By Mark

At the close of each year, I always come up with some kind of message--like we all do--to the students who are about to leave my classroom. I posted my message to the class of 2010, ruminated about the significance of the ceremony in 2011, and have been mulling what to share with the class of 2012. Here it goes:

This year I want to address the lies perpetuated by this graduation "celebration." 

I'm talking about the blatant lies and excess flattery penned in cliche'd almost-rhymes in the cards you have been or will be receiving from friends and family over the next few weeks. Thankfully, like much of the homework reading assigned in the last several years you won't be reading those either. I know you'll shake them for cash, check the envelope just in case, then hand them to mom for filing in your memory book.

Let's start with the most seemingly innocuous: "Congratulations, graduate! You did it!"

By Tamara

It is the end of May. Yet, daily, in every period there are three to five students who need a pencil. Or paper. Or both. Or just need to be reintroduced to their binder which has been languishing in their locker. Since January.

This daily inability/disinterest/motivation (I don't know which descriptor to use here, which is the crux of this post) to come to class prepared is less about there being fourteen days of school left than it is about personal responsibility. A reflection really of what this batch of kids expects from life and themselves. I am worried.

Having spent over a decade teaching in Title I schools, students' lack of basic supplies is the norm. So like most title schools we stand in the gap with a heavily discounted student store and many teachers keep extras in their rooms for those kids who really can't access supplies. So there is really no reason other than conscious choice for a student to come to class without basic supplies.

It is that conscious choosing not to bring the materials necessary to actively engage in learning that has me worried. It is not even the typical "I can learn this by osmosis" attitude. The repeat offenders are presenting as uninterested and unconcerned with learning. Now middle school students are not reknowned for great forward thinking or meta-cognition beyond "I think Justin Bieber is really cute/stupid" (though they do often have moments deep thinking and the hardest questions I have ever been asked have come from seventh graders). They do typically get if-then-because kind of logic. The kind that takes poor kids with difficult home lives to skills center, community college, and beyond. These kiddos aren't there. And I don't know that what I am observing can even be called apathy.

It's more a perfect storm of learned helplessness, lack of opportunity, and almost nonexistent value for obtaining knowledge...about anything. I don't believe any of them want to grow up to be stupid. But they certainly don't want to grow up to do anything requiring they come prepared, on time, or with a sense of curiosity. I fear our best intentions have created this storm. These kids KNOW if they hold out long enough we will give them the answer, and the pencil and paper too.

So I am wondering: which acronym in the Ed Reform alphabet soup is going to address accoutability?

By Mark

By nature, I am a pessimistic skeptic. I am a glass-half-empty-because-it-is-cracked-and-leaking kind of person. But, if there's one thing I believe, it is that a person should, no must, be willing to adjust his or her beliefs when faced with new information. 

Thus, though I was a TPEP skeptic at first, as I have learned more, my attitude has shifted.

Thus, though I was a PLC supporter at first, as I have learned more, my attitude has shifted.

I think resistance to a new acronym, doctrine, or mandate is healthy and important. The "new" must be vetted, examined, deconstructed, and challenged in order to become worthy of acceptance. The key there, though, is that if something new can be proved to have merit upon close and level-headed inspection, then it can and should be accepted.

Yet, it is staggering how much energy some people invest into resisting: resisting change, resisting what is new, and even resisting learning that might threaten or contradict their initial knee-jerk and not-fully-informed reaction to the "new."

Case in point: making copies.

By Marge’s Son

In 1966 I started kindergarten. The bus stop was in our front yard, and my mom put me out there with the other kids to wait. “Stand here,” I was told, “and when the bus comes, get on it. When the bus gets to the school, get off and someone will tell you where to go.”

The bus came, but I didn’t get on. Instead, I went back in the house. My mom was there with the rest of my family, and when she saw me I could tell what she was thinking, “This one clearly needs more supervision.”

Which I got. All through school my mom was on top of things. Getting me to bed on time, getting me up on time, making sure my clothes were clean, my lunch was packed and my homework was done correctly. She drove on field trips, stayed home with me when I was sick and baked cupcakes on my birthday. She didn’t do anything huge; she did all the small things that go into raising a child. She did all the stuff that every teacher wants every student’s mom to do.

Twenty years after the failed bus ride I was a very young teacher. I was living at home, trying to save money for my upcoming wedding. My little brother was home from college and we decided to go skiing. It was a Wednesday night and my mom saw me heading out the door.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Me and Steve are going skiing.”

“Steve and I. And isn’t it a school night? Are your lessons planned for tomorrow?”

Always the mom. Always worrying; never fully convinced that I would succeed without supervision. And always right.

Throughout my career I’ve had to measure every parent of every student against the standard set by my parents. Some have come close. They’ve done all the little things. They get their kids to bed on time, get them up on time, make sure their clothes are clean, their lunches are packed and their homework is done correctly. They come on field trips, stay home with their kids when they’re sick and bake cupcakes on their birthday. They do all the small things that go into raising a child. All the stuff that every teacher wants every student’s mom to do.

Twenty years after the ski trip I was up on a stage at a huge convention center in Washington, DC, receiving an award for teaching. As I stood there, I saw my mom in the crowd. She looked relaxed; as if realizing that a lifetime of supervision – of parenting – had finally paid off.

This is for you, Mom. Thanks for everything.  It’s also for the rest of the moms, who make what we do possible.

 

By Travis

Writing did not come easily to me. In junior high, I would watch my friends energetically write, their pencils dancing away, creating works of great literature, or at least semi-coherent pieces that would garner a passing grade. 

Writing eluded me. I knew what writing was and I was an avid reader, but the power to mold words and phrases into something worthy was beyond me. It was akin to magic.

Science and math were my subjects. I tolerated English because I enjoyed reading. Then in my senior year, my American Literature teacher changed my life.

Mr. Blair was a short man, solidly build. The use of "stout" would fit most welcome on his person. He wore casual clothes as he was also a coach in a variety of sports. Golf shirts and jeans. He did not have the appearance of an amazing teacher. I walked into class on the first day and had him figured out: sports guy who loved worksheets and end of chapter questions. I would nail this semester. 

I left that first day both wrong (totally wrong) and happy at being wrong (a unique endeavor in my early adolescence).

By Mark

There will be coffee awaiting me in the main office tomorrow in honor of Teacher Appreciation Week.

Coffee: I used to joke with my students that if any of their papers came back with coffee stains from me, it was a bonus 5 points. That comment comes from a deep memory of receiving back many an assignment in Mrs. Jones's class that had coffee rings on the corners.

On my drive in to work this morning, I got to thinking about Mrs. Jones, from whom I took 9th grade science, chemistry, physics, geometry, Algebra II and Advanced Math Pre-Calc. She was basically half the science department and half the math department in the tiny high school from which I graduated. 

My freshman year, a rather self-important group of us claimed that we were going to get her fired. She simply expected too much of us. It was unreasonable. A few of us had parents on the school board, so we knew it would be a slam dunk.

By Travis

I took my sons to school with me on national Take Your Child to Work day. It humanized me. I have a good rapport with students because I care about them as people outside of my subject area. I know for many students the intricacies of Shakespeare’s language in The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is not what is important for their survival that day. I also know that my class may just be a blip on their day of ups and downs. Given this, I work hard to make their time in my class an “up.”

By Mark

Of my seniors, some may graduate, some may become a statistic.

Of the total FTE in my building, some may have jobs next year, some may be RIF'd.

Of the courses on the master schedule, some classes may be scratched, some may be cobbled together.

I may decide to stay in the classroom. So much depends.

All of these this-or-thats will be decided in May. How appropriate.

By Mark

For several years, my building has been identifying and aligning curriculum to standards--first state standards and now Common Core Standards--with part of this process being the identification of the Power Standards! each unit of instruction is to focus upon.

Simultaneously, we are gearing up for a new teacher evaluation system which figures heavily on a teacher's ability to define what his/her students' learning targets are and assess and document student progress toward those targets.

To an extent, both have been an uneasy fit for me as a high school English teacher. It is not so much in the philosophies underpinning these movements. It is that no one that I talk to seems to understand what I've started calling "The English Problem."

By Tamara

I will be spending this week setting standards for language
proficiency testing to be measured by WELPA (Washington English Language
Proficiency Assessment) A charge that feels dubious in light of this recent
piece. I don’t want to finish the week feeling like a cog in the assessment-for-profit
machine. So why did I even sign up for this role?

Because this year’s WELPA (it’s first role out since switching
from WLPT II) was a nightmare.
Nightmare as defined by questions and tasks that were not developmentally or
linguistically appropriate for age/time in country or in any way connected with
curricula/skills taught in the classroom. It asked kindergarten to identify syntactical
errors in sentences they were required to read independently (which part of
them being in Kindergarten did the writers miss??). It asked sixth grade to
describe science lab procedures. Which could be ok except lab-based science is
not offered until middle school in my district.

A language assessment with no sense of the stages of
language acquisition or what content is covered when is an invalid measure and
a tremendous waste of tax-payer dollars. So I am going because like Travis, I
want to take control of what I can. I would rather be a part of the process,
knowing I got my voice heard, than feel “done to”.

by Travis

My posts as of late have been somber, critical, and perhaps too much on the glass-half-empty side. I am aware that they have been. I knew they would be.

This dark view on our state’s support of our educational system and the future success of our schools is the result of watching education change over the 15 years of my career.

But enough about school. I gave my kitchen a simple remodel during the first week of April.

Days later, as I was preparing a meal in my kitchen, I recognized the metaphor. This kitchen is my outlook on teaching.

By Tom

While leafing through a recent copy of The Stanwood-Camano Crab Cracker, looking for something to do in the greater Stanwood metropolitan area, one event caught my eye:

Ready Reader: Preschool Storytime; 9:30AM or 10:30AM at Stanwood Library. Let imaginations run wild with fun books, sing-along songs, and creative activities that prepare young minds for the adventures of reading. Playtime or craft may follow. Ages 3 to 5 years. Caregiver required.

There it was: the Achievement Gap, in all its ugliness, hiding beneath something as sweet and innocuous as a preschool story hour.  But when you think about it, the implications are clear: if you want your child to get ahead – and stay ahead – then you need to get her down to the Stanwood Library on Wednesday mornings. This is what we tell ourselves.

It's certainly what my wife and I told each other. She interrupted her career for ten years and took our children to every story hour, tune-time and kiddy-exercise class in town. And when nothing was scheduled, she read to them or took them to the zoo. Why? For the same reasons you did all those things: she wanted to give our kids every advantage so that they’d be successful in school and beyond.

We talk a good game in this country, but we really don’t want a level playing field. We’d rather play downhill. We want to get ahead and we want our children to get ahead. We don’t want our children to enter school and then learn how to read, we want them to enter school knowing how to read. And if possible, we’d prefer that they enter a school in which everyone knows how to read. That’s the American way. It’s probably the French way, the Mexican way and the Ukrainian way too, for all I know, but it’s definitely the way we do it here.

So we tell young parents to engage their children in all these learning activities. And we tell them that if they do, it will help their children be successful. We also tell them that if they don’t, their children risk becoming unsuccessful. Later on, of course, those prophecies pan out. The Ready Readers get the best grades, go to the best colleges and grow up to get the best jobs, and the kids whose parents couldn’t read the Crab Cracker, or didn’t know where the Stanwood Library was, or simply didn’t have time off on Wednesday mornings fell behind. Just like we said they would.

By Tamara

I observe my class of seventh graders struggling to complete their persuasive writing assessment. It is quiet enough to hear the ticking of the clock. To an unpracticed eye they are engaged and hard at work. Yet in reality one is more interested in reading student work posted on the wall, another is staring into space (waiting for inspiration or for the clock to run out?). One I caught writing on her ankle. When I said "Really?" her excuse was "I'm not texting!" Me: "No, you're not. You're not writing either."

The assessment was due last Friday. It is now Tuesday. They had three days in class. And the weekend. And last night. We offered a "reward" to the class withthe highest percent of on-time turn ins. They are still not done. Looking for anything to do but write. Sure, they have their topic, their power map (mostly), but they would rather be taking down chairs or rushing to close the door on the noise in the hall. Anything to avoid opening that vein and bleeding onto paper.

Is it frustrating? To no end. But I empathize. I too have been overwhelmed and avoiding writing.

By Mark

I do not envy my colleagues who teach high school math.

In the few years I've been teaching, I've watched the mad dash and scramble to react to the nearly annual changes in statewide math assessment. At this point in our building (as I'm sure is the same in every high school), students are working toward three different sets of graduation requirements related to math credit and assessment requirements. From WASL to HSPE to EOC. If only it were just a name change...

As a language arts teacher, I have witnessed relatively little change in terms of the content and skills demanded of my students in our high school statewide assessment. Our HSPE is essentially the WASL. I still feel that the test assesses the basic skills that ought to be expected for a student to earn a diploma that has any value.

I've tried to stay informed about the current state of assessment in Washington, but as it is an ever-moving target--with many moving parts--it is easy to miss something. And I missed something that I think is rather significant. I feel kinda dumb for having missed it. I'm sure somewhere along the line it was announced in a staff meeting or mentioned in an email, but the fact is, I missed it.

By Mark

Though I do not believe that uniform curriculum standards will actually cure any ills in education, and though I do not believe that the Common Core standards for the language arts are really clear or specific enough to even do the job a standard should, I do not oppose the idea of being able to connect my daily instruction to specific learning goals and, yes, broader context standards such as the Common Core.

I teach high school language arts. In my 9th grade class, the first day back from Spring Break, I passed back grades and feedback on my students' recent essays (they did very well!) and we worked through a reflection/goal-setting activity to ready them for the coming long-haul of five-day-weeks with no holiday weekends or days off. 

The lesson went well. The kids strategized how to "keep the wheels from falling off," and I shared with them the story of my personal "gremlin" which followed me around in high school and messed up all my science experiments. My gremlin--rushing through tasks rather than reading directions--was the cause of many academic stumbles. I had the kids identify their own gremlins and reflect how to avoid pitfalls of student-hood as the sun is coming out. We strategized how to avoid the kind of saboteur-gremlins that start to multiply this time of year.

So why did I start this post with talk of standards? It has to do with a hallway conversation that followed this gremlin lesson.

By Tom

A few years ago I was giving my third graders their annual standardized test. This was the reading assessment, and Rachel had her hand up. I asked her what she needed. She wanted to know what a “selection” was. She was stuck on a question that asked her to pick the correct main idea for the “selection” she had just read. Now, you and I know that “selection” is the generic term for any form of text, whether it’s a poem, an essay, an article or a story. But when you’re in third grade, the generic term is “story.” Rachel was a good reader, and if I had told her that the question was asking her to pick the main idea of the “story,” she would have been just fine. The question was clearly directed at her ability to find the main idea, not her understanding of the term ”selection.” Nevertheless, I wasn’t supposed to explain it to her.

I was conflicted. Should I define the word, thus enabling the test to actually measure what it was designed to measure and enable Rachel to demonstrate a skill that she actually had? Or should follow the letter of the law and do what I was told to do during the 20-minute Proctoring Workshop that we all had to attend?

What would you have done?

By Tamara

Here is your three part challenge should you choose to accept it: 1.) Demonstrate your proficiency as a teacher measured in part by MSP/HSPE scores, 2.) Mentor a student teacher so they may start their career at a point of proficiency, 3.) Remember those tests? MSP and HSPE? Make sure your students pass them.

In light of a new position I recently started and conversations about whose class to place my own child in next year, I have been ruminating about the three way raw deal this “mission impossible” presents. How should we shepherd new entrants into the profession given the current climate of high stakes testing and teacher evaluation tied to said tests? No matter how knowledgeable of content and pedagogy, no matter how energetic and committed, a student teacher by definition presents inconsistency in instruction. In spite of the fact we have all been there, in spite of the fact no one can step into teaching with any hope of success without at least minimal “in front of the class” experience, how many of us are going to continue to be willing to take on student teachers? Especially in the spring, when our names, our evaluations, our jobs are tied to a test someone else is preparing our students for? And what about those fresh faces who bring talent, energy, and optimism? How are they to get the experience they need to become successful teachers? Then there are the students. Kids need consistency and firm boundaries on multiple levels to feel secure enough to take the intellectual risks required for growth. The first grade classroom I am considering for my son will transition between the master teacher (fabulous known commodity) and at least two student teachers (who will likely be great). Dynamic? Yes. Consistent? In fits and starts. Is that set up really in students’ best interests?

By Rob

Sometime ago the teachers in my district decided to extend our school day four days a week so it could be shortened on Wednesday. 

This was a benefit to teachers. Wednesday was a day for collaboration and planning.  My team of second grade teachers had a standing meeting on Wednesdays.  We planned curriculum, and designated responsibilities.  We consulted our ESL teacher and literacy facilitator. We graded collaboratively.  We learned from sharing successes and failings.

By Travis

Education is a fascinating field in which to work. In addition to the joy and interest that students bring with them each period, I find our educational system fascinating. This system can be observed, and analyzed, as if it were an animal, a personality, and in many cases, a machine.

Suzy is a teacher. This is not her real name. In fact, it may not be the correct gender. However, for this tale, I will use Suzy. It is the name I use with all of my writing that I do with my students. Suzy is not the name, but the person is real.

Suzy is a teacher who works in a large school within a large school district. Recently Suzy learned something about how the education system works, or more to the point … Suzy was taught something that I find appalling.

By Mark

Everyone has probably heard about, or actually read, the New York Times website article that discussed the supposed downward spiral of teacher morale. It highlighted how teachers working in struggling schools had the lowest morale, and the teachers with greater satisfaction tended to have "more opportunities for professional development, more time to prepare their lessons and greater parental involvement in their schools."

Travis recently shared his one cent about how morale can easily crumble in our present atmosphere. Tamara shared some thought provoking questions, too. And Tom found himself indigo and then entered stage five.  

In my meetings and phone calls and emails and faxes (yep, faxes) with legislators the last few weeks, I've found myself repeating the phrase that I feel like I have "a target on my back and the blame for all society's ills on my shoulders." In quiet moments in the car or after my kids are in bed, I too have thought about what other jobs I could apply for.

But the next day, I walk into my classroom, close the door on it all, turn to face them and breathe a sigh of relief.