Letters
Elephant in the Room
The thoughtful contributions by Mr. Hayes, Ms. Kim, and Mr. Vecino (summer 2008) on the unspoken threat all educators face in today’s classrooms were as cathartic to this reader as I hope for the authors as well. During our early careers, many of us may have risked a roundhouse blow while attempting to break up a fight in a class or lunchroom. My colleagues working Treatment Alternatives to Street Crime programs had the occasional conveyance of a .45 caliber handgun that, thankfully, was handed over — no shots fired — and discreetly returned to the home of the owner from which it was stolen. But those days of facing-off with a student with raging hormones or a fragile, angry ego often held warnings of some sort, a barometer to gauge the temperament and prepare our response. Today, a classroom or college campus holds no luxury of predictable mayhem, and the weapons of choice are cold and unforgiving in harming their often random victims — circumstances similar to walking patrol on the streets of Fallujah.
For the past 15 years, much of my work has focused on providing critical incident stress debriefing/management to law enforcement and flight crews. Sadly, educators may need to give consideration to in-service curriculums that include modules on post-shooting trauma and critical incident stress management, if for no other reason than to be better prepared to help our students — and ourselves. Thank you, Bill, Agustin, and Josephine for talking about the “elephant in the room.”
Joe “Jody” Fitzgerald, Ed.M.’79
Direct and Indirect
This is about your interview with Jacqueline Zeller (summer 2008). The bond between teacher and student is an extraordinarily important topic. My disappointment is that the interview substitutes platitudes for discussion of what actually happens in real classrooms. I doubt we need to be told “students are more likely to feel safe at school when they have positive relationships with their teachers.” Instead, we need to know what students actually feel, and why. I suggest that one answer lies in the research of Ned A. Flanders (1965). He found that what he called “indirect” teaching (praising students, asking questions, encouraging discussion) increases student participation and, by inference, feelings of safety. I saw this finding borne out consistently in 30 years of watching teachers at work. Zeller should have cited such observation-based particulars.
One more point: NCLB has placed enormous pressure on teachers to do what Flanders called “direct” teaching: lecturing and correcting errors. There’s very little room in such teaching for empathic response and patient waiting for students to learn.
Daniel Lindley, Ed.M.’59
Not So Quiet
I was very pleased to read “Can You Hear Me Now?” (summer 2008) and about Joanna Belcher’s experience with a student with a unilateral (one ear) hearing loss. Research [has shown that] students with unilateral hearing losses have been documented to have academic difficulties. Belcher’s student had intersecting issues of hearing loss and coming from a bilingual home (which has not been widely researched). Her experience with a student having undetected hearing loss in schools is, unfortunately, common. This issue, however, is much less common when schools have educational audiologists involved throughout the district and can monitor the hearing of all students. Educational audiology is a service identified in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Students with a hearing loss who do not qualify for special education can also receive services through a 504 Plan. Unfortunately, the implementation of educational audiology services is vastly different between states and even among school districts within the same state.
Kym Meyer
I was glad to see that Ed. was devoted to the critical connections between health and education. For years, all of us at GSE (especially those of us who’ve been associated with the Risk and Prevention Program) have been talking about the important things that we all know — risk factors, violence, relationships, and the “quiet” (sometimes) problems that can ground kids who might otherwise take off. There’s no dispute about any of this. But sometimes they’re not so private. People know but there is no vision, commitment, or leadership to address the obvious obstacles that are keeping kids from learning. That’s what was missing from the Ed. conversation here and in the larger public forum.
[Senior Lecturer] Paul Reville is to be commended for acknowledging that previous efforts have absolutely missed seeing the impact of poverty on kids.
Without understanding and determination at the highest levels the public will never understand the extent to which socioeconomic and health challenges keep kids from achieving. Ever since 1986, when the College Entrance Examination Board issued its important study, Keeping the Options Open: Final Report of the Commission on Precollege Guidance and Counseling, the public has been urged to attend to the structural fact that school-based services — guidance, counseling, social work, psychology, nursing — are almost always left to languish, particularly in those schools where children need every advocate they can find. Routinely, school-based service providers have critical information about what is going on in kids’ lives but are marginalized and excluded from school leadership teams. … GSE has to do more than repeat itself — and Ed. would do well to look for people with big picture determination to address the achievement gap, which will haunt and cost us all in many, many ways for generations to come.
Margot Welch, Ed.D.’90
Isolated, Not Impoverished
Amy Magin Wong’s profile of Sarah Levine, Ed.M.’77, Ed.D.’80, was very inspiring (winter 2008), but I wonder if characterizing the development of health and dental resources in the Nepal Himalayas as “bringing free dental care to impoverished children” is not peddling in imperial (benevolent) humanism and dubious generalities. For example, if Levine’s destination is the NGO-subsidized dental clinics in Solukhumbu, as a full-time, year-round resident of a village outside of Namche Bazar in the Mt. Everest region for the past 10 years, I can assure you that while dental and medical resources are indeed scarce here, a good majority of the local residents would hardly describe themselves or their children as being economically “impoverished.” There is a thriving tourism industry in Nepal providing dependable seasonal work, and a booming construction industry and farming livelihoods also provide for many residents. There are dollar millionaires from the Himalayas, and I personally know people from Himalayan families who have bought houses outside of Boston and paid in cash, in full. … What people in remote Nepali Himalayan villages truly are, however, is isolated — isolated from health, dental, and other resources, despite the continuing efforts of highly dedicated local people and their NGO partners. … To parallel Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory, I would like to offer the hypothesis of multiple economic intelligences. Not a cultural relativism, but rather a view of exchanges based on the supply and demand of a balanced, full range of values, both material and “knowledge” assets. The benevolent “First Worlders” can and should donate to improve conditions for people in Nepal (and elsewhere), and they are welcome. But it would be a grave mistake to suppose that Nepalis have nothing of equal or greater value to export to the “developed world.”
Bhiksuni Lozang Trinlae Drolma, Ed.M.’93
Editor’s note: Bhiksuni says that there is also a public library movement underway in the Khumbu Himalayas. Ed. readers are invited to send books and magazines, including children’s books and teacher training materials, to Namche Public Library, PO Namche Bazar, Solukhumbu, Nepal, 56002.
Editor’s note: Another vigorous debate concerning grammar! In the last issue of Ed. (summer 2008), the headline on our cover read, “A theme issue looking at the undeniable link between feeling well and doing well in school.” As a result, we received several letters from readers who questioned the phrase “feeling well.” “Feeling well,” wrote James Ackerman, “meaning one’s sense of touch is in good order, should be ‘feeling good.’” Agreeing with Ackerman, Caryle Maw, M.A.T.’68 suggested a theme issue on grammar. After much discussion in our office, we concluded that all parties are correct. When it comes to discussing health, both “feeling good” and “feeling well” are acceptable. As Paul Brians writes in Common Errors in English, you would never write “the pie smells well” — that would imply that the pastry in question had a nose — but when it comes to health, “feeling well” is, well, just fine.
Correction: In the last issue, Ed. incorrectly gave Ed Dieterle two doctoral degrees. He says that as much as he would like two, he only has one, and it was conferred this past June.
