Thursday, April 26, 2012

Recent Lost Virginities: A P-M-I





Katherine here.  


Somewhere in my early married life there was a group of teachers at Green Mountain High School who lived and breathed school and we hung out together.  A lot.   We synergistically learned that teaching kids to think had nothing to do with content, but it had much to do with teaching kids jargon and systems of thought.  C. Fite taught science students a language beyond nouns--it wasn't about memorizing types and kinds of plants and critters.  C. Fite was a guide helping young thinkers find the right places to cut the biological world into parts.

In English classes, Jim and I were cutting things into parts of our own.  Sophomores learned to cut with  initiation knives for a year of their lives.  Juniors dealt with the knives of philosophy, sociology, and Zen Buddhism.  Seniors cut through tragedy after tragedy after tragedy.  Somehow, by teaching kids how to think, rather than actually teaching individual books, students learned both process and content. That was the plan anyway.

C. Fite also gave her blooming scientists a jargon to hang onto and to connect with the rest of the subject area world.  Students learned about hypotheses and theories and facts and inferences.  Though nouns, these are process words.  They describe types of scientific thinking.  All it took was a Friday afternoon at a local bar to figure out how these words lined up with our English jargon.  In English we taught subjective labels and objective details and subjects, assertions, and key terms in thesis statements. This jargon is a writer's and reader's language.  It is a set of nouns for describing a way to think about reading and writing.  All the science words and the Language Arts words were explaining different contents in very similar ways.  It was cool.

I meant for this introduction to be shorter (go figure).  I just wanted to say that I have no idea how successful I was, but Jim and I and Cindy and lots of others at that time tried to teach kids to think. And we all began with baby steps.

The first thinking strategy Jim and I taught kids was to P-M-I almost whatever content we were attacking.  To P-M-I something, you simply use your analytical knife and cut things into what you see as Positive (P), Minus (M), and Interesting (I).  I'll forever be grateful to Edward DeBono and his books about Lateral Thinking which led me to the concept.  I discovered that almost any freshman could master this thinking system and that should tell you worlds.

With all this in mind and with all the Salinger-esque interruptions and delays so far, I'm ready to roll.   I've managed to try a number of new things in the last year and I want to think about them and a P-M-I list seemed like the perfect filter.  Here's to a year of lost virginities of all kinds.  Thanks for listening.

 RECENT LOST VIRGINITIES: PLUS

1.  I cooked my first pork belly.  I did it Asian style (Mizuna cookbook).  When it was all fried and crispy, I served it like lettuce wraps.  Yum.
2.  I went to The Santa Fe Opera.  I finally get it.
3.  I loved Sayulita, Mexico.
4.  I ate my first sweet potato pancake at Snooze.  I eat them a lot now.
5.  I ate grilled scallions sprinkled with cheese in tortillas at La Lancha in Guatemala.  We made them at home last summer.  Time to do that again.
6. I went to Boulder and was fit for shoes at Newton Running (named for Sir Isaac and featured in the Denver Post not too long ago).  My feet are very happy.  This is a very cool place if you're looking to be a barefoot runner, but the actual practice of going barefoot or wearing the finger shoes hasn't worked out for you.  My shoes (one pair for running and one pair for hiking) are turquoise.   Somehow that just seems appropriate.
7.  I learned to lean pieces of art up against mantles and walls and corners and things.  Our friend David taught me this when he was buying a small landscape oil in Jackson Wyoming to lean against some books in his library.  I'm leaning things all over the place now--mostly because I don't have a library.
8.  I now love Tory Burch flip flops.  That's really all I want to say about that.

RECENT LOST VIRGINITIES: MINUS

1.  I crossed the borders between Belize and Guatemala twice.  The rates changed constantly.  The people in front of us were charged half of what we were.  People with large guns and uniforms reminiscent of Woody Allen's Bananas were standing close by.  We did not argue.  It's interesting that is always costs more to get out of a country than it does to get into a country.
2.  I hated the bus ride to Sayulita, Mexico.
3.  A bird pooped all over my dress while I walked down the Malecon in Puerto Vallarta.

RECENT LOST VIRGINITIES: INTERESTING

1.  I read my first Jane Austen book--Pride and Prejudice.  I struggled through the first half.  It's much ado with not much going on besides who likes who and it just reminded me far too much of love stories filtering through sophomore Big Chiefs (lots of words without much substance).  I really enjoyed the second half even though it kind of pissed me off.  I mean--the huge problem of a aristocratic-type person loving/marrying a mercantile-person is not the stuff Hardy was after with Tess.  I have Emma.  We'll see.
2.  I ate waffles and fried chicken for the first time.  I really liked it--salty and sweet together.  I couldn't do this regularly though--need to keep my girlish figure.  This might hit the PLUS category except for location.  Chris recommended Lo-Lo's in Scottsdale.  Turned out it was in a strip mall and filled with people who look like Scottsdale and it just didn't seem to feel very Southern.  The Kool-Aid (House Speciality) came in all sorts of bright colors and flavors.  Didn't have any.  I had plenty growing up.
3.  I walked up Granite Canyon in the Tetons instead of down.  We ran into an avalanche and lost the trail and then we ran into a giant bull moose and we had to bushwhack around him and find the trail yet again and we saw waterfalls and all sorts of nature stuff from a totally new viewpoint.  It was also a lot harder going up.  There's a lot to be said for taking the lift up Rendezvous Mountain and walking down the canyon.  We once saw a naked girl lounging in the river on that route.  Jim gave himself 20 points for that wildlife spotting that day too.  I didn't think she was worth more than 17 at best.
4.  I walked ALL the way around Emma Matilda and Two Ocean Lakes starting on the south side (Tetons again).  I loved this part--views of Ox-box Bend from high above and a new range of wild flowers.  The back side sucked.  Dark and woody ("Lions, and tigers, and bears--oh my!) and I've never had to wade through so many mosquitoes in my life.
5.  I'm learning to care for an orchid.  A gift from David who has them in his store.  It's gorgeous, but I fret over it.  I don't know what I'm doing and it's the thirstiest darn plant and David says they should be able to go 10 days or more without water.  This is not Alabama and my orchid nearly died last summer when a neighbor cared for it while we went to Wyoming.   It just lost all its blooms and Im hoping this is natural.  It's still green and pleasant looking otherwise.  My son-in-law will be relieved the blooms are gone now though.  He's shackled with taking care of it while we are out of town and I'm sure it'll be less pressure now that it's just a lot of greens and roots.

Enough.  It was good to think through some new experiences of late.  I'm tired though.  I don't want to think anymore.  It's time to settle down in front of ESPN and let pundits carve the world into NFL draft choices.






Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Teacher Evaluations Gone Amok


Katherine here.

Today is my first day off after coaching my flock of teachers this year.  That's what I do.  I help interesting folks finish the requirements for Colorado teaching licenses.  These aren't teachers fresh out of college who've been through a traditional program.  These are people with degrees who are shifting careers.  They have amazing experience and often make remarkable teachers.

I've done this seven years now.  I've worked with a National League Baseball Umpire who is now a calculus teacher and baseball coach at Gateway in Aurora.  One teacher fought forest fires in New Mexico and became a superb science teacher for students expelled from Denver Public Schools (DPS).  I've worked with Broadway dancers, one comedian,  two real live rocket scientists and several remarkable artists.   This year's group included a Flamenco dancer from Mexico City, a mountain and ice climber from Venezuela. and a PROUD Latino Zumba instructor.  I love learning how each of them found a way to a classroom.

I see these folks twice a month and I get to know them.  When they worry, I worry.  I'm excited that two will get married this summer and one will travel to England.  I hope those having to take DPS ELA units can manage to find open classes that fit with their lives.  I want good things for them.

The job has been harder this year and not because of the 17 teachers I've been working with since last August.  Mostly it's the atmosphere of teacher oppression that wore me down.  There seems to be a universal attack on teachers that has lived a long time on editorial pages and blogs.  Teachers are scoundrels who do nothing and reap great retirement benefits--that sort of thing.

This year teacher hatred, however, has become very real for classroom teachers, especially DPS teachers living through their LEAP evaluations.  LEAP has created a culture of fear in lots of DPS schools--especially where there isn't a strong principal who really knows his staff thoroughly and accurately.

Here's as brief a synopsis of this situation as I can muster--listed in steps to keep me under control.

1.  The Colorado Legislature passed a law basically attaching problems in education (low test scores, etc) to "bad" teachers.  This is a new data-driven concept derived from a Harvard study showing that the biggest impact on student success was the teacher.  The legislature reversed the logic (along with many other state legislatures) and decided lack of success should be attributed to "bad" teachers.  In the Colorado Legislature's effort to get Federal Race To the Top dollars, they made districts responsible for large and sweeping changes in teacher evaluations with the goal of improving things by the elimination of all those "bad' teachers.

2.  DPS saw the huge cost factor and wrote grants leading to the creation of The New Teacher Project.  It was designed to create a massive and eventually high-risk evaluation system.

3.  The New Teacher Project, led by former Teach For America and DC Education Bureaucrat  Richard Greene, shared the program's goal at meetings with Metro State staff where I work.  Greene indicated that since data showed that 20% of teachers are "bad," the goal would be to eliminate 20% of teachers each year.  High expectations.

4.  The evaluation program, LEAP, that Greene designed and led, was staffed with a small army of Teach for America folks who all seem to be 28 years old, female, never wear coats even in cold weather, and behave as though their two years of Teach For America experience and a summer workshop with Greene and his statistics can cure all things educational.

5.  The LEAP army is supposed to see teachers 4 times a year.  Teachers are given notice of a two week window when an evaluation could take place. (often missed because the evaluators seem to always be running behind).  I think there are eight pages of teaching components the teacher is to demonstrate in any forty minute time the LEAP observer arrives.  It doesn't matter if it's a fire drill or the last day before a big vacation or if you happen to be giving a district assessment.  That forty minutes is your fate.

6.  There are 8 LEAP categories with sub-components that define master teaching.  If a teacher was part of "the pilot," he/she needed to score a 5 in 5 of the 8 categories in order to have the teaching contract renewed.   Student test scores can help the teacher if the teacher has enough students for the scores to count.  Greene changed the rules late this year and eliminated the bottom score--mostly because all pilot teachers would have to be non-renewed I think.   The non-pilot teachers have three years to get their numbers up to par and then their jobs are on the line too.

7.  The LEAP program sends fliers to all teachers with photographs of happy instructors smiling and saying, "I've been Leaped."  The fliers did not make my group of DPS teachers embrace the system.

This kind of high-stakes evaluation system isn't about helping teachers.  This LEAP system has turned an awful finger-pointing public symptom into something real and concrete for teachers in DPS.  These folks are doing well in their classrooms for beginners.   They might do even better without the threatening numerical system and the army of LEAPers who seem to know it all and have expectations I don't believe they could pull off themselves.

The Colorado Legislature blew it by making teachers the scapegoat for everything wrong in education and assuming a great evaluation program could be a panacea.  Denver Public Schools blew it because the district took the law so seriously.  They have made their own work force paranoid.  Paranoid people rarely grow and improve.  They are too busy being worried.  Really good teachers need to worry about kids, not their own LEAP scores.

So far there is nothing like the LEAP evaluation program in other Metro area districts.  Maybe they don't have skilled grant writers.  Maybe they felt the evaluation systems they had in place would do the trick if they just did a better job of following through with them.  Maybe there is some common sense in other districts.  Time will tell.

My job was harder this year.  My 16 DPS teachers worried more than they ever had.  There was a whole new level to their worry this year beyond meeting standards and helping their students grow.  It made me worry more too.  I'm ready for a break.



Wednesday, April 18, 2012

How does your kid measure up?


Baby Apps

Here is another in an increasingly long list of reactions that prove I'm getting old. I read in THE ATLANTIC just this morning about the new wave of apps designed to keep track and chart EVERYTHING about your new infant's behavior. On Baby Connect, for example, you can log the exact amount of your child's intake, describe, weigh and measure your child's output (a rather disgusting thought), record every sleep session, describe the differences in your child's crying and fussiness, etc. You can even ask the app to tell you, based on the data you have entered, how your kid stacks up. What percentile is he? How does his poop "measure" up to other two month olds'? And the biggest question of all: Is my baby normal? I find the whole thing horrifying. It's right up there with play dates and toddler visits to the beauty parlor.

There's one line that really concerns me. The article says the best thing about the new baby apps is that they offer "tech-savvy parents a substitute for hand written diaper-change and feeding logs." DIAPER-CHANGE AND FEEDING LOGS! Were we supposed to do that? No one told me. No mention of it by Dr. Spock. Penelope Leach ignores the whole thing. I'm kind of ashamed to admit that we have no diaper-change log for Franny. It makes me a little angry that our pediatricians never mentioned the possibility. I think we've missed out on a valuable source of nostalgia. Sure, we have plenty of photographs that we can go through and remember. But when it comes to diaper-change logs, nada!

And what if the app goes down, or someone swipes your iPhone? At the Y if the FitLinxx computer that keeps track of everyone's progress--the total weight lifted, total miles run--is off line, many members wander around aimlessly, not knowing what to do. You know, they really wanted to lift weights and run today, but the computer broke. By the same token, do your baby's full diapers count if they can't be recorded? That's why if I was a new parent I wouldn't want one of those apps. Just too much to worry about.

Sunday, April 8, 2012

Easter and the Grand Canyon


Katherine here. April 8, 2012. Happy Easter. Enjoy Passover. Embrace the holiday of your choice (Baseball fits here somewhere) and celebrate with devotion and joy. Lots of that going on around here.

I'm just now beginning to ease into anything like an appropriate Easter-like attitude and I suspect most folks make their peace with Easter long before they are sojourning through their sixties. I've always been a late bloomer though.

My history with Easter could probably be turned into a "poignant" or "tortured" memoir. I never read books that reviews label as "poignant" or "tortured," but they seem to make their authors famous and wealthy celebrities. For me to enter the book tour, I would have to exaggerate more than even I am capable of and I would have to fictionalize the actual churches I attended. None of my Easter history is Catholic and it seems like most "poignant" and "tortured" memoirs tell the history of Catholic childhoods. My Easter history and current seeming comfort with Easter seems finally worth one small Easter morning post. This is it.

My early religious instruction was with the Congregationalists. I went to Sunday school and disappointed rarely. I'm a good student. I wasn't perfect though.

One story captures it all. We were coloring as instructed by the Sunday School teacher (her defining quality was a highly hair-sprayed, very blond, flip hair-do). I saw her every Sunday for at least seven years and that is the only characteristic I can bring back.

Every Sunday had a pattern. She read a Biblical passage. She explained it. We colored it. We drank Kool-Aid and ate cookies while we colored. I liked it. Given my general random personality, I oddly had a coloring system. I liked to use the pointy crayons the best. My hands are large and controlling small things has been difficult always. The tinier the point of the crayon, the better chance I had of keeping it inside the lines which was hugely important both at Church and at school in those days. I wanted to please. I wanted to stay inside the lines. Using the pointiest crayons available helped me please people. One of the drawbacks of the pointy crayon system is that traditional colors have generally been worn down and therefore rarely get use in the pointy approach. It was a hard lesson to learn.

There was an Easter morning when I was probably in second grade and I was lining up my handful of crayons by virtue of their pointyness and facing a dittoed portrait of Jesus on the Cross. The pointy crayon I began with was violet. It has always been a color I like and I remember being pleased the crayon I'd begin with was one of my favorites. I colored Jesus's hair violet. I carefully drew dark violet wavy lines to highlight individual hair patterns over the lightly shaded hair colored underneath. Olive green streaks of halo-light illuminated Jesus's head.

The teacher was making her rounds and wowing out over colorings with appropriate Christian love. Until she saw mine. It was Easter she told me. Jesus with PURPLE hair!! JESUS WAS BLOND!! I would go to hell. She mentioned the hell part repeatedly. Didn't I know halos were yellow. I was sent to the corner. My Kool-Aid and cookies were confiscated. A note was left for the pastor. I stayed after. My mother was informed. I cried a lot. Message learned: Religion tops Art. My colorings were quite traditional after that. I was a good girl and I learned my lessons well. Funny though, I still love violet and olive green together. Check out the walls of my house sometime.

There were many Easters I only remember in terms of minor disappointments. Mom would make me special dresses. I would get frilly spring hats, gloves, and special spring shoes. Once she bought me some black patents and a pale green straw hat with black ribbons I'm still trying to replace. Mom would have Easter parties and there would be plans to have rousing egg hunts and BBQs and I always looked forward to watermelons that she scooped out and filled with watermelon pieces (no seeds!) and strawberries.

Many years it snowed. Mom would not let me wear the pretty clothes. The egg hunts were in the house where it was easy to find them and then the house was filled with an awful over-cooked egg smell. No BBQs. Hamburger Spaghetti instead. Crowds of people in our little house and my dad hating it. He didn't go to church and hated big gatherings inside our house and he just hated Easter and religion for reasons I didn't understand until much later in my life.

We stopped being Congregationalists when I was making the move from Sunday school to sitting with the Congregation and being a grown-up in the Church. It was our form of confirmation, but I didn't learn that term until much later. I think most churches have this ritualized and I was just the wrong candidate for the ritual in our church. In order to earn your Bible and enter the congregation you had to recite all the names of the books of the Bible in order and in front of everybody during Easter Sunday service. It was going to be tough for me--I was pretty shy then and memorization was tough (the times tables had almost killed me).

The same Sunday school teacher had followed our group all through our grade school years and I colored appropriately for the rest of my coloring tenure there. Jesus was always blond and his halos were always yellow. When confirmation neared, she drilled us and made us repeat the names of the books in the Bible with rigor. Mom drilled me. Even Dad drilled me. I practiced constantly, but I continuously struggled with Galatians (later on I would struggle with Paul and his epistles for other reasons). Mom suggested I remember it by saying "galoshes" because it sounded a little bit like Galatians and that helped. During practices I could do the names correctly. Even Galatians.

On the confirmation Easter Sunday, I went last because we were ordered alphabetically. The other six or seven in front of me did fine and were presented with Bibles and welcomed to the congregation individually. I blew it. I said "galoshes" instead of Galatians as I zoomed through the New Testament book names. The congregation laughed, but the pastor didn't. He said I had come close and maybe I could earn my Bible and enter the congregation the next year. It was a pretty awful moment.

We never went back to the Congregationalist Church and Mom gave me a Bible the next Sunday with the words of Jesus printed in red. That came in handy. It wasn't long before we were Methodists.

My happiest childhood Easter was at the Grand Canyon when I was eleven. Fourth grade I think. We were returning from Las Vegas from my family's first vacation. Mom thought we should stop and see the Grand Canyon because she believed it was possible we'd never travel again and it was kind of on the way home and she believed if we woke up Easter morning there, our Easter wouldn't be just hours of driving back to Denver. Though Dad relished the idea of an Easter driving with no restaurants open to create stops, he relented and we arrived at the Grand Canyon late at night and barely had time to eat at The Bright Angel where we stayed--nice cabins on the South rim. It was very dark at the Grand Canyon.

Easter morning there was a revelation. It had nothing to do with the view though. We had our first Easter with foil covered chocolate eggs hidden all through and around the cozy cabin. I loved them so much. I received a stuffed kitten I liked and my brother got a remote control helicopter that was truly wonderful. We had a nice breakfast at the lodge. It was the happiest Easter morning my family had ever spent I think. There wasn't church, but nothing was tense either. It was nice.

With the canyon right there, however, we did not go look. Dad needed to get going. No more relenting--he had work soon. We drove away and stopped at two turn-outs and oohed and ahhed. The Griswolds might have seen more of the Grand Canyon than we did. I vowed I would go back. I had a good feeling about the place.

I'm writing this because two weeks ago, Jim and I went to the Grand Canyon. I finally went back. We arrived in the daytime and we walked the 14 miles of the South rim the two days we were there. We stayed and ate at the historic El Tovar which has the most amazing location ever. I didn't go down the Bright Angel Trail or the other trail that heads down. I don't do well with anything involving sheer drops and it was mid-March and lots of ice in places still. I'm a wuss.

There were moments when the crowd by the lip of the canyon and the idiotic young males going out on ledges to get themselves photographed and the crappy food at the El Tovar (they served sticks of that fake crab stuff and called it "Fried Calamari") were disillusioning. The next morning, however, when it's just you and the light and the universe and such expanse and such time glaring at you--well, it's just hard to be disillusioned.

That's my Easter message, my Passover message, my spring message, my today message. The world is disillusionment. Just making it through the news seems a heroic feat sometimes. It would take Christ himself to take on all the sorrow on FaceBook in one day alone. "Sorrow floats." I've spent too much time looking for those disillusionments recently and it's amazing how the bare bones of nature--the Grand Canyon, the Grand Tetons, the Napoli Coast--can wipe them away for me.

Today is Easter. Do what you do to escape disillusionment for a bit and remember we are all part of some whole. We are all God, we are all Jesus, we are all the Buddha, we are all Allah, we are all Nature, we are all the Whole.







Wednesday, April 4, 2012

How Do You Mourn A Symptom?

This is just to give you an idea of how bad it is going to get.

We were celebrating Ruth Ellen's (Kathie's mom) birthday at Mizuna last Saturday night when Ruth Ellen said something like, "That Obama has certainly raised the death tax!"

We asked what she was talking about and she told us that because of Obama every one had to pay $35,000 when they died. She said she had read it in the Post. This death tax fantasy was a lot like her outrage at the cuts Obama had made to social security.

Even when confronted with the truth ("Ruth Ellen, has your social security been cut?"--"No, it's about the same."), she refuses to abandon her newest certainty.

This is a smart woman. She has a degree in music from KU. There had to be a time when she valued facts. What is happening?

The truth gets shouted down every time it rears its head.

Trayvon Martin for example. There are so many levels of tragedy its hard to keep track. But all that yelling and name calling and radio ranting freak outs over the President's stating of the obvious ("If I had a son he would look like Trayvon"), just obscures the real issue.

What is a state doing with a "Stand Your Ground" law in the first place? Couple the spirit of that law (can you say "Class Warfare?"), with the vigilante spirit that prompts someone to want to be on neighborhood watch complete with his very own walkie talkie and his very own gun and the odds are that someone is going to get dead. I don't think it is a racial thing necessarily. But I suspect if we had gated communities of primarily black wealthy people with black neighborhood watch volunteers, hoodie wearing white guys better think twice about jogging around the neighborhood.

If we listen to those making the most noise, here is our situation. There is a basic mistrust of government because government tends to distribute hard earned tax dollars to those who don't deserve it. There is a belief that illegal immigrants (you can spot them because they tend to be non-white and poor) are figuring out ways to sneak over the border to our warm and inviting country so they can have anchor babies and live here with them happily ever after. And there is another belief that anything the public sector does can be done better if privatized.

Since we are increasingly being held hostage by the idea that any tax is creeping socialism, the only way to balance budgets is by cutting services and privatizing them. We see whole towns choosing bankruptcy over paying police and fire departments. What happens in that case? The middle class and the poor--you know, the ones who not only shouldered the financial burdens of the community by paying taxes, but who also relied on those same services--get forced out and the homeowners put up a gate, install surveillance cameras, and hire a couple of security guards. The next step is to set up a private fire district and find a trendy corporation to set up charter schools with specialized curriculums and parent led field trips to the Gallapagos during spring break.

Can't afford it? You say you're a single mom and have to work? Don't worry, there's a bus stop on the corner that will take your kid to the public school down the road. I hear they're going to get computers this year.

That's the biggest tragedy. Politics has robbed Trayvon Martin of his humanity and it has obscured his family's grief. How do you mourn a symptom?