A Place at the Table

It’s a Hamburger Helper World we’re living in these days. Times are hard and budgets are tight. People are eating out less and clipping coupons more. The weekly newspaper's Food supplement is featuring “stretching your food dollar” rather than “expanding your epicurean sensibilities.” While eating is a necessity, where we eat and what we eat is discretionary, so when a dollar needs squeezing, the food budget is one of the first categories to take a hit.

Unfortunately, a lot of policymakers put education spending in the same category as food budgets. They know that public education is a necessity, but they also view education as an excellent place to go searching for some fat to trim. Unfortunately, in many schools, the fat was all gone long ago, so to trim anymore will require cutting into the meat. The biggest cost of education is personnel, and in virtually all school systems, the cost of teachers is directly related to their levels of experience.

In these tough economic times, I fear we may have some stakeholders who are going to be pushing harder than ever to stretch the budget by laying off or buying out the chefs and filling in with some Tuna Helper Teaching.

“What’s so wrong with stretching the hamburger or tuna or teaching for that matter?” some might ask. Well, let’s take a closer look at the product. Although I don’t serve or eat Tuna Helper myself, I keep a box of Creamy Broccoli Tuna Helper in my pantry at school. Analyzing food labels is part of my FACS curriculum and Tuna Helper is an interesting example.

Did you realize that in addition to no tuna, there is no cream, and while there is some broccoli, that seasoning pouch contains more salt than vegetable? So why do people buy these sort of “convenience” foods? They require little thought, skill or imagination to prepare. They produce a consistent product that is filling even though it may have very limited nutrition value. To the indiscriminate palate that has never experienced skillfully prepared fresh food, packaged food may not be exciting, but synthetically produced flavor is acceptable even if sugar and salt tend to be pervasive.

If you ask most shoppers, they would cite lower cost as their primary reason for buying a packaged convenience food. In reality, Tuna Helper offers a limited amount of real food value at comparatively high price. It would be a lot cheaper, a lot more nutritious, and not much more trouble to start from scratch.

If the promise of a cheap nutritious family dinner in a box is a marketing success, then how much more tempting is the idea of Tuna Helper Teaching? You know, just throw in some kids and a hint of teacher, add the special curriculum packet, simmer over high accountability and serve. It’s fast, easy, convenient, and consistent. It may not be inspiring, but isn't it harmless and certainly better than nothing? After all, it keeps the kids busy and can be delivered by a teacher without a lot of experience, creativity, or planning time.

Here’s the problem: A Hamburger Helper dinner every now and then might not do any major harm. On the other hand, a regular diet of the stuff is to be avoided. It provides too many calories with insufficient nutrients and contains high quantities of fat and salt that may damage the body while dulling the palate to authentic flavors. Cooking and eating become mindless, meaningless chores rather than nourishment to body and soul.

Tuna Helper Teaching runs the same risks. Packaged curricula do not adjust to the needs or tastes of the learner. They do not challenge the skills or excite the imagination of the instructor. Consistent multiple choice responses become more desirable than authentic learning experiences. The design focus is convenience rather than excellence. The outcome is that it fills the day without enriching the mind.

Some policymakers are quick to point out that times are hard, stakes are high, money is scarce, and there are just no other solutions but to opt for the standard ingredients and the package directions. “Tuna Helper Teaching,” they’ll tell you, “may not be exciting, but it’s adequate, it reduces the risks that creative teaching carries, and is the best we can do with the resources we have for public education.”

The predictions of the long term damage and cost of childhood obesity are grim enough. But the impact of obesity on the next generation pales at the potential problems we are creating by stuffing our children with an education that limits their learning to what some manufacturer (i.e., education publisher) can fit in a cardboard box.

Posted by Susan Graham at 1:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Lately there is a miasma of stress that hovers in the halls of my school and community. In a high speculative and very expensive real estate market, property values have dropped precipitously, leaving more than a few mortgaged folks with a negative value. The stagnant building industry and retail market will leave some of our students' families without work. Property taxes are our primary funding source for education, so we are looking at draconian cuts on top of last year’s merely drastic cuts.

As a suburb of Washington, we live in the shadow of the Capitol and the Pentagon. Election years mean potential life changes for some families. Deployment is always just around the corner in other homes. Middle school is tough enough without adult pressures oozing into the halls to mix with the homework, hormones and heartaches of early adolescence. Thirteen year olds alternate between worrying about their interim reports and making the team, and wondering where they'll live and whether their parents will be around.

This weekend I needed a break. Friday afternoon I left the papers on my desk, knowing they could wait since Monday was an in-service day. I spent Saturday morning digging in my yard rather than grading. Then, pleasantly weary, I did not read the book that I received as “homework” from a Central Office committee. But while I did avoid work, I couldn’t quite put school behind me. Instead, I spent my weekend with a new young teacher friend, Ms. Hempel.

She had chosen teaching because it seemed to offer both tremendous opportunities for leisure and the satisfaction of doing something generous and worthwhile. Too late she realized her mistake; teaching had invaded her like a mild but inexorable infection; her students now inhabited her dreams, her privacy, her language.

Ms. Hempel is not quite real, but within a few pages, I knew that she was more than a character in a novel. Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s Ms. Hempel Chronicles is not quite fiction, not quite a collection of short stories, and not quite a series of essays on teaching and learning in the middle school environment. It is a compilation of all of these. Bynum builds her story on her own experiences teaching seventh grade at the Berkeley Carroll School in Brooklyn.

Ms. Hempel can touch her students’ lives because she has not lost touch with her own experience of being thirteen. Because she recalls with clarity her own adolescent misconstructed efforts to deal with an adult world, she cuts through the pseudo- sophistication of her students. “Haven’t you heard,” she asks her eighth graders, “about the clowns? Who kidnap you? Who drive around in vans?” Only someone who vividly remembers her own adolescence and the confusion of dangling between childhood and adulthood understands that worldly eighth graders can still be unsure whether there might really be a van full of clowns gone bad, lurking just around the corner.

I am sorry to tell you that Ms. Hempel doesn’t stay in the middle school classroom. Like so many fine teachers, she leaves. And though it’s not stated, it would appear that she leaves during those first five years when so many teachers walk away. Author Bynum left the K12 classroom herself. In addition to being an author, she now teaches at the University of California, San Diego.

Unlike Ms. Hempel and Ms. Bynum, I’ve stayed in middle school for 20 years now. I am teaching the children of my former students. It keeps me young, but it also wears me out. There are days when I contemplate what I might accomplish as an educator beyond the middle school classroom. And there are days when I just wonder if there isn’t a nice job in an insurance office that would be a lot easier. But most of the time, I love what I do. Bynum puts it this way:

This was the feeling that Ms.Hempel couldn’t shake: conviction that she spent her days among people at the age when they were most purely themselves. How could she not be depleted when she came home, having been exposed for hours, without protection, to all of those thrumming, radiant selves? Here they were, just old enough to have discovered their souls, but not yet dulled by the ordinary act of survival, not yet practiced at dissembling.

Tomorrow I’ll go back in my classroom. I will be immersed in the egocentricity of adolescence for four hours before I can catch my breath. I'll come up, scurry to the office, scarf down a sandwich, and plunge back in for another two hours. Sometimes I question how long I can keep up the pace. Still, the weekend with Ms. Hempel reminded me that though it can knock the wind out of you, middle school can leave you breathless with wonder.

Posted by Susan Graham at 12:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)