I have a student who reads well and is a math whiz, but can be hyper-focused on a book or a math concept that he finds intriguing. Sometimes during discussion time, he will focus on making origami birds, one after another, rather than participate. It’s a quiet activity but can be distracting as other kids at his table watch his progress instead of leaving him to himself. Other times, he uses his pencil like a tiny baton, twisting it back and forth like a drum major. It flicks the table and this time it’s a noisy distraction. His mother is one of my best classroom volunteers. She won’t tell him that he’s been diagnosed with ADHD, even though he has seen articles about the syndrome on television and has said, “Is that me?”
the pencil as distraction
Was it luck that I didn’t blurt out in a conversation with the boy and his parent a comment about such symptoms? I know better than to offer a diagnosis, no matter how distressed the parent is. But just an offhand comment would have been unkind.
Compare my problem in a full classroom of smart children with the articles in the news about Tennessee and Memphis. The state was one of the first lucky grantees of Race to the Top funds to turn around low-performing schools. How can a state turn a piece of luck into the monstrosity that has become the model as depicted on TV and in the news? Speed seems to be the problem. For one, the state instituted a teacher evaluation system based on a single poor test, instead of spending the time to devise a good model for evaluation. Second, the changes were made top-down, not getting buy-in from the teachers or administrators affected before implementing change.
On top of that confusion, imagine re-playing the 70’s when white students left the Memphis schools for the suburbs to avoid integration. At that time the district had a half white and half black demographic, but all black schools on one side of town and all white on the opposite side of the city. Now it’s an issue of money-the inner city district is way down on its luck and the suburban county district is doing fine. A controversy over who gets how much lead to the merger of the districts. Good luck for the students in Memphis, but class and race challenges rise to the surface for the suburbs.
Reading about those shifts makes me wonder what’s going to happen to the children like my ADHD student who need support way down at the classroom level.
Will their luck depend on me as one of the teachers who keeps chugging along even in difficult circumstances? Leave it to the big guys to hash out the system? And hope that the big guys rise above race and class and use some research to guide decisions. Can we depend on such luck?
