My educational coach stood (who, by the way, is the most amazing and tremendous teacher I've ever had had the pleasure of working under) at the white board. “R-A-F-T,” she spelled out in fat, black letters.
“Raft?” I asked, “What’s raft?”
“RAFT,” my coach responded, capping the Expo marker excitedly, “Is the new writing strategy we’re implementing this quarter.”
Our content team looked blankly at the board.
“The ‘R’ stands for ‘role.’ That’s the position you’re going to take. The ‘A’ stands for ‘audience.’ The ‘F’ is ‘format,’ and the ‘T’ is ‘task.’”
Silence.
“Basically, we’re trying to help kids understand the ‘P’ in POWTIDE,” she continued, alluding to yet another pedagogical acronym. “We need to give them a method to ‘pull apart the prompt’ before they ‘outline’ and ‘write.’”
For those of you removed from the world of trending academia, acronyms like “RAFT” and “POWTIDE” are the most recent panaceas in a series of quick-fix techniques designed to put our public education system back on track. Ten years ago it was “Do Nows” and “Exit Tickets” (which have now been rebranded as “Initiators” and “Assessments”). To put it bluntly, these acronyms are education’s garcinia cambogia, the latest diet fad, marketed with phrases like “quick” and “easy,” but ultimately unable to come-through on their extravagant promises.
Now, I haven’t been in the teaching game long, but in my humble experience, it’s best practice to be skeptical of anyone or anything promising that it can make a task traditionally associated with time, energy and a lot of hard work “quick and easy.”
As my coach began outlining the strategy in detail, I thought back to my own educational experience. How was I taught to write an essay? How did I learn to build an argument or craft a thesis statement? How did my teachers coach me through standardized tests?
The answer is they didn’t. When I was in school, my teachers handed me a text. They said, “Read this.” They handed me a prompt, and said, “Write this.” There were no “CATCH” notes, no “SOAPStone” graphic organizers, no three step word-recognition and visualization processes. And yet, here I am, eight years later, writing an essay, expressing myself in standard written English without an interactive rubric to guide me through the process.
The inconvenient truth is that there is no academic diet pill that can replace what’s really missing from my students’ education. There are no short-cuts that can compensate for minutes spent reading, writing and thinking, or the fact that they’ve been pushed through a system that rewards teachers for passing students that are reading below grade-level and scoring far below proficient on standardized tests.
How does a child make it to the 11th grade without being able to read? How can a child make it to the 11th grade without knowing what a noun is? How can a child make it to the 11th grade without being able to turn a fraction into a decimal? How can a child make it to the 11th grade without ever having been asked to write more than a pre-fab, one-page five-paragraph essay? How can a child make it to the 11th grade with the understanding that a paragraph should consist of exactly five sentences, no more and no less?
No, I haven’t been teaching for long. But what I can provided is an un-jaded, first-hand account of everything that’s wrong with the American public education system, a system that has failed my students, and in so doing, has produced a generation of young, urban students who--if they graduate--graduate with the belief that normalcy is spending the next forty-odd years in a diabetic coma, sucking foodstamps from the teet of Uncle Sam.
