Matching Tracksuits

education and teaching

What Should Be the Last Straw

Tuesday 20 August 2024

It was near the end of the school day, and the eighth-grade assistant principal pulled me out of my classroom to tell me something. “You’re going to get an email in a little bit that I don’t want you to read until you get home, relax, have some dinner, and then have a drink.”

I knew what was in that email from what she said. It’s something that has been bouncing around for a year or more and now has finally come to full fruition: South Carolina Regulation 43-170.

The email from our principle included a link to the official district explanation:

Effective August 1st, 2024, SC Regulation 43-170 requires teachers to produce a complete list of the Instructional Materials (including classroom library books) that are used in or available to a student in any given class, course, or program that is offered, supported, or sponsored by a school, or that are otherwise made available by any District employee to a student on school premises. That list shall be provided upon reasonable request by any parent/guardian of a student in the District.

What does this mean in practical terms? The principal spelled it out in no uncertain terms:

  • All books in your classroom library have to be named in a list
  • Link to Lesson Plans
  • Worksheets
  • Books
  • PowerPoints/Slides
  • Articles
  • Workbooks
  • Video Clips
  • Excerpts

In short, all the materials we might give to a student in a given year.

Why?

Because there’s a concerted effort among teachers to turn as many students gay as possible and promote critical race theory every chance we get. We have so few other demands on us that, out of a sense of woke duty, we purposely spend time trying to turn kids gay and putting down whites. All mathematics word problems are set in San Francisco or must include some anti-white framing. History teachers eschew all periods of history except the Stonewall riots and contemporary history with a bent toward institutional racism. Science classes neglect all disciplines except genetics, and they only discuss the gay gene. Finally, we English teachers simply have students watch episodes of Will and Grace and write summaries of them.

In case anyone can’t tell (and those who proposed and promoted this law probably can’t tell), this is satire. I feel it necessary to state that upfront. None of this actually happens. That goes without saying, but just in case someone stumbles on this and uses it as proof that teachers are encouraging students to identify as gay, anti-white cats, I must say emphatically once again, this is not happening. When dealing with a blunt viewpoint, one must use blunt instruments.

If either of our kids expressed any interest in going into education, I would try my hardest to discourage them. I’ve come to wonder whether or not there is a conscious effort to destroy public education by placing such onerous demands on teachers that the majority of them quit so that the state can farm out education to private firms just like so many states have done with correctional institutions.

August Monday

Monday 19 August 2024

We’ve been in school for nearly two weeks now. It’s time for the honeymoon period to end, sending everything into a series of predictable unknowns: who is going to turn out the nearly-constant talker who, when redirected, grows aggressive and disrespectful? Who is going to become the example of a nearly-always bad mood? Who is going to start refusing to do much of anything?

Usually by this time of the year, I can see those students starting to let the cover drop and be their true selves. Last year was so tough there was no honeymoon period: we eighth-grade teachers could see it clearly the first day.

This year? I’m still waiting for them to appear.

I’m trying not to get too unrealistically optimistic about it. They’re sitting in my class for sure. They have to be: they’re always there.

But maybe, just maybe, not this year?

AI Image created from the prompt: “An oil painting in the style of Vermeer of several students working on a writing project collaboratively.”

Added Weight

Tuesday 13 August 2024

We all came back to school hoping this year would be better, hoping that some of the bureaucratic micro-managing the district is forcing on our school would lessen somewhat. Last year it was reports that disappeared into the netherworld, reflections that sat in shared Google Drive folders unread (at least nothing was said about them), data that was just useless numbers comparing (incoming cliche alert) apples to oranges. I wrote a sixteen-page document detailing all the problems with all the nonsense and sent it further up the food chain.

We thought — worst case scenario — that we would at least stay the same, that the bureaucracy would just level out and be consistent with last year’s level of paperwork. We hoped — best case scenario — that it would lessen at least a little. What we didn’t fear was that even more nonsense would get dumped on us, but perhaps we should have.

Perhaps I’m biased, but I feel the English department is getting the worst deal of all. We got new textbooks this year, and we were told we have to follow the district-provided pacing guide exactly and administer the district-provided final assessment without exception. We have to weave in other district requirements for our school without regard to whether the requirements help us become better teachers, without regard to whether the tool we have to use to do this is effective, without regard to any conflicts that might arise between this requirement and those thirteen-thousand other requirements.

Last year, we had two required “Common Formative Assessments” (God, how I hate that term now) each quarter. These were multiple-choice assessments administered through Mastery Connect (the worst program on the planet — a veritable cornucopia of bad design and worse implementation) that all grade-level English teachers had to give. They were to cover one standard. The problem is, all the questions from the district required question bank (we were told we were not allowed to create our own questions) accompany texts, so to get ten questions about one standard, we were having kids read five or six texts. An assessment we were told should take fifteen to twenty minutes invariable took the entire class period. Occasionally, the questions themselves were useless. If the standard was about finding evidence in a text, the question would often be a “Part B” question: “What is the best evidence to support the answer in ‘Part A’.” Where’s part A? Who knows? Buried somewhere in Mastery Connect.

This year, though, we’re required to do three CFAs (we love our acronyms in education) per quarter. That means three full class periods to administer an assessment that — here’s the real kicker — none of the English teachers even think is useful. It is, in short, a total waste of time so people further up the chain can write reports for people further up the chain from them.

All without asking for any feedback about the efficacy of the procedures we have in place.

Additionally, we now have a required CSA — Common Summative Assessment. We’ll just use the district required unit test the fulfill that requirement, but the first unit’s test is eighteen pages long. We estimate it will take at least two class periods. And right after taking that test, they’re taking a benchmark test (for which we shorten all classes that day to half an hour and give them the entire morning), which is essentially the same damn test.

And we’re to do that every single quarter.

That’s six or seven days per quarter just for assessments that we the teachers don’t even think are effective. That’s twenty-four to twenty-eight days of the school year. That’s 13-16% of the entire school year just for this asinine testing. And that doesn’t even take into consideration the other days for other alphabet soup tests. Taken altogether, we’re looking at nearly 20% of the school year spent taking useless multiple choice tests.

And when students don’t do as well as we think they should, do we step back and say, “Hey, what did we make the teachers do that could have contributed to this”? Of course not: teachers are the only variable in this whole equation that districts can boss around and legislatures can legislate, so we take the blame for everything.

If either of our children were thinking about going into education, I would tell them that I’m not paying for their college unless they do a double major and take a second degree in some other field so they have options for when they’re facing the situation that we’re facing. I’m fifty-one years old; this is only getting worse; I have few to no options but to keep plowing through it.

But after today, I’d almost kill for options outside the classroom.

Second Day

Friday 9 August 2024

“Mr. S, you’re my favorite teacher so far.” We were lining up this morning to head out for related arts (or “essentials” as the new nomenclature dictates — people in education love to rename things to show supposed progress and improvement), and he said this out of the blue.

“You’ve only had one class with each of your teachers so far,” I laughed. “How could you possibly form an opinion that fast?”

“Well, your class was the only class we actually did something in yesterday,” he clarified.

I am not one to begin the first day of school with a long lecture explaining all the ins and outs of my classroom procedures. Sure, I have a specific way I want students to turn in papers, but I’ll explain that when they have their first papers to turn in. Certainly, I want them to know about my website, which I work hard to keep updated daily, but I’ll show them that when I’ve created my first update so they realize firsthand how useful the site can be. Definitely I want them to understand how we’re going to get into groups for collaboration, and I want them to know where each group is to sit, but we’ll go over that when we get in groups for the first time. So the first day, I always make sure we work. We do some writing, some reading, some chatting. We work in groups; we work in pairs; we work individually.

And the second day, we go over procedures.

Are you kidding? We have too much material to cover! Any procedures I’ve neglected will have to wait until that first time we need it!

First Day 2024

Thursday 8 August 2024

Last year’s first day — exactly one year ago — was a little strange. In here, I wrote it was a good day, but that was not entirely true. My two on-level classes were, in a word, hyper. Several students were immediately chatty, immediately disruptive, and there were several more students who fed into that. There was a bit of attitude at times, and while I tamped it all down quicky, it didn’t seem to bode well for the rest of the year.

I was right.

Last year’s eighth grade was tough. We’d heard they’d be tough from sixth-grade teachers; we’d heard they’d drive us to insanity from seventh-grade teachers; and we saw the difference immediately.

Most eighth-grade classes are pretty calm at first. Most eighth-grade students are reasonably relaxed those first days, trying not to push boundaries, trying to make a decent first impression. Those kids (rather, many of them) did not do this. And it was a harbinger of things to come.

“This year’s kids are better,” everyone said. We met them all today, and I would have to agree: a night-and-day difference.

One less stress.

Our kids started school with the usual excitement: the Girl is starting her senior year (how in the world is that possible?) while the Boy is starting seventh grade (how in the world is that possible?).

“Enjoy your last first day of school,” I said to her, though that’s not quite accurate. She’s planning on going into bio-engineering, and she’s already accepting/planning on getting a doctorate, so she has plenty more first days of school.

As for the Boy? A snippet of a conversation from a couple of weeks ago says it all: “You have to pay for college?! You have to pay to sit in school?!”

Turned Upside Down

Wednesday 7 August 2024

Our school district has a way of jostling teachers out of their comfort zones. Take this year, for example. We’ve known for a long time that we’ll have new standards for English. The logical way to let teachers transition to these new standards is to let them take their existing lesson plans and retool them as necessary to meet the new standards. True, they are, by and large, almost the same standards, but there are some new items on that list which will take some time to unpack and figure out how to teach. Perhaps letting us focus on that during the first year would be a good move.

We’re also getting new textbooks this year. This means that a lot of the stuff we’ve done in the past might not necessarily work with the new selections in the new textbook. A lot of it will, but not everything. The logical way to transition to this new textbook would be to give teachers a year or two to make the move over. After all, we’ll likely be using these books for six or eight years. We can take our time with transitioning and make sure we do a good job.

Or our district could manage these transitions as they actually chose to this year:

  • Provide new standards (actually the state did that, but…)
  • Provide a new text book
  • Provide a detailed unit pacing guide that we must follow to the letter
  • Provide a 35-question, 18-page mandatory test for the end of that unit, a test that has some questions that are not even covered in the unit
  • Demand all teachers make the transition immediately
  • And best of all, do all this the day before students return for their first day of the school year.

There are a lot of stressed teachers today. I had to talk an experienced teacher out of walking out and simply quitting today. This is her last year before retirement, and it’s not how she wanted to end her career. If she’d walked out, I wouldn’t have blamed her.

Meet the Teacher 2024

Monday 5 August 2024

“Last year’s kids were a real challenge,” the seventh-grade teachers all admitted. And to be fair, they warned us about them this time last year: “This is some group!” We hear that a lot, and we put it down to a typical exaggeration: they’re never as troublesome as last year’s teachers make them out to be.

But last year, they were right. One-hundred percent accurate. Last year’s group was exhausting.

“This year is going to be so much calmer for you guys!” all the seventh-grade teachers have been reassuring us during these first days back. Today we met a lot of them.

It’s hard to tell after such a short exchange, but we are, indeed hopeful.

Final Day 2024

Wednesday 22 May 2024

We started the day (as in right after roll) with a final fire drill. All the eighth-grade students went to the area by the basketball courts and lined up as always. Almost. The difference was immediately visible: only about a third of the students were there today.

After spending a little time outside, I had kids help me pack up all my books, which I have to do every single year, which is really a pain.

And we also said goodbye to a kid who changed everyone’s life on the eight-grade hall for the better.

Eighth-Grade Day

Thursday 16 May 2024

The whole grade has taken him under their wing, to use the cliche. Everyone loves H. Everyone gives him high-fives. Everyone cheers for him.

And today, everyone was eager to get him in the circle to dance.

Field Trip

Wednesday 15 May 2024

Most of the eighth-grade students went on a field trip today to Dollywood in Tennessee. I was one of the teachers who stayed back to watch the kids who didn’t go. On our team, which usually has 110 students, only 14 were there today. We had a social-emotional learning session (we watched Inside Out), had a nice lunch, and spent some time outside.

One of our students, who just moved to the States this year, came to me with an American football and gestured (he doesn’t know much English yet) that he wants to learn how to throw it.

We worked on it a while — I hadn’t realized how many things go into throwing a football, little motions and rotations that I never even thought of. He struggled a bit, but it was all laughs and high-fives.

It was a good day.

Letters

Wednesday 8 May 2024

At the start of the year, I have my English I students write 500-word letters of introductions to me. I want to know what makes them tick, and I want to know what concerns they have about English — their strengths, their weaknesses, their goals.

“Five hundred words!?” They are incredulous. “And it’s due tomorrow.”

I read the letters then make notes from them that I share with the other teachers on our team so we can all get to know the kids quickly at the beginning of the year.

At the end of the year, I give them back. Their reactions are always the same. Most of them have forgotten all about the letters; all of them have forgotten what they wrote about. They read their letters, laugh at what they wrote about, laugh at how they wrote, and they read each others’ letters, and the laughter just swells.

“Mr. Scott, we’ve changed so much!” becomes the common refrain.

Tomorrow, this year’s students write their letters to next year’s students — a major grade and an overwhelming assignment when I tell them about it at the beginning of the year. Now, after a year of me hounding them, none of them are terribly worried about the assignment.

But just to give them perspective, just in case they were still casting about for ideas about what they’ll write tomorrow, I gave them their letters back today.

Instructions

Tuesday 7 May 2024

We’re done testing for the year, at least eighth-grade teachers and students are finished with the unmitigated hell that is state testing.

Perhaps what is most annoying to me is how we treat these kids, who have been taking these tests three or four times a year for the last several years, like they’ve never had a test like this in their life. The Test Administrator Manual (TAM — that damn TAM) includes what we’re to say, with the explicit instructions to say things. Rather SAY things:

Every single test, we say the same things. We start with that quote above and then state the most obvious lie:

It is important that you do your best in answering the test questions.

TAM

It is, in point of fact, completely irrelevant whether students do their best or not. It might affect their placement, but by this point in their schooling, they’re in the track they’re in: moving from on-level to honors happens rarely at this stage of the game.

SAY: This is a secure test. During this test, you may not have any electronic or other device with you that can be used for communication, timing, imaging, or accessing the Internet. These devices include, but are not limited to, tablets not approved for this test, smart phones, cell phones, mp-3 players, e-readers, smart watches, or any other electronic imaging or photographic devices.

You may not use any device, including the device you are using for testing, to copy, save, send electronically, or post to the Internet, any test content.

TAM

I read these instructions as fast as I can because everyone’s heard them. Multiple times. I can rattle off “smart phones, cell phones, mp-3 players, e-readers, smart watches, or any other electronic imaging or photographic devices” as fast as I can say anything. It even has a certain rhythm to it.

This is a secure test, we tell them, and we pass out test tickets that allow them to log on. And as if to show how completely irrelevant these tests are (Can any of the people who create the tests remember their scores? I doubt it.), they have this lovely jumbled juxtaposition in the instructions:

So an outline of the test instructions would be this:

  1. Do your best on the test.
  2. This is a secure test.
  3. Click on the link to log in.
  4. Do your best on the test.
  5. Here’s the ticket for your test.

It’s ridiculously badly written.

From there, we read directions aloud, even telling them when to click “Next.”

It’s difficult to restrain the urge to include snarky comments while reading the instructions, but that would be a testing violation, I’m sure, and there’s no need to risk that for a few giggles from students.

What’s the point of all this for students? There is none.

What’s the point of all this for teachers? There is none.

It’s all about the politicians.

Testing

Tuesday 30 April 2024

Today was the first day of state standardized testing, and it was, as I expected, a mess. The company that our state pays to do the testing is DRC Insight. I’m not sure why: we’ve never had a smooth testing experience with them. We’ve staggered starts by grade; we’ve staggered by grade and then hall; we’ve staggered by grade, and then hall, and then room — nothing has ever produced a simple experience where all students get logged on immediately and start the test without issue.

How many millions of dollars are we spending for this substandard, time-wasting torture?

For my part, it’s hellish because I’m not allowed to do anything other than watch the students test. We don’t want them cheating, you see. But the truth is, students know this test really has no impact on their lives, and while they usually do their best, they’re not overly worried about it.

And this led me once again to cynicism: as I walked around the room, I crafted a sentence. I took a moment and jotted it down, then continued walking around the room, looking at the tops of students’ heads. I thought of edits and changed the sentence. I repeated the process until I’d eliminated all unnecessary words to express the simple truth of standardized testing:

Standardized testing quantifies students and teachers to provide politicians scapegoats for their failed education policies.

Lit Circles

Monday 29 April 2024

Kids are ending the year with lit circles, which gives them a lot of independence and an opportunity to show themselves (and others) how well they can handle such responsibilities. Unlike the rest of the year, for this work I allowed them to choose their own groups. Several of the Latino students decided to work together. Their English ability is a wide spectrum: one boy has just moved to America and speaks no English at all; another boy just moved to America and speaks intermediate-level English. One girl has been living in the States for a number of years but still has some difficulties with English.

I told them to do their best to stick to English, to help each other out as they’re working. They’ve been doing just that.

These kids have a very special place in my world right now: I know, to a slight degree, the struggles they’re going through. I often remind them about how much they’ve improved this year, and I tell them how proud I am of them and more importantly, how proud they should be of themselves.

“And just between us, teachers aren’t supposed to have favorites, but I so enjoy working with you guys,” I told them. “You’re not my favorite, because I’m not supposed to have them, but you’re close,” I added, with a wink.

“We know,” one of the girls laughed.

Poster Day

Tuesday 23 April 2024

For about four years now, each of my classes during the book fair has picked out a poster that seems uniquely out of character for me, which they then all sign, and I hang it on the wall.

Previous years’ posters include two BTS posters, a Riverdale poster, and several kitty posters.

Today was our day in the book fair, so all classes picked a poster. They’ll be signing it tomorrow, and they should be on the wall by the end of the week.

This year, more kids seemed more interested in picking the poster. Usually, it’s just a handful of students in each class; this year, the whole class at times was inspecting the poster and making suggestions about which one to buy.

It made me feel exceptionally good.

Review

Wednesday 17 April 2024

One of my classes is working on clauses — recognizing them, using them, transforming them. Today we had a lower-than-usual attendance because of a Junior Beta Club field trip, so it was a somewhat relaxed day. We finished with a game of Kahoot, an online learning site that gamifies quiz-type reviews. We played a variant called Submarine Squad. According to the site,

You and your crew are stuck in the deep blue! A hungry fish is quickly approaching. Answer questions correctly to boost your submarine and follow instructions to escape.

Kahoot usually encourages a bit of competition; this particular variant encourages teamwork and cooperation. They have to work together to escape, and as the beast approaches, opens its jaws, and slowly begins to crunch down on the ship, the encouragement to each other increases.

When they do manage to escape (they didn’t make it the first round), they all jump out of their chairs and cheer, giving each other high fives and doing silly little happy dances.

It’s one of the reasons I love teaching eighth grade: they’re still kids at heart.

Still More Testing

Wednesday 10 April 2024

The results of this test will pass into mysterious silence: the students would get more feedback about their writing from a random stranger on the street than they will from this test. Other than the practice they gain from writing yet another analytic piece about a text (which was likely painfully boring and irrelevant to them), this test is an utter waste of time.

Yet I admire these kids for the effort they are putting into a largely Sisyphean task, for even those who’d had their heads down at one point complete the test and appear to do their best. This shows a perseverance and maturity that I, in my increasingly cynical fifties, seem to lack. Were I taking this test, my temptation would be to submit a rebellious, snarky response: “We are completely sick of all this testing, and I for one refuse to participate in this charade.”

What would be the reaction of the evaluator? Would she nod in agreement, lowering her head a bit in shame at her admittedly-minimal role in the process? Would he grow indignant, frustrated that the student didn’t see the value of a test he regards so highly, angry at the student’s teacher who so obviously neglected to impress upon the student the critical nature of the test? In short, just how much faith do the creators and evaluators of these tests have in the tests themselves? It’s hard to imagine how they could see any value in today’s test that will be unevaluated and provide students with absolutely no feedback, so we’re all left wondering just why we did it. We all, teachers and students alike, develop the sense that test in general is just a tool to provide numbers to some group of bureaucrats so they can create for educators arbitrary comparisons and goals to provide these bureaucrats with a false sense of effort and accomplishment. We’ve recognized the problem, determined its scope, and created (or rather, ordered the creation of) a set of tests sure to solve the problem. And if they do not solve the problem, we can always create still more tests and metrics that ignore the actual issues but can serve as a balm for our consciences.

This all assumes that something will be done with the test. For all we know, the responses could simply be saved on some computer somewhere, completely forgotten soon enough and totally meaningless as a result.