My last teaching year felt absolutely surreal. If a government expert decided all our third graders needed to learn nuclear physics, would we simply fall in line? Would we spend hours teaching our eight-year-olds the fine details of binding energy, the Liquid Drop Model, nuclear dimensions, saturation of nuclear forces, Fermi gas, and shell models?

I am becoming afraid that we might. Districts might start paying consultants to give seminars on fusion and whatnot, obliging teachers to attend endless meetings and professional developments designed to make saturation of nuclear forces accessible to elementary students. Lost teachers would spend their free hours discussing the lunch provided and how that lunch compared to previous lunches. Were the vegetarian options plentiful enough? Did pretzel rolls work with tuna?

Giving this student this test was pure madness:

(Click for better view.)

I knew it. I tried to tell people. They got mad at me for my lack of faith in my students. No, let’s be more accurate: At more than one point, they BLASTED me and threatened to fire me. I spent a full fall week-end trying not to shake and then put a resignation letter in my glove box that I never executed. I drove around with it for months.

But my students needed me. I thought. I think. (I will never be quite sure.) Given that someone was checking in on me, walking into my room at regular intervals to make sure I was following the plan prepared by the now-bankrupt East Coast consulting firm that was determining every math lesson I taught, and given that I didn’t have the stamina to take much more verbal abuse for trying to remediate my students and teach them the elementary math they had somehow missed, I am not sure how much resigning would have affected my students. They would have found someone else to teach those incomprehensible math lessons, someone who might not have cared nearly as much about my students as I did. I worked furiously to keep morale up and to help them continue to believe in themselves even as I academically slaughtered them, day by day.

We had a rough fall, but my the end of that fall, they all understood that every class in the school was receiving that same curriculum, whether bilingual, special ed, or so-called “regular” in character. Other classes were also spending more than 20% of their time testing or quizzing. No classes were having field trips. No classes were getting special breaks except for an occasional 10 minutes free time at the end of the week with snacks, a reward for exceptional attendance. We won those ten minutes more than most. They understood I was as trapped as they were, and I seemed to be getting into trouble enough so that they felt sorry for me. They knew I was fighting to make the year work for them.

I never lacked faith in my students. Had I been allowed to teach them the language and math they were missing, I am certain they would have made progress. I am certain they could have learned a great deal — had they been taught the missing mathematical steps that government and administrative intervention left no time to pursue.

I retired in grief. Finally, I have moved on to anger. I handed all those completed or semi-completed, stupid yellow and white tests to academic coaches who spirited them upstairs into piles. Administration presumably looked at those tests. If they didn’t, they ought to be fired.* Coaches looked at those tests. They saw that my students never passed these seventh grade Common Core tests, unsurprisingly since documentation showed their AVERAGE mathematical operating level placed them in the third grade. These coaches were easily bright enough to understand that I was right when I kept telling them I needed time for remediation and I needed to differentiate instruction. I was given permission to remediate for 20 minutes of my block — though I always got in trouble if the Assistant Principal caught me doing this – and to differentiate PROVIDED that I also did everything that all the regular classes were doing. If I’d been Hermione Granger with a Time-Turner to rotate, shifting time, I might have had a chance, but with everyone already so far behind, I had no time. I could not keep up, much less get ahead so that I could go back somehow.

Oh, my God, was this STUPID. To the Department of Education: I am OK with  President Trump firing all of you. I do like the NAEP tests, but… In the big picture, I think we need to return control of the classroom to the classroom teacher.

P.S. Upon reflection, maybe I don’t want all those people fired. But all those representatives of the state of Illinois who actually walked into my classroom during the last year? They never helped me one bit. I resent giving my tax dollars to a system that functions so badly, if it functions at all.

*The Principal and Assistant Principal have since left the district, actually, like they all do after they fail to deliver results. In fairness, through relentless benchmark testing, the Principal did deliver some improving numbers. I think she left, rather than being pushed. She was also far kinder and more supportive by year’s end. I think she had figured it out, not that her improved attitude did my students much good by then.