School Bells are Undemocratic

I wrote this post for the Cooperative Catalyst.

While teaching my grade 8 students, I wanted to discuss the idea of distractions, so I read them an excerpt from Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson that discusses how interruption is the enemy of productivity:

Interruptions break your workday into a series of work moments. Forty-Five minutes and then you have a call. Fifteen minutes and then you have lunch. An hour later, you have an afternoon meeting. Before you know it, it’s five o’clock, and you’ve only had a couple uninterrupted hours to get your work done. You can’t get meaningful things done when your constantly going start, stop, start, stop…

And go all the way with it. A successful alone-time period means letting go of communication addiction. During alone time, give up instant messages, phone calls, e-mail, and meetings… Your day is under seige by interruptions. It’s on you to fight back.

My class proceeded to have a very interesting conversation about all of the distractions they have in the day. Many of them could relate to the ‘communication addiction’ that the excerpt referred to. We all admitted that sometimes we are the annoyed (the person who would like to tell others to ‘screw off’) and the annoying (the person who should be told to ‘screw off’).

It didn’t take long for some of my students to identifying other kinds of distractions that they were not responsible for. Ethan, a grade 8 student of mine, blogged his thoughts for me. Here’s Ethan’s take on how undemocratic school bells are:

School bells, the most ridiculous invention on earth. Some people want to spend a certain amount of time on certain subjects, for example; if I prefer math more than social, shouldn’t I have the right to stay as long as I like at math, and as long as I learn something and don’t screw off? No, instead, a inanimate, ringing tin can have the right to tell me what to do, where to go, and make decisions for me. A piece of metal has more authority than a living human being! Truthfully, this thought makes me feel small, and without any say. I think students should have the right to learn what they want, when they want, wherever they want and however they want to do it! If I could take health and science classes all day I would. Why? Because I am facinated about how things work, especially the human body. As for social, i don’t especially want to know what happened all those years ago. I’m also not saying that social is pointless either, many people find the past very interesting, just not me. School’s purpose in my eyes is to prepare you for the future, so why not be able to tune your studies to what you would like to become?

Ethan’s point is well taken. He’s begging for the opportunity to be given more rights and responsibilities than the archaic school bell schedule can ever give him. He’s searching for a more democratic version of schooling. It’s time we took students like Ethan seriously.

Homeworkaholism

In Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson go on the offensive against workaholism:

Our culture celebrates the idea of the workaholic. We hear about people burning the midnight oil. They pull all-nighters and sleep at the office. It's considered a badge of honor to kill yourself over a project. No amount of work is too much work.

Not only is this workaholism unnecessary, it's stupid. Working more doesn't mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more.

Workaholics wind up creating more problems than they solve. First off, working like that just isn't sustainable over time. When the burnout crash comes - an dit will - it'll hit that much harder.

Workaholics miss the point, too. They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions.

They even create crises. They don't look for ways to be more efficient because they actually like working overtime. They enjoy feeling like heroes. They create problems (often unwittingly) just so they can get off on working more.

Workaholics make the people who don't stay late feel inadequate for "merely" working reasonable hours. That leads to guilt and poor moralle all around. Plus, it leads to an ass-in-seat mentality -- people stay late out of obligation, even if they aren't really being productive.

If all you do is owrk, you're unlikely to have sound judgements. Your values and decision making wind up skewed. You stop being able to decide what's worth extra effort and what's not. And you wind up just plain tired. No one makes sharp decisions when tired.

In the end, workaholics don't actually accomplish more than nonworkaholics. They may claim to be perfectionists, but that just means they're wasting time fixating on inconsequential details instead of moving on to the next task.

Workaholics aren't heroes. They don't save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done.

As a teacher, I read this thinking of homework and how kids play the game, jumping through the homework hoops that teachers hold in place. Too often teachers make students who don't do their homework feel inadequate for "merely" working reasonable hours during the day.

Alfie Kohn explains how simply adding more time to the school day is a poor way to make educational reform:

To begin with, let's consider the assumption that homework ought to be useful just because it give students more time to master a given topic or skill. Plenty of pundits rely on this premise when they call for extending the school day - or the school year. Indeed, homework itself can be seen as a way of prolonging the school day on the cheap. After-school assignments ratchet up the amount of time students spend on academic topics by an hour or two. Ergo, higher achievement.


Unfortunately, this reasoning turns out to be woefully simplistic... It's hard to deny, for example, that lots of kids spend time in school looking at books or listening to lectures without getting much out of the experience. Would more of what the experts call "time on task (ToT) be likely to make a difference? The answer to that question is so obvious that ToT proponents were forced some years ago to revise their original proposition. In the amended version, learning was said to improve in proportion to the quantity of engaged time on task... compelling students to do more school assignments at home is not especially likely to maximize engaged time.

Okay, maybe time on task isn't all that effective, but maybe it's the best we can do? Kohn puts this misassumption down just as fast:

Instead of asking, Does more time for academics help? maybe we should ask, Does more time for academics help more than other things we could do instead? A Stanford University study compared four different reforms: peer tutoring, smaller classes, increased use of computers, and adding an hour of instruction each day. The result: "On a cost-effectiveness basis, the time intervention was found to rank at the bottom with respect to improving student performance in mathematics and third out of the four [in reading].

This really shouldn't surprise us. As teachers, how often do we say it is the quantity of your learning that matters more than the quality? I couldn't imagine saying this.

Students are already fulfilling the quantity of time by attending school. If we think that assigning homework will do anything to address the quality or engaged time spent learning, we are kidding ourselves.

I stopped assigning homework 5 years ago, because I came to see homework as not something to be assigned but to be inspired. When I poll my students to find out how many of them willingly do more of what we do at school on their own time, half of them put up their hands. Perhaps surprisingly, some of that half are students who typically wouldn't do their homework if it was assigned.

If children want to continue their learning at home, then more power to them, but let's not be so arrogant to believe that without school no learning would occur. We know this to be bullshit because far too many students have to leave school before they can find their true passion.

I believe we can agree most, if not almost all, students dislike or even hate homework. Because of this, we need to seriously rethink its use. The perceived gains of homework are largely a myth; however, because the harmful effects of homework are very real, we need to seriously rethink whether we should be asking kids to go home and work a second shift.

Ignore the "real world"

In their book Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson offer a rather in-your-face indictment to those who use the 'real world' to justify apathy:

"That would never work in the real world." You hear it all the time when you tell people about a fresh idea. 

This real world sounds like an awfully depressing place to live. It's a place where new ideas, unfamiliar approaches, and foreign concepts always lose. The only things that win are what people already know and do, even if those things are flawed and inefficient. 

Scratch the surface and you'll find these 'real world' inhabitants are filled with pessimism and despair. They expect fresh concepts to fail They assume society isn't ready for or capable of change. 

Even worse, they want to drag others down into their tomb. If you're hopeful and ambitious, they'll try to convince you your ideas are impossible. They'll say you're wasting your time. 

Don't believe them. That world may be real for them, but it doesn't mean you have to live in it. 

We know because our company fails the real-world test in all kinds of ways. In the real world, you can't have more than a dozen employees spread out in eight different cities on two continents. In the real world, you can't attract millions of customers without any salespeople or advertising. In the real world, you can't reveal your formula for success to the rest of the world. But we've done all those things and prospered.

The real world isn't a place, it's an excuse. It's a justification for not trying. It has nothing to do with you.

The most successful people in the world become successful because they overcome the odds. They found themselves on a journey where roadblocks were the norm, not the exception. Wonderfully talented people make something of themselves not because they are just naturally talented, but because they passionately pursue success through their failures.

Andrew Razeghi offers this bite size wisdom:

Know that we humans do not have to be stuck in our ways. We choose to do so.

If we keep expecting others to change first, nothing will ever happen. It is like the body and the shadow.  Where the body goes, the shadow goes too.  The body never follows the shadow.

Are you the body or the shadow?

The problem with infinity

In his book The Dip, Seth Godin writes, "the problem with infinity is that there's too much of it." He ends up talking mostly about business and markets, but his point is not lost on education.

The trouble with focusing on content as the primary role of education is that there is an infinite amount of stuff to know.

If teachers are suppose to the be sage on the stage, they might never have time to get off the stage.

If teachers are suppose to be the jugs and the kids are the mugs, the teachers might never notice that their jugs are bottomless and the kids' mugs are already overflowing.

If teachers are to chalk and talk, they may only stop talking because they are waiting for their turn to talk again.

Rigorous and rigid curriculums that are bloated with content is used to rationalize all kinds of horrible pedagogy such as horrendous loads of homework to sit-and-get-regurgitate-and-forget lessons. We cover curriculum at break-neck lightning speeds so that we can say that we covered while we really have no idea whether we've uncovered anything for the kids.

I'm not saying content isn't important, but for the most part, school gets curriculum wrong. You can't demand teachers to dispense an infinite amount of material and then hold them accountable for reducing it all to a finite score.

Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson offer this perspective on planning in their book Rework:

Why don't we just call plans what they really are: guesses. Start referring to your business plans as business guesses, your financial plans as financial guesses, and your strategic plans as strategic guesses. Now y ou can stop worrying abou them as much. They just aren't worth the stress.


When you turn guesses into plans, you enter a danger zone. Plans let the past drive the future. They put blinders on you. "This is where we're going because, well, that's where we said we were going." And that's the problem: plans are inconsistent with improvization.


And  you have to be able to improvise. You have to be able to pick up opportunities that come along. Sometimes you need to say, "We're going in a new direction because that's what makes sense today."


The timing of long-range plans is screwed up too. You have the most information when you're doing something, not before you've done it. Yet when do you write a plan? Usually it's before you've even begun. That's the worst time to make a big decision.


Now this isn't to say you shouldn't think about the future or contemplate how you might attack upcoming obstacles. That's a worthwhile exercise. Just don't feel you to write it down or obsess about it. If you write a big plan, you'll most likely never look at it anyway. Plans more than a few pages long just wind up as fossils in your file cabinet.


Give up on the guesswork. Decide what you're going to do this week, not this year. Figure out the next most important thing and do that. Make decisions right before you do something, not far in advance.


It's OK to wing it. Just get on the plane and go. You can pick up a nicer shirt, shaving cream, and a toothbrush once you get there.


Working without a plan may seem scary. But blindly following a plan that has no relationship with reality is even scarier.

On the record, teachers are bullied into saying that they teach every single outcome that their state or province dictates. Afterall, if they admitted otherwise, they run the risk of being tossed out on their ear. But off the record, over an ice-cold beer, teachers will likely say that they don't get to everything because they just can't. There is too much.

And yet, there are some teachers who will stand stead-fast and recite their allegiance to their curriculums. To these teachers I say, wouldn't you like a little more autonomy? To be trusted a little bit more? A little more time and opportunity to explore the things you and your students would like to explore? In the end, all I am advocating for is more trust and autonomy for teachers.

This is why the very best teachers spend everyday of their lives subverting or ignoring curriculum. And they do so because it is in the best interests of their students.

The Culture of Public Education

In their book Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson offer this on culture:

Instant cultures are artificial cultures. They're big bangs made of mission statements, declarations, and rules. They are obvious, ugly and plastic. Artificial culture is paint. Real culture is patina.

You don't create culture. It happens. This is why new companies don't have a culture. Culture is the by-product of consistent behavior If you encourage people to share, then sharing will be built into your culture. If you reward trust, then trust will be built in. If you treat customers right, then treating customers right becomes your culture.

Today's high-stakes test and punish accountability is bastardizing our school's culture. In a queer attempt to count and measure our way to better learning, we are poisoning our classrooms.

Alfie Kohn puts it this way:

A school that is about raising test scores is not a school that is about excellence and love of learning.

Kohn's words are strong and rightfully so. Test scores are a fraudulent fabrication that are fatally undermining education.

Want proof?

Stop giving tests. Stop talking about the results. Stop discussing this 'need' to raise them.

And you will find that learning will persevere. Tests could cease today and learning would prevail tomorrow.

You see, learning is natural. And so can assessment, if done correctly. Let's simplify; two things must happen to conduct summative assessment:

1. Gather

2. Share

What may surprise you is that a teacher need not ever use tests to properly gather nor do they ever need to use grades to share.

In his classic book The Schools Our Children Deserve, Alfie Kohn explains:

There's good reason to think that the best teachers do not rely much on pencil-and-paper tests because they rarely need them to know how their students are doing. Teachers who base their practice on a constructivist theory of learning are always watching and listening. Everything from the kinds of tasks assigned to the way the classroom is organized has been designed to help the teacher know as much as possible about how the students are making sense of things. This kind of informal assessment is continuous, making things like quizzes very nearly superfluous. We might even say that the more a teacher needs formal tests to guage student achievement, the  more something is wrong. (With direct instruction, of course, the teacher is talking more than listening, so traditional exams would be seen as necessary.) As parents, we shouldn't be worried about those who need to give frequent tests because they may have no feel for how their students' minds work.

Kohn then provides this powerful classroom teacher's testimony:

In the real world of learning, tests, and reports and worksheets aren't the most meaningful way to understand a person's growth, they're just convenient ways in a system of schooling that's based on mass produciton... I assess my students by looking at their work, by talking with them, by making informal observations along the way. I don't need any means of appraisal outside my own observations and the student's work, which is demonstration enough of thinking, their growth, their knowledge, and their attitudes over time.

This might all seem quite counter-intuitive. I know it flies in the face of the way I was educated and the pedagogy I practiced at the start of my teaching career, but good teachers understand what Chris Lehmann meant when he spoke at TEDxNYED and said,

What we see with our eyes daily is more important than what students bubble in on one day of the year.

In his book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, Sir Ken Robinson explains further how the public education culture is in trouble:

Most of us can look back to particular teachers who inspired us and changed our lives. These teachers excelled and reached us, but they did this in spite of the basic culture and mindset of public education. There are significant problems with that culture, and I don't see nearly enough improvements. In many systems, the problems are getting worse. This is true just about everywhere...

Children everywhere are under intense pressure to perform at higher and higher levels on a narrow range of standardized tests...

The result is that school systems everywhere inculcate us with a very narrow view of intelligence and capacity and overvalue particular sorts of talent and ability. In doing so, they neglect others that are just as important, and they disregard the relationships between them in sustaining the vitality of our lives and communities. This stratified, one-size-fits-all approach to education marginalizes all of those who do not take naturally to learning this way...

These approaches to education are also stifling some of the most important capacities that young people now need to make their way in the increasingly demanding world of the twenty-first century - the powers of creative thinking. Our systems of education put a high premium on knowing the single right answer to a question. In fact, with programs like No Child Left Behind (a federal program that seeks to improve the performance of American public schools by making schools more accountable for meeting mandated performance levels) and its insistance that all children form every part of the country hew to the same standards, we're putting a greater emphasis than ever before on conformity and finding the "right" answer.

Alfie Kohn, Chris Lehmann, Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson and Sir Ken Robinson's comments all share a common theme - and that theme is trust. The case against high-stakes tests, grades and standardized curriculums is built on the notion that we must entrust teachers to make professional decisions.

Just as you can't test your way to better learning, you also can't mandate standardized curriculums and bully your way to student engagement without marginalizing a great number of students (and teachers).

A school that is more concerned with raising test scores than raising children has corrupted their culture. Sir Ken Robinson summarizes the sad state of affairs the culture of public education has found itself in:

Most students never get to explore the full range of their abilities and interests. Those students whose minds work differently - and we're talking about many students here; perhaps even the majority of them - can feel alienated from the whole culture of education. This is exactly why some of the most successful people you'll ever meet didn't do well in school. Education is the system that's supposed to develop our natural abilities and enable us to make our way in the world. Instead, it is stifling the individual talents and abilities of too many students and killing their motivation to learn. There's a huge irony in the middle of all of this.

We must provide students with both differentiated instruction and differentiated assessment. Rather than forcing students to learn the way we teach, we must teach the way students learn. And equally important - rather than forcing our students to conform to our narrow range of high-stakes assessment demands, we must enlist a broader range of authentic assessments that fit our students' needs.

To continue educational reforms that simply double the dose of high-stakes testing and further narrows, standardized curriculums is intellectually indefensible and morally bankrupt. Because policy makers have proven so inept at understanding this, teachers must lead the way in advocating for the schools our children deserve.