Every now and then, in the teaching life, we get lucky and former students let us know that we mattered… I got an email today from a former student — not one I’d kept in touch with, but one who was a great, fun student in class. She used to make my classes more fun because of her intelligence and energy and willingness to take risks. Here’s a piece of the email.

Coming to [college] has made me realize how very few good teachers there are in the world. Thank you for being one of them, although now you’re a principal…hopefully helping to make more of them.

I’ve been living in the life of the mind a lot this summer, thinking about a lot of the abstract parts of school design and teaching and learning, and as we start a new school year, and as we talk so much about reinventing school and curriculum design and 21st century learning, it’s important to remember this — The success of what we do is measured by the difference we make in the lives of the students in our charge. It starts with the care we show them. It starts with the joy with model for them. It starts with the relationships we develop with them.

And, as the new school year starts, as we all get back to working with our students, let’s remember that every now and then, we get lucky and students tell us what we mean to them… but even if we don’t. My hope for all of us this year, as we deal with the stumbling blocks and craziness and frustration and exhaustion that comes with teaching is that we all remember this:

We are the lucky ones. We get to teach.

Charles Murray — yes, he of the Bell Curve — has said the time has come to abolish the SAT. His recent article in The American is the focus of a NY Times Blog piece entitled "Death to the SAT." Murray writes:

The evidence has become overwhelming that the SAT no longer serves a democratizing purpose. Worse, events have conspired to make the SAT a negative force in American life. And so I find myself arguing that the SAT should be ended. Not just deemphasized, but no longer administered. Nothing important would be lost by so doing. Much would be gained.

The Times blog piece is a quick summary of the longer piece in The American. It’s a fascinating read, arguing that while the SAT once leveled the playing field, it is now simply a measure of socio-economic status, not of aptitude.

We are living in fascinating — if disturbing educational times, but you have to think that when you have conservatives like Charles Murray and liberal / progressives like Monty Neill lining up on the same side of a growing anti-testing movement, we may be headed for a change in the way we think about education in America.

[I’m re-reading Understanding by Design with a really slow, careful eye. I’m going to be writing about some of the ideas I find there. The book is really worth a read, as it’s a fantastic, very detailed way to build a progressive, performance-based curriculum. We use it as a fundamental building-block for curriculum design, and while I think we did a lot welll with it last year, but a major focus of mine for this year is to go much deeper in our usage of it. I’m going to picking and choosing pieces that strike me to write about. Often they won’t be the major ideas because I don’t think I can do that as well as they do in the book. I’m going to take a sideways glance at some of the other ideas.]

The fundamental idea at the heart of Understanding by Design is that we teach toward enduring understandings as our goal and therefore skills and content serve something deeper.

In the chapter “The Six Facets of Understanding,” Wiggins and McTigue write:

What any curriculum designed for understanding must do, then, is help students realize that their job is not merely to take in what is “covered” but to actively “uncover” what lies below the surface of the facts and to ponder their meaning. This is, of course, what constructivism means: Meaning cannot be taught; it must be fashioned by the learner via artful design and effective coaching by the teacher.

First, I love that turn of phrase, that we must move from coverage to uncoverage — from recitation of facts to exploration of meaning. Secondly, I don’t think that means that we lose the lecture completely, but rather, with all things, we must now ask ourselves “What purpose does it serve for me to craft my unit / lesson / class this way?” For example, a brilliant lecture can lead to provocative conversation, writing, sharing. But there, even the lecture has been recast — it is not, at its most primary, a vehicle for information transmission, but rather a vehicle for questioning, probing, challenging. Think of the best workshops that various folks have written about this summer, the best ones did not merely transmit, they provoked, they began, for the participant, the process of “uncoverage.”

It strikes me that there are so many more skills that must come into play when we challenge our students to uncover rather than worrying about whether or not our teachers cover. Decoding skills, interpretation skills, the ability to form a thesis, the ability to judge the veracity of information, the ability to synthesize information into a well-argued position or thesis. This is what we want our students doing every day, but to do that means that we have to understand that — even with AYP and NCLB — our primary job is not to cover the material, but instead to use the material to uncover the intelligence, the abilities and passions and energies of our students.