Why educating children isn't like making cars

Great video about why using a factory model for educating children isn't either efficient or practical. The CHCCS system might want to be reminded of this as they make the decision that all students should be educated to go to college.

Time for a new kind of school

I thought I had found the perfect school for D#2 and one that actually tempted me back into teaching in a school setting. I had found my dream job. Except . . . . it wasn't. Nor was it a good place for her. Not a bad school, just not the right school. So, that behind us, we're off to the next wonderful school.

Where, you might ask? I'm asking too. For a child like my daughter, and for many other children, there is no wonderful school. Many kids can go on to be successful if they can just make it through the ordeal we call education. What is needed is a different kind of school. Will someone please start one?

Uh, me? Are you talking to me? Can I actually start a school? My friend Meredith put it this way: "You thought you had found your dream job. Perhaps you were dreaming too small."

So here's the dream under its working name:

Just Right Academy is a private elementary and middle school geared to children who need structure, consistency and positive reinforcement, remediation and a multi-sensory way of learning, more movement, and reduced stress. Students receive direct small group and/or individual instruction in reading, math and language arts, along with integrated social studies, science, art, music, and drama. In some areas a student may need intense remediation, while in others he or she may need to be challenged. Social skills are directly taught and constantly reinforced. Learning to serve is an important value and there are daily opportunities for this along with monthly service Fridays. Movement breaks and physical activities are built into the schedule. A high school curriculum may be added later if the need is there.

Unnecessary stressors such as homework, high-stakes testing, and inappropriately difficult and/or busy work are not part of the program. But because life is not stress-free, techniques and strategies are taught to help students deal with the inevitable stressors and frustrating situations in their lives.

JRA’s core philosophy is that of Nicholas Hobbes’ Twelve Re-ED principles:

l. Life is to be lived now, not in the past, and lived in the future only as a present challenge. All children come with a history, but it is essential that it doesn’t haunt them in their present school setting. Every day, every hour, is an opportunity to start fresh.

2. Trust between child and adult is essential. In order for learning to happen, adults must be seen as reliable and trustworthy allies with predictable and consistent behaviors. A culture of trust and consistency must exist among the adults before the children ever begin at the school, and a commonality of philosophy is critical.

3. Competence makes a difference, and children and adolescents should be helped to be good at something, and especially at schoolwork. Some children require direct teaching and multisensory learning in order to become competent at reading and math. Other opportunities for competence are regularly offered.

4. Time is an ally, working on the side of growth in a period of development when life has a tremendous forward thrust. The brain is maturing in children and many just need a safe place to develop skills and competencies that might develop with time on their own.

5. Self-control can be taught and children and adolescents helped to manage their behavior without the development of psychodynamic insight. We are not psychotherapists nor are we a day treatment program, but all humans have behaviors that must be unlearned and replaced with more productive behavior, no matter the reason they occur.

6. Intelligence can be taught. Intelligence is a dynamic, evolving, and malleable capacity for making good choices in living. Problem-solving, both with academics and relationships, can and should be taught. Practice in making good choices is constant.

7. Feelings should be nurtured, shared spontaneously, controlled when necessary, expressed when too long repressed, and explored with trusted others. An atmosphere of honesty allows children to share through writing, drama, art and conversation. Constant coaching helps children learn to control the actions their feelings may cause.

8. The group is very important to young people, and it can become a major source of instruction in growing up. A healthy group can be a source of support and reinforcement to a struggling child. Older children can assist younger ones, thus gaining self-confidence in the process. Peers who cooperate rather than compete can be a source of strength and learning.

9. Ceremony and ritual give order, stability, and confidence to troubled children and adolescents, whose lives are often in considerable disarray. All people find comfort in predictability and ritual. Though out time, cultures have created rituals to help them through times of disequilibrium and transition, and so we do as well.

10. The body is the armature of the self, the physical self around which the psychological self is constructed. Children need to move, both in play, work and physical challenge, and all these are built into JRA’s program. It may be recess, gardening, sports coaching, working, or hiking, but movement is central to our program.

11. Communities are important for children and youth, but the uses and benefits of community must be experienced to be learned. Communities come with responsibilities as well as benefits, and so each child contributes each day by doing chores. Monthly service Fridays expand the community. Students help plan celebrations and support each other in many ways.

12. A child should know some joy in each day and look forward to some joyous event for the morrow. Every child should experience some joy in school every day, whether it’s a game at recess, mastering a difficult concept, reading with a dog, or celebrating one of our many holidays such as Squirrel Appreciation Day, King Tut Day, Jackie Robinson’s birthday, Cherry Pie Day, or World Penguin Day.

Is this something I can do myself? I'm not crazy. Wonderful people have come forward and there are more of you out there, people who may hold a small or large piece of this school and not even know it. We are in the process of forming a nonprofit and putting together a board of directors. While we will have to charge tuition, we want to have lots of scholarships so that all children who need this kind of setting can come. This is not a day treatment program for troubled kids; we want all kinds of children who need structure, consistency, movement, positivity, and strong academics.

Here are some needs:

1. a building; we are looking at one this week, but are open to all suggestions in Durham, Orange or northern Chatham.

2. financial donations, especially after we get nonprofit status.

3. donations of children's books, educational materials in good condition. We are especially interested in Saxon math materials and any math manipulatives.

4. Play tables

5. Someone to create a website

6. Someone to create a brochure

7. People who would be interested in serving on a committee: bylaws, curriculum, renovating and building (bookshelves, etc), fundraising, admissions, outreach, calendar

8. Prayers

9. Computer wizards and computers

10. People who can set up matching giving plans at their companies

11. Legos, K'nex, Lincoln Logs, any building toys, Playmobile sets, especially historical ones

12. Educational puzzles, especially wooden ones

13. Hot Dots materials

14. Wilson Reading systems materials, especially magnet boards and card packs

15. Office supplies such as staplers, paper cutters, scissors, markers, etc.

16. Corporate partners

17. students

We'd like to open in the fall 2010. What we want is a school for kids who could be superstars with the proper support and coaching. I know they are out there and I know most schools can't meet their needs. I have taught some in the past, I tutor some now, and I'm related to several. These kids can change the world if we can give them the leg up they need. Let me know if you want to help or you have a student who is a superstar in the making.

anxiety, depression and school?

My cousin Rosemoon Mecho just posted this great article about the correlation between anxiety and depression in children and adolescents and traditional schooling. I thought it made many good points and certainly holds true with my two very different children as well as most of my students. Take a look.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/print/37511

January's Rant

I rebelled against homework at an early age. As an undiagnosed ADD dyslexic, all it did was made me feel stupid. So I just said no. The classes weren't that hard and I'd do the reading. But I wasn't about to do any math or French. No one wanted me a second time, so I surfed along from grade to grade with low but passing grades. My senior year, Col. Walker, who taught us economics and Problems of American Democracy (an anti-communism course with a text written by J. Edgar Hoover), called my bluff the day before my not-yet-begun research paper was due. I pulled my first all-nighter and turned in a poorly written paper that allowed me to graduate.

I hated homework then, but that pales to how much I hate it as a parent. (A disclaimer here: as a teacher, I assigned homework. I believed in it. I was wrong.) I promise you, homework was not invented by the parent of a special needs child. Every day the school would send me home an exhausted, grouchy fifth grader and expect her to do geometry (she can't multiply), write essays (she first needs to learn to write a single good sentence) or some other equally undoable assignment. Family time was nonexistent. The week a close friend was dying, I wrote the school and told them that homework would not be a priority, that during that week we would be concentrating on our friend and our family. I got a return email explaining that homework was an expectation and not doing it would result in D#2's not being able to fully participate in class. Bad parent!

Homework is one of those ideas that sounds good in theory: practicing skills, involving the parents in the child's education, and learning time management. It might surprise you to learn that there is very little correlation between homework and those things. Instead, homework strains families, frustrates kids and is generally not meaningful enough to be done at school. Internationally, the countries that show the highest academic scores—Japan, the Czech Republic, and Denmark—assign very little homework. The countries at the bottom of the list generally assign much more.

During the time that a child should be playing outside, exploring interests, developing passions, and learning how to interact socially, many kids are spending up to three hours a night on homework—and that's in elementary school. Parents often feel obliged to be heavily involved. Indeed, in affluent school systems, the demand for homework is very often parent-driven. But this means that children from single-parent, non English speaking, or low income families may not have that parental involvement. When homework is necessary to participate in class, these kids find themselves at a disadvantage, thus widening the ever-growing gap between privileged learners and those who aren't for whatever reason.

More and more educators are starting to see the harm that excessive and unnecessary homework can do. In a thoughtful article called "Rethinking Homework", a principal talks about three important facts about homework: the negative effects of homework are well-known, the positive effects of homework are largely mythical, and more homework is being piled on students despite its lack of value. He goes on to make recommendations as to how homework can be improved.

One of the articles he quotes, "Homework Hell", talks about homework from a parent's point of view. She rails against the craft-type homework that requires late night runs to Wal-Mart. I join her in feeling admiration for the child who demonstrates higher level thinking skills in doing as little as possible on a particularly silly project: Assigned to construct a relief map of one of the 50 states out of plaster of Paris, the boy chose Nebraska. He made a flat rectangle. As his aunt said, "You've got to love a kid who puts into the assignment exactly the effort it's worth."

Homework almost sent my child and me over the edge. I feel very fortunate to have been able to pull her from her homework-loving school and put her in a school where lots of learning takes place, but no homework is assigned. Her anxiety has plummeted. Interestingly, she occasionally can be found after school doing research and writing stories and reports. She brought home a book she is interested in reading. The pressure is off; let the learning begin.

We have a name for adults who work all day and then continue at home as well: workaholics. We know that is not healthy. I hope someday we will realize that is equally true for children and let them spend their afternoons and evenings learning in experiential and active ways. Until then, perhaps more of us should just say no.

. . . and MY philosophy you ask?

I was on my second day of working on the preceding article about school philosophies. I had hogged the computer and the phone rang regularly with people returning my phone calls. My elder child finally asked me to articulate my teaching philosophy since I was badgering everyone else about theirs. Luckily I was ready.

I believe that every child is precious and deserves to learn in the best possible way for him or her. The details include respect, finding joy, reducing anxiety, and feeding the right wolf (see November's post for the wolf story).

What's our philosophy?

I'm on a training subcommittee for SNAC, the Special Needs Advisory Council, for Chapel Hill/Carrboro City Schools. We spent almost two hours talking about the myriad trainings, both state or federally mandated as well as ones that dealt with methodology, and how one goes about evaluating whether they are effective or not. We were floundering. And though the other committee members did not share my certainty on the matter, I felt strongly that it's impossible to evaluate programs if one does not know what the philosophy of the school system is.

I've heard the quote that Christianity (my tradition) can be distilled into one sentence: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. All the rest is details. The details are often what gets us into trouble, what with fighting over gay marriage, ordaining women, or birth control. But I think all Christian faiths would agree with Jesus when he said this is the first law and commandment. So I wandered around the rest of the day asking questions about school philosophies, both public and private, looking for the statement that summed us up when the details are stripped away.

Because I work in so many different schools and see how they are different, this is something that is front and center to me. Two private schools, Carolina Friends School and Jordan Lake School of the Arts, have such a clearly defined philosophy that they can be summed up in a sentence or two each: For CFS, it's Quaker Values—truth, respect, peace, simplicity, nature, service. JLSA's is more informal—We believe quirky kids have much to offer the world and we create an environment where they can be accepted and successful. Both schools have longer mission statements, but this core philosophy can be found in every decision that is made, down to the kind of copy paper used, how teachers are addressed, how decisions are made, and who cleans the school. A culture is created in which all participants buy in and actively seek to further. This helps with discipline problems, teacher retention and definitely with evaluation. I will write more about these two schools in later posts.

What I found with the Lincoln Center staff I talked to is that although they may have a personal philosophy—and most of them did—they had trouble articulating what the district's philosophy was. "Well, we DO have a mission statement," was a common reaction, but most couldn't remember what it was when put on the spot. The words diversity, partnering, high expectations, and doing what's right for kids were things that were mentioned. I talked to staff at Glenwood Elementary, my daughter's school, and found a very enthusiastic philosophy, but when I asked if it were the district's or the school's, we agreed that it was probably the school's. It was when I talked to school board members that I realized that we did have a governing philosophy, and some of them could articulate it well. There is a page on the CHCCS website called "Keeping our Eye on the Ball: the Focus of CHCCS", which is is intended to clarify mission, goals, and priorities, particularly for instructional staff members. Board members use this when making budget and policy decisions and several spoke with great passion about specific parts of the philosophy that meant a lot to them.

When I spoke to parents I was somewhat surprised and disturbed. The philosophy that many have spent time working on is not trickling down to a lot of the parents. A link on a website is no substitute for the culture that is created when all participants understand and buy into a governing philosophy. The way people are greeted by a receptionist, having phone calls returned, how complaints are handled, how a child who wets his pants is treated, how easy it is to find out how one gets a struggling child tested—all these things work together to create a culture. At Glenwood, Mr. Battle, the chief custodian, is one of the main reasons that school has such a strong and caring culture. His obvious love for the children and strong work ethic make him both a role model and a hero to the kids. Glenwood's Gator Show Choir teaches the whole school about excellence. The annual three day Sound to Sea field trip to the beach builds community as well as academic skills outside the classroom. I have seen this culture maintained by three different principals, so it's more than just leadership. But not all schools have such a strong built-in culture and Glenwood's is by no means perfect.

When I talked to parents in an admittedly unscientific poll, the overwhelming perception of the district's philosophy was "Education for all, excellence for none." This included EC parents, parents of the gifted and parents of typically developing children. There were pockets of satisfaction with specific teachers or programs, but a lot of frustration about having their children's needs met. Many of my friends who can afford it have pulled their children out to homeschool, utilize charter schools, or go to private schools. And I must admit that I have often felt that all that was cared about was EOG scores and that good enough was good enough. When IDEA was first implemented and schools no longer used the discrepancy model to label a child, my 2E older daughter, who had a 60 point discrepancy on some of her subtests, lost her IEP just as she was entering middle school. When I talked to someone at Lincoln Center about this, I was told, "We no longer have to worry about potential. All we need is a C." In middle school she was faced with classes that were either too hard or too easy, accusations of laziness in the area of her disability, an abusive teacher, and an unresponsive administration. In December of her 6th grade year, at her request I pulled her to homeschool her. I don't know if my daughter will be a candidate for Harvard or not. That's her choice. But I would like her to have the option if she does choose. And I certainly would like more than mediocrity.

When comparing philosophies it is not entirely fair to compare private schools to public schools. In this case we are talking about a whole system with the further complication of federal and state "regs", EOG's, and ever-changing mandates from the legislature. Their job is much harder. But I have seen Wright School, a state-funded mental health institution and school, deal with the same regs (and more) in a positive and life-enhancing way—because they have created a culture around the 12 principles of reeducation (I wrote about Wright School in November, "Education at its best"). I, perhaps naively, believe that with the right leadership and involvement at all levels, we can develop a supportive culture that lives up to the CHCCS philosophy that sits largely unknown. We are more than the regs; we are collective guardians of one of the most precious commodities in the world, our children, and it is our job to know what we believe, create our culture and to pass it on to them.

I didn't get my pithy philosophy statement until today. When I asked my daughter's EC teacher what she perceived the district's philosophy to be, she immediately answered, "You mean, all children will learn?" That's it, and the rest is details.

Wazi-Wazi, part 2

Since I talked about wazi-wazi last week, I've tried to be more thoughtful about how to prevent it in my children, my students and myself. We are fast approaching a season that is especially stressful, and many of us will feel off-center and beside ourselves. How can we protect our true selves?

A prime cause of wazi-wazi is hurried transitions. The Christian Church, the tradition from which I come, has always recognized that transitional times are dangerous times, and thus many of their sacraments center around those: birth, marriage, and death primarily. Other religions and cultures also have rituals that celebrate those milestones, along with coming of age. Even losing teeth has rituals in cultures around the world. Think about the rituals you have around birthdays, adoption days, anniversaries, and holidays. Ritual gives us a way to make sense of transition. Perhaps we should look at the smaller transitions in our lives and create rituals for those. How many tantrums occur when leaving, arriving home, going to bed and getting up? A tantrum is a sign that a child is in a state of wazi-wazi. One of the principles of re-education, used at Wright School where D#2 attended, states "Ceremony and ritual give order, stability, and confidence to troubled children and adolescents, whose lives are often in considerable disarray." It's not just troubled children who need this.

For daughter #2, Sunday nights and Monday mornings are very hard. I didn't even recognize this until our upstairs neighbor mentioned it (she could hear it!). Once I saw how discombobulating this transition time was to my daughter, I created a small ritual: time alone with Mom while D#1 was at youth group, hot chocolate, and a scone. A more relaxed time talking about the week ahead has made Sunday nights much more pleasant. And since Sunday nights have gotten better, so have Monday mornings.

Giving up a crib for a "big kid bed", potty training, welcoming a new sibling, the death of a pet, starting or ending school, all of these deserve recognition in a ritualized way. This is more important for some children than others. There are kids for whom anything done more than once is a tradition. Those kids especially need the comfort of ritual. It could be as small as a song for getting in the car or putting on shoes, and as thought out and prolonged as a party for the older sibs before the new one arrives, helping to choose a name, going to doctor's appointments with mom, and a welcoming ceremony. New clothes, lunch box, backpack, and school supplies herald the beginning of school in our house, as it does in many. Many people have school ending rituals as well. I taught for seven years at a boarding school with a dress code; on the last day of classes, the kids raced to the campus pond and jumped in, coat, tie, and all. Kids will often create rituals if we don't and they aren't always helpful ones. Sunday night anxiety, having to have the TV on when falling asleep, and tantrums in the grocery store are all child-created rituals. If you see a difficult transitional time developing, beat them to it with a ritual of your own or one you both invent.

To most children, tutoring is a bit like torture, and so I ease most of mine in with at least two games of the card game Blink. It's a fast-moving game that takes about two minutes and most of my students beat me handily. We're both laughing at the end of it, and then tutoring begins. It's an enjoyable signal that it's time to get to work. For some of my kids, those on the autism spectrum especially, doing the lesson in the same order each time prevents anxiety. A Wilson lesson is highly ritualized; after the first few lessons, a child always knows what to expect. This is often a comfort when dealing with a difficult subject.

As the holidays arrive, think about the rituals you have in your family. Which ones cause stress and which ones bring comfort? It may be time to ditch the unhelpful ones. It may be time to pay attention to those you care for and figure out what they need to keep them centered and that impostor self away. And while you are at it, think about yourself as well. A parent or teacher in his own state of wazi-wazi is sure to create it in others.

In a state of wazi-wazi

It has not been a good couple days for daughter #2. Sunday nights and Monday mornings are always difficult, but this extended into Monday night and Tuesday morning. Tantrums, difficulties at school, difficulties with me and her sister, anguish . . . once again she's in a state of wazi-wazi.

I first learned about wazi-wazi from Gertud Mueller Nelson, a renown Christian educator and expert on family ritual, in her book To Dance with God:

Colin Turnbull, in his marvelous accounting of the Mbuti peoples of Zaire, passes along to us their understanding of the dangers in transition. The Mbuti see the person as being in the center of a sphere. In moving from here to there, the sphere moves too and offers protection. If movement in time or space is too sudden or vehement, we risk the danger of reaching the boundaries of the sphere too quickly, before the center has time to catch up. When this happens, a person becomes wazi-wazi, or disoriented and unpredictable. If you pierce through the safe boundaries of the sphere into the other world, you risk letting in something else which takes your place. If the Mbuti know of and guard against such violent and sudden motion—and that without the experience of automobiles or jet planes—what do we, the so-called civilized people of the world, know of our transitions in space and time? I think we are a whole society in a state of wazi-wazi, beside ourselves and possessed by impostor selves.

Many of my students suffer from wazi-wazi. One normally hyper and joyous student is taken over by a sullen and still impostor when he is faced with work that is too difficult or when he is pushed too quickly. Another suffers from a far more dramatic and long-lasting case. E., a child with autism, was speaking, reading, and writing when a new sibling joined his family. For a while he stopped all language. His sphere had been pierced in what to him was a violent and unpredictable way. But patient and loving parents and a great school are helping the real E. find his place back into his sphere.

Since I've come to understand this concept and its effect, I have tried to mitigate the jarring effect it has on my child and my students. Tonight, as she fell asleep, she held my hand and told me she loved me. My child was back and the impostor was gone, at least for awhile.

I didn't plan to go THERE!

Today, one of my former students found out that her daughter has juvenile diabetes. It's always devastating to get a difficult diagnosis for one's child, no matter what it is. I was expecting my biological daughter to be dyslexic; with my genes, it would be surprising if she were not. And we cope with it fairly easily, although it did mean homeschooling her once she hit middle school. My other daughter's diagnosis of mental health issues was more unsettling. I had no idea what I was facing. I have many friends who have received difficult diagnoses about their children, be it cancer, autism (sometimes in multiple children), learning disabilities, or any of the other diagnoses that can turn one's world upside-down. They have all dealt with it with grace and courage. After the initial shock, they have rolled up their sleeves and gotten to work. Tiger moms (and dads) and activists rise from the ashes of dreams of an untroubled future. They have a new jargon, a new routine, and as one dad of a medically fragile child said to me last night, "It's old hat now." That doesn't mean it's always fun, but there is grace.

I've thought all morning about what to say to T. in response to her daughter's diagnosis. I've always been irritated by the well-meant words that God will never give you more than you can handle. First, I don't think God makes children sick. And second, you only have to watch the news to see that people often have more than they can handle. But I know that T. is a strong person, and I'm reminded of a story I heard at a dyslexia conference.

Imagine your delight. You are being transferred to the Rivera. All your life you have wanted to live in the south of France, and now you have your chance. In the depths of winter you will be eating wonderful French food and basking on the beaches. You've studied French for a long time in preparation; you have bought clothes appropriate to the climate. You climb on the plane and off you go.

The plane lands and you look out the window. Something is wrong. The landscape is blanketed with snow and, though it's just 5:00 pm, it's pitch dark outside. As you disembark from the plane, you are hit with an icy blast. You stand there in shock and your cell phone rings. There has been a change of plans and your new assignment is Norway.

You spend the next 24 hours in tears of rage and despair. It's not fair! Why did this happen to you? You don't have the right clothes. You don't speak the language. There are only five hours of daylight a day and it's freezing. The food is strange and you don't like it. You never had the slightest desire to go to Norway!! You go through the motions of finding a place to live, buying new clothes, starting your new job. Everything is harder because of the language barrier, the deep snow, the dark and the cold. Everything is a struggle and you are consumed with rage with the unfairness of it all.

Life goes on and you notice the days are getting longer. As spring comes, you start to look around. Oslo has many beautiful buildings that you never noticed before. The people are friendly and patient with your lack of Norwegian. As you sample more of the local cuisine, it loses its strangeness, and some of it is downright good. Summer comes and you visit the breathtaking fjords and enjoy the long hours of daylight and the temperate climate. You make friends and one day you realize you're okay with being in Norway. It's not where you wanted or planned to go, and you still feel a pang for what you are missing. But it's where you are and that can't be changed. You feel the anger dissipating. You know the winter and all its difficulties will come again, but you will enjoy the summer while it's here and cope with the winter when it comes. This is where you are.

So T., all I can tell you is that I'll pray for Abbey and hope for a cure. I hope your doctors are nice and knowledgeable. I hope you have a family and community that supports you. I can promise you that grace will come.

Which wolf?

Pete, D#2's unit coordinator at Wright School, realized I was a person who loved and needed stories, and at particularly low points in our time there would tell me a new one. Here is the most healing story he told me, one that guides my day-to-day interactions with my students, my children, and others I come into contact with:

An old Navajo grandfather was walking with his grandson. He looked down at the boy and said, "Son, inside you and every human there are two wolves. One is a good wolf and one is an evil wolf, and they are fighting to the death." They continued walking in silence until the boy cried, "But Grandfather, which wolf wins?" The grandfather replied simply, "the wolf you feed."

Here's hoping that every child has people in her life who feed the good wolf.

Learned Helplessness

One of my favorite quotes, and I can't remember or find who said it, is that to best educate a child, you should give him a book and get out of the way. I have found that to be great advice with Daughter #1, who is homeschooled. Schools are not set up for gifted dyslexics, and I finally stopped fighting and pulled her out. She neither wants nor requires much of my help. She takes a couple of enrichment classes, uses an algebra text with DVD lectures if she needs it, learns history through novels, and is reading lots of short stories. She also spends a lot of time investigating her interests of the moment: classic rock, photography, forensic psychiatry, sewing, harmonica, drama. She is truly an independent learner.

It's harder with D#2, who struggles with anxiety and has also missed a lot of school over the years. I find myself sitting with her as she does her homework, helping her through math problems that have her extremely frustrated. Part of it is due to an excessively wordy math text which makes things much more complicated than they need to be. But this week, her class is joining with other classes across with country in a math challenge, where the student does on-line math problems and earns points for her class for correct answers to problems that get progressively more difficult. There is very little explanation, but the student has the chance to try again on similar problems after being told the correct answer. Tonight, she sat for two hours doing math by herself. Occasionally she'd ask for help, but after I explained it once, she'd send me off, saying. "I can do it now." I had to bribe her with pie to get her to quit.

What an empowering experience for a child who is "bad at math"! It is so easy for those of us with special needs kids to push them into the trap of learned helplessness, with the very best intentions of course. Letting a child make his own mistakes and learn from them, letting him know you consider him a capable learner, and setting up situations where he can succeed on his own are incredible gifts to a child. Far too often we—teachers, tutors, and parents—rescue a child and end up doing it for him. As a teacher, I often saw homework, projects, and papers clearly done by the parents. That tells the student that he is not capable of doing quality work. Allowing mistakes and having reasonable expectations make a child feel he is able to do what is asked of him.

I am very grateful to D#2's teachers for setting my child up for success with this math program. She can't wait to get up and start in on math tomorrow. It also reminds me that I need to help her make homework more HER job and less OUR job whenever possible. She will always need more of my help than D#1 in academics, but her pride in her math performance tonight makes me think she needs less than she is getting.

You must be mistaken!

How many mistakes did you make today? I made quite a few. I forgot to take the books back to the library (fines building up!), I turned a street too early, I threw away something I needed, I left my dayplanner on the floor and the cat peed on it. And those are the ones I'll admit to. So where did we get the idea that our students' work needs to be perfect? When did we give them the idea that we expect perfection from them? Was it when we made a child copy a paper over numerous times until she "got it right"? Was it when a B wasn't good enough? Was it when we lowered the grade on a paper by a letter grade for every mistake in it? Was it when we corrected him in front of the whole class or called on him to read out loud? No wonder so many children suffer from anxiety!

I'll ask a child to tell me about an event and his story will be full of detail and rich, descriptive vocabulary. Then I'll ask him to write it down. "How many sentences?" he groans. And the product is a sometimes perfectly written, incredibly boring narrative with three or four word sentences, full of easy words he is sure he can spell. Wilson Anderson calls this "dumbing down". It takes a long time before I can convince him that I'd rather have a vibrant story full of errors than a snore-inducing paragraph with perfect spelling. I tell him about Oriental carpet makers who always include one mistake in their carpets because only God is perfect, and to produce a perfect carpet would be trying to be like God. I encourage him to make sure there is always at least one mistake for the same reason. I'll have him use Anderson's technique of underlining words he thinks are wrong and continuing on. And on every student's notebook is a sticker that says, "Every mistake is another opportunity to learn." As I pointed out an error to a child, she said, "I know, there's one of those opportunities!"

Seeing the mistakes a child makes is a large part of diagnostic teaching. I may think she knows those consonant digraphs, but if she writes about a mother hen and her chiks, I know we need to do more work on -ck. It's a lot easier to spell a word in isolation than it is when you are thinking of content. And just because I encourage mistakes, it doesn't mean we don't correct them. But we may not correct all of them at one time. Also, while invented spelling is great for kindergartners, we move children away from that by teaching the rules and structure of the language. Making the same mistake continuously hinders our ability to move on and means I need to find a different way to teach whatever is causing the problem. We're always moving toward improvement, but not perfection.

Thomas Edison had many failures before inventing the things he did. He did not see this as a problem: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Henry Ford said, "Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement." "If you can't make a mistake," Marva Collins teaches, "you can't make anything." But my favorite is this: "The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one." (Elbert Hubbard) We have so many opportunities to learn and try new things. Don't let the fear of mistakes keep us and our students from trying them.

You are not the one who failed

My favorite students are those who are failures. They come to me with no hope left. No matter what's been tried—Reading Recovery, resource help, extra teacher time, learning centers—they still aren't reading and they have accepted the fact that it's their fault. Here they are again, going through reading assessments that spotlight their weaknesses, with another stranger who will eventually give up. No wonder they have bad attitudes.

The first thing I tell a new student after I assess her is that I know she can learn to read. It's just that no one has taught her yet. "It's not your fault that you learn differently," I say. "I WILL teach you to read. And if I can't, it's MY fault, not yours, and I will help your parents find someone who can. But I don't plan to fail and I will teach you." I love the look of puzzled surprise I get after I say that. They may not believe me, but they are intrigued. No one has ever said it's not their fault, and whether they can verbalize it or not, they believe it is.

I want my lessons to always feel a little too easy for a student like this, and I tell them so. I compare learning to read to building a house. "When you build a house, where do you start?" I ask. The bottom, they reply. "And if there are holes in the bottom, what happens to the house you are building?" It falls. "There are holes in the foundation of your house. We are going WAY back to fix those holes and then we will keep going up. And with every brick, you will be a better reader."

And so we go back to short a and a few consonants like s, f, r, and m that blend easily into that a, along with t and p to put at the end. Soon they are reading sat and fat and maybe even map. And then I can say, "Now you can read. The rest is just learning more sounds." That's usually enough to get them back for a second session.

Sometimes a student will ask, "Why didn't my teacher teach me?" I always emphasize that it's not the teacher's fault either; no one taught him how to teach students like this. And until we change how the universities teach reading methodology, there will continue to be failures.

I love the failures. But I wait for the day when there aren't any because the schools are able to hire teachers who can teach children who learn in all different kinds of ways. Though there will always be kids who need one-on-one help, we can significantly reduce that number with proper teacher training. It's time to look at who the real failures are and address that problem. There are holes in the foundation of our teacher training programs. We need to go back to the bottom and fix them.

I may love the failures, but they don't love failing. And they are not really the ones who are failing.

What's a Renegade Teacher?

I am a reading tutor out of penitence. I have a BA in English and was certified in Reading, but in all my coursework I was never taught how to actually teach reading. I was taught how to test a child to see how poorly he read, how to arrange my class so he'd want to read, how to determine the reading level of a text, how to teach finding the main idea in a passage, but never the mechanics and structure of the language and how one imparts that. The thinking seemed to be that if I did all these things, my students would just pick literacy up like a dropped item on the floor. Learning to read was an act of will. And if they didn't learn, well, maybe they just weren't trying hard enough or their parents weren't sufficiently involved.

Whole word was the method I was taught, with an emphasis on looking at the pictures and using context clues to guess at words. Phonics? The only lesson I remember about that was when the reading professor wrote the word ghoti on the board. "If phonics worked," he said, "that would say 'fish'." We stared blankly. The punch line came triumphantly: "gh as in rough, o as in women, and ti as in nation. Phonics doesn't work."

And so in 1977 I became a Title I reading teaching for 9th and 10th graders in a North Carolina mountain high school. I went in with high aspirations and a desire to change the lives of these kids. My students never learned to read. I worked hard, I arranged the room just so, I exposed them to the very best literature I could find, but these kids just didn't learn to read. And no one, not their parents, not the administration, not the Title I supervisor, no one was outraged or even surprised by this.

After four years of that job, I took a position teaching English at a private Episcopal boarding school in the foothills of North Carolina. This school had a language therapy program for dyslexic students. I didn't pay too much attention to it; two very nice ladies took students and worked with them on their reading and helped them with the papers I assigned. Dr. Lucia Karnes was the school psychologist and she ran a six week camp for dyslexics at the school during the summer break. She hired me to teach composition at camp and asked me to provide language therapy for one student. I underwent her three day training with such skepticism I could hardly stay in the room. She used the Orton-Gillingham method, indeed had trained with Mrs. Orton, and it was heavy on the phonics. And I knew phonics didn't work.

The student I was assigned was bright, but was having difficulty in reading and spelling. I dutifully if unenthusiastically went through her program with this boy. When she did post testing with him at the end of the six weeks, he had gained two years in his reading and spelling.

My world was rocked. I was stunned, but most of all I was furious. If kids could be taught to read, why had no one taught me how to do it? What had I done—or not done—to all those kids who had come to me full of hope? I grieved for all the students I had failed, but there was no way to put things right for them. A famous Mother Jones quote says, "Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living." And that's what I determined to do.

When I moved to Chapel Hill and first started tutoring, all I had was Mrs. Orton's little yellow book, A Guide to Teaching Phonics. But I devoured it and anything else I could find and soon became a proficient reading tutor with successes of my own. I decided I would be a renegade teacher.

The dictionary defines renegade as "one who rejects a religion, cause, allegiance, or group for another; a deserter; an outlaw; a rebel." And that's me. I rebel against bad teaching and bad methodology. I no longer owe allegiance to the instruction I received that did such a disservice to so many children. I found a new cause. I am a renegade teacher. Watch out!