The Education of Eva Moskowitz Read online

  When the yearbook was finally complete, the vendor brought me a copy and we paged through it together. He’d initially resented all the additional work we were making for him, but he now told me that it had been the best professional experience of his life and that he’d never look at yearbooks in the same way. I learned that while people may initially dislike being pushed hard, they may feel differently when they see the results of their labors. I also discovered the satisfaction that comes from working with talented people. I wasn’t a particularly good writer or photographer, nor did I know anything about layout. My sole talent was getting other people to use theirs: inspiring them, organizing them, holding them accountable. Together, we’d shown that if you put your heart into it, you could take something that might otherwise be pedestrian and unimportant and make it great and meaningful.

  Working on Stuyvesant’s yearbook, I became close friends with a classmate named Sarah Nazimova who, in addition to being a very talented artist, was incredibly bright and interesting. We’d talk for hours on end about our thoughts on everything: education, psychotherapy, politics, friendship, love. Through her, I got to know a classmate named Eric Grannis who one day invited me to a picnic in Central Park. He seemed interesting and witty so I accepted his invitation. We got together a few times over the ensuing months and then he invited me over to his place for dinner on a weekend when his parents were away. Since Eric had platonic friendships with several girls, I wasn’t sure his interest was romantic, but I suspected it was when he served me a sophisticated Italian meal he’d cooked (chicken with porcini mushrooms, risotto, and a mocha gelato) at a candlelit table. A good night kiss removed all doubt.

  A week or so later, we were walking in a park near school and began talking about education, a topic that Eric had thought about a great deal as his father was a professor of education. Eric thought students at failing public schools should be given tuition vouchers to attend private schools. I’d never heard of this idea, which was quite obscure then, and it deeply troubled me. Education, I said, was far too important to be handed over to the private sector. In that case, asked Eric, was I against food stamps? No, I said. Well, he replied, tuition vouchers were just food stamps for education. If I trusted private industry to make food, why not schools? And conversely, if I thought the government was more competent than the private sector, shouldn’t the government produce food for poor people rather than just give them food stamps? Was I also against all government aid for students attending private colleges or did my distrust of private education only extend to K–12 education and, if so, why? I found Eric’s ideas disquieting but I was attracted to his intellectual independence and quick mind.

  While Eric was very smart, he wasn’t terribly focused. He’d been an indifferent student and seemed to be taking a rather lackadaisical approach to getting into college. Whereas I’d studied endlessly for the SATs, Eric had taken them cold. My head therefore told me that I should be wary of him. As for my heart, I’ll let my diary tell the story:

  2/2: “Think that I’m beginning to get emotionally involved with Eric. I enjoy talking to him and he’s a very special person.”

  3/12: “God, I’m falling in love with Eric. All I talk about with Sung-Hee is Eric, about what an amazing person he is.”

  3/13: “I’m afraid I’m going to mess things up. It’s scary to love someone.”

  I think what attracted me to Eric was his love of learning. He wrote short stories and plays, took jazz lessons, learned how to cook gourmet meals, and read fiction copiously; he did all this not so he could get into a prestigious college or impress people or make a lot of money but simply because he enjoyed it. He also seemed to be interested in me for my mind. He’d taken months to get to know me before he’d even kissed me on the cheek and for my birthday had given me a collection of short stories by Flannery O’Connor, one of his favorite authors. While I don’t think Eric gave a moment’s thought to how to make me fall in love with him, he couldn’t have formulated a better plan if he’d tried.

  Eric was intrigued when I told him about bike trips I’d led as a camp counselor so we decided to take such a trip together the summer after our graduation. We biked from Montreal, Canada, to Buffalo, New York, sleeping in a tent and cooking our own meals. From Buffalo, we flew to Florida to visit Eric’s aunt Franny. I’d assumed she’d be a short old woman who played mah-jongg, but when we arrived, out walked a glamorous middle-aged woman in a white bikini. It turned out she was a counterculture poet who’d written a racy coming-of-age novel titled American Made and then married a millionaire businessman with whom she’d lived in a sixty-room mansion. Now divorced, she split her time between Manhattan’s West Village and the Florida Keys where, she informed us, pot was plentiful and of high quality because it washed ashore when dumped by smugglers running from the Coast Guard.

  Eric’s family, it turned out, was from a quite different background than mine. His mother, Alexandra, was the daughter of an Irish poet who had eloped with a debutante whose ancestors were Huguenots who’d come to America in the eighteenth century. Eric’s father, Joe, a bookish man who’d initially studied for the ministry at Harvard before going into education, was from a protestant family in Milwaukee. Yet, while our families had come from strikingly different backgrounds, they had similar values. Our parents were all educators—Eric’s mother, Alexandra, was a learning disabilities specialist—who valued the life of the mind and enjoyed nature. These similar values helped bring Eric and me together.

  I worried, however, about what would happen to our relationship now that we were heading off to different colleges: the University of Pennsylvania in my case, Columbia College in Eric’s. After we parted, I wrote Eric a long letter reminiscing about our relationship and sharing my worries about our future: “I’m scared of being hurt—you finding another woman that you love more. I’ll be damned if I’m going to lose you. I feel very satisfied but completely unsatiated. I want more. I love you. Eva.”

  16

  EVEN OLYMPIC ATHLETES CRY

  2009

  Many people have observed that standardized tests don’t measure real learning, just superficial test-taking skills and rote learning, and that our country’s obsession with testing is doing profound damage to our educational system. If that’s what you believe, I’m afraid my views may disappoint you. I believe well-designed standardized tests measure real learning and understanding.

  Consider the following math questions:

  How many positive two-digit numbers are evenly divisible by 4?

  The measures of the angles of a triangle are in the ratio 1:2:3. What is the measure of the largest angle?

  If x is an integer, what is the greatest possible value of the expression 1-x2?

  A boy has as many sisters as brothers but his sister has twice as many brothers as sisters. How many boys and girls are there in the family?

  These are all good math questions because they require creative thinking and an understanding of conceptual math. They are questions that an effective teacher might teach in class or put on a test but they also can and do appear on standardized tests. Requiring a student to select among five answer choices and fill in a bubble doesn’t make these problems any less challenging or worthwhile.

  Standardized tests can also measure a student’s ability to read carefully and thoughtfully, to understand complex passages, and to analyze what they have read. Test makers have even figured out how to measure many of the important skills associated with good writing. I’m not talking merely about rudimentary subject-verb agreement, but also about subtler skills such as recognizing vague references to antecedent nouns, identifying a proper vocabulary word by making subtle distinctions in meaning, and knowing how to make sentences more precise and less awkward.

  Ironically, it’s actually teacher-created tests that more often focus on rote learning (e.g., “Who was America’s first president?”) or simple procedural skills (“What is 125÷5?”). Standardized tests are better designed because
a team of professionals can put far more effort into creating a test than an individual teacher. The College Board’s accomplishments with the Common Core–aligned SAT are particularly impressive.

  It’s a myth that students can do well on a standardized test just by learning superficial “test-taking skills.” Sure, skills like learning how to pace yourself affect your performance, but you still need to know your stuff. Take the math questions above. No test-taking skill or trick allows you to answer them correctly without mastering mathematical content. SAT prep courses may help you raise your scores by teaching you new vocabulary words or problem-solving techniques, but that’s still real learning. When my oldest son studied for the SATs, it had a noticeably positive impact on his vocabulary.

  But forget my opinion. American universities, which are the envy of the world, make standardized test scores one of the greatest single factors in admissions for both their undergraduate and graduate programs. No law requires that they do so; they choose to because, in their experience, these tests are a strong measure of a student’s academic accomplishments. Surely if standardized tests can measure whether a student can handle Harvard College or Yale Law School, they can measure a fourth-grader’s math and reading skills.

  Many teachers don’t like standardized tests and don’t want their students to be anxious about them, so they tell their students that the tests aren’t valid and they shouldn’t worry about them. Such a message, however, inevitably diminishes students’ motivation to do well on tests that are very important to their future. This isn’t a problem for the children of affluent parents who, however much they may rail against standardized tests, will make sure that their own children do well on them, but it is a huge problem for poor kids who rely upon their schools to prepare them.

  If you’re a teacher who doesn’t like standardized tests, by all means advocate for your position. Petition Congress. Write to universities. Publish op-ed pieces. But please don’t tell your students that tests don’t matter, because you’re just selling them a bill of goods. Your duty is to prepare your students for the world as it exists, not as you would like it to be. Moreover, while telling kids tests don’t matter might make them feel good in the short term, they’ll feel differently when they don’t get into the college they want to attend or don’t have the career to which they aspire.

  Our students would be taking standardized tests in the spring of 2009 for the first time, and I was determined to give them as good a chance of doing well on these tests as students from affluent families. I was particularly concerned for Sydney, the girl who had been hospitalized for sickle cell anemia. Unfortunately, she’d gotten pneumonia and spent additional weeks at the hospital and then had a relapse as soon as she was released. She hadn’t been able to return to school until October 20 and even then was weak.

  I initially left test preparation to my teachers, but when I saw what they were doing, I became increasingly concerned. They were giving students dubious strategies and advice such as not to change an answer because one’s first choice is usually right. I believe the best way to prepare students for a reading comprehension test is to teach them how to comprehend what they are reading. Isn’t that just regular school? Yes, pretty much. The difference is really about intensity of effort, about using the prospect of competition as an opportunity to dig deeper and try harder.

  Kids are naturally impulsive, so they read a passage as if they were taking a Rorschach test: something in it catches their interest or reminds them of something and so they think the passage is about that. Take the nursery rhyme “Jack Sprat”: “Jack Sprat could eat no fat. His wife could eat no lean. And so between them both, you see, they licked the platter clean.” A child might say that this rhyme’s main idea is that different people like to eat different things since that’s how the rhyme begins. That interpretation, however, leaves out the poem’s entire second half. A better statement of the main idea is that people who are different can make a good team because they complement each other. Or take the nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty.” A child may say it’s about the need to be careful with things that can break, but that doesn’t account for the last two lines: “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.” A better description of the main idea is that some things can’t always be fixed when they break.

  Thus, our job was to get students to move past their initial reactions and instead to consider the whole text. Distinguishing a text’s main idea from subsidiary arguments often requires understanding the logical structure of a text. For example, the main idea of the Declaration of Independence isn’t that all men are created equal, although that’s a catchy line, but that Britain’s violation of Americans’ inalienable political rights justified revolution.

  One of the most popular teaching techniques nowadays is to ask students to make what are called “text-to-self connections,” such as “the boy in this story gets mad at his sister like I do sometimes.” While children benefit from this approach when they are quite young, as they mature they need to be able to focus on what the author means, not only on their own reaction to the text.

  Many critics of standardized tests claim test preparation is a waste of time. I agree that bad test preparation is a waste of time, but when it is done right, it can be quite intellectually valuable. In fact, I have found over the years that our students actually learn more when they do test preparation than at other times of the year because both they and our teachers are so focused on mastery.

  Our students took the state reading test in January and we then turned our attention to preparing them for the math test. Again, this didn’t mean learning tricks or superficial strategies. Rather, it involved making sure the kids understood the necessary mathematical concepts and learned how to be careful in their work. Just as in reading, the kids were naturally impulsive and careless. Suppose for example that a child multiplies 3.5 by 3.6 and gets 1.26. When the child sees that 1.26 is one of the multiple-choice answers, he concludes he must have gotten the calculation right when, in reality, he’s made a decimal point error the test maker has predicted. We therefore taught children to double-check their work. That, however, didn’t mean just doing the same thing again but rather using another method. For example, in the problem above, the student would estimate the answer by figuring out that it must be somewhere between 9 (3 times 3) and 16 (4 times 4). Estimating is both a useful skill and, in this context, requires that the student understand the mathematical principle that the product of two larger numbers will always be greater than the product of two smaller numbers.

  The other piece of the puzzle was teaching children to be careful and precise. Paul wrote to me in February that he was deeply troubled by the “general tolerance/acceptance [of] sloppiness/carelessness in all of our schools, a lack of insistence on accuracy, precision, and attention to detail.” If a student was sloppy when he copied numbers from a word problem, Paul would make him practice that skill until he learned to be more careful. Learning to be meticulous in your work is a critical life skill whether you’re taking a standardized test, performing heart surgery, or planning a space mission.

  We also taught kids to try harder because often the problem wasn’t a lack of understanding but a lack of effort. For example, one of our teachers emailed me about a student who had “bombed practice today, but while we are sitting here one-on-one he is slamming it.” We could also tell a child wasn’t trying when he spent the final minutes of the exam staring off into space at the end of a test rather than double-checking his answers.

  Our job was to get the kids to care about their academic work just as much as they cared about other things in their life such as being popular or playing basketball well. To do this, we’d praise students for improving their scores and confront them if they were being lazy. Did this sometimes make them feel bad? Of course! That’s normal. If you want to go through life never feeling bad, don’t aspire to accomplish anything, root for a sports team, or fall in love. Caring ine
vitably means feeling bad at times. In fact, some of our students cared so much they’d cry when they didn’t do well. We didn’t encourage that but neither did we see it as a sign that something was horribly wrong. Watch eight-year-olds lose a championship basketball game: they cry. Even Olympic athletes cry, but nobody goes around saying, “Oh, those Olympic athletes shouldn’t care so much.”

  Good teaching is like good parenting: love is necessary but so too is disapprobation. That doesn’t mean humiliation. A teacher should never say “You’re stupid” or “You’ll never amount to anything.” In fact, they should say the opposite: “I’m really disappointed in you because I know you have the ability to do so much better than this.” Teachers must never give in to unhelpful emotions such as anger or frustration. A teacher who loses control loses trust because students know that out-of-control adults are prone to hurting them either physically or emotionally. While it’s perfectly normal for teachers to become angry and frustrated, they need to let off steam with their friends or a therapist, not students. Khari, who was particularly insightful about emotional relationships with students, noticed that some teachers were unnecessarily escalating conflicts to satisfy their own emotional needs:

  It is not a good idea to deliver bad news to scholars in the moment. Instead of telling a scholar prone to tantrums, “I am calling home!” just call home. Instead of telling a scholar, “You now have upstairs dismissal,” just take the scholar to upstairs dismissal. Do not tell a scholar, “I am calling Mr. Shabazz.” Just call me.