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May122012
POSTED AT 11:46 PM
Ratios and Glorified Garages "Robot! Robot!" I looked up from the circle of young people in front of me on the convention arena floor to see an orange blinking light in the middle of a formation, rolling in my direction. "Robot! Robot" People were getting out of the way, pulling small kids aside, squeezing away from the center of the jammed isle, up against the students intently working behind them in the noise and heat and wound-up action. It was like a religious procession with an ancient and venerated icon on a gurney, blessed with all kinds of modern-day holy relics and stickers; Four kids were out in front with the make-way wail, a kid in a banana suit came next, skipping, four kids wearing yellow hair wigs were pushing and pulling a cart on which was balanced a collection of aluminum and plastic and wire widgetry with weird wheels 1 blinking an orange light, a bunch of logos stickered to the side from global high technology corporations, a national welding company, a nationwide chain of retail stores, down through to the name of a corner strip mall dentist. Close behind came two students guiding a set of rolling mechanic’s tool boxes and over the top of the whole thing is a massive sound system blasting every kind of music from Katy Perry and Daft Punk to Thomas Dolby and the ELO. Turning back to the pit activity I was looking at before the procession rolled through, this group was obviously preparing to do the same; their robot nestled into a pink powder-coated aluminum wagon with big rubber wheels, a kid on either side up to their elbows in #18 wire, a girl with a Phillips screwdriver in hand; the other with crimpers at the ready and a third on the floor with a heat gun 2 rotating and shrinking plastic tubing over some twisted bare wires with spade clips on the ends. Two more kids with a clipboard and a laptop, cell phones in hand were tense, almost jumping up and down; "cmon! cmon! We gotta go!" Four others had their heads down, thumbing the digital devices, one with the wagon handle resting on her hip, ready to haul their mechanism out of the pit and into the last rounds of the contest. The team behind me and next to ours had an EZ-up tent over their pit with camouflage netting thrown over; there was no one there, everyone was at the official scale having their robot weighed and recorded on the official chart being projected on a concrete wall off to the side of the arena. At the back of their empty pit was a big flat screen flipping through pictures and video of all the tasks that were accomplished and the people who helped get the team to this regional FIRST competition. In almost every pit there was activity, some of it deliberate and organized, some chaotic and messy, with tools and parts all over, people bumping into one another. "Robot! Robot!" Another team wheeled deliberately down the isle, its leader somebody covered neck to knees with pin-on buttons and mementos from other teams, his/her head gear a painted-up cardboard box with circles of green LED's for eyes and the team number on four sides, walking steadily with a finger under the front of the box to keep the battery-powered thing on his/her head. One kid, following up the rear carried a three foot long piece of plywood with a couple of laptops bolted onto it and a gamer's joystick in the center, wrapped in cables: the robot driver. There was a huge, five thousand voiced "Ohoooo!!" A hundred feet away, something had happened out of my range of vision. What it was I couldn't gather- a team's robot may have fallen over, lost a part, could be going in dysfunctional telecommand-induced circles; I'd have to find out later. Our team, in our pit, was replacing a pneumatic piston powering the pushing arm that did one of the functions the game required, but the fittings on the new, higher pressure actuator had larger diameter threads than the fittings on the original, requiring a ferrule crimping tool, different diameter connection fittings, and a student was anxiously searching cardboard boxes and plastic crates trying to find the crimp tool. A second student was picking through a plastic compartmented tray full of hose fittings, and three more were simultaneously removing the weaker part and attaching the new one with plastic zip-ties. A Mentor stood by watching the whole thing. We found out after the next match that the new pneumatic operator almost put us over the one hundred twenty pound weight limit, a disqualifying no-no that sidelined several teams already. Up in the stands were groups of students and parents and mentors watching, some with laptops and digital pads taking notes on team robot performances, some sleeping off the exhaustion and stress, others actively rooting for their team or for others. This was the last afternoon of the competition, the final eight teams had been set; the highest scoring eight teams had invited two others to join them, and now the final competition rounds of three VS three alliances had begun. A few teams were in the pits packing up from having been eliminated from the competition, but most people, students, parents, mentors, were up in the seats to watch the final spectacle; sixty-five teams competing at this regional event to determine the best engineered outcome to a difficult real-world problem. A lot of people were highly invested in the final conclusion, win or lose, and seeing the work of others who worked as hard as you did, out there on the playing arena has a visceral effect. Everyone knows your struggle, the hours you put in, the mashed knuckles and cut fingers, the begging for funding, bringing meals at all hours to keep your team's energy up, updating websites, the hundred small tasks; everyone did as you did to get yourself here, all share insight into a type of education mostly lost to the global American educational environment. Even if your team got knocked out of the competition by a higher scoring team or for some major mechanical, electrical, digital malfunction, seeing those you competed against go on to success validated your own efforts; by competing with you, they became better as a result: iron sharpening iron, and the resulting clash is compelling performance for spectators just from the ring themselves. 3 At this point in the game, because it's really a game, it's become nerves; the final twenty four machines are the best of the contest, engineered to take a beating and be repaired, driven repeatedly with skill and finesse against machines and drivers that exhibit personality on the playing floor, whose actions and reactions can be anticipated and countered. Despite the skill, the organizational efforts, frustrations overcome, the whole thing is focused around, at least for this year, the ability to put basketballs through hoops placed at various heights, do it in alliance with others, do it with software controlled mechanical and electrical equipment while following rules that simulate a basketball game, with timing and penalties and credit for collaboration. For two and a half days, these students have been here, struggling to keep their complex engineered widget operational, develop strategy and modify it as the opposing team modifies their strategy against you, operate them both against like-minded and skilled others without getting “freaked out when things don’t work,” where the competition "is going to eat your gear, and you’ve got to get it back and patch it together and learn from your mistakes” 4 and then go around and do it again, maybe during the course of ten to fifteen different contests, with and against the number of teams in the stadium. The Bigger Competition Venue: When a kid puts on her/his first job resume that they were part of a FIRST Robotics 5 team, they get bumped to the top of the in-bin stack of applications; they don't need to impress anyone so they can stand front and center in the crowd; their reputation precedes them 6 due to the realia-based nature of the FIRST robotics experience. When the kid finally sits across the desk from the old gal or old guy who ultimately makes the decisions and asks the "what did you learn" from the experience questions and the kid can answer coherently, they'll nail the job over the equivalently educated kid with the purely academic experience. The purpose of the FIRST organization is "To transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated and where young people dream of becoming science and technology leaders" 7 because the founders began to realize twenty five years ago the problems we are facing in this area of education and had a big enough idea, deep enough pockets, organizational skill to put the organization together and rope in other actors and stakeholders contributing to the job-skills conversation. Again, as described in chapter Pilots, Planes, RAT’s, the very large and unseen sideshow to this stadium-sized sporting event for young technologists is how much money and donated time is put in play by big and small corporations and businesses to keep these student teams in the game with the result that students learn these technical and vocational skills. To field a bare-bones team working out of some parent's garage or the storage room of their small business 8 easily costs ten thousand bucks, though FIRST puts a cap on money that can be spent on actual robot-building parts and materials to provide a basepoint for funding equivalency. 9 The teams with engineering clout, with consistently winning programs will accumulate and regularly distribute thirty or forty grand to keep their team on the playing floor so they can fund their own gear like tools and equipment. 10 Then there's the off-the-radar stuff; t-shirts, other team gear, the personal outlay for food, funding or fundraising to get the team individuals and tools and the machine itself transported 11 to the event location and stay there for the three days of competition, the hand-crafted and collectable team trinkets the students trade with one another: when you look out over the 27 by 54 foot playing floor, multiply that visualized number by the sixty or so teams on any one playing venue; the place is awash to the gunwales with cash to teach these young people engineering, math, science, technology skills. Multiply again that dollar figure by the number of nationwide events, sixty nine, you get a product that has to be delivered on pallets via shipping container, unloaded with a forklift. And this multiple pallet-load of cash, put up to get teams to the events, doesn't touch the scholarship funding pile. Last year twelve million dollars were served up by entities large and small to hand out to students planning to go on to higher education; this year (2012) the total exceeds fourteen million with "more scholarship providers... joining our program," so if you want some if it for your kid, check this footnote. 12 Caveat: they must be an active participant of a FIRST robotics team. It's a rare public school that fields a team as part of a regular day for-credit class 13 using public money to fully fund it, and if they do, it's sans funding to pay for things like entry fees and personal transportation, lodging, meals for students and mentors, team uniforms, though administrators are proud to point out that their school sponsors a team. This is no longer the kind of education we do or believe in, 14 and organizations like Kamen's and Flower’s FIRST have stepped in to fill the gap. 15 The majority of stakeholders in education encourage these robotics competitions but the reality at the school site makes them a quaint and geeky adjunct to the regular day program; useful to teach leadership skills, encouraging students to participate, but the motivation to high school administrator’s and counselor's support of these programs is the result that a student can then cite FIRST Robotics on the application to the university. Ask any kid in a robotics team: "why are you here?" The majority will tell you within the top three answers they want into a good college, want to beat the crowd, and the FIRST moniker is helpful; a minority will cite the college application as the only reason. There is no problem with this. The problem is with the evolution over the last thirty-forty years of the current education environment creating conditions where FIRST was birthed from necessity, became huge and prestigious from its quality to serve that necessity, is a premier brand to be associated with to accomplish the necessity of access to the world of technical education and technical vocation. Other, non-team students see first-person the success, status of their peers in the school leadership networks, their predecessors in the university competition game and in the job world resulting from participation in the vision and real skills learned in the process. But back to the arena: The uniformity of plastic stadium chairs is not conducive to the comfort of my building contractor distorted spine, so that final Saturday I brought a folding canvas camp chair to put in one of the wheelchair alcoves and so spread out and put my feet up on the rails. I'd never seen anything like this though YouTube gave me some impressions. There are "sporting events" for all kinds of occasions and pseudo-competitions possibly related to something marginally educational, but this one was on such a stratospheric plane of intensity that it got me a little weepy, sitting up there, camera and tripod parked, spectatoring * the action and my thinking about it, both the techno/human struggle on the playing floor and the supporting backstage “get it back and patch it together” struggles in the pits. I am incapable of communicating how, when young people see a vision, 16 put their hands to an essential work to master technical skills, how many people will step up and support it, fund it, give time, human resources to the venture; the greater vision of this happening nationwide on an intimate level to better the individual student's personal outcome is an emotional thing to consider. * No, not that kind of spectatoring. The word should be able to be used in other contexts despite its current clinical application and grammatical impossibility. Here was an event, funded by thousands of individuals, hundreds of organizations promoting math, science, engineering, technology skills for both the smart and smartless from outside the educational establishment, having a gross educational value in the scores of millions because of a belief in the efficacy of the skills learned in process to the outcome. The bar to access is low, merely desire and internal resolution. The bar to achievement is beyond sight and set by the individual participant, but with rungs low enough, close together enough so all can have access, progress at any speed, achieve as far as inherent skills and motivation take them, the empowering with real skills the result. There is no color barrier, no socioeconomic stratification, 17 no achievement gap to leap; the methods to excellent achievement are opposite to what we do in regular public school, the work is mostly done after hours and through non-school means, 18 the ratio of students to adults is low, and I'll not occupy your forbearance with naysayers to this particular process. Within the FIRST education model, in contrast to the regular school day, students are allowed to gravitate to what interests them and soak up the learning by doing the tasks they have invented to accomplish the goals for whatever year's game rules have been pre-agreed to. Some students will immediately find they do not fit the task; computer programming for instance, and pursue two paths: one; try harder, get more educated (on their own time); two; try on a few other jobs until they find something that fits their skill disposition and temperament. Press this dynamic into a graded classroom scheme where the instructor must demonstrate to the Powers that rigor and relevance, the high bar are the measurement tools; it's impossible to prove such to spectatoring stakeholders who have a set of preconceived notions of what the interior of an effective “technology” classroom should look like. A school or school district administrator comes into the shop, a kind of “glorified garage,” 19 takes a guided tour by a student or mentor and sees nothing but piles of junk, incomprehensible tools and equipment, a few old, decrepit, dangerous looking machines against the walls. Few understand the value of the bin full of aluminum cut-offs and clips, of previously used robot parts, wires, stacks of batteries, "old" motors used once and salvaged, put in bins and boxes on the shelf, stacked under tables. To the team member, these piles of "junk" are the valuable raw resources from which the current robot is built; when you need to fabricate an aluminum bracket to hold some widget on the robot, it's far more efficient in the use of time, energy, resources to salvage/scavenge an old part, modify an old part than fabricate one from new, off-the-rack raw material. To the very smart but ignorant administrator, this is a lawsuit waiting to happen, and if he/she's really dumb, has little trust in the people or the method to the outcome, can’t see the vision, will order the place be "cleaned up" the "junk" thrown in the dumpster. School site administrators can operate a calculator just as well as their incoming ninth graders, and in today’s educational economy must have the freedom to park thirty eight to forty two students in a classroom (at least in California) to balance the load between staffing, facility resources, and the numbers of students to be served. Classrooms that use “junk” in the instruction optimally operate with numbers between twenty to twenty five- the maximum number that can be served in order to teach these domains competently and have students usefully occupied with other than busywork. 20 The former method relies on the instructional delivery model (if there’s no such thing, I’ve just invented it), the latter the mentoring/coaching model, far more labor intensive. For purely instructional delivery, you can park a hundred fifty posteriors in the tiered lecture hall, do due diligence and produce the outcome on the Scantron with the resulting digitized skill-measuring metric and be fairly certain of the outcome by analyzing the outcome against the benchmarks. If one or two of the interrogation metrics are suspect, you throw them out and recalculate, or, if on deeper analysis realize it's a matter of lack of skills in those one or two areas, you reteach, measure again. The coaching/mentoring model produces an outcome with physical objects with a process diametrically opposed: When you go out to a playing field after school to watch the football team practice, the track and field team go through their motions, what do you see? If it’s a substantial school, perhaps a hundred students in the various levels of skill ability groupings performing their exercises to acquire realia-hand-body-eye-affect skill mastery. 21 How many mentors/coaches are out there mingling? Four, five, six? Doing the numbers gives you a twenty to twenty five number, and the posh, well-funded teams have a lower ratio because the boosters too know how to operate the calculator and put in the time, expend personal resources to raise the money to pay for the coaches/mentors. The success within USFIRST operates with much the same dynamic; if you have a group/club of a hundred students, the number of involved parents/mentors can get the ratios down to one in ten, one in eight, and the resulting skills learned by students increase accordingly. It's not uncommon for smaller teams to have ratios of one in four or three. This works because the situation operates on the donation model; the mentor/parent is donating their time, effort, skill, resources to see the process through, has motivations other than the financial. The model is affectual, relationally based, the public institution financial, union-rule based. Notes:
1 The weird wheels are actually diagonally placed rollers oriented on a circular aluminum hub, designed to be fixed in one direction and having a low friction coefficient, can be counter-rotated against one another, used to steer an object forward and reverse, right or left, rotate in any direction on its center axis via motor control software programming. 2 Heat Gun: It looks like an oversized hand-held hair dryer but produces enough red heat to crisp your skin if you're stupid enough to hold it there long enough, used to shrink plasticized tubing over bare wires or wiring you want to keep in a tight, neat bundle. 3 "As iron sharpens iron, So a man sharpens the countenance of his friend." Proverbs 27:17 4 The larger discussion, an interview of the filmmaker James Cameron by Patt Morrison in the context of diving solo to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean: You stay calm and keep everybody on track because people who are new to the game, like some of our young engineers who have never accompanied their hardware into the ocean before, get a little freaked out when things don’t work. I have to remind them that the ocean is going to eat your gear, and you’ve got to get it back and patch it together and learn from your mistakes. Morrison, Patt, A man overboard, Los Angeles Times, 4/14/12, p. A19 5 FIRST: For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology 6 Someone somewhere once said "Some peoples' reputation precedes them, some it only follows afterward." 7 usfirst.org mission and vision page. Accessed 3/18/12 8 One local team worked in a foreclosed Japanese restaurant at all hours, enduring multiple police visits at zero dark thirty until the watch captain put out the word that it was OK for young people to be in there, demolishing partitions to use the material in their robot, spray painting walls to get the artwork of their team logo finalized. The team member who told the story, long graduated, is now a paramedic in the California Central Valley who can relate how when medical issues go wrong in the field, the ad-hoc improvisational skills, among others learned on the FIRST team saves the lives of car crash victims, stupid mountain climbers. Source: Sean Roberts 9 Starting an FRC Team: In Detail "FRC teams cost approximately $12,000 on average (in Washington State) to run for a year. Some teams can spend as little as $9,000, others spend nearly $50,000. It all depends on your circumstances." "A typical rookie team will have about a $12,000 budget if they can participate at one local event, say in Seattle." http://www.firstwa.org/FRC/Startateam/StartinganFRCTeamIndepth/tabid/143/Default.aspx Accessed 3/22/12 10 Teams with and without permanent shop sites or machine shop tooling are always borrowing and loaning tools and shop machinery, traveling to outside vendors, and to keep the gear operational requires both maintenance/repair skills and money for spare parts. Parents and interested local businesses step in to fill the gap with their own gear like welders and such, but to have a permanent shop and meeting spaces for all the operations, team or classroom-owned equipment is unobtainium by many groups. There is an equivalent dynamic with human resources and funding: Teams from areas dense with high technology businesses have an engineering and funding advantage over teams from farther flung areas having less of each. 11 This year the robots, limited in weight to one hundred twenty pounds, were shipped gratis by Federal Express from each build site to the competition venue. At the bottom of this link are the FIRST shipping instructions via FedEx: http://frc-manual.usfirst.org/viewItem/7 Accessed 3/25/12 12 Many colleges and universities, professional associations, and corporations offer college scholarships to high school students on FIRST teams. This is official recognition of the knowledge and technical and life skills these students have gained from participating in a FIRST competition. For 2012, we currently have over 147 scholarship providers that are making available over 664 individual scholarship opportunities with a total value of over $14 Million! As the season progresses, more scholarship providers will be joining our program. So keep checking back here to see new scholarships! FIRST Scholarships: --Vary from one-time awards of $1,000 to full four-year tuition (estimated at $160,000)
--Are typically merit-based and cover a broad range of scholastic abilities
--May be for STEM majors (60%); or for any course of study (40%)
--Are usually for use at a specific college/university, but a few can be used at any school
--Each have unique eligibility requirements, deadline dates, and application procedures usfirst.org/about/scholarships/scholarship-opportunities"Show me the list of FIRST Scholarship Opportunities http://www.usfirst.org/aboutus/scholarships Accessed 3/18/12 13 Despite the high engineering, programming, math, science, vocational, organizational management skills learned in process with fielding a team, a for-credit class is still considered an elective in California; the A through G thing. 14 No, we don't believe in it despite the lip service. If we did, there would be no FIRST organization, no need for funding and teaching these skills via back-alley means, attempting to attach it to the conventional curriculum caravan with rusted coat hangers and electrical tape. There's an interesting conundrum here: At the top of the educational food chain there is made no curriculum space, no facilities or funding for this kind of education during the regular day. But go to the mechanics and service people that keep the school district facilities running, the busses rolling, they see the necessity for this kind of learning, will put aside their stack of work orders to fix the robotics team’s drill press or band saw, scour eBay to get repair parts for an old welder, cut a fair deal to use school/school district transportation assets and avoid the commercial rental franchise. 15 Dean Kamen, inventor of medical equipment and the Segway transportation device. Woodie Flowers, physicist, professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 16 “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Proverbs 29:18 (KJV) 17 We've established a strong partnership with the University of Southern California. Dr. Larry Lim, the MEP (Minority Engineering Program) and MESA (Math, Science, Engineering Achievement) Director, has been a very strong supporter and advocate of ensuring our Latino and African American students get exposure to the fields of math, science and engineering. He provides us with a machinist and access to a machine shop. He helps us set up field trips. He requires all students in MESA to participate in math, science and engineering challenges. High percentage (sic) of our FIRST students are studying math, science and engineering at the United States Naval Academy, USC, UCLA, Boston University, Smith College, University of Colorado, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Cal State Long Beach, UC Santa Cruz, and several Junior Colleges. Foshay Learning Center, on the corner of Western and Exposition in South Los Angeles, has 85% of students eligible for "free and reduced" lunches, and is a Title I school; renters outnumber homeowners two to one, median family income: $29,000: http://www.team597.net/ Accessed 3/25/12 http://www.k12guides.com/school/Foshay-Learning-Center:062271003017.html#lunch Accessed 3/25/12 18 Long afternoons and evenings, all-nighters are put into the six-week “build season;” much time at home spent managing communications, writing fund-raising letters, making and delivering team meals, designing and programming that does not get recognized when the countdown begins and the machines run free. Meanwhile, much is being proposed of late to extend the hours of the learning day, to push instructional time outside of school hours (called ELT, Extended Learning Time), to accommodate low achieving students: Now, with the support of influential policymakers like (Education) Secretary Duncan, ELT is becoming one of the most widely used strategies for fixing the nation’s worst public schools. Billions of federal stimulus dollars are currently being spent to expand learning time on behalf of disadvantaged children. Congressional leaders working to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA have proposed making ELT a core strategy for school turnaround. The U.S. Department of Education’s parallel effort to give states waivers from the current version of ESEA also includes a major bet on ELT. See the link here for the full PDF of: Off the Clock: What More Time Can (and Can’t) Do for School Turnarounds, by Elena Silva, EducationSector, Educationsector.org. http://www.educationsector.org/publications/clock-what-more-time-can-and-cant-do-school-turnarounds No, you can’t put a robotics team in every school, nor should you. The point is that this kind of education has a community following where funding follows. Perhaps this is my limited middle-school teacher perspective (bias?) talking, but I don’t see much accommodation during regular school hours for learning the skills these robotics teams produce in the wider discussion of educational preparation for the university or career occupations, perhaps because of bias against these hands-on, occupational-type skills? 19 “The skill base to enter the Martian atmosphere, descend to the surface and land softly is a pretty unique skill,” said Richard O’Toole, executive manager of JPL’s Office of Legislative Affairs. The Mars test bed, tucked away at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, doesn’t look like much more than a glorified garage. Inside, the lights are harsh, the air ducts noisy and the work is the toilsome side of science: Tinker, test, repeat. “But step back and look at the big picture… wow,” said engineer Steve Schroeder. Schroeder plodded across a bed of gravel on a recent morning and unclipped a sensor on a six-wheel dune buggy of sorts, bedazzling with wires, lasers and cameras- the working replica of the Curiosity rover. This is where Curiosity’s handlers prepare for it’s August (2012) landing. And it’s this “glorified garage” atmosphere that is the machine nursery for the potential of “finding evidence of life as we know it…”. Gold, Scott, A loss in space budget, Los Angeles Times, 4/1/12, P.A27 20 A sop for those who must be convinced by research and only research before believing any claim made about the education environment: this is pure anecdote poured neat, and you can swallow it or not. Get your spreading butt out of your comfy chair and mingle a bit in places foreign to your experience; you will escape the well-deserved reputation elitist. 21 Answer me this: Tracking students by skill ability is verboten in the classroom, but on the athletic field, the teacher/coach who does not practice tracking based on individual ability will be quickly handed his/her hat and coat, hounded out by stakeholders who demand results. Each student in the process, each parent, each administrator party to the scene may not like every aspect, but permits or promotes the practice so as to acquire the desired outcome (excellence). Why?
Jan212012
POSTED AT 10:52 PM
The Jump to the Digital
Excerpt from the chapter Death of Vocation
from the upcoming book All Thumbs
In 2012, people over the age of thirty-five or forty, who grew up before the digital era were able to use materials to construct their learning, and then gravitated to computers and the digital matrix and used its processes to integrate what they had learned into a productive outcome. Communications, record-keeping, designing, far more than I'm capable of listing have been translated to the digital and made cheaper, simpler, more productive. Adults of that generation appear bemused, even reverential that younger people have taken to the digital skills and produced outcomes that appear to duplicate their own or even exercise the digital in superior fashion, learning quickly what used to take earlier generations years to master. But without an understanding of the precursor cognitive pathways, long and sometimes difficult that have produced the advanced outcomes, the older generation promotes the skills the digital era excels at, forgetting that the foundational learning on which the digital skills seem to represent are missing. People younger are made to jump to the productive outcome, the "higher" cognitive level without the learning of what I call the precursor skills of materials manipulation, the methodical understanding of real-world heuristic or empirical processes. Young people intuitively grasp what older adults have had to master later in life with much frustration and effort and the older people see this jump as an increase in cognitive skill on the part of the young, or at least the bypassing of discontinued skills for a more effective or useful set of skills. Older adults have developed the small-screen digital skills and integrated them cognitively into a wider, holistic picture of educated life, where younger people have been made to short-circuit the process and jump immediately to the integrationist skills. The payback for this earlier jump is the appearance of learning and competency, but without a mode of practical application, the skills don't connect to the reality where effective skills must be made to operate. Take for instance the ability to draw and detail an individual machine part or a larger integrated product like an aircraft with a design program like AutoCAD, Autodesk, SolidWorks. The student can design, calculate stresses with various materials, and print the plan for fabricating the part and brag about the perfection and mastery of skills, but another student who has actual experience working with materials can look at the drawing and see glaring flaws: there may be no ability to cut certain angles, access to other areas of the part may be restricted by occulted computer views unable to visualize the actual three dimensionality of the part despite claims that it can, clearances and tolerances, relief dimensions that come from standardized tables that do not actually reflect the reality where metal or composites or plastic must be made to function. It's like the cognitive interpretive structure of reading print to understand a topic: reading requires a working knowledge and conversance with the language to take the flat text, translate it into images the cognitive can interpret, and understand the meaning of the images evoked in the process. Seeing video of the same images bypasses the cognitive interpretive functions, going straightaway to the evocation without the context or complex cognitive struggle of interpretation, much less the nuance of multi-dimensional meaning the text is capable of communicating. So too the use of image-based digital systems to construct meaning do not necessarily demonstrate that learning has been mastered. We who look over the shoulder of the student to see the outcome of the digital process check the box on the graduation chit and move the young person along because in our cognitive perception, the student has mastered the content because the outcome appears to mimic our mastery. Jumping to the images appears to produce the same outcome as the text-cognitive method when nothing of the sort has taken place... When working with materials and processes that have physical properties, the student, well versed in solely the digital is at a disadvantage when made to compete with another having skills with the materials and the tools to produce the outcome of the original digital design. Experience with something like heat transfer and its effect on the dimensionality, surface and interior modification of tool steel or aluminum alloy has a certain vicarious understanding through the view of the flat screen, but the student with the gloved hands on the actual tongs, pulling the steel from the furnace, heat-treating it to specifications, and then machining the part to spec will be more expert than the merely digitally prepared student, and possess skills that will make him/her more employable... Much has been said of late about our loss of eminence as a global power when standing among other states, a discussion beyond my perview, better left to those more qualified. My insistence is that students go from the public learning institution with skills for the digital, the intellectual, and the practical so as not to lose their personal eminence among others when competing for work in the world outside our school fenceline. It's these employability skills we have lost in the current dispensation of public secondary education to the point where other nations are drinking our milkshake, and we must move to get this practical-focused education back.
Aug232011
POSTED AT 12:52 AM
An excerpt from the chapter Set Up To Fail
From the upcoming book
All Thumbs But to deal now with the kid who is in a time of life where he (because it's mostly a he) can't sit still for the chemistry coursing through every neuron of his body and his predisposition to motion. He can't sit still and regiment himself to the Numbers because he's on the high end of the activity curve. Nothing wrong with that, no dysfunction, no psychological defects, intelligent and likable, maybe even polite enough, but unable to attend. Assertive/strong willed/feisty or pushy in the way young boys are who need to act out the interiors of their head in order to have peace in their body, but not of the bullying sphere. The kid who trends to hyperactivity, who needs stimulation, who cannot learn without movement is still within the curve, just on the high end and again, nothing defective; in fact, he's probably more intelligent than you, thereby his boredom with the standard regimented program. This kid needs activity to keep his body in check while we fill his mind with the useful stuff he needs to keep employment and live life within society. He has a place with the rest of us instead of being labeled a behavior problem and pushed out to the principle's office or sent out with the custodian to pick up papers on the quad. Like attempting to tune up a dragster engine with a rubber mallet, discipline and structure, learning that is activity based for this high activity student has become a quashy, blunt instrument less able to tweak the nuances. In former times, this kid would have been given activities and work to employ his body, his hands, structured in a framework that taught skills having immediate meaning, and discipline of a sort that was real and immediate, though the fastidious set today would call it harsh, maybe even brutal. 1 As time and our trend to social niceties have evolved, to insulate the other thirty five or forty students in class, this kid gets put out; The result for him (or her, an increasing subset due to the digital connectivity factor) is early burn-out, disinterest, intentional acting out that later gets us one more put out on the street with no skills, little motivation to interact constructively with society. We have gotten into "the use of psychiatric drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural bent toward action, the better to 'keep things on track,' as the school nurse says..." 2 so they can sit still, be calm, attend, raise their hand in polite accommodation, and act like the teachers want them to act so the teacher has an orderly, on-task classroom and accommodate the larger volumes of students. To medicate is the logical next step to coerce these young people into the fit of our modern classroom model and attend without the nuisance of constant motion and distraction when we ourselves have so many to attend to and keep on the track to the score taking at the end of the school term. That most teachers are women, young girls attend better than boys, and we (teachers) like the calmer attention dynamic better because it fits our perception of the model classroom are subjects for another whole volume of discordant discussion on how public primary and secondary education is bent toward the kinds of teaching and learning for which girls are most able. The arguments are not new, but the measurable dysfunction trends in learning and the opinions of the people in front of the students lay bare the mistaken evolution to the feminization of education: "... it is boy's aggressive and rationalist nature - perceived by many educators as a behavioral disorder - that's getting so many of them in trouble in the feminized schools. Their problem: They don't want to be girls....As a result, boys have become disengaged. Only 65% earned high school diplomas in the class of 2003, compared with 72% of girls. Girls now so outnumber boys on most university campuses across the country that some schools have even begun to practice affirmative action for boys in admissions." 3 Displace your indignation at this appallingly cheek, possibly demeaning-sounding idea for a minute. Ask any teacher with some longevity in the system if girls and boys have different styles of learning and need "differentiated" learning activities. What's the answer? Why are we attempting to press each gender into the same learning- style mold while talking tall about differentiation, and that if the process and outcome are truly, clearly examined, our practice is clearly more advantageous to one gender over the other? The trend now is for university graduates to be mostly women; women get better grades while earning more graduate degrees than men, and in some places the ratio of women to men on campus is two or three to one, saying a great deal about equality of access, Title IX, attitude shifts in education and access within the wider culture. 4 There should be no buts or distraction from providing every benefit to all who apply themselves, so think not that I disparage any group or individual that works hard and earns what they achieve. Girls tend to be more studious than boys, our classroom literal and observable evidence demonstrates it, and girls should be rewarded for hard work and devotion no matter the circumstances. What has changed to cause the measurable deficiencies in the OG 5 is that we have cut back that which boys once excelled in to make them fit into a learning style and into learning topics where a sizable minority of the OG will not have success. This thirty/forty year trend in the loss of the technical and vocational, things at which boys excelled, sliced off an avenue for success that has no substitute component in the current iteration of public education. In what direction though are these boys/men heading if they neither complete a university degree nor get job skills? How many stories do you have of the people in your circle of acquaintance who have young men that cannot get a career off the ground? 6 What is the gender of the majority of those who prey upon others, are occupants of our prisons? 7 Previously, I commended ExxonMobil for girl engineering day 8 and still do, despite the obvious move on their part to burnish reputations and feed the squeaky wheels of their HR and PR departments. Back at school the next day, boys are asking: "how come we couldn't go too?" I knew it was coming, and on the bus ride home the previous day floated a few believable answers to myself: "It's because only about twenty five percent of engineers are women, 9 it's because girls don't normally have an interest in this kind of stuff," "because the refinery could only send three busses." The looks on their faces were truly sad; they knew in their hearts this kind of gig was their domain and didn't mind sharing, but they already knew better than to complain about the obvious unfairness of the situation; they had been enculturated since the beginning to understand that girls get special treatment, underscored by the weight and force of the educational establishment, and no matter how they felt about it, nothing would change the situation. But they put their heads down and go away from every one of these not-so-subtle slights with an understanding they are second class in comparison, in the instructional energy invested in them. Connect this second-class-citizenship affect promoted all the way through the system, and the actual status with the under-representation of men on the university campus; add in the component of lack of job skills and unemployment status: these data points merely need the connecting lines attached to create the picture of this skewed gender dynamic. Despite this unbalanced gender component permeating public education, the focus is still on every student's ability to sit for the Tests and types of education that fit into preparation for a university course of study. Shifting focus a bit, there is yet another but more subtle series of points that should go in the background of the skewed picture: Why is it that single-gender classrooms are being adopted by innovative educators in more and more places, despite laments from the multiculturalist crowd that this is a step back to Plessy VS Ferguson, 10 Neo-Jim Crow or a Taliban-model instructional scheme? Put this young boy in a classroom where half the kids look and smell distracting, advertising their new parts, trying on new roles, with teachers that quash the energy level, this usually male kid has trouble paying attention to anything academic or intellectual. So what that the rest of his life he will have to live and work in this multi-sexual-stimulus-overloaded environment? For a limited time, for the sake of getting the basics of literacy and numeracy, single gender in the instructional setting works. So what that you can't measure the learning outcomes of single gender in such a way as to prove the "separatist" theory? Teachers and administrators, like the supreme court justice say: "I know it when I see it," an unscientific quantification system for sure, but far more warm and human than the Jadis' bodice 11 metrics we're compressed into that must express learning quality or quantity. An experienced teacher or administrator can walk into a classroom unannounced and see learning taking place or not, whether structure in the process is there or not, students are interacting with the topic/subject or giving you "smiley face," throwing chaff. 12 Can you force a metric on that moment? How many of those moments can possibly be measured? At the end of the term when the stats come back, you might be able to quantify single-gender as a proviso in the scores, you might not, but the students are still interested in learning, still engaged with the process. 13 Maybe it's a matter of the filter through which the majority of educators see the world: Come school costume day on All Hollow's Eve, young girls will pull out the fishnets with the stilettos, the minimalist maid uniforms, look in the mirror and comment to one another "how cute" they look, and off to class with or without parental oversight. Boys see the same view and begin gnawing their knuckles based on their interior chemical distillations and the distorted images fed by the media they're permitted to consume on the small and large screens of their lives that serve to amplify their pheromone soaked and jangled neural networks. Push these images or something only slightly moderate into the classroom and you get distraction and all manner of acting out by both boys and girls to attract attention, behavior teachers must attempt to manage before instruction is capable of taking place. Girls will see the body images as style, boys will see through the images, and the more exposure of flair and distinctive appearance, especially during instructional hours, the less ability for both boys and girls to focus the eyes and affect elsewhere, in this case, the matter under instruction. In schools where uniforms are compulsory, gang affiliation and student safety against violence in the community is partly the motivating factor to uniformity of appearance. Style, based on economic purchasing power many times drives the conversations that attempt to remove as much as possible the distraction/distinction element in appearances due to the ability of some to spend endlessly on clothing and style, and the necessity of others to shop at yard sales and second-hand shops, a reflection of economic power relationships playing out in schools that affect the student's ability to focus on instruction. The balance between wearing nothing and great swathes of canvas is a question, based on context, the context of this discussion that being at the school should point everyone's eyes and affect to learning, minimizing distractions, but the arguments will always come back around to focus on personal liberties and the ability to express oneself by whatever means available, be it speech, comportment, appearance. The current common values express a favoritism on the part of school personnel toward girls and their ability to express themselves in relation to their appearances; in contrast, the non-public school need have fewer debates on demanding style modification, and the growth thereby of private and home schooling, demonstrating the parent's desire to focus on instructional values over prevalent and base appearance values. Let a member of the OG show up at school in a muscle shirt or "tank top," he gets a T-shirt from the office; girls who show up likewise attired are given an unconscious perquisite, permitted access to the cheek-by-jowl multi-gender proximity necessary in so many classrooms. Yet we still wonder at boys' inability to focus on the learning tasks before them, the evidence being their lower test scores and absence percentages at the universities. Do you think he can concentrate on anything else but the images sitting around him? Do you really expect him to do otherwise, even as we continue to talk safe sex under the euphemism of making "healthy choices?" It may all come down to the power relationships at school, what kind of battles one is willing to take on for the sake of gender neutrality, a new meaning for the definition of "hostile sexual environment." 14 The appeal to common sense in relation to appearances has little significance among the educationist intelligentsia; it's too amorphous, not scientific enough; lack of university presence on the part of men, attributed to so small a thing as distraction attributed to female clothing style is absurdist fodder for the night's talk shows, but it might just be that simple. Who's willing to do the research on this one? It's too icky, full of connotations, too qualitative for the research-minded, and the results, though measurable, evolve from classroom anecdotes of the (mostly) short people sitting in the chairs. For many years, the new normalcy where teachers, especially men, need not speak up and defend the OG for fear of earning a label like "sexist" or be suspected of harboring unseemly intentions is subtly enforced, and any attempt to describe this highly charged environment "reads badly in cold print." 15 Adults rarely look at the world from the young person's perspective meanwhile promoting adult expectations, forcing young people deliberately or by default into roles and rules adults have long endured and have experience with without considering the consequences of imposing this perspective on the less mature. If I really wanted to be a bomb thrower, I could claim this favoritism in the education environment is a subtle, permissive sexual harassment, a demonstration of genderist power and sexual energy directed against boys who are given little guidance with the ability to manage these images, permitted no voice in these matters, offered no preferences, given little help or protection by means of different modes of learning that appeal to their natural inclinations. But that claim, I agree, would be a little over the top.
Notes: 1 " New Mexico is now the 31st state to outlaw corporal punishment in public schools." http://www.detentionslip.org/2011/04/breaking-new-mexico-outlaws-corporal.html# Accessed 4/8/11 2 Crawford, Matthew, Shop Class as Soulcraft, An inquiry into the value of work, The Penguin Press, N.Y. 2009, p. 73 3 This from 2006 in a Los Angeles Unified school. Think the trends have declined since? How schools cheat boys, by Gerry Garibaldi, Los Angeles Times opinion, 8/6/06 4 ..."women now outnumber men applying to and graduating from college so much so that it appears some colleges are giving male applicants an admissions boost..... What's happening with the education of U.S. boys? Why are so few of them applying to and graduating from college? Theories and arguments abound. Some say that boys are more active and thus less able to sit still for long periods - and as a result, more likely to be categorized as having attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder or needing special education." Colleges' gender gap, Los Angeles Times editorials, 1/25/10, p. A18 5 OG: My daughter has taken of late to call boys the "Other Gender." 6 "...the idleness rate is rising: The share of Americans younger than 24 neither at work nor in school has steadily increased since 2007." An upside-down work world, by Ronald Brownstein, Los Angeles Times, 6/10/11,p. A17 7 On average, the United States spends about $9,600 a year per K-12 student. We spend about $22,600 per prison inmate. "Increasing the high school completion rate by just one percent for all men.... would save the country up to $1.4 billion per year in reduced costs from crime. Sixty five percent of convicts are dropouts, and lack of education is one of the strongest predictors of criminal activity." The Arkansas Intervention by Adam Hall, The Journal, Transforming Education Through Technology, June/July 2011, p. 24 8 See the chapter three, Pilots, Planes, and RATs 9 As of 3/10 the percentage was actually 27: Women engineers and scientists still making inroads, by Judy Peet, NJ.com, 3/21/10 "Women... received 62 percent of all the biology undergraduate degrees, 52 percent of all the chemistry degrees and nearly half of all the mathematics and ocean science degrees awarded in 2006, according to industry statistics." http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2010/03/women_engineers_and_scientists.html Accessed 8/22/11 10 The shibboleth "Separate But Equal" has acquired such a baggage train, promotes so many unassailable images, that any program, any agenda attempting to make distinctions between people is destined for the tar and feathers. 11 Forgive me for substituting a euphemism for a vulgar simile; I remind my students to avoid coarse language everywhere possible and express themselves succinctly. Jadis: The White Witch looming large in Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia.12 Fred Jones, in one of the best practical application books on classroom instruction, motivation, and discipline I've encountered, uses the term "smiley face" to describe a student's attempt to divert attention from the instructional task at hand. Tools for Teaching, by Fred Jones, Fredric H. Jones & Associates, Inc., Santa Cruz, CA., pp. 156, 189 Chaff: Military aircraft pilots engaging an enemy will release clouds of aluminized paper or other metallic objects to confuse radar sensors and obfuscate their intended purpose. 13 Grades and standardized tests have become the ultimate assessment of student learning in our current educational world and the only measure having validity to the non-educator. The below referenced study on student engagement with learning, how students produce work that does not engage them in order to merely get the grade contrasts with being fully engaged with the subject but where achievement is not necessarily demonstrated by good grades or academic achievement measurement: Student's 'Episodic' Engagement, 1/22/10, Inside Higher Ed., Doug Lederman http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/22/engage Accessed 5/23/11 14 Fraternity Row, by Charoltte Allen, Los Angeles Times, 6/8/11, p A 21 15 Korda, Michael, Hero, The life and legend of Lawrence of Arabia, Harper Collins, N.Y., 2010, p. 303
Jun052011
POSTED AT 10:18 PM
An excerpt from the chapter Numbers, in the upcoming book
All Thumbs
Relevance and Rigor, two of many words currently flipped about with a great deal of energy on the part of the stakeholders are inescapably people dependent; the implementation of our desire for rigor and relevance depends on the motivation and drive of the people standing in front of the classroom. Those with high desire to serve, high motivation to excellence, will do so as long as they are not inhibited by the in-place educational structures that countermand their efforts. If there is rigor and relevance, it can be imposed on the system via dictate, but the people with motivation and interest have to enforce it. It is a fight; against the limited time and larger numbers, against recalcitrant or jaded students, parents who loose their feral children on the system, the wider corrosive cultural influences that trend opposite to attention to scholarship. Who is willing to stand up from the crowd of mediocrity and take the hits that come from standing cross-purposes to the trend toward common, base values that trend to equalized outcomes? It's like that story of the cane and the wheat field:
"You remember how one of the Greek dictators (they called them "tyrants" then) sent an envoy to another dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practice, in a sense, "democracy". But now "democracy" can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to 'Be Like Stalks.' " 1
Who wants to stand out when the union bosses encourage "democracy" among rank and file, where innovation is suspect, a divergent voice promoting divergent practice connotates a loose cannon?
Outsiders to the daily machinations inside the educational sphere look at this as merely a financial transaction: Money for goods and services, like having your house termited or the drains routed, a grooved attitude among stakeholders without actual classroom experience, who believe outstanding performance should be rewarded with commensurate compensation.
This purely mechanistic perception common to commerce and industry that personal performance is dependent on personal gain, without a visceral, affective understanding of the larger struggles within the educational environment adds to the task load of the people standing up at the front of the classroom. The standards, the numbers, the assessment all depend on the people: First of all parents of the student, the student, and the willingness of the teacher to serve both, with backing by decent school site administrators who have the student/teacher/parent relationship in primary focus. The willingness of parents to parent, willingness of the student to be directed, willingness of the teacher to serve both, the willingness of the administrative system to support the relationships is a description of a perfect world that does not, never will exist; so the move to more rigor, more relevance pushed throughout the system to enforce what is not freely given, to get the outcome we desire.
Despite the proposal to pay more for the teaching skills in highest demand, more money will merely obtain a contract with values motivated by the financial, not the human, the compassionate, and reinforce the status quo. Would I like an extra twenty grand a year? Sure; I could fix my termite-eaten garage. Will that extra cash make me a better teacher? No. More motivated than I currently am to get all students up to the "bar?" Hardly. It would probably make me more sensitive to minding my P's & Q's, avoid doing anything even mildly offensive so as not to lose the plush gig. Out will go the challenging to excellence, of giving the "C" or "D" for pedagogical uses, the willingness to provoke parents into bringing their best game to being parents as leaders, not followers. I'll want more and more to "be like stalks."
"Pedagogically, you might want to impress on a student the miserable state of his mind. You might want to improve the student by first crushing him, as then you can recruit his pride to the love of learning. You might want to reveal to him the chasm separating his level of understanding from the thinkers of the ages. You do this not out of malice, but because you sense rare possibilities in him, and take your task to be that of cultivating in the young man (or woman) a taste for the most difficult studies. Such studies are likely to embolden him against timid conventionality, and humble him against the self-satisfaction of the age, which he wears on his face. These are the pedagogical uses of the "D." But give someone a low grade, and he is likely to press upon you the fact that his admission to law school hangs in the balance." 2
This people dependency portion within education reveals the The Dark Side of excellence in teaching, when this individual gives up, for whatever reason, the thing that motivates and inspires them. It could be anything; a series of unfortunate events, personal shocks, the realization that all their hard work has been taken for granted by the administrative structures, the false accusation by a student on any one of a number of charges, the continuous emotional exhaustion when confronted by the great need sitting before them they cannot possibly fill, the economic struggle to make ends meet when shopping the resume will get a better personal financial picture, or just plain old aging and retirement.
That one person who started the program, who keeps the ball in play, who puts in the extra time, the personal money, who applies her/his creativity to intractable problems is the moving force propelling outstanding learning, but when they're gone or thrown in the towel, they've been worn like old shoes, what then? The long slide to mediocrity begins, as people with less talent, less experience, motivation, interest take over. As I've said, you need not be a rocket scientist to be a teacher; merely willing; it's that one individual willing to make the difference, who stands up when others sit, and when she/he's gone, the vacuum sucks in mediocrity to fill it unless there is another individual willing and bold enough to fill that space and take on the world. When the willing, for whatever reason, go elsewhere, the not-so-willing must take over and then you see the scripted systems, the efforts to command no child be left behind, the union contractual mandates to protect the marginal and incompetent, the efforts to add incentive pay for modest gains.
Teachers of teachers say you need three things to be great, another "rule of thirds:"
Education
Experience
Talent/inherent skill/artistry
Any two will make you competent if you pour effort and desire and willingness to serve into it. To be great you need all three. 3 Any one by itself makes you:
A Loose cannon: Merely Inherent skill
An ice cube: Merely Education
A burned out husk Merely Experience
The greenest newbie teacher, straightaway from flipping the tassel from the right side of the mortarboard to the left, with great inherent skill, will still need ten thousand hours standing in front of the chairs and desks to become truly gifted in the trade, thus the claim that it takes four to six years to make a competent teacher. 4
1 The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis, Macmillan Publishing Company Inc., N.Y. 1961, p. 165
2 Shop Class As Soulcraft, An Inquiry Into The Value Of Work, by Matthew B. Crawford, © 2009, Penguin Press, N.Y. p. 146
3 Sharroky Holly, Associate Professor of Education, California State University, Dominguez Hills, Carson, CA., USA
4 A good source document for further study of "The superior quality of the experts' mental representations (that) allow them to adapt rapidly to changing circumstances and anticipate future events in advance:" Expert Performance and Deliberate Practice, An updated excerpt from Ericcson (2000)
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.html Accessed 6/4/11
Jan242011
POSTED AT 10:11 PM
Adolescents *
Adolescents are odd people. For an adult, sojourning with them is unsatisfactory unless one has patience wide and deep as the sea. They are slaves of their appetite, with no stamina of mind; drunkards for soda, milk or water, gluttons for pizza, shameless beggars of candy. They dream for weeks before and after their rare brushes with the opposite sex, and spend the intervening days titillating themselves and their hearers with bawdy tales. If the circumstances of their life gave them opportunity they would be sheer sensualists. Their strength is the strength of those segregated from the choices of the adult sphere: their intellectual poverty make them sophisticates of fashion and their cliquish mannerisms. If forced into adult decisions they will succumb like animals to its diseases, meanness, luxury, cruelty, crooked dealing, artifice; and, like their class of being, they will suffer them exaggeratedly for lack of inoculation.
If they suspect that we want to drive them either they are mulish or they go away. If we comprehend them, and give time and trouble to make things tempting to them, they will go to great pains for our pleasure. Whether the results achieved are worth the effort, no one can tell. High school teachers, accustomed to greater returns, would not, and, indeed, could not, spend the time, thought and tact lavished every day by parents and relatives for such meager ends. Adolescent processes are clear, adolescent minds move logically as our own, with nothing radically incomprehensible or different, except the premise; there is no excuse or reason, except our laziness and ignorance, whereby we could call them inscrutable or incomprehensible, or leave them misunderstood.
They will follow us, if we endure with them, and play the game according to their rules. The pity is, that we often begin to do so, and break down with exasperation and throw them over, blaming them for what is a fault in our own selves. Such strictures, like a general’s complaint of bad troops, are in reality a confession of our faulty foresight, often made falsely out of mock modesty to show that, though mistaken, we have at least the wit to know our fault.
* With apologies to T.E. Lawrence: Adapted and modified from Seven Pillars of Wisdom, A Triumph, pp. 219, 220, by T.E.Lawrence, © 1926, Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc. New York.
Dec202010
POSTED AT 11:29 PM
When was the last time you had to name something? Put a label on a product, a device, a process in order to profit from or create interest in it? Give a concept or an endeavor a recognizable idea representing a desirable outcome?
The name you put on a thing creates a picture in the mind of the beholder on the product or process or experience, or puts a buzz on the numerous networks or creates a sense of envy that motivates people to go out and get what you want them to get, putting power or influence or money in your pocket. Politicians and Advertisers and Chatterers have a knack for this, The Rich and Aspiring Rich since the Neolithic have known this and put it to use to create mind images of all those things we enjoy or think we enjoy, like Protection, Investment, Liposuction, being Rich, like Renewable Energy or Girls Gone Wild or Luxury.
Other names create images and visions that earn our criticism, like DDT and Chernobyl, Asbestos and molestation and Insider Trading. Merely saying the words, rolling them off the tongue makes you feel icky.
Think of all the connotations and the images created in your mind when I write this word: Stagecoach.... It has the sense of quaint, of old-fashioned, of history book imagery. "Vocational Education" also is one of those terms that create picturesque images and feelings.
The term "Vocation" has fallen out of use, as has that former term for cross-country mobility because the V word no longer works in current society, in orthodox education, in the world of educational preparation for the later work environment. The "V" word which for previous generations evoked a sense of suitability, stability, and fit for a particular individual in a line of work or trade or job type also defined one into a socio-economic compartment and those definitions now grate on our modern internal acceptable use policies.
Another but more religious-themed term is "Calling," the sense of "one's life work" or a sense that a higher power was/is ordering one's life to direct it in ways unregulated, unpermitted, involuntarily chosen against the will of our personal egalitarian sensibilities. As "higher powers" have been regulated by many in the intelligentsia to twelve-steppers and the superstitious, we avoid the use of the word. The term vocation, fellow traveler with the term calling, are both, borrowing the words of Reagan, "on the ash-heap of history." They will probably not rise again from having taken on connotations of lockstep regimentation and not-of-my-own-choice educational decision making.
Put the term "vocation" on a course of study, you will have visions in the minds of both speaker and listener of plumber's butt-cracks, sweaty and sun-burned guys digging ditches, factory drones making furniture in dust-filled sweat shops. The term envisions thirty or forty years standing at the same table moving parts from one bin to another, putting the same bolt in the same hole, turning it with the same wrench, with thirty minutes of lunch and the whistle to tell you when to take a shower.
The term as-was used no longer describes the world where we change jobs every five to seven years and move out of our house or apartment likewise. What parent wants that previous lifestyle and job for their kid? What teacher wants that for their students? The plumber though is making eighty grand (equivalent wages of the master-teacher), the ditch-digger operates a backhoe at two hundred fifty an hour with a half-day minimum, and the furniture maker, if he/she still exists here at all, still makes thirty thou a year, an unlivable wage in the California economy. Some things have not changed, but most have, though the perceptions of the educational stakeholder intelligentsia have remained fixed on the connotations behind the term Vocation, Industrial Arts, Career Technical, Shop Class (in its varying permutations- wood, auto, machine, etc.). Some in the educationist talking circles are coming around,† but most in the halls of academia keep the sweaty butt-crack vision firmly fixed in their minds, and it's those who have that old vision who hold the reins of this stagecoach that is public education.
The former personification of Vocational Education in America is an impact area littered with vast quantities of cast-off targets; there is tracking, there is marginalization from race, from socio-economic factors, from language deficiencies, from special education factors, from what we are calling now the ADD/ADHD set of kids. For whatever reason, the former form of Vocational Ed., Industrial Arts, Shopclass, had both the perception and the reality of marginalization despite it's ability to actually train and teach students to make, to have a productive and comfortable lifestyle. Due to the former and existing nomenclature we attach to this educational domain, it continues to suffer from maligned perceptions and continued eradication from our schools.
The current name of the transformed Vocational Education is now CTE or STEM. But it's not the same as it once was, nor should it be. As industries evolve, technical skills evolve with them, but the foundational knowledge base and elemental technical training will remain the same. Changing the name of the thing is merely a clever way to hide the fact that we are teaching, need to teach, topics that provide for a vocation for those young people who will never acquire that university parchment we hold dear. Changing the name neither changes the image nor the visualized workplaces the stakeholders have of what previously existed in this domain of public secondary education.
There's an argument among some of the educationist cud-chewers that if you learn a single trade, spend your time learning to do tasks within a single domain or type of work, you will be marginalized in a few years by the newest transformation, the newest supersession that will take the place of the trade-school-mentality single-topic method/course of study. What critics of this "vocational" domain of education don't see (usually because they have no skill with these kinds of work) is that the vocational topics are foundational, like the common Bachelor of Arts degree in one of the liberal, social, general studies: it's entree, a starting place and introductory track for progression into further studies, further training, further expansion of skills into specialist or even wider generalist skills and practice. For they are in actuality a practice, as some of the other professional domains are labeled, in that perfection of the skills is manifested in the practice of the skills; excellence in the doing is built upon repeated and continuous doing. Who wants that neophyte surgeon operating on one's brain? Who wants the neophyte mechanic changing out the brake pads on one's car? The effect of a botched job in either case is complementary.*
The so-called "wrench-turner" skills that fundamentally support the vehicle and transportation repair trades, the "green" technology trades, the institutional infrastructure trades, can be applied anywhere both now and in the future. The kid in high school auto shop, learning the nuances of the internal combustion engine, the dual-fuel engines, the electric motor theory and methods of control, and systems of fuel/electric vehicles can take these basic skills and apply them to wind turbines, to air conditioner/heating systems, to computer repair, to high voltage electrical distribution systems, to installation and repair of low voltage control and high voltage switching systems associated with direct solar electricity producing arrays; this list is woefully inadequate. The basic wrench-turner and fabricator and trouble-shooter skills are what prepare young people for careers in middle-class wage earning jobs, the very jobs the chattering classes are in such angst about losing in this country.
Yes, we have parked much of the manufacturing we consume offshore to avoid high wages and environmental regulation here. But that worm will turn and we will no longer be able to compete with the consumers in the same markets from which we trade due to their own increasing rates of consumption. We will again soon need to produce the goods we outsourced, and with what skill base? The educators have eliminated the production of these skills.
"Economic inequality is rising in the United States. The rich have gotten richer, the poor have stayed poor, and families in the middle have seen their incomes stagnate." ** Doyle McManus has nailed several of the issues and causes to this problem, but leaves out one salient component. The tripartite of decent education, stable families, "few children out of wedlock," (citing current research to that effect) makes sense to everyone uncompromised by educationist viewpoints promoting the normalization of contrary views so popular now among social transformist educators.*** What gets left out of the educational algebra is the factor of the vocational as a useful educational domain for those students who do not fit the curricular mold we would massage them into.
That the teaching and learning of vocational and career-oriented skills lack luster with the educator-intelligentsia is truly an image problem, possibly a marketing problem for further action, but despite our plumber/ditch digger imagery, we must turn back to the teaching of the career, the technical, the vocational in public secondary education in order to give the marginalized and so called "at risk" students an opportunity at something resembling the middle class. Putting the Vocational, the Career Technical back into the mix of public secondary education and changing the A through G requirements**** to make these courses legitimate for both high school graduation and university entrance is truly one of the biggest missing expressions of the educational algebra.
So the rich get richer; it's always been thus and will always be, so we can shut up and can our envious rhetoric about the guy or gal who has a nickel more than we do, or continue to create barriers against what we aspire to, that distract us from being effective in the classroom; inspiring and teaching skills that enable the current crop of young people to expand their intrinsic interests and skills so they can join that middle class of which we are so enamored, that the talking heads are so knotted up over.
† Should Public Schools Provide Students with Vocational Opportunities? By Grace Chen, Public School Review, May 7, 2009, publicschoolreview.com/articles/102 accessed 1/14/11
* Though surgeons and vehicle mechanics will never have equalized wages (be clear that I do not argue here that they should), the mechanics are catching up, due to supply and demand forces resulting from lack of competent mechanics related to the absence of what was once taught at the public secondary level.
** The Upward Mobility Gap By Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times Op-Ed, 1/2/11 latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mcmanus-twous-20110102,0,5332722.column Accessed 1/2/11
*** See John Searle's quotes of honest leftists who "find it tempting to try to turn the curriculum into an instrument of social transformation." The Storm Over the University, The New York Review of Books, 12/6/1990
ditext.com/searle/searle1.html Accessed 1/4/11
Searle made this critique in 1990, and in the subsequent twenty years, the political term "progressive" has become mainstream in many areas. Witness the rise of homeschooling where parents bail out of the public system due to activities on the part of educators that swerve off the topics of literacy and numeracy to invest their social transformist opinions on the students.
**** State of California university entrance requirements driving curricular decisions and choice of classes for high school graduation. See a description of the University of California requirements from their website here:
"a-g" Subject Area Requirements, http://www.ucop.edu/a-gGuide/ag/a-g/ Accessed 1/4/11
Aug102010
POSTED AT 09:53 PM
Good educators tend to be intuitive people, and when confronted with something that runs counter to intuition, recoil a bit. The art and practice of education requires a deft hand and mind which will observe how a student is doing on any given day or on any given assignment, and when he/she sees the student struggling to understand, gives a hint or a leading question to inspire the student to the next level of understanding. For educators, real teaching and learning that lasts a lifetime is a practice. Just as in medicine or law or another professional art, it is an applicable skill, learned and applied in the doing, and successful or poor results sometimes depend on variables beyond the control of the educator.
A thousand times we have seen this happen in our own classrooms: we have a sense about it: we intuitively know that a student is having a difficult time learning a subject or skill. We see the situation unfolding before us, and we go there where the student is to help them overcome the difficulty, and even give up the answer or the solution or the information, or directly instruct if we think it will help the student down the road to success.
Caring people that most teachers aspire to be, we are in angst when we observe students struggling to understand, and fight ourselves sometimes to up and blurt out or hand out or give away that which the student wants. Some of the motivations behind that are good: we do not want the student to become discouraged and give up the fight for knowledge, and we will move mountains on occasion to see that a mediocre student gets the spark which will inspire them on to success.
There is within us an inherent revulsion at letting a student dangle out there without a helping hand to guide them and enfold them within the larger shadow of our kindness. In theory we admire the struggle for knowledge and the sometimes monumental effort required to master a body of skills and expertise, but in reality cringe when we see fumbling students suffering, either from our designs or their own, to acquire mastery of the theme at hand.
The exceptionally needy students are both the most satisfying and infuriating to work with. Some will go on and on, pestering you with needless questions merely to get your attention, and others will bluster and pose for the same end. How to inspire both to master themselves and the topic?
Our intuition in this matter demands our action. But what if we deny the indulgence of this sharply honed intuition? What if we let the student suffer a bit? Why not let them endure pain for awhile for the greater good of mastery over the subject or skill at hand?
Yoyo Ma, the cellist, once described one of his teachers as coming to the point of letting go of teaching him a specific piece of music. The teacher said, "I'm not going to teach you this; You have to learn it yourself."
Teachers must come to the point where they let go of the student in order for the student to learn on their own terms. Once the student has mastered a skill set and demonstrated proficiency, the teacher must go the next step with the student and permit or maybe even pull a little coercion to make the skill or the knowledge the student's own; to add the student's interpretation to it. The teacher can advise and comment, but the student can now take the body of knowledge or the set of skills and make her/himself independent with it.
But there is also the danger of turning the student lose too quickly, before the critical faculties are fully established. Again, it's a fine line the teacher balances in their practice to produce a capable and confident student.
We talk at great length about self-esteem and how to inspire it in our charges. But no-one knows what self esteem is. It takes on a new definition at each person’s telling, and is dependent on someone other than oneself; in effect, our self esteem is at the mercy of others and their capriciousness.
I think self-respect is a finer concept. Self respect comes of our own doing or lack thereof, and is dependent on our own action or inaction. Low or no self respect is a matter of choice, whether bred into us or chosen, and each individual continues to make choices which reinforce low, modest, or high self respect.
Many many young people have no self respect because they have not been trained (bred) into it, or have had it ripped away from them. It is not a thing inherent, like the air we breathe, or the existence of gravity. Respect for self must be educated in a disciplined manner into a young person and reinforced repeatedly by means of example and observation, so much of which is lacking currently in adults.
As Scott Peck said, “Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them? Do we want to teach our children to solve them?"* Solving problems means putting off procrastination, facing issues and dealing with the suffering and possibly pain inherent to the solution in order to gain mastery, new skills, self respect.
Letting our students suffer; allowing them to dangle out there a bit for the purpose of mastery of the objective, and then encouraging them to produce even more inspires in them the self respect and character required to survive and excel in life.
Having no challenges or difficulties or suffering to overcome makes one complacent, lazy, overconfident, and many times lends to the acquisition of the expectation that the world owes one that which they desire without making the effort to go and acquire it by work or sacrifice.
Everyday we choose.
*The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth by M. Scott Peck, M.D., Simon & Schuster N.Y., © 1978 p. 15
Aug092010
POSTED AT 08:13 PM
The Silver Bullet
We Americans, so impetuous and impatient, are currently looking for the next silver bullet to fix the multiple deficiencies in American public education.
That there are deficiencies is not in doubt, from miserable high school graduation rates to dismal university completion rates to the inability of young people to find and keep employment, to the complaints on the part of employers of limited skills on the part of new, young hires: multiple indicators demonstrate a great deal of failure in public education.
The NCLB set of national legislation is the culmination of thirty years of struggle with declining student performance, and as we go into the next iteration of this massive sea-change in educational direction, we cast about to put in the missing piece that will do a permanent fix on the downward trend in test scores. The new missing piece is incentive pay for teachers.
Teacher performance pay for higher student test scores is all the rage at present and currently in style with the chattering classes, based on assumptions that giving more cash to teachers who can demonstrate more learning on the part of students will put the fix on our downward spiral. "Call it 'incentivizing,' as the education experts do, or 'combat pay,' as they do in the trenches. It's more than dangling money to lure teachers in. It's a way to reward the very best teachers, financially and professionally." 1
The concept of incentive pay, founded on industry practices based on the factory assembly line/production model is that more and verifiably higher quantity/quality production equals a better product, which should in turn return more compensation to the assembly line employee. It's not an esoteric argument; it's pervasive and well-understood; attempting to implement such a scheme in the classroom just defies the reality that is teaching and learning.
The generally held assumptions are that a good teacher, motivated, experienced, and well trained, will produce like students. The perception is that you can pour in all the right ingredients in the proper proportions and get a standard outcome within a standard deviation in the allotted time frame.
But incentive pay for teachers is not a new recipe; it's merely the latest proposition in a cavalcade of attempted fixes- here are a few current and former silver bullet strategies; you decide if they have worked or not:
-- More intensive and comprehensive teacher training: This would seem to be a good strategy to help teachers operate the assembly line more efficiently, so that when Joey or Janey student comes down the line with some learning difficulty/deficiency, the proper component will be installed by the teacher that will correct the deficiency.
-- Differentiation: The practice on the part of teachers of tailoring an education plan for each individual student, or for small groups of students of like learning status (within a larger classroom setting) so that they each learn at a pace commensurate with their learning levels and abilities.
-- Test scores as assessments to identify student deficiencies: In keeping with the trend of more scientific assessments that should (in theory) lead to more/better differentiated education for any particular student, assessments have become an endless compilation of data on student progress and performance, and the information can be massaged multiple ways to get the data points needed to help students learn.
-- Scripted teaching/earning methods: Dictating uniform student learning strategies toward universal outcomes has become popular of late, and these programs focusing on making sure all students are getting the same type, style, and quality of education at the same time, despite the individual student's location in the city or state, or on the socio/economic status of the student, seem to be a good thing.
Scripted systems also would seem to ameliorate deficiencies in teacher training and experience, as your average Joe teacher, on the job for a short time, can deliver instruction as well as veteran Jane with ten years in the classroom. At least, that's the theory behind the most regimented scripted systems.
-- The movement toward university preparation for all students: It's a fine thing, assuaging our egalitarian sensibilities. The soaring rhetoric that all students should have access to a university degree brings out the best of our intentions to do our best for each and every student despite any difficulties or obstacles inherent to the student or the home or school environment.
-- Multidisciplinary methods: Throwing in the kitchen sink to broaden and deepen curriculum understanding seems like a good thing. Adding many different learning activities to accommodate different learning abilities and styles, combining many disciplines to illustrate the topic at hand are all good things. The recent installation of "Hip Hop High" 2 that focused on media arts to communicate the broader high school curriculum is an example of this trend.
-- Free and Reduced Lunches: Hungry students do not learn as well as students with proper nutrition in their little bodies, and feeding needy students at school for free or at a reduced price seems like a good extension of public resources that will enable more students to do better at school without the distraction of hunger.
-- Multiculturalist focus and protections: No bullying is a good thing; not having to fear fellow students in the classroom or on school grounds makes for safer learning environments that help students focus their attention on learning. Language, cultural, religious, genderist, national, racial enclaves where students can gather for camaraderie and commiseration should also help students be more comfortable and confident at school without fear of harassment.
-- Health care: Student medical and health maintenance at school has become the purview of those who believe parents do not have the intelligence or ability/capability to provide for their children. Unfortunately, as teachers and students must now fend off more often lice, bedbugs, MRSA infections, and other close contact vermin and pathogens, more medical attention during school hours would seem to make sense. 3
"Choice" issues as curricular values fall under this topic as well, as do sex education and prophylactic distribution with or without parental consent. 4
-- More technological applications: To engage student interest and captivate student attention from the multiple streams of competing media, we have moved to instituting the latest techno apps in the classroom. The intent behind the apps is to deliver instruction more efficiency in a way that will hold student interest, to assess student learning, (as listed above) to communicate with the other stakeholders, to make the mundane chores more convenient and take less time.
Unfortunately, too many variables exist that throw the educational production line out of calibration, and one of those is waste: public education is an expensive, messy business, full of waste on many levels, and this "messiness" is a daily factor incumbent to the process. As a teacher, it's just accepted, and you move on. You seldom see an immediate return on the investment of time and resources, so higher pay for more of the same will work for those who are in the system for the paycheck, the work schedule, the pension.
When you consider teacher bonus pay tied to test scores, another difficulty deciding who gets the cash is that you cannot possibly be consistent with applying the data because of the uncontrolled variables, the messiness. This is why student test scores are so dicy as an indicator of student competence. It's difficult to measure qualitative data due to the huge numbers of variables outside the control of the indices you use to measure, like a test or one-time observation of student achievement. Consider a few variables:
*Students unprepared for learning on arrival at the school:
Early age push-off to enter school, leaving students always at the bottom end of the cohort, with perennial immature skill sets throughout their educational career
*Parents unable or unwilling to provide stable relationships in which to provide student emotional and/or physical stability, which in turn degrades focus on education
*Teacher task load:
Class sizes that prohibit individual student/teacher interaction
Time consumed by technology innovation and obsolescence
More educational preparation, credentialing, training
*The focus and movement toward university preparation for all students that prevent low students from keeping up with the mainstream, affecting the ability to deliver instruction at the pace required by the state
*Unions:
Policies, procedures, buffers that protect the incompetent/destructive
Adversarial attitudes despite common goals
Financial contributions by unions to individuals/organizations that protect the political and policy-making status quo
Compensation/work rules issues taking precedence over instruction
*The elimination of classes/courses and whole programs that once kept students interested in school, what we are now calling "enrichment"
*Cultural attitudes that encourage resistance to authority:
Enculturated attitudes that resist or trend away from organized and orderly instructional delivery and toward the individual as the center of the learning universe at the expense of others
*Cultural assumptions fed by media, that encourage economic, social pressures that distract from education. Examples:
Social media and small-screen time consumption endeavors
Advertising focused on appearances over substance leading to exhibitionist choices in clothing and behaviors
Personal lifestyle focused on commodity acquisition and exhibition
*Cultural attitudes resisting education that demonstrate excellence:
Elimination of competition that reinforces excellence
Enforced group efforts and activities that pulls down high achievers
Grade and certificate inflation for personal esteem purposes
The perceived stratification between "blue/white collar" work 5
*Institution of new or experimental programs that raise expectations, but for one reason or another, do not bring the expectations to fruition*
The silver bullet of incentive pay for teachers does not affect to solve any of the few above mentioned entrenched trends, because the problems have accumulated over the last several decades, and dismantling them, if it's even possible, will take decades more, with cultural and political knock-down drag-outs all along the way.
If you can control the variables, as in determining which students the school will accept based on prior performance, if you have the ability to acquire motivated and experienced teachers, if the demographic on which the student population is based controls for minimal impact of the above listed variables, teacher incentive pay works. Google for the research literature and see what you get.
The more pay for better performance model works as an incentive for the assembly line employee where production or piece-work methods of compensation can produce verifiable, demonstrable results in the highly controlled and methodical environment on the shop or manufacturing floor, but for education, not so. This is a job that cannot be left at the job; it's personal, emotional, dynamic, temperamental, idiosyncratic. Why do you think teachers get two months off in the summer? It's to emotionally recover; get over the loss of of the hundred fifty or so people you came to know so minutely, put your brain and heart and feelings back in your body and get ready to go at it again for another ten months.
If there's a silver bullet that will fix public education, it's not just one that will bring repair to education but many, and most have little to do with school. One very short list:
-Be less self serving, more self-sacrificing- On the part of all stakeholders, release attitudes and long-held agendas and antagonisms that work against student learning.
-Have less desire for the material stuff, more desire for the relational stuff.
-Be prepared to think and be, instead of to merely react and do, resisting the urges that turn us into reflexive responders to advertising.
-Create relationships that are stable and long term, instead of focused on what can be got for merely personal, individual satisfaction/gratification.
-More face to face relationships as a counterweight to digital relationships.
-We are a culture with Western roots, founded on principles put in place and proved over millennia. Acknowledge these in-place facts and act and teach accordingly, because our cultural, political, and economic freedoms are built upon this model, and it's an exception to what came before and what exists elsewhere.
-Accept people for who and what they are, despite differences, inherited or acquired. Protected enclaves, no matter the definition or political gravitas, divide us and work against the freedoms, as individuals and a culture, we hold dear.
There is real work ahead, difficult work that requires effort and sacrifice, patience and devotion. Are we, as a culture, up to the task?
1 First, hire the best teachers: New schools are gorgeous, but who's in the classroom matters more, by Sandy Banks, Los Angeles Times, p. A2
2 Hip Hop High--
The Academy for Recording Arts, a school operated under charter from first the Centinela Valley Union High School District in Hawthorne, CA, and then the Hawthorne School District, that focused on intensive media and recording arts curriculum:
http://www.pr.com/press-release/50541
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-hiphophigh-20100620,0,1425793,full.story
http://www.dailybreeze.com/ci_15380630
3 http://www.ghsa.net/node/641
http://www.cdc.gov/features/mrsainschools/
4 http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-us-condoms-grade-school,0,1224906.story
5 Shopclass as Soulcraft, An Inquiry Into The Value Of Work, by Matthew B. Crawford, © 2009, Penguin Press, NY, pp 31, 32
Apr212010
POSTED AT 11:11 PM
In the Emergency Room or at the accident site or on the scene of a
natural disaster there is the medical practice of Triage, where the most
critically injured, most damaged, most in need get treated before the
less-injured. It's one method for organizing a chaotic environment and
enforcing order on a sometimes dangerous, highly fluid, very stressful
situation.
Making the decisions on who to treat and in what precedence are
brutal transactions made so that those most likely to survive will do so, and those most likely to die or the less-critically injured get set aside to avoid
burdening the emergency responder assets with unnecessary, unhelpful, or useless effort. When resources and time are short, the triage
decision-making framework sets task priorities of most important, most
critical, and treats them first.
Some with less than critical injuries must sit in the hallway or on the pavement until the critically injured are treated, put in
the delivery system, and got down the road to more considerate care.
That the less-critical are in pain, in agony even, must be put in
abeyance by the responders despite their miserable, pitiful condition
and shocking appearance.
Those involved in the accident/disaster but uninjured and ambulatory
are asked to step to the side of the road, or get involuntarily
employed, helping others in need, a traumatic experience in either case.
I stepped back and looked around my classroom the other day and
realized I'm doing educational triage: The most critically in need
educationally get my attention first, those who posses minimal skills
get it second, students who are competent get my attention once in a
while, and those who don't need my help get put to use helping the rest.
What has brought us to this?
It's class size: the ratio of the number of students per teacher.
If you do the math on class size and the amount of attention any
teacher can devote to any student during any one class period, it's
clear that we have fallen into a great dark hole. If I have fifty five
or so minutes of class time, and each class has thirty or so students,
each kid gets less than two minutes of my time. Multiplied by five
periods, a hundred fifty plus kids are in need of instruction and
attention and my time is divided by the needs and necessities of each
and every student. This is an unrealistic assessment of how classroom time is used, of course, but it illustrates the point that class sizes, the ratio of students per teacher, is degrading both quality and quantity of education in California.
In this state, we are no longer at thirty kids per teacher.
We've moved into the high thirties and forties. Hand out an assignment
and you get back a hundred fifty to two hundred individual student
artifacts to assess and comment on and record. Add the higher numbers to
the already high task load,* and you burn through teachers at a faster
rate than already exists.**
In one corner of the classroom is the crew that gets the
instructional delivery, gets turned loose, finishing first with little
input from me but ending up bored for the rest of the period unless I
have planned ahead and can pile on more work or engage them in an
interesting "enrichment" endeavor commensurate with being categorized as
"Advanced" or "Proficient." These high achievers get little help to be
more successful, get little push to expand their horizons to become
possibly outstanding, and get put to work doing the jobs I cannot get
to.
In the center are the majority who mostly get the instruction as
delivered, but need help or coaching or an encouraging word here and
there to become competent, or what we call the "basic" students. These
students who need a bit of advice, a little coaching here and there, go
to the perimeter and get my help when I can spare the time.
In various pockets, or placed individually around the room are those
the state categorizes as "Below Basic" or "Far Below Basic;" pupils
most in need of the greatest amount of the teacher's personal attention.
They have the lowest skills or consume the rest of us with behavioral
dysfunction, and occupy most of my time, at the expense of all the
others.
Current educational practice is to identify the "Advanced" and
"Proficient" students and spread them around the classroom to help the
others, sometimes to the point of doing student-to-student mentoring.
Although common and currently considered to be part of "best practices,"
this practice does little to engage the best students in learning
worthy of their skills. It in fact pulls them down to a median, a common
denominator. The "Basic" pupils in need of the teachers' help must make
do with help from peers if the teacher can't get to them within
classroom time constraints.
Teachers never leave the students in the classroom, taking home
loads of work just to keep track of student achievement. But we are
becoming more reluctant to give out necessary assignments leading to
expanding the student's skill base because of the sheer volume of work
we must take with us and process after hours.
A friend of mine at a local high school, teaching honors English,
hands out only two or three writing assignments a semester, and he's an
exception. Again, it's a math thing: at a hundred seventy five students,
a five page writing assignment that will potentially develop real
writing skills gets you eight hundred seventy five pages of mush you
have to wade through, critique, comment on, and record for grading
purposes.
Who has the ability or time to read papers for three or four hours a
night and on weekends, and get the work returned to students quickly
enough for them to benefit from the teacher's critique?
Teaching is not a job that can be left at the job, and we signed on
for this, and the best will stick with it because they see the need for
students to be educated. There are merely not enough hours in a day to
competently teach to the number of kids being crowded into the
classroom, and so we do another version of triage with our only real
asset: time.
But what if the teacher is expert and knowledgeable, experienced and
"Proficient," as mandated by the current authorities? These teacher
competencies and inherent talent take no account of who walks in the
door that has to be "accommodated."
The greenest newbie teacher will tell you that no instruction
happens without having order in the classroom; a sense of discipline and
method and process. Only after these structures are established can
instruction begin or begin to be effective.
Two or three students who make the decision not to learn and
actively work to make the classroom a place of disarray will distract
the teacher's focus. Merely four or five pupils who have come to the
classroom unready to learn (for whatever reason- language deficiencies,
attention disorders, immature skill sets, fractured family
relationships) will preoccupy the teacher's time. The majority, who need
help as well, get it sparingly or in groups, and have to work together
to figure out what has to be learned. The high achievers get bored, and
without arresting activities to engage them, become discipline problems
themselves.
Being reduced to doing instructional triage due to the sheer
numbers, students are getting a degraded education when compared to
communities and states and countries where class sizes are more
reasonable or where students are grouped by ability (another word for ability grouping is "tracking," an impossible method to advocate in our multiculturist climate).†
So what's the perfect class size? This is not a treatise on
the promotion of Home Schooling, but those people have figured it out: it's
1:1. One teacher, one pupil, and the average mom or dad with a high
school education is perfectly competent to teach through primary and
secondary grades. Home Schoolers have opted out of the public system,
and are doing it in greater numbers because the public educational
establishment as perpetuated can't possibly provide a quality education.
But back to the establishment: Contrast the students most prepared
to be educated because of a helpful family dynamic-- Two parents in one
house have the opportunity to spread out the workload and make the
triage decisions more deliberately, and there are more "responders" to
manage emergencies. More supervised time can be built into the family
dynamic for academic preparation, and students benefit as a result.
Conversely, those in poverty, (the largest indicator of student
achievement) lowest on the economic scale, are there usually because
there is involuntarily one income earner in the household, and that
single adult must do all the tasks to keep the family in one piece. It
comes back to triage. If the one income earner must put in the time to
bring home the bacon (or tofu), the kids get no or little supervision
and interact with small screen social media or with skateboards or
exclusively with their peers to the exclusion of studious pursuits,
family relation-building pursuits. The economic triage decisions require
the adult to manage all of it, and preparation for academics, while a
high aspiration, becomes a low priority in fact.
So what's the answer? More money for more teachers? We've got no
money for education. The cash collection and distribution hierarchies
are designed to limit support for education.
Reduce teacher pay? If you think teachers are over-paid at present,
cut wages a little more and you will truly get the bottom feeders who
have no alternatives but teaching because they have no other skills. Or
you will get a higher percentage of educated people in the system who
want to teach merely because they want access to young people.
Defer more maintenance? The buildings are termite-ridden and leaking
because we have disposed of the maintenance staff who once kept paint
on the fascia and patched the roofs and rain gutters.
Tax the wealthy some more? They move out of state and take their
job-creating skills with them.
Confiscate profit from corporations? They too will have no incentive
to stay, and set up shop elsewhere.
If there is any one thing that will ensure the viability and health
of the economy and social fabric of our state, it's education, but the
train smash-up we have to live through day after day has to stop.
Maybe the State of California has to file for bankruptcy and
re-negotiate
everything. Without decent education for our young people, the place is
going to seize up and grind to a halt anyway.
* See this link for a fuller explanation of the term Task Load:
** The below article is typical of thousands of individual stories, or
Google Teacher Burn Out Rate:
† A few schools have taken up the neo-tracking mantle, but it's a sensitive issue with a great deal of resistance from educators determined to level all outcomes. See one school's story here: Teacher Led School Innovates With Student Regrouping, Education Week, 1/19/11, by Stephen Sawchuk
Sep262008
POSTED AT 01:33 AM
Mindoro Island
© 1993 Joseph Petito
Sweat was forming puddles on my arm. My head was tilted back inside my helmet so I could look down at myself lying in the tall grass, and as I watched, sweat percolated up to the surface of the skin, formed little drops around the hairs to make a puddle, and rolled off to the elbow. There was nothing else to do but lie in the shade and sleep, and nothing I could do to keep away the boredom. It was so humidly hot that it can’t even begun to be described. It was like laying in a sauna while wearing all my clothes and a field jacket, all the while being toasted by fifty cigarette lighters.
Laying there in the half-shade of my poncho, watching myself sweat, and dozing off helped me pass the time until my next radio watch. We were short-handed on this operation, so the watch was four hours on and four off, and I had a couple of hours to kill until I was on again. As tired as I was from having been awake most of the night, running up and down the mountains repairing radios and copying messages, the incredible heat made it hard to sleep. The flies didn’t help either. Lying there, dozing off, a fly would land on my face or arm and bite off a chunk, so I had to swat it until it went away for a minute before repeating the process.
The poncho that was half-shading me didn’t help either- The thing was made of a nylon sheet with metal grommets around the perimeter and had a hood in the center with a shoestring to tie around your head when it rained, and it was coated with some kind of rubber stuff that made it stink, especially when it got hot. The smell is one of those things I will always remember- Whenever I’m around military gear, especially canvas and material that has been waterproofed, the smell grabs my mind and drags it back twenty five years to the feelings I felt when I first smelled it. After a while I tuned out the smell, but then there was the noise from across the path where my little pretend-tent was.
All the radios for the battalion CP were situated there, on the bank of a creek, and the hiss and distorted voices coming across the grass made me think I was still on radio watch, even though I was dozing. It was kind of funny- usually the radios were located in the same big tent where the communication platoon slept, and you could wake up to go on watch and not miss a thing since you had been hearing what was going on in your sleep.
This operation was different though- instead of being trucked in with all our equipment, tents, generators, cots, and the other trash of a grunt headquarters company, we were helicoptered in and dropped in the middle of a tropical forest where, if we wanted to get anyplace, we walked. No trucks or tents, no sleeping bags, no field jackets- it was too hot for any of that, and we carried the minimum amount of everything except water. Everything we had we carried about on our backs or had it flown in and dumped off by helo. It made for tough going. The elevation was high, the humidity was way higher, the mountains steep, and the occasional rain made the ground sticky and slick, so you had to watch your footing carefully when going up or downhill.
One night, about zero dark thirty, we were humping up a hill on a narrow and winding path, and a guy slipped off, tumbling over and over into the ravine with his pack and weapon, crashing through bushes and into trees, and broke his leg. We had to go down and get him, splint his leg, and carry him back up the hill with all his gear, and then find a clearing for a medevac to land and take him back to the ship for treatment.
But there was no place for miles that the helicopter could land, and we couldn’t just drag the guy up and down the hills with bones sticking out of his leg while looking for an LZ. It was really dark too. There was just a bit of moon, and we were way down under two layers of forest where it was as black as it could get. We finally found a place where there were fewer trees over our heads, and Captain Ferguson called in a medivac to get the man out. He also called in two AH-1J gunships to circle around and drop white phosphorous illumination flares so we could see what we were doing instead of stumbling over tree roots and bumbling around and bumping into one another.
All this shouting and organizing took an hour, and then we could hear them coming in the distance, their big blades flopping and grinding away at the still air. Meanwhile, the Captain fished around in his jacket pocket and pulled out a gadget that looked like a fat felt marker, screwed something into the top of it, held it over his head and gave it a flick. Instantly the sky blasted apart with a green signal flare so the pilots could find us in all this blackness. (pilots were always carrying around slick contraptions to wow the average Jarhead) He had to do the flare thing two or three times until the pilots finally located us milling about under all that foliage with his landing lights
The big CH-46 came in low over us and hovered, lowering a stokes on the winch cable through the trees that were being pushed about from the wind made by the rotor blades. We strapped the man in and they hauled him up, the crew chief standing with one foot out the side door with his hand on the wire, trying to prevent the stretcher from swinging back and forth from the prop wash and bashing into tree branches on the way up. Meanwhile the other two helos were dropping illume every few minutes- the phosphorous flares swinging and smoking on their little parachutes, leaving white trails in the sky, making the night stark white with long black shadows. I wished it was me getting to go back. It would have been almost OK if I had broken my leg, just to get back aboard the ship and have a shower and a clean rack to crawl into, without the bugs and the heat and the stink.
Back on the path by my poncho tent, people were coming and going; the battalion commander (the CO) and his executive officer, (the XO) the captain in command of Lima company which was providing perimeter security for us, other radio operators and messengers, and general foot traffic on the path across a hilltop where three hundred guys with weapons were sitting around in holes they had dug in the ground. There was a lot of movement and noise, and I was scrunched in the middle, trying to snooze so as not to fall asleep on the next radio watch.
While I was laying there unconsciously waving down the flies, a drift set in, like a blurry picture of water flowing over smooth stones, and some kind of sleep finally came, but so did strange images; an image where I saw a helicopter fly into a hill and smash, tumbling over and over with men and weapons flying out everywhere; smoke and fire and shouting; fear and death and burning heat. I had dreams like that all the time. I flew on helicopters a lot, and at first, until I got used to being jerked off the ground and set down dozens of klicks away, I was afraid of the monstrously deafening things. The other, more experienced guys would brag and tell stories of helicopter crashes they had been in and survived, and of crashes they had seen where no-one survived, and I was really nervous about flying in the things, even afraid of them.
The first time I had to go up on one, a big CH-53, I was shaking all over from the adrenaline of being afraid- I could barely sit still and was anxious the other guys would notice I was sweating and shaking from fear. They were incredibly noisy, too, like a continuous sonic boom that lasts as long as you will your unwilling self to be inside the thing. Oh yeah. Hot hydraulic fluid sometimes dripped on you from the overhead; It was red like blood, but thin like olive oil, and it got all over the seats and the floor, so you had to watch for puddles of it on the aluminum deck plates, or you’d slip and look like a fool. That’s why we always had to point the muzzles of our weapons at the deck- it looked kind of funny; all these mean looking Marines dressed in their camouflage utility uniforms, greasepaint on their faces, with all their packs and weapons and ammunition and other deadly stuff, but with the muzzles of their M-16’s resting on the deck with the stocks in the air. It was because all the hydraulic controls and pipes and cables that made the helicopter go were in the overhead, and if your weapon accidentally discharged while pointing up, it would put a hole in something vital, usually flammable too, and we would all crash and burn.
One of the types of helicopters I flew in was made by the Boeing Company, that also makes the 747 airliner. The helicopter was big and had twin blades on top that turned in opposite directions, and was called the CH-46. It had a nickname: “The flying Boeing body bag.” “When I crash, just wrap me up in it and bury it all.”
I used to have silly dreams where the helicopter went high in the air and then the blades flew off into the stratosphere while the rest of us crashed into the sea, turning into a submarine, where we landed on the deck of the Titanic and blew up the iceberg- or the helicopter landed on the pointy end of a mountain top, and it was so steep that you couldn’t get out because you would slide down the side- or the helicopter would land on top of me and thousands of guys would run off the back ramp one by one, and everyone would step on my butt like a doorstep.
This time though, everything got really quiet, and I woke up. No one was paying any attention to me; they were all looking at one of the radios across the path, and then everyone started shouting all at once. The CO and XO were looking at a map, kneeling on the grass and running their fingers over it like they were trying to find something; the air liaison officer, Captain Ferguson, was a couple of feet away shouting at someone, one of the radio operators probably, who was down on his knees fiddling with his radio’s frequency knobs, sweating and cringing from having the captain shouting in his ear. He grabbed a map from a staff sergeant who had just walked up, and snatching the radio handset away from the operator still kneeling in the mud twidding knobs, began to shout now at someone on the radio- probably the SAR people at Clark. Everyone else just stood around looking at the radio and thinking hideous thoughts. We were too far away. There was nothing we could do. It was a done deal.
All the visions of fire and smoke, and the pictures we had seen, and the people we once knew, and the scenes we had attended came out of the backs of our minds and performed another scene for each of us. Dread and frustration and futility settled in on everybody in range of the radios. The shouting stopped after a few minutes, while a few guys came up to see what was happening.
I was still half asleep, sitting up in the grass and the mud like a wet and stinking dog, when Capt. Ferguson yelled at me – “Corporal Petito! Getchyer radio and get saddled up!” That was really strange, because the captain never yelled. (at least I had never heard him yell before) He was really old, at least thirty five, and had a bit of a stomach, which was strange for being a Marine- Marines don’t have stomachs- they just have a lot of muscle where stomachs are supposed to be. He was quiet and kind of soft-spoken, and gave orders like he was ordering stir-fry at a Chinese noodle house. But everyone did exactly as he said when he said it. If he said jump, we asked “how high” while we were in the air. He was the best officer I thought there ever was, because he would listen, and ask you how you were doing, and find a way to make a difficult job seem interesting and important. He was actually not a ground-pounder- he was a pilot who flew F-4’s. The F-4 Phantom is a supersonic jet that was designed back in the fifties, and is still in service today, forty years later. For it’s time, it was advanced and innovative, and every few years, someone thinks up a new job for the aircraft, which is why it is still in service all over the world. Why he would want to slog up and down the hills with us I couldn’t figure. It was probably a career thing.
Since I was his communicator, I had to carry all my usual stuff, like food, water, ammunition, my weapon, and all my other personal stuff like the other guys, but I had to carry a twenty pound radio too, and with extra batteries. The batteries themselves weighed about four or five pounds, and we had to carry at least two extra. On top of all that, for this training exercise, I had to carry a KY-38, a secret piece of radio gear that made voice radio conversations sound like static, so the enemy couldn’t listen in on sensitive orders and messages.
Capt. Ferguson had a weird sense of humor too. One time, we were slogging down a path on Okinawa; me with my radio and rifle and all my other gear, and he with his map case and sidearm, all covered with sweat and the stinking orange dust that the helicopters kicked up when they came in to land. The dust stank because it had in it all the disintegrated bodies from all the people who died there during the World War II battle, and since we had been out in the field for three or four days, we looked and smelled pretty rotten. It wasn’t just the smell of a good work out or locker room sweat either- it was sweet with an acrid edge that sat in your nose and only went away after three or four showering and clothes-washings.
As we slogged along, to pass the time, he started telling me about the climate controls in the F-4, and how you could adjust a few levers so that it wouldn’t get too cold in the aircraft. It was infuriating. Here he was, talking about how to adjust the air-conditioning so your feet wouldn’t get a chill, inside an aircraft that flew thousands of feet above us in the clear, clean blue sky, sitting all cologned in a seat wearing a clean uniform, while we were down here stumbling from exhaustion and covered with sweat and the stinking dust. But I would have done anything for him.
I started fumbling around with my ALICE pack, dumping out my socks and C-rats and other stuff, and putting in the radio, both antennas, an extra battery, and my canteens and first-aid kit.
Not knowing what to do with the KY-38, I left it and it’s cable in the grass under the poncho; it was big and bulky and weighed a ton. One of the guys in the communication platoon must have picked it up after I left and secured it for me, because I could have gotten in big trouble for abandoning it there, even court-marshaled, but because of what happened that day, nobody even mentioned it to me later.
Stuffing the frequency lists and call signs into a side trouser pocket, I looked over at the Captain, who was talking to the CO, and they seemed to agree on something, and then he looked at me.
“Come on!” he said, and pointing at a sergeant who was standing around, said “You too! Come with us!” He ran up the path toward the top of the hill. The two of us ran up the path after him, over roots and around trees, and through bushes and stuff that grabbed at our utility uniforms. I especially had a hard time, because the branches seemed to reach out and grab my radio antenna, sticking up through the pack and above my head, and the others would have to stop and help me get untangled. After ten minutes of this stupidity, I stopped, panting and sweating and swearing, and throwing the pack to the ground, fished around inside, and unscrewed the three foot tape antenna (I couldn’t listen to the thing since I was running anyway!). Folding it up, I pushed it to the bottom of the pack, lashed it all back together, put the pack back on, and began running again to catch up with the others, the pack and radio banging against the raw spots on my shoulders.
At the top of the hill we stopped on some bare ground with a tree off to one side, almost crying, trying to catch our breath, and looking ahead, we could see in the distance a column of black, greasy smoke coming up from beyond another hill. There was no wind at that time in the morning, and the smoke came up straight, like it was boiling out the top of a volcano. I was leaning on the tree with my mouth hanging open, sweat coming out of every pore, and trying to get enough air to breath. On top of our hill, it was several thousand feet above sea level, and the altitude, combined with the heat and humidity made for exhausting climbing.
But we weren’t there yet. We were on top of a small hill attached to another taller hill with a saddle in the center, and we had to go across the saddle and up to the top and back side of the larger hill, where the smoke was coming from. It was about a klick away, and another three hundred feet of elevation.
We let go of the tree and started running again. We ran, we walked, we stopped to breathe, we looked up at the smoke and looked at one another and started running again until we felt like dying. Whenever we stopped to rest, bending over with our hands on our knees, panting like dogs and with sweat dripping off our noses, we looked up at the smoke that never seemed to come closer, and then at one another with guilt in our eyes and ran on again. We ran, we walked, we rested, we did it over and over until our uniforms were black with sweat and we were white from heat exhaustion. At the age of twenty, I was in the best physical condition I had ever been in my life, but I was humiliated by how weak from fatigue I felt. Finally we climbed out on top of the second hill.
On the top was a grassy clearing, with patches of orange dirt here and there, and throwing myself on all fours in the dust, gasped and heaved for breath while looking around. Captain Ferguson was doing the same, and sergeant Cunningham had turned over on his back in the grass, staring at the sky and trying to suck in some air. On one side of the hill was a stand of trees, and on the other side a cliff, dropping off into a ravine. Here at the edge the grass and dirt were all churned up, as if a tank had run back and forth over it and left a bunch of ruts, and a water buffalo was stuck in an eroded gully next to the cliff with one wheel and the hitch up in the air, leaking water into the orange dirt. Attached to the tank trailer was a heavy nylon sling with a big D ring, the kind that we used to attach an external load to the underside of a helicopter.
Sometimes the supplies or equipment that needed to be carried by helicopter were too big and bulky to fit inside, or they had to be unloaded really fast, so we would sling them, attaching the D ring to a big hook on the underside of the bird while it was hovering just overhead. The helo would then fly away with the load hanging below in the sling. It was obvious what had happened: The helo had picked up the water buffalo, got into some kind of trouble, dumped the buffalo, and then hit the dirt and tipped over and into the ravine, tumbling over and over with all it’s crew and passengers.
There were a bunch of Marines standing around, some looking over the cliff, some talking to one another, and a few smoking cigarettes. Nobody looked at us. Most of them were looking down at the grass. One guy was sitting on an ammo can, smoking, and looking at the water buffalo.
I recovered slightly, threw off my pack, and pulled out the radio. Quickly assembling the ten foot whip antenna, I screwed the flexible rubber base into the threaded socket on the top, licked the connector on the handset, pressing it onto it’s socket and giving it a slight twist, and turned it on. I unbuttoned my side trouser pocket and got the frequency list and call signs out, slightly soggy with sweat, and after looking up the numbers, clicked through the channels to dial up the ship operations frequency, the one we used for administrative stuff. We were at the outer range of my larger antenna, and even though I could see the ocean from the top of the mountain, the haze prevented me from seeing the ship, the U.S.S. New Orleans. The New Orleans looks like an aircraft carrier, only much smaller, and was designed to carry helicopters instead of jet aircraft. It also had been used to recover the astronauts who returned from the Skylab space missions four or five years previously.
I called the ship, gave my call sign, and sent my traffic: SEND WATER, STOKES STRETCHERS, ROPE, AND AXES: OVER! They called back, faintly: SAY AGAIN; OVER! They were so far away they could barely hear me, so I spelled out the words phonetically- I SPELL SIERRA ECHO NOVEMBER DELTA BREAK WHISKY ALPHA TANGO ECHO ROMEO BREAK…… I spelled it all out for them, letter after letter, transliterating in my head, which was incredibly frustrating, because I was still recovering from the run up the hill and totally out of breath, shaking and sweating bullets, mentally fogged from lack of sleep, and trying to think ahead and anticipate what we needed down there to rescue the people in the smoke at the bottom of the ravine.
To make things even worse, I knew the guy on the ship whose voice I was talking to- I also knew that his bottom was firmly planted in a nice cushioned swivel seat behind a nice clean desk in a nice air conditioned compartment aboard the ship, and was looking forward to nice Navy chow for dinner. And a nice Navy shower after he came off his radio watch with a nice clean rack with clean sheets to crawl between that night. In another air-conditioned compartment.
The smoke was horrible. It kept coming up and coming up, like a bad dinner, black and ugly and oily, smelling of jet fuel and rubber and nylon and flesh. Looking up through the smoke I saw another helicopter circling around to land, and someone popped a yellow smoke grenade for the pilot to observe which direction the wind was blowing, throwing it out into the center of the grassy clearing where it could be seen.
That didn’t make any sense to me; wasn’t there enough smoke to see which way the wind was blowing? The helo, a UH-1N, settled in next to us, whipping us with the rotor wash, knocking over the radio, and blowing the yellow and black smoke all together, with the orange dust, into a gray swirl, imbedding itself in our hair and uniforms and turning our sweat to orange mud. The crew chief, who was kneeling on the floor in the back with a safety lanyard latched around his waist, started throwing stuff out the open door like he was insane, throwing boxes and bundles and bottles down onto the ground like it was a big pile of trash going into a dumpster, while the rotors beat the air and the dust blasted and the co-pilot calmly swiveled his head and stared out at us through the dark visor of his flight helmet.
The beating noise from the blades and the screaming from the twin turbines was deafening. Two people jumped out the other side, a Navy hospital corpsman and a doctor, a Navy captain. Avoiding the rear rotor, like two machetes spinning around at about eye level, they came to where we were hunched over, shading our eyes from the dust next to the knocked over radio.
The UH-1 had never really landed; the pilot had just hovered with the skids barely touching the grass while the crew chief did his business, and so he took off quickly, nose down and flying directly over the ravine and it’s inferno and it’s black smoke, which must have gone inside the open door where they all could smell it. There is nothing like the smell of burning JP-5 that will make a pilot hurry- it was their friends down there in that smoke and these people would fly like tortured men to get supplies in and casualties out.
As they were flying off, I righted the radio, kicking some dirt clods around it to keep it upright, and once I could hear again, sent a few more messages that I thought would be useful, and then had nothing to do.
The view from the top of the mountain was spectacular- The lush green of the trees and rolling hilltops, the canyons with white water roiling at the bottom, the blue ocean in the distance, and the limitless brilliant blue of the sky with fluffy white cumulus clouds here and there made the moment a memorable tropical vision or a perfect vacation advertising picture. In my peripheral vision was the black, boiling smoke that destroyed it all, with it’s evil smell and evil premonitions.
I gave the handset and the damp frequency lists to Captain Ferguson, and he dialed up a close air support channel to coordinate all the aircraft which were coming on station to help with the rescue. Way, way up high, I could see an OV-10, a twin engine, twin seat spotter aircraft, making slow, one mile circles in the sky, and the Capt. was talking to the observer so the two of them could coordinate flight patterns with us and keep the various airplanes (we called helicopters airplanes sometimes) from bumping into one another.
With nothing else to do, I emptied my pack again, putting in some medical supplies and IV bags from the big pile on the ground, with my two canteens, and prepared to follow the two Navy guys down into the ravine. My utility jacket was stinking and soaked black with sweat by then, so I unbuttoned it and threw it down on the grass with the extra battery in it’s plastic baggie, going shirtless the rest of the afternoon.
Captain Ferguson was in his element. He knew every pilot he ever talked to on the radio (or seemed to), and could always get us a ride somewhere when we really needed it. It was he who taught me there were always six ways to do anything- Just because you couldn’t get what you wanted by going in one direction didn’t mean you couldn’t get what you wanted. There were always other avenues of approach and back channels to accomplish the task at hand. On this day he was flipping channels and pulling levers and cajoling and wheedling to get what he needed for the people at the bottom of the hill. He did a pretty good job that day.
The Navy captain was a pretty old guy, and as we slid down the hill, I was afraid he wouldn’t be able to stop, and go over the edge and into the fire. We slid down the steep side of the ravine, working ourselves sideways so we wouldn’t slip, holding onto the grass and small bushes with one hand while the dirt slid out from under our feet. The ground was all torn up and littered with junk- packs and ammo cans and broken weapons, and then the rotor head and the helicopter blades, all broken and crushed and twisted into weird shapes. Each of the seven blades weighed several hundred pounds, but they were bent like pretzels and torn open from the impact of hitting the ground while spinning at hundreds of miles an hour. The rotor head, a thousand pounds of precise mechanical beauty and hydraulic engineering brilliance, was crushed and mashed, leaking hydraulic fluid and resting upside down on the sloping grass.
The first guy we came upon was sitting in the dirt holding onto a little tree, straddling it actually, and his nose was all bloody from having hit the ground face first, plastering his hair and his teeth with the orange dirt. He must have jumped off the back ramp or got thrown out when things went bad. The doctor checked him out and found that he seemed to have a couple of broken ribs, so we decided to get him up to the top of the hill where he could be treated. We had no stretcher, but it wasn’t very far, so the three of us, by pulling and dragging, worked at getting him to the top. He was hurting so much however, and crying out so often, the doctor changed his mind and decided to get him to the bottom where the main rescue effort was taking place.
A helicopter came past and started to hover below us in a small clearing, so we held the injured man under the arms, by his belt and by grabbing fistfuls of his utility jacket and trousers, and as gently as we could, by digging in our heels, slid him down the hill. He was in a lot of pain because the shock had probably worn off, and I was starting to get irritated with him because we couldn’t touch him without making him cry out. I felt guilty about being frustrated with the guy- after all, he was the one who was injured. Finally, we got him down to where the others were, and the doctor organized a place where he could do triage near the crash site.
The injured were being treated about fifty yards away and downhill from where the helo had actually gone in and was still burning, and on the other side of the place was a small clearing where helos were landing and dumping off supplies; the stuff I had radioed for while at the top of the hill.
The problem was that there was no level place for a good LZ. The one clear place near the crash site was actually the crest of a small hill, bare on one slope and the other covered with tall trees; big tropical hardwoods that rose forty or fifty feet. Another corporal and I grabbed a couple of the axes that were lying around, and fell at one of the smaller trees at the edge of the clearing. After fifteen minutes of intense chopping and sweating, we cut through the tree, but it wouldn’t fall down; we were Marines, not lumberjacks, and our ignorance had made it fall against several other trees and just stand upright, leaning crazily, ready to topple over any second. We gave up, soaked and with trembling arms and shoulders. Tree cutting with axes is hard work, and we had only cut the smallest of about thirty trees at the edge of the little clearing.
While we were chopping, a UH-1 came in, slowly, and the pilot eased in and gently pressed the front of his skids into the top of the hill and hovered there with his rotors turning and the rear of the airplane suspended in the air, not landing really, but with the front end planted steadily enough to throw out supplies and take on one or two casualties strapped into stokes.
It was frightening- people were all around with hardly any level place to stand upright, and in order to take off, the pilot had to lift off slightly, back up twenty feet or so, and then lift straight up and over the trees before going forward again. This maneuver was tricky and really dangerous, because there were a lot of people from the rescue party moving close about with nowhere else to go. Due to the steep terrain, the trees were just a few feet away from the helicopter’s turning blades- I was afraid we would lose another because of the trees and the steep hillsides. The whole event demonstrated the several pilot's mastery of their aircraft- knowing what it could and could not do and taking calculated risks to accomplish an unplanned mission.
The rest of the afternoon was a blur of action. Moving people from one place to another. Dragging a Marine with two broken legs up a hill in a stokes, panting and shoving and dragging him over tree roots and around trees, tripping and sweating and cursing the heat. Another Marine, with red hair, not looking injured at all except for some bloody bubbles around his mouth and nose, being zippered into a rubber bag. A black Marine with a small burn on his side, dead, but with no other obvious injuries, being zippered away. Carrying another Marine in a stokes, his trousers and underwear all torn to shreds, shot full of morphine for the several compound fractures he had. I was embarrassed for him and for me because of his nakedness, but he was in no pain and didn’t seem to care at all. He was conscious, but relaxed from the drug and curiously watched the goings on around him.
In the small clearing after our tree-chopping mess, a CH-46 attempted to land, but the front blades started whacking off the tops of the trees next to the clearing, scattering everyone standing by, and the pilot had to back off and use the rescue winch to take on casualties.
One Marine, strapped into a stokes, was being raised on the winch rigged over the rear ramp of the big CH-46. The crew chief was laying on the ramp with his helmeted head and his shoulders hanging over the edge, forty or fifty feet above the ground, guiding the stokes wire with a gloved hand and with the other giving signals to another crewman at the winch controls up by the front door. Just as the stokes reached the ramp, it caught on the edge and tipped over vertically, hanging there with the man in it in an upright position. Had we not strapped him in, he would have fallen out. After a hellish minute of watching the man bang against the aluminum ramp several times, the crew chief cleared the snag and muscled him over the edge of the ramp. It was excruciating to watch.
I noticed, next to a tree, two cameras; a Nikon thirty-five millimeter still camera and a Bolex 16mm movie camera. The photographer must have been sent out to record the scene, but he ditched the cameras next to a tree in order to help out.
I noticed Captain Sparks, the CO of Company K of 3/4, down there with a radio strapped to his back and the three foot tape antenna looped over the strap on his shoulder and tucked under his arm, talking to someone, probably Captain Ferguson, at the top of the hill. I had never seen an officer with a radio on his back before- that was something for enlisted men like me to carry, but there he was, coordinating things in the ravine, calmly talking and relaying information while the activity came and went around him.
After a couple of hours, I sat down on a tree root to rest and drink some water from a five gallon can, tipping it over and splashing it on my head and face and rinsing off some of the muddy sweat. Even though the water was hot, it felt good; the clean, distilled water from the New Orleans sloshing on my face and short hair and soaking my trousers. It felt immoral, wasting so much water when the air was to hot.
Captain Sparks or someone, I don’t remember who, saw me sitting and came over and told me to leave, because there was nothing left for me to do. There were enough people there anyway, and the injured had been gotten out, so I refilled my canteens and left, climbing to the top of the hill with my almost empty pack.
It was a long and slow climb, and I was tired. I got to the top where Capt. Ferguson and Sergeant Cunningham were, and when I climbed over the edge, pulling on the grass to get over a ledge of dirt and onto the clearing, they looked at me kind of funny, and asked if I was ok. I had a pretty bad headache, but I said “yeah.” Later, I realized I must have looked pretty pale from heat exhaustion- not having drunk enough water to replace what I had sweated out that afternoon.
It was becoming dusk by then, with the sun going into the sea, and none of us looked forward to the long hump back to where we had started that morning. Capt. Ferguson somehow got hold of a helo pilot, flying back to the ship, and convinced him to land and give us a lift back to our unit. It was a UH-1N, with seats on the sides above the skids, and after stowing my radio gear and buttoning up my damp and crusty utility jacket, the three of us swung on and strapped in.
The pilot looked back to see we were in place, pulled up on the collective, the rotors bit the air, and with another swirl of dust, we took off toward the sea, flying low and slow. Capt. Ferguson squatted down between and behind the pilots and put on a flight helmet in order to talk to the crew above the noise, and to direct them to our starting point. I sat on the starboard side, in the nylon and aluminum seat, with my seatbelt pulled tight and my pack and radio strapped into the seat next to me. I let my feet dangle over the edge of the open door, waving in the wind, and the wind from our travel felt good, drying the sweat on my face and arms and back, chilling my wet trousers, while I looked down and around at the trees rushing past just a few feet under us.
It was a scene of incredible beauty- the setting sun over the misty ocean, giving a red cast to the light on the trees and hills; the hills themselves rolling up and up in the opposite direction into the clouds, and the individual trees rushing past; the prop wash disturbing the branches as we flew just a few feet above.
The contrast between the incredible beauty all around while I was enmeshed in a great war machine was an ever-present fixture and conundrum in my mind. The spectacular sunset and purple sky and the exhilaration of speed and wind in the face immediately after the raw death and destruction I had seen created separate compartments in my brain- each had it’s own time and place and separate feelings and images, and each demanded that I open the door and visit occasionally to let the emotions and images wash over me.
So many times I marveled at the natural beauty so near while practicing the arts of death and ruin and waste, but there was no one with which to share the experience- who could understand the dichotomy and appreciate what I was feeling? Who there and then was ready to look deep inside and pull out the depths for examination? At least that’s what I thought at the time.
Flying back, I felt pretty numb. All the images I had seen were replaying in my mind, and looking down at the path we had run over that morning, I realized that despite all the mind pictures that were running in front of my eyes, I felt nothing. Not sad, not mad, not emotional in any way; just nothing; just empty and bored out like a cave in a hillside; like the emotional side of me was switched off and put in a closet for storage until I had the time and the guts to pull it out again and look at it. It was like a big blank spot in my head that had been wiped clear of emotions and feelings for the time being. All I could do at that moment was to put my head back, drink some warm ship water from my canteen, and soak in the feeling of the harsh, warm wind blasting past, drying my face, and enjoy the rush of flying low over the treetops.
The Capt. pointed out a landing spot, and the pilot flared his bird and landed in our first clearing, the one with the tree, and we slid out, waving and mouthing “thanks!” against the whirlwind. The pilots nodded back at us, hauled up on the collective again, pushing the cyclic forward, and took off for the last time toward the ocean where the ship waited to take it in for the night.
It was good and dark by the time we arrived back at the CP, bumbling and stumbling and cursing ourselves for not thinking to bring flashlights. I found my place in the grass by the path and lay down under my stinking poncho in my stinking utilities to sleep on the ground hugging my KY-38. No radio watch for me that night; they made someone else cover it and let me sleep til morning.
After an aircraft accident of any kind, the military convenes a board of inquiry; officers and enlisted people expert in flying and aircraft, to review the situation and events that led up to the accident, as well as interview observers and survivors, and review the aircraft maintenance records. They try to piece together why the incident took place, and find ways to prevent it from happening in the future. They also sometimes place blame on anyone who was negligent.
They found, in this case, that the pilots had unknowingly miscalculated the lifting power of the helicopter due to equipment modifications beyond their control. At sea level, with average temperatures and average humidity, there would have been no problem with hauling a load of troops while carrying a half-full water tank trailer on a sling. But at several thousand feet, with high temperatures and high humidity, the lifting power of the aircraft was diminished by several percentage points, and this was just enough to push it out of control and into instability. While trying to lift off, the back end of the aircraft started to spin in the direction of the turning rotor blades, throwing it out of control and into the ground, which probably would not have been so lethal if the ground was level and flat- there may only have been some dented sheetmetal, banged heads, and broken landing gear. In this case it went over the edge of the hill and down the canyon, tumbling over several times and catching fire from the crushed fuel tanks and full load of spilled JP5.
I can visualize the pilots, sitting there in the sweltering cockpit, flight helmets on, transferring troops from the hilltop to the ship, over and over and over again, sweating rivers under the Plexiglas canopy, where the sun beats down remorselessly and there is nothing that can be done but sit there and endure it and sweat until they were sitting in a puddle in the uncomfortable nylon seat. All that and maybe having to pee too, and “what the heck! This machine is built to handle it- we’ll take it all back on one trip,” instead of splitting it into an additional trip.
A few days after our return to the New Orleans, there was a memorial ceremony on the flight deck where all the Marines and Navy Corpsmen attended. All except me. I couldn't bear to stand with everyone else and listen and watch, and though I was unaccounted for, I never heard about it later.
I think now of the men who died that day, from Company K of Third Battalion Eighth Marines, and helicopter squadron HMH 462, late in the night as I sit in front of the computer screen and write, while it is dark and still.
I imagine the lives they could have lived, like the life I still have, with my wife and children sleeping in the other rooms, with the glass of water here by the computer screen and iTunes in the headphones. They could have had this life, full of family and friends and experiences, but they don’t, and the repercussions of their deaths continue to resound within their families and within me to this day.
A few weeks after our return to Camp Hanson from the Philippines, Captain Sparks and I, and some Navy corpsmen and a doctor, were each awarded a medal for extraordinary achievement for our actions. There was a parade with the regimental band and color guard, and a colonel pinned the medals on us. I was embarrassed about the whole thing, that I had done nothing more than all the others who were down there too.
I pull out the medal once every few years now and look at it, turning the bronze metal and green fabric over in my hands, and see the scenes again and smell the smells, opening the compartments and turning on the lights, and feel grateful for the life God has allowed me to hold for awhile, the life I still live.
Glossary
ALICE pack ALICE is an acronym for a type of backpack
Ammo Ammunition or sometimes flares or explosives
Camp Hanson A Marine base in northern Okinawa
C-Rats Short for “C” Rations- Canned food to be eaten while out in the field
Chow Food or a meal
Clark At the time, a very large American Air Force base in the Philippines
CO Commanding Officer
Communicator Usually a radio operator or someone who carries and operates communication equipment.
Compartment A room aboard a ship or boat
CP Command Post
Deck Navy or Marine word for the floor
D-ring A large and heavy steel ring shaped like a “D” and used for connecting heavy loads with nylon straps
Field Jacket A padded and heavy military coat for cold weather
“Get saddled up” To get all your gear together and get ready to march
Ground Pounder Someone in a military organization who has to walk wherever he goes
Hump To march or walk fast carrying a lot of equipment
JP5 Jet fuel- a very pure form of kerosene
Jarhead An insulting or endearing term for a Marine (depending on who says it)
Klick One kilometer- one thousand meters
LZ Landing Zone
Muzzle The front end of a weapon
Operation An organized action or task carried out my many people
Overhead Navy or Marine word for the ceiling
Phonetic Alphabet Using words to take the place of letters so as to be better understood over the radio
Rack A Navy or Marine word for a bed
Saddle A low ridge between two taller hills- a kind of depression or low spot between two hilltops
Sidearm A pistol
SAR Search and Rescue
Sensitive Secret
Starboard Right side or the right hand
Stock The back end of a rifle
Stokes A type of stretcher in the shape of a person, made of hollow wire rods and steel mesh that allows the injured person to be completely strapped in and immobilized
Triage Quick medical evaluation of an injury to determine who gets treated first
Traffic A message over the radio or telephone
Unit A military organization, or group of people
Watch A period of time to be on duty or required to be at a place
Water buffalo A 500 gallon fiberglass or steel water tank on a two wheeled trailer, usually towed behind a truck
XO Executive Officer (the second in command)
Zero dark thirty Anytime between midnight and five in the morning
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