Outside it was 95 degrees. Inside I don’t think it made 90. I’m not sure. Maybe it did. It was dauntingly hot regardless. Only the spray bottle saved me. It’s extremely hard to learn in that sticky, oppressive heat. It’s at least that hard to teach.

Especially in poor districts, there are still many schools without air-conditioning systems.

If this keeps up for a few weeks, my meltdown may be impossible to prevent.

Eduhonesty: We are starting schools earlier and earlier in order to be ready when state testing rolls around in the spring. But in poor districts, air-conditioning may never have been installed. My district started in the middle of August, as has become common, and I’d like to declare that early start a probable waste of time.

Like farmers, teachers in these old schools are at the mercy of the weather. Early fall is blazing away in the Midwest, sun trapped by walls of windows, heat rising to second floors where fans are useless. Above the mid-eighties, fans simply don’t work. Students don’t work either. I take them to air-conditioned spaces, but I am sharing these spaces with other teachers. Lessons are presented in abbreviated form. Individual instruction time is high but group time has been gutted by the need to be considerate of colleagues’ classes.

We have lost a great deal of time in the last two weeks to soaring temperatures. We should have started after Labor Day, as schools once did.

I want my lost two weeks back.

This sounds like a lesson plan. We use big words. We use action verbs. I can’t write “students will review division” or at least that’s viewed as substandard. Students need to be actively involved! If I write “students will derive an algorithm for dividing integers” that’s apt to go over much better with administration.

My lesson plans are artful examples of polysyllabic overkill, filled with action verbs. My students infer, derive, adjudicate, authenticate, reconcile, substantiate, contextualize, ratiocinate, synthesize, poeticize and even posterize.

Eduhonesty: Students never just review or learn. That’s part of the reason for these 5 page lesson plans. I’m not sure if we are building student’s vocabularies but we are certainly adding words to our teacher’s “internal lexicons.” Sometimes I wish I could just write “students will review division”, though — since that happens to be what we are doing.

Remember subs?

I remember subs. I even know a few.

I helped console a sub awhile back. He told me the students had been singing loudly and screaming in class all day. They had even screamed AT him at one point.

That sub does not plan to be back and I don’t blame him.

In our more difficult urban and impoverished school districts, classes often double up because no sub can be found. Given how hard the kids can be on subs, I’m not sure that much, if any, learning loss results.

Eduhonesty: “Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build
and nobody wants to do maintenance.”  ~ Kurt Vonnegut (1922 – 2007)

Discipline is at an all-time low out here. Well-meaning counselors and deans endlessly talk to students, trying to help them understand why their behavior should change. I have a news flash for those counselors and deans: Most of those kids know exactly what they did and why it was wrong. They are experts at telling stories that adults want to hear.

These once and future thugs don’t need to “reflect.” They don’t need second, third, fourth, etc. chances. They need consequences. Consequences might result in some reflection. They might result in the district managing to keep a few more subs. As a teacher, I have the leverage of grades to use to influence behavior. I also have a relationship with individual students. But subs rely on student goodwill and the threat of consequences from the Dean’s office to hold their classrooms together.

Eduhonesty: Sympathetic listening has its place, but it also builds thugs. Those students who were singing loudly while that sub tried to talk? They should have been suspended. That singing and screaming was an act of aggression against the sub and the excuse, “We was just singing!” is unworthy of any discussion or reflection. These kids are smarter than that. They knew exactly what they were doing.
 

I came home and plunged into work. I’ve spent hours completing my lesson plans for my four different classes, due tomorrow, and completing a questionnaire related to an assessment I am going to be obliged to give next week, and then again at the end of the grading period. The questionnaire also comes due tomorrow. I’m about to retire for the night so I can stumble out of bed tomorrow as early as possible to drive to school to finish these tasks.

What I did not do was any preparation for actual instruction. I had no time.

Eduhonesty: Of course I need a lesson plan. But the part where I find the college readiness standards, the Illinois standards and the Common Core standards and then record those standards in order to document that I am meeting standards sucks time away from my students. To meet all administrative requirements, I am required to produce a five-page document where a one- to two-page document would do. The questionnaire was related to the need to demonstrate scoring improvement by students over the year. If this night of writing had been an extremely rare occurrence, I’d have let it go, but such evenings are becoming standard for many teachers.

When I have to produce these papers, I can’t be writing a PowerPoint or cutting out shapes for a new activity. I can’t be looking online for  a great lesson idea. I can’t be grading student papers. School has barely started, I have been running full-tilt, almost nonstop, and I am already behind on my grading.

I’m sure I have many counterparts in other schools, too.

Testing gurus and educational administrators are trying to teach America’s children to think. I’m not against thinking. But I will observe that thinking comes somewhat naturally to this species.

If we fill our students’ heads with facts, they will think. But you can’t think (clearly) until you actually know something and know it reasonably well. Too many students have learned too little to effectively think about the topics they are given.

Eduhonesty: Recent generations are ripe for deception. They don’t have the knowledge base to recognize propaganda and they don’t understand the need to acquire that knowledge base. We have let them retrieve too often and we have forced them to memorize too little.

Nobody should harass nobody. No how. No way. Especially sexually.

I just summed up a segment of a district-wide meeting that took the speaker around 1/2 hour to get through. Oh, the speaker added a few more details. I should add the part about calling human resources if asking the perpetrator to stop does not work.

Eduhonesty: If you are smart enough to teach, you should recognize harassment. For that matter, if you can teach in a poor or urban school district, you can probably hand that harasser his or her dismembered head on the proverbial platter after feeding any loose brains to your pet zombie.

Every year some nurse from the school district lectures me, telling me and a few hundred colleagues to avoid our student’s bodily fluids. Frankly, we don’t need to be told not to touch the blood and vomit. Does the whole school district have to hear this talk every year? How about photocopying a page with the highlights, and then attaching that summary to bags of rubber gloves and band-aids? The bags could be placed in mailboxes, the whole matter handled by trusty mailboxes.

Eduhonesty: We waste too much time in unnecessary meetings.

We have finally finished days of meeting and professional development. The students have finally arrived. We did not get a single, dedicated hour for classroom preparation. This is more of a problem than it seems. Computers are not connected and cords cannot be found. People are wandering around in search of hardware, scavenging if they can. In particular, the disappearance of smart board cords is a conundrum that has some teachers frustrated. They may or may not have been stolen over the summer.

I have no computer. I have an online attendance and grading program that I can use — once I scrounge a computer. In the meantime, I’ll copy onto paper and do this work at home. I have no desks. I have no BOOKS except a single copy to take home, provided by the woman in charge of supplies, who reassured me that the other teachers did not have books either.

Rather than trying to motivate me with cheery speeches in endless meetings, I would have liked to solve my supply problems. But whenever I had time — lunch, that is — no one was around to help, so I went to lunch too.

Why did this happen? I suspect the endless attempt to improve me simply got out of hand.

Eduhonesty: Far too often, we waste a lot of time fixing teachers who are not broken. We should try getting them books instead.