Here are the lyrics to a new song by Tom Chapin and posted in honor of the PSSAs being given this week all over Pennsylvania and high-stakes tests everywhere…

Not On The Test

Go on to sleep now, third grader of mine.
The test is tomorrow but you’ll do just fine.
It’s reading and math. Forget all the rest.
You don’t need to know what is not on the test.

Each box that you mark on each test that you take,
Remember your teachers. Their jobs are at stake.
Your score is their score, but don’t get all stressed.
They’d never teach anything not on the test.

The School Board is faced with no child left behind
With rules but no funding, they’re caught in a bind.
So music and art and the things you love best
Are not in your school ’cause they’re not on the test.

Sleep, sleep, and as you progress
You’ll learn there’s a lot that is not on the test.

Debate is a skill that is useful to know,
Unless you’re in Congress or talk radio,
Where shouting and spouting and spewing are blessed
‘Cause rational discourse was not on the test.

Thinking’s important. It’s good to know how.
And someday you’ll learn to, but someday’s not now.
Go on to sleep, now. You need your rest.
Don’t think about thinking. It’s not on the test.

Want to watch two of the true heavyweights of educational thought engaged in passionate, inspiring, informed debate?

Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch are engaged in a series of old-fashioned letters on a new EdWeek blog called Bridging Differences.

[This started as a comment on Dan Meyer’s blog entry: Career Crisis #2 of 2, but in the end, his post got me writing about something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. I’m editing what was a comment into a fuller post, but also may come back to this idea a bunch in the future.]

When I was a basketball coach — a part of my job that I had no training for, just an excitement — I used to read books, go to coaches’ clinics, watch video, etc… and another coach asked me, “Why do you do all this?”

My answer to them, I think, speaks to something that I feel is incredibly important in education today — the ethic of care. My answer was that my girls showed up every morning at 6:30 am every morning, and they deserved my best. I knew we’d lose games, and I knew there’d be games when we missed lay-ups and made mistakes. That’s o.k., but I never wanted the girls to lose a game because I wasn’t a good enough, prepared enough coach. It was my job to teach them the game as well and as thoroughly as I could — it was my job to care about them and their abilities, that meant being REALLY good at teaching skills.

That’s the ethic of care. That idea that we must teach our students, we must care about our students and a big part of caring about our students means being really, really good at teaching them the skills they need to learn. The biggest mistake we can make is assuming that "caring" has to equal "nice." In fact, it may surprise folks, but I’m terrible at remembering to bring in cookies or donuts on the holidays – always have been.

The best parents aren’t the ones who smoke pot with their kids because, ‘Well, they were going to try it anyway.’ And they aren’t the ones who let kids think that it’s o.k. to break rules, etc… they are the ones who teach kids the lessons they need to succeed in life, even when those lessons are really hard to learn. Same is true for teaching.

Nel Noddings is the educational theorist who writes most powerfully and convincingly about this. (by the way, I think that link is a bit flowering and even obtuse in the explanation of her ideas. I’ve always found her more accessibe than that.) I wish I could remember the first text I read by her — it’s not like me to forget books, but I’ve been wracking my brain on it to no avail. But she’s got the goods, and she’s got a LOT of books. And then, to take Noddings’ ideas further, and perhaps a bit more practically, I’d read Moral Leadership by Thomas Sergiovanni. His work on building the "virtuous school" is amazing and inspiring.

In both Noddings’ work and Sergiovanni’s work, I’ve found that kindness and care must be backed up with a pretty strong spine and a willingness to do what is right for the student in front of us, rather than what is easy — and Noddings speaks specifically to this idea of displaced motivation to avoid exactly the kind of easy version of "care" that we see too often — people (not just teachers) who care for / care about another person and act in such a way so that the carer feels good about their actions without considering what is best for the person being cared about / cared for. Sometimes, being a caring teacher means calling a parent to say, "Hey, your child didn’t do their homework." Sometimes, being a caring teacher means saying, "I’m not sure my students got the lesson today, I need to rethink my own practice." And sometimes, it means knowing that if a child feels cared for, they are more likely to come to class with an open mind, but once they are there, we have the responsibility to respect that relationship by being worthy of it with a well-crafted lesson.

One of the reasons I talk about care and passion and such is because we have to find ways to make this teaching life one life. As long as we’re asked to be schizophrenic, this job stays really, really tough. When we’re able to marry our care and our professionalism — when we see the links between them and embrace them; when we see caring as part of the work we do (and that’s why we have Advisory at SLA — it’s the institutional representation of the ethic of care), and when we see care includes teaching hard, prepping hard, always learning, then it makes it a lot easier to reconcile the very different — and insanely hard — skills this job requires.