Teaching to Learn, Part 4: The Testing Game

Me in my extremely fashionable floppy
beige safari hat, and children.

Tuesdays are my least favorite mornings of the week.  Most other mornings I arrive at school, drop my things, don my extremely fashionable floppy beige safari hat and head out into the garden for some pest control, watering, or a few moments of calm before the school day begins in earnest.

Not on Tuesdays.  Tuesdays are lesson planning days.  On Tuesdays I arrive at school, drop my things, place my laptop under my arm, and enter the library which, thanks to an HVAC malfunction, currently doubles as a walk-in refrigerator.  Next the garden team checks our unit calendar to see what topic we'll be teaching the following week, then we unfold our laptops and open up our school's lesson planning template.*

In the top right box of that template stand three capitalized letters and a fourth lower-case one in parentheses: GLE(s).  Grade Level Expectation(s).  These are the skills and ideas, broken down by subject area, that the state of Louisiana expects our students to understand by the end of the school year.  Each of our lessons, and by extension each of our classes, involves content drawn from the science GLEs.  2nd grade, my focus area for teaching, has 51 GLEs for science alone.**  Almost every student gets tested according to these criteria, and both teachers and schools are evaluated on how well students meet these expectations year-to-year.

For four mornings in mid-April almost every student in Louisiana undergoes some form of standardized testing.  Fourth and eighth graders have it especially tough - failure to pass the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program, or LEAP test, means repeating the grade.  The stress created by the weight of the test is probably enough to cause some students to fail.  3rd, 5th, 6th and 7th graders took the iLEAP, a less high-stakes exam but one that can act as an indicator for students who may need to repeat.

I'm a big believer that kids need to be tested less, or not at all, or at least in a very different way.  Any standardized test I've ever encountered is extremely reductionist; often all they measure is a student's ability to take a test or a teacher's ability to teach to it.  These tests set a very narrow scope of what it means to be a successful student to the detriment of all students, especially those who might be gifted in ways that tests like these will never show.  Like traditional schooling tends to do, standardized tests make the "gifted" students feel good and the challenged students, or the students gifted in other ways, feel less good.

Testing can really limit what teachers and students are able to achieve.  I had a conversation recently with a middle-school English teacher who was reflecting on his last couple years of teaching.  "Last year my kids did great on the tests but my classes were dull and my students weren't that engaged," he shared.  "All I did was drill, drill, drill for the tests."  This year, his classes have been inspiring.  He's seen such growth in his students' ability to express themselves through writing, and he's created a really positive and supportive classroom culture.  "But they're screwed for the tests," he said.  "We haven't been drilling nearly enough."  Perhaps a really skilled teacher can collapse the either/or between an ideal learning experience and an ideal test score, but for most people it's pretty difficult.

Testing also glosses over so much about what happens in a school.  For instance: do educators create an environment where kids can believe in themselves?  Are students happy and supported?  Are they learning to be loving, caring, compassionate, thoughtful, communicative people?  Are they good listeners, good sharers, and good friends?  What are students good at that's not traditionally measured on tests?  How much do students retain of what's on the test after the test itself?


It's a game, in a way.  We all play along, following rules we didn't create and sometimes don't understand or respect.  Those who adhere most strongly to the rules tend to do the best, and are rewarded with accolades and funding.  It's highly competitive and some students, teachers and schools are better at the game than others.  There are winners and losers, only in this game the losers get held back, fired or shut down.  You can choose not to play, but you'll pay for it.  You can also choose to play only by the rules and ignore other aspects of raising young people, but society will pay for it.  I work in a school that plays both the testing game and the raising kids game exceptionally well, but teachers and administrators end up paying for it in the form of extremely long hours and high faculty turnover.

Clearly I'm no fan of the sit-and-regurgitate method of evaluation.  So when I walked into school on Thursday morning for the first round of testing I expected to spend the better part of the next four mornings frustrated and sad.

Instead I found myself smiling, a lot.


As I walked into the cafeteria that morning during breakfast I saw the fourth grade teachers handing out "good luck" cards that their students had written to each other as encouragement.  I'm sure a handful of kids didn't take the assignment too seriously, but reading the cards almost all of them had really touching and thoughtful messages.  The students worked really hard to draw nice pictures, write peoples names in funny or creative lettering, or come up with some really kind things to say to their classmates.  Even the kids who got someone they didn't get along with seemed to step up.

Right after the cards were exchanged one of the teachers led the entire grade in a warm up exercise that involved stretching, words of encouragement, and screaming.  My students never get to scream in the cafeteria.  It was a small victory for exceptions, and I think it made them feel special.  The scene in the cafeteria that morning became this beautiful and rare 9-year-olds' version of solidarity.


When testing began a handful of non-testing middle-school students made their way out to the garden where they got to spend their entire morning.  Some of these students had never set foot in the garden before and probably wouldn't have save for their testing exemptions.  They got to play with and feed the chickens, go hunting for snails and caterpillars, and harvest cabbage leaves.

The younger students finished testing earliest.  As they made their way past the fourth grade rooms toward the cafeteria they walked by in total silence, out of respect for their older peers still testing.  It was the quietest and most focused I had ever seen them in the hallways.

As a hallway monitor one of my responsibilities was to watch over testing groups while the teachers returned their testing materials to the main office.  I was standing in a silent room with a small group of fourth-graders when one boy started making motions with his hand as if pantomiming a ball.  Another boy raised his hands up together as if to say "throw it here!"  Pretty soon the whole room, girls and Mr. Sam included, was involved in a calm, hilarious game of silent catch.

Every day during testing I saw little shining moments of resiliency.  Of positivity.  Of compassion.  Even in this stressful and unfortunate environment, or perhaps because of it, my students and co-workers showed their most vivid human colors.

It's a lesson I've been learning all year at school but have only recently begun to take to heart: even within a troubled system, it's possible to create pockets of real beauty.  It's a lesson that extends beyond schools, and one that offers hope to frustrated and confused hyper-politicized 20-somethings who are looking to carve out small corners of good in an impossibly huge mess of a world.

When it comes down to it, we're never disconnected from things we resent.  Public school educators will inevitably be part of the regime of testing.  Justice-minded entrepreneurs will participate in exploitative economics.  Environmentalists will depend on fossil fuels and Big Ag.  Homesteaders will never be fully off the grid.  There is no off the grid.

If we begin to believe that we've carved out an existence that exempts us from the parts of the world that we find troubling, we're likely kidding ourselves.  It's an illusion, an image, and if you read my last post you might agree that images can have very bad unintended consequences.

Rather than trying to separate ourselves from the evils we see, perhaps it's a better approach to acknowledge that we're in the thick of them, always.  That the best thing we can do is to act despite them - to love, to give, to teach, to create in the face of them.  Here's a self-serving analogy: the narrative is big and it isn't going anywhere, but in small ways we can begin to re-write it.  We can edit a line here or there, add or subtract the occasional paragraph and maybe even alter the punctuation.

More and more I'm convinced that creating a better world is just as much about form as content:  that what you do matters, but whatever you do, how you do it matters too.  We all have to play games, but we also have a choice in how we play them.

If you're an educator, fit your passions into the gaps in the curriculum.  If you're in food service, be the very picture of grace even to the most ungrateful customers.  If you're a software engineer, be the most thorough and passionate software engineer anyone has ever met.  If you're in clerical work, smile at your coworkers more than they thought anyone could.  If you're a financier, be the best damn listener your clients will ever encounter.  If you're an executive at Exxon-Mobil... well... lets draw a line somewhere.***

Maybe I'm clinging to this belief to relieve some latent guilt about working in an extremely problematic school system.  Maybe this is an early stage of rationalizing an eventual full-blown sellout.


I'm hoping that's not the case.  I'm hoping it's nuance.  I'm hoping it's the closest thing to wisdom that I can muster at 22 and still not yet a year out of college, a place where I sometimes believed that the only way to make a dent in the big bad world was to start from scratch, away from it.  Sometimes I still wonder if that could be true, other times I wonder if it's even possible.  I'll never be sure.

I am sure that on the Tuesday morning after spring break I will have a lesson planning meeting at 7:15 AM.  I know that the first thing I will do is fill out the GLEs that I'm required to cover.  I also know, or at least I'm starting to learn, that my lesson plan doesn't have to end there.  I can deliver the testable content and also include garden work, higher-order thinking, communication skills, and even some pure fun.  I can play the testing game without giving up the imagination game, the personal growth game or the building relationships game.


If you've ever spent time around children you know that the ones who have the most fun playing games aren't the ones who always win.  It's the ones who, win or lose, make the choice to have fun.  It's the ones who don't despair when playtime is over, but rejoice in having had it and in knowing that it will come again.  It's the ones who, sitting silently in a room after a three hour test, don't see any balls lying around, so they imagine one into existence instead.

That is how you play a game.

~~~~~~~~~~

*We gardeners have it a hundred times easier than most of our colleagues, who spend the better parts of their evenings and weekends lesson planning.


**2nd grade also has about 50 GLEs each for ELA and social studies, and about 30 for math.


***Or perhaps not.  If we're never fully detached from the evils we see, then probably we're never fully embedded in them either.

Paint and Racism

Last week three monuments in New Orleans were graffitied in protest to the recent killings of three young black men: Trayvon Martin from Florida and Justin Sipp and Wendell Allen from New Orleans. One of the monuments is to the White League, a paramilitary group formed in 1874 by former Confederate soldiers, the second is to Confederate General Robert E. Lee, and the third is to Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

The Jefferson Davis statue stands at the corner of Canal Street and Jefferson Davis Parkway, about three blocks from where I live. Last Wednesday I took the photo on the left on my way home from work. On the base of the monument it was written, "FOR JUSTIN SIPP," and a bit higher up paint was splattered vividly in red and green. By Friday the paint had been pressure washed clean by Roy Pennington, a private citizen concerned with how tourists in town for the Final Four would perceive the city. He had this to say: "I was angry. People will see this, our city defaced. I don't think so. Not if I can help it." On his attitude toward the killings, he added: "There’s nothing racial to it in my mind. Someone defaced our city times three. I can’t change racial relations, but I can clean a monument."

Pennington's decision to pressure-wash the graffiti off of the monuments is the next page in an old story, one that begins in antiquity.  It's a story about how images matter, how they not only reflect culture but can actually create and reproduce it. It's a story about how the worship of a particular image birthed a deep cultural prejudice, and how our culture's worship of certain images permits that prejudice to continue. It's a story about paint and racism, and the relationship between the two.

My life changed forever the first time I read Clyde Taylor's essay The Art of Ethnic Cleansing.* Taylor, art historian and eradicator of cultural myths, calls to attention one simple fact that forever altered the way I thought about beauty, history, and everything: the Greeks painted their statues. Vividly. In bright and flamboyant colors. Temples and public buildings too. The whole notion of pristine white marble adorning the landscapes of ancient Athens and Sparta? That was actually a really big misunderstanding, brought about by something called weathering.

Alabama State Capitol.  This photo has clearly been dulled down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alabama_state_capitol,_Montgomery.jpg

If the left hemisphere of your brain hasn't yet melted and begun dripping out of your ears, think about how thoroughly we worship the image of pristine white marble. Find me a state capitol that doesn't resemble the modern-day Parthenon (which, by the way, used to be red and blue with gold highlights). Find me a tourist attraction in the DC mall not made of the stuff. The closest I've ever come to going blind was last August when I drove through Montgomery, Alabama on my way to New Orleans. Standing in front of the capitol pavilion for just a few seconds was enough to burn a bright red glare into large swaths of my corneas. We really really like bare white marble, and the Greeks really didn't care for it at all.

How did this come to be? Well, things got pretty exciting in Europe right around the 14th century. After hundreds of years folks were finally pulling themselves out of the Dark Ages and into the light, largely crediting Greek and Roman thought as the driver of the Renaissance engine. "Humanists of the Renaissance and Enlightenment [...] found in Greek philosophy, politics, art, literature and life-style the very type of human perfection," writes Taylor. "The exaltation of ancient Greece was a way of declaring and legitimizing the identity of those qualified to exercise refined taste and judgement." In other words, the cultural connection between ancient Greece and Early Modern Europe wasn't some sort of linear progression, but a "creation of instant cultural history" that functioned to lend some credibility to Europeans' chosen forms of intellectual and artistic worship.

From Taylor, The Mask of Art

That worship went beyond erecting large white buildings adorned with Corinthian columns, phallic central domes and "U"s shaped like "V"s. Artists and scientists also worshipped ancient bodies, or at least whatever marble statues and busts they could get their Enlightened hands on. Measuring and diagramming these busts and statues, scientists established a loose consensus about what an "ideal" head looked like (i.e. Greek), down to the shape, angle and size of the chin, the forehead and the nose. Then they went a step further, measuring the heads of Africans, then apes, and comparing the three. Placing these image in sequence as a spectrum of beauty, and by extension level of civilized-ness, intelligence and morality, the African stood somewhere between the ape and the Greek.**

Now consider this. You're an early American colonist. You need labor. Lots of it. Cheap. And quickly. You're a Christian, so you can't do something wicked unto your brother. But those Africans, they're not your brothers - according to scientists they're just a step above the apes. They're undercivilized, hypersexual, unchristian beasts. Now you don't just have a labor force, you have a culturally sound rationalization to enslave them - a rationalization grounded in "science;" science grounded in the arbitrary worship of an image; an image grounded in a gross misunderstanding about something called "weathering."

Soon there's a whole culture built up around this idea - that Africans are something between apes and Greeks. It's American culture, circa 1800. At this point it's no longer even recognized as an idea, it has become a cultural "truth." The arbitrariness has been forgotten, cast aside, washed away.

In this process we come to see that images matter. By idealizing white marble Europeans began to idealize their own whiteness, and in turn began to vilify African blackness. "The Greeks became the template of those who were both beautiful and capable of recognizing beauty," writes Taylor, "while [...] the Africans became the anti-type of beauty." We often think about how images reflect what's real, whether it's culture, nature, or events. Taylor shows us that a parallel process occurs simultaneously: images create what's real. When Europeans represented Africans as inferior in European art and science, it became "truth" in the minds and practices of Europeans and their American counterparts.

Now it's not to say that slavery and the colonization of Africa only happened because European thinkers were able to justify their exploits through the use of racist images. Obviously there were other elements at play, like the demands of building a nation-state or the need to acquire resources to fuel an industrial revolution. But the images did form a crucial part of the regime of European supremacy during the colonial age. And for those who had an interest in making Euro-white society look really good, the images mattered enough for them to fight tooth, nail and quill to see that they went unchallenged.

When archaeologists began to discover traces of pigmentation in Greek art and architecture, some began to realize that maybe that whole white marble thing was actually a really big, really ironic mistake. But by then it was too late; artists and scientists had already drawn too much of Europe's self-image upon their incomplete template of Greek beauty.

To acknowledge that the Greeks painted their statues would have been to admit that the entire European understanding of beauty was not only based on mistaken assumptions, but also totally arbitrary and self-serving. And let's not forget the Europeans' nasty habit of mixing sculpture with biology and biology with race. In this light, acknowledging the paint would have called into question the very foundations of art, science, and European cultural superiority. Taylor puts it mildly, with more than a hint of irony: "The knowledge that the Greeks painted their sculptures did not meet with enthusiasm."

Art historians and intellectuals did not simply ignore the fact of Greek paint. They actively denied it, reinterpreting, revising and repressing Greek art to fit their idea of what it should have been like. "The clamorous discussion around such a discovery [...] never happened," Taylor writes, "Nor has it ever been allowed to enter popular knowledge."

Al Jolson in blackface, one of the few representations
of blackness that's no longer culturally acceptable
http://image.qpicture.com/image/a/artist-al-jolson/al-jolson-297644.jpg

Fast forward to today.  Do images still matter as they once did? Perhaps old truths don't hold quite the same type of power - it's no longer ok to say that African-descended people are just a step up from apes or that they're not as capable as white people of doing something. It's no longer possible in American culture to use a racial image to justify widespread slavery.*** But before you claim that images no longer cause harm, that they no longer perpetuate our culture's deep and extensive history of racism, consider the paint. Consider that 400 years later its existence is still barely acknowledged. The image of beauty that helped define modern racism remains almost totally unchallenged. The visual culture that followed has largely remained unchallenged as well, save for a few of the most egregious representations of people of African descent.



And still the images remain. They surround us. They're inescapable. They continue not only to reflect culture, but to create and re-produce it. Images that juxtapose dark-skinned people with animals. Images that tell us, often subconsciously, who is a threat and who isn't. Images that allow anyone to believe we can know enough about somebody in an instant to draw a gun and pull the trigger. Images that cause people to believe the worst about themselves, telling them who they are and are not, what they can and cannot become.

Note the Angel/Devil binary in this advertisement. Its subtlety 
does not mitigate its effect on our perception, but actually enhances it.
http://www.toptenz.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/benetton-560x382.jpg

Now consider Trayvon Martin. Consider Justin Sipp or Wendell Allen. Could an image have had anything to do with this? Could a cop perceive a suspect a certain way because of what she or he saw on television or in a film or in training? Could images have had something to do with why history played out in the particular way that it did?  With why 150 years after the abolition of slavery people of African descent in this country still lack equitable access to opportunity, power and resources? With why the crime and incarceration rate among people of African descent is so scandalously high? With why people of European descent hold a disproportionate share of the wealth, PhDs and political offices in the United States? Is it possible that all of these circumstances are partly the result of perceptions and self-perceptions derived from the Greeks, their marble, and everything that followed?

As a society we're failing to ask hard questions about the collection of images that help shape our culture.  As those images developed from the earliest idealizations of Greek beauty they added layers of complication to the problem of the original paint.  One of those layers is the subtle and steady persistence of racism in American society.  Racism is our Greek paint.

European intellectuals and art historians ignored and repressed the Greek paint at great human cost.  We continue to repeat their wrong, and for many of the same reasons. To acknowledge our paint would be to admit that our culture is not what we've made it out to be. It would call into question whether we're even approaching the image of post-racial equity that we so worship. It would compel us to consider that perhaps racism and sexism and heterosexism and classism and all forms of prejudice not only exist in our culture, but are inseparable from it, and have been from the start.

Too much is at stake for our society to challenge the images that form our self-perception.

Images that seem harmless, that we claim don't matter anymore, that allow us to say things like "There’s nothing racial to it in my mind."

Images that can be traced with bright and flamboyant colors starting with the European Renaissance and continuing through the colonization of African, through slavery in America, through Jim Crow segregation, through the blatant violence of the Civil Rights Era, all the way through to the persistent, insidious, and often invisible aesthetic violence of Hollywood, television, and mass media.

Images that we continue to draw on because they're all we know. Because people identify most strongly with stories they've already heard and pictures they've already seen. Hollywood will keep telling tales of violence and despair in the hood because it's easier, flashier, and sells better than a story about redemption or forgiveness in the hood. And every time a film tells a particular story or represents a particular image, it becomes that much more likely to appear true. It becomes that much harder for an image-driven culture to become something different, something better.

Seen in isolation these images may seem benign. Seen in the context of a history in which images matter, in which images can do real harm, the images of today take on new significance. Seen in the context of a story in which the maintenance of an image is tantamount to the maintenance of an entire culture, it becomes crucial for us to ask "why?," "how?," and "for whom?".

Roy Pennington is not the bad guy in this story. There is no bad guy in a story where an entire culture and its entire history need to be held accountable for past and present wrongs. But last week when Roy Pennington pressure washed the paint off of three monuments in New Orleans - three monuments representing this country's history of racism, no less - he wasn't just tidying up a city for its guests. He wasn't just doing his civic duty, preserving beauty for the public good. He was maintaining an image: that racism is a thing of the past; an image grounded in a historical process of repression and erasure; a process analogous to a thing called "weathering."

As we mourn the deaths of Trayvon Martin, of Justin Sipp, of Wendell Allen, and as we seek explanations and solutions and solace, let's demand accountability from the police, from the law, from the government.

Let's also demand accountability from Hollywood, television and mass media for their role in maintaining images that cause harm. Let's demand accountability from our schools to teach young people that images matter, that they have histories and meanings and consequences. Let's demand accountability from ourselves and from each other, recognizing that the images on our screens and in our minds have more power over us than we might imagine.

Until we're ready to look deeply into the foundations of our culture - to reflect on the imagery in our history and in our present, to admit to the depth and breadth and subtlety of racism in our society - we can't even begin to heal.

Next time let's let the paint stand, if only as a reminder.




~~~


*If reading this article is not a semi-annual ritual for you, do yourself a favor and make that happen.

**There are dozens and dozens of recorded instances of European attempts to create universal ideas of beauty and civilization, and well-documented evidence of the scientific and anthropological conclusions drawn from them relating to levels of intelligence, morality, sexuality, and more. Here are a couple of examples:

The Return of Sara Baartman - Zola Maseko
The History of White People - Nell Irvin Painter
Primitivism and other Misconceptions in African Art - Ekpe Eyo

***Though perhaps racial images play into why slavery still exists, and is in fact legal, in prisons:

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
- 13th Amendment, United States Constitution