TEST TEST TEST

Everything I hated about working in a corporate environment is true about education and it
hit me only today. My friends who are IT professionals and the like constantly complain about long meetings, unrealistic goals, silly sounding pep-talks full/ of meaningless double speak, etc. I had my share of that kind of environment at UPS during school.
Everything we're doing comes back to test scores. The other day my teacher/ told me about a plan book she had gotten. The subject was building community, and she showed me some activities she had planned to help build community in her classroom. Sounds like a great idea! The student body seems to be really needy emotionally, and some semblance of family unit is exactly what the doctor ordered. Now, I don't doubt this woman's commitment for a second- she loves these kids like her own and they know it. But what she said next shook me to the core: "because studies show that building a community atmosphere can raise test scores." What has this environment done that has polluted the mind of even the most loving, selfless teacher I have ever known?
Yesterday we watched Underdog as a reward for those students who met xyz requirement for being one of the "good" kids. It bugged me to death to lose instructional time, but the kids seemed to enjoy it and honestly, they probably needed a break. Then after the film, they got a peptalk about how the principal wanted the students to be like the Underdog on the TCAP. We can't even watch a movie anymore...
This kind of environment feels so much like the corporate environment that I want to scream. I went into this because I wanted to be in a field that was not a selfish rat race. Instead, what I'm finding is that test scores have replaced profits. At least in a mindless, pointless race toward profit I might make money. As it is, I'm in a mindless, pointless race toward an increase in score on a test that I believe is fundamentally flawed.
All of my campus school profs told me not to worry about test scores- if I taught well, it would happen. But I really feel like displaying that attitude in the field would get me canned pretty quickly.

Why Standardized Testing Gets in the Way of Real Learning

I've been reading Brian Cambourne's Responsive Evaluation: Making Valid Judgments About Student Literacy in my evening spare time. Nothing particularly revolutionary about the book to me- but I have really enjoyed it. It's not that often that I read something I can use the next day.
As a teacher, I have two ways to teach material: I can parcel it out and micromanage it (that would produce the kind of spreadsheets and bar graphs that would really impress someone like a parent or a principal) or I can teach the material holistically. You can guess which of these methods I prefer.
As a teacher, I can't just teach the material that's on the standardized tests given by my state. No knowledge exists in isolation, and to teach it in isolation is essentially a memorization skill. Since my brightest students seem to do poorly in memorization, it's clearly not an effective measurement of student aptitude. When you teach things in isolation, or in the memorize-it way, you have to be mindful that you may be teaching the wrong thing unintentionally. I'm thinking of my wife and I's work teaching analogies: she and I both have the same problem. We've been asked to teach analogies to children that haven't yet gotten a handle on abstract thinking. Believe it or not, they are a second grade standard in a lot of states.
That's the real problem with standardized testing- it prevents us from A) Teaching to the ZPD of students, and B)Teaching holistically. It doesn't make a lot of sense to teach a progressive plan and then assess students in a conservative way. By locking in a mandatory conservative testing method, the state has locked in conservative methods. Methods which, by the way, have been proven ineffective for well over 50 years.
But the pressure is so intense on administrators, because of NCLB and state expectations, that criticizing this kind of testing in public could be tantamount to career suicide. The last thing a teacher would want an administrator to think is that they don't take standardized tests seriously. So we're completely prevented from having this discussion in the first place- and it's far to important to keep out of the public forum.

My Reading Program: It's Not Rocket Science

I'm sure I've probably mentioned how much I loathe the basal reader my students have. It's full to the brim with the most boring and tiresome tokenism- among other things.

So this week I started a new reading program: Read what you like to read. The first day was today, and I am already predicting a great success. Students are taking great interest in reading their books. My only requirement is that they submit a small book report on each book, just as proof that they read it.And because of course I need a massive, constant stream of grades to prove that I was doing...grading? Seriously, I'm tired of this mentality that everythingmust be assessed.)
We'll break things down into a short mini-lesson, and then some one on one reading remediation with each student. Just a quick way to counsel with them to see how they are progressing.
I really want this to work well. I can tell my cooperating teacher is highly suspicious. She favors the assessment-heavy approach of breaking reading down into tiny bits of skill to assess individually. I can see the logic in that- if I were designing a standardized test. But I want reading to be a "whole" skill that my students have. They could ace most of the standardized material if they could just read and think critically.

3 Day Weekends

Best invention of all time. Now I can put off all of my weekend work until monday morning, instead of Sunday night.
I came home this weekend with a backpack that weighed 50lbs. I don't resent grading at all. What I do resent is grading busywork. Work that we have assigned only to keep students busy- and that we grade only to make students prove they were busy.
I know I'm not supposed to penalize students' grades because of behavior. I fail to see how this is not exactly what I'm being asked to do.
It's really starting to grate on my nerves how little of my time is actually spent teaching. Between the parties and the walking in line and the recess and the PE and the dismissal and the "SIT DOWN" there's just not enough actual instruction going on. The school day needs to be about half the length it is. I'd rather teach the material with urgency, and go home.

Easier All the Time

I felt like garbage today. Seems like the flu shot and a handful of vitamins is just enough to keep me from calling in. I think I've felt this way for weeks now, too.
I walked in today, having been gone a couple days between a career fair(blah!) and a snow day (yay!)and find that one of the students who has been obsessed with my hair style since the day I walked in is now wearing that same hair style.
Since I'm learning to be sensitive to 5th grade egos, I chose not to say anything. But it looks great on the kid.
Teaching is getting a little easier as I make it more "mine" than it was before. I was not very good at stepping into my cooperating teacher's mold. I'm starting to feel a big conflict in our personality types on the horizon. She's so organization-minded, so into spending extra time(she's in on weekends and nights all the time) and I'm a lot more into getting everything I can out of a day. I remember how much I resented my teachers wasting my time. So when I design activities, or units, they don't sum up into multiple choice tests very well. And I hate multiple choice tests. I like essays, I like discussions, reports, art, music, presentations, etc.
Multiple choice tests are another way that public schools imprison the minds of young people. If you're creative enough to see more than one interpretation of a question, you're punished with indecision about it. When you bottle up creativity, it comes out looking like rage. And we wonder why our youth creative and enjoy such violent, angry art. What are they angry at?
They're angry at a great big machine that's smashing all the energy and creativity out of them- stealing their most active, energetic hours of the day and wasting it on something somebody at the state told your uneducated grandma they'd do so they could get elected.
And unfortunately, I get to be one tiny cog that's making that machine lurch forward over a cliff.
Being part of this system feels like driving nails with bananas. I know what it is I want to do, and I've got the energy. Feels like the right motion, but nothing is happening.

If They Were All This Easy.

Man, I wasn't miserable for any portion of the day today! Was it the extra caffeine? I don't know... The kids are a lot better disciplined than they were last week. I told them all to make a point of having a good week- it's a relatively short one(super early why-did-we-show-up dismissal) and then another three day weekend.
Of course, I'm sure there is some banal 5 hour long meeting for usthis friday. Educators seem no more concerned about wasting each other's time than they do about wasting their students time. Of course that doesn't stop any of them from starting literally every single part of the meeting by saying "I know you're all in a hurry to get out of here so I'll make it quick."
Now wait a second, this was supposed to be a positive posting.
Let me try this again.
Lessons went relatively painlessly. I am taking more charge and I can tell it is helping my cooperating teacher. She's having a lot more time to take care of her business. My setup is so unconventional that it's hard for me to tell how much responsibility is really mine. I'm entering the grades, writing the tests, making the worksheets, planning reading, social studies and science, etc. Because of the weird structure, though, nobody is in complete control.
Also, this weekend I learned that I now know everyone at Wal-Mart.

Laying the Hammer Down

I laid the hammer down yesterday, and I still don't know if I should have. I know I was too easy on the students for the first few weeks.
I have about a 10 students who I spend the whole day censuring. They all lost recess for a week, and lost their privilege to attend an ice cream party.
They've been scowling at me ever since.

I wrote that last week after one of my hardest days. I've just started the first day of the next week and they are somuch better than they were before.
Now I have to be wary of swinging to far right and over-disciplining them. In that scenario, I have no control and they force me to try and come up with something worse.

1 week from 1 quarter done!

So this time next week I will be half done with my internships!
Having a lot better week this week, because so many people have been sick at my night job, I've been bumped up into doing a job thats a lot easier and that ends earlier. Another hour in the day was just what I needed.
I had a good talk with the ESL and GT teachers at my school yesterday. I really think a pull out program is where I want to be if I teach. Standing in front of a class and asking them to sit down a million times in 5 hours is just getting awful. Nobody can get learning done for 5 solid hours. This isn't pickup trucks we're making here- learning takes time to sink in.
I used to think that college classes had days in between because they respected that their students were adults and had things to do. Then I had this internship and realized that clearly this was never the case. Those breaks are there to let things sink in.
Public school would do well to consider an alternating schedule of 3 days a week of mandatory classes, and two days a week of online classes that students choose.

I can't wait to start the more aggressive reading program I have designed for next week. Too many of my students need help for me to spend time on their silly textbook.

Rusty Mondays

I always come in on Monday mornings with a lot of enthusiasm. It's the only day of the week that I can come in having had enough sleep to be firing on all cylinders. All the other days I feel a little bit stupid because of sleep deprivation.
But for some reason, what I gain in enthusiasm and planning and content knowledge, I lose in my classroom management ability. They just walked all over me today.
They also really disappointed me with how disinterested they were in my lecture on Immigration. Half of the them are recent immigrants, but they don't seem to make the connection, or show any interest at all. I know they hate the lecture format, but sometimes it's the only way I know to teach something. I don't know a way to make everything into a game, and I get sick of the idea that I should trick them into learning.
Also, I got a chance to go over a basic reading level test that they took at the beginning of the year. It explained everything about some of my students- many of them scored in the kindergarten to second grade level(as fifth graders.)
Several of them were not identified as LD, but clearly need more attention than I can give them. Reading has really got to be my new priority, no matter how much I enjoy social studies. If they can't read, I'm wasting everyone's time!

Overwhelmed.

It can't be Sunday night again already. Everyday is just a day closer to getting out of this non-stop stress lifestyle. This internship is the most classist, sexist thing I have ever had to deal with.
Business interns? They get paid for their services. Me? I had to pay $3K to get myself into this mess.
Planning 7 subjects for 5 days is completely impossible to do adequately. No one is learning anything in my classroom- they're just memorizing. I'm perpetuating a horrible cycle of poverty and stupidity.
Poor kids all go to the same school- so that school produces lousy test scores(because, you know, my students have other things to think about, like eating) and so they come under pressure from the state or, more recently, the feds via the state. So we get asked to drill and drill and drill on the same inane, ignorant, useless, and irrelevant material until the children can cognitively vomit this material back onto the test. (By the way, I was instructed regarding what to do if a child vomits on a standardized test. You'd think they were the dead sea scrolls or something...)So these children do poorly on the following year's material. Because every year, the material gets harder, until middle school and high school happen. Then the material becomes too much to memorize- you have to understand it. So they drop out because, well, school is completely impossible. How could you memorize an entire high school math class?
That's only one of the many things that is disgusting me about the public school system. All the latent rage and contempt I felt toward this system is slowly coming back to me, bit by bit.
I can't handle the idea of stamping all the originality or character out of children. I can't handle the doublespeak of an institution that gives daily anti-violence announcements, and then paddles misbehaving students. Most of all, I can't handle how much of my time is spent on engendering the stupidity that fills their textbooks.
All memorization is a waste. All learning under coercion is a waste.
The internet happened and made 99% of my work completely irrelevant.
You want to know how many ounces are in a cup? Don't waste your time filling your brain with that kind of inanity. Ask google.
My students need skills like critical thinking, data management, data organization, interpreting statistics, understanding finance. When they need to know what magma is called when it reaches the surface, they can google from a mobile phone.
All my students need is a class in how to be a good steward and good manager of all the data they have at their fingertips.
And until education is willing to make that kind of turn, my career will be 99% waste.
And I don't know how long I can continue to work a job where I have to trick my employer into thinking I am teaching geology and not critical thinking. I don't want a job where I live for the 1% of my day in which I get to teach something meaningful to the 1% of my pupils that want to learn it.
This is hard.