What Really Counts

I was talking with a teacher this morning about her goals for the various children in her class.  She was able to talk about each child, and had a good idea already, even though it's early in the year, about what she wanted to emphasize in working with each of them.  Now you may be thinking, "OK, so probably one child has more difficulty with place value in math and another child has more difficulty with spelling multisyllable words. . ." and the like.  Yes, it's certainly true that this teacher knows all that, but the goals she was talking about this morning for the children in her care are more individual and more important than that.  With one child, she will be working on helping him to become more organized, to slow down and plan his work, to put more thought into it.  With another child, she will be working on helping her to become more assertive and to analyze and express her opinions more effectively.  With yet another child, she will be working on helping him to see others' points of view and to be more kind to his classmates and a better friend. . .

I'm sure that each of us has had some wonderful teachers in our past whom we remember to this day.  The teachers who made a difference in my life were the ones who knew me as a person, who showed me a new way to look at what I could possibly accomplish, and helped to open my horizons.  I remember my high school German teacher who took the time to work with me on my senior piano recital piece and sparked my confidence and love of music, and my 7th grade teacher who opened up the world of poetry to me and helped me to think that I could write. . .  I could go on, and I think that every one of us has stories like that and every parent has stories about a teacher who made that kind of difference in the life of his/her child.

I have recently finished reading an interesting book about children and character (How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, by Paul Tough) that reveals and emphasizes the importance of character, including qualities like perseverance, curiosity, conscientiousness, optimism, and self-control, for achievement and success in life.  These qualities are better predictors of both academic success and success in life, and Tough demonstrates how schools that work with children to develop these qualities help to give them the foundation for success that they need.  Today I also read a blog post discussing the other side of the same concept -- how blind faith in numbers leads to obsession with winning and failure to realize what's really important ("How Our Love For Numbers Warps School Reform", from "The Answer Sheet" in the Washington Post).  As noted in this entry:

In education, the question “How do we assess (kids, teachers, schools)?” has morphed over the years into “How do we measure…?” We’ve forgotten that assessment doesn’t require measurement — and, moreover, that the most valuable forms of assessment are often qualitative (say, a narrative account of a child’s progress by an observant teacher who knows the child well) rather than quantitative (a standardized test score). Yet the former may well be brushed aside in favor of the latter — by people who don’t even bother to ask what was on the test. It’s a number, so we sit up and pay attention. Over time, the more data we accumulate, the less we really know.

As you may have noticed, the school MCAS scores were released this week.  We did well, which I'm happy about, but I am much more happy about the fact that our teachers work with children in the way I described in the first paragraph of this post, and I hope we don't ever lose sight of that.