I spent my Saturday morning providing free tutoring as usual. Today, I finally got “Marisombra” to join us after repeated calls to mom. That gave me two tutorees working at an early elementary school level. I kept shifting between topics such as order of operations, how that pesky exponent works, and what factors cause bias in samples. Afterwards, I went to pick up something at school and then to Walmart.

My Dean was working as usual, putting in her 60-plus-hour week to make the money to get her kids through college. The Walmart clerk was also putting in a sixty-plus-hour week to put a child through college. In her case, that week involved two jobs, one at Walmart and the other driving a school bus. We connected over college costs — my husband and I still aren’t out from under yet — and I stood at the end of the line finishing the discussion after she had moved on to her next customer. My clerk was tired. She almost never has days off at this time of year. If the busses aren’t running, Walmart has all hands on deck for the week-end buying frenzy.

Shifting from one foot to another in her blue, Walmart smock, that forty-something, wavy-haired, brunette clerk quickly told me about her family, anxious to share the details of her struggle. The tired lines and dark shadows below and around her eyes reminded me of why I keep trying, even now that my days in education are numbered. The exact number is thirty, I believe, and I am definitely counting, albeit with ambivalence. I want out of education as it is now, but I will miss the teaching of an earlier time, a time when I could create my own lesson plans based on what my students needed rather than pie-in-the-sky standards created by politicians who have never sat in an urban or economically-disadvantaged classroom.

Eduhonesty: I see my students in that woman. What happens to those kids who never manage to get ready for higher education? Who have their first baby at sixteen or even younger? Some of them will end up working two jobs like that clerk, trying to give their children the gifts they could not give themselves, like an education that will pay the bills. My Dean has an office filled with cookies, family pictures, and homey tsotchkes. She can sit when she is tired. She regularly receives appreciation from the school’s teaching staff. She works too many hours, but her overtime is her choice, not the result of a big-box store’s whim.

The difference is education, all education. If I can convince some of my girls and boys to finish high school, to go on to get a degree or learn a viable trade, I will have succeeded. If I can convince these students to postpone parenting until they graduate from high school, I will have succeeded. In the culture where I teach, these are not slam-dunk aspirations on my part. I taught a middle-school class a few years ago where more of the girls had babies by the end of high school than not. My goal has been straightforward: Try to sell hope for a brighter future. Hope does not walk the halls of my middle school on a regular basis, but sometimes teachers can invite hope in for a short stay. Enough short stays and we may get a high school graduation with a commitment to further learning at the end. I want my students to have offices with tsotchkes and snack food, not long days counting minutes on the clock while they shift from foot to foot.

Time dedicated to MAP yesterday ran 160 minutes or 2 hours and 40 minutes. A few students were also pulled out for AIMSWEB. Students were taking the fluency section of the AIMSWEB from helpful parapros, social workers and others. I kept passing the little student desk where one woman was testing all day in the hallway near my room. The fluency testers are completing the grading for students so I think I may be entirely off the hook for this piece of AIMSWEB grading anyway.

Meeting time ran only 1 hour and 10 minutes. Testing was only peripherally involved as we discussed what had happened during testing, our challenges and triumphs. The newest version of the MAP test scared me at times. The software’s hardly friendly and quirky things happened. Students disappeared from lists. Worried students then stared at me as I tried to find someone to get them back into the student queue. In a year or two, I would be able to troubleshoot all this weirdness myself, but for now, I had to wave my arms at the Assistant Principal down the hall. At the end of testing, when students finished, the button that I was supposed to push was named “delete session.” I stared at that button, unwilling to push anything that said “delete” even though my instructions told me to push that button. But I have tested new and revamped software too often to trust instructions. Finally, the guy across the hall rescued me and pushed the delete button as I sat frozen in front of the finished test session. He grinned and told me that now it was his fault if all the tests somehow went away. I love the guy across the hall.

I have needed more time to teach basic skills — a great deal more time — and I resent the proofs that I see when the MAP results pop up at the end. A number of students showed notable improvement, but not everyone did. Once again, stronger students climbed the ladder, but the Weakest students never managed to grab a rung.

Eduhonesty: I have the SLO details for this week-end along with other thoughts. I’ll be busy this week-end. In addition to all this other testing, I have to grade science and math quizzes along with daily work and more AIMSWEB. I’m buried. They’re tested out.

C’est la vie, c’est la guerre. A quest may be in order. I think there may be a chocotini waiting out there with my name on it.

Grade, grade, grade — I keep putting pink marks on wrong answers. In the end, I count whatever right answers remain. I am a long ways from done.

Unfortunately, I am not the fastest grader in the Midwest. Fortunately, I have a smaller class to grade than most, smaller than everyone except the special education teachers I believe. AIMSWEB is paper and pencil, not computer-based, and I have to get the final tallies into the spreadsheet of student results. If this has taken me the entire evening, I suspect all the other teachers who gave this test — which is almost everyone in the school — have spent the entire or almost entire evening grading. The AIMSWEB test does not affect student grades. Its content only peripherally relates to what my students have been taught. AIMSEB is a quick, general knowledge test for language and math which includes content from elementary school and up.

Eduhonesty: I have to quit now because I have to grade and I’ll be getting up early to continue, I expect. Time spent on testing today amounted to 25 minutes of AIMSWEB prep stolen from science since I could not get through all of the AIMSWEB prep materials in previous tutoring periods. Four students were also taken out of classes, missing instruction to AIMSWEB testing by other persons. One left at the end of the hour which was no problem. I will have to catch the others up on a few details related to spring and neap tides. The afternoon meeting was kindly cancelled so that we could grade after school. Time spent on grading is about 3 1/2 hours so far and that pile of papers remains far from done.

Preparation for tomorrow’s classes? Not happening. Not today, anyway.

Not enough time. Ever. Blogging is only possible because everybody else is picking all my materials and I am forbidden to go off the track. So much of my time loss relates to administrative and governmental demands, too, rather than instruction. I guess it could be worse. Special education teachers have told me that half or more of their time is spent on official meetings and paperwork rather than actual teaching.

Time spent on AIMSWEB amounted to about 20 minutes, 3 sets of 3 minute tests, not including time to pass out and collect papers as well as time to lecture students on the importance of taking the test seriously. After the 1st mini test, I was forced to address the issue of seriousness since a couple of boys had repeated the words “sausage” and “deez nutz” during the first test, cracking up the class. I probably ought to have sent those boys to the Dean, but I did not think that would result in optimal testing conditions. My class would have been badly upset if I wrote up referrals for those double entendres and we still had two mini tests to go. So I simply addressed them all, re-explained the importance of this latest test, and sobered the group up before they tried AIMSWEB again. We seem to have reached test burnout before we started this test, but I have been giving them so many required tests and required test preps lately that I’m not sure they believe they have ever had a break.

Still, total time lost to this standardized test was specifically only 20 minutes. We then spent the rest of tutoring doing math that might help prepare for the next AIMSWEB test on Thursday, another 20 minutes. An unquantifiable, but hardly irrelevant, addition to the testing mania came when emissaries from the Dean came to fetch students for more AIMSWEB testing. Five of my students left during class to be tested. One requested student was absent. Of the five who left, four missed lecture on unfamiliar material. One went late enough so that he had heard about the 1st and 3rd interquartile range, but he missed the start of the reinforcement activity. Students were gone for times ranging from 8 minutes to 15 minutes. Conservatively, that’s 40 minutes of missed classtime for students in my classees, taken at odd and awkward intervals. These pull-outs were occurring all over the school.

Why the pull-outs? Due to the craziness from the last two administrations of this test, someone on top came up with a bit of help; instead of teachers doing all the testing and grading, paraprofessionals, coaches and Deans are doing the fluency portion of the test. I am not sure who will grade these sections. My parapro is not expecting to grade anything, so I may be stuck with the grading. In the meantime, students keep arriving at my door, interrupting my class to take yet another member of my class out for AIMSWEB testing.

I only spent 5 minutes working with a colleague to get ready for MAP testing. She could not get on the computer at first so we shelved the MAP effort. The servers lack bandwidth or something, a coach explained, and sixth grade is already MAP testing, rendering the internet dicey at times, and keeping all other students off the internet.

Eduhonesty: Time lost to standardized tests –NOT INCLUDING STUDENTS REMOVED FROM MY CLASS TO TEST ELSEWHERE — amounted to 45 minutes.

Time for tests would run much longer if I completed the grading of my “SLO” (student learning outcome) tests but I am not even starting the SLOs. I’ll describe SLO’s tomorrow if I can. Since I’ve resigned/retired, I’m skipping my SLO homework. I’ll just ask colleagues to estimate how long their own SLO tests took. I am counting these with standardized tests because they are not used for student grades. They are used to assess teacher effectiveness.

I may not get to the SLO blog post tomorrow, though. I am supposed to hunker down in Dennys to grade AIMSWEB tests after school with the guy across the hall. Grading general tests that don’t count for student grades can be pretty aggravating. I’d rather not grade these sheets alone.

I gave math tests that that few students could effectively read at the start and end of the day. I explained and translated problems, went over vocabulary and finally cut them loose. I hope to be happily surprised by results tomorrow, when I have time to grade this thing, but I would not put a dime on the odds of that happy surprise. I went over another math test during tutoring after giving a standardized test’s (AIMSWEB) computation section today, a mere 10 minutes of student time, not including about 5 minutes of set-up. AIMSWEB administration takes little time. If we did not have to grade all the papers from it, AIMSWEB would be easy.

My meeting ran about the prescribed 40 minutes and involved generalized planning and discussion for daily classes plus a dose of testing details. Then I went to help a nervous colleague who was worried about getting ready for the MAP test that starts in a couple of days. We spent some time trying to figure out the instructions. That left about 20 minutes planning time. I made copies.

Science involved independent work with easily understood worksheets on moon phases and a more general crossword covering recent science vocabulary. That gave me time to work on the latest vocabulary project, my 500 sight words that all my students must read to me so that I can put them in a spreadsheet tracking this reading time.

Eduhonesty: Total time devoted to standardized tests today, including discussion, planning and actual testing, ran about 35 minutes, a very manageable time loss as we leapt out of the testing gate.

I just ran the average grade level for the students that I teach. In math, that level is 4.06, meaning that students are scoring at the beginning of the fourth grade on the MAP test. In reading, they are scoring at 3.04, or the beginning of the third grade. I lumped both my groups together. If I separate them, the results are more problematic. One class is substantially below the other. Technically, these kids are in the seventh grade.

What books are at the third grade lexile level? The Captain Underpants series qualifies, along with the Berenstain Bears and the Zack Files.

Here’s the first page from tomorrow’s test:

I did not write this test. No one in my school did. The required outside consultants that came with our government grant wrote the test. Overall, the test looks decent enough, but I’d like to ask readers to think about reading that test if they read at a first or second grade level. If the mean average for reading in my student group falls at the beginning of third grade, that means the group has a fair number of first and second grade readers. The range actually runs from first grade to fifth grade. Only one student scored as high as fifth grade.

I have to give this test tomorrow. I expect an epic fail despite the time we spent working on the relevant vocabulary and concepts, even if I take time to tell the class what land conservation laws are and how this might relate to hiking. One reason I expect my fail is simpler than vocabulary, though. I’ll ask readers to try to solve the second question on this test. That question’s far from a no-brainer and, honestly, while it may have a “best sample,” every one of those answers is half-daft. Unfortunately, this is question number two, setting the tone for the whole test. At this early point, I expect a number of kids to enter that deer-in-the-headlights state of despair that leads to panic and random guesses.

I’ve had a week to work on this material. It’s not enough. They need more time. But we are all supposed to give the same tests at about the same time and I am already one day late. The train never stops. The train will not stop for me. I have to give this test tomorrow. Then I expect I will “lose” a day going over what went wrong so we can get ready for the retake that fits nowhere in my time budget. But 100% of these kids’ grades are based on these tests so the retake will be a necessity.

Week after week after week, I have been giving these tests and picking people up after they fell. How much resilience can I demand of these kids? How much resilience can I demand of myself? But when I tried to talk to my Assistant Principal about this issue — more than once — I ended up being told that he found my lack of faith in my students disturbing. (I can hear Lord Vader.) The implication was always that I must not know how to do my job and I’d say he’s right. I don’t know how to do this job anyway.

I find my Assistant Principal’s lack of faith in the copious quantities of data that he and the administration have been amassing all year to be simply… inexplicable. How does he expect first grade readers to do this test? What kind of scaffolding/remediation/tutoring does he expect to fill in the gaps? I have been tutoring and sending kids to others for more tutoring. But at the end of the day, that tutoring and scaffolding might as well be Band-Aids on third degree burns.

Eduhonesty: I have been told that I must use the materials provided to me. Almost none of my students can read those materials. I have been told I must keep up with the regular population. I can only do that at the expense of repetition. Without that repetition, I believe retention will be scant, and test scores appear to be bearing me out as the year progresses. I can tell when my students are learning and I’ve never seen a year where so little actual learning occurred, even when I can laser in and get students ready for that weekly test.

To use a metaphor that explains why I have to retire: I feel as if I have been forced to open a puppy mill filled with lost, sad puppies trapped in cages. Those windows to the world in an earlier post today? My puppy mill has no windows. Only endless chances to get beat on the head with test papers for failing to do the right puppy thing, a thing that no one has properly modeled, taught or explained. I am so sorry for the puppies I will be leaving behind, but I can’t do this.

I don’t think they can find anyone who can, frankly. But some corporation is running this operation and they want us to use the same materials and present the same material at the same time. No one will let me go to the library or the internet to find the right materials or let me take the time to do the needed remedial training. Oh, I can go to the library or internet to get those materials to share, but I don’t have close to enough time now so extra materials do me no good — and I am not allowed to substitute, only supplement during blocks of nonexistent time.

Eduhonesty; I understand that next year the corporation and district administration will allow bilingual and special education to adapt materials. Anyone looking at this year’s data can see that one-size-fits-all surely did not fit the bilingual and special education students. No one should have needed to gather a year’s data to find that out, either.

“Books were my window on the world. Growing up at the Elephant and Castle, which was very rough, my paradise was the library.”
Michael Caine

Books remain windows to the world for so many of us. We store our hopes, our interests, our dreams and our escapes in bookcases, waiting for free moments to dive into pages that provide us with succor and flight, diversion, learning and enlightenment. The more we read, the larger our personal worlds become.

My school’s library is about to be shut for renovation for the rest of the year. A well-known, local corporation has offered to refresh my school’s little collection of aged books. Renovations are greatly needed so I am not complaining. If I get a chance this week, maybe I will go look for that book on African-Americans that I stumbled on last year. My favorite quote, “Negroes may even be your teachers.” We need new books.

I hope the library will have a bank of computers next year — currently it has two — as well as updated materials. I regret the spring closing of the library. Still, any plan to update the library has my backing. I’ll add to my to-do list the need to talk to language arts teachers about pushing town library cards. Too many students here have no books in their homes. I wish we could renovate the library during the summer, given that my district already has severe reading challenges, but this upcoming closure likely results from corporate vacation schedules.

Eduhonesty: Any nitpicking here aside, I’m extremely happy about the library remodeling.

Taken from an administrative email: “Questions have come up about using the computer labs during the MAP testing window. Unfortunately we will not be able to use the labs. Technology has advised us not to use it because of bandwidth.”

The testing window runs from April 13th to April 22nd. Readers need to understand that the school’s laptops are being assigned to students for testing. Rooms do not have computers for students with a few special education exceptions. My colleague down the hall has two desktops in addition to her own machine, for example. We just took the student body offline for 8 days, except for testing.