Randy Turner's Blog - Posts Tagged "education"

I have always heard those stories about high concept phrases that lead to books and movies, but I never thought I would ever write that way.

My first novel, Small Town News, published in 2005, was a fictionalized version of a true story that happened when I was teaching in the small Diamond, Missouri, School District in 2001. Our superintendent, the man who hired me, disappeared on the same day the city's bank was robbed. The two events had nothing to do with each other, but that will never stop them from being inextricably linked in the minds of Diamond residents.

My eighth grade writing class inspired me to write the book when class members complained about the way the media was treating the superintendent's widow. So I had the basic idea for my story- how a small town reacts when it is under siege from the media. I drew upon a lifetime of living in small towns and 22 years as a newspaper reporter and editor to write the novel. It was a mild regional success.

The next year I took a shot at something I had always wanted to write- a mystery horror story. Devil's Messenger told the story of a teenage date rape victim who communicates with her murdered father through instant messenger. I thought the book was far superior to Small Town News, so naturally, it flopped, and for the next several years, I stuck to non-fiction.

It was one line, actually three words, that finally made me want to get back to fiction and oddly enough, it was not the line that serves as the headline for this post.

I wanted to write something about the problems facing those of us who are in the trenches of everyday public education in the United States. I have been in contact with teachers all over this country, had done a considerable amount of reading, and at first, I thought I would write another non-fiction book, perhaps combining many of the education blogs I have written for Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and the Turner Report. Then one night, I was watching the Glenn Ford movie from the mid-50s, about life in a high school, The Blackboard Jungle, and I thought it was time to update the concept to the 21st Century and the three words, The Smartboard Jungle, popped into my mind and immediately that became the working title for my third novel.

The new book, however, did not have juvenile delinquency as its central theme, but the twin horrors of public education, students with weapons and a clueless bureaucracy that slowly beats the idealism out of classroom teachers.

That's when the tagline occurred to me- If the shooter doesn't get them, the system will. The title, No Child Left Alive, of course, is a play on one of the most miserable educational "reforms" ever created, No Child Left Behind.

The book emphasizes the problems teachers face during one year in a dysfunctional public high school, following the dictates of a new leader and a scheming assistant who was passed up for the main job after the death of the head administrator.

From there, I weaved stories of bureaucratic inefficiency and brilliant ideas designed to keep up with government dictates or to game the system, but which do nothing to improve education.

Teachers in any public school system in the United States should be able to recognize themselves or their colleagues in No Child Left Alive.

Hopefully, they wil be able to survive the system and will never have to face a shooter.

Thanks for reading. No Child Left Alive can be found at this link: http://www.amazon.com/No-Child-Left-A...

The book is available for free download through Tuesday, October 9. After that, it will be available for $2.99.

As the school district where I teach moves rapidly toward becoming one of the most modern in the United States, I received a number of reminders yesterday of the pitfalls of relying too much on technology.

For years, I have shown my eighth graders a news clip from the year 2000 about a 13-year-old boy who challenges a 15-year-old to a fight as they are riding the school bus home. When they get off the bus, the 15-year-old hits the 13-year-old on the back of the head, causing the younger boy to fall to the ground fatally wounded.

After the 13-year-old is pulled off life support, the older boy is charged with felony murder and is tried as an adult. After he is convicted, by Georgia law he is automatically sentenced to life in prison.

The 20-minute video brings up three issues that have always sparked great discussions:

1. Should a 15-year-old stand trial as an adult and should someone that young be sentenced to life in prison?

2. Should parents be held responsible for the acts of their children? The dead boy's parents state in this video that they think the killer's parents should also be in prison.

3. What should schools do to protect children? It is revealed in the video that the killer had received 34 referrals, been suspended 11 times, and had threatened to kill one girl and burn down her home.

The Miller/Belluardo discussion is one the students have always found fascinating, but I dropped it last year because of technology. My only copy of the video was on an old fashioned videocassette.

This year, I decided to bring back the case as a good way to end the first quarter. I took my camcorder and shot the story as it was playing on my TV screen. Though that it is never pretty, it worked, so I thought I was ready for a day of stimulating discussions.

Overconfidence is never a good thing.

The next morning, I arrived at school at 6:40 a.m., knowing I only had a short time to load the video onto my school-issued laptop since we had a professional development training meeting scheduled for 7:15 a.m.

The process of loading the video into I-Movie went smoothly until the very end when a message popped onto the screen showing an error. The computer I have is one of the oldest still being used in the district and apparently, the I-Movie on it was out of date. At that point, it was almost time for the meeting.

I took my computer and camcorder with me and another teacher agreed to load the video. I also knew I had the option of getting another laptop when I returned to my classroom after the meeting.

When the meeting concluded, the video was still loading on my colleague's computer, but I decided to hedge my bet, but grabbing a second laptop from our mobile I-cart and loading it there as well.

I was in the middle of that process when the math teacher who has been using the computer cart this week, came in and asked me if I was using computer number 10. I was. "That one has been causing us problems," he said. Sure enough, moments later, the computer screwed up.

One more strike against technology.

I retrieved another laptop from the cart and began the process for the third time (four counting my colleague's efforts). As I was starting, the fire alarm sounded.

We hurried for the exits, figuring it was a drill. As it turned out, it wasn't. Some smoke had set off a faulty sensor and we had to stay outside for more than half an hour as the fire department made sure the sensor was all right and we could return to classes.

When we finally got back into the building, we immediately had to go to our commons area for an assembly featuring a motivational speaker. I stayed in my room long enough to load the video. This time, it worked.

I needed to use the camcorder to video the assembly so I took it to one of the members of the Journalism Club She had just begun shooting when the camcorder died. I had let the battery run down while downloading the video.

I hurriedly returned it to my room, plugging it in so it could recharge. After the assembly, there was not enough time left in my third hour class to show the video, so I began setting it up for fourth hour and discovered that the mirroring function of my laptop was not working which meant I could not show it on the whiteboard.

We were already into fourth hour when I sent a student to see if our tech guy was available. He came into my classroom moments later and, at first, he could not figure out what the problem was. Then he hit the "Eureka" moment, as he discovered that I had unplugged the device so I could recharge my camcorder.

With that fixed, he left, and I prepared to show the video. Only I could not see the video on my screen. I could hear it, but I couldn't see it. Unforgivably, I snapped at my students, who were acting as any students would act if their teacher was playing with technology in front of the room when it was time for class to be in session. (They will receive an apology today.)

By the time, I finally found it, I was disheartened to discover that the sound on the first part of the video was not loud enough for the students to hear it- and I still had half an hour of class and nothing left to do.

As usual, I had a fallback plan, and we had a classroom discussion based on the positive and negative things that had happened to the students during the first quarter and somehow, it turned into a great discussion.

Unable to show the video, I continued with the discussions during my final two classes. They turned into some of the best discussions we have had all year, and we have had some good ones.

Last night, I reshot the Miller/Belluardo video on my IPod and I am going to try it again. The IPod loads on my IPhoto, which has been working, but I am never going to get overconfident again.

I have a backup plan just in case.

Don't you just love technology?

It is never easy to record a webcam video during the time of year when anyone with a landline telephone (sorry, I am hopelessly out of touch with the modern era) receives one robocall after another.

I was almost completely finished with my video, when the phone rang loudly, trashing my efforts. I answered and it was one of those calls designed to leave messages, but only on answering machines.

After a few of the mild epithets (condemn it, being one) that I always use instead of the hard stuff, I gave the video one more shot, and thankfully, it worked out.

In the video, I receive endorsements for my new e-novel about education, No Child Left Alive, from some top names, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, entertainer (and alleged singer) Britney Spears, and horror writer Stephen King.

It remains to be seen if this big-time display of celebrity firepower sells any books, but it certainly was an adventure making the video, which can be found at http://rturner229.blogspot.com/2012/1...

No phrase irritates me as much as "data-driven education."

As someone who has dealt with educational data for the past 35 years, first as a reporter and now as a classroom teacher, I have learned that statistics should never be taken at face value.

From my discussions with teachers across the United States, I have seen many of my thoughts confirmed and many of them in a way that scares me, especially when it comes to statistics on violence in our schools.

I have heard one story after another of how school administrators, seeking to climb up the organizational ladder, report declining statistics on violent incidents and referrals, often by categorizing them differently, or by adding a separate layer of reports that are then not included in those that go to the state or federal governments.

I also hear from teachers who suffer the consequences when their building administrators, often following edicts from top administration, send those who commit classroom disruptions back into the same classrooms without any type of meaningful consequence. This has led to an increasing feeling of isolation among teachers, and in fact, has led many of them to leave for other, less stressful, better-paying jobs.

That lack of discipline has led, despite "statistics" from many school districts showing that the number of such "incidents" is on the decline, to an increased amount of bullying, which always leaves the door open to the sort of violent incident that happened April 20, 1999, at Columbine, and has been repeated since then across the country.

Education, in a frenzy brought on, in part, by No Child Left Behind, perhaps just as much as a reaction to the so-called "reformers" who are looking for ways to profit from public education or want to destroy it so they do not have to pay taxes (since they are sending their own children to private schools, anyway), has jumped on the bandwagon of one fad after another, often with sketchy, sometimes non-existent statistical backing.

And let's face it, it is hard for school boards and administrators to make names for themselves, unless they are trying the latest "innovative" methods of teaching, even as they discard those two years later for the next round of can't miss, cutting edge, state-of-the-art advancements.

All of these factors increasingly leave classroom teachers in a struggle to separate the wheat from the chaff among these educational ideas, and being forced often to make "innovations" work even when common sense says they won't.

Teachers' struggles to cope with all of these outside forces are the focus of my novel, No Child Left Alive. I had initially planned a Christmas promotion for the e-book this weekend, but I do not intend to try to make a profit from a book with that title and with the tagline "If the shooter doesn't get them, the system will," in the wake of Friday's shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut,

At the same time, I firmly believe that the issues brought up in the book are worthy of discussion, so I am offering free downloads of No Child Left Alive today (Sunday, December 16) and tomorrow.

Buzzwords like "data-driven education" and "best practices" are often the enemy of real education and rely on statistics and personal ambition that have nothing to do with the reality our nation's teachers see in the classroom every day.

Please feel free to download the book today or tomorrow at Amazon and let's start a discussion.