Learnings and Lowlights

I did not wind up quitting the afore-mentioned unprofessional development. It was a training on Arts in the Classroom, which was promised to me as a chance to improve my own (greatly lacking) skills as a visual artist, thus giving me the confidence to teach more art in the classroom. In actuality, the program was in fact 1-2 hours a day of wasted time, 1 hour a day of lunch and other breaks, 2 hours a day of supposedly NCLB-required training on standards and lesson-planning, and the remaining 3-4 hours was, finally, doing art.

It makes me a bit of traitor to the cause, I admit, but those 3-4 hours might actually have been worth it. I learned some great things and I've started planning how to use them already. I'm happy to share those learnings here, with some unprofessional development lowlights thrown in for your entertainment.

Learning: Arts might just be the best way to teach ELD, the one area where I don't really have a scripted curriculum. (SHHHH!) I'm planning on using the arts (visual, musical, theatrical) to give meaning to all of the ELD activities I generally have to make students focus on "because I said so." No more silly prompts about favorite this or that, students will respond to Dali, Ansel Adams, or Diego Rivera. No more heartless narratives about summers, students will write the story of Rhapsody in Blue or Beethoven's 5th. Instead of pointless dialogues, students role-play conversations by Shakespeare, Wilde, or Gary Soto. Obviously, lessons on grammar, vocabulary, etc. will be included too. If you're interested in doing this too, let me know and I'll send you my long-term plan.

Lowlight: Because credentialed, CA teachers are not familiar with standards, we had to be taught about them through something we are all more acquainted with: baking a cake. Not just a verbal analogy, used in the midst of a 5 minute lecture, mind you. No no. It was a 2 day, 2 hour lesson involving real cake making materials, real cake and, my personal anti-favorite, a real faux-singing of "Happy Birthday" to a poor, lost-looking cafeteria worker. At no point, I might add, were we given more than 5 minutes to actually look at the arts standards.

Learning: Teaching the arts is important. Too often I think we're led to believe that integrating the arts is sufficient, rather than actually teaching the arts as content in and of itself. We might read a story and have the students respond with drawings. We might listen to music from the historical era we're studying in history. That is simply using, not teaching, the arts. There are basic skills and essential concepts to art that it never occurs to us to teach. There is a simple vocabulary that enables the meaningful discussion of art that our students do not know. Just like reading, we cannot expect our students to understand, let alone enjoy, art, without a confident understanding of the subject and process.

Lowlight: Teachers were instructed to read a Charlie Brown cartoon (which was actually quite good and is now tacked to my inspiration wall.) and given about 5 minutes to complete the task. The cartoon was then very dramatically read to them by their instructors, taking a total of approximately 10 minutes. I cannot really tell you the point of the whole exercise.

Learning: The arts really will improve students overall performance. As I was learning how to do wood-block prints on styrofoam meat trays and thinking how easy it was and how great it would be to share it with my class, the little Red Back-to-Basics Devil on my shoulder was whispering, "But Mr. AB... Juan still can't read."

In respone to him, though, let's take an over-arching look at the plight of Mr. AB, at-risk Arts Student.

Mr. AB hated his first day of school. So much so that he thought about quitting. Except that he loved one part... Art Class. He was successful in art class, producing sketches better than he ever had before because someone finally taught him to draw figures beyond sticks and circles. So he came back and back again. He came back everyday that week, except for Wednesday. Why did he miss most of Wednesday? Because he knew that there was no art class on Wednesday.

I hereby swear, I will never disavow the import of arts in the classroom again. If I, who value my vacation nigh as much as life itself, am willing to sit through 3 hours a day of frustration and indignation for the chance to make a paper-mache ogre, surely we can see the value for 10 year olds. Likewise, if I, a professional, am willing to cut my professional classes to sleep-in because I know that the chance to paint said ogre has been put off until Thursday, how can I expect better behavior from my kids?

Unprofessional Development

There’s a little part of me that wants to give credence and publicity to the adage: “Those who can’t teach, teach teachers.” I don’t quit much but I am SORELY tempted to quit a “professional”-development training I’m taking this week. If this blogging doesn’t provide enough catharsis, I may very well do it.

If/when I ever run a P-D training, here’re the lessons I’m going to live by:

Teachers, even when in a learning role, do not cease to be professionals. We have our BAs; if we were going on in our learning we would be in law school or grad school. We want to learn like we are in law school or grad school. That means no gimmicks, no games, no group work, and no, absolutely no, teacher-voice. If you could end that sentence with "Boys and girls," don't say it. Do not play chimes or a recorder to get my attention, do not make me sing, and do not make me sit on the floor. I teach elementary school, that does not mean I am in it! Only God, not the County Office of Education, can revert teachers to being children.

There is a time and place for “lesson demonstrations:” in front of classes of children, tape-recorded for our professional critique and observation. There is no need for us to pretend to be students to understand how a practice might be implemented. Likewise, we do not need pretend to teach a class to show that we understand how to apply a theory to our practice. Certainly, do not lecture the whole time, but there are ways to let us interact with the material as adults. Any college grad is capable of meta-cognating at such a level where we improve our practice by discussing it, not awkwardly and haphazardly “modeling” it to bored and frustrated peers!

Be meticulously planned, carefully prepared, and absolutely efficient. We’ve all taught bad lessons, we know exactly what they look and sound like from the moment they begin. Like lying to your mother, you will not get away with being unprepared in front of teachers! Similarly, as professional lesson-planners, we know how much time it should take to teach a single concept. Do not take 30 minutes to teach a 5 minute idea, even if someone has budgeted you that. Fight with the budget before you waste our time.

Do not take time to write norms. If you really think I don’t know how to behave at a meeting, why do you trust me to run a classroom? Similarly, for those too-frequent teachers who don’t know how to act at a meeting, don’t imagine that your little poster of “expectations” is going to change their behavior. They know what it takes to be professional, if they’re not doing it, you need to address it. Talking while someone is teaching is universally rude, you don’t need a document to back you up.

Lastly, do not serve bad food. If you can't afford to give us reasonable fare, that's fine, but don't demand we stay at your facility and eat crap. I'm poor, it's summer, but I will shell out $7 to eat like a professional adult.