Standards-based grading has become the latest hot fashion in education, especially in lower-scoring, urban areas. The plan is to give credit based on how well students have mastered state and national standards. Students are not graded on homework. They are expected to do the homework without receiving technical credit for their efforts. In theory, they will do this homework so they can do well on the standards-based tests that determine their grade.

Uhhh… I want the guys who came up with this latest bright idea to come to my classroom. Today I asked a class to brainstorm ideas on how they would improve the school if they were school administrators. A boy chipped in immediately to say that the girls should be allowed to wear short skirts. Before I could remonstrate with him over this sexism, the girls chimed in to support him. Students improved the school lunch, extended their lunch period and eliminated a number of reforms intended to improve academic achievement.

The idea that these kids are going to do homework solely to do well on a test smacks of an adult maturity that my students lack. A number of these kids will do no homework if they can pass by passing the test. Since the administration will never let a large number of them fail, that means many students will stop bothering with homework.

This system could work if we actually failed students who did not master the standards. I doubt we will. We will simply blame the teachers, instead, for not having taught those standards, after having eliminated the best incentive to do homework — grades for homework — that we possess.

Eduhonesty: Plans to improve education that rely on the maturity and self-interest of our students are problematic at best. We have used regular grades for years. Grades are not responsible for lack of academic excellence in some school populations.

I’ll lay it on the line: In many cases, students are responsible for their own lack of academic excellence. They are trying to figure out how to sneak short skirts into school when they should be doing homework. Told to read a chapter in the evening, they play video games instead. By high school, it’s time to stop blaming everyone EXCEPT that kid playing video games who left his book in his locker.

It’s also time to stop trying to reinvent the wheel. We don’t need a new grading system. We need to honestly enforce the system we have. The problem is not the grading system. The problem is passing almost everyone regardless of what they know.

Sweltering classrooms as the outside temperature spikes into the mid-eighties, babies with fevers getting IVs in hospitals, texting or gaming through the night — the causes for my drooping students are many. Tell-tale red eyes look up at me, lids at half-mast. Seating charts can be used to keep behaviorally-challenged students on task. I find I am also using them to keep certain students awake. While we can’t control all the controlled (or uncontrolled) substances, the heat, or sick kids, I wonder if we could seize a few electronics before bed.

The copy machine has had no staples for days, maybe since the start of the year for all I know. The secretary just tells people there are no staples, seemingly astonished that anyone does not know that by now. She clearly does not care. There seems to be no one else to care. We staple, staple, staple. How many minutes are lost? Who is in charge of staples? But I am not going to raise a fuss. I’m new here. No one else seems inclined to fuss. Maybe they sense the futility of complaining.

Eduhonesty: Capable secretaries are essential to a well-run school. Richer districts can pay more and provide more help for the support staff. Secretaries often stay for decades in our more affluent school districts while they turn over frequently in other, less fortunate districts. In five years in this district, I’ve seen many secretaries come and go, some good, some scary. At times it’s funny, like when we discover there’s no phone tree for a snow day because the secretary in charge of that task left for a better job. Other times its annoying. I stapled maybe 100 tests today.

In the recent past, schools have emphasized retrieval over memorizing facts. But I am listening as the pendulum begins to swing back. Administrators cautiously talk about the need to memorize facts that are on the standardized tests.

The conflict is amusing except for those moments where teachers get trapped in the middle. Administrators want memorization but they don’t want to linger over portions of the curriculum. The curriculum map has too many standards to cover. They also want to see fun, enriching lessons filled with critical thinking questions and enthusiastic student responses.

I have to put college readiness standards and common core standards in my lesson plans, along with Illinois standards at times, and I am supposed to match my lessons and supportive materials to those standards. The effort takes hours, especially since we keep adding new standards and I keep teaching different classes. I am holding my own on creativity requirements, but I am not getting a lot of effort at memorization. Many of my high school math students don’t know their multiplication tables (often called math facts today).

Eduhonesty: The truth is that memorization is not fun. It may provide foundations for critical thinking, but it’s not a critical thinking exercise either. Memorization has been neglected in recent years, replaced by calculators, internet searches and those enriching lessons where students answer hypothetical questions, often very badly since they have so few actual facts to bring to the table.

Will the pendulum swing back toward more learning of facts? I hope so, but our students are no longer accustomed to mental labor of this nature. Resistance on their part can be expected — and it may not be futile. A remarkable number of students don’t know the answer to “What is eight times four?”

It’s hot. The seating chart’s a mess, filled with swaps, arrows, moves and marker. One of my students offers to rewrite it for me. She always offers to help. Will she make it to the end of this year? She’s already showing so I don’t think so. I hope she’ll return. She’s diligent, helpful and hard-working, traits that can lead to academic success even in a single-parent household where English is a second language. Soon she’ll be a single parent of two, though. Education doesn’t usually survive that burden.

I don’t have any answers here.

I took them to every air-conditioned space I could find. Parents kept calling them out. The two obviously pregnant girls were gone by my last class. They should never have come in the first place. This was a crazy day to hold school. It’s nearly 8:00 at night now and it’s 89 degrees, still too hot to walk the dog. My classroom was in the nineties and muggy to boot. I was honestly unsteady on my feet by the end of the day and my judgement was clouded. In retrospect, I doubt I was in condition to drive home.

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.