Modeling

I haven’t kept up either of my blogs for some months now.  That doesn’t mean that I have stopped thinking, or stopped having interesting experiences, on the contrary… it just means that working full time and going to school full time have taken precedence over blogging.  I want to air some of my observations from the trenches of America’s public school system in underprivileged areas.  Most of these thoughts have been brought on by a question that Teach for America asked its corps members on our mid-year survey.  One of the questions read “Is educational inequity the most pressing issue facing our country?”  I paused to reflect on all the factors that contribute to educational inequity, and then to the factors that feed those factors.  Trying to place them into a hierarchy of most pressing is somewhere between difficult and impossible.    When I started TFA I (correctly) assumed that some of the fault for educational inequity and other societal problems lay with the actual school system.  While there are lots of broken pieces in our school system, and there is fault and blame to go around, I want to call attention to some principals that I find lacking in America’s underbelly.  Principals that I think have been fundamental to America’s success and could be fundamental to her fall… today I will start with modeling as a teaching technique, and keep a look out for more on the way.

Modeling

While I have considered a career in modeling, that is not the topic of this post.  Rather modeling is something we talk about all the time in teaching.  Modeling how to do a task, operation, or procedure is simply good didactic practice.  Modeling is how much of our learning occurs both in school and at home.

I have had some funny run ins with parents who perhaps don’t see that the modeling that the student sees at home is being acted out with detrimental effects in school.  For example, we recently called in a parent to discuss her child’s insatiable appetite for hitting his peers every time anything slightly annoying happens to him.  As soon as we told the parent about this issue, she turned to her son and walloped him upside the head and said “Don’t hit” she seemed to think that she had resolved the issue.  I had to turn away and cover my face so that the parent wouldn’t see me laughing at her… all that she had taught her child in that instance was that when frustrated, the natural response is to hit.

The modeling that my male kids see out of males is usually even worse than what I’ve described above.  Only a small percentage of my students have male role models in the home, and some have no males in their lives whatsoever.  So where do they see male behavior modeled? TV, movies, music, sports and me.  This translates into a myriad of problematic beliefs and behaviors including machoism, objectifying women, defiance towards authority, pride, etc

Sports figures have a chance to redeem the males that my students see on TV.  Of course the fact is that TV shows A-Rod doing steroids, J-Rich doing 90 in a 35 zone, and Pacman Jones starting gun fights in strip clubs… great male models.  This week was another example: A friend invited me to a Sharks NHL game, I was thrilled to go, not only for the good company but also because my kids love the Sharks and watch their games often.  I am not much of a hockey fan, and haven’t been to a game in quite some time.  I was disappointed to see the stupid kind of macho flare-up fights that occurred at least every five minutes in a hockey game.  The fighting is completely purposeless, and detracts from an otherwise beautiful game.  Just as bad as the actual skirmishes is the crowd’s reaction.  They seemed to cheer louder for each one of the tiny flare-ups than for goals scored.  I felt like inviting the man next to me to my middle school so he could cheer on the brawls there too. 

Is that really what we want to encourage? Many of my students who don’t have male role models at home take notice of whatever other models they see.  It is no wonder they get up in each other’s faces every time anyone says anything that could be construed as offensive -- they see it on TV, they see it in the arena and they hear thousands of adults cheering for it.

While I hope that I am a good model of how a man ought to interact with his world, I fear that what they see in me diametrically opposes 12-15 years of their own observational experience.  Those years of observing bad models aren’t easily undone.

 You reap what you sow America.  We have sowed some violent winds, and now must face a forecast for a lot of storms.