(I started but did not finish this post in October. I decided to finish it tonight. It fits well enough tonight and on many other days.)

It’s the end of Indigenous People’s Day, Columbus Day, or whatever you want to call it. I need to get ready for tomorrow. I can’t do it. I spent the week-end dealing with a sick elderly cat and grading numerous papers. I should do all sorts of practical things with my data. But I’ve burnt out.

I will have to go to bed and get up early, preparing for battle before at the break of day. Teachers can’t go in cold. Some do, I guess, but the results of that performance often look ugly. Kids know when you are trying. Kids know when you care. I need a plan for tomorrow.

I hope sleep will help. This level of burn-out belongs in February, not October. Part of the problem is that I know I have to grind through all sorts of numbers to produce new data for the administration. I expect this to suck up my evenings for all of the rest of the week and who knows how far beyond that time. I don’t expect to have lesson preparation time, only data-crunching time.

Eduhonesty: All this data makes me want to bundle up, turn on Dr. Who and call in crazy. I don’t call in sick and I’m not going to start now. At this rate, I may eventually be able to call in crazy, though. Forget illness, bereavement, jury duty, personal time, or professional development. What I need is crazy time. I need time to make props for my lessons, to cut out tiny pieces of pizza, to dye marshmallows and to put together a model of an atom, but I’ll take time to go hide under the covers and sleep.

By Rhett Morgan, from http://www.tulsaworld.com/communities/catoosa/schools/catoosa-teacher-fired-after-driving-students-on-snack-trip-with/article_ce620bfe-2e9f-5ecc-ada5-31aeb076c871.html: The article is titled “Catoosa teacher fired after driving 11 students on snack trip, with two in trunk,” and includes the unfortunate details of how a 10-year teacher named Cagle got fired.

“She piled 11 students ranging in age from 12 to 15 into a Honda Accord, placing two in the front seat, seven in the back seat and two 12-year-old girls in the trunk, Long (the attorney for the school district) said. The group traveled about one mile to a Wal-Mart, bought food items and returned to school, the attorney said.

Two students who were out of the classroom when the group left were left behind at the school, Long said.

Teachers are required to obtain signed parental-guardian permission before transporting children off campus, and “she acknowledged that she didn’t do so,” Long said of Cagle.

My favorite part of the article reads as follows:

“In the end, the board was concerned that parents, grandparents, guardians send their kids to school every day with an expectation that they will receive education benefit during every course that they attend and that … rules regarding get-permission-first will be honored,” Long said. “Also, no parent or grandparent or guardian should ever expect that any teacher, particularly not an experienced teacher, will take their children off campus in the trunk of a personal vehicle.”

Eduhonesty: I’d say that ten years qualifies as experienced. What if she had been teaching for only two years, though? At that point, could she put students in her trunk? What’s the cut-off here?

I have to admit this article left me feeling ambivalent. We all have a few stupid moments in our lives. I’ve had more than a few. Ten years of teaching should not be wiped out by one wacky morning. Still, the students-in-the-trunk move qualifies as a real contender for Stupid Moment of the Year. But maybe they do that kind of thing in small towns in Oklahoma. Many parents came forward to support this instructor. I don’t think I’d fire this woman if she’d been doing a good job teaching, as parents contend. I suspect a “No driving students anywhere ever” would work just fine.

P.S. I’d suggest a google search on “how much do school districts pay annually in attorney fees on average.” Many Americans might be astounded by the results. San Bernardino City Unified spent more than $1 million on outside legal counsel during the 2012-2013 fiscal year, and more than $4 million over three years, according to one report.

I have an entire classroom of students who are four years behind mathematically according to benchmark tests. Only one student is testing above that four-year deficit. In many cases, those dismal test results seem explicable. When I work with most students in this class, it’s clear that many struggle with math. New concepts don’t come easily to them and the those concepts don’t stick without a great deal of repetition. In this time of rapidly moving, scripted curricula, that repetition can be extremely difficult or even impossible to manage.

That said, the real mystery has to be that small subset of students who catch on relatively quickly, those students who don’t need a great deal of instruction and repetition to take off running with the new material. What happened to these students? How did they get so far behind?

Eduhonesty: I am honestly mystified.

We were expected to avoid parties and celebrations, providing full instruction until late in the day on the Friday before break. I don’t support that approach. In fact, I think it’s a perfect example of theory trumping common sense.

One of the best reasons not to attempt rigorous instruction on the day before break has to be the number of students who take that day off. In my school, most students with disciplinary infractions took the day off since they were supposed to do academic work with the Dean while their peers had fun. This absentee tally does not include the number of kids who told their parents or guardians that they didn’t feel well and therefore might as well stay home since, because of upcoming vacation, little work would be done at school anyway. One of my best students had travelled to Miami for a family wedding. Various students in the school recently left for Mexico. Some will miss more than a week of instruction while visiting relatives in Guanajuato, Mexico or other places where the weather’s warm and dad and mom have family. One year, I lost two boys for two months when they went to Puerto Rico for the winter. The boys never attended school there, either. They came back with excellent tans and little hope of catching up on what they had missed.

I know the counterargument would be that those students who come to school should get the full range of services we can provide. I agree with that idea. I’m just saying that it’s complicated, especially when students are all excited about vacation, promised Christmas cell phones, family gatherings, church celebrations, and all the little details of the season that eclipse day-to-day academics, at a time when up to one-third the class is absent.

Eduhonesty: The day before break is a perfect day for reinforcement activities, for fun Jeopardy math and science games. It’s a ridiculous day to introduce new material, but a few of my colleagues who had fallen behind the scripted curriculum went forward when they should have retreated, trying to catch up to the schedule. In a saner time, no one would think of introducing new material on the Friday before break, but we have a schedule to keep. That schedule sometimes leads to real wackiness.