Race to the Top?

            When I was in high school, just a decade ago, standardized testing was not a part of our lives. They were just beginning to field test some of the HSA’s, but none of these tests counted against students or schools. I recall being selected to take the biology test, and, knowing that the test held no weight on me or my school, I did very little preparation for the test. Regardless, I wasn’t one of those students who could ever just turn in a test where I bubbled all C’s, so I did my best. The test was surprisingly easy. But, I only had to take one of those tests. Every single person I graduated high school with said thank God we graduated when we did and didn’t have to take all those standardized tests. We were in some of the last good years where our teachers still had the control in their classrooms to lead us on a journey. We were part of the last good years where teachers weren’t forced to teach to a test. We were focused on tests that meant something, on AP classes that were rigorous and challenging (and didn’t ever use those buzzwords as descriptors, they just were). We had some of the most amazing teachers, who were amazing because of the freedom they had to teach about what was meaningful and important, rather than what would be on a test that was shipped in a box like an Amazon package.

            My most meaningful classes in high school were AP European History and AP Composition. AP European History was one of the few challenging classes I ever took (We were also, unfortunately, already a part of the age where students were beginning to complain about too much work, and at a school where students were expected to get all A’s and B’s because of course everyone’s little Sally Joe did all of the assignments and I have no idea why she is failing!). First of all, the teacher of this class was one of the best I have ever had to this day. Everybody loved him. He was anecdotal, honest, and hilarious, and he knew the subjects he taught inside and out. To pass his class, you had to read the textbook. You had to create a timeline of European History in your head (and probably on paper first, too), and he helped every single one of us do that by providing us with some of the most fascinating stories of European History. And, of course, any one who knows a thing or two about European History, or even just knows of Henry VIII and his six wives, will tell you that the content provides a wealth of anecdotal stories fascinating to any age group, but especially to the budding and, at times, volatile romantic minds of teenagers.

            To be a good teacher, you have to be a storyteller. I think this goes back to our history, to the oral traditions of Homer and other stories and legends that were not only forms of entertainment, but beautifully disguised lessons as well. As a teacher in a time where standardized testing has led to standardized curriculum, I see the rules are changing. I see the reins of every classroom being handed to someone sitting in an office at the Board of Education who has quite possibly never set foot in a classroom, let alone taught in one. The oral traditions, the opportunities for storytelling are disappearing, but when I find time for those moments amidst the overflowing curriculum, I remember why I got into this job in the first place. Teaching is a beautiful profession. When you are passionate about what you are teaching, when you tell a story, when you can help students to connect and associate what they are reading with something relevant to their everyday lives (Disney/Pixar movies, Instagram, texts), the reason for learning becomes clear to everyone in the room, and students become engaged. It is those moments of magic that I live for. The quiet in the room as all the students look up front and open up a lively conversation about how the neighbors in Rod Serling’s “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” are falsely accusing one another with a mob mentality that frighteningly resembles McCarthy era America as well as Gaston’s jealous incitement of a mob to “kill the beast” in Beauty and the Beast - those connections and associations have always been what excites me about learning. I become so excited when I speak about these associations with my students. They engage with my excitement and with the connection. Our neurons are firing in the ways they should be! Students’ brains are engaged and they aren’t making off task associations. We are keeping it all relevant and interesting at the same time, which can be so very difficult to do with twelve and thirteen year olds who are constantly bombarded by fights with their best friends or bullying or crushes. And, the truth is, even those stories, have a connection to what is being read or learned in the classroom. The stampede of students running to watch a fight in the hallway certainly follows the idea of mob mentality, which leads to a teachable moment about peer pressure and overcoming the changes in your brain that occur when you become part of a mob. Why is it difficult to be Steve and easy to be Don? Why didn’t people call out McCarthy for falsely accusing people of being communists? Why didn’t anyone tell a teacher that there was going to be a fight?

            But as educators, and certainly at the county level, we don’t talk about real life associations or even associations among texts that are relevant to students. We talk about “driving connections among various texts.” That sounds terrible. And, what makes it even worse, we are told what texts to drive the connections among. So, where is the creativity? We are not teaching children to take pride in their associations. We are not forging new connections in their brains. We are spoon-feeding them connections that have already been made by someone else’s brain. We are teaching them to see what some person at the county or state or even federal level saw. What good does that do anyone?

            When I was in college, I took a class in which we watched The Lion King. Yes, I went to a "little Ivy" school in Boston and one of my course's texts was The Lion King. Why? Some of you may have already guessed the connection to a college-level English literature course: Hamlet. Seeing the connection between a Disney movie I had watched and cried over again and again, and a Shakespeare play that I could never really fully engage with emotionally, made me realize what Shakespeare was all about, what literature is all about really. It is about sharing the human experience. These stories repeat themselves in many ways. Themes recur and teach us lessons time and time again. And, just as learning the definition of a word one time doesn’t quite send the point home, learning a lesson or a message once, doesn’t quite get the knowledge hammered in either. We know how our brains work. We know about connecting new knowledge to prior knowledge. We know that we remember things better when they are tied to something meaningful or emotional in some way.

            So, am I purporting that we need to find a Disney movie to connect to every piece of literature? Well, not exactly, but I am suggesting that we need to make learning more relevant. The things we teach in school often exist to our students as information or texts that stand alone in a textbook, textbooks that stay in their desks and seem to have no relevance to the outside world. What is the greatest way to help a student to remember something? To help them to connect it to something that is already meaningful to them. For most people, some of our deepest connections are tied to emotions forged in childhood. For me, and probably many twenty somethings, we connect to Full House, Disney movies, Pogs, Nickelodeon, Tamagotchis, Lisa Frank-the seemingly trivial things that were always there as we learned about the world. When I meet an old friend we can connect over old stories from high school or legendary teachers. The truth is that we remember stories better than we remember anything else. We can learn this from great Roman orators, or even more recent speech makers who tell a story and bring a call to action or a lesson through their narrative. You have to make what you are saying relevant to your audience. Stale curriculum and standardized (yep, this word alone says it all) tests are relevant to no one, except for those waiting for the data to pour out the other side. That is why they are stale and standardized. They have one purpose: data.

            But the data-driven world is on a sour path, if they think they can close the achievement gap by making things look better on paper, on a chart or a graph. We can make our academic graph look better, but there will still be kids stampeding down the hallways because they never learned about mob mentality and how to resist it. What truly makes a difference is connecting through our human experiences. Is that hard to do with adolescents? You better believe it. Is it impossible? Of course not! We are here to teach, to learn, to go through a journey. We are not here to Race to the Top and make sure that No Child is Left Behind. This thing we are doing -learning, teaching, education- it is a journey, not a race. There will be no child left behind because every child will be a part of this journey that will continue for the rest of their lives. There is no top. We are moving across a timeline, not up a mountain. As Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces has taught us, as Star Wars has taught us following that example, there is something that brings all humans together, something that is universal. It goes back to great myths, to all of our literature. It is the universal experience of being human, what we so concisely label as “theme” in our secondary language arts classes. Teaching through narrative will close the achievement gap because this is truly the universal language. The experience of what it is to be human, in any space or time, this is what will bring us all together. This is where our educational reforms need to start.