I need a few more plusses. Let’s start with this one: I am never bored during the actual school day except when in meetings, and I remember from corporate life that everyone is sometimes or regularly bored in meetings. My work remains challenging. Once the day starts, I am on a rocket ride to the other side. Time never slows except in meetings. Even meetings can be a welcome break if you don’t listen too hard. I contribute to meetings regularly. Whether I am fascinated by the minutiae of the lesson plan or not, I have always been a talker and I do like to improve things around me. Student responses always interest me. Trying to keep student attention engages me. Finding a tenth way to say the same thing to the same student, in hopes an idea will somehow connect, helps me to think outside my personal boxes.

Eduhonesty: I never have a dull day — frustrating and crazy days, yes, but never dull. I often have fun moments with my kids. I don’t have to sit. I don’t have to stand. If I am a caged bird in this time of HyperTesting, at least I occupy a super-large cage filled with construction paper, scissors and protractors. My cage has cheery walls covered with inspirational sayings, along with decorated pieces of construction paper, marshmallows and toothpicks. I have a trapped audience who share my fondness for marshmallows, toothpicks, construction paper and scissors, although maybe not protractors.

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was a financial analyst. I read annual reports all day and assessed corporate credit-worthiness. For all the perks of that job, I’d rather teach.

The paper was important and the student understood that. He was allowed to use the laptop for his research. The question was not too difficult: What would happen to a plant kept in a closet? I started reading his answer and the first few lines were confusing. Then I realized he had copied from a site on how to grow cannabis in your closet. Unlike other closet plants, his cannabis was growing gangbusters.

Most of the class’s plants were failing to thrive, deprived of light and water. I’ll have to talk to the minority who think there is no air in closets. But despite the good laugh I got from Pot Man, I can’t avoid a soupçon of concern. I’d like to think Pot Man was joking. Unfortunately, I’ve talked to him. I lean toward believing he was copying the first response he opened after he put in his search term without considering the meaning of the words in front of him.

Eduhonesty: If he wasn’t so young and his eyes weren’t so clear, I’d suspect Pot Man of sampling his product.

Testing makes my day easy. Nevertheless, that’s two days of testing this week and one of those required tests barely relates to content that has been taught in class. I spent 164 minutes today on a test that I fully expect will have nuked my class. I doubt anyone passed. I’m doubt anyone CAN pass. I morally object to this test. But every math class in the grade is expected to simultaneously administer this travesty of an assessment instrument. So I did. As tenure becomes attenuated, careful teachers don’t take chances. I can be fired. Refusing to give that test would be insubordination.

Eduhonesty: I reassure my class that this test will not figure into their grade. It’s only for data-gathering purposes. I tell them to do their best. I try to convince them that data matters. I put on the music. I hand out the tests. I field multiple complaints. The tests roll on.

In the past five days, instruction has barely managed to edge out testing in my classroom as the two great rivals, testing and instruction, continue to duke it out for student time. During the epic days of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, new material was actually presented as instruction boldly faced off against testing, claiming chunks of class periods for actual student learning, before testing knocked us out in the semi finals on Thursday and Friday.

Instruction is expected to stage a huge comeback on Monday.

Eduhonesty: The ratio of testing to instruction has become positively silly. Seriously, I tested all day, for every period, on Thursday, with the exception of my 45 minute tutoring period. Friday, I tested during three of my four classes. I did not write these tests, but I must give these tests despite the 9 days we recently missed due to other standardized tests. I will say it’s rather relaxing. I put on the CD I made from student song requests and I provided hints to the desperate. This week-end I will grade.

Planning for the day can be tedious. Detail, detail, detail. Where’s the video link? Do I want to download this Active Inspire flipchart? What’s my time situation? Can I fit this foldable in somewhere?

The task is made both simpler and harder by the ease of clicking on links. Teachers Pay Teachers will sell me many useful items and even has freebies. Google will help me find ideas for activities and presentations. My problem is that link on the rare black jaguar crossing the Amazon River. I like “jaguar” links.

Some mornings, it’s hard to stay focused.

I’ve had two students with stomachaches this week who wanted to see the nurse, one who had not eaten because she refused to eat anything the cafeteria provided, and another who skipped our cafeteria food in favor of a large quantity of super-hot, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. The actively sick are surrounded by the undernourished. Can we please get the government out of the school-lunch business?

Eduhonesty: I’m sure part of the problem is that my district has been teetering on the edge of insolvency for years. We don’t have the money to buy the delicious-tasting apples, although we manage to get apples. We don’t have the money to buy nutritious Asian food that meets the guidelines. We do have a population that’s about one-half Hispanic. About our only Mexican food has been cheap-chicken tacos that are weirdly sweet and kind of scary. I’d give that chicken to my cat or dog, but not to my children. I wouldn’t give too much of that chicken to the cat or dog, for that matter.

Those old, uncontrolled lunches? At least they tasted O.K. They even tasted good sometimes.

More importantly, the kids ate them.

(I have gutted this post, taking out details that identified me too easily. The full post will return in March or April. I’m sorry if someone pointed you here and part of what I wrote is missing.)

Was that my summative evaluation? It’s barely February, but the district seems to want lots of time to decide who they will keep and who they will dismiss. I’ll know within a week or two if my evaluator is going to Danielson me. I don’t think it matters much now if Charlotte’s Axe falls on my head. I doubt they’ll push me out the door before the end of the year. I do my job. I teach furiously and with some remnants of passion.

A colleague asked, “Are they trying to get you out?” Good question. The answer most likely is yes. It’s clear they are pushing some teachers out and I might try to get rid of me if I were culling the herd. I make a fair amount of money due to an absurd number of college credits and a number of years in the classroom. More importantly, I have tried to advocate for the maligned whole-group instruction. I continue to contend that when nobody knows the material, then whole-group instruction remains appropriate. Thanks to the many lesson plans steered by outsiders and the Common Core, I frequently find myself teaching material that no student has seen before.

Eduhonesty: Let’s get back to Charlotte Danielson, the well-meaning woman who created the axe. My district is laying off people and determining the order in which people will be called back based on scores from the Danielson rubric. That’s not what Danielson intended. But administrators are threatening teachers throughout my district by telling them that if their average score falls below 2.something-or-another-above-the-middle-anyway (I’m tuning out a fair amount of this craziness now.) they will not be renewed. One of our administrators is considered to be a much tougher grader than the most likely alternative, so people with an unlucky draw in evaluators have been running scared.

(I want to observe that I am in no way against teacher evaluations. Like standardized tests, teacher evaluations fulfill a necessary purpose. The devil is in the details. A colleague recently told me gleefully that he had been lucky. In three years, he had never gotten evaluated by the Evaluator that Everyone Fears. That’s luck. A lot of people have not gotten lucky. Danielson’s rubric contains 4 domains, 22 components, and 76 elements. In one class period, no one can observe all of that and a regrettable number of evaluators will likely infer or even make up numbers to fill out the requirements. I’ve been in professional development meetings where we all tried to decide if a teaching video merited a 2, 3 or 4 on Danielson’s rubric. Mostly, people varied by one number, but one woman’s two can sometimes be another woman’s four. A tough evaluator who gives all 2s and 3s will end up with a very different final average than a less tough evaluator who gives mostly 3s and 4s. No evaluation should depend so heavily on luck of the evaluator but when that many numbers are in play, pure mathematics ensures that the effect of the tough evaluator will be magnified.)

Charlotte’s axe is not merely an instrument used to lop off the heads of teachers who don’t cooperate with current theory. While that axe is decapitating a fair number of educators across the country, one other Danielson effect needs to receive a great deal more attention. As I go through all the paperwork for my Professional Development for the year, days and days of development if you add up the meetings, I find that, with one single, subject-area-related exception, all but a few hours of my development have been about either Charlotte’s axe or new, improved disciplinary measures. Since last year, my district has aggressively taught the many components of the Danielson Rubric, helping teachers learn how to succeed under this rubric. That helpfulness is appreciated, but the time… Oh, the time! We are spending meeting after meeting on the Danielson Rubric to the exclusion of almost everything else, with a little discipline thrown in on the side. And no wonder. I have a copy of The Framework for Teaching: Evaluation Instrument, the 2013 edition of Charlotte Danielson’s explanation of her rubric. The book is 109 pages long.

It’s as if Charlotte has sucked up our professional development time, replacing it with endless explanations of how her rubric works. Over and over, we learn the components of our new teacher evaluation system. What corporation would use almost all their available training time to teach employees the company’s evaluation system? At this point, I wish I had been tracking the specific minutes of those meetings so I could present hard data. I’m afraid my data’s soft, but all I can say is this: I get it! Now, please can we talk about something else? Given a choice, I think I’d prefer an in-depth investigation of the U.S. Post Office’s finances or a presentation on cholera vectors in developing nations. Actually, I’d far prefer to hear about cholera.

We are a school with new teachers, a number of them first-year teachers. Yet, ironically, in this time of differentiation, we seem to be doing almost nothing except teaching these new teachers the Danielson Rubric in whole-group meetings. I’d like to note that my district might benefit from practicing what Danielson and school administrators advocate — doing small-group work based on individual needs. I’m sure our new teachers would benefit from separate sessions tailored to their classroom management needs. I’m also sure that some of us have grasped the details of Danielson’s rubric and are ready to move on.

Charlotte built an axe. I don’t intend to stick around much longer to observe its effects, but I think I’ll share one last no-doubt-unintended consequence. I have been advising colleagues to move out of academically disadvantaged areas into more prosperous, higher-scoring districts. When a large portion of anyone’s evaluation is based on individual student behavior and class test scores, the smart move is to go where the behavior is the best and the test scores are the highest. Period.

That’s probably what I would do now — if I did not plan to retire.

The poster sat up on my wall for some weeks, supposedly the Law of Conservation of Mass. I had just cleaned off the walls to put up new, more current material. Not until I pulled down the construction paper did I realize that “conservation” had turned into “conversation” instead. Well, LOL, the masses in my room definitely like to converse.

I am looking at the checklist for The Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) lesson plan. The checklist includes 27 items. These are expectations for lesson plans for bilingual classes. Numerous other expectations exist for lesson plans that are not included in this list because those expectations are for general lesson plans. The lists/expectations do overlap. For example, “use a variety of question types including those that promote higher-order thinking skills” has to be a strong addition to any lesson plan for any group of students.

This 27 item list has to be incorporated into the lesson-plan model demanded by my school. That plan has separate expectations. We have to include all relevant common core standards, for example. We have just been told that our breakdowns on the plan for students who are below grade level, students who are at grade level and students who are above grade level are inadequate. We are supposed to include all of our specific strategies for meeting the needs of these three groups in separate sections now. I’m not sure exactly how this will work. I’m sure the lesson plan just got larger and harder, though.

Eduhonesty: I would say these lesson plans provide a great snapshot of what’s wrong with education today. All of these lesson-plan demands seem rational and all are defensible on some level. But I took a position as a teacher, not a lesson-plan writer. To meet these expectations, I’d have to spend most or all of Sunday writing my plan. When I got done, I’d be unable to remember whole chunks of it unless I spent the day reading and rereading the plan. I’d also have about as much chance of completing all its components as I would of leading the first Martian colony.

Class lengths differ from place to place, but teachers are supposed to write plans that can’t possibly fit with any rational set of class lengths. Fortunately, my teams are creating these plans with my input during meetings. We are all on a shared lesson plan. I also simply skip that checklist. Instead, I focus on remembering we have to work on vocabulary.

I am triaging as I try to get through my current lesson plans. I skip parts that I view as less important. I read and reread as I go. Sometimes I slip up. More often, I simply can’t get through the plan in the time available.

Am I the better for my new, 5-7 page, explicit plan that breaks down all the details? It’s technically a better lesson plan, I’m sure. My lesson plan used to be a short document that loosely laid out the direction for the week and its connection to state standards. Minutiae were certainly lacking in that short plan. But how much instructional preparation has the new, required plan eaten? How much discussion about individual students has the plan preempted? How many class-preparation activities have been put on hold or eliminated in order to hit all the targets in writing that plan? How many science experiments have never happened because my science team has spent days planning the lesson plan, using minutes that might have otherwise set up experiments that frankly are not happening this year, experiments that would have happened in the past when teachers could have been setting up microscopes instead of looking up standards to paste into documents that I suspect are lightly read at best. I’m sure the administration sometimes scrutinizes these documents, but I also know that if they read them all for every subject they receive, they would never be able to leave their offices.

P.S. Upon thinking about this post, I realized I had left out one important element. For any lesson plan to work, students have to cooperate. The cavalry has to go over the hill. That’s part of the challenge. I’ll try to write that post later. I also need to note that lessons should flex sometimes. When the class goes off on an interesting and useful tangent, the best move may be to dump the plan and go with the teachable moment.