrators of good faith to knuckle down and show the students of our communities how to achieve as much as Lucy did.
List of Real World Skills Lucy Demonstrated:
- Entrepreneurship
- Multicultural Sales & Marketing
- Localization
- Translation
- Editing
- Proofreading
- Graphic Design
- Project Management
- Recruiting
Lucy is one 16 year old girl who is now probably 25. I wonder where she is. I pray that she took the lessons of those days with her and now shows a boss the same quality of work and the same ethic; it will serve her well in these tumultuous times.
You can take what I am writing as some wild theory. Or, you can open your mind and take it as the right course of action. I do not have all the pieces to the puzzle of solving the destroyed American education system, but I know for sure that any exercise of the kind that fired up Lucy’s heart and mind the way that menu activity did, is part of the answer.
Peace and good luck.
Feature image courtesy of Flickr, m01229.