Matching Tracksuits

The Honors kids are working through a parts-of-speech review, and today we went over pronouns. (Not for the whole class, mind you — we only spend about 15 minutes per day working on this. Otherwise, it would be numbingly boring for everyone, including me.) Students were identifying demonstrative, interrogative, and relative pronouns, and number five was a question, an excellent opportunity to see for interrogative pronouns.

“Let’s skip to five,” I said, giving them a moment to read it. “The first pronoun in that sentence — can anyone identify it?”

A smart young lady raised her hand. “What,” she replied correctly.

And then it hit me — there’s always a joke of the day. I like to make the kids laugh, though most of my jokes make them groan. But here was a chance to recreate a classic.

“Number five,” I repeated. “The first pronoun.”

“What,” she repeated, a little confused.

“I’m asking you — the first pronoun in number five.” I had to phrase the next part just right. “It’s what?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“It’s what,” she confirmed, her eyebrows furrowing a bit more, smiles starting to appear around the room.

“What?”

“Number five?”

“Yes. I’m asking you. The first pronoun.”

“What.” She was starting to catch on here.

“The first pronoun!” I let a little faux frustration creep into my voice. “Look at number five and identify the first pronoun.”

“It’s what!” a full smile as she had caught on at that point.

“Why are you asking me?! I know what it is. I want to see if you know. What is it?”

“Yes!” Now she had it.

“Yes, what?!”

“Exactly!“

By now everyone was giggling, including her.

“Does anyone know what we just recreated?” I asked.

“Who’s on first?” came a voice from the back.

“Very good!” And our first brain break of the day was to watch the first few minutes of that classic.

There’s a caterwauling feline I’m tossing around above my head that seems determined not to be part of this juggling act, and I can’t really blame it: after all, I’m also juggling a set of kitchen knives and a chainsaw, along with some greasy ball bearings and a blob of slime one of my students made, and they’re all getting tangled up in the random arcs in which they sail over my head. Every time the cat comes into my grasp, I get a fresh set of deep gouges as the cat’s claws rip into my skin. At the same time, I have to worry about the slices the knife blades so desperately want to inflict on my arms, and the chainsaw seems determined to take off one appendage or another. The greasy bearings and slime are just the last lovely touch as they somehow make my hands simultaneously slippery and sticky, complicating the entire process. And so I’m bound to drop something.

I have two classes of eighth-grade on-level English. In one class, I have seven students of such low English ability that I’m supposed to make alternative versions of most things we do. In both classes, there are also students with special education requirements that are similar. Some of these kids need only a little help; others need a lot. So for multiple-choice tests, I make three versions: one with four possible answers per question, one with three possible answers per question, and a final one with two possible answers per question. Once I make these tests, I have to make sure that the right student gets the right test, which can be particularly challenging since most of them are supposed to be administered electronically so that we have “data” to assess. (I put that in quotes because a) it’s representative of the foundation, indeed, cornerstone of edu-speak these days as and a result, b) I absolutely loathe it.) So what happens if I give 

• Required number of grades and suggested grading schedule
• Required assessment that I really don’t feel is a good assessment — too difficult for these students
• Required units/pacing guide that I don’t really feel is good for these students — too much of a shotgun, hit them with a million topics approach. 
• Required to cover the same things as other teachers at roughly the same time in the name of “equity”

The shells on the beach just at the edge of the surf were visible for only a few moments before the white bubbles and turbulence hid them again. In the brief time I could clearly see them in the shallow water, it was obvious most of the shells were only fragments, often smaller than the smallest coins, slivers well on their way to becoming grains of sand. Every now and then, a shard would catch my eye, and I would think, “I might try to grab that one” just before incoming wave hid them once again. By then it was too late: once the water cleared up, the tide would have tkane the shard so far away from its original position that finding it was all but impossible. Another might catch my eye, but then the process would simply repeat itself.

To get a shell required calm and patience followed by a paradoxical ability to move quickly when needed. Hesitation meant the loss of the moment. In some ways, that’s a metaphor for live in general for many people. Everything is about getting the right moment, and when that fails, increased stress is the outcome.

Yet the older I get, the more I realize the error in living like that, the unnecessary stress it causes. Yes, I might not get that exact shell that I wanted, but there were plenty of other shells that were just as lovely, often more so.

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?

What’s on my mind lately? The amount of stuff I have to do:

• One grade per week per student
• One Common Formative Assessment per class per three weeks
• One Common Summative Assessment per class per grading period
• Contacting all homeroom parents by phone within the next three weeks
• One collaborative team meeting per week
• One grade-level English teacher meeting per week
• One grade-level meeting per week
• Assorted meetings with district personal about various topics
• Assorted 504 and IEP meetings
• Lesson plans in a very detailed required format that include
  • Differentiation for ML (multi-lingual) students for each lesson
  • Differentiation for special education students for each lesson
  • Differentiation for early finishers
  • Plans for collaborative teaching with co-teacher in inclusion classes
  • Plans for integration of ML strategies
• Data chats with students every Monday
• Faculty or department meeting every other week
• Positive notes to three students each week
• Create a list of every book in my classroom library
• Make publically available every resource I use

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:

• 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.

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.