I came home and plunged into work. I’ve spent hours completing my lesson plans for my four different classes, due tomorrow, and completing a questionnaire related to an assessment I am going to be obliged to give next week, and then again at the end of the grading period. The questionnaire also comes due tomorrow. I’m about to retire for the night so I can stumble out of bed tomorrow as early as possible to drive to school to finish these tasks.

What I did not do was any preparation for actual instruction. I had no time.

Eduhonesty: Of course I need a lesson plan. But the part where I find the college readiness standards, the Illinois standards and the Common Core standards and then record those standards in order to document that I am meeting standards sucks time away from my students. To meet all administrative requirements, I am required to produce a five-page document where a one- to two-page document would do. The questionnaire was related to the need to demonstrate scoring improvement by students over the year. If this night of writing had been an extremely rare occurrence, I’d have let it go, but such evenings are becoming standard for many teachers.

When I have to produce these papers, I can’t be writing a PowerPoint or cutting out shapes for a new activity. I can’t be looking online for  a great lesson idea. I can’t be grading student papers. School has barely started, I have been running full-tilt, almost nonstop, and I am already behind on my grading.

I’m sure I have many counterparts in other schools, too.

Testing gurus and educational administrators are trying to teach America’s children to think. I’m not against thinking. But I will observe that thinking comes somewhat naturally to this species.

If we fill our students’ heads with facts, they will think. But you can’t think (clearly) until you actually know something and know it reasonably well. Too many students have learned too little to effectively think about the topics they are given.

Eduhonesty: Recent generations are ripe for deception. They don’t have the knowledge base to recognize propaganda and they don’t understand the need to acquire that knowledge base. We have let them retrieve too often and we have forced them to memorize too little.

Nobody should harass nobody. No how. No way. Especially sexually.

I just summed up a segment of a district-wide meeting that took the speaker around 1/2 hour to get through. Oh, the speaker added a few more details. I should add the part about calling human resources if asking the perpetrator to stop does not work.

Eduhonesty: If you are smart enough to teach, you should recognize harassment. For that matter, if you can teach in a poor or urban school district, you can probably hand that harasser his or her dismembered head on the proverbial platter after feeding any loose brains to your pet zombie.

Every year some nurse from the school district lectures me, telling me and a few hundred colleagues to avoid our student’s bodily fluids. Frankly, we don’t need to be told not to touch the blood and vomit. Does the whole school district have to hear this talk every year? How about photocopying a page with the highlights, and then attaching that summary to bags of rubber gloves and band-aids? The bags could be placed in mailboxes, the whole matter handled by trusty mailboxes.

Eduhonesty: We waste too much time in unnecessary meetings.

We have finally finished days of meeting and professional development. The students have finally arrived. We did not get a single, dedicated hour for classroom preparation. This is more of a problem than it seems. Computers are not connected and cords cannot be found. People are wandering around in search of hardware, scavenging if they can. In particular, the disappearance of smart board cords is a conundrum that has some teachers frustrated. They may or may not have been stolen over the summer.

I have no computer. I have an online attendance and grading program that I can use — once I scrounge a computer. In the meantime, I’ll copy onto paper and do this work at home. I have no desks. I have no BOOKS except a single copy to take home, provided by the woman in charge of supplies, who reassured me that the other teachers did not have books either.

Rather than trying to motivate me with cheery speeches in endless meetings, I would have liked to solve my supply problems. But whenever I had time — lunch, that is — no one was around to help, so I went to lunch too.

Why did this happen? I suspect the endless attempt to improve me simply got out of hand.

Eduhonesty: Far too often, we waste a lot of time fixing teachers who are not broken. We should try getting them books instead.

A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kickboxing.
~ Emo Philips.

We work relentlessly to get our bullies into line. We don’t always succeed.

Eduhonesty: Kids are like plants. Plants grow toward the light. Kids grow in the direction of their most likely successes. Unfortunately, for some kids, their best chance of success is in a fight on the bus.

Or at least, that’s how they see it.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
~ Albert Einstein

Eduhonesty: True, but imagination works better when there’s knowledge to back it up. You can visualize a car without understanding a car, but you can’t build a car until you understand a fair amount of physics, materials science, metallurgy and chemistry.