No referral to the Dean was written. I just watched as a student came up to copy down the material on the smartboard (good), decided to use my stool as a bongo drum (not so good) and then started singing Ave Maria in a painfully beautiful mezzo-soprano voice. He won’t have that voice much longer, but for the moment, he is amazing. I just let it go and listened.

Eduhonesty: This attitude undoubtedly causes me some moments of difficulties as a teacher. Disruptions should not be tolerated. Exceptions to the rules create trouble. Drumming would have resulted in mild repercussions. Once he started singing, though, he was home free. I just wish the periodic table made more students sing like that.

Apparently, an SUV full of teenagers crashed in Idaho after a 16-year-old passenger used a lighter to set the driver’s armpit hair on fire, according to the Ada County Sheriff’s Office. Fortunately, while all five kids in the Ford Bronco were hurt in the crash and required medical treatment, all are expected to survive the 5:30 AM crash.

That boy with the lighter? He’s probably a student in somebody’s classroom. Most likely, he has five or six teachers who see him daily. Let’s hope he doesn’t light firecrackers in bottles too often while he sits in school. I recall a student from my first year teaching who tried that twice. I’ll observe that Idaho boy was probably drunk and/or high when he had his brilliant armpit hair inspiration, but I’ll also observe that this young man may hit school with bloodshot eyes and a blank demeanor on a regular basis.

Eduhonesty: The problem with boys like armpit-guy is that too often nowadays we send them to the Dean for their various creative infractions, and the Dean then talks to them, listening as they explain how their sad home situation led to their latest unfortunate lack of control. They are returned to the classroom after they promise to never light a firecracker again. The promise and they promise. They make an art of sincere-sounding promises.

Skipping my rant, I’ll go straight to the point: We need more alternative schools. We need more alternative in-school suspension options. These boys mostly don’t belong in a classroom, despite our noble desire to save them from themselves. Rather than saving armpit-guy from himself, we ought to save his fellow students from his off-the-chain behavior.

I admit I am basing this post on precious little real data, but I reserve the right to be gravely suspicious of a front seat passenger capable of doing anything that damn dumb.

I am not writing any tests. I am supposed to teach what other people decide should be taught and then give the tests other people write. If not for data requirements and the many, many meetings, I might even have some free time. So I won’t take the blame for the problem that asked if the particles in a liquid are close together or far apart.

Student answer: Far apart/close together. I am giving credit, too. Look at the ocean. Some of the particles in that liquid are very far apart. Others are right on top of each other. Kudos to my student, although I had some doubts about the part where he described one physical property of a pop can as “the top is open, inside bugs.”

Eduhonesty: Maybe he needs to cover his cans.

A couple of posts back I talked about Googledocs and the annoyances they create for me as everyone shares, shares, shares.

This morning I had a realization: The Googledocs are exactly like the staff lounge refrigerator. One of my colleagues last week explained that she never uses the fridge. “It’s filthy,” she succinctly explained. She brings her own mini-cooler with her lunch inside so she never has to open the refrigerator door.

I am less fastidious. I wrinkle my nose a little at the smell and look for a clean spot to place my food, trusting my plastic, grocery-store bag to keep any lunch and snack items safe. Someday someone, maybe even me, will nobly clean the fridge. I finally brought wipes down to the lounge last year, only to find out that one of the parapros had cleaned the monster the day before. Sometimes I take it upon myself to throw out McDonald’s sacks that have sat in the same spot for weeks. The problem’s simple: Everyone uses the fridge, but no one has responsibility for the fridge.

My Google drive is loaded with the damndest Googledocs. I know the lessons that high school social studies will give next week. I’m not at the high school and I don’t teach social studies. I have all the language arts lesson plans. I don’t teach that either. The crowd of documents obscures the documents I do need, many of them in wrong or dubious folders since we were all required to enter the world of Googledocs, but we were not trained. If there was a training, I missed it anyway. Maybe it was on a Googledoc I never saw.

Last night I tried to arrange documents until I gave up. I could easily spend a whole day cleaning up the mess that has been shared with me, but I don’t have a day. Today, I am creating a cheat sheet to tell me how to find documents that matter. Information management in my life has turned into a game of “Where’s Waldo?” and I don’t see an end in sight. Many, many people are tasked with putting documents onto the drive to prove they have met district requirements. No one is tasked with taking the old stuff off. So I dodge around the language arts lesson plans from August and move on, looking for the professional development PowerPoint I actually want to read.

Student’s description of the particles in a solid:

“The particles are far apart and connected.”

Student’s answer to the math problem 8X = 24:
8X = 24 = 24 = 8X.

There’s no way to disagree with the last answer. I’m not sure the problem asked the student to solve for “X” either. Whoever wrote that particular standardized test probably assumed she’d know she should solve for “X”. Sometimes my students can really think outside the box, though.

“There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology – the tendency to do what
is reasonable even when it isn’t any good.”

~ Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (credit to Bob at bob@lakesideadvisors.com for unearthing this bit)

We hauled out the laptops today. We did our latest standardized test. It’s easy to do all this testing nowadays thanks to all the computers sitting around. We can measure. So we measure. Afterwards, we measure, and measure again for good measure. The ease of data collection creates an atmosphere conducive to data collection.

Eduhonesty: Inundated with data, I am blogging away here, in part to avoid trying to begin to figure out all the data that has flooded into my various inboxes and googledoc folders this month. I am pretty much drowning in data. The tentacles of my googledocs keep wrapping themselves around what little organization I manage to create, snuffing out my hopes of figuring out exactly what may be lurking within my many inboxes.

Googledocs can easily be shared with many people at once. And, oh, do we share. Sometimes we are required to share. Minutes for meetings have to go to all participants, would-be participants and administrators who prefer not to participate but need to confirm the existence of the meetings they miss. Great lesson materials get shared, enthusiastically passed on to colleagues. I regularly share my ideas. Click, click.

All of this is reasonable. However, as we struggle to find time to actually do our job — to teach — I wonder if it’s any good.

Let’s see. Who’s left? Who’s left who started with me? I was one of twelve or thirteen new teachers then. None of them are left. That colleague who needed reassurance today? She pointed out that I was one of the few remaining teachers she knew. “All these new faces,” she said.

Eduhonesty: In the next few years, other faces will vanish, including my own. It’s not that I am working too hard, although I have worked virtually nonstop for every minute of the last week since Saturday night. It’s that I am working stupid. We are gathering far too much data and some of it is manifestly impractical. Giving a test in English to a new arrival to the country who does not speak English wastes time. Giving multiple tests to find out students’ academic readiness levels also wastes time. It does not require weeks of testing to assess students’ academic levels — or it shouldn’t. A lot of that data should already be stored in student files. Updates to that data ought to be accomplished within a day or two.

If we want student test scores to improve, I have a strategy to suggest: Why don’t we try teaching students instead of measuring them? Why don’t we restore planning time, so that instead of hastily prepared PowerPoints we can set up interesting experiments instead? Why don’t we stop measuring the threat and attack it instead? We are a full month into school and my district is still measuring furiously. This is ridiculous.

Having lost much of the last week to one standardized test, I lost this afternoon to another standardized test. A few students will lose a portion of Monday. Absences will not save them.

My colleague from yesterday seemed much more cheerful. On the other hand, I found another member of another of my teams to hug this morning. I spent my extremely precious “planning” time minutes (possible total of maybe 25 today if I had not decided to help yet another colleague) reassuring this experienced and very capable teacher that everything was going to be OK. We went over strategies that might get my colleague one more year in the system before “retiring” early since that extra year will be financially advantageous — one more early retirement if retirement is the right word. I’m not sure it is. In another less crazy time, this woman might easily have put in another decade in the classroom. She’s very knowledgeable and she loves teaching and her students.

She’s not even sure about next year. The stress is making her cry. She’s beginning to fear for her health. I suggested some strategies, but also said that health comes first. Quit if you need to quit, I said, pointing out she could probably sell textbooks.

Eduhonesty: Today’s colleague crisis has nothing to do with teaching. As I noted, this teacher loves teaching. The crisis is all about demands for data, requiring full evenings to be devoted to spreadsheet creation rather than lesson preparation, endless testing that interrupts and compromises teaching, evaluations that are based on student enthusiasm in a district of poor and broken families where student enthusiasm may be diminished by lack of food, housing and hope. If an exhausted student puts his head down to sleep during class, a critical evaluation may be lowered unless the teacher can promptly wake him up in a cheery and academically receptive mood. But if that student got no sleep the night before, as can happen when 10 family members are stuffed into a two-bedroom apartment, sometimes that cheery awakening simply may not be in the cards.