Pollutants: STAR, pesticides, oil, etc.

Upon arriving to the elementary school, we, the volunteers, were assigned to our own classes to help out with. When I heard that one class was going to be working in the garden, I quickly volunteered myself for that classroom. I went over to room 22, where a 3rd grade class was in the middle of the classroom portion of a two part lesson about pollution provided by two UCSC undergraduate interns.

The discussion of pollution was definitely themed toward the Watsonville landscape of farms. A lot of the topics seemed to go over the kids heads, and I don't blame them. The UCSC students even gave the 3rd grade students a chance at guessing what nonpoint source pollution (NPS) could be, which I just had to look up myself to know exactly what those terms meant when put together. They also didn't have all their facts together, as they said that pesticide kills bugs and not weeds, but really pesticides kill anything considered pests, including weeds, although they are more specifically labeled as herbicides.

The second portion of the pollution lesson consisted in going out to the garden where the children got into groups and created a simulated contaminated water supply. The ingredients were water, grass, vegetable oil, beans, vinegar, paper clippings, and cumin. They represented water, runoff foliage, car and industrial oil, poop, acid, trash, and pesticides, respectively. Although it could have served as a good simulation for educational purposes, the kids' age range was not on point. In third grade kids need to be involved and constantly challenged in order to keep their attention and interest. In this exercise, I feel more time was spent by the UCSC interns and the teacher in keeping the kids seated at the benches and quiet than actually teaching them something. To me, this is all because of the structure of the lesson. It is my feeling that kids at that age still learn very kinesthetically, by movement, so keeping them contained will not only hamper their learning, but it will be damn near impossible.

...break in non-stop writing...

I am blessed to have friends who have already graduated with degrees in areas that I'm interested in pursuing or researching myself. I just got off the phone with my friend who now teaches 3rd graders and majored in Psychology with a concentration in Child Development and also majored in Philosophy. After speculating in the previous passage about how kids learn at that age, especially in that context, I just had to get her opinion. Turns out I was pretty much spot-on!

She reference one of my favorite authors, Paulo Freire, who talks about how education can be transformed to actually serve the needs of the students more in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In the case of the 3rd graders that I was working with, the UCSC interns were using the banking method of teaching to get the kids to "learn." The banking method of teaching is the idea that students' minds are a tabula rasa, Latin for "blank slate," upon which teachers deposit their knowledge. In this instance, the interns assume the kids don't have any knowledge of pollution, and therefore it is the teachers' duty to fill in that space in their thinking. Sadly, this form of education remains the main mode of teaching throughout public education, which devalues the student's own experiences, their abilities to critically think, and the student's actual needs in learning.

While there were aspects of the lesson that required the students to come up with their own answers, most of the information was prescribed. Also, as I mentioned, the students were not being engaged. This leads me to emphasize the importance of experiential learning paired with problem-posing education. Problem-posing education was presented by Paulo Freire as and alternative to the banking approach, in that problems that can be and need to be solved by the students are the main focus, encouraging students to have an active role in their own education. While the 3rd graders did get a simulated polluted water supply, very little of the lesson utilized active problem solving. At the wrap up, when we asked the students what they learned (or remembered in this instance), very few of them could even recall what all the ingredients represented.

Before recess, the teacher had told me that in a conversation she had with her daughter the other day, she expressed that she didn't really feel like she was teaching her students anything except how to take tests. I discussed this concept a little with the group, with Scott reminding me that, at this point, it's not our place to criticize the failure of standardized testing. Really, how can we when this stupid test has been around since I was in K-12, until I graduated in 2006? If no one has abolished it yet, then who are we, as tutors and as unqualified outsiders, to tell a struggling school that succeeding in it is as relevant to the kids success as learning to juggle, but when the school's funding depends on it?

After recess, we got back into the function of containing the children's energy before we passed out the STAR practice tests. Because the teacher had already expressed to me that her focus was on teaching the kids how to get through the test, I understood the process when she taught the kids to look for key words in the question in order to find the answer in the text. The sad part was that in my mind I was thrown back to high school, when my professor was teaching me the exact same thing in order to succeed in another standardized test.

One student, Jesus, got done with all the questions really quick. I checked them, from afar, to see if they were all correct, and they were, though his answers started at #1 when the questions we were working on were #11-16. When time came to go over the questions as a class, he was totally in his own world of energetic, attention-grabbing behavior. Once again, I was reminded of back when I was a kid, but I eventually was diagnosed with "ADD," which I know think is a bogus diagnosis because I've recently been finding that everyone pretty much has ADD. I feel the problem isn't the child being inattentive, but the institution not giving the child enough to be interested in. So rather than fixing the problem in the institution, psychiatrists drug kids so they "misbehave" in uninspiring classes. I digress.

In the end, I did feel like all we were doing was getting them prepared for standardized testing. Furthermore, STAR might be the first test that gets students to think in this fashion, of working the system rather than actually learning and applying one's knowledge. This to me is an indicator that we should be encouraging critical thinking a lot sooner than high school, when critical thinking was beginning to be introduced to me (aside from punk music). If standardization, as a process of conforming minds to a certain standard, begins in elementary school, then we are wrong in thinking that beginning a discourse on how to think critically in high school will really do anything. By then, the standardized form of schooling has been ingrained. (Click the link for John Taylor Gatto's breakdown of compulsory education to see what I mean, and how it has very negative effects on our society, since we're over consuming and all). Standardized testing, because those who design the tests don't take into account the differences - class, race, location - among school settings, the tests also privilege mostly white middle-class students, who don't have to deal with internalized oppression as an active force affecting their judgement going into the test.

As an anarchist, I do not see the viability in traditional education nor in standardized testing. Standardized testing doesn't make sense. Because humans live, breathe, eat, sleep, and clothe themselves differently, it is likely that they will think differently. That means they will do some tasks at different paces than others, it means that they will do different things according to the different situations, and it means they can focus more in some areas and less in others compared to other people. People generally learn differently from other people. I'm not saying that you can't put people into some loosely defined group based on types of learning, but nothing is ever fixed. Therefore, testing that gets standardized county-wide, state-wide, and nation-wide are useless in showing a students' performance. Using these standardized tests to decide what funding schools will get is an injustice to people everywhere, and it's a sad reason why schools are turning charter and killing unions. But that's another issue.

The structure of schools are also against my principles. Schools set up a hierarchy of knowledge, and, as Gatto mentions, diffuses critical thinking. The system sets up a prison-like day-care center for kids where rules must be stringently obeyed, especially those of the people in authority, namely teachers and administrators. The fear of these peoples' positions, as well as the rules they enforce, make it hard to question ones' environment. Not to mention the sad fact that every piece of knowledge has gotten compartmentalized, so that once you learn about the great mechanization of industry you don't learn about the horrible alienating reverberations sent throughout society. Anarchist back in the day realized the lack of attention to class in school, so they set up modern schools. Now-a-days, anti-authoritarians and forward thinkers realize how compulsory schools and higher learning institutions facilitate a concentration of knowledge, and therefore power, while simultaneously devaluing community based education and experiential learning. To combat that, skill-shares and free skools have been organized to provide non-hierarchal education on a range of topics. I've been meaning to make it out to the Santa Cruz free skool myself, and I tried to get a skill-share going during Tent City, but we got mostly rained out and I didn't plan it out well enough. Let me know if you ever want to go.