Farrah and Gerardo have split. Who cares? Just about everyone in my classes, and a lot of other students walking the school’s halls as well. It’s a big story. She was sobbing a few days ago, head buried in her hands, black streaks running down her face. I let her go with a friend to the bathroom. They were gone for about 10 minutes, fixing Farrah’s make-up and commiserating in our local version of the neighborhood watering hole. The bathroom plan was my best option, better than listening to wails in class and probably better than trying to find the social worker. There’s seldom a social worker around when you need one.

Why am I bothering to write this story down? Because if I ever needed a day of whole group instruction, that was the day. But I’m so scared to be caught doing whole-group instruction that, at this point, I break into groups just on principal. I am supposed to do groups. OR ELSE. So I group. But I guarantee that any group I was not actively involved in was talking about Farrah. I could overhear some of these conversations.

Eduhonesty: Group work is overhyped. I am not alone in this view. Almost every teacher I know agrees with me. (I can’t think of one who doesn’t.) We group because we are expected to group. But 12 – 14 year-old kids cannot be relied upon to stay on topic once the teacher wanders away. Stories begin. Gerardo was seen with Farrah’s friend, Monica, by the high school. Farrah was cheating with Gerardo’s friend, Jimmy. Monica and Farrah are going to fight after school. Rumors take off wildly in our small groups, if not in the classroom then during the passing period.

What I’d like to say here is that I wish I felt more respected and trusted. I know when the lesson plan ought to flex. I know what the classroom needs most. Too often, I am delivering what I believe is suboptimal instruction due to the need not to deviate from the lesson plan. The scary administrators have won. I was threatened with termination for not following the master plan. Now I do exactly what I am supposed to be doing, even when I believe I ought to be doing something else. In this time of, “No excuses!” I don’t expect I will even be given a chance to provide an explanation why I have veered off course. So I don’t veer off course. This works for me.

I wish it worked better for the kids.

Saturday morning tutoring is cancelled. The teacher has professional development (PD). She will be busy from 8 to 3 today being developed. She’s been developed on embedding language learning into her lessons repeatedly, but a certain number of PD hours are demanded by the state. For the average teacher, 120 hours of PD are expected within the license cycle.

I am the teacher who is about to sacrifice her tutoring and leisure time to a PD that I have taken in a variety of forms before.

Eduhonesty: I view my PD obligations as one more set of good intentions run amok. Should I be improving myself? Definitely yes. Will this PD improve me? Possibly yes. Would my students be better served by my using this time to prepare clever lessons, identify student areas of weakness and catch up on homework grading? Almost certainly yes. For that matter, they might have been better served if I had not cancelled Saturday tutoring. I have been excruciatingly well-developed on the SIOP model for lesson planning and the Charlotte Danielson rubric in the last few years.

Can we stop now? If I wasn’t listening the last 50 times I heard about SIOP and Charlotte, I’m unlikely to start listening now. If I was listening, then I guarantee you I don’t need to hear the details again. This turkey has been marinated, basted, wood-fired, poached and deep fried. This turkey’s been cooked to jerky.

I’m sure this will be a good PD, but I’d rather go tutor my students, and buy them donuts and hot chocolate. When tutoring resumes, we are probably moving from McDonalds to Dunkin Donuts — the better to get my guys up on a Saturday morning.

My students were supposed to write out their strategy for solving a story problem. I liked Maria’s plan: “I will multiply or divide.” That was the whole plan.

It’s another version of a plan I come across regularly, one where a student takes numbers and does math to them whether those numbers need to be operated on or not. One exam earlier this year gave two absolute values and asked which one was farthest from zero. Many students triumphed over the problem, but a few simply added, subtracted or multiplied the two numbers without reading the question.

“Hah!” A few students seemed to think. “It’s numbers! I will throw some random math at them! Maybe it will stick!” Or something like that. I really have no clue what these students were thinking when they multiplied the two absolute values for absolutely no reason at all.

Eduhonesty: Teaching has many mysterious moments.

The cusp is the place to be. Money, time and resources flow toward that cusp, a magic academic line that separates students who meet expectations from students who fail to meet expectations. The line becomes most clearly defined on state standardized tests, but also lurks in benchmark tests and other measurements that affect evaluations and merit pay. In this time of testing madness, if the push is to raise the percentage of students who “meet expectations,”* then the cusp kids are the kids with the most potential. If test results suggest Jaquan and Shaniqua missed meeting expectations by only a few points, then Jaquan and Shaniqua join the group of students who are most likely to be able to cross the expectations bar, raising the total percentage of students who “pass” the test.

I have had principals tell me directly to focus on these cusp kids in tutoring groups and classes. Teachers form groups to identify their cusp kids and determine which skills will help these students to boost their scores. Targeted instruction begins afterwards, often small group instruction within a larger class. In this time when whole-group instruction is frowned upon as pedagogically old-fashioned, breaking classes into groups has become almost de rigueur in education. The groups are formed. The triaging begins.

Students too far below the cusp and students safely above the cusp may be almost ignored. As in war, with our resources overwhelmed, we leave the grievously wounded to die while providing only light care to those we expect will manage on their own. In a fifty minute period, a teacher may spend half an hour with the cusp kids and 10 minutes with each of the other two groups. Materials will be prepared to keep all students occupied so the teacher can focus on the cusp group. Those materials frequently are regrettably easy; the teacher does not want to be interrupted with questions.

Eduhonesty: I’m not going to editorialize much. This scenario is occurring in lower-scoring schools across the nation, largely because it’s genuinely the best bet for raising the percentage of students who meet expectations, the main goal for many poor and urban school districts. The last time I was instructed to use this strategy, I was also told to keep my cusp group small, preferably at 6 kids or less, with an intense focus on these kids. That left the my cusp group’s classmates mostly on their own.

When scores count so heavily, and lower scores bring so much scrutiny and misery to administrators and teachers alike, this preferential treatment for cusp kids becomes a natural by-product of the testing system. I can’t say I approve. But I am not going to slam my administrators either. In war and in testing, sometimes the best options are ugly. Resources are limited. We end up putting our resources where we expect they will do the most good.

*This push to “meet expectations” can be found in almost all public schools, a legacy from No Child Left Behind.

Teachers talk about their classes. We have an intense job that most of us take very seriously. With this post, I want to thank all the husbands, wives, sons, daughters and friends who have sat through the Jimmy stories. Teachers can talk almost endlessly about their funny children, their sad children and, especially, their problem children. Put two or more teachers together and the story-telling may become exponentially more involved as we share our Jimmies and Janies. We give each other advice. We commiserate. We share tips from the latest professional development. Sometimes we just laugh.

Eduhonesty: This post is for teachers. Is there some patient spouse or partner sitting at the dinner table, nodding when you describe Janie’s latest antics? Does your sister or brother listen supportively to your classroom stories, expressing outrage at the latest administrative absurdity? Do your friends hug you as you apologize for leaving early to make lesson plans? Do friends even help you to come up with lesson plans?

Give those folks an extra hug, maybe even some flowers or homemade cookies. At the end of the day, our listeners help give us perspective. They provide a place to vent. They help us stay balanced in a time when education keeps getting steadily nuttier. Having someone to listen to the Jimmy stories helps teachers to remember that education is about the Jimmies, not the tests.

My doctor prescribed this little, round, cantaloupe-colored pill as an anti-anxiety med. The pill is to be taken as needed. My last bottle lasted years. This one may take me through until spring.

I’m not very anxious. I don’t suffer from social phobias. In a professional development meeting, I never have to tell myself to speak up. I contribute to professional conversations regularly and spend at least some time telling myself to keep my mouth shut because I’ve shared enough. I’m not afraid of my classes. I get along well with my kids and I can manage them. Administration sometimes makes me feel like taking a pill, but by the time they’ve finished with me, well, they’ve finished and I no longer need the pill that I might have taken in advance if I were clairvoyant. If I were clairvoyant, I’d have resigned in August. But I’m not, so I am doing the best that I can for the sake of a group of needy kids.

The pills are slowly going away, though. I take them when I’m grading. I don’t pop one every night. I can gut my way through a small quantity of grading without assistance. When I get behind, though, or when I have given exams all day on top of daily work, I may resort to half a tablet to help me through the hours of papers on my desk.

Especially on Fridays, my grading often terrifies me. This was not true in the past. Last year, I taught the material. When I thought the students had mastered the material, I gave the test. I would give smaller quizzes before that summative test to get information on how instruction was going. I’d look at quiz results and tweak my instruction. The process was straightforward with most students producing acceptable to excellent results at the end.

Now I am giving tests written by outsiders, matched to a curriculum determined by the need to make points on the PARCC test at the end of this school year. My weekly tests are tailored to the formal grade level of the students in my classes, a level four years above the operating level of one of my classes, and only slightly less than four years above another class. These bilingual students struggle to read the tests. They are no where near understanding the subtleties of math and science that are clobbering their grades.

It’s easy to grade a good test, quick and affirming. These tests are not good tests. I wade for hours through attempts at test-taking. I try to find partial credit opportunities. I work to understand where the quizzes and tests went wrong, so that I can attack specific learning deficits in specific students. In the end, I still lack information because these tests are almost all multiple choice or fill-in. In order to keep the data consistent between teachers, we all are required to give the same tests and we can’t allow much freedom of choice in answering. An essay test would be problematic because teachers are expected to use consistent grading criteria.

I spend many hours grading due to the profusion of tests that other teachers and administrators create each week. That’s not the problem. I am used to spending many hours grading. So why do I currently want to curl up into fetal position and hide under my bed? My students don’t understand these tests. Even if I teach them the test’s content, question by question, I receive some results that are simply incoherent. In the end, students operating at a third grade level can’t do a great deal of seventh grade material without more tutoring and extra support than I am able to provide. I send students for tutoring after school, I call them into the classroom before school, and I am even meeting students in fast-food restaurants on the week-end. Some tutored students are hanging by their fingernails from the cliff face. Others are falling onto the rocks below, along with almost all the students who cannot or will not attend tutoring.

Eduhonesty: When my students are failing, I feel as if I am failing. I am failing. But I’m damned if I know what to do. I’ve been told in very threatening terms that I have to stay in sync with my fellow teachers. So I keep doing what everyone else is doing. I keep consoling the special education teacher, whose students are also failing all these tests that she is not supposed to adapt.

I hate those tests. I purely hate those tests. I completely and utterly loath those execrable excuses for assessments. I’m reaching the point where I almost can’t stand to grade them although they are easy enough to grade. I look for “C, D, B, B, A, B, C” or whatever the latest string of letters and/or numbers may be. I add up the mistakes and put the result in the grade book. As of this date, I have not a single “A” grade and very few “B” grades. Many students are failing my classes.

I’ll acknowledge that these students perhaps ought to be failing. They are lacking fundamental knowledge from elementary school. I hate to be a party to this mass retooling of expectations and requirements in its first year of implementation, though. Some of my students feel so sad and lost. I’m great at pep talks, but no pep talk exists that fixes “I know you’re failing three classes for the first time in your life despite the fact that you are working diligently and staying late for tutoring on a regular basis.”

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” Elie Wiesel

Across America, teachers are protesting the Common Core, PARCC, and the onslaught of standardized testing that has been sucking educational hours from our schools, while channeling curricula into smaller and smaller boxes. People outside education are sometimes persuaded to ignore these protests when bureaucrats throw the magic words “data” and “comparison” into the equation. We need to be able to compare our students, we are told, and raise the scores of those who are disadvantaged. That score argument can sound persuasive on the surface.

If we look closely, though, flaws in the standardized testing rationale stand out almost immediately. For one thing, many districts are now spending more than two weeks testing students to get those comparisons. That’s an irrational amount of testing, especially when we consider that testing hours directly replace instructional hours. Much of that testing is duplicative, documenting academic performance issues that have been repeatedly documented in the past. For another thing, ample evidence now exists that struggling school districts are eliminating classes that don’t directly contribute to test score improvements. Our strongest districts continue to offer pottery and studio art classes, while our weakest eliminate woodworking, cooking and even music classes. The kids who most need an anchor to keep them in school often receive the least interesting classes, as the push for higher scores drives out fun classes in favor of extra math and English instruction.

Eduhonesty: PLEASE, LISTEN to our teachers. We have been teaching test strategies for years now when we ought to have been fostering learning. Evaluations make this more necessary by the year. The problem is not data; we need data. The problem is that the data train seems to have run off the rails, and it’s falling down into an abyss of numbers that people often have no time to evaluate, while taking some very good kids down with it.

The snow hit yesterday, so attendance was light. Some parents came. One stepdad came with his girl, gathering information for her dad in hopes that dad would quit buying the girl new phones and shoes until her academics improve. I sense a battle for the girl’s affections and a future filled with new shoes, whether this student does her work or not. At least someone is trying to keep her on track. Stepdad seemed like a lucky draw, one I hope the girl will eventually appreciate.

Students with stronger grades outnumbered their counterparts. That’s always true in conferences. The students who most need help often manage to keep their parents home on conference night. The students who know they are academically in good standing will remind mom and dad about conferences, eager for their moment in the spotlight. In the larger scheme, I’m sure that this attendance pattern contributes to the results I see in my classroom. Conferences reinforce the need for continued academic effort.

I wish more struggling students had made it to last night’s conferences. I hope a few will come this morning. Grades this semester are very low, in part due to the scripted master plan provided by the strangers now running my school. I keep having to give tests I did not write that are years above the academic operating level of my students. Some students are seeking out extra help and tutoring. Others are staying in their cabins as the Titanic goes down. I need to talk with many parents, but day conferences are almost always much lighter than evening conferences. Contrary to preconceptions about the lazy poor, most of my student’s parents work. Many work two jobs. They are the working poor, putting in 50 hours at slightly over minimum with no benefits because their employers hold them below the threshold for benefits.

Eduhonesty: I have to put on my high-heeled shoes now, going off into the snow to visit with moms and dads. That day of evening conferences runs long. I worked twelve straight hours yesterday, gulping down coffee and Dunkin Donuts egg white flatbread in the short break between my regular day and conferences. I enjoy conference days, though. Moms and dads are my strongest allies, shoe-and-phone-dad notwithstanding. Sometimes they can get the homework done. They can make a student understand that schoolwork and school behavior matter. I give a lot of talks, but parents walk the walk. When they step out into a night where the air hurts their faces, and white ice crystals cover the road, they tell their children how very much school matters.