Mary Hobson 9/15/23 Mary Hobson 9/15/23

Rethinking Education

I haven’t done any official polling, but I think most people agree that our current education system is broken. I’m not sure that there is any consensus on the ways in which it is broken, and I’m positive there is no agreement on how to fix it. Me, personally, I think it needs to be dismantled entirely and rebuilt from the bottom up. And, I think we missed a huge opportunity with COVID to do this. We finally saw, as a society, some of the huge problems with the system. But I think there’s one thing pretty much everyone can agree on—schools rely too much on standardized testing. We test too frequently, rely too heavily on the results, and under circumstances that are never going to accurately assess what children actually know. This issue, all by itself, is education’s biggest failure.

The point of education is to learn necessary and vital living skills and information. And the point of testing is to assess what they know, fill in the blanks, and build on that. But if the testing conditions result in children having a panic attack and being unable to answer a single question because of anxiety and sensory issues coupled with their body’s literal refusal to comply with external demands, no one will ever discover how much they know, and we destroy their self-esteem in the process. Children who receive various necessary accommodations end up testing in different rooms from other children, raising the likelihood of their peers declaring that their scores are “invalid” because they got “extra” time or other “unfair advantages.” But if the noise in the testing room is so overly distracting that I cannot hear myself think, how is providing me with a quiet room an unfair advantage? Rather, it’s the person who doesn’t need the quiet room who has an unfair advantage in this situation.

Also, why is a child’s ability to properly transfer their answers from the test booklet onto a scantron bubble sheet the final arbiter of the child’s knowledge? One miss-bubble could cause a child who answered every question correctly to end up with a failing grade. Why do we demand that third graders complete this skill under a time crunch? What if transferring all of the answers became a secondary task completed at the end of the test? Why does each section have its own time limit? Why not let kids who are great at math have some extra time to work on a more difficult language section and vice-versa?

This week I administered a standardized test to my homeschooled kiddo. We took five days. Day 1, they powered through the two reading sections. Day 2, they struggled through a single math section. Day 3, they struggled through the second math section. Day 4, we took a break. Day 5, they breezed through all four language sections. Next week, we’re going to take all of the answers they put in the test booklet and transfer them onto the bubble answer sheet. Why? Because it’s a difficult skill for them—just ask their OT. There’s absolutely no reason to ask them to do it under high-pressure circumstances. I also let them listen to music because it helped make them less anxious. And there was no chair scooting, coughing, sneezing, pencil tapping, finger drumming, loud gum chewing, or innumerable other distractions that naturally occur when you have 20 or more kids in the same room, which also improved their ability to concentrate and focus.

My role as proctor on Day 3 was less than traditional. I spent the entire time clipping the tops off and handing over a continuous supply of ice pops to keep kiddo’s blood sugar up and numb their painful teeth because they had their braces tightened earlier in the week. What do we do for the poor kid at school whose braces got tightened the week of standardized testing? Or the diabetic child who needs to eat throughout the test? These are circumstances I can easily accommodate in my home administration of the test, but which unnecessarily disadvantage students who must take the test under the rigid conditions at school. I can guarantee you that if my child was required to take a standardized test, it would in no way reveal their truest knowledge. Indeed, their standardized test scores in third grade were so low that they were placed in remedial classes—classes the teachers immediately advised were unnecessary because my child had the vocabulary and reasoning skills of an eighth grader.

But that isn’t why I homeschool my kiddo. In fact, I never intended to homeschool my kiddo. I was adamant that they were going to go to public school. I became extremely angry and frustrated when it became evident that school wasn’t working for them. My internal rant went something like this: “I had to suffer through it. We all did. It’s just the way things are. Suck it up.” But as the demand avoidance increased and the meltdowns at home began to destroy any chance of ever having a relationship with the kiddo, it became clear that I had to adjust to who they are and how they learn, and regular school was never going to work for them.

In this way, COVID was a blessing. Watching them do school at home, I was finally able to see the mask drop and teachers and administrators finally saw the child I saw—the one that was overwhelmed and struggling to be perfect and not cause trouble, but entirely physically and emotionally dysregulated. I was soon as frustrated as my child as I tried to navigate the system to get my kiddo properly assessed and fought to get them the services to which the law entitled them, but that the school continually refused to provide. I even had to fight the school to get it to acknowledge that their own assessments revealed a need for accommodations.

Having made no progress after spending thousands of dollars on an education attorney, I began to think that homeschooling was going to be the only way to make certain that my child’s needs were met. Unfortunately, my research only left me more frustrated as I tried to navigate the statutory requirements in New York—where we lived at the time. And I say that as a licensed lawyer! Worse, the homeschooling I had been trying with my kiddo didn’t seem to be working any better. It didn’t matter what traditional or online curricula or individual books I tried, the meltdowns and refusals continued to increase.

I finally decided to have my kiddo privately assessed so that I knew how best to meet their needs and get them the physical and mental developmental supports they needed. That also took forever and cost an arm and a leg. While we waited, I decided to use that time to “unschool” my kiddo. There are lots of definitions of unschooling and lots of explanations. For us, unschooling was essentially decompression time. Demands for learning were removed to give the kiddo’s nervous system time to calm down from the perpetual fight/flight/freeze/fawn/flop responses. It gave all of us time to essentially reset and create a new foundation from which we would try to build. It also gave us space to rebuild the relationship that had been severely damaged from all of my attempts to force my kiddo to fit into the broken education system. We talked a lot and began to rebuild trust a little at a time. The more they saw me keeping my word, the more they trusted me when I said things would change.

During this time, I was also lucky enough to discover a woman who knew all about homeschooling in New York and believed strongly in child-led learning. What I learned was nothing short of life-changing. Homeschooling is not the same as doing school at home—or at least, it doesn’t have to be. Indeed, this process taught me that I had to “unschool” myself. I had to relearn that education and school are not the same. One of the best things I learned from her was how to translate everyday activities into edu-speak. I was learning almost as much as my kiddo was, because I was learning to look beneath what most people saw and describe the learning that was actually happening instead. I suddenly saw the value of play and experimentation.

When we left NY for the Midwest, we were pleased to discover that our new state didn’t have the voluminous paperwork requirements NY had, which had made certain aspects of homeschooling easier. But the homeschool system is not easy to navigate—something I think is intentional—and it’s also unavailable to too many people. I see parents posting about their neuro-diverse kiddos and the struggles they are working hard to overcome in our cookie-cutter school system that demands quiet, passive compliance more than learning anymore and I worry about how many other kids are masking at school and exploding at home, or unable to be quiet and still for the ungodly long day, losing access to recess—the one things they truly need—as punishment for their non-compliance, and receiving emotional wounds that they will carry for a lifetime. How many parents know their kids need something else but can’t give or get it for them for innumerable reasons?

parents/guardians who can’t work from home or stop working in order to homeschool;
broken or overly burdensome systems designed to be so complicated that people give up trying to access or continue using them;
the inability to get the assessment services necessary to properly diagnose kiddos, whether from inordinately long waiting lists, or the cost-prohibitive nature of a private assessment
underfunded special education systems, unable or unwilling to accept anyone but the most obviously needy children;
school systems refusing to provide required services because they know the parents can’t afford to litigate and there are no real consequences even if the parents do;
overworked, underpaid, and demonized teachers with unwieldy class sizes that prevent them from meeting the needs of all of their students, but who still try because they are passionate and then end up burned out
vouchers taking much-needed funding from public schools and funneling it into the hands of private schools where there is rampant and permissible discrimination, racism, and religious indoctrination and no accountability

I don’t have any answers on how to fix this. Not yet, anyway. But I have spent so much of my own time and energy discovering the fissures and problems, I want to become a resource that allows other families to save some of their energy and resources not having to do all of this same work. So I’m exploring what that would look like.

Photo Credit: Robert Collins (@robbie36), Unsplash

In the meantime, I want you to imagine with me an education system where kids are excited to go each day. Where their individual needs are met so that they can become the best version of themselves. Where they are excited to learn and grow and try and fail in a safe environment. Where they aren’t funneled in any particular direction. Where they are encouraged to play, to explore, to experiment, to try. Where they are rewarded for what they learn through failure as much as they are when they get things right. Where kids who need structure and limits get it, and those who don’t can receive space without excessive regulation. I’m feeling strongly pulled to research and advocate for radical changes to our education system to make this dream a reality. If you have thoughts or ideas to share or know of resources I should investigate or tap, please let me know.

Mary Hobson 5/8/21 Mary Hobson 5/8/21

In Defense of Teachers

This evening I attended a virtual “Meet the Candidates” event for the people running for my local Board of Education. One of the candidates indicated that in talking with members of the community, they had heard from parents that “ a lot of new teachers” had been hired for this past school year and that there was a feeling that some of these teachers were not sufficiently experienced to educate their children. I cannot speak to these parents’ experiences, but I can speak about my own. My daughter had four “new to the district” teachers this year, and I found each and every one of them brought something to the table. In fact, my biggest fear is that many of them will not be rehired for the upcoming year. So, I wanted to take a moment and talk about my concerns with this rather generalized argument and explain my support for not only the “new” teachers but all teachers.

My first problem with this argument is that the speaker did not define their terms. The statement made was that the district had hired “a lot of new teachers” for the 20-21 school year. The implication from the remainder of the argument was that these were inexperienced teachers who were not able to provide an adequate education for the students in some way. But who were the “new” teachers? Not all “new” teachers lack experience. A teacher could be new to the district but have years of previous experience teaching somewhere else. Therefore, just because a teacher is new to the district (i.e. newly hired) is not a sufficient basis on which to judge their adequacy as a teacher. Furthermore, even assuming that the statement was meant to refer to newly credentialed teachers (i.e. lacked any previous teaching experience other than student teaching), that is still not enough information to tell whether they are a “good” teacher.

I want to take a minute and talk about “good..” I deliberately chose not to use “qualified,” because, presumably, a teacher would not have been credentialed or hired if they did not possess the required knowledge and experience to be considered “qualified..” At the same time, “good” is an extremely subjective term. Indeed, what constitutes a “good” teacher could be the topic of its own blog post. So, for purposes of this post, I use the term “good” to mean that a teacher knows the material they are teaching to the students, connects with the students, and adequately communicates both their expectations and the subject content in a clear and appropriate manner.

So, let’s talk about newly credentialed teachers. There are generally two categories: bright fresh young adults out of college, and second-career folks. I wanted to talk about the latter first. I find second-career teachers on the whole to be extremely good teachers. They have been out in the world actually using the subjects they are teaching in everyday life, giving them an extremely good handle on not only the basics but often the minutiae of the material. They can easily provide answers to the “how is this relevant to my life? when will I use this outside of school?”-type questions. They also often have great, relevant stories that can entertain. Both my brother and brother-in-law are second-career teachers in physics and history, respectively, and both of them are adored by parents and students alike. My cousin has been involved in music all of her life, providing private piano and voice lessons before becoming a full-time church choral director. This past year, she became a first-year high-school choral director; not an easy task during the year of COVID. In fact, I would argue she had what was probably the most difficult class to navigate given all of the extra concerns and cautions related to singing that come with COVID. And yet her school received a First at the state’s choral competition (among other music department awards). New is not the same as inexperienced and it is not equivalent to incapable. My daughter’s art teacher is an amazing woman who comes from the art world and has been teaching the children all kinds of things I never learned in art. She had found ways to tie projects into topics and games the children find interesting. One of the things she shared with me is her desire to teach kids that, out in the world, “art” is not just painting or sculpture or getting into galleries, but digital art, comic book illustration, toy building and modeling, animation, advertising design, and so much more. She brings a huge wealth of information to the students that no teacher, no matter how many years of experience in the classroom, could provide. To in any way suggest that she is not a good teacher because she is newly-credentialed lacks logic and merit.

Photo Credit: Beci Harmony (@bacihannah)

So, let’s move on to the last of the three types of “new” teachers—the young adults fresh out of college. First, let’s remember that all of these teachers have numerous hours of student teaching. Experienced teachers and administrators have watched them teach these subjects to other classes of students and deemed them, adequate teachers. Presumably, we should be able to trust our seasoned educators to make these determinations. If not, our problem lies not with the newly-credentialed teacher, but with the credentialing system—something over which they had no control. and, therefore, cannot reasonably be held against them. Alternatively, if we do trust our credentialing system, then we need to show it by not outright dismissing the adequacy of the abilities of newly-credentialed teachers. Each of us started somewhere. None of us got where we are without having been given a chance by a person when we had no experience or no credentials. Furthermore, our blind deference to experience over raising up a new generation has shot us in the foot in many professions. My understanding from friends in the business is that there is an entire level of experienced engineers that simply does not currently exist because the people who ought to be reaching that level right now went unhired in years past due to budget cuts and other issues. Many teachers are reaching retirement age. If we don’t begin to hire new teachers and give them the experience they need to move forward in their careers, we are doing a disservice to future generations.

Furthermore, I would argue that young, newly-credentialed teachers are precisely what this strange year of teaching required. New teachers are now Gen Z. These are the native tech users. I am Gen X and even I consider myself to have “grown-up” using computers and the internet. In a year that required trying new things and changing tactics at a moment’s notice, heavy use of technology, and connecting with students both in-person and virtually, I believe that newly-credentialed Gen Z teachers were in the best position. They had just been educated in new ways of teaching and interacting. and had experience with all of the “new” technology, but were new enough to teaching that they were not heavily invested in any particular teaching method and could easily pivot if they suddenly found themselves teaching from home because they were quarantined, or needed to teach to students both in the classroom and at home. They also had the benefit of being able to craft their curriculum knowing about the difficulties of COVID, rather than having to construct something different by modifying a curriculum to which they had already become accustomed.

Photo Credit: Kelly Sikkema (@kellysikkema)

At the same time, I want to be clear that experienced teachers were amazing this year. Many of them engaged in Herculean efforts to educate their students to the best of their abilities under unique and unprecedented circumstances. To those who have complained that teachers “had it easy” this year, I want to share with you the story of my brother, who teaches High School physics. My brother is married to an amazing, immuno-compromised woman who has worked full-time from home this entire time. They have two children who could not go to in-person school because they could not risk the children bringing COVID home to their mother. Likewise, my brother could not teach in person for the same reason. Their two children were in 5th grade and kindergarten. The kindergartener took to online learning like a fish in water and had an amazing school year. The 5th grader struggled and, ultimately, had to be home-schooled. So, my brother spent most of his mornings home-schooling his older child but spent roughly two hours in online office hours answering any and all questions from students about lessons from the day before. He then figured out the lesson for the next day and, around 5:00 p.m., went to the school to record the next day's lesson once the building was sufficiently empty. The recordings for the various different classes (he teaches both AP and regular physics) were left for the aide to show to the various classes the next day, after which he would again spend several hours in online office hours making sure all of the students understood everything and, considering what he learned in that time, craft the lessons for the next day. What with overseeing one child’s online learning, home-schooling the other, making sure both children completed their homework, responding to students, creating and adjusting lesson plans, and recording multiple class lessons for his students, I am quite honestly surprised that he ever found time to sleep.

Did every teacher teach brilliantly this year? No. Was every student able to learn as well as they may have in years past? Most assuredly not. But this problem is not unique to your child, or your school district. Your child is not “behind.” Why? Because they are all “behind.” Everyone—every school every college, every parent, every teacher, every employer, must adjust their expectations. When children are born prematurely, or experience long hospitalizations for any reason, parents are told that we need to subtract that time from their age to understand where their education and emotional growth is. What happened with COVID is that it suddenly became necessary to do this for every child. They went through something huge this past year. We all did. We all still are.

What we need to do now is stop trying to hop directly back to “normal.” We need to process whatever the heck it was that just happened. It might also be helpful to take this time to evaluate whether going back to the way things used to be is actually desirable. Maybe, since we are already in a time of change and assessment, we can use this as an opportunity to change how education work, how employment works, how health insurance works, how our social safety nets work, how our government works, Maybe we decide we like what we have. If so, great. But maybe we discover that there’s a better way to move forward. A more flexible way that won’t bring our society to a screeching halt when (not if) another global pandemic hits. I think we owe it to ourselves to find out.

We are all tired. We are all stressed. We are all starved for human companionship and touch. Let’s be careful about the generalizations we make and the knee-jerk reactions we have right now. Yes, mistakes were made. But rather than throw blame around, let’s do our best to learn from them. Let’s try to be more thoughtful. More empathetic. Let’s model the behaviors we keep saying we want to see more of in our world.

Mary Hobson 6/8/19 Mary Hobson 6/8/19

Educational Series, Pt. I - Why Teachers Matter

I have had a few different thoughts recently about why having good teachers matters. Today's blog is going to cover engagement, interest, and careers.

I have always been good at math and science. Loved chemistry and physics! In high school, I knew I was going to be an engineer. I applied to two colleges--MIT and Purdue. My SATs weren't quite enough for MIT, but I was accepted to Purdue either right before or a few days into my senior year. My physics teacher my junior year was amazing. We made holograms! He was funny, and he made the material interesting. I became his student helper my last year in school.

When I arrived at Purdue, the freshman engineering classes were huge. We had chemistry in the auditorium where concerts were held so there was room for all 300+ of us. I was a number and excelling was all on me. I had always been self-motivated, but there was no way to get to know most of my professors. My math professor spoke English as a second language. He was probably brilliant, but I had difficulty understanding him, let alone the math concepts he was trying to impart.

And my physics professor was boring and generally the caricature of a socially inept scientist. He did the experiment where you sit in a chair and hold a spinning bicycle wheel and move the wheel to spin in a different direction. He hit himself in the head with the wheel, which caused him combover to flop over and not get fixed the entire lecture. But he was the better physics professor. The other one only taught in the spring semester, always failed most of his class, and was put on teaching probation each fall because of it.

Photo Credit: Hal Gatewood (@halgatewood)

I get that freshman engineering is something of a weed-out program. But making us hate math and science seems to be the wrong way to go about it. Since I'm not an engineer, it should come as no surprise that I quit the engineering program after the first year. I switched my major to psychology. I can't tell you how many people told me (and my parents) what a mistake I was making because I was now getting "a chick degree" and there was more money to be made in engineering. But it was too late. I had lost the fire for physics and calculus and moved on to statistics and psychological experimentation.

But I'm not a psychologist either. As much as I enjoyed the material, I am an empath, and counseling people would have crushed me. I would have taken things on and taken things home, and it would have been a disaster waiting to happen. After I changed to a liberal arts school, which had more options for my degree, I added a minor in criminal justice. I took amazing classes in the history and sociology departments. I had at least three history classes that were taught as law classes, where we had to memorize cases and explain their application to hypothetical situations on exams. I LOVED those.

Color me surprised that there were any history classes I liked. See, with the exception of my World History and US History classes in high school, I abhorred history. Avoided it like the plague. Every World History class started with the Fertile Crescent and made it to Rome by the year's end. Every US History class started with the Revolutionary War and ended around the Civil War. In High School, we managed to avoid this pattern and learn more modern history. I found the depression and Watergate fascinating. I was intrigued by how much religion played a part in World History. But it had never been taught in a way that was engaging or interesting.

I will now share some embarrassing information with you. In my 20s and 30s, my husband and I would play "I or II." He would name a leader or important figure or country and I had to say if it was WWI or WWII. I knew Hitler and Churchill and Japan and the big ones, but otherwise, I was wrong. A lot. The information *never* stayed. I could memorize facts and figures and keep them for a school year, but they inevitably fell out because there was nothing to hang them on in my brain.

But stories? Stories stay with me. That's why I was great at law school and am successful at my paying job. Cases are simply stories. Facts that make skeletons to hang cases on. Turns out, historical fiction is the same. Even biographies work depending on how they are written. I can do research after and find out what pieces of the story were true and now have a way to hang onto the facts because of how they impacted the characters' lives.

Maybe I was always going to end up a lawyer. Maybe I would have left engineering at some point even if I had good professors. I'll never know. What I do know, is that teachers and professors who engaged me are the ones I learned the most from. When learning was fun, interesting, and practical, I soaked it in like a sponge. But all of my elementary and middle school history teachers were coaches who had been hired for sports; not people who had studied history or had any idea how to make it interesting. So I missed out. I am learning a lot as an adult, which pleases me. But I wish I had learned a lot of this back then so I would have an even broader, richer knowledge now on which to build.

My brother and my brother-in-law both teach in high schools. Physics and history, respectively. When I hear what and how they teach their classes, I wish I had more teachers like them. I have a lot more to say about them in Part 2. But for now, I want to focus on the fact that they have found ways to engage their students, keep them interested, show their students that physics and history are relevant in everyday life, and make learning fun.

To me, these are the marks of a good teacher. And I was blessed to have many. But it makes the others stand out even more by comparison. I want my kid--and all kids--to love school. To be excited about learning. To have teachers who show them the world in new ways and teach them how to learn and think critically, so when they find the thing that sparks joy inside them that they want to do to earn a living, they have the tools to do just that.

So, no more hiring teachers just because they can coach. Hire them because they can teach! (Or even so both! My HS physics teacher was also a basketball coach! It's possible to do both well.) Students deserve teachers who want to be there and want them to learn. Let's make sure we give them that gift. It will make a huge difference in a short time.