What Matters to Me, and Why

Third in a series of speeches for Arts of Communication, at the Kennedy School of Government (the first here, the second here).  

Assignment: Speak about your values.

Over the past few weeks, a number of you have spoken about growing up white and privileged.  In the small town where I’m from, that was my experience, too.  My parents are loving, caring, and involved in the community.  But let’s face it: we were more likely to be in a food co-operative than a multiracial coalition.

A month after I graduated college, I moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to volunteer with AmeriCorps.  In college, I’d been an ethnic studies major and student activist.  I was drawn to Milwaukee because it was diverse, affordable, and a bit gritty.  I was drawn to AmeriCorps because, before I became a schoolteacher, I wanted to immerse myself in the community.  I wanted to learn about the institutions around me, and about myself.  Little did I realize, living in a white neighborhood, and working in a black one, just how immersed I would be.

When I arrived, I had six weeks to kill before the program.  I went on brewery tours, I bought a bike, I learned about Milwaukee history.  And I settled into the room I’d rented in a two-bedroom apartment, one of six units in a yellow stone building in a neighborhood people had told me was good to rent in.

A month after I moved in, my roommate Helen and I were chatting one night.  She said, “if you ever need something fixed, talk to me.  The landlord, Gretchen, doesn’t like to deal with subletters.  And I’ll tell you something else Gretchen doesn’t like: blacks.”  Ellen went on: one time Gretchen found out she was considering subletting to a black couple.  She told her, “If you ever rent to people with hair like that, I’ll evict you.”

That night, I learned: it’s one thing to read about race, another to feel it pound, feel it sweat.  I went to my room in a daze, wrote down everything Ellen had told me on a yellow legal pad.  That night, and many more nights, my muscles would clench with questions: Should I move out?  Should I stay, and try to change minds?  I had black friends.  Could I invite them over?

I decided to stay.  I decided to take action.  Now, I didn’t end unfair housing.  But I gathered facts, secretly.  I called up a fair housing council, and gave them each piece of the story.  They opened a case—though I never found out how it got resolved.  But as they investigated the practices in my building, I had to interrogate the habits of my mind. 

For Milwaukee is a city with a lot of street crime.  And for many people, the face of that crime is young, black, and male.  That fall, as I’d leave my AmeriCorps job at the Red Cross to wait at a bus shelter on the corner of 27^th and Wisconsin, in a downbeat, black neighborhood, I’d like to say I felt no anxiety or prejudice.  But I’d be lying.

With time, I found my own way to be comfortable.  I talked to friends and colleagues about—my own racial feelings.  I walked around the neighborhood.  I engaged people at the bus stop.  I tried to make peace with my skeletons.  That fall, I learned: It’s one thing to feel open-minded, but another to open your mind and see how you really feel. 

More than that, in my year in AmeriCorps, I learned what structural racism, and personal racial prejudice, look like in living color.  What was the more important lesson?  To take steps to rectify institutional racism?  Or to take a step back and reflect on our own racial feelings?  Both.  And I learned that you can’t deal with one and not the other.  As long as our minds are segregated, our apartments, our streets, our neighborhoods, will be segregated.  I truly believe that, even if we can’t overcome inequality overnight, with time, we can—but it has to start with each of us.

File This Under:

Wonky but Revealing: Cutting Class, a report from MassBudget on the problems--visible and hidden--with the public education funding formula here in the great state of Massachusetts.


The Executive Summary gets the main points, but there are many nuggets throughout the whole text.  Key takeaways: There are some structural and some situational issues with the "foundation budget" for school systems--what  schools spend on their system, minimum, which differs from district to district depending on number of low-income students, distribution of elementary vs. middle vs. high school students, and so forth.

Structural: the formula was set based on 1993 figures, which weren't adjusted once it was signed into law in 1994, thus always lowballing district needs.

Situational: health care costs and special-ed costs are higher than what you might expect.  Many reasons for both, mostly understandable.  The result: districts pull money that could be used for regular ed teachers and other services to fund their legal obligations to special-ed and employee benefits.

Circumlocutionary: By "the great state of Massachusetts," I actually mean, "the Bay State," "the citizens of the great state I governed," or "home," depending on which version you prefer from what Romney used in his victory parity speech tonight.  By my count he did mention the state's name twice, but it was listening to him get around having to say "great" and "Massachusetts" in the same sound-bite-bound sentence was almost as painful as, well, as listening to him speak in general.

By "home," he expanded by way of saying, "It's nice to be home for the first time in two months."  Hmmm.  Hasn't been in Massachusetts in a while?  As my mother might say, that's sort of how he governed.

Policy Takeaway for the Week: It's likely the only major legislation to get through the Massachusetts Statehouse before summer is the budget, and a bill to contain health-care costs.

First reaction: man, that's slow.  Why doesn't anything ever get accomplished in politics?

Second reaction: considering how much health care eats up the state budget, a health-care bill is an education bill, a transportation bill, a community-development bill.  In theory--the devil will be in the details, of course.

Which One Do You Want to Hear First?

The good news is, I got a summer job offer in Chicago.  It trains.  It pays.  It even pays as much as my former job!  And it starts a whole month after school ends, so there'll be some much-needed R&R.

The bad news is, I've got a dog of a cold.  And it's getting worse.

The hard news is, I need to give a speech on My Values in 9 days, and I'm struggling to get ideas on paper that feel deep enough to speak on, but not too detailed that they go for more than the allotted four minutes.  Time to suck on a zinc tablet and think it over.

Week Links: Answer Me This

Bike lanes versus ... Hollwood shoots?

Growing STEM ... in preschools?

Sturgeon swimming in ... the Charles?

Dirty Dishes and Public Transit: [Re]framing the Issue

Second in a series of speeches for Arts of Communication, at the Kennedy School of Government (the first here).  

Assigment: Choose an issue, and creatively employ framing techniques to persuade your audience to your position.  (Overused Metaphor Alert).

T alert.  Every day this week, the MBTA transit system will carry 1.1 million passengers. T alert.  Each of the last twelve months, on-time performance has been above 93 percent for the Red Line.  T alert.  In two short years, nearly the entire system has gotten real-time, GPS data so customers can track when buses and trains arrive.

How many of you have taken the T in the last week?  … Me, too.  How many of you have heard announcements like the ones I just made?  … Me, neither.  Instead, we’ve heard dire warnings from T officials about cutting services and raising the fares we pay.  We’ve heard frustration from riders, who see cuts and hikes as yet another attack on folks who already stand in the cold for buses.

This problem isn’t new.  If you’ve ever been in a relationship, you know what I’m talking about.  Have you ever woken up in the morning, come down to the kitchen, and been faced with a sinkful of dishes?  Your partner left them there.  You get upset, you roll your eyes, you start complaining.  Now imagine the dishes were there because your partner spent all last night making you a home-cooked meal: maybe a pork roast, mashed potatoes, butternut squash.  But here you find yourself, bickering about a few dirty plates.

That’s where we are with the T.  When I’m frustrated with my girlfriend, something I find useful is stopping and taking stock of all the good things we do for each other.  Let’s try that for the T.  When I was about eight, I visited my aunt in Quincy.  She took me on an adventure—to the old New England Sports Museum at the CambridgeSide Galleria: we rode the Red Line in, switched to the Green Line, and emerged above-ground, over the river.  It was my first time taking public transportation.  For years, I’ve been an avid transit user; and as a teacher, 60 bucks a month has always been softer on my wallet than gas and car insurance. Like any of us, I look for service that’s rapid, reliable, and can make renovations for the future.  Sure, I’ve had the occasional frustration.  But those are exceptions in what’s normally an exceptional system.  Most of the time, the meal’s good and the dishes get cleaned.

So let’s stop arguing.  Our dishes aren’t dirty because our partner is lazy, but because the dishwasher’s broken.  The T is 5 billion dollars in debt.  Just like a broken dishwasher, there are many reasons.  Two thirds of the debt was passed on to the system by the state.  And in 2000, lawmakers decided to fund the T with projected sales tax revenue … and then the economic bubble burst.  The result?  Every year, between 20 to 30 percent of the revenue the T takes in leaks right back out—to service that debt.  The projected deficit for next year is more than 150 million dollars.

But if the arguing continues, not only are we not going to do the dishes; our entire relationship will be on the rocks.  As in a relationship, both sides have a legitimate point.  Those dirty dishes probably should have been cleaned, and you probably should have appreciated that pork roast a little more.  It’s fair for T officials to consider cuts and fare hikes, especially given the system’s solid performance.  It’s fair for riders to be concerned about the personal impacts.  

Let’s stop arguing, and start talking straight.  If you need a new dishwasher, it’s time to set aside a little more money each month to buy the appliance.  It won’t be easy, but we should ask the same of the T.  Remember, it’s public transportation: it’s ours.  We must demand high quality—but be willing to chip in, too.  Let’s ask the T to find creative new revenue sources.  Let’s say no to service cuts. But let’s say yes to reasonable fare increases.  As in a relationship, it’s time to stop tearing each other down, and starting building for the future. 

Right Questions

My family-engagement class had its first guest visit yesterday.  

I'm not usually the biggest fan of guest visits.  I loved this one.

Our visitors were representatives of the Right Question Institute.  They didn't have the right question, but they wanted to help us get there.

It was a night of doing.  Our guests didn't tell us about the RQI so much as they led us through it.  According to Right Question's Web site, RQI

promotes the use of a simple, powerful, evidence-based strategy that helps all people, no matter their level of income, literacy or education, learn to help themselves.

How?  Through a deceptively simple process of getting folks to generate their own questions.  Broken into groups of five or six, we were handed a small paper squares containing four math problems: 3+2=5, etc.  

Hypothetical: You are parents of a first-grader.  This is the assignment.  What are your questions? 

One person scribed.  The rest of us asked.  She wrote.  RQI doesn't seem to have what you'd call a Roberts-Rules-of-Order DNA, but structure us they did: No stopping to edit or judge.  Question is copied exactly as is.  Change statements to questions.  Ask as many questions as possible.

Is my child ready for this?

What was the process that led to teaching this?

Will this be on a test? ...

We were then handed new squares.  They had four math problems, too--the same ones.  This time, though--we were parents of twelfth-graders.  Ask away.

After these first rounds (lasting two minutes), we were asked to do a few more things: change some open-ended questions to closed, and vice-versa; pick our top-three priority queries; and so forth. 

What's the point?  For whom is this?  In our class context, an obvious use would be by a parent coordinator at a school to spark parents to ask questions leading to deeper school involvement or advocacy.  The facilitators suggested that to promote "microdemocracy"--authentic involvement in the institutions that affect you immediately and daily--requires questioning reasons and process and role.  What was the basis for this decision?  How was it made, and who participated in making it?  What can I do?

**

Are we asking ourselves the right questions about education?  

This morning, I read a 2005 piece by a prominent, respected, and mainstream ed organization proposing ways educators and policymakers can strengthen American high schools.  

An eye toward preventing dropouts and getting kids ready for college or career: very well.  

"Global competitiveness ... rigor ... college readiness ... business leaders are saying ... global competitiveness ... the need for workers who can ... including these measures on tests ..."  

Valid things all.

Do I support strong high schools?  Absolutely.  Have I benefitted from rigorous classes? Most definitely.  Is it crucial that kids have the skills to get good jobs in which they can grow and prosper?  Of course.  

But kids are also citizens.  And developing human beings.  Buried somewhere about halfway in, I found "interest" and "hobby."  Pretty sure "joy," "enthusiasm," and "democracy" didn't make it.  Let alone "asking their own questions."  

Most would say that education for economic success is valuable.  And I don't disagree.  But this read like a style manual for a generation of widgets.  Is that the best we can do? 

100% Language Immersion: Why I'm (Slightly) For It

I became a better language teacher when I asked my students to speak only the language they were learning--and did the same myself.  In my brief period teaching high-school Spanish, my students did activities in Spanish.  But I didn't think of them as Spanish speakers--even though they were in an intermediate class!

When I moved to teaching adult ESOL, I didn't just change location.  I changed attitude.  100% English was the name of the game--and it was only a beginning class.  How, and why?

As I've written recently, there are some very good reasons for allowing use of students' native language in a second-language class.  It creates a comfort zone--especially for adults already adjusting to a host of new cultural expectations.  It makes classroom mechanics go more quickly, freeing up space for learning.

At the end of the day, though, I'm still for 100% immersion.*  For a couple reasons.

Why not let students banter in their own language?  After all, they can translate a confusing word, explain an instruction not well understood the first time around.  Because the kind of classroom where students learn more language is one in which they participate in lots of small-group and pair work and use the "target language" (English in the ESOL setting).  The "tidbit" language, small talk, back-and-forth, if it happens in that target language, is very helpful for building skills.  How are you?  What page are we on?  Do you want to go first?  Can you pass me a pencil?  Don't or doesn't?  In fact, it's actually more real than a lot of the language practice that happens in traditional "drills" or speaking activities--the questions are authentic, not out of a book.  What's more, when students go back and forth in the target language, they have to adjust the language they use to help each other understand--that's also a very important way of building language skills.

Any classroom has plenty of anecdotes that show this, but there's also research that makes the case.  One study I read about showed that students who interacted in the target language in small groups "negotiated meaning" many, many times more than those who weren't working in such groups.  It's not side stuff; it's the main stuff.

There's also the familiar slippery slope.  If you set the bar to 100%, there are probably going to be moments when folks resort to their native language.  As I argued in my previous post on this topic, the job of an adult educator is not to police students.  If you ask for 100%, you might get 98%, say--which is pretty good.  Set the bar to "let's speak English 95% of the time"--and you'll probably get 90.  I remember watching my students, who knew they were trying to hit a high bar, force themselves to "take the hard way out"--use the English phrase they thought they didn't remember, ask the English question they thought they couldn't get out.

Isn't it just too challenging to ask beginning (or intermediate) speakers to understand everything in the target language?  In a sense, yes.  God, when I was teaching high school, if I'd tried to explain the complex directions I laid out for vocab games, my students' eyes might have glazed over more than they  already were (amount of immersion was only one of my struggles; sigh).

Hold yourself to 100% target language as a teacher, though, and it can bring out something finer.  The experts say that students who are learning a language from scratch need plenty of pictures, role-plays, models.  It makes for hard work.  Once I adopted 100% language immersion, I had to keep Occam's Razor on hand at all times: what was the simplest explanation or activity available?  What metaphor could I use to display it?  Google Images was also my best friend.  And Total Physical Response, which I found to be an incredibly effective teaching technique.  Lengthy instructions?  Better to simplify the task, and model how to do (perhaps using my favorite: Doug Lemov's I/we/you sequence of modeling).  Detailed explanations of grammar?  Better to structure activities where students listen and observe how language is used in specific settings--perhaps responding physically.  I had to bring my teaching to a higher level in order to bring the lessons to students at the right language level.

This isn't to understate the great things that can come from more complex work.  While the beginning levels of language learning demand a language-rich, yet straightforward atmosphere, I also had positive experiences integrating substantial role-plays into class.  Students might act out being a nurse and a patient at a health clinic.  But to get to such complex work, students first need a foundation of grammar and vocab first, a model of what to do (YouTube being another of my best friends), and support as they do it.

Can there be a place for "safety valves" of native-language use?  Of course.  One semester, students asked to post chart paper on the wall, and write English words they needed translated on it.  Later, the translation could be done.  Teachers who speak a student's native language can always clarify something during class, after break.  Volunteer tutors can sit side-by-side students and intervene when something is just really confusing.  But I'd tend to see these as special exceptions.

At the end of the day, I'm for 100% immersion--slightly.  Done right, it brings out more in students, and brings out more in teachers.

*N.B. As I pointed out last time around, I'm making a point about language use in a second-language program--I'm not making a point about the merits of bilingual education as a whole.  That's a topic for another day.