Photo by selma90

If  you’re a teacher, my condolences go out to you at the beginning of this semester.

With the nation polarized concerning just about any issue, the hate- and fear-mongers have pounced on teachers with a sick, perverted glee.

You may have the misfortune to have your local newspaper publish an alleged “comic” strip (an odd name for a propaganda-strip devoid of any comic relief at all) that will go unnamed here. No need to publicize the hate-filled, malevolent ravings of a malicious maladroit. If you don’t know the one I mean, I wouldn’t dream of sending you to his reactionary website, but you can see a copy of an offensive cartoon at http://cartoonistsgroup.com/store/add.php?iid=51181

For years, that malcontent has been spewing venom about how teachers are the bane of modern society because of constructionist education reforms.

A typical case of the debate around education reform is the “Math Wars.” The Math Mojo Chronicles have tackled this issue a bit in some of my posts about the math wars.  In those writings I’ve tried to be open minded, and not lay blame at any one group’s doors. We’re all culpable to some degree. But to blame teachers for the things they have no control over is more than a little wrong, yet that is exactly what that foul creature does.

Alas, many people, like the questionable cartoonist, prefer simple answers to complex questions. They apparently never learned to think beyond scapegoating the easiest target, even if it’s the wrong one. It is apparent that they had bad teachers. Something has to explain their lack of logical thought. It’s a typical logical fallacy to assume that even though you are poorly educated and suffer from a lack of critical thinking, that everyone shares your ignorance because they had bad teachers, as well, but that is where this odd duck is at.

Let’s put it bluntly – teachers are up against some terrible odds today. They are expected to be babysitters, lawyers, nurses, bean-counters, crisis-negotiators – anything but teachers. They are often stuck with class-sizes that are over the legal limit, and can’t do anything about it. They deal with some parents who spend no time on their own children’s education, yet expect every teacher to be Annie Sullivan (“The Miracle Worker”)

Then along come some lobbyists for different curriculums and textbooks, both traditionalist and reform-minded, that fight for the administration’s budget (your tax dollars) and want to inculcate your kids with their ideology.

It is a canard that teachers are at fault for this. Teachers are more at the mercy of a treacherous industry that is bound by a bottom line that the student’s welfare plays no part in.

Administrators are held hostage to a high-stakes testing strategy that makes no sense, and a sardonically misnamed “No Child Left Behind” act that handcuffs them to standards that are haphazard and unenforceable, and will change as often as the wind. In turn, they hold the teachers responsible to “make it work.”

Ignorant people like to blame teachers and/or their unions. I think these people are under the impression that teachers unions are behemoths that wield impressive political power, and are responsible for everything from the fact that many schools need weapon-detectors at the door to the the 9/11 bombings, to, what the heck, the fall of the Roman Empire.

If you’re a teacher and need protection from asinine school-board decisions or administrative abuse, you’ll soon find out that teacher’s unions have about as much clout as a crepe paper shillelagh club. Teachers are routinely overworked and undervalued, and forced to fill out useless form after form about “student achievement” and IEPs that will be ignored by the people who have to make decisions about how to help that student along in the future, because of “budget restraints”. If schools don’t meet the “academic standard du jour,” the administrators will look to pass off any culpability on the teachers, first. The buck stops “down there, with them.”

The money may go to put air-conditioning in the superintendent’s office, or go to a new football scoreboard more than it will to actually effective teaching supplies. Then the teacher will have to shell out his or her own money to equip the class. Or the PTA will hold a bake sale. How would you like to have to bake cookies to have your employer be able to give you the supplies you need to do your job?

How would that propaganda-pushing caricature of a journalist like to have to educate some kids who come from homes that have never had a real book in them? Or maybe kids who only know abuse at home and cannot behave in public?  Would it be the teacher’s fault to have a class with kids who have an intelligence span wider than that of the cartoonists’ core audience, yet have to have all of them meet a one-size-fits-all standard?

Families move more often than in the years of “Leave it to Beaver.”  A class may have pupils from school districts with entirely different standards than that class. The teacher has to make up for all the discrepancies that he/she had nothing to do with, yet that teacher will be responsible for the grades of children that may have come into the class woefully ill-prepared, because the children may have come from one or the other doofus-districts.

Teachers are hampered by exactly the type of ignoramuses who insist on “standards” that the ignoramuses themselves do not understand, and could not enforce. It’s easy to set up well-meaning (if naive and ineffectual) criteria for other people, and through wishful thinking and some notion about “tradition” expect others to live up to your unreasonable expectations even as you pull the rug out from them and disrespect them.

Scapegoating is the oldest, meanest, and dumbest propaganda tool in the simple-minded person’s playbook. Scapegoating the lowest man on the totem pole is the cheapest shot one can take.

If you really want to find who is responsible, look for the person who’s assigned the closest parking spot to the building (besides the handicapped spot – the disabled are picked on enough) and keep looking up from there. Anyone who’s saying, “… but we’re doing the best we can…” and who’s not speaking out for the rights of students and teachers first, is, in the words of a true cartoonist and journalist who actually stands for something meaningful (Doonesbury), “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!”

It needs to be pointed out that I am not re-assigning blame to all administrators. There are those who are fighting the good fight. I actually met one recently. It was refreshing and sobering. Those ladies and gentlemen need encouragement, just as the many good and great teachers out there.

If you have an administrator who is in trouble with the school-board for standing up for his or her teachers, support that person. If you have school-board members who are trying to shake up the establishment by standing up for administrators who support teachers, shake their hands. Buy their cookies.

As for the status-quo, unimaginative, bean-counting functionaries who take up office space and never deal with students or parents directly, let’s have the courage to stand up against them. Speak up at meetings, inform yourself as to who is running for school board member, and then go vote. Write letters to the editor. Don’t jump to conclusions.

And as for the propagandists who only put false words into speech bubbles and attribute them to people they attack, and draw unflattering pictures of people they don’t like or understand (just like when they scribbled nasty graffiti and malicious stick figures of the teacher on their school desks when they were children), well, there’s no need to fill more space concerning them.

Here’s to all the teachers who love their mission but are hampered by their jobs. You’re the best! (Along with the school librarians!)

Check out these other sites that have notices the same thing about that mindless strip:

http://duckcover.blogspot.com/

This one is great: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-kelly/mallard-fillmore-makes-me_b_38124.html Here’s a quote from it:

“Mallard Fillmore” is an actual disgrace. Reading it is like watching the loneliest creep at the gun show try to pick up a waitress by quoting George Will, throw up on himself, and cry.

It goes on to point out that the strip repeatedly attacked Ted Kennedy for driving drunk in the Chappaquiddick incident, then shows the mugshot of the cartoonist when he was arrested for driving drunk, himself. If it walks like a hypocrite, and quacks like a hypocrite…

How could I resist this? It’s from http://www.caglecartoons.com

• What if I Fail 9th Grade Math? (Part 1)
• What if I Fail 9th Grade Math? (Part 2)
• What if I Fail 9th Grade Math? (Part 3)
• What if I Fail 9th Grade Math? (Part 4)

A reader (Trevor) wrote in:

i am going to fail math 9 . what ill happen if i fail. i cant go to summer school my family refuses to take me. if anyone knows if i will go to the 10th grade or will be in 9th again please tell me

thank u.

Professor Homunculus sez:

Trevor,

There’s no way for me to tell you what your school will decide. Each school is different. Your family refuses to take you? Man, I feel for you – your school is not supporting you, your family doesn’t sound like it is either – but don’t worry, because the most important part is - that’s you.

You obviously are taking the situation seriously.

Let me tell you a story. There’s a guy I know who had a similar problem. He wasn’t failing, though. As a matter of fact, his grades were great. He just finished his junior year in high school. But his father was a “simple” kind of guy, and didn’t want the kid to go to college. It was too “fancy” for their family. It wasn’t exactly a family priority.

Now this kid wanted to get to college real bad. He loved learning and was very smart. His school was in a rural area of upstate New York, and just having good grades from that “hick” school back then wouldn’t help you get in to college. There were scholarships for kids like him back then, but he knew his family wasn’t going to help him get one.

He didn’t let that stop him. He wanted to learn math way beyond what his school taught. He thought if he could just get really good at something, “something would turn up.” There was no internet to research, and no place to go to find out how to get help. He really didn’t have a plan, but he knew he didn’t want to give up. He wanted to get to college, and he thought “learning stuff” would be part of the way of getting there, and that was the only thing he had control over.

A book had recently been published, entitled, “Mathematics for the Million” by Lancelot Hogben. He took that book out of the library in the summer, and he worked through every single page in it by the end of the summer. He worked his ass off.

He didn’t just stay in his room and learn, though. He was an avid baseball player, and was out in the sandlot playing with his friends almost every day. He once told me that when he was a kid, he even saw Babe Ruth play in an exhibition game, somewhere in upstate New York.

Anyway, he studied so hard that he sort of “mesmerized” his family. His father had never seen anything like that. By the end of the summer, his father had come around, and had agreed that he’d allow his son to apply for scholarships. And he got one.

He ended up getting a degree in chemistry, and then a Ph.D. in physics. He became a friend of the physicist John Wheeler (who in turn was a friend of Einstein’s), and was about the most distinguished teachers at RPI and in the NY State University system.

I was lucky enough to have this man as a teacher when I went to college in the 70′s. He was the most brilliant man I’d ever met in my life. He recently passed away, and I miss him every day. His name was Kent Lawson, and he invented the discipline of Eduction (Edux), which I hope to be able to make available on the web soon.

The reason I’m telling you this is because, in effect, you are in a similar situation. But he was as bit older than you, so may not have come up with his Idea, yet.

That Idea was to decide what you want, and work towards it despite what the people and institutions around you do. You seem to want to pass into the next grade. What if summer school is not an option?

Trevor, that might be the best thing that could happen to you. More time in the same school that didn’t help you pass during the entire school year sounds like a waste of time to me. You know one of the definitions of crazy? It’s “doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.”

So, if you really want to progress, go to a library . Sit there with a notebook and a pencil or pen, and brainstorm. Try to honestly figure out what your weak-points in 9th grade were. Be specific. Don’t just say, “Math” for example. Figure out what part of math. Was it geometry? Proofs? Algebra, word problems, etc?

Then try to trace the problem back to the place where you do understand. Let’s say you have problems dividing fractions. Do you know how to multiply them? Add them? Maybe not. But can you compare them, like knowing that 1/2 is larger than 2/5? If so, you know where to begin – you need to learn how to add fractions and work up from there.

If you don’t do this process with yourself, you may think, “Jeez, I need to know how to divide fractions – I just have to learn that.” Then you’ll start there, without the basis of addition and multiplication, and you’ll just be frustrated.

Go back as far as you need to and start there. Then HAMMER that subject. Find a decent book in the library about basic math and learn what you need to, and then find every textbook you can with examples of it and don’t stop until you’ve done at least 100 examples of each thing you need to know. If you can’t find examples of them in books, only then should you hit the internet and google “examples of dividing fractions,” for example.

Isn’t this more than they require? Of course it is! What was required didn’t help during the school year, did it? So get into the habit of doing more than they expect.

Trevor, after a few days of this, you will find that you like it. That’s the big surprise. It’s because you are doing something you want to do, for yourself, and there’s no idiot grading you.

If you do this, after a few days the librarian is going to notice, and he or she will help you with stuff. You will get a great reputation. Keep it up, and you may even deserve it!

Doing this will change your life for the better. I can’t tell you know in exactly which ways, but I hope you will write another comment by the end of the summer and tell us all just what this did for you. Let us know, too, if you try this, and keep us informed on your progress. If you need specific math help, let us know.

Once you have made your very specific list of things that you need to improve on, send it in, and if I have any resources to help you, I’ll pass them on to you.

All the best!

- Professor Homunculus

By the way, f u cn read ths, u no tht i don’t write in that style kiddie-internet style at all. Take a hint from the people you are looking to get help from, and try to match their style a bit. It may make them think that you take them seriously, and that may make them take you more seriously, OK?

’nuff said.

P.S. That book I mentioned, Mathematics for the Million, is still a great math book, and belongs in every home.

While reading a magic book from a local public library, I found a trick about math. It seemed simple enough, so after practicing and rehearsing it, I tried it out in a show.

BOOM! It was a huge hit. People came up to me afterwards and said things like,
“You must be a genius,” “We loved your magic, but how on earth did you do that math ?”

That flabbergasted me. I hadn’t realized how much “juice” you could get out of math. So, deep into my thirties, finally convinced that I could learn this stuff, I decided to learn more.

Now I have this blog, which is devoted to all people who are fed up with the baloney that schools feed you about how you need to learn on their schedule, because they need to “cover material.”

When the material is more important than the students, there’s a bad disconnect with reality.

I couldn’t do long division when I was in my thirties. Since then, I’ve managed to learn and do it mentally faster than most students can do it with paper.

You can definitely learn until you decide that you can’t. Don’t let anyone else decide that for you.

If you are “beyond school age” (which of course, you never are, because of adult ed. and more and more colleges accepting adult students) you may be in luck. You can learn math at your own pace, and from better sources than most schools offer.

Some of the greatest mathematicians of our day, and the past, have written books for self-learners. Here is a partial list:

“The Realm of Numbers“, by Isaac Asimov – A half-century after it was written, this is still one of the most readable and clear introductions to math, what it means, and how to learn it that ever was written. It is out of print, but you can get it on inter-library loan, and you can still find used copies.

“Mathematics for the Million“, by Lancelot Hogben – Ditto, but more advanced, and it’s still in print. It’s in most good bookstores in paperback.

“Playing with Infinity“, by Rozsa Peter – Ms. Peter takes you on a clear journey through numbers math. She is an excellent guide

All of these books were written over 50 years ago, during the first boom in American “self-help” book genre. Hogben’s book was one of the books that started the craze. They were written clearly, and without talking down to you. They still rock!

I mentioned libraries. I’ve said this dozens of times on this blog and elsewhere:

Libraries may be the most important buildings in any community, and librarians are the wonderful and mostly under-utilized guardians and sharers of knowledge.

Support your public and school libraries, and get acquainted with staff. It may be the most valuable educational connection you ever make.

And, as Tom Robbins said, in Still Life with Woodpecker (1980):

“It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”

’nuff said!

Professor Homunculus