Thursday, April 26, 2007

All is not lost

In spite of my frustrating first year, there is a lot of positive stuff happening as I plan for the future.

First, my students started a petition to bring me back. It won't get anywhere, but it's really touching that I have students who care enough to do something like this. Unfortunately, only high regents scores could save my job, and even these guys admit that probably won't happen.

It helps that I'm not being fired. This is simply a one year contract that's expiring.

A friend is completing her first year at a small school that she loves, and she's put in a good word for me with the superintendent. She said that he's excited to hear from me, so that's a good, solid lead. It's a long commute, but it's rare to hear a teacher who actually loves their district and the administration, so a commute would be a small sacrifice. And it may help me that they have no male English teachers there now.

I also found that I have 4 people--including a principal--who want to write letters of recommendation for me. That will say a lot to other districts as I apply for new jobs.

So all is not lost. I have a solid resume, solid references, and a solid year of experience behind me. I'm not too worried about the future right now.

I'm gonna miss this place

This is something I've been keeping to myself for the last 4 months. Schenectady City School District has elected not to invite me back for another year.

The whole review process this year has been very frustrating for me. It seems that no one is willing to tell me what their expectations were until after they thought I wasn't meeting them, and by then it was too late.

I don't want to go into too many details, mostly because I don't know if I can describe most of it without sounding like a disgruntled employee trying to lay blame elsewhere. I certainly made my share of mistakes, though I honestly don't think any of them are much worse than rookie mistakes to be expected of a first year teacher, and I don't think that any of them are things that the district couldn't reasonably expect for me to better next year.

There are a few things about the review process that really bother me, though. The biggest is that my coordinator never said anything that would indicate that she was unsatisfied with my progress until she made the final report. Her final report also included a few things that were factually incorrect, things that she wouldn't have a way of knowing even if they were. The most frustrating thing about this is that these were items that she and I talked about. She wrote them in her draft of my interim review but removed them from submitting the final draft to the district. Somehow they reappeared in the year-end evaluation.

The final bomb, though, was a statement by my principal. "Eric has not shown the level of dedication that we expected for his job." The reason this bothers me so much is that it would be hard to show any more dedication to my job. I'm after school with students nearly every day, I've given up almost all of my personal life to survive this first year, I support a bunch of student activities, I make calls to parents more often than 90% of the teachers in the school, and by the time the report was made I hadn't taken a single sick day.

So I asked the principal how she determined that I wasn't dedicated enough, and she said that she wasn't satisfied with my planning.

I will admit that I have a long way to go with my unit planning skills. I even asked my principal if she knew of any other teachers who had plan books that she liked that I could use for a model. She named a few teachers, so I went to them and asked, and every one of them told me "I haven't done those since grad school." When I told this to the principal, she simply said "That's because they're at a higher level than you."

So it's evident that the principal just doesn't like me, and no matter what I do I just won't be able to please her. There's some speculation that she didn't like the fact that they only interviewed male teachers last year, and she might have decided not to like me before I even came into the building. Who knows. None of that's really important, the bottom line is that I'm not coming back.

It's frustrating, for sure. And to be totally honest, I'm a little disappointed in myself. A district like mine is some of the toughest teaching there is, and I took more than a little bit of pride in being able to do it. Though there were a lot of days I didn't want to get up and go to school, I found the strength to do it anyway, knowing that the work I was doing is important and that there were kids there who valued my presence.

I'm gonna miss this place.

Monday, April 23, 2007

The test

Luis is a likable kid. A big, lovable hispanic teddy bear. He likes to please and is fast with a smile. He's also very sociable, and since academic work is a struggle for him he gets distracted quite easily.

Thanks to the work of his regents prep teacher, he passed the English regents test with a 70. That's a pretty good score around here, so you'd think he has pretty decent language skills.

That is, until you saw the quiz he took for me last week. All he had to do was find an example of a simile, a metaphor, charicterization, setting, and conflict in the play we've been reading. He was allowed to use his book and his notes, but still only managed to provide an example of a simile. Folks, there's a page in the book labeled Setting! The setting is described in every scene, as is a brief characterization of each character. We talked about the similies and metaphors in class. This the sort of quiz that a student with the most basic skills should be able to pass easily, but he bombed it.

This is why teaching to the test gives a false impression of student success. The kid gets a 70 on a state test but barely shows competency in class. The prep teacher has developed a great system of teaching directly to the test and makes each task very formulaic. She just doesn't give them any language skills.

She's not the only teacher doing this. In fact, most teachers teach directly to the standardized tests, just because they want to get their tst scores up.

So what is the value of the test? Everyone--and I do mean every one--knows that most teachers teach to the test instead of teaching the critical thinking skills that students will need to be successful on any test. Anyone who denies this is lying.

As far as I'm concerned, the test is just about worthless. It doesn't measure competency, it doesn't accurately measure how students in one school compare to students in another school, and it eats up huge chunks of instructional time. We spend 10 days each school year just giving these tests, and about 1/4 of the rest of the year trying to prepare for them. That's too much time wasted.

Here's the one thing that tests do well: Tests provide an easy metric for politicians to use to support whatever agenda they have concerning education. That's it.

Saturday, April 21, 2007

Old school

Gary skipped class for 3 days straight and was 10 minutes late when he finally came.

And then he made a call from his cell phone. In class.

"It was business Mr. G."

"I don't care if it was the Pope, the President, and your mother on a conference call. You do not use your phone in class."

He hasn't done it since.

Friday, April 13, 2007

Breakdown II

Shalonda was having a tough time getting to work on her paper. She surpised me when she chose Miles Davis as her topic, and I was excited because I knew I could help her make the link to 60s rock & soul, and from there to hip hop. I dig Miles and was excited that some of the other kids would get some exposure too.

It's not unusual for her to have a hard time getting started. She's not a good student and is very social, so when faced with something hard she starts goofing off. After a couple of minutes she just put her head down.

I went to talk to her to help her get started, and she just said "I can't concentrate today, I've got bad problems." After another minute or two of talking those tell-tale tears snuck by her defenses, and pretty soon she and I were out in the hall while she unloaded.

She's pregnant. Again. She had a miscarriage 6 or 8 weeks before. This time her biggest worry was that her dad was going to kill her because she promised it wouldn't happen again. Like most kids, she was convinced that her life was over and she had to drop out of school, and I kept telling her about all the programs we have to help her stay in school. She wanted to keep the baby, the daddy didn't want anything to do with it, her dad was pissed at her, and she doesn't talk to her mom. She's in a tough spot.

She didn't know that there are programs that guarantee her money for college, AND an apartment, AND acceptance to a pretty good college (I can't remember which one) if she just graduates high school and stays in the program.

For a little while, we had a breakthrough. I was able to convince her that every decision she makes has to be about the baby and how she can best take care of it, including graduating high school so she can get a better job, and maybe go on to college.

And it worked. She sat down and got right to work. She needed a lot of help, but for the next two days she seemed motivated to succeed.

Fast forward four days: She came in after a long weekend and blindsided me with a great big hug, saying "Mr. G., I'm not pregnant!" She started bleeding over the weekend and thought she was having another miscarriage so she went to the ER. Turns out that her period was three weeks late, but that she wasn't pregnant.

Crisis avoided, and now she's back to her usual nonsense. She has done almost no work and earned an F for 3rd quarter, and I'm pretty sure she won't pass for the year.