Yes, really, feast your eyes upon this (screenshotted from an email I received.)
It seems the College Board, if we can still call them that, maybe we should call them K12, nope, somebody already claimed that trademark, wants to sell curriculum to school districts.
Maybe somebody needs to tell David Coleman that the states have moved on from Common Core. There’s no one agreed-upon set of standards for secondary math education upon whose foundation a single curriculum can be built.
But curiosity getting the better of me, I went ahead and took the survey. If the College Board wants to send me a $10 gift card, it will be the only little nicety I will get of out coordinating 2,400 tests each year for the last two I worked.
For that number of tests, College Board sends a $3,000 rebate check to the school. In order to receive it, the AP Coordinator has to check off what the money will be used for. Reasons include paying qualified community members to proctor, obtaining resources for AP courses, and a stipend for the AP Coordinator as minor compensation for all the extra hours required to pull off a successful year with thousands of exams received, tracked, taken, and returned with no security breaches.
It might have been an extra $300 or $400 dollop into the paycheck. However, if you think I ever saw that, excuse me while I struggle to control my bladder as uncontrollable laughter shakes my body.
To get back on topic, after answering a few background questions like years of teaching and last role in the school, the survey settled into presenting three statements, of which one would be most compelling and one would be least compelling.
It became clear that the College Board wasn’t asking questions about what would be most important in a grade 6 to 12 curriculum, but what blurbs would best be used in a marketing campaign for attention.
Maybe I should have screenshotted every view, but we are all weary with this <ahem.> Suffice it to say that every blurb that drew attention to preformatted, provided assessments got a least compelling. Every blurb that emphasized teacher autonomy and discretion in designing instruction got a most compelling.
I would advise College Board to explore a merger with Pearson, a/k/a Savvas Learning, if they really want to get into the curriculum biz. For their part, Pearson would love to get their mitts on the AP juggernaut. Win-win? Pbbt, it’s a lose-lose proposition.
One day Chicken Little was playing in the yard when, whack!, an acorn hit her on the head. “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” she said. “I have to tell Cocky Locky.” “Cocky Locky! Cocky Locky! The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” Cocky Locky said, “It is? Well then, we have to tell Ducky Daddles!” “Ducky Daddles! Ducky Daddles! The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” Ducky Daddles said, “It is? Well then, we have to tell Goosey Poosey!” “Goosey Poosey! Goosey Poosey! The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” Goosey Poosey said, “It is? Well then, we have to tell Turkey Lurkey!” “Turkey Lurkey! Turkey Lurkey! The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” Turkey Lurkey said, “It is? Well then, we have to tell the king!” But on the way to tell the king, they met Foxy Woxy. “Foxy Woxy! Foxy Woxy! The sky is falling! The sky is falling! We have to tell the king!” Foxy Woxy said, “I can help! Follow me! I know a shortcut to the king.” Foxy Woxy led Chicken Little, Cocky Locky, Ducky Daddles, Goosey Poosey, and Turkey Lurkey right to his den. He licked his lips and said, “Step inside to see the king.” “Tricky Foxy Woxy! The king is not in there!” they shouted and ran away as fast as they could. At last they arrived at the castle. “King! King! The sky is falling! The sky is falling! A piece of it fell on my head!” “The sky is not falling. An acorn fell on your head,” the king chuckled as he plucked the acorn from Chicken Little’s head. And so Turkey Lurkey, Goosey Poosey, Ducky Daddles, Cocky Locky, and Chicken Little went back home. “Whew! The sky is NOT falling!” (Source: LearnwithHomer.com.)
Khan Academy, which began as a project by its founder, Sal Khan, to bring free internet tutelage to schoolchildren, then got in bed with College Board and the SAT suite of products (yes, that’s how College Board refers to it,) by providing a customized path of review based upon PSAT results, is now trumpeting its latest venture.
Khan Academy has met Artificial Intelligence.
“It does math although not always perfectly.”
One supposes the name is a combination of Khan and amigo, the Spanish word for friend. But this may not be anybody’s friend as one of its supposed benefits is that Khanmigo will do lesson planning for teachers. However, Sal should learn that lesson planning for teachers in most districts is a cut-and-paste job into mandated templates. No intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is needed for that. (Not saying that is real lesson planning, but it is what passes for it these days.)
Sal also tells us that AI is already embedded in everything that Khan Academy does, for example, giving hints to help students solve problems. He insists that the AI will assist students in finding answers and will not be a vehicle for cheating.
Ironic or fitting that the AI robot is using the CHAT?!
Sal goes on to claim that he is helping students emerge from the pandemic and connecting their learning to what’s going on in the classroom. To his credit, he does not use the phrase learning loss.
“What if, when writing a story, the AI works with the student to write the story, not for the student, but alongside them making sure the student is doing the bulk of the work but pulling the story out of them? Making it more fun, making it more engaging …”
(Mr. Fitz, if nothing else, Sal is creating a great story line for your next series of strips.)
Khanmigo is in beta testing as they are working with districts and schools who already are joined to their ecosystem of teaching videos, exercises, and tests. The problem with Khan Academy is the same problem every edutech product, free or other wise, has. The pathway is prescribed and unaltered. What happens when a student doesn’t understand the video, can’t solve the problems, or answer the questions correctly?
All they can do with edutech is rewatch the video and try again. Yet, as every teacher has been told repeatedly in observations, if the students didn’t learn from your lesson, why would you reteach it the exact same way? You have to do it different as the first time didn’t work.
But all edutech can do is offer the same teaching approach over and over. Khanmigo’s promise is that its AI engine (a GPT-4 based product) will overcome that limitation.
That has yet to be seen as well as whether its safety features are effective. In the presentation, Sal tells us that teachers and schools will be able to review student’s interaction with the AI bot. Inappropriate chats or those ‘on the edge’ will be flagged.
The Grumpy Old Teacher becomes the GORT, the grumpy old retired teacher.
At least I’m not the GOAT, a strange acronym that stands for greatest of all time, because the goat is someone who gets the blame when things go wrong or people are unhappy, most often undeservedly so.
But I would never claim to be the greatest, much as I would never claim to be an ally. That is something others have to decide based upon how they perceive my writing, my actions, and my motives. Nobody would think of me as the greatest, anyway.
The only thing I’ve decided about this blog is to drop the third-person voice. That was a deliberate choice to add an extra layer of separation between me and my job as a school teacher in Jacksonville, Florida, a fact I’ve never tried to hide but I didn’t make it obvious, either. That way, no one could possibly think anything I’ve written could be seen as speaking for the school district.
Five retirees and guess what each of us got in the bag?
The blog will continue to focus on education. I keep scribbling new topics on post-it notes and slapping them on the wall, literally, the wall behind my computer where I keep all my important to-do notes.
What will be missing are the behind-the-scenes reports. As I am no longer a working teacher who can talk about what’s really going on inside the building, maybe that will be the end of the blog as those are the posts that garner the most views.
But there’s still a major job to do. I can no longer talk with students about testing and say, “It wasn’t always this way. In my day, we didn’t have annual, end-of-the-year standardized tests and my generation turned out okay. Know that school (with its curiosity-killing, soul-dampening, torture-like test prep all day long) doesn’t have to be like this. One day you will have children of your own and you can change this.”
But I can keep preaching from this platform. So, the theme song quoted in the title won’t really be true. This tin soldier will hang around for a while, not in the ivy-covered halls, but in the arena. Since the esteemed Emily Bloch, formerly with the Florida Times-Union, now writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer, always DTWD, left town, we haven’t had comprehensive coverage of the school system. The big stories are covered well–Jacksonville does have an amazing corps of local journalists–the nitty-gritty that has an impact, though, gets overlooked.
Just a thought, I’m not committing to attending all the workshops and mundane meetings of the school board, but I do have deep institutional knowledge to bring to the conversation.
So, while I’m riding away from the daily chaos and joy of bells, lessons, athletics, drama, and the like, I’m not really going anywhere. See you in the funny papers.
Since the book-banning began in earnest, Grumpy Old Teacher (GOT) has been buying some of the targeted titles on his limited budget and reading them to see if the text supports the objections of those who would see them burned a la Fahrenheit 451. Warning: what you are about to read are GOT’s thoughts and they are not likely to please anybody on any side of this controversy.
That piqued GOT’s curiosity to find out what exactly is in the book.
The first thing to notice is that it is a memoir. The author, Maia Kobabe, is first and foremost going to tell us about her life from childhood into adulthood and her struggles with locating who E is (Sorry, Top Gov, if that upsets you, but I read the book and I know the pronouns E wants us to use.)
This book is not a manifesto. That is one of its strengths.
It’s someone telling a story about eir life, a life from toddlerhood through postgraduate years where the author can’t figure out where E fits in.
Not everyone needs to read this book, but there are those who do. Those who, like the author, struggle to understand themselves and why they don’t fit easily into traditional categories of gender and sex. That’s why people like Kobabe share their stories–to help someone else going through the same struggle.
In eir story, Kobabe recalls how the library was a refuge during the difficult years of adolescence and growing up. How E found the books that helped, how E spent hours and days and months in libraries reading about others who also didn’t quite fit into traditional gender roles.
Books are important.
That brings up the second book, All Boys Aren’t Blue, another memoir that is being banned in Florida’s schools. GOT read this one, too.
Maybe Top Gov would like this one; he’s proud of leading a red state.
This one’s a bit different, but of the same vein. The author recounts how he knew he was different from a young age, but he didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about how he was different and where he fit. His gender identity was firmly male and he found himself with a same-sex orientation.
Like Kobabe, his family realized who he was and accepted it. He wasn’t the first and they took it in stride. Even on a family trip, when all the other children were getting stylish sneakers, but Matthew (that’s the author, you’ve got to read the book) insisted upon cowboy boots, his grandmother took everyone to a Western store so he could get his boots.
So what’s going on here?
Book banners delight in pushing buttons. Those who show compassion, tolerance, and empathy toward those who don’t fit traditional gender roles, those who simply listen to children talk about their developmental path toward discovering who they are, those who show basic respect for the human dignity of children by calling them they want are called groomers and indoctrinators, not for the purpose of bringing attention to caring adults, but to obscure the true picture by provoking an emotional response from the public at large.
Both books are stories recounted by their authors of their awkward, difficult journey toward adulthood, including coming to an understanding of their sexuality. As they tell their life histories from the vantage point of young adulthood, they touch upon some sensitive subjects that are an essential part of their story.
Each has a chapter or two that discusses a sexual experience. This alone does not make either book pornographic. Neither does it mean that the books should be freely available in a school. GOT in particular would not ban these books from a school library, but on on the other hand, he would admit that those who have reservations have a legitimate point of view.
This is why I said at the beginning that this piece would not make anyone happy. I truly believe that those who object to some parts of some books have a valid opinion.
It’s not that I agree with it; it’s that I can recognize that others have a different viewpoint and that there is room for legitimate disagreement that we need to work through. That happens not by name-calling on social media or screaming at school board meetings. It takes place through the quiet discussions that we have in our lives, whether in our churches or civic organizations or shopping or visits to the park.
To return to the books, both authors have an intended audience. They write for others who did not have or could not find a book like this to help them through their difficult years of finding and accepting their identity. They did not write for a general audience.
So–don’t ban these books. Stop the assault on any book that dares to mention or include characters who are other than cisgendered and heterosexual. Let these books find their audience for whom they are intended.
Each may be vital to some youth, some struggling adolescent, for whom the book will make all the difference in the world.
In GOT’s experience, they will find the book and the book will find them. All others won’t even notice. Sometimes, we adults make more of things than we ought. The kids are okay; it’s our issues that cause the problems.
Should these books sit on a school library shelf for anyone to find and peruse? Perhaps not. Maybe what we need are wise librarians, media specialists, who know their clientele and can make appropriate recommendations either toward or away from a particular book.
Oh wait, we decided years ago that schools didn’t need responsible, mature adults with professional expertise and experience to help children find books to read.
Oh, you thought GOT was talking about Governor DeSantis and his desire to have a state militia at his personal disposal?
When you live in Florida, a flat land of drained swamps that collect in retention ponds in order to build on dry land, you get used to it–the collections of Canadian geese that find the ponds and surrounding habitat perfect for nesting.
And what better place than a school? There are ponds and plenty of open grassy spaces, perfect for raising the next generation of honkers that bully humans better than any other species except maybe for humans themselves.
It’s that time of year when we carefully step around the goose dung because they don’t care where they drop it. Keep a sharp eye out! Many students don’t as the black stains that not even pressure washing can remove testify to their stomping and grinding the offensive material into the concrete.
What a perfect metaphor as it’s also that time of year when governors across the land sign bad legislation about public schooling into law. School districts will spend the next twelve months stepping around the goose piles, new and old, as they navigate their way through another year of muck and murk.
Retirement could not come at a better time. During the annual Spring budgeting process, which principals are obligated to share with their faculty, the district said that they were planning for around a 20% reduction in enrollment due to the new universal voucher law. Thus, while our school is maintaining its enrollment and maybe increasing over last year, the threat of losing teaching positions hangs over us.
That worry will no longer be mine. If you don’t teach, you don’t understand that twice a year, toward the end of a school year in the Spring and at the beginning at the end of Summer, teachers sweat out the budgeting process hoping against hope to be able to stay at their school and not have to move. “Surplus” is a dirty word to a teacher.
Seniority flew out the window nine years ago. It’s all about the test scores and, if yours aren’t high enough versus the other teachers in your subject area in the building, you find yourself at the top of the list.
Then there’s the RIF. A surplus means you are moved to another school; a RIF means you lose your job. Grumpy Old Teacher’s (GOT) district hasn’t seen a RIF in decades, but if you talked to the old-timers before they retired, you heard stories of people sitting by their phones over the summer (yeah, pre-cell phone days) waiting for a call that enough people had quit that jobs were available for those who were riffed.
Are those days back? We have yet to see.
Don’t sputter that there’s a teacher shortage. You can solve one by either finding qualified teachers or finding a way that the jobs are gone and you don’t need them.
Florida is not the only state pursuing many strategies to effect the latter.
Meanwhile, the culture wars go on. Teachers are a prime target; to misquote the bard, the governor says, “How do we hate thee? Let us count the ways.”
First up, and this is the joke to lighten the piece, Florida has now banned children from attending drag shows. Damn! go a couple hundred elementary teachers. Now we have to think up something else for our first field trip in the fall.
If you’re not laughing, you’re part of the problem. No teacher would conduct such a field trip, no administrator would approve it, and no show would allow it.
Goosestepping.
Then, there are the pronouns. Teachers and all other school-based personnel must use the pronouns according to the “sex assigned at birth.” GOT promises not to go on a tangent about how ridiculous a phrase that is. The birthing process does not ASSIGN a sex like a teacher would assign homework to be done. Nor is gender-identity chosen. Both occur from the unique combination of genes, biochemistry, and other things that take place when a sperm fuses with an egg.
Oops, to recover from the tangent, teachers are barred from using preferred pronouns that a child might tell them to use. Teachers must use the pronouns, um sorry about another tangent, but how are they supposed to know? It is said that the ancient Greeks began competing in the nude at the Olympics so women couldn’t sneak in and compete with the men … but GOT hopes no one suggests THAT as a solution to the pronoun conundrum. How do we know?
We’re not going to do inspections. We’ll take the child’s word for it.
Goosestepping.
Parents rights. Oh yes, to channel Mr. T, I pity the teacher fool who dares to talk to a child about what bodies do when they grow up. Schools can provide menstrual products for girls, but they can’t explain how to use them or why they are necessary. (At least, in the elementary grades. But then you see what Florida did with its Don’t Be Gay law. It started with K – 3, and now it extends through 12th grade.)
What’s a teacher to do? One misstep and they’re covered with <ahem>. The legislators, the governor, the far-right wingnuts, like middle school bullies, watch, jeer, and video to post on social media.
Is it any surprise that teachers are leaving to find better sidewalks?
Grumpy Old Teacher 