Weeds: An Educational Metaphor

Most days in the summer, you can find me in this chair. It's my weeding chair. I'd be lying if I said that I enjoy spending time in this chair, but it does give me a lot of time to think. During the school year, everything gets filtered through the lens of my classroom, but the summer gives me the time and space to filter my classroom through the lens of other activities. My Paw Lackey and my Mamaw Grace both taught me that there are lessons to be learned from a garden, and I value the time I spend in my garden for the clarity it gives me. This morning, I was thinking about weeds.

Every gardener hates weeds. The battle against them is time-consuming and ongoing, and you never really win it. You may reach a temporary truce if you hit a dry spell or if your hubby sneaks into your garden with Roundup (usually doing more harm than good), but eventually, the weeds will come back. They always do. 

So it is with bad ideas in education. I have never been in any other career, so I can't speak about any other profession, but the proliferation of bad ideas in education is just like this patch of weeds in my garden. I weed at least two rows every day. Usually this allows me to stay out in front of the  problems. But last week we went camping, so for three days my garden went untended. And this is what I came back to. Not just a few weeds, but a jungle. 

That got me thinking that the garden of education has been untended by the gardeners. The weeds just keep popping up, legislated or mandated by people who spend their time thinking up ways to keep the hypothetical garden in check. Most of the people who create these mandates don't garden themselves, and therefore can't tell a bean plant from a morning glory. And we, the gardeners, the teachers, have been too distracted just trying to keep our plants alive. We've been planting seeds, cultivating the soil, carefully watching our plants grow. But all the while, the weeds have been growing too, and they don't need care. They will grow anyway.

When your weeds have reached this point, you have no choice but to go to battle or you'll lose the garden. It won't matter how much you water or prune or fertilize your plants, they will get strangled out by the weeds. But here's the problem: some of the weeds' root systems have become so entrenched that they do damage to the soil itself when you pull them out. They can topple healthy plants. They can leave behind sneaky, small root fibers that will begin to regrow immediately. Their foliage hides any number of disgusting critters, just waiting to crawl out and damage your plants. But removing them offers benefits in the long run, and you can stave off any damage by carefully working to remove the weed with minimal disruption to the soil. 

For too long, we have refused to look at the weeds growing in our garden. One of the most entrenched weeds we're faced with is a traditional grading system. Underneath the soil, its roots have spread, sending tendrils into every corner of the garden, threatening the roots of every plant that grows there. For every ounce of fertilizer, every drop of water we feed, the needs of the grading system rob our plants of nourishment. All of the things we cultivate so carefully: growth, joy, ownership-- all of these are stunted if we allow the weeds to continue to grow. 

The natural outcome of the grading and ranking system that spreads its roots under our garden is the now entrenched system of standardized testing and the sticks and carrots that come along with it. If the traditional grading system forms the roots, then standardized testing is the vine.

   

If you didn't know any better, you'd think that morning glory might be something desirable to have in your garden. It sure is pretty. But behind those beautiful flowers, the vine itself is one of the most vile weeds that ever attacks my garden. It creeps up the stem of healthy plants, growing right alongside them and stealing the nutrients in the soil, all the while sending out sticky "creepers" that wrap tightly around the host plant's stems and leaves. By the time the flowers start blooming, it's too late. Any attempt to tear out the morning glory will likely damage the host plant too badly. 

The showy blossoms and easy to grow nature of the morning glory is tempting to gardeners who don't know what they're doing. Surely something so pretty can't do that much damage, right? That's why continuing to allow people who have no knowledge of education to make decisions is such a bad plan. Standardized testing is easy. It has clear answers. It's fast. And those colorful charts and graphs that you can make with all that data look nice! But all the while, it is strangling our students. It is strangling our growth. It is stunting our plants and our ability to produce the fruit we want.

So what's a gardener to do? The time for us to ignore the weeds and just focus on the plants has passed. We have to put on our gloves and start pulling. If any of us have a hope of disrupting the system of standardized testing, we have to start from the root. We have to start with a hard look at our grading practices. Even a morning glory can't live if we tear its roots from the ground. We have to ask the hard questions: What is the purpose of school? Why do we refer to school as "preparing students for the real world" when for them, it is the real world? How do we measure success? Why do we need to rank and stack students? Should education really be a competition? Do my grades reflect student learning, or do they reflect compliance? What does an "A" in my class mean? Are students failing because of academics, or because of behaviors? 

A willingness to examine these issues will put your eye squarely on the weeds that are growing in your garden. Once you find them, it is up to you what you will do about them. You can continue to ignore them, and let the weeds get a little more entrenched each year. You can have a garden that way, but you'll never reach the full potential for harvest. It's hot, dirty, tiring work, but it is so worth it. Won't you join me in the garden?

Curious to learn more about how to weed out entrenched grading practices? Search this blog for posts with the label "the gradeless classroom," or leave a comment! I'd love to connect with you! You can find me on Twitter @Mrs_J_of_EAMS or on Facebook (Cristi Lackey Julsrud).