Appreciating a certain teacher

I had a pretty miserable time in "K-12" education. Hell, I've had a pretty miserable time in all my time as a "student." It's not that I'm not good at learning. I love learning. I think most of us do, but "school" is not traditionally about learning, but rather about arbitrary rules and arbitrary rankings - and I do not like either.

Yet, within a range of horrors that "school" has been for me, there are amazing bright spots... and those bright spots are almost all related to great teachers. A third grade teacher, Mrs. Janowitz, who let me show what I could do with music and architecture and made school a little bit safe. A sixth grade teacher, Martin McNeil, who understood an 11 - 12-year-old boy's needs for certain forms of space. Alan Shapiro, who I spent four years with (formally) as teacher, mentor, advisor, friend, and who showed me what education could be. Joe Kuszai, at Michigan State University, who gave me space as an artist to grow and learn and even lead. Antonio Diaz, police sergeant and lawyer in the New York City Police Academy who focused on what I could do, not on what I could not. Y.S. Lee at Pratt Institute, a master teacher who understand the purpose of education. Jonathan White and Kathy Bailey, life changing educators in Criminal Justice at Grand Valley State University, and Alexandra Gottardo and Elizabeth Schaughency, not just great teachers and colleagues, but the "special educators" who truly transformed my life.

below: Alan Shapiro on education, unionization, life...

I can bring myself all the way to the present and Punya Mishra, Lynn Fendler, and Susan Peters at MSU's College of Education.

And I sincerely thank everyone of these brilliant people... but, and in part inspired by Charles Blow, as "Teacher Appreciation Week" begins - and as people like Barack Obama and Arne Duncan begin their faux statements after years of teacher bashing - I want to speak about one teacher in particular.

Her name is Ruth Socol, and she's my mom.

I can remember when she began teaching - I can remember when she graduated from Hunter College - probably mostly focused on adding a touch of income stability to the family. She began teaching in a pre-union time, earned almost nothing and had any chance at free time taken up supervising playgrounds and cafeterias. I remember her up till all hours of the night at this little desk which sat by the front door working on lessons, working on grading. I remember her taking all sorts of summer jobs to help make ends meet.

But that's not what I want to write about.

Not her teacher pic... (obviously)... but my Ma as a young bride was
"movie star" beautiful... and this is an incredible photograph

I want to write about the fighter. My mom never accepted the status quo. She sure could have done all her work and gone home. There sure was plenty to do at home, and honestly, for the time, the schools she taught in were pretty good. But she wasn't satisfied, at any level.

She fought really hard for unionization and the AFT - few elementary teachers pushed very hard for this, it was mostly a secondary thing - but she battled for it. It not only meant decent pay, it meant having a real voice. And when it came down to a big strike over teacher power in the schools - as much as it hurt her to do so - she was part of a small picket line outside of a huge elementary school.

My mom taught third grade, which
featured Dick and Jane in Streets and Roads
when she began

But even more critically, she fought for kids, every day. She pushed for "open classrooms," literally knocking down walls between rooms in order to build a multiage space with no desks, and almost no chairs, where kids could move and get comfortable and progress at their own rate. She pushed her administrators on this, moving them forward, embracing a newly diverse student body and making it work. She spent summers helping to create new - and multimedia - learning materials, leading the push to kick "Dick and Jane" out of the schools. Leading the push to bring manipulatives into maths. (I clearly remember a few summers, around age ten, when I had piles of Cuisinaire Rods to play with...)

She visited her students' homes. She talked to them in the supermarket. She individualized her lessons and fought against homework. And she observed and observed and observed.

"If I could do one thing," she told me when I was maybe 16, "it would be to never push any kid to read before third grade. Most aren't ready for it, and every year my room is filled with eight-year-olds who hate reading and never want to see a book again."

She was among the earliest teachers I knew to toss classroom furniture and replace those desks and chairs with carpet and pillows because, as she said, "kids hate those chairs." Now, her students were no different than any other students, and what she was seeing was no different than what anyone else was seeing, but she simply wouldn't accept what she knew didn't work.

She fought and she worked and she fought for everything that was right for kids, for her community. And she made a real difference. Hardly a month goes by in which I don't get a message in Facebook from one of her ex-students. "Am I her son?" "How is she?" "Please tell her that she changed my life." All this about a woman kids met at age eight.

Anyway, I am her son, and I am the continuation of her life work. She is doing great, she's healthy and active and living well. And thank you, because she changed the lives of many, in really important ways, as so many great teachers do.

From childhood, from my mom, I learned that there is no profession more important to society than teaching. And for all these years, I've wished our culture recognized that.

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week to my Ma, to every teacher. And Happy Mother's Day too.

- Ira Socol

Changing Gears 2012: learning to be a society (again)

(1) ending required sameness     (2) rejecting the flipped classroom     (3) re-thinking rigor     (4) its not about 1:1      (5) start to dream again    (7) re-thinking what "literature" means       (8) maths are creative, maths are not arithmetic     (9) changing rooms     (10) undoing academic time     (11) social networks beyond Zuckerbergism     (12) knowing less about students, seeing more     (13) why we fight

The adults could argue about anything,
and did every night.

I grew up in a family, in a place, in a community, in a culture which could and would debate anything anytime. It could debate politics and religion and sport and music and literature with wild passion, and it did, wherever two or more people gathered.

I remember very clearly how my father would play sports on Sundays, and he, an absolute socialist, was in constant debate with one friend who was a true Communist (he subscribed to Soviet Life magazine and New York Communist newspapers) and another friend who was a very-right-wing Republican State Senator. They agreed on almost nothing, yelled a lot during their conversations, but, and here's the thing... they were never anything but the best of friends, they never doubted each others' patriotism or each others' positions as respected members of society, they never threatened each other with anything more than electoral defeat.

I was thinking about this on a Friday night when my "spousal equivalent" looked at her Facebook stream and saw, from the friend of a friend, a person threatening to "shoot all liberals with a rifle." Nice. This came at the end of a week in which certain commentators on the American political right appeared willing to stir up threats of violence against an elementary school because they disliked something eight-year-olds had said.

You understand what I'm talking about. All over the US supposed "leaders" are willing to describe their opponents in terms so vile that it cannot be surprising that some are inspired to violence. But don't let that kind of ultra-extremism fool you into thinking this is a fringe thing: The governor of New Jersey has built a big political career out of insulting people in public. More Republicans in Iowa voted for a man for President who routinely insults large segments of the population in vile terms than voted for anyone else. Chicago just elected a mayor who's political career, including White House Chief of Staff, is based on incivility.

And it is certainly no surprise that our children learn the wrong things. "We" are the models, and "we" are acting in some horrible ways. Yes, I include "me" in "we" - it is not that I casually advocate violence, I don't, but I'm surely guilty of "saying" things on-line which go beyond provocation (which I think is generally a good thing) into angry denunciation (which, while perhaps being required on occasion, should be used very sparingly).

A Civil Education

Civility among us might be described in various ways, and, depending on the environment, things change. This is, and has always been true, which is why the larger the audience we seek, or agree to (Facebook, Twitter, blogs) the more careful we must be. Where I live in Michigan, for example, people often say, "Eye-talian" when referring to people (or food) with an ethnic background in the nation of Italia. And in West Michigan, that's usually simply written off as lingual ignorance, no big offense taken. Where I grew up, however, a place where every phrase used in the classic "ethnic insult" scene from The Godfather was used and accepted, "Eye-talian" would have gotten you punched out pretty instantly. So would "Jewed," as might some reference to the mascots of either Lucky Charms or the University of Notre Dame. On the other hand, the simple "God Damn" I was raised with can really offend the people who grew up where I live now...

This is the only version I could easily find on YouTube... Whatchagonna do?

But I was raised, I think, well enough to understand that when I left the confines of the "New Rochelle to City Island culture zone" I watched what I said much more carefully. No reason to start a fight with someone before you even actually meet them. This was reinforced when I attended the Police Academy. "First do no harm," one of my instructors said, "no one ever became less of a threat because someone called them a motherf***er. Watch your language. Be a professional." So, I am always stunned, and deeply disappointed in the training, when I hear cops cursing. What part of a "be a professional," or, "be a role model," don't they understand?

No, not everyone understands, one writer, complaining about "PC gone hardcore" in The Observer, suggests that, "perhaps we should all adopt the kids-on-the-bus attitude: accept that everyone is different, make jokes about it, but don't take offence unless it's meant. As Finn said to me: "It's about how you take a word, as much as what people mean by it. It's just words." How personal do you want to get?"

But I do, and we all should. Basic civility is what allows us to hear each other, to meet each other, to work with each in this thing called "society."

Less than two miles to the north, Thomas Paine tried to retire in peace,
but he was already too radical for the United States.

"The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilised community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together. The landholder, the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman, and every occupation, prospers by the aid which each receives from the other, and from the whole." Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man

Now Paine was a "provocateur" of the highest order. He truly made the American Revolution possible through his writings. He raised a large part of British North America up to a point of armed revolt against their government, then he helped do the same in France, and yet, it was never his goal to divide the people of a nation against each other, or against the people of other nations. He was English, yet he was equally at home in America and France. He was a Marxist more than a generation before Marx was born, but he worked comfortably with landed gentry like Jefferson. In doing so, he changed the world.

The Power of "Consensus"

I always believe. Faith in the Gunners, the Mets, the Jets, the Spartans,
the Gaels, the Rangers, and once they're back across the Hudson, the Net

Consensus, is one of those good and bad things. A consensus which is "fixed," which is impervious to new information, say, "African-Americans are not really the same species as Whites" in the "old American South," are toxic. This is where "faith" and "education" come into conflict. Faith being a belief in things despite facts or despite the lack of facts - I begin each English football season believing that Arsenal
 will win the Premier League, the FA Cup, and the Champions League. I begin each American football season believing that the Jets will win the Super Bowl and Michigan State will win the Rose Bowl. I begin each baseball season believing that the Mets will win the World Series. These are "faith" beliefs, facts can not shake them. In sport that is fine, the social contract surrounding sport is that we root for differing teams, believing in them absolutely. No one in Green Bay, or Ann Arbor, or Philadelphia has to agree with me for the world to keep spinning. In other areas this creates bigger problems.

Consensus is a particular problem when it is based in majority opinion alone, and majority opinion, apparently, takes on real power even before we get most children into school.

"In this study, three- and four-year-old children watched as a small group of people (either three or four members) named a novel object. The majority of group members would use the same name for the object; the lone dissenter would pick a different name. The children were then asked what they thought the object was called.
  "The results revealed that majority rules when it comes to influencing the opinion of preschoolers. The children in the study would consistently select the name that was used by the majority of the group members. And even more interesting, in a follow-up experiment in which only two members (someone from the majority group and the dissenter) remained in the room and named a different object, the children would still go with name that was provided by the majority group member.
   "These results indicate that children as young as age three and four are able to recognize and trust a consensus."

Thus it is important that we help our students, from the very start, how to do multiple things: How to separate faith from fact. How to separate belief from knowledge. How to accept new information and incorporate that into a belief system. How to listen to a group, and yet, how to stand up for one's own beliefs. How to persuade. How to be persuaded. And, in all of these sometimes contradictory things, how to do all this without making enemies, how to do it without insulting people... essentially... how to argue in ways which allow you to argue with the same people the next day.

Step six of Changing Gears 2012 is committing ourselves to helping our students to be part of a civil society. Because we cannot exist long as a society if we continue to act towards each other as we have been doing.

It must be OK for us to say that our leaders are using
language which should be unacceptable.

We have to help our students understand that the words we choose matter. That our willingness to listen to diversity of opinion matters. That our willingness to respect each other matters. We have to say to parents who object to their children hearing divergent views, "you can keep your child at home, but this is public education in a nation founded on the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and respectful differences are welcome here." At the same time we must be clear, "disrespectful opinions are not OK."

This isn't really difficult. I went to school in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-racial community with very strongly contested politics. Republicans came to speak in school, Democrats did, extreme Conservatives did, the Black Panthers did. All of our religious schools brought all of us to all the other religious services as we moved through our studies there. So I sure knew that my father thought Mayor Ruskin of New Rochelle was dangerous,1 but he would have gone ballistic if I had refused to listen to him when, running for re-election, he visited my seventh grade. So, I was appalled that there were American parents who objected to their children hearing the President of the United States in September 2009. I didn't like what he said, but that has nothing to do with anything. I would have listened to him as I listened to New Rochelle's Mayor as my son listened to the State Senator from Holland, Michigan... with critical listening skills, and the ability to debate.

That is step one. We can learn to listen. Step two, is we can learn not to insult. And we can begin not insulting by considering the weight of words. Let me give you an example, less apparently loathsome than say, Newt Gingrich telling young Americans, including many veterans, to "take a bath," or Mitt Romney attacking former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman for serving his nation. I tend to get insulted when a certain political group describes themselves as "pro-life," because the implication is that those of us who disagree are somehow "anti-life." Now I can - and have - defined being "pro-life" differently, I think a "pro-life" politician or voter is one who favors universal health insurance, family and parental paid leave, higher "living" minimum wages, required minimum vacation time, and a right to housing, which, I guess I could say, makes all against those bits of legislation "anti-life." I am also very happy that a number of young women I know, faced with "accidental" pregnancies, could depend on Welfare and Medicaid systems which allowed them to give birth and begin raising their children safely, and so I could declare that my state's Republican government, which has drastically cut those programs, is "anti-life," but here's the thing... kind of like that instructor told us in the Police Academy, it's probably true that you rarely begin to win someone to your side by calling them a murderer.

'"The Catholic public official lives the political truth most Catholics through most of American history have accepted and insisted on,” [New York Governor Mario] Cuomo declared [in a 1984 speech on abortion at the University of Notre Dame], “the truth that to assure our freedom, we must allow others the same freedom, even if occasionally it produces conduct by them which we would hold to be sinful. I protect my right to be a Catholic by preserving your right to believe as a Jew, a Protestant or nonbeliever or anything else you choose.”'

Mario Cuomo, 2000, "We owe one another an obligation to treat each other with dignity, with respect."

"I know it may be hard for Mitt Romney and some people to take," Jon Huntsman said this Saturday night, "but most of America is with me because in the end they want this America to be working together,” and he is right. We need to be a nation which works really hard to find ways to speak across our divides, we need to find ways of speech which allow us to listen across our divides, we need to find ways to respect each other. I don't ever want to see a crowd of American "patriots" boo a combat veteran again, or cheer the idea of letting fellow citizens die. And I don't want anyone to call anyone a Nazi ever again, that is, unless the person is an actual Nazi (and if you can't tell who is an actual Nazi, you may need to go back to school).

Third, we need to practice. We cannot learn to be better by avoiding the difficult issues, we can only learn to be better by helping our children to learn how to confront the ideas which most challenge us. "A good citizen questions, informs himself or herself, thinks issues through, reaches conclusions, and participates in public life. A good teacher helps students to understand that controversy is the lifeblood of democracy, to learn how to inquire into past and current controversial issues that are meaningful to them, and to participate in public life," AlanShapiro wrote in an essay in teaching controversial issues, which is where I am sending you readers next.

Bring the controversies to your students, but... (in shorthand)

(1) Examine yourself and your own prejudices, 

(2) Create a safe environment where disagreement and minority ideas are not threatened, 

(3) Find out what students know and think about an issue before beginning an inquiry. Start where the students are - wherever and whatever age they are, 

(4) Examine questions. After listing student questions on the chalkboard without comment, the teacher invites scrutiny of them. Which require factual answers? Which call for opinions? What words may require definition before a question can be answered intelligently? Which contain assumptions? Which are unclear and need to be reworded? Which are impossible to answer or useless to the inquiry? 

(5) Have students experience multiple perspectives and the complexity of public issues. Exposure to different points of view on a controversial issue is necessary but insufficient, 

(6) Promote dialogue. Students usually need help in understanding the differences between dialogue and monologue, between dialogue and debate. Dialogue aims for understanding, enlargement of view, complicating one's thinking, an openness to change, 

(7) Be responsive to students' feelings and values, 

(8) Encourage both independent and collaborative work. Students need opportunities to pursue inquiries by themselves and with others. In either case, they need to understand the purpose, what they are going to do and how to go about it, ways to communicate findings and conclusions, 

(9) Provide opportunities for students to act on their conclusions. The idea of taking action may seem pointless and hopeless to students. Confronting and dealing with students' sense of powerlessness then becomes essential.

Yes, this is can be hard in today's toxic political environment, it can be really hard. But if we are to have a true democracy it is essential that our children learn to be better than we have been.

- Ira Socol
next: re-thinking what literature means
1 - Republican Mayor Ruskin sold David's Island, the former Fort Slocum, to New York's Consolidated Edison Corporation to be used as a spot for 12 nuclear power generating plants. Those of us living a half mile away were understandably troubled by this plan which, they said, "would "only raise the temperature of the surrounding Long Island Sound ten degrees." A great guy named Dr. Jim Egan, a professor, devout Catholic, powerful liberal, ran against Ruskin in 1967 and was crushed, but I met Bobby Kennedy when he came to New Rochelle to campaign for Dr. Jim.

 

Pedagogy 101

Pedagogy 101

by Alan Shapiro

Suited (I thought) and tied,

earnest as the day was very long,

I taught them when to be still,

why they needed to listen,

where Columbus was born,

how to answer textbook questions

and what the similarity was

between my decrees and their grades.

Sitting at bolted desks            

while flies rambled on tall windows

they taught me when to shut my mouth, 

why I needed to hear,

where they were coming from,

how to question textbook answers,

and what the difference is

between schooling and education.

18 April 1999

Once more: On the value of teachers

USA Today wasn't interested, so I'll just get my message out the twenty-first century way...

On a day in January of this year a man named Alan Shapiro died at the age of 85. He was not particularly famous, as most people are not, but for many of us who were touched by his life, many of whom gathered on the last Saturday in March for a memorial service, a celebration of his life, he was someone who changed lives, who changed the world.

Alan was a teacher. In today’s United States that is not a beloved profession. The President’s Secretary of Education routinely disparages veteran educators. Governors and their legislative allies of states from New Jersey to Wisconsin to Idaho say that teachers are overpaid, underworked, and greedy. Billionaire Bill Gates, Jr. says they stop learning anything after a couple of years. Celebrated “educational reformers” like Michelle Rhee have built careers and fortunes attacking the classroom teachers who work with our children every day.

Alan was a teacher, a veteran teacher, and he was a union organizer. He built both a teachers’ union in New Rochelle, New York and he built an alternative education system for students in that city’s school system. He thus empowered both.

I was one of those students, my mother was one of those teachers.

Celebration For Alan from Paul Shapiro on Vimeo.

This is an hour+ video, but there's some good stuff

I met Alan as a 14-year-old ready to drop out of school. Angry, bitter, completely frustrated by any connection between my life, my learning style, and a miserable urban junior high school. In that year alone I’d be thrown out of three classrooms “permanently,” including very luckily, my English class within the first week of school. I landed among the “academic losers” in Mr. Shapiro’s room, in a class grouping other teachers literally called “dumb English.”

To make that classroom work, Alan did everything today’s “reformers” refuse to do. He abandoned not just testing, but grades - allowing the room to choose a grade we’d all get for the whole year. He abandoned teacher-centric instruction, often sitting silently, waiting for us to begin. He abandoned traditional discipline, letting us sit or not sit wherever we chose. He abandoned traditional delivery - when we read novels he also showed us the films, played audio readings, or read to us as a group. He abandoned traditional student work. There was no homework, and students responded to what was going on in class any way they chose to.

At the end of that year this group of “losers” collected over 150 pages of stories and poems we had written into a book we proudly shared, and I, suddenly, wanted to write.

Immediately after that, as a result of a teachers’ strike led by Shapiro, the New Rochelle City School District allowed him to begin an Alternative High School designed in collaboration with Neil Postman and Charlie Weingartner, as part of a new high school concept for the city, one based in student choice of program.

I, and many others of my generation who joined the memorial service, were in that Alternative High School - The Program for Inquiry, Involvement, and Independent Study - known as “The 3Is.” In the 3Is the rest of the “form of school” disappeared. There was no required attendance. Most learning happened far away from anything which even resembled a class. There were no grades at all - it was “pass/no record,” with self and teacher evaluation of what had happened. For English I spent four months working with an overnight radio newsman, learning writing and editing without ever putting a pencil near paper, later I worked on the Program’s weekly newspaper. For social studies I worked in the City Planner’s office and interviewed the homeless in Grand Central. For science I worked on creating a heritage farm in a city park. Others worked in city greenhouses or the hospital emergency room. Took courses at Iona College or spent weeks at museums in New York. Read “great books” and discussed them on Tuesday nights in Alan’s living room, or argued theories another night in the science teacher’s home. There was folk dancing and mural projects. Efforts to work with elementary students and classes designed around student-asked questions.

And the results were stunning. From a mix of students including a huge percent likely to drop out, filled with what we’d now label learning, attention, and emotional disabilities, the 3Is got almost everyone to graduation, and got almost everyone to four-year colleges and universities, from Brown, MIT, and Cornell, to Hampshire, Kenyon, and Oberlin. For 13 years, until the conservative politics of the Reagan-era squashed such experiments, the 3Is took hundreds and hundreds of students who “did not fit” and “could not succeed” and proved the opposite. At that memorial we were educators and architects, lawyers and artists, managers and businesspeople. We are successes indeed. We are successes because he trusted us as both students and humans, because he knew we were individuals, not statistical data points, because he gave totally of himself to make our lives better.

But Alan’s actions stretched much further. My mother, an elementary school teacher, given voice by the union and enough income to take classes in the summer rather than work a second job, literally tore down walls in her school, creating a no desks/no chairs multiage open classroom. Today, via Facebook, I constantly get messages thanking her for her teaching. Other teachers at every level began experiments which challenged the system, including Alan’s 3I founding partner, who became principal of all New Rochelle High School in later years.

If New Rochelle has done better than most cities at educating a highly diverse and rapidly changing population - and the evidence says that it has - this may be largely due to the impact of Alan’s work in both unionization and true educational reform. In ways large and small, he changed the world.

And now I need to say that Alan is hardly alone. All over America, in places big and small, master teachers, protected by unions and tenure, challenge the system on behalf of their students. All over America teachers learn and grow, doubt and invent, and help turn those abandoned by our increasingly rigid systems to alternate paths. All over America great teachers are saving kids like me in public schools in every kind of place. I meet them through my work, I listen to them, I see them online, collaborating and looking for knowledge, solutions, ideas, day and night. Honestly, there is no profession in our society which should be more honored, or more highly compensated.

The memorial service for Alan Shapiro took place in a community center in a rural Connecticut town. The community center was once the extravagant home of a stunningly wealthy 19th Century governor. Not as wealthy, perhaps, as New Jersey’s Chris Christie or Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, but obviously a very rich man. Then, as now, as the men who become Governors begin or end in great wealth. Then, as now, teachers, at best, reach some level of middle class comfort for their decades of life changing efforts.

But I was struck by something. A hundred plus years hence, today’s politicians and their “works” will be as completely forgotten as the “Who’s that?” whose house we were gathered in, but the impact of great teachers ripples out through society and through generations. In the years to come, when the Christie and Walker mansions have crumbled, what Alan Shapiro taught will still matter.

- Ira Socol

You may read much of Alan Shapiro’s “retirement works” at teachablemoment.org You can hear Alan in his own words at http://vimeo.com/21549634 The original New Rochelle “Postman Proposal” is available at http://www.echonyc.com/~jkarpf/3i/proposal1969.html

Chris Lehmann, Alan Shapiro, and sitting on a Philadelphia floor, almost 40 years ago

On a rainy morning back in the 1970s a few students from New Rochelle, New York's Program for Inquiry, Involvement, and Independent Study ("3Is") walked the couple of blocks from New Rochelle High School down to the Mayflower Elementary School parking lot. One student had a mother who taught there. I guess we were old enough to have drivers licenses, yeah, or this tale might have other components than the relevant ones. At the elementary school there may or may not have been a conversation between mother and daughter, and then we piled into a Ford Country Squire station wagon, filled it with gas at a Getty station on North Avenue, and drove to Philadelphia.

We didn't ask any adults about this. There were no permission slips. Not much of a plan. We were students in a different time and in a different kind of school.

Our mission was to visit The Parkway Program, a secondary school like ours, but located in the heart of a major city. We had many similar schools around us at that time, "Schools Without Walls" existed throughout Westchester County and Long Island as parts of, or adjuncts to, public high schools. We had visited them all, even played basketball against them all, but the program in Philadelphia offered us a chance to see how this translated into another environment.

"The whole scene oozed with activity and life and while there was no apparent order to it all, a sense of purpose seemed evident... I asked [the head teacher] if he would identify the kinds of things that were going on about us. His response - quick and unqualified - was to the effect that he had no idea what the activities consisted of, that it was furthermore not his business to know, and that the participants had defined the content, value, and details of their pursuits and were probably doing whatever it was they felt it important to do." - Greenberg and Roush. Philadelphia

Schools like this were notoriously hard to observe and evaluate. There were few - if any - things which looked like "classes" or "classrooms." Students were, typically, not there. And if they were there, what they were doing was either not obvious, or way too obvious (we had a brief hop-scotch craze, and we also had one student, who would go on to graduate from MIT, who entertained himself by running full-speed into the walls).  Most learning took place in projects - individual or group - or through conversations or individual reading, and might take place (in the case of the 3Is) in Alan Shapiro's living room in the evening ("Great Books") or Grand Central after midnight ("Abnormal Psychology") or at the City's Parks Department Greenhouse or the New Rochelle Hospital Emergency Room or City Hall or wherever.

This 'inability to observe' was, I suspect, part of the movement's downfall. Despite incredibly impressive graduation and four-year college attendance rates (far better than the "regular schools"), observers, especially as Reagan/Bush conservatism became the national mood, saw nothing but "kids hanging out, doing nothing." The model was too far from the expectations of political leaders to make any sense.

I thought about all this as Chris Lehmann, principal of Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy (SLA) and organizer-in-chief of the EduCon conference, and I discussed education on a brief post I wrote last weekend from SLA and EduCon. It's a great conversation, which touches on all the difficulties faced by those really trying to help kids learn (as opposed to those trying to test kids, which is a different idea), and all the difficulties of observing and discussing learning.

I had gone to EduCon and been uncomfortable. Nothing wrong with that in itself. I write a lot about the mismatches between schools and students, teachers and students. One size never fits all. And, I did find SLA students to be comfortable with their school, happy with their school, happy with their learning environment, which is what matters. It may not have been my vision of radically different education, but I'm not sure that SLA claims to be that. Others, perhaps they are very well meaning educators desperately looking for "an answer" and grasping at anything which looks successful as their "model," will see SLA and EduCon as a 'Nirvana,' but - that's "reader response," not school claim or design.

School in session, circa 1975

But what had struck me, especially on Twitter, was that when I said I wasn't comfortable at EduCon or that I had questions about SLA, a flood of educators told me that what was wrong was my behavior. You can see that in a couple of the blog comments (not from Chris) as well. You can also see the flip side. People, perhaps including myself, blaming the environment for the entirety of the mismatch. And that is an old, old conversation.

Student: "This school sucks." Educator: "No it doesn't, it's just your attitude." If you wander school corridors, as I tend to do, you will hear versions of this conversation all the time.

So, as Chris and I talked, talking out an initial face-to-face conversation which went something like this: Chris (walking down the hall): "Ira, aren't there any sessions which seemed interesting to you?" Ira (sitting in the hall): "Chris, you know I don't go to classes." - perhaps you've heard versions of this in your schools - I begin to think about how we see learning.

I had come to EduCon from a week walking schools with teachers and some students. We had "done rounds," going classroom to classroom, looking at spaces and what was happening inside them. And I realized how rarely teachers "share practice" like that.

And then I thought way back, way back to that rainy day in the 1970s. And I wondered how often our students really "share practice"?

So when we arrived in Philadelphia and climbed the stairs to the Parkway Program's home base, we found something which looked as different from our space as might be imaginable. They occupied an old 1950s style office space. We occupied a never-used-as-intended third floor cafeteria. Their's was dark and complex, ours was horribly uninteresting - so blank as a space we called it "The White Room."

But when we sat down in a circle on their floor, and began to talk, we found our common ground. And we talked about all the things which were 'really great' about this kind of school, and all the things which were 'really hard.' We started with surface things. We wished we were downtown like they were. They kind of wished they had some school facilities - gyms, etc - which we had around us. We all struggled to figure out what we were doing, and why. We all understood the liberation which came when we were freed from "industrial schooling."

Parkway watching, 1970

And then it got more complex. We all had different kinds of pre-high school experiences, and we talked about how those might have shaped our sense of the "possible" were it not for the interactions we had in our schools. We talked about - yes, we talked even though we lacked the right words - about what peer-to-peer unstructured learning was like. We talked about carrying the skills which had often gotten us in trouble K-8, into this new kind of learning space and using those skills in positive ways. We asked how they used resources - teachers, businesses, museums, institutions, the city... and compared that to how we did the same. We talked a bit about the future, and we were all vague - our education was not career driven - but we all suspected that we'd avoid traditional classrooms at all costs.

I think, without getting into "meta" jargon, we, by sitting down together, we're deeply thinking about our learning. We all did this anyway. We attended schools where every bit of our education was not just under our control, but had to be created by us (Alan Shapiro's oft-used quote: "You don't like it, do something else."). I was the one who decided that I needed 'non-reading English' and rode with the midnight WVOX news guy for a few months, learning writing without "writing" and reading without "reading" and editing via audio. I was also the guy who decided that classes just did not work, and so, I had to come up with something else.

But there's something about sharing those ideas of how we learn, sharing them beyond our comfort zone, which sharpens the understanding. And somehow, before we ended up challenging the Parkway kids to a "New York v Philly Home and Home B-Ball Series," I think we all had a better sense of what learning meant to us. Because we had held it up against various mirrors and lenses, and seen it in new ways.

Which is the same thing I saw when teachers showed each other their classrooms - classrooms in action. Which is the same thing Chris Lehmann allows to happen when he lets people wander SLA, and when he lets people doubt what they see. "I forgot to take it down afterward," Chris said about the elevator sign which bothered me, "My bad. It should have come down after the weekend because I agree, students should not have the Thou-Shalt-Nots all over the building. And I've probably walked by that sign three dozen times." Learning via seeing through others eyes. Through seeing yourself reflected in others eyes.

In the end I think this is about what Postman and Shapiro and Weingartner and others called, "Learning how to learn." And it is about letting kids find their path to that.

If I think back to that Country Squire, there were kids in there reading Siddhartha, and Franny and Zooey, and Das Kapital. There were magical musicians and gifted mathematicians. There was me, the storyteller who never read anything, and one friend who mostly just drew pictures. It didn't matter. We knew how to learn, and we were a learning community.

And that should be exactly what we want for our kids right now.

- Ira Socol

Alan Shapiro, 1926-2011

Alan Shapiro, a leader in student-centered education and teacher-educator for almost half a century, died Friday, January 28, at Danbury Hospital in Connecticut after a short illness, at the age of 85. 

My friend, my mentor, my teacher.

He taught for many years in the New Rochelle (NY) Public Schools and founded The Program for Inquiry, Involvement, and Independent Study in 1970, a high school alternative program based on theories he developed with friends Neil Postman and Charlie Weingartner. He had written, for more than a decade, for the educational idea site, Teachable Moment.


The family has requested that those wishing to honor Alan Shapiro’s life and legacy consider contributing to
The Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility,
publishers of TeachableMoment.org  
475 Riverside Drive, Suite 550
New York, New York 10115
212.870.3318 | fax: 212.870.2464
info@morningsidecenter.org

I might request that the best way to honor his memory is to do everything you can to insist that our educational systems be student-centered learning and inquiry communities.

- Ira Socol

On human value

On Saturday afternoon, as my good friend Paul gathered with his family in Connecticut, I went to the closest thing I could find to a dumpy New York area pizzeria in this frozen West Michigan tundra, and had a couple of slices and a Coke.

a day which encourages interior thought

There was an essence of physical memory to be touched.

I can remember being fifteen. Fifteen? Yeah. Before a drivers license and the $100 1965 Corvair with the two-speed automatic (shifter on the dash) gave me wheeled mobility. I usually took the "M" bus up to the high school from the corner of North and Main, but I never rode it back. Instead I walked down North Avenue in New Rochelle, which the early French residents had called "The Middle Line." (Lacking a central river, French settlers needed to create an artificial divider from which "ribbon farms" could spread.)

18th Century map of Nouvelle Rochelle

I would walk and process the day, working through my world in a fully alone time. But usually I'd get hungry along the way, and often I'd stop at the G+G Pizza on New Rochelle's "bar strip" south of Iona College.

I'd order a slice of their incredibly oily pizza, blot up the grease with napkins, pour on the parmigiana cheese, and sit at a small table staring at the traffic outside.

Often I thought about things which Alan Shapiro had brought into my world.

Alan gave me a voice. I mean, I talked a lot before, but Alan Shapiro allowed me to find that my voice mattered, that people would hear what I said. He let me know that I could use my life experiences to help others if I figured out how to communicate. At a moment in my life when I knew I was going nowhere, this teacher held up a map of the universe and suddenly, there were possibilities.

But in those moments over pizza - then and now - I'd think about what I was doing through an "Alan" frame. Did it have value of some kind? Could I explain it? Could I take it another step in any - or many - directions? Was it always better to try, even if the result didn't seem likely? Could I bring others with me? How did I know what was said to me was "good information" or crap?

And if it was late, and the day had been hard, I'd work through those questions - about whatever - and I'd decide to keep going.

On this past Saturday, Alan's son emailed that Alan had woken up after a few days of being 'out of touch' and had recited this poem...

A. E. Housman (1859–1936).
A Shropshire Lad. (1896).

Into my heart on air that kills

INTO my heart on air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

He is dying, and quickly, or no, as he said to his grandson today, when his grandson said, "you don't have to fight it Papa," "I'm not fighting. I'm sailing."

It is an end as courageous and elegant and inspired as the life which preceeded it.

And I'm not sure I'd really get through this week, except that I am deep in the midst of doing Alan's work.

All his life he fought for children. All his life he worked to help teachers around him get better. All his life he refused to let rules or plans or politics get in the way of kids learning, and kids being OK. All kids. Everywhere.

And so this week, as he lies in a Connecticut Hospital I am surrounded by educational magic in the making. I watch the kids in Mike Thornton's classroom free to discover as they study, free to not follow any lesson plan, free to not limit their learning to the state curriculum. I watch kids in Melissa Techman's library move through spaces now safe and flexible and redefinable by the kids to their own needs. I watch physical education teachers breaking down all the fears and barriers which beset so many kids. I watch high school students, liberated by an inspired teacher in a library-centered digital media lab, talk about discovering self-respect and even, yes, success in school, through following their passions.

And I know the value of teachers and the value of what those of us in education are trying - every day - to do. Not the faux value expressed in tonight's State of the Union ("nation builders" LOL), but with a real understanding that there is truly no job which is more important in any society. No job which deserves more real respect, and support, including job and economic security. No job we can invest in continuing education for which will help us as a world more.

Alan taught me many things, and one of them is the power of the teacher liberated to do their best for each individual student. The power to save lives, to give voice, to open opportunities, to allow imagination to soar, and to figure out how to be what you can be.

Many people bash teachers daily these days. Many always have. Fools like the current Governor of New Jersey and other politicians and commentators are nothing new. There are always meaningless people who seek to tear down those who have chosen to make their own lives important.

But listen to me. Barack Obama wants to turn your school into a cross between a Chinese Prison Camp and a badly run factory. He wants to stop you from doing what, if you look up from your test prep, you know your kids need you to do.

Honor Alan Shapiro with me this week. Be the best educators you can be, and damn the rules, the common cores, the mandates. Be the best educators you can be every day and try to be a better educator every day.

You've got nothing to lose. They'll blame you anyway. So let's just ignore "those" voices, and let's find our own.

- Ira Socol