Summer vacation is over and I am back in the routine of waking at 6 o’clock each week day. The first full week of classes is done and I find myself comfortably into the swing of a new school year. The students I have been assigned appear to be both bright and enthusiastic—at least up to this point. With the first exam coming up soon I should know if appearances are deceiving; though, their honors Biology teacher from last year says that these students are very good workers.

Class sizes are reasonable, with the exception of advanced placement chemistry which has 30 students. A young man wanted to change his schedule the first week of school and come into my AP class, but the registrar and I told him no; the class being filled to capacity. Actually, 24 students would be ideal. They took an exam over the summer homework assignment I gave them in May and the scores were about average. In my mind, these scores are never high enough. I will need to step up the pace this year as the Chemistry exam is the first of the AP exams in May, giving me two weeks less than last year.

We did the first lab with my honors classes on Wednesday, and second period was quite exciting. About ten minutes into my explanation of the procedure I heard a thump, and turned to find one of my students flat on the floor. She had fainted, coming to almost immediately. We helped her up, and I found a stool for her to sit on while I evaluated her situation. She said that she had never fainted before, but declined a trip to the school nurse, insisting that she felt fine. I honored her request. About two minutes later a different young lady collapsed. Her situation was visibly different, looking like a seizure rather than simple fainting. Her eyes fluttered and rolled, her hands were clasped together and held tightly to her chest. The whole episode lasted about a minute. When she snapped out of it, she complained of blurry vision and a headache. Alarmed, I had her taken to the office to see the nurse. I have had other students faint before, but in all my years of teaching never two in the same period. I followed up with the school nurse the next period; telling her about my suspensions that it was a seizure, not simple fainting. She said that the girl seemed fine, but was picked up by her father and taken home all the same, adding that she had a doctor’s appointment for the next day. I reported the other girl who did not want to go to the office and the nurse decided to call her down to check her out too. Both young ladies showed up in class the next day, no worse for wear.

Thursday evening was the yearly “back-to-school” night where parents run through their student’s schedule during five minute periods. The evening was uneventful for me, but some teachers reported unpleasant encounters with parents. One Spanish teacher recounted how he was ambushed by a parent. Her daughter has a D, based on a single recorded assignment the first week of school. He admitted that he would not be entering grades as quickly in the future based on his encounter with the ridicules parent.

My evening was much tamer. After 35+ years, most of the parents I encountered were either former students, or parents of former students. Being a known commodity works in your favor—unless you have been an ass.

My favorite Woody Allen movie is “Love and Death”, hence the picture above. One of my favorite lines in any of his movies was not in it, but in another whose name I can’t remember. “Those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach-- and those who can’t teach, teach P.E.”

Sadly, it is true that many people believe that someone goes into teaching because he or she could not hack it in the real world. As well, most people believe they could do as good a job or better teaching students anything they happen to know (or think they know) something about. The Chicago Public Schools use this widespread feeling among the populace to lower their costs. Experienced teachers are fired, usually when a school is being “reorganized” because of poor performance, and replaced by new teachers recruited from industry to enter the teaching profession. This happened to a friend who taught in the CPS system. When his school was reorganized all the teachers had to re-apply for their positions; most of those hired back had five or less years of experience. He had taught for 20 years and was too “expensive” to rehire. His replacement was a woman who had left her job as a chemist in the private sector to become a high school teacher. She was paid at the level of a first year teacher, saving the school tens of thousands of dollars. He found out from a colleague that she quit after three weeks. Depending on who you talk to, this practice may occur frequently. School administrators get away with this by convincing the media that there aren’t enough teachers when no such shortage exists.

Recently, the federal government has proposed a new multi-billion dollar stimulus package which they claim will save the jobs of many fo the teachers that have been laid off. In reality, the money, if allocated, will be used to hire additional first year teachers—the experienced teachers that have been laid off will not be getting their jobs back. Make no mistake about it, many public school administrators believe that a trained monkey could do as good a job as many teachers; and would hire one if they could get away with it. With teaching salaries being 75% or more of school budgets, the incentive is high to purge the highest paid staff whenever possible. Union contracts usually prevent this from happening; but when a CPS school is deemed failing by the central office teacher tenure and seniority are canceled. It is a puzzle to me why the teacher’s union doesn’t put up a fight when these things happen. Maybe they don’t care; union dues are the same for everyone, regardless of their experience.

Don’t get me wrong here; I’m not implying that experienced teachers are always better than inexperienced teachers. Many experienced teachers have given up and are just “phoning it in” until they have acquired enough years to retire at full pension. I feel that decisions about teacher retention should be made based on effectiveness, not seniority or, on the other hand, how cheap someone is to employ. Seniority and salary are both easy to measure, so they are easy to use in retention decisions. Measuring effectiveness is much more difficult. In my mind, the best measure of effectiveness is to pre and post test students; measuring effectiveness by student improvement.

Allow me to illustrate. You are asked to determine which of two cars is faster. Both are on I-80, making their way to California from Chicago. You locate each vehicle using their GPS system and determine that one is near Denver, the other is in Omaha. You report that the car near Denver is the faster of the two; Denver being closer to California than Omaha. This is the equivalent of using post testing only, something like exams on state objectives, to measure the effectiveness of a teacher. Maybe the vehicle in Denver left Chicago a month ago, and the vehicle in Omaha left yesterday. Now which one is faster?

I am going to test my method this school year. Over the summer I generated a test consisting of 50 multiple choice questions that cover the major concepts in chemistry. I will give this exam to my students the first week of school and again the last week of school. By doing this I hope to verify that the students actually learned something this year.

The family reunion last week was an enjoyable Sunday. Seeing my cousins is always a treat—especially since I see some of them only once a year at this event. My cousin Lori wanted everyone to tell a story about our grandmother and we each recounted a fond memory of her. The older cousins, me included, remember her old house; while the younger ones remember the home she moved into in 1974 when the old house was taken by the city to build the new city hall parking lot. I remembered walking the 2 blocks from my grade school to have lunch with her and my great aunt from time to time. I also remembered watching the yearly Christmas Parade that went past her home from the comfort of her front porch. My uncle, her youngest child, remembered sitting around her kitchen table with his friends when he was in high school eating pasta. His friends loved to visit because my grandmother would always feed whoever showed up. My cousin Kathy remembers how dark and scary her basement was, while my cousin Michael, the problem child, remembered how he would try her patients with his child-like mischief.

One of the things I look for when my wife and I shop antique stores and estate sales are old math and science books. My uncle knows this, and when he runs across one he usually picks it up for me. On this day he presented me with three finds that turned up at an estate sale. They were purchased for a total of $1.50.

One, “Primary Arithmetic” published in 1902, was intended to be used, in the words of the author,“ by boys and girls who know the numbers from one to ten thoroughly.” The two year program was based on the belief that students should learn by reading about a topic. The preface contains the following quote from an address to the National Association of Education in 1896 by W.T. Harris, United States Commissioner of Education.
“If a child learns how to use the text-book, he learns how to make use of the experience of mankind. The text book enables the child to do individual work for himself, and helps him to become independent of oral teaching.”

In my mind, this is probably the most important concept in education ever proposed. As my former high school English teacher and a retired colleague told me a long time ago, “The word education comes from the Latin root ‘educo,’ which means ‘to draw out from’ not to pour into!”

In another of the books titled “Graded Work in Arithmetic—Eighth Year” published in 1902, the author outlines a set of 91 lessons for the 8th grade student to master. I found the following problem in lesson 6;
A dealer bought a lot of tinware for 19/16th of its value, and sold it for 11/12th of its value. If his loss was $32.50, how much did he pay for it?
The correct answer is $142.50. I am planning on giving this problem to my advanced placement chemistry students to see how they do on it. My guess is that almost none of them will be able to solve it correctly. Email me if you want to know how to solve the problem.

The last of the books was titled “Manu-Mental” Computations, published in 1904. The author is Woodford D. Anderson who was a professor at Missouri Wesleyan College and the University of South Dakota. One of the most interesting things about this book is that it was autographed by the author on the inside front cover with a note of appreciation to one of his professors. I haven’t yet figured out what the process is all about, but it has something to do with multiplying and dividing using the joints of the fingers and the positions of the tips of the fingers. When I get some spare time I plan to read the book (94 pages) and figure it out.