Rose Moon Rose

By surprise, in the cold and rain,

the moon of a fertile love

long past,

with only a little vigilance and care,

The Rose Moon Rose.

The Problem with Those ******* Tests

I had an interesting box lunch at a state-wide teachers’ conference yesterday; English teachers of high school students on one side of the room and of students entering college on the other. On each side of the room, teachers were divided into small groups and each group composed a list of four or five things their students needed to know in order to succeed in their respective courses. Then each group joined with a group from the other side of the room, and compared notes, and finally there was a whole-group sharing of results

The results were both illuminating and disturbing. The high school teachers’ responses focused on specific skills and information apparently required to prepare for standardized testing; identifying genres, terms, vocabulary, even test-taking skills. The college teachers did not answer this question in terms of specific knowledge at all. In the final discussion, it became clear that our side of the room we are actually quite flexible about what, specifically, we are prepared to teach; if they don’t know the difference between an argumentative essay and a cause-and-effect essay, we are ready with numerous examples. At the same time, we expect resourcefulness and initiative from our students that the high school teachers do not; we want them to go look up things they don't understand and to ask us if they are still confused. Our responses to the question of student success had largely to do with what might be described as student identity: taking responsibility for their own learning, asking for clarification, knowing how to find and evaluate information, willingness to examine and evaluate conflicting information and points of view, and (curiously not mentioned by the high school teachers) understanding that they need to come to class, come on time and do all the assignments, and that not doing those things throughout the semester leads inevitably to a low grade.

Responses from these two groups of teachers were apples and oranges. High school teachers are forced, because of the high stakes of the standardized tests, to focus on knowledge specifics. Success in college depends less on what, exactly, students already know than on how willing and able they are to find out. Whatever it is those tests measure, it isn’t college readiness.

Perhaps a better test of college readiness might be a sort of individualized information scavenger hunt. Each student gets his or her own randomly selected list of questions, and an hour or so in a library to find the answers.

Bobby, here. Mrs. D. finally figured out how to get me an email address and get me onto this blog. A few false starts, including figuring out that she can't sign me up for an email account using my real birth date, duh...like I said before, not the brightest chipmunk in the tree. I'm about 45 in dog years, but they don't know how that works at Google.

We went to Texas for Spring Break, where things are not going especially well. We're staying with the folks who have a pet pig I'm not allowed to chase, and now they have a new puppy with no manners that I'm also supposed to get along with. This puppy thinks I am a puppy, apparently. I'm not.

The humans seem to be enjoying themselves, however. They think the puppy is cute, and they think the things they say to each other are important and sometimes even funny.

I am hunkered down and hoping for better days, but just thought I'd let you know I'm hooked up.

Wind Moon Waning

The Moon in Aries, after the Spring Equinox, called by disparate names—magic moon, seed moon, wind moon. Why this one should be more magic than any other, I don’t know. For the best Magic, I would favor the Harvest Moon, the one that falls in Virgo, in late August or early September, but perhaps that’s because I’m a Virgo myself.

Seed Moon makes sense, because the Spring Equinox begins the Planting Time, when the ebb-tide of Fire makes the earth ready for the powers of humankind to sow it.

But this year it was most of all the Wind Moon, blustery and wet. Monday night we met at the accustomed bar and hofbrau down near the shore, with our long-standing plan to go down to the water to greet the Moon after dinner. But one friend was sick, another exhausted, the weather impossible. Three of us drank, ate, felt kind of old, and called it a night. It felt like a defeat of sorts.

The work week has passed, the wind and rain continue. Hard on the old joints. A flyer from the teachers’ union in our mailboxes at work urges us to consider retiring now, before the current contract expires, because after they negotiate a new contract our retirement benefits may look rather different. However, I think my Magic for this season will be to just keep doing what I do, wind or no wind.

The story behind the way of things runs in a circle, and can be entered at any moment of the year.

This is the time of the God's transformation from child to man. He beholds the Lady, now a mature maiden, and is overwhelmed with love. She is ready for union, but knows that he is not yet ready for her.

Some say that there must be a swift, secret mating at this time, because it is nine months from now that the new God will be born. But there is really no need for the Gods to conform to the biological time frame of humankind, or any other species.

Be that as it may, the Lady sends him away, into the Greenwood. She gives him work to do, to prove his manhood; mysterious tasks, secret gifts--it is whispered between them, what is to do be done.

She sends him away, to live wild in the Greenwood until time and work are accomplished. She promises that if he does all that she requires, she will meet him on May Eve in the Greenwood, and become his wife.

Equinox

At the Spring Equinox, I was told by by first teacher of the Craft, the Fire tide reaches its height and begins to ebb. It marks the coming-of-age of the young God, who was born at Yule and will be crowned at Midsummer. With the ebbing of the fire tide comes the season for sowing; seed is sown for new life, new workings and new endeavors. Fire has the power to destroy and create anew, and now, in the ebb-tide, I have found that a Witch's power grows--the tides flow at the Great Sabbats, ushering in times ruled by the powers of Nature; the ebb-tides are more susceptible to the influence of human magic.

This, and the time of Harvest between Lammas and the Fall Equinox, are the two most demanding times of the year.

There may be hard work on many levels--professional, emotional, and magical. Projects to start, new developments in your relationships with others. Magical work that you undertake at this time may have far-reaching implications. All this work will use to the utmost the resources you have been mustering during the past few seasons.

You may well have feelings of pressure and urgency about all that needs to be done during this season, and you may find that you have little or no leisure time for a while. Be sure that you get enough food, sleep, and rest to sustain your health. Pay conscious attention to time
management, and do not get swept away by the feeling that you are too busy to be organized.

Seek out companions in your work whose company gives you pleasure and who share your values and goals. Such friends will make the work more enjoyable, and mutual-assistance arrangements can help get jobs done.

This is a time for sharing resources and tools, as in the old days a team of oxen and a plow could be shared around several farms until all the fields were sown.

The Bottom Five Percent

It’s good to hear that the Obama administration has taken notice of the failures of No Child Left Behind—beginning with the cruel irony of its name, because it has been leaving so very many children behind. (The ones I know best are the teenaged immigrants of Oakland who were abandoned in a weird triage program that funnels a strapped urban school system’s limited resources into the intensive coaching of the kids haven’t passed the test yet, but might. Fifteen-year-olds who turn up not speaking English aren’t going to pass the test any time before the age of 18, so just provide some kind of nominally supervised space for them to hang out in for a year until they can drop out. Then, if they or their families still have any aspirations for them, they will turn up in a community college where we do, in fact, have classes and teachers for them.)

But to return to Obama’s proposed renovations. Now, I wanted Obama with all my heart, but when it comes to education, which is what I do, I’m starting to feel like what Tom Lehrer described, in another context long ago, as a Christian Scientist with appendicitis. First we heard about competitive grants and a “race for the top.” A race is by definition something that most people lose. It is not a good paradigm for public education. To get a competitive grant, you need a good grant writer. Good grant writers cost money. I’ve worked in inner city schools where nobody had the time or energy to fill out the forms for the most obvious non-competitive funds, let along any hard-to-get grants.

Here in California we lost this race, being too broke or too disorganized or too union-ridden or something. (California schools have a very high proportion of English language learners, and we who teach them have an unreasonable tendency to resent evaluations made of them, and us, based on tests administered only in a language they don't yet know very well.) But I think in fact that failling to qualify for this new game plan may be a blessing in disguise. Now the idea is to target the lowest five percent of the low-performing schools, and be very, very tough with them. Fire teachers and principals, who are obviously the culprits who are responsible. Give their jobs to creative and enthusiastic people who are waiting in the wings, just dying to take over. You snooze, you lose.

For several years, I worked as the coordinator of a family literacy program, funded by a competitive grant won by Catholic Charities, which can pay grant writers, which operated out of the lowest-performing elementary school in California. For a year or two it was second to the bottom, edged up by another one down in the LA area. But then we slipped down to the place of honor once again. It is probably a lot like the lowest-performing elementary school in most other states.

There is a lot about this kind of school that Obama does not seem to know. For one thing, before you go firing the staff, many of whom who are either recent college graduates rapidly recovering from their idealism or genuine saints hanging in there from dogged dedication, be very sure that you really have figured out who else wants to work there. It's not like casting a Broadway show, or anything like that. The jobs were very hard to fill, as I recollect. Perhaps in the present job market people are more available, but they won’t be any more creative or enthusiastic.

And please, before you blame the school for those low test scores, have a look at the community it's sitting in. The school where I worked serves two communities, living side by side in more or less equal numbers, with no love lost between them. It is an inner-city African-American neighborhood devastated by the drug epidemic. Kids damaged by drugs before they were born, kids surfing sofas, kids raised by impoverished and exhausted elderly relatives who do their best while the parents are off somewhere burning up the welfare checks in their crack pipes. The neighborhood also serves as a landing pad for recently arrived immigrants, mostly undocumented Mexicans, a more hopeful community, partly because their involvement in the drug scene is more peripatetic and more profitable, and partly because they tend to go find somewhere cleaner and safer to live around the same time that they start learning English, so that if the kids do eventually pass the Star test, it will be somewhere else.

Don’t blame the principal and the teachers in this place for the low test scores. Pin medals on them for their efforts to head off violence, scrounge up food and clothes for everybody, and remain calm at the sound of nearby gunfire.


In unrelated news, it's St. Patrick's Day.

"St. Patrick drove the serpents out, and brought the churches in,
'Twas a bloody poor bargain, I would say, be Pagan once again!"

(Lyrics by Isaac Bonewitz, to be sung to the tune of "A Nation Once Again.")