The Success For All Foundation is excellent at turning genuine learning opportunities into moments of dull conformity.
One day this past spring my 5th period class was threatening to break free of that mold.
Whenever I can go quiet, take a seat on top of a desk in the room, and simply point and speak students’ names while they carry the conversation, I know that true understanding can’t be far off.
The text that day was Novio Boy, a play by Gary Soto published in 1997 that centers on the first teenage date of a boy who’s romantically interested in an older girl. The play is somewhat predictable, but also funny, thoughtful, and rich with potential for understanding into what it means to be a young person who’s dating for the first time.
Students were absorbed in the discussion, asking questions of each other, referring to the text to defend their points of view, and bringing up examples from different mediums, including other books and their own experiences. In short, they were searching for insight.
But I was about to play my part and throw water on this spark.
The problem was that the questions that were mandated by The Success For All Foundation for this play simply sucked, and I had to turn students’ attention toward them.
The questions were too focused on the minutiae of stage direction and tone that they missed an opportunity to discuss young people’s relationships with adults, with their peers, or with their love interests. I ended up cutting off the discussion because we needed to move onto the “Lightning Round” (read: sharing their answers to the prescribed questions). In attempting solely to hammer home a format for answering questions on a standardized test, we missed a chance at gaining something more enduring.
Everyone involved in public schooling has their own ideas of what a complete education should look like, even if they’ve never taken a single moment to think about it.
People who don’t know any better (and some who do or should) bark about transferrable skills or training workers to beat the Chinese. SFA has made a fortune off those impulses, preferring to sacrifice insight in the pursuit of compliance and temporary skill proficiency.
Some days, I have preferred to go in the opposite direction: sacrificing the skills in order to focus on insight. I never completely skipped over the reading and the questions that The Foundation mandated, we just wouldn’t spend too much time belaboring the point when it came to discussing our answers. Instead we’d move onto a short documentary, a news clip, or an imagined roleplay.
To be clear: the reading helped to inform our understanding of whatever else I made time for–we didn’t abandon it, but the skill was no longer our Holy Grail.
The Success For All curriculum that I use is continually guilty of this myopia.
We read about the transmission methods of HIV in a magazine about infectious diseases without once mentioning the stigma surrounding gay people living with the virus.
We learned all about the great technological achievements of the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai without looking at an image of a worker from India who couldn’t leave because his passport had been confiscated by the very company that lured him to the UAE in the first place.
In short, we ignored opportunities for understanding for the sake of standardized proficiency.