I’m gonna start this off with some disclaimers because I do not want to appear like I am setting myself up as The Guy Who Is Doing Everything Right and everyone else in US education is Doing It Wrong.
- I am not criticizing my colleagues or anyone currently teaching students in the classroom.
- I am not criticizing my students. Heck, I am not criticizing any students anywhere in the world.
- I am not criticizing the administrators of the school where I teach students or anyone in the day-to-day work of running a school.
What I am doing is trying to point out some trends in education, technology, culture, and politics that have carried all of us to a certain point. I am talking about some things that I have noticed in my own practice. And I am inviting anyone who is reading this to think about how we can be intentional about changing our systems to help take us to a better place.
We are in the midst of a crisis in reading and literacy that is part of a wider crisis in attention in a world that is rapidly shifting to video. I follow a lot of college professors on Bluesky and various newsletters as a way of staying current in my understanding of the fields where I teach students, and many of them have been talking about the difficulty they have been having over the last five years in getting students to keep up with their reading. Personally, I find Paul Musgrave to be one of the best at articulating what’s going on here.
My go-to explanation has been to grumble about how education policies like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have influenced this decline over the course of my career. Other people have pointed to the way teachers have been trained to teach kids to read over the last twenty years. But there is also evidence that this is not a problem confined to the United States. And if it is happening in wealthy countries, it shouldn’t be surprising to see signs it is happening in less-wealthy nations as well.
We’re seeing standardized tests scores that are still in decline after the worst of the COVID pandemic. While standardized test data has always been problematic, there are signs that not using that data may be even more problematic, as there is evidence that students are passing courses without having mastered the skills those classes are supposed to teach.
That’s a lot of bad news. But I want to say one thing to try to put these problems in perspective. It is still a relatively new idea in society that we should try to give all young people a substantial formal education. As recently as 1980, almost one third of US adults over the age of 25 did not have a high school diploma. In 1960, about one third of US adults between the ages of 25 and 29 did not have a high school diploma. To try to get that number closer to 90 percent is an enormous undertaking. I think we deserve credit for taking that on as a goal.
That said, I think we have probably been unrealistic about how many resources are necessary to carry out that task successfully. As a result we are constantly trying to scrape through and survive rather than putting ourselves in position to succeed at such an ambitious and worthwhile goal. We got in this situation through many systemic factors, and every individual administrator, teacher, and student is rowing against the tide to try and steer us in a better direction. Working toward systemic change is important, but while that process is happening I still have 140 teenagers to teach every day.
One thing that I have found helpful is that I am embracing my age. I’m 50, and even though I got a late start in my high school teaching career, I have been teaching students for 17 years. (This upcoming school year will, I think, be the last year that my seniors were born before I started teaching high school students.) I am not the guy who’s going to be able to relate to my students well because it wasn’t so long ago that I was in their shoes. I am not the guy who’s immersed in the latest tech and culture trends to be ready to incorporate them into my teaching.
Nope. I’m a Cranky Old Fella now, and while the good old days weren’t always good, I find myself looking back more and more often to see what I did in those days that I can pull forward to today. This is not a fully developed list or method, but these are some of the ideas I have been playing with as I think about how to improve my classroom practice as I get ready for my 18th year teaching high school students.
Stick to Text: I am a print snob. I admit it. And I know that makes me unusual. I know that much of the audience has shifted away from text as audio and video material becomes easier to produce and distribute. But while I believe that spoken language and visual media have much to offer, text has unique advantages in organizing and presenting information, and as educators I think we have to require students to build the skills to make use of those advantages. At some point we have to stop cutting the texts down. We have to require students to build their reading stamina. (And this means we need to put real resources and effort into assisting students who have difficulty reading.)
Fewer Grades: I think the trend to have gradebooks available digitally and for lots of classwork assignments to get graded has overall been detrimental to students. I think this trend makes it harder to establish the rhythm and the routine that a series of assignments will culminate in an assessment that requires them to demonstrate understanding. We wind up sending a message that an assignment doesn’t matter if it isn’t graded. We don’t help students build the skills to do long range planning toward a goal.
Keep Analog in the Mix: There’s a lot of trial and error in this for me, because there are some parts of using digital tools in education that I think are, in fact, very helpful. I have made a lot of handouts and worksheets for my students over the years, and when every student had access to a Chromebook I started putting most of that online. I loved spending less money on copy paper. I loved not having to keep track of piles of handouts for when students lost them. I loved not carrying half a ream of paper back and forth to work for grading. I loved not misplacing things that students handed in late. I loved making a comment on a Google Doc rather than trying to squeeze something into tiny letters in the margin. I loved being able to give people a link to follow up and get more info. And I do not want to completely lose all of these advantages. But there are advantages to being able to mark up a piece of paper. There are advantages to writing out your thoughts by hand. And I think developing those analog skills make you better prepared to use digital tools well. So I am thinking about how I can help my students build those skills.
Like I said, everything wasn’t better in the old days. The only thing I unequivocally miss from the 1990s is the prevalence of my favorite rock bands. But I think it’s worth it for teachers to look back and think about school has changed, and talk to each other about whether it’s time to revive some blasts from the past. If you need me, I’ll be in my yard having an amicable conversation with the clouds.