When a student dies

A former student of mine died last week.

I realize that declaration is utterly lacking in finesse.  So was Brandy’s death.  On Monday morning, she was alive, and by Monday afternoon she wasn’t. No lead-up, no warning. 

The default response of almost everyone close to her has been But I just talked to her…

yesterday,

this morning,

last night.

Like the execution of Ned Stark, the first time this happens, we are utterly unprepared, and the feelings that arise are equally unpredictable.

When I was 17, a classmate died in a farming accident.  We learned about it on Saturday night during a basketball game.  Friday he was at school.  Saturday afternoon he was dead.  I had harbored a bit of a crush on him and was shocked and saddened by his passing.  For weeks, I would forget that he was gone and turn toward his locker to tell him something during passing period.  I’d quickly realize my mistake and look around to make sure no one had seen me.  I have no better word to describe what I felt in those moments than jealousy.  In dying, he had attained an understanding of something that I could not comprehend, and I wanted to know what he knew.  I just didn’t want to die to get it.

At 38, Brandy was among the oldest of my former students.  She was smart, acerbic, prone to sarcasm, reliable, funny.  She was one of the many kids who found a place to belong in the school’s theater department.  As costume crew chief, she was my right hand for at least a half dozen shows.  In fact, she showed me the ropes when I was first hired.  She introduced me to my first Dairy Queen Blizzard.  She also introduced me to her older sister, who is my best friend.  If for no other reason, I am eternally in her debt for this.

Although I never discussed this with her explicitly, I don’t imagine that high school was particularly comfortable place for Brandy.  She did not possess the currency that is valued in high school.  She was not bubbly or athletic or cute and cuddly.

And that’s what makes her death all the more heart breaking.  From my limited perspective, it seems that it is only recently that she began to embrace all the possibilities open to her.  She had started a new job that was both emotionally fulfilling and potentially lucrative.  She began distance running and taking cool vacations.  There was so much she seemed poised to attempt.

I don’t know how the rumor got started that high school is the best time of your life, but it’s time we put it to bed.  There’s a reason they refer to graduation as Commencement.  When high school ends, that’s when the good stuff begins:

The careers. 

The loves.

The houses.

The pets.

The hobbies.

The friends.

The hair colors.

There’s an S on the end of each item on that list.  Do you honestly expect to want forever what you wanted when you were 18?

Some years ago, I attended a funeral for a 21-year old who was killed in a motorcycle accident.  The priest was given the unenviable task of imbuing this tragedy with some meaning that might comfort this young man’s family. The refrain he kept returning to was how wonderful it would be to remain 21 forever.

The sermon came from the same well-meaning place as the fatuous remarks with which you are inundated whenever an inexplicable tragedy strikes.

 “She’s with God now.” 

“You know, you can still talk to her, right?” 

“It’s all part of God’s plan for you.”

I reject all of these.

I have another former student, Linda, also in her thirties, who has metastatic cancer.  It is in her brain.  It is in her spine.   She has a three-year old son who has never known his mother when she was not sick.

You cannot make me believe that God needs this woman more than her son does.

I don’t think we are supposed to find comfort or meaning in a young woman’s death.  In fact, such events should make us profoundly uncomfortable.  The only useful purpose they serve is to shock us out of our complacency, to remind us that life is fragile and temporary, that today is a gift, and tomorrow is far from guaranteed. 

Since being diagnosed, Linda has completed her PhD in musicology, become a much sought-after author of concert program notes, begun a popular and highly respected blog debunking myths about classical music, and continues to be a wife and mother.  Occasionally, she’ll post on Facebook that the chemo slowed her down that day and, consequently, she was only able to finish two of the four writing projects she wanted to get to. 

Let’s stop looking for meaning in death.  Rather, let us allow the constant threat of it inspire us to lead full and intentional lives.

What Exactly Does the Inauguration Have to Do with Becoming a School Principal?

I’m not quite sure how it happened, but somewhere along the way people began seeking me out as a mentor.  They ask me for career advice.  Me? All the time! 

I’m not being falsely modest when I say I don’t really know why.  My own career was built on a foundation of poorly researched choices, chutzpah, and desperation.  If not for a few instances of tremendous serendipity, I’d be living in the basement of my sister’s house and hoping to score an ACT tutoring gig at a store front in a strip mall.

Seriously.  I got my first teaching job totally by accident.  The names of most of Chicago’s suburbs are compounds of a limited number of natural phenomena. There’s Forest Park, just west of the city, and Park Forest to the south; Lake Forest on the north shore and Lake Park to the southwest. As a city dweller who didn’t drive, I had neither reason nor interest in learning these nuances, so I confused the names of a prestigious north suburban school district with a slightly less glamorous one to the west.  Glenbrook’s loss was Glenbard’s gain.  And mine.

But I digress.

I work with a lot of young teachers, and, I suppose because my terminal degree is in educational administration and policy, they often ask me for advice about becoming administrators.  First, I explain that I have little interest in either administration or policy.  My degree is a function of the department that employed the person who was chairing my dissertation committee—another poorly researched choice that eventually worked itself out—and that my interests lie in teacher quality and efficacy. 

This rarely discourages anyone from continuing to solicit my opinion.  So here’s what I tell them. 

Wait five years.

Most of you probably think that I’m alluding to the folk wisdom that it takes five years to become a teacher, that, if expertise is in large part a product of experience, five years is the minimum amount of experience needed to quality as an expert.

That’s not why I tell them to wait.

A good administrator has to have lived through at least one cycle of state and national elections. You have to experience firsthand overhauling your curriculum in an effort to comply with one administration’s policy only to be asked by another to dismantle and rebuild it four years later.  You need to feel the heartbreak that occurs when, after buying into a paradigm shift and working for two years to transition your practice to meet it, you are betrayed by the same people who pitched it to you in the first place.

Sometime in the late 1990s, the state of Illinois adopted a new certification process.  Teachers had five years to assemble evidence of their continued professional learning.  Hard copies of this evidence—transcripts, certificates, programmes, etc.—would then be submitted to the Illinois State Board of Education where, presumably, someone’s job would be to verify that every certified teacher in Illinois had attained the necessary number of credits.

There are approximately 130,00 teachers in Illinois.  If each of them submitted only five artifacts, the ISBE headquarters would collapse under the weight of nearly ¾ of a million documents.  Well, that’s what I was counting on anyway. 

For many of my younger colleagues (and, sadly, some of the older ones), this process was a source of tremendous anxiety.  I overheard more than a few panicked phone calls attempting to track down a certificate of attendance for a conference they’d attended six months earlier.   

I collected nothing—just waited.  I’d been around long enough to know this wasn’t going to happen.  

And it didn’t.  When the first few portfolios starting arriving in Springfield, those tasked with implementing the policy suddenly realized that lacked the time, the manpower, and the will to do so.

I don’t know what replaced it.  Presumably something equally superficial but less bulky.

One of the most important jobs a principal must do is to serve as a buffer between her faculty members and the continuous barrage of stupidity bombarding them.  A principal may not be able to excuse teachers from external mandates, but he can help them discriminate between tasks worth doing well and those worth doing well enough.  Great principals encourage their people to put their time and energies into executing policies that are meaningful and stand a chance of sticking around. 

The other stuff they let them half-ass.  

But until you’ve been in the classroom at least five years, it can be hard to tell the difference.

Pride Goeth Before a Fall (or Does it?)

Recently, I became concerned that my point of view as a blogger was too ill-defined.  Without a unique niche, I’m just one more self-proclaimed educational expert yammering away in cyberspace, and God knows, we have enough of them. 

This concern got me to thinking about a night fifteen or so years ago, following one of many break-ups that everyone but me saw coming.  My friend and I were about four inches into a bottle of something brown.  She looked at me, a bourbon-glazed twinkle in her eye, and suggested that maybe God’s plan was for me to serve as a horrible warning to others.

I don’t remember much from that evening but I remember that comment.  I like it.  It gives my screw-ups gravitas. 

If this is, in fact, my cosmic destiny, it seemed appropriate to blog about my education-related failures.  In addition to providing some schadenfreude-induced laughter, I hope some struggling teachers can take shelter in them. 

“See how badly I screwed up?” they beckon.  “I bet you didn’t screw up this bad!  And even if you did, look what a great career I’ve had despite my shortcomings!”

Over time, I’ve learned that the worst case scenario rarely happens.  And when it does it’s usually not as bad as you think it will be.

This prologue will precede every post in this particular series.

I make no secret of my disdain for movies about teaching.  This contempt developed over time as I came to understand that real teaching bears little resemblance to the pabulum peddled by Hollywood.  Even documentaries must be viewed with a generous dose of skepticism, as their version of the truth is circumscribed by the political or ideological bias of the filmmaker.  I have been unable to get all the way through Waiting for Superman, frustrated as I am by what I feel is David Guggenheim’s rather simplistic implication that charter schools are the solution to every problem facing urban American education. 

Back in the day, though, that film would probably have impelled me to join a charter school network.  Then I would have sent a letter and headshot to Guggenheim in the hopes that he’d put me in his next film.  I wanted to be the kind of teacher people made movies about. 

In fact, I had a particular scenario in mind, culled from a small volume called The First Year of Teaching: Real World Stories from America’s Teachers.  In one vignette entitled “Don’t Waste Your Time with Those Kids,” a newbie is assigned to a class of self-described “retards” and can’t seem to corral them.  On Day #2, she reveals to the students her own struggle with dyslexia and forbids them to label themselves stupid.  They immediately improve.  They even coax her into drilling them in grammar because “people still think [they’re] stupid because [they] don’t talk right.” 

The students know she is getting married over the summer, but they are poor and can’t afford to buy her flowers. They take the initiative to solicit donations from floral shops and funeral parlors, literally filling her room with flowers. The student who spearheaded the operation tells her, “Period 2 got you roses, and Period 3 got you a corsage, but we love you more.” She bursts into tears.  She gets married, all the kids graduate, six earn college scholarships, and everyone lives happily ever after. 

That was the sort of first year I expected.  Nothing less than slavish devotion from my students —including but not limited to a roomful of flowers—would do.  I had no reason to expect otherwise.  Everything I’d ever read or seen assured me that if I worked hard enough and cared deeply enough, this would happen.

On my last day of student teaching, I received numerous cards, a bouquet of flowers, a bottle of really excellent perfume, and a necklace and earrings set.  One young lady sang “How Do I Say Good-by to Yesterday,” reducing me to heaving sobs.  Being a Super Teacher was even better than I had hoped.  

And so easy.

I found a job teaching English and theater in a western suburb of Chicago and fully anticipated that, by the end of my first year, Oprah would be optioning the rights to my life story.  At 7:20 a.m. on my first day, I went to the ladies’ room, touched up my make-up, and fluffed my hair so that I might look perfect when, at 7:30, I positioned myself at the podium and greeted my Senior Composition class.  Around third period, with my first section of freshmen, things began to unravel.

I have an acting background and an undergraduate degree in theater.  As a result, I am highly sensitive to audience reaction. I could feel that something was off. They were grinning, but the grins didn’t seem to match the timing of the jokes. I couldn’t put my finger on the problem and was beginning to feel uncomfortable, so I finished my introductory shtick and suggested they talk quietly until the bell.

            “Don’t you want to collect these cards?” I had passed out index cards and asked them to write down their contact information.

            “Oh, yeah. Pass those up.”

            I walked along the front row collecting stacks of cards and eventually was handed one with a piece of paper folded on top of it.

“Oh. My. God.” I inwardly smirked.  “Someone has a crush on me already and has passed me a note?!“  With a shiver of anticipation, I unfolded the paper and read:

X Y Z

I looked down and, sure enough, my fly was wide open. And had been since about 7:20 that morning.  It was now a little after 10.

I quickly ran through my options. I could burst into tears, flee the building, get in my car, and never come back. I could find a way to make this their fault, get really angry, and start yelling. This is how we dealt with anxiety in my family. Or I could react the way I hoped my own teacher would react if I were sitting in one of the little desks. I started laughing hysterically and zipped up.  I didn’t even turn around. 

Given these humble beginnings, you might expect me to surrender my Super Teacher aspirations. Instead, that incident reinforced them.  Third period was, hands down, my best class that first year.  They liked me.  I did relatively little screaming at them. 

If I could turn that sow’s ear into a silk purse what couldn’t I do? Clearly, I was destined to be the hippest, the smartest, the bestest teacher in the history of education.  The idea that my career would be anything less than spectacular was unconscionable. 

Of course, that was just the first day.  The real teaching had yet to begin, nor was I in any way prepared for what real teaching entailed . . .

Deb Teitelbaum, PhD is a faculty member at the NC Center for the Advancement of Teaching in Cullowhee, NC, and focuses on beginning teacher support and secondary ELA instruction.

A Timely Reminder: The Holidays are not Joyful for All Your Students

When I posted this essay last year, I was unprepared for how widely it would be shared.  Clearly, it filled a need I didn't realize was so great.  As we approach the holidays, it seemed wise to bring it out of retirement for the benefit of those to whom this is new information and for those of us who sometimes forget.
Sometime around the third or fourth year of my career, I was asked to teach a course called Senior English.  This was a semester long class for students who needed an additional half credit of English to graduate, mostly seniors on the five- and six-year plan.  In addition to books smarts (which some took great pains to hide) they were wiser than they should have been at that age. 

Calvin wrote an essay about being stopped by the cops while carrying more than an ounce of dope. The moral of the story, it turned out, was, “Always keep some juice in your glove compartment in case you have to eat your $#!+.”

That was tame compared to Betsy, who, through a series of misguided choices that snowballed, found herself serving at the pleasure of a dope dealer boyfriend who gave her room and board in exchange for pimping her out. And this, of course, was preferable to life at home with her abusive father.

And then there was Perry. Perry’s parents were cocaine addicts. By the time he was six, he knew how to get himself ready for school and on the bus because his parents were incapable of doing it for him. At age 13, he found his father’s cocaine stash. By 15, he was addicted to heroin. One thing led to another, and he found himself facing an attempted murder rap. Now on probation and hoping simply to be a normal teenager, he couldn’t understand how the stoners always knew to target him: “I swear to God, Ms. T., I wasn’t at this school twenty minutes before somebody asked me if I wanted to get high.”

In January, after the kids returned from winter break, Perry began falling asleep in class, not doing his homework. I feared he had begun using again and kept him after the bell one day.

“What’s going on, dude?” I chirped, trying not to sound judgmental.

“I’m sorry. My mom’s boyfriend tried to pick a fight with me over break. I think he wants to get my probation violated. So I’m living with my brother in the city.”

Perry was taking a commuter train from Chicago to the western suburbs, a trip that required him to get up at four in the morning. He wasn’t using; he was just exhausted from the effort of trying to be a normal kid. In mid-explanation, he grinned and said, “See what my girlfriend got me for Christmas?” and held up his arm to show me his watch. The metal band hung nearly an inch slack on his too slender wrist, but he glowed with pride.

“Wow—I think she kinda likes you!”

He chuckled shyly.

“Are you going to be doing that commute for the rest of the year?”

“I don’t know. I’m trying to get enrolled in Gordon Tech.”

“Okay, well, keep me in the loop, okay?”

What else could I say? Perry probably would have desired it otherwise, but circumstances had rendered my class a very low priority.  I let him sleep.

That same January, three different students told me tales of constructive eviction from their own homes. I had grown accustomed to disdaining stepfathers and mothers’ boyfriends. Not until this time did I begin to blame the mothers themselves. With no children of my own, I tried very hard not to judge the parenting of the adults in my students’ lives. Intuitively, though, I knew that while I had often accepted the company of some fairly worthless men, I had yet to meet the man for whom I would sell out my own flesh and blood.

            I share all this as a public service announcement.  Both new and experienced teachers may benefit from being reminded that some of our students have spectacularly bad parents.  If your child has asthma, you should probably forbid smoking in your home.  If you have young children who should be asleep by nine, the late-night partying needs to take place somewhere else. 

At worst, many of our students spend the so-called holidays with people who should not  be allowed to own a pet, much less raise a child.  The TS in PTSD stands for traumatic stress, and it doesn't just affect soldiers.  It can result from being beaten by someone three times your size or threatened with homelessness.  Under chronic stress, the brain has two options.  It can completely shut  down, resulting in the student who  will not respond, who shrugs off our attempts at communication.  Or it can remain perpetually vigilant.   These are the students are always angry, ready to fight you or their peers or the cops or whomever they perceive as a threat. 

This winter, please recognize that some of your students may have spent two weeks in what amounts to a battle zone.  Don’t be surprised when they manifest bad behavior upon their return to your classroom.  And try not to compound the problem by being harsh with them.      

No matter how unreasonable their behavior seems to you, it makes sense to them.  You don’t need to know the specifics of their situation to give your kids the benefit of the doubt, to remind yourself that no child wakes up in the morning and asks, “How can I screw up my life today?”  Make an effort to be the calm, trustworthy, reliable adult they absolutely need at this time.  As Eric Jensen wrote, “If yelling worked, the kids from the worst families would be the best behaved.”
One more thing I think needs to be stated explicitly, although I wish it didn't: all the students I wrote about here were white.  No race or ethnicity has a monopoly on dysfunction.

Here’s hoping 2018 is a better year in every way!

Deb Teitelbaum, PhD, is the author of Shut up! A Quick & Dirty Guide to Decreasing Teacher Talk and Increasing Student Talk in the Classroom, available on Amazon. She currently teaches English in an alternative high school in rural North Carolina. You can find her on Twitter @debteitelbaum,  Youtube, and her Facebook page, Teaching Up!

What if I told you there were no U.S. schools?

Among the sticks used to beat teachers in this country is the perception that U.S. students are less educated than their international peers.  Those who make this claim usually cite the findings of large international assessments, such as the TIMSS or PISA studies, that show the mean score of American students well below those of other industrialized nations.  Here’s the problem, though.

From an instructional standpoint, there are no U.S. schools.  There are no American students.

 “Whaaat?!” I hear you cry.  “Of course we have U.S. schools.”

No, we don’t.  We have a Department of Education—a fairly recent addition to the Presidential cabinet.  With the smallest staff but third largest budget of any cabinet-level department, it is empowered to lead the dialogue about education and disperse funds for various programs and grants.  

Now, you might be thinking, “Doesn’t receipt of those funds entail some sort of compliance measure or attainment of some standard?”

And the answer is, “Mmm...meh.”

Let’s take a recent and well-publicized example, the Race tothe Top program, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.  Among the stipulations attached to the receipt of these funds were the adoption of common standards and the use of high quality common assessments.

Had these stipulations been enacted, we might be on the road to having U.S. schools.  Instead, they became plot devices in a political drama that pit the liberal/tyrannical Obama administration against states with conservative/freedom-loving legislatures.  Those states voted essentially to renege on the terms of the deal. 

Most of the decisions about the enactment of teaching and learning are made at the state or district level.  That is why, in some states, science teachers must present the argument for intelligent design along with evolution or why other states use textbooks that refer to African slaves as imported workers.

The difference between the states becomes unmistakable when their international achievement scores are disaggregated and each state’s results are presented separately.

The graphic seen here is taken from U.S States in a GlobalContext: Results from the 2011 NAEP-TIMMS Linking Study.  It reveals that in eighth grade mathematics, Massachusetts students, on average, are outscored only by students from South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan.

Also noteworthy is the success of many states in comparison to Finland.  Until this three-ring circus that constitutes our Presidential election eclipsed everything else, I couldn’t pull up my Facebook feed without reading about the idyll that is is Finnish education.  According to the NAEP-TIMSS data, though, more than half of the states in this country, including several of the most populous, outscore Finnish students in math at the eighth grade level.

Now, I know that test scores do not provide a complete picture of a school system.  However, test scores are the preferred metric of those who criticize “American” schools.  By and large, these are the same people who shriek, “Government overreach!!” in response to any effort to ensure that students in one state receive the same quality of education as students in another. 

This year will mark my 21^st as an educator, and I am officially tired of defending my profession.  Alexis de Toqueville asserted that, in a democracy, people get the government they deserve.  Perhaps in a confederation of quasi-independent states, they get the education systems they deserve as well.  

You may have rigorous expectations, but do your students?

I’ve been sweating over the agenda for a workshop on teaching English II—sophomore English for you civilians. 

I’ve read Fisher & Frey’s Rigorous Reading.  Twice.  I’m going to have the teachers practice creating all six levels of text-dependent questions.  I’ve got a great heuristic device for analyzing poetry.  I’ve got another for analyzing character[1]. 

For our opening activity, I’m going to ask them to deconstruct the end-of-course test using an activity called List-Group-Label, once again tapping my current favorite professional book, Making Thinking Visible.  I want the teachers to see that higher order thinking skills are not antithetical to the test.

To drive this point home, I even selected the wood floor background for my PowerPoint slides.  It’s visual metaphor: the EOC represents the floor, the least our students should be able to do.  If we teach to the ceiling, the floor will take care of itself.  Clever.  I know, right? 

So why am I sweating?

They say that nothing is idiot-proof to a sufficiently motivated idiot.

I taught high school English for eleven years, and I was clever even then.  I had nifty heuristic devices and graphic organizers and catchy expressions.  And they were all very effective…for the students who gave a damn.  Nothing is student-proof to a sufficiently apathetic student.

When I was a student, I didn’t care about math.  Despite that fact, I did fairly well in it because I could plug-and-chug.  Teach me the algorithm, and I’ll know when I have the right answer.  I was far less successful in any math class where I had to figure out which algorithm to use or—God forbid—create my own. 

Close reading, like theoretical mathematics, is not merely an intellectual act.  It is a manifestation of the desire to understand.  Before students can successfully read between the lines, they must believe that there’s something worth finding there. 

I am an ethical person.  I no longer provide after-school professional development because it doesn’t work and, frankly, it’s inhumane.  I need a minimum of three hours and teachers who are not already exhausted.  It is not enough for me to present the material; I want teachers to use it.

For the first time since arriving at my current employer, I’m concerned that teachers may not be able to implement what I give them.  I can’t in good conscience craft a presentation on how to effectively teach English II without including some instruction on how to build the will of the students to engage with the material. 

 And, to be quite honest, I'm not sure I know how to do that.  I'm not sure I ever did.

I'll keep you posted.

---

[1] Big ups to Denise Sawyer of Lee Early College in Lee County, NC, by the way, for her assistance in pulling these materials together.

What if there's no prior knowledge to activate

            Activating students’ prior knowledge is one of those edu-speak phrases so often repeated that it has in many ways lost all meaning and functions only as a square on satirical faculty meeting bingo cards.

The intention is good.  New information can be more readily understood and remembered if it can be assimilated with material that already resides in long-term memory.  For example, if I needed directions to somewhere in downtown Durham, NC, I would ask where it was in relation to Fullsteam Brewery.  I have a very clear mental image of that area and can easily build onto it, despite my nearly tragic lack of directional sense.  I once missed the entire state of Virginia.  True story.

Unfortunately, the places with which I am that familiar are very few, and my map reading skills are purely theoretical.  When I first moved to Athens, GA, from Chicago, I needed to buy a shower curtain, so I called the local Target store and asked for directions.  

The clerk asked, “Do you know where the mall is?” 

I said, “No.” 

She tried again, “Do you know…” 

I said, “Let me save you some time.  I’ve lived here about sixteen minutes.  I don’t know where anything is.”  We eventually worked it out. 

The prior knowledge activation technique that I hear used most often is to ask students, “What do you know about ______?”  And the problem is that many of our students don’t know anything about the topic.  Asking them, “What do you know about Ancient Egypt?” is analogous to asking me where the mall is. 

Actually, it’s worse.  I absolutely knew that I had no idea where the mall was.  Our kids often think they know things when in fact they don’t or the things they know are complete fiction.

            According to Dr. David Sousa, author of How theBrain Learns among other titles, we tend to remember best the first and last things presented to us in a learning session.  That means students need to receive only correct information initially.  The use of the above technique or the much-beloved KWL chart may explain why students give those same wrong answers on the end-of-unit test, despite weeks of instruction.

            It may be more useful to plan your lessons with an eye toward creating a schema, as opposed to activating prior knowledge.  Consider, for example, Ancient Egypt.  Rather than asking students what they know, present them with an image like this one.  Better yet—give them an assortment of images. 

Now ask them simply to observe: “What do you see?” This can be done individually, in small groups, or as a whole class.  Make certain to limit students’ contributions at this point to what is objectively present in the image.  No interpretations or value judgments just yet.

When students have exhausted their observations, ask them, “Based on what you see, what do you think is going on?” 

Finally, ask students to consider what questions persist for them.  “What are you still wondering about?”

This activity, called See-Think-Wonder, is taken from the superb book Making Thinking Visible,  I like that it allows students to craft an accurate mental framework on which to attach the material they will be studying.  Later in the unit, the teacher can refer back to the images rather than spending a great deal of time explaining a concept.  Because the students were allowed to ponder the images for a considerable amount of time, they are apt to be remembered and serve as useful shorthand. 

Perhaps more importantly, it presents academic material as a puzzle to be solved.  Cognitive psychologist Dan Willingham, author of Why Don’t Students Like School?, explains that people like puzzles and will keep at them provided they believe they have a reasonable chance of success. If you have ever persisted at a difficult crossword or Sudoku, you know this is true.