Crush Lusher
Posted: September 27th, 2012 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 8 Comments »
TNTP has put out a 17-page booklet, where 5 successful teachers each describe a move they use. It’s called Unlocking Student Effort.
This one is really zippy, by Jamie Irish, a KIPP math teacher in New Orleans:
Drinking Crush orange soda makes you better at math. It’s absolutely true.
My 8th graders students drink Crush during every quiz, regional benchmark exam, and standardized test. I can tell when the test
gets difficult because they all start taking bigger sips.A visitor once inquired about the rules in my class. One student said, “Crush Crush Crush or get crushed,” and then turned
back to her work.During class, if a student gets a few questions wrong, he or she is sent to drink Orange Crush-colored water from the water
cooler. The student drinks one cup and, as if by magic, he or she never gets a question wrong for the remainder of class.One day, Franquell brought a can of grape Crush, not orange, to morning homeroom. I stopped my announcements and said,
“Franquell, you know that only the Orange Crush bestows magic math powers, right?” She sighed and said, “Mr. Irish, the corner store ran out. They always run out of the orange kind. Kids are buying it all up. They can’t keep it in stock they said.”
Don’t you want to read more?
Interesting that they selected 2 teachers from the same school in NOLA.
Love the Crush thing for motivation, but can’t imagine plying my kids with soda all day long.
Regarding the teacher who tried teaching Shakespeare after the example of Marva Collins but found herself frustrated the kids didn’t see the “relevance”…
My wife just told me that Collins actually had an answer to this question, which she recounts in her book: she didn’t stop and wring her hands about how she wasn’t making Shakespeare relavant to ghetto children. She told the kid that Shakespeare was the greatest writer in the English language and if he didn’t see why they were learning this it said something about him, not Shakespeare.
So, a genuine question here from my wife again, regarding the Orange Crush distributor. Are we so sure that it really constitutes “bridging extrinsic rewards and intrinsic [motivation]” t0 talk about the remote external reward of college later while handing out the very immediate benefit of soda? Habitual excellence is not supposed to be merely an instrumental value.
Bob, I don’t doubt your wife’s good intentions, but her telling her student there was something wrong with him recalled more dreary moments in my own schooling, when teachers tried to tell me “get with the program,” or, “it’s for your own good” whenever I resisted learning. Such statements suggested there was something inherently wrong with me for not buying what they were selling, and I was much more likely to tune out the next class than tune in. And if I did tune in, it was to pass the test – not because of any inherent love that was burgeoning between me and the material. Like you, I worry that making rewards for learning extrinsic; however, I don’t see how suggesting that canonical content is inherently good and if you don’t get it you’re inherently bad undoes that bind, however. In fact, I think it is a sure-fire way to make kids hate school.
The 8th graders where I used to teach also were taught Shakespeare. Rather than present him as a great old white man you need to know (E.D Hirsch, I’m looking at you), the 8th grade teacher worked hard to find ways in which to connect what appeared to be a text with unfamiliar, challenging language to themes that could transcend differences in race, class, culture, and time period. That’s the better approach. Rather than holding up Shakespeare as a bitter pill that one had to swallow to get along in society, Shakespeare instead can be understood and appreciated for providing us a new way to think about and understand relations to ourselves and to each other. Isn’t that why he remains, 400 years later, a writer of some renown? It’s the harder road, to be sure, but the right one.
I’d argue that the same rule about teaching Shakespeare applies to most difficult content we struggle to teach in school. The point ought not to be just to get it because “it” is good. The point ought to be to get it because “it” helps you or makes you better in some way.
Bob and I agree, though, when it comes to the case of Orange Crush. Irish’s idea is cute, and I don’t doubt Lusher does get “crushed” year after year. I do worry, however, about the narrative students internalize about competition and the purpose of their education. Reading the whole TNTP article, I see Jamie presenting knowledge to his students as less for its own sake, than for its ability to demonstrate the students’ achievement in a context of competition with other schools. If you read his locker room speech (p. 12), you see these political undertones made explicit. Jamie spends about half of his motivational speech explaining that he wants good scores to prove to other people that charter schools are the right model of education for poor urban kids. When he exhorts his students’ towards testing success, his promise of a better future becomes enmeshed with a hope that their success will also represent the superiority of New Orleans charter schools’ superior education model.
How is Irish’s speech conflating knowledge, achievement, and competition possible? I’d argue this is a product of making students’ mathematical “knowledge” visible via testing. The results of those tests have been placed under public scrutiny and rendered into a commodity comparable via percentages, averages, and raw scores. Now these commodities are being subjected to market forces that compel teachers to view students and schools within a framework of competition.
In a sense, it’s only natural that Irish should come to view his students as players helping KIPP to win “the big game.” Indeed, this is what we should expect when education becomes subject to market-based logic. The problem is this: I understand how students’ test-based success really matters for Jamie and KIPP (who are locked in a struggle to prove the validity of their educational model); I don’t understand how it helps kids. When Irish notes the correlation between LEAP and ACT scores, he makes a classic research mistake of conflating correlation and causation. We sincerely hope that test-based results lead neatly to college success, but as Paul Tough (and a host of academic research) is happy to tell you, the case is not nearly so simple. That’s why I worry that, good intentions aside, Irish’s students may yet end up the ones “crushed.”
With regards to teaching Shakespeare to 8th graders; it’s an uphill battle in many respects. Just citing Shakespeare in front of students unfamiliar with his work, causes immediate intimidation. The association with Shakespeare being the yard stick along which greatness is measured does not provide a steady platform for unsure students stand upon.
Unfortunately, I have no remedy for combating this intimidation other than to pander and show Baz Lurmann’s Romeo And Juliet as a mechanism to display a legitimate connection between Shakespeare and the things that engage today’s youth (movies, guns, celebrities, violence, etc…).
With regards to Mr. Irish’s CRUSH lessons… I think those of you who are faulting this system are missing something very important. The arguments are being made that he doesn’t understand the difference between “correlation and causation”, that he’s just feeding kids sugar so they perform well – like Pavlovian dogs, or that “Habitual excellence is not supposed to be merely an instrumental value,” aren’t looking at the bigger picture.
Don’t you all think that a teacher as smart as this guy (he’s been teaching for a decade, degree from Columbia, won the Fishman Prize, and an award from KIPP this year) has thought of that? Don’t you think that he has observed what has worked and what has not, assessed the pro’s and con’s of his method, and made an educated decision using the facts of circumstances of his specific classroom to formulate a system that works best for his specific students?
Additionally, you are all failing to see the HUMOR in what he’s doing. I admit, I was skeptical – giving kids soda during the school day? I don’t allow food or drink in my classroom… ever. Needless to say, I wasn’t originally a fan, but I saw the numbers and (being a math teacher as well) I never argue with numbers. So I did more research, have any of you seen the videos that KIPP Central City has put out for their students in preparation for LEAP? They are hilarious. The Crush “Branding” going on here is tongue in cheek and the students recognize this. In a video I saw, their Principle (I think) dressed up like a giant frog, Mr. Irish dressed in an orange tuxedo, and they made an adventure movie to motivate their students.
I think that we’re not seeing the forest for the trees if we’re casting Mr. Irish’s plan in a negative light… and I think what KIPP Central City is doing for LEAP can be translated to what we can do for Shakespeare as well. The “Branding” he’s doing with his classroom is part of a bigger machine that the whole school community is taking part in. Students aren’t individuals striving for independent achievement; they are members of a community using their powers as individuals to raise the whole.
Orange Crush soda isn’t just a temporary reward that is consumed and discarded. It is a signifier that each student uses to affirm their place as a member of a community. A community that they want to belong to, not that they have to. A community with goals and with motivation. A community set up for success… and isn’t that what we all want our classrooms to be?
Kate, I’m with you.
Re: orange soda and motivation — please don’t misunderstand me, as I happen to know through personal sources that this fellow is indeed a terrific teacher. But we don’t always know what makes us effective. I was just probing HIS specific claim that this technique is precisely about bridging from extrinsic rewards to intrinsic motivations. It wasn’t clear to me how this does that. However, the more modest claim you made about this being part of community spirit and such seems more substantiated to me (particularly having worked in similar schools with a lot of humorous stuff like this to make it fun for kids).
BTW, I’ve helped teach Shakespeare to KIPP middle schoolers (we performed a play, with musical orchestration!) and I FULLY appreciate the pain of working through that. Nobody’s suggesting, certainly not Marva Collins, that we order kids to read things without context or help. I think the point is just that time spent working methodically through Shakespeare — to see how he speaks to all those big questions — has some real meat to it that you won’t get just writing essays about your relatively unformed opinions about x or y.
EduKate, thanks for your reply.
I think your comments highlight the fact that I didn’t make the purpose of my critique very clear. Sorry about that.
It wasn’t my goal to simply cast Jamie in “a negative light.” Instead, I should have explained that my concern was with how TNTP uses Jamie (via the Fishman Prize) to represent a particular vision of “superlative classroom practice” and how there limits and dangers that accompany this idealization – particularly in terms of how we think about equity. In other words, this isn’t exactly about Jamie as much as it is about how Jamie is used by TNTP.
After some reflection, I ended up reworking and expanding upon my original comments here into a paper for my class on ed reform. I explain what I mean above in a lot more detail, and I hope it clarifies where I stand. It’s too long to post here, but you can read a version of it on my blog:
http://edreformanon.blogspot.com/2012/10/orange-crush-and-good-teaching.html