A school in Nova Scotia suspended a student for five days because he wore a shirt that said “Life Is Wasted Without Jesus.”

The South Shore Regional School Board suspended William Swinimer from Forest Heights Community School in Chester Basin for five days for wearing a shirt emblazoned with the words, “Life is wasted without Jesus.”

School board Supt. Nancy Pynch-Worthylake said the wording on the shirt is problematic because it is directed at the beliefs of others.

“If I have an expression that says ‘My life is enhanced with Jesus,’ then there’s no issue with that, everybody is able to quickly understand that that’s my opinion about my own belief,” she said.

I do see that as a distinction with a difference, but it’s a rather murky terrain.

Jonathan McLoed argues thusly:

That’s some nice hair-splitting Ms. Pynch-Worthylake is attempting, but it demonstrates an ignorance towards Mr. Swiminer’s faith. Christianity is, certainly, an incredibly personal faith, but it is not introverted and it is not weak. The message of the t-shirt is a universal declaration. It is unequivocal, but it is not pointed.

Granted, the shirt did not say “My life would be wasted without Jesus” but rather that life in general is. That can easily be taken as suggesting that your life would be wasted without Jesus. And so there can be a little provocation construed there. Having said that, the ambiguity involved does not lend itself to an ideal situation for administrative discretion. They might be more willing to pull the trigger in some cases and not in others. They might see one instance through the prism of tolerance to the wearer, and the other through the prism of intolerance to people other than the wearer, even when they are essentially the same thing. James Hanley argues in the comments to McLoed’s post:

Yes, that’s what it’s saying to those students. And a student saying “Jesus is not real” is making a clear statement against the Christian kid’s life.

And both T-Shirts ought to be allowed.

Both should, or neither should. You can argue that “Jesus is not real” is a statement of belief not directed at anyone else, but it makes an implicit statement every bit as much as the Wasted shirt does. Murky.

It’s hard to say whether the administration is in error with this ban without knowing how they would respond to similar messages from other groups. What’s not hard to say is that regardless of their decision, they suspended the kid for five days. At my old school, you could punch someone in the face and be suspended for fewer than five days. I want to know what sort of mediation was tried here. This comes across not as conflict alleviation, but punitive action. I am not certain why they couldn’t have simply said “each and every day you wear that shirt, you are suspended for the rest of the day.”

-{Sorry for the relative silence. I plan on picking things back up more solidly next week. We’re trying to get everything together for a brief trip back to Delosa for a wedding. Below is a NaPP post that touches on some themes I have mentioned here before.}-

I’ve always been torn as to whether or not to write about my adventures in substitute teaching on NaPP since it’s not really political and most non-political stuff goes on Hit Coffee but it is sociological. I had a two-fer assignment today, with the first period a 3rd grade class and the second period a 5th grade. The former was probably the best performance I have turned in to date. The latter was one of the most challenging classes I have filled in for. I’d actually filled in for the class before. It was a bad experience, but I thought I had screwed up. Nope.

Anyhow, the observation of the day is that there are really three kinds of male troublemakers in school (maybe in life).

The Bad Egg Group

The first are Bad Eggs. There’s usually one or two of these in every class. Sometimes it seems to be a manifestation of other problems they’re having. The overlap between Bad Eggs and special instruction is not insignificant. Sometimes, though, they’re just Bad Eggs. You know that the future holds nothing good in store for them (and, likely, people around them).

The Impulse Group

The second group is perhaps the most perplexing. It’s also the smallest group. It’s the kid who is basically a Really Good Kid, save for some serious impulse control problems. They want to be quiet. They want to be good. They try harder than any other student in the classroom to help you. But they’re also among the biggest troublemakers. They just can’t help themselves. I had to report to the teacher that the single-most helpful kid in the room was one of a handful on the Worst List. He was also the first kid I have yelled at since beginning my substitute teaching tenure. Bad Eggs may be less pleasant to deal with insofar as the Impulse Kids, who are at least good or great half or a majority of the time, but they’re easier to deal with.

The Osmosis Group.

The third group are those that absorb the mood of the class. You get the sense that in a good environment or on a good day, they’re fine. But they become a part of any problem that exists. These are actually the most problematic only because they are the most numerous. You try to get them to behave and they simply point the finger at someone who is behaving worse (typically an Egg or an Impulse). These are also the Give Them An Inch kids. You give them an inch, which they may or not be able to handle, but then Bad Egg and Impulse will take a mile and these kids will be right behind them.

It’s only the Bad Eggs that you feel good about writing up. One of the interesting aspects is that when I make my list at the end of the day, even in a really bad class like this one (this class apparently drove two different substitute teachers into retirement over the course of the year), there are only two or three Bad Eggs at most. Then you throw in a couple Impulse Kids and the Osmosis Brigade comes out of the woodwork and at that point, there is so much cover for noise that you can’t single anybody out because almost everyone else is talking and goofing around.

I have an assignment at Redstone High on Monday. Last time I was there, I took a walk and some pictures of the area surrounding the high school. Here they are… (more…)

Today there was an assignment on the exploration of the Americas for the special ed class I had today. It involved my reading to them a page with four paragraphs and answering a series of questions. When they asked for help, I would tell them what paragraph the answer is in. Sometimes, I’d have to get more specific.

The final paragraph read:

Ponce de Leon returned to Spain in 1514. The king of Spain was pleased with his discovery. He appointed Ponce de Leon governor of Florida and gave him a royal grant to colonize it. In 1521, he again landed in Florida with two ships and 200 men. The Indians there fought with the colonists. Ponce de Leon was badly wounded in battle. He died soon afterwards at the age of 61.

The question was: What title did the king give Ponce de Leon?

Student complained that she couldn’t find the answer.

I told her that it was in the couple of sentences of the paragraph.

Ponce de Leon returned to Spain in 1514. The king of Spain was pleased with his discovery. He appointed Ponce de Leon governor of Florida and gave him a royal grant to colonize it.

Still no luck. I rephrased the question. “What job did the king appoint Ponce de Leon to?”

Spain?

No, it was a job in Florida.

Royal grant?

No.

It says royal grant.

That’s not the answer, though.

But I can’t find the answer.

Keep looking.

Five minutes later… King of Spain?

No, the King of Spain appointed de Leon for a job. What job?

I don’t understand.

If I am the teacher of the classroom, what is Ponce de Leon to Florida?

The teacher?

Keep looking.

It’s in {points} this sentence:

He appointed Ponce de Leon governor of Florida and gave him a royal grant to colonize it.

Five minutes pass.

Is it colonize?

Read it again.

I can’t find it.

This process was repeated with “Who did the colonists fight that were already here when they arrived?” Also, “What did the King of Spain want Ponce de Leon to do to Florida.” I can’t recall that she answered a single question without a significant amount of guidance (though none perplexed her as much as that one).

—-

I figure there are four possibilities:

(1) She can’t read. At all. I’ve had her before and I would think that I might have noticed something like this. But maybe not.

(2) She can read, but doesn’t understand these particular words. The thing about this one is that she speaks at about a 4th or 5th grade level. I never have trouble understanding her. She seems to understand what words mean. Otherwise, I’d just assume this.

(3) She can read, but doesn’t understand the point of reading. That the answer is in the content of the question rather than simply finding the right word. She’s impatient and trying to find a short cut. Though, as with four, it took her longer to hash this out with me than it would have for her to read it.

(4) She can read, but has learned that expressing frustration will get someone to give you the answer. Though, as with three, the whining was more effort than the reading would be.

I’m not sure what the least depressing answer of the four is.

I (sort of) beat a mentally handicapped 7th grader in checkers… and I’m proud of myself! Mostly because he apparently plays a lot of checkers and I haven’t played in years (I had to remind myself of the rules). Of course, the kid didn’t realize that I beat him. I had more pieces left on the board than he did, but I overtook him at the last possible second with a double-jump that went from him having a 7-6 advantage to my having a 6-5 one. He went first, so fair is fair.

It was a half-day yesterday, because they are about to get “Easter Break” and so they were let out at 1:00 instead of 3:00. Better still, classes ended at 11:00, followed by an assembly and then a meal-party.

The assembly had various community leaders. The first was a high school teacher who basically said “Bullying is wrong, but when you get to high school don’t be the kind of jackass that is going to make kids want to bully you.” The third speaker was a state senator who used to teach at the school, who basically said that you are all beautiful creatures of god and that you need to act like it. The second speaker was perhaps the most interesting one. He was the owner of a couple local fast food franchises. His lecture was basically how to go about getting a job in the service sector. At my high school, they would have had a guy explaining how to get a job outside the service sector. But Redstone is Redstone.

The second speaker’s advice was relatively straightforward. Be respectful, don’t ever think that you’re better than the job you are applying for, and stuff like that. He tripped over a bit on one point, which is that you should avoid getting tattoos or piercings because you will be evaluated negatively on them. The trip-up was that he was essentially saying that books will be judged by their cover, which books aren’t supposed to be, but they are, and so while you shouldn’t judge a book by your cover, people - especially people that hire and people presumably including him - will most definitely judge you by your cover.

Another difference between the middle school and my own middle school is the assumption, in the latter case, that everyone there will go to college. Every mention of college in this assembly was tempered by “If that is what you want to do” or “if you think that is the right thing for you to do.” Because, well, a lot of the kids aren’t going to college. And I suppose they decided it’s unwise to pretend otherwise. Also, they might worry about getting angry calls from parents who didn’t go to college or something.

I plan to write more about special ed in the future, but the sort of low-capability classes such as the one I had yesterday are actually among the easiest. Not because the kids are easy - they have attitudes that run the gamut but all of them have… quirks - but rather because low-capability kids come with paraprofessionals. They’re far better equipped to run the class than I am. I take orders from them.

Paras in Arapaho are basically one-on-one tutors and supervisors. No college degree is required for the job. One of the paras works nights as a waitress. The cultural distinctions between paras and teachers is white collar versus blue doing very similar jobs. While the paras do not measure up in terms of academic accomplishment, they have a certain… toughness. Some of the toughest people I see within the school system. What they seem to lack in finesse they make up for in a willingness to say - and this is a quote - “Jesse, cut that shit out.”

(Which Jesse does. Immediately.)

We’ve been on the road for over 8 hours over the last two days. Tomorrow I have a sub-job at the middle school. Special ed again (this time the lower-functioning class). Last week I actually got a two-day high school gig that was not special ed. Both high school and not special ed are unusual, though I had the assignment due to the teacher being gone at the Special Olympics.

Not only was it not special ed, but I had a couple honors sections. They were not at all what I expected. Indeed, my most troublesome class of the day was an honors session. The fact that it was at the end of the day probably made them more antsy. Also, they were not given enough to do. Even so, a lot of these kids were not what I would have expected. There was a delightfully ditzy cheerleader type. There were two girls with piercings out the everywhere.

I actually knew some of the honors kids from teaching middle school last year (it was a freshman class). One girl thought it was creepy that I recognized her. I actually only recognized her for two reasons: First, because she used to live back in the Deseretian town where I worked (Mocum). Second, she was annoying as hell. I had another that I had noted looked really young for her age last year who this year looks… not young for her age anymore (though she doesn’t appear to have made the mental transition yet).

The non-honors sections I had were generally well-behaved, but not very productive. It’s their last semester. Most are probably not going on to college. They could barely care less. I had a class of ten and five showed up the first day and six the second.

Back to the honors sections. Someone in last period asked if they were the worst class of the day. I said they were, which had them really surprised because usually third period is worst. Third period was fine. They remembered that Codey wasn’t there. Surprised, I asked if Codey was somehow a problem student. They all said yes. I was surprised because Codey is the regular teacher’s son.

If you are so inclined, participate in this.

I was looking at a university’s price structure for their distance learning program. They explain:

Tuition $173/credit
Distance Education Fee $75/credit
TOTAL $248/credit

Developmental Math (site-based MTH 065 & 095): $173 per credit, no distance ed fee

Okay, $248 a credit. Got it. They go on to explain…

Examples:

3 credit undergraduate course: 3 x $248 = $744
3 credit graduate course: 3 x $478 = $1,434

Okay. If you need this spelled out for you, perhaps you should be reconsidering going to college.

-{Note: This is a land-grant university with an endowment of approaching half-a-billion dollars. Half Sigma might say otherwise, but not what I would consider a glorified community college.}-

Back when I was minding the hellspawn, one of the diamonds in the rough was a girl named Magdy. Unlike Dariette (a Daria-like girl, but with Aspergers), I didn’t take an immediate liking to Magdy. But as the days progressed, she became increasingly helpful. She was tough enough not to be intimidated by the other kids, but unlike most of the other tough kids chose - for whatever reason - to be rather helpful to me. Dariette was nice and friendly, but Magdy helped me get control of the classroom to the extent that I did. And when she wasn’t helping me, she was quiet doing her work or her own thing.

Despite my taking a liking to her, I also got the sense that… things are not likely to turn out well for her. Not the least of which because she was in resource/remedial classes. But also because… well, it was just a sense I got from her. She’s not going to college. She probably won’t graduate from high school. She may be a mother before then. I wouldn’t be surprised if she ended up on drugs or in skirmishes with the law. I can’t even explain why I thought these things about a girl who was nothing but helpful to me and by appearances was almost standard (not dressed provocatively, typical hair-care, and wore little or no make-up).

So last week, I was back at the middle school teaching another resource/remedial set of classes. The 8th graders I had this year were the same as the 7th graders I had last year (and a couple 8th graders I had this year were 8th graders from last year, as well). Magdy was among them. And once again, she was just a marvelous student (with bonus points for actually remembering me). Which was odd, because her name was on the list of students to be wary of and for whom there was a specific protocol for misbehavior (never a good sign). I also got a look at her file, which was… not ideal. Some problems in the 7th grade, more in the 8th. But her previously standard appearance had started changing and she has already started the physical (at least) progression to where I think she will end up. Nose ring. Another piercing below her lip. The first day she looked kind of… messy (though less so the second day).

Also, this time around, I got a better idea of where these classes are, scholastically (it’s easier with English and Math than Science and Social Studies), and it was disheartening (a subject for a separate post). None of these kids are going to college - not even community college. The Direct Instruction I ran through was more reminiscent of elementary school than regular middle school. Groans of frustration doing relatively simple mathematical tasks such as counting change (True or False, seven dimes and seven pennies equals seventy cents?), percentages (a pie chart split in six with one of them colored in), and comparatively simple multiplication (24x6). Magdy could do the first but didn’t like it, did well on the second, but struggled on the third.

The kids end up in these classes generally for one of two reasons: they have legitimate developmental problems or they have attitude problems, or both. Magdy seems to fall into the second category, which makes her perhaps the only student who does that I actually took a liking to and wish the best for in more than an abstract wish-the-best-for-everybody sort of way. I’m just hoping it’s not both.

On a sidenote, one of the things that gave me a little hope last year was that she talked about her father during some downtime and said something that suggested that he was a fixture in the household. My expectations for the Magdy-like kids are such that I thought “Well hey, at least she has a father who stuck around!” Well, I came to find out that it was her step-father and she doesn’t know her real dad. There’s still a bright side, I suppose, if there is a stepfather she gets along with well enough to think of him as a father.

I’ve commented before that in high school, I typically often lunch alone. It was a combination of back luck (always seeming to have a different lunch period from all of my friends) and an inability to “put myself out there” and find people to eat with. There were some respites from this isolation, however.

I can’t remember how Clint and I ended up eating with Sonja and Grace. I think it was the semester that we had previously been eating with Myron - a lunch companion we felt a strong need to get away from. Yet even that doesn’t make sense. I have multiple memories of the same thing. But somehow, we ended up just eating by ourselves within proximity to Sonja and Grace, who were also eating by themselves. And eventually our pairs merged and the four of us ate and chatted together for a time.

This was a-okay by us because both Clint and I had independently noticed - and discussed - Grace. She was rather cute, if you noticed her, but she had the sort of face that almost seemed designed to be inconspicuous. She wasn’t overweight, but didn’t have much of a chest. A little tall, pale-skinned, but not a thing objectionable about her. She dressed in a peculiar manner partially designed to get attention, but we never got the impression that she really succeeded. You had to be looking for girls like her to notice her. Clint and I did look for such girls. In lieu of girls like Sonja, who I will get to in a second, Grace was the sort of girl we felt we had a shot with and would have been really happy to couple up with. She was shy, however, and so were we, and so it was one of those things that each of us would notice, ask the other if they had noticed her, and then talk about how she was the sort of girl we would notice, be glad to couple up with, and might even have a shot with.

So it seemed fortuitous when we ended up lunching with her. The only problem was, we were also lunching with Sonja. I’d had a couple of classes with Sonja, but hadn’t thought all that much of her. Except that her matter-of-fact, earth-shattering beauty was not coupled with any sort of self-elevation, snobbery, or, for that matter, popularity. She was, after all, eating alone with the invisible Grace. But she was Hollywood star beautiful. If you’d asked me to name the 20 most beautiful girls at our huge high school, she would have probably made the list before we started lunching with her. To put a fine point on it: she wore nail polish. I didn’t care.

And this created a problem. Because as awesome as Grace was - with her unassuming looks combined with outstanding style of dress - she was standing next to a girl that was virtually a model. A gregarious, personally pleasant, intelligent, single model. We both agreed that Grace was much more up our alley (and that, in addition to being quite cute, was also pleasant once you got her talking). Whenever Clint and I had a group of two-and-two, we had the tendency to want to partner up. Not that we had delusions of romantic stuff, but just a pairing. This itself created problems because we’d always hone in on the same person. The Grace, typically. But the Grace was usually next to a girl that was fat, or unpleasant, or pretty but with a bad personality. Here, she was sitting next to Grace.

And so the Invisible Girl that Clint and I had noticed was, in a near-perfect situation, invisible to us again. She made it easy, because she so rarely talked. But it’s one of the things I look back on with a certain perplexity. It’s also one of the things I look back on as evidence that no, I am not too terribly different from most guys. I fall under the spell of the conventionally beautiful - under at least some circumstances - just like the rest.

It’s also one of those things that outlines the positional nature of the relationship market. Partially because Grace’s presence was amplified or muted by who she was sitting next to. Partially, though, because even though Clint and I never denied that Grace was as cool as she was by our own typical standards, we both wanted to be associated with the more desirable person. Even if we had no chance of romance with her, we’d forgo what might have been a legitimate chance with Grace just for the chance to be more publicly associated* with the likes of Sonja.

Just as I don’t remember how the situation came to be, I don’t remember how it broke up, either. It was, for its time, a wonderful pocket of existence. I’d lament that I never got more opportunities like that, except for the fact that we sort of blew it.

So apparently, school lockers are becoming extinct:

All of the students we spoke with at Parkway West and Ladue, estimate about 95% of upperclassmen don’t use lockers.

“I see a lot of students carrying around very heavy backpacks, with their locker with them, a portable locker,” said Eileen Kiser, spanish teacher at Parkway West.

Several reasons are given when you ask “why” students today don’t use lockers; don’t have as many books because of newer technology, rather carry all items with them, and lockers are no longer used as a gathering spot to talk to classmates.

“Our lockers aren’t meeting places anymore because we are talking a lot through texts, so we don’t have to meet and share gossip at the lockers or anything,” Shanker said.

While we found no schools locally that have done away with lockers, a recent USA Today article says it’s a growing trend. KAI Design and Build, an architecture firm based in St. Louis, has designed two schools without lockers in Texas. KAI President, Darren James feels its only a matter of time before you see new schools in St. Louis being built lockerless. James says their statistics also show about 95 percent of students don’t use lockers. Some local teachers also feel, lockerless schools could be in the future.

Maybe I was ahead of my time! At least, until I regressed.

When I was in high school, I used to carry around all of my books in a huge duffel bag. Sometimes I would sell the use of my locker to others. My high school was rather large and the lockers are always along the periphery, which meant that they were never centrally located or easily accessible. The result was that the bag was severely overloaded and had to be replaced every year or so. Same make, same model, start all over again.

What changed things was the campus news program. I actually saw myself in the hallway and was horrified by what I saw. I was so… slouched. I’d learned by that point that posture matters, and so the next week I asked my parents to get me a traditional Jansport backpack and started switching at lunch time. Within a week, two girls commented that there was “something different” about me. Both meant it entirely complimentary.

Even the elementary schools in Redstone have lockers. They didn’t in my school system. This may actually be somewhat indicative of what the article is talking about, though. The schools in Redstone trend to the very old. The ones in my district were new. Newer schools, less likely to have lockers.

Getting rid of lockers presents a logistical challenge. Having “classroom books” makes it more difficult to assign homework (though more likely that the kids have books in class). I suppose it works to have a classroom set of books and a book for each student. A little more expensive, but school districts are (or often can be) less than rigorous about replacing textbooks. The Redstone textbooks still include Yugoslavia, which is not insignificant when you consider the heavy Slavic population of teachers (I’ve noticed a trend among teachers with Slavic names that they actually have maps of eastern Europe on the wall even if they’re not teaching social studies).

Having assurances that kids do have their books in class is rather important. The alternative is that they stare at you blank-eyed or that they “read off a neighbor” which makes classroom enforcement more difficult. I do fear that, however, without the accommodations of a locker and/or a classroom sets that more kids will simply keep their books at home rather than lug them around school all day like I did.

Except when referring to padded cells, when people talk about “rubber rooms” they are as likely as not talking about the New York education system’s reassignment centers, where teachers accused of misconduct bide their time until the district determines what to do with them.

I thought about that when I was confronted with a different sort of educational holding cell: alternative schools.

The school district I grew up in had an alternative school. It was a godsend. It took all (well, most) of the people that were disrupting everything in the regular classrooms and getting them the heck out of the way. I never labored under the illusion that they were getting much an education over there. I didn’t really care, though, because they weren’t getting an education where they were and at least this way they weren’t preventing anybody else from doing so. My perspective changed a little bit when I discovered that a friend of mine (a couple grades back) was sent to one. I never knew what for. I never asked. But he was a bright kid. I sort of gave him my sympathies as politely as I could (”That must have been tough” or something like that), but he actually shrugged it off. I hadn’t realized what a hellish place I thought it to be.

I have a couple of times been given an assignment to Redstone’s alternative school. It isn’t a hellish place. It helps, I suppose, that the school is comparatively underpopulated. When filling in for a social studies teacher for a half-day, I had all of six students over three periods assigned to the class. Only two showed up at all. My second assignment (another half-day) there was for PE. I thought that would be awful, but it wasn’t, really. Thirty kids over two periods. They self-organized and did their own thing.

The reason my only two assignments there have been half-days is that it seems largely staffed by coaches. So they miss half-days when they have some competition halfway across the state. While there are always exceptions, it was my experience that coaches tend to be the least… engaged… of classroom teachers.

The Missing Portion of the Post:

There is an “alternative” school in Callie. A military school, actually, in close to the literal sense. It’s run in conjunction with the local national guard. It’s for the real hard cases from all around the state. I’ve never actually seen the campus, but I do see the kids marching around town in a “TEN-HUT!” sort of way. The Callie Academy is for the really hard cases. From bits and pieces I here, that’s where kids go before they get kicked out of the system entirely. My wife sees a lot of them as patients. She says that they are actually uniformly polite with the “yes ma’am” and “no ma’am” and among the most respectful patients she has. Instead of being accompanied by a parent, they’re accompanied by instructors (looking over their shoulders, I imagine, and causing the exceptional behavior).

This couldn’t be any more different than Redstone’s Alternative school. That’s where it really is approached more as a holding tank. I’ve frankly never seen anything like it. A fifteen year old pregnant girl in the hallway drops a pack of cigarettes and a teacher says “Hey, Molly, you dropped your cigarettes!” She picked them up and was on her way (yes, this actually happened). My own cigarettes never leave the car and aren’t even supposed to be there. There is no time I pull into the school and there aren’t a handful of kids smoking cigarettes at the grocery store across the street. I go to another corner of said grocery store, just so that I am not actually smoking with the students.

My first assignment had a kid take a cell phone call during class. The principal walked in. I’d told him to get off, but he waved me off saying he’d be done in a minute. The principal actually walked in at that point. I thought I was going to be in trouble, but he didn’t care. During PE, some kids who were ditching class came in and joined in the fun. I told the principal, who sent one kid back but let the rest stick around.

The odd thing about it is that the kids actually aren’t all that bad. They are mostly completely indifferent. They can’t really be bothered to challenge authority. Or maybe they just already won. When I had them for PE, I was left a note that they needed to play volleyball or basketball. Instead, they chose to play dodgeball. I told them that I would let the regular coach know that they said it was okay and they shrugged it off. They were pretty brutal with one another with volleyballs being thrown at heads from a few feet away. Never a complaint, though. Compare this to dodgeball in the grade school where all of my time is consumed comforting some kid that’s crying. (I’ve come to the conclusion that the bans on dodgeball have little to do with kids actually getting hurt - they’re really quite resilient - but rather a lot more to do with how annoying and time-consuming it is for teachers.)

They’re also oddly - and refreshingly, in some ways - self-directed. Fewer actual fights and feuds than in regular school. Everyone seems to know the hierarchy and acts accordingly. The weaker kids seem to be perceived as a waste of the stronger kids’ time.

I don’t know what the difference is between these kids and the ones who get sent to the military school. I suspect that the latter are considerably further down the misbehavior path. I also think it depends on what the parents consent to (a lot won’t consent to their kid being sent across the state). It’s kind of funny that the system has given up on one set of bad kids, but is going the extra mile with what I suspect are a worse set of kids.

I consider a lot of public education to be a mere holding tank, but this was the first school I had ever been to that seemed to simply accept its role as such. I don’t really know how I feel about that. It seems honest, but also depressing. And I do wonder what is going to happen to these kids when they are allowed to leave the system. And if the results are actually any worse than in a regular classroom. One of the worst assignments I ever had was a remedial class at the middle school. I don’t know what separated those kids from the ones shipped off to the alternative school. But lordy, lordy, were they worse-behaved. It just seemed to bring out the worst in them. A constant tug-of-war with struggle and rebellion.

So maybe, in the end, maybe this is the lesser of evils. Or maybe it’s just easier. It’s hard to say.

One of the natural inclinations that, when I substitute teach, is not to put myself in the class. What I mean is, if I have a middle school class (for instance), I can usually guess half way through any period where I would fit in within the class’s dynamic. These are the students who would torture me. Those are the students who would be my friends. Those are the students who would unfortunately be my friends. Those are the students who would be kind but distant. That right there is the fat girl who would make fun of my weight to ingratiate herself with the popular-mean-nonfat girls. At the end of the day I do my write-up, and I should not mention - or fail to mention - a student on the basis of how I would expect they would have treated me at my middle school.

It’s a little different with the grade school kids because the social patterns aren’t all set yet. The notion of “I can’t be friendly with you because then other kids won’t like me” hasn’t fully set in yet outside of less than a handful of toxic individuals. I was actually a little surprised by this despite the fact that it matches up with my grade school experience. I remember a couple of kids at West Oak Elementary getting a really hard time, but it was rather an exception. I had previously thought that I had glossed this over because I wasn’t on the receiving end of much of it myself. But I am coming around to the idea of social patterns not having formed.

To jump back to middle school and high school and the inclination I have to resist, I guess it goes back to that saying that you graduate from the public school system but you never really leave it. The social patterns that establish themselves there long outlive their original context. I remember Eva saying that she and a previous boyfriend were having a hard time relating to one another because he was super-popular in school and she wasn’t. It sounds trivial, doesn’t it? Yet I am not sure it is. When your perception on that place that you spent seven hours a day for thirteen years of your life is so different, you can approach everything social with different assumptions. The justice of schoolground popularity, for instance. More basically, whether or not you can assume that people will like you.

Now, the older you get, the less all of this matters. But it does matter straight up through marriage. I don’t consider it a coincidence that all of the major romantic interests in my life have ranged from not-particularly-popular to unpopular. The friends through which you meet the person you marry are often (though not always) going to be people that you meet and become friends with while you labor under whatever impressions you have of your interactions with other people that you got from school. This isn’t set in stone (my brother Mitch was not-particularly-popular in high school but became Mr. Social in college), but it’s a general tendency I have seen.

All of this being really horrifying, when you think about it. Our social expectations being derived at a time when social alliances have no consequences beyond social standing. When being useful isn’t socially useful, for the most part. When being smart doesn’t help. When following the rules doesn’t help (and can hurt). These are the seeds from which our self-perceptions are often planted.

I had a kindergarten class today. It was a relatively light day, as far as academics go. The afternoon was spent with a Christmas “play” (more like a recital, but they called it a play). The rest of the day was spent with Christmas books and a couple short movies. Almost none of them involved Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.

This was a problem.

Because over and over again, in any picture book or movie that showed the reindeer without Rudolph, the same response occurred: “WHERE’S RUDOLPH?!?!?!?!?!” My options of explaining this were three:

(1) Rudolph is a registered property of some media rights company and so any story where Rudolph appears must therefore pay this company money. In an effort to make their product less expensive and therefore enjoyed by a larger number of people, writers and producers of Christmas material where Rudolph does not play an integral part will leave Rudolph out of it. This, of course, diminished the enjoyment of the story for kindergarteners everywhere. So tell your parents to write your congressman in opposition to future copyright extensions so that eventually Rudolph can be more widely enjoyed by children such as yourself.

Pros: Accurate and potentially motivating young people for political involvement.

Cons: None of them will understand what the heck I am talking about.

(2) Think of it as though there are multiple parallel dimensions. What takes place in one universe does not necessarily take place in others. For instance, in this story, there are talking bears and wolves. As we know, in our dimension, bears and wolves don’t talk (and are more likely to attack one another than be best buddies). So, while Rudolph may exist in the world of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, he does not necessarily exist in this world of talking bears or wolves or this other world where dogs talk to one another in various accents.

Pros: Concedes the possible existence of Rudolph and places the context of the story within the storybook worlds where they are being told.

Cons: None of them will understand what the heck I am talking about. Except the words “Rudolph doesn’t exist.” They will understand that part.

(3) Rudolph is dead.

Pros: Short and to the point.

Cons: Will make kindergarteners cry.

(4) This story takes place before Rudolph was the lead reindeer. Remember how, at the beginning of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer how Rudolph wasn’t a part of the sled team? This story is like that.

Pros: Does not foreclose existence of Rudolph (and therefore Santa), comparatively short and to the point with an example they may be able to understand.

Cons: Kids have an incomplete understanding of “before” and “after.” Plus, if for instance there are only two reindeer, they will wonder why only two were necessary at the time of the story but Rudolph was one of several. Coming up with an explanation of how union regulations requires the hiring of more reindeer, or how animal rights advocates insisted on it, would require a greater understanding of the real world than kindergarteners are likely to have.

I went with #4, though left out the part about union regulations and instead opted for an explanation that the story took place when there were less people (errr, bear-people) and therefore less presents required carrying and therefore fewer reindeer were required.

To get to a more serious point, this actually is indicative to me of the problem of indefinite copyrights. Rudolph has extended beyond something that some guy made up for Montgomery Ward and into a cultural icon. Not even a pop culture icon, but a through-and-through cultural one. I suppose we should count ourselves fortunate that Santa Claus himself wasn’t invented under the current copyright regime.

(To any kindergarteners reading this blog, that last part is a joke. Because, of course, nobody invented Santa Claus!)

Up until about the eighth grade, the first semester ended about two weeks after we returned from Christmas vacation. Then, some law was passed that allowed school to begin earlier in the year. A few days off and inservice days were shifted to the Spring, and the semesters were separated by winter break. Shortly after I graduated high school, there were grumblings that the school year was starting too soon. The local theme parks and other summer-fun places were complaining that they were left with only a little more than a couple months of business. So they tried to pass another law forcing districts to wait until September to start school. Education experts, in turn, argued that starting the semester earlier in the year was problematic because it would require splitting up the first semester again, which was problematic because of the brain drain that occurs over those two or so weeks.

As I read about this debate, I scratched my head. First, if they forget it over two weeks, then they never really learned it. Second, though, if we’re worried about what happens over two weeks, what about the two to three months of summer?! One of the frustrations for K-12 for me was that how it seemed that half of each year was spent reminding us of what we had learned over the previous year and forgotten over the summer (except that I didn’t forget, which made it even more frustrating). I was reminded of this when I read the following snipit from Reihan Salam’s piece on education:

Alan Krueger, the Princeton economist President Obama tapped to serve as his chief economic adviser, co-authored an important paper with Molly Fifer in 2006 on summer learning loss. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds are at a big skills disadvantage in early grades, but that gap grows with each passing year. One reason is that while middle-class kids take part in enriching activities during the summer, ranging from camp to stimulating conversations with educated parents, poor kids are far less likely to do so. With that in mind, Krueger and Fifer called for a program of summer opportunity scholarships paying for enrichment programs during long vacations. It’s an excellent idea that should be pursued.

But what we really need is a cultural shift in which all of us take more responsibility for our education. We are not empty vessels into which credentialed professionals ladle knowledge. Rather, we are a special kind of animal uniquely good at learning through imitation and practice. Somehow we need to find better ways to capitalize on this fact — inside school walls and outside as well.

Or, of course, we could eliminate and/or divide out the “long vacations.”

There are a few arguments against this one. The theme park lobby being one of them. They like having things condensed in a way that allows them to concentrate all of their business over a short period of time (though, apparently, there is such a thing as “too short”). And a lot of leisure activities are season-specific (beaches, for instance). The fall and spring, where at least a few weeks of vacation would be harbored, can be too cold for outdoor swimming (where applicable) but too warm for playing in the snow (where applicable).

The second argument is that a lot of schools up north are not cut out for summers. They have non-existent or insufficient air conditioning. Which strikes me as insane no matter where you live. I hear this in particular about the northeast and that just strikes me as bizarre. They brag about how much money they spend on schools, but don’t shell out for adequate air conditioning systems?

The last argument is that summer school is necessary for some kids to get caught up.

In any event, I am unmoved by these arguments when you consider the degree of brain-drain that does occur over the summer. The third is the only really problematic one, to me. For the students that fall behind, I think the solution to that is with a quarter system where some classes over some quarters are repeated. While useful for shorthand, I think that overall the tendency to delineate too much by “grade level” is problematic. I would prefer more of an assessment/promotion approach on a class-by-class basis. So if we did go to a year-around system, I would support other changes occurring at the same time. Up to and including allowing families to pull their kids out of school for family trips, in the event that the months-off are staggered between the school. Staggering months-off could also go a ways towards alleviating the Disneyland problem.

As for the air conditioner problem, buck up and pay for it.

Long Island University Professor says that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was bullied, others agree and disagree:

Millions of viewers have reviewed the evidence. So, was Rudolph bullied?

“What they do to him is bullying especially what they’re teaching the kids now as big as it is in the schools, but yes, he was definitely bullied,” Audra Bamford said.

“We just watched it the other night and I was telling my kids that’s not how we treat our friends,” Ronette Hillenbrand added.

“No I don’t think he’s being bullied,” Dr. Friday said. “I think the problem lies with Santa. He’s just not hugging this poor defenseless thing.”

Santa’s involvement (or lack thereof) hadn’t really occurred to me. Perhaps it’s a telling indictment of how the expectation isn’t even there that authority figures will help.

I think it all depends on how far you stretch the definition of “bullied.” You can limit it to physical violence. You can broaden it a little to include threats of physical violence. You can broaden it even further to taunts and ostracization. I think all of these things apply as bullying of some sort, though some of these forms are more serious than others. I remember back in college I had a discussion with a female classmate wherein she argued that girls are worse bullies than men because guys rely on violence while girls are more creative and hit other girls where it really hurts: self-esteem. I countered that (a) violence hurts and (b) violence in boys is not unrelated to self-esteem. On the second point, she said that the same was true of girls and it was nothing like the self-esteem hit of being accused of being fat. We never came to an agreement. I think there was a fundamental misunderstanding of how boys and girls respond to accusations of weight (which hits girls far harder than boys) and physical weakness (the other way around).

As for Rudolph, I am inclined to agree with Dr. Giuliani that yes Rudolph was bullied, but disagree with his assertion that the movie promotes violence. The attitude towards the taunting of the other reindeer is treated with uniform negativity. If it does anything wrong, it’s to perpetuate the notion that the bullied are bullied because they are “special.” Which sounds nice, of course, but… doesn’t exactly ring true.

On the subject of bullying, Dr. Phi wonders to what extent “helicopter parenting” has actually helped alleviate the bullying problem from years past.

As the college football season descends into chaos, the subject of playoffs is again coming up. Which, as many of you know, I oppose. One of the main reasons for that opposition is that playoffs can render regular seasons moot.

Long before I took this stance, I got an object lesson in this. A particularly absurd one. This is more a telling of a story than a post about the BCS. I said almost all I have to say about college football playoffs here.

I am not a particularly athletic person. But there are two things to keep in mind: I started playing little league from a very young age. And I was pretty good at baseball. On the first point, it meant that while I didn’t have a whole lot of talent at sports like basketball or soccer, I was at least considerably more practiced than most. So when we played these things in PE, I was actually an asset to anyone willing to overlook that I was fat.

When it came to basketball, the “team leader” - Donnie - was not particularly willing to overlook that even despite the fact that I was 6′0″ tall in the 8th grade. There were six to a team and he had me swapping in and out for the 5th spot only because everybody had to play. One time we had six and the other team had four and I played for the opposing team and did remarkably well. It didn’t matter, though. I was not very athletic-looking. Our team came in second place (of six) overall, though. First and second place won a week of free time (fifth and sixth had a week of running laps).

After basketball came softball. This time there were only two teams. Donnie was one of the team captains. The other was Cory. Cory was on my little league team. Because he - like myself - was plugged in to the local little league, he knew who was good and who was not. So while Donnie was picking the jock-types, Cory was picking people he knew to be good. Donnie actually chuckled when I was Cory’s third pick, Cory, for his part, said he actually would have picked me sooner - as I was the best hitter on our little league team - but he knew he could wait for me. We both agreed he should have waited longer since it was apparent Donnie wasn’t going to pick me any time soon.

We destoyed them. Day after day, game after game. There were a lot of games because the mercy rule was called into effect regularly and we started over. Every now and again they would get lucky. We won 15 and they won twice. On the last day, the coaches announced it was the last day and that we were playing a “championship game.” And wouldn’t you know it, they won their third game that day. The end result? They had a week of free time and we had a week of running laps*.

What stood out to me was that nobody thought there was anything wrong with this. So hardwired into our thinking that a playoff is how champions are determined, that this seemed perfectly fair to everybody involved. We’d had a playoff for basketball, hadn’t we? Well yes, because there were six teams, two of which had tied for first and a third was only one game back. This, on the other hand, was essentially stating that the first 17 games were scrimmages.

* - I say a week, but it was probably only a couple of days. The 15-2 record I am more sure about. If I’m off, it’s not by more than a game or two in either direction. I know they won no more than three games. I know we won no less than 13.

Such is The Atlantic’s solution to the problem of bullying:

Instead of asking why bullies bully, scientists led by University of Illinois psychology professor Karen D. Rudolph are beefing up the coping side of bullying research by looking into why victims retaliate, ignore, or repair relationships after an attack. Through a series of surveys to 373 second-graders and their teachers, they investigated how each child approached and valued his or her peer relationships, how many of the children had been bullied, and how they responded to such attacks.

The data was revelatory. Though it wasn’t astounding to find out that half of the children reported being the object of taunts, gossip, or intimidation, how they reacted to their harassers was. The key to anticipating victims’ responses, it turns out, is to figure out their motivations for interacting with their peers in the first place. That is, kids who wanted to be popular and feel superior tended to retaliate impulsively. Those who wanted to appear cool by avoiding criticisms were more likely to pretend like nothing happened. And those who were genuinely interested in fostering friendships tended to react in healthful, positive ways. They asked their teacher for advice, sought emotional support, and found means to solve the tension with those who harassed them.

From a moral perspective, it is, of course, beyond agitating that we put the burden on the bullied to smart their way out of the situation. Of course, as I’ve said in the past, there is a certain logic to it. After all, it’s the victims that care what’s happening. It’s the victims that agree with society as a whole that bullying is a bad thing. It’s not, of course, the bullies themselves.

And there are some truths to this. While some people will get bullied no matter what, there are different ways to cope with it and some are more productive than others. There were three things that worked for me, two of which involved changes on my part and the third a system change at the school district.

If we look at the public school popularity echelon as we look at economics, I was a low-class kid. One thing that improved my situation was making middle class friends. The more of those I had, the less of a target I was. Middle class folks have at least some upper class friends, and the bullies to some extent watch themselves. The more you surround yourself with people that the bullies don’t want to get into it with, the more they will target people that are alone or that associate in target-rich environments. Of course, this was a negative-sum approach. Being less a target than the next guy doesn’t help the whole. Unless you become middle class yourself and lend aid to lower class people. I did this a little, though not much.

The second thing I did was crass bribery, which no school would recommend but which worked for me. Instead of giving away money, I helped a couple of bullies with their homework. On the first order they stopped picking on me and even became friends of sorts, but on a second order they provided a degree of implicit protection. They never threatened other bullies, but so long as I was on friendly terms with the former bullies, the others started avoiding me. Unlike the previous, this actually may have been positive-sum. Not only did the bullies I bribed not go after me, they also stopped going after my friends. And I think there was a net gain. (My friends didn’t receive the second-order effects that I did, however.) It was this that got me through my eighth grade year.

The third change was a systems one, and I believe a positive net gain. I changed schools, from a relatively unwealthy middle school to a wealthy high school. The bullies were vastly outnumbered, and made smaller by the fact that the worst were shipped off to the alternative school. I hated my high school, but it was great in this respect. It provided me enough breathing room that I could at first be invisible, and then start making middle class friends.

My experience in substituting has reinforced the notion that dealing with bullies - at least from an institutional standpoint - is exceptionally hard. Even for teachers and administrators that mean well. Last spring I mentioned a story at Pitts Elementary where two kids got into a fight, of sorts, and when the detention slips were sent out one of the kids was crying and the other was showing it off to all of his friends. How, precisely, do you punish a kid who shows off his punishment slips to all of his friends?

I don’t even know where to begin.

The method of discipline involved moving magnets up and down a spectrum (up for good, down for bad). The hassle this caused cost me 20 minutes in the morning and then another 15 during spelling time. At first, kids were being “helpful” by moving magnets up and down based on whether their classmates were doing good. This was followed by kids moving up their own magnets. Tattling is always a headache, but this just formalized it. Worse, the more I had to monitor that, the less I could monitor the classroom, all of whom were on the play carpet supposed to be reading. But they weren’t reading, therefore more magnets were being moved.

Then there was the pencil-sharpening debacle, another 15 minutes. Everybody in the whole daggun class had an unsharpened pencil. The bickering at the pencil sharpener meant that I had to just sharpen them myself. At some point, I am pretty sure kids were just breaking their pencils because the sharpener was where the action was.

Elementary school kids are actually generally quite good about participating. Particularly when it comes to the Direct Instruction stuff because they love yelling out the repeat-after-me’s. From a teaching perspective, I don’t like DI because it just feels stupid and rote, though ideologically I don’t have a problem with it because it’s really supposed to work. But I could barely get half of the class involved.

Early grade schoolers are also surprisingly good about ceding to authority, generally speaking, but I was almost at the point where I was just going to pick up the kids and physically put them at their desks. Except for the degree of trouble it would have gotten me in.

Apparently yesterday there was a big thing about bullying, so accusations of bullying were flying everywhere. About a half-dozen kids all just left after lunch to go to the principal/counselor/nurse. I had to get the other teacher involved to straighten that all out.

There was one case of bullying that I almost had nailed. The kids were playing dodgeball and a kid was crying on the ground due to some other kid’s “unfair” balltoss. I didn’t see that, but the kid he was pointing at then proceeded to throw the dodgeball straight at his head while he was one the ground. The crying kid ran away. When I finally found him, he refused to identify the kid that did it. I would have come down on the bully anyway, but it was one of three kids (all with shaggy blond hair, all wearing NFL-logo jackets) and I wasn’t positive which one it was. I needed the bullied to point him out and he refused to do so.

Speaking of which, dodgeball really is a mixed blessing. I am strangely happy to see it, but it does involve a lot of injuries and a lot of crying. With the exception of the above, the crying tends to be temporary.

One kid is so excitable that they have to put her in a jacket lined with metal to keep her from running around everywhere.

One little girl (actually, one of the good ones) got a papercut. I basically told her to tough it up (I couldn’t see the cut, no matter how hard I tried). Five minutes later she was bawling. So off to the nurse she went. After which, other kids started trying to injure themselves so that they could go to the nurse, too.

I actually had a frame of reference here. One of the girls in this first grade class was in the first grade class I taught at “the good school” (Rushmore). She was held back for a questionable reason: she was doing fine, but her Irish Twin needed to be held back and so the parents held them both back to keep them together. The difference in behavior between first graders and second graders is negligible and favorable to the former, so she wasn’t an outstanding student because she was more “mature” than her classmates. She was just a diamond in the rough. At Rushmore, she was a middle of the pack student that I really only remembered because she would keep hugging me. So in the context of Rushmore, she was average. In the context here, she was far and away the best student I had. Only one other came close.

I found it noteworthy that all three of the students I was “warned” about by the other teacher were male. The worst offenders were almost all female (one of the three she pointed to were an exception).

I’m going to have to come up with some better classroom management strategies. Not all of my grade school assignments are going to be at Creston and Rushmore.

I’ve taught previously at this school, Church Elementary, with a couple of pretty decent classes.

Notably, however, when I was last at Rushmore, one of my students was the daughter of Church’s principal.

“The main thing is to keep them from killing each other. If they learn something along the way, even better.” -The other first grade teacher.

I got an assignment at Rushmore elementary yesterday. Rushmore is far and away the best school in Redstone. The test scores say as much, but even before I saw them I singled out that school as having an absurdly positively atmosphere. I was glad to get the assignment because I had feared that I had been blackballed there after this whole incident (which, by the way, actually worked out in my favor: I got paid for one 1.5 days because of a mistake on their part).

It was my third straight assignment for the third grade, oddly enough.

One of the girls was 4′8″. In the third grade. I wonder if the high school girl’s basketball coach already knows her name. Speaking of which, last year I had a middle school student whose gender I was uncomfortably unsure of until I saw that she was on the girl’s basketball team. She was approaching 6′0″. As for Miss 54″, she commented that her father and brothers were “very tall” so I doubt that it’s just an odd growth spurt. She also didn’t seem like the kind of kid to be held back unless she was close to the borderline.

With the exception of a couple, every time I teach below the 5th grade, I am informed that I am a very tall individual and/or I have very large feet. This time I was informed that I was a very tall individual. One of the boys was bragging to another of the boys that at least they came up to my beltline.

I finally met Mrs. Truman. For those of you who do not recall, my actual last name is less common than “Truman” and so it’s odd to have someone with my same last name. And any time I teach at the middle school, I am asked if there is any relation. This time I made a point of stopping by to introduce myself. I know that she knew of my existence because she accidentally got my Valentine’s Day bag when I left it behind. I was… kind of disappointed in her, actually. She had very dyed and very dried hair. She was very friendly to me and we had a laugh about the event of the previous year, but given all of the raves I’d heard about her, I figured she would remind me of a third grade teacher I liked rather than the one that I hated.

I commented that any time I am asked about her among middle school kids I am told that she is/was “totally awesome” and that I might have benefited from the association. She appreciated the compliment and said that it would probably be different in high school, though, because her husband is a parole officer and “a lot of kids at Redstone High School have to deal with him.”

With the exception of the last name and the Valentine’s Day incident, I wouldn’t have expected her to know anything about me, but she actually knew that I am that guy that drives out all the way from Callie. The principal stopped by and said hello and asked if I was still making that drive. That seems to be my role. The guy who makes that really long drive. It also makes me wonder if, while I haven’t been blacklisted, they still think of me as iffy because of the whole incident over six months ago. He was nice, though.

The principal is very popular. Which is not surprising, since he either has the plum job or is actually so good that Rushmore’s impressiveness is attributable to him. I guess I have been watching too many crime shows, because when I think of a popular male principal, a part of my mind thinks that we’re going to discover that he’s kept a 15 year old girl chained up in his basement for five years or something equally harrowing.

The day was largely uneventful. Getting third graders to be quiet is a challenge. At the bad schools, it’s to get them to stop talking to one another. The only blow-up we had today was actually over academics. They all swore that the answer key was wrong about something and just blew up about it, requiring the other third grade teacher to come over.

The thing I’ve learned about elementary school kids is that they love routine - at least in school. They are very good at pointing out if you are doing anything that is not according to the routine and The Way Things Are Supposed To Be. No matter how minor.

Teachers have cooler gadgets than I was in school. We had blackboards and later overhead projectors. They have “smartboards.”

Rushmore used to be an “open classroom” environment. This was a hippie venture where they didn’t have separate rooms for everybody but instead taught everything in a wide open area with different sections. This adventure did not last long. But you can see the layout is not that of a typical school. The big open area in the middle still exists and the classrooms shuffled off to the side. They added new classrooms over the summer, though, so it almost looks traditional, though the layout still looks odd. It feels like somebody emptied out a department store and put in a school.

For all of the praises I sing to the school, it’s actually most known for a student-on-student shooting that happened there a long time back.

I really, really meant to take some pictures of the anti-bullying and positive mental attitude posters in the classroom. One of them had a picture of Alice (from the Brady Bunch) and ALF, saying that you want to be like the former but not like the latter. Putting aside that these kids probably don’t know who Alice and ALF are, who wouldn’t rather be ALF? Almost all of the anti-bullying stuff puts the onus on the bullied to extricate himself from the situation or “talk it out.” No surprise there, but one of the posters involving frogs managed to sum up the attitude very neatly.

Kay Steiger sounds off the warning bells with regard to online college:

Via the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, a new study confirms some earlier findings about the efficacy of online learning in two-year colleges. The study, conduced by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, looked at more than 50,000 students in Washington state’s community or technical college system. What they found was that students who load up on online classes, especially early in their higher education careers, are less likely to finish their degrees. This is worrisome, especially because, as CCRC notes in its report, the number of students taking online courses is only increasing.

Other commentary has pointed out that online learning requires a basic degree of computer know-how that a lot of people don’t have and that online learning requires a level of discipline that traditional learning doesn’t. These are both very valid points and two of the three main reasons why online education will never become a norm (even as computer know-how increases). But there is something else at work, which Steiger points out: online students are not the same as physical students in terms of student profiles.

The Atlantic has been raising the banner of the non-traditional student. This is part of the “problem,” if you view it as such. Non-traditional students returning to school may be a good thing, but they’re often going to be the most marginal students. Not because they’re lazy or dumb, but because they have a lot of other things going on. That’s precisely what attracts them to the flexibility of online learning in the first place. This is also one of the reasons that for-profit universities have such abysmal graduation rates. They cater to precisely these students.

When we talk about increasing college enrollment, this is one of the things that we have to be looking at. We’d partially be bringing into the fold a lot of people who are not, at present, in a great position to do well in school. It may be worth bringing them into the fold anyway! But we have to accept that one of the costs of this is going to be higher drop-out rates and at least some students potentially hurt along the way with debt but no degree. Unless we’re going to start paying people to go to college, we have to factor this into the equation.

This is something that brick-and-mortar universities themselves often look at. One university near where I live is trying like hell to make the transition away from being a commuter school that provides the opportunity for a great education to people without a lot of options in favor of being a more traditional university. Why? Because a lot of these students are failing out. This hurts the university’s profile by making it look like a school that is failing. But by changing the student body to a more traditional one, the hope is that the numbers will improve and the university will look better. The only sacrifice required is shuffling off the “wrong” people to schools that are less good.

And on a personal level, I grit my teeth when I hear people talking about how they want their kids to “work their way through college.” Presumably so that they won’t take it for granted. There may be something to this, though in my experience working while going to college is more often going to be a recipe for failure. A working student serves two masters. My ex-girlfriend, an honors student in high school, failed miserably in college due in no small part to the fact that she was working at a pet store the whole time. Could she have done both if she were more disciplined? Sure. But that’s the kind of disciplined student you don’t have to worry about in the first place. Meanwhile, my own GPA fell considerably when I started working while attending. It’s a serious distraction. Some people have no choice. But putting kids in that situation for the sake of making a point or thinking it will lead to better outcomes is mistaken.