Eduholic

Remember running after kids on the playground, tapping them under the slide with an unequivocal, “You’re it!”? Back when tag was a game, the rules were simple. Now that it’s an acronym for “talented and gifted” in my son’s school, things aren’t so clear cut.

I found myself at a PTA meeting last week, learning the ins and outs and acting, inadvertently, like the parents I dread when addressing a group as Dean. A bright-faced first year teacher was blithely describing the entrance requirements and curriculum for the “pull out programs” in language arts and math that my son might be eligible for as he moves into fourth grade at our local public school. And suddenly, it felt personal.

I was the product of gifted and talented programs growing up, as I’ve shared. Fairfax County’s model was and still is different than Alexandria’s, where I now live. FCPS has “centers,” self-contained schools where the selected kids enjoy “GT” classes all day long, a school within a school model that stands in stark contrast to the rationed “pull outs” of Alexandria. In this model, kids leave their base classroom for an hour or two a day to get special lessons only in areas in which they are deemed gifted (due to budget constraints, science and social studies aren’t offered).

How do you get the stamp of approval? Each district has its own screening criteria, which begs some obvious questions about what it means to be gifted in the first place. In our school, a committee determines if a student scores in the “superior” range in four of five categories: an ability test (“Naglieri’s Nonverbal,” if you’re wondering); an achievement test; teacher rating based on a checklist of observed behaviors; student work samples, produced under controlled conditions (a writing sample or math quiz in the guidance counselor’s office, I think); and grades.

There is an alternative if currently underused path to admission, apparently, called the “Differentiated Education Plan,” or DEP. It was my sense that the school was hoping to diversify the mostly middle class population in the program through more aggressive use of this, but as a newcomer to the scene I can’t speak to that with authority.

What does running this gauntlet get your kid? I was heartened when reading a handout that listed qualities of the “bright child” versus those of the “gifted learner.” The first column included “knows the answers, copies accurately, good memorizer, enjoys sequential presentation…”. My son’s resistance to learning his 7’s time tables flashed across my mind as I read.

The “gifted” column sounded much better: “has wild silly ideas, creates a new design, initiates projects…”. Images of the lego-strewn basement and backyard games with Jack organizing the neighborhood kids into stations for cowboy training seemed suddenly signs of intense academic promise.

My bubble burst when I heard the newly minted teacher describe the sorts of activities that occurred in her class: “In math, we start in Chapter 4 and by fifth grade we get as far as we can through the sixth grade book.” She looked pleased as punch at this point, adding, “The children are expected to keep up.”

In language arts, there were daybooks of critical skills and vocabulary books and five paragraph essays. And, lots and lots of sentence diagramming. Here, the young teacher smiled again, as broad as a Cheshire cat: “It’s very intense.” My hand went up of its own accord at this point in the presentation.

“How do you teach writing?” I asked, hoping for a ray of, well, anything from the “gifted” list rather than the “bright” list. I didn’t get it. Writing prompts, five paragraph essays, reports with footnotes. Footnotes for fourth graders? I could picture my son withering under the regimen. Did I mention the two C’s rule? Not keeping up gets you “exited” (repetition of the phrase “expected to keep up” here, still with a smile but lips primly pursed.)

The meeting went on, and my hand popped up a few more times. It really wasn’t my intent to put the young teacher on the spot, or the guidance counselor who sat mutely by her side. No one else among the couple dozen parents seemed to have as many doubts as I did. The accelerated traditional program I’d heard described was not what I wanted for my son.

But I also know that in this context, it is the only way to get out of a classroom next year where he likely won’t be pushed. Grapevine reviews of next year’s teachers make it pretty clear that he won’t be having the fantastic time he’s enjoying now with a still energetic thirty-year vet under whom he’s thrived.

Which, all in all, leaves me feeling like the last kid on the playground, looking for someone to play tag with after all the others have gone home for dinner. I honestly don’t know what we’ll do with my son next year. But I’m pretty sure I know what we won’t.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

One of the first things I put up in my office for this new job was a quilted tapestry about three feet square. It’s an Amish star on a dark green background, composed of diamonds ranging in hue from turquoise to wine. I’ve had it since my first teaching gig, sixteen years ago, when I bought it from the artist, a colleague who was retiring (to quilt more). Years before, she had been my own 8th grade English teacher. We read A Midsummer Night’s Dream in her class, and she called us “toads.”

Recently I read the latest issue of the The Journal of the Northern Virginia Writing Project (Volume 29, Issues 3/4). In it, grey-mustached site director Don Gallehr, among others, reports on the National Writing Project’s annual meeting, explaining the evolution of the current leadership structure by going all the way back to Jim Gray’s founding of the Bay Area Writing Project in 1974. While Don’s long been a colleague and mentor, I never knew Jim Gray (I was busy in Mrs. Pursinger’s first grade class around that time), but a teacher from TJ with whom I shared a trailer and by whom I was ushered into the mysteries of “IBET,” the integrated 9th grade program, had taken classes with Jim at UC Berkeley. Pam raises llamas in West Virginia when she’s not teaching the latest generation of TJ freshmen to eschew obfuscation or delight in the Odyssey.

At the back of this issue, Don remembered Bernie Glaze, who died this November. A giant in Fairfax County and the Project, Bernie had influenced me when we crossed paths at Mount Vernon High School, late in her career and early in mine. She got me onto a character education committee and the next thing I knew I was chairing it, working with students to codify community service in a Book of Gifts and later supervising service at the school in the IB program. In some ways I can look back on that and see the seeds of my urge to build a canoe with TJ kids, or why I am now in a position to help kids make good choices as a Dean here at Congressional.

I don’t know Peter Stephens, but he had an article in this issue of the Journal, called “A Year Later: How the Summer Institute Played Out in Room 613.” A newly-minted Teacher Consultant, Peter wrote about how his own teaching had changed after becoming one. His second point was, “Be both linear and flexible about the writing process.” I liked his nod to Yeats as he reflects on the messiness of real writing: “ ‘Recursive’ suggests a nice spiral—maybe a falcon’s widening gyre… [but] what serious writer follows anyone else’s process? Any such center cannot hold.” I circled languidly above my own third quarter this weekend, thinking about the terrain below and how I would guide my students across it.

Yesterday in class students began writing towards an autobiography, part of a unit we’ll weave into the reading of Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. This is my take on a course of studies inherited from my predecessor here, thirty year English teacher Margaret Quadrino, also a T-C. She left generous notes about the units she’d developed over the years, including a “family history project” that has become part of the lore and culture of the eighth grade experience. How will I stitch together these parts with other scraps I’ve gathered?

Rather than write the story of their life complete, I’ll have students do a chapter. Deep not broad. To figure out which one, first they must write a table of contents, organizing their story into six or more sections and describing the content of each. This assignment, I realized, was similar in form to the book proposal I’ve been pecking away at recently. Again, my own writing informs my teaching of writing.

To help students conceive their story, I reviewed different ways to brainstorm for an autobiographical writing: a chronology, of course, but also a web or a list or a geographic map. I kept in mind Peter’s admonition to let each kid discover their best mode. Writing with the students, I tried a web one period, and a list the second. I ended up with cars: from my parents’ poo-brown wagon, in the back of which I bagged newspapers at 6 am, to the orange microbus I bought when waiting tables after high school, and on through today’s sturdy Cherokee plastered with stickers from family vacation spots like “OBX” and Vermont, cars can tell the story of my life.

Just another day’s lesson, but, like my tapestry, pieced together with a thousand diamonds of different hues. Together, their neat geometry is my teaching. The scheme is colored by my ongoing association with the Writing Project, and more broadly, all the teachers I’ve had and known and continue to work with today.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 1:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)