A beginning to building community relationships

After months of planning by many people, my school held its first, in what we hope to become annual, community bash last night.  The bash was planned to be an event to bring the parents and community to the school as a way of building relationships.

The system in which I teach went from one mega high school seven years ago to community high schools with multiple feeder elementary schools and one middle school.  The problem that we began to encounter is that the parental support started lagging.  I have talked to many educator friends of mine around the country and the lack of parental support, especially at the middle and high school levels, is not and isolated problem.  At Bryant we asked ourselves, what could we, as educators, do to change this situation and change the culture of our school cluster?

At Bryant we are fortunate to be in a partnership with the Alabama Consortium for Educational Renewal, an arm of the University of Alabama, which helps our school in numerous ways.  ACER is also in partnership with one of the high schools in the county system.  At the county school, the partnership created a renewal project between the community and the school, and it has grown and helped to revitalize that community over the past several years.  At Bryant we decided that we needed to do something of a similiar manner.

Planning began in May and much of it was coordinated through Google Docs and Dropbox.  Technology is great and an easy way to get things accomplished without having to hold meetings once a week!

The event was a success.  We had a great turnout and everyone enjoyed the games, food, marching bad, cheerleaders, etc.

The sad part to the whole event is that we had to plan and host an event to get some parents to come visit our campus and mingle with their respective schools faculty.  Parents are willing to come to a festival, but many will not set foot in a school unless their child is in trouble.  

At this point I could start a rather long rambling of ranting on parents and how they expect teachers to be responsible for raising their children, and then when said children don’t meet their expectations they start ranting on how the teacher failed the child, but I won’t. 

Instead, I’ll just leave it at this...

The African proverb, It takes a village to raise a child, is true and I hope this event will be the starting point of building greater community connections and ensuring the success of our students in a full partnership - schools, faculties, parents, and community   members.  We all win in the long run!

A History of Grades

In the past few weeks, there has been much talk and discussion among the tweets as to what constitutes grades, how do we assess student work, and what do the grades assigned truly mean.  What does an A really mean, and so forth?  Of course, this got me to thinking.  

How did the world of education first come up with a system of grades?  Why the particular letters A, B, C, D, E, F, G, S, and U?  Why a particular grouping of numbers?  In most schools, Pre-K through first grade may use the E (excellent), G (good), S (satisfactory) or U (unsatisfactory) delineations. Beyond second grade it is the A, B, C, D, and F combinations.  How do policymakers decide the grouping of numbers to accompany those letters?

I thought I’d do a little investigating and find out.  So, like any good doctoral student, I went online and began to investigate through the services offered by the university library.  There was much information available, and a good portion of the information I have used in this post comes from an article written in 1993 by Mark W. Durm.  The article, titled “An A Is Not An A Is Not An A: A History of Grading” was published in The Educational Forum, 57.   

Before this nation ever had secondary schools, we had colleges, and much of the first grading systems seemed to be not based around the quality of work presented by students, but more around social class.  For example, in the early years of Harvard, students were not arranged alphabetically but were listed according to the social position of their families, and grades reflected (Eliot, 1935).

Mary Lovett Smallwood wrote Examinations and Grading Systems in Early American Universities (1935).  In her book she related that marking grades to students was first instituted at Yale University.  She quoted Yale’s President, Erza Stiles (1778–1795), as writing in his diary that 58 students were present at an examination, and they were graded as follows: “Twenty Optimi, sixteen second Optimi, 12 Inferiores (Boni), ten Pejores.”

Between those years and the mid-nineteenth century it seemed that, for the most part, letters were used for the grades and there was no particular method of grading.  Each institution determined its own assessment formula, along with descriptive adjectives in reporting the performance of its students.  In 1877, Harvard appears to have set the bar for determining numerical grades.  The faculty designed a system of grades based on 100 percent.  Division 1 - 90 or more on a scale of 100; Division 2 - 89 to 75; Division 3 - 74 to 60; Division 4 - 59 to 50; Division 5 - 49 to 40; and Division 6 - below 40.  Students making marks in Division 5 or 6 were considered to have failed.

The system that American currently uses, although slightly changed in the numerical equivalents, was the brain-child of Mount Holyoke.  The College, in 1897, adopted letters for marking students and correlated those letters to a certain grouping of numbers.  Their scale: A, Excellent, equivalent to percents 95-100; B, Good, equivalent to percents 85-94(inclusive); C, Fair, equivalent to percents 76-84 (inclusive); D, Passed (barely), equivalent to percent 75; E, Failed (below75). In 1898, they changed the scale to reflect the following: A - 95-100; B - 90-94; C - 85-89; D - 80-84; E - 75-79; F - Failed.

These schools came up with a system of grading, but they did not leave a record behind that indicated what constituted each letter or numerical grade.  What quality of work must the student submit to earn each grade?  The question seemed hard to answer then and we find it hard to still answer today.

Education is not static.  Every aspect of instruction is different.  Students are different.  Teachers teach differently.  Systems have different expectations and standards.  There is not a national curriculum (yet, and I hope there never is).  Therefore, the debate of what constitutes an A will be forever ongoing. 

Summer Learning

Being one day away from finishing my third week on the road at various workshops it is interesting to see many of this weeks tweets focus toward personal learning and passion for the profession.  For those in the non-teaching world, the summers of teachers are supposed to lounging around the pool, sipping cold drinks, reading books, and just being lazy.  Just one perusal of twitter will prove that many teachers break the stereotypical mold, many of them tweeting about education issues while on vacation.

In quite the stereotyped fashion, teachers often spend summers revamping their classes or preparing for entirely new classes, and continuing their professional growth.  Last week thousands of teachers attended ISTE 2010 in Denver.  In various cities across the country (and world) hundreds, if not thousands, of teachers have attended seminars sponsored by ISTE, NCSS, NEH, Gilder Lehrman, the AP College Board and many other discipline organizations.  This is how we spend our summers! 

For many who attend these workshops, we do so because we are lifelong learners and they are the way we rejuvenate ourselves and prepare for the upcoming year.  As John Cotton Dana stated, “Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.”  What we learn during the summer allows up to continue the passion we have for educating students in the classroom.  The rejuvenation received during the summer is often passed on to our students, making them lifelong learners in the process.  To be the best teachers we can be we should be intuitive and remember that the knowledge we have must constantly be improved, challenged, and increased.  

That is exactly what I have done since I began my second career of teaching ten years ago.  Each workshop provides me with new content knowledge, teaching methods, and professional contacts.  This summer I have gained a considerable amount of content knowledge and pedagogy by attending my local Teaching American History Program, the Gilder Lehrman workshop, The Sixties in Historical Perspective at Georgetown, and the AP Psychology workshop at Oglethorpe University.  I must say a sincere thank you to all the people involved in making sure these workshops happened.  

History as Memory

This week I am attending my fifth Teaching American History Program seminar at the University of Alabama.  To brag for just a moment, I have attended more of these than anyone else which goes to prove just how much I love learning.

Today we traveled to the American Village in Montevallo for a special "teacher only" program about bringing history to life.  This was my first trip back to the Village in about four years.
 Since they opened about ten years ago, I have always taken a class or two on a field trip there.  I haven't been able to in about three or four years.   I was amazed at how much they have grown.  They have amazing (and educational) programs, but they have so much more on to come.

Tom Walker, the Director, welcomed the group this morning and during his welcome he made two statements that I thought were profound.  The first quote he attributed to the author/historian David McCollough and the second to his grandmother.

"The hardest part of teaching history is that it is hard to forget that we know how it turns out."

"History is to a country what memory is to an individual."

I have probably heard these quotes,  or some alternative form, before but today they held a different meaning.  Teaching history is hard, but it is made even harder because as a teacher I know everything (or  as much as possible) about the subject I am teaching.  My students do not.  In that aspect, it is hard to break things down and decide what parts should and should not be taught.  It is also hard in that history is always being questioned and in some instances, rewritten.  While that is good it presents a challenge for a teacher to try and convey both sides of a story and why some on the outside continue to question it. Isn't that part of what we try to teach our students?  To not only understand different opinions, but to continually question and critically think.

The second quote struck me more profoundly.  We have become a nation that has become very selective in our memory and in too many instances just plain lackadaisical in paying attention to this nation's history.  So much is being lost in the process.  If our house was on fire the first thing we would grab would be our picture albums because they are the history of memories for the family.  History classes should be the picture albums for our nation's history.  As teachers we need to pull out those albums more often and peruse them with a renewed sense of purpose rather than teaching to the test or just meeting the objectives.

The Beginning....

I'm not new to blogging.  I have been blogging with my students for five years.  However, spurred by my colleagues who have been blogging professionally with other educators, I have decided to join the cause.

Therefore, before I begin blogging on education and related matters, allow me to introduce myself.

I grew up in a small Alabama town and spent every spare minute I had reading.  Needless to say, I was the kid who didn't mind getting grounded for minor (or major) infractions because I could then stay in my room and read.  My love of reading stems from the moment I was born.  I think my grandmother showed up at the hospital with a basket of books.  From that point on she read to me, until I learned how myself at age three.  I am proof of how important it is for children to be read to.  Reading opens up so many worlds! My grandmother also loved history and many times we would take local history trips.  I loved these trips because they made history and her stories come alive.

My love of history was cemented the summer I turned 12.  The public library was my sanctuary and my 7th grade English teacher was a volunteer.  We spent a great deal of time together that summer as she introduced me to many classics, but it was her introducing me to Eugenia Price that brought history alive even more.  Since that time I have read (and own) every Eugenia Price novel.  Oh, how she brought her stories to life.

Fast forward a few years and it's the middle of the 1980s.  The '80s was the decade of business.  All of us who entered college did so with the idea that with a business major we would be millionaires by the time we were 30.  So wrong!  Guess we just had our eyes turned by shows like Dallas, Dynasty and movies like The Secret of my Succe$s.  I did and didn't.  I did earn a business degree and worked for 15 years in various positions at a local community college.

By 1997, I was finding ceilings in my job and just wasn't happy getting up and going to work every morning.  I've always lived with the philosophy that if you are not happy with your job, then you will not do a good job for your employer and you should find another job or occupation.  That's just I decided to do, with the full support of my family.

I took my love of history, explored my options, and enrolled in the College of Education at the University of Alabama.  I graduated with a bachelor's degree in 2000 and a master's degree in 2005.  I am currently pursuing an Ed.D. in Curriculum and Instruction at UA, hoping to finish all coursework by 2011 and the dissertation by 2012.

After graduating in 2000, Alabama was in proration and you could not buy a teaching job, but I was fortunate to have God designing my path.  I called a friend who was headmaster at a private school enquiring about any private school jobs within driving distance.  Divine intervention!  Her history teacher of 30 year had just resigned.  I taught there for two years and enjoyed it immensely.  It was a great learning experience, teaching six preps and being sponsor to many.  Two years later, Divine intervention again.  I was looking for a public school job and was within 24 hours of accepting a position I just wasn't very sure of when my current position came calling.  I interviewed and was called with the job offer on the same day.  I just finished my 8th year.

There have been many ups and downs.  Many days when I've beaten my head on the wall, so to speak, and many days when I can't do anything but marvel at the lightbulbs going off in the minds of my students, but I have loved every minute that I have been teaching and I look forward to another ten years.

From this point, I hope to blog both the positive and negatives of education and teaching from my perspective and look forward to the intellectual exchange.