Educational Documentary: American Teacher

This is another documentary about education that should be coming out this year.  This one, American Teacher, does not focus on the next "revolution" that is supposed to save American education.  Rather, this one looks at the everyday, average teachers--the impact they have can on our children, and how relatively little they are compensated for it.

American Teacher is an outgrowth of The Teacher Salary Project, which is itself an outgrowth of the book,   Teachers Have It Easy:  The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers, by Dave Eggers, Ninive Clements Calegari, and Daniel Moulthrop.   The book and the movie both tell the tales of how much good teachers have to give of themselves to do what should be one of the most important jobs in our society--educating our children.

Here are some eye-opening statistics from the website:

• 92.4% of teachers spent there own money to buy educational supplies (2007-2008)
• 62% of teachers work at second jobs outside the classroom, EVEN THOUGH
• The average workday for teachers is 10 hour per day
• Only 4.7 percent of college juniors say they would considering teaching as a profession at the current salary level
• In 1970, the average difference in starting salaries in New York City between lawyers and teachers was $2,000.  In 201, the difference between the two professions averages out to first-year lawyers making about $115,000 more than first-year teachers.
• 46% of public school teachers quit teaching within five years

I haven't seen the movie, but it sounds like a breath of fresh air after so many documentaries, policies, and high-profile educators who act like teachers are the enemy.  On the contrary, of the teachers I know personally, they are some of the most committed, overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated people I know.

The movie has been previewed in Washington DC and New York City, but there is no news about the date of its release or the places that will hold screenings.  However, you can sign up for their mailing list to receive notice if it is coming to a place near you.

A Different Kind of Art Class

Today was my son's last art class for this academic year at the art studio where he has been going for the past few years.  Art is my son's favorite activity right now, so it is probably the one class he would be glad to continue year round.  However, it is nice to have a few months without weekly obligations, and there are lots of ways that he can continue to do his art.

I do want to give some public acknowledgement to his art teacher, however, because of the different approach she takes to art.  Her name is Jenny Eggleston, and her art studio is called "Egg in Nest."  She is both a wonderful artist herself and a gifted teacher--and what more can we ask for when looking for teachers for our children?

But here is why she is a PERFECT teacher for a student like my son.  Jenny's classes are different than most classes in that she doesn't "teach" the class a certain technique or project or whatever.  Rather, Jenny's classes are multi-age, multi-media, and multi-project.  That is, she accepts students from elementary through high school--all in the same class--and allows each student to work on his or her own passions, interests, or priorities.  She is prepared to supply all sorts of media--colored pencils, pastels, charcoal, watercolors, oil paints, collage, digital art, etc.--and all sorts of inspiration, in terms of historic and contemporary themes or artists.  While each student works on her or his own project, she circulates around and gives individual assistance or guidance on art techniques, media usage, or composition.  She sometimes initiates a group project, and holds a public art exhibit, based around a common theme, each semester.   For the past two years, at least, the spring theme has been combining poetry and art, which I wrote about in an earlier post.  However, other themes are centered around raising money for a fellow student who needed an organ transplant, and creating art to comfort, connect with, and encourage our troops overseas.

So while this approach may not appeal to all students and/or parents, if your child wants someone who acts more like an art coach than a traditional teacher, I don't know anyone better than Jenny Eggleston.   She has been a real gift to my son.  And she is an inspiration to me as a teacher as an example that everyone doesn't have to be following the same path for great education to be taking place.

IF you are lucky enough to live in the Raleigh/Cary/Apex area and would like to check out her teaching style this summer, she is offering some week-long art camps for different age groups that you can read about from her website.  For example, my son is signed up for a middle school/high school camp where they will work with a professional poet to produce a book combining art and poetry.   We are both really excited to see what he will produce out of that week of classes!

Is the Movie "The Social Network" Bad for Understanding Both Innovation and History?

There was a really interesting article in my favorite paper, The Washington Post, today, in the business section (which is not usually my favorite section).  In "Where the next Facebook will come from," Ezra Klein claims that the current movie, "The Social Network," does a disservice to those who are trying to understand how Facebook became such a worldwide phenomenon.  According to Klein (and I'm just going on his word and what I've read in the reviews, because I haven't seen the movie myself), the movie depicts Facebook founder Mark Zuckerman as the quintessential computer nerd genius who is connecting the world through his technical expertise, his singular vision, and refusal to surrender to more socially-adept competitors.  However, in real life, there were many Facebook-like experiments that were percolating along at the same time (a process known as "simultaneous invention"), and it was as much luck as anything that it was Zuckerman's concept that won out (although Klein does credit him with developing a cleaner interface than the alternatives).  Klein argues that while we as humans find it easier to latch onto the idea of a person coming up with an idea rather than the idea manifesting itself as part of an evolutionary technology, we need to focus more on the latter approach if we are really to understand the nature of break-through innovations.

This point of view is seconded by Steven Johnson, a writer/historian/internet innovator who you may know as the author of the book "Everything Bad is Good for You," (one of those books that are on my list but I haven't gotten to it yet).  His brand-new book, "Where Good Ideas Come From:  The Natural History of Innovation," examines successful transformational ideas from evolution to You Tube to see what the key factors are for fostering innovation.  But Johnson apparently (again, I'm going from reviews and interviews here, because I haven't read this book yet either) agrees with Klein, stating that innovation is almost never the result of an "Eureka!" discovery by an isolated genius.  For a short (just over four minutes) synopsis of Johnson's findings about good ideas, see his clever and fast-paced You Tube video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU .

So, OK, I haven't seen the movie or read either book, and business innovation is far from my field.  But I'm easily swayed by this argument because it lines up with something I've long disagreed with about the teaching of history.  I think, particularly in the United States, our approach to teaching history is too heavily oriented to what I call "The Great Man" (expanded to "And Great Women" in more recent years) approach.  That is, I think by personalizing history as much as we do, children growing up thinking that without Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson we wouldn't have declared Independence, without Washington we wouldn't have won the war, without Lincoln we would still have slaves, etc. etc.  And while these people were all great people, and there is no telling what would have happened if they hadn't had the positions they had, they also had those positions because they were representatives of a movement larger than themselves.  Certainly they effected history, but they were also manifestations of the currents of thought and activity of their times.  I think we do students a disservice when we focus too much on the representatives of the times and don't look at the undercurrents that brought those particular representatives to a place where they had the opportunity to turn those thoughts into actions or policies.

After all, isn't "The Social Movement" movie actually about really recent history?  And if we do that to people who have only been in the public eye for under 10 years, what are we likely to do after a century or two?

It's funny, because the Washington Post's movie critic, Ann Hornaday, gave the movie a really good review, calling it a "parable for our age" and comparing it to "Citizen Kane" and "The Great Gatsby."  But, of course, those works are fiction.  Too often, I think, when we focus on the people rather than the environment of the era, we end up fictionalizing our history as well. 

Lesson Plan: Teaching Concrete Poetry

In "The Captain's Song" from the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera, The HMS Pinafore, after the Captain has explained to his crew all his personal prohibitions that make him such an exemplary captain (things like never getting sick at sea, never swearing, etc.), they sing this refrain to each other:
Sailors: What, never?
Captain: No, never!
Sailors: What, never?
Captain: Well, hardly ever!

Like the Captain, one of my personal teaching policies is that I hardly ever give my students an assignment that I am not willing to do myself (or, at least, wasn't willing to do when I was at the same level of development) and/or haven't tried myself.  I figure that if it's not interesting or valuable enough for me to do it, I shouldn't ask them to, and if I haven't tried it myself, how can I give them the best instruction on the matter?   And while I've written a good bit of poetry in my time, I don't think I've ever written a concrete poem....which happens to be the topic I'm teaching this week.

So this past Sunday morning, I noticed something unusual as I was driving to our spiritual community, and so I ended up making a concrete poem out of the experience:

(OK, technically, this is actually a space poem, which shows movement through space related to the topic of the poem, rather than a concrete poem, which is supposed to take the shape of the subject.  But we're covering both, so I think it still counts.)

I'm really glad I did it, because, like the I Spy poem, it is really much harder to do than it looks.  Originally, the second stanza had varying numbers of words (from 9-11), and that just threw the entire composition off.  So I had to find ways to express the same thing but with the same number of words while retaining the same syllable pattern.   It was fun, but it ate up much more time than I expected (but, then, what doesn't?)

One thing that we've been doing in class is writing poetry after being inspired by music and/or art or photographs.  And while the poem came from my experience (another thing we are discussing), the title was inspired by both.  It is a twist on a Stephen Sondheim musical, Sunday in the Park with George, which is about the artist, Georges Seurat, as he paints his most famous painting, "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" (well, it's really about a lot more then that, since it is an examination on the nature of art and artists and relationships, but that's for another blog).

Anyway, were I a visual artist, or even somewhat proficient with Photoshop, I would attempt a picture of what I see in my mind when I think of this poem, which is Seurat's painting:

EXCEPT I would replace all the people with geese, and add a few contemporary touches, like one of them playing with a video game, and, of course, a pizza.  Wouldn't that be a fantastic image?

But, the point is, I think it is really great if we can teach students to use all their senses when writing poetry.  It's great to come up with wonderful words, but it is good for those words to connect with an actual experience, to be inspired by or contain some elements of music (in my case, it's "Putting It All Together" from Sunday in the Park with George), and to create a visual image (like my Seurat geese).  Not every poem needs to have ALL of those, but they should have at least one of these to generate some substance beyond just the words.  And try it yourself--see if your poem isn't more fun and/or more meaningful to you when it includes one or more of those elements.

For a related post, see A Concrete Poem on Catching Fire.

PS--My son wanted to be mentioned in this post, so I will just say that he read my draft and called it "a lovely poem," which I really appreciated hearing from him.