The End is Near for GED 2002

The end is near. The end is near.

That has been the cry of 60-point text boxes over the past 18 months targeted to GED students who have just one, two or three GED tests left to take. There are just two months left in the current series. Those students who, for whatever reason, have not completed the 2002 test series will find that as of January 1, 2014, the old test series scores will expire and they will have to start their second chance all over again. The end of the GED 2002 test series is near. Very, very near.

Billboards, posters, handbills, stickers, buttons, and postcards about the GED 2002 Closeout have been printed, promoted, and promulgated since the summer of 2012. The message was always simple: those students who are close to finishing the 2002 series need to make this goal a priority and complete the work that they have started. College campuses and literacy councils across the state have sent letters to students foretelling the end of the 2002 series. Too many of those letters have been returned: Addressee Unknown. So to reach the unknown we have solicited news articles, broadcast reports and PSAs about the end of the series. Some campuses even recruited college staff and fellow students and offered bounties to find those who were close to finishing their tests.

Obviously, it would be best if those students who have started the 2002 test series immediately signed up at the various GED test centers across the state to complete the series. We have extra classes scheduled, focused instruction, and dedicated instructors who want to help as many students as possible finish the series. It doesn't help anyone, if these students don't complete the credential.

And, because of this national closeout campaign, many GED non-completers have returned and we celebrate that. But I have files of too many other students who remain unconcerned even though the GED is their best entree to future success. These students have been called, emailed and posted and have not responded. Yet, sometime after the first of the year, they will wander into the GED classroom and will discover that their previous work has been replaced with new curriculum and their test scores have expired. The end will not be near then; it will be there. That will be a sad, discouraging discovery.

The Pole Climber Cohort

A cohort is a group of students who have something in common and work together toward a common purpose. Education research shows, not surprisingly, that students in a close-knit cohort do better than students who are segregated, fearful, and uncertain. As I said, when you are taking Educational Psychology, this is not a surprise.

Seeing it transform a classroom is something else.

One spring semester I had a last-minute assignment for a group of Electrical Power Technicians, the workers who dig the trenches, climb the electric poles, string the cables, and restore our power during winter storms. The students needed to complete a one-credit interpersonal communications course called "Communicating Effectively" to finish off their degree. 

The course is usually a fun one to teach: lots of out-of-your-seat exercises, group work, games and puzzles all around the notion that we communicate verbally only a small part of the time and non-verbally the rest of the time. Most of the class lessons demonstrate to the students the non-verbal side of communications. I had successfully taught the course with a mixed program of students in earlier semesters and thought the class was a hoot. These students, however, had not, for whatever reason, completed this course. It was important, my Associate Dean explained, that this group complete this course this time so that they would graduate with the rest of their class.

The students dragged themselves to the first class still wearing the outdoor gear and boots splashed tan with clay from a muddy digging project from the morning. January in Wisconsin is not a good time to dig trenches. The class members were male, 20s to late 30s, dirty, tired, hungry (my class was scheduled tight against the outdoor lab, so most missed their midday meal), and had very little interest in this course. As they slumped into their seats, feet sprawled out beneath the table, the semester looked as bleak and long as a cold February night. Hoot indeed.

But then something interesting happened. Every class has a hierarchy among the students: some of the students are leaders, some are followers. If an instructor can catch the interest of the leaders, the rest often come along. An introductory exercise, nothing special really, caught the attention of a couple of the students and first session ended well. So did the second, third, fourth sessions and so on as each of the students found an area of interpersonal communications that seemed particularly interesting to them.

Six weeks in I noticed that the group had almost perfect attendance -- unusual in non-program Gen Ed courses -- and those who missed were harassed by classmates. "Where's Randy?" I asked. "He had a hard night and missed class today, but we'll get him his homework." And they did and he did. An instructor can tell if a student will be successful by his or her attendance: most of the cohort, I called them my Pole-Climbers (they liked the name), never missed a class. 

They almost always came at the first last moment -- my classroom was four buildings away from the trades building. One moment my class was empty but then it quickly filled with their active energy. I looked forward to the class, and feeding off their enthusiasm, heavily used group work and projects in each course, saving lecture for the reading in between classes and explanation of class experience.

The final assignment of the class was their choice: either an eight to ten page paper or a short project demonstrating one of the interpersonal skills discussed during the class. All of the students picked the project option. I should have videoed the final classes as one student after the other tried outdo classmates in creativity, application and energy. On the final day, though I had written a final exam, I put it to one side, talked with them about their future work, and wished them well.

Each semester I try to achieve the same kind of success and I've taught many other excellent classes, but none achieved the magic of my Pole Climbers.

It remains the only class in which I dismissed the final exam and aced the entire class. How much of their success was their own work and how much was the unifying power of the cohort? A little of both, I suspect. I certainly don't think it was instructional brilliance. Some class members would have been successful even if mixed with students in other programs and with other instructors, but others were pulled up by their classmates to achieve a level of student success that probably surprised all of them. A strong, vibrant cohort raises the student success bar beyond anyone's expectations.

Fifty Celebrity GED Graduates

OK. I try to be original in these posts. When I quote from a source, I use the information as an aide, not a crutch, but this bit of info was too good to pass up, so I am shamelessly sharing.

The Adult Literacy League of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, posted this list yesterday on Facebook and it was shared today by the GED Testing Service where I saw it. The list of 50 celebrities who earned their GED, was headed in both posts by a photo of the late-great Peter Jennings of ABC News, a GED graduate. Here, uncut and with no additional comment from me (what more could I say), are 49 other students (alphabetical by first name) who are also, surprisingly to many, GED graduates. Recognize anyone?

50 Cent, Angelina Jolie, Bill Cosby, Bjorn Born, Bo Bice, Bo Derek, Carrie Fisher, Cary Grant, Cher, Chris Rock, Christian Slater, Christina Applegate, Cyndi Lauper, D.L. Hughley, Danica Patrick, Danny Aiello, Dave Thomas (founder of Wendy’s), David Bowie, Dean Martin, Ellen Burstyn, Eminem, Evel Knievel, F. Story Musgrave (NASA astronaut for 30 years), Flip Wilson, Fran Lebowitz (author), Frank Sinatra, Gene Hackman, George Harrison, Gerard Depardieu, Glen Campbell, Hilary Swank, Jackie Collins (New York Times Best Seller), James Garner, Jerry Garcia, Jerry Lewis, Jessica Simpson, John Chancellor (News journalist), John Travolta, Jon Huntsman (2012 Republican Presidential Candidate) , Judge Greg Mathis, Kweisi Mfume (NAACP President), Lindsay Lohan, Mark Wahlberg, Mary Lou Retton (Olympic gymnast), Merle Haggard, Michael Caine, Michael J. Fox, Michelle Rodriguez, Nicholas Cage, Olivia Newton John, Oscar de la Hoya, Paris Hilton, Peter Jennings, Peter O’Toole, Pink, Prince, Redd Foxx, Richard Pryor, Ringo Starr, Rob Thomas, Robert Wagner, Roger Daltrey (The Who), Sanjaya Malakar, Sean Connery, Sonny Bono, Steve McQueen, Tom Jones, Wally Amos (Famous Amos) and Waylon Jennings.

When You Need to Reach Out and Touch Someone

Rather than type a text, send an email, or post a Facebook message, I picked up the telephone when I needed to contact some of my students this week about a new class that I was teaching. My goal was to reach as many continuing students as I could as quickly as I could so they had first choice of available seats. Telephone? you might ask thinking of all the other options I could have used. Sure, you remember that clunky, dusty thing that sits behind the computer monitor acting as a paperweight for the 2010 staff directory and last winter's pepperoni pizza coupons. The telephone.

I'll admit a land-line is probably not the first choice of the techno-savvy who have Schwarzenegger-sized thumbs from constant, frenetic texting, but I still find it an effective tool to make contact with students -- even my 20-somethings. I did not consider this choice unusual or dated until I read a Wall Street Journal article by Anita Hofschneider a few days later titled, "That Thing With the Buttons and Receiver? Pick It Up" (Wednesday, Aug. 28, D1). Hofschneider quotes young entrepreneurs who roll their eyes at the phone as an old-fashioned nuisance, "burdensome" one said, and another complained that phone interruptions "hinder creativity and delay projects."

Some of these enlightened ban the phone from their office space. I suppose a non-phone environment makes sense in a sleep lab, a yoga center, or religious retreat house -- or if you were very, very annoyed during political campaign season -- but removing it entirely seems as productive as taking away the letter "R" from the keyboard. The _esult is _eadable but ve_y dist_acting. And, after reading the WSJ article, I wondered if the quoted anti-phone people were also as annoyed by the ping of instant messaging or the lure of the latest Tweet by a 15-minute-of-fame celebrity. Perhaps anti-phone sentiment is just revenge for this summer's sold-out rock concert tours by septuagenarians.

As a w_ite_, sorry, I meant "writer," I understand the power of the printed word through texts, emails and social media, but I don't think the human voice should be a casual second or third-hand communication choice.  Relationships in sales, in business, and in education are built through voice and gestures, interpersonal human contact, not emoticons. The sound of the human voice communicates nuances and meaning that goes much deeper than the flat, convoluted prose of written language, especially the pseudo-proper business grammar in most offices. The draw of human contact is why, for example, students prefer face-to-face classrooms as opposed to online or video courses, especially when they struggle with a topic. Working beside a real person, not a white screen with words, makes all the difference.

I agree with the sales manager interviewed in the article who said in professions "where personal rapport matters ... email (exclusivity) won't cut it." Having done a little sales work myself, I appreciate the effectiveness and place of the phone in the business world, and I do feel for the office manager at the end of the WSJ article who had to teach a new employee "what a dial tone was and explain that desktop phones don't require you to press 'Send'." I wonder what that new employee's thumbs looked like?

What's Missing from Teacher Training

Let's say you've just hired a shiny new group of instructors for your technical college. The newbies are excellent: top certification in their field, years of doing the work that they're just about to teach, and maybe, if you are lucky, actual teaching experience as an adjunct for you or another college. Congratulations. You've done a good job. Now, what do they need to know in the next couple of weeks?

Well, they need to know how to write a syllabus; they need to know the competencies and objectives of their classes and how to find them; they need to know their way around the school; they need to know internal software and processes; they need to know their colleagues. And, in addition to other "need to knows", they will need to know brain-based education theory (Bloom's Taxonomy is always helpful) just as soon as the HR paperwork is filed.

All that is well and good and important. But one bit of new teacher training (a crucial one in my humble opinion) is often overlooked on most need-to-know lists: the new instructors need to know the theater of teaching. What do I mean by that? I mean the new teachers need to know how to be effective communicators on the stage we call the classroom.

What, you might ask, does theater have to do with the technical college classroom? Sounds a little too liberal arty. And, the androgogg might say, doesn't this go against popular education training? Aren't we trying to move away from the "sage on the stage" and move toward a student-centered classroom? Certainly, but that doesn't dismiss the effectiveness and communicating power of gesture, voice, posture, pace, listening and response: the basics of stagecraft. Preparation, rehearsal, direction, performance, evaluation: all this and more are needed for effective teaching.

I'll admit my theater bias comes from training and performance on the stage in high school, college, and in a little over 20-years of community theater work. But, I also have no doubt that stage training prepared me for my current role in the classroom. Don't take my word for it. Think back to your own experience as a student: what kind of teacher was able to really hold your attention? What kind of teacher excited you, inspired you, made you want to jump up and begin your lab work? It was probably not the teacher (and we've all had these) who read in a sleepy monotone from yellowing 4x6 cards. I would bet your best teachers had a presence that you were not quite able to define: they had either a natural stage presence or one that was backed by training.

Teaching is a performance art whether that "performance" is a lecture, demonstration or discussion. Those who deny that statement are probably not teachers (or at least not very effective ones). An effective teacher is first of all an effective communicator and the basics of effective communications were first developed and refined on the stage. Any instructor, I believe, with even a rudimentary sense and practice of stagecraft, will outshine others who dismiss theatrics as being somehow beneath them.

A master teacher, one who has practiced the theatrics of teaching, possesses an honest, clear, dynamic, individual style that communicates both content and credibility. A master teacher makes each moment in the classroom look easy, effortless, even though that moment has taken hundreds of hours of practice and preparation. Somehow, someway, we need to include a heavy dose of the theater of teaching when we are training our new instructors (a refresher course for old hands wouldn't hurt either).

Putting Your Billions Where Your Priorities Are

A recent weekend Wall Street Journal featured an essay from Amanda Ripley's new book, "The Smartest Kids in the World -- and How They Got That Way" (2013). Some of the world's smartest kids are trained in South Korea's hagwans-- think of them as tutoring labs on steroids. The WSJ story featured a rather satisfied looking Kim Ki-Hoon, "a rock-star" teaching entrepreneur, called the "Four-Million Dollar Teacher" because of his hagwan business revenue. I really don't have salary-envy. I give him credit for successfully and profitably creating an education business model that works. What worried me in the Ripley essay was the resulting comparison between South Korea and the US.

"In 2012, (Korean) parents spent more than $17-billion on (online hagwan) services. This is more than the $15-billion spent by Americans on video games that year, according to the NPD Group, a research firm."

Gulp. OK, let's try to put this in perspective. Granted American parents may be putting in a lot of time and dollars in their child's education which is not included in this statistic, granted putting money into an effort does not always guarantee success, granted out children have more interests than just school, granted South Korean students many also be buying video games (though I'm not sure when they are going to play them since they have long, long school days in addition to night and weekend hagwan duties), granted Kim Ki-Hoon's hagwans may be a little pricey and each unit of hagwan is more expensive than a single Call to Duty purchase. Granted, granted, granted.

Still. It's a basic concept of economics that when given a free choice, consumers spend their (usually) limited budget on those things that are most important to them. In South Korea, parent's choose their child's education: a $17-billion investment by those parents is hard to ignore. Those parents obviously feel that putting that kind of investment into a generation's education is worth it. So far, according to Ripley, the effort seems to be working:

"Thanks in part to such tutoring services, South Korea has dramatically improved its education system over the past several decades and now routinely outperforms the U.S. Sixty years ago, most South Koreans were illiterate; today, South Korean 15-year-olds rank No. 2 in the work in reading, behind Shanghai. The country now has a 93% high school graduation rate, compared with 77% in the U.S."

I could make some smart comment about spending our billions on high-tech athletic fields rather than in the classroom, but I don't have the heart. This link takes you to the rest of the essay (it's a short read) or buy the book, so, if you are interested, you can read up on where some of the smartest kids is in the world are -- and the parents who helped them along the way.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324635904578639780253571520.html?mod=e2tw

Snort, Snork, Shtick Shtuff

"What's a vegan smoothie?" asked my brother-in-law, reading the countertop menu at a favorite Sunday morning coffee shop. "I mean, what could you put into a smoothie that wouldn't be vegan?" The silliness started as we waited in line for coffee. Sometimes you need a break from weighty discussions of life, the universe and everything. Life can't always be serious.

"A tenderloin?" I suggested, "Blood sausage? Pig feet?" I pictured traumatized vegan kitchen workers splattered by a bloody manic food processor. My brother-in-law and I are not reincarnations of comedic word guru, George Carlin, but Sunday morning walks sometimes turn into word play sessions between us. Both of us find the disparity between denotation and connotation interesting. My wife usually stays out of our discussions when we are on a roll. Just as well at times.

Once seated with the vegan smoothies ("Tastes a little like chicken"), we talked about the many odd nonsense words that are made up of "S" plus a consonant, a single vowel, and one or two letter consonant combinations. What is the attraction between "S" and silly words? I don't know, but there seems to be a link. We agreed words with real meanings (swap, swim, smit, snuff) don't count. Alright, "snuff" might count because it leads to the logical past tense "snuft" as an irregular form or just "snuffed" as a regular verb. We might be silly, but we try to be grammatical.

"Snert" "What's that?" "I think it was the name of a comedy sketch character on the Milton Berle Show." "Before my time." Yeah, mine too."

"Smurf." Too easy we agreed. Not as old as the Milton Berle Show, but just as silly. Especially in blue. "How can they do a movie about them?" "Don't know and don't care. They're as creepy as garden gnomes."

"Snork." A sort of word, depicting a healthy appetite, emblematic of college days. Other college slang included "scuzz," "smat," and "schwip." Definitions? Don't ask. Frat house slang is not PG-13.

"Swup?" No reply. A word that has yet to find a popular meaning. Sad when you think about an orphan word peering up from an empty grammatical bowl. "Pleashh shur, may I have shome more?"

"S'up?" "Words with apostrophes are not acceptable." " Yeah, especially those from ad campaigns." "S'right you are." "Ha. Humor."

I pulled a napkin from beneath my smoothie and began making notes. "What are you doing?" "I could use these ideas for my blog if I run out of material during the summer break."

"Schmuck." Good idea. I'll add that too.