Notes From the Human Teacher

I'm working on a sci-fi novel right now that I started a few years ago, when I first moved to Colorado from Alaska.  I'd taught middle school in Alaska for ten years, and Colorado teenagers were fairly similar to the ones who had filled my classroom in Alaska:  eager, resistant, malleable, stubborn, rebellious, needy. Teenagers.  However, Colorado teenagers were far more absorbed by their cellphones.  Had I failed to notice this in Alaska?  Did the mountains and glaciers, the glittering ocean water, the sight of whales pull Alaskans' eyes up and out of their devices more?  Or did the "no cellphones" rule at the middle school where I'd taught in Alaska just shield me from the direction our society has been moving for quite awhile?  Everywhere I looked, in every common space, at every lunch hour, in the parking lot after school, in the Mexican restaurant down the street from our high school, kids were bent over their phones, checking, checking, checking, posting, checking.  It was a problem.

One day, the sentence came to me:  "No one has talked to me in eleven years."  I had this image of a world in which all teenagers have ceased to interact with each other face-to-face at all, where it would be possible to move through all of one's years of school without a human voice, where everyone has shifted to only needing their phones, and nothing else.  

It was an outlandish idea, and I discarded it for a couple of years.  How ridiculous to think that we will ever reach a time when people do not crave the basic human interactions of laughing together, kissing each other, looking each other in the eye, touching a hand or a shoulder.  Yes, teenagers are obsessed right now with Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, HeartChat.  That doesn't mean their phones will take over their lives completely.

Unless we help make it happen.  Last Friday, I sat through the annual proctor training for the state tests.  For the past several years, I've been administering state tests to my students each spring, dutifully reading the directions, keeping time, pacing around and around the room while my students sit in desks in straight rows and fill in bubbles on scan-tron forms.  Every principal for whom I've worked has emphasized the seriousness of the tests, the way our students' performance will affect the school's funding and status in the state.  Each year, the stakes have gotten higher.  Administrators stand at the entrance to the secure room that holds the boxes of tests and signs each box out to each teacher; we're instructed never to look at the tests students are taking; we're required to bring the tests back alphabetized on the penalty of a note in our files.  The ring of a student's cellphone will invalidate all the tests in that room; a test given in the incorrect order will also invalidate all the tests for that room and jeopardize the overall performance of the school.  This is unbelievably serious.

For the first time this year, the state of Colorado will administer computer-based tests, the PARRC tests created and sold by the Pearson Corporation.  Although twenty-four states originally signed up to administer these tests, parent lawsuits, financial constraints, and other considerations have dropped the number to ten plus Washington, D.C. Because Colorado is helping pilot the tests this year, our student scores will not count at all.  The idea is that states could all administer the same test across the country, to see if students are actually meeting Common Core standards, or if each state's standards are relative.  I've never believed in the worth of these standardized tests, as they rarely test what my students know or how they know it, and they take away weeks of academic content time.  However, the computer-based tests are taking all of this to a new low -- and they're compounding the problem of a society overly dependent on their devices.

These are actual words and phrases from our training last week: 
*"It is an option to have a human reader."
*"Scratch paper is not secure."
*"The test monitors must be state-sanctioned."
*"Teachers should be in a position to see students working, not students' work."
*"Teachers should use proximity to keep students on task."
*"Ensure a standardized testing environment."
*"Proctors should erase the seal code once the test is underway and only provide current seal code."
*"A misadministration of the test includes systematic unethical behavior."
*"Watch for a breach of secure test materials."

*"In these virtual groupings of students. . ."

*"The administrator will ensure the chain of custody of the tests. . ."

I'm frightened.  At the risk of sounding like an alarmist, a conspiracy-theorist, a science-fiction writer, I'll say this: if we continue to place our children (from third grade and up) into these secure, contained, completely computerized environments, and we allow an unchecked dependence on devices during their free time, we will see a dramatic shift in the ways our children think, imagine, feel, and interact.  No one other than the designated proctor (me) is allowed to be with them in the testing room, so I cannot invite you into my classroom to witness the way a testing session looks -- my twelve- and thirteen-year-olds dutifully sitting in straight rows with their Number 2 pencils poised, bubbling circles, silent for two hours when they are never silent, docile when they are never docile.  Now they'll be on computers, and we are not allowed to say anything but "Keep working," even if their computer is malfunctioning.  The human teacher becomes a mere monitor of a room of children interacting with a computerized tool the human teacher is prohibited from seeing because that violates the test's security.

We should all be frightened.  

People write science fiction as a warning.  This is what could happen if. . .  But the deeper and deeper I move into the future I'm imagining in my fiction, the more frightened I am of the present.  What are we doing?  People in the corporate world shrug at teachers' passionate vitriol about standardized testing and say the tests are a way to guarantee quality. Advocates for Common Core say it's a logical way to ensure high standards across states and communities.  I've made those arguments before, too.  Except I've lost faith in the tests as utilitarian tools for learning, and have begun to see them for what they are:  punitive tools attached to money that finances corporations, long bureaucratic hours that only increase students' alienation at school and add nothing to their learning.  

I'm moving forward on the science fiction manuscript again, but sometimes I have to pause -- blink -- tell myself we're not in that world yet.  It's still February, and I'm teaching my students about the Holocaust, exploring personal narratives, interviewing survivors, examining primary source photographs.  I want them to think for themselves, not as part of a machine.  Only that kind of creative, critical thinking will save us from repeating the history my student Forrest, a 7th grader, captured in this cartoon he doodled in his notebook last week.

I can still be a human teacher, encouraging our "no cell phones" policy in spite of the eye rolls, forcing them to look each other in the eye and talk about the human truths of history.

I will do this until I am notified that my methods are not state-sanctioned, not secure, a breach of the system.

Yikes.  Lately, it's been too easy to imagine a dystopian world in a which a child really could go years without hearing a human voice or making eye contact with another human's eyes. . .

Teaching: War is Not a Game

We're currently playing World War II as a game.  Two weeks ago, I asked each of my 7th and 8th graders to choose a country by sitting in the chair behind a placard, and they've been role-playing the Axis and Allied powers each day since, rolling dice for battles, shouting out the "secret powers" that give them extra points.  The kid playing Germany yells out, "Dictator who will stop at nothing, for two extra points!"  Canada grins.  "I've got 'millions who want to serve' for one extra point, and France has 'free French Vichy fighters in the south' for another point".  The strategies begin as the kids enter the classroom.  "I think it's 1941 today.  Pearl Harbor happens now, doesn't it?  That means the U.S. might enter the war."

Like everything about teaching, this may or may not be an effective approach to learning about World War II.  While we're not repeating my own dismal middle school experience of memorizing battle names and dates, victors and generals, I worry I'm making war feel like too much of a game.  It's fun, which isn't the message I want to convey about global conflict.

So we took a break from the game yesterday to read and view primary sources from the Library of Congress collection about Japanese Internment in the U.S.  Ansel Adams' and Dorothea Lange's photographs silenced the kids.  This happened here?  In the U.S.?  We read FDR's Executive Order 9066.  This was okay to do?  What about the Constitution?

I asked them, "Could this happen again?" and in every class someone said yes.  "To whom?"  Maybe Muslims.  Maybe people from the Arab world.  Maybe gay and lesbian people?  Maybe immigrants.  The list grew as the kids imagined the ways in which certain groups could become enemies of the state.  I allowed the conversation to continue not because I want them to become paranoid, but because I want them to think critically.  

We're protected from that happening again, though, right?

It's happening now, I wanted to say.  In Guantanamo Bay.  At the Mexican border.  In Palestine.  In Ferguson.  Behind prison bars, inside detention centers.  In Alabama's resistance to same-sex marriage.  

What I said:  Keep asking questions.  Question everything.  Keep your eyes open.  

Today, we returned to our World War II game, to the final year: 1945.  The dice battles were raucous again, and the score in every class between the Allies and the Axis was close.  It felt more like a basketball game than anything, with the Allies cheering when they forced a German retreat, and again when the Soviets encircled Berlin.  "I'll use my secret power of 'Location in the Pacific'!" Australia announced in a battle with Japan, and Japan shot back, "Then I'll use my power of 'Kamikaze pilots'!"  One point here, one point there.  

And then, in every class, the kid portraying the U.S. looked at his or her card and said, "I'm going to use my secret power that wasn't ready until now.  The atomic bomb, for fifty points."  And in every class, the kids reacted to this with stunned silence.  Well.  The war was over.  And?  The game had changed.

We ended by reading an excerpt from Dr. Michihiko Hachiya's firsthand account of the Hiroshima bombing.  I let Hachiya's words linger in the room.  "It was all a nightmare -- my wounds, the darkness, the road ahead."  

My students left class quietly, subdued.  

War is not a game.  But maybe two weeks of role-playing these countries and the events of WWII made the end seem more personal, more real.  Maybe that was the reason for the silence when the atomic bomb was finally played in our game.  Or maybe -- for a flash of a moment -- the kids understood that none of these events are fictional, that all of this really happened, inthis world, in the world they are in the process of inheriting.

Keep asking questions.  Question everything.  Keep your eyes open.