I bought the little, shiny pink tree from Urban Outfitters nine years ago. I know the tree’s age because the first class to decorate the tree was in Skokie, Illinois. The next year was the first secret Santa year. The tree is definitely not PC. Church and state are colliding when I carry in my Christmas tree. The tree will enter the classroom on the 15th of December for the last week of school before break; I don’t want to give admin too much time to notice or think about the tree. Ornaments will be simple this year. In a time of bell-to-bell, scripted instruction, I can’t be caught making tree ornaments that don’t directly relate to the lesson. Maybe I can think of a way to turn ornament-making into grouping like terms. Maybe I will have students decorate bodily organ systems and hang them on the tree. Whatever. We’ll work it out.

We’ll have secret Santa, too. The kids have drawn names for my class and the class across the hall. They are excited.

No one in my classroom will be offended. They are all Christian, mostly Catholics. If I had a student from another religious group, I’d be sure any activities honored multiple traditions.

Eduhonesty: This tree has seen classrooms with chalkboards that used real chalk, overhead projectors, computers with floppy drives, new laptops, Chromebooks, and smart boards. It has seen kids from 11 to 20 years of age. (If you start school at eight in Mexico, we will let you finish high school.) It’s been decorated in Play-Doh and geometric, paper shapes. I like the idea of bodily organ systems for the year 2014.

I am happy to pull out the tree for what I believe will be the last time. I’m a little sad, too. I have loved the kids in these classrooms. I will miss them.

I just finished “I would love to teach but” by Valerie Strauss, December 31, 2013. She does a great job of describing a time when no students are allowed to fail — whether they deserve to fail or not.

Eduhonesty: School districts have begun trying a system where no score is below 50%. I have worked under this system. If work is completely wrong, or even if work is never turned in, the student receives 50%. The rationale behind this system lies in the desire to keep students engaged in school. If they fall too far behind, I have been told, they will not be willing to try to catch up. They have to have a chance to succeed. At 50% minimum, everyone has a chance to “succeed.” Students who hack out an occasional assignment can at least pass.

But what have we taught? I believe we are teaching skiving. At www.oxforddictionaries.com, skiving is defined as “avoid work or a duty by staying away or leaving early; shirk.”
“I skived off school”: /skīv/ British informal gerund or present participle: skiving

The word’s scope appears to be expanding. From the Urban Dictionary:

skive — Doing anything but that which you are supposed to be doing during a specific time frame.

E.G Pretending to do something for which you are being payed for, such as a your job, but instead doing other things (like having a laugh, phoning your friends, hiding from your boss, surfing the internet, playing computer games, having a sly cigarette) that are totally unrelated or unconected to that which is within your job description.

Taking 2 hours for lunch instead of 1 and getting a collegue to cover for you.

Leaving work earlier than you should, and hoping your boss doesn’t notice.

Calling in sick to work, then going out for an all day pub crawl. by Siona Beht June 22, 2004

The 50%-for-breathing grading system has to be one the best techniques for teaching skiving that I can imagine.

Differentiated homework is a phrase I invented for the gradebook to indicate days when students receive homework based on what they already know and could stand to practice. Rob might get adding fractions while Amy might get one-step equations. I’m the only one who can do this for my class. I know my class and I know what they can and cannot do. Here’s my not-exactly-stunning observation on these homework days: I get back a far greater percentage of the homework than I usually do. I may get it all back. This never happens when I give out the assignment associated with the lesson plan I am required to give because of the curriculum-selected-by-the-East-Coast-consultants. What they can’t do, they don’t do.

I put a catch-phrase in the blog a few days back that I like: Whoever is doing the doing is doing the learning. If they can’t do, however, they don’t do, at which point no learning takes place.

Eduhonesty: We don’t improve America’s test scores by working years above student’s academic operating levels. Differentiation can’t fix the problem of lower-scoring students if a teacher can’t differentiate materials. Sometimes those materials need to be changed. In the meantime, I’ll keep giving handing out my varied homework assignments. Interestingly, the kids don’t seem to mind at all. I say, “You do this one,” and they happily take the sheet. They like being given something they can do.

One interesting reason why I am trudging forward has to be the lightening of my workload. If I do what everyone else plans, I don’t have to plan. I find the Master Plan saves me an enormous amount of time. They tell me where to march. I march. They tell me what hill to take. I gather the troops and head for the hill. The troops whine. I take command. I rearrange seats. I give pep talks. We trudge forward.

Eduhonesty: The Do-What-You-Are-Told-Or-Else regime requires little actual brainpower on my part. Today I thought of a couple of quick ways to reinforce the lesson plan that allow students to get up and move. I actually did a little creative thinking. I’ll share this with my special education colleague. All this sharing cuts down on the cognitive load. The new regime has a great deal to recommend it, except for its lack of flexibility.

But perhaps flexing is overrated.

I was threatened with termination for not following the new Master Plan in which other people determine what I am supposed to be teaching and how I am supposed to be teaching it. Since then, I have obediently followed the script, although I did walk around with a resignation letter in my backpack for weeks. I am thinking of updating the letter. Resignation sounds positively heavenly.

Sigh. Resignation sounds heavenly, except for the part where I abandon my students and colleagues. I have bonded to these kids, as I bond to every group of kids. I don’t resent spending my personal funds to supply them with handouts and candy rewards. If I vanish, my colleagues will be forced to pick up my responsibilities. I’m not easily replaced. I have an unusual set of certifications. My kids could end up with a long-term sub for the rest of the year, not necessarily a sub with the correct qualifications. I’ve seen it happen. One year, in a complicated teacher swap, I ended up in another school, while the woman I swapped with ended up in another subject area. That met the need for a missing teacher in that subject area — but the students I left behind had a long-term sub until that sub disappeared. After that, a series of subs taught — or did not teach — my former students.

So the letter stays in the backpack, for the sake of the kids and for the sake of the guy across the hall.

I must admit that termination sounds like one way out of this mess. At least I would not feel herded, hounded and muzzled. I’d love to have a chance to present my views. I can’t do so if I am to keep the Scary Administrators of the Baskervilles at bay.

Eduhonesty: Sigh.

Farrah and Gerardo have split. Who cares? Just about everyone in my classes, and a lot of other students walking the school’s halls as well. It’s a big story. She was sobbing a few days ago, head buried in her hands, black streaks running down her face. I let her go with a friend to the bathroom. They were gone for about 10 minutes, fixing Farrah’s make-up and commiserating in our local version of the neighborhood watering hole. The bathroom plan was my best option, better than listening to wails in class and probably better than trying to find the social worker. There’s seldom a social worker around when you need one.

Why am I bothering to write this story down? Because if I ever needed a day of whole group instruction, that was the day. But I’m so scared to be caught doing whole-group instruction that, at this point, I break into groups just on principal. I am supposed to do groups. OR ELSE. So I group. But I guarantee that any group I was not actively involved in was talking about Farrah. I could overhear some of these conversations.

Eduhonesty: Group work is overhyped. I am not alone in this view. Almost every teacher I know agrees with me. (I can’t think of one who doesn’t.) We group because we are expected to group. But 12 – 14 year-old kids cannot be relied upon to stay on topic once the teacher wanders away. Stories begin. Gerardo was seen with Farrah’s friend, Monica, by the high school. Farrah was cheating with Gerardo’s friend, Jimmy. Monica and Farrah are going to fight after school. Rumors take off wildly in our small groups, if not in the classroom then during the passing period.

What I’d like to say here is that I wish I felt more respected and trusted. I know when the lesson plan ought to flex. I know what the classroom needs most. Too often, I am delivering what I believe is suboptimal instruction due to the need not to deviate from the lesson plan. The scary administrators have won. I was threatened with termination for not following the master plan. Now I do exactly what I am supposed to be doing, even when I believe I ought to be doing something else. In this time of, “No excuses!” I don’t expect I will even be given a chance to provide an explanation why I have veered off course. So I don’t veer off course. This works for me.

I wish it worked better for the kids.

Saturday morning tutoring is cancelled. The teacher has professional development (PD). She will be busy from 8 to 3 today being developed. She’s been developed on embedding language learning into her lessons repeatedly, but a certain number of PD hours are demanded by the state. For the average teacher, 120 hours of PD are expected within the license cycle.

I am the teacher who is about to sacrifice her tutoring and leisure time to a PD that I have taken in a variety of forms before.

Eduhonesty: I view my PD obligations as one more set of good intentions run amok. Should I be improving myself? Definitely yes. Will this PD improve me? Possibly yes. Would my students be better served by my using this time to prepare clever lessons, identify student areas of weakness and catch up on homework grading? Almost certainly yes. For that matter, they might have been better served if I had not cancelled Saturday tutoring. I have been excruciatingly well-developed on the SIOP model for lesson planning and the Charlotte Danielson rubric in the last few years.

Can we stop now? If I wasn’t listening the last 50 times I heard about SIOP and Charlotte, I’m unlikely to start listening now. If I was listening, then I guarantee you I don’t need to hear the details again. This turkey has been marinated, basted, wood-fired, poached and deep fried. This turkey’s been cooked to jerky.

I’m sure this will be a good PD, but I’d rather go tutor my students, and buy them donuts and hot chocolate. When tutoring resumes, we are probably moving from McDonalds to Dunkin Donuts — the better to get my guys up on a Saturday morning.

My students were supposed to write out their strategy for solving a story problem. I liked Maria’s plan: “I will multiply or divide.” That was the whole plan.

It’s another version of a plan I come across regularly, one where a student takes numbers and does math to them whether those numbers need to be operated on or not. One exam earlier this year gave two absolute values and asked which one was farthest from zero. Many students triumphed over the problem, but a few simply added, subtracted or multiplied the two numbers without reading the question.

“Hah!” A few students seemed to think. “It’s numbers! I will throw some random math at them! Maybe it will stick!” Or something like that. I really have no clue what these students were thinking when they multiplied the two absolute values for absolutely no reason at all.

Eduhonesty: Teaching has many mysterious moments.

The cusp is the place to be. Money, time and resources flow toward that cusp, a magic academic line that separates students who meet expectations from students who fail to meet expectations. The line becomes most clearly defined on state standardized tests, but also lurks in benchmark tests and other measurements that affect evaluations and merit pay. In this time of testing madness, if the push is to raise the percentage of students who “meet expectations,”* then the cusp kids are the kids with the most potential. If test results suggest Jaquan and Shaniqua missed meeting expectations by only a few points, then Jaquan and Shaniqua join the group of students who are most likely to be able to cross the expectations bar, raising the total percentage of students who “pass” the test.

I have had principals tell me directly to focus on these cusp kids in tutoring groups and classes. Teachers form groups to identify their cusp kids and determine which skills will help these students to boost their scores. Targeted instruction begins afterwards, often small group instruction within a larger class. In this time when whole-group instruction is frowned upon as pedagogically old-fashioned, breaking classes into groups has become almost de rigueur in education. The groups are formed. The triaging begins.

Students too far below the cusp and students safely above the cusp may be almost ignored. As in war, with our resources overwhelmed, we leave the grievously wounded to die while providing only light care to those we expect will manage on their own. In a fifty minute period, a teacher may spend half an hour with the cusp kids and 10 minutes with each of the other two groups. Materials will be prepared to keep all students occupied so the teacher can focus on the cusp group. Those materials frequently are regrettably easy; the teacher does not want to be interrupted with questions.

Eduhonesty: I’m not going to editorialize much. This scenario is occurring in lower-scoring schools across the nation, largely because it’s genuinely the best bet for raising the percentage of students who meet expectations, the main goal for many poor and urban school districts. The last time I was instructed to use this strategy, I was also told to keep my cusp group small, preferably at 6 kids or less, with an intense focus on these kids. That left the my cusp group’s classmates mostly on their own.

When scores count so heavily, and lower scores bring so much scrutiny and misery to administrators and teachers alike, this preferential treatment for cusp kids becomes a natural by-product of the testing system. I can’t say I approve. But I am not going to slam my administrators either. In war and in testing, sometimes the best options are ugly. Resources are limited. We end up putting our resources where we expect they will do the most good.

*This push to “meet expectations” can be found in almost all public schools, a legacy from No Child Left Behind.