Sometimes desperate educational leaders simply go too fast. As Lily Tomlin said, “For faster relief, try slowing down.”

What happens when you are trying to fix six impossible things before breakfast, while writing standards and lesson objectives on the board, and helping students with mask anxiety while other students are blissfully throwing their masks-optional face coverings into the waste basket? What happens while you run, run, run to get everything done?

Things get lost. Big things. Little things. Long-term and short-term things. Items on the list that matter simply disappear. It’s math really. If you have 14 hours of things to do and only 5 hours available, then 9 hours will remain undone. And if every day is about the same, the negative numbers will simply pile up. Nothing else is possible.

5 School hours for active learning (which does not include lunch, gym, recess if applicable, positive behavioral interventions, and other weird, random interruptions) take away 14 hours of useful, academic things to do = -9 hours of goals accomplished.

Eduhonesty: If kids have fallen behind, picking up the pace is EXACTLY the wrong thing to do. Lost kids deserve a chance to catch up — and that requires slowing down until they understand the content they missed. In math especially, switching to hyperdrive produces black holes and flattened kids who are spewing out weird numbers to try to make their teacher happy, if they are doing any work at all. And we shouldn’t be giving first graders four-syllable or maybe even three-syllable words on spelling tests. Yes, a number of kids can spell those words. But the fact that we get away with those spelling lists sometimes does not justify those lists.

It’s time to return control to classroom teachers, who are in position to determine what students missed and what they should see next. Top-down management and pie-in-the-sky standards have come together to create an abominable “strategy” in education, one in which we treat students like high jumpers and then “raise the bar” for struggling students who cannot clear the bar already in front of them. Worst of all, this strategy has been incorporated into toxic rubrics that frequently blame teachers for failing to execute impossible demands.

Mayra could not do sixth grade math? Well, Mr. Brown, why did you fail to teach her the seventh grade math we mandated you present to her instead?

And the checkmarks go into little boxes that essentially say Mr. Brown is barely satisfactory, or maybe even needs to improve — while Mr. Brown quite sensibly gets his real estate license.

Hugs to those of you still willing to walk into classrooms and bigger hugs to those who recently decided to walk away.
hugs to all my readers.