Terms of use, whether you like it or not

SOMETHING I FOUND OUT SINCE I POSTED THIS:

A teacher got a letter-in-the-file for not using our school data management computer enough. Without divulging the name of the system (I don't know how many schools have it), it is accessible from school computers through an https:// address. This is the first time I've heard that someone has been formerly disciplined about the use (in this case, the non-use) of computer data. It doesn't look good.

For the 100th time: WHERE IS THE UNION???

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A blog I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my first experience with ARIS — that’s the system the DoE bought when it went on a technological shopping spree with taxpayer money — made me reassess my relationship with school computers.

Don't get me wrong, I like computers. I especially like them when I have a fair degree of control over who gets to know when I’m online, what kind of stuff I’m doing there and whom I’m writing to. ARIS will not give me those pleasures, and I will probably resist using it as long as I can.

Within a week of that post, I was refused access into my school email account and could only get back in by re-registering and accepting the DoE’s “Acceptable Use Policy” (AUP). I don’t remember doing that before, but maybe I did, when I was less burnt by this system. In any case, I hope that their forcing me to re-register was part of a general housekeeping exercise and that they weren't just targeting me. Did everyone’s access to nycboe get cut within the past couple of weeks?

Being wary of anything the DoE does at this point, I decided to actually read the AUP they were telling me to sign off on before I could get back onto the system. If you're interested in the whole text, it's online here.

It’s not that I oppose a system that tells you what you can and cannot do when you're on it. What I thoroughly oppose is that we've been forced into having a DoE email account in the first place and then told all kinds of stuff about how it has to be used.

For one thing, by making us sign the AUP, someone — whether it’s a local administrator or a higher-up at Tweed — is telling us to give up a right to privacy. While it is true that privacy is not an iron-clad Constitutional right, courts over time have sought to give it some definition, as explained in this passage:

The Constitution does not specifically mention a right to privacy. However, Supreme Court decisions over the years have established that the right to privacy is a basic human right, and as such is protected by virtue of the 9th Amendment. The right to privacy has come to the public's attention via several controversial Supreme Court rulings, including several dealing with contraception (the Griswold and Eisenstadt cases), interracial marriage (the Loving case), and abortion (the well-known Roe v Wade case). In addition, it is said that a right to privacy is inherent in many of the amendments in the Bill of Rights, such as the 3rd, the 4th's search and seizure limits, and the 5th's self-incrimination limit.

Here's the 9th Amendment, for those who haven't memorized it: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

Way down in the AUP's clause on Privacy, there's this startling remark:

e) System users have no privacy expectation in the contents of their personal files and records of their online activity while on the Department system.

Must we agree to this? Backing up a bit, there’s this:

a) The Department reserves the right to use "cookies" on its site. Cookies are computer programs that . . . store information about a user on a computer hard drive or disk. Information stored includes, but may not be limited to, the date and time a user visits the site and information about the user’s activities while online. Any information gathered is obtained solely for the purpose of improving the Department’s services and providing the system with statistical information to assist in improving teaching and learning by teachers and students respectively.

Except as otherwise provided in this Internet Acceptable Use Policy, the Department will not use cookies to gather personal identifying information about any of its users. Personal identifying information includes, but is not limited to, names, home addresses, e-mail addresses and telephone numbers.

I’m not so worried about the “personal identifying information” mentioned in the 2nd paragraph above. What I am very worried about is the kind of “statistical information [the DoE will gather] to assist in improving teaching and learning.”

That’s because I don't much trust the DoE’s methods to improve teaching and learning. Just look at its abysmal record on class size reduction, the misrepresentation of test results and graduation records, its campaign against senior teachers and the way it stocks schools with so many uncertified and possibly transient educators, and its fake accountability/grading systems to achieve the data outcomes they desire.

Users should be aware that their personal files may be discoverable in court and administrative proceedings and in accordance with public records laws.

At this point, I’m saying to myself I really don’t want any part of this thing.

And right after that I’m asking: Don’t we have a Union to object to our being forced to sign onto such an invasive system?


It’s worth noting some other things in the AUP, like the section on “Freedom of Expression," which talks solely about the items set forth in the Bill of Student Rights and Responsibilities: there's absolutely no mention of free speech for staff.

I’m also not crazy about the clause in “Inappropriate Language,” which tells users not to use “rude, inflammatory . . . abusive or disrespectful language” or engage in “personal attacks,” but I can live with it, since there are so many other places where we can talk about the BloomKlein debacle — and talk about it we really must.

It's rather quaint that we have been given permission to engage in "incidental use" during our duty-free time ("staff may be permitted to use the Internet for purchasing a book for personal use during their lunch hour"), though I don’t know many teachers who have luxury of a duty-free lunch. Maybe that's what goes on at Tweed.

The AUP says that teachers who make their own web pages must “provide a resource for others." They don't mean like this one, of course, though I frequently quote from primary sources. Web pages created on DoE computers must “reflect well upon the Department, district and school,” which is really the kind of thing we used to expect from the Soviets or Chairman Mao.

There's a fair amount of talk about violating these AUP rules: employees breaking the rules "will be handled by appropriate discipline.” It's not that I’m intending in my lifetime to surf salacious sites on school computers or hurl obscenities at anyone in Outlook Express. But, there’s a good deal of ambiguity here. Just how critical of Joel Klein and Tweedledom can one be on a DoE computer without being disciplined? Have they assigned a team of übersnoops to monitor the internet activity of critics like myself? And what might be that "appropriate" discipline alluded to above that would keep me and others like me in line?

If the truth be known, I saw a ray of hope in this sentence:

The Department may revoke Internet access in its sole discretion.

That would suit me just fine, because then I wouldn’t have to read all that self-serving crap administrators always circulate to staff. And if my principal really wanted to speak to me, she’d have to send me a note in my mailbox or just pick up the phone, without an infinite number of people getting CC or BCC copies.

Talking about e-mails, the AUP not only orders us to use it “frequently," but be sure to do certain things when we’re on it, like delete unwanted messages “promptly.” Fine if the system were optional, but it isn’t. First they force us to have an account, and then they tell us how and how often to use it. It's as if they have boundary issues or something.


Lastly, I would be remiss in not citing these paragraphs on the DoE’s “Acceptable Use Guidelines” for emails.

"Acceptable" e-mail activities are those that conform to the purpose, goals, and mission of the DOE and to each user's job duties and responsibilities . Users shall have no right to privacy while using the DOE's internet or e-mail system . E-mail may not be used for personal purposes during working hours, except that users may engage in minimal e-mail activities for personal purposes, such as family correspondence, if the use does not diminish the employee's productivity, work product, or ability to perform services for the DOE.

"Unacceptable" use is defined generally as activities using DOE hardware, software, or networks at any time that does not conform to the purpose, goals, and mission of the DOE and to each user's job duties and responsibilities . . .

NOTE: Users may be subject to limitations on their use of e-mail as determined by their supervisor. The DOE reserves the right to examine any/all e-mail or Internet correspondence for security and/or network management purposes.

Violation of this e-mail policy may result in disciplinary action.

The underlining is editorial, and on the grounds of these bits alone, we should all consider boycotting the whole system.


Weingarten, you're a lawyer. Doesn't any of this offend you?

A taste of ARIS

I got my first ARIS training the other day.

It was a short session, probably the first of many they have in store for us, but I had enough after about 10 minutes.

We were shown how to log on, follow a few links, and see how much information we could access about all our students. Not bad, I thought, but then I started calculating how much information the DoE could learn about me while I was logged on.

Let me say first off that I do know what I can expect of writing stuff on-line, and I don't like anyone being able to snoop around in my business when I haven't told them they could. (I have enough trouble with the feds doing that behind our backs and without a warrant.) Use ARIS and you're giving the DoE tacit permission to monitor your professional work habits really up close and personal.

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The first task in our training was to create a "group" out of the student data. By way of example, they showed us how if we twiddled this or that, ARIS could automatically group all the LTAs (Long Term Absences) in our classes into one big list.

Pardon me, but any teacher worth his salt knows exactly who is not coming to class, and no computer is going to make it any clearer. Now, if they invented a way to make phonecalls home to the parents of these kids, and keep making them when the line is busy or track them down when the phone is disconnected or the voicemail is full, then log those calls in automatically and send some documentation over to the principal to show you've done some prodding — then I'd say they've got something really useful. But to tell me what I already know without being able to sort out the truancy issues is simply outrageous.

Let me withdraw that. It's not outrageous, because I forgot ARIS is not actually designed to help teachers. It's designed first to monitor teachers, and then to project an image of a kind of high-tech proficiency — a perfect system, in fact, for the Madison Avenue types of Kleinworld and not for common sense, hands-on educators like ourselves.

The second part of our training just left me flabbergasted. They showed us how within the ARIS system we could — wait for it — communicate with other educators through the internet! I'm talking MySpace, Facebook and Twitter kind of stuff. Private subscriptions, public ones. We could throw some questions out there to see if anyone responds and share our thoughts with other educators.

They didn't mention that Big Brother could be very interested in all that sharing and communicating. Who on earth would believe that anything we do in ARIS would really be private.

Spending $80 million on a blogging system that exists everywhere for free is inane.

Let me withdraw that. It's not inane, because I forgot ARIS is not actually designed to facilitate communication. It's designed first to monitor teachers, and then to pretend it wants to facilitate the sharing of ideas. Puh-lease! When was the last time the DoE ever showed any interest in creative thinking at the teacher level. They've been too busy with one-size-fits-all methodology and teaching to the test for more than a decade.

ARIS is neither helpful or amusing.

It is costly, not particularly innovative, deceptive and invasive. The DoE could service us much better by providing a working computer and printer in every classroom, and sending over a supply of paper and extra ink cartridges. They should design a system so teachers don't have take attendance two or three times a day, generate and disseminate copies of any relevant IEPs to every teacher required by law to get them, and most of all, guarantee we're not being monitored when we communicate and share ideas with teachers down the hall.

The person with the most seniority gets the job

I feel remiss in not writing, but before I go on a proper leave from blogging, I feel obligated to explain why the sporadic posts.

Consider this explanation a treatise on licensing.


After a successful arbitration a couple of months ago, I was reclaimed from the ATR pool and restored to a full music position. There were two in the building at the time, and though it could have been played out in various ways at the principal’s discretion, it was decided that low man, a new teacher, would have to become the ATR that I had been, and I would get his general music position. It was a nightmare taking over someone’s classes near the end of a semester, and as little said about those six weeks the better.

Fast forward to the end of January, when principals make plans for the spring semester. Student attendance down, one music position would have to go. The band program was more in line with what principal wanted (who knows what the parents or the union reps thought about this, since the CEPs were not done on time), so general music was going to be axed.

The band position for the spring would involve two introductory bands, an intermediate and a more advanced one, and a new course, a percussion/drumline group. There'd be a spring concert and perhaps a nice stroll in the Puerto Rican Day parade.


I had actually been expecting to be placed into excess again as soon as the principal could find a way to do it. That would have been fine. Dabbling in a variety of subjects from day to day as an ATR — Shakespeare, Italian, health, algebra, volleyball, law and variety of other — was in a bizarre way the implementation of one of my youthful dreams, to become a “Renaissance woman.”

Alas, twas not to be. The band position had to be offered to me, though one could easily ask why, since I had never wanted to teach band and neither asked to or ever even tried to.

DoE regulation: The person with the most seniority holding the license gets the job.

The reason, then, for this ridiculous situation was simple and stupid.

When the DoE replaced the city arts licenses in 2001 with some new ones that were more in line with the state’s K-12 licenses, they gave us music teachers two of them: one for Music and another for Orchestral Music. I had activated the Music one and barely remembered I even held the other one.

No one at the DoE knows a thing about music or they'd have realized that being an orchestral conductor or bandleader is altogether different from being a teacher of music appreciation or directing a chorus. The person in charge of these groups should know how to handle each of the instruments (and none of them are cheap), as well as how to play them, clean them, repair minor problems and replace parts, regulate their use in the room, and transpose parts. I won’t even mention being able to play the piano while you’re conducting, or making an occasional arrangement if the players you have don't match what the music calls for. Heck, I would have liked to know where each player should be sitting.

Horrified, then, at being offered the position, I whipped out my contract — Art.17.B., which allows voluntary excessing — and put my request for me to excessed instead of the band teacher in writing. HR quickly rejected it. That's because the UFT and the DoE have agreed not to excess high school teachers in the middle of the year, so you can’t at this time of the year voluntarily put yourself into it. 

Instead, "leftover" educators become teachers without a program, and in this case, they resolved that it wasn't going to be. I was the most senior person holding that dusty, unactivated, all but forgotten Orchestral license lying in the bottom drawer of my file cabinet. The job had to be mine, it couldn't go to the real band teacher. The only option would have been to retire on the spot, but with the financial crisis being what it is, I don’t think so.

So, here I am a bandleader for the first time in my life, a few weeks away from my 62nd birthday. And I must be the only person in the school with four preps a week, three classes of 40-50 on register and a circular 6-R duty that has nothing to do with my skills. Shell-shocked is a good word for it, and it applies just as much to the principal, AP, and the original band teacher as it does to me.

This should go a long way to explain the sporadic nature of my recent posts.

Surviving this semester will mean hundreds of hours of extra work, from learning how to blow, pound, care for, and draw reasonable sounds out of more than a dozen instruments to making up some simple arrangements for the beginner bands and lesson plans for all of them, particularly the new percussion group, which no one at the school has really thought through.

I’m actually thinking of this as a career change, from ed blogger to bandleader, and at this point I have far more experience with the former.

Look out for my next post sometime in late spring, when 17.B. will come in very handy.

Breaking my silence, musically speaking

Now that I've been reinstated into the music position from which I was excessed two summers ago, it is time I devote at least one post to teaching music in a New York City high school.

Or should I say warehousing music in a New York City high school.

For those who have never paid much attention to the Class Size Limitation clause in the contract that allows 50 pupils in music classes (Art.VII.M.1.g.) — and I’m afraid that includes Ms Weingarten and Partners, who keep hoping this issue will go away on its own — consider what this means for just a moment.

1. The number 50 may have come about when performance groups like choruses, bands and orchestras had these many kids in them, or even a lot more. I’m not questioning those kinds of classes, since not only do the kids who are in them generally want to be there and know how to behave, but it’s really fun to make a great big sound. General music, though, is identical in every way to any other subject, and there is no reason at all for having 50 kids in that kind of music class.

2. Our registers are made up of kids in 4 different grades, 9th – 12th.

3. Our registers contain regular ed students, kids with IEPs (learning and behavioral), kids with hearing and other kinds of disabilities, and ELLs.

4. There are no stipulations at the state or city level that set percentages for IEP students in the class. For example, 65, 80 or 100% of the 50 pupils may have special needs.

5. It is true that not all students show up on any given day, but the same could be said for any other subject class.

6. On the registers alone, record-keeping (including daily and weekly attendance), marking and grading involve 47% more processing time and production than for any other subject.

7. Contacting parents and/or guidance counselors on attendance and behavior issues: ditto.

8. Music teachers still have to devote one period a day to Professional Activities.

9. Roll back to 2003 when the chancellor, new at his job and distinctly unprepared to take it on, decided that there would be a new emphasis on literacy and math and all subject teachers had to focus on skills in these areas. It’s not that I mind focusing on literacy and math. In fact, I’ve focused on it for 21 years, with lessons on poetry and song forms, lyrics and articulations in English and many other languages, with whole notes, quarter notes and all the rest. I feel that music teachers, unbound by a specific curriculum, can do a whole lot to bolster up what's taught in other subjects. But, if there’s to be a directive to do the same kind of work in a music classroom that’s being done in a major subject, then the class should not be 47% larger, because there’s nothing to stop administrators from criticizing you if you can’t make it happen. The union was very much asleep on this.

10. There was also the directive to set up your classroom in the “workshop model.” I could never bring myself to do that, I hated it so much, but I wasn’t in a high school at the time so I don’t know if principals enforced that ruling. A quick calculation makes it 12 groups of 4 kids. Zounds!

11. Discipline. Music teachers are held to the same standards as everyone else.

12. Differentiated instruction. Ditto.

13. Gym classes also have 50 on register in junior and senior high schools, but many of the points made above apply only to music classes.

About two years ago when I spoke on all this at a Delegate Assembly, and where the groans were actually audible when the delegates heard some of the factors listed above, Weingarten asked one of her henchpeople to follow up and see if the union could arrange for some “non-contractual relief” for music teachers.

For my money — literally, my union dues — she should have done away with clause Art.VII.M.1.g. altogether and have high school music teachers teach the same number of kids everyone else does. As long as the chancellor and the regional superintendents were requiring all teachers to include literacy, math, differentiated instruction and workshop models, it was never fair that music teachers had to do it all with 47% more kids. We were left open to any kind of criticism they felt inclined to send our way if we couldn’t make good on the directives.

Failing that, she could have insisted on a new clause “f.”, where the contract discusses Professional Activities (Art.VII.A.6.), something like: “High school music teachers are exempt from a Professional Activities duty because they teach 47% more kids than other teachers.”

At the very least, Weingarten could have asked for one more item in the Professional Activities Options (VII.A.6.a), something like: “f. Extra record keeping, marking and grading (music teachers only).”

Zip, nada, zilch til now, and I expect never.

Weingarten had been negotiating these contracts already for a decade and knew very well she wasn’t going to do anything about getting music teachers any “relief,” non-contractual or otherwise.

I’ll place the blame for this fairly, on the union, on Klein's negotiators, and on school administrators. No one's holding a gun to a principal's head to program 50 kids at a time into high school music classes. That number is a cap, not an order. It's both outdated and stupid, especially when some high schools have a majority of students reading at Level 2. Principals could instead program these classes like all the others, with 34 students.

When administrators soak everything they can out of a faulty contract for monetary reasons, kids suffer and teachers suffer. No bonus they pocket at the end of the year can add to their personal karma or put integrity back into the system.

Can we get back to teaching grammar yet?

Just a day or two after Learners Inherit and I went separately off on the shoddy English tolerated by the DoE and its testing partner McGraw-Hill, NY Times Editorial Observer Lawrence Downes wrote of a similar kind of despair.

In an essay yesterday subtitled "An Elegy for Copy Editors", he reminded us exactly what these very important writers do, and how skilled they have to be to go about doing it.

Copy editors handle the final transition to an ink-on-paper object. On the news-factory floor, they do the refining and packaging. They trim words, fix grammar, punctuation and style, write headlines and captions . . . [they] are the last set of eyes before yours. They are more powerful than proofreaders. They untangle twisted prose. They are surgeons, removing growths of error and irrelevance; they are minimalist chefs, straining fat.

The way I look at it, when they do their job well, you can read the text without stumbling. When they do it superbly, you feel like you’re on a hovercraft, buoyed up and being moved along all at the same time.

Downes rues the demise of a profession:

As newspapers lose money and readers, they have been shedding great swaths of expensive expertise. . . Copy editors are being bought out or forced out; they are dying and not being replaced.

Style and consistency may have meant a lot in a print environment, but as newspapers compete in a new web world, it is “speed, agility and creativity” that get the job done.


I was working in District 2 when English teachers were running around the halls screaming, “They’re not letting us teach grammar!” That was because Lucy Calkins had come on the scene and sold an entire borough or two on writing workshops.

At the heart of her philosophy is the notion that children ought to be given a “voice,” encouraged to discover and refine their own personal writing style, as they compose “stories that matter.” . . . Her approach to literacy reviles “direct teaching,” where the teacher stands in front of the room and lectures, preferring instead that children work in small groups and consult each other as much as possible. . . . She writes of the “art” involved in teaching and conferring, and thereby suggests that while aspects of literacy can be taught, there also exists a degree of creative intuition in the process, on the part of both the child and the teacher.

Only a few years later, it was the foreign language teachers who were running around screaming. “How can we teach kids to conjugate verbs in Spanish and French when they don’t even know the parts of speech in English!” Some took their jobs really seriously and were telling everyone who'd listen that they were now having to teach grammar in not one language, but two: the foreign one and English as well.


The DoE has told us in so many ways that literacy is what they’re after. They’ve cut arts and sports curricula to make more room for it, they’ve insisted that kids keep writers’ notebooks à la Calkins whether teachers wanted to use this method or not, and they’ve replaced classic works of literature in school libraries with brightly packaged easy-reads on alluring subjects. They've tested endlessly, hoping that this ritualistic act of measurement might, if they could tweak it just right, produce some kind of magical picture of how literate our kids really are.

This is the tradition that has been established for a generation of schoolkids in New York City. But, it has failed the majority of them. They can’t write.

As one distressed teacher wrote a few years ago:

As everyone knows, NYC teachers are being forced to use [the Calkins workshop] model but it is not that effective for the middle, not to mention the struggling learners. Don't tell the mayor and Lucy but most of the students fall into these categories! Also, it is hard to run around correcting all the personal feelings that the kids are encouraged to write. What tops it off is the kids hate it. What happened to directly teaching skills? It is not happening in all the unrelated "mini" lessons. One of the students asked me, "Why don't you teach us how to write like you teach us the other subjects?" He was right! Teach, model and practice . . . HELP!!!

Help is at hand.

For the intellectually challenged at Tweed and McGraw-Hill, there’s an excellent paper that came out of the 2002 conference of the National Council of Teachers of English. It’s been endorsed by the Linguistic Society of America, another scholarly group that, unlike the faux-educators who issue directives to the city’s classroom teachers, cares deeply about language.

It has a very simple title: Why is grammar important?, and one would think that the essence of their argument is something the DoE would have subscribed to a long time ago. Here are some key paragraphs:

Grammar is important because it is the language that makes it possible for us to talk about language. Grammar names the types of words and word groups that make up sentences not only in English but in any language. As human beings, we can put sentences together even as children — we can all do grammar. But to be able to talk about how sentences are built, about the types of words and word groups that make up sentences — that is knowing about grammar. And knowing about grammar offers a window into the human mind and into our amazingly complex mental capacity.

People associate grammar with errors and correctness. But knowing about grammar also helps us understand what makes sentences and paragraphs clear and interesting and precise. Grammar can be part of literature discussions, when we and our students closely read the sentences in poetry and stories. And knowing about grammar means finding out that all languages and all dialects follow grammatical patterns.

. . . Teaching grammar will not make writing errors go away. Students make errors in the process of learning, and as they learn about writing, they often make new errors, not necessarily fewer ones. But knowing basic grammatical terminology does provide students with a tool for thinking about and discussing sentences. And lots of discussion of language, along with lots of reading and lots of writing, are the three ingredients for helping students write in accordance with the conventions of standard English.

You don’t have to convince me.


The proofreaders responsible for the text excerpted by Learners Inherit would have done well to rely on the rules of grammar to get their meaning across. In example 1, for instance, it is entirely unclear whether it is the dual identity of Pluto or the planet itself that has been enshrouded in controversy, and I doubt very much that the ices mentioned in example 4 can on Pluto or anywhere else “rise,” as the passage says. May I add how depressing it is to see the words Sun and Earth capitalized, as if this were some kind of medieval tract giving supernatural powers to those celestial bodies.


The beauty, subtleties and greatness of the English language cannot be pulled out of the minds of children who do not hear much of these qualities in their daily lives. We do them no great favor when we pay more attention to “self-expression” than to the rules and structures that make the communication of their ideas possible.

Amy Benjamin reminds us that the ancient Greeks included grammar as one of the seven liberal arts. These, she says, have been considered the “handmaidens of thought.”

We should never tolerate the dissolution of our precious language traditions as the result of decisions made in corporate boardrooms or by advisors who are completely out of touch with what inner-city schoolchildren need to know to become successful communicators.


New post: I had some further things to say on this subject here.

Sacrificing the learning years — Why?

When you’ve made a career in a classroom because you enjoy teaching and all its challenges, you can’t help drawing some conclusions about how kids learn, and whether they learn.

I have come to believe that three phenomena do the most damage to young minds: porn, violence, and the workshop model.

The first robs children of their innocence and the chance to discover the deepest secrets of adult life at an appropriate pace, the second makes them numb to inhumanity, and the third deprives them of a suitable environment for absorbing a ton of information and learning the techniques of just plain thinking.

Forces within our society, including the right of free speech, have failed them on the first two, and the DOE’s rigid and overreaching directives have failed them on the third. What we have is a generation of highly aware and over-exposed students, most still quite innocent when you come down to it, who know a whole lot about the darkside, but feel decidedly uncomfortable when asked to learn, reason, memorize, reflect, or practice any of the other cognitive skills.

According to the NY Teacher (Deidre McFadyen, Feb. 17, 2005):

The workshop model is the brainchild of [Carmen] Farina ... and Lucy Calkins, the founder of the Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University’s Teachers College, which has received more than $10 million in training contracts from the Department of Education in the past two years. The model is premised on the belief of “progressive” educators that the best way to encourage deep and enduring understanding is through “discovery learning” in a small-group setting, where students puzzle out problems and acquire knowledge on their own.

One of the features of the workshop model is that desks are arranged in small groups, often of four.

It is obvious and well known that two things happen the minute you turn four desks with kids at them in on each other: (a) each student has to deal with the three other personalities around the table at the same time he has been instructed to think, and (b) the only person in the room who has a really decent handle on the subject is not one of those three. The teacher, who has mastered the subject and internalized the knowledge, is on the outside of that huddle and generally has to be fairly aggressive to make his presence known.

Cognitive skills are private. It is your brain that is acquiring them, and it’s the obligation of an educational system to give you a proper space and a decent amount of time to learn them in. Processing speed, memory, logic, reasoning, attention skills – all those good things that allow you to be really functional in the world when you grow up – are your skills, not your neighbor’s, or those of the kid across the table from you.

A lot was written about the workshop model a couple of years ago when teachers realized how insistent the DOE was about steamrolling it into our classrooms. (See McFadyen’s article mentioned above and a Liz Ditz post on Sept. 10 of the same year that quotes from other NYC ed writers. Or do some googling.) Neither I nor anyone else is suggesting the workshop model should never be used, only that it should never be used tyrannically, exclusively, or injudiciously.

It’s time to look at this methodology again, now that high school teachers are dealing with classrooms of students whose ability to learn has been stunted by way too many years of workshop modeling in inappropriate and downright unworkable settings.


Here’s what we confront with the incoming 9th graders:

The preponderance of talking, with few having the self-control to monitor themselves. I'm speaking about good students as well as strugglers. Students of this age simply talk, a lot and loudly and with a limited awareness that they are interfering with the learning space of others.

The frequency of going off task. Their social habits and needs pull them greatly in other direcctions.

The migration of desks set up in L-shapes or short lines turning in on themselves as students gravitate into the small groups they've grown accustomed to.

The marginalization of the teacher, who often has to plead for silence and attention.

The non-compliance of the marginal students who simply cannot work on their own until the teacher has the chance to put them individually back on track.

By the last years in high school, some of the frivolous behavior is dropped, but by then it’s too late. The precious cognition we always had wanted for our students is no longer within their grasp.

It is time to take a hard look at what has been wrought upon a generation of students in this city by businessmen and ed contractors, many of whom lost their credibility a long time ago. You can’t give back the “learning years” to kids who’ve been sacrificed to a gross and heavy-handed experiment that has not worked.

It is time to return teaching to the teachers, who for the most part, are the only ones who have any hands-on experience with the populations of kids they have made it their life's work to nurture.