The room is full of students. And they are all silent. Absolutely silent. Waiting for the instructions they are about to receive. They don’t do anything until they are told to. They follow every instruction as it is given.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of course, the instructions are given by a teacher\u2026 me. I am reading a script. I read it verbatim, as instructed. Because my job and teaching certificate depend on it. The entire room is being controlled by a outside authorities, the state of Florida Department of Education and a testing company, authorities that are not physically in the room, but which controls everything that is going on there as surely as if they were the puppet masters and we the marionettes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How indoctrinated are we all into the cult of silent testing? I have had a student throw up \u2013 loudly \u2013 during a writing test, and everyone just kept working. During this year\u2019s testing a student\u2019s dog got hit by a car outside the media center where I was testing; much drama and blue police car lights. The kids kept right on testing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For all the talk that floats around that kids are disobedient, in certain circumstances, they are incredibly obedient. They have been conditioned from early in their schooling to be obedient during standardized testing. Ironically, they are less obedient in class, where (at least in my view) what is going on has actual value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of course, I feel that what I\u2019m doing in class has actual value mainly because, in many ways, I am being disobedient to what the System of school tells me I should be doing. I have been disobedient to edicts to follow scripted curriculum, to follow curriculum maps with \u201cfidelity,\u201d to not question \u201cthe test\u201d in front of students, to use rubrics and data to track students\u2019 progress, to make my teaching all about the test.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have always been a good, compliant kid, even as an adult. I was rewarded for my style of teaching as district Teacher of the Year, and this helped reinforce my \u201cgood kid\u201d psyche. Do good things, get rewarded. Within three years after winning, though, I discovered that the very things I was awarded for were no longer valued by the teaching profession. So I had a choice to make that caused me levels of stress that nearly drove me out of the profession: obey, and give up everything that makes teaching worth doing, thus shortchanging yourself and your students, or disobey and teach according to your conscience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I chose the latter, but it wasn\u2019t easy, even with the support of a great principal. Over the course of the past 12 years, I have grown a lot. I am much more comfortable being disobedient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I might have saved myself a lot of stress and depression, however, if I could have traveled to the future and gotten myself a copy of the book I recently read from the library, the 2015 book Intelligent Disobedience<\/em> by Ira Chaleff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although many lament the lack of obedience in our society, and feel that if everyone just \u201cfollowed the rules\u201d it would solve everything, Chaleff warns of the dangers of that approach. He is not against obedience, by any means. He asserts that in the majority of organizations, most of the time, obedience and following instructions is the only way an organization can function. So obedience, Chaleff says, is the best choice when the system is \u201cfair and functioning,\u201d the authority figure has legitimate authority and is competent, and when the order itself is \u201creasonably constructive.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But he makes a very strong case that, appearances to the contrary, we are conditioning our citizens to be obedient to a fault. He gives examples of companies where those in power ordered criminal acts and the employees followed. He recounts the harrowing story of a phone call to a McDonald\u2019s by a man posing as a police officer that resulted in a restaurant employee being confined and abused for hours by her supervisor and others\u2014because they were just doing what they were told. The victim said she had always been to told that when someone in authority says to do something, you do it, without question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He also reviews the famous (though perhaps not famous enough) 1960\u2019s Milgram experiments in obedience to authority, wherein subjects were told by the \u201cscientist\u201d figure to give a person behind a window in another room electrical shocks, up to a fatal shock. The person in the other room was only an actor pretending to be shocked, of course, but the subject giving the shocks didn\u2019t know this. Two thirds of subjects kept administering shocks up to a potentially lethal level because the \u201cauthority figure\u201d kept telling them to do so. They were just \u201cfollowing orders.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Add to this the history of \u201cI was just following orders\u201d excuses given by the perpetrators of atrocities, and the incidents of adult child molesters using their authority as a adults to keep their victims in fearful, silent compliance, and the need for \u201cintelligent disobedience\u201d becomes even more pronounced. Note the title of the book is not Disobedience for Its Own Sake<\/em>; it is Intelligent<\/em><\/strong> Disobedience<\/em>. The phrase comes from the training of guide dogs, who must be trained to be intelligently disobedient lest they follow orders from their master that get them both killed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chaleff gives examples of intelligent disobedience saving the day and transforming systems, including the Florida teacher who refused to give the FAIR test to her young elementary school students and ended up having the test removed as a requirement in those grade levels. He also critiques the realm of \u201cclassroom management\u201d as being focused completely on absolute obedience and compliance to the teacher\u2019s authority, of never, ever questioning what you are told to do. This can indeed go too far. I have often tried to point out to adults, and, more successfully, to students, that we are holding students to the very lowest level of Kohlberg\u2019s Levels of Moral Development: I don\u2019t want to get in trouble<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chaleff makes the case that intelligent disobedience must be taught in schools. Not being part of the school system himself, though, I don\u2019t think he realizes two things. One, that questioning things should be at the very heart of the educational mission, and two, that teachers can\u2019t give away what they don\u2019t have, and they are being told to not question orders, to do what they are told, to not speak up. You can\u2019t get students to question and learn intelligent disobedience if you, yourself, are not allowed to question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For around ten years, our district Language Arts \u201cused\u201d the College Board\u2019s SpringBoard program, a workbook that we were encouraged to use unquestioningly, day by day, page by page. I was intelligently disobedient about it, and have many reasons to believe that I was more successful than many of the teachers who followed it \u201cwith fidelity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Late into the \u201cSpringBoard years,\u201d as Common Core was being introduced, I sat at a Department Contacts meeting full of the lead Language Arts teachers at various schools, and when some of the teachers saw what the standards were demanding of students, some of these teacher leaders actually said, \u201cHow can we teach these standards if they are not in SpringBoard?\u201d My goal here is not to debate the standards, but to note that obedience to the system was producing teacher leaders incapable of thinking about and making decisions about curriculum on their own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lots of people talk about the need to teach \u201ccritical thinking skills\u201d (whatever they are), but we have set up a system where absolute obedience for teachers reinforces absolute obedience for students. Critical thinking involves questioning, and questioning can involve intelligent disobedience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chaleff laments the fact that intelligent disobedience is not being taught in schools and needs to be. As I finished the book and was talking to my wife \u2013 also an English teacher \u2013 about it, I had an epiphany. We English teachers are<\/em> teaching intelligent disobedience \u2013 by teaching fiction. It makes me wonder if one of the main functions of fiction is, in fact, to teach intelligent disobedience. Think about how many novels are about characters standing up to authority. I am currently teaching The Giver<\/em> to one class and Fahrenheit 451<\/em> to another (though Guy Montag isn\u2019t always intelligent about the how<\/em> of his disobedience, his why<\/em> is right on the money). I just went to see Captain America: Civil War<\/em> yesterday. Intelligent disobedience again. Story after story, from Antigone<\/em> to Star Wars<\/em> to Harry Potter<\/em>, is about the tension between authority and freedom, about characters being intelligently disobedient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I pointed this out to my wife, she said, \u201cAnd what does Common Core want us to de-emphasize? Fiction.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n As I write this, I have just taken her thought a step further. When fiction is taught we are taught to \u201cclose-read\u201d with students for literal meanings and \u201cnon-trivial\u201d inferences. The standards do not encourage teachers or their students to connect fiction to their lives. That might encourage us all to emulate the intelligently disobedient characters we find there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every so often you read a book that seems to know you, to explain you<\/em> to yourself, that helps you make sense of things in a new way.\u00a0Intelligent Disobedience<\/em> is one of those books for me. I highly recommend it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After I return it to the library I\u2019m going to need to buy my own copy. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The room is full of students. And they are all silent. Absolutely silent. Waiting for the instructions they are about to receive. They don’t do anything until they are told to. They follow every instruction as it is given. Of course, the instructions are given by a teacher\u2026 me. I am reading a script. I Read More >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[59,14,57,58],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrfitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrfitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrfitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrfitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrfitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mrfitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":151,"href":"https:\/\/mrfitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions\/151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrfitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrfitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrfitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}