This is from Washington Post Answer Sheet, March 2, 2013, by Valerie Strauss, who introduces the commentary.



How much does school reform really address what goes on in the classroom? In 

answer to that question, here’s a piece from a teacher who will give you some 

of the bad news. It was written by Michele Kerr, a second-career teacher, 

credentialed in math, history, and English, with a master’s in education from 

Stanford University, She teaches math -- everything from prep for the 

California High School Exit Examination to pre-calculus at Kennedy High School 

in Fremont, CA. This appeared on Larry Cuban’s blog on School Reform and 

Classroom Practice. 





By Michele Kerr





“Ms K, I need to do my work with Ms. V. My education plan is my civil right!” 

Deon’s entire body was contorted in a geometric impossibility, the better to 

shout at me from the back of the room. 





“Hey, Ms. K! Come here! What if both numbers are negative?” Sticks was waving 

me over. 





“If the rise and run are both negative, the slope’s positive. Just like 

multiplying!” Jack argued, as Cal watched dispassionately. 





Welcome to the first month of my math support class, for juniors and seniors 

who haven’t yet passed California’s High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE). Snapshots 

from a typical day: 



• Deon and Mack in exile, Deon facing east in back, desk jammed up against the 

full-wall closet, Mack facing due north, desk flush against the middle of the 

wall. The two would scream at me for a few minutes, demanding to be released 

to their guided studies teacher now that I had successfully removed anything 

remotely resembling fun from their grasp. Eventually, they growled various 

forbidden words and subsided into something approaching silence. 




• Miguel and Eddie obliviously tagging my whiteboards with my precious student 

markers that I’d taken away twice already. 




• Yesenia and Juan, a brother-sister pair who only spoke Spanish, chattering 

away about anything but math with Pauly Jay who, in a class that’s half 

Hispanic, is nonetheless my only bilingual student. 




• JattJeet dozing off, Tavon fixing me with a hostile stare for disrespecting 

Deon and Mack. 




• Johnny wandering aimlessly, resplendent in a teal plaid shirt and striped 

turquoise shorts, wearing a pink winter girl’s hat and a purple school blanket 

wrapped round his shoulders over his backpack, which he never took off. 




• Atamai whirling around on a wheeled free-standing chair, stopping only to 

shout a math question at me or argue when I told him to put his posterior back 

in a desk. 




• Brian tuning out the world with music, having surreptitiously put his 

earpieces back in when I wasn’t watching.
• Jack, Cal, Victor, and Sticks usually working on the assignment for the day. 





And so it went.





Juniors and seniors who haven’t yet passed the seventh-grade standard-based 

CAHSEE are kids for whom math presents a serious challenge. A class of 

students with mostly low motivation and widely varying but generally weak math 

abilities is first and foremost a management problem, and a huge part of the 

management problem is the math. In order to maximize learning time, a teacher 

has to manage not only the students, but the math. 





First task in managing the students: separate the vortex from the driftwood. 

The disruptive vortex sucks all the driftwood into his wake, where all spin 

about endlessly and, alas, happily, in circles all the way to the bottom. Pull 

out the driftwood and nothing changes. Move the vortex and the driftwood go 

back to floating about aimlessly, amenable to redirection. The quintessential 

disruptive vortex, Deon could single-handledly destroy half the class’s 

productivity if left undisturbed; his absence or isolation always left most of 

my “driftwood” students open to the idea of getting some work done. 





The much rarer productive vortex students capture driftwood and spin it in the 

right direction. I was blessed with two. Seated with Jack and Cal, Sticks and 

Victor would compete madly to get the most work done; left to themselves, 

Sticks would toss wads of paper at JattJeet, with Victor shouting direction 

vectors. Understand that “good” kids and “bad” aren’t useful distinctions: 

Jack and Cal had the occasional zero-productivity hour, and all kids had days 

in which they settled down and learned. Deon was a math-solving machine who 

worked fiendishly once I isolated him from all other entertainment. 





After carefully managing vortices, I sat the rest of the students so that no 

one, ideally, was next to a buddy. I ruthlessly rearranged students for the 

sole purpose of ruining their social hour, and pushed hard upon pain points 

(no music during practice, an F for the day) for any misbehavior. Then I had 

to figure out who to call and what to write when students left to go to the 

bathroom and never came back. 





By the end of that first month, I occasionally ended class declaring that 

everyone had a daily F, and often endured various bleats of “Ms. K, why you so 

mean? Why you yelling? Chill out,” from kids whose voice volume went up to 

11. But most days we had fun. And no matter how crazy the class got, I taught 

math every single day. 





Onto managing the math, so that the driftwood would move in the right 

direction, and preparing the students for the test. 





The students have multiple opportunities to take the test.

I aimed my 

preparation push for the November test, with the February test as a backup. Of 

the original eighteen students, I thought nine would pass by November, or get 

close to it. Their existing math knowledge wasn’t so much the problem as was 

their inexperience in high-stakes tests. The other half did not appear to have 

the language, motivation, and/or math skills to pass, but at least I could 

teach them some math they could use when they finally got around to wanting it 

badly enough.





But even that limited goal was a challenge. I learned how long I could run an 

upfront discussion before their attention waned, carefully timing the moment 

when I moved them onto practice problems—which had to be carefully managed, 

too. Struggling students need to build momentum on a string of problems before 

they get to their first hesitation point. Hit that hesitation point too early 

and they “shut down”. They look away and find a more rewarding activity: talk 

to their neighbor, take a nap, turn up the volume on their iPod, sketch, 

tiptoe out of the room when I’m not looking, send objects airborne in pursuit 

of a target. Finding worksheets that started with problems simple enough to 

get them working and then built to more challenging work that wasn’t too hard 

took up a big chunk of my day. I’d spend hours looking through practice sets 

to be sure they didn’t leap to tough problems too soon, and often just wrote a 

dozen or more identical problems on the board, simply varying the numbers. 

Even with all that effort, some concepts were still too hard for some 

students, and I couldn’t always reach each one before he got pulled into a 

disruptive vortex. And so, from managing the math back to managing the 

students.





I lived for the days when I scored a win. Much is made by both reformers and 

progressives about the soul-killing nature of drill, but I got hooked on the 

genuine triumph my students felt when they worked a whole set of problems 

correctly. They beamed and bragged. Stickers were not unappreciated, or maybe 

a big red star with a smiley face. They didn’t mind the drill. They minded 

that they couldn’t do the drill, and so pretended they didn’t want to. 





Sometimes students could do the work but just decided not to that day. Long 

ago, all these students learned that the relationship between effort and 

result was non-linear with no guarantee of a payoff. That this payoff was 

passing the CAHSEE, something they needed in order to graduate, was sometimes 

forgotten in the moment. But it’s not as if I could offer a guarantee. Some 

students never do pass the CAHSEE.





“Improving teacher quality” is the buzzphrase for 2013. Yet none of the 

challenges I’ve recounted are addressed by higher teacher Graduate Record Exam 

(GRE) scores, and an understanding of multivariable calculus offers no tools 

for managing a student howling nonsensical accusations about his rights under 

the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. No conclusive research on 

superior discipline approaches can inform ed schools of the best way to 

prepare teachers to help students with complicated motivations and no real 

desire for academic excellence. Meanwhile, education reformers point 

accusingly to the very existence of high school students who haven’t yet 

mastered fractions and percentages as de facto evidence of incompetent 

teachers with inadequate knowledge, even though all of my students had been 

taught these concepts dozens of times over the years, from both traditional 

and “reform” approaches. 





Another catchphrase these days is “grit”. While academically they might be 

driftwood, my students are a forceful, opinionated group who questioned my own 

views on politics and social policies (“Ms. K, what’s your position on 

alcohol?” “Upright. Bad idea to drink lying down--and never consume before 21, 

of course.”). Many hold jobs. At least one is a committed and dedicated 

athlete. While some have abysmal Grade Point Averages (GPAs), others are 

respectably above 2.5. Several seniors have done well enough on the Armed 

Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) to qualify for military service.





Five of the nine students on my “should pass” list did, in fact pass, Jack and 

Deon in October, the other three in November. Two of the remaining four got 

“high fail” scores; the other two did about five points lower than I would 

have liked. All four on the “should pass” who didn’t probably did well in 

their February test. Of the remaining nine with more challenging skill 

deficits, at least half will find the motivation, the focus, or the language 

skills in the next year to succeed. The others have the option to waive the 

requirement.





Reformers will judge me for the low pass rate. As a long-time test prep 

instructor, I judge myself for the four who didn’t pass in November, and will 

continue to look for better tools. But as a teacher, I judge myself by the 

degree to which my students develop increased confidence and competence in 

their math skills, as well as the degree to which they take more 

responsibility for their academic choices. 





And on those criteria, I am content. All the students improved their 

understanding of proportional thinking, linear equations, and binomial 

multiplication, skills which will help them move through the high school math 

track. Sticks is now doing well in my geometry class. Victor stopped by two 

days before the February CAHSEE asking for practice material to brush up, and 

Brian visited to give a full report of his performance after the same. Jack 

and Cal are studying for their college placement tests.





On the last day of class, I read this article’s opening paragraphs to my 

students. They listened in total silence and then burst into applause, with 

faces that I must describe as shining. Some of them picked their own 

pseudonyms. While none said so directly, they are clearly pleased and proud 

I’d chosen to write their story. As I looked out at the class I’d worked so 

hard to teach, I remembered my students make their own judgments. Clearly, I 

hadn’t done too badly in their estimation--and I wouldn’t be a teacher if that 

assessment didn’t matter most.