Common Core Advocacy As A Job Requirement?

16 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

Tags

Assessments, Common Core State Standards, Corporatized Education Reform, Education, Education Reform, Employment Practices, High-Stakes Testing, North Carolina, Partisan Politics, Teacher Effectiveness, Teacher Evaluations, The Hunt Institute, The James B. Hunt Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy

The James B. Hunt, Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy (aka, The Hunt Institute), building and logo, 1000 Park Forty Plaza, Durham, NC, January 16, 2014. (http://www.beacondevelopment.com and Facebook.com).

A few months ago, I applied for a Director of Programs job with The Hunt Institute in Durham, North Carolina. I know, I know. I should’ve known better, considering their ties to the Common Core, but I didn’t. In my defense, I did it through the University of North Carolina job website. I received an email on Monday to set up a Thursday interview, followed by another email on Tuesday asking me to write a hypothetical two-page brief “intended for a state legislator that describes why standards and assessments are important; how they interact; and what legislators need to understand about implementation.” (Keep in mind, The Hunt Institute is supposed to be a nonpartisan nonprofit organization).

Below is the brief I wrote in response (also, here):

Over the past decade and a half, you have been a key advocate of public education reform. You have helped pave the way for the adoption of Common Core Standards and a series of comprehensive assessments for students across the state. You have also served on committees that have urged the implementation of new measures for teacher effectiveness, measures based in no small part on the resulting scores that students and schools obtain on the new comprehensive assessments. Your rationale and that of your colleagues has been to cite the need to close the achievement gap between low-income students and students of color on the one hand, and high-income and White students on the other. Although this goal remains laudable, the means that you have advocated and the state of North Carolina has adopted will do more harm than good on the path toward educational equity and the nurturing of high academic achievement regardless of race and socioeconomic status.

There is mounting evidence across the state – indeed, across the country – that more and more comprehensive testing and assessments have failed to achieve the desired result of closing the achievement gap. Teachers and principals have noted that the time devoted to testing and to preparing students for testing has grown to the point where they have time for little else in terms of student learning. Recent surveys of students have shown that student motivation for learning has declined as the amount of testing has increased. And the most undeniable statistic is that nearly half of the state’s veteran teachers (i.e., teachers who have been in the profession for more than five years) have resigned or retired since we began introducing new state standards and assessments a little more than a decade ago.

This isn’t to suggest that we go back in time to the period before the rise of new state standards and assessments in the late-1990s. Rather, this is a time in which we should reflect on the deficiencies of the current model and take the following steps to ensure that our standards and assessments actually encourage student learning and thus a closing of the achievement gap. Below is a list of recommendations before continuing to move forward with Common Core State Standards and school district/statewide testing regimen:

1. Reconsider the Common Core, or at the very least, disconnect the relationship between it and the state assessments. States all over the country, including North Carolina, have reported problems in taking these standards and using them to develop appropriate curricula for their students. The use of these standards, developed in less than a decade, with little input from teachers, administrators, in some cases including administrators in Raleigh, has meant little to no ability for teachers on the ground to match up the standards with the curriculum or the needs of their students. It is simply a too big, one-size-fits-all approach to teaching and learning that results in neither teaching nor learning. The effect has been to reduce our classrooms to laboratories, where our teachers serve as principal investigators, and our students as lab rats. We should have standards, but ones that better fit our state and the needs of our students. Not to mention ones that allow for teacher adaptations to encourage learning.

2. Revise the number, frequency and kinds of assessments that we are doing for our students. As it stands now, we are doing entirely too many assessments too early and too often for students in the state. Assessments start as early as the second grade, with school district and state level assessments occurring throughout the year, approximately once ever six weeks. For students, the psychological effect has been to turn education into a torturous and boring chore, rather than a fun and imaginative process of learning and development. Nearly every study that nonpartisan groups have conducted in the past seven years has shown this to be true. To be sure, we need to do assessments, but not two or more levels of assessment six or seven times a year, especially in the elementary grades. Rather, we should be doing one set of diagnostic assessments twice a year at the elementary school level, and once a year at the middle and high school levels, so that the students in greatest need of academic help can get that help. In practical terms, the money the state legislature currently has devoted to testing and the testing companies for our regimen of assessments could be better spent on diagnostic testing and additional tutoring for students in need of it.

3. Resist the need to tie teacher evaluations to assessment scores. This is simply the wrong way to go about determining a teacher’s ability to reach their students. Even the best researchers in the field on teacher effectiveness have shown that the best teachers can only improve a classroom’s performance on any given assessment regimen by about two (2) percent. From poverty to eating a healthy breakfast and getting a good night’s sleep, there are plenty of factors in assessment scores in which individual teachers have no control. Yet the irony is that because the state has adopted this form of teacher evaluation, it has all but eliminated the ability of teachers to be teachers – to think independently and to act with enough autonomy to best determine how to reach their students. This kind of teacher evaluation process has encouraged every teacher in the state to “teach to the test.” This has significantly reduced the amount of time teachers devote to such tasks as independent reading, geography, social studies and other subjects that, ironically, stimulate student learning. We certainly need better trained teachers. What this means, though, is that the state needs to create a process by which the standards for entering the profession are higher. This could include the use of National Board for Professional Teaching Standards assessments of teacher excellence early on, as well as consistent mentoring and professional development as early as their first day in the classroom.

In summary, the best way to move forward in terms of standards and assessments is for our state not to rely on them as a substitute for actual teachers and actual teaching as the means for improving student performance. What we have in terms of standards and assessments is cost-ineffective, and it actually defeats the goal of closing the achievement gap, the very goal we in this state are all after.

It’s difficult to respect a job process in which a prospective employer isn’t up front about a key component of the position, in this case, the need to promote Common Core State Standards and teacher evaluations based on student assessments. It’s also difficult when they insist they’re nonpartisan, even though taking on the role of advocate for this brand of education reform is decidedly a centrist-conservative position. But being asked to not interview after writing this hypothetical brief is the best example for why education, politics and a job search should never come together. Especially if we really care about education and kids.

“The Negro Problem,” “The Jewish Question,” & “Closing the Achievement Gap”

10 Saturday Aug 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Anti-Union, Booker T. Washington, Closing the Achievement Gap, Corporatized Education Reform, Crisis in Education, Education Reform, Eugenicists, Eugenics Movement, Frederick Hoffman, High-Stakes Testing, Jewish Question, Negro Problem, Parallels, Private Foundations, Teacher Effectiveness, Teachers Unions, Technocrats, W. E. B. Du Bois

Logo of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, 1921, May 9, 2005. (Fastfission via Wikipedia). In public domain.

What do these three disparate phrases have in common? This came up during my recent lunch with my friend Andrew at Lebanese Taverna a little more than a week ago. Among other things, we were lamenting the dominant theme of education reform as union-busting and the supplanting of teachers with high-stakes tests and Teach for America substitutes.

As we discussed Andrew’s second book on the 1990s culture wars and their roots in the 1960s conservative movement, it occurred to me that what both of us have thought of as recent or new really wasn’t. The efforts over the past decade to “close the achievement gap,” an actual problem really, are based in the nineteen and twentieth-century eugenics movement more than it is in a real sincere effort to confront the barriers to high academic achievement for students in poverty and for students of color.

Satirical cartoon of Rudyard Kipling’s The White (?) Man’s Burden (“white” colonial powers being carried as the burden of their “colored” subjects), Life Magazine, March 16, 1899. (Travb via Wikipedia). In public domain.

“How does it feel to be a problem?,” W. E. B. Du Bois asked numerous times and wrote in numerous ways in his The Souls of Black Folk (1903). The Negro problem for White scholars and politicians at the turn of the twentieth century varied from Frederick Hoffman’s 1896 statistical eugenics argument that predicted the “extinction of the Negro” to the much more common struggle of how to educate the Negro (but not educate them too well). Hoffman’s White supremacy argument was a bit outside the mainstream even for his Whites-are-always-right era. The more mainstream problem of Negro education became one of “practical” vocational (or, as it was called at the time, industrial) education as advocated by accommodationist Booker T. Washington versus Du Bois’ higher education and leadership preparation for the Black Talented Tenth.

We’re here again, in the early twenty-first century, with the technocrats in government and White paternalists in the private foundation world sounding the alarm that there’s an achievement gap between the affluent and the poor, as well as between Whites, Blacks and Latinos. Except that this achievement gap’s been around for a half-century. Except that the biggest single factor in raising student achievement rates is family income and occupation(s), not more testing or a theory of change to assess teacher effectiveness. Except that schools in the districts in which the achievement gap is the most obvious — segregated, mostly poor and of color — are underfunded when accounting for inflation and other factors (e.g., age of school buildings, teacher-student ratios).

So too with the “Jewish question” in comparison to this crisis in education. One of the worst kept secrets in the first half of the twentieth century was that the Jewish question wasn’t just a Nazi German one, but an American one as well. The real Jewish question for American educators was how to explain Jewish overrepresentation as high achievers in public education and as the best and brightest in higher education. That despite the work of eugenicists — the technocrats of their day — to tweak IQ tests and entrance tests in favor of affluent White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

They couldn’t answer their Jewish question in higher education, except to limit the number of Jews accepted in elite institutions like Harvard, Yale and Princeton (in the latter case, to the point of exclusion). But we know how Nazi Germans decided to address their Jewish question — exclusion, discrimination, persecution, and the Final Solution. All to the detriment of advanced science and technology programs, not to mention the German economy. Vast resources went to a deadly and ultimately useless cause, all in the name of racial purity and betterment for “Nordic Aryans.”

“Mind The Gap” warning in London Underground, Victoria Station, November 27, 2011. (Reinhard Dietrich via Wikipedia). Released to public domain.

In a very limited sense, the same is occurring with the education reform movement these days. Educators and politicians all pulling billions of dollars that could otherwise go to free breakfast and lunch programs, psychological services, physical education and arts programs for an eugenics-light agenda. No one from this movement has suggested a final solution as such, but they do believe that teachers unions, bad teachers and not enough STEM programs are the problem. Note that though the goal here is to “close the achievement gap,” the actual things that occur at schools in which most of the high-achieving Whites and Asian Americans (many of whom attend private and parochial schools) aren’t on the table at all.

Ultimately, the problem with the fear-mongering crowd on the “problem,” the “question” and the “gap” is that their perspective is one of the all-knowing, all-seeing White paternalist. One whose ideas about a situation or a group comes out of thin air, in some strange attempt to help said situation or group. In the case of today’s version of education reform, the only end-game is to destroy public education while exacting a profit in the process. Closing the achievement gap? Yeah, if “closing the gap” is defined by closing schools, killing unions and leaving most of America’s poor and of color students with no alternative for a better future.

How High-Stakes Testing Strangles Motivation and Competition

31 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, race, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Ability Grouping, Competition, Education Reform, High-Stakes Testing, K-12 Education, MAP-M, MAP-R, Montgomery County Public Schools, Motivation, Mount Vernon public schools, MSA, SRA, Teacher Effectiveness, Teaching and Learning, Teaching Styles, Testing, Tracking

Homer strangles Bart (again), The Simpsons, February 2011. (http://www.goodwp.com/).

Homer strangling Bart (again), The Simpsons, February 2011. (http://www.goodwp.com/).

One of the biggest casualties in the current K-12 education reform effort — otherwise known as measuring teacher effectiveness through high-stakes testing — is the notion of competition, academic and otherwise. At least, students competing to make themselves better students, better athletes and even better people in the process of matriculating through elementary, middle and high school. Competition suffers when the teaching, motivational, psychological and financial resources necessary to level the K-12 playing field have gone instead to testing companies and psychometricians.

So much has been the emphasis on testing and raising test scores that most in education reform now think competition among students on the K-12 stage is an abomination that must be rooted out, and not part and parcel of the learning and human development process. This is really too bad. For what often makes school fun for children is a healthy dose of competition throughout the process.

To use myself and my ten-year-old son as but two examples of what has occurred in K-12 education reform over the past three and a half decades, it is apparent to most educators how much has changed as a result of the fear of competition and lack of autonomy to motivate students. Testing, of course, was part of my educational experience growing up. From third grade through sixth grade in Mount Vernon, New York’s public schools, the school district tested us with the SRA (Science Research Associates, Inc.) exam in reading comprehension and mathematics every spring. At the end of the school year, we’d learn how well or not so well we tested in these areas in terms of grade level.

Data mining (one of the hallmarks of reduced teacher autonomy), cropped and edited, September 2006. (http://www.qualitydigest.com).

The Mount Vernon Board of Education used the test for two purposes. One, it was a diagnostic exam, as it would show students with reading and math comprehension skills at, above or below grade level. When I took the SRA in third grade, for example, I read at the 3.9 grade level, or on par as a third marking period third-grader. When I took the fourth grade version of the SRA the following year, I had jumped up to a 7.4 in reading, or the equivalent of a mid-year seventh-grader.

The district used the SRA for a second purpose, though, at least by the end of sixth grade. It was part of a package that determined what academic track a student would take as they moved on to middle school. In my case, my straight A’s and my SRA scores (which put me at the 12th grade level in reading comprehension and 11th grade level in math) put me in the gifted-track magnet program called Humanities in 1981. For some of my elementary school classmates, it meant general education classes, or, in a couple of cases, remedial or special education classes.

Ability tracking through an examination and grades over four years has its own sinister flaws in terms of race and class — it has tended to disadvantage Black students, especially poor Black kids. But it at least wasn’t the constant mantra of testing that millions like my ten-year-old son has faced since he began kindergarten in August 2008. For nearly every year, my son has taken a school-level, county-district level, or state-level exam in Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools, including MAP-M and MAP-R, TerraNova and the MSA assessments. What’s more, teachers have administered practice versions of these exams (including unit guides and what they call formatives) about once every six weeks during the school year since my son began second grade.

The constant testing would be meaningful if teachers could get together and decide at the classroom level how best to address students’ needs in areas like reading comprehension and mathematics. These determinations now are tightly controlled at the state, district and school leadership levels, leaving teachers with little room to use their abilities to, well, teach. Really, motivating students — the most critical tool a teacher has in challenging students to become better learners — has become a secondary tool. Especially since these test scores only count in favor or against individual teachers and individual schools, and not specifically for or against students.

$Robot teaching math 3d illustration, July 31, 2013. (http://www.123rf.com).$

Robot teaching math 3d illustration, July 31, 2013. (http://www.123rf.com).

The last piece is a good thing. Most educators now agree that ability grouping or tracking has fostered too much competition for a school district’s resources among students, teachers, administrators and parents. K-12 education reform has leaned so far the other way, though, that teachers have virtually no say in the curriculum from which they teach, even in kindergarten, and have little from which to motivate their students as learners. In fact, teachers and school-level administrators are the only ones with some motivation and sense of competition, as dollars and jobs are at stake every spring as a result of annual testing. This motivation, though, is all about teaching students how to get better test scores, and not about actual learning, development or academic improvement, a poor way to reform K-12 education.

And it is the motivation to learn that sparks the competition necessary for students to improve themselves, to work with each other to become better students. Another student’s success can even encourage other students to work harder, to make themselves better academically, athletically or even socially. In the current K-12-as-laboratory-experiment-environment, this theme of motivation and healthy competition leading to student success is not only missing. For reformers, it’s been deliberately omitted, as if poor kids and students of color in urban environments don’t need motivation and competition to become better students and people.

We Called Him Mr. Lewis

03 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Arne Duncan, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Chemistry, Cigarettes, Disllusionment, ExxonMobil, Family Income, High-Stakes Testing, Humanities, Low-Income Students, Michelle Rhee, New York State Regents Exam, Nicotine, Organic Chemistry, Politics of Education, Poverty, Steve Perry, Students of Color, Teacher Effectiveness, Tenth Grade, US Department of Education, Wendy Kopp

Screenshot from To Sir, with Love (1967), December 3, 2012. (http://movies.tvguide.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws – pic’s low resolution/subject matter for blog.

The dumb technocratic class (Wendy Kopp, Michelle Rhee, Steve Perry, Arne Duncan) and the assholes who fund them (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, ExxonMobil, US Department of Education) continue to pump out the mantra that effective teachers are the single most important variable in student performance, retention and graduation. This despite a half-century’s worth of research showing that family income was the far more important piece of data.

But even if Kopp, Rhee and Perry’s snake oil somehow turned out to be true, the fact is, the high-stakes testing movement and No Child Left Behind (and now Race to the Top) has turned effective teachers into lab leaders teaching to state-wide tests. Our current K-12 regime makes it so that ineffective teachers can be seen as effective because they’re only concerned with higher test scores, not actual learning. And some of them, not even concerned with that.

About this time thirty years ago, I had a group of wholly ineffective teachers in my tenth grade Humanities classes at Mount Vernon High School (see my posts “Half-Baked Z and Christian Zeal” from September ’10 and “This…Is…Jeopardy” from March ’11). Mr. Lewis was but one example of an unimaginative instructor. He was our Level 1 Chemistry teacher. We started his class in a very tense situation. There were fifty-one students in our class to start the year because the school administrators had failed to hire a new Level 0 (the highest level for the highest of the high-performing students) teacher for Chemistry. Our future valedictorian and other Level 0 folks spent a month protesting to the head of the Science Department, Estelle Abel, about the overcrowding and the mixing of the two levels. It took nearly two months before the situation was resolved. By that time, November ’84, none of us wanted Lewis for a teacher.

His was a class that could be fun and entertaining, but not usually educational. Sometimes our chemistry education came with errors and miscalculations. Perhaps his mistakes piled up because it was seventh period and near the end of the school day. Or maybe we were tired and inattentive.

Marlboro cigarette butts, September 19, 2007. (bachmont via Wikipedia/Flickr.com). In public domain.

The truth was that Lewis was a teacher with a serious chemical addiction. His was a chain-smoking world. When he opened up the door to the storage room where the test tubes and Pyrex jars were, stale cigarette smoke entered the room. His teeth were a pasty yellow, and they had a film that seemed to build up on them and in his mouth by the time we had him at the end of the day. On more than one occasion, Lewis would get phlegm caught in his mouth while in the middle of one of his lectures. Then he’d pause as he gulped the phlegm, and then he kept going. It was absolutely disgusting.

One day I met with Mr. Lewis after class to discuss my struggles with the material. He was at the front lab table sitting on a stool. In front of him on the table were fifteen Marlboro cigarettes, all lit and neatly lined up in a row. During our ten minutes together, he smoked one cigarette after another, sucking them down so fast that he had to pause to clear his throat from time to time. By the time I left, he’d gone through twelve out of fifteen, and I smelled like I’d been at one of my father Jimme’s bars. I was more than sure that Lewis’ nicotine dependency was a factor in his inability to teach Chemistry to us well (Cigarettes And Coffee, by Otis Redding).

My grades for the year going into the last weeks of the school year had ranged between an unimpressive 70 and an 87. But with the New York State Regents Exam in Chemistry coming up, Lewis was nonchalant in his attempts to prepare us for the Regents. Lewis went as far as to say, “There’s nothing to worry about” on the subject of organic chemistry. “There will be hardly any organic chemistry on the exam, anyway,” he said. After eight months of listening to his blathering, I thought “That’s it!” The next time I got money from Jimme, I bought the Barron’s Chemistry Regents exam prep book. It was just before Memorial Day, and I had a month before the exam.

Barron’s Regents Exams & Answers Chemistry (2011), December 3, 2012 (http://barnesandnoble.com).

On my Chemistry Regents I scored a 95, the third or fourth highest grade in the school (the highest grades were a 99 and 97 that year). My score raised my final grade in Lewis’ class six points, from a 79 to an 85. My score left me feeling jaded and disillusioned. “Wow,” I thought. “My teachers really don’t know much more than I do!” I knew that a lot of my Level 1 Chemistry classmates didn’t fare so well on the exams, because they believed Lewis when he said that there wouldn’t be much organic chemistry on the exam. By my own count during the exam, between thirty-five and forty of the 100 questions were organic chemistry ones.

It took having Meltzer for AP US History in eleventh grade for me to trust teachers again. I didn’t need anyone to teach tests to me. I needed a teacher who could help me open up a door into myself and into a world I hadn’t explored before. And millions of students — especially of color and from impoverished backgrounds — need teachers free to do that, without the threat of high-stakes tests hanging over them like a boulder.

No Good Teaching Deed Goes Unpunished

13 Friday May 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Politics, race, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

AP American History, AP US History, AP US History Exam, Blue Ribbon Schools, Burnout, Harold Meltzer, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Politics of Education, Richard Capozzola, Student Achievement, Teacher Effectiveness, Teachers Unions, William Prattella

It’s never really been much of a surprise to me how much we don’t appreciate good teachers. I should know. A few semesters ago, a student of mine filed a complaint against me because she couldn’t see my lecture notes well enough due to some issue with the LCD projector for my classroom. Mind you, she admitted that she didn’t have her glasses that day. When I didn’t allow her to interrupt me in the middle of class over the issue, she stormed out, yelled a couple of obscenities at me, and slammed the classroom door shut.

I know, it’s much worse on the K-12 level, between incorrigible students and insolent parents, school and district administration. Not to mention the pressures of NCLB, initiatives like Race to the Top (or bottom, really) and private foundations with their own agendas. Add to that article after article blaming teachers unions for being on the wrong side of corporatized education reform that emphasizes math and science and test scores over humanities and social science and critical thinking.

Former NYC DOE Chancellor Joel Klein’s now among them, in his lengthy (really, too long) piece on “The Failure of American Schools” in this month’s Atlantic Monthly, laid much of the blame on teachers and teachers unions. Not our nation’s economic woes, an overemphasis on math and science, or a system that was created not to teach academic excellence, but to weed out the so-called weak-minded. It’s no wonder that the average career of a teacher is five years!

A quarter-century ago on this date, my former teacher Harold Meltzer’s good deeds came to fruition through our AP US History class and our AP exam that year. We learned in September ’86 — the beginning of our senior year — that three of us (including yours truly) all scored 5’s on the AP American History exam on this date. That meant that three of us had earned six college credits a year before enrolling in any university. There were at least four others who scored a 4, guaranteeing them three college credits. Another five scored a 3, considered a passing score by colleges and the College Board.

It was the best an MVHS AP class had ever done on any AP exam up to that point in the high school’s history, and should’ve been a crowning achievement for Meltzer and the school. Yet instead of praise or at least a “Congratulations,” Meltzer was treated as if he’d shown up MVHS by his boss, Social Studies Department Chair Larry Smith, a red-headed man who looked like a character from Dune. He snickered at me every time he saw me with Meltzer. Neither Superintendent William Prattella nor Richard Capozzola saw fit to honor Meltzer or our class for our achievements. It was ironic, because MVHS won a Blue Ribbon Schools of Excellence award from the US Department of Education a few months later, off of the work of teachers like Meltzer, as well as Humanities students.

There were rumors that some of the White parents were unhappy with Meltzer’s methods of teaching, which typically involved us interpreting history rather than answering straightforward history trivia questions. More than rumors, actually, as I walked in on a meeting between Meltzer and a parent my senior year. That mother demanded an A for her daughter in Meltzer’s AP US History class. What wasn’t exactly a rumor, either was that Smith was looking for any excuse to take AP US History away from Meltzer. Especially since it was so shocking that both White and Black students did equally well on the exam that year. Of course, there were other, more deeply personal issues between the two men that likely involved jealousy and other not-so-secret secrets.

For our part, our cohort stopped talking to Meltzer altogether. Sure he was eccentric, even a bit strange and unorthodox as a teacher, but at least he cared. And by the way our scores turned out, he didn’t deserve the cold shoulders he received from most of my classmates our senior year. It bothered me when I’d see Meltzer saying “Hello” to one of us as we passed his Room 275, only for one of us to walk by as if Meltzer had phased out of our space-time continuum.

I was sure that some of it was related to Meltzer being a “confirmed bachelor.” But mostly, I thought that despite Meltzer’s lack of a normal teaching style, that my classmates were total assholes toward him. Meltzer spent the week before the AP exam after school with us going over every conceivable fact of American history for the more anal of us. It was above and beyond, and also unnecessary. Because Meltzer had taught us enough about egalitarianism, critical and independent thinking, and “coming to the point at once” in the first months of his class for all of us to do well.

Meltzer died from a number of ailments at the age of sixty-six in early January ’03. But one thing I was sure of that hastened his decline was the bitter and broken heart he had from the way he’d been treated in his last years as a teacher. I just hope that I brought a little bit of laughter to the man in his final months and weeks. Or at least, something to smile about.