Does a rose by any other name smell just as sweet? – Well, duh.
It doesn't take a lot of mental rumination for a teacher to figure out when a kid is giving him something slopped onto a piece of paper at the last minute just to fulfill minimum requirements. It's common sense, but common sense and a little critical reflection would go a long way in the LA Unified School District, especially when it comes to those OH-SO-POPULAR teaching methods that get labeled "cooperative" or "collaborative" learning.
My Vice Principal at Huntington Park High School smiled sweetly the afternoon that I went to talk with her for the first time. I had only been at HP for a few weeks, but I noticed recurring behavioral habits there and in my naiveté thought that a well-meaning administrator would have observed the same things. Being careful to avoid the "L" word with its politically incorrect connotations or even synonyms such as "indolent" or "unmotivated, " I explained that there seemed to be cultural components in our students at HP that are standing in the way of successful academics. For instance, I had noticed an almost universal response to a class assignment. One or two persons would do the assignment and the others would attempt to copy the work of these one or two students. She interrupted me. Still beaming her smile, she informed me that the students were not copying but rather, "engaging in collaborative learning."
She spoke the magic buzz words with a facial expression and tone of voice that revealed she felt herself to be introducing me to a new innovative concept I had never heard of before. I smiled back at her and abruptly changed the subject. I realized that pursuing the conversation any further would have been like discussing the theory of evolution with a Southern Baptist. There is nothing new about collaborative/cooperative learning. It's at least 30 years old and implementing it in an East LA classroom requires a Baptist style of faith commitment in the expertise of people with fancy sounding Education degrees. There can be no discussion with its adherents.
The truth is that the kids are very familiar with collaborative learning (or at least with classroom methods that fall under its heading) because they've managed to pass through middle school with its help. They beg to do their work: "in groups." It's great to be able to gossip and talk about TV, then copy something at the last minute and receive a passing grade. Educational theorists believe "collaborative learning" to be a more democratic model of classroom instruction. Well, not the copying business-but that doesn't really happen. of course, since all students want to learn and are impaired by authoritarian instructional styles.
Most experienced school teachers know better, yet contemporary educational theorists live in fear that any prospective new teacher might slip into a classroom setting in which some authority source, be it a text book or a teacher, imparts knowledge to a passive recipient That's just so neo-Nazi! I believe there's a time and a place for a free exchange of ideas, but not while learning to read and write.
The state of California has imposed educational standards on schools and school districts. I think this was done to better ensure that classrooms function as places where basic knowledge is transmitted, rather than as hospitals of social therapy. LA Unified has attempted to transform the content standards into a democratic tool for kids to use as they, in innocent juvenile expertise, evaluate the material that is covered in class. This is why district policymakers consider it terribly important that the teacher spend five minutes of each class period of each day writing out the content standards to be addressed during that class session in language that includes lexical items and syntactical structures well beyond my English as a Second Language students, while the kids sit and chat or copy work that is due for another class.
A few semesters ago I had one 11th grade class in which the majority of students had decided they wanted to become better writers in English - Yes, this really did happen! The dis-interested ones began to ditch, so soon I was left with a group of fifteen students who gathered up close to the front of the room and interacted with me, asking questions and offering possible answers, then listening to me give them information. If they didn't understand something they asked for clarification. Sometimes one student translated an idea into Spanish for the others. The point is that THEY decided they were going to learn. I didn't decide this for them; no innovative method by-passed their own motivation. They decided to have knowledge move from me to them very Un-democratically without any fear of damaging their precious self-esteems in the process. They didn't care about democratic format. They wanted to learn things that they didn't know already. I worked extra hard for these students, but I didn't mind the extra effort.
We have a new Vice Principal at HP. She speaks passionately about the need to get our kids to succeed academically. She leads our "staff development" meetings by throwing Xerox copies of articles from education periodicals at us that emphasize methods and the need to "scaffold to the schemas" of poor disadvantaged students. These articles are mostly exoneration and accommodation treatises, but I really couldn't give you the details. You see, at these meetings we break up into groups to discuss and fill out response sheets, and in our group the new teacher fills out the response sheet and the rest of us copy it.
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