If You Could Give Your Students Only One Thing, What Would It Be

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Author: Ella Hebe

The power cords slither across the formaldehyde-backed industrial carpet in an entangled web of electrical promise. Laptop computers stand at attention, flipped open all around the U-shaped table. The LCD projector hums overhead. We're entering the third hour of a PowerPoint presentation about how to effectively incorporate ACT standards into our curriculum. A red laser ball hops and wiggles on the screen in the front of the room as if it wants us to sing a song.

Later this afternoon, we'll be arguing about which of us English teachers should be awarded the honor of teaching our students the glory of the semicolon and which will get to teach Macbeth. But for now, we're just sitting here—a team of professional, public Audemar Piguet Replica school artisans reduced to a hypnotic zombie-state as we try to absorb the data: Kids who score high on the ACT are less likely to commit suicide, we're told. They make fewer trips to the doctor. And they make more money when they enter the workforce. One of my younger colleagues, dressed in gym shorts and a gray foodie, flexes his calf muscles rhythmically. Next to him, a veteran teacher is counting the days till retirement behind closed eyelids. Or maybe he's praying; it's hard to tell. One dedicated teacher, a middle-aged woman who came into the profession later in life after working in the corporate world, peeks up at the screen over her bifocals, intensely engaged, processing, calculating, and assimilating the data with a knowing nod. To my far left, the basketball coach munches granola. To my far right, the hardest-working teacher in our building rapidly taps away at her laptop's keyboard, trying to keep pace with the presenter. By tomorrow, she will email each of us a detailed synopsis of the entire presentation. An administrator is sitting next to me in suit and tie, obsessively checking his BlackBerry while another administrator, who is seated next to the presenter, nods off, then jerks herself awake and offers a pointless, irrelevant observation. Across the room, the AP teachers sit grimacing over sternly folded arms, no doubt conjuring spells they will later cast over all of us. I can almost hear the echo of "Foul is fair and fair is foul" passing between them as their eyes burn holes in the image on the projection screen.

The presenter is an East Coast guy who educated his own kids in private schools. He's clad in an athletic, nylon pullover and tan polyester pants with pointy Italian leather shoes. When he's not clicking to the next slide, he's stroking his well-groomed, white, professorial beard and telling us it's OK to have "lofty ambitions when we adopt the ACT standards Omega Replica Watches and develop assessments, which will create a reliable pool of data from which to assess our effectiveness." The tech-savvy administrator looks up from his BlackBerry to remind us that lofty goals are great, "But don't forget, the bottom line is that we need to see a three-point improvement on the ACT this year."

I did not bring a laptop computer to this meeting. I do not own a BlackBerry. I'm scribbling these "notes" on a yellow legal pad in crude hieroglyphics so that no one will be able to see that I'm off-task—thinking aloud on paper about the bizarre assumptions that are being made here by everyone in this room, including even the most independent and cynical educators among us.

The basic premise of the presentation is that the primary goal of high school ought to be to prepare kids to succeed in college. And no one in the room has balked at this thesis. There was a time when such a statement would have enraged most high school teachers. It would've started a firestorm of debate, preventing the presenter from reaching his second slide, much less leading us on a three-hour tour to Gilligan's "College-Readiness" Island.