This little shoulder bag simplifies teaching life greatly. Today’s post repeats from last year I believe, but my old, gray bag follows yesterday’s phone post perfectly. Besides, we have many new readers who most likely have not scoured the entire blog. Kipling makes this bag with its two zippers. I like having three sections. The top section fits almost all phones, at least so far. In a few years, you may need a beach tote for those phones.

Guys probably don’t need the bag, although anyone who wants to go to school in his kilt and sporran has my total support. I back your right to use a man purse, too. But guys are lucky enough to have pockets. Designers of men’s clothing seem to understand the need for pockets.

Women’s clothing often omits any helpful pouches. Even sweaters and jackets may not have pockets. If you always drape the little purse over your shoulder at the start of the day, you can skip the problem of, “Oops! No pockets again.”

You want to keep your keys and phone on your person. You may want other phones on your person. Having a few markers and maybe reward coupons stashed in the bag helps. These little bags make every day easier.

P.S. A colleague of mine who taught special education actually had a car stolen and totaled by a middle student some years ago. Students have also been known to stash keys in clever places as a “joke,” one that almost no teacher ever has found funny.

Phones. Oh, phones. How much time do I spend playing Words with Friends? Going through random mail? Playing (more) Words with (more) Friends? Flashing over to Facebook? Checking Yelp for Thai food? Looking at orange and red Google roads?

I understand how seductive phone time can seem. At this point, for that reason, I strongly believe teachers need to keep phones out of the classroom. No good comes of letting these little bundles of gaming and internet connectivity into the room. Students will point out academic uses for their phones, but no academic use exists that compensates for the time loss from texting, gaming and surfing.

Students can work with real calculators. They can use classroom technology to search for information on the internet.* They can even use books.

Relating back to my last post, you don’t want to let the worms into your classroom, right? Well, the phones have worms. They have jewels, footballs, candy, tanks, soldiers, and even nuclear weapons. So no phones. No mercy, either. Let one phone in, and pretty soon the phones will reproduce. Arnold Schwarzenegger will be hiding in pockets throughout the classroom.

Eduhonesty: IMPORTANT phone advice. Do not seize phones unless absolutely unavoidable. If you must seize them, keep them on your person. Depending on school procedures, hand them off to administration as soon as possible if allowed. I have seen colleagues accused of damaging phones or losing/taking phones that disappeared. If the whole class sees where you stash the phone, someone may take advantage of that fact.

Guard your own phone and install password protection. I still remember trying to help a colleague find her new, expensive birthday present. Sadly, she never did find that phone.

*In the absence of classroom technology, especially when other resources are scarce, phone usage becomes considerably more complicated. I have let phones into the room in that situation.

Pic from https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/iLI15g8PtD6X_cRuaEMnevCHJ9vQ4maMm3PnXJf8I5FTur4j1of-DGoHjs65FIS273s=h900

For the newbies and those new to technology in the classroom:

Before I get to phones, I want to return to the worms in the last post. It’s easy to let a worm go. It’s easy to say to yourself, “Well, Jared finished his work and we only have two minutes left. Let him play the game.”

Beware of worms! Watch out for those moments of kindness. You can’t let the worms gain a foothold. As soon as you let Jared play the worm game, the laptop next to him will go to that URL. Pretty soon everyone will fall under the spell of the worms. Then they will start asking you, “Can I play the worm game? I’m done with my assignment.” They may even try to bargain with you. “If I finish the  homework for the week, can I play the worm game?” The problem will begin to grow larger. “Why can’t I play “Droid Attack? You let Matthew play the worm game.”

If you are not careful, your classroom may begin to resemble Tremors #6: The Worms Eat Ms. Q’s Classroom. Worms will gnaw on your lesson plan and swallow your reinforcement activities whole. Minute by minute, you will be battling worms, droids and other time-sucking creatures, all intent on stealing your class time.

If you have ever watched a lavalantula movie or that classic Big Ass Spider, you should know the key ingredient to managing cyberworms: You can’t let them reproduce. If you do, there goes the plucky heroine’s best friend — and most of your students with her.

I’ve had some fun, but the idea behind this post was quite serious. A minute here, a minute there, and soon whole hours will slip away. If you want to use the worm games as rewards, the terms of that reward have to be clearly spelled out with penalties for infractions.

One major help as you add technology to the room: Set up your classroom with your desk in back so you can see what’s on student screens in front of you.

http://www.clipartlord.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/explosion6.png, Quotation from Star Wars 4: A New Hope, sourced from a favorite site, http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0000002/quotes:

Han Solo: [sounding official] Uh, everything’s under control. Situation normal.
Voice: What happened?
Han Solo: [getting nervous] Uh, we had a slight weapons malfunction, but uh… everything’s perfectly all right now. We’re fine. We’re all fine here now, thank you. How are you?
Voice: We’re sending a squad up.
Han Solo: Uh, uh… negative, negative. We had a reactor leak here now. Give us a few minutes to lock it down. Large leak, very dangerous.
Voice: Who is this? What’s your operating number?
Han Solo: Uh…
[Han shoots the intercom]
Han Solo: [muttering] Boring conversation anyway. LUKE, WE’RE GONNA HAVE COMPANY!

Our problem has never been lack of standards: Before the Common Core, we were awash in standards. We were drowning in standards. A few years back, my district and many others were creating “power standards,” a subset of the complete list of standards for each grade and for each subject. These power standards represented the state standards that the district decided were the most important standards, since there was no way to teach all the state standards. In poor and urban districts failing to make test targets, “power” standards tended to be picked based on a bang-for-your-buck on spring test scores. More affluent, higher-scoring districts had greater discretion, and could pick their power standards based on what they hoped students would know in the long-term.

A huge issue was raised in my last sentence, one still flying too often below the radar. Listening to the news, one might think America was suffering from a large educational reactor leak, very dangerous. It’s not. In many zip codes, we remain absolutely competitive internationally. These districts do not need the reformed standards and tests that keep coming at their schools like Imperial Storm Troopers. They pay a great deal less attention to the implied threat of those tests and troopers, too.

The negative effects from America’s testing barrage are impacting our poor and urban districts far more fiercely than they are impacting higher-scoring, financially comfortable districts. Administrator turnover in academically strong districts remains considerably lower than in disadvantaged counterparts, allowing these already-stronger schools to develop cultures and stability while they work on whole-child education. I taught a middle-school Spanish maternity position recently where students are sometimes excused from class for band and drama activities. In the low-scoring district from which I retired, students were never excused for nonacademic reasons. In the last ten years in that low-scoring school, six principals came and went (one great guy stayed four years until a government grant forced him out) at the head of that district’s middle school, and I may have missed one from the start of the decade. During that time, in contrast, my maternity-position school had exactly one principal.

From https://www.yahoo.com/?fr=yset_chr_syc_hp, sourced from NPR.org

Should Teachers Ask Students To Check Their Devices At The Classroom Door?

 Tania Lombrozo drew attention to research showing that students using laptops and other digital devices in the college classroom are less likely to perform as well as students not using them. It isn’t just that using the devices to multitask during lecture — searching the web, posting on Facebook and Instagram, texting, etc. — may hurt your performance. It turns out that students around you who see you multitasking show an even more marked drop-off in how well they do. There’s nothing surprising in this. It’s true, as Tania notices, that students are likely to underestimate the deleterious effects that indulging in digital distractions may have on their performance …

Read more

The article is at http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/08/09/488214332/the-best-schools-in-the-world-do-this-why-dont-we and is titled

Tip #7 for newbies, and others whose districts’ testing regimes are spinning out of control: Work on cultivating resilience in your students. Work relentlessly on resilience. In particular, make sure students understand that despite the crazy amount of time their classroom may be spending on testing, test scores remain only a very small part of who they are and what they may have to contribute to their world.

Eduhonesty: Phenomena that cannot be precisely quantified may nonetheless dramatically affect human lives. We cannot accurately measure post-traumatic stress disorder, but we acknowledge this disorder exists. We cannot measure the stress created by intensive testing, especially inappropriate, intensive testing, but we know this stress exists. When the girl in the front row breaks down crying during the test, and wails to her teacher, “I can’t understand this!” that stress cloaks the classroom, and may set off other tears elsewhere.

Do we know how our students are feeling as a result of our recent barrage of testing? Do we know how appropriate the new PARCC test’s content is for the majority of our students? Given the extraordinarily high failure rate on PARCC, that question should be asked and answered. That question ought to have been answered before so many students were required to take the test.

Are our students benefiting from all this testing, and if so how? How much testing actually results in useful, new results? Who else benefits from testing? The people who sell the test are certainly benefiting. New Jersey estimates that the cost of implementing the new PARCC standardized tests in New Jersey public schools might cost more than $100,000,000 dollars after four years. The state spent around $22,000,000 in 2015.^[1] And that $22,000,000 only bought one of multiple tests students are taking today.

[1] Kelly Heyboer, NJ Advance Media for NJ.com, The Star-Leupdated March 22, 2015 at 11:37 AM.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/08/09/colleges-across-country-give-new-perks-to-illegal-immigrant-students.html

A new fall semester is about to begin. And while American college students struggle to pay for their higher education and long to be the fortunate recipients of college scholarships, illegal immigrants find their path lined with institutionalized supports, loads of scholarship money — and a healthy dose of “go get ’em kid,” as they break U.S. law.

Just this May, former Secretary of Homeland Security and current University of California president Janet Napolitano announced a three-year commitment to support illegal UC students university-wide.

“We are committed to continuing a path forward for undocumented students at the University of California,” Napolitano said in a website message. “This funding will further strengthen the university’s undocumented student initiative, and help ensure that these students receive the support and resources they need to succeed.”

The article continues if readers want to visit the above website. Fox News goes on to protest this use of taxpayer and college funds.

As a former bilingual teacher, I’d like to weigh in on this issue. We are not talking about a bunch of young people who just arrived here from Mexico or Guatemala. For one thing, few recent newcomers have the English necessary to tackle college.  We are mostly talking about children who grew up in the U.S. educational system. In some cases, these children arrived here as babies. They may have no memory of their countries of origin.

These are the kids without social security numbers who may nonetheless have attended U.S. elementary, middle and high schools. They may have been among the best students in their schools. These would-be college students are likely to come from poor families.

I know their parents. I’ve been calling those parents for years, finding them in factories, restaurants and cleaning jobs. Sometimes I can’t find them because they are out working in fields or yards. These parents don’t have that social security number, either, but somehow they  find work. They work hard, too. Many of them have two jobs.

Readers, please explain this situation to people if you agree with me. These kids ought to get help with college. This is the only country many of them know. America will be better if we help these kids to fulfill their potential. Some of our best and brightest students are following parents into factory or yard work for lack of a social security number. We can do better by the kids who have been raised here and who have fought to achieve academic excellence.

We already stunt too much potential. Kids without numbers know that they cannot be nurses without that critical 9-digit number. They study medical billing instead. They know they can’t be teachers without that number. They take jobs in private preschools instead. They give what they are allowed to give, often not nearly as much as they might be able to give if we provided them a college education and path to citizenship.

Eduhonesty: Well, so much for tips for teachers today. Newbies might go back to last August in my feed if they are looking for tips. Last year’s August and September tips were especially geared to new teachers.

I had to take a day off from tips today, though, after I read this article. The text is inflammatory but, more importantly, the content slants the truth. The parents of these children are not living off the system. Without a social security number, they cannot. They are working. Sometimes they are working sixteen hours a day in low-wage, physically demanding jobs in the hot sun. They are taking tassels off corn. They are harvesting melons. They are putting small parts into other small parts while standing on their feet all day in backrooms without air-conditioning, hoping someday to get a job “on the floor” where the temperatures run in the seventies instead of the eighties or nineties.

When we don’t allow these children access to U.S. colleges, we condemn them to taking tassels off corn and working in backrooms. I’d like to suggest that America needs to be bigger than that. Do we want to create a class of indentured servants? Is that who we are?

A modern version of indentured servitude will be the de facto result of not allowing the children of illegal immigrants access to higher education.

Tip #6 for teachers working in academically-disadvantaged districts: Write down the fun parts of your school experience. What did you like most? What kept you after school? Start advocating for those activities during meetings and in committee work.

Take the lead if you can find the time. Maybe you will have to be the one to organize the trip to the Museum of Science and Industry. Maybe you will have to start the Latin Dance Club. Other schools’ debate coaches can help you learn to coach debate. But however you can do it, fight to get fun into your school.

We have to deemphasize testing.

My last year, I gave PARCC^TM tests, ACCESS^TM tests, AIMSWEB^TM tests, MAP^TM tests, mandatory East Coast unit tests, and weekly obligatory quizzes, not to mention extra tests and quizzes needed to raise grades since the administration had decided that 100% of grades should be based on assessments.

All these assessments were administered throughout the school year to give the state, district leaders, school administrators and teachers feedback on how students were progressing toward meeting academic expectations. With these lost days of testing, my school was able to provide quick information to the state showing that students were making academic progress. But I spent over one-fifth of my classroom hours testing that year, a ridiculous loss of instructional time by any measure. My students also had an extremely rough year. I may have created a few future drop-outs. I hope not, but the kids at the bottom of the testing pool were having little fun that year.

Ever-increasing testing ironically hits our lowest-scoring kids the hardest. Academically successful districts don’t have to give extra tests to show higher scores. Those districts don’t have to present new data regularly to the state. Their administrators do not need to travel from classroom to classroom asking students to please, please take upcoming state tests seriously. Those administrators can do the traditional job of a school administrator instead. They can work on school spirit rather than school scores. They can expand the breadth of academic offerings within their districts, rather than telling electives’ teachers to focus instruction around math and English for annual state test. They can visit clubs to listen to speakers and watch dances.

They can focus on kids instead of numbers.

In schools where administrators are chasing higher digits, though, the hallways can become grim. Are your administrators are too busy to worry about spirit? If so, Tip #6 says step into the gap. Be the life of the party. Plan the dance with your colleagues. Get the crepe paper up there.

Eduhonesty: School dances have kept more would-be drop-outs in school than mandatory extra math practice ever will.

Tip #5 — for all teachers: If you get a chance to join the Curriculum Committee, leap on it. Speak up. Speak often. Tell everyone what you think your students will need to learn next year. In the worst-case scenario, the wrong curriculum can hijack your classroom. Fight back!

Eduhonesty: Channeling Eeyore out here. Welcome back to the Blog of Gloom and Doom, where the glass not only may be half-empty, but is sometimes laying in shards all over the classroom floor. I want to get those pieces in the wastebasket before any students get hurt.

The shift to the Common Core is resulting in curricular changes that can cause actual harm in academically-disadvantaged districts, as desperate administrators flail about in attempts to improve scores. As I noted before, more and more often, teachers are given a script to follow, a script that may not match their students. They are told to stay on the group track even when the group track does not seem to benefit some, most or even all of their students.

Why does this happen? Multiple forces are in play, especially the perceived need to review all material expected to be found on the PARCC, Smarter Balanced or other annual, spring state test, the Godzillas among the many tests tearing up America’s classrooms. While schools that are doing well in the test game can afford to relax and schedule museum trips, schools that are failing to hit targets may become almost wholly focused on that Godzilla, bringing all their guns and students to bear on that one target.

“Data” has become another potent force driving academic homogeneity. If all classes take the same test, then all teachers and students can be evaluated using the same yardstick. That sounds perfectly rational on the surface, but can result in special education and bilingual students wasting days of school time taking tests they cannot even read. Students are sometimes fed into the testing system as if they were interchangeable parts – despite the fact that we have year after year of evidence documenting that this assumption has been becoming steadily less true over time.

In a class with student achievement scores that differ by six or more grade-years – such classes are common nowadays — teachers should not be giving all students exactly the same quizzes and tests at the same time. Those identical assessments are likely to bore the kids at the top, while they demolish the confidence of the kids at the bottom. Kids in the middle usually do best, but in worst-case scenarios, where the kids and the Common Core remain years apart, even the kids in the middle may be unable to gain a foothold on the academics coming at them.

A good teacher matches instruction to students; Drew who cannot read must be taught differently than Sadie who reads above grade level. When government leaders and school administrators demand districts prepare all students for identical tests, many students are cheated out of instruction and remediation they need to succeed. Administrators can demand that I teach seventh grade Common Core standards, but when a student has entered my classroom at a second-grade, academic level, that student cannot learn those standards without many, many hours of remediation. The time I spend instructing that student on standards five full years above his or her understanding will not only be wasted but will carry a potent opportunity cost, the time lost for essential instruction in third and fourth grade mathematics.

Please, readers, if you work in that scripted school, if you have the opportunity, stand up for remediation time — real remediation time. Get your students’ remediation requirements out front and center. Help curriculum planners to estimate time realistically. You may be unable to fulfill this mission as your district tries to hit every standard that might be on the state test, but sometimes we get lucky. Sometimes our voices are heard.

They are never heard when we do not speak.