One of my students came up to me yesterday in a purple, argyle-patterned sweater vest over a gray-woolen sweater. He was dressed for the Valentine’s Dance and he was considerably more dressed up than most. I could tell he was unsure about the new look.

“Do I look good, teacher?” he asked. His chubby, round face was hopeful, but apprehensive. He’s still waiting for the growth spurt that will come in the next few years. Some parent had definitely picked that argyle sweater combination.

“You look great!” I said and gave him a big grin. He grinned back.

I love to give positive reinforcement to the slightly unsteady and unsure students who wander the halls of my school.

The state of Illinois requires that all schools use the Charlotte Danielson rubric for teacher evaluation. That’s what administrators have told me anyway. Other states and districts are using this rubric as well. Without going into tedious detail, I want to note one problem with the rubric. The rubric is set up so that an evaluator must fill in pages of information, the good, the bad, and the hopefully little or no ugly. But if you create a box for things that need to be fixed, people will find something that needs to be fixed, especially since these evaluators are often watching more than 30 kids. If you stick a nail up in the (d)evaluation instrument, administrators will naturally grab for hammers. Since any student’s off-task or otherwise unfortunate behavior is a nail to be pounded down, the boxes will always have little dings: “Three students in back did not finish the work before the teacher went on to the next activity,” for example, or “two girls on the side were talking while the teacher demonstrated plotting points,” or “the teacher used few critical thinking questions.” (How many critical thinking questions are there about plotting points? Actually, there are a number, but how many should be stuck into one lesson about plotting points?)

The problem is not with the criticisms per se. We should all be trying to improve as instructors. The problem is that the structure of this rubric almost mandates that a fair number of suggestions for improvement are included along with observations of what went right in the lesson — whether the lesson overall went well, not-so-well, or badly. Given that some administrators will include as many suggestions for improvement as they can in order to document that they are doing their job of improving instructor performance, the final Danielson rubric may be filled with myriad tiny, little criticisms, even if the net product is a “favorable” review.

Eduhonesty: Teachers receive few pats on the back during the school year. Especially in poor and urban schools, principals are too busy to just wander into classrooms. Sometimes, contracts prevent this random entrance into classrooms. Teachers work alone. In a given year, teachers may get more praise for teaching from clerks at Target as they buy yet another set of markers and art supplies than they do from their school administration. Historically, the teacher reviews were the time when the pats-on-the-back came through. “Great job, Ms. Jones. I like the way you presented the genes and those marshmallows with the little eyeballs really got the idea across. I can tell your students know their … (fill in topic here.)”

Now those compliments are diluted. “Great job, Ms. Jones. I like the way you presented the genes and those marshmallows with the little eyeballs really got the idea across. Did you notice that two students at the back ate their marshmallows though? One of them put glue on his partner, too. You may need to create a system to manage the marshmallows better. If you could find eyeballs that had peel-off backs, that might solve your glue problem.” (And cost you another three dollars, since the only supply the school offers is glue. In a poor district, the school probably will not buy your eyeballs or marshmallows — even if you had time to wait for a purchase order to make it through channels.)

The administrator continues: “I think you might need another color of eyeball too in order to make this activity authentic. What about blue eyes? Overall, the activity did seem to cover the material well, though, and I can tell your students understand the main idea of the lesson. However, you only used a couple of critical thinking questions. Just having them identify how the genes behave is not enough. With the Common Core coming, we need to make certain that our students regularly respond to challenging, critical thinking questions. For example, you might ask “What are you attempting to accomplish with your marshmallows? What data and what experiences contribute to understanding how you put together your marshmallows? What evidence can you supply to prove that your marshmallow creature follows the laws of genetics in the chapter?” Etc. Etc. Etc.

In the end, that last review may be perfectly positive when the rubric is numbered and scored. Administration may even consider the final result a good review showing that the teacher is at least proficient. There’s a real chance, though, that the teacher feels like crap. As he or she reads her review, there appear to be so many things that could or should have been better, so many opportunities missed. He or she also may feel a tremendous sense of injustice since teachers are now being held responsible for the behavior of all their students. If Zeke could not stay awake because he played video games all night for the third night in a row, a remark like, “teacher failed to wake up student in the front row,” especially if said teacher tried four or five times to wake Zeke up, inspires a sense of anger or even rage. Short of throwing a bucket of ice water on Zeke, most likely nothing but a fire drill could have kept that boy’s head up.

What the teacher lost under the new review system was that “Well done!” that used to come at least a few times a year. “Very good lesson” is NOT the same thing as “Very good lesson except for this, that and these other things.” The difference can be huge, as well as extremely demoralizing. So many teachers work nights, week-ends and vacations. An uncluttered, uncomplicated, “Great job!” with a few targeted suggestions for future improvement helps justify all of this mostly unrecognized labor. Sometimes now, that “Great job!” may never be heard, lost in the flotsam of all the negatives the rubric is designed to document in order to “improve” instruction.

I am 100% in favor of efforts to improve instruction. But writing down every teeny sub-optimal detail helps no one. “You need to pick up the pace on your opener” is a valid criticism, as is “Teacher did not seek student input on the effect of volcanoes.” There are many valid criticisms that correctly fit in a review. But when we start brainstorming critical thinking questions about marshmallow deployment, we have gone too far. The new Danielson rubric results in a plethora of tiny nails pounded into a review that become nitpicking at its worst. Especially in the case of new teachers, I could see where a few of these reviews would result in a person saying, “I obviously can’t seem to teach, so I guess I’ll go back to school.” Or accounting. Or any other job where the-now-former-teacher might expect to feel less like a failure.

We are a poor district. The large majority of our students get free breakfast and lunch. So I never see that Starbucks card gift that teachers seem to get in other districts. (There isn’t even a Starbucks nearby!) But I am very grateful for my Russell Stover chocolates, my many hugs, my chocolate heart, and especially one hand-written note, evidence that a student had taken time for me in carefully penciled letters on a slightly-ripped piece of lined paper. We had a fun day yesterday despite the fact that I insisted on continuing instruction instead of showing movies.

Government paperwork sucked up most the day. Bureaucratic surprise visits did not help.

Eduhonesty: I’m feeling a bit desperate tonight. Will some independent authority please do a time study on the number of minutes devoted to testing as opposed to teaching and learning? I am too busy to do that study. But the amount of time spent on testing, documenting testing techniques, documenting the documentation on testing techniques, inventorying materials and filling in random bubbles the barcode label could not include — all that time could be spent on instruction and preparing instruction. My instruction could be much more fun and informative if not for the testing hours from this week and the week before. I am afraid the “diminished-instruction” effect on daily lessons does not hit the radar often, though, since I always have instruction prepared. It’s like making soup. I can always whip soup together, but there’s the boring chicken noodle and the luscious lamb stew. Too much testing leads to canned chicken broth filled with mushy noodles and frozen vegetables. Technique disappears because technique takes time and time has become the missing element, stolen by test prep.

In concrete terms: I worked 12 hours yesterday, taking 10 minutes for lunch, and 20 minutes at some Panera on the way home for dinner, at least half of my day’s labors on paperwork not directly related to instruction. I cut meals for the last two days (The scale made me happy this morning!) I am losing my alleged planning period to more of the same mandated testing today. When I got home last night, I was too tired to grade or tweak instruction so today’s lesson will be a little less interesting and papers are piling up for the weekend. A special education coworker worked until midnight the day before yesterday, mostly to get done with her the individualized instruction plans required by the government. Now if she could just get some time to actually implement the plans… The scary thing is that I know this woman. She will probably regularly walk out of that school at an unsafe hour because she WILL prepare that instruction. Like many others, though, she is planning to change careers as soon as she can practicably put her departure plan together.

“Boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers.”

~ Erich Fromm

I almost blew past this quote without reflection. Then I stopped. Am I bored? I am more bored than I used to be as I teach a prescribed curriculum with little room for detours, determined by some faceless administrator above me or perhaps the faceless administrator who sold us the latest student improvement program. Are my students bored? More bored than they would be if I could step off the curricular train to pursue areas of interest that do not directly impact test scores.

What am I producing? Mostly, coherent explanations of somebody else’s not-always-terribly-coherent material. What are my students producing? In too many cases, as little as they can get away with, depending on the nature of the material. When the whole school is forced to read a story about a kid who does not resemble my students and who is trapped in a situation that few, if any, of my students can relate to, engendering enthusiasm for the reading mission may be beyond my natural powers of cheeriness, even with audiovisual aids and the cleverest differentiation and scaffolding.

Eduhonesty: The American testing regime has upped the boredom quotient in our schools considerably. I expect American society will encounter the fallout from this ennui and lack of productivity soon. Teachers are observing the growing detachment of their students and regularly comment on this lack of intrinsic interest in learning.

“Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”

~ Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Eduhonesty: If I want to keep my job, I can’t exactly follow Mark’s advice. I am likely to lose my job if I fail the number of students who deserve to be failed. So I won’t. I like my job. But some of these kids would be better off if I did not offer them so many chances to recover their grades. What I am teaching them will not help them when they actually go out and get a real job. Schools give fourth or fifth or twentieth chances. Bosses don’t.

When I was in kindergarten, they taught me my right from my left. We were always facing what I then thought was West (It was actually South. My guess is my teacher had been a bit confused herself when teaching directions). For years afterwards, I had to face West in order to figure out where “right” was because I wasn’t entirely sure if “right” was the same while facing other directions. I did not want to ask for fear of appearing stupid. I would just turn to face the appropriate direction. I had a pretty good intuitive sense of the compass which would later help me while driving. I think I was inadvertently teaching myself to orient myself in space, all in search of this mysterious thing, “right” and its equally odd counterpart, “left.”

A few simple questions would have made my life so much easier, but as I got older it seemed impossible to ask those questions. I could not handle the possible humiliation.

Eduhonesty: I’m betting lots of kids in my room have those questions stocked up but are too afraid to ask. I hope at some point they’ll trust me enough to let me make their lives easier. Pride is a powerful force, though, and it messes up many of us.

Middle school girls often start the year academically ready and eager for the year. Then the hormonal balance goes haywire. Suddenly they start to drift. They are not looking at me anymore. There eyes are focused on some skinny kid across the classroom. They giggle a lot. Sometimes the boy looks back at them. They giggle more. Their brains have gone tharn or thither and attempts to get them back capture their attention only for the briefest moments.

Eduhonesty: Our boys and girls would do better in single-sex middle schools. There are days when I am tempted to hang a sheet across the room. I am 100% certain that “Catrina” would do better if the possible objects of her affection were behind a dark, king-sized curtain.