And I’ll flee to Scotland before you.
Cause me and my math class will never meet again
On the bonny, bonny shores of lucidity.

Hmmm… I can probably find a better closing word, but I captured the idea.

We’re all on the high road. We’re all teaching the material expected to be on the seventh grade test. The scariest administrators in the world will most likely serve us our entrails on a platter if we don’t. But I have a class where every single student except one tests at a middle elementary school level. One student tests toward the end of elementary school. I don’t know what went wrong in elementary school.

I know what’s going wrong now. Today I will continue presenting material required by the one-size-fits-all-but-of-course-you-are-expected-to-differentiate lesson plan. I found some nifty word problems online that I can use for the story problem section of my lesson plan. According to this website, these problems are actually for eighth graders, but they are exactly what I am expected to be doing. So that’s what we will do.

Confusion will be extremely high, of course. The high road is proving a daunting climb for my class, but I am not allowed to offer any reasonable alternatives. I’ve reached the point where I’m afraid to speak, in fact. If admin told me to teach my poor minions calculus, I’d probably just buy a Calculus for Dummies book and start trying to figure out how to make some of the material manageable. Any attempts to slow this train down just swing the spotlight in my direction. I’m avoiding the spotlight at all costs. Let the scary people run things the way they want. They’ve tried to intimidate me. They’ve succeeded.

Eduhonesty: Weirdly enough, I expect what is occurring to produce at least some of the results admin wants. I’ll explain why in my next post.