Redemption

Anyone who has kids knows that it's a losing battle when a kid won't do something because they're convinced you hate them. I've tried my best to make sure my students know that I care about each of them and that I do my absolute best to grade fairly. When I slip, it's always in the kid's favor, and I also make sure they know that I don't get any joy when they get a bad grade.

When urban kids get into that funk, it's even worse. They won't keep quiet long enough to even look at their grades, and they're so self-important that they don't see any way they could be at fault.

Tykima came to class the day after she got her report card (with an F in my class), threw her book on the floor, and said "I ain't doing no work in this fucking class cuz you don't grade fair!"

"Tykima, I think I did grade fairly. You missed a quarter of your homework, slept almost every day in class, and and did less than half of your daily writing."

I knew it wouldn't change her mind, but I had to say it anyway. Tykima stormed out of class. A few minutes later the kids were talking about grades again and one of the students who barely passed said it for me: "If you do your work you get a decent grade." There was a little relief knowing that at least a few of them got it.

And I gotta hand it to the dean on this one. I talked to her about Tykima to see if she knew anything about the kid and how to handle it, and an f-bomb and walking out of class has to be written up. The dean and I agreed to bring the kid down to talk, and she did a great job of being an intermediary and helped to keep the kid in class. And she backed me up 100%.

The really great thing was that I didn't have to fight with the kid like it was a battle. I don't think you can win those sort of battles anyway, no matter how right or how compassionate you are. I forget this all the time, so I guess this was my reminder.

Holy Christ, I could be screwed

My principal is coming to do a formal evaluation in the morning, and I've got laryngitis so bad I can barely talk. No way in hell am I going to be able to keep all these kids on track with verbal commands.

I don't dare call in sick. If you were the boss and one of your employees called in sick on the day of an observation, what would you think? If I'm lucky, she'll take mercy on me. Maybe.

I've got about 90% of the necessary work done, and here I am writing in my blog at 12:15 AM. How smart could I possibly be? I'm screwed.

I love experts

"Experts," that is. Quotation marks are important.

One of the experts hired by the district to help make us better teachers loves differentiated instruction. It's a cool concept. It's also one I don't know a lot about, but here's what I do know: Typically, you have several "centers," each with different tasks, and the students go to the different centers to do the tasks they think they can accomplish best. The teacher is supposed to construct these centers so they focus on different skills, slightly different content, etc. so that each student has a successful learning experience. I like the idea a little bit, but this means that there are about 3-4 different lessons needed for each class, each day. And to be totally honest, I am barely keeping my head above water coming up with the 1-2 activities each day I have been doing. Maybe it will work better next year when I'm familiar with the books, but for right now I'm managing to keep a chapter ahead of the students, if that.

Here's the other thing: differentiated instruction requires students to be motivated to learn and get work done on their own, because with 3-4 different activities happening simultaneously the teacher can't be there each minute to walk them through it. Most of my students do not have this sort of motivation, and they drag the motivated ones along with them.

The expert also says that students hate to write so I shouldn't make them do it, and the minute I make them write I lose them. (This is English class...) She said the same thing about reading.

Let's recap. I teach English. The expert says don't make them read or write, but give them extra opportunity to create unsupervised chaos. Does the math add up here? Does anyone know how this promotes literacy?

Here's the thing, some of my worst kids have actually told me that they like the daily writing. They miss it when we skip a day. A couple of them are barely literate and can hardly string three words together, but they like writing. And the freshmen loved when I gave them free time in class to read. Best class we had all year. Almost all of them actually read.

Is it clear to you guys why I'm a little confused sometimes?

Vote with your dreams

I really don't want to use my blog as an opportunity to ridicule my employer because, for the most part, they're pretty good. But a few weeks ago we found out something new and I felt it was important to get this out in the open.

For those of you who haven't been keeping score, Schenectady City School District has gotten failing scores on audits related to the No Child Left Behind act for a couple of years running, so this year we're under the gun. All sorts of program changes and audits are happening. (Part of this process is a 60-minute survey that I will need to take, but before I can take the survey I need 45 minutes of training on it.) The district needs to show that they are improving the education we give our kids, and we need to do it ASAP or something bad happens. I can't keep track of all of it, honestly, but I suspect we'll lose money and have more nosey feds hanging around.

How do you show that things have improved? You improve test scores. How do you improve test scores immediately? Stop teaching anything that isn't directly related to the tests.

Word is that the 8th grade English Language Arts tests do not test any skill that would necessarily be learned by reading a novel-length book, so starting this year, we are no longer requiring middle school students to read novels. The focus is on short stories instead. The school still owns novels so a teacher could still choose to teach them, I suppose.

So it's not entirely unlikely that in a few years my freshmen will come to high school without ever having read an entire book. Some literacy program, huh?

This is the bullshit that happens when you vote with your fears, folks. Too late to remind you this year, but keep that in mind on election day. Vote with your dreams and hope your representatives find ways to acheive them. Don't vote with your fears, because your fears will probably come true.