Failing to reach the standard

At the end of the year at my school they have Year 9 pantomimes.  Each form class writes and performs a pantomime.  There are some rules.  The performance has to have a song and dance routine, and it has to have a teacher in it.  There was a certain inevitability about the fact that I would be involved in my form class’ song and dance routine.

You may or may not know that one of the big songs of the last while has been the Party Rock Anthem (everything after about 3’40″ is awesomeness.  On the other hand this song is hilarious from start to finish).  What I hadn’t realised was that shuffling was very important to this song’s success.  Shuffling is a kind of dancing.  This is important because my form class decided to do Twelve Shuffling Princesses as their fairy tale for the pantomime.  I think you can see where this is going.

Quite often in my life I mock things as being easy when I have never tried them.  For example, I once spent quite a lot of time mocking golf.  I mean,  how hard could it be?  Banging a ball around with a stick and trying to get it into a hole?  I was quite boring on this subject, until I actually tried to play golf.  After spending a few hours trying to either (a) hit the f%&king ball, or (b)  find the f&%king ball in the bushes, I realised it was actually pretty hard to play golf.

I also did this with Kapa Haka.  Kapa Haka? Pfft. How hard can that be? That feeling lasted until about September this year when we were taught how to do the school haka. I’m a lot less coordinated than I had previously thought.  All the singing, and arm waving, and stamping is very hard to coordinate.  Suddenly I realised that I looked like an embarrassing Dad trying to dance at a wedding.  Ok, so Kapa Haka is really hard, and people who do it really well have worked really hard and are talented.

Right, so I had to face the fact that I would be shuffling in the pantomime.  Here’s what shuffling looks like.

Pfft!  I thought.  How hard could that be? (How come I keep thinking this even after the golf and kapa haka debacles?) I started getting up at 5am (no one needs to see me shuffling), and looking at youtube clips that teach you how to shuffle.  I did this because I had already hit my first hurdle.  The first hurdle was when I had stood in my living room the previous day and I had the previously unthunk thought “right, I think I’ll shuffle” and I realised I had no idea what to do. 

Ok, so now it’s 5am and I am looking at some guy talking on youtube about shuffling and  I am trying to do it.  The basic step is called Running Man, and I can’t begin to tell you how hard it is to do if you think about it while you are doing it.  I found myself in some kind of retarded, disjointed leg bobbing that always seemed to turn into Riverdance.  The only time I could do it was when I somehow stopped thinking about it, but this proved very hard.  Somewhere, in the back of my brain, there was always something called Dignity lying on the floor laughing its arse off.

Next I tried the sideways shuffle.  For some reason this was a lot easier.  Well, it was easy to shuffle left, but for some reason really hard to shuffle right, so I would end up stuck in the far corner of the room with no way of getting back.  After three mornings of this I decided that my dance routine would look something like an old man warming up for a hurdling competition followed by a seamless shuffle into the left hand wall.  Probably this would be ok.

When I demonstrated my technique to the class later in the day they had no hesitation in dropping me from the dance number.  It was cold.  It was hurtful.

It was also a relief.

It also made me think of two things.  Firstly, about the folly of passing a ruler over things and telling people they are below the standard.  I took Art from Year 9 to Year 13 because I loved it.  I was only average (below average if we take my final mark).  I had no great gift.  I enjoyed turning out pencil sketches of buildings and landscapes.  That’s about it.  My painting portfolio in Year 13 was not much chop.  I’m glad I did it though.  Like I’m glad I started playing guitar when I was around 15 or 16.  I never became a good guitar player, but I have had thousands of hours of pleasure out of it and the bands I have been in.  Just as I had quite a bit of fun discovering that I am a crap shuffler.  It’s amazing what you can discover about yourself and others when you are having fun doing something you love.

I said that getting dropped from the dance team made me think of two things.  The second thing is this very fine, and entertaining talk by Sir Ken Robinson about how school can kill creativity.

The first time I watched this clip I was charmed, but missed a few of the messages.  His messages are interesting.

Education, he says, is preparing our kids for the future but we have no idea what the future will look like.  My daughter started school this year.  When she retires it will be around 2075.  Or taking it another way, how did the education of a kid starting school in 1945 prepare them for 2010?

Creativity should be given the same status in education as literacy, and that being wrong is a big part of creativity and learning.  “If you’re not prepared to be wrong you’ll never come up with any original.”  Yet, he says, we are creating students and school systems where being wrong is the worst thing you can be.

We also have school systems where creativity is at the bottom of the hierarchy of subjects.  He talks about Dance and Drama which he correctly says is a subject that is right at the bottom of the hierarchy.  If you want to know what the hierarchy is just imagine this conversation:

Child: “I want to drop Chemistry and take [insert 'useless' subject here].”

Parent: “You’ll never get a job doing that!”

But who gets a job in the field of Chemistry?

As for Dance and Drama, I would have avoided it like the plague if it had been offered when I was at school, but a lot of kids would have loved it.  Rosamund is a little dancer.  Anytime there is any music on anywhere she instantly starts to boogie.  Eleanor also dances, and she loves drawing.  Her drawings just keep getting cooler.  The last few times she has done drawings I have genuinely thought, “I wish I would draw like that.”  So it annoys me when people look at kid’s drawings and make suggestions.  Don’t they know that every part of a kid’s drawing has been carefully thought about?

While we are on this tangent, here is her latest drawing of me.

Which, I think we can all agree, tells us a lot about the state of my footwear.

Thankfully, my mother was very tolerant of all my creative whims and subject choices when I was growing up.  I dropped Maths after I got the equivalent of my basic numeracy credits.  It really hasn’t mattered that I took it no further, and has been much better for me to stuff around in Art, and play the guitar, and write blog posts, and try and fail to shuffle.  Much, much better.

I hope to work at a school, and be parent who says this: “can you write and do sums?  Good.  Now, what do you really want to be in a few years?”  Then all I have to do is make sure I listen.

X Factor and Te Kotahitanga

So, it’s time for me to stop being cute, and actually deal with a few facts.  When National says 20% of students are leaving school without good qualifications they are right.  Never mind about the distribution, and the nuance, they are right.  They are also right to say that this is not acceptable.  Although New Zealand does well in the PISA tests we do less well at bridging the gap between the people who are achieving and those who are not.  Overall we are doing really well, but in parts of New Zealand we are not.  It is still not true to say that “schools are failing them”.  Schools can join the queue of responsibility along with all the other things that have failed those students.  Somewhere in that queue would be generations of politicians.  So let’s talk about one group in our school system who do badly, and a programme the government should be investing more money in.

***

New Zealand, like all former colonies of some long faded empire, has a first people.  In New Zealand they are the Maori who arrived here in perhaps 800AD.  Captain Cook showed up in 1769, and British settlement began in earnest from the 1840s.  Once the colonisers had killed the Maori or dispossessed the Maori or even, in some extreme cases, fairly bought land off the Maori, the situation for the Maori was grave.  Like our British cousin colonies of Australia and Canada, New Zealand’s first people are poorer, live shorter lives, are more likely to leave school without qualifications, and end up in court far more often than the descendants of the colonisers.

I believe that the situation for Maori is much better than it is for say the Inuit, or the Cherokee, or the Aborigine, but that’s not saying a great deal.  The Left in New Zealand tries intervention, and special targeted programmes to improve the lot of Maori, and the Right in New Zealand tend to scrap these programmes and say that we are all equal and different treatment on the basis of race is racist.  Which is correct.  A society where one race is poorer, lives shorter lives, has higher incarceration rates, and so on, is pretty clearly a racist society.  If that is too blunt, let’s just say it is a society dealing with a racist legacy that feels queasy with creating race-based programmes to sort out the imbalance.

One such “racist” programme that attempts to fix a problem is called Te Kotahitanga.  It is a programme worked out in New Zealand to try and raise Maori achievement in schools.

Here is Russell Bishop, the programme director, talking about Te Kotahitanga (don’t worry, it’s a very short clip).

You will note what he says about the Maori students who are engaged and do well at school.  They said that they had to “leave who they were at the door… to achieve in the system you had to be like a pakeha person.”  The Te Kotahitanga programme seeks to change this fact.  Here is Russell Bishop again, explaining succinctly how this could be changed.

I would like you to note this section of the clip.

“I’ve always found that one of the biggest challenges in getting schools to accept what we’re talking about has been this business of our wanting to focus on Māori students. Whereas the common mantra has been that we treat all students the same, that we don’t single out one particular group of people and focus on them.”

Which is, I can tell you first hand, how Te Kotahitanga and its ideas was greeted in both of the schools I have worked in by a solid core of teachers.  Once they hear the ideas behind Te Kotahitanga they say something like:

• “I do all of those things for all of my students anyway.  I treat everyone the same.”
• “Why should I focus just on Maori students?  That’s not fair.”

To be honest with you, this was my reaction too.  Until I confronted three facts over the last three years.

Fact One (an anecdotal “fact”)

I was a Dean for two years at a lower decile school.  This mainly meant working with the “naughty” kids.  I didn’t keep a running tally, but it is a fact that my clientele were mostly Maori.  Mostly Maori boys if we want to be specific, but there were plenty of Maori girls coming to my office as well.  Of course all races were represented on the chair across from me in my office, but Maori boys were there more often and for more serious offences.  I once had an afternoon of restorative meetings with three different students and their famalies for fairly serious things and they were all Maori boys.  If I had to put figures to it I would say that 65-70% of the students I worked with in my office were Maori, and that the school had a role that was 43% Maori.

You need to know that they were my favourite students, that I will remember them for the rest of my life, and that they were part of the reason I decided I couldn’t go on and that I needed to leave the school.  Not because of them, but because I didn’t believe the school was serving those kids well.  Please remember the queue of factors.  The school was not doing it’s best, but we had been handed a huge legacy of issues to confront when those students came to us aged 13.

It’s all very well for people to say that we can’t treat people differently, but frankly this is not facing the reality of our situation.  The reality is that our society has treated a group of people very badly and left them with very poor outcomes and that man tends to hand woe on to man (it deepens like a coastal shelf).

Fact Two (a statistical fact)

Very recently I bothered to watch all of the most boring looking clips on the Te Kotahitanga website and I discovered this.  Frankly, it is one of the most interesting things I have ever heard in the Maori education debate, because it cuts through a whole lot of stuff and gets to the nub.  In short, once you take out what kind of school students are at, and take out the socio-economic background of the student, there is still a negative effect on Maori achievement in schools because they are Maori.

The woman in these clips is Adrienne Alton-Lee, and she goes on to give examples of how racism can exist in the classrooms of the most well-intentioned people just through the misuse of the word “we”.  Which is exactly what I needed someone to tell me.  Being a better teacher for Maori is not actually about putting Maori words on the wall, or saying kiaora, or learning waiata (unless those things are authentic for you), it is about appreciating the diverse perspectives in the room, and giving them power.  It’s also about not saying “when we won at the battle of Gate Pa”, but saying “when the British soldiers won at Gate Pa” (and never mind the veracity of that statement anyway).  It’s about giving equal weight and time to the Nga Puhi story in the class, or the story of the Chinese student in the class.

To you this might not mean much, but to me is like a giant lightbulb getting switched on.  My old school attempted to take on board the ideas of Te Kotahitanga, and tried to run it, but failed to understand the crucial point I have just discovered for myself.  It seemed to me from the programme leaders (I should stress that we had an in-house programme and not an official Te Kotahitanga one) that I was supposed to use Maori words, and impart Maori stories in class, and that this always seemed doomed to me because it was fake.  It is fake.  You shouldn’t do it.  That’s not really what it is about.  It’s more about being open to the stories and cultures of others.

Fact Three (a surprising example)

We all have dreadful secrets we are ashamed of.  My latest one is that I’m addicted to the X-Factor USA.  The most surprising thing about this is that it was the X-Factor USA that made me see what it was like for a person who had previously “left their real selves at the door” in order to “achieve in the system” break through and reveal their true identity.

This clip is about eight minutes long, but the important stuff is in the first two minutes and the last two minutes.  The first two minutes are important because of how the contestant Melanie Amaro is speaking.  Please notice her accent.  It is important.  Up until this point in the competition this is how she has always spoken, but when she finishes the song something truly astonishing and moving happens.

Which I would like to offer as an example of what Te Kotahitanga is about.  Having the students come to class with their real voices, and their real experiences, and getting a hug from Nicole for it.

Finally

One thing the government could do if it wanted to improve the results of a group that is not doing well in schools is increase funding to the Te Kotahitanga project.  My school was forced to run an alternate programme because there wasn’t enough funding to include us.  Looking back on it now it seems like the people leading the alternate programme in the school didn’t really understand some of the key messages, but in their defence they also lacked money and support.  In education money buys people time away from classes so that they can plan, observe, implement, reflect and lead.  For us, it also would have bought us the full training programme led by the experts who would have set us on a clearer path.  After the money has been given to Te Kotahitanga the government would just have to let the experts run the programme.  The experts are the teachers with decades of experience, and Masters and Doctorates in Education who are dying to be given the resources to change people’s lives.

Whatever figure it is that will be spent on setting up charter schools, if that figure were halved and given to Te Kotahitanga it would have a much more significant impact on the lives of students, and the future families of those students.