Erica Jacobs

Erica Jacobs: I am Horace: More thoughts on Theodore Sizer's progressive Educational Philosophy

Theodore Sizer's death has led me to discover how accurate he was in describing why high schools are similar to what they were 100 years ago, and why public school reform is a hard sell. Last week I wrote about "Horace's Compromise," Sizer's book about teachers who enter into an unholy agreement with students to keep classrooms genial and undemanding at the expense of intellectual depth and student engagement. Most teachers can see themselves in Horace, but Sizer's 1984 book was only the first of three about the educational system. In "Horace's School" and "Horace's Hope," Sizer gives teachers reasons to believe that not only can the educational system be changed for the better, but...

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Erica Jacobs: I Am Horace: How Theodore Sizer nailed what really happens in high school

When Theodore Sizer died last week, the nation lost a compelling voice against No Child Left Behind and other test-driven cures for educational ills. For decades, he decried the complacency of schools where students do the minimum and well-meaning teachers enter into a pact to endorse those minimal efforts as long as students remain "good." I didn't discover Sizer's ideas in Education School (I never took education classes) and not by reading any of his books -- I discovered his wisdom in the trenches. As a literature Ph.D. when there were few college teaching jobs, I started teaching high school in the 1980s, and the phenomenon of "Horace's Compromise" (the title of Sizer's 1984 book)...

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Erica Jacobs: When words fail us

This week the students in my Advanced Composition class are writing about miscommunication. In this era of 24-hour connections via computer and television, examples of misfires are all around us. The class began by brainstorming a list of miscommunications based on different accents, cultures, customs and beliefs. Then we proceeded to more abstract failures in understanding: language that's too technical for our level of expertise, or that assumes a perspective we don't share. Even our gender, according to author Deborah Tannen ("You Just Don't Understand Me"), leads to communication that's rife with misunderstanding. With all these potential sources for miscommunication, it's a miracle...

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Erica Jacobs: In education, everything old is new again

"Standards-based curriculum" is the buzz phrase in education, and has been for a long time. When I started teaching college in the mid-'70s, the curriculum was based on readings chosen by the instructor, who never thought about "standards." Students were expected to read great texts and be able to write with clarity and insight. In the mid-'80s, when I began to teach high school in Fairfax County, "standards" had to be met. All the books we chose to teach fit into the curricular "strands" of reading, writing and speaking. County benchmarks were lists of vague prescriptions like "Students will be able to read in multiple genres from a variety of prose sources." We justified our choices...

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Erica Jacobs: Erica Jacobs: Disciplining students: Acccckk!

My favorite commentary on discipline in the classroom is a cartoon by Sandra Boynton titled "The little joys of teaching are without number." The wise owl at the teacher's desk is looking out, with a resigned Jack Benny-like expression, as students sleep, dance on the desktops and talk to friends in the desks behind them. Touche. My favorite personal classroom anecdote dates back decades to my first year of teaching. Martin, a frisky ninth-grader, took advantage of my five minutes in the teachers' lounge between classes to hang 30 chairs from the ceiling, each carefully wedged between the metal frames holding up acoustic ceiling tiles. When I returned from the lounge, I had a decision:...

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Erica Jacobs: The musical buzz of helicopter parents

In Fairfax County, parents are not typical of most school districts. They are educated, strategic and know their way around a computer Listserv. That's why I wasn't surprised to discover that two Fairfax County high schools have started their own parent teacher organizations instead of paying dues to the National PTA. Fairfax County Public Schools parents successfully lobbied the county to change the numerical grading scale so it is more in line with other districts. No more will a 93 be a B+; anything 90 or above will earn an A, just as it should have been all along, according to parents. Parents are particularly active in good schools. Where I taught in the mid-1980s, only a few of...

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Erica Jacobs: Schools - Keeping things in perspective

Newspapers expound on the downward spiral of public schools, and parents move heaven and Earth, as well as all their worldly possessions, to give children the opportunity to go to the best schools available. Parents fear that a child who is turned down by a selective high school or college will be consigned to mediocrity. But in the midst of alarmist newspaper articles and fearful parents, I developed some needed perspective today. I came across a fan marked “JACOBS, ROOM 232,” and remembered Edison High School, my first teaching job — a school without air-conditioning. On the second floor, the rooms reached 100 degrees in June and September, and a fan gave us the...

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Erica Jacobs: In the classroom, old is good

A new semester at George Mason University is full of hope. Students may be turning over a new leaf or embarking on a new living arrangement or a new major. Anything is possible. As predictable as the sense of infinite possibilities, though, is the anxiety of returning students. Some have been away from school only a semester or two, but some return after a decade or two. Those mature students have never achieved their degrees for a range of reasons: They were in the military, raising families or working long hours. Returning students think of themselves as "old," not "returning," but their experiences enrich every college setting. Not all 20-year-olds want to be in the classroom, but...

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Erica Jacobs: September 11 in the classroom

Friday will be eight years since 9/11. The day itself had begun uneventfully, as was true for most of us as we recall that clear morning. I was teaching “1984” when Eliot Waxman, who shared the teaching responsibilities in our Advanced Placement class, rushed into the room to announce that a plane had hit the Pentagon. Several of our students had parents who worked at the Pentagon, so nothing about this announcement was an abstraction. Our students feared for the lives of people they loved. When we turned the televisions onto CNN, we saw flames engulfing the World Trade Center. Additional students were worried about family members. Cell phones — normally banned in...

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Erica Jacobs: Bracing for swine flu in the classroom

Projections for the swine flu epidemic have ranged from modest (no greater risk than any flu season), to the alarming (up to half the population at risk.) Schools in many communities will be centers for mass inoculations, but as they get ready for a possible flu outbreak, will teachers be prepared to deal with numerous absences? I’ve never taught during an epidemic, so my experience with emergency class cancellations draws on the winter of 2003-04, when weathercasters predicted big snowstorms, and I devised a contingency plan. Each week I thought to myself that it might be “the big one, Elizabeth,” as Fred Sanford was fond of saying. Fairfax County teachers had...

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Erica Jacobs: Memo to Teachers - Shake Up the First Day of School

Have you forgotten the anxiety of the first day of school? The fitful sleep of the night before -- worrying about friends, what you'll wear, your new teachers? All this is followed by a day when teachers enumerate rules, expectations and details about what you can and can't do during the coming months. Bummer. My high school students often confided that the first day was such a sleep-deprived blur, they never could remember all the "essential" information thrown at them by teachers and principals. After more than a decade of playing along with the typical first-day scenario, my teaching partner and I decided to shake it up. We created a hands-on activity based on summer...

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Erica Jacobs: High school doesn't have to be boring

We’ve all seen someone who, like the high school student in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” is asleep, drooling on his desk. “Anyone? Anyone? ... ” the teacher intones while he takes roll. It really doesn’t have to be like that, and though high schools are taking steps to combat the boring nature of some classes, change is taking place at glacial rates. A few teachers are natural performers, and in their rooms students are engaged, no matter what the subject. One of the most popular literature professors in Columbia’s graduate school taught courses on John Milton, whose poetry is difficult and inaccessible — main ingredients in the recipe...

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Erica Jacobs: Teachers’ unsung heroes are their department chiefs

If it hadn’t been for Sue, the department chairwoman during my first year of high school teaching, I wouldn’t have lasted. Nearly one third of teachers drop out during their first three years, and the reason two thirds stay may well be the unsung heroes of every teacher: their department chairmen. I had no notion what high school students would be like — only 10 years of university teaching as a measure. I’d been a successful college teacher, but that part-time gig was not paying the bills. It was time to take the public school plunge. I was unprepared for the reality of what is known as “the reluctant learner.” That first year, all my students were...

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Erica Jacobs: Revising an educational assumption

Sometimes we use time away from routine to reinvent ourselves. Nothing as dramatic as a reinvention happened during the three weeks I spent at Oxford University with local students, but the British system of reduced numbers of class sessions and more work outside class has led me to question our own system. Why do colleges and universities measure their course requirements by the number of hours students spend in the classroom? Higher education in the U.S. has almost universally given three credits to courses that meet one, two or three times a week for approximately three hours total, in 14 or 15 week semesters. Schools on the quarter system adjust the course load and hours...

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Oxford’s dreaming spires

Last week, George Mason University students celebrated their time in Exeter College, Oxford, with a closing dinner that mirrored the opening one (“The Harry Potter Experience,” July 8.) There was, however, one huge difference: The Exeter summer program had, in three short weeks, produced a community of scholars and friends, linking Oxford tutors, administrators, students and faculty advisers. The mood was more wistful and the decibel level higher than during our first dinner. The light still glowed on the elaborate table settings and old mahogany paneling, but we had bonded the way few semester classes bond back home. As the 23 of us (21 students and two teachers) made the...

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Learning from a polite society

Last week, those of us from George Mason University staying at Exeter College, Oxford, England, during the summer school program had the pleasure of watching the taping of BBC’s “Lewis” — a sequel to the popular “Inspector Morse” series. Filming took place next door, at Lincoln College, and we were able to see Lewis and his own Lewis-like sidekick tape the same one-minute scene over and over. We were impressed with the polite interaction of camera crew, technicians and actors with those of us watching from the opposite sidewalk. They asked us, kindly, not to take flash photos during filming, and to move over if they planned a shot that included our...

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A day at Oxford summer schools

During the three weeks of the summer school program at Exeter College, Oxford University, George Mason University students are among those enrolled from all over the world. Each student’s day is slightly different, but a shared rhythm emerges by the second week, uniting our students with those from as far away as Australia, China and Russia. Dawn breaks at 5 a.m., and shortly thereafter the crow, who perches daily on the Exeter College chapel, begins to caw in short bursts: three caws, four caws. At first I thought he was a fire alarm, but when I saw the crow proudly perched atop the roof, I knew he was Exeter’s harbinger of day. Breakfast is at 8 a.m. in the “Harry...

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Erica Jacobs: The Harry Potter experience

As Andy Roddick and Roger Federer prepared to take center court at Wimbledon, 21 George Mason University students arrived at Oxford University — primed for three weeks of intense scholarship and a bit of Harry Potter magic. Our opening dinner introduced students to a dining hall every bit as wondrous as Hogwarts’ hall — filmed just a few blocks away at Christ Church College. This is the fourth time I’ve played a part in British study abroad (the other three times at Cambridge University), and student enthusiasm for the program has been broad-based and unwavering. Complaints are rare and small (“Where are the ice cubes?”), and praise lavish and...

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Erica Jacobs: The trivial and transcendent in study abroad programs

This weekend, 21 George Mason University undergraduate and graduate students, plus two faculty directors, will go to Oxford University for three weeks of summer study arranged by GMU’s Center for Global Education. What kids are reading This weekly column will look at lists of books kids are reading in various categories, including grade level, book genre and data from booksellers. The books below, written between 1937 and 1954, were among the works read aloud at The Eagle & Child pub in Oxford, England. All are appropriate for ages 10 to adult. Books of “high fantasy” by the Inklings The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis 1. The Lion, the Witch, and the...

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Memo to graduates: How to avoid the recession monster

Nate Beeler’s cartoon in Tuesday’s Examiner was right on point: New graduates find themselves at the mercy of a gigantic, green recession monster. But a few pages into the newspaper, an article partly offset that grim picture: The Washington, D.C., area is better than most in terms of employment opportunities and cost of living. My students at George Mason University are quite concerned about their future prospects, as are graduates everywhere. My experience with 20 internship students this past year and the advice of counselors who work for GMU’s Career Services have given me some ideas for successful job hunting. Much of this advice you’ve heard before —...

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It’s all in how you say it

In a piece of writing, how you say something is often more important than what you say. Students often throw up their hands when asked to write an autobiographical college essay, or a personal narrative. “I have nothing to say!” They forget that “Seinfeld,” one of their favorite classic TV shows, was “about nothing,” and that Shakespeare is not called “The Bard” for his plot lines, but for his poetic style. Students are largely motivated by the desire to get a good grade, so they attempt to figure out what topic would achieve that goal. Only the best writers understand that the topic is almost irrelevant. William Zinsser, who wrote the...

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Study abroad means dialing up the caution

This past weekend at George Mason University, the Center for Global Education held its annual faculty and student orientation. Upcoming study abroad programs range in length from two weeks to two semesters, and include Ecuador, Australia, Beijing, Buenos Aires, Japan, Israel and the Philippines, along with more traditional places like London, Paris, Berlin and Milan. The orientation’s main message, for faculty and students, was to exercise caution. In a world where the word “pandemic” jostles for position on the front page next to “acts of terrorism,” trips that take students out of their university homes to new environments require faculty to prepare for...

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Subvert the conveyor belt of learning with new ideas

Short of overhauling the factory model of our public middle and high schools, what options are open to teachers and administrators that will give students a sense that they are valued as unique individuals, not as cookie-cutter products? We should treat all students as though they are “gifted.” I realized this during teacher training at Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology, a magnet school in Alexandria. Teachers were introduced to activities designed for gifted minds and temperaments so we could adjust our teaching to accommodate their special needs. In “carouseling,” named because groups moved in clockwise circles, students moved around the...

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Stop the conveyor belt – I want off!

My last column bemoaned the 19th century factory model that still holds sway in our public middle and high schools. Students show up as products on an assembly line, undergo slight alterations at each station, then are sent down a long chute into the “real world” of college or the workplace. No wonder students tell me they feel like objects! Although the ideal solution would be to change every school to conform to an entirely new model, there are still things teachers and administrators can do within the old model to make students feel like individuals and not car parts. Students, no matter what their age, want to feel valued and recognized. The conveyor belt creates...

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Conveyor belt education

You remember the conveyor belt in school: You arrived early, appeared at the first “station” and underwent a modification as facts were stuffed into your brain. You then proceeded to the second, third, fourth, fifth and final stations. At each stop there was a worker who was in charge of too many products being generated at too fast a pace, but you were altered in some way at each step, making you feel like an assembly line product. When you got to the last station in the factory, you were given a diploma and sent off into the world to make something of yourself. With this type of 19th-century model, is it any wonder our children are bored by high school? At Oakton High...

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Determining what's real and what's fake

Holden Caulfield never tires of calling people phonies. In “Catcher in the Rye,” high school is “full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a g****** Cadillac some day … and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little g****** cliques.” For my high school students, as for Holden, “fake” and “phony” were bad; “genuine” and “real” were good. Yet those same students who loathed “fakery” didn’t think there was anything wrong with occasionally cheating on homework or...

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You just don’t understand

I have borrowed the title of Deborah Tannen’s book on communication between men and women because my 66 college students recently wrote narratives about people who, literally or figuratively, speak a different language. Daily we are misunderstood, in trivial and important ways. Narrating an account of one such interaction shouldn’t be hard, but I knew my students would find the analysis of its significance challenging. But they always surprise me with their inventiveness, and these papers tackled the subject in more subtle ways than I expected. There were the obvious literal language snafus on trips abroad, or with non-English-speaking employees of local businesses. A few...

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The write kind of teacher training

This is my 34th year teaching secondary and college students, and I’ve been subjected to at least 15 or 20 “teacher training” experiences. Only a few were valuable, and one — the Northern Virginia Writing Project — changed my life. How does this transformation take place? It can happen in a few days or over a four-week Summer Institute. The Writing Project inspires teachers to create student-centered classrooms, for a change that often gives us renewed energy and passion for our profession. During that time, we become students who learn the magic of writing down our thoughts and choosing topics we care about. We form reading/writing groups and learn to...

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The writing solution

The past four columns have outlined ways students’ educations, both public and private, can be improved by preparing for Advanced Placement tests in high school. AP prep automatically forces a curriculum to focus on critical thinking instead of rote memorization. And it’s not expensive to train teachers to deliver this high-quality instruction, even as early as elementary school. But a father’s e-mail reminded me that reading and analysis are only one part of the solution. Writing is the rest. If children don’t love to write, and haven’t been guided to appreciate the craft of writing, why should they be inspired to read? Nearly all criticism of public...

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The AP solution: Part IV

If “a chicken in every pot” aimed to end hunger, the ending of rote learning in high school could be achieved with Advanced Placement in every curriculum. D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and other superintendents looking to upgrade the level of critical thinking in their schools could achieve that goal by adopting AP throughout the school system. That means not only would a wealth of AP classes be offered to high school students, but that elementary and middle school students would be taught with the assumption that they would soon be AP students. Interesting reading and writing — plus the vocabulary used to analyze it — would be a fixture in classes at...

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The AP solution: Part III

Improving the education of our youth is a task far more complicated than sending a few teachers off to summer Advanced Placement training and buying good books for students to read. But AP English Literature is the ideal place to start a school’s intellectual renovation because students have been reading and writing since first grade. The difference is that the AP work connected with these two “R’s” is on a new level of difficulty — a level that will spill over into student work in social studies and science as well. Logic and the ability to read closely are skills used in all aspects of education. Where should a prospective AP teacher or school principal...

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The AP solution: Part II

Having proposed the “simple” solution of incorporating Advanced Placement classes in every high school in America as a way of improving our educational system with little taxpayer cost, I should outline what makes AP classes so transformative. It’s all about the reading. The English Literature AP program is the one I’ve taught and graded for two decades, and for that students need to read widely and be able to think logically and with discrimination. The rationale behind the course is that students will be able to determine how nuances in language communicate an author’s message to best effect. The ability to detect the magic of words in skilled writers is...

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The Advanced Placement solution — part I

Ordinarily, I don’t advocate simple solutions to complex situations. The factors that contribute to success or failure of a school or a student are so numerous that we’ve been arguing since the nineteenth century on the best way to accomplish the goal of achieving literacy for all children—and I include math, science, history, art, and music to the foundational literacies of reading and writing. Yet there is a reason why I’ve championed the Advanced Placement program for twenty years. AP is flexible enough to fit in any school setting, and is intelligently designed to elevate high school thinking and writing to something approximating college expectations. Over...

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Education: The long and short of It

Teaching requires us to split ourselves in two—able to respond to the crisis at hand, yet able to place the immediate concern in the larger context of what came before and after. In writing this column, one week I think and write small; the next column tackles large issues and philosophies. Johnny’s outburst in class could be a function of something that happened on the school bus, his ADHD, his boredom in a slow moving class, or a general failure of his school and its teachers. Often teachers, parents, and educators point fingers by turns at one, then another. I spent my entire career as a high school teacher laughing at the shenanigans of my students while suppressing a...

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Fairfax County students are upgraded

Last week, the Fairfax County School Board voted unanimously to accept the parent group “Fairgrade’s” recommendations for a new grading scale. These changes don’t put Fairfax County at the cutting edge of other school districts; we are now conforming to the standards of most other districts in the country. As a teacher who graded thousands of Fairfax County high school students over 23 years, I applaud the move to standardize the county’s grading system. When I first taught here, I wondered where the 94=A and 84=B came from. In my Philadelphia high school and my New York college and graduate school, 90 was an A and 80 was a B. The Fairfax County grading...

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Obama's writing life

Barack Obama is not just the first black man to become President, he is the most literary writer to become President. Other Presidents have written books, usually after leaving office and even then with the help of a “real writer” to shape the narrative and smooth out wrinkles in the prose. But Obama became a writer before he ever became a politician--way back when he was in law school. Obama exhibits the habits of a writer. He keeps a notebook; he keeps a journal. He files away memorable events and hopes they will become anecdotes to illustrate a point in an argument, or represent a moment in time. As a writing teacher, one of my greatest pleasures is watching my students...

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NCLB: Recipe for success or failure?

As an avid reader of cookbooks, I can tell a lot about the potential success of a recipe just by reading it. Of course, the truth is in the tasting, but some recipes are destined for success, and some doomed from the beginning. The No Child Left Behind Act is like a recipe in several respects. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings often repeats her mantra, “what gets measured, gets done,” and NCLB quantifies students and schools into a mathematical formula with a single result of 100% proficiency. NCLB has allowed some variation in that each state’s yearly progress is measured differently, according to where they began. But having made the error of treating education...

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Michelle Rhee and teacher training gone awry

Michelle Rhee has worked valiantly to improve the District of Columbia’s school system, but her latest decision to drop support of the most rigorous teacher training, National Board Certification, and instead support “The Skillful Teacher” program shows that she is choosing formula over reflection. According to a January 5 article in The Washington Post, Rhee plans to further weed out weak D.C. teachers and subject the remaining to “professional growth” based on “The Skillful Teacher” model created in 1987 by Jon Saphier and Robert Gower. 1987 was my first year of high school teaching in Fairfax County, and my school was one of the...

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Education and days long since

Tonight we will sing of longing and appreciation for “days of auld lang syne.” Usually translated from the Scottish as “days of long ago,” a more accurate transcription would be “days of old long since.” “Long since” differs from “long ago” by including a broader sweep of retrospection: it incorporates time right up to the present, whereas “long ago” indicates a point in the past. This quibble about the translation of our traditional New Year’s song is an example of what teachers do; we look at something taken for granted in our lives—like the passage of a bill, or a short story by Edgar Allen Poe, or the...

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Students and the spirit of Christmas

For the first time in over two decades, I have no students during the Christmas season. When I taught high school, my desk was piled with gifts from students: homemade cookies with red and green sugar icing, and fudge decorated with shiny cellophane. Mistletoe and poinsettias livened up classrooms, and students passed around platters of cookies while their teachers pretended not to notice. This year, without all that youthful holiday exuberance, a visit to a former student became my lesson on the spirit of Christmas. Juliette Wells is my all-time best student. I taught her for three of her four years at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology more than 15 years ago. She...

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The lessons of study abroad

One of the perks of attending college is access to study abroad programs. As a past faculty advisor of George Mason University’s summer program in English at the University of Cambridge, and as the future advisor for Oxford Summer School in 2009, I think more college students should take advantage of these life-changing opportunities. Only 5% of college students graduate with study abroad experience. As the workplace becomes increasingly globalized, employers often look for international experience on student resumes. That one line addition of University of Madrid or Oxford University Summer School just might make the difference in getting a job with an office in Spain or...

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How we learn

A legacy of teaching Senior Seminar at Oakton High School for more than a decade is that I make connections between things, even when they seem unlikely. The Advanced Placement interdisciplinary course I helped create was all about “connections”—literature to government, books to life, the present to the past, the past to the future. So it is not surprising that a College Board workshop I just conducted for Baltimore County teachers gained significance from the book I was reading, “Alex and Me,” by Irene Pepperberg. Alex was the bird genius immortalized by three decades of scientific studies that forever put to rest the insult “birdbrain.” (Read...

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The sense of a school ending

While you are reading this, I am meeting my last classes of the semester at George Mason University. I have borrowed Frank Kermode’s phrase for the header of this column because, at the conclusion of every semester, the class writes about endings. Everyone tries to make sense of endings. Did we end the project/semester/year well? New Year’s resolutions are clichéd caricatures of making an end because people often--quite cynically--make resolutions they know they can’t keep. We think that a list of what we should have done negates all we didn’t do. Is that how auld lang syne works? Not for my students. As they struggle with this last paper, due on the last...

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Giving thanks for student narratives

When Barack Obama’s rise to power is recorded in future textbooks, his 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address, where he told his riveting story, will be a pivotal moment in that history. “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.” The power of “The American Story” came home to me while I read my George Mason University students’ personal narratives. The story each tells is a testament to the possibilities in our society, and as American as tomorrow’s Thanksgiving feast. For me these...

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Students Give Back: Internships

If Goldman Sachs’ top executives are willing to take a 99% cut in compensation for 2008, the rest of us should think about how we can contribute to the economy by donating our time and productivity. For students, internships are a time-tested way to get valuable experience in their field with an apprenticeship status that’s welcome (and maybe needed) in a tight job market. Why should any student want to work for little or no money? Internships put students in the workforce with no future obligation to enter the field or the particular organization. Employers love interns because they are young, skilled, and come cheap. Students benefit when their resumes include job...

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Is student cynicism dead?

An expression that didn’t exist when I was a student is “whatever…” The ellipsis at the end is important because the power of “whatever…” is what it doesn’t say. On its surface, it’s colloquial for “It doesn’t matter,” except it is indifference with an “edge” that adds cynicism to that indifference. Not only do users of “whatever…” not care, they are also telling you to “get lost.” Every election for the past twenty years has left most of my students with a “whatever…” reaction. Most didn’t vote because they thought it didn’t matter who was...

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An educator’s letter to the new president

Dear Mr. President, Education will be a priority when you take office, so here are recommendations based on my experience as an educator. 1. Pay for Performance When Pay for Performance was introduced to Fairfax County more than twenty years ago, I was in a pilot school. Teachers participated because it eventually meant more money. We embraced the hope that what we did in the classroom would be appreciated and rewarded. It was a fiasco—albeit one that lasted several years before the Fairfax School Board voted it out during the budget crisis of the early 90s. The reasons were simple, and we should have anticipated them: principals and vice principals don’t always make...

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Leaving behind NCLB, not children

Imagine you are the parent of a struggling first grader. Perhaps there is a learning disability, or a psychological condition that blocks the learning process. Now imagine you design a plan for your child’s school years, “guaranteeing” success by requiring incremental increases in GPA, culminating in a 100% average for senior year. Any year your child’s GPA doesn’t increase by at least 5 percentage points would result in heavy sanctions: loss of specific privileges your child covets. If your child starts with a D average in 1sst grade, moving to a D+ and later a low C and C+ might seem like a cinch. But as your child approaches the higher grades and courses...

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What students learn from presidential campaigns

I have taught through eight presidential elections and am always surprised that students who are too young to vote pay scant attention to political campaigns and their issues. That changes in high school. In government class, they are often provided the opportunity to register to vote, a privilege especially welcome every four years during the presidential campaign. This year the primaries seized the imaginations of seniors at Oakton High School in record-breaking numbers. Nearly every student who was eligible to vote took advantage of that basic tenet of our democracy. But that leaves out most of the students who attend school daily and hear on the news, at the dinner table, and on...

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NCLB And The Tyranny of Grades

As a student, I scrambled for grades until I went to graduate school at Columbia University where courses were taken for “Y” (automatic) credit; for the first time I could concentrate on my education and not on grades. I was as motivated to do well in my Y credit courses as I had been earlier, when chained to the tyranny of A through F. Grades are still paramount in students’ minds and in education reform. We grade everything—from schools to films to the restaurants we visit and the wines we drink, and even the jobs we do in the workplace. We love reducing a big experience to a simple grade. What we forget is that the grade is only as good as the grader, and...

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Test scores as school labels

Visiting another state always reminds me how good my own county’s education system is. In my role as College Board consultant, I have visited West Virginia, New York, Tennessee, Mississippi, Florida, South Carolina, and the southern part of Virginia. In every single venue, there are hurdles teachers must overcome in order to do their jobs, and in some places those hurdles are formidable. With every workshop I conduct, I return to Fairfax County, Virginia with renewed appreciation for our school system. Last Friday, my Advanced Placement workshop drew 28 public and private school teachers from the Ft. Lauderdale region. They ranged from new teachers to one in her 60’s who had...

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In Search of a Grading Formula

In most subjects, grading is a simple matter of what’s missing. If students have a math or history test on Wednesday, studying the material—applicable formulae in math and the contexts surrounding historic events in history—will most likely yield a high grade. If they miss a logical progression in solving a problem, or a fact and its implications in history, then they will receive a lower grade because of what’s missing. In the humanities, and especially English, that sort of formula only works for reading quizzes and work that can be quantified. Command of language, a graceful prose style, and level of complexity are qualities of the best English papers, but...

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How Different Is High School From College?

I started teaching at the college level, spent the middle of my career both as a full-time high school teacher and part-time college teacher, and am currently winding up my career exclusively in the college classroom once again. Teachers at both levels always want to know: which do you like most? What’s the difference? It’s similar to your youngest asking which child you like best. The truth is, they’re all good. When I walk into my classroom at George Mason University, there’s no question whose direction everyone will be following for the next hour. Students are respectful, sometimes a bit too quiet. My high school classroom was also respectful, but it had the...

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What Kids Are Reading

Saturday, September 27, the National Book Festival--with 72 writers and illustrators talking about their work--will take place on the Capital Mall. The following are some of the many children’s authors speaking in either the “Children” or “Teens & Children” pavilions (in parentheses) at the designated times. Children’s Authors Speaking at the National Book Festival 1. Marc Brown and Judy Sierra, “Wild About Books” 4:05 p.m. (Children) 2. David A. Carter, “The Big Bug Book: A Pop-up Celebration,” 2:55 p.m. (Children) 3. Doreen Cronin, “Thump,Quack, Moo: A Wacky Adventure,” 12:35 p.m. (Children) 4....

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A Constitution Day Writing Contest

What’s patriotic, educational, and might win students big money for both themselves and their teachers? The “Being an American” essay contest is open, for the first time, to every high school student in the nation. My seniors participated in the first two trial years and three of them won cash awards, including one first place prize. Sponsored by the non-profit organization The Bill of Rights Institute, the contest is designed to heighten awareness among students and teachers of the relevance of our country’s founding documents. Last year the pilot contest solicited entries from 17 states plus the District of Columbia. This year all 50 states are eligible. Contest...

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New Teachers: Don’t Let The Turkeys Get You Down!

New teachers are flooding classrooms across America. Baby boomers are retiring, and the classroom is gradually becoming younger, even at the front of the room. There is so much about teaching that varies according to location, administration, and grade level that it’s hard for a veteran, like me, to know what to say to a new teacher. My daughter is teaching her first classes and, truthfully, I’ve become tongue-tied each time I open my mouth to give her advice. But I’ll give it another try. Sometimes I think adapting the Woody Allen line “90% of life is just showing up” works for teachers, since reliability is one of the chief qualities schools look for. Lack...

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New Teachers: Don’t Let The Turkeys Get You Down!

New teachers are flooding classrooms across America. Baby boomers are retiring, and the classroom is gradually becoming younger, even at the front of the room. There is so much about teaching that varies according to location, administration, and grade level that it’s hard for a veteran, like me, to know what to say to a new teacher. My daughter is teaching her first classes and, truthfully, I’ve become tongue-tied each time I open my mouth to give her advice. But I’ll give it another try. Sometimes I think adapting the Woody Allen line “90% of life is just showing up” works for teachers, since reliability is one of the chief qualities schools look for. Lack...

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At school’s start, anything is possible

You have just started the school year, and you’re in second or seventh or eleventh grade, and your pencil case is filled with sharp number 2s, erasers, and you have a binder full of blank paper you can’t imagine filling anytime soon. Maybe you have dividers to separate subjects, or perhaps you’ve outgrown that organizational tool, but you also have a school calendar where you swear you will put every assignment so you will never forget any homework. You have a backpack that might be new, or maybe it’s a little worn, but still it promises infinite capacity: it will hold all the books with all the knowledge you need for the coming year, and maybe for your whole life...

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The first day of school

It was just after 7 a.m. on the first day of George Mason University’s fall semester, and as I headed to my office I saw three students peering intently at room numbers. “What number are you looking for?” I asked. “107,” they replied, which they were never going to find on a second floor with only 200s. When I told them to go down to the first floor for the 100s, they gave me a “duh” look, aware they were being boneheaded. Welcome to first-day-of-school panic. Later, as I crossed campus on my way to and from classes in three different buildings, I passed students I’d seen going the other way a few minutes earlier. They must have been...

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Every Teacher's Nightmare

Students have back-to-school anxiety books to soothe their fears, but where are copies of “The Student From the Black Lagoon” or “Mrs. Smith and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” to soothe the nerves of teachers? All student nightmares of not being able to find the classroom and showing up to school inappropriately dressed are multiplied in the nightmares of teachers who have the same anxieties. We dream of first days without textbooks, of standing in front of the room in bathing suits, of arriving at the wrong school or the wrong classroom. When a teacher opens the door to the classroom, whether it is kindergarten, twelfth grade, or...

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Erica Jacobs: Summertime, and the learning is ... ?

As a teacher, I expect my George Mason University summer writing course to meet every day, compress six papers into four weeks, require revisions until students cry "uncle!" then end with a smile and an "Enjoy what’s left of the summer."One thing I don’t expect is to learn something. Yet nothing is more reliable than student unreliability. Just when you think you have the summer all figured out, your students shake up your preconceptions. It happened with a paper I assign each semester: What is it to be an American?Students......

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Erica Jacobs: Slaying the college essay dragon

Every September, I conduct a college essay-writing workshop that seems like one giant Dr. Phil show. I start out with 60 anxious high school seniors, and end the class with nearly all of them reassured, sporting a "can do" attitude and the beginning of a good essay.The stakes have never been higher. Each year, the number of applicants increases as the percentage accepted to selective schools decreases. Yet many parents and students have not altered their goals: Ivy League and other schools at the top of national rankings continue to......

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Erica Jacobs: Is testing the future of higher education?

The same day the Commission on the Future of Higher Education approved its final report, news broke of the foiled terrorist plot to bomb U.S-bound airplanes. Could there be a connection between the way we train our youth and how successful we will be in making peace with the rest of the world? If the Commission’s recommendations are carried out, the United States is in trouble.According to the commission, universities "should measure student learning" with standardized tests. This oversimplified No Child Left Behind solution will not work to create a......

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Erica Jacobs: Watch and learn: There really may be real value in reality TV

Your children are watching it, my students are watching it. Heck, you and I are watching it. It’s reality TV. Is it, contrary to its title, total escapism, or does it have something to teach?It was the dancing on "So You Think You Can Dance" that got me hooked. But it wasn’t just the dancing; it was the fact that, as an audience member, I really felt I was getting to know the participants.That may be the most "unreal" part of reality television. Of course, we are not getting to......

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Erica Jacobs: Summer is another word for teacher rehab

My name is Erica Jacobs, and most of the year I am strung out. That’s right, as a teacher, I am plagued with serious problems. I am sleep-deprived, operating on sensory overload 24/7, perpetually overwhelmed with a sense of responsibility I do and do not have.In May and June, I suffer from paranoia that test scores will not be good enough. I begin to enjoy seeing the backs of my students as much as they enjoy exiting my room.I am tired of Johnny and his mother, who are convinced that,......

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Erica Jacobs: The school column no one will read

It’s Labor Day, and as someone who writes a Monday column, I know all about holidays. On Memorial Day, New Year’s Day and Columbus Day, I am lucky if my son e-mails, "Good column, Mom!"So here it is, Labor Day, and there is no one to commemorate the renewal of the school cycle. Well — there’s me. HELLO OUT THERE! Silence.When no one is out there, a speaker has a certain license. I can say things I would normally not say, like: I HATE THE BEGINNING OF SCHOOL! See?......

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Erica Jacobs: What becomes of the bored student?

Teachers often wonder what happens to students who were bored by our classes. What are they doing? What sparked a passion in college? Former students who return to say hello are usually the ones who were engaged all along.One answer arrived Friday morning in the form of a student who had taken Senior Seminar, which I teach with Eliot Waxman. After memorizing the posters on my wall — "By the way, Dr. Jacobs, you really should make some changes!" — Alex graduated two years ago and joined AmeriCorps, an organization......

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Erica Jacobs: What’s in a high school student’s name? Plenty.

Three weeks into the school year, I am faced with my hardest task. With standardized tests and increasing expectations for all teachers, how can there be a single "hardest" task?Simple. With 162 new students each fall, my biggest challenge is learning their names. It takes me weeks — at least. Some classes are easier than others. The class with four Stephanies, a Kate, and four Katies — some of the "Katies" are actually "Caities" — has me stumped, yet my first period’s names were easy to learn.I wouldn’t fret,......

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Erica Jacobs: What parents want from teachers

Eliot Waxman, with whom I teach Senior Seminar, greeted the parents of our students with a smile. "I know how you feel," he added. "I just went to my first back-to-school night for my son in kindergarten." There was a chorus of "Awwwws." A parent piped up, "But the desks were smaller, right?" We all laughed as Eliot conceded, "I didn’t even try to sit in a desk. I stood."And so Eliot and I conducted his sixth and my 22nd back-to-school night. I remember attending them as a parent with......

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Erica Jacobs: Teaching the second time around

Whoever said you only go around once hasn’t visited the teachers’ lounges of Oakton High School recently. In the last 10 years, several of our best teachers have come to the classroom after long careers in law, government or in the military. And they are all men.If Oakton is at all typical, men are no longer scarce in classrooms. I have watched Eliot Waxman’s first teaching years, and his background as a political consultant and government employee makes him a better government teacher. His years running focus groups for......

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Erica Jacobs: In praise of the average student

Should we "track" students according to ability or performance? In Fairfax County, there has been a lively debate over this question for at least 15 years. Jay Mathews, my favorite education reporter, has recorded varying parent and teacher opinions in his Washington Post articles. No one has a simple answer.But Mathews and I concur with the school policy that fewer labels lead to more student opportunities. English used to have four tracks. Now there are only two: regular and honors. Dan Domenech, former Fairfax County superintendent, endorsed the policy when......

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Erica Jacobs: Students ask ‘Who Am I?’

Who am I? Am I a teacher? A mother? A wife? A columnist? Where does one identity begin and theother end? We ask ourselves similar questions over and over, often surprising ourselves with our conclusions.My seniors ask this question when they write soliloquies just before we begin reading "Hamlet," Shakespeare’s most introspective play. "Who’s there?" are its first words, and from that moment the play is all about a search for identity, much as a student’s senior year is about finding a direction for the future.Hamlet recites seven soliloquies, and......

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Erica Jacobs: Education needs some unpredictability

Teachers and students live in an alternate time plane. The sun rises and sets, keeping time for the rest of the world, but for us time begins in September and ends in June, with several moments on this educational clock when we hit the "pause" button. Those are called holidays.For students, the time cycle is the same year after year, although some things change: teachers, subjects, classmates. The most unsettling change is within themselves as they grow, look different, act different, feel different. For most teachers it’s the same school,......

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Erica Jacobs: Life and death in a high school

This has been a difficult week at Oakton High School.Last weekend, one of our students was killed in a terrible automobile accident with another of our students at the wheel. The boy who died had an older brother in the senior class, so many felt connected to one of the three.Even those who, like me, knew none of them were affected by the wave of grief that rolled through the halls. Four years ago, two students were killed as they waited for a light to turn on the very......

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Erica Jacobs: A complex lessonin gender roles

Fifteen years ago it was considered "edgy" to teach Zora Neale Hurston’s novel "Their Eyes Were Watching God" to high school students. The curriculum leaned heavily on Dead White Males. My class still appreciates the classic DWMs, but Hurston’s novel is the origin of the "Changing Women’s Roles" senior seminar Eliot Waxman and I conduct annually.Over time, I have noticed shifts in attitudes toward women’s roles, but one thing never changes: Students, both male and female, are surprisingly aware of the conflicts and frustrations their mothers feel as they juggle......

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Erica Jacobs: A Procession of ‘Lasts’

Long before students hear the processional from Edward Elgar’s "Pomp and Circumstance" at graduation, they have experienced a procession of events, each one of them for the last time.Friday they rejoiced that the fire drill was "our last fire drill!" They have had their last Advanced Placement tests and their last interim grades. Soon they will take their last high school finals. With the passing of each "last," the students grin in triumph, but with some awareness that not all of their "lasts" will be so simple.Within weeks, students will......

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Erica Jacobs: Students ask: Am I my brother’s keeper?

The day before spring break, my classes participated in one of the last "Senior Seminars" of the school year: Am I My Brother’s Keeper?The topic grows out of James Joyce’s "The Dubliners," a study of alcoholism, domestic abuse, child molestation and addiction. Obviously, those problems are not limited to Dublin.The question we ask in this combination English/government classroom is what obligation we have to deal with these issues? What should families, communities, states and federal agencies do? Or should these problems be handled by the individual and any victims?The subtext......

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Erica Jacobs: Minority achievement a many-layered thing

In 20 years, high schools may be as innovative as colleges in offering courses in African-American or women’s studies. But for now, teachers still gravitate to the lesson plans outlining the five-paragraph essay [how many five-paragraph essays have you seen in the real world?] and grammar worksheets.Scores for black students are the Achilles’ heel of an otherwise high-achieving Fairfax County school system, according to the front page of Friday’s Washington Post. Superintendent Jack Dale was right when he spoke of peeling back layers of an onion to uncover problems that......

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Erica Jacobs: So you want to be a teacher?

Last week I was part of a panel of teachers and professors who spoke to 75 George Mason University students interested in the teaching profession.Other panel members’ tasks seemed easy compared to mine. One explained licensure requirements, another explained the masters program in creative writing, and another gave students the discouraging statistics on a Ph.D.’s prospects for a tenure-track job.I was the only speaker not associated with a degree-granting program: a specimen of a real, live high school teacher.In that role, what should I tell them? If you have followed......

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Erica Jacobs: It’s test time, but who’s sweating?

It’s four days until the test. Four days. Each May, I suffer from test anxiety. One hundred and six of my charges will be sitting for the Advanced Placement Literature exam Thursday.Ironically, students seem relaxed; I am the basket case.My students missed the Anxiety 101 classes you and I took. As the test approaches, they continue to check text messages surreptitiously under their desks.In the "dry run" test last week, one otherwise intelligent student wrote on "1984." The problem? He couldn’t remember the main character’s name: "For the purposes of......

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Erica Jacobs: Semester’s end

Colleges are letting out for the summer, and I have met my George Mason University advanced composition class for the last time. They turned in papers on "endings."The assignment is designed to inspire students when their energy might otherwise be running dry. It invites them to bring closure on a personal experience, and on the semester.Because they have read an article by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross ("On Death and Dying"), a few write about death, but many more write about the end of a relationship, a vacation or a season.There is a......

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Erica Jacobs: Lucy in Oprahland

Tonight Oprah Winfrey will be giving away $200,000 pairs of diamond earrings to each person honored at her Legends Ball for famous African-American women; on Wednesday and Thursday, Oprah will honor Elie Wiesel and 50 high school students who wrote about the relevance of his account of the Holocaust in "Night."The juxtaposition of diamond earrings and the Holocaust says something about the paradox that is Oprah. Those contradictions seem to meet in her shows. Oprah gives equal honor to media celebrities and those who commemorate historic atrocities.Lucy Young doesn’t see......

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Erica Jacobs: Lucy helps us remember

All of us at Oakton were eager to see how Oprah would handle a show featuring high school essay contest winners writing on the relevance of Elie Wiesel’s memoir of the Holocaust. (See my column of May 22.)How would she balance the horrific past with an afternoon show celebrating teenagers’ futures? More precisely, would Oprah be able to honor Wiesel and his seriousness and still give high school students the whirlwind brush with celebritythey anticipated?I knew Oprah had pulled it off when Lucy Young, one of the contest winners,......

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Erica Jacobs: Some reasons why teachers don’t write columns

Teachers have affected the lives of every single person reading a newspaper,yet columns written by teachers are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Patrick Welsh is a notable exception; his articles for The Washington Post’s Outlook section have been "must reads" for two decades.In general, though, journalists write about teaching; education consultants write about teaching; professors of education write about teaching. But teachers don’t write about teaching.With the exception of The Examiner, where can you go to find snapshots of what actually happens in the classroom? Even magazines exclusively about teaching......

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Erica Jacobs: Grading papers at the beach

Every June for two decades, I have spent a week grading papers for the Educational Testing Service’s Advanced Placement Program. In English Literature, there are 1,125 high school teachers and college professors who are — at this very minute — grading 275,000 AP exams.We began at 8:30 a.m. Friday, and will end at about 5 p.m. Thursday. That’s seven full days, with no weekend. Yet we love (almost) every minute of it.Part of the draw is the feel-good atmosphere of the reading itself. Yes, there are lots of logistical problems......

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Erica Jacobs: My 15 minutes of teaching fame

Halfway through the seven-day Advanced Placement grading marathon with 1,175 English teachers, I had 15 minutes of fame.Our chief reader, Jim Barcus, arranged to have four of us speak for an hour on Oscar Wilde and Robert Penn Warren, the authors on the AP test. "How Would You Teach That?" was such a success last year that it was moved to the Hilton Ballroom this year, with an open wine bar, cheese and fruit. Three hundred teachers sat in rows of chairs and at linen-covered round tables, sipping wine and......

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Erica Jacobs: Making sense of an educational end

It’s the bottom of the ninth, the third act (fifth act if you’re Shakespeare), dénouement, coda, epilogue and postscript. In other words, the school year is nearly over.If you are a student, you have awakened at 5:30 a.m. for the last time until September, you have downloaded your last Sparks Notes summary, made your last frantic IM to others in your class about the project due in six hours. As teachers, we have turned in our grades, begun to pack our rooms up, backed up our computer files, thrown out......

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Erica Jacobs: Behind the scenes at graduation

I have attended 20 Fairfax County High School graduations in the last two decades, and after the first five or so, they were pretty boring.Each year, the exciting speculation for teachers is how many glitches there will be. Will someone’s cap and gown be stolen from the "greenroom?" That happens every year, this year included. How many beach balls will be smuggled into the ceremony, and, once put into play, how long will they stay aloft?We wonder why that particular contraband has brought such delight to generations of students. Is......

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Erica Jacobs: The classroom boy crisis — myth or reality?

Two recent studies have brought to mind my recent "regular" 12th grade English class. The first, released by the Washington think tank Education Sector, reported that the educational boys crisis has been greatly exaggerated.In the second, the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center revealed divergent nationwide high school graduation rates. Fairfax County led the field, eventually graduating 82.5 percent of ninth-graders. Detroit posted the lowest rate: 21.7 percent. The national average was 69.6 percent. Girls graduated at a higher rate (72.7 percent) than their male counterparts (65.2 percent). My......

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Erica Jacobs: Fourth of July undergoes multicultural makeover

I thought this Fourth of July would be like the others. When our children were young, my husband and I would do "American" things: Grill hamburgers and hotdogs, go to the Mall. It was a day to celebrate all things American:flags, food, fun, fireworks.But this Fourth of July was different. During the afternoon, a fierce line of winds traveled through Fairfax City downing trees, one of which sliced our neighbor’s house in two — right through their living room. We felt incredibly lucky to have an intact home with running......

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Erica Jacobs: Gracious and graceful Mary Day was truly a teacher’s teacher

Twenty-four years ago, I nervously went to my first assignment as a writer: a look at the Washington Ballet School and Company for the Christmas issue of Georgetown Magazine. Mary Day, who died last week at the age of 96, was director of both school and company, and therefore my first stop. The year before, she had shepherded Amanda McKerrow to the Moscow International Dance Competition and watched her win the gold medal. Day was already a legendary teacher in the Washington area, but now she was known worldwide.I......

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Erica Jacobs: Egads! The test results are in

Each summer in mid-July, I am on tenterhooks awaiting the arrival of Advanced Placement test scores.I know I focus too much on the test. Don’t I write about the dimensionality of teaching and learning, and how impossible it is to quantify that? Don’t I write about the importance of teaching the whole student, and not just the part that can write a cogent essay or fill in a scantron sheet?Yes and yes. My rational side tells me scores aren’t important. But my competitive side wants me to do well —......

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Erica Jacobs: Writing well is the best way to win ratings war

Not too long ago, we rated only cars and appliances. (That’s why Consumers Reports was invented.) Then came ratings of doctors and hospitals; we needed those so we wouldn’t die.But in the era of reality TV and the Internet, everything now has a rating. All we eat and all we do ranks somewhere on the 1-to-10 continuum. Worse yet — our lives are on that continuum. Employers rate us. We rate employers. And now — groan! — students rate their teachers.When RateMyTeachers.com was new, teachers didn’t worry. If only two......

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Testing positive

Each year the College Board sends out Advanced Placement test results in mid-July, ending an agony of waiting for both teachers and students. The resultsthis year were more charged than ever since my nearly 150 test-takers were my very last AP students. I have always wanted students to do well, but this year I wanted them to do well so that my memories of this last group would have a rosy glow. Do you know how rare it is to teach nearly 150 teenagers and not have a single hostile......

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Students grow like onions

Less than two weeks ago, I was a full-time high school teacher, and had been for more than two decades. Although I always teach George Mason University classes during the summer as well as during the regular year, this summer seems different because these students are representative of my future. Now that I have a full-time college job, I will never again teach anyone younger than 19 years old. Yet my current students resemble high schoolers in unexpected ways. College students......

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