I haven't felt like posting here in a long time-maybe because I haven't been feeling great about the job I'm doing as a teacher. Maybe because of my mixed feelings of hopefulness/hopelessness about the Occupy movement, and myself as an activist, and what good activism is in an oligarchy anyway. And how bad things have to get before they change (and whether things change even after a country hits rock bottom). Since our winter break, though, at least the part of this quagmire that has to do with doubts about my teaching ability has gotten better, so I thought I'd return to post some thoughts on that.

I'm teaching the Social Studies class for the GED right now. The Social Studies test is, as really all the tests are, primarily a reading test--and it's probably the hardest one in that the passages are longer, the sentences are more complex, the vocabulary is more academic, and the time relative to number of questions is much shorter than in the other four tests. One fairly routine reason that students tend to fail the practice test several times before passing is that it takes practice to be able to finish the passages in the time allotted-people rarely finish the test the first couple of times.

So here I am teaching Social Studies, actually my favorite subject in the world. The passages are, I would say, about 3 or 4 grades above some of my students' functional reading levels, aside from the difficulty caused by their lack of background knowledge, and, honestly, the times when the answers to the questions are actually just wrong. (There was an article on Slate a few months ago discussing the fact that on the US citizenship test, also multiple choice, some of the answers are actually wrong too). A lot of what I need to be teaching is reading; if it weren't for the fact that the students and I would both die of boredom (and my students are largely not the kind of people willing to pay attention to something boring because it's on the test), I'd be doing GED passages for most of every class.

For a while I was trying to teach the history through reading, but I realized that that wasn't really working-when the students aren't strong readers, they don't have a lot of energy to devote to content while reading. We'd read, but they weren't retaining a whole lot. I could also see them starting to see history as something boring or to be avoided, even though in other contexts (videos, the Junior Scholastic magazines we get) they are enthusiastic about it. It just really hurt my heart. History for me has always been such a source of empowerment and interest, such an exciting way of understanding how the world is and how it got that way. I felt like I wanted to sue myself for educational malpractice(a comment I've heard from teachers operating under No Child Left Behind in public schools, as well).

So I changed things. I started making them a packet with lists of terms and people (and some pictures) for each topic as it arises, and after we start the class by doing a GED passage together, I sort of lecture and we sort of discuss for half an hour or so. I do write down definitions on the board, and they do copy them, but we also talked about the similarities between segregation of the Jews in Nazi Germany and segregation of the blacks in the American South. I explained eugenics and what eugenicists believed about race. We talked about what black soldiers wrote and said about fighting for the end of Nazi genocide as part of a segregated army. For the second chunk of class we read together--we're reading a book written for young adults about the civil rights movement. I figure it's practice at reading that's partway between the GED and their actual reading level, and it's a narrative, so it's not fragmented the way reading passages is. They really like the book, so they pay attention while we're reading it, and I think it's taught them a lot they didn't know about black history and the South.

All of this has made all of us (me and the students) much happier about Social Studies class, and I think they are actually learning more. As always, however, I know they'd pass the test faster if I taught differently (and if I were teaching in a public school classroom, where you don't get to schedule the tests when students are ready, the way I teach could probably make the difference between students passing and failing the standardized tests. Not a positive difference, either). I end class really energized because my students were excited to find out that Harriet Tubman carried a pistol with her, and I know they'll understand something better, now, about the risk that she took when she led people to freedom. But I can hear Arne Duncan muttering over my shoulder about what a terrible teacher I am, and I know if I taught in a regular school, that's exactly how I'd be labelled.

Read Linda Darling-Hammond's article on how Congress is "redlining" high poverty schools-it really is incredibly frightening how much work is currently going into making sure that high poverty schools continue to be punished for the populations they serve, continue to have far fewer resources than low-poverty schools, and continue to be staffed by a revolving door of relatively inexperienced teachers. Who thinks this is a good idea, that we know poor schools sometimes have half the per child funding of wealthy schools-but instead of fixing that, we're going to continue to penalize those schools for not matching up to wealthy schools' test scores?? I keep wondering how bad things have to get before people revolt, but then I fear that the answer is-unless the people hurting are wealthy, it just doesn't count in America. The government figures the poor are lucky we're still "donating" any funds to the education of their children at all--or even letting them continue to live here at all. (Obviously poor people are never REAL Americans.) Our Founding Fathers (I'm sure we'll soon see in history textbooks, if we haven't already) saw the wisdom of feudalism when they wrote the Declaration of Independence, so long ago. And you'll have to take our word for it, because we couldn't possibly let you read it (it's not going to be on the test). Just trust us. They meant it to be this way.