Let's get Real

I’ve been teaching for 22 years. I remember when I just started the job was “easy”: all I had to do, on my opinion of that time, was to transfer everything I knew onto the students. The roles of all participants were clear: teacher gives the students his/her knowledge and the students come to class to collect the knowledge. The image of a classroom was clear too: the students are sitting at their desks listening to the teacher. If the teacher asked a question the students had to raise their hands and the teacher would pick one person to answer the question. I don’t think there are many people who can see a different image of a school, but the number is growing and the time came for you to realize the defects of this fairytale image of a hypocritical pretense you still call a school. Kids are dropping out in record numbers and instead of thinking how to change and adjust to the kids' needs we are planning how to bring more police to schools. Many books are written and read about the fairytale of love and marriage. The “happily ever after” is the rest of your life and the wedding is just one day from your past or your future. Your task is to make it happy life with or without this one day. School is like that too. School is a part of everybody’s life. Some people chose to stay and live this life as adults by becoming teachers, but the majority will not stay and didn’t choose to be at school. Circumstances, like laws, parents, society made them to be here. So the role-playing that all kids come to school to learn and teachers come to school to transfer their knowledge onto the kids is falling apart just like the fairytale of “happily ever after” is falling apart for their parents. We are adjusting to the adults problem by getting used to divorce as a part of life and take each case as individual couple problem, but we still treat the kids as a group not as individuals; and we still are trying to make them stay in school instead of making school relevant to their real life. I am sorry that I started from something that seems negative. It is not negative, it’s an old fairytale. Fairytale is never negative it’s just not real. It’s a beautiful image of our great-grandparents of how they saw happiness. They had to work from early morning to late night. The labor was very hard: cut trees, break rocks, wash cloths by hand in cold water, dig soil, wax floors, plow, harvest, sew, weld, build, lay railroads and highways, etc. etc. etc… They wanted their kids to have a childhood, to play and learn. They fought for their kids’ right not to work until they become adults. For too many of them happiness associated with the time they did not have to work. Times changed. More and more people find happiness at their workplace. More and more people go to work because they love what they are doing. More and more people are proud of their achievements and want their kids to achieve even more. This is why educated parents push their children to go after higher and higher education. This is why uneducated parents want their children to be the first generation in the family with high school or college degrees. We have to thank technology for making that possible. Thanks to technology we do not have to dig soil or plow the fields with our bare hands. Thanks to technology we wash and dry our cloths with just a push of 2 buttons. Thanks to technology we can transport ourselves from one place to another without walking. Thanks to technology we build, sew, weld, plow, harvest, and even calculate by dialing, switching, and clicking. We don’t even have to cook every day any longer. We have new problems though. We got fatter, we poison out bodies with pollution, we react to a little pollen with an allergy like it is a bio-attack, we consume antibiotics and hormones with our foods, our air is filled with harmful invisible rays, we cover the constant noise of our environment with loud music or TV broadcasting. I am not complaining, I love every moment of my life and I would not exchange it to anything else. I am just trying to be real. For every need and every problem we, humans, got we have people who would take care of it. There are farmers to grow our food, there are cooks who will prepare it, there are vendors who will deliver it, there are drivers who will transport goods, there are sewing and knitting machine operators who will make out cloths, there are doctors and nurses who will take care of us when we are sick; there are entertainers and sportsmen and authors who will keep out minds occupied ;) There are lawyers and judges who will help us to solve a conflict. Unfortunately, there are also politicians who will deepen a conflict and journalists who will play on a controversy. But for them we have activists who will fight for our rights and create even more controversy :) There are scientists who are trying to answer our current questions and solve some of our problems. Of course, while they do that they create new questions and new problems for the future generations to search for more answers. For each of these occupations people have to learn, study, get education. For each of these occupations people will have to practice how to operate a specific piece of technology. The school is still very much needed, maybe, even more than ever before. What is the role of school in this circus of life? And what is my role as a teacher? Am I still required to transport my knowledge onto my students? What part of my knowledge is so valuable that worth to be transported? How do I know that the knowledge I give them is useful not just litter for their young brains? How do I know that they learned? Do tests measure learning? Too many questions, too few answers. Life is real, life is messy, life is unruly, life does not have all the answers to all of the questions and if school is a part of everybody’s life it should be as messy and as diverse as life itself. Your teacher should not give you the answers to all of her questions; she should help you to search for your answers to your own questions. Then and only then we’ll bring up generations of happy and content people. People who know themselves, can answer to their questions, and stand for their believes. A teacher is not a boss; neither is he/she a friend. I am a servant of the future. When I give my students a mark on the report card this mark reflects how well I served and how happy the future will be. Believe me, the students do not want an “A” for nothing. They will lose any respect for a teacher who gave them a good mark for nothing. They always know when they deserved a real “A”. Today I think that the role of school should be helping the students find their "calling". I know how hard, sometimes impossible this task can be for some people. I know that for majority of the students we will not find that "calling". But we’ll make the first step, we’ll help the young person to start learning about him or herself. The more they understand themselves and each other, the more excepting they are of themselves and each other, the happier beings they will be. Here, I will try to start a new fairytale for the school of the future. After a while it’ll become as hypocritical as the current fairytale is, so what. Its life and life never stays the same. I am surprised the current school survived for so long.

Back to Education Topics: PBL

PBL stands for Problem-Based or Project-Based Learning which has a potential to become the way people of the future learn and the schools of the future function. I do have some “half-thought-through phrases”; I would even say “a-quarter-thought-through” or maybe “not-thought-through” images. We often hear that the students can’t do this or can’t answer that, can’t find something on the map, or can’t explain something we can. We concentrate on what they can’t do instead of admiring what they can do. They can hear you and keep up with the conversation while typing their text messages and listening to their music. They can achieve a level on the computer game that we don’t understand at all; or if we do understand the game then their speed is unbelievable. Any kid when given any electronic device begins to push the buttons and gets results even if this is a new device s/he didn’t see before. Too often I am thinking that we are trying to hold the kids back to our standards from the last century instead of creating new standards that might hold some value in the nearest future. Imagine a fish in an ocean, the water runs through the gills, the fish gets the oxygen, but doesn’t slow down the flow of the water, and if needed moves to another spot and on and on. The ocean is the amount of information entering our consciousness all the time both kids and adults. We have to learn how to swim in it, catch what we need and leave what’s not. My generation was born into a lake, maybe even just a puddle of water, and it takes us time and effort to learn how to swim in the limitless ocean. The kids were born into the ocean; they have some kind of innate ability to filter the info and ignore whatever their sub-consciousness tells them is out of the area of their current interests. They naturally find the answers to their current questions fast and efficient. When I have a class in a computer lab the answers to my questions they find within first 2 minutes, the rest of the time is spent on creating the presentation. Of course, I am talking about the kind of questions that do not require “thinking”, like math problems often do. Creating the presentation does require “thinking”, but it is creative thinking, not math problem solving thinking. This is why the students love the creative part of the presentation, not the research part of gathering information which often is out of the area of their current interests. I, the teacher, brought the questions; they are my questions, not theirs. The last thought is about current projects. There are quite a few very good projects created for the elementary school level. There are even more topics which are even more appropriate and interesting for the kids of that age which are completely missed and forgotten. There are just a couple of good projects for middle school and there are no good projects for high school kids at all. I think I know why it is happening. We, adults, make those projects. They are artificial, do not come from children natural curiosity. The younger the kids are the higher level of curiosity is. It goes down because we do not help them to find answers to their questions, instead we bring our questions to them and make their questions less important. Do you see what kind of message we send to the kids? Their questions are not important. Important questions are not interesting. Learning is work, unpleasant thing, when you are forced to answer somebody else's questions. Of course, the teacher should help the kids with the questions as well as with the answers, but we have to learn how to trust the kids' instincts. Introduce the new topic and allow each kid study it only to the depth of his or her choice. For most of the topics you will see that the kids will learn and have fun getting familiar with new terminology, after that they will lose the interest and the teacher has to prepare next new topic. However, there will be a smaller group of kids who will develop their own questions about the topic, those should be allowed to go deeper and deeper in their search, while the rest of the class gets familiar with new and different topics. Only after work like that we can group the kids by their interests.

Type 2 Diabetes: my research

I started this research out of necessity. First, I tried to copy and paste info on a word document, but got lost in the sameness of monotonous text. So to organize my thoughts and learning I decided to apply the technique I use with my students: Power Point Presentation. It turned out to be so easy and efficient to group the info in the logical slides and make it beautiful at the same time. I want to show you what I came up with:

Type 2 Diabetes

Very interesting thing this Type 2 Diabetes, also called Insulin Resistance. They say that your cells refuse to take glucose in because of the insulin resistance. So what’s the cure? Turns out they choose to add more insulin: very logical solution. It kills 2 birds with one stone: first it kills the pancreas, which stops producing its own insulin (used to work well before the treatment); and it kills any hope to ever go medicine free, which is a good news for the pharmaceutical companies.

I have a history: both, my mother and my mother-in-law, were turned into diabetics 40 years ago when the experiment with Type 2 Diabetes just started. They both believed the doctors and took the medicine offered to treat their conditions. My mother-in-law now completely depends on insulin and gives herself a shot after every meal. My mother refused to use insulin treatment (she could do that even in horrible Soviet Union) so she was treated with other hormonal medications, she is also dependent on the medication she takes. Her chronic condition is good for the business. Both of them are paying, and paying, and paying all these long 40 years.

Both of them were menopausal women in their forties or fifties at the time they were “forced” to start the medication treatment of their high blood sugar. I am a menopausal woman now and my hormones are out of wack too. My sugar numbers are not stable, but my pancreas is making insulin, it’s alive and well. Thank you, my insurance company, for not paying for the deadly medication which would make me drug dependant for the rest of my life just like my mother.

I Googled Diabetes and Wikipedia has all this info about Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. They talk about insulin-production by the pancreas, and about liver part in glucose making out of fructose, and other hormones that take part in the process of converting excess of fructose into fat. Turns out the whole process was well researched and conclusions were drawn. 40 years of study did help to solve the mystery:

Type 2 Diabetes is not caused by malfunction of the pancreas; it is a different metabolic disorder which can not and should not be treated with insulin. They know that today, the doctors will give you a medicine which does not work on your pancreas, it works with your liver. This is their new experiment: what will happen to Type 2 diabetic if we slow down the liver. Interesting. I almost became a subject in this new experiment, like my mother became a subject of their experiments 40 years ago, which will take another 40 years and many thousands of people to find out that it’s a bad idea. They should not slow down my liver; right opposite, they have to stimulate it to work faster and cleanse my body of all impurities faster too.

My own hypothesis is that my liver was already too slow and covered with fat. This is why I get fat so easily. It’s easer for my liver to store the toxins in fat instead of removing them out of my body. There are holistic researchers who tell me that to help my liver I should change my diet. Eat more food that stimulates the work of my liver like radishes, leeks, pepper, cabbages, onions, and garlic. I do have to cut on sugar, which I love in my coffee and tea, but I only cut it in half, I still put 2 teaspoons in my cup. This is important because half of the sugar molecule is fructose ring which will be converted into fat by my poor lazy liver. I have to continue with my exercise routine, I just have to add some aerobics to make my heart to pump the blood faster from time to time.

TO TEST OR NOT TO TEST

I am familiar with all tests we already use and the ones that are coming in the near future. The future does not look very promising. In the past I was always defending state tests. I really believed that in this old failing system of education test preparation had been the only working motivation and a class management tool. To control the behavior and outcomes I used to bring the topic of regents prep and everybody would start working.

Not any more. This motivation does not work at all. I always knew that the change would come from the kids, not from a new administration or politician. I could not imagine how exactly the new will grow out of this old and festered system. Now I see it. The kids do not care any longer if they pass or fail, they do not want to learn for the test, they do not want to learn abstract stuff we had obediently memorized and happily forgot as soon as the test was over. Our children refuse to play this hypocritical game of pretending that they are coming to school to learn something to pass a test.

In reality they learn something in spite of the school hindering.

There are too many adults though who are playing the game, pretending that they are doing something important, and using the taxpayers’ money for their own benefit. Because these adults need to prove all the time how their “job” is so important, they create more and more tests, and exchange one test with another one. The salary keeps on coming. They completely changed the job of a teacher as an educator into a babysitter.

There are still too many really good teachers who will move on into the future together with the kids. Those teachers will help the kids to learn what’s important for them. The English teachers will pick books to read that will be relative to the kids lives. The math teachers will bring problems relevant to real life too. History teachers will relate the past with the future. The Science teachers will help to understand how the surrounding world works. And all of them will use all kinds of art, games, sports, theatre, concerts, exhibitions, performances, technology and quiet time to just sit alone if the kid needs it.

Sorry, today it's not about teaching.

Today in the news (ABC 6 a.m.) they told us about a family that had to hide from doctors and authorities. The family has a son with some kind of cancer; the doctors want to treat the boy with chemotherapy; the family chooses to use alternative medicine. When I hear cases like this I can’t stop thinking about the state of our medicine. This kind of news put me in a constant state of horror, one day they will come after me in an attempt to save me from myself. Only people with special interest or brainwashed idiots may think that the suffering this family is going through can be fixed in court. Prosecutor can’t care about the health of this boy more than the parents. The doctors can’t tell us that we have to pay for their treatment over the treatment of our choice. Pharmaceutical companies can’t be always right. These doctors can’t cure anything with an exception for some surgeries (which make us incomplete anyway); they can only convert us into chronically ill people so they could collect our money for the rest of our lives. It pays if we live longer and seeker. It is not in the interest of any doctor to really cure us. I have to admit that it’s not in their interest if we die either because then only the funeral services will collect. The doctors can’t cure us because they do not know how. Every medicine they try to use to cure one part of the body turns out to be poisonous to some other part. There are so many new disorders and malfunctions of different organs that it, by itself, is an epidemic right now. Man-made epidemics: epidemics created by doctors and pharmaceutical companies while experimenting on us their new medications. Have you heard this commercial that tell that 57% of an experimental group showed that the medication worked? What???? 57% is a half. What kind of a conclusion can you base on 57%? Shame on both the company and the FDA that allowed this medicine; now 43% of people who try this medicine are at risk. Thank goodness the insurance companies are on our side: they just refuse to pay for these experiments. This permanent state of experimentation made me think of modern medicine as a large Lab where all of us are a large experimental group. One question has still been unanswered: why do we have to pay for the experiment? Even if I agree to allow the doctors to experiment on my body I would expect them to pay me for putting my life at risk. The opposite is happening in real life: I am required to pay for becoming the subject of their experimentations. The logical conclusion to this absurd situation is there already in today’s news: we can’t even say no to that treatment any longer, the doctors, authorities, and pharmaceutical companies will send police after me to enforce the medication. I am taking this event so personally because I recently had similar experience. Luckily the authority were not after me to force unwanted medication and the insurance didn’t pay, so I didn’t have to buy the pills that supposed to cure me from so called Type 2 Diabetes.

What's wrong with K-12 approach?

I am a high school teacher. I love my job, I love the high school kids, I love the fact that my students are an everyday challenge, they are full of surprises, thinkers and doers. I love to trick them into learning something new. I love that they teach me a few things now and then. I can't imagine teaching kindergartners or elementary school kids. I don't want to describe why, I just can't. I know many great teachers who can't teach neither elementary nor middle school level. The job requires completely different set of traits in a person. I always get frustrated when hear all of us, teachers, put in the same pot of K-12 which ignores the specifics of both: the kids level of comprehension and the teachers' skills and talents. In our days you often hear complains about schools. Some even say that the education system is in crisis. Maybe. If we want to fix it, let's first agree that the elementary school teacher has to teach the kids just to read, write and count. They have enough responsibilities teaching everyone how to use a bathroom and how to clean their noses. They have to teach the kids the rules and how to be a student. They have to teach the kids about day and night, about seasons and weather. They have to teach the kids how to read time and find the length using a ruler. Are we sure that we want the elementary school teachers to teach "science" to their students? or any other subject that was not their major? I don't. I prefer to teach not reteach. Many good high school teachers will tell you how hard it is for us to reteach the mistakes made by an elementary school teachers. The subconscious always overpowers the new information we try to put their. Elementary school teachers fill in subconscious before we train the brain to think. I have to think about this. Continue later :)

Teaching Moment

I get up in the morning; make myself a cup of coffee. I don’t make my bed, never did. It’s nobody business if my bed is made or not. You don’t like it, don’t look into my bedroom.Nobody will suffer if my bed is not made. I have completely different attitude towards my garbage. My garbage is everybody’s business. The more garbage I produce the less space is there in the landfill for you.

How did it happen that I started to care about garbage? I started to teach Environmental Science class and the more I learned about the problems of today the more changes I made in my every-day life. I started as any teacher who has to teach this course with the balance in an ecosystem, and biomes, and food chain etc. But I got bored too soon because it was the same material I usually teach in Regents Living Environment class. Why should I do the same stuff with a different course? So I changed.

This time I did mention the information my students had learned in other science classes too, but this time I was building on top of what they already knew. Turns out other people concerned with the problems in the environment also made the same changes. You can find textbooks that rearranged the material around human needs for air, water, land, food and energy. This is the way to go. How do we use our land, or air, or water? How do we damage environment to get our needs met? What problems do we face that must be solved in order for the future generations to continue their normal life? This time I didn’t get bored. I learned a lot about today’s problems, more, than I would ever know if I didn’t teach this course.

Most of my learning was happening when I was reading my students projects. They learned and I learned with them. We learned about organic food and organic farming. We learned about the solar panels and the wind mills. We learned about cars that run on water, and the cars that run on compressed air. We learned the three principles of Green Living: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. That still didn’t feel enough. I had to change more.

My students are high school kids. They are almost adults. Many of them work. Many of them are taking some college courses. All of them without exception tell me that they want to recycle. OK. We placed recycling bins all over the school. Now I observe how my environmental science students who want to recycle drop their unfinished food into recycling container instead of garbage, but the empty bottles still go into regular garbage can. What is going on? I don’t understand.

I spoke to our school custodian, wise man, he told me not to worry, it takes time to change the people’s set of mind. We all know how to keep it clean by putting everything into garbage. The fact that it’s not clean at all is not common knowledge. One of my students had an “Aha” moment last week, he said: “So, when we clean we make it [Earth] dirtier!?!?!!!” Our landfills are full and New York exporting its garbage to other states. Just think about it: we pay our taxes to transport our garbage to other states.

What we have to start doing is: SEPARATE OUR OWN GARBAGE. Nobody can separate your garbage. The custodians will recycle what we separate. It is not in their job description: separate recyclable and reusable from the rest of the garbage to save space in the landfill. No, it is the responsibility of the person who throws the garbage. Stop for a second and think: where should MY garbage go? It turned out this step is the hardest to take. Like the addict’s first step to recovery is to admit that s/he is an addict, our first step to cleaner future is the realization that if we don’t separate our garbage our kids will live on top of a huge landfill.

So here I am every Friday morning with my cup of coffee, a large blue bad of recyclables, and mess in the bedroom :)

I have this blog posted in 2 different places. This problem really bothers me at the moment.