Erica Jacobs: I Am Horace: How Theodore Sizer nailed what really happens in high school
By: Erica Jacobs
Examiner Columnist
October 28, 2009
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) was all around me.
Horace, a fictional teacher besieged by too many students on the one hand and the demands of the school bureaucracy on the other, strikes a "compromise" to make few demands on his students as long as they cause no trouble. That's what high school was in the 1980s. This cynical option changes in Sizer's two subsequent books ("Horace's School" and "Horace's Hope," published in 1992 and 1996), when the re-energized Horace seeks grass-roots reform in education.
What Kids Are ReadingIn many ways, my career has followed Horace's trajectory. My first three years were spent in a school where parental involvement was low and student shenanigans were high. Mediocre, and occasionally sadistic, teachers were all around me, and I quickly learned to close my classroom door and bond with the students -- who were unfailingly clever and curious.
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 came from Amazon.com's list of children's best-sellers and are listed in order of popularity.
Children's Books on Middle and High School Survival
1. Surviving High School: A Guide for Introverts by Kristopher M. Billingsley
2. Too Old for This, Too Young for That! Your Survival Guide for the Middle-School Years by Harriet S. Masatche and Karen Unger
3. Where Should I Sit at Lunch? The Ultimate 24/7 Guide to Surviving the High School Years by Harriet S. Masatche and Karen Unger
4. Sandy Silverthorne's Surviving Middle School by Sandy Silverthorne
5. Been There, Survived That: Getting Through Freshman Year of High School by Karen Macklin
6. Caught in the Web (How I Survived Middle School) by Nancy Krulik
7. Surviving Bullies Workbook: Skills to Help Protect You From Bullying by Dickon Pownall-Gray
8. Middle School: How to Deal by Nuts and Bolts Girls and Yuki Hatori
9. High School Survival Guide by Vanessa P. Girard
10. Amelia's School Survival Guide by Marissa Moss
They didn't want to do "work," but if something seemed "fun," they were willing. I brought in stacks of books for outside reading and soon had them reading Sophocles (whom they pronounced as Saw-Pho-Culls) and Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" (which became "The Pride and The Prejudice," like a Regency soap opera, in their oral reports).
They read "Beowulf" and enjoyed it -- as long as I allowed them to write their own epics about their state championship football team. I never had to strike Horace's cynical compromise because I was able to fool them into thinking the work we were doing wasn't work at all.
But the no-work culture was something most teachers didn't have the energy to fight. The bureaucracy only cared about keeping hall fights to a minimum, and if a teacher's classroom was orderly, it left us alone. No one held students to any "standards," and the school's single Advanced Placement literature class solicited reactions on poetry from each student but didn't ask for analysis.
At that school, some of Sizer's reforms have subsequently happened because of Fairfax County's increased emphasis on open-enrollment AP and International Baccalaureate programs. So students in all current advanced literature classes (and, I assume, in other classes) are now held to high standards.
But teacher burnout continues to be a part of Fairfax County schools, and "Horace's Compromise" still holds true in myriad ways. Next week's column will look at how some teachers become energized (as Horace and I did), against all odds, and the forces that work against their reforms. I will continue to write about ways I am Theodore Sizer's Horace.
Erica Jacobs, whose column appears Wednesday, teaches at George Mason University. E-mail her at ejacob1@gmu.edu.
More from Erica Jacobs
- Erica Jacobs: What no teacher can prepare for
- Erica Jacobs: Horace's Hope: My educational journey
- Erica Jacobs: I am Horace: More thoughts on Theodore Sizer's progressive Educational Philosophy
- Erica Jacobs: I Am Horace: How Theodore Sizer nailed what really happens in high school
- Erica Jacobs: When words fail us
