I have previously put forth my opinion that true differentiated instruction requires the ability to use and teach different materials. This year, I have been required to teach exactly the same math to all my students. I am allowed to work on remedial math in blocks of essentially nonexistent time, especially if I can somehow do this in small groups, but my students are all supposed to take the exact same probability test at the end of the week. They all take the same unit tests designed by a group of outside consultants as well. I think this same-material-for-everybody approach is bonkers.

From today’s instruction, I offer this example to show in a nutshell why one-size-does-not-fit-all. The two middle-school students below are in the same class with me twice a day, once for math and once for science:

Student A: Ms. Q, if there are bacteria on Mars, would they be dangerous to us if we went there?

Student B (while we were tossing coins, making a probability chart): Ms. Q, which one is heads and which one is tails?

Eduhonesty: My scary unit tests results don’t surprise me much, if at all. I’m managing to teach a great deal of the required math for the year. But some kids are not ready for that grade-level math. Trust me.

I have learned in my years of teaching that kids can often pronounce multisyllabic words perfectly without understanding what they are saying. These acts of mimicry convince teachers that vital reading skills have been acquired until the tests and quizzes start to roll in. I’m not sure how kids reach the seventh grade unable to decipher book content once the pictures are removed, but I do know this: We desperately need more remedial reading programs.

We need to teach reading to students until they can read. Currently, we pass students along into language arts classes where they are lost, unable to access the content needed to pass their tests. We place them in art and band classes that provide welcome escapes, but at the expense of hours that might help these students cross the reading threshold. We need to stop creating these one-size-fits-all curricula molded into one-size-fits-all schedules.

If we want to understand how students can graduate from high school unable to effectively read a newspaper or fill out a job application, these reading-light curricula and schedules should be added to the list of reasons.

Eduhonesty: I can already hear the objections.

“We give them plenty of materials to read!” Various district leaders might reply.

I’d like to answer that objection. An unreadable book might as well be no book. When our desire for “rigor” results in the purchase of books whose lexile level renders those books indecipherable, we are wasting our students’ time and our own time — and we are also wasting a great deal of money, the money that might have been spent on more accessible books instead.

Reading comes naturally to many children, but other children need help to master this essential life skill. We need to specifically teach reading. We can’t hope that our children will become readers simply because we thrust books into their hands. The wrong books not only don’t help, they may do harm. I am convinced those indecipherable books create nonreaders.

How long has the district been out of paper? I have been asking teachers to try to remember. Around a month might be a good guess. No one’s sure, though. We have been bringing in our own paper for quite awhile now. One teacher told me that we had borrowed paper from another district. That’s an interesting rumor anyway. I’m no investigative reporter and I’m not sure how much of my valuable time I want to give to the paper issue, but I do want to make one observation: The same people creating my district’s plans for the future managed to use up all their paper about two months before the end of school, and possibly some weeks before that. This fact does not inspire confidence.

Common pedagogical fashion favors small group work right now. I have fought this battle for the longest time. I have tried and tried to group since multiple sources warned me my evaluation depended on people seeing a split-up class, with grouped students helping each other. Only my students are so far behind the freshly-created, outsider-based, required curriculum that they can’t do small groups well — when they can do them at all.

For the introduction of new material, whole group instruction is wholly appropriate. No one in administration would listen when I repeated that practically everything I was required to present was new material — often material without foundations, which also needed to be presented. So I grouped and I ended up with a lot of kids off task and a lot of time wasted.

I have had a long, tiring year. Computers finally saved me on the small group score, allowing me to present the right picture to onlookers. Some months into the year, we received software programs; groups could use the software while other groups worked with me to learn the main concepts for the day. This meant that I gave the main lesson three times when I had a vocabulary station and twice when I did not. Students worked on the computers and then moved to other stations. The new math software program started above my students’ learning levels — with one documented exception — so this system did not work as well as it might have, but at least my groups did not appear ridiculous. They weren’t the most efficient use of my pedagogical time, however.

Eduhonesty: Frankly, when students know so little of the required content, letting them teach each other regularly seems like pedagogical malpractice to me. But what do I know? I just work here.

P.S. Among other considerations, when I give the main lesson three times, I must shorten that lesson. Even if I give a great 20 minute mini-lesson each time, I can’t pack as much information and practice into 20 minutes as I can into 35 or 40 minutes. My students then necessarily are deprived of possible instructional time, an opportunity cost that cannot be recovered.

We were talking about standardized testing and some issues were put on the table that don’t often hit this blog. Because I teach in a lower-scoring, financially-disadvantaged district, my posts often deal with issues particular to this milieu. In the district where I work, we are trying to bring our ACT’s up so that more students from the district reach that 21 or so that suggests a student may be able to survive college coursework.

This girl had a 27*, a score that can get her into the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and many other fine schools. Her worries are different. She believes her score has been impacted by that fact that she is a slower and more meticulous test-taker. That’s entirely likely. ACT tests are designed so that students often don’t finish a section.

I’ll call this girl “Angie.” Angie objected to the accommodations that gave other students extra time. English-language learners and special education students may get extra time. Students with savvy Northshore parents may be entitled to extra time because their parents know how to work the system. I believe I could have gotten extra time for my younger child, for example, due to documented OCD issues, despite the fact that this child has always excelled academically to the point of being a National Merit Finalist. Parents in this upscale school district regularly hire tutors for their children. One child who used to regularly visit my house had five tutors until dad finally got her score up to 27. We take the ACT seriously in this suburb.

Eduhonesty: Upon short reflection, I added this issue to my list of reasons why high-stakes testing has gotten far too much public support. Ironically, as we attempt to level the playing field for urban and/or financially disadvantaged students, we are actually creating a system that puts these students at a further disadvantage. The students where I work don’t have the resources to hire tutor after tutor. Many parents in my work-district did not finish high school themselves. Unemployment and underemployment runs high here. Parents who have recently arrived from other countries especially don’t understand the pivotal role of the ACT in college applications — or in high school perceptions. Guidance counselors will provide an enormous amount of help to a child who scored 25 on the ACT, but very little help to a child who scored 16. One child has been tracked for possible college by a number. The other child plunged off that track when the score results came back.

I will note that a score of 16 indicates little chance of college success. As a former student once said, “I think they give you fifteen just for breathing.” But parents in my work-district too often don’t know how to help their kids fight for the numbers.
And in this data-driven, numbers-based culture that we are creating, numbers can be destiny.

Angie understands how the numbers work. She is going to be fine, although she has a legitimate complaint. But I look at the many parents where I live who do not hesitate to pony up $60 per hour or more for tutors to help with daily coursework, regular tests and standardized tests, and I see a gaping inequity, one that can’t be covered by occasional afternoons of free, afterschool tutoring given to whole groups rather than specific individuals. Kids in my neighborhood go into the testing game with loaded dice and the money to take second, third, fourth, and fifth chances at tests that cost. (Kids who qualify financially may get up to two fee waivers for the ACT while in high school, requiring the help of a school counselor. This covers basic testing costs, but no additional costs and no extra score reports.)

Parents where I live don’t hesitate to spend hundreds of dollars to increase ACT numbers. They also pay to deliver higher GPAs and SAT-specific content-learning. Parents where I work are often forced to spend that money on food and rent instead. As we emphasize numbers, numbers, numbers, we provide a natural advantage to those who can afford tutors — and one more barrier for those who cannot.

*The ACT maximum is 36.

Yesterday’s tutoring was rough. Davey kept randomly blurting out odd comments during tutoring while I was trying to go over a math quiz.

“Did you know I fell off my bike last week?”
“My cousin got a new gaming system.”
“I don’t like to go to Walmart.”

Told to please be quiet and listen, he kept going with the random monologue until I had to write him up and send him out to in-school suspension. Manny thought Davey was so funny that I almost had to send him off with the obligatory paperwork as well. I was livid with both by that point in class.

A nearly colleague had similar problems.

“Ten minutes for them to turn to page 248,” he said to me. “Ten minutes!” He had not finished something he needed to do by the end of the day. I had not finished at least two things I needed to do. Deliberate attempts to suck up time had succeeded in sucking up enough time so that we both fell behind. I didn’t talk to any other teachers. I think state-visit day may have created enough tension that, by day’s end, many of the troops were a little squirrelly.

Here’s part of yesterday’s problem: My plan required some independent work. I needed time to talk with individual students. I passed back unfinished papers with the word “Finish” on top. But without my direct supervision, tutoring turned into social hour, in no small part because a couple of boys have become frighteningly lost. I then took us back to whole-group instruction to go over a math quiz. The boys still chose to opt-out through passive-aggressive behavior. For one thing, I’m sure they suspected that quiz had gone badly for them.

Tutoring was no fun at all, that’s probably how best to sum this up. I will have to make a couple of phone calls home. But this post is about to take a left turn on the road to teacher-pulling-her-hair-out. I’m unhappy with both boys. They know it. I’m also unhappy that my boys have been set-up for this latest fiasco.

Davey is my Lil Davey of earlier posts and all he wants is to go back to elementary school — or to drop out. He wants out of THIS school desperately. Manny has no idea what he wants, except to play video games. He may well end up dropping out, too. He can’t read — and I mean can’t. The boy reads at an early elementary level. As soon as I embed that math in a story problem, he’s gone.

The previous system protected these boys, to some extent. At the start of the year, I had a fair number of bilingual students come up to me and ask how they could be failing.

“I always got As and Bs,” they said.

I am sure that’s true. But these students were years, sometimes as much as five or six years, behind grade level in various subjects, living in that proverbial fool’s paradise that comes when smiling teachers give you high grades, tell your parents how well you behave and send you off for another summer of play. These students were falling further and further behind, year by year. I have been part of that system and I have told those parents how well their children behaved, even as I gave them undeserved grades for work that contained a fair amount of effort, but not nearly enough understanding.*

My district’s students have hit a reckoning time. The state has taken over. Outside consultants have determined the materials teachers are to use, based on actual academic expectations for grade-level students across the country. From the outside, it’s hard to fault the state or the outside consultants. Zip codes should not be destiny and too many zip codes have been allowed to pass along these nonreaders who can’t add fractions for too long.

The Principal has us going over student standardized-test data with the kids. For the first time, they know how they are performing compared to the average American student. I can’t fault the Principal for her decision to share the data. When a twelve-year-old student cannot read as well as an eight- or seven-year-old average American student, that twelve-year-old and his or her parents/guardians need to know what is happening.

In the trenches, however, I am seeing some disturbing behaviors. What happens when we share this kind of information with students? Here we tread into the murky waters of resilience and shaming. We are shaming these students, no matter how sensitively we approach the material. We can share their progress and triumphs in test score increases. The Principal has been careful to emphasize the need to share any and all progress in an upbeat fashion. We are to be as encouraging as possible.

Still, resilience is a tricky thing. The same data that can make one girl decide to try much harder next year may cause another girl give up entirely. As I look out into my room, I see students who have locked into the battle to improve those scores. They are beginning to ask me questions. When I write “see me” on a homework paper, they come up to find out what went wrong. I also see kids who are tossing those papers without comment, who never ask, and who blurt random comments about bikes and game systems.

Eduhonesty: Saturday morning tutoring is about an hour and fifteen minutes away. I have regulars. I mostly have regulars, in fact. I have occasional drop-ins. I also have the students who have never managed to come once. My attendance list might be a pretty good rough indicator of resilience. Students who think they can succeed are getting up and coming to see me on Saturday mornings. At least some of the others are like Lil Davey, I think, who never comes. They have given up.

*This phenomenon obviously demands another post, perhaps even a book. In my defense, too many fails can lead to loss of a job and, some years, it did not matter whether students failed or did not fail classes. We passed everyone. We even passed a girl in one of my classes who had missed one-third of the year. Her mom had tears in her eyes as she thanked me for this decision that I’d actually had no control over. I assure readers that I have been teaching as hard and fast as I can. I also assure readers that the situation I am describing has been happening all over the country. If Americans want to know how our high schools can graduate so many students who can neither effectively write nor do simple, everyday mathematical calculations, I just answered that question in a nutshell: We kept passing them on.

Apparently, the whole district has run out of paper. That’s what the Principal told me when I quietly suggested she put paper in the machines on the day of the state visit.

The mind boggles.

My school has been out of paper for weeks now. Does this mean all the teachers in the district have been buying their own paper since mid-April? I’m afraid this could be true.

The school has been out of paper for weeks, at least paper for teachers. I was out of paper, too. I had lent the last of my personal stash to the guy next door. The copy machines run on empty most of the time now, waiting for their latest gulp of Walmart’s special 20 weight foolscap.

I nonetheless ambled toward the machines to try to make copies of a probability handout. No paper. No obliging colleagues carrying personal paper to share. No chance to barter for homework copies, or depend on the kindness of relative strangers. I trotted back to my classroom. It’s faster and easier to pass out copies, but students receive some benefit from copying material projected from the document camera.

Eduhonesty: I have bought a lot of my own paper this year. My fellow teachers are doing the same. Given that we just got a seven-figure government grant, though, I wonder why I am supporting Walmart. Couldn’t the district buy more paper? Where is our paper?

I am sure the students don’t mind. The paper crisis cuts down on homework, for one thing. I’d like to observe that students complete homework printed on white paper much more often than problems they have written down for themselves. I know this to be true from experience. I suspect that photocopied assignments simply seem more official and therefore less optional.

Maybe we are conserving the Earth’s resources. Like the hotels that no longer wash towels, we no longer replace paper, saving the trees for posterity. If so, I can get behind our grand gesture — especially since I do not seem to have a choice. Let the trees win, I say. Decreased grading is not proving all that hard on me, actually.

If I were trying to pull up the learning and scores of a struggling district, I’d have paper on hand, though. More completed homework does help us with that mission. Just saying.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: (An administrator sometimes referred to as Lord Vader)
Date: Wed, May 6, 2015 at 8:07 AM
Subject: Thank you
To: (A whole bunch of teachers including me)
All,

I wanted to say thank you to everyone for their tremendous work and effort over the past couple weeks with MAP and PARCC testing. I know testing can be draining and everyone has been eager to get back to teaching. I appreciate everyone’s patience and flexibility with the scheduling changes. It hasn’t been easy, but we did it!

As I walked around this time for PARCC, I noticed that students were more focused and the energy of the room was more positive. I know that others who help support the relief efforts made the same comments. This is a true testament to the hard work that everyone has put in to motivate and teach our students.

Today, we will not be doing any make up testing (YAY!!!). I will be working on a schedule to get all our students done testing for PARCC. We will start tomorrow and hopefully finish by mid week next week.

Again, thank you for your hard work. Please be patient as student will be dismissed out of class to finish testing over the next couple days.

(The Sith Lord)

Eduhonesty: If those “couple of weeks” were the only weeks, this missive would not be noteworthy. But we are in our third bout of testing for AIMSWEB and MAP and our second bout of testing for PARCC. This does not include diagnostic tests from the outside consulting firm that are not counted in the grades, but that have been given regularly throughout the year.

Since PARCC finished yesterday, but the make-up schedule had not yet been created, I had a carpe diem moment this morning and seized the Chromebooks so students could take notes as Googledocs. Readers will know that the internet has been off-limits to students during these last few weeks because allowing too many students on the net sucks up our limited bandwidth, creating testing issues. Chromebooks have sat idle while students took the PARCC test, a slow process since that same limited bandwidth made it necessary to test groups grade by grade. On the plus side, YouTube returned a few days back. Not all streaming video is blocked now. I used the return of YouTube to reinforce today’s probability lesson. Sometimes an extra eight minutes of another voice saying what I said, but in a slightly different way, makes all the difference in terms of student understanding. I can reinforce my lesson without seeming repetitive.

I will be glad when PARCC is over-over. I hope to see the end of standardized testing by next Wednesday. Absences that lead to test make-ups lead to even more classroom make-ups, of course, since the absentees have to catch up on what they miss in class while they are taking their make-up tests.