Dear Teachers: Please Save the World (and Raise Standardized Test Scores, Too).

Dear Teachers,

            We, the school reformers of America, have a little job for you. We realize you feel you are busy trying to teach reading, science and math.

            Yes, many of you already come to work early, stay late, and spend countless hours at home grading papers and creating lesson plans, too.

            We don’t care about any of that that. We’re school reformers and we love to talk about what you should do.

            We expect you to fix the world. We expect you to show us data, too, to prove when you do. We love data so much we want you to carve out time from helping children to chart everything you do. Band teachers, count all musical notes played. Gym teachers, we must know how many jumping jacks your students performed. Art teachers, how many colors did each pupil use? Don’t have time to save real children and chart data, too? Maybe you should work a little harder, you know, tabulate data in your room when you’re normally eating lunch.

            In what ways do we expect you to fix the world? For starters, you should plug the “school-to-prison” pipeline. You might doubt this “pipeline” actually exists. You might argue that problems of society spill into your classrooms, and not out onto the streets. You might claim the best way to plug the pipeline would be provide competent legal assistance to all defendants, no matter how poor, or make sure all American adults have good-paying jobs. You might think a way to empty the pipeline would be to stop jailing people for non-violent drug offenses.

           

We’re reformers. We don’t care what you think. No. We put this problem all on you.

Oh, and while you’re at it, could you make sure to keep teaching social studies, science and health.

            You need to get busy—you have lots of work to do. We expect you to prepare every child to “compete in a global economy.”

We love that phrase! Google “preparing students to compete in a global economy” and see how many hits you receive!

You might say, “Wait! How do we prepare students to compete in a global economy if corporations ship millions of jobs to China and Bangladesh? How do we prepare the kid from Michigan or Montana to work in an automobile plant if production has been shifted to Mexico, where workers come cheap?”

Quit whining, teachers. We reformers don’t want to hear it again.

We know you can do more! We might be policy wonks, tucked safely away in comfy offices, with nothing more than cogitating to do. But we have all kinds of suggestions for what you should do. We want you to focus on character education: teach the young to be honest, empathetic, hard-working, and show up for work on time and every day. We expect you to teach children how to handle money, how to do home repairs and get the family car running again whenever it breaks down.

We want you to address teen dating violence, too.

To be frank, there is no end to what we expect of you. You should teach students how to succeed in marriage. You might get all sarcastic and say, “Maybe this is the job of ministers and rabbis and not for us.”

Quit grumbling. You’ve got more work to do.

We expect you to teach sex education (even though most Americans can’t decide what topics schools should include). For example, we want you to teach children to be accepting of gay, lesbian and transgender peers. Then we want you to deal with parents who are furious because you dared. By the way: Would you mind terribly giving up your union protection while you’re at it? Because, really, when do parents ever go nuts and what administrator or school board member ever bent like a willow tree in the face of parental or public ire???

In fact, we are going to blame you for the failure of sex education, too.

Also, schools should teach self-defense. It’s a scary world outside the classroom and you can fix it for sure.

That reminds us: you need to focus on drug prevention education, for sure.

We want you to teach understanding of different cultures and religions; but if you bring up Islam, well, parents might blow. And have we mentioned this lately? We want you to put prayer back in school!

            Being a school reformer is hard. It’s tough giving so much advice. But we expect you to be rigorous. You must demand more from your students. We know, as reformers, even though none of us has ever taught, that the parents we’ve never had to deal with will love you if you set a high bar. We can say this, with perfect confidence: The more rigorous you are the more you will reduce the number of dropouts in your schools.

            Did we mention: all dropouts are on you?

            Of course, we expect the schools to provide free lunch, and now free breakfast, as well. We think you should allow kids to eat scrambled eggs with toast in your classrooms. Then it will be part of your daily grind to help clean up the mess when everyone is finished and insure class still gets started on time. (And remember, you have data to chart, so you might not want to waste all that time you spend going to the bathroom every day.)

By the way, we expect you to turn the tide on childhood obesity, even if schools, struggling to raise test scores, have been forced to cut back time devoted to gym.

            What else do we think you should do? Why, we’re just warming up! We think you should add an hour to your workday and not complain to your unions, because this is the only way to raise standardized scores. We don’t want you to balk. We don’t want you to demand extra pay. We think you should carry around phones so parents can call you, night or day, and ask any question they like, and all of this for free—you know, like lawyers and doctors and other professionals do.

            It might appear to you that we are asking for too much. This makes us think you are the problem in the schools.

            We want you to teach students to write computer code and expect you to save children who are homeless and have no computers at home—or, for that matter, homes. You must teach children how to cook, to file taxes, to prepare resumes, and to jump in when medical emergencies occur. You need to show them how to live sustainably, too. You should also teach yoga, because children today are stressed out. And don’t be babies and run to the union when parents freak out.

            Well, as famous reformers, giving all this advice is tuckering us out. We’re going to take a break now. We have to get ready to attend a gala for reformers, testing company executives, corporate lobbyists, billionaire philanthropists who dabble at fixing schools and politicians of varying stripes.

            (There won’t be a single real teacher in the room. We don’t believe teachers know anything about helping kids.)

            At any rate, don’t forget to prepare every student to pass all the newest standardized tests. Be sure to devote plenty of time to test prep. Get busy, quick, and create and score a few pre-tests, create and score a few practice tests, chart every fragment of data, and then spend a week or two administering all the standardized tests, even if those tests seem to change every year!

            Remember: We expect you to fix the world and we know you can do it if you follow all our advice.

            If you can’t—if you’re not all excellent at what you do—and no: “good,” or “very good,” don’t cut it in our eyes—well, we promise, we will find someone who actually cares about kids and pitch you all out on your ears.

Your friends,
The School Reformers

PEACE OUT!

Better get busy! You have some fixing to do!

                                                                                 

I Hate Standardized Testing. How about You?

When I retired from teaching, in 2008, I thought perhaps I might be losing my grip. I already believed that a growing fetish for standardized tests was warping U. S. education out of all recognition.

Maybe I’m just a crabby old codger, I thought.

Maybe the problem is me.

I don’t think so, though. I still loved my students the day I walked out of my classroom for the last time. I still loved teaching. And my fears have only increased since I retired. I also know I’m not alone in my concerns about the damaging effects of all the testing. The backlash is growing. That’s certain. On Facebook, for instance, you can find dozens of groups opposed to all the standardized testing. I’m not a crabby old codger, either. I’m happy to be retired. I still communicate with a thousand former students, via Facebook; and I get to babysit my granddaughter every Thursday.

Even my retirement check is excellent.

Still, I worry constantly about what we’re doing to a current generation of teachers and students. It’s obvious now that the collateral damage from testing is immense. Almost half of all principals admit cutting time for physical education in order to focus on “teaching to the test.” Art and music programs have been ravaged. Even time devoted to science and social studies has been reduced, because if it isn’t tested, then it can’t be measured as learning.

The passion for learning is harder and harder to keep alive. No child in history is ever going to look back fondly on their years in school and say, “Oh, I loved how we used to do all that test-prep.”

The widespread collateral damage might be justified if bombs were actually hitting the proper targets.

Real educators (not all the arrogant school reformers who love testing) see every day that they are not.

They’re just causing collateral damage.

Test scores in reading and math aren’t soaring. Gaps in the performance of racial groups aren’t narrowing. Most scores on the national tests, ACT, SAT and NAEP (National Assessment for Educational Progress) are flat as bologna sandwiches tossed under the wheels of speeding school buses.

Or, as we learned recently, with SAT results for 2015, scores are declining! We’ve crammed billions of dollars’ worth of standardized tests down millions of teachers’ and tens of millions of students’ throats.

Only the big testing companies have benefitted.

In other words, it turns out, I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t a grumpy old codger. Or, maybe I was; but I was still right about all the testing. In 2009, I sat down to write a book about what teaching is like—about both the joys and challenges—and my opposition to testing has only deepened with time. I have watched politicians screw around and screw around and keep changing the tests teachers and students are expected to take.

I have seen and heard about all the collateral damage.

The educators I meet tell me, almost without exception—and I always ask, because I want to get the case I built against testing in my book right—that testing isn’t helping. No. Testing is ruining education.

So, the years passed—and I was still happy, not grumpy—and I kept sharpening my attack, until, recently, my book was finished. Opposition to the shifting regimen of standardized tests is now one of the three critical messages included in Two Legs Suffice: Lessons Learned by Teaching.

I believe effective teaching boils down to hard work, and plenty of it, for both students and teachers, and to artistry. I believe the focus on standardized testing is a “paint-by-the-numbers” approach to learning.

I hint at the problems as early as Chapter 2 (The Quintessential Fact).

Then, in Chapter 11 (Two “N” Words and a “D” Word), I begin in earnest to focus on the crippling effects of standardized testing in a story about teaching middle school students empathy.

During a discussion about dehumanization one day, a young lady in my class raises her hand, and says, “Mr. Viall, the other kids dehumanize me. They call me a ‘dog.’”

It was a moment I will never forget, one of the few times in my class, given the context and emotion in the room (we had been talking about the Holocaust), where I was actually speechless.

And, so, it still bothers me today. I knew then—and knew now, you can’t measure empathy with a fill-in-the-bubble-test.

Yet, clearly empathy matters.

Here’s how the chapter begins:

11.

Two “N” Words and a “D” Word

“Folks never understand the folks they hate.”   

James Russell Lowell

I was working out at the gym one afternoon, trying to burn off a few bag-of-chips-for-lunch calories, when I ran into an old high school friend. Ray Spicher spent a career in education, serving as a highly-regarded principal for the Cincinnati, Princeton and Madeira City Schools.

Naturally, we talked shop. I asked what he thought of standardized testing. I’m like an idiot savant when it comes to the topic and ask the same question of every educator I meet.

His answer captured perfectly what I believe is a central dilemma of school reform. He said he thought testing helped kids at the low end in school, forcing teachers to devote attention to their needs. Overall, he thought testing was a disaster.

Then he added (this is not a perfect quote, because both of us were huffing and puffing and pedaling stationary bikes), “I used to tell my staff whatever you measure you’ll get more of. If you test for ‘more cars in the parking lot,’ you’ll get more cars in the parking lot.”

My fear exactly: We’ll have more cars in the parking lot. Some will be old Ford Pintos, a model famous for its propensity to explode in a ball of flames when rear-ended. Others will lack tires and sit atop four concrete blocks. The engines of two or three won’t turn over. Several that run will have the kind of air bags that explode. They’ll be more cars, true, but the young drivers, if they can get them running, will have no better idea than before where they want to go.

I’m a history teacher. I know, when it comes to standardized testing, what history shows.

***

I touch on that history briefly in Chapter 11, then hit it again in Chapter 28 (Gone, Test, Gone), noting that not only are these tests expensive, not only aren’t they working, but politicians keep changing their minds about what tests teachers must give and what tests students must take.

Here’s how I explain that problem:

28.

Gone, Test, Gone

“Infinite effort and ingenuity went into accomplishing very little.”

Christian Meier

Was I right to be so adamant in opposition to standardized testing? To the very marrow of my bones, I believe I was.

In May 2009, the State of Ohio gave the social studies section of the OAT one last time. Scores across the state remained dismal, though good at my old school. Complaints about content were multiplying. Printing, distributing, administering, collecting and grading the tests cost money. The state budget was tight. So, scattering benchmarks and indicators to the winds, the state did away with the social studies portion of the OAT.

Counting state standardized testing in the late 80s and early 90s we’re deep into the third decade of the Age of the Testing Fix. Yet nothing has been fixed, almost nothing gained. What do we have to show for all the time and money spent? A strait-jacket has been placed on good teachers. Much of what makes education special has been lost or circumscribed. The paperwork burden on frontline educators grows, metastasizes and threatens to kill the host. Bureaucrats tighten their grip on schools.

The IRS model comes to education.

By 2010, it was obvious NCLB had failed. Policy makers decided new Common Core standards would work where old standards had not. All tests then in use would be scrapped.

Fresh billions would be spent to devise and implement a new testing regimen. Forty-two states and the District of Columbia jumped aboard for the latest merry-go-round ride.

Experts promised. This time testing was going to work.

Five years later, many states are backing out. Politicians who care ten times more about remaining in office than students or learning still argue over what teachers must do.

How nutty does this seem? The Ohio General Assembly voted in 2010 to implement Common Core. Ohio educators began gearing up to meet the newest testing challenge. Vast amounts of time and effort were invested, only to discover in November 2014 that lawmakers were shifting position once more.

In 2015, tests tied to Common Core were used for the first and only time. The Ohio General Assembly decided to drop out of Common Core.

So another set of tests was dead.

Brand new tests, possibly based on the pre-Common Core standards used by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, would be created for 2016. If lawmakers had their way, these standards would remain in place for three years. Then they, too, would be phased out and Ohio would develop some really cool standards of its own. Frontline educators, increasingly fed up with political idiocy, could only rub their weary eyes in disbelief.

The merry-go-round continued to spin. Every June, it stopped in pretty much the same place.

***

In the meantime, we continued to use standardized tests to “measure” what students knew and held teachers alone accountable. Molly Hinker, a dedicated young Language Arts teacher, was shocked one year when a young lady turned in her standardized test two minutes after receiving it. She had colored in the bubbles at random and left every essay question blank.

A teacher may not supply answers, but Ms. Hinker did ask if she might not like to take her test booklet back and try doing something.

She replied astutely, “It’s not my grade, it’s yours.” And with that she headed happily for her seat.

In terms of accountability, we still blame teachers for low scores even if a student fails to show for class sixty-five days in a single school year.

We still blame teachers when kids are homeless and have to worry about their next meal.

We still blame teachers when teen girls get pregnant and lose interest in school.

We blame them when teen boys smoke marijuana daily.

We blame them when parents abuse or neglect kids, who must cope and take tests the following day.

We fault teachers and fail to help children.

And that’s a tragedy and a crime.

***

For today, I’ll leave it at that. I’m retired now, as I’ve said. I don’t have to worry about kids anymore.

Yet, I do.

I don’t believe for one moment that all the testing were doing helps kids who need help the most.

If You Write about Education, Shouldn't You Talk to Educators?

Sometimes, you have to wonder. 

Do the people who write about American education ever talk to educators? And do they know they should?

Those questions came to mind again when I read “The Education Assassins,” a recent editorial in The New York Times.

The title was slick and hooked my attention. Luckily, no actual bullets flew, but it turned out there were those who hoped to eliminate the U. S. Department of Education.

Typically, the author, Frank Bruni, made mocking reference to Governor Rick Perry, who wanted to eliminate the Department, but couldn't remember which one. Common Core was also mentioned. Readers learned that Jeb Bush was for Common Core. Senator Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat made a cameo appearance in the column. So did Lamar Alexander, former U. S. Secretary of Education, now, like Murray, interested in reducing the Department's sway. 

Indeed, if Ms. Murray and Mr. Alexander have their way, new legislation might hamstring Mr. Duncan. 

“There’d be no federal say, for example, in how (or if) public schoolteachers are evaluated. If the bill passes—and it has significant bipartisan support—the department would be a shadow of itself,” Mr. Bruni warned.

Naturally, he talked to several school reformers, none of whom ever taught, to get insights for his editorial. And what story about U. S. education would be complete without Joel I. Klein adding a bit of folksy wisdom? Without federal involvement, the former chancellor of the New York City Schools insisted, “Some states will do good stuff, but there will also be laggards and a lot of happy talk.”

I found myself thinking: “Who knows ‘happy talk’ better than Mr. Klein?” (He certainly knows very little about teaching.)

When Mr. Klein ran the NYC schools he routinely faulted teachers. He insisted “grading schools” was key to improvement. He was all for charter schools, never realizing charter schools might drain off capable students, leaving kids with disadvantages concentrated in neighborhood schools.

Mr. Klein never realized this might happen because Mr. Klein is a lawyer by trade, hired by a billionaire mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg (who never taught) to run the schools. Certainly, Mayor Bloomberg’s attitude was clear. He once said the problem in education was that we no longer hired teachers from the top of their college classes. They came from the bottom twenty percent, “and not of the best schools.”

Yes. Teachers were the problem. Sure, sure. Sure they were.

At this point, I began to ponder some of the myriad problems every frontline educator can see. I thought back to poor Mike, who missed 106 days of class in one year, not because he was sick but because his mother allowed it, when I had him in seventh grade. I thought about how, while Klein and Bloomberg were spending their days bashing teachers and hatching plans to increase the weight of standardized test scores in determining teacher pay, they missed an obvious obstacle.

That is: 200,000 New York City students, roughly 1 in 5, missed a month or more of classes every year.

Nevertheless, I kept reading. I was praying Mr. Bruni might talk to a real teacher or principal or school counselor. Several think tank reformers were quoted. A politician called Duncan “a helpful voice” during his six years as head of the Department of Education. 

Again, I found myself wondering: “Duncan? The poor man hasn’t strung two sentences together in six long years to indicate he has any idea what challenges frontline educators face.”

What, then, does Mr. Bruni miss in the end?

He misses what almost all writers about education today miss. No one asks educators who survived the slaughter at Sandy Hook how much “grading schools” might have helped on that sanguine day. 

No one talks to the principal at my wife’s old school about tying teacher pay to test scores, and how that might compare to being chased from her building by a knife-wielding, schizophrenic mother. 

No one offers suggestions for what frontline educators might do to aid the 6,000,000 children who are victims of abuse and neglect every year in the United States. 

No one goes into a tough Chicago neighborhood, where Mr. Duncan once ran the schools, and asks teachers, “What help could you use in meeting the needs of teens who happen to be gang members?”

No one ever asks.

I spent thirty-three years with the Loveland City Schools, a highly-regarded system, just outside Cincinnati. And if the Department of Education ever did anything to help me or help my peers or help students, I am not aware of it. The bureaucrats, politicians and reformers talk blithely about what educators must do.

They never talk to educators.

They don’t talk to Chris Burke, now principal at Loveland Middle School, and an educator I greatly respect, who says increased standardized testing has been detrimental, forcing his staff to spend nineteen days on test administration this year. “It’s all about compliance,” he tells me, with a hint of resignation. He mentions, to my surprise, that 35% of seventh graders at LMS opted out this year.

Katie Rose and Jenn Ramage, two dedicated young teachers, join the conversation, calling the testing process “nuts.”

“Nineteen days,” Katie exclaims. “Can you believe it? And forget Reconstruction [which the curriculum says she should cover at year’s end]. I only had one day left to cover the Civil War.”

Her disgust in the face of all this piddling interference with real attempts to educate teens is clear.

I’ve been working on a book about teaching for some time, myself. And I keep asking every teacher or retired principal or counselor I meet what they think about the direction we’re headed. I try to pose one question in the most neutral tone possible: “Do you think all the testing and recent changes in education have enhanced learning, hurt learning, or had, basically, a neutral effect?”

At a wedding in California a few weeks ago, I sat down beside a woman who turned out to be a retired elementary school principal. When I got to the word “hurt” in my usual query she interrupted. 

“HURT,” she said emphatically. “Does anyone say anything else?”

I laughed and said she had to let me finish. “But, to be honest, no,” I admitted. “They don’t.”

That’s what those who write about education might discover if they ever took time to ask. The growing backlash against testing, the bitter disdain for Mr. Duncan among frontline educators (the NEA called for his resignation in 2014), the willingness to shut down the U. S. Department of Education, these are not matters of mere politics.

These issues affect educators and the children they deal with every day.

When I asked Jeane Weisbrod, my old friend, who retired recently after a career in Loveland, she told me me she resented all the testing because it meant “sacrifice of valuable instructional time.”

I was talking with current staff members, and retirees, during a ceremony to honor Jeane and Diane Sullivan, a retiring art teacher, and Ora Sue Peabody, a fine school secretary, who was hanging up the phone for good in July. 

Jane Barre, former Loveland Middle School principal, called the metastasizing testing burden “lunacy” when I asked her opinion. Jane went on to serve as assistant superintendent for another local district after she left Loveland. When she began that job testing took up ten percent of her time. By 2009, testing ate up half her day, making it hard to accomplish anything else of substance. Diane chimed in to say she felt sorry for younger teachers who would have to deal with this mess for years to come. Like Diogenes, but stopping occasionally to sample the brownies, I was looking for anyone who felt our “leaders” in Washington knew what they were doing. Sue Lundy and Lauren Cripe, two of the best educators I ever knew (Sue is retired; Lauren just finished her tenth year) agreed all the testing was terrible. 

Sue called it “crazy.”

So, there you have it. That’s what Mr. Bruni missed. Those who work with children, or have worked with children, believe Secretary Duncan and the politicians have absolutely led us down the wrong path. 

They believe learning has suffered harm.

In fact, if we want to help children, here’s what we might do. Take part of the $70 billion spent by the Department of Education every year. Hire more counselors and more psychologists to work directly with kids. Get creative if you want to aid our nation’s youth. Take $20 billion and award $20,000 college scholarships to a million high school seniors every year. Use another $20 billion to help 1.6 million children who experience homelessness, who suffer both in and out of school. 

That would provide $12,500 in good housing for each child.

I think real educators, those in the academic trenches, could come up with all kinds of ways to use money and manpower to improve the lives of the boys and girls they work with every day. Arne Duncan? Let him go into a classroom in an inner city Chicago school. Let him work with teens in gangs.

Joel I. Klein? Let him have a chance to teach, too. He can work with kids who've been sexually abused at home and see how much “grading schools” matters.

If Mr. Bruni were to ask me, or ask most of my old colleagues and friends, what we thought about the Department of Education, I suspect most of us would say, “Sure. Scrap it. And scrap all the standardized tests.”

Those tests cost $1.7 billion annually.

I’d tell him: “Take that money and divide it among 17,000,000 elementary school students. Let each child take $100 to the nearest book store. Let them buy books—and see if reading scores don’t go up faster than they have in the last fifteen years, despite this absurd fetish for all the standardized tests.”

If nothing else, if you are writing about education, start by talking to people who actually do the educating. 

Spend more money on books. That might help students improve reading scores.

*********

If you liked this post, you might like my book about teaching, Two Legs Suffice, now available on Amazon.

Or contact me at vilejjv@yahoo.com and I can probably send you a copy direct for a little bit cheaper. My book is meant to be a defense of all good teachers and a clear explanation of what good teachers can do, and what they cannot do.

Two Legs Suffice is also about what students, parents and others involved in education must do if we want to truly enhance learning.

I actually taught for 33 years, more than all nine U. S. Secretaries of Education, Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp, Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Stephen Brill and about a hundred more “school reformers” combined.

Yep. Combined!

Teaching About Slavery

I’ve been trying to write a book about teaching and decided there wasn’t room for this chapter about slavery. Perhaps it will give other educators a worthwhile idea or two. I used to write my own materials, since textbooks tend to be so dull.

Excerpts follow:

Chapter Sixteen: Slavery: How Bad?

“…the absence of control. Here one lived knowing that at any time, anybody might do anything.”

Toni Morrison

...I began by creating two readings that looked the same and all examples came from the same sources. I simply divided them. Anything that made slavery sound good (or at least mild in nature) I put in one reading. Everything bad ended up in the other...

Each tale had the same title: HOW BAD WAS SLAVERY????? And the opening statement was the same:

The answer to the question, “How bad was slavery?” may surprise you. For now leave it at that. Remember that slavery began at Jamestown in 1619 and did not end till 1865. You should also know that in 1860 there were 4,000,000 slaves owned by 400,000 masters and mistresses.

The question, then, has a complex answer. The slave owners were ordinary people. So were the slaves.

After that the text was completely different and equally “true” or equally “untrue.” Or was truth complicated?

On one side I placed examples like these:

It may surprise you to know that not all owners were white. The Cherokee Indians practiced slavery. Marie Metoyer, a black woman, owned fifty-eight slaves. Cyprian Ricard, another free Negro, had ninety-one. Dilsey Pope owned her husband. After a terrible argument she sold him in anger. Later she cooled down and tried to buy him back.

His new owner refused.

I liked that one because I could imagine Dilsey pitching a fit, like any normal wife, and could imagine her regretting it.

The next section (about slave diet) ended with this:

…At Christmas one owner gave his slaves cheese, coffee and candy. The house servants of a Tuscaloosa, Alabama master gave a party for their friends at which cake and ice cream were served. Another slave reported that her owner gave her anything she asked for. Often she got up early, went “down in the kitchen and got my coffee and cream before the white folks got theirs.” “Yes,” she added, “my white folks was good to me.”

And then there was this:

Derry Coburn met Daniel Boone in the winter of 1800-01. For the rest of Dan’s life Coburn, a slave, was his “regular companion in the woods and probably his closest friend.” Once Boone got his hand mashed and stuck in a heavy trap and had to drag it back to camp. Coburn never thought about trying to escape. Instead, he removed the trap, bandaged his “master” up and went back to his cooking.

Another perfect setup was a quote by Solomon Northrup. Solomon was a free man living in Maryland until two con-artists promised a job with the circus, got him drunk, and carried him to Virginia where he was sold into servitude. (His story recently became the movie Twelve Years a Slave.) Even Northrup, however, had this to say about one master:

He described Miss Mary McCoy, owner of a hundred slaves, this way: “A lovely girl, some twenty years of age...she is beloved by all her slaves, and good reason indeed have they to be thankful that they have fallen into such gentle hands.”

She was “an angel of kindness.”

The pro-slavery reading ended with this:

Finally, we have the case of William Wells Brown. It is true—that he ran away from his owner. Then he was caught and thrown in jail. At the time he heard his master was ill.

You may wonder what slavery was like. But take note of what Brown had to say: “I prayed fervently [with intense feeling] for him.”

I assigned the “good” handout for homework and started class the following day by asking simply: “Were any of you surprised by what you read?” It soon turned out, that by writing carefully I had duped even the best students. (I taught seventh and eighth grades; I would hope older kids would not be so easilyt fooled.) And keep this in mind—there were good masters because there are good people in this world.[1]

“Who has something to say?” I wondered.

“I didn’t know there were black slave owners,” replied one of my students.

“One slave owner gave his slaves ice cream and cake,” offered another.

I took comments and added a few supportive ideas, stringing the fraud out as far as I could. Sometimes a student would object. “I read a book about slavery once, and it didn’t sound anything like this.”

“Was it a novel?” I asked. “You know, if you want to sell books, they have to be exciting. So it’s more interesting to have a daring escape than to write about shoeing horses or chopping cotton.”


Finally, when I felt I had played the string out as far as I could I asked someone to find the example of Solomon Northrup. What did he say about Miss Mary McCoy and what did it prove?”

I had a volunteer read the quote (mentioned above) then asked, “So what does this example prove?”

The student who had just read now agreed that slavery wasn’t as bad as she thought. One of the boys said there were a lot of good owners.

Read the paragraph again, I said. What does it really show?

Finally, someone would say: “Mr. Viall, it says they had reason to be thankful to have fallen into such gentle hands…Doesn’t that mean there were owners who were worse?”

“Ah…correct.”

I was surprised every year how few students saw through my subterfuge. Take the example of the owner who gave his slaves cake and ice cream. I waited in vain for someone to protest, “Mr. Viall, this was only one owner!”

I also liked to cite Jefferson Davis—who let slave set up courts, with slave judge and juries. Only once did he overturn a punishment—and that was to lower it. So who was in control, I asked every year? Again and again, students said—well—the slaves.

No, no.

“What word in the sentence shows Davis was in control?”

The answer dawned slowly. The key word, students would finally realize, was “let.” He let slaves have limited freedom.

Davis was still in charge.


At this point it was time to pass out the bad side of the story. I explained that everything in the first handout was true, as much as any limited view of reality is true. But was it the full story? If good people owned slaves, psychos did also. There were 400,000 slave owners. Some had to be evil.

“Finally, what happens when words are taken out of context?” I asked. “What did William Wells Brown say when he found out his owner was sick?” Not everyone was willing to take time to look for the quote. I added, “I’ll give you half my Twix bar if you find the answer first.” (I often ate candy during class and skipped lunch to help students later. And I knew almost all middle school students would perform for food—and kept a ready stash of candy bars in a bottom desk drawer.) Wendy raised her hand and claimed the treasure.

She read: “I prayed fervently [with intense feeling] for him.”

“All I did was saw the quotation in half. That is what he said, but not all of it. Wendy, you get the whole candy bar if you can guess the rest.”

“He prayed for him…to die?” she ventured.

“Correct! You are the Candy Bar Queen!”

I turned the kids lose and let them read on their own the remainder of the period. Now they heard Theophilus Conneau, captain of a slave ship, admit:

…Most vessels carried tools to pry slave’s mouths open if they refused to eat. There were nets to keep individuals from jumping overboard, a common form of suicide. On one voyage Conneau set sail with a “cargo of 108 boys and girls. The oldest was not 15 years of age.” Another time he packed his slaves between decks only 22 inches high.

If different owners shipped slaves on the same vessel it was necessary to brand their “property” to keep them from getting mixed up. An adult was marked on the upper arm. A child was branded on the buttocks. Conneau admitted this was a “disgusting duty.” Still, the idea of branding human beings seemed not to bother him that much. “This ... [is] done as lightly as possible,” he claimed, “and just enough for the mark to remain only six months.”

Or they read this—from American Slavery As It Is, an abolitionist account drawn from southern sources and published in 1837:

Under a system where one person might own another anything was possible. In 1834 Madame LaLurie of New Orleans was found to have kept seven slaves chained in her attic. Newspaper accounts indicate one boy was imprisoned five months. Fed only a handful of corn meal each day, he was subjected to “the most cruel treatment” every morning. According to witnesses an older black man had been beaten till his head was broken:

The worms were actually to be seen making a feast of his brain! Another woman had her back literally cooked (if the expression can be used) with the lash [whip]. The very bones might be seen projecting through the skin.

Or:

When an owner was “creative” punishment could take many forms. House servants could be demoted and sent to the fields. Saturday night dances could be canceled. Slaves might be required to work on Sunday—normally a day of rest. If a maid showed an attitude she might be denied a pass to visit her husband on another plantation. One owner made slave men dress in ladies’ clothes and do “women’s work.”

Another used a pair of scissors to punish a disobedient female slave. She had, said one witness, “real long hair and they cut one side of her hair off and left the other side long.”

Or:

Linda Brent was witness to similar abuse when a cook fed her master’s dog too much cornmeal mush. The dog vomited in its bowl and died shortly after. This brought the owner storming into the kitchen. “He said the mush had not been well cooked, and that was the reason the animal would not eat it. He sent for the cook,” Brent remembered sadly, “and compelled [forced] her to eat it.”

Later we also read the story of Frederick Douglass in his own words. One evocative detail, I thought: Frederick’s mother lived on a different plantation and visited him when she could, when her owner allowed. One day she brought him a sweet cake shaped like a heart, a detail I thought perfectly captured the humanity of all those millions of unfortunate human chattels. 

We heard from Booker T. Washington, in the same way, who described his boyhood as a slave up until the age of nine.

In days to follow I asked students to write a 500-word essay about “their” lives as slaves. Then we did a skit (in the form of a panel discussion, involving five masters and slaves), meant to last a full period. My students were great in these kinds of skits, what were essentially set up to be like “plays without dialogue.”

These are ideas I brought to class—not standardized knowledge—and the great work my students did in those skits, and on that story—none of that was standardized either.

Reading done by one run-of-the-mill history teacher in order to put together his own unit on slavery:

American Slavery As It Is by Theodore Weld (published in 1837); yep, I actually read that.

Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell; the book is written beautifully but filled with subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle racism—as when Mitchell talks about what a good master Scarlett’s father was. (He only whipped one slave, for not taking care of his race horse!)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe; there are some great scenes, including one where an overseer causes a fainting slave in the cotton fields to revive by sinking a pin into her thigh. 

A Slaver’s Log Book by Theophilus Conneau; the captain’s ability to make excuses for almost any action, including many that would have to be classified as horrible crimes, is quite amazing. 

Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington (1901); Washington has some great comments about the import of education for the freed slaves later.

The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass (three versions)

Puttin’ On Ole Master, which included the story of Solomon Northrup, which became the Academy Award winning Best Picture, 12 Years a Slave.

Great Slave Narratives, also including stories by former slaves.

WPA interviews with old slaves, conducted in the 1930s; on file at the Public Library of Hamilton County.

And, of course, numerous other sources…

I used to tell students the history of slavery was written on this man's back.

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[1] I know some might disagree with that kind of statement. I’ll add this example, if it might help. Suppose you are convicted of a murder you did not commit and sentenced to life in prison. Your jailor turns out to be a good person and treats you with human decency. That doesn’t make the fact you’re innocent and serving out a life sentence palatable.