New Vision and Goals for K-12 Education Since 2018

 

I retired from Maryville College in May 2018 after teaching at the college for 28 years. When I retired, I was the director of teacher education. I now live in Houston, Texas. I had planned to do some teaching, but I developed some health problems and had major surgery. But that has not kept me from being aware of what is happening in education.

As a result of my retirement and hospital stay, I have had ample time to think about the issues our country faces today. When I go through this mental exercise of trying to determine the cause of the issues we are facing, I always think about the possible role of education in addressing those issues. We can take our pick from the issues at hand: race relations, political polarization, the downward spiral of income of middle America, and the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the institutions of America.

Competition versus Cooperation

I will not argue the point that we live in a competitive world, and I have been just as concerned as you that our schools are not adequately preparing all students for what they will face in the future. On the other side of the coin is cooperation and I am just as afraid that we have not prepared our students to cooperate especially with those who are different from them.  I played basketball in middle school and high school, so I learned a lot about being successful in competition. I’m not certain that cooperation received the same emphasis, especially when it came to those who are different than I. Living in southern Appalachia, most of the folks I saw were working-class white and either Baptist or Methodist in religious preference.

I believe that cooperation is more powerful than competition. In competition, one side wins and the other side loses, one side is built up and the other side is torn down, and one side receives admiration from society and the other side receives only disdain. However, in cooperation all sides are winners, all sides are built up, and all sides receive admiration for what they have accomplished. The issue that scares me the most is I am not certain in our current political state that we can return to cooperation over competition.

Public Service

I can remember from my early days in education the required course in government was called Civics. I was well into my educational journey before I realize that the civics books emphasized the role of the citizen in governance rather than just the structure of our government. We killed civics because it cannot be taught like a history course. It must include engagement with one’s community, and we have not done that very well in our public schools.

There is another term that I would like to inject at this point. Elected officials are often referred to as public servants. If one fulfills the role of a public servant, he/she will always emphasize cooperation. However, I am afraid that our elected officials do not behave as public servants, rather they operate in the arena of competition and their goal is to destroy the opposition.  But let me be clear, I am not blaming solely our elected officials, we get the leadership we vote for. We deserve what we get.

Bless You My Children,
Dr. Terry L. Simpson
Maryville College
Prof. of Secondary Education Emeritus

The Journey

 

 

I don’t know if you ever wonder where I find ideas for a topic for one of my educational blogs. Actually, I get my ideas from many different sources. I have chosen for this blog an email sent to me from one of our former students. I will not give you his name or the names of the local schools because the thrust of what he is saying and his pilgrimage over time are what I want you to focus on.

 

Dr. Simpson,

I want to send this to you to say thank you. I’m not sure if you know of all of my journey in education, but I know you know how I fought the idea of even becoming an educator. I was set on using Maryville as a place to get a business degree, cruise on to law school and becoming the next Jerry Maguire. But fate, the Lord and Terry Simpson knew better!

 

You may not remember talking to me about becoming an education major my sophomore year and again my junior year. You may not know that to this day I felt there was a sinister plot involving you and Jim Pavao to talk me into this pathway and four years I worked on how that could be with a conspiracy theorist like mentality. But in the end, it brought me to where I am today. It has been quite a journey since 2003. A journey of returning home to OR to learn the lesson no man can be a prophet in his own town to carving out a new try in Nashville, to burning out of education completely to sale construction to a return to OR. It’s been quite a ride, I’m not sure if I am coming or going most days, but I want to thank you for putting me on the rails.

 

On July 20^th, I made another leap. This time a leap of massive proportion. I have traded in my 1.8 mile commute to the middle school I attended here in OR as the Vice Principal to take on the task of building a virtual learning program for Knox County as the assistant principal for grades 6-12. We have close to 19,000 students in the district K-12 in the virtual learning program. For my role, I helped to serve close to 10,000 of those students along with countless teachers and my amazing principal. We have been building this program, and working to design how we are going to help support all of those students, teachers and families.

 

It dawned on me today, in the middle of my 25^th conversation with a confused parent, who had no idea what asynchronous meant, talking on the phone this evening with two teachers who are unsure, and preparing to produce a video on connecting with students and families in a virtual learning environment for my morning staff video messages, I owe you. I would have never chosen this life for myself. A life and pathway I know led me to my amazing wife, who is an assistant clinical professor at UT K teaching elementary teachers how to teach math. A life that has led to the two most amazing children in the world has seen and a  life where I now can truly help students help their kids. A life where all of the challenges I made to the status quo of education are coming to fruition for me as I am able to help make real change. You lit the first flame and there have been many days along the way I have bless you for that and many days I have cussed you for it as well (imagine me as a sports agent, making 3%...ahhh living the dream).

 

I wanted to tell you how much I appreciate you! How grateful I am for you and seeing in me, something I never would have seen in myself. At the end of the day, Maryville College was a great experience, but I truly believe the Lord knew this great-grandson of an Irishman needed to be a Scot to me Dr. Terry Simpson.

 

I appreciate you more than you’ll ever know and I love you dearly for infusing a passion for helping kids into my life.

 

I hope you are doing well and enjoying retirement.

CL

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Bless you my children, 

TLSimpson

Educational Reform in the United States

We Missed Two Golden Opportunities

During my 44 years in public and private education, with the last 28 years being in teacher education at Maryville College, I participated in numerous educational reform efforts. These efforts enabled me to study the successes and failures of educational reform, and ponder the reason for those successes and failures.

Since I started teaching middle school in 1973, I thought that I would go back and summarize the major reform efforts since 1970. Then I remembered that this is an educational blog not a doctoral thesis.

As I was thinking about this transition in emphasis, one of my favorite musical groups of the 1950s and 60s came to mind. The Statler Brothers began performing in 1955 as a country music, gospel, and vocal group. They began traveling with Johnny Cash in 1964, and it all ended in 2002 at the Salem Civic Center in Salem, Virginia with their retirement from live concerts. 

One of their fun songs was Do You Remember These?

Do you remember these…
The boogey man, the lemonade stand, taking your tonsils out?

Ah, do you remember these…
Gable’s charm, frog in your arm, loud mufflers, and going steady,
Veronica and Betty, white bucks, and Blue Suede shoes?

Do we remember these…
Knock Knock jokes, who’s there? Dewey. Dewey who? The boat neck shirts, fender skirts, and Crinoline petticoats?

Now that I have your mind off the Coronavirus…Oops, if you remember most of the items above, you are more susceptible to the virus because of your age, so stay safe.

I began my teaching career in 1973 at Cedar Bluff Middle School in Knoxville, Tennessee. I also taught at Greenville High School and Collin County Community College in Texas during the 1980s. I finished my career with 28 years at Maryville College in Maryville, Tennessee in teacher education. During these years it seemed as if we were constantly reforming and trying to reinvent education.

Do you remember some of the reforms during the 1970s? 

Do you remember these...
PL 94-142, the Buckley Amendment, open space education (the school with no individual classrooms), and testing ALL teachers for their content knowledge since we already knew that teachers were not very smart?

Do you remember some of the reforms during the 1980s? 

Ah, do you remember these...
A Nation at the Risk, President Ronald Reagan and his goal to abolish the United States Department of Education, Cultural Literacy, higher academic standards, accountability, the Tennessee Instructional Model, the Lesson Cycle (Texas) and raising the standards for admission into teacher education programs in our colleges and universities?

Do you remember some of the reforms during the 1990s?

Ah, do we remember these...
Outcome based education, goals-based education which included the following two goals: By the year 2000, all American students will come to school ready to learn, and by the year 2000 American students will be first in the world in achievement in mathematics and science. No, we did not reach these goals.

Do you remember some of the reforms since the year 2000? 

Do we remember these...
The No Child Left Behind Act, Block scheduling, Teacher Quality Grants, teacher evaluations focused on student outcomes rather than teacher inputs, and the Common Core?

I would argue that few of these reform efforts had any major or lasting impact on education in the United States. In my 44 years as a teacher and teacher educator, I opposed a few of these reform efforts with all my strength. The Tennessee Instructional Model and the Lesson Cycle in Texas were really the same model of instruction. The model, a direct instruction model, was to be used in all lessons in all classes K-12. I thought this was absurd. Different academic subjects and different topics within those subjects often require different models of instruction to be taught and learned effectively. These two models of required instruction simply tied the hands of effective and creative teachers. The No Child Left Behind law is what you get when knowledgeable teachers are not part of the process in developing new curricula. Some of the requirements were so far out in left field that it became comical.

However, the one reform in curriculum that I thought had a real chance of making meaningful reform was the Common Core. The opposition to the Common Core came from politicians and self-appointed watchdogs of curriculum reform, and they had no idea of what this reform effort was trying to do and especially where it originated. The Common Core was completed in only two subjects: mathematics and English Language Arts. It was amazing to hear people blame the Common Core for all the different things they opposed in American education.

I will conclude this blog with one structural change, and one curriculum change that I think we should investigate fully. I believe that we should require all students to take the same courses in high school for the first two years. Then the students planning to attend a traditional college/university will stay in high school for the last two years to prepare for a rigorous college curriculum. The other students would be transferred to the community college system in order to study rigorous technical and vocational subjects. They should receive a technical certificate in their area of study. A significant part of their senior year would be spent working in their technical fields much like student teachers in a teacher licensure program work in the schools. We are smart people, so we can figure out what to do about football. Of course, the Coronavirus may have already figured it out for us.

The second change I would like to see in the American high school is a change as to when various courses in the high school curricula are offered. Student schedules should resemble college schedules rather than an elementary school schedule. In Brazil I visited a very good private high school. The first thing I noticed was that students had some classes on MWF and other classes on TR. These students took Physics every year for four years. In the MWF and TR schedule lots of creative design is possible.

Our response in the United States to the call for reform has been block scheduling. When this first came out, and school systems started adopting block scheduling, I opposed those who contended that block scheduling weakened the academic program. Now, after watching block scheduling for a number of years, I must conclude that it has weakened the academic program in most high schools. It is no wonder that so many of our students perform so poorly on international mathematic exams.

Meaningful reform in American public schools will be extremely difficult. Changing the structure of the American high school is next to impossible. We need some strong effective leadership in these areas. Do I have anyone who will take the challenge?


Terry L. Simpson, Ed.D.
Professor of Secondary Education Emeritus
Maryville College

Bless You My Children!

Would you like Dr. Simpson to speak at your school, teacher education event, or church? He can address a number of topics that would be agreed on in advance.
Your highest cost would be travel.

A Much Smaller Number of Undergraduate College Students Indicate That They Are Interested in Becoming A Teacher at the K-12 Level

Even though I retired in May 2018, I still constantly get updates and reports on the status of education in the United States and in countries literally around the world.  In my estimation, however, the most serious problem facing the future of education in the United States is the decreasing number of college students interested in going into education, especially K-12 education. The article I have just read was a study completed in Michigan; the number of students interested in becoming teachers has dropped up to 90% at some small private colleges.

The first question most people ask is: Why is this happening? You usually get similar reasons, often centered around low salaries, lack of prestige, and history. Unfortunately, these are accurate to a degree, so in order to recruit new teachers to the profession and strengthen public education, we must come up with some new strategies.

Since I was a teacher for 44 years at the middle school, high school, and community college levels, and I taught in the Maryville College Teacher Licensure Program for 28 years, I have a thought or two to share with you. First of all, K-12 teachers do not set the standards for teachers, nor do they govern who enters the profession. In the United States of America, education is the responsibility of state government, and not the national/federal government. I often had students from other countries in my classes at Maryville College, and they could not understand how something as important as education could be left to state government. When this type of governance is mandated by the Constitution, there is one guarantee. The numerous, and often small, school districts fall into one of two categories: rich school districts, or poor school districts, based on the wealth of the districts.

When I examined the local school districts that worked with our  Maryville College program, I found it amazing that you could get in your car in one school district, drive less than 30 minutes, and find yourself in another school district that did not provide the same advantages for their children. Teachers who get trapped in some of these lower-performing school districts are eager to get out. If they are successful at being hired by one of the higher-performing school districts, they will make more money and have more respect and prestige from the community. This is one of the hardest battles we face in this country with local school districts. The educational experiences are not the same.

I am concerned that on many occasions teachers are their own worst enemies. They actually do not want people in the larger community to know they are teachers. You can attend almost any college recruitment day, and it will not be long before you hear the following statement from one of the parents, “I will pay for your college experience in any field--except teaching.” I am not certain we will ever be able to change this perception. But there is one thing I know for certain: if you build a high-quality teacher licensure program, you can still recruit good students into that program. In short, it all starts with the teacher education faculty. However, the program must also have the full support of the college administration and faculty in order to equip new, high-quality teachers for the profession. This can be done, because I played a small part in doing it.

We often told our teacher licensure students at Maryville College, “If you want to be TREATED like a professional, ACT like a professional, SPEAK like a professional, DRESS like a professional, and INTERACT with your students as a professional would.”  For, you see, teachers earn the status of “professional” from the community by working hard for that recognition by modeling the significant traits of a professional. There is, however, one thing to avoid: Do not camp out in the teachers’ lounge every day at lunch, because you will turn into the teacher that you do not want to be. It’s a place where things are said about kids--and their parents--that a true professional should not be discussing in public. As a teacher, you will find out personal things about your students and their families that you should take to your grave and never discuss with anyone.

Teachers should be involved in their communities in all aspects of community life. These are places where teachers can earn the respect of the community. I’ll never forget one day, after church in the town where I was teaching high school, when a member of the church was discussing with me my job in the community.  I told him I was a high school history teacher, and we began discussing a few of my topics and other things I was doing in class. He responded, “You know, I think you could really teach history.” Those are the battles we must fight and win. Most of the adults in this country do not have kids in school, but we must sell our programs to that very community. It can be done.

Bless You My Children.

Terry L. Simpson, EdD

Back to School in Real Life: May 2018 - December 2019

I retired in May 2018 after completing 44 years as a teacher, 16 years in the public school system and 28 years in the teacher education program at Maryville College. The 28 years at Maryville College resulted in some of the most productive years of my life. If I had told someone that my goals for the teacher education program at Maryville College would be to achieve state, regional, national, and international recognition, few people would have believed that these goals were anything more than impossible dreams. Consequently, they were not shared with most people. Yet, these goals were achieved through the hard work of my colleagues and students in the teacher education program.

I have never thought that these goals demonstrated arrogance on my part. However, if it was arrogance, then the good Lord took care of that attitude between May 2018 and December 2019. We moved to Tyler, Texas after my retirement. I had been fighting Parkinson’s since 2001, and it began taking its toll on me physically. By fall 2018, I was experiencing weakness throughout my body, and I began to have hallucinations. By Christmas 2018, I did not have the physical strength to drive the few hours from Tyler to the home of my daughter, Jennifer.

By spring 2019, I began losing the ability to walk, to stand up from a sitting position, to hold utensils while eating, and to write, because I could not hold a pencil. This became very scary time for me, and it tested my faith to its limit. I assumed this was the end result of Parkinson’s. I went to Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas to see a neurologist, Dr. Olga Wiln. She quickly determined that my physical problems were not the result of Parkinson’s, but that I had experienced a stroke or damage to my spinal cord. I entered the hospital the same evening, and by noon the next day it was determined that the spinal cord in my neck was damaged due to compression. While the surgery itself would not be complicated, the healing process would be. It would take six months to one year of intense physical therapy to see improvement of these physical problems.

This experience is giving me a new understanding of humility. For the last three months I have had to have help to complete any body functions. I have learned that I have to depend on others to live each day. The number of degrees behind one’s name no longer matter. The most important people in my life each day receive very little pay for the essential work they do each day. Many of them have become a daily blessing in my life each day. Striving to be in the center of God’s is no longer obvious. My daily goals have now become being able to stand without help for 10 minutes or to take three steps without falling. I have asked this question many times during the past three months, “Why am I here?” At times, it has become a difficult question to answer. I know one thing for sure: I have become eternally grateful to Jennifer and her husband Jeffrey, Savannah, and the other grandchildren. I am grateful for the support of faculty and the students at Maryville College and their willingness to follow me.

However, I want to mention two individuals. Dr. Charles Redmond was pastor of First Baptist Church in Lenoir City, Tennessee during the 1970s, and from there he went to First Baptist Sulfur Springs, Texas. He recommended me for a position in Greenville, Texas. He then went to First Baptist Pasadena, Texas. Jennifer and I went to see him this past summer, and he actually remembered me. When I shared my health issues with him, he asked, “May I pray for you?” He got up, walked across a very large room, got on his knees at my feet, took my hands and prayed a prayer that seemed to touch the very throne of God.

The second person is a nurse supervisor at Methodist Hospital. I will leave the hospital on December 20 after four weeks of intense daily physical therapy. She is a large African-American woman who always knows what is going on. She came into my room yesterday and said she had been watching me and was impressed by my progress and attitude. Then she laid her hands on my head and began to pray. She prayed that God would give me complete healing.

This old man of 71 years has learned many valuable lessons. These people and many others have become new blessings in my life.

In my last Ethics class during January Term 2018, we reached an impasse on how to respond, or if we should respond, to some very evil situations. My question was, “Why are you here?”

In my situation over the past year, I’ve asked myself over a hundred times, “Why am I here?” I have some clarity, but I am still working on the complete answer. The good Lord knows, and I am learning to trust him anew, and need to realize that I am still a student and need to learn some new things.


Bless you my children…

tls


Dr. Terry L. Simpson
Director of Teacher Education, Emeritus
Maryville College

Thankfulness

I am writing this blog on Wednesday before Thanksgiving Day, and like many of you, I am trying to finish all the chores related to Thanksgiving and leave time to rest in order to enjoy Thursday. I am not sure this will happen. I wonder how we have digressed to the place in our culture that we dread days that should be filled with happiness, celebration, and contentment. As a teacher, the Thanksgiving break was not much of a break. I was often too busy grading student assignments that were turned in before the break. However, I think as teachers we have often missed the opportunity to make this attitude of “thankfulness” a significant part of our teaching and learning experience with our students.

I want to tell you a story that forever made thankfulness a significant part of my life. My first-grade teacher was Ms. Presley. She and her husband were not from the East Tennessee region. I do know that her husband was a scientist at the Oak Ridge Nuclear Laboratory during World War II. They chose not to live in Oak Ridge and ended up in a rural area of Loudon County. By the time I became a senior in high school I had long realized that she had been a significant part of my educational experience. I didn’t know what made her better than most other teachers, but I knew that she was. Consequently, in the spring of 1967 when I graduated from Loudon High School, I sent four “thank you notes”--two were sent to individuals who I felt had made a significant difference in my life. One of those was Ms. Presley, my first-grade teacher.

She did not teach the next year because her children were entering high school, and she wanted to be able to spend time with them in their activities. After her husband died and with serious health issues, she moved to Maryland to live with one of her daughters.

I came to Maryville College in the fall of 1990 and began my 28 years in teacher education at the College. In the mid-1990s, while we were living on the family farm in Loudon County, I received a phone call from Carl who lived not far from our home. When I answered the phone he asked, “Can you come over to my house; there is someone here that wants to see you?” As I drove to his house, I had no idea who this individual was.

As I walked into the home, I saw an older lady sitting by the kitchen table. Carl asked, ”You don’t know who this is, do you?” I suppose all I did was nod because I did not know who she was. With a big smile on his face, Carl said, “This is Ms. Presley, your first-grade teacher.”

Ms. Presley also smiled and said, “Terry, I cannot really see you because I am almost totally blind. I can see the outline of your body but not your face or any physical feature. However, I wanted to come and see you.” She went on to tell me that I was the only student that she taught who came back to say “thank you” for being my teacher. She was nearly 90 years-old. She shared with me that one of the reasons she had to make this trip to Tennessee from Maryland was to say “thank you” to me--her student.

I always told this story to my teacher licensure students right before the Thanksgiving break or at the close of the semester. I would tell them to think of that teacher that made a difference in their lives, to write the “thank you letter,” and to give specific reasons as to why that teacher made a difference.

Have you ever been thankful for your students? Have you told them? You still have time before the close of the semester.

Bless You My Children, 
TLS

After This Bitter Election, What Do I Expect of Our Schools?

As I start writing this blog, I am sitting at my desk on Tuesday, November 6, 2018. Yes, it is election day, and Deborah and I plan to vote this afternoon. I am ready to see the end of this campaigning season. We have experienced everything from hateful name-calling to the massacre of 11 Americans who were worshiping in their Jewish synagogue. As a history teacher, this massacre greatly troubles my soul. Are we no better than the Nazis during the 1930s?

We are historically incorrect and politically naïve if we think elections in this country were much more civil in the past. As a native of Tennessee, I have often read the story of the election of Andrew Jackson as the 7th President of the United States. Jackson made bitter enemies throughout his lifetime, and they wanted to prevent him from becoming president of the United States. However, it was next to impossible to shake the confidence of Jackson, so they went after Rachel, his wife. She was called the epitome of a profligate woman: a bigamist, an adulteress, and a whore. Their accusations were so hurtful and vicious that she died between election day and the day that Jackson was to take the office of President of the United States. Jackson became so depressed that many of his supporters feared that he would not go to Washington to take the oath of office. Jackson blamed her death on his political enemies, especially Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun. They were Jackson’s bitter enemies until the day he died.

Another presidential election that was filled with name-calling was the election in which Theodore Roosevelt ran as a third-party candidate. Although he had been a friend, Roosevelt grew to despise his hand-picked successor in the Republican Party, William Howard Taft, toward whom he directed his hate-filled speech and name-calling.

To add to our pain, in 2018 we live with the power of technology, especially the Internet and 24-hour news cycles. This means that we cannot get away from the hateful speech and name-calling, as well as the senseless acts of violence.

Regardless, we cannot stand by and not do nothing. We owe our children a response to the civic and political climate in which they are being raised. Yes, I do have a few suggestions for schools.

Suggestion one: Students will be able to define stereotype and give a current example of a group being unfairly judged through stereotype. 

It is unethical to stereotype an entire group of people based on the knowledge one has of a single individual or a few individuals in that particular group. The group could be a religious group, ethnic group or any group different from the dominant group to which I belong. I learned in the early elementary grades at Davis Elementary School that it was not fair to judge an entire group based on this limited knowledge of the entire group.

Suggestion two: Students will be able to define ad hominem and give several current examples of individuals or groups on the receiving end of ad hominem attacks. 

One of the most rejected attacks in academic debate is an ad hominem attack, which can take the form of overtly attacking someone or casting doubt on their character as a way to discredit their argument through personal abuse, personal attacks by name-calling, or refutation by caricature of the person. In a formal academic debate this type of attack would get you an “F”. Too bad that we could not give many of our political candidates an “F” during this past election cycle. This will only be stopped when we refuse to listen to a politician that resorts to attacking the person rather than the ideas of that person.

The National Institute for Civil Discourse has as a purpose to revive civility in our civil discourse. They state that making fun of a political opponent, making disrespectful or demeaning statements, refusing to listen to arguments of different points of view, and making exaggerated statements that misrepresent the truth must be rejected in our civil discourse.

As a teacher in middle school, high school, and at the college level I have concluded that we must rediscover that in our democratic republic all citizens have the right to express their views in the marketplace of ideas. I am required to respect all people even those who have views which I reject. 

As John Dewey argued many years ago, the school classroom should operate as a miniature democracy. In other words, students need to practice civil discourse. If this does not become a priority in our schools, both public and private, I fear the end result for our country.


Bless you my children, 
tls

Dr. Terry L. Simpson,
Professor Emeritus 
Maryville College Educator Preparation Program

Image Source: [Onlin image/logo]. Retrieved November 8, 2018 from https://www.revivecivility.org/