Schools as Gift-Giving Cultures

Here are some thoughts I’ve had for awhile about the nature of schools and learning.

The book The Gift by Lewis Hyde has had a deep impact on my life and work. In it, Hyde proposes that artists have a hard time making a living because their work is based in one kind of economy, but they live in another. Hyde posits that the mainstream culture is a commodity culture but artists live in a gift-giving culture.

Bear with me while I try to explain what he says.  In a commodity culture, goods and services are exchanged tit for tat – I give you money, or some expression of value, and you give me some good or service in return. Then we’re even and the transaction is done. See ya later.

In a gift-giving culture (and Hyde gives examples of a number of traditional cultures that use gift-giving, like the potlatch of Northwest natives) the gift is given freely without expectation of immediate reciprocity – he says the gift “goes around the corner”, out of sight. Since the transaction isn’t complete, the relationship stays – a gift-giving culture builds a web of interdependence. In a way, wealth is expressed not by what you have, but by how much you give away. Hyde says artists, by the nature of their work, are gift-givers. Musicians can’t help but play, dancers dance, artists paint and writers write. If they hoard, waiting for proper monetary compensation, they dry up and the gift stops. They offer these things up, believing that something will come back. Art builds community.

But therein lies the rub for the artist. It’s hard for them to get a fair commodity value for their art, since these works arrive to them as gifts and are passed on as such, whether they’re paid in money or not.

Okay, that’s a short and fumbling explanation of Hyde’s book – if you want more, I highly recommend it, though I will add that for all its brilliance, to my mind, the second half is kind of a slog.

I’ve been thinking about this in relation to schools, and it explains a lot about the current (and perhaps chronic) fight over whether schools are succeeding or failing. When I look at the schools I work in, I see, overarching everything, a gift-giving culture. Almost everything is offered without expecting immediate return. Children give assignments to teachers, and offer to read out loud to their classmates. Nurses hand out band-aids. Teachers bring in their own books to the classroom and parents bring in snacks. Children share their French fries. Teachers fill in for their co-workers at recess, or as lunch monitors. Children bring in small gifts for their teachers. Cupcakes appear in the teacher’s lounge. In all of these exchanges, and thousands more, there is no tit for tat, no final accounting, no exchange of any currency (okay, French fries)– they are done to make the culture go, and with each of these simple gifts, the web of connection grows. For all the math that’s taught, it’s amazing how little is measured in a school. And this ignores the greatest gift-giving of all – the one that truly goes around the corner – the teacher gives the gift of teaching and knowledge without ever seeing the final result. Only years later, a grown person may realize the gift they were given, and have no way to pay it back except to offer something similar to someone else.

That return on investment is a hard one to measure.

Even though we don’t name it, all of us understand intuitively that the school is a gift-giving culture. That’s why when a teacher demands a raise, or decides only to work as much as they are actually required (“work to order”), or walks out on strike, many people are incensed. How dare that teacher insert filthy money into this situation? We feel that the unspoken rules of an unnamed gift-giving culture have been broken. By and large, teachers are loath to make waves. Most teachers, in my experience, are nurturers and accomodators – it takes a lot to get them to speak up about being treated fairly. In this, they’re like artists, or nurses – their work offers gifts that can’t quite be monetized. They really would rather teach.

I especially see this paradox playing out in high-stakes testing and the ongoing push to measure educational achievement. We have witnessed the emergence of the quantifiers, the bean counters, as the major arbiters in whether an education is valid. Calibrating things, measuring their value, giving merit pay based on test scores, counting the number of minutes of instruction time and doing away with activities not easily measured (um, for instance, like a storyteller’s visit or a class party), are done in the belief that this will be more educationally effective.

Except schools don’t work like that, and neither do humans. When we leave no room for these “valueless” activities, these expressions that have no immediate return, or we insist on finding a way to measure them, we’re destroying the fabric of the culture. While we need to reach agreement on what things are important to teach, and find ways to see how a child is growing, when the measurements drive the activity of the school, the culture is damaged and you get a lot of sullen people who are going to think twice about giving without return. Not just teachers, but kids and staff.

I think some people who institute this stuff have good intentions. But they’re wrong. No matter how you cut it, a school isn’t a profit-making corporation offering goods and services in exchange for equal financial value. It’s a bad model.

A test score that punishes isn’t a gift at all.

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A Song About Testing

I had a busy and interesting week last week. I went to a workshop with Nick Rabkin, an arts educator who speaks eloquently about the importance of arts in the schools. You can check out one of his columns here. Then I presented at the Fall Forum of the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) in Providence. I love what CES is doing, and it’s a comfort to me to know there are educators who are really thinking through what makes a good school.

I’m no fan of No Child Left Behind, nor of Race to the Top. I’ve been in schools a long time and seen a lot of things, and I don’t think these programs are much of an answer. They don’t really frame the question right. This of course, deserves a longer discussion, and I’ll post more. But for now, I want to post a song I wrote a year or so ago about testing. It’s not on any recording and I don’t know if it will be. And this is just me and guitar. I wrote it after listening to one teacher after another lament the effect of high stakes teaching on their work. LIke I said, Race to the Top doesn’t really shift the focus much from No Child Left Behind. Testing has its place, but it’s no answer. And like I say in the song, it sure isn’t teaching.

Here’s the song. Hope you like it:

Click here – The Ballad of Janice Miller

My name is Janice Miller and teaching is my trade

A lifetime in the classroom here in seventh grade

Twenty-six  years of teaching, I’ve tried to do my best

I love my work, I love these kids so I won’t give this test

You say you need to measure, that testing’s how you see

If the kids are learning all the things you think they should from me

But testing isn’t teaching, don’t tell me they’re the same

I think all you really want is to find someone to blame

Some pencil mark won’t measure  the life that someone leads

And some number in a box won’t show what it is that that kid needs

And all your faith in testing it has a hollow ring

If some kid’s poor and hungry, the tests don’t mean a thing

Take all the men on Wall Street who think they know the score

And all the politicians who cut our budgets more

Put ‘em in the classroom with thirty hungry kids

Come back in nine months and ask them how they did

My name is Janice Miller and teaching is my trade

A lifetime in the classroom here in seventh grade

Twenty-six  years of teaching, I’ve tried to do my best

I love my work, I love these kids so I won’t give this test

You say you need to measure, that testing’s how you see

If the kids are learning all the things you think they should from me

But testing isn’t teaching, don’t tell me they’re the same

I think all you really want is to find someone to blame

Some pencil mark won’t measure  the life that someone leads

And some number in a box won’t show what it is that that kid needs

And all your faith in testing it has a hollow ring

If some kid’s poor and hungry, the tests don’t mean a thing

Take all the men on Wall Street who think they know the score

And all the politicians who cut our budgets more

Put ‘em in the classroom with thirty hungry kids

Come back in nine months and ask them how they did

There’s a point of no returning

There’s a point where something breaks

There’s a point where someone’s taken as much as they can take

There’s a point comes when you know that what you’re doing’s wrong

That’s the point where you say no and refuse to go along

My name is Janice Miller, a teacher’s who I am

I’ve never made much trouble, I’ve done the best I can

There’s a million more like me out there, I can’t speak for the rest

But I’m sick of what we’re doing, so I won’t give this test

©2012 Bill Harley and Round River Music (BMI)

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Elementary school kids – my people

From NY Times article I cite - hmm - dubious legality here

There’s a really interesting article in the New York Times today (Tuesday, December 27) about brain chemistry and kids of “middle childhood”. It affirms most things I’ve come to believe about this age and reminds me of what I like most about them. They’re smart and alert and interested and growing in a million ways at a prodigious rate. They’re making connections and gaining a sense of themselves and others that younger children don’t have. This is related to “theory of mind” which is the realization that other people have their own minds and thoughts and experiences that are different from one’s own.
Truth is, this age – 6 to 12 – is mostly where I live in my stories (and many of my songs). Alert and not jaded.Great sense of humor. Great sense of justice.
Picasso said that all artists create from a certain age, and that he was (if I remember correctly) thirteen. Put me a couple of years younger and leave me there.

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Stories – This I Believe

Me and Ed Murrow - and a thousand others....

I’ve been a fan of This I Believe since its reincarnation by the incomparable Jay Allison a number of years ago. That said, I never got around to submitting one. But finally I did, on the Rhode Island NPR station, WRNI, which has continued the program under the direction of Rick Reamer. My offering played last week. It’s very close to what I’ve been writing about in this blog for the past couple of years, so I thought it made sense to share it here.

Click HERE to hear the piece:

And here’s an Old Year’s resolution – before the new one starts: More blog posts. Honest. Let’s see how I do.

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Confessions of a semi-Luddite

I’ve come across several articles in the last month about technology and education that have got me thinking about where educators, schools, and society spend their energy and money. In one, a teacher shows how using youtube and online information has changed how he teaches. In another, the US government announces it is going to focus more on the use of digital technology in education.

In both of these articles, there is an inherent assumption that technology is a key to solving our educational problems.

I ain’t so sure.

I am, I guess, a semi-Luddite, in that I have a “prove it to me” approach to whatever the latest hot thing is. Technology (like computers, ipads, and, um, books) has its place. And something in the whole slew of new generation of software and hardware and connectivity has value. But figuring out which thing it is and how to use it isn’t that easy.

And there are other things that are important, too.

What would you expect from a storyteller? – a guy who spends most of his time in front of warm bodies, emitting intentionally formed bits of air out of his mouth.

But I’m no enemy of technology – as long as it’s considered. And I want to be careful and not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

But all this talk about technology in education has me thinking several things about its limits and problems.

First, in almost all the literature extolling the use of new media and technology, there is the underlying, still unproven assumption that all this stuff is going to do a better job at teaching students. We still don’t know if that’s true, but we are always attracted to what ‘s new, hoping it’s our savior. A recent article in the NYTimes about a district outside of Phoenix notes that their heavy investment hasn’t reaped the rewards they were hoping for. Defenders are quick to say that the testing used to measure student achievement doesn’t really measure what the technology is helping to develop – a new way of thinking. We artists use that argument against standardized testing too, but it’s a little surprising that technology rides in on a promise of raising test scores, and then shifts its argument. (And actually, the arts has proven their value that time and time again, to no apparent acknowledgement or effect on the part of the powers that be.) I’m no fan of standardized testing, but if we’re going to spend billions on something, it would be nice to know it works.

Second – there is no way technology would be everyone’s darling if it didn’t involve huge amounts of money. There is a lot at stake here, and it’s notable that the people who are crowing the loudest about its possibilities are those who have spent their lives designing and selling technology. Apple and Google run the workshops for teachers on how to use technology and in the Internet in the classroom. Should we be surprised that they see technology as the answer to our problems? Is it shocking that the Gates Foundation has found a way to influence the discussion about what American education needs? Education is a gold mine for corporations, and they spend a great part of their time lobbying everyone about its possibilities.

I’m not saying these people don’t have good intentions. Of course they believe in what they’re doing.

But that doesn’t mean they’re right.

National, state and local governments have bought in. Lobbyists help.

Schools spend millions of dollars every year on new technologies to help teachers. And the truth is, the companies that sell the stuff already have plans for something else that will make it obsolete in five years. When you buy a hundred computers, you know you’re going to buy a hundred more in a couple of years. Corporations selling it have that figured out.

You don’t make that much money off pencils.

Or teachers. Corporations don’t really benefit from developing skills in a teacher (unless it’s to use their product). I am left wondering what it would be like if we spent anywhere near the money we do on technology on working intimately with teachers on classroom management skills and group dynamics. Or (here it is…) on being good storytellers. Or on how to really foster good relationships between home and school and giving parents support. These things are teachable, but they’re not bright and shiny – they are actually kind of hard to do, and they have no glossy flyers and videos with pulsing beats that promise the moon and stars.

One result of the ever-increasing dependency and worship of technology as a teaching panacea will be an increasing gap between the rich and the poor. If you’re like me, you’re more and more upset about the widening rift between the haves and have-nots. I walked into a teacher’s room at a fairly well-heeled school a couple of weeks ago and saw all the teacher’s assistants (which means two adults in each classroom) sitting around a table – fifteen of them all with identical Apple laptops.

Not happening in Bedford-Stuyvesant, I think. Or most places, really. Most school districts will never be able to afford the luxury of the newest technology. Especially since we don’t really want to spend money on education for those less fortunate. And Apple donating computers doesn’t really solve the problem.

The more we praise technology and the latest development, the more we ignore those who will never see it. The more all this stuff costs, the more students we leave behind.

So I’m brought back to the notion that a lot of energy is being devoted to one aspect of learning at the expense of other things. Technology will not close the gap between rich and poor. Technology is not the answer to someone who does not know how to teach. And I don’t believe a video has the same impact as a flesh and bones teacher, well trained and familiar with the student, giving the same information. It may provide support, but not replacement.

I think we praise technology because we’re hoping it’s the quick fix. Tech purveyors want us to think that, too.

And the deeper, more long range truth, is that the growth of all this technology and continued production of more and more stuff is unsustainable. We can’t afford, in the long run, to depend on more and more. There is a reckoning up ahead, and it will probably force us to fall back upon some simpler approaches to communicating.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve talked with a number of teachers and principals about this. Several principals (and good ones, I think) noted that it’s not all or nothing – they are really figuring out how to incorporate technology into teaching so it’s a useful tool. That’s good. A good teacher has a wide array of resources and methods they draw on when teaching. And advanced technology, within limits, is a great idea.

Like I said, I’m a semi-Luddite. Until we use up the fossil fuel, we’re not going back. But I don’t believe the hype and promise. Because I’ve also seen what good administrators and teachers can do with more limited resources.

They need some attention, too.

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Between Home and School – the journey of a book

About ten years ago, I gave a talk to a group of teachers about the connection between home and school. I had been hired to tell stories, but instead wrote a series of letters back and forth between a mom and the teachers her kid meets along the way. It was an imagining of how teachers and parents might communicate, based on my own experiences as a parent and my work in schools. Over the years, I’ve read it in various workshops and people have always liked it.

Still, that was all I did with it. It’s my tendency to finish one project and just move on.

This past summer, Debbie (wife, president of our huge corporation(?), and now publisher) decided it needed to be a book and that we would do it ourselves. We sent it out to a variety of people – writers, educators, parents – for review and made some changes. Our longtime designer, Alison Tolman-Rogers, helped with the design of the book. I drew a rough of the cover illustration and she did the final artwork and design. We got some quotes from people we thought would like it, including George Wood, a first-rate principal and educator, and Amy Dickinson of “Ask Amy”, who worked with me years ago at NPR. Everyone liked it.

After a lot of research, we decided to publish initially with the self-publishing branch of Amazon. Debbie worked with them very closely, sending proofs back several times to make sure they got it right. Since then, we’ve found a printer that does a beautiful job at a better price, so we have our own copies from that printer, and Amazon sends out their copies if someone orders it from them. (more about, um, Amazon in another blog).

So now it’s out, and it feels like we’ve touched a nerve. It’s a small, simple book, and can be read in one sitting. There is an underlying philosophy, but it’s the story of the mom and the kid and the teachers that reaches people. We’re getting orders from principals who are buying it for their entire staffs, and I’ve been asked to speak at workshops and conferences about the book and how the relationship between home and school can be strengthened. Parents are buying it as Christmas presents for their kid’s teachers. I got an e-mail from a teacher friend who said before she wrote a note to the parent of a student in her class, she thought about the book and how to best approach the problem she faced.

I am not an expert on teacher-parent relationships, but instead, someone who has given thought to it and tried to find a way to talk about it. I seemed to have found a way for everyone to listen and talk to each other. My expertise, if I have one, is in imagining how things might be, and then getting people to tell stories. As I say in the book, it’s the decision to keep communicating that is the most important thing.

Like Hippocrates said, “Life is short, art is long” – it may take a long time for something to bear fruit. Some small thing I did a number of years ago has taken years to bear fruit, and I never would have dreamed it could still be alive.

And then, I should add, you can order it here.

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How to Evaluate a School

If I were to design a test for the effectiveness of schools (and I won’t), one of the questions that everyone (teachers, students, administrators, staff) would have to answer would be, “How many people can you name?”. The more people everyone can name, the better the school.

Faceless and nameless doesn’t work in a learning environment, and when you read about the consolidation of schools to save money, you know it’s going the wrong way. The more people, the fewer of them you really know. When you know the people around you, and you feel part of a community, you care more about what happens.

There’s an editorial in the New York Times yesterday talking about the success of small schools in NYC. When large high schools were broken up to smaller theme-based schools, student performance went up (and not by some shaky test measurement, but by attendance and graduation rates).

Of course, this makes me think, “Well, duh”. It’s so obvious we shouldn’t have to say it. But it needs to be said. You can put all of this under the heading of “Things we know, but don’t pay attention to”.

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Songwriting with kids – not rocket science

This week in my day at Paul Cuffee School, I wrote and recorded a song with each second grade class. This may sound fairly impressive, but it’s really a pretty straightforward process if you remember to keep it simple. The songs will not make the hit parade, and in fact, unless they’re sung at an all school meeting, probably won’t be heard outside the classroom where they were created. But they have a real value within that classroom.

I told the kids that I wanted them to write a song about their class and the things they did in it. The first thing we did was brainstorm as many different things about their class as they could think of. They started with general things you could say about almost any class – we like our teacher (always a good thing to say!), we study math, we have recess. But I pushed them to come up with things that made their class different. Someone said, “We study the arctic!” Someone said, “The other classes study the arctic too!” Everyone nodded in agreement. Now they were thinking.

In Rob Pike’s class someone said, “We have worms and flies!” Then they explained that they were growing worms and turning garbage into soil by having the worms pooping. Interestingly enough, the word “pooping” didn’t send anyone into paroxysms of laughter – Mr Pike had discussed the virtues of worm poop enough that it seemed like an everyday thing. Which it is.

There was a discussion about popcorn parties. Mr. Pike uses some simple behavior mod in the class, adding shells to a jar when a good thing happens in the class. When the jar is full, there’s a popcorn party. That was different from other classes.

With those discussions things got more specific, and we had material to work with.

I saved a lot of time in the songwriting process by using the melody of a song everyone already knew. In Rob Pike’s class, I used “This Little Light of Mine”. In Donna Raymond’s, we used “Aiken Drum,” and in Sarah Rich’s, we used “This Land is Your Land.” Having a melody and song structure already set up made it a lot easier to get the kids thinking like songwriters. When they would come up with a line they wanted to use, we had to find a way to fit in the correct number of beats. This can be pretty challenging (even for people who call themselves songwriters), and the kids need some help on this – they began to learn if the rhythm was right or wrong and could identify the difference, but needed help in finding the right phrasing.

Everytime we found a phrase that worked we wrote it down on the flip chart and sang it – the kids got more excited as they saw the song take shape.

I should add here that songs like “Aiken Drum” or “This Little Light” are great ones for beginning songwriting, since all the kids need is one good line, which gets repeated three times, and a finishing line that is the name of the song. There’s not a need to worry about rhyming in this structure – the kids an focus on content and rhythm

We are second graders at Paul Cuffee School
We are second graders at Paul Cuffee School
We are second graders at Paul Cuffee School
Playing and learning every day

After that general line, we moved on to truly unique ones like:

“We have slimy worms, pooping in our class”
and
“We have popcorn parties when the shell jar’s full”
and my favorite
“We’re all different colors, we don’t really care”

Like I said, not rocket science, but the kids began to understand how the process worked. I’m not completely happy with the last line (“Playing and learning every day”)– they were having trouble saying everything they wanted to say, and I suggested it in the interests of time– it’s pretty trite and it’s my fault. I really try to have the kids not settle for a line that is untrue or doesn’t quite fit in the rhythm of the line.

“This Land is Your Land” is more challenging, because rhyming is necessary, and to be strict with the rhyme, you have to find three words that rhyme, and that can leave you with some lines not quite perfect
In our class, we have a sail (on the wall as a backdrop)
We study fish, we study whales
We work so hard, we never fail
This class was made for you and me

Here, I wasn’t so happy with the “never fail” line, but a kid suggested it and everyone liked it – of course they fail sometimes, we all fail, but… And it was pretty interesting brainstorm words that rhyme with “class”. I stopped that discussion.

So, in twenty minutes we had come up with a bunch of lines that scanned. We sang it through a couple of times. And then, the beauty of software. I set my laptop up on the chair I’d been sitting on, turned on Garage Band, sat on the floor with the kids and we all sang the song together. The microphone built into my computer was completely adequate for what we were doing. My voice is too present, but with such a short period of time, I figured the kids needed my voice as a guide and prompt. A couple more run throughs and they could have sung it on their own. And probably are. We recorded a couple of takes, I listened back at lunchtime, chose one, and burned it to a cd. The kids were excited and wanted to sing it for the whole school.

The benefits of this kind of thing include the sense of accomplishment the class feels in doing something together, the growing awareness of who they are as a group of people, and a tool for them to use in the weeks and months ahead – a song they can sing.

And, like I said, this is not rocket science – it’s something a teacher could do, even without a guitar. if you’re worried about your voice, listen to mine on the recording. Muffin Man, Skip to My Lou, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star – any familiar melody with a simple lyric structure works. With more time, classes are capable of more complex subjects, structures, and language. But this is a good place to start. Here’s the song I wrote with Mr. Pike’s class:

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Longer Hours ≠ More Learning

I did a school show the other day at 2 pm. There were about two hundred kids sitting in the school auditorium No one died, but it was a dead crowd. Teachers and kids came up afterward and told me that they liked it, but you woudn’t have known it during the show. Most of them sat there, semi-comatose. Great periods of silence. Quite the contrast to the show I had done in the morning. That morning, it seemed I could do no wrong. What was wrong with my show in the afternoon?

I don’t think it was me.

If you’ve been performing for a while, you know a dead room almost immediately – three minutes into the performance, you’re pulling out all your tricks, every thing you’ve learned to get some kind of reaction, but they sit there, deep in their seats, and they ain’t moving for you. It’s just something to get through, and you accept it. It’s not always about me – it’s just where they are.

That show was a dead room. And the truth is, most school shows in the afternoon are much more difficult than the ones in the morning. The teachers don’t react. It’s harder to get the kids to participate. Their attention wanders. Everyone is tired. You can see it in their eyes and in the way they sit.

Generally, I try to avoid doing afternoon shows.

All this has me thinking about the move towards having longer school days. I would like to know whose bright idea this is. Who thinks that kids can learn more than a certain amount in any given day? Who thinks that extending the day will raise the almighty test scores?

Ask any teacher when they teach math and reading. Not at 2:30 in the afternoon, that’s for sure. It’s too late, at that point. As my memory serves me, that was when the health teacher taught us how to brush our teeth – a lesson I was taught every year, and a lesson I still haven’t learned, according to Peggy, my dental hygienist.

More instruction is not the answer to greater learning. It’s a simple answer, and easily instituted (ah, then, perhaps the politicians…), but not an intelligent one. The proof to this is the kids I meet who are taught well at home in a home schooling situation (and not all home schooling situations fit this description). Academics can be handled in a couple of hours, when the kids is alert and attentive. Another class at 2:45 is not going to solve the problems faced by the American educational system.

This observation is so transparent it boggles my mind that there’s any discussion about it. Who does anything well at 2 pm in the afternoon? A good time for a kickball game, I think. Or for doing something with your hands.

There are two arguments for a longer school day – one sad, and one logical, but not really about education. The first is that instituting a longer school day frees adults from having to deal with children for another hour or so. This is the argument for school as warehouses or holding bins – not a particularly positive aspect of education. The other, with more merit, is that for many kids, especially in urban areas, the late afternoon hours are fraught with danger – it’s when kids are most at risk for bad things happening. But this is not really an argument for more instruction, but instead an argument for a safe place for them to be.

Other than that, I don’t know why anyone thinks more hours of school is a good idea.

I sure don’t.

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Great op-ed piece in the Times on schools

Last week the NY Times had a great op-ed piece about what schools need to teach. It’s so commonsensical it’s stunning, and  echoes what many of us feel about the current direction of education. Here’s the link – Playing to Learn. The discussion page of the article is good, too.

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