“A wet dream is kind of like a fart.”—Sex Ed Teacher Gets Shaft

As the last male staff member in my K-6 elementary school, it fell to me this year to teach the human growth and development lesson to the fourth grade boys. Sex ed for the preadolescent set; a user’s guide to your changing penis.

It was just as awkward as you’d expect.

Things began well enough. We separated the girls and boys and went to different rooms, and the boys knew exactly what was going on by the tittering laughter that was already peeping out before they even sat down. After a brief, sputtering introduction I started a video called Just Around the Corner. First segment, fine. Teenager talks about how nerdy he was before and during puberty. Quite boring, really.

Then the animated penis comes dancing onto the screen.

The visual I’m trying to give you there is much, much worse than the reality, but if you judged from the shrieks of horror that arose from the boys (yes, shrieking boys) you would have thought that Ron Jeremy himself had shown up in the video and whipped it out for all to see.

Anyhow, the actual animation was of a naked boy, very indistinctly drawn. Suddenly hair begins sprouting out of his crotch and armpits, and he gets pimples. The narrator goes through the material in a very matter-of-fact manner, I assume. I can only assume, because at this point my head was buried in my hands wondering how the hell I had gotten into this situation while the boys alternately covered their faces and stared in wide-eyed wonder at the cartoon willy.

Then came the close-up. This is the penis. This is the scrotum. Inside the scrotum are the testicles. This here, that’s where the seminal fluid comes out of the scrotum and makes its way up to the penis. That’s the reproductive process, boys. If you have any questions, ask a trusted male figure who isn’t me.

After the video I was hoping for stunned silence, but they were hyped. There was a quick quiz (“Why yes, Timmy, wet dreams are perfectly normal.”) and then ohgodhelpme the question and answer period.

“Mr. Grant, when they talked about the penis getting hard, was that for...s-e-x?”

“Yes, that’s a part of sex.”

“OH MY GOD, HE SAID SEX!”

F me, but did that ever open the floodgates. One little guy who is too honest for his own good gets a thoughtful look on his face and says, “Sex? My mom says my sister has that,” which actually shut the room up for about two seconds. Another one pops in with, “You start having sex when you’re 18! Or maybe 17. It depends,” which I obviously couldn’t let go unchallenged, so I said “It’s a personal choice, Bobby. Waiting until you’re married is a good thing,” which satisfied a lot of them.

"Do you have sex every time your penis gets hard?" I wanted to say that I certainly do but that they probably wouldn't get that lucky in life; I answered "No." instead. I think that is probably better for the whole keeping my job thing.

There was also some confusion about semen. “So the baby starts inside the dad, and he gives it to the mom?” one little guy asked me, not understanding the idea of the semen fertilizing the egg. I explained it a little bit more, which lead to the perfect follow-up: “So how does the man get the sperm inside the woman?”

No. We are not going there, you can learn that in 5th and 6th grade health, or you can learn it from the boys on the bus, or you can learn it from the copy of the Joy of Sex that you found when you were snooping around your parents bedroom one weekend when they were gone, but you’re not going to learn it from me. Thank you, here’s your free deodorant, go back to class.

That said, I can see the need for this type of education. The hardest topics to teach are often the most important, and hearing the misconceptions these kids had (e.g., "Men can to get pregnant, I saw it on Oprah!", which is a real quote from one of the groups I had) is quite startling.

For all the nurses and health teachers out there who deal with these issues on a daily basis, I salute you.

Read more here, if any.

Statcounter says....

...this is going to be an interesting OSPI race.

Looking at the recent keyword activity here on the blog, three of the top five searches are Terry Bergeson (#1), Rich Semler (#2), and Randy Dorn (#5). This, and we're still three months away from the primary. I'd expect to see a spike in the coming days in Semler searches; the key will be to see if Dorn starts picking up more attention.

It'll be an interesting summer.

Read more here, if any.

WASL Test Administration Quiz Release Items

Actual questions from the WASL proctoring training test. And by actual, I mean mostly made up.

1) During the WASL test many students are confused by question #6. Mrs. Smith stops the class and shows them how to approach answering the question. Is this definitely OK, definitely not OK, or too close to call?

Answer: Definitely not OK. You may not expand on any WASL questions.

2) During the test many students are confused by question #6. Mrs. Smith stops the class and berates them for not recalling the three different lessons that she taught on probability; after a 10 minute screaming jag she retreats to her desk and sobs gently into her morning espresso. Is this definitely OK, definitely not OK, or too close to call?

Answer: Definitely OK. Neither screaming nor crying are banned by the test.

3) As students are taking the reading test a group called Mothers Militantly Against the WASL storms the school, breaks into the secure test storage facility, and holds tomorrow’s science WASL hostage for a $1,000,000 ransom. The principal refuses to pay the money. Is this definitely OK, definitely not OK, or too close to call?

Answer: Definitely not OK. The principal should pay any ransom money out of their building budget, or Title II Part C funds.

4) After losing her election for Superintendent of Public Instruction in 2008 Terry Bergeson returns to the classroom. In April of 2009 KOMO News 4 helicopters take video of her on her knees in the school parking lot, plaintively screaming to the heavens for relief from the ungodly testing monster that she helped spawn. Is this definitely OK, definitely not OK, or too close to call?

Answer: Definitely OK, and a delightful image to boot.

5) A teacher refuses to give the WASL and becomes a folk hero with ballads written about him. Meanwhile, his kids still end up taking the test, only their teacher isn’t in the room to be with them through the process. Is this definitely OK, definitely not OK, or too close to call?

Answer: Definitely not OK. C’mon, Carl.

Read more here, if any.

Sonya, Sonya, Sonya....(A Review of the May 9th Get Free! EFF Podcast)

I'm listening to the EFF's Get Free podcast from May 9th, and their new director of Labor Policy Sonya Jones says that it's "very hard to get your hands on" teacher's contracts (it's at about the 6:20 mark).

#1- Many school districts post their contracts on-line.
#2- It's public record; you should be able to get a copy in three days or less by mail if you ask for it.
#3- If the Director of Labor Policy thinks getting copies of the contract is the difficult part, then actually effecting changes in those agreements would be nigh-on impossible.

I've disagreed with her before, but this just seems defeatist.

"The school board can not reduce the number of teaching positions they have without negotiating that with the union," says Sonya. That's false on the face of it. The school district doesn't have to hire for positions that aren't needed. which is why many districts will handle decreased enrollment via attrition. I'm not going to defend Kitsap (the same way I wouldn't defend Spokane last year when they were bleeding kids but refusing to cut staff), but I really can't see how this is a union problem.

I do like the Godfather comparison, as long as it doesn't include the woefully terrible Godfather III. As the lead negotiator for my district I'm considering getting a fedora and wearing a white-on-white shirt/tie combination in order to set the tone.

It's also flat-out wrong to say that the schools that won't be receiving the AP grant didn't have AP programs in place; University High School in Central Valley has AP and would have been a grant recipient.

It's also wrong to say that union dues in this state are $900 a year without pointing out how much that can vary from district to district; while the WEA and NEA dues are consistent, local dues are not.

And can you imagine the stress on administrators if the teachers were represented by four different bargaining units, or if one teacher joined more than one association? If you think it's hard to fire a teacher now, sheesh....

And Sonya obviously has some research to do on teacher strikes here in Washington. They happen, and simply saying "They're illegal!" is ignoring the problem.

This idea that contract language looks the same from the smallest districts all the way up to Seattle is ludicrous. There might be some commonality in the nuts and bolts, but compare a Seattle or Spokane to a small district like Cheney or Reardan and the differences are far greater than the similarities.

It's also interesting to me to see a group like the EFF that's put a lot of work into model legislation projects that can be used in any state criticizing the WEA for having boilerplate language available. Different sides of the same coin?

Anyhow, lots of education discussion in this episode. Well worth listening to for anyone here in Washington who cares about education, from either side of the political spectrum.

Read more here, if any.

A Look to the Future

Item--New Business Item #8 from the 2008 WEA Representative Assembly: that WEA, in the future, use its best effort to avoid conflict with the national process to select delegates to the national conventions in presidential years.

Cut ahead to 2011...

Hey Mike, we need to schedule next year’s rep assembly.

Sure thing, John. What dates were you thinking about?

Well, here’s the thing. Do you remember New Business Item #8 from 2008?

The one about scheduling around conventions? Sure!

I went and looked at when the national conventions are scheduled, and that’s not going to be an easy thing.

Why’s that?

Well, I can find a week when we’re not electing delegates to the Democratic National Convention, and I can find a week when we’re not electing delegates to the Republican National Convention…

(John and Mike laugh uproariously over the thought of WEA members going to the RNC)

…but the other conventions are problematic.

What other conventions?

(John gestures to a calendar) Well, the Green Party elects their nominees here, and that’s important for the members from Seattle. The Libertarians picked this weekend, which really effects our small/rural locals.

(Mike, impatiently) OK, that’s four parties, but...

...but the list keeps on going, Mike. The Constitution Party is here, the Prohibition Party is here...

The Prohibition Party? You’ve got to be kidding me!

They’re big in Benge. Then there’s the Socialist Party, the Workers World Party, the Marijuana Party...

I’m guessing they’re not big in Benge.

But you can see the problem, can’t you?

I can, and here’s what we’re going to do. I want you to...

(fin)

The vague ending is intentional, since I have a strong feeling this New Business Item will never be heard of again.

If you ever have a chance to go to Rep Assembly, take it. It’s one of the more interesting exercises in democracy that you’ll ever see.

Read more here, if any.

Would Oklahoma City Consider Taking the Mariners, too?

....or would that be an act of aggression against a fellow state?

My Lord, but this team is horrible.

Read more here, if any.

Workbooks That Don’t Work

We’re making a commitment to look at every aspect of our spending, and one area that is getting a close look is student workbooks, because there’s a ton of them and they’re all expensive. In my first grade room we have two different books for reading and one for math; they cost about $40 each per child. That’s about $10,000 a year, then just for workbooks for my one grade level.

Looking at that, we decided that next year we would eschew the reading workbooks in favor of a cheaper phonics workbook; we didn’t feel like we could do without math. Even in reading it will be difficult because of how the workbook paces the curriculum, and so we’re going to have to make a pretty strong commitment to bringing in other ways to teach specific reading strategies, high frequency words, and spelling.

If you’re doing a curriculum adoption make sure that you nail down what the year-to-year costs will be to keep it going. We got caught with our pants down.

Read more here, if any.

Let’s Talk About Sex Gender

The May 7th Education Week has a detailed article (Single-Sex Schooling Gets New Showcase) on the growing movement in South Carolina to offer more single-sex education options. The article comes with a map that lists the number of single-sex public school offerings state by state, and I was surprised to see that Washington had five listed. Doing a little poking around I came across this website from the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, which talks about programs in Camas, Vancouver, Olympia, and Seattle. I’ll be darned.

What do you think about single-sex classrooms? If you were in school, would you feel positive about the experience? Would you put your own children in single-sex environments if they were available?

Read more here, if any.

What Value Value Added?

There’s an interesting article in the May 7th Education Week on the “value added” model for judging teachers and schools. Under a value added (VA) system quality is judged by the change scores on a consistent scale; the MAP assessment from the NWEA is a good example of what a value-added test might look like. Some pieces from the article that struck me:

“My personal opinion is that this model is promising way more than it can deliver,” (Audrey Amrein-Beardsley) said in an interview with Education Week. “The problem is that when these things are being sold to superintendents, they don’t know any better.”

I’d be curious to understand what exactly it is that a data model like value added can really promise. The results of data analysis can be spun in a variety of ways, true, but the data itself is what it is. I’ve looked at VA as more a piece of the puzzle rather than as a whole puzzle in of itself, but maybe I need to look closer at the issue.

Later the article talks about the problems associated with using VA for programs like merit pay:

For example, results might be biased if it turns out that a school’s students are not randomly assigned to teachers—if, for instance, principals routinely give high-achieving students to the teachers who are considered the school’s best.

This is a legitimate concern. I’ve known several teachers in my short career who can do amazing things with gifted kids but can’t reach out to the low learners at all; by the same token, I want the low kids because the growth is the most spectacular in them. I think that this could be a strength of VA, because if you add 30 points to the scaled score of a low kid but only 5 to a high achiever, it’s clear where the most progress was made.

The most important piece of the article, and one that I’ve brushed on before:

But the more sophisticated the technique, the less understandable it could become for practitioners. The question is whether the added accuracy will make it harder for teachers and administrators to buy into value-added accountability systems, several experts say.

It’s critical that the teachers understand what the score on the test means, and that they know what factors could move that score up or down, especially if you intend to use this test to make a judgment about the teachers or their students. There’s nothing that breeds distrust faster than to be told, “You don’t need to know the details,” because that’s where the devil usually is.

It will be interesting to watch this conversation unfold.

Read more here, if any.

Can every school be an excellent school?

A loaded question, indeed.

Over on the Evergreen Freedom Foundation's Youtube channel there's a video touting the upcoming release of Flunked, their documentary on the education system. It's looking like it will highlight some schools that are succeeding against the odds, and I'm looking forward to it coming to Spokane.

The thing about a movie like Flunked, though, is the question of whether the model is replicable. It's one thing to highlight schools that are doing incredible things; it's another to take what works at that school, apply it to a different school in a different setting, and expect the results to be the same. Worth trying, sure, but only with an understanding that the experiment might well fail.

This is why there are no "THE answers" in education. Competition might be ONE answer, in some settings, but they certainly aren't THE answer. The same could be said about vouchers, merit pay, pay for performance, small class size, increasing teacher salary, or any other adaptation in the field today.

Given that I ask you this--what's getting in the way of making your school an excellent school, and how would you fix it?

Read more here, if any.

Shenanigans on Jay Greene

There’s a blurb in the May 7th Education Week on a new study done by the frequently wrong Jay Greene. His analysis of his own report:

“Our results from evaluating Florida’s McKay program provide additional evidence that rather than being harmed, public schools respond to the challenge of exposure to school choice by improving the education they provide.”

See? School choice works, vouchers are good for kids, the free market will indeed solve all, and Keynes deserves to be in the same pantheon of education gods as Dewey, Kozol, and Vgotsgy. But wait a minute....

McKay Scholarships are available for students with individualized education programs, which are required under federal law for students with disabilities. The vouchers let recipients attend public schools of their choice or private schools that accept the vouchers.

Are you getting a sense, then, of why schools that have a lot of kids leaving with McKay vouchers might be seeing an increase in test scores?

I’m sure that if I bothered to read the report (The Effect of Special Education Vouchers on Public School Achievement: Evidence From Florida’s McKay Scholarship Program) I’d find an awful lot about isolating variables and controlling for factors and ANOVA and the many other statistical tricks that can be used to make a point, but I have a feeling that the gut-level instinct is all I really need on this one.

Read more here, if any.

Why My Local Didn’t Vote No Confidence in Terry Bergeson

There’s a rather odd article in the May 15th Seattle Times about the no confidence votes the WEA has been pursuing against Terry Bergeson. They cite a “confidential memo” that sources in the AP acquired, and that’s just plain laughable—a memo that’s been sent to 400 different locals, has been in 1000 different hands, and has been mentioned online repeatedly hardly qualifies as confidential. This isn’t a secret initiative by any stretch of the imagination.

That is also borne out by the front-of-the-section article in the Saturday Spokesman-Review ($) on the vote of no confidence that was taken at the WEA Representative Assembly late Friday afternoon. It passed by an overwhelming majority, though a later request to make it a unanimous vote was blocked.

I was one of the blockers. My local abstained from taking a position on the Bergeson issue, because there are enough teachers in my group who believe in her that I wouldn’t have been representing them well if I had voted yes.

If you’ve followed the story at all (good background here and here) you’ve probably picked up on the fact that local leaders are polling their members to gauge their opinion of Dr. Bergeson. I did that in my group using an online tool called Survey Monkey that worked really quite well, and about a third of my people responded, which is pretty good for us.

And boy, did I get savaged. Comments ranged from “I want nothing to do with this” to “If you do this, I’m going to quit the union.” Many made a rousing defense of Terry and felt that we should be working with her to solve the problem, which is a theory that I’ll probably explore in a different post later on.

There were also a ton of comments from teachers who are frustrated with the WASL, who have been in the classroom for 25 years and hate to see what it’s doing to learning and to the kids, and who blame Terry for the whole mess. In fact, the majority of the people who voted in the poll said that they felt strongly enough about the issue that they believed the vote of no confidence was a great idea.

So given that, why didn’t I make us a part of the no confidence vote?

• A majority of the people who responded to the poll said to vote no confidence (21 out of 41), with the rest split between “Leave Terry alone!” and “I really don’t care.” 21 people is about 1/6th of my membership; should I have gone with their vote, overriding the other 5/6ths?
  
  
• The membership of my local is more conservative than most. It’s a small town that serves a military installation (Fairchild AFB), and any union measure is immediately down two strikes before it even gets off the ground floor with many of my members.
  
  
• I really didn’t need the publicity. Had I taken us in this direction I’ve no doubt that my town newspaper would have picked up on it, writing a story which would have immediately verified many of the very worst suspicions people hold about teacher unionism. That wouldn’t have been a fair position to put my members in.

For those locals that voted No Confidence in Terry, I congratulate you. Teacher voice matters, and you are to be commended for making yours heard.

I just ask that you don’t assume silence to be acquiescence, either for or against. Union politicking can be a wonderfully complicated endeavor, and this is one of those times.

Read more here, if any.