Please check out my last post before reading this one. I joked about recording bathroom breaks as data on spreadsheets. More data! I laid out the basic opportunity-cost problem with gathering data on bathroom breaks, but I need to carry this exercise in what-ifs a little further.

So my fellow teachers and I start recording bathroom breaks. An interruption here, an interruption there, and pretty soon my thought processes may have holes the size of canyons in them. That’s my first problem, one I faced regularly when students spoke up wanting to read the words on their latest 500 words list.

My larger problem will be future interventions. When we gave benchmark tests this year (8 total), we recorded results for six of these tests in different spreadsheets. That data was then analyzed to determined who should receive extra help or interventions. Lower students were assigned to afterschool tutoring. Next year, those scores will affect their classroom placements. Students with the lowest scores are expected to receive no elective class of their choice due to placement in remedial classes designed to help with their academic deficits.

If my district started tracking bathroom breaks, interventions would follow. Teachers would have to wean “Oscar” from the bathroom after they determined he was spending 37 minutes each day on average hiding out in the boy’s room. Teachers would be expected to call home, probably a number of homes — repeatedly. If Oscar complained he desperately needed that bathroom pass throughout the school day, the nurse would likely have to send home a letter suggesting his parents take him to see a urologist. The nurse would then have to track these letters, and there might be quite a few of them. Boys and girls bathrooms in my former school are busy places.

Teachers might have to attend team meetings to plan out bathroom schedules for individual students and then address the issue of school rules used to address exceptions. How do we determine an emergency? Should we log emergencies? What consequences will we have for an excessive number of emergencies? What exactly is an excessive number of emergencies? Should girls receive special dispensations due to their monthly cycles? How will we deal with boys claiming discrimination? (I guarantee you that some Oscar or another would pipe up to say, “But you let Kimberly go for the last three days!”) When should we call home? The meeting might bog down, as ambitious new teachers and administrators argue larger issues: Is the passing period too short? Should we schedule a mid-morning break? If so, how will we avoid taking time from specific classes and not others? Should we have a rotating break? How will we determine break times? Should we advance the break time by ten minutes each day? How will we track this? Who will be responsible for the new bathroom break schedule tracking spreadsheet? If we share the responsibility, who will create the schedule showing when different teachers are responsible for the break schedule spreadsheet? At what time should we start these breaks? At what time should we cut them off? Do we need to liberalize the bathroom policy at lunch? What about bathroom vandalism? Should security be stationed near the bathrooms during break times? Should we allow water breaks too? How will we prevent disruption to classes that do not have a break scheduled? How will we manage breaks when we are testing? Etc. I can see this meeting in my mind and I can see myself trying to look attentive for well over an hour as we all hash out these issues, coming up with policies for some and tabling others while parceling out more noninstructional work.

I can visualize this whole damn meeting because I have sat through so many variants of this meeting. Data gathering leads to policy and interventions, which lead to meetings. And more meetings. As part of our efforts, staff will be expected to document and discuss improvements. So in a few months, we will be taking time out of the weekly seventh-grade meeting to discuss that fact that student bathroom usage has fallen 36% and our 17 identified problem students have decreased usage by a full 83%.

We might gain real benefits from this exercise in bathroom control. Classroom learning time will go up as bathroom usage goes down. But at what cost? How much time did it take to get those 17 kids on track? How much time was taken away from all of their classmates while we worked on this problem.

Eduhonesty: Good ideas run amuck are killing us out in the field here. ‘Nuff said.

In a previous post, I joked about recording bathroom breaks as data on spreadsheets. More data! The idea struck me as funny in part because I could see it happening. Why not? Upon reflection, I feel I should elaborate. A big issue is hiding under my pee sheet.

We had a program last year where students were supposed to read us 500 sight words correctly. We had to listen to each student in our homerooms* read lists of 50 words and then record student completion in a spreadsheet. Fifty words by fifty words, we made our way down the new word lists. Students who completed the entire task received a neon-green t-shirt. All teachers with “homerooms” participated whether they taught language arts or not. All teachers lost class time to listening to students read words, one by one.

The 500 words program was not a bad idea per se. Students in my district suffer from vocabulary deficits that interfere with their long-term academic success. I gave up class time toward a greater good. I gave up hours of class time. Here’s a sample spreadsheet from one teacher and one class. Every one of those little “x” entries represents the teacher sitting with a student and listening to that student read 50 words. The below spreadsheet was downloaded from the original Google Doc. I cut off the tabs below that show all the teachers names. Seventh grade alone required eleven spreadsheet pages. Sixth and eighth worked on their own spreadsheets.

Was the 500 words program useful? Certainly. Was it worth the instructional time loss? That’s debatable. The program added to the already high level of frantic in my math classes as I tried to teach and keep up with those required weekly quizzes that other people were writing for me. I didn’t have any time to lose, but my time kept bleeding away regardless.

Would the bathroom spreadsheet be useful? Certainly. Middle school and high school teachers would benefit from tracking and timing the sometimes hourly trips to the bathroom by “Oscar,” for example. Some of these frequent bathroom flyers should either see the Dean or a urologist. Tracking this time would enable teachers to keep students in class who are missing too much class time now.

I’m afraid if I suggested this idea, though, some administrator might actually put my bathroom spreadsheet into play. Like the 500 words, I would have created one more time demand on already frazzled teachers who are sacrificing instruction to reporting requirements every day. Help! Help! We are drowning in good ideas out here and I suspect our situation will continue to worsen. As we hire teaching coaches and new administrators to teach teachers how to teach, we create these “bathroom” spreadsheets. If I were a coach, I’d have to justify my pay. Since I would not be teaching — many coaches don’t — I’d have oodles of time to come up with good ideas to improve my school, new programs to rob time from old programs and, most importantly, from instruction.

We don’t have enough time now. Not enough time to meet all the standards. Not enough time to prepare for all the required tests and quizzes. Not nearly enough time to do the remedial work that students in academically-struggling districts require.

My bathroom spreadsheet struck me as a perfect example of the problem. If I ran this by administration, they might sign off. The information would be useful. We could then design interventions for students who are the using the bathroom to skip class in bits and pieces. Only where do the interventions stop? Where do we draw the line and say, “I have six good hours to teach during a day and these spreadsheets and interventions are stealing minutes and even sometimes hours from that teaching time.”

Eduhonesty: I come back to opportunity cost, one of the biggest elephants in the education room today. When I am listening to students read words to me, what math or science am I not teaching? When I am tracking bathroom breaks, who am I not helping with their classwork? When I am sitting at one of my too-many spreadsheets, who is teaching my students?

*Technically we did not have homerooms last year. We called our first period class homeroom and made only essential announcements at the start of this time, so the 500 words activity took place almost entirely during class time, with a few exceptions at the start or end of the day.

From the article “Screen Addiction Is Taking a Toll on Children”

The text of the following email is from my former math department chair, and is used in the previous post. I thought I needed to pull out one more topic from this short email.

The link below provides a series of tutorial videos that would be appropriate to assign to students to watch who were absent. You could document that as an intervention and say that it was provided for students to view on their own time or make time available during the school day for students to view it while you move forward with other students.

http://www.virtualnerd.com/pre-algebra/ratios-proportions/scale-models/scale-model-examples

Eduhonesty: “You could document that as an intervention …,”  she writes. This snippet brings out an aspect of government oversight that does not hit the table often enough. We are documenting interventions furiously. Documentation requirements keep rising, both for classes and individual students. At this rate, soon we will be keeping spreadsheets recording the exact time and length of all student bathroom breaks.

The opportunity cost of this documentation keeps growing as time demands created by that documentation balloon around us. I cannot prepare lessons while I am tracking individual interventions for everybody who is behind, which amounted to absolutely everybody in my math classes last year, at least if we compare their standardized test scores to last year’s PARCC expectations. The time taken to create documentation has to come from somewhere. Especially at the middle school and high school level, where teachers may teach 150 students or more, and usually teach over 100 if they are responsible for regular classes, that time will sometimes or even often be taken from instructional preparation. No other outcome is possible.

The instruction still happens, of course. But maybe science teachers do a shortened version of the experiment or skip the lab entirely because they can’t find time to do the set-up work. Maybe a PowerPoint ends up less carefully crafted because the teacher making that PowerPoint spent hours writing up interventions instead. Maybe a math activity gets cancelled because the teacher does not have time to count out all the little paper strips she needs to work on those fractions. Or the activity takes 50 minutes instead of 30 because the teacher ends up using to students to do prep work she would have done herself if she had not been producing mountains of data for administrators instead.

Eduhonesty: Opportunity costs from data gathering efforts are among the largest, invisible elephants sharing the room with us.

P.S. That “bathroom break” Google Doc spreadsheet would be useful, actually, if not for the time requirements involved. Some students take a break every class if they can. These students may lose hours each week to bathroom breaks, 5 to 10 minutes at a time. When teachers push back, those teachers face repeated interruptions of, “But it’s an emergency!” Girls can always call on lunar phases, too, invoking the time of the month excuse. No one fights back on that one, especially the guys.

Teachers in the trenches often worry a great deal in these times, especially if they work in a school that is failing to deliver the government-mandated numbers. Big details and little details may come to administrative attention. The extent of oversight has become off-putting, at the very least. Still, for all the teachers out there who are annoyed by the degree of interference from above, I’d like to offer a defense for administration.  Administrators are under the gun too. The following is an email from my principal:

All,

Just a gentle reminder we will have visitors from ISBE (the Illinois State Board of Education) visiting us all day tomorrow. Please wear a (district) or (school) shirt if you plan to wear jeans or dress in business casual attire.

 Thank you for your understanding and cooperation in this.

 Kindly,

 (My dedicated principal who has been trying so hard and doing so well that I have decided to like her despite the fact that she sometimes shoots before she knows what she is aiming at)

I am certain that my Principal was no happier bringing large groups of state visitors into my classroom than I was to see them trooping through the door.

“It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.”
~ James Thurber (1894 – 1961)

When I wrote about the small-group shibboleth, I entered a larger area of education called “best practices.” In teaching, many options exist for presenting material. This leads to studies to find the most effective teaching techniques, techniques that then acquire the label “best practices.”

The problem with best practices is that they are too often taken out of context. Presenting material first in a long block in English and then in another block in Spanish, with limited moving back and forth between languages, is considered a bilingual education best practice. Giving instruction in English and then switching back and forth is called code switching, and the research sensibly suggests that many students will tune out the English and simply wait for the translation. That does not mean that material should always be presented in these long blocks, however. It depends on the class. Everything depends on the class.

If a bilingual class consists of students who speak almost no English, then the English block will need to be simpler and shorter. If the class is staring blankly at me, I may choose to code switch rather than leave my students lost while continuing my English lecture. I am the teacher. I can see the confusion. I usually can sense when to change languages for clarification purposes.

If a bilingual class consists mostly of students for whom English is their dominant language — surprisingly often true in Illinois anyway, given that placement is based on an English test and no one may be checking for Spanish understanding — then the English block will need to be much longer. Frankly, sometimes the Spanish block can be dropped entirely, although I prefer to teach dual-language classes as much as possible. But if I am cornered, with immediate tests and quizzes scheduled all around me, I may abbreviate that Spanish piece considerably for time reasons.

I have to know my class to know how to proceed. What I will choose to do will not always look like best practices. I will select the strategy that gets me the best results.

Eduhonesty:  I may get in trouble for my choices, though. Administrators may ding me for not using alleged best practices, even administrators with limited teaching experience and limited understanding of those best practices. Too many people have read the synopsis of the study’s results, and not the study itself.

Too many people are failing to ask critical thinking questions such as the following: If the teacher in the study was instructing 22 economically-advantaged students with a full-time teaching assistant when she conducted her action research, will the same results apply to a teacher in an impoverished, urban neighborhood with high absenteeism, no aide and an average of 32 students per class? If not, what accommodations will be necessary to make the new strategy work? Can this strategy actually work without that smaller class size and full-time aide? Would another strategy be better, given the constraints posed by class size, lack of resources and chronic absenteeism?

One size never fits all. Some fashions fit almost no one, such as those long, tight, slinky sun dresses with the horizontal stripes. If those dresses look good on anyone except models, I’ve yet to meet that person. And any study that takes place in a room with under twenty-five students and a full-time aide may only work in small classes with aides — a vanishingly small percentage of regular classrooms in many districts.

I’ll throw down the gauntlet: I think small-group work, while sometimes valuable, has become seriously overrated. All small groups all the time seems pretty close to malpractice to me, not because groups don’t work. They do sometimes. I have a few outfits with horizontal stripes that fit me fine. But the evidence for the benefits of large-scale, unrelenting use of small groups remains tenuous at best. Where is that evidence? I’ve looked for it. I haven’t found it yet. Fashion should not make us make stupid choices.

I don’t want my previous post to sound like an indictment of small groups. Small group work has its place. Especially when some of a class knows a topic well, some slightly and some not at all, small groups are extremely useful pedagogically. Depending on the class and student dynamics, knowledgeable students can be used to help academically lower students. Different material can be presented to different groups, fpcusing on individual needs.

Eduhonesty: My problem is not with the idea of grouping. Group work and group projects enhance learning when used correctly. My problem is with the idea that evaluators MUST see group work in motion when they walk in.  My problem is with being criticized for the absence of group work when nobody in the room knows the material I am supposed to be teaching. At times, whole group instruction can be wholly appropriate.

Especially when every student in the class has been thrown into the deep end of the pool and they are all in over their heads, the teacher should decide when and how to group — or whether to group at all.

Why were my Assistant Principal and I at such loggerheads this last year? The reasons are complex and interwoven, but one reason stands out. He would never listen to my rationale for lesson choices. Small groups were seldom working for me and I did not think that the reason was my lack of understanding of small groups. I get small groups. But if nobody in the class knows the material, they are seldom the best use of instructional time. I could never convince my Assistant Principal of this. He had been told that “best practices” included these groups and he had not taught long enough — or in the time of small groups — so he did not understand the limitations of those groups. He also did not understand why a group of bilingual students could not always be doing exactly what the regular students were supposed to be doing. He would not listen. He would just say, “No excuses.”

As I’ve said before, where there are no excuses, there are no explanations. I had good reasons for my instructional choices, but I was never allowed to explain any of them. I got criticized for using materials other than the materials used in the regular classes: In my defense, I thought the ability to read one’s assignment might be relevant in the larger educational scheme, but that only led to a reiteration of his contention that I obviously lacked faith in my students. I would contend that I had reviewed their individual reading test scores. For that matter, I had sat down to work with all my students so I had a pretty good sense of what they could understand and what would be so much gibberish to them. In the meantime, I kept losing time to artificially creating groups, time that I could only recoup after school or on week-ends, but many students would not come in after school or on week-ends.

In the end, I delivered the test scores that my administration desired and they seemed pretty happy with me by May. I did finally learn how to efficiently teach to tests. I learned how to do nothing EXCEPT teach to tests. I just hope my students hold on to what they learned. We went quickly with scant time for review. The next test was almost always four days away or less. That left few available minutes to reinforce past concepts.

Why I quit: That idea that regular, special education, and bilingual students should be doing the same lesson plans and taking exactly the same tests? That was my school’s policy. That was an administrative requirement. And it was completely goofy. Many of those bilingual and special education students couldn’t even read the math story problems they were supposed to answer.

I fear this year’s summer learning loss will be a bloodbath.

Eduhonesty: Still processing here. It takes awhile to get the big picture. The interesting part of my processing is that I am growing more and more convinced that I spent the year participating in an educational experiment that was batshit crazy — at least for the population of students I was serving.

I honestly believe this experiment benefitted many students at the top of learning pyramid in my school. For students lacking English-language skills or battling other more serious educational deficiencies, though, the one-plan-to-rule-them-all ensured a long, mysterious and demoralizing year. Nothing in educational theory justifies those unreadable tests. Nothing in educational theory justifies the opportunity costs created by those tests, with special education teachers spending (losing) a whole week’s instructional time to prepare students for a test they can’t read requiring math they can’t do.

In the end, my genuinely competent principal had realized that the scores at the bottom were not moving. Next year, I understand adaptations for special education and bilingual classes will be allowed. I won’t be there, though.

Someone else will be carrying the “Better than Batshit Crazy” banner for me.

My husband wants to know why we have all these Dixie cups. Why do we have a stack of Styrofoam plates? We have extra plastic forks and spoons, too.

The reason is simple: We had bell-to-bell instruction without parties all year until the very end. We were never supposed to give students food not provided by the company that made our lunches, except after school. My only social events this school year were a couple of movies after school and a quick Christmas feeding before school at the start of winter break.

I had stocked for a regular school year and a regular year in my past included a few Friday fun times after tests were finished, especially the big tests of the year. We used to celebrate the start of winter break, too. Since I taught bilingual classes, we would pause for apple soda and snacks during Cinco de Mayo. Over Halloween, we might have lunch in the classroom with caramel apples. I guarantee readers that I was running way too scared of my Assistant Principal to even ask for that caramel apple day at the end of October. At that point, I was actually thinking seriously of quitting because of his nonstop criticism of damn near everything I ever did.

Eduhonesty: I’m still processing this year. But if readers are curious, that’s why we have a few months worth of Dixie cups in my cupboards.