Why "High Expectations" Isn't As Simple As It Sounds

In 1964, Robert Rosenthal performed an experiment that has become quite famous. You’ve probably heard the gist of it even if you’ve never heard the name Robert Rosenthal in your life (which I hadn’t either until, like, five minutes ago.) Basically, he took a random sample of students and told those students’ teachers that these particular students had been identified as especially gifted. Over the course of the experiment, he found that those students, despite having been chosen at random, did come to perform better in school than a control group. Somehow (though it is a bit unclear exactly how this process unfolded) their teachers’ higher expectations of them led them to greater success.

When you hear this experiment mentioned these days, it is usually in the context of some inspirational speech: Have high expectations for all your students! Call them scholars! Insist upon excellence! Raise the bar and they will rise to meet it!

But I think what is at play here, really, is an equivocation on the word “expectations.” It is being used in two different senses.

Sometimes, we use the word “expectations” to mean the implicit, unconscious beliefs we hold about what is going to happen in the future. I expect that the sun is going to rise tomorrow morning; I expect that watching the latest episode of The Good Place is going to make me happy; I expect that my coworker Glen is going to walk over and make small talk about what day of the week it is. (“Almost Friday!” or “Monday again!” or “Looking forward to the weekend.") These types of expectations are usually based on past experiences. And often, we’re not even consciously aware of them - that is, until they are violated. Have you ever taken a sip of a drink that you thought was one thing but turned out to be another? You didn’t even know you were expecting water until you tasted coffee. And it can be a really nasty shock. Same thing when you are expecting there to be another stair and there is not and you end up slamming your foot down way too hard and feeling like an idiot.

Someday I'll write about the convoluted philosophy of this show, because
that's my idea of fun, apparently. 

Other times, we use “expectations” to mean something like “demands.” Think of a mother saying to her child, “I expect your room to be clean when I get home.” What she really means is that she demands that the child’s room be cleaned, implying that there will be some sort of punishment for the child if the room is not clean when she gets home. But it’s definitely possible that she actually expects the room to remain messy, that she anticipates having to give out that punishment. The moment the kid is out of earshot, she might say, “There’s no way he is cleaning that room.” So, clearly, there’s a difference between this way of using the word “expect” and the primary definition of the word.

(It kind of reminds me of when President Trump told FBI Director James Comey, “I hope you can let this go” about the Michael Flynn investigation and then some Republicans tried to say this wasn’t actually an order because Trump was just expressing his hope. Which everyone with any understanding of nuance and context and connotation - of language, that is - knew instantly was bullshit. Even Trump’s defenders were clearly being disingenuous.)

But when it comes to “expectations,” the distinction is never made quite so explicit. Rosenthal’s study was about “expectations” in the primary sense; its application is always about the other sort of “expectations,” the ones that we can actually control. Because as this article points out, no teacher - or other human being for that matter - is really completely in charge of his or her unconscious beliefs. If I expect that a particular student is going to be disruptive, that expectation is going to color the way I interact with that student. And as much as I remind myself to treat that student just like any other, to give him or her the benefit of the doubt, to be critical of my own assumptions and prejudices - that is only going to get me so far. At the end of the day, I am still going to be something of a slave to my own biases.

The NPR article (“NPR-ticle?”) acknowledges this - kind of. But then it weirdly comes to the conclusion that the best way to change one’s beliefs is by changing one’s behavior. This is ostensibly based on a study, but I feel like the study isn’t discussed in enough detail for me to really understand it. And the article doesn’t say much about how you could or should change your behavior. I am left feeling skeptical, left feeling as though our beliefs and expectations are largely out of our hands. The idealist in me wants to say that discussion and critical reflection are our best hope, but I also know that that’s a lame, cop-out answer, kind of like implying that “conversation” can heal our nation’s political divide.

It's amazing to me how many "inspirational"
quotes like this there are. 

But this has important implications, especially when it comes to the idea of social justice. It has been shown that white teachers, even those who support anti-racist causes, tend to have lower expectations of their non-white students. These are ingrained in us by our culture. And I wouldn’t be surprised if something similar is true along gender lines, although that might be less of an issue because education is not male-dominated the same way it is white-dominated (although STEM programs often are.)

Every article that I have found that discusses this subject always seems to fall back on that same idea that “being aware” of these biases is - while not sufficient - a good “first step” in the project of eradicating them. But I’m not so sure if I buy that. It sounds nice, but is there any real reason to believe it’s true? What if we can’t control our expectations at all? What then?

I have no goddamn clue. It’s a very unsatisfying and bleak premise, which is why I have been trying and failing to write a conclusion here for a solid fifteen minutes - some part of me can’t bear to end on such a hopeless thought. Some part of me has to believe that we can do something. Even if we must acknowledge that any project of this sort is going to contain an element of failure, I have to think or hope or believe that it could bring some success, too. To get a bit meta here for a second - I can’t help but to expect it to, and so that, in itself, kind of proves my point.

But either way, we should try to be clear about what we’re saying and, at the very least, recognize that “expectations” can mean two different things.

Testing Isn't Everything; It's The Only Thing

My students’ test scores went up last year. Quite a bit, actually. And as much as I am skeptical of the validity of standardized test scores (in the abstract, at least), it is definitely cool to see some evidence that my class has made some sort of a difference. The 2016-2017 school year was the first year that the students in grades 6-8 had a class devoted to writing and - since that was the only major change from the previous year and it was only students in grades 6-8 whose scores rose significantly and it was only their ELA scores (not Math) - it seems reasonable to infer that this class caused that rise in test scores. (Unless you’re David Hume or something and you don’t believe in the notion of causation at all, in which case - yeah, I get it, but also, like, come on.)

Let me brag here for just a second. When my most challenging cohort of kids, last year’s seventh graders, took the ELA test at the end of the 2015-2016 school year, 33% of them were judged to be "proficient." On the 2016-2017 test, that number rose to 71%. That's compared to a statewide average of 63% proficiency. So, in other words, that class went from being way below the state average to slightly above it. And they were the lowest of the three grades I teach. 88% of the sixth graders and 86% of the eighth graders were judged proficient on the ELA test, numbers which put our moderately-high-poverty school in league with schools in affluent towns like Bedford and Amherst. (It’s something of an open secret, I guess, that high income levels are generally associated with high test scores.)

And yeah, I’m definitely that guy who would say “you know, test scores aren’t actually a good measure of learning” if my students’ scores had gone down or stayed the same - but who is perfectly willing to automatically, unthinkingly accept them as valid when they make me look good. (Maybe it counts for something that I’m aware of that? Or maybe it actually makes it worse because I’m not doing anything to fight it?) But that’s not really my main point here.

Proof that rich people are just objectively better, I guess.

My point has to do with the fact that, at the end of this year, I will not be able to see if my students’ progress on these tests was just a fluke or an actual pattern. Because they will be taking a completely different test than they did last year. The format of it will be very similar, but it is designed by a different company - AIR instead of SBAC - and will separate out reading and writing instead of grouping them both together under "English Language Arts." And that means there is no way to make comparisons between the 2016-2017 school year and the 2017-2018 one. We will have to wait until 2019 to have any sense of whether our students' scores are improving, declining, or remaining static.

(Two caveats: that doesn’t mean we won’t have any clue if they’re improving at the skills that we teach. Of course we will. And it also doesn’t mean that people won’t try to say that the results of the new test mean something in relation to the old test. Let's say, for instance, only 60% of students are judged proficient this year - I'm sure someone out there will take this to mean their scores have gone down. I discussed that latter issue in more depth the last time I wrote about testing.)

There is nothing inherently wrong with scrapping an old test and finding a new one, of course. If the old test was bad or invalid, then that’s the wisest thing to do. But it sure does seem to be happening an awful lot. New Hampshire has only been using the SBAC test for three years, a short enough time that I, a twenty-six year old “baby teacher," remember when it was first introduced. I was working in a school at the time. Before that, they had the NECAP, which was around for a bit longer - I remember taking that one in middle school. But when I was an elementary student, there were different tests - one in fourth grade which I want to say was called the CAT (but I refuse to look it up) and a different one in third grade. And those are only the state-mandated tests. It says nothing of the local or school-level tests, which in some places may be changed even more frequently. Or the NAEP test that some schools (including mine, last year) are selected to participate in. It’s hard for kids to keep it all straight, keep track of what they are expected to do on each test. (Not to mention all the acronyms. Sometimes I think our culture has AOD - Acronym Obsessive Disorder. [That sounds like a joke Alfie Kohn would make. Apologies to Mr. Kohn if it is.])

When the test du jour was the NECAP, students were often told to “fill the box” with writing. It was a paper and pencil test and many educators knew that longer responses tended to get higher scores - hopefully because those students were more likely to have elaborated on their answers, but also possibly because some primitive part of the human brain actually believes that more equals better. But when it was replaced by SBAC, “filling the box” became objectively impossible; SBAC was a computerized test, where the box would expand to the length of the Bee Movie script if you typed that in there. (If I remember correctly, you couldn’t copy-and-paste into the box, in an attempt to prevent plagiarism. But I am sure there are some dedicated slackers out there who would be willing to type the whole thing out just “for the lulz.” In fact, the name of a particular seventh-grader just popped into my head. He'd definitely do it if he were in the right mood.) So we had to change what we advised the students to do.

And I think, somewhere in my three years of administering this test, I had gotten pretty good at preparing my students for the writing portion of it. I knew what they would be expected to do and what sort of practice they needed to be able to do it well. And honestly, I thought the writing component of SBAC was pretty darn good. I didn’t love the time limit, but other than that there wasn’t all that much in there that I could take issue with. I felt pretty confident that my regular approach to teaching writing was going to help them succeed on the test as well as grow as writers in the long-term.

"Ya like jazz?"

So maybe I’m partially just annoyed that a standardized test I am familiar with and kind of actually liked (or at least didn’t mind having to deal with) is being replaced. And I definitely am distrustful of the fact that the writing component of our new test is going to be scored by a computer. (I’ve written about that before, too, and so have a bunch of smarter people than me.) And if my students’ scores suck this time around, I’ll almost definitely blame that.

But it also seems like the people involved in education are constantly trying to reinvent the wheel, like the perennial impulse is to dump out the whole bag of apples and start over from scratch. Veteran teachers have been telling me for years that education is cyclical - things that fall out of favor always come back again. And already I feel like I am starting to see that. But it’s also true that there are certain assumptions and features that are never (seriously) questioned - things like annual standardized testing, or the underfunding and subsequent understaffing of many schools. People talk about these things a lot, of course, but no one ever actually does much to address them.

And then there are the things that are really never questioned, which are the things that I can’t even mention here because I am not capable of seeing them, because they are part of the water that I am dissolved in. And my hunch is that if there is any sort of answer to all of the problems that we face, that would probably be the most promising place to start looking.

3 Bad Reasons to Dislike Common Core

There are plenty of things to criticize, dislike, or distrust about the Common Core. But we should be clear about a couple of things:

1. The Common Core is not the same as standardized testing.

For one thing, standardized testing has been a thing in schools since at least the 1980s (give and take a bit depending on what, exactly, we are willing to count as a "standardized test.") Arguably, our national obsession with testing students all the time reached its peak in the early part of the 21st century, during the George W. Bush No Child Left Behind era (when I was a fifth-grader or so) and has slightly weakened since then. But yes, standardized testing is still very much a thing. And it certainly has changed forms since 2002 and one of those changes is that the new tests have become (or at least have been forced to advertise themselves as being) "Common Core aligned." But the Common Core itself doesn't insist upon these tests in any real way. It's really just a list of standards. In fact, the folks who created the Common Core probably just assumed that new tests would be created and implemented based on the new standards, so they didn't have to explicitly say so. Testing is just a constant. Blaming the Common Core for the testing that predated it for decades is kind of like blaming the current president for a perennial problem like the national debt. (Hey, for once, here's something that is not actually this president's fault!)

2. The Common Core is not about the federal government taking over education
This has died down a bit lately, but for a while there was definitely a strong tendency to equate the Common Core with President Obama and the “federal overreach” of his administration. Now (to use that president’s favorite catchphrase) let me be clear: it is true that there is nothing in the Constitution that gives the federal government the power to do anything involving education. (Although arguably the 9th Amendment could be used to argue that the children of the United States have the right to an education. But then one could counter with the 10th Amendment, which says that anything not specifically delegated to the federal government ought to be left to the states. Which only gives credence to my idea that our nation is divided into “9th Amendment people” and “10th Amendment people” and possibly has been all the way back to our founding.) But Barack Obama did not create the Department of Education; Jimmy Carter did. Nor did Obama create the movement towards “standards and accountability” - that began in the 80's or 90's (again, depending exactly how we define it) and has raged ever since then.

Probably not even the dumbest take on
Common Core ever written.

More importantly, the Common Core is not actually a federal program. In fact, one of the groups that sponsored its creation was the National Governor’s Council - clearly a state-level organization. And it was left up to each individual state whether to adopt the Common Core or develop its own set of standards. Only forty-two states currently use the Common Core as their set of standards, though the number was once as high as forty-five (and Minnesota insists on being the “sometimes Y” of the bunch, accepting the ELA Standards but not the Math ones, for some personal Minnesotan reason.) All the federal government actually did was offer incentives (in the form of grant money) to states who adopted the Common Core. Now, I suppose one could argue that tying federal money to the adoption of these standards is in itself a form of federal overreach, but it is not the same as Common Core actually being a federal program. And it is not unprecedented - the federal government was arguably more directly involved in education under No Child Left Behind, in the George W. Bush years discussed above.

Also, the most recent education bill passed by the federal government in 2015 explicitly prohibits them from offering any further incentives to states for adopting the Common Core. So even if there was a legitimate gripe there at one point, it’s been resolved. And you guys won.

3. The Common Core did not “change math”
This is the most annoying one to me. And I suspect that anyone who isn’t directly involved in education (or weirdly, inexplicably knowledgeable about its intricacies) most likely thinks of this sort of thing when they hear the words “Common Core.” Because there are a ton of Facebook posts out there that feature parents or teachers complaining about “Common Core math.” (If you don't know what I'm talking about, here is a good sampling, though it's not from Facebook so the level of discourse is very slightly higher.) And those posts tend to get a lot of comments. And those comments all seem to harp on the same point, which is that the Common Core has “changed” the way math has taught.

First of all, no. It hasn’t. It doesn’t prescribe any teaching methods.

But some of the resources that have been developed (by other organizations, most of which are for-profit corporations, which may be an issue but a separate one) to be “aligned” to the Common Core do introduce mathematical concepts in a different way than many of us were taught. They put more of an emphasis on estimation as a way of solving problems; they expose students to different strategies for mental problem-solving; they are concerned with developing students’ “number sense” or “mathematical literacy.” And yes, some of the strategies they use to achieve these goals may look confusing to someone who sees them out of context. (And of course, there are also just poorly-worded questions and teachers who teach concepts poorly, but that is true regardless of the subject or standards being used.)

But there is a good reason why we are focusing on those things now instead of just teaching math the same way it has always been taught. Because, by and large, that way didn’t work. Yes, traditional math instruction works for some people. Some people just “get it.” I was one of them. But many others don’t just “get it” and we have finally decided to stop just trying the same thing over and over, expecting (or demanding) different results. So although math itself has not changed, the way math is being taught is (in some places, but not everywhere) a bit different.

One thing I find annoying about this is that the people who complain about the “new math” that their kids bring home are very often the same people who will take any opportunity to tell you about how much they hated or sucked at math when they were students, how they just never understood what the teacher was talking about, how it just seemed like a bunch of meaningless numbers and letters. Well, these new approaches are an attempt to address that concern. (And by the way, I think this correlation is more than just incidental. I think that people who do legitimately understand math will also be able to understand or figure out the new approaches to teaching it. So there’s a contradiction here - you can’t argue that the traditional way of doing things was effective if you are also living proof that it is not.)

And rather than being intended to supplant the “traditional way” of doing math - lining up two numbers to subtract them, for instance - most of the time the “new approaches” are aimed at either deepening kids’ understanding of mathematical concepts or giving them another strategy for problem-solving. In this latter case, whining that the traditional way of solving math problems is no longer the only way children are taught starts to look a lot like complaining that we now make an effort to be inclusive of holidays other than Christmas.

Bo Burnham, creator of the only "new math" that matters.

Which brings me to my next point: criticism of “Common Core math” is often couched in vaguely culture-war-y language, which suggests that “Common Core math” is part of a larger movement - either to eliminate facts and replace them with guesses or to coddle kids by never telling them when they’re wrong. Either it’s an instrument in the service of relativism or of being overprotective of children. Both of which are undeniably associated with certain politics (though this doesn’t always make sense.) And that gets us back, once again, to Obama.

It all works together to create a pretty cohesive narrative. Obama is using the federal government to take over education, implement unpopular standardized tests, and force a politically-correct, participation-trophy curriculum down the throats of our nation’s children. Except that no part of that is actually true.

Reflections on "Why Kids Can't Write"

I’ve got a couple problems (not ninety-nine, just a couple) with Dana Goldstein’s article in the New York Times this past August, “Why Kids Can’t Write.” Because kids’ writing (and kids writing, a subtle difference) is pretty much what I am paid to think about for eight hours a day, five days a week, and when you think about something that much, chances are you’re going to have some pretty strong opinions on it. And you’re going to feel an overwhelming impulse to correct what you see as misconceptions about that thing. Like, two years ago I could hardly keep from explaining to random strangers (at parties, let’s say) the subtleties of the difference between Subway’s Spicy Italian, Italian BMT, and Turkey Italiano (the advanced version, reserved for more intimate settings, included a lecture on why it was ambiguous to just ask your Sandwich Artist for an “Italian,” since that is also a type of bread.) Granted, no one ever cares about these rants, and I’m sure this will be no exception. But we write them because we feel we must - and I’m sure someone could make the case (and I possibly already have, somewhere) that this makes them the purest form of writing. So let’s go.

The first problem with Goldstein’s article is that it never really answers its eponymous question (okay, technically it’s a relative clause, but that’s even worse if you think about it. Don't think about it too much.) It really says nothing about why kids can’t write. (That definitely is an interesting question, by the way. My own answer happens to be: because writing is really goddamn hard. And I'm not even fully convinced that I can do it. But I don’t really accept the premise. Kids can write, at least as well as anyone else can.) But Goldstein doesn’t offer an answer. All she does is profile two actual teachers of writing and their methods, with the implication that these approaches, if they were adopted more widely, would make it so that kids could write.

You would never fold the meat like that. You're not
even supposed to. It's actually wrong.

It’s the way in which she discusses each approach that really creates problems for me.

First, she talks about Dr. Judith Hochman, who has a strategy that focuses on teaching students to make meaning at the sentence level first and then slowly build up to paragraphs and, finally, essays. Her approach is direct and explicit. Goldstein says it “focuses on the fundamentals of grammar” and “a return to the basics.” (More on that significant word “return” in a bit.) And from what I have gleaned from the article, I think it is probably quite effective in the hands of a competent teacher with the right, authoritative personality.

When discussing Hochman’s approach, Goldstein contrasts it with stereotypes about “child-centered approaches” that feature “cozy writing nooks” and “journaling about one’s personal experiences.” This is basically a caricature of the writing workshop method. It is taken for granted that this approach is widespread, even universal, and has been since the 1930’s when “progressive educators began to shift the writing curriculum away from penmanship and spelling and toward diary entries and personal letters.” (Quick check: how many of us actually attended schools where spelling didn’t matter in writing? I've never actually seen one.) There are no statistics given about how many writing teachers actually use a workshop method (though I’d honestly be interested to know the breakdown. George Hillocks, in his research for The Testing Trap, found few, but those surveys were conducted in the 90s and I imagine things have probably changed a bit since then - though I’m not sure in what direction.)

Despite what Dr. Hochman says, I always see kids writing
at desks or tables in these things.

The odd thing is: Goldstein is not committed to vilifying the workshop approach. Dr. Hochman might be, but journalist Dana Goldstein is certainly not. The other teacher she profiles, in fact, is Merideth Wanzer, who runs a writing workshop for high school students. Wanzer is associated with a branch of the National Writing Project (as am I, to make my bias here plain), the organization that is most responsible for promoting workshop-style, process-oriented teaching of writing across the country. And Wanzer’s workshop includes some of the expected, orthodox elements of that approach: free-writing exercises and an emphasis on exposing students to great writing in hopes that it will influence their own.

In the parts of the article where she is discussing Wanzer, Goldstein contrasts this approach with “formal grammar instruction, like identifying parts of speech.” In one throwaway sentence, she even acknowledges that direct grammar instruction has even been shown to make students’ writing worse (as measured by standardized assessments of writing, at least, which have their own problems, of course.) But as before, there is no data on how many teachers teach writing like that, by having students learn the parts of speech in a decontextualized manner. (Again, I’d be interested to know.) But whereas Goldstein assumed that the workshop approaches were widespread, she seems to dismisses decontextualized grammar instruction as negligible - again, without any actual data to justify that decision.

But the thing is: Wanzer is the workshop method and Dr. Hochman is direct grammar instruction. The two teachers she profiles and implicitly praises are not exceptions to a general rule of mediocrity. Rather, the two extremes that Goldstein assumes are the norm (that is, bad teaching) are really nothing more than the stereotypes that the two sides of this great debate apply to each other. It’s kind of like this: finding a sane conservative person and saying “he’s not some gun-toting redneck racist” and then finding a sane liberal person and saying “she’s not some kale-munching, safe-space elitist” - as if that’s an accomplishment. It’s the most blasé and uninspired sort of centrism.

And this becomes especially bad when Goldstein goes on to advocate for a compromise between the two approaches. As if that's an insight. Yes, obviously young writers need to learn the structure of the language and how to compose effective sentences. Every writing workshop enthusiast knows that. And yes, they also need to feel a sense of ownership over their own writing and to be exposed to quality literature. Every grammar lesson lover knows that, too. Anyone who is any good has always been doing some combination of both things (though there are undeniably different ways of balancing and sequencing them, some of which may be more effective than others.) And don’t get me wrong - the extremes do exist. But they are just that: extremes.

And I don’t think anyone who actually teaches, who actually thinks about this stuff eight hours a day, five days a week needed the New York Times to tell them that.

*

The only "back to basics" we need.

So that’s my first and most significant issue with Goldstein’s article. But I have two more. Up next is that it uncritically adopts a common, but ultimately baseless, narrative about the history of education. This is the story that education was once very traditional, rooted in direct instruction and “the basics,” but then was taken over by “progressive reformers” at some point and still lives in that shadow. Now, certainly there have been progressive reformers - John Dewey, Lou Labrant, and many others, all the way from the 1930s up through the present day - and they have had an impact upon education. But I don’t think there is any evidence that it was actually a takeover. Progressives didn’t conquer education any more than they conquered politics. There are still plenty of traditionalists out there and, by some accounts, they have remained a majority all the way through.

So the rhetoric of “back to basics” is disingenuous. As Alfie Kohn has written, most of education never left the basics. The movement to spread workshop-based, process-oriented methods of teaching writing was never as successful as Goldstein seems to assume. And even more - there is a whole part of educational history that is relevant here that she ignores. (Which is inexcusable, given that the same Dana Goldstein wrote an entire, fantastic chapter about it in her book The Teacher Wars.) And that is the high-stakes testing and “accountability" movement, which more or less began in the 1980s with the publication of A Nation at Risk and has not slowed down, just changed forms, since then. As P.L. Thomas explains in his critique of Goldstein’s article (admittedly the inspiration for this one), the testing movement effectively killed, or at least stalled, the movement towards “authentic writing instruction” (his non-neutral description of workshop-style teaching.)

But the real problem is that, without data, we are forced to rely on our own assumptions of what education is like. And "progressives took over" is an appealing, simple narrative to invoke, just as it is in the world of politics.

*

And finally, I think Goldstein’s article reveals something even more fundamental about the way we tend to look at teaching (and perhaps other things as well.) I think we often tend to look only at the positive aspects of the things we are familiar with. We sit in on a class and we think about what the lesson is accomplishing. We see that the kids are learning grammar, or they are improving their writing, or they are practicing their revision skills. We rarely bother to think about what is not going on, what they are not getting from that particular lesson. And that might not be a problem so much as an inevitability - it’s harder to conceptualize a lack. But I think we need to start making an effort to see things from both perspectives.

I remember when I first started spending time in classrooms as a non-student - first as an observer, and then as a substitute teacher - my automatic instinct was to look at what was being accomplished. I compared each lesson to “nothing” rather than to all the other possibilities. So a class where students spent twenty-five minutes filling out a math worksheet meant that they were getting twenty-five minutes of practice honing their problem-solving skills. Better than nothing, I’d say, mentally. But the truth is that there are so many other ways that twenty-five minutes could have been spent, and some of them may have been more productive. Opportunity cost and all that.

But for whatever reason, I had this sense in my mind that the majority of what happens in most classrooms out there was really - at a fundamental level - “nothing.” Either it was devoted to managing students’ behavior, or it was busy work, or it was watching movies, or it was teaching so outdated and decontextualized that it wasn't even worth taking seriously. That is what I really, albeit implicitly believed. And there’s definitely a sense in which many Education classes encourage this attitude in their proto-teachers. How many class discussions did we have in which we all seemed to agree that “most teachers” were lacking in some way, that the education system in general was just plain broken, and that we could or should or must be the solution? (And how many others where I found myself feeling that my classmates would join the ranks of ineffective teachers, but I would be the exception?)

And outside of education departments, we pretty much think along the same lines. I mean,

The only movie I really remember from 5th grade.

try bringing up education in pretty much any context with any group of people (except teachers (except sometimes teachers too.)). It will almost certainly go in a critical direction and stay there. We have this tendency to vilify teachers in general, though we will certainly acknowledge individual teachers as “one of the good ones.” But what I have come to realize through actually working in schools for, like, six years now (holy crap) is that it is not a minority of teachers who are doing good things in their classroom. The majority are, in fact, doing things that have value.

But we do need to recognize not only that there is always an opportunity cost for everything we choose to do, but also that every lesson contains both intended effects and side-effects. Yong Zhao has written a fantastic article about just that idea. Hochman’s approach to teaching writing may be effective at getting students to craft stronger sentences and use words like “nevertheless” appropriately, but it may also result in students becoming disengaged from writing as a creative act. And a workshop approach like Wazner’s (or mine) may lead to greater engagement in the writing process, but it may leave students without knowing all that much about the parts of speech. There are always going to be trade-offs, and some of them might not show up until later on.

Nor is compromise always going to be an answer here. First of all, there are not just two ways to teach writing - there are an infinite number of possible approaches, and you are always going to have to make choices from among them, which means leaving something out. The same is true of any subject. That’s just part of life. Also, when bringing together two approaches, there is no guarantee that you are going to get the best of both worlds. You could very well get the worst of both. That is: a hybrid workshop-basics writing class could result in students with lower grammar skills than in pure direct instruction and lower fluency and motivation than pure workshop. Also, there are some strategies which only work if they are pursued holistically, that can not be broken down and served up piecemeal.

But Goldstein’s article does not give us that nuanced sense of things. It assumes that writing taught purposefully - as exemplified by both Hochman and Wazner, on different ends of the ideological spectrum - is the same as writing being taught well. It assumes that we are being held back by the carelessness of individual teachers, who allow their teaching to take the form of a caricature. This keeps us from fully realizing that the problems we do have (i. e., why kids can't write) are either a) intrinsic to the teaching of writing (which, by the way Kurt Vonnegut once claimed was an impossible task) or b) structural, having to do with money and time and administrative support and school policies and a bunch of other things that individual teachers cannot really control.

Why can't kids write? There may be ninety-nine problems, but a majority of teachers being very bad at teaching them how probably ain't one. (I'm so sorry. Also, I tried really hard to get this to rhyme with "bitch," but I guess it just was not meant to be.)