Mining For Hidden Gems

What constitutes a “good” school?  As a parent, and now as an educator, I have been asking that question for at least 21 years (That’s how old my oldest child is!).  My own parents’ life quest was to provide me with “good” schools, no matter the expense and trouble of finding one, including moving to another continent.  One of my friends has home schooled her nine children (adopted and biological) because their thirst for knowledge has never been satisfied by the public schools where she has lived.  My other friends have looked for magnet and charter schools within their home districts in hope of a more challenging, rigorous education that will prepare their kids for college.  But is preparing kids for a college education in and of itself what makes a school “good”?  What should be the ultimate goal of education?  I believe that we are here to know and to love.  Consider the notion of knowing about and loving all that is in and around us as the ...

In 1976, I was an eighth grader living in Tehran, Iran.  The previous year, the Shah, the King of Iran, had put in place a universal mid-morning snack program, where milk, juice and cake or cookies were given out to children at 10:00 a.m. every morning in every school in the country.  I guess it was his way of sharing the oil wealth with the masses.  My affluent classmates, however, having had a full breakfast, sometimes found other uses for the snack items.  Once when a policeman was hit by a milk carton thrown from a second story window, our new assistant principal, Mrs. Momeni came in to give our class a lecture.  She was new to our school and we had not quite figured her out yet.  She didn't shout or insult.  She just told us about the school where she had come from.  It was one in the south part of the city, the poor side, where if a child was absent, his mother would come to collect his snack because that was his only meal for the day. ...

I was thirteen when I started collecting poetry.  Most of the time I did not even understand what the poems were saying, but I liked their sound; I liked the way they played with words and used them to stab or caress my heart.  Of course, writing poetry was out of the question.  Poets were born, not bred.  They had extraordinary talents and could talk in a mysterious, veiled form about lofty topics.  At fifteen I moved to the United States and started studying in English.  I could read and understand almost anything in English, except poetry.  I knew the words individually but somehow the way they were put together to make poems made them sound foreign to me.  So I put poetry aside. Thirty years later, as I studied to be a teacher, I learned to use poetry to build reading fluency.  By then English had moved from being my second language to become the language of my thinking.  I had come to find poets like Emily Dickinson, Langston Hugh...

A middle school math teacher's grading policy says that students can make corrections to tests and quizzes only if they fail and then, only to bring up their grade to a 70.  My graduate studies professor, on the other hand, taught for mastery, giving everyone the opportunity to go back and learn what was missed on any test or assignment. I think there are two ways of looking at our job as teachers:  We can act as gate keepers, letting through those who either know the material already or learn it quickly and in the way we are most comfortable teaching, and keeping out those who for one reason or another don't "get" it right away.  Or we can be guides, meeting each student where he or she may be, getting to know his or her strengths and believing that there is a time and a way for everyone to reach the same learning destination. We are gate keepers when we focus on what is missing and miss what is there.  We may feel uncomfortable accommodating different learni...

Let me first give my reasons as to why teachers are  like doctors: Uneducated individuals are a burden to the rest of the society, as much as or more than unhealthy ones. The effects of good and bad teaching are life-long and consequential, much like the results of good and bad medicine. A good teacher must "diagnose" every student in order to be able to teach him or her in the most effective way possible.  This is not an easy task because many times the student cannot articulate his or her difficulty, or the teacher does not have all the resources to perform an accurate assessment of the learning problem.  In addition, one teacher usually has to manage twenty or more "patients" simultaneously and single handedly. Now, if we agree that the job of the teacher is just as valuable as a medical doctor's, then we must: Treat teachers with the same professionalism as doctors and consider them "specialists" in their fields Have educators set the standard...

Years ago I read a book by Leon Dash called Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in Urban America .  It is the biography of a drug addicted, AIDS infected grandmother on welfare as well as  the story of her children.  Well written and gripping, Dash writes about how six of Rosa's eight children lived a similar life of poverty, illiteracy and crime, whereas two of them were able to escape that cycle.  One of them  started along the same path, but was arrested for robbery at a very early age.  The experience was enough to scare him straight.  But the part of this story that I keep retelling is the reason why the eighth child broke away and was able to make a middle class life for himself. It turns out that because he was a good natured, quiet child he would get invited to classmates' homes to play and he would notice that not everyone lived as he did.  He had caught a glimpse into another world and it was enough to convince him that there was a differe...

I am reading Stones into Schools by Greg Mortenson of the  Three Cups of Tea fame, and came across these statistics:  "In the impoverished hinterlands of the western Himalayas, $20 is enough to educate a first grader for an entire year, $340 can send a girl to four years of high school on a full-ride scholarship, $50,000 is sufficient to build and outfit an eight-room schoolhouse and endow the teachers' salaries for the first five years."  I know these numbers do not compare to the cost of education in the U.S., but I do know one thing:  It costs a whole lot less to educate a child than to rehabilitate an adult, no matter where we are in this world.  The same source also cites World Bank studies that show how one year of primary school can result in an income bump of 10 to 20 percent for women later in life.  Where girls are educated infant mortality rates drop significantly after one generation, as does population growth. So whenever there is a choice we...