They are not potential rocket scientists. Most are not college material. Most cannot write a coherent paragraph and they are fourteen years old, raised in schools in the United States. Some may be the victim of poor teachers and poor instruction. But many are just… slow.

We go over and over the multistep equations. I try multiple approaches to get the idea across. The idea dies before my eyes. I am particularly fascinated by the homework papers turned in without a single correct answer. These papers are virtually always written by girls who wish to please me by doing their homework even though they manifestly have no clue what the symbols on the sheet mean.

I should not be inflicting this homework on these girls. We have to teach certain concepts, I am told, in order to get them ready for the state test. But they can’t get ready for the state test. Hell, they can’t add fractions.

These are the lost children. These are the fucked children, victims of an agenda which has no room for slow learners. Get them help, politicians say. We have to get these students ready for college.

Here’s the dirty secret: We can’t get some of them ready for college — not a real college, anyway, a college with standards that graduates students who can read, write and cipher. If after years of intensive interventions a kid still can’t remember how to turn a fraction into a decimal, with or without review, that college fantasy is a bureaucrat’s dream and a student’s nightmare.

What do these slow learners need? They need a time machine. They need to go back to the past where they would have been channeled into classes with other students who were operating at their learning levels. They need those vocational classes that we have been gutting in the name of No Child Left Behind.

One of my Facebook friends is a former student who is learning auto repair at his local community college. He’s a great kid, one of those kids who brightens up any classroom. I’m perfectly happy for him. I have to ask, though, why he has to pay all this money to get a certification that he ought to have been able to mostly complete in high school. Those classes are all gone now, the equipment sitting idle in empty rooms.

I want to ask my readers to do the following: Put yourself in the shoes of those slow learners. You have books you can’t read, tests and homework you can’t do, and the pressure is unrelenting to learn ideas that have eluded you for years. You are getting special help, but that help is still presenting you with material that is 4 or more years above your actual, documented learning-level. How do you feel? How are you benefitting from your interventions? Keep in mind that the other kids always notice special interventions and some of them may be making fun of you, too. Kids can be especially cruel in middle school.

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.
–Mark Twain

The search “cheating by school districts” returned 12,000,000 results in 0.34 seconds. The first page of articles includes large cities and huge school districts, such as Atlanta, Philadelphia and Columbus, Ohio. A friend of mine a couple of years ago received a group of special education students who had supposedly passed the state exam. Upon further work with these students, she discovered the group could not read.

“The implementation of the Common Core State Standards presents countless challenges, and as a result, successful implementation depends on the resiliency and willingness of school staff to grapple with incidents of defeat.”

Eduhonesty: Dammit, you bastards! We are making the children of America into fodder for this latest test machine. THEY are the ones who will need resiliency as we pummel them with yet another test that most of them will find difficult, if not impossible. I may be wrong about this, but I fully expect the Illinois state test that will be our first Common Core experiment to be a general disaster. That’s my prediction.

I’d love to be wrong.

He stayed after school on Friday for an hour. His mother came to pick him up. A few others were supposed to stay, but the siren call of Friday afternoon was too much for them.

So I worked with David as he slowly, laboriously struggled through his science packet. His cousin has helped him. He showed me a few things she had taught him. Still, the effort was a struggle, a word-by-word fight for understanding. His other teachers and I agree that David might belong in special education. But the process of even getting him considered is a multiday effort with no guarantee of success. I have done it all before only to be told that my student had an I.Q. of 78 and did not qualify for any special services. The magic number is 75, I believe. Almost everyone knows that those tests can easily vary by 3 points, but that one magic number kept my student out of special education. David seems very much like that girl from my past.

Still, we are going to have to assault the portcullis, the heavy iron gate at the entrance to the special education castle soon. David needs help.

At one point, I said, “See, you are learning this. You are getting better.”

“Am I?” he answered. There was such pride in his eyes, but behind that pride lurked a scintilla of hopelessness. I could see the doubt mixed into that expression. David now doubts his ability to learn.

Eduhonesty: This kid who reads so slowly is about to take the first Common Core annual state exam. The math problems supposedly will be all story problems with more than one right answer possible. David is going to get annihilated. His reading speed would ensure that, even if he could sort out the math. If he’s feeling somewhat hopeless now, I can only imagine the fallout from the upcoming test.

Right now, my David is a polite, helpful kid who tries to do the work. He always says thank-you when you help him or give him a treat. Sometimes he drifts and talks too much. Sometimes he gets distracted and does not pay attention, especially when he cannot understand the material being presented. I was kind of entertained when I went with him to his locker to get his coat and we found one missing assignment we had been working on towards the top of a crumpled group of homework papers that had obviously never exited the locker. He apologized profusely. We will have to try to work with him on locker organization.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this great kid becomes hell on wheels in high school, though.

February being African-American history month, I’d like to quote Langston Hughes, who expressed my concern for David perfectly:

A Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

How long can we keep throwing this kid in over his head and expecting him to say “thank-you”?

“Who invented social studies anyway?” Paula asked peevishly. “Why do we have to do this?”

I laughed. Nobody knows, I told her, and gave her a little pep talk. I spend a lot of time being peppy. I figured her social studies teacher could use the help.

Paula did not seem reconciled to social studies when I was done.

RtI is an acronym standing for “Response to Intervention.” It’s a new, mandated plan that requires schools to identify students who may be at risk of failure and provide those students with steadily more intense interventions to get them back on track. RtI can be extremely complicated since it requires small group and one-on-one assistance — whether a district has any additional resources for this small-group and individual work or not. But we all have lots and lots of meetings on how to implement RtI, frequently concerned with how to identify those students needing extra help. Then we try to figure out how to provide help without neglecting the regular students more than necessary.

I just stumbled on a note in a journal from some past RtI meeting that I found entertaining:

“We need a wild banshee intervention system.”

Eduhonesty; Students fall behind for many reasons. Behavioral issues create the biggest challenges. Our wildest banshees seldom respond to RtI, but we can leave no child behind. So we leave everybody else behind while we try intensive interventions on students who are wild, loud and out of control. I’m not saying these students don’t need help, but they frequently need more help than anyone except a trained psychologist or psychiatrist can provide.