Matching Tracksuits

Tech-free day — which means students couldn’t use any technology. And they had to look up a couple of unknown words…

When you go for your first interview in years, it might be a semi-stressful event. After all, you’re out of practice.

You haven’t done this for so long you might not prepare properly. You might forget the name of the teaching model the school uses, and on the way to the school, you might have to refresh your memory at a traffic light.

You might have forgotten the stress of wondering if you’re going to be on time: you left with plenty of time, but who knows what delays await you, especially on Southern roads. It could be road work; it could be a traffic jam; it could be awful roads; it could be someone going ten miles under the speed limit.

You might have to schedule the interview just at the tail end of your day, and in an effort to be a little subtle about things, not come to school dressed for the interview but attempt to make the switch on the way. A service station bathroom? Too long. GPS says I only have eight minutes to spare. Traffic lights for the shirt and tie; remote corner of a grocery store parking lot near the school for the pants.

You might have to go to the restroom when you arrive but decide there’s just not the time (even after checking in with the receptionist), and besides, it’s not that urgent.

You might have forgotten that you’re not strictly (or even nearly) wearing dress shoes because you’ve gone all in for zero-drop shoes and don’t own a pair of formal zero-drop shoes, and you realize you probably should have bought some. In the meantime, you try desperately to remember not to cross your foot on your knee.

You might find yourself talking too much and have to tell yourself to shut up. “It shows your passion,” you might justify later. Perhaps your right.

First interview in seventeen years — went alright. We’ll see.

Today we covered 3.1 — Tybalt kills Mercutio, Romeo kills Tybalt, and the prince banishes Romeo.

“When you get to the third act of a Shakespeare play,” I’d explained to the kids yesterday, “everything changes.”

I’ve always especially enjoyed the lesson we do for 3.1. The kids select various divisions of the scene, read and discuss those divisions, and then prepare a tableaux vivant to summarize it. Kids who get the latter part of the scene quickly call me over to check their understanding.

“Wait, Tybalt is dead? How did that happen?”

“You mean Mercutio is gone? What?!”

My answer to all such inquiries is the same: “When you guys present your tableauxs, you’ll see.”

In the South, we don’t know what to do with snow. When it falls, everything comes to a halt. There are long lists of closures and delays on every local website — first and foremost, schools. Our district posted this today ahead of snow that’s suppose to start around noon tomorrow:

Greenville County Schools will have an eLearning day Friday, January 10. Schools and office buildings will be closed. All activities, including athletic events and field trips, are canceled on Friday and Saturday. The District’s ICE (Inclement Conditions Evaluation) Team evaluated the forecasts, and the decision was made based on the predictions and timing for snow and/or ice accumulation, which may result in unsafe road conditions, downed power lines, and loss of electrical services.

Because we are an approved eLearning district, this day will not have to be made up and instruction will be provided through Google Classroom. Students will complete eLearning assignments later if they are unable to participate due to power outages, lack of internet service, or other barriers. Once operations resume, school personnel will begin rescheduling events as appropriate. Please check local media, the district website, and the district’s social media for the latest information on school closings or delays.

I have mixed feelings about this: elearning days are seldom very productive because so many students, for whatever reasons, fail to log in and do the work. Teachers almost always give light work during that period because they know so few people will show up. Knowing this, a few more students decide not to show up.

But at least we’ll be able to play in the snow. In theory.

First day back of the new semester. Being with the kids again reminds me of why I continue teaching: it’s an incredible feeling to realize my job is simply to help a bunch of really great kids. Did everything go perfectly? Of course not. Were there some magnificent moments? Of course there were.

Could I have used another few days of break? Of course I could — but not from the kids. Not from the kids. From the paperwork, meetings, and bureaucracy.

Today was our first day back in the building. It was, mercifully, a teacher workday. It’s a good way to begin the new semester: I had time to do some serious planning in the morning, and I worked with the Special Ed teacher who co-teaches one of my classes to figure out some effective ways of simplifying a terrorizing, difficult text that’s in our textbook. That’s how I spent my morning. I could have used the afternoon to prepare some of the materials we’d planned on using and to create some differentiated (i.e., simplified) versions for some of my students who are still learning English. (I’ve got seven students in one class alone who speak very limited English, including one who speaks almost no English. She needs a specialized English class for absolute beginners, not anything I can give her. But I’ll be damned if someone is going to be in my class and not learn something, so I make special mini-lessons for her that I squeeze in here and there. Otherwise, she works on Rosetta Stone.) Still, we didn’t have that time.

Instead, we had a Clifton Strengths Finder session. Earlier in the year, we were asked required to take a survey to help find our strengths. Each question had two activities and you were to pick which one you preferred and to which degree, and there was a neutral option in the middle. For example, it might be something like this:

Imagine it’s time for dinner. What are you more likely to do: pick the restaurant or decide to stay home? What an idiotic question! It depends. How tired is my wife? How tired am I? How much money do we have? What do we have in the refrigerator? What time is it? What plans do we have after dinner? I picked neutral.

Another one: Imagine you’re speaking to community leaders. Are you the “let’s get started now” type or the “No, I don’t eve want to do that” type? Again, that depends. What am I talking about? How long am I expected to speak? To what end am I giving this speech? Do I even support the cause? Is this something likely to affect change or am I just a figurehead speaker? I picked neutral.

A third example: Imagine your boss asks you to work on a big project. Are you a big picture person or do you need details? Once again, it depends. What is this project? Do I feel it’s in my scope of expertise? Will I be working on this alone or with a group? If it’s with a group, what role will I be playing? What is the timeframe for this project? What is the budget? I picked neutral.

A final example: Imagine you’re receiving an award. Would you want individual recognition or would you insist on recognition of the team effort. Bet you can guess where I’m going with this one: it depends, damnit.

Almost every one of the questions was like this. I picked “Neutral” over and over and over — for most of the 190 questions. (Yes, 190 questions. Are these people insane? Does district administration think I have nothing better to do with my time than read 190 poorly-conceptualized questions?)

Just before break, I got an email from the district office politely requesting me to take the survey. I did take the survey. We don’t have your data results. (New Year’s Resolution: I am so sick of hearing the word “data” that I have sworn I will not use it myself at all in 2025. I hate that word now, oh how I detest it.) Well, I know I took it. But we don’t have your results — the session won’t be as meaningful for you if you don’t take the survey.

When I logged back in, I saw a message: “We were unable to tabulate your survey because you selected ‘Neutral’ too frequently.” Well, that’s what I get for thinking. I explained this in yet another email. Can you please take the survey again? Fine, I’ll take the survey.

For probably 175 of the 190 questions, I randomly chose any of the options other than “Neutral.” In fact, if I’d thought about it, I would have had one of my students come in during planning and pick them randomly for me: it was such a hassle because the survey software was so poorly programmed. Sometimes the “Submit” button worked the first time, sometimes I had to click it twice. Still, for about 15 of the questions, something caught my eye in the wording or the responses, and I actually answered those questions truthfully.

Today, we got those results back. Strangely and somewhat unexpectedly, the test results put my four top strengths as just the ones I’d choose for myself. Two thoughts about this: first, how did it do that? It was literally 92% random selections. Second: why did I spend all that time taking a survey when I already knew what the results would be?! I could have looked at this chart and told you most of my strengths would lie in the “Strategic Thinking” block, and four of my five “strengths” were in that quadrant. The only outlier was one in executing: I have a “restorative” strength — I like to fix stuff and solve problems. No, I don’t. I don’t at all. I prefer to think things through carefully and avoid the damn problems in the first place. That’s my priority.

This is one of the biggest contemporary frustrations with teaching, and it seems to be nationwide: the powers that be require us to waste so much time on just such things as today’s nonsense.

Sept 19, 2017

Our state is no longer using the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) assessment that it has used since I first began teaching in South Carolina over a decade ago. The test was a nationally-normed test that provided teachers with a wealth of useful data about kids’ skills and abilities. And since it was nationally normed, it provided a broad overview for parents (and teachers) about where an individual child was nationally in relation to the rest of his peers.

As a teacher, I was able, at a glance, to see what a student needed. If the national normal for eighth graders in the fall was 220 points, I knew that a kid scoring 210 was fairly far behind the norm, and a kid reading below 200 was reading at something like a first grade level.

Then last year, a funny thing happened: it was announced that the national norm for eighth graders had been re-established at 218. This was the former norm for seventh graders. This suggests that as a nation, we’ve dropped a little over the last decade.

What can the state do about this? It reflects so badly on our schools that we must do something. What do we do? Get serious about holding back students who don’t master content? Implement a serious, statewide program to deal with the behavior problems that correlate (and likely significantly contribute to) this decline? Budget more money to decrease class size?

None of these things. Instead, they dumped the test. The test is showing results we don’t like, so what do we do? We stop using that test. Easy — problem solved.

One key skill a good reader consistently employs is the simple cognitive act of connecting what she’s reading to what she already knows. “Connect to Background Knowledge” says the teacher’s poster of effective readers’ skills. When talking to the district language arts coordinator about skills our students are lacking, this was one that the three eighth-grade English teachers agreed was one of the most critical and yet most lacking skills.

“I remember sitting with my family when I was their age,” I said, “watching the local news at six and the national news at six thirty.” I knew about current events and how they were connected to previous events as a result. I knew about Chernobyl as it was happening (with of course the Soviet propaganda delay taken into account). I watched the fall of the Berlin Wall in almost real-time. I knew about the Tiananmen Square massacre because Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and Dan Rather told me about these events. I was, therefore, constantly building new background knowledge.

“Why don’t we get back to watching the CNN Kids news to remedy this?” the ELA coordinator suggested. We all thought it might be a good idea and decided to talk to the social studies teachers about why they weren’t doing it anymore.

I should have guessed why.

“There was just too much pushback from parents,” a social studies teacher explained. “This one is mad about the network choice. ‘Why CNN and not another news station?'” Never mind for a moment that no other media outlets produce, to my knowledge, the equivalent. “They would say stuff like, ‘Why are you showing our kids liberal propaganda?’ And then there were those on the other side who felt it was too conservative.”

“How about telling the parents, ‘Well, that sounds like an excellent conversation to have tonight at the dinner table,'” I suggested.

Tuesday has very little going for it. It doesn’t have the unambiguous “you have to get through it” feeling of Monday. It’s not hump day. It’s not Thursday (a.k.a. almost Friday). And of course, it’s not Friday. But Tuesdays this year are even more intolerable because of our Collaborative Team Meeting. A weekly mandatory meeting, it’s as bad as it sounds. Occasionally, we get something useful from it, but like so many things these days in education, it just has the feeling of being a report mill for the higher-ups (who usually make two, three, four, or more times the average teacher’s salary) so they can justify their job.

It’s often a day for giving a test. I would have said “A day for testing,” but “testing” now has connotations of standardized testing, and the increase in standardized testing is one reason so many of us are trying not to give tests of our own as much as possible. After all, how much can these kids be tested?

“Why not just use all the tests you have to administer for the district as grades?” Today, for example, we went over our benchmark scores. The benchmark, according to the powers that be, is supposed to be an accurate reflection of the degree to which the students have mastered the standards we are to teach in a given quarter. The only problem: they always include questions from other standards which we are to teach in other quarters!

“How is that a benchmark?” I asked one of our leadership team (another useful bit of jargon).

“Well, it’s also predictive,” came the response.

Predictive of what? I don’t need a test to tell me how well the students are going to do on a standard I haven’t even covered yet.

And the questions themselves — so often a jumble of confusion. We went over one question today (they are allowing us to see isolated questions this year, but only when they were projected on a screen without us taking pictures or copying it in any way — profits over the kids!), and I had trouble making sense of how they were even supposed to answer it, let alone which was the correct answer.

“If I am struggling to make sense of the question, what chance do my students have?” I asked.

“Let’s focus on the things in our control,” came the reply.

When you start your day of with that kind of a meeting, it’s a challenge to regain a positive footing when the kids start coming into the classroom. And had it been last year’s kids that came in after such a meeting, I would have stood by the door as the students entered and daydreamed about simply walking to the front office and saying, “Someone better get in my room — there’s no adult there, and I’m not coming back.”

But this year, I have such wonderful kids. Sure, some are disruptive and a little argumentative. Many are immature. Several are chronically lazy. But there’s not a kid about whom I could say, when he’s absent, “Well, thank the heavens for small mercies.” There’s not a kid that I just dread working with because I know she’s going to turn every single thing into a confrontation and make me thing it would be more productive to bang my head against the cinder block wall for the entirety of the period than to work with that kid. And trust me — I’ve taught plenty of kids like that. But this year, not a one.

So it’s easy to reign in the frustrations of a meeting and put on a positive face when such a great group of kids comes in. But it makes all the uselessness of all bureaucratic nonsense all the more acute.