Teaching the Invisibles
by Jack Seeker.
(Available on Amazon's Kindle)
Chapter 25
Schools will stop failing when we stop failing society
As told on Public Radio’s This American Life (episode 474 on their
website), Dr. Nadine Burke-Harris discovered this for herself. She set up a
health clinic in a minority school in San Francisco and assumed she’d be
helping with asthma, immunizations, obesity, and other routine health concerns.
Instead, she was being asked to treat students referred by teachers who would
swear they had ADHD.
She examined the students. They didn’t
have ADHD. They had trauma. These kids were living with violence on a daily
basis, be it domestic violence, gang shootings, or abuse from an alcohol or drug
addicted parent. She also says it doesn’t have to be over the top stuff. In
what she calls a “mundane” situation, parents needing to board up their home
every time they leave to prevent getting robbed will make a child too anxious
to learn. But that’s a normal part of these students’ environments. I recall
overhearing a girl worrying about a stalker watching her every day after
school. I reported to security and they got on it, but how well was she doing
in class when she’s wondering if she’ll make it home later?
Besides twice the chance of heart
disease, four and half times the chance of depression and twelve times the rate
of committing suicide, trauma won’t permit a child to sit still, exercise
impulse control or, of course, concentrate. Four or more traumatic experiences
and the likelihood of developing learning or behavioral problems is thirty-two
times higher than a person without any harmful events in their lives. But hey,
somehow a gifted teacher with new and improved methods will get these kids on
their way.
So to sum up: Poverty can lead to
neglect, violence in the home, untreated parental mental illness and substance
addiction, gang infested schools–which leads to childhood trauma–which leads to
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder–which leads to students in a state of fight or
flight, and that doesn’t allow much room for thinking or reasoning.
Now I know why my high school students
didn’t retain anything from junior high, and why, when they were taking a test,
it was like they were seeing the material for the first time.
The good news
There are schools and programs that are
now instilling and reversing the lack of what are called non-cognitive skills,
such as self-control, aggression, relating to others, paying attention, and
being able to delay gratification. Paul Tough in his book, How Children Succeed, and economist James Heckman tell of schools
that teach these skills right along with the class work. Tough describes
classes at these schools as more group therapy sessions than normal classes. Heckman
cites intensive sessions with social workers stressing positive thinking,
persistence and self-esteem, and he was amazed that students meeting with a
college-age mentor only twice a year showed big improvements in their grades.
And they both approve of charter schools that put in doctors, nurses and social
workers in sufficient enough numbers so the root causes of low grades can be
effectively dealt with for the first time.
But even with students who don’t have
serious social problems, their poverty alone will stand in their way. Here’s an
example of how low-income children have trouble even getting started, and how a
school is helping them by doing the complete opposite of what government
departments and school boards think they should be doing. From The New York Times:
February 12, 2012
A Field Trip to a Strange New Place: Second Grade
Visits the Parking Garage
P.S. 142 is a high poverty
school so close to the Williamsburg Bridge that during recess children can hear
the cars above them driving to Brooklyn. Almost all of the 436 students qualify
for free lunches. (Ever notice people who do succeed from this kind of background
rarely talk about it, while people from, not the middle class, but pay-for-a-new-car-in-cash
kind of wealth insist they’re “self-made men.")
On the first day of school,
when they walk into Frances Sachdev’s kindergarten class in Room 117, most are
already behind. By age 4, the average child in an upper-middle-class family has
heard 35 million more words than a poor child. Studies have shown that while
about two-thirds of kindergartners from the wealthiest 20 percent of households
are read to at home every day, about a third of children from the poorest 20
percent are.
Experiences that are
routine in middle-class homes are not for P.S. 142 children. When Dao Krings, a
second-grade teacher, asked her students recently how many had never been
inside a car, several, including Tyler Rodriguez, raised their hands. “I’ve
been inside a bus,” Tyler said. “Does that count?”
When a new shipment of
books arrives, Rhonda Levy, the principal, frets. Reading with comprehension
assumes a shared prior knowledge, and cars are not the only gap at P.S. 142.
Many of the children have never been to a zoo or to New Jersey. Some think the
emergency room of New York Downtown Hospital is the doctor’s office.
The solution of the education
establishment is to push young children to decode and read sooner, but Ms. Levy
is taking a different tack. Working with Renée Dinnerstein, an early childhood
specialist, she has made real life experiences the center of academic lessons,
in hopes of improving reading and math skills by broadening children’s frames
of reference.
The goal is to make
learning more fun for younger children.
Earlier this year, Ms.
Krings’s second grade visited an auto repair shop where, for the first time,
Tyler sat in a car. “I sat in the front seat and then I sat in the back seat,”
he said. It made him feel like the star in one of their library books, “Honda,
the Boy Who Dreamed of Cars.”
While many schools have
removed stations for play from kindergarten, Ms. Levy has added them in first
and second grades. One corner of Ms. Krings’s room is for building blocks,
another for construction paper projects. There are days when the second grade
smells like Elmer’s glue.
Several times a month they
take what are known as field trips to the sidewalk. In early February the
second graders went around the block to study Muni-Meters and parking signs.
They learned new vocabulary words, like “parking,” “violations” and “bureau.”
JenLee Zhong calculated that if Ms. Krings put 50 cents in the Muni-Meter and
could park for 10 minutes, for 40 minutes she would have to put in $2. They
discovered that a sign that says “No Standing Any Time” is not intended for
kids like them on the sidewalk.
One day last week Ariana
Flores said: “We’re going to see a municipal parking garage today. We’re
getting a good education.”
When reading, children are
taught to make predictions of what is to come in a book, based on a variety of
evidence — the cover, chapter headings, foreshadowing. Ms. Krings’s students
used their field trip booklets to do the same before their visit to the
Delancey and Essex Municipal Parking Garage.
Several predicted that
drivers would have to pay to get in.
To be out of school on a
sunny winter’s day and walking to a municipal parking garage — it doesn’t get
any better than that. Kammi Poom skipped the whole way. Alan Zhao thought it
was hilarious to walk like Frankenstein. Evan Nuñez, the smallest, hurried so
he could be up front with Ms. Krings.
“There it is,” shouted
Julissa Jirmnson. All of them had passed a municipal parking garage before, but
few had been inside one. They walked up a ramp, past a blue handicapped zone,
orange cones and a red Big Apple sign, then watched the cars coming in. They
could see the drivers press a green button and take a ticket, but they didn’t
see anyone paying money as they had expected.
In such situations, Ms.
Krings recommends consulting an expert, so they asked the man standing in the
front booth, whose name was David.
David stepped out, they
crowded around, and he said, “They don’t pay to get in, they pay to get out.”
“I knew it,” said Ariana.
“I knew it, too,” said
Kammi.
After that, well — there’s
too much to tell it all. On the way back they stopped to copy down words from
interesting signs. Ariana wrote, “Sprinkler Control Valve Located in Basement.”
Jairo Fermin wrote, “Thru Trucks Use Houston Street.”
“I want a decibel level of
zero,” Ms. Krings said as they walked back into the school.
For the next hour they did
field trip follow-up. Ms. Krings gave them Muni-Meter math problems. At the
block station the boys kept building racing tracks and knocking them over while
Yudy He Wu made a municipal parking garage and lined the top with Matchbox
cars. They never stopped chattering to one another, which Ms. Krings said was
good. “They’re working together to resolve problems and developing their verbal
skills,” she said.
When Ms. Dinnerstein first
came to the school, staff members ran for cover. One of the miseries of being a
teacher is that every year, someone shows up from Tweed Courthouse headquarters
with a new plan to raise test scores.
But after four years of
academic lessons built around sidewalk trips to the Essex Street Market, the
subway, several bridges and a hospital emergency room, Ms. Krings is moved by
how much learning goes on.
Daniel Feigelson heads the
network of 30 schools that P.S. 142 belongs to. He said that he wished more
principals would adopt the program but that they were fearful. “There is so
much pressure systematically to do well on the tests, and this may not boost
scores right away,” he said. “To do this you’d have to be willing to take the
long view.”
I reprinted
this article to give us an idea of where we're starting from with inner city
children. But I don't think their long view will work out. Their lives outside
of school will catch up with them in their adolescence. Improving the caliber
of teachers and instruction works great in places like Finland and Singapore
where economic support and social services are already in place. But where 20%
of our children don’t have the proverbial level playing field, we’re running
our education system ass backwards, teaching kids before they can sit in a
chair without having to worry about just surviving another day–the same way I
taught my classes for three years.
The foundation of a vibrant economy is a
good education system. And we can only have that if we provide the services and
support that the children we don't see really need. Do I think it'll happen any
time soon? Shit, we won't even pay to fix our bridges.
Excerpted from Teaching the Invisibles by Jack Seeker. All rights reserved.
Available on Amazon's Kindle
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