I was on my way to a meeting, having done every rational and irrational act required of me for the day. I swear, I thought the Principal glared at me. At first, I thought that I must have been mistaken. Now I am not sure.

What happened? A test happened, and not a good one. Monday’s math test went well, so well that I was a little surprised. I had predicted my higher students would benefit from the one-track-to-rule-them-all (see the November 8th post), while my lower students would not. Test scores appear to be bearing me out. Tuesday’s test was reading, however, and a number of students simply did not try to do well on that latest set of adaptive, computer-generated questions. Some obviously did not try at all. One student managed to fall three grades.

The language arts teacher observed that results reflected more on him, but I don’t think that’s true. A three-grade drop has little to do with instruction. The fact that this class, the same class that gave me a boost yesterday in math, did so poorly on reading reflects on both of us, the teacher who taught the material and the teacher who proctored the test. Administrators would say I should have persuaded my class to make better efforts. But I did my damnedest. I encouraged and I cajoled. In carrot and stick fashion, I also pointed out that lack of progress might lead to mandatory tutoring (which it may) and other interventions.

What happened? I don’t know. These bilingual students don’t like to read. That’s why many of them have not managed to exit into regular classes despite entering bilingual programs in early elementary school. More importantly, I suspect test-burnout has begun kicking in.

Eduhonesty: I do think I made a mistake. I assumed that the desire to avoid mandatory tutoring and to show progress would be motivation enough to get a solid effort. I should have offered large quantities of candy coupons instead. It’s scary to think that careers and student placements might end up being based on candy coupons, but I think candy coupons would genuinely have helped and, in a few cases, might have helped a lot.

My students were well-behaved, helpful and hard-working yesterday after the test. They appeared to want to make up for their lack of effort. Part of that good behavior came as a result of my reading the group the proverbial riot act, but some of it was the desire on the part of fundamentally good kids to cheer up their teacher. All I can do is sigh.

Total time preparing to give standardized tests, giving standardized tests or preparing students for standardized tests for Monday and Tuesday adds up to 6.17 hours. That’s probably all anyone needs to know to realize that my last two teaching days took a nearly mortal blow, but the devil is in the details. For those readers who are interested, details follow.

Yesterday: Time spent directly on MAP testing totaled 75 minutes. Time taken from my prep period to help another teacher with MAP testing totaled 35 minutes. (I was lucky enough to miss the whole meeting!) I gave 45 minutes to preparing students for the ACCESS test. I discussed MAP and ACCESS with colleagues for maybe 10 minutes.

Total time on standardized testing yesterday ran 165 minutes or merely 2.75 hours.

Today was heavier. Directly doing whole group, standardized testing today (MAP) took 75 minutes. I then helped another teacher with MAP testing, using 10 minutes of my prep, stolen from a meeting I did not mind missing. Preparing to give another standardized test (ACCESS) required 70 minutes after school. On the plus side, my group decided to call those 70 minutes a meeting to get “meeting credit,” covering ourselves for required meeting time since we will not have time for our usual, unpaid afterschool meeting tomorrow because of yet another meeting that is expected to run long. Adding to this, we gave 10 minutes discussion to testing at the morning meeting to which I was late. Later, I spent 40 minutes going over material expected to be on the ACCESS test with my tutoring students.

I will not bother to record the minutes I spent in other classes getting ready for other regular class tests. Math classes obviously ought to have regular tests and I ought to be getting my students ready for those tests. In a real sense, if I started throwing those tests into my test minutes bucket, we’d fill the bucket. Those minutes would amount to almost every minute of every day — except for the standardized-test minutes which are cannibalizing growing amounts of instructional time.

Eduhonesty: So, using only the standardized tests that are not directly related to instruction, time spent today on testing and/or test prep amounts to 205 minutes — or 3.42 hours, for a two day total of 6.17 hours.

This time is often directly taken away from instruction. When I’m lucky, it’s taken away from meetings instead.

It’s late Sunday afternoon. In the past, I’d have been working on my presentations, trying to make the week’s material informative, fun and engrossing for my students. But I’ve been told to keep the extra touches out of my PowerPoints, no pictures of my pup allowed. I’ve been told I have to be teaching exactly what everyone else in teaching when they are teaching it. I will have to give my students the same test as everyone else, despite their bilingual status. I could argue harder for adaptations, I suppose, or simply adapt and wait for the reprimand, but I don’t think much of the math is adaptable anyway. Science classes are a bit luckier. We are still making modifications for special education and bilingual in science, largely because no one has noticed and we have not yet been forbidden to do so. Still, there’s not much to be done. I have to go online and into my mail to find out what I am supposed to do. I’ll do that shortly. In the meantime, MAP testing and ACCESS testing are coming at me like a freight train and testing will be blowing up the bridges that are my classes regularly for the next two weeks. Blamm!! No science today!! I’ll need to create a calendar to plan for these frequent interruptions.

Eduhonesty: The creativity I once associated with teaching has mostly vanished. That creativity was undoubtedly my strongest point, the reason why my classes generally flowed well with minimal interruptions. I miss the old days.

I utterly lack the motivation to attack tomorrow’s material, whatever it is, but I have to check the mail and googledocs. My students need me. I haven’t left a student behind yet. I am going to do my best to give the kids what they need. That said, I hope I can be forgiven for feeling like my helicopter is spiraling down in a plume of oil smoke right into the heart of Mogadishu.

“Man is what he is, not what he used to be.”
~ Jewish saying with credit to Bob at lakesideadvisors.com

We would likely substitute “people” for “man” in this saying nowadays, but I like the sentiment regardless. Many people bemoan recent changes in education and I frequently feel ambivalent about their criticisms. Has education changed? Significantly, and for the worse, in my opinion. Have people changed? Weirdly enough, I suspect the answer to be yes, and that fact creates my ambivalence.

Eduhonesty: We don’t know what effect the many hours of gaming are having on our children. We don’t know what the effect of teaching retrieval skills rather than memorization will be. I honestly believe that all this hype about small group instruction is based in fashion and wishful thinking. Especially in economically and academically disadvantaged districts, small groups too frequently wander off task. But I’m sure traditional whole group instruction does not work as well as it used to work; attention spans appear to be declining. Kids now want information in fast, short sound bites, or quick-paced games. We are responding to that desire by creating those 10-minute-maximum lectures, as well as new software, especially scads and scads of “learning” games. Will sound bites and games work?

I have a private suspicion that we ought to work on students’ attention spans instead. I also view retrieval vs. memorization as a dangerous path to tread. In the end, you can’t think critically without a base of background knowledge, and memorization creates background knowledge in a way that retrieval never will.

I no longer tell my students the days’ lunches are healthy choices. I can’t give healthy that bad a rap. After many years of sometimes eating school lunches, I haven’t been to the cafeteria for months. I’ll give up my 1/2 hour lunch to drive to Taco Bell first — and I’ll eat better if I do. Our cafeteria’s idea of healthy often borders on inedible. In the meantime, the students all stuff bags of Flaming Hot Cheetos and other scary, red, snack foods in their lockers.

Eduhonesty: If it comes down to bags of crunchy, spicy-hot, fried bread or the new school lunches, crunchy red bread seems to be winning. The government needs to get out of the lunch business. This is silly.

America has more bad teachers than minotaurs or basilisks, but not nearly as many as media reports would suggest. The myth of the bad teacher has crept into explanations of our country’s declining educational prowess, a convenient explanation that ignores many truths. I want to state upfront that I am not saying there are no bad teachers. Every profession has its greater and lesser lights. An old joke expresses this idea perfectly:

“What do you call a man who graduates at the bottom of his medical school class?”
“Doctor.”

What do you call a person who graduates at the bottom of his or her education classes? You call that person teacher, at least for awhile. But this is a profession where half of all graduates leave within the first five years. Some teachers may have paid over $50,000 for a master’s degree in education that they quickly write off as an expensive mistake. The data suggests that 50% attrition rate may be increasing, too. If we keep sniping at our teachers, the teacher exodus may escalate — which will create a new problem. We can’t fill many open teaching positions now. America is hurting for capable STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and bilingual teachers. Districts struggle to find secondary Spanish teachers.

Eduhonesty: The idea that we can get rid of the “bad apples” and replace them with better apples requires a supply of apples that, in some cases, does not exist. We may have a pool of waiting second-grade teachers; we don’t have a pool of qualified high school Spanish teachers. Furthermore, I don’t think there are nearly as many bad apples out there as pundits have suggested. Teaching self-selects for better teachers. Students make life miserable for teachers who can’t manage a classroom or who can’t explain their material. Those teachers tend to leave, usually sooner rather than later. Administration also makes life miserable for less able teachers. (In some cases, administration makes life miserable for everybody, but less capable teachers get more than an equal share of that misery.)

Let’s be clear. Media attacks on teachers need to stop. Teachers take on a tough job that requires knowledge, resilience, and commitment. They learn on the job and the research suggests they will underperform for the first two years until they begin to master their craft. Without support and positive reinforcement, though, many potentially great teachers will leave during those critical first and second years. We need to provide reasons for talented educators to stay and continue to grow within the profession.

I am sometimes struck by this irony: Educators understand that positive reinforcement builds self-esteem and encourages effort. Yet school administrations and media writers don’t seem to understand that the same forces that create strong students also create strong teachers. Continuous criticism wears anyone and everyone down.

Uh, guys? Simply put, we desperately need more positive reinforcement out here. Are America’s test scores declining because of poor teachers? Teaching must be a factor in those scores. But we are now a country where the census indicates that one in five households speak a language other than English within the home. We are now a country where both parents often work in the evening to make ends meet. We are a country where young girls who have dropped out of school end up raising the eight children they birthed before the age of 31. (She was a hard-working, dedicated mom and she tried to help her high school boy after he was expelled.) We are a country of economically-segregated neighborhoods. I work in a school with a free and reduced lunch — read poverty — rate of over 90%. My children attended the school where I live, which has a poverty rate of 3%. The educational ramifications of economic segregation dwarf any problems with lack of teacher training, I am certain.

Attacking teachers may be easy and convenient, easier than attacking the problems posed by poverty, lack of English-language skills and the rapid unravelling of the American family. The fact that these attacks are easy does not make them right. Perhaps part of our problem — a problem I expect to worsen — is that the most qualified quant jocks, the men and women able to teach advanced math and science, are opting for professions other than teaching. Why get $35,000 to start teaching chemistry when you can get $70,000 to start as a chemical engineer? Especially when chemical engineering commands respect at a time when teachers are often treated with suspicion and contempt.

I wrote up the student for talking repeatedly while I was testing another student. (When is testing not happening in one form or another?) The student denied talking at all and then added that it was not his fault because “we have loud voices.”

Eduhonesty: Let the Dean sort it out. I’m tired of trying to keep the world silent for the ubiquitous testing. Let’s notch back the testing so I can work on critical thinking, helping students understand that you can’t deny the infraction and then offer exculpating circumstances for having committed that same infraction.

A more reflective student interrupted my mathematical spiel to ask a question:
“Ms. Q, is it true that sitting is bad for you?”

I suspected a hidden agenda, an attempt to get a water break or something like that, but then the conversation segued into complications of diabetes. The disease runs in my student’s family. A student in back made a joke and my questioner immediately snapped back that diabetes was not funny.

I’ll go off-topic for sincere, serious questions. I briefly talked about circulation, aging and the benefits of exercise. Here’s the observation I’d like to make: By the end, my audience was attentive. I had strayed into a topic that apparently interested almost all of them, even if I’m not sure why. All eyes were on me. When I went back to math, almost all eyes stayed on me.

Eduhonesty: Mental breaks can be as helpful as physical breaks in this time of less gym, fewer recesses, and bell-to-bell instruction.

“Robot Handjobs Are The Future, And The Future Is Coming” reads the Yahoo headline. I don’t bother to click on the link. I know I’m not remotely interested in this latest piece of Yahoo fluff.

But how many of America’s children are on Yahoo right now? Even during the school day, some of them are sitting in cafeterias and classrooms surfing on smart phones. As far as I am concerned, school districts might as well give up trying to block sites. Only teacher supervision can slow the technological onslaught that is attacking adolescent innocence.

Eduhonesty: We can’t stop the erosion of childhood as a separate life stage, I believe. We need to adapt to these new times with the understanding that we have lost a great deal of control as soon as we hand our kids their smart phones. We can’t control the wacky articles that Yahoo will offer. Critical thinking skills are becoming crucial to understanding the information and misinformation that proliferates across cyberspace.

Our students would benefit from coursework tailored specifically to this need.