Or Maybe, Just Maybe, It’s Time to Go.

Reader, Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski: The cure for burnout (hint: it isn’t self-care) | TED Talk

How tired is too tired? As I write this I am thinking of the many friends I know who are talking about the years remaining before they can retire. I am thinking of those sitting on that retirement fence, not sure whether to return to their districts come August.

“Just one more year?” They ask their friends and themselves.

Insights and other thoughts from the above Ted Talk, along with a few pertinent questions:

Reader, how do you feel? Does working in the classroom, parenting, fighting for social justice or just managing pandemic life leave you wanting to curl up in bed? Do you feel foggy? Detached? Can you appreciate your victories? Can you even believe in your victories?

It’s worth pausing to look at three common components of burn-out:

And understand that when we tell ourselves we have one more step…one more mile… one more year… in us, we are not always telling ourselves the truth.

Eduhonesty: I owe this blog a post, one that I am fascinated to discover I have not written. I fell over the cliff once, then got back up, left my job for a less stressful position and simply went on. But I have seen the intensive care unit. I know the relief of hospital sheets and strange machines pumping immobilized legs while finals go on… or don’t go on… without me. I honestly have no idea how grades were determined that year. I fell far enough over the cliff that no one even asked me to try to help with grades. I assume they used what I had in the system.

But, readers, I owe you that post when I can put it together. Because I learned a truth that year: Sometimes you should take the smaller pension, and walk away. Or at least change positions.

Only you can know your truth, and maybe more music and meditation will carry you past the crazy. Stress helps us achieve and motivates us to do better. Feeling stressed can be useful and even therapeutic sometimes. Many people do their best work in response to demands and deadlines.

But if you are not having fun, if you are worrying excessively, if work days seem to be nothing but ever-growing stress-stress-stress-stress-stress… If the thought of going back to work feels like navigating an asteroid field while under attack from forces you somehow never seem able to predict or control… If the thought of going back to work ties your stomach up in knots…

P.S. Well, THIS was not what I intended to write. I was going to write a cheery let-me-help-you-cope post. But I am going to publish anyway, because I think teachers (and many other workers) cope too much. Education’s demands get nuttier and nuttier while teachers keep saying, “I will work harder.” Instead, maybe we should plan our retirements or look for positions in better districts — even when changing positions unfortunately involves a pay cut. I am guessing the next few years will be an especially good time for educators, paraprofessionals and other school employees to change districts.

Hugs to all, Jocelyn Turner

Welcome to life on Planet X. We’ve had a long, lonely interlude since March of 2020. Maybe you never wanted to be an astronaut, reader, but somehow we all got shoved into the pod and shot into space. This new “normal” of masks and social distance still feels alien to many of us as we stand on the little red dots in various lines to get into places that no longer resemble their earlier selves. Getting my real ID license a few weeks back was an adventure in dissonance. No chairs except for a few for people waiting for their road test. Two people guarding the door and shepherding traffic. No lines. And, astoundingly, once I got past the gatekeepers, the whole thing took about 15 minutes.

Some things remain the same. They still wait for the worst moment to take that pic and then anything goes if your eyes happen to be open. Still, I’ve looked blanker and more confused, and my eyes (and unfortunately mouth) are somewhat open.

It’s been especially wild for teachers out here in space. These struggling professionals have kept going in and out of live learning while struggling with remote platforms and more remote students. They are working to the point of exhaustion sometimes, with varying amounts of success to show. The biggest problem with remote learning is a simple one: A kid can wander away, mentally or physically, and you don’t necessarily know the kid has left the ship.

Where is Zeke? Is he hiding in the galley, maybe eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos? Has he gone to play his Xbox somewhere? Is there any chance mom might be able to get him back to work? Where is his mom? Something about being shot into space makes kids squirrelly (duh) and many “A” students would walk out of their classrooms if they could make their escape with reasonable odds of going unnoticed.

Eduhonesty: Gratitude journals help us keep our spirits up. So can guided meditations. Here’s my tip for this: Start small. You don’t need to plunge right into transcendental meditation. Almost nobody I know has time to commit hours to another self-improvement project. Finding my shoes and car keys can be enough progress on some mornings :-).

But YouTube abounds with short meditations. Fitbit has a meditation section. You can easily find source material. Want an app? 15 Best Meditation and Mindfulness Apps for 2021 (developgoodhabits.com) has a selection. Put meditation into Spotify or your music source.

Five minutes here, ten minutes there, another five minutes before dinner and you may find your stress levels have taken a dive. Some meditations are even designed to ease you into sleep. Some that are not designed for that purpose work well anyway; I love the Body Scan meditation by Jon Kabat-Zinn because I am almost always asleep before we get much past my left leg. Every time, he tells me to stay awake, but my stay-awake success rate is probably less than 1%. Need to sleep? This meditation has been helping me for years.

Kabat-Zinn’s mountain and lake meditations bring me to a better, calmer state of mind. YouTube is a motherlode of possible sources of stress reduction and relaxation. Here’s a sample sitting meditation: Mountain Meditation Exercise, Jon Kabat Zinn – Bing video. Sitting helps greatly when you must stay awake.

Pacing is highly individual in guided meditations. Some are too fast for me. They make me effort to follow, which works against calming. Certain voices also work better for me than others. If at first your attempts at guided meditation don’t work, don’t give up.

Many five to ten minute meditations can be found in cyberspace, mostly focused on breathing. Stress is all about breathing, as breath prepares us to fight or take flight. Breath reflects our state of mind, but it also creates that state. Anxiety feeds anxious breathing which feeds anxiety. Meditation can break that cycle.

Those whose school years are almost over may read this post and say, “Why now?” The answer lies in COVID-crazy school years. The district where I live will be finishing at the start of June. I talked to a friend this morning, however, who still has FIVE WEEKS left. We are making up for lost time all over this country and teachers who customarily are nearing the end of the end game at this point are sometimes now looking at an end in July, Stress is running high in hard-hit geographic pockets, especially for teachers and others who are going to be working outside of the house when their children are released for summer vacation.

Is that you, reader? Depending on the age of your children, a 30 minute meditation may sound like about as feasible as a backyard Mars launch. Sometimes half-hour chunks simply don’t exist. But 5 to 10 minute chunks can usually be carved out, even if you have to bribe the kids to do it. All that stuff about finding a quiet, uninterrupted time and turning off the phone during meditation? Definitely optional! Occasional quick shifts to Plan B come with the territory where children are concerned.

Reader, especially if your mood and energy are sinking, PRIORITIZE YOU. Throw in five meditation minutes when you feel the stress starting to climb. If you wake up first, seize those early moments before the household awakens. If you are fighting to get to sleep, look up meditations for that purpose. And promise yourself at least five minutes before you go to sleep.

Here’s a short meditation by Deepak Chopra to start or get you back into the meditation habit: Deepak Chopra’s Go-To 3-Minute Meditation To Stay Focused – YouTube

Hugs to my readers. The light in the distance really is the end of the tunnel, and not another freight train. Jocelyn Turner

P.S. If meditation always puts you to sleep, you are not getting enough sleep.

Eduhonesty: Are you tired, reader? Maybe even anxious or depressed? Evidence suggests gratitude journals can help. Gratitude and well-being: A review and theoretical integration (berkeley.edu), Gratitude Journaling Is Good For Your Mental Health And Maybe Physical Health To : Shots – Health News : NPR

Exhausted teachers and anyone else who wants off this spaceship — I suggest you make a gratitude journal. It doesn’t have to be all gratitude. It’s YOUR journal, a one and only. Random art and self-exploration can make the day better too.

But throw in the “Today I am thankful for… stuff along the way. The improved speed and efficiency of the DMV made up for its weirdness, for example. What’s good? What worked? Did Zeke produce a few great metaphors for his latest assignment? Are the kids adapting well to in-person learning? If not enough is working, I suggest finding a recipe and making a success, like triple ginger cookies or breakfast pumpkin bars.

Gratitude journals help us frame and reframe our reality. Those journals can be easy, too. If you are too swamped to even think about cutting up paper and pulling out the paints, then a few quick lines with a pen work fine. I like physical journals but this could easily be done as a Word or even Excel document.

Hugs from the Blue Room, Jocelyn

A follower asked me to address vaccination hesitancy. Where is the proof that someone should let Walgreens or CVS loose with a needle of Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson and Johnson vaccine? That’s a question that gets dismissed often by the pro-vaxxers, and I’d say we are doing a poor job of responding to people’s concerns. What should be a teachable moment has turned into a riot of finger pointing.

The questions are mostly legitimate: Can you prove vaccination is beneficial? What about the people with side effects? How can we know this is safe?

Eduhonesty: At first I thought the benefits of vaccination might be too far off-topic for this education blog but, upon reflection, I realized my questions are actually all about education. The vaccination debate has been steeped in math from the beginning. We are playing vaccination five-card draw poker and a crazy number of people are throwing away their pairs or even three of a kind to draw four cards. Why is this happening?

Teachers often start instruction by using analogies to help connect ideas. I think I will start with dogs. Can I prove that dog ownership is beneficial to human health? If we use longevity as our measure of the benefit of dog ownership, yes, I can, despite the guy who fell down the hill chasing his dachshund and broke his ankle in several places. Check out Do dog owners live longer? | American Heart Association.

To make my case, I have to spend some time looking up studies online. I have to understand that SOURCES MATTER and more sources are better. I’ll take something from the American Heart Association without much concern about its trustworthiness — although anything from the internet merits concern. On paper or from cyberspace, I should be suspicious of a source like “Puppies R Us.” When I find a Puppies R Us article about longer-lived pet owners, I should keep in mind that Puppies R Us is making its corporate profits selling puppies.

Also part of the picture:

1. Anecdotes are not evidence. In the larger scheme of things, the guy who broke his ankle rushing down a tree and bush-studded hill to rescue his dog does not count. The guy who felt sick after his shot may not count either. It all comes down to numbers. We ignore numbers at our peril.
2. Sometimes no option is perfect or even good.
3. In any choice, the weight of the factors going into the decision has to be estimated, and then later sometimes reevaluated. Life’s not simple. If it was, everyone who wanted to live longer would simply get a dog.

Proof can admittedly be hard to nail down. That guy with the dachshund might well have been better off in the long-run if he had chosen to collect iguanas instead of sausage dogs. Yet his life is likely to include future dachshunds, more Kongs, tug toys and games of fetch. Asked about that ankle, he’ll say, “s*** happens,” while helping his short-legged dog onto the couch.

S*** happens.

The future is undiscovered country, and life involves endless choices that test our ability to measure risk against reward.

Reader, please vaccinate. Vaccinations shut down the US polio and small pox threat. True, I spent a summer unable to swim or bathe when I had an oozy, doctor-visit-worthy reaction to a smallpox vaccination. I still have vestiges of the ancient scar. And polio remains active, if rare, in Central and South America, Africa and Asia. See Smallpox – Our World in Data for information on the one disease that was entirely wiped out by vaccinations. It’s true: You can entirely or almost entirely eliminate a disease if enough people become immune to it.

It’s like playing a monster game of foosball. A piece can only move when a peg strikes it. Once you vaccinate, though, almost everybody ceases to be a peg in this game. That peg disappears off the bar and it can’t move the COVID particles ball anymore. (Notice I said “almost everybody.” Right now, COVID is everywhere and even a few of the vaccinated are kicking that germ around.) If enough pegs disappear, that game becomes lame or even unplayable.

We have to go by probabilities where public health is concerned. About those clots: Birth control pills and COVID itself have a much greater chance of causing a blood clot than the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The numbers are rather ludicrous, given that 15 out of 7 million comes out to odds of 0.000002142. The odds of being hit by lightning are 1 in 15,300 or 0.00006535. The odds of being killed by a venomous plant or animal are 1 in 44,459 or 0.00002249. (Odds of winning the Powerball jackpot: 13 things more likely to happen (usatoday.com)) In other words, we have a lot more to fear from lightning and bad snakes than we do from vaccines. Can I trust Kaitlyn Kanzler who wrote this article in 2019? Other sources appear to have similar numbers.

Numbers should not always be trusted because someone took time to write them down, I admit. But let’s say our 15 in 7,000,000 is actually 30 in 7,000,000 instead. Those odds only amount to a 0.000004285 chance of that clot. Those zeroes matter a lot. The odds of getting struck by lightning — still far higher than the odds of a vaccination clot. It’s worth noting that almost every person who suffered that particular side effect was female. If I were a guy, I wouldn’t break a sweat about that side effect for a nanosecond.

Currently about 44% of the United states has had at least one shot of vaccine and 31% is fully vaccinated. The test cases have been tested. The shots have been given. Most people I know had trivial reactions. A few had fevers and more serious discomfort. But they are all fine now.

That is not true for all my friends who had COVID. I just talked to a friend who had this virus about five months ago now. She hallucinated for three days. She struggled with brain fog for weeks afterward. Back then, she sounded so breathless it scared me just to talk with her on the phone. When she called a few days ago, she started by saying that she was walking, and that was why she sounded breathless. But she never sounded breathless when we used to walk the track before COVID. And she still struggles to smell or taste food. She relied on family members to taste dishes and help her prepare their family Easter dinner.

Reader, please vaccinate. I wrote this in September and I strongly recommend it to everyone on the fence about that shot: When I Could No Longer Walk Up the Hill — And Amber Is Still Sick, Six Months Later | Notes from the Educational Trenches (eduhonesty.com) You don’t want this disease ever. A few days of arm pain with or without fever is a tiny, tiny price to pay to avoid what can go wrong if you skip that shot.

The likelihood of dying from COVID has been falling, true. But try to imagine not being able to enjoy the taste of food for four months and counting. So far, the consensus is that those people who lost their sense of taste or smell last year will probably eventually recover. Most recover in a few weeks or months, but others are still waiting. Try to imagine going to rehab to regain your ability to breathe. You don’t have to get violently sick to become a long hauler. Some people with mild cases back in 2020 are still dealing with body aches, joint pain, brain fog, chills, sweats, fatigue, headaches, heart palpitations and chest pain or pressure, exercise intolerance, dizziness, plus numerous other ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties of symptoms that are not resolving. A recent poll of a long hauler group on Facebook found 98 symptoms of this disorder.

P.S. I look at my friend as she pushes herself to regain her strength and I think I’d happily let Bill Gates track me to avoid what she is going through. Except Bill Gates isn’t tracking anybody and anybody who is worried about being tracked needs to surrender their cell phone RIGHT NOW. A student once stole my phone. I stood in a police station in one town and watched my phone being transported to another town after the cops had tried to get it back for me. The cops gave up as the phone left their city limits, but the next day, I retrieved my phone from a snow drift some twenty miles from home using standard software and my husband’s tablet. I put it in a plastic container of dry rice at home and the phone came out fine.

A message for those people who are afraid of being tracked: Oh, my. No one needs to chip us, guys. All they need to do today is hand us a Samsung or iPhone. Heck, I wouldn’t be stunned to discover they can track us through the chips in our cars or even our dachshunds. And to anyone afraid that the Democrats are running porno rings and trafficking children out of pizza parlors, I apologize. Somewhere we failed to teach critical thinking skills to a lot of lost souls.

What Representing Men in Divorce Taught Me About Fatherhood | Marilyn York | TEDxUniversityofNevada – YouTube

Absent, part-part-time, and cast-off dads matter hugely in today’s academic results. They are one of many disparate factors that get eclipsed by endless discussions of standardized test results. We don’t use those tests to make any useful recommendations related to this topic — or any topic as it applies to an individual student.

These tests are big data. They are mostly meant for government bureaucrats, not teachers, parents or students. Schools may pick up some ancillary benefit as they compare results to those of other locations, but those benefits are microscopically tiny when compared to the costs of testing. Parents may learn areas where tutoring might be useful — but they will get little information on exactly what tutoring is needed. And you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. When Mack is struggling in mathematics, his parents likely don’t require multi-day tests to find that out. A quick email to his teacher will work much better, and should result in helpful information weeks or even months sooner.

Here are a few interesting stats:

Children of divorce are less likely to earn a four-year or graduate degree, according to recent research from Iowa State University. They have lower GPAs and are statistically 24% less likely to receive a high school degree. (See Link between divorce and graduate education a concern as more jobs require advanced degree • News Service • Iowa State University (iastate.edu) and 8 Ways Divorce Can Impact a Child’s Academic Pursuits – Divorce Magazine.)

Eduhonesty: I picked this issue out of a basketful of factors that are almost never addressed within our schools. Those state standardized tests are DISTRACTING us from many elements that matter in our children’s educations. They are also documenting and redocumenting facts we already know. We identified our struggling zip codes decades ago. With rare exceptions, those zip codes are still struggling. We connected low socio-economic status (SES) to low test results decades ago. Has this country done anything meaningful to address this challenge? I’d have to say that No Child Left Behind amounted to ten giant steps backwards in terms of solving that problem of low-SES skewing of test results downward. In fact, NCLB might just have been a rocket ride in the wrong direction.

Big data hasn’t helped us. Big data is hurting us, in fact, as I have documented throughout this blog. In the meantime, we are so busy sorting data and putting it into spreadsheets that the meeting about support for fatherless children or children in the middle of life-changing events such as divorce — well, that meeting probably never happens. The discussion about possibly adding another counselor or social worker? Another meeting that never happens.

Eduhonesty: I want to repeat that I am not anti-test. But every test creates opportunity costs. The most obvious cost is the material that we cannot teach because we are testing yet again. I lost about 1/5th of my last school year to testing preparation and testing before I retired. Honestly, that year’s testing schedule (2 benchmark tests times 3, added on to the year of two PARCC tests, not including “practice” tests) was close to INSANE.

But this post is intended to highlight one more underexplored cost of testing. What about the fatherless children? And that’s only a small start. We have identified many factors that affect educational success.

What about the homeless children? Homelessness has been exploding lately according to some sources. Anecdotal sources talk about growing tent cities within cities. “The nation has experienced three straight years of increases in homelessness…” according to COVID-19 and the State of Homelessness – National Alliance to End Homelessness. The article notes that, “as unemployment rapidly increases, so do predictions for homelessness, with one expert estimating that nearly 250,000 new people could join this already growing population over the course of the year.”

Missing fathers and lost homes are urgent problems that schools should be addressing. Counselors and social workers are sometimes thin on the ground, though, especially in cash-strapped districts. I don’t want to bog down in the absurdity of property-tax-based school funding. I do want to highlight critical absences — the discussions that never take place because we are too busy manipulating numbers.

One more problem with testing run amok: We end up ignoring problems that cry out for action while we dissect late-arriving tests instead. I have already pointed out in my last post that the tests almost always come back after the school year is effectively over, and sometimes well into summer or even the next fall. Then the PowerPoints start being created to share the data. (Or worse, they don’t get created and that data never informs any important decisions despite the time loss it generated.) The professional developments start being crafted to try to teach that Common Core math that didn’t work for the last few years, but maybe if we… or we… or… a lot of brainstorming happens in curriculum meetings that points directly at that test or the standards that built the test.

In the meantime, does anyone attack the problem of fathers or nonexistent housing? Some of our children might benefit enormously from extra support that never arrives because we never even start talking about their problem. Unless those students begin breaking down into tears regularly in school, no one may recognize they are facing any new or unusual challenges at all.

We only have so much time. I understand that we cannot solve the world’s problems and we must tread lightly when addressing students’ home lives. But aspects of life outside the classroom manifest in performance struggles within the classroom. Those aspects keep getting ignored as we myopically try to push test scores up by looking only at those tests themselves, usually shortly before we begin the meetings to prepare for the next test.

I believe we would benefit greatly from taking standardized tests off the table for a few years, giving ourselves time to take a good look around at what is happening in American education — at what has been happening with America’s students. Because our students should not be seen as sources of data. They are children, and a great deal has been happening in their lives lately. They absolutely do not require more stress — especially since we are unlikely to learn much of anything new from the testing that is stressing them.

I AM SO SICK OF ARTICLES THAT TELL ME — SHOCK!! — HOW POVERTY AND LOW TEST SCORES GO HAND IN HAND. Yes, and water is wet, there are too many shootings in Chicago, and our kids waste too much time on their phones. We know that already. Can we go on to the next step? That step is not another test or test-preparation session.

I strongly suspect a review of demographic and socioeconomic correlations from the year 2000 — or even 1970 — would show the same racial and economic divides we see today. See The Racist Consideration in Testing that Does Not Hit the News | Notes from the Educational Trenches (eduhonesty.com) for an example. Certainly the last decade or two has kept hitting the same nails on the head over and over again.

No Child Left Behind has failed. The Common Core is failing. Our toxic testing culture has not put a dent into the achievement gap. Maybe freeing time and funds to help individual children navigate their complicated times could help. But we will never manage to help individual children unless we can free up and commit time, energy and conversations to identifying possible solutions for the problems holding our students back.

The massive time suck from standardized testing prevents those conversations from ever taking place.

Thanks to all my readers, Jocelyn Turner

Maybe in some state somewhere the situation is not quite as bad as my headline above.

Please share this post with PARENTS.

Here’s what I know: That state standardized test was given in late spring and didn’t ever come back for weeks or even months. During the year of the first PARCC administration, it didn’t come back until sometime during the fall of the NEXT school year.

Parents may think these tests are providing useful data. Useful to whom? Not to the classroom teacher. Even if the data comes back before the end of the school year, which is not always the case, no one breaks the data down in any helpful fashion for classroom teaching. No one tells me Jared does not understand percentages. They may tell me that Sadie has fallen far behind in reading, but if I have not figured that out for myself by the end of the school year, I am a genuinely awful teacher.

THOSE TESTS ARE PRETTY NEARLY USELESS TO TEACHERS.

State standardized tests provide big data to the government. That’s their purpose. They don’t help individual students. But they do, directly and indirectly, steal weeks of your child’s instructional time. I can’t be teaching while I am testing. More importantly, I may be forced to teach your child inappropriate material because my efforts are supposed to be pointed at a test that does not match my individual students’ learning levels.

OPT OUT. Because I am learning nothing that will help me to educate your son or daughter. I am just wasting all of our time, so that someone in Washington can reaffirm for the ten-millionth time that there seems to be a correlation between poverty and low standardized test scores.

PLEASE OPT OUT.

How strange has education become? When I was in high school, I confess I skipped school every so often to go to Point Defiance Park in Tacoma, Washington. Groups of us would stand near the bus stop while the truant officer glared. Truant officers didn’t seem much more effective back then than they are today. But my friends and I would never have taken the bus across town on a day when we had an important test, and our parents were justifiably upset when the school called to tell them what we had done — even outraged in some cases.* Parenting tip: Grounding a reader doesn’t work well if you take her to the library first.

But today skipping school may even be sanctioned by parents. Our irrational tests have spawned opt out movements across the nation as parents attempt to pull their children out of harm’s way. More parents all the time are opting their children out of standardized testing.

I am now recommending opting out in my blog. I feel I have no choice. The years keep passing by, and longer, more complicated, and steadily less appropriate tests continue to come down the pike, despite numerous pleas by educators and others. If COVID could not stop the march of the standardized tests — and even the Biden administration wants testing to go forward — then I support parents taking control and exempting their children from this ritual.

Someone must take control SOON. As it stands now, no one seems able to answer one vital question related to the kids at the bottom of the testing pile-up: How are we going to fix the kids that we are breaking, the ones not lucky enough to stay home or in study halls on test days? Because while many US students are rolling with the US testing regimen, others are taking a volley of regular hits to their self-confidence and self-esteem that will not be easily — if ever — repaired.

We are using kids to get our government data, and “using” is exactly the right word. Then we give them their test scores, showing them exactly where they are in respect to everyone else. We have done this for decades, of course — but that annual test gained orders of magnitude of importance over the last twenty years, a legacy of No Child Left Behind. Meanwhile, electives and vocational/technical education faded or even vanished as school districts threw more and more of their resources toward classes directly designed to improve test scores.

Please, readers, especially older readers who went to school in saner times: Try to imagine being a kid in the 30th percentile on a measure that you have been told is the most important aspect of your whole school year. You can’t help but feel you failed, even if there was no way to succeed, for whatever reason. Because sometimes there is no way to succeed, whether it’s because you speak Spanish at home or because you missed months of school due to a traumatic brain injury or any of the thousands of reasons why different students don’t score well.

Eduhonesty: I am not against testing. We do have to be able to compare Memphis to Chicago to Seattle. We do have to identify at-risk groups. But we don’t need the Godzilla-like MONSTER that today’s testing has become. Testing this spring will be fed by toxic fears and researcher radiation in a time when childhood is struggling and too often losing its fights against electronic and other forces.

Tests can be done without structuring a district’s whole instruction around beating the test — a process that makes education less fun and also devalues learning for its own sake. Districts should not be losing weeks of education to tests — especially since the educational losses from that time hit the most disadvantaged kids the hardest. During my years teaching, I never got a SINGLE, ACTIONABLE piece of information back from a state standardized test in time to be of any use to me in the classroom.

Weeks of lost time — with ZERO to show for it in the classroom itself.

That’s absurd. That’s true. And that’s why we have to pull back, pull our kids out if necessary, and shut this ridiculous data pipeline down.

*I was enough of a nerd that my mother actually felt reassured when I skipped school to walk the beach with friends. When busted I would end up with the special note, “Please excuse my daughter because she was indisposed.” If I was sick, the note read, “Please excuse my daughter because she was ill.” She would explain to me that she was not going to lie for me since lying was unacceptable. But going to the beach obviously was acceptable. Across the years, I remain grateful for my wacky parenting.

Thanks to all my readers, Jocelyn Turner

I’ve recently posted ways in which that spring state standardized test hurts students. Here’s a subtle and cumulative effect that hurts teachers, one that’s happening all over the country.

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It’s a short, simple phrase: The kids can’t… Maybe it is followed by “add fractions” or “tell time” or any of a thousand-plus possibilities. And sometimes that phrase is absolutely true. Among my most aggravating teaching moments were those when I tried to explain that my kids could not, in fact, do material that the administration had nonetheless required because “it’s on the test.”

Still, this phrase should be viewed with caution and trepidation. “The kids can’t” has the potential to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I present this as another reason to opt-out and shut down the madness of today’s testing culture, a reason I don’t think I have ever read elsewhere. Let me try to explain my slightly convoluted idea using an example:

I am the teacher. The administration has told me that my 4th period class, in which one student is testing two years below grade level and everyone else is at least four years below grade level, must do grade-level algebra problems because these problems will be on the state standardized test in late spring. Very limited remediation time or support is available. I may naturally look at this scenario and declare, “But my class cannot do these problems.”

I am right. Especially with all the required tests going on throughout the year, I don’t have a realistic shot at pulling this group up four full years mathematically in a few months. I might be able to find a magic carpet for one or two gifted kids who just arrived from Cambodia or the like, but basically my administration might as well have asked me to teach the group to plan the next spacecraft landing on Mars.

My question: what happens if this scenario repeats too often? When I am repeatedly asked to teach a process because “it’s on the test” to kids who are years behind grade level when they arrive in my classroom, I find myself repeatedly saying “My kids cannot do this.” I may be right. The kid who cannot add fractions cannot do eighth grade math. That’s simply a fact. The fractions must come first. Remediation must come first.

Let’s skip all the issues involved in catching up the children who have fallen behind. I want to look at one aspect of this scenario: I keep saying, aloud or to myself, “the kids can’t do it.” After awhile, I may come to believe what I am saying, EVEN WHEN IT IS NOT TRUE. The kids can’t do “it” is a self-fulfilling prophecy when I do not teach “it” because I have already concluded — perhaps correctly but perhaps not — that “it” is impossible.

This is a mindset issue, but not one that simply results from selecting unfortunate words. If I have a group of kids that mostly cannot clear a four-foot high bar, being told that I must prepare them to clear an eight-foot high bar represents a disconnect with reality. Too much disconnection and my go-to internal messaging may go haywire. In place of “this is what we must do to master Topic X,” I am regularly starting with “the kids can’t…” instead. Once I get stuck in that place then, yes, they can’t. They can’t because I won’t even try to get them over the bar, viewing that effort as essentially futile.

This all began with that spring standardized test and an administration desperate to pick up points on that test — so desperate that rational instruction fell by the wayside. What happens to the teacher who keeps being told to force her students to leap tall buildings in a single bound? One thing that may happen is a subtle attitude shift from “we can do it” to “my students can’t.”

“My students can’t” is not a phrase we want teachers to be using often, even when it’s true, maybe especially when it’s true. Students sense when a teacher believes in them and they sense when he or she lacks confidence in their ability to complete the latest standard projected up onto the whiteboard. They may not understand that their teacher has simply made a rational judgment about an irrational academic expectation. Instead they may think that their teacher lacks faith in THEM. Meanwhile, we are wearing a groove into that teacher’s set of self-messages, one that starts with “my kids can’t…”

Those spring standardized tests work directly against rational expectations based on past performance. After a teacher has been told to plan another Mars landing too many times, that teacher may give up on teaching topics that remain eminently useful and doable. That teacher didn’t exactly lose faith in students. Instead, he or she lost faith in rational curricular planning.

But the effect of this loss of faith will be the same regardless of its source. Set the bar too high and everybody may fail. Some kids will jump higher. Other kids will quit and walk off the field. Some teachers will begin stealth teaching — teaching what their students should learn next in a rational universe rather than whatever pie-in-the-sky standard is pasted on the board. Other teachers will try to teach those standards because that’s what their group is expected to be teaching, whether that content makes sense for their particular group or not.

Reason #42 for opting out of this year’s big test: When the test determines the curriculum — as it almost always does today — that curriculum may fit nobody in a special education, bilingual or even regular classroom. That results in a substandard education, potentially for every student in the classroom.

This set-up also results in a teacher who has to keep saying, “my kids can’t…” until those words sometimes create the reality they once merely described.

Now is a perfect time for the change. Let’s just stop. Let’s scrap those spring state tests altogether. If government and educational leaders balk — and the Biden administration recently betrayed us by putting the spring tests back on the schedule — I hope parents will opt their children out of state testing on a national basis.

Here’s the vital number that inspired my retirement and this post: During my final year teaching, all classes were obliged to test for more than 20% of the school year — two benchmark tests, PARCC (the year of two, separate administrations), unit tests prepared by an outside consulting firm, and weekly quizzes designed by departments to prepare students for the unit tests. That left 36 * 0.8 = 28.8 weeks available for instruction, except the number was actually smaller. We had to go over MAP test results with students, devote time to PBIS behavioral support plans, and all those nitty gritty little extras that suck minutes at odd moments.

Eduhonesty: Sometimes nobody’s listening. Various school and government leaders keep pushing for testing right now and somehow we have to get their attention. We have to pull the lever that will send this train off the track. Because the train must be derailed. We have been throwing students off the train for decades anyway, straight into ravines off bridges set so high that no one can see the bottom in the mists below. Lost kids? We’ve lost so many as our tests and standards hammered children, children who were sometimes happy to dive out that train window or fill out the high school early exit forms.

I favor channeling Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. We can be peaceful. We can behave like civilized, sensible parties in this ongoing dispute over the urgent requirement for megatons of data dynamite. Not everyone has to stay home to make opting out work. All we need are ENOUGH students out eating ice cream and watching Netflix. As the numbers of students who opt out grows, the reliability and validity of test results falls. We no longer know if the population we are measuring reflects the population as a whole. We can destroy the usefulness of the data. Once we do, those tests should be relegated back to their old status of a useful exercise in intelligence gathering, rather than the purpose of a whole year’s worth of instruction.

We must do this. I know I sound like a gouged, repeating piece of vinyl on an antique record player, but here’s one more repetition of my driving theme: These tests are clobbering kids psychologically.

Maybe my readers are not having my classroom experience. Not all kids are taking a hard hit. Children who test well tend to do alright, for example. But many children do not test well. Anxious and academically-deficient kids feel especially beaten up by our spring rite of passage. I believe state achievement tests certainly form part of the rising problem of anxiety disorders in children today.

Sobering numbers have been masked by the pandemic. COVID numbers have taken over the news, leaving large issues in footnotes. Here’s one such number: “According to the National Institutes of Health, nearly 1 in 3  of all adolescents ages 13 to 18 will experience an anxiety disorder. These numbers have been rising steadily; between 2007 and 2012, anxiety disorders in children and teens went up 20%.” (Anxiety in Teens is Rising: What’s Going On? – HealthyChildren.org; Anxiety and depression in children: Get the facts | CDC)

These annual tests are also responsible for today’s pie-in-the-sky curricula. In many locations, predetermined curricula demand that kids learn what may be 48 weeks of work in only 28 weeks of school. That’s impossible for all but extraordinarily gifted kids. The result? If the tests themselves don’t put cracks in kids’ psyches, that curriculum death march can do the job all by itself. Schools that try to cover the entire content of the test by spring may simply be moving much too fast for either retention or comprehension.

Please, please, please. Reader, do you have children? Grandchildren? Don’t let them take those annual spring achievement tests.

I’ve had my shots and I may do some afternoons this spring, but here are the facts: I don’t need that extra $10,000 to $12,000 a year. I’ve been proving that all this year. I’ve gotten used to going to bed at midnight and waking up between 8 and 9 A.M. I’m enjoying learning Adobe Photoshop right now and thinking of taking a class. I might be pretty much close to done with teaching on a regular basis, in no small part because I’ve fallen out of the habit of teaching, which I kept up after I retired because I LIKED teaching — but not the pay and not getting up. I’m sure I am not alone. I might begin subbing again soon. I might not.

I think I am close to being one of the many, many “former” teachers.

Eduhonesty: The sub crisis will not pass with vaccinations. It will not become one more blip on the COVID radar for years. Many of the missing subs had fallen right out of teaching into a retirement of less frequent teaching with more breaks and the bonus of half-day work days. We never truly left teaching. But in 2020 and 2021, we stayed home, and here’s what I learned: baking bread, painting watercolors, making collages, blogging, learning software, zooming educational webinars, walking dogs, writing poetry, and binge-watching TV tend to be extremely pleasant ways to spend time. I have developed all sorts of hobbies. When I retired, I had no idea what to do with my time, so I kept teaching. Now I fill all my time easily.

I’d guess there are lots of people like me. I don’t think we will be going back, not often anyway. Due to the shortage, free time has mostly disappeared from the sub schedule — schools need more certified bodies in classrooms every hour of every day — and I don’t want to have to worry about when I will be able to go to the bathroom. Been there, done that.

I still don’t know how the next year will play out. The new normal is not normal at all. Retired teachers don’t know what to do with those socially-distanced, no-contact classrooms, and I expect the old guard will mostly duck that weirdness, again because the sub shortage has increased work demands but not yet the already-paltry pay. In the meantime, baking bread has taken off so ferociously that one would think yeast had just been invented, and friends keep sending me texts and emails for virtual art classes, science webinars and science fiction conventions.

Here’s hoping our vaccinations bring the new normal into something more approximating the times we remember before 2020. Some days, I really do want back into that classroom.

Many hugs from Jocelyn Turner, who finally stuck her name into this blog a few weeks ago.

P.S. Lesson of the week: If a cookie recipe has the word “healthy” in the title, that’s not the recipe you want.

P.S.S. Please opt out of testing this year if you can, or help others to do so. Those tests have been clobbering lower-scoring kids’ psyches. Yes, we took them when we were kids, but the emphasis was not there. In fact, my brother recently asked me if we had even taken standardized tests. He could not remember. But today’s kids will remember because we are now building a whole year’s instruction around preparing for those tests, and we are even discussing scores with children later to “help them improve academically.” I believe we are mostly “helping” to create anxiety disorders instead — and this has to stop. We are driving some children much too hard for little or no benefit to create “data-driven” instruction that doesn’t seem to be working anyway.