She made all her middle-school students read World War Z. She was lucky. Her school allowed her to pick the materials she used that year. She hit up family, the internet and any other sources she could find to get the books.

She was also smart. Even if the book was technically too tough for most of her students, she understood the fascination of zombies. Her class had fun. Their reading scores soared. I particularly liked her video project: Student groups wrote and produced videos designed to find homes for the orphans of the zombie apocalypse. Many students obviously used models taken from ads for abandoned dogs and horses on TV. The ads were often funny. They also showed hard-work, thought and media awareness.

Eduhonesty: I suspect many or all of these students will remember the year of the zombie, the year when they learned a great deal of vocabulary while doing group work that possessed genuine challenge and appeal. They climbed a literary mountain, given their reading levels when that year began. Classes that followed will remember the Hunger Games and Divergent, other young adult series that my colleague tackled.

I would have loved to try that zombie unit, but I don’t have a say in what I teach now. All the language arts teachers in the grade are reading the same stories at the same time. Much of the material is selected by outsiders from the East Coast or the Administration Office. I moved away from language arts anyway, bored with many of the short stories on my required roster, so I would have to coteach zombies with the guy across the hall — except he can’t pick any of his stories, so the idea’s sadly moot. I would have been happy to put in the extra time.

Here’s what I know that many administrators seem to miss: You have to pick the best books for your class and these are not necessarily politically correct short stories written by young writers with agendas. The best books and stories are those that students actually want to read. I remember watching a middle-school girl at a first grade reading level hacking her way through Twilight. Nothing I planned all year probably helped that girl as much as her fierce desire to read every detail of Edward and Bella’s romance.

(I started but did not finish this post in October. I decided to finish it tonight. It fits well enough tonight and on many other days.)

It’s the end of Indigenous People’s Day, Columbus Day, or whatever you want to call it. I need to get ready for tomorrow. I can’t do it. I spent the week-end dealing with a sick elderly cat and grading numerous papers. I should do all sorts of practical things with my data. But I’ve burnt out.

I will have to go to bed and get up early, preparing for battle before at the break of day. Teachers can’t go in cold. Some do, I guess, but the results of that performance often look ugly. Kids know when you are trying. Kids know when you care. I need a plan for tomorrow.

I hope sleep will help. This level of burn-out belongs in February, not October. Part of the problem is that I know I have to grind through all sorts of numbers to produce new data for the administration. I expect this to suck up my evenings for all of the rest of the week and who knows how far beyond that time. I don’t expect to have lesson preparation time, only data-crunching time.

Eduhonesty: All this data makes me want to bundle up, turn on Dr. Who and call in crazy. I don’t call in sick and I’m not going to start now. At this rate, I may eventually be able to call in crazy, though. Forget illness, bereavement, jury duty, personal time, or professional development. What I need is crazy time. I need time to make props for my lessons, to cut out tiny pieces of pizza, to dye marshmallows and to put together a model of an atom, but I’ll take time to go hide under the covers and sleep.

By Rhett Morgan, from http://www.tulsaworld.com/communities/catoosa/schools/catoosa-teacher-fired-after-driving-students-on-snack-trip-with/article_ce620bfe-2e9f-5ecc-ada5-31aeb076c871.html: The article is titled “Catoosa teacher fired after driving 11 students on snack trip, with two in trunk,” and includes the unfortunate details of how a 10-year teacher named Cagle got fired.

“She piled 11 students ranging in age from 12 to 15 into a Honda Accord, placing two in the front seat, seven in the back seat and two 12-year-old girls in the trunk, Long (the attorney for the school district) said. The group traveled about one mile to a Wal-Mart, bought food items and returned to school, the attorney said.

Two students who were out of the classroom when the group left were left behind at the school, Long said.

Teachers are required to obtain signed parental-guardian permission before transporting children off campus, and “she acknowledged that she didn’t do so,” Long said of Cagle.

My favorite part of the article reads as follows:

“In the end, the board was concerned that parents, grandparents, guardians send their kids to school every day with an expectation that they will receive education benefit during every course that they attend and that … rules regarding get-permission-first will be honored,” Long said. “Also, no parent or grandparent or guardian should ever expect that any teacher, particularly not an experienced teacher, will take their children off campus in the trunk of a personal vehicle.”

Eduhonesty: I’d say that ten years qualifies as experienced. What if she had been teaching for only two years, though? At that point, could she put students in her trunk? What’s the cut-off here?

I have to admit this article left me feeling ambivalent. We all have a few stupid moments in our lives. I’ve had more than a few. Ten years of teaching should not be wiped out by one wacky morning. Still, the students-in-the-trunk move qualifies as a real contender for Stupid Moment of the Year. But maybe they do that kind of thing in small towns in Oklahoma. Many parents came forward to support this instructor. I don’t think I’d fire this woman if she’d been doing a good job teaching, as parents contend. I suspect a “No driving students anywhere ever” would work just fine.

P.S. I’d suggest a google search on “how much do school districts pay annually in attorney fees on average.” Many Americans might be astounded by the results. San Bernardino City Unified spent more than $1 million on outside legal counsel during the 2012-2013 fiscal year, and more than $4 million over three years, according to one report.

I have an entire classroom of students who are four years behind mathematically according to benchmark tests. Only one student is testing above that four-year deficit. In many cases, those dismal test results seem explicable. When I work with most students in this class, it’s clear that many struggle with math. New concepts don’t come easily to them and the those concepts don’t stick without a great deal of repetition. In this time of rapidly moving, scripted curricula, that repetition can be extremely difficult or even impossible to manage.

That said, the real mystery has to be that small subset of students who catch on relatively quickly, those students who don’t need a great deal of instruction and repetition to take off running with the new material. What happened to these students? How did they get so far behind?

Eduhonesty: I am honestly mystified.

We were expected to avoid parties and celebrations, providing full instruction until late in the day on the Friday before break. I don’t support that approach. In fact, I think it’s a perfect example of theory trumping common sense.

One of the best reasons not to attempt rigorous instruction on the day before break has to be the number of students who take that day off. In my school, most students with disciplinary infractions took the day off since they were supposed to do academic work with the Dean while their peers had fun. This absentee tally does not include the number of kids who told their parents or guardians that they didn’t feel well and therefore might as well stay home since, because of upcoming vacation, little work would be done at school anyway. One of my best students had travelled to Miami for a family wedding. Various students in the school recently left for Mexico. Some will miss more than a week of instruction while visiting relatives in Guanajuato, Mexico or other places where the weather’s warm and dad and mom have family. One year, I lost two boys for two months when they went to Puerto Rico for the winter. The boys never attended school there, either. They came back with excellent tans and little hope of catching up on what they had missed.

I know the counterargument would be that those students who come to school should get the full range of services we can provide. I agree with that idea. I’m just saying that it’s complicated, especially when students are all excited about vacation, promised Christmas cell phones, family gatherings, church celebrations, and all the little details of the season that eclipse day-to-day academics, at a time when up to one-third the class is absent.

Eduhonesty: The day before break is a perfect day for reinforcement activities, for fun Jeopardy math and science games. It’s a ridiculous day to introduce new material, but a few of my colleagues who had fallen behind the scripted curriculum went forward when they should have retreated, trying to catch up to the schedule. In a saner time, no one would think of introducing new material on the Friday before break, but we have a schedule to keep. That schedule sometimes leads to real wackiness.

In a time when we substitute “negative patient outcome” for dead, we can be reassured that the lowly worksheet has not bought any farms, and is not kicking buckets in its free time. No, the worksheet remains alive and well. Students are still plotting points that turn into pumpkins. But teachers are creating euphemisms for that worksheet. We provide “class work” or “activity sheets.” We supply “guided practice” or “independent practice.” If possible, we group kids so that they can work on the “reinforcement activity” together, helping to further disguise the nature of that piece of foolscap which happens to be covered with math problems or worse — perhaps even spelling or grammar exercises. It’s getting harder to defend teaching grammar and ridiculously hard to stand up in favor of spelling, unless you couch spelling in terms of providing practice with Greek and Latin affixes. It’s also getting harder to prevent cheating if you classify shared work done by groups in that category.

Eduhonesty: Worksheets are old-fashioned, we are told. Students need to be “engaged” and worksheets do not inspire them. All I can say is, when today’s students find those bosses who want to engage and inspire them, while those students decide whether or not doing actual work is worth their time, I hope they’ll Facebook me so that I can quit and join the firm.

On a regular basis, I confront the question: Where does the learning go? Academic fundamentals seem to fade away over the summer. Our elementary-school efforts become evanescent collections of fading facts and fantasies, math and English once seen and then forgotten.

Why do my students reach middle school unable to add 1/2 and 3/4? Why don’t they realize that a positive number multiplied by a negative number always yields a negative answer? Why have they forgotten to line up decimal points? Did a previous teacher really tell my students that they do not have to know how to divide? That’s less improbable than it seems: I had a district administrator tell me the same thing a few years ago, suggesting that I hand my class calculators and forget about the mechanics of division.

Other districts score much higher than my district. What do they do differently?

Eduhonesty: Part of my challenge this year (as usual) has been an egregious lack of previous learning to build upon. Teachers are supposed to start by finding out what their students know, building upon previously absorbed fundamentals. However, I have stumbled upon one, and only one, single item in my year’s curriculum that my students seemed to know. My students can plot points, even if a number needed a refresher on which direction to go and when. The mystery remains. I’m sure these kids added, subtracted, multiplied and divided fractions. Why do we seem to be starting nearly at scratch in so many places?

I have an interesting suspicion. Many quick, fun activities for math involve plotting points. We hand out points to plot that turn into pumpkins at Halloween. We hand out boats, trees and bunnies. We may even let students color and decorate the final products. These activities make good openers, five-to-ten minute activities that allow teachers to take attendance and handle administrative questions.

Perhaps the main difference between plotting points and adding fractions comes down to total amount of practice time. We practice plotting thousands of points. If I’m right, I’d say this fact argues for a great many more fraction worksheets even if worksheets are no longer in vogue. It also argues against pressing forward with the curriculum so quickly that those worksheets don’t happen. We need to stay focused on the need for repetition. All these fun activities to introduce new material provide little or no benefit when that material has become no more than a wisp of memory one year later.

I brought in banana cake to eat before school. We had revived Secret Santa although heavy absenteeism and probably previous confusion kept the number of presents down. That worked out in our favor, since the Principal arrived in my room very early in the morning. When she arrived, all students were seated and listening. Bits of suspicious banana cake and a few random presents were scattered around, but my co-teacher and I were busy discussing administrative issues with the students while the Principal watched. I’m glad it didn’t look or sound like a party. Later that day, we sacrificed tutoring time and some of our last class to incentives and rewards for better students. Students without recent disciplinary infractions got to play games, use electronics, and start movies. I guess they will have to rent those movies if they want to see the endings, but the close of the school day allowed for a treat.

Eduhonesty: I enjoyed Friday incentives for the same reason I enjoy Saturday tutoring. I had a chance to talk with small groups of students. This bell-to-bell, block-schedule instruction flies in the face of research on children’s attention spans. Generally I think America’s children need more breaks and exercise than they receive. I was glad to get a break, a chance to look at pictures and selfies on phones while finding out about older brothers and sisters I remember. We had some fun. We did some team-building. The New Year will work better because of silly selfies, I’m sure of it.

The guy across the hall is impressively bright. I love the guy across the hall. He’s intelligent and dedicated to his craft. He’s witty, the source of funny moments that balance out crazy days.

Yesterday we discussed the resiliency issue that I raised in my last post. He agrees that all these impossible-to-understand tests are hurting students’ self-esteem. He knows that the tests are poor tools to use to test understanding since they contain material the students do not yet know. He’s on my page. Just about every teacher I know has joined me on this page, to one degree or another.

Yet we all keep handing out these tests. Because we fear for our jobs, we seldom protest. Tenure no longer provides much protection to someone who appears to disagree with the administration. We look at the latest test some outsider created, the latest test we are required to administer. We shudder. Then we start handing out Number 2 pencils and bubble sheets, or stapled sets of standards-based gobbledygook. If our students don’t understand what’s on the test, that material might as well be ancient Greek or purest gobbledygook.

Why are we letting this happen on a day-by-day basis? I believe part of the reason lies in the fact that we have become lost in the forest. The tests are trees, so many trees everywhere that we lose any sense of where we are actually standing. We just slog through the underbrush, passing more trees as we go, impediments to hack through and weave around that take up all of our time. We can’t see the landscape. We are blocked in by trees.

When we glimpse the landscape, we mostly just rush off to the next professional development meeting, or the next team meeting, or the next emergency sub assignment. We hunker down with the next set of emergency documentation that needs to be prepared for the administration. Teachers are too busy to fight the pernicious effects of testing.

This forest is dangerous for our kids, filled with with creatures with sharp teeth. We are ripping away at some psyches when we hand out those bubble sheets. We know this. But the next set of papers are always due, the next set of documentation has to be prepared. We try to ameliorate the damage while providing our mixed message: Do the best you can because this test is important, and may determine your future classes, or even affect your whole life, but don’t worry if you can’t answer the test questions. We just want you to do your best.

Unfortunately, some of America’s children hear frequent utterances from their teachers that make little or no sense. “Do your best” we say. Many students just let the words wash over them, as they drift through a sea of bubbles and a forest of teeth. “Whatever,” the kids say. “Whatever” may be the best defensive strategy many kids can come up with today.

I’d like to help my students, as I watch their apathy increase in tandem with irrational testing. But I spent the whole night getting ready for the next school day. I’m sick and about to cut sleep again. I have no time. I can’t think who would listen to me either.

On the plus side, the science final went surprisingly well.