Life in the Classroom
Thank you for the magnificent photo on the September 2001 cover and for the other photos throughout the magazine. I am an education consultant far removed from the schoolroom, but this splendid photography puts me right back in the classroom and shows how learning looks when it hums. Your photos sing!
—Mary Berliner Cabral, Education Consultant, Accelerated Learning, Nevada City, California
Don't Standardize Teaching
In his interview with Educational Leadership's Editor in Chief Marge Scherer, Robert J. Marzano ("How and Why Standards Can Improve Student Achievement," September 2001) chooses his words carefully, but he implies that classroom teachers are too busy or intellectually challenged to be responsible for selecting content and establishing standards and that they desperately need the help of the bureaucracy. "Someone at the district or school level," he says, "has to cut the content down: get lean and mean and identify the bare-bones essential content" (p. 17).
If teachers don't define the essential core of the curriculum, then what are they doing? Are they robots? Marzano's apparent effort to teacher-proof the curriculum, schools, classrooms, and students is typical of much of the past century's misguided education thought.
Although Marzano is correct in saying that we should "cut the number of standards and the content within standards dramatically" (p. 14), he wants to do it with a centralized, dictatorial, top-down approach. Teachers, however, are where the rubber meets the road and where participatory, collegial decision making about curriculum should be. Centralized standardization takes the serendipity out of teaching and learning.
Standards and certain testing—such as the current minimalist Texas TAAS test—are both important and useful, but the organizing principle of public education should never be a set of tests or someone else's standards. Rather, education should center on seeking the answers to three questions: What does it mean to be an educated person? What does a quality education look like? How can we tell?
—Thomas Prentice, Assistant Professor, Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas
At Risk for Suicide
As a clinical psychologist and school district administrator, I was pleased that Jeff Q. Bostic, Carel Ristuccia, and Steven C. Schlozman addressed the issue of the suicidal student in public schools ("Shrink in the Classroom," October 2001), but they should have mentioned the risk for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender students. The Center for Disease Control's Youth Risk Behavior found that students who identify themselves as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender are three to five times more likely to attempt suicide than are their peers.
—Alan L. Storm, Assistant Superintendent, Student Services, Sunnyside Unified School District, Tucson, Arizona
Read-Aloud Time Creates Community
Bravo to Steve Gardiner's "Ten Minutes a Day for Silent Reading" (October 2001). In my 4th grade class, we have a 15-minute read-aloud period while students eat their snacks in the morning and a 15-minute sustained silent reading time immediately after lunch. On Back-to-School night, parents were amazed when I showed them that those short periods add up to 45 hours of read-aloud time and 45 hours of sustained silent reading during the year. The read-aloud time allows us to share a common culture of complex, well-crafted literature that is several years beyond the students' independent reading abilities. Our silent reading period, by the way, is called SQUIRT (Super Quiet Uninterrupted Independent Reading Time).
—Keith Schoch, Fourth Grade Teacher, Thelma L. Sandmeier School, Springfield, New Jersey
We Should Teach Health and Physical Education, Too
Although the issue "What Should We Teach?" (October 2001) paid close attention to science, math, social studies, music, and art, I was disappointed to find no direct support for physical education or health instruction. Each content area has to compete with other disciplines to continue to exist in a shrinking school day, and I spend much time advocating for the terrific men and women who are committed, professional, and expert at what they do daily in the gymnasium, on the playing field, and in the classroom. Unfortunately, the October issue struck out by omitting this important discipline.
—Patricia Degon, Director, Health and Physical Education, Shrewsbury Public Schools, Shrewsbury, Massachusetts
