Oak Forest HS Teacher Publishes Piece in Sun-Times

Oak Forest High School teacher Jen Schanz had a taste of the pressure writers feel on a daily basis as she was working on her Sun-Times piece, published on April 30. Schanz, an English teacher, wrote an op ed piece for the Sun-Times called “No Standardized Test Can Measure Empathy and Wisdom” as a part of a program she applied to called Ed Lab. Ed Lab was a way for participants to connect common core to state tests. According to Schanz, “Two college professor writing gurus taught the class. The subject was the teaching of writing—the pedagogy—of the activity.” During the class, Schanz caught the attention of Steve Zemelman, who is on the Board of Director’s for the Illinois Writing Project and he asked Schanz to write the op ed piece for the Sun Times.

“I wrote the first draft in November and sent it Steve Zemelman and to my principal, Dr. Brad Sikora. It was hard! I edited it five times before it was submitted to the Sun Times and even then, they edited it more. It was humbling to receive such good feedback from the professional writers on the staff.”

The topic of the piece is something that Schanz feels strongly about, which is the number crunching that teachers are being required to do these days. In the article, Schanz writes, “The true art of teaching is evoking enough enthusiasm for reading that they forget to check Instagram. One way to achieve this is through laughter; when students are laughing about a topic, they are learning.” She relates the experiences that her students had when they actually heard the author of the book they were studying live at the Chicago Humanities Festival. The class had been studying the graphic novel Persepolis by Iranian author Marjane Satrapi. The students were excited to see the author at the Chicago Humanities Festival session. Schanz writes, “How does Satrapi measure success? When people reading Persepolis imagined themselves as the narrator, as ‘this girl.’ An abstract enemy is easy to annihilate but someone in a mirror is impossible to target. When a student says, ‘I can’t believe how much I care about a character in a graphic novel,’ it is a drop-the-microphone-and-walk-offstage teaching moment. Sadly though, in terms of testing, it’s no more than the sound of a tree falling in deserted woods. No one can rank students by how much they laughed or cared, but that’s what would measure whether schools create thoughtful citizens.”

In the future, Schanz said, “No student will remember the exact topics we covered in class and the tests we took. They will remember they learned how to write and defend their positions in class.”

This whole experience gave Schanz a new respect for the work of journalists. “It was harder [to write this] than I thought. It took five drafts and even those were edited more by the Sun-Times professionals. It also took longer than I thought to get it published because the mayoral race superseded my piece, as well as the unrest that was happening in Baltimore.”

If you would like to read Schanz’s piece, you can read it at this link: http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/7/71/566444/standardized-school-test-can-measure-empathy-wisdom.