I know today’s meeting with a counselor was very important for students so they would have an idea what to expect in the soon-coming high school registration process. I know they need to know this stuff. But do they have to learn it in my class? A class that is tested by the state? A high-stakes class?
I’ve written often enough, I suppose, about how my Saturday rhythm has changed over the last forty years or so. Saturday once meant church, seclusion, no work, no socializing with non-church folks, no sports, no school-related activities. Nothing that could pollute our minds or get our focus away from our sect’s teachings.
Saturday afternoon at 2:30 we met at the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) union hall. We usually arrived at least an hour earlier, and stayed at least an hour past the 4:30 end time. Every Saturday afternoon, a two-hour meeting during which men of dubious theological education pontificated about the conspiracy theories that comprised the bulk of the organization’s theology. The only saving grace was the playing (and later, as a teenager, socializing) that took place before and after the meeting.
These days, my Saturdays are so much more fluid. Sometimes, there’s a clear outline to the day, with chores in the yard occupying much of my time. Once school starts, I send a fair amount of the morning grading students’ work. Today, for example, I went through 43 kids’ single-paragraph analysis of “The Cask of Amontillado.” They wrote things like this:
The narrator’s story can be trusted because Montressor is confessing his actions to the priest on his deathbed. For example, Montressor talks to the preist because he knows the “nature of [his] soul.” and would not believe that he “gave utterance to a threat”. This proves that the priest knows Montressor very well, probably because the same priest would come to his house often. The priest also would not suppose Montressor killed someone. He would most likely want to admit his wrong doings before he died. Another example is, In “half of a century” no one has disturbed the catacombs or found Fourtunado’s body. It shows that no one has found out what happened to Fortunato 50 years later. This also explains the reasoning why Montressor would tell his priest, because he would be very old by this time; old enough to be on his deathbed. To sum it up, because Montressor is confessing to the priest that he killed Fortunado, this narrative can be reliable.
I worked through the papers in between trimming shrubs, cleaning my bike chain, and cleaning out the basement.
The shrubs — didn’t L just trim those? Her chores on Saturday usually include getting crickets for her frog, shopping (she usually gets the week’s groceries on Fridays, but there’s always something more we need), and cleaning her room.
The bike chain — didn’t I just clean it? Bike maintenance is something I’ve never really enjoyed. It’s so tedious cleaning a chain, replacing cables, adjusting brakes, replacing tires. But the worst of it all is definitely chain cleaning. No matter how carefully I clean it, there’s always a bit of grime left behind. But nothing makes a bike look better than a spotless chain.
Today, I used a new degreaser, and I was fairly pleased with the results. Ultimately, what I’d like is an ultrasonic cleaner that I could just drop the chain into for a few minutes and then let dry. But in the meantime, I’ll use a degreasing solution and toothbrush.
Cleaning out the basement — there’s been a crate of old books that K will eventually take to Goodwill, and among the books are several of my college lit anthologies. I’ve kept them for so long because — well, I really don’t know why. I haven’t cracked one open in so long. I had them at school for a long time, but I’ve run out of shelf space and brought them hope.
That is a story in and of itself. Last year, the state of South Carolina provided each English teacher with $3,500 worth of independent reading books so we could have a classroom library of contemporary, high-interest books. But this year, things changed:
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.
Greenville County Schools Press Release
In short, we’re not to have any books that even hint at sex. It’s another last-gasp effort of the far right to maintain its stranglehold on young people’s minds, I say to myself. For me, it’s simply a headache, which is why I’ve closed my library: I haven’t made the list yet, and I have no idea when I’ll be able to. In the meantime, I posted a sign explaining the situation, and I look forward to Meet the Teacher night when all parents can see the signs because I’m going to make my presentation standing right beside one.
So I guess in a way, my Saturdays have come full circle.
Every year it’s the same: I’m going to do a better job encouraging and facilitating independent reading. And every year’s initial visit to the library starts out with that intention. And then reality sets in, deadlines for covering content loom, and the independent reading time slowly gets strangled.
What’s on my mind lately? The amount of stuff I have to do:
And that really doesn’t cover everything — that’s just what I could list off the top of my head.
Is it any wonder so many teachers are burning out?
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:
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.
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?
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.
“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!
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?!”
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:
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.