Essays by WriteWells: A journey into thought

The Days When Data Made Sense

I began teaching in 1992.

It was a simpler, darker time.

The mimeograph machine was taking its last gasping breaths, copy machines were the exciting new technology, and teachers had just begun experimenting with something called a “personal computer.” We carried handwritten gradebooks, took attendance with a pencil, and somehow managed to educate children without a single dashboard, heat map, or algorithm informing our every move.

Frankly, it’s a miracle any of our students learned anything.

After all, we didn’t have benchmark assessments every six weeks.

We didn’t have standards trackers with cheerful green boxes and alarming red ones.

We didn’t have predictive analytics, growth percentiles, data walls, learning targets, success criteria, or color-coded spreadsheets large enough to require two computer monitors.

We had…our brains.

Poor, primitive teacher brains.

How could our inferior minds possibly determine whether students were learning?

Without computer-generated reports, we were forced to rely on crude, almost Neanderthal methods.

We noticed who came to school.

We looked at the work students completed.

We talked to them.

We watched them read.

We listened to them explain their thinking.

We paid attention when a usually energetic child suddenly became quiet.

We knew who had eaten breakfast.

We knew who slept on a friend’s couch the night before.

We knew whose parents read to them every evening.

We knew who dreaded going home.

It was all terribly unscientific.

Imagine making instructional decisions simply because you knew your students.

Today, thankfully, we have evolved.

Now we have formative assessments, summative assessments, interim assessments, benchmark assessments, universal screeners, standards-based grading systems, progress monitoring, predictive models, artificial intelligence, and enough educational software to keep an entire server farm employed.

We can measure nearly everything.

The question is…

What have we discovered?

After decades of collecting mountains of data and analyzing millions of data points, education has arrived at several astonishing conclusions.

Students who come to school regularly tend to learn more.

Who saw that coming?

Students whose home lives are unstable often struggle academically.

Remarkable.

Hungry children have difficulty concentrating.

Groundbreaking.

Children whose parents read to them generally become better readers.

Someone alert the research journals.

Students whose families value education and actively participate in learning are more likely to succeed.

The algorithms have spoken.

To be fair, data has tremendous value. It can identify trends, expose inequities, measure growth, and help schools make thoughtful decisions. Good assessment is an important part of good teaching.

But somewhere along the way, we began acting as though data created understanding instead of simply describing it.

Teachers didn’t suddenly become insightful because a spreadsheet confirmed what they had observed for years.

We knew.

We knew because we spent seven hours a day with our students.

We knew because we noticed who smiled less than they used to.

We knew because we heard the stories that never appeared on a benchmark report.

We knew because teaching has always been less about collecting information than about paying attention.

Even social-emotional learning has become another exercise in measurement. Students complete surveys asking whether they feel anxious, connected, or supported. Teachers deliver scripted SEL lessons complete with discussion prompts and fidelity checklists.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the back of the room sits the veteran teacher quietly thinking, “I’ve known Emily was anxious since October.”

Not because Emily selected a “2” on a digital survey.

Because she stopped making eye contact.

Because she quit laughing with her friends.

Because she suddenly started asking to visit the nurse every afternoon.

Because that’s what teachers do.

They notice.

The greatest educational technology ever invented isn’t artificial intelligence.

It’s human intelligence.

Specifically, the kind developed by thousands of hours spent watching children learn, fail, grow, struggle, and succeed.

Perhaps the real lesson isn’t that we need less data.

Perhaps it’s that we need to remember what data is for.

Data should support teachers—not replace their judgment.

It should confirm what experienced educators observe—not convince us that observation itself is somehow unreliable.

In 1992, we taught with handwritten gradebooks, pencils, conversations, and relationships.

Today we teach with dashboards, algorithms, predictive models, and digital reports.

Curiously, the children haven’t changed nearly as much as the spreadsheets have.

They still need breakfast.

They still need stability.

They still need someone to read with them.

They still need adults who care.

And they still need teachers who know them well enough to see what no algorithm ever can. 

 

The Myth of the Blank Slate

Aristotle was among the first to pose the notion of tabula rasa, or “blank slate,” in terms of how people learn to navigate the world around them. All too often, educators across our nation come to the classroom in August with this definitive mindset. It makes sense: new class lists, new ideas that have formed over the summer, and new-old professional development that promises us success. Unless you are the jaded “waiting for retirement” teacher, we can all fall prey to this siren song of changing the world through whatever content we are teaching.

Realism checks in around the end of September, when we realize our students never have—and never will—come as clean white sheets of paper pulled from the colorful pages of their new notebooks. As teachers, we hope this year will be better, or that it will follow last year's resounding successes. While optimism shines eternal, its sibling, pessimism, waits just outside the door in its shape-shifting forms: complex discipline issues, difficult relationships, complicated home experiences, and administrative booby traps disguised as accusations of “lack of engaging lessons” or “poor classroom management.” If you would just… is the sentence starter for too many administrators and parents. And, in their defense, teachers often find themselves echoing that same fill-in-the-blank with their students.

Our students arrive with brand-new backpacks—hours spent choosing just the right one—full of the supplies required on the list. What we don't see is the invisible backpack: the one carrying a lack of motivation because failure has become a comfortable option; mind-consuming thoughts about family problems; and unkind labels they may have carried through multiple August beginnings.

That is not a blank slate.

It is a confusing, illogical mind map of ideas, emotions, experiences, and personal demons, much resembling that backpack and its notebooks at the end of the year.

Teachers aren't blank slates either.

We come carrying our own invisible backpacks. We bring memories of students we couldn't reach, lessons that landed like bombs, and the biggest monster of all: test scores that seemed far removed from the true outcomes of our teaching. We have real nightmares about such things. Yet our backpacks still contain hope, expectations, and no small amount of stubborn persistence.

The problem with pretending is that it can cause us to misunderstand ourselves, our students, and even our administrators. Dwelling on failure can become self-fulfilling. The history of our students—and of ourselves—should inform us, not define us.

Perhaps Aristotle would say, “See? Your experiences do fill your page.”

We all need to be able to take our experiences—good, bad, and everything in between—and use them to build not a “fresh” start, but a connected one. We can acknowledge the backpacks full of “stuff” we carry and use that experience as a tool. We can recognize resilience in failure and embrace what we often call good old-fashioned grit. Perhaps grit isn't simply the ability to push through difficulty. Perhaps it is the ability to carry what we've learned from difficulty without allowing it to determine where we go next.

School isn't a blank page. It is simply a new page in an ongoing story.

We don't get to rewrite the pasts of our students. To even consider that would be a travesty. Their pasts are part of them. What we can do is help them examine, sort, and sometimes rewrite the negative messages buried inside that invisible backpack.

That applies to teachers as well.

Learning, for all of us, is about growth, however small it may be. Education should be about providing opportunities to learn and creating pathways for personal connection. None of us in this miasma of learning is immune from failing. But we can help students—and ourselves—clean out and sort through the cluttered invisible backpack.

And perhaps most importantly, we can help students and ourselves believe that we, not the backpack, gets to decide what comes next.