This report summarizes my activities while on sabbatical from Sept. 2002 through June 2003. The sabbatical gave me a renewed sense of purpose in my profession, although it did not turn out to be anything like the sabbatical I had planned.
Publications
I had intended to focus my time on research and get some publications out. There are only two publications worth noting, and neither is related to my usual research:
Newark Charter School
I have been involved with Newark Charter School since its inception, and have two daughters attending NCS. Last summer the principal, Greg Meece, contacted me about teaching 7th and 8th grade economics classes there as part of the social studies curriculum. I taught 6 sections of economics at NCS during the fall semester, and 5 sections during the spring semester, managed a Friday 6th-grade homeroom, coached NCS’s Monday afternoon cross-country program, and did some occasional substitute teaching in math.
Under Delaware standards, about one third of the public school social studies curriculum is supposed to be oriented to economics, for which there are four broad content standards:
However, my search of actual middle-school economics curricula yielded a great deal of material reflecting a traditional orientation to home economics, personal budgeting, etc., but few formal treatments of the core concepts that university-level economics courses emphasize: comparative advantage; supply, demand and market equilibrium; profit-maximizing production; money, credit and banking; inflation and recession. I developed my own series of formal treatments of these and other topics, tailored to the 7th/8th-grade level. Most of my economics problem sets integrated skills these students were developing in their math classes, including graphing. I hope to get some other teachers to adopt these materials and give them another year or two of testing, and then publish a middle school economics curriculum from these materials eventually. I am trying to convince Jim Casey, another social studies teacher at NCS, to co-author this curriculum with me.
In the spring of 2003, I had all of my classes participate in the Stock Market Game (offered locally through UD’s Center for Economic Education and Entrepreneurship) as part of the economics curriculum. The majority of my student teams earned money in a bear market, and three NCS teams (including two of mine) were among the top 10 money-makers in Delaware.
NCS differs from conventional public middle schools in several respects. First, classes are grouped by student performance, so that there is enormous variation in classroom environments. My two classes of top-performing students were fully capable of handling college freshman-level economics, and were extremely well focused on the topics I gave them. My two classes of low-performing students were highly distractible, and included a number of students with learning disorders (some diagnosed, some not) and some behavior problems. After years of teaching college undergraduates and graduate students, the switch to middle school students was very challenging. There is a consensus among public school teachers that middle school is the toughest level to teach, because young adolescent students are undergoing such big, rapid changes in their lives.
A second characteristic of NCS is the heavy involvement of parents in all facets of the school. I spent a significant amount of time in communication with parents. The parents of top-performing students tended to contact me most frequently, and expressed the most anxiety about their children’s performance in my class (a couple of extreme cases were parents whose 8th-graders were applying to Charter School of Wilmington); the parents I contacted about students’ behavior problems, missing work and low grades were generally less responsive, and less likely to initiate communication with me. Parent involvement is a much more significant determinant of student success than I had previously realized, and I suspect that academic success and failure patterns persist over generations. Parents who had positive school experiences themselves communicate to their children that school should be a positive experience, are more willing to visit the school, and pay more attention to their children’s educations. Parents for whom school was a negative experience are at risk of conveying this negativity to their children, don’t visit the school unless they are called in for conferences, and are much more accepting of their children’s academic failures.
Parent Care
My principal concern during the sabbatical year was the health of my parents in Providence, RI. My father developed symptoms of parkinsonism later diagnosed as two degenerative neurological diseases: progressive supranuclear palsy and Lewy body disease. After losing his ability to read and developing serious balance problems early in 2003, he deteriorated fairly rapidly and died in December 2003 at age 82.
I was extremely fortunate to be able to spend long blocks of time with my father during the last six months of his life. Apart from several short hospitalizations, he was able to stay at home with my mother, my sister and occasionally me providing most of his care, and he died quite peacefully at home. In the latter stages he suffered from dementia and occasional hallucinations, but his personality remained intact until the end. It was a long, painful goodbye, but we got to say everything that needed to be said. Since his death I have had no regrets about my 50-year relationship with him, and I have had a fairly easy time with the grief.
After my father’s death, my mother had a biopsy on lumps in her breast that turned out to be malignant. She had a lumpectomy in February followed by an exhausting series of radiation treatments through May. Again, I was lucky to be able to see her through surgery and recovery, and to support her through some tough parts of the radiation regimen. Her prognosis is good.
Kid Care
During my sabbatical year I was able to be primary caregiver for my two younger daughters, ages 12 and 10. One of my girls has always struggled in school because of ADHD. I was able to give her more consistent support in getting homeworks completed and staying organized. She was able to stay better focused on her schoolwork, and resolved some significant difficulties with one of her teachers on her own. She made honor roll for the entire year for the first time in her life. For me, this was the most rewarding experience of my entire sabbatical.
I coached my daughters’ soccer team (Newark Parks & Recreation Junior League). Despite having somewhat younger and smaller players than most other teams, we developed a very effective passing game as the season progressed, and we topped off a winning season by advancing through the playoffs to the League championship game.
Community Activities
I was able to extend my involvement in various community activities.
Christina School District: Several years ago Bob Stachnik and I co-founded a citizen group called “Association for A Better Christina” to push for more responsive leadership in the Christina School District. We adopted a long-term strategy of getting reform-minded candidates elected to the School Board who would demand better accountability from the CSD administration. We recruited a series of new candidates for the School Board from the various nominating districts; mobilized successful campaigns to defeat some long-time incumbents; defeated a badly-designed construction referendum, and got the district administration to put forth a better-targeted referendum that passed by a huge margin. In the fall of 2002 I published a statistical analysis of CSD’s mediocre performance on the Delaware State Test Program (DSTP), rebutting the administration’s claims of improvement (these were anecdotal exceptions to a general negative trend). The School Board made the difficult decision to seek a new leadership rather than renew the contract of the current Superintendent. While she was leading the search for a new Superintendent, Board member Terry Schooley told me she would not run for re-election in 2003 and encouraged me to run for her seat. I ran unopposed in the May 2003 election and joined the School Board in July 2003 during the Superintendent transition. The new Superintendent is highly energized and committed to rapid reform. I currently have one or two daytime meetings plus an average of two full-evening meetings each week dealing with school issues.
Delaware Open Space Council: In summer 2002 I was appointed by Gov. Minner to represent New Castle County on the Delaware Open Space Council. (The Council includes seven citizens plus two state legislators with Secretaries of DelDOT [citizen member], DNREC and Agriculture plus the Director of DEDO [ex officio]. DNREC provides staff support.) The Council meets quarterly and allocates Delaware’s Realty Transfer Tax monies and some Federal Land & Water Conservation fund monies to the protection of open space parcels.
The Nature Conservancy, Delaware Chapter: I have been a Trustee of the Delaware Chapter of The Nature Conservancy for about seven years, chair TNC’s Science Advisory Committee and serve on TNC’s Finance Committee. TNC has recently undergone a major restructuring under new president and CEO Steve McCormick, and I was able to participate in Trustee training to stay abreast of the restructuring. (TNC is a major partner with the DE Open Space Council in protecting critical habitat areas from development.)
Church Activities: I am an elder of Head of Christiana Presbyterian Church in Newark, and have served on the Session (church’s governing body) for almost five years. Last fall as Chair of Personnel, I conducted the consultative evaluation of our pastor. In January 2003 I took over as Chair of Christian Education and have sought to re-energize our CE program. In April 2003 I directed the sixth annual Trail Triple Crown, a series of trail races at White Clay Creek State Park. Proceeds from this event benefit four faith-based homeless ministries: Meeting Ground, Emmaus House, Friendship House and Elkton Men’s Shelter. This year we included a full marathon that drew over 200 runners from all over the US. The event yielded over $9,000 for the four shelters. I also continued to serve occasional Sunday dinners at the Andrew’s Place men’s shelter (basement of St. Andrew’s Church in Wilmington)—something I have been involved with for 11 years.
Team Diabetes: Over the past three years I was a volunteer coach for the American Diabetes Association’s Team Diabetes program, where runners get friends and businesses to sponsor them in a marathon, with proceeds going to ADA. My responsibility was getting these runners adequately trained to complete a marathon. Team Diabetes was one of at least a dozen charity marathon programs modeled after the Leukemia Society’s very successful Team in Training program. My last runner completed the 2002 Honolulu Marathon. Last fall ADA terminated the Team Diabetes program due to low overall participation nationally.
Personal Fulfillment
I read extensively, with a developing focus on the early history and doctrinal formation of Christianity; these have a direct bearing on the problems of Christianity today. Contemporary fundamentalism is a defensive reaction against modern challenges to outmoded doctrines. My readings on this topic included Karen Armstrong’sA History of God (1993), The Battle for God (2000), Holy War (1988), Buddha (2001) and Muhammed (2002); Paula Fredriksen’s Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews (1999); sections of The Nag Hammadi Library (revised edition, James M. Robinson, ed.); Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels (1979), The Origin of Satan (1995) and Beyond Belief (2003); and John S. Spong’s Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (1991), Why Christianity Must Change or Die (1998) and A New Christianity for a New World (2001).
These are not conventional Christian writers. Armstrong, a former Catholic nun, now an agnostic, analyzes the recurring fundamentalist dynamics common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Fredriksen is a convert to Judaism and an expert in the early history of Christianity; Pagels explains the tensions between gnosticism and mainstream Christian doctrine; Spong, an Episcopal bishop whose writings are widely viewed as heretical, offers highly articulate challenges to Biblical literalism, interprets modern fundamentalism as the death throes of theism, and outlines a post-theistic faith in God as the “Ground of All Being” (from Paul Tillich), and Jesus as entirely human but most deeply connected to that Ground of Being. The Nag Hammadi texts include “gnostic” writings such as the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Mary, etc., that were suppressed in the 2nd and 3rd Centuries by orthodox Christians such as Irinaeus of Lyon (who was largely responsible for defining the New Testament canon). This reading program has brought me to review the tenets of my own faith, and it sheds new light on the Christian doctrines I grew up with. I have discussed the Armstrong and Spong books at length with the pastor at my church, and I am thinking about proposing an experimental readings course at UD on Christianity, perhaps taught in cooperation with local clergy.
With the approach of my 50th birthday and the death of my father, I became more interested in my family’s history. Using www.familysearch.com, I was able to develop extensive ancestral trees for my children and myself. I was raised in the north and had always considered myself to be New England Yankee, so it was a surprise to find a large branch of Confederate Virginian ancestors. This research also revealed to me the hardships people endured in previous centuries.
I ran various marathons and ultra-marathons: Stumpy’s Marathon in September 2002, Ocean State (RI) Marathon in October 2002, the JFK 50-Mile ultra-marathon in November 2002, Buzzards’ Marathon in January 2003, HAT 50K in March 2003, Boston Marathon in April 2003, and the HUMP 38-Mile ultra-marathon in June 2003.
Looking Forward
This sabbatical has reenergized me:
Teaching: It has intensified my commitment to excellence in teaching. I volunteered to teach FREC 240 (Quantitative Methods) while Dr. Rhonda Hyde is on sabbatical this year, and am developing a lot of new materials for that course. I am switching from ArcView to Arc 8/9 software for FREC 480 and FREC 682, my GIS courses; this will be a technically challenging migration for me, but will greatly expand the potential scope of these courses.
Research: This sabbatical has rekindled my desire to publish my research in a broader spectrum of outlets, and to eventually seek promotion to full professor. Over the past five years I have published little or nothing in conventional refereed journals because I get impatient with the too-frequent slowness and nitpicking of peer review, and because small-circulation academic journals don’t often have much relevance to real-world issues. In recent years, when I wanted my research to actually make a difference and influence peoples’ thinking, I would write an op-ed piece for the News-Journal, see it published that week, and elicit far more comment and reaction than any academic journal article ever gets. When I wanted to publish a technical piece, I would simply post it on the web, data and all.
I anticipate some shifts in my research focus. I have discovered an enormous wealth of education data through my school board work, and would like to pursue some analyses of school efficiencies, identifying controllable variables that affect student test scores, graduation rates, etc. I will also try to structure some paid internships for statistics graduate students to support CSD’s own data analysis needs.
Service: It is probably time for me to take on some formal time allocation to service activities in my workload.