I teach bilingual classes in Illinois. Without going into the many subtexts implied by that statement, I will make one important observation. Bilingual programs in Illinois can be a lot like roach motels; students go in and they don’t come out. They keep raising the exit test scored required to get out, too. Many of these students have been with the same relatively small group of students for years. Some students have even been known to deliberately fail the test in order to stay in the program with their friends.

Tonight I am trying to make seating charts, a surprisingly complicated endeavor. I want to separate friends, but my classes contain many friends and few strangers. If I choose a nonfriend seating partner for a student, I risk that student being bullied or at least insulted by the seat partner. I can’t use the unattractive fat boy as a block in many spaces because some girl will then surely make him feel like an unattractive fat boy. He’s better off in the place he chose for himself. But some of these girls absolutely must be separated. Some friends can stay together; they listen, do the work and help each other. Others distract each other constantly; these girls are going to fight the new chart.

In another class, I need to separate a group of boys. I could use a few cones of silence to deploy strategically over a few desks. Members of this group talk to themselves when no one else is available.

Eduhonesty: Planning a diplomatic dinner at the U.N. no doubt resembles my night’s most important task. A vital computer program has been down for a few days so I have a lot of catching up to do in general. Seating charts will come first. Then parent calls. Then setting up grade programs. All my planning periods of the week have pretty much been sucked up by required meetings. Meetings are scheduled for every planning period with extra meetings being planned outside my planning period since we have no time for meetings during our planning periods due to our many meetings. If that doesn’t seem to make sense, well, I think it captures the sense of my life. As far as I am concerned, I have no planning periods. They can’t fool me. If it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck, even if you call it a pomegranate, and a planning period is not a planning period if you can never use it for planning.

Postcript: The charts are done and parents called. The grades remain untouched since the program has changed. I don’t know what to do. Instruction has been lightly touched upon. I am ready for the day’s openers. It’s 6:00 AM and I have a lot to do fast.

The kids are great. A few feisty boys will take a little management. The heat has left me nearly limp, though.

In the meantime, my mail includes a message that asks me to a 7 AM meeting and says please bring certain materials from last week. In 5 days of professional development, how many sheets of material do they pass out? Small forests died for our development. I wonder where those desired materials are. Sigh. The search begins.

The confusion continues.

I just spotted an article about Robin Williams that suggested a Parkinson’s drug led to his suicide. One of the listed side effects for the drug is apparently suicide. My first thought was that doctors have been far too cavalier about prescribing many of their new miracle treatments. I’ve taken those drugs, the ones where the side effect proved worse than the original condition. I’d rather have a migraine than find myself lost in a closet with no memory how I got there. Doctors in pursuit of a cure frequently ignore side effects, prescribing with little or no discussion. Maybe they think the pharmacist will fill in the holes.

Eduhonesty: It occurred to me that I am describing an excellent analogy for education today. Educational administrators prescribe fixes for problems without regard to side effects and almost without discussion. They decide to make grades based 98% on tests, for example, ignoring the effect on motivation where daily work is concerned. They go to an all-year school year (which I like), sometimes without adequately providing for the childcare problem they are creating. Often I think they expect the teachers and parents to fill the holes. News flash: Teachers and parents frequently can’t motivate a child to do homework that “does not count” in the child’s eyes. Sometimes parents don’t have the funds for the nonexistent childcare.

Too many “solutions” lead to people scrambling to solve the problems created by the solutions.

Robin William’s death is tragic. We can’t know his story, but the world has become a darker place. I hope no one takes offense at this post; I recognize I have used the saddest of events as a springboard.

We are all to teach the same lessons at the same time. We will have constant meetings to coordinate this. I will be inundated with meetings since I am what we call cross-categorical: I teach more than one subject. Almost all assessment will be based on tests. Daily work and homework only count at the margins now. Tests can be retaken, so we will constantly be sending students for mandatory tutoring and test retakes. Very limited adaptations are expected to be allowed for special education and bilingual students. All students are expected to be with the program.

Temperatures are expected to be in the eighties next week. I don’t know if they will let me take students outside in those temperatures — the classroom runs hotter than outside — and I don’t intend to ask. My plan is to take them outside until they tell me I cannot. The whining will be fierce regardless.

Eduhonesty: I plan to purchase Dragon software. If this blog continues, I will need a way to get thoughts down fast as I work my way through the swamp.

I regard the new regime as a fascinating experiment. What we were doing did not work. Will this work? I can come up with all kinds of doubts about the new plan but, in the end, we can’t keep running a failing school the way we ran it before.

So let’s give this a try. Reports to follow.

If the heat doesn’t kill me first.

It’s a scary time to teach now. We do not necessarily mentor our newbies despite the wealth of research suggesting that teachers underperform during their first two years, pulling classroom management together in year three. Another irony: Financially comfortable districts often have excellent mentoring programs. Poorer districts may lack the time and resources to provide similar programs despite their greater need for such programs.

In these less-affluent districts especially, new teachers and many established teachers end up on the chopping block when administrators get desperate to show they are doing their job. Scores too low? If all else fails, culling staff members can be one way to show an attempt to fix the numbers. Tenure and unions provide some protection in many locations, leaving new teachers as the easiest targets. More and more, established professionals may also be targets as union protections are gutted or eliminated.

Eduhonesty: I believe dedicated professionals can become sacrifices in an attempt to show Boards and other outsiders that a district is intent on raising scores by improving its staff. I’ll be the first to admit some teachers should lose their positions. I’ve known a few who did little work, a few who clearly no longer cared about their students. But I’ve also known a second year teacher who was working so hard it hurt my heart to see her lose her position. She would have been good eventually, possibly excellent.

Once, I was that first year teacher hanging from a branch by the tips of my claws and it’s lucky I survived. That year, I felt a lot like a cat who’d climbed a tree and was too scared to come down. A lot of us have hung from that tree. I’ve watched fast decisions made on the basis of little data by people making snap judgments, sometimes to show how tough they are.

One advantage to surviving awhile in this profession is that people come to know you. At that point, if a kid lies about you, your credibility holds up. I’ve seen lies drive people out of their positions, though. During my first year teaching, I had a student lie about a fight in my classroom. My supervisor was in my corner, but even he did not believe me. Instead, he tried to coach me in a more plausible story than the actual truth.

Kids lie. Kids may act out in evaluations, sometimes just for fun. They don’t exactly know what’s at stake, but they know they can make their teacher miserable. I believe that’s what happened to that second-year teacher. For that matter, kids will behave unusually well in evaluations for teachers they like. Likability can skew evaluations in both directions. Administrators get trapped, mired in scenarios where they have to prove their ruthless pursuit of higher point values. New score-improvement programs supplant or take precedence over mentoring programs. I won’t even start on the Charlotte Danielson rubric, a method for evaluating teachers by total points that can be particularly harsh for new teachers who are still developing their craft. Or older teachers who are not getting along with their supervisors.

Maybe I will start on Danielson, who composed a rubric assigning numbers 1- 4 to a wide variety of teaching tasks, 1 being unsatisfactory and 4 excellent. I won’t go into great detail, but a short snippet here illustrates one reason why teaching is becoming scarier of late:

Fuzzy numbers pose a general problem in the social sciences. Today I saw a perfect case in point. As part of professional development, an auditorium of teachers, principals, social workers and other educational professionals watched videos of teaching performances and then judged those performances using the Danielson Rubric. For one video, about 1/3 of the room gave the performance a “1,” while most of the room gave the performance a “2” and a few mavericks picked “3.” It’s easy to debate between “2” and “3” or between “3” and “4” since mediocrity and excellence are to a great extent in the eye of the beholder. Classroom conditions were noted in discussions among observers. I guarantee that I have much greater odds of getting a 4 in a classroom of twenty kids as opposed to a classroom of 35 kids. My odds go up depending on what I’m teaching, too. Art will be better than geometry, for example, since student enthusiasm figures heavily in Danielson’s rubric. My odds go up if I am teaching college-bound juniors as opposed to freshmen, especially in a high school with a high drop-out rate. Many factors affect those numbers which have little to do with my actual instruction, and not even an auditorium of people in education can nail down what the “true” number ought to be. How much your supervisor likes you can easily make the difference between a three and four, and the final average of that rubric may be heavily influenced by all those numbers that round up or down.

Social science numbers aren’t like sales totals. Sales totals are hard data. Danielson numbers are fuzzy numbers, numbers that are nonetheless being used to make hiring and firing decisions.

It’s a bit of a mess out here, that’s all I can say. I’d like to suggest a few fixes. First, we need to adapt the scoring rubric for new teachers. I’d eliminate point scores entirely for first year teachers and substitute intensive mentoring instead. Second, I’d like to let teachers pick their evaluator(s) from a list of in-district or in-school candidates. This could be a short list, but allowing a few options can help prevent unfair evaluations. When administrators are known to be tough “graders,” getting evaluated by these administrators becomes akin to drawing the short straw.

I’d also like to scrap the Danielson Rubric. That rubric might as well be a “cuteness” scale. We can assign numbers to cuteness. We might even have an overall general consensus with most people thinking Sandra Bullock is an eight or nine and Tommy Lee Jones is a four or five. In the end, though, these numbers are too vague to be used to make decisions. One woman’s five could be another woman’s eight.

When 1/3 of an assembly picks one number — a number labeled unsatisfactory — and 2/3s pick a number considered basic competence, then the rubric they are using ought to be discarded.

I went to The Learning Store to buy school supplies. I needed borders for my bulletin boards and a few other start-up items. The Learning Store stocks many designs, colors and styles of borders, some shiny, some not. I’ve taught long enough to know what I need to look for: Borders that set off my boards without tempting students to add details to their art. Designs in black are a great choice.

That line snaked all the way to the door. Maybe a few of those teachers were going to be reimbursed, but I’m sure the majority were pulling out their wallets and spending their own money on manipulatives, popsicle sticks, posters, art supplies, and borders. I’m lucky because I have most of what I need; I am giving away posters rather than buying them. We teachers buy what we can at Walmart and other less expensive sites, but The Learning Store helps at the start of the year.

That $250 deduction that teachers get on their taxes? A number of people undoubtedly spent the whole thing in The Learning Store that day. Most of the line looks very young. I’m sure some people in line have student loans they are paying off in addition to the hit their paycheck is taking for new classroom decorations, games, and activity packets. The new teacher I talked to in the staff lounge this week spent $20,000 on her education classes — and those are only the classes she needed specifically for teaching, extra classes added to her actual major and other regular, required college classes. My young colleagues bring lunch from home usually, since the expense of nearby fast food falls outside of their budget.

Eduhonesty: I listen to people bash teachers and I am angry. They should take a morning to go talk to some of the teachers in that teacher’s store line. They should watch the care that goes into setting up these classrooms. Teachers commonly spend a great deal of their own money to create the classrooms they want. They also buy breakfast, clothing, snacks and supplies for students, especially in poor districts.

I volunteered to tutor. This will be an afterschool commitment, but I don’t care. Of all the changes for the upcoming year, mandatory tutoring stands at the top of the new administration’s great ideas. You don’t pass the test, you retake the test. We provide the tutoring you need to get there.

Eduhonesty: Fair is not equal. Students where I live manage to get into America’s very best colleges using the standard 180-day school year. Their parents embrace summer, a time for camp and family activities. But students where I work are barely managing to get into college and many are unprepared for the academic work expected. When I last looked, the average ACT was more than 10 points lower where I work than where I live, 36 being the top score possible. Those low results call for mandatory afterschool tutoring and an all-year school year, with optional schooling available during breaks.

My terrier loves to fetch her long, rawhide sticks. She’s not much good at “fetch” since she’s a terrier; she hates to let go of the stick. But we were having a good time a few minutes ago and I reflected on the fact that dogs, cats, and people love to play. Heck, alligators and armadillos probably love to play.

We need to keep this in mind as we educate America’s students. I believe that when the second largest school district in Illinois banned parties, they made a mistake. The idea that all minutes of all classes should be dedicated to nothing but the curriculum flies in the face of human psychology. Most corporate firms understand the benefits of fun times. At the very least, they commonly have that party in late December, once called a Christmas party.

Eduhonesty: Some elementary schools lately have been cutting back or eliminating recess to get more instructional time, We need to stop making these cutbacks. If children need more instruction, we should lengthen the school day or extend the school year. But fun matters. Breaks refresh people.

Earlier this year, a colleague and I had a field trip cancelled due to weather. We rescheduled. I went out and got McDonalds for that day’s lunch, a large undertaking that cost a couple of hours and a couple of hundred dollars, most of this covered by the kids. My colleague was concerned.

“They have been allowed to do what they want for hours,” he said. “They’ll be off the chain tomorrow.”

I assured him that classroom discipline would not be impaired. It wasn’t. Their behavior was excellent the next day. Rewards create goodwill. Breaks create enthusiasm. Obviously parties should not be a weekly feature of life, but celebrations have a place.

Recess has a place. We all need to recharge. A great deal of research documents the fact that young children don’t have long attention spans. Attentions spans tend to lengthen with age, but kids can only put so much new material in their brains in one sitting.

The desperate desire to bring up test scores should not be allowed to blind us to the human need for rest, relaxation and play.

I wrote the following: “teaching (to the test) leads to substandard results in the cases of students who are too far out of line with their state’s standardized test expectations for their grade. For those students, teaching to the test frequently does more harm than good.”

Why?

It’s the nature of the game. To teach to an eighth grade test, I must teach eighth grade material. But if my student is operating at a fourth grade level, a great deal of that material will be incomprehensible to him or her. If my district insists that all teachers teach the same material, which is material on the test, I will be teaching material to kids who simply are not ready.

Eduhonesty: Why did education work better in the past? One reason is that when Anne-Marie finished the fourth grade reader, we handed her the fifth grade reader. When Ginger finished the third grade math book, we handed her the fourth grade math book. In the early part of the 1900s, a man named Lev Vygotsky captured the idea perfectly:

No one yet has proved Vygotsky wrong. Students work best and learn most in their zone of proximal development, the zone where they can do new work with guidance. Can we teach them material outside that zone? Only if we get them up to the point where that material BECOMES the new zone of proximal development. Sometimes this leap may be possible with a great deal of extra tutoring. If administrations script out all the lessons for the year, leaving little or no time for remediation, then many kids are left behind; if a kid won’t or can’t come after school, as is often the case, then that kid will simply be staring into space a lot of the time, a victim of irrational test demands.

If a student can’t add fractions, and doesn’t know square roots or the order of mathematical operations, algebra’s quadratic formula is outside of the zone of proximal development. Without remediation, that formula can’t make sense. If a teacher is forced to teach the quadratic formula anyway because that formula is expected to be on the test, we are wasting some students’ time, barring extensive tutoring that seldom happens. Even when tutoring is available, once a student has fallen that many years behind, the extra hour we usually provide in the afternoon might as well be a Band-Aid® on a third-degree burn.

Whenever teachers spend any significant portion of class time outside of most students’ zones of proximal development, we are wasting their time and incurring an opportunity cost, the cost of not teaching them the material inside the zone for which they are ready.

I read my post of August 9th and I am struck by the defeatism in my words. The school year will begin shortly and I have to rein in that streak of negativity. If I don’t, my students may sense my feelings. I can’t afford for that to happen. My students need to feel that I believe in them. They need to feel that I expect them to succeed. I need the optimism required to aggressively pursue after-school tutoring sessions.

Eduhonesty: This year, I plan to teach like I bowl. I try to set the bowling ball down slightly right of center and I focus on hitting those arrows that are about one-third of the lane down. I don’t aim at the pins per se. They are too far away. My approach does not produce world-class bowling, but my scores don’t fall into any disaster zones either.

I left a student behind who had missed the math boat. He clearly had analytical skills. He could break down problems well and come up with rational solutions. I promised him that, if I came back, we’d work more on finding out why he was testing so far behind grade level in math. So I have my first student to tutor if J. hasn’t moved. I’ll have to pull in others. If administration is making my job harder, that doesn’t mean I can bail on my students. They deserve my best. They also deserve my confidence.

I plan to focus on solid short-term improvements in the belief that if I can fill in the gaps in elementary math knowledge, I will take down a fair number of pins. In Bel Kaufman’s “Up the Down Staircase,” Kaufman has a phrase: Let it be a challenge to you. I have my challenge. In the near future, I’ll be working to build up my enthusiasm for that challenge.

I intend to walk into that room ready to win the game.