Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
The Emperor Awards celebrate remarkable achievements in the education world over the past year. They also serve as exemplars for the school term that’s about to begin. While they commemorate the monarch who paraded around in his underwear, they also recall the loyal subjects who kept telling him, and each other, just how splendid he looked.
We customarily begin with the Sisyphus Prize for Perpetual Research. Last year we spotlighted the finding that children’s prowess in “roughhousing better predicted their first grade achievement than kindergarten test scores.” This year a study of math instructional methods stunningly determined that “direct” instruction by teachers along with “routine practice and drills” involving “traditional textbook practice problems and worksheets” was “consistently associated with gains in math achievement.” Researchers also concluded that innovations like “using manipulatives, calculators, and music to learn math” were “ineffective.” Sisyphus 2015 salutes both the intrepid research team for rediscovering what should have been obvious and all those math experts whose brilliant innovations made the study necessary.
The bid for the Archimedes Eureka Honorarium was hotly contested this year. Nominees included the national poll of teachers which identified poverty as a “barrier to learning.” Running neck and neck was the equally startling announcement that “giving students pertinent visual information, such as a diagram” helps them “understand and remember” a lesson, a revelation which built on earlier groundbreaking findings that “highlighted the benefits of note-taking.” The Eureka nod, however, goes to a report which conclusively determined that “low-income” high school students who took four years of English and three years each of math, science, and social studies” are “more likely” to be “college and career-ready” than those who took fewer courses. Equally amazing, students who exhibit “academic discipline” and “commitment to college” are “more likely to remain enrolled in college.”
A generous Ohio district designated 20 percent of its high school graduates “valedictorian.” Owing to course-weighting, students can graduate with GPAs higher than 4.0, and officials decided that by appointing all 222 students who did, “more students could be eligible for scholarships linked to the designation.” One former co-valedictorian, who had shared the honor with 72 classmates, justified the policy on the grounds that “today’s multiple valedictorians are achieving more than the single valedictorians of yesterday.” Recognizing that, indeed, academic “achievement levels have changed,” the Academy presents its Vince Lombardi Everyone’s a Winner Trophy to district officials and any students who want one.
Not far from Coach Lombardi’s favorite stomping grounds, Wisconsin’s legislature and governor inked a law requiring the state’s university system to inform the legislature whenever any more than five graduates from any Wisconsin high school need freshman remedial courses. One in five entering freshmen currently require a remedial course, so the list of indicted schools should be long. The law doesn’t specify what action will be taken against the offending districts, but the Academy’s inaugural Golden Scapegoat Statuette pays tribute to both the legislature and the governor for adroitly placing the blame for students’ lack of achievement and the university’s low standards in admitting them squarely on the shoulders of Wisconsin’s public schools, whether it belongs there or not.
In a noteworthy commentary on student free speech, an Oregon federal court ruled that a school couldn’t discipline a student for his Facebook posting in which he called his teacher a “bitch” and stated that “she should be shot.” The judge opined that the eighth grader “did not intend to threaten the teacher” or “seriously believe” she should be shot, and that allowing him to escape any punishment for threatening to kill her did not “substantially interfere” with “appropriate discipline in operating the school.” The court found that the three-day in-school suspension imposed by administrators, while unacceptably severe, was simultaneously not severe enough to indicate that the school had taken the threat “seriously,” which meant administrators shouldn’t have suspended him. The John Dillinger Medallion toasts the court’s convoluted reasoning and its courage in the face of threats against other people’s lives.
The Eureka nod, however, goes to a report which conclusively determined that “low-income” high school students who took four years of English and three years each of math, science, and social studies” are “more likely” to be “college and career-ready” than those who took fewer courses.
A California English teacher walks off with 2015’s Distinguished Priorities Cross for banning Shakespeare from her high school English classes on the grounds that his plays, which deal variously with North Africans, Italians, Scots, Greeks, Jews, Danes, and overall human nature, “don’t reflect the cultural perspectives needed in today’s classrooms” since they were written by a “451-year-old English white man.” She argues that while non-white students shouldn’t read Shakespeare because it’s not their culture, white students also shouldn’t read Shakespeare because it is their culture and they need more “diversity.”
Advocates for increasing women’s participation in the technology field have introduced Jewelbots, a “programmable friendship bracelet” designed to “hold girls’ interest” and entice them into writing computer code. The bracelets, which actually “don’t require much real programming” can “light up when their friends come near,” “integrate with their social media accounts,” and “send secret messages in class.” Administrative memos instructing teachers to permit Jewelbots in their classrooms are expected to arrive around the same time as the invitations to their districts’ annual gender stereotyping workshops. This sterling example of entrepreneurial feminism earns the Bill and Melinda Gates Silicon Star, presented this year with matching earrings.
Competition for our final award, the George Orwell Creative Use of Language Prize, is always fierce. Honorable mention goes to the jargon masterpiece, “differentiating instruction by combining proficiency-based learning, self-directed instruction, and tiered assignments with Growth Mindset,” in the prospectus for an education course specializing in “clarity of learning goals.”
This year’s winner, however, is the “ideal candidate profile” circulated by a prominent charitable foundation in search of a “director of its national education strategy.” The job posting liberally sprinkles buzzwords like “bold vision,” “diverse stakeholders,” and “learning mindsets,” as well as four variants of the word “strategy” in the first three sentences, but in all its nearly 300 words never mentions the word “teacher” or the necessity of classroom teaching experience in leading the foundation’s effort to improve public schools. For the foundation’s discretion in ensuring that no teachers need apply, we bestow this year’s coveted Orwell.
As always, the Academy’s trustees convey their standard offer that any readers who find themselves in agreement with one of our winners should feel free to count themselves a winner, too.
Each of us at some time deserves an Emperor of our own.
Even Poor Elijah and me.
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