The University of Akron was in the news again today, and not for a good reason. In this article from MSNBC, "Will Congress Turn It's Backs On Students?," it is suggested that the government doesn't care about students with huge loans. The student, Becky, who is a public school teacher, has taken out $96,000 in student loans, and now would like Congress to somehow alleviate her of what is described as a predatory practice of the student loan lenders.

First, let me state my belief that this is not a "problem" for government to intervene. Do I think something needs to be done about the $96,000 debt of this student? Absolutely. But not by the government. First, let's talk about what the student received for her money.

First, let me state that I don't know this student, and I don't know what her lifestyle was like before, during or after her college career. For $96,000, Becky may have attended school for four to six years. The article doesn't state how long she attended school. During that time (judging from the huge amount of debt), she likely lived on campus, in one of the designer dorms UA has to offer. UA boasts of it's award-winning apartment style residence halls, with private kitchens and baths. All that, for only $9,308 a year. Surely, living in luxury will make it easier for students to study, right? They offer wonderful dining options, like dining plans that include Starbucks, Einstein Bagels, Subway, a grille, a market, a cafe, and many others. Deluxe accommodations, only $4240 a year. Students can have their morning cup of java on the way to the Rec Center, which boasts "What can you do at the Rec Center? You can bike, run, shoot hoops, swim, play ping-pong, climb a 53-foot wall and join any number of group-exercise classes, ranging from yoga to cycling to Zumba."


Wow, it sure seems like students have the opportunity to live like royalty at UA. I'm sure there is equal opportunity to live a lavish lifestyle while at any other university around the country. And, let's be honest about what happens AFTER life at UA, after she has received her degree. I bet that students feel they can't take a step backwards, into "regular life" like the student in this story described in the article. Students, once they become dependent on zumba and  Starbucks and  deluxe apartments wouldn't want to go back. And when student loan lenders are offering to furnish all this luxury for you, no problem, sign on the dotted line - students take that money. The article states that over 40 million Americans have bought into that luxury. And keep in mind, when we say "But, they needed that money for education," it was not JUST classes. It was a lifestyle upgrade. 


I don't know Becky, but I see students like her every day. Students come to my class showing off new tattoos, new piercings, designer clothes, fancy meals, energy drinks, Starbucks, flashy UA clothes - and then I wonder.... "Why are these students so unlike me? Where do they get the money to do this?" Let me tell you how I lived in undergrad. I lived in a two-person dorm. My roommate and I shared 30 square feet of cinder block, built in 1956, called McMaster Hall. We bought an old bunk bed from Goodwill. We had a used futon, and we would fashion a coffee table out of milk cartons. We had a tiny cube fridge, and ate a lot of mac and cheese. I thought I was hot stuff when I moved up to an apartment with a roommate. We lived in a one bedroom apartment off campus, that cost $430 a month. I paid it by being a waitress on the weekends. I may have had crappy surroundings, but I had friends, I was happy, and I was learning a lot. I loved being in school. I wasn't building up any debt. NO DEBT. But I don't see many students "tough it out" anymore, because they have student loan packages that pay for deluxe livings.


The article is right - schools and student loan lenders will give students EVERYTHING they want, and more. And, they will saddle them in debt, for their choices. Just as I have to live with my choices at Mount Union (I have no student loan debt, thanks to a wonderful family who helped me pay, and my frugal habits and weekend job) Becky and the students like her will have to live with their choices. These students will be in debt for their Starbucks and lavish lifestyles. And there is NO REASON for the taxpayers to be paying for that. This is not a government problem - this is out of control spending, catching up to these students.


So, if I were to offer any advice to a student, choosing to go away and live at college - take the bare bottom choices. Choose to live in the oldest, cheapest residence hall. You'll only be sleeping there, and will spend most of your time, out with your new friends. Take the bare bottom dining plan, and buy a Keurig for your dorm room. Make your own coffee, and take it to class in a reusable mug (hello, environmentally friendly!). Get a weekend job. Spend your class time wisely, wake up early, and go to the library to study. Plan your day to make the most of the time when many students will be sleeping off their hangovers to be as productive as possible. Better yet, live at home, or with as many roommates splitting the cost as you can manage. 


Choose your major WISELY! You may hate math, but any major that involves math will likely get you in a better career than one without. The "fun majors" are often the ones that have no job opportunities once you graduate. Or, you'll be competing against 800 other applicants for that one job. Make sure that you'll be able to pay your bills once you graduate.


And, once you do graduate, hit that student loan debt as hard as you can! Better to slash it while you're young, than to let it build and compound interest. Becky has $96,000 in debt - here's what I would suggest to her, specifically. Take in a roommate or two. Or, even though it's not fun, move home with your parents. Live in their basement while you toss every cent at that debt. If you need to live out on your own, then slash every bill you can.


Got used to deluxe cable while on campus? Slash it by buying a Roku, and Netflix. Get rid of cable, you don't need it. Start looking into frugal living tips - my personal favorite site is The Simple Dollar. There are a ton of tricks and tips to save money, or to stop wasting money. He makes great suggestions too - like to stop trying to impress people with money. I think one of the pitfalls of a college degree is that people believe they should be in a certain lifestyle the second that they graduate, and that just keeps them perpetually in debt. Sure, after living at UA and having deluxe accommodations, deluxe food, deluxe drinks, deluxe Rec Centers, a movie theater, a lazy river, and social events, you want to keep up that lifestyle, but look at what it's doing to countless other students besides Becky. To put it bluntly - IT'S DESTROYING THEIR LIVES.


Who would have thought going away to college would be the thing destroying people's lives? But that is the reality. Did many students make that mistake of being sucked into a glitzy, glamorous game? Yes. Should the government bail them out? No. (and for the record, government shouldn't bail out anyone, in my humble opinion). The reason student loans cannot be discharged in bankrupcy is simple to me. If you take out too big a home loan, the bank takes back the house. If you take out too big a car loan, the bank takes back the car. If you take out too big a student loan, to live like a rockstar for four to six years, there is nothing for the bank to take back. They can't take that education away from you - nor should you WANT them to. 


Now is the time for people with these huge loans to make a significant life change. Buy a smaller house. Stop buying new stuff. Get a roommate or two. Stop trying to impress other people. Find cheap or free activities through your city's website. Slash all your bills.Sell stuff on Ebay or Craigslist you don't need or use. Go to the library instead of the bookstore. Make food at home. Move somewhere cheaper. Take on a second job. Do this for yourself, and your future, because Congress, the president, and the government is not going to help you. Only you can help you. It's never too late to start making better money decisions.

Life is full of tests. To be a doctor, you take many exams through medical school. You take the MCAT to even get into med school. In fact, EVERYONE who goes to med school must pass the MCAT, and almost every US and Canadian medical school requires it. I went and clicked on one of the six topics and skills that are assessed by the test. Just the Biology section had 17 pages of outlined topics you would have had to have studied for YEARS in your undergraduate program. Even as a Biologist myself, there are some topics I would want to go back and review before I’d ever take that kind of test. I am glad that every one of my doctors has had to pass that test, and tests like it, in order to take on the responsibility of being a doctor.


If I want to get into law school, I have to take the LSAT. The LSAT is a standardized test that measures reading skills, analytical skills, and logical reasoning. This test is described as “providing a standard measure of the acquired reasoning and reading skills of law school applicants.” When a student has taken and passed the LSAT, the law school has a reasonable understanding of what this applicant is able to do - read, and reason. I am glad that every lawyer has had to take that test, in order to understand and comprehend the law, and all it's intricacies. 


What, then, do we want from the professionals that are part of our daily lives - our teachers? When I wanted to become a teacher, in Texas, I took the TExES, or the Texas Examination of Educator Standards. As I remember, there were two parts - one part about the subject matter, and one part about understanding teaching. I actually remember the day I took that test. I was living on the Mexican border, and I had to drive to San Antonio for the proctored, secure examination. There were two other teachers with me in the car for the 2 ½ hour drive - one was a teacher’s aide who had completed her coursework, and wanted to move up into a teaching role. The other was an “emergency certified” teacher, like me, except that this was his third time taking the test, and his last try before he would be let go from his teaching position. When you were on an emergency certification (I was, because I had a Biology degree, but no teaching experience. I took all the classes while teaching full time) and you had three years from when you started to pass all the classes, and take the test. If you couldn’t pass the tests, you lost your job.


I had always accepted that this was how the system worked. I was never angry that I had to pass a test. I was never mad at the test, or fearful of the tests. I knew that if I did all the practice tests, reviewed the materials, approached my professors at school about anything I was unclear of, and just took care of business, I’d pass the test. Sure, it wasn’t fun to study. It was tedious. It was boring. It got in the way of some fun stuff I wanted to do on the weekends. But, if I wanted to be a teacher, and I did, I would pass that test. I invited friends over to study. I made binders full of material about each topic, flashcards, even read my study material out loud so I could record it and play it in my car on the way into work. I knew I had it.


(Beware, this paragraph has swearing in it) At the time, I was living with a person who wanted to become a federal agent. He also had to pass a test. He went through 3 months of intense academy to learn to shoot, learn the law, learn the job, and learn Spanish. Then, he had one year from when he started working as a recruit, until he took the test, and would either pass, or get fired from his job. Our attitudes about “the test” were a million miles apart. My attitude was “If I want this job, I take this test. Obviously it’s a test I can pass, because most of my fellow teachers have passed it, so I just need to buckle down and do this.” His attitude was “I hate this f**king test! It’s so unfair that some of these guys are Hispanic, and we are both being tested the same way on if we know Spanish. It’s not fair. If you’re a native speaker, you have an advantage. And what if I’m having a bad day, and can’t shoot? What if I’m sick? What if I can’t remember a stupid little law, or mix it up? I mean, I know the laws in general, but what if they pull out an obscure law and I miss it? This whole test is bulls**t! And my job depends on it! What if I fail, and I have to go get another job? People will know I failed. F**k this, no F**K THIS!!!!”


The closer we got to his year, the more angry, aggressive, and paranoid he got. He didn’t settle in to study - he spent a lot of time bitching with the other recruits. His first topic of conversation at every meeting with another recruit would be “The test… blah.. blah… angry blah.” I noticed that several people, especially the native Spanish speakers, stopped hanging around us. He was mad all the time. He would take his weapon with him everywhere - to the grocery store, to Walmart, to friends’ houses. He treated me in an increasingly hostile manner, because I would ask him if he wanted to study together for our tests, go out to meet new friends I had at the school and their husbands, or go to the gym and exercise (he said all the walking from the job made him miserable and tired). He became known as “Amy’s angry boyfriend.” I made excuses, “He’s just upset about this test. It will pass. He’ll pass the test, and then everything will be fine.” Finally, I broke up with him three months before his test, because I couldn’t live like that. Being surrounded by hostility about the test, anger over studying, constant anxiety about failing, fearfulness about losing a job, and test-aggression was making me physically sick. It was like a disease to all those around us. It weighed on our lives, and broke us apart.


Friends, there are teachers who's attitudes are like mine, and teachers who have an attitude like my boyfriend in your child’s school, who's emotions feed into your child, who are preparing them to take their tests, and ultimately, to graduate. I actually used to be the one designated science teacher who would be assigned every student who hadn’t been able to pass their graduation exam. I worked with these students a period a day, after school, and on Saturdays. I had material for them on EVERY CONCEPT that would be on their tests. I meticulously scoured through old, released graduation tests, figured out which standard the question applied to, and then made mini-tests for my students to take on each assigned topic. I bought them all green highlighters (somewhere I read that if you liked green, you were smart, I don’t know if there is a smart color, but it sounded good) and peppermints (I read that peppermints helped you concentrate), and so any time you came to me for test prep, you got a green highlighter and a peppermint. Somewhere I read that yoga helped people de-stress and focus, so on test days, I would lead my class in yoga pre-test.


One semester I started off with 128 seniors who had failed their senior science graduation exam. I read, re-read, practiced, encouraged, cheer-leaded, and gave them tips and tricks to beating multiple choice tests. I became known as the test whisperer - I could help you pass the test. I knew everything there was to know about that damn test, and I knew how to help students pass it. That year, I got every student to pass except SIX. And I remember those six, very vividly. One girl had such negative talk, that she refused to even read the test. She marked her scantron, and then fell asleep, every time she took the test. She repeated to me often, “I’m a failure. It’s OK, I know I’m not going to graduate. I don’t care anymore.” She set herself up for failure, and no matter what I did, she refused to even try. Another girl refused to speak English. We were on the Mexican border. Even though I never taught in Spanish, I understood it, and she understood me in English, but she would never answer any question in English, no matter what I did. All her other teachers just allowed her to speak Spanish (80% of the teachers on the border are Spanish speaking also), so she refused to do anything but speak Spanish. Another boy was a gang leader, and was only at school to attempt to sell drugs. He was suspended so much that I barely got to see him. When I did have him in class, he was sulking, in a foul mood, and staring into space. He was preoccupied, and wanted nothing to do with me or the class.


Even the best of teachers can’t reach everyone. I consider myself one of the best, most professional teachers there is. I was part of an amazing group of teachers in my department who worked together the make the science experience amazing for our students. And by everything you hear on the news today about students, we should have had utter failure in our school. We had 99% Spanish speaking students. Most of our kids were on free lunch. We had gangs, drugs, students with children, and troubled students. But we all said, “there is no reason we can’t get everyone to pass the graduation tests.” And we were right. We pulled our resources, at our department meeting each week we would each bring our best lessons on a given topic, and then make a plan so that each teacher in the department did that best lesson, and then we revised it together to make it better, make rubric answer keys, make common powerpoints, find labs that worked with that lesson, and made sure it aligned to the standards. We got to be so good at it, that in three years, we went from 39% passing the graduation tests, to 89% when I left the school. We were professionals at getting kids to pass the tests.


And never would I say we “taught to the tests.” We taught everything that was ON the test, sure, but we also got to highlight the topics we loved (one teacher loved plants, and another loved evolution). The labs we did with the students were fun and hands on, and we loved that our lesson planning was a collaborative effort. We never felt alone, because we were professionals who met regularly and took each person’s strengths, and highlighted them. Some days, all the Biology teachers would meet in the lecture auditorium, and bring all their classes of students, and one of the teachers who was really good at the topic would put on an exciting production with multimedia presentations, an outline for the students to take notes, and the other teachers would be out in the “audience,” helping kids who had questions, kids who were sleeping (you all know it happens), or helping students who needed assistance. Mostly, though, these production days were looked forward to by the kids, because it was like watching a concert, with a rockstar teacher leading.


What it took to make this happen was a collaboration between our school, and the UT Charles A Dana Center at The University of Texas in Austin. We did what was called “The Professional Teaching Model.” I plan to write more about it in the future, because it was that program that helped us turn ourselves from troubled, tired teachers, to professional teachers. We were amazing. And it was HARD! But as we all know, teaching is HARD, whether you’re succeeding or failing - so why not make it successful?


And for parents, who would you rather have leading your class? Someone like me, a professional teacher, who is motivating and fun, and hitting every standard and getting your child to pass those tests? Or someone who is constantly bitching about how unfair the tests are, how they hate the standards, and how burnt out and angry they are? A teacher who feels hopeless and angry, or who works with their department and school to be part of a collaborative, professional, efficient, effective team? Who IS your kid's teacher? If you ARE a teacher, who are YOU?


There is a popular author who has a blog that I often see shared who I absolutely despise. I won’t even mention her name, but she’s an educational historian who is what I’d label as a “critical theorist.” She is critical of education, and spends all her time breaking down how bad education is, how bad teachers are treated, how bad politics affect education, how bad the common core is, how bad testing is, and basically how bad EVERYTHING is. She offers no solutions that are feasible. She makes teachers despair even more. She amplifies criticisms, finds faults in the system that she says make it hostile, and writes books to terrorize teachers, and make them afraid. She’s a s**t-stirrer, s**t-flinger, and an irresponsible, critical, worthless hack (in my opinion). And I feel sad for every teacher who climbs on board with her, ready to complain and waste their time fighting against standards. And I plan to write, teach, motivate, and educate until she goes away. I will talk louder, write more, motivate, encourage, and enable success in the profession that I LOVE. Because I believe every school district, every single school, every department, and every teacher is part of this amazing profession called EDUCATION, and that people would prefer to be lifted up, instead of held hopeless to the ground. We all got into this profession to make our lives, the lives of our students, and the education in this country get better. And I, friends, am just getting the ball rolling.


Who’s with me?