Since I described the computer lab situation last year, perhaps I should throw in an update on the Computer Lab in 2012:

We now have spiffy laptops although no printer that works as yet. The computer lab has never been officially opened but I am going there anyway. So let’s say the lab opened in mid-March. People find me there and say, “Oh, is the computer lab open?”

I’m kind of amused to discover I don’t want to tell anyone that it’s open. Right now, the only people who are competing with me for the lab are the special education teachers who have their IEP (Individual Education Plan — the special program for students who need extra help) meetings there. I told one colleague who works near me. I can share the lab with him. I told a special education teacher. But mostly I’m keeping quiet.

For one thing, it’s cool in the lab. When the class goes above 85 degrees, that lab is a welcome refuge. As of this date in mid-March, the only student work saved on the disks in the downstairs lab comes from my classes. I don’t know what if anything is saved on the upstairs computers. We’re working downstairs because that was the only working lab on the day I started our PowerPoint projects. Since we are saving to specific machines, we’ll stay downstairs for now. I need to buy a flash drive so I can back-up student work.

The problem with this blog is that I approach it like I approach Facebook. I don’t want to put in personal truths because I wish to keep a light cyber-footprint. So I remain cloaked for the most part.

I have a lot of truths to tell and a lot of issues to get on the table. But I don’t want to lose my job. Contrary to what is often presented in the public, it’s absolutely possible to fire a teacher. It’s not as easy as it is in the private sector, but I have seen teachers fired.

It’s also possible to drive a teacher to quit. I watched as one long-time high school employee was moved to the middle school to teach material she hardly knew, then moved again into another subject in another room, isolated from the rest of the staff. She lasted out that year, but I never saw her again after that.

Eduhonesty: It’s difficult to fire a tenured teacher. Unions often can and do take care of their members.

Districts are more likely to drive unwanted teachers to quit and they have formidable powers at their disposal. That 3rd grade teacher who angered her Principal may suddenly find herself teaching 7th grade science in another building, if she has the endorsement, with a planning period at the tail end of the day and a sweltering room over the kitchen.

You can’t send 10 – 14 million illegal immigrants home. Even if you could locate them, even if you had enough manpower to detain and deport them, I doubt our economy could take the blow. They are holding up the lowest rungs of the service sector in many parts of the country.

So we are going to educate their children. Those kids won’t just hide in the basement or attic. I have no clue how many of my students came here through the back door. (I actually could make a reasonably good guess, but I’m not asking and I’m not supposed to ask.) I expect a fair number will never return to their home country in any case.

What does this mean for education? It means we need effective bilingual programs that prepare these students to enter American society. Right now, programs are a hodgepodge of philosophies and agendas. California and Arizona dictate one year of bilingual education while Illinois will allow a student to go from kindergarten through high school in bilingual classes. What’s best? We need to figure that out.

College libraries are loaded with academic research. Doctoral candidates fill libraries as they attempt to describe the many different states of American education, spewing out reports of varying validity and reliability.

It occurs to me that much of our older research may be pretty useless, though. The world has undergone a paradigm shift. America’s students are becoming steadily more linked into the world wide web and steadily less separable from each other, their electronics providing them with a constant barrage of communication. In the meantime, America has many more young, single parents, resulting in many minimally supervised children. Gangs control some neighborhoods. Demographics are changing all over the place.

From http://www.newgeography.com/content/003834-detroit-why-hast-thou-forsaken-me:

The children of today are not the same children who participated in the studies of the sixties. Their lives are too different. Their educational experience is necessarily different from those children who were young in the mid-1900s.

For example, homework studies of the past may genuinely no longer apply to today’s school population. The conditions of homework have changed too greatly. My students can go home and look up an essay, and then copy and paste that essay into a word document, or simply buy the essay outright. Even if they only copy and paste bits, the effect on learning is profound. The effect on integrity is equally profound.

Some weeks are so hard that it’s just impossible to blog them. Many people like to read accounts of brave, plucky people fighting against the invading aliens at all costs. Apocalyptic fiction has a real audience. But I believe almost no one would like to read a real-life, blow-by-blow, genuine account of that apocalypse. (Then again, “The Road” did pretty well.)

I don’t mind paperwork. I do mind nonsense paperwork, especially when I see that this work is creating extra confusion and trouble.

They have moved everybody’s rooms. I am to be on the second floor, sunside in a decrepit, older building without air-conditioning. The Principal promised he’d help, and I absolutely believe in his good intentions, but I also believe that I am screwed. I nonetheless had the kids move anyway. Maybe the invading alien hordes will put me out of my misery before I am actually forced to occupy that physical space.

If not, the 85 degree rule will go back into place. Above 85 degrees, we go outside if at all possible. Above 90 degrees, we go outside regardless. The test will be canceled at those temperatures for sure. Sigh.

Middle-school girls are so hard on themselves.

“I’m too fat,” they tell me. “My nose is too short. My nose is too big. I’m too short. I’m too tall. My hair’s too curly. My hair’s too straight.” They mostly agree that thin and light-complected is a win, despite the fact that complexions run darker in this school.

I had one girl run out of the class in tears when someone told her she was “flat.” They don’t necessarily want big breasts, but they sure don’t want to lose the breast-development competition.

Classroom instruction ground to a halt while I stood near the doorway, trying to simultaneously watch a class and discreetly convince the girl in the hallway that her breasts were just fine, exactly right for her age.

I changed the name above as I move into the borders of confidentiality.

For months, we have prepared for one girl’s move to another school district. Her dad came to tell me she was leaving. He wanted to make sure she did not fail 7th grade since she will be leaving school early to go to Mexico and the family plan was to move to Naperville when she returned.

Dad wanted to be closer to work (his commute’s over an hour) and he wanted better schools and a better neighborhood for his kids. The house next door got shot up in some gang-related drive-by shooting. I wished him well and we planned a pizza party to coincide with her departure, the end of the Constitution test and the near graduation of the 8th graders.

But Marni’s not moving, although she will go to Mexico and this somewhat sickly girl will miss yet more school. I know what happened. Dad discussed the problem with me. He liked Naperville, but he was stunned  by the housing prices there. He’s been searching for a house for months. He can’t find a place for his family in his price range.

This week mom had Marni pick up the registration form for next year. She’ll be back. Dad will be spending somewhere around three hours in his daily commute. I’ll likely have this girl in my 8th grade classes next year.

The educational problem attached to this post: Our poorest neighborhoods have our poorest schools, for the most part, and we offer these families no alternatives. Even those families who are able to move often can’t find housing in a good school district that they can afford. When everyone was working on blackboards and writing in notebooks, this difference mattered less, especially since school discipline worked much better in our past. In this technological age, though, Marni just suffered a real loss.

Our computer lab was not even working until mid-winter this year. There are no student computers in the rooms. My class has one day a week in the lab when it is working and available — a time better measured in weeks this year since I’m not sure that lab was accessible for even two months — and even when the lab is working, we’re often frantically using those ancient computers to do school testing before the system crashes again. (I keep intending to take my old floppy disks into the lab to see if I can get some useful old stuff off them, although the fact that the lab printers hardly ever work makes that more complicated. I may be able to move some stuff to a flash drive if the software meshes.)

I spent much of April and May without internet in my classroom. I could not even get my district mail. My students asked repeatedly if we could do the social studies constitution tests available online. The answer was no, of course. I didn’t even have the internet in the classroom and when they got the computer lab up, they tried to use it for MAP testing of the student body. The lab has continued to crash. It’s almost June. We’ll see if the student body manages to finish the MAP test. I wouldn’t put money on it.

The technology gap is only one problem that Marni faces by being unable to move.

Where am I going with this? I’d like to point out that these situations occur all over America and form a fiercely strong argument for a voucher system. We can’t solve the affordable housing issue. Market forces will always make some areas unaffordable to lower-wage workers. But we could begin to address the issue of those children who are forced to live in an area with poor schools. If Marni’s dad received vouchers to pay for an education, he might be able to find a school near his job that would better help to prepare his kids for the future.

My district has many excellent educators and motivated administrators. But that does not change the fact that our test scores are hugging the bottom in the educationally-illustrious state of Illinois and nothing that requires real money or infrastructure works very well here.  In another district, Marni’s dad could go online to look at his daughter’s academic progress. In the land of no email and no internet, however, we don’t even have a standardized grade program, much less one that a parent could access from outside the school. Hell, for some weeks this year, even our district website didn’t work.

P.S. The situation improved somewhat the next year and then improved dramatically the year after that when the state effectively took control of the district.

Quote from one of my seventh grade students:

“My little brother’s gonna go to summer school cause he’s flunking all his classes. He doesn’t even know how to read.”

Her little brother is in kindergarten.

To get to the same side of course!

Excuse the math joke. The following is no joke.

My previous post quoted Yalda T. Uhls in her blog “In the Digital Age” at (http://www.parentinginthedigitalage.com/2011/03/china-education-and-parenting-how-does-it-differ-from-us). That post was about time spent on academics. Ms. Uhls also mentions a separate issue that I want to throw out on the table:

Another important difference is the competence of teachers in elementary school.  In China, teachers learn a major subject that they will then teach in the classroom, such as Math or Science.  The result is the teacher is usually both more prepared and interested in the coursework.  By contrast, 90% of US elementary school classrooms have one teacher who teaches all subjects.  Thus, many American teachers have a subpar understanding of subjects such as Math, even though they are student’s primary source of knowledge for these subjects (Tsui, 2005).  This fact alone may explain why US 5^th graders rank so far behind Chinese students in Math.

I received my original certification in high school mathematics and a truly disturbing number of elementary teachers have told me, “oh, I was never any good at math.” By 5th and 6th grade, this matters. Teachers cannot teach what they don’t know.