Recently dubbed “Minister of Propaganda for the education status quo” by none other than Andy Rotherham, Public School Insight’s Claus von Zastrow is rockin’ it old school, posting a good one on student motivation and its “evil twin,” pandering.
Teachers and parents are up against a lot when they try to motivate their kids to work hard and succeed. It can be tempting to attach bells and whistles to every chore or assignment, but that will send the wrong message. Perseverence is part and parcel of true motivation.
Seditious, treasonous stuff. Silence him!
As I told my class on numerous occasions every year, “You MUST be motivated to do well in school. That is your only choice. This may not be fair but it is reality. What you do over the first twenty years of your life determines the state of you existence for your last seventy to eighty years of your life. Work hard and do well in school and you will be rewarded. Slough off, do nothing or work only on the margins and you will be forced to pay for it for the rest of your life. There are no mulligans here either. You must do it now or be prepared to live a life of deprivation.”
I was very demanding and persistent about all of this.
Comment by Paul Hoss — January 12, 2010 @ 5:24 pm
Agreed, Paul. Sounds like we gave the same speech. The question is how you square that with the notion that an unmotivated child is the result of an uninspiring teacher.
Comment by Robert Pondiscio — January 12, 2010 @ 5:44 pm
An uninspiring teacher? To quote an infamous twenty-first century educator, “Seditious, treasonous stuff.” Off with his license!
Comment by Paul Hoss — January 12, 2010 @ 7:18 pm
“Teachers and parents are up against a lot when they try to motivate their kids to work hard and succeed.”
Are they? Universally? Most days I have no trouble motivating my grandchildren. Some days it is all I can do to keep up with them.
As I recall, John Holt was the first person I heard observe that learning is a natural state for human beings. The hard question is why is it that some efforts to educate paradoxically turn off the impulse to learn.
Comment by Homeschooling Granny — January 12, 2010 @ 9:06 pm
Homeschooling Granny,
One-on-one with your own brainy offspring is way different than one teacher, sixty assorted kids. Today in my afternoon class of 12 year olds, six out of thirty were eager to run with me in lessons on appositives, Confucius and Poe’s “The Bells”; many of the rest wished I would just go away and stop bothering them. Socializing, texting and performing sadistic pranks were higher on their agenda. The hang-dog looks of several of them had a major “energy vampire” effect on me. Ugh. The only benefit of their uncooperative behavior was that it provided an apt counterexample to proper student behavior according to Confucius.
Comment by Ben F — January 13, 2010 @ 1:34 am
Ben F
I’ve been trying to understand why parents with immensely different backgrounds, levels of education, and parenting styles seem to be able to educate their kids without the preparation we expect of a teacher. I think Paul Hoss has identified it in his writing on individualized instruction and how to bring it into the classroom. Have you read that? It is right here on Core Knowledge blog and I found it rapidly by googling: Paul Hoss Individualized. The discussion that follows is well worth reading as well.
Comment by Homeschooling Granny — January 13, 2010 @ 6:26 pm
Granny,
First, I don’t really see how failure to individualize was at the root of our troubles in yesterday’s class. M. and L. were not giving me hang-dog looks because I failed to pitch appositives at their level –they both were getting it fairly well. It’s just that they weren’t enjoying it that much. I confess, I wasn’t making it fun. It was plain vanilla, straight ahead direct instruction. They got it, but they didn’t enjoy it.
Could I have made it more entertaining? Yes, I could have. If I had skipped washing dishes and going swimming the evening before. Or skipped a long phone call with my friend from Maine who I haven’t talked to in six months. It often seems to me that I face a choice between delivering deluxe, entertaining lessons and living a balanced life. More and more I opt for balance…and concomitant plain jane lessons. Does this entitle the kids to give hang-dog looks? I lean toward “no”, but perhaps you see things differently.
Regarding individualization: it seems to me that if individualizing instruction is the only way we can save American public education, we’re doomed. It’s too labor-intensive. Public school teachers operate in an environment in which they effectively have no prep time (once you’re done with using the bathroom –finally–, running some copies, and checking your email, most of your forty minute prep is gone). They are on the stage for seven periods a day coping with a wild assortment of kids. They do not have true curricula, just weak textbooks and a list of standards. So assembling lessons with any real substance or color requires more labor AFTER an exhausting eight hours with the kids. Individualizing significantly increases this prep labor (and by now it’s 5 pm and you haven’t yet GRADED a single paper). Teachers who devote 60 hours a week may be able to pull this off. These teachers either burn out or lose balance in their lives (I grant you, there are a few paragons of efficiency who can pull this off with aplomb). Do we really want to build a school system that drains the life force from its teachers? We’ve got to design a system that mere mortals can staff without martyring themselves. From what I’ve read, Japan, Singapore and Finland do not rely upon individualization to ensure their kids succeed. What do they do differently? For one thing, they have great off-the-shelf, national, detailed curricula (e.g. Singapore math) that take a lot of the planning burden off of teachers. For another, they give their teachers a lot more prep/grading/collaboration time each week (an average of 20 hours a week vs. our 4). Also their curricula are content oriented and promotion is linked to mastery of content, so each rising class is more homogeneous ability-wise. The need for individualization, thereby, is largely obviated. These measures are the only reasonable way to reform our system. Individualization, differentiation and interventions –these buzz terms we hear all the time –are desperate attempts to cope with the messy effects of a broken, irrational system.
Comment by Ben F — January 14, 2010 @ 2:19 am
Geographic mobility may be one of the overlooked factors in education. It is my understanding that the aforementioned countries not only have long-established national curriculums but populations that are far less mobile than in the US. It is much easier to teach an already-developed curriculum (and on the basis of international tests, good ones) to a stable population of students. In the US, there is neither a stable curriculum nor a stable population. At the lower end of the SES curve, the student population tends to be in continual flux and I cannot imagine that it is not a significant factor in (lack of) achievement.
Comment by momof4 — January 14, 2010 @ 8:06 pm
Geographic mobility, momof4, to my mind is one of the strongest arguments in favor of a national core elementary/middle school curriculum. Your point about high mobility among low-SES families is precisely the point–the kids who can least afford it are hurt the worst.
Comment by Robert Pondiscio — January 14, 2010 @ 8:39 pm
Differentiation can operate at the margins (for example, it’s what teachers do when a student has missed several classes because of illness); it can’t be the basis of classroom instruction, because of the reasons Ben F. notes. K-12 education is only economically feasible if it’s done as a group activity, and it’s only pedagigically effective if the instruction can be delivered effectively to groups of students, so that each student gets a lot of instruction and a lot of interaction with the material, rather than a small amount.
Comment by Jane — January 16, 2010 @ 1:40 pm
[...] and schools have little or no support to make standards mean something in the classroom.” The Minister of Propaganda for the education status quo thus finds himself under the same big tent as Checker Finn and Mike Petrilli at Fordham. Even [...]
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