Teaching

Grouping by perceived abilities is fraught with peril for students. Take a look at a video that explores this common practice and offers some effective alternatives.

The Texas State Board of Education has made nationwide headlines in recent weeks by rewriting the curriculum standards for its k-12 textbooks. Texas is the 500-pound gorilla in textbook publishing. It has the second-largest textbook market after California and a highly centralized way of buying the books. Long story short, Texas often creates the template for others states’ textbooks.

I recently finished The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Sherman Alexie’s young adult novel repeatedly hit my funny bone and my weepy bone, too. The protagonist, Arnold “Junior” Spirit, a Native American on the Spokane Reservation, barges through all the traps of pathos and romanticisation sometimes found in “multi-culti” kid literature. There are repentant racists and quiet heroes, little triumphs and gut-punching tragedies. But it’s a great book, and I can see why it won the 2007 National Book Award.

As a child I knew my grandfather was different. Grandpapa had been a sharecropper in southern Indiana. He had worked most of his adult life raising corn and pigs. His hands were big and callused. He stooped when he walked and the skin on his neck and face was scarred. His earlobes were long, stretched and fused down low at the back of his jawbone. His eyes seemed to be a bit elongated in their sockets. He was different because he looked different. You see, when he was a young child he had played with matches and caught his clothes on fire. His facial disfigurement was the price he paid for the bad judgment of a toddler.

A few years ago, I wrote a classroom resource about ecology for elementary and middle school kids. It covered all the territory you’d expect—biomes, habitats, food chains, etc.

But the publisher insisted on a conspicuous omission. No mention could be made of one of the major biologists who pioneered ecology.

That biologist was Charles Darwin.

As a young newspaper reporter in Texas, I covered my fair share of speeches. The thrill of hearing an important person give carefully prepared remarks wore off quickly. So I got in the habit of turning away from the speaker and watching the crowd.

Texas is in the throes of rewriting the curriculum standards for its K-12 textbooks. And that is something to be very, very worried about.

That’s the term the man used – “Mississippi eyes.” He was describing how he saw California’s Imperial Valley after he had spent time as a civil rights activist in Mississippi and Alabama. He had been born and bred in the Imperial Valley, deep in California’s agricultural belt. But he had never understood the inequities or racism of life there until Mississippi taught him how to see.

Years ago, I was inspired by Douglas Brinkley’s The Majic Bus: An American Odyssey. In it, Brinkley described how he taught history to college students. He took them to historical sites and had them speak with eyewitnesses. Wanting this, but not knowing how to pay for it, I looked inward. I realized that our high school campus was surrounded by history, just like every other place.

It started as an email:  “I’m not sure that I’m going to be able to maintain teaching… .”

Then another:  “Does teaching ever get any easier?”

A third told me, “We’re on our fourth principal in three years… .”