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."
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?