A couple of posts back I talked about Googledocs and the annoyances they create for me as everyone shares, shares, shares.

This morning I had a realization: The Googledocs are exactly like the staff lounge refrigerator. One of my colleagues last week explained that she never uses the fridge. “It’s filthy,” she succinctly explained. She brings her own mini-cooler with her lunch inside so she never has to open the refrigerator door.

I am less fastidious. I wrinkle my nose a little at the smell and look for a clean spot to place my food, trusting my plastic, grocery-store bag to keep any lunch and snack items safe. Someday someone, maybe even me, will nobly clean the fridge. I finally brought wipes down to the lounge last year, only to find out that one of the parapros had cleaned the monster the day before. Sometimes I take it upon myself to throw out McDonald’s sacks that have sat in the same spot for weeks. The problem’s simple: Everyone uses the fridge, but no one has responsibility for the fridge.

My Google drive is loaded with the damndest Googledocs. I know the lessons that high school social studies will give next week. I’m not at the high school and I don’t teach social studies. I have all the language arts lesson plans. I don’t teach that either. The crowd of documents obscures the documents I do need, many of them in wrong or dubious folders since we were all required to enter the world of Googledocs, but we were not trained. If there was a training, I missed it anyway. Maybe it was on a Googledoc I never saw.

Last night I tried to arrange documents until I gave up. I could easily spend a whole day cleaning up the mess that has been shared with me, but I don’t have a day. Today, I am creating a cheat sheet to tell me how to find documents that matter. Information management in my life has turned into a game of “Where’s Waldo?” and I don’t see an end in sight. Many, many people are tasked with putting documents onto the drive to prove they have met district requirements. No one is tasked with taking the old stuff off. So I dodge around the language arts lesson plans from August and move on, looking for the professional development PowerPoint I actually want to read.

Student’s description of the particles in a solid:

“The particles are far apart and connected.”

Student’s answer to the math problem 8X = 24:
8X = 24 = 24 = 8X.

There’s no way to disagree with the last answer. I’m not sure the problem asked the student to solve for “X” either. Whoever wrote that particular standardized test probably assumed she’d know she should solve for “X”. Sometimes my students can really think outside the box, though.

“There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology – the tendency to do what
is reasonable even when it isn’t any good.”

~ Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (credit to Bob at bob@lakesideadvisors.com for unearthing this bit)

We hauled out the laptops today. We did our latest standardized test. It’s easy to do all this testing nowadays thanks to all the computers sitting around. We can measure. So we measure. Afterwards, we measure, and measure again for good measure. The ease of data collection creates an atmosphere conducive to data collection.

Eduhonesty: Inundated with data, I am blogging away here, in part to avoid trying to begin to figure out all the data that has flooded into my various inboxes and googledoc folders this month. I am pretty much drowning in data. The tentacles of my googledocs keep wrapping themselves around what little organization I manage to create, snuffing out my hopes of figuring out exactly what may be lurking within my many inboxes.

Googledocs can easily be shared with many people at once. And, oh, do we share. Sometimes we are required to share. Minutes for meetings have to go to all participants, would-be participants and administrators who prefer not to participate but need to confirm the existence of the meetings they miss. Great lesson materials get shared, enthusiastically passed on to colleagues. I regularly share my ideas. Click, click.

All of this is reasonable. However, as we struggle to find time to actually do our job — to teach — I wonder if it’s any good.

Let’s see. Who’s left? Who’s left who started with me? I was one of twelve or thirteen new teachers then. None of them are left. That colleague who needed reassurance today? She pointed out that I was one of the few remaining teachers she knew. “All these new faces,” she said.

Eduhonesty: In the next few years, other faces will vanish, including my own. It’s not that I am working too hard, although I have worked virtually nonstop for every minute of the last week since Saturday night. It’s that I am working stupid. We are gathering far too much data and some of it is manifestly impractical. Giving a test in English to a new arrival to the country who does not speak English wastes time. Giving multiple tests to find out students’ academic readiness levels also wastes time. It does not require weeks of testing to assess students’ academic levels — or it shouldn’t. A lot of that data should already be stored in student files. Updates to that data ought to be accomplished within a day or two.

If we want student test scores to improve, I have a strategy to suggest: Why don’t we try teaching students instead of measuring them? Why don’t we restore planning time, so that instead of hastily prepared PowerPoints we can set up interesting experiments instead? Why don’t we stop measuring the threat and attack it instead? We are a full month into school and my district is still measuring furiously. This is ridiculous.

Having lost much of the last week to one standardized test, I lost this afternoon to another standardized test. A few students will lose a portion of Monday. Absences will not save them.

My colleague from yesterday seemed much more cheerful. On the other hand, I found another member of another of my teams to hug this morning. I spent my extremely precious “planning” time minutes (possible total of maybe 25 today if I had not decided to help yet another colleague) reassuring this experienced and very capable teacher that everything was going to be OK. We went over strategies that might get my colleague one more year in the system before “retiring” early since that extra year will be financially advantageous — one more early retirement if retirement is the right word. I’m not sure it is. In another less crazy time, this woman might easily have put in another decade in the classroom. She’s very knowledgeable and she loves teaching and her students.

She’s not even sure about next year. The stress is making her cry. She’s beginning to fear for her health. I suggested some strategies, but also said that health comes first. Quit if you need to quit, I said, pointing out she could probably sell textbooks.

Eduhonesty: Today’s colleague crisis has nothing to do with teaching. As I noted, this teacher loves teaching. The crisis is all about demands for data, requiring full evenings to be devoted to spreadsheet creation rather than lesson preparation, endless testing that interrupts and compromises teaching, evaluations that are based on student enthusiasm in a district of poor and broken families where student enthusiasm may be diminished by lack of food, housing and hope. If an exhausted student puts his head down to sleep during class, a critical evaluation may be lowered unless the teacher can promptly wake him up in a cheery and academically receptive mood. But if that student got no sleep the night before, as can happen when 10 family members are stuffed into a two-bedroom apartment, sometimes that cheery awakening simply may not be in the cards.

Chairs pushed into desks, a jacket flung onto the floor, papers slammed onto a desk, the whole energetic performance punctuated by curses… I watched the tantrum unfold after school ended. I’d have called security on a student. It’s harder to figure out what to do with a colleague. I decided to hug my colleague and offer reassurances. I tried to be upbeat, as upbeat as the beaten-down can be. I threw in a bit of silliness. In the end, though, I mostly just listened because there wasn’t much to say.

“If they want fucking lessons, then they should give you time to plan fucking lessons,” my colleague (normally an extremely well-spoken person) almost shouted.

As noted earlier, testing demands along with other lengthy bureaucratic demands have eaten the time that might have gone into lesson planning. Creative lesson-planning disappears when no time remains after demands for parent calls, daily (sometimes twice-daily) meetings, mandatory tests, subsequent mandatory grading, and other job requirements. “Not optional,” admin says, and one more item such as monitoring the stairwells gets bumped to the front of the list. Administrative demands suck up time in the foreground, time in the background and sometimes time in the dead of the night.

Eduhonesty: I find it scary that so many colleagues are cutting sleep and bolting down food in working lunches without finding the minutes necessary to plan fun lessons, especially since these colleagues will be held accountable for a lack of fun lessons come evaluation time.

News flash for my administration and many other administrations in these test-driven times: No one has repealed the 24 hour day. No one has built any teacher-cyborgs that are classroom ready, either.

I spent the last few days after school grading a standardized benchmark test we gave to all our students. I ate various soups at Panera in the evening, long after my usual dinner time, because I could not get out of school sooner. As soon as this was done, I got the email telling me that MAP testing will begin shortly for all students. In addition, all my students are to take another specialized, standardized test in the next week if possible. This does not include all the tests given in classes; one common test or assessment is expected weekly. This does not include homework grading.

Eduhonesty: The upshot is that I have begun the “atom” unit but we never built that atom with marshmallows, gumdrops, toothpicks, or whatever. We may never get a chance to build it. I can barely get my sleep. I can’t get to Walmart. I talked to other science teachers. We are all in the same Titanic lifeboat in the same Northern Atlantic waters. Experiments and activities are being sacrificed for lack of time.

I hope there are not too many typos in this post. I don’t have time to post. But I batted this out as quickly as I could because I want to chronicle what is happening.

This is too much testing. Period.

The idea of evaluating teachers by looking at students makes a certain amount of sense. If all the students are looking out the window during a lesson, clearly something’s quite wrong. Enthusiasm matters.

That said, I need to make an observation: You can always find something wrong, especially in an academically-challenged, poor district. These districts are the toughest places to work, the areas with the most need and the areas with the most turnover. That turnover creates instability and interferes with many long-term strategies struggling districts attempt to implement.

Eduhonesty: I strongly advised a younger colleague this week to move up the socioeconomic ladder or move out of education. You want attentive students? Go someplace where upwards of 90% of the kids will go to college. Working in a district where only a tiny percentage of students successfully complete four-year college stints is playing a losing game, especially when student test scores determine a significant portion of your evaluation.

The best teachers are beginning to flee districts to which they have given their lives. I know three who decided in the last year to retire sooner than they had intended. I know two others who were on the fence about staying and decided to quit. My young colleague — and a number of his peers — will be looking for new positions come spring and some of them will find their way up the socioeconomic ladder.

Unintended consequences abound in today’s educational climate. If you are going to be graded on your students, you obviously should choose to teach the strongest group of students possible. Idealists will still start in our lower districts, but after a few negative evaluations based on lack of test-score improvement and stubborn student misbehaviors, the best and brightest are likely to jump to more privileged districts. As for me, I will help engineer exits for a few favorite colleagues. I will write more recommendation letters.

I will watch the exodus.

Somebody in administrator classes has been teaching a technique for teacher management. Administrators come in and observe class. They then leave a note or write an email that praises some aspect of the class:

Wow: “Your students (the majority) demonstrated respect and rapport when a student volunteered to pass out the calculators and were attentive to the lesson. I wonder… why students were allowed to sit together who were unable to do so and why their behavior was not addressed when it disrupted the lesson.”

That last would be two boys talking and not paying attention. I didn’t feel the lesson was “disrupted.” The idea “disrupted” seems a bit bigger than those two, although I disrupted the lesson when one was forced to move, I guess. I’m not going to complain about the comment. The desire to improve staff performance makes sense. I’m not above learning new tricks, either.

Eduhonesty: The problem is that pretty much all the feedback we get nowadays is in the form of “I liked this but not that.” When the behavior of students becomes a major factor in evaluating teachers, you end up with today’s situation. Positive feedback always becomes qualified. An occasional “good job, well done” without caveats might go a long way toward engendering more enthusiasm in me for my job.

We are certainly busy. I spent the whole last evening creating data to document where my students stand with regard to different Common Core and other standards. I ran out of time. I’m short of sleep. I should not be writing this. I don’t have time.

But I am afraid that, as we work to achieve our many goals, we are losing sight of the big picture. All children are different. We are required to give them almost exactly the same instruction nevertheless. Will this benefit the kids? Possibly. In special education and bilingual classes, none of them are close to knowing the math they are being taught. If they learn that math, we will all win.

Eduhonesty: I come back to a long-standing concern: What is the effect of regularly — in our new data-driven climate I think could say ‘almost constantly’ — being forced to take tests you fail? Does anyone know? Does anyone care? I’m supposed to work hard to develop my students’ self-esteem. But “You’re improving!” may not be much solace to a kid who went from getting 4 out of 20 right to getting 10 out of 20 right. When the material you are forced to teach is positioned five grades above where your own data shows that kid has been operating, much better results are unlikely.

Our approach will likely benefit a number of underachievers who needed to work harder, especially those who have not fallen too far behind already. I expect to see score gains. What will happen to those kids who can’t understand the new material, though, especially at the rapid and inflexible speed at which we are presenting that material? I am afraid that afterschool tutoring will prove about as effective as a Band-Aid on a third-degree burn.

P.S. Need to be positive. Need to work on being positive. It’s hard sometimes, but I have to believe in this particular field of dreams. I am going to be living in it.