PARCC testing: Actually, taking a bath in language might be a better metaphor for learning than the lightbulb thing.

Mama (from Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun): There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing. Have you cried for that boy today? I don't mean for yourself and for the family 'cause we lost the money. I mean for him; what he's been through and what it done to him. Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most; when they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain't through learning — because that ain't the time at all. It's when he's at his lowest and can't believe in hisself 'cause the world done whipped him so. When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is.

I felt happier yesterday than I can remember feeling.  I'm sure I've felt that way before, it's just been a long time.

I got to talk to Rachel for a few hours.  We talked about happiness and gratitude and how that all works, and then, obviously, we got to wondering what that all has to do with teaching.

Before I quit, I remember reading something written by some other teacher about how all the bullshit seems worth in in that moment where the lightbulb turns on for a kid.  And though of course the lightbulb thing is a well-known cliche, I was like, "I have no idea what this guy is talking about."  I wondered whether I'd never really taught a kid anything, and/or if I had, why I didn't take such gratification from "that moment."  I formed a theory that maybe I'm an organizer, an activist -- not a teacher.

But then Rachel said she's never noticed a lightbulb go on like that for a kid either.  So that was a relief.

We couldn't think of a good metaphor for the teaching moments that we like, but Rachel had a good example of one:  She told me about this kid in her class yesterday who, thinking about A Raisin in the Sun, which they had just finished, said, "But it's not Walter's fault, and it's not even Mr. Lindner's fault.  It's about White supremacy."  Now that's a kid trying out some big-ass ideas.  But he's not "getting it" in that sense that the light goes on and he understands and now that's done.  He's a sixteen-year-old kid whose teacher has facilitated his access to terms like "White supremacy," and he's trying on that thinking.  And he'll have to continue to try on that thinking, like the rest of us, for the rest of his life.  That lightbulb thing is too final.  It's just not like that.

My own favorite teacher once told me that when she got to Berkeley, where she had accepted a position as a one-year visiting professor, she was astounded and delighted to find that there were other people in the world who, like her, just loved "big, juicy ideas."  Before then, she said, she'd tried to keep her love of that stuff to herself, lest anyone find out what a freak she was. (Are we making kids who love ideas feel freakish?)

But the way that teacher let me in on "big, juicy ideas" (which, honestly, is kind of gross to say) made my life so much better, even in these last few years which have, largely, sucked.  She's the kind of teacher I have always aspired to be.

Another teacher-friend, one of the very few 6-12 teachers who's been in the classroom for more than ten years whose practice I respect, quit last week.  PARCC testing did her in.  (And I don't at all mean that younger teachers are somehow more likely than older teachers to be good; I just mean that it's easier to stick around when you don't give that much of a shit.)

Anyone who's not a teacher doesn't really know how fucking nuts high-stakes testing makes the adults in a school building act.  Kids are warned within an inch of their lives to turn their fucking cell phones off.  Administrators put up caution tape across hallways to make sure that no non-test-taking students enter the testing arena.  All of a sudden the school has hella cash to spend on snacks for the kids.  So many emails with rules and rule reminders and rosters and roster changes get fired off.  Big-ass testing manuals (i.e. scripts) with flagged pages show up in teachers' mailboxes along with a couple more emails in the inbox to read those testing manuals with special attention to the flagged pages.  The meetings.  The tenseness of the meetings.  Don't care if there is a tornado brewing outside on test day, we're having school.  And the poor fuckers who get tapped to proctor the test, woof.  Throughout the entirety of the test, you have to "actively monitor" the test-takers.  That means hours of watching kids take a test (a test that, to anyone who knows something about language and literacy, is very obviously theoretically unsound and therefore a waste of fucking time -- and so much money and anxiety).  In some states, it's actually illegal for a teacher to read a book while the kids test.

For real, I'd like to see some research done as to the actual distance wafted by the smell of frantic desperation from public schools on testing day.

It might be almost funny if I hadn't also seen how seriously kids take the test.  All of a sudden, my hilarious, resistant, brilliant, bawdy, darling scholars would turn into these silent, #2-pencil-sharpening zombies.  (At least for a little while.  Thankfully, there were always a couple who, after a few minutes, came to the conclusion that "FUCK THIS" and just went to sleep.)

(Another thing to be thankful for: Andrew reported to me that this week, all of the girls in his fourth grade classroom, upon finishing each section of the test, set to work braiding the shit out of their own hair.  He said they all looked bananas by the end of the day.  What a great image.  What a relief.)

I went to a talk at Mills College a few weeks ago with Kevin Kumashiro and Christine Sleeter called "Confronting neoliberalism: Classroom practice and social justice teaching," and I finally learned what neoliberalism means.  Whereas classical liberalism, Kumashiro explained, idealizes the preservation of individual freedoms in balance with the public good, neoliberalism chops off the public good part.  With the focus on individualism and elimination of concern for the social welfare come obsessions with deregulation and privatization, leading to deep cuts in public services, attacks on organized labor, etc.  In schools, this means the over-emphasis of easy-(and cheap)-to-score standardized tests, systems like Response to Intervention that, in the name of efficiency, label and sort students for “intervention” by their deficiencies in terms of stated (and often culturally irrelevant) academic and behavioral goals, and increasing control by White, wealthy business leaders intent on using market strategies – rather than the input of teachers, students, and families – to inform their reform initiatives.  (In prison this plays out as a commitment to punishment and case-by-case retribution rather than to restoration and collective justice; it also plays out as economically-tilted calls for reform on the basis that we can’t afford to keep incarcerating people at our record-breaking rates, rather than as significant engagement with the human rights issues at stake in our country’s prison industrial complex.  In both contexts, Black boys and men, though increasingly people from other marginalized groups, bear the brunt of these failing policies and practices.)

So the PARCC (and it's equally heinous predecessors) is essentially a way to makes it easy to pinpoint (and fix or fire) the exact teachers who are fucking up.  (Just like RtI makes it easy to pinpoint [and fix or incarcerate] the kids who are fucking up.)  Once you identify enough "bad teachers" (and what is a "good teacher," by neoliberal standards?  One who is willing to tow the line?  Be an instrument of the system rather than an intellectual/artist/activist/human?) in a school, you can shut it down, bring in the businessmen, and start making the money (on the backs of, most often, low-income Brown and Black kids).

Proponents of the PARCC will tout the importance of the literacy skills it tests, namely evidence-based argumentation.  Fine.  Fine by me.  But, in his chapter in Closer Readings of the Common Core, Randy Bomer has a real point when he explains:

(Ahem, Lucy Calkins,  et al., and your Pathways to the Common Core: I'm not "a curmudgeon"  just because I choose not to read the CCSS "as if they are gold."  WTHeck.)

I wonder what school would be like if the adults put as much energy (and money) into shit that matters as they do into making sure they follow PARCC testing guidelines to the T (or risk losing funding)?  Even though managing the standardized delivery of the test across every school in the country is really hard, it's way easier than dealing, at a federal level, with the legacy of slavery that informs the persistence of Black kids getting labeled as failures by schools.  It's way easier than dealing, at a federal level, with the pervasive racism that informs the defunding of bilingual education and the Jim-Crow-esque limitations placed on the dreams of kids who are undocumented immigrants.

But, like, really.  What if we spent all this time, money, and energy on that ^?  What if we spent all this time, money, and energy on engaging kids in big, juicy ideas (that aren't really testable in a  cheap-to-grade way)?  What if we took on, with such an obsessive urgency, the need for every one of us to think seriously about White supremacy and how it works in our own lives?  What if we thought seriously with kids about "when do you think is the time to love somebody the most"?

I have more to say on this, but I have to go to work, selling wedding dresses, because I'd rather do that than play this stupid game anymore.

Except that, hell, now I'm playing it with the GED in prison.