When You've Got To Slow Down

Here we are, late April, finally. The end is near, here in New Mexico, it's now less than four weeks away. That means a few things. First of all, it means that we're running out of time, but it also probably means that students are having a little difficulty staying focused, most teachers are starting to drag a little bit, and administration is still breathing down everyone's neck, does that sound about right?

Well, if your state is anything like New Mexico, you might have some lag time between your standardized testing and the end of the year. We take it to extremes here, taking the test over 10 school weeks before the end of the year, yes 10. That means that the pressure is in full gear up until the last week of February. The testing then takes place for two weeks, and the last 10 weeks, most of March (with Spring Break mixed in there), April, and May coming after the storm.

For me, this is a golden opportunity to do some actual teaching and let my kids actually learn (let's stop it with all this essential learning, back to basics nonsense, I'm talking about those 'nice to know' things that all teachers wish they had time to teach).

In terms of literacy, this means more self selection, more multimedia tie ins, more long discussions, and more chances to take risks on some new and untested books.

We've lost touch with our students so much that it sickens me. School has been reduced to numbers, students nothing but test scores and labels of advanced, proficient, nearing proficient, or beginning step. It's ridiculous, we need to stop patting ourselves on the back every time a kid goes up two percentage points on the test, and start patting ourselves on the back when a kid pulls a book off the shelf for fun or because they're interested, that's what it's all about, everything else is nonsense.

How To Get Rich While Making School Lame

OK, so this isn't a 'get rich quick' post with a how-to, the title was just a ruse to suck you in, and now you're here, so you should probably just read this post, because it probably will make sense to you.

Most school districts are alike, and as a rule, the bigger the district (student and city population wise that is), the more banal some of the ideas that come out of the leadership can be, that's just the way it is. I've seen so many programs come in and out of my school district that I can't remember all of them, and the crazy thing is, this is only my third year as a teacher. I'm not exaggerating, I've seen a lot in that short period of time, since 2005.

I've seen reading programs, writing programs, math programs, science programs, social studies programs, and even different approaches to Title I programs. Some of the programs come from the big textbook companies, you know, the Scott Foresman, Houghton Mifflin bunch, but I've also gone through programs invented by one person.

I've seen Math Investigations, Nancy Fetzer, Response to Intervention, Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA), Baldridge, New Science Science Kits, and the Scott Foresman basal reading series, just to name a few. Now sure, most of the examples I gave are companies, but there are those programs that come from individual people.

Of course, they're not all bad, and most are crafted by someone who really believes in their program, and they bring it out there for the world to see, and possibly bank a few million dollars while they're at it selling it to big and small districts alike.

The problem I have is that when schools jump so hard and deep in to a program for every single subject, meant to take up every single minute of the day, they're all but assuming that teachers, the professionals in this great field of education, those on the front line, are incompetent and incapable of doing the work themselves.

I don't mind having math textbooks, they actually make my job a little easier, but I don't want to have to teach, day by day, out of a scripted program. Sure, the reading basal may have a nice story here or there, but by no means do students need to have a literacy experience, for years at a time, that are almost solely based around textbooks, this just isn't' right.

If I wanted to get rich quick, I'd think up of a new way to bring test scores up, and sell it off. I would go around the country doing trainings, peddling my materials, and then sit back and drive a Bentley around while students continue to push further and further away from education and teachers continue to leave the field in droves because they feel insulted, but who cares, I'd be rich.

As this blog evolves (or if you read my other blog, The Buss), you will see that I'm definitely a teacher to the core. I support teachers, I support them as professionals, as the leaders and innovators in the field, and as the trailblazers that will actually save education. It's not about some innovator with that great idea, I'm sure it worked for them, but I need to have the right, as a teacher, to pick and choose what works and doesn't work for my students. Anything else is idiotic.

Forced Into Doing Something Idiotic?

It's the question that applies to 100% of all teachers in this country. At one point or another (sometimes at all points), we're forced into some kind of program, whether it's a literacy program, a test-practice program, or a math program, that is completely idiotic and hasn't been thought out very well.

I live and work in New Mexico, which, needless to say, means that I am VERY familiar with idiotic ideas in education. I could be talking about many things right now, but mainly I'm talking about the Response to Intervention model that is currently a dark cloud hanging over our schools(you can Google it yourself if you'd like more information, because I don't want to provide a link that is completely one-sided in its definition and explanation of RTI).

Here is precisely what Response to Intervention is:

Everyday, for 40 minutes (longer in some places), students are pooled in to homogeneous groupings (groups of students at similar skill levels, so all the high kids are together, lows together, etc). In these groups, the teachers have to design some interventions that will serve the students. Since this is reality, and not some superintendents wet dream, the interventions have quickly turned to 40 minutes of daily test taking strategies.

It's supposedly mainly an intervention model that focuses on literacy components. However, intervening on students in no need of the intervention is not just a head scratcher, it's absolutely moronic. Now, I'm sure that some schools out there have appropriately implemented the model to only address those students who 'need it,' but now we've stumbled into a new area of debate.

The struggling student, many times a student with special needs, has obviously, OBVIOUSLY, become the plague of schools across the nation, because they hold down test scores (called Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP). Response to Intervention was crafted to serve these students. Before RTI, many schools would just pull these students out of science or social studies instruction (because who needs those? I'm not joking, I have literally been told that social studies doesn't help on the test, so it's not important) and work on reading strategies more. This is problematic for a number of reasons.

First, social studies and science are important disciplines, especially at a younger age. When educators make the error of assuming that literacy instruction is isolated to some sort of 'reading block,' or must be done in a certain way, they are taking away the power of differentiated and cross-curricular instruction. Done correctly, science and social studies are extremely valuable literary subject areas, especially for the struggling student, who is also at risk for being the bored student.

Second, well, I think I just said it. The struggling student is at risk for being the bored student. If we pull them out for 40 more minutes of test taking strategies, echo reading, and comprehension testing from isolated passages and short stories that they connect to in no way, then they'll just hate it even more.

So, have you been forced into doing something idiotic? I'm going to make a new label titled 'forced into something?', as well as 'teaching the test,' and will put similar posts under those labels so that this discussion can be furthered in the future. I realize this blog is new and doesn't have many readers as of yet, but if you come across this post and a light bulb goes off in your head, let me know what you're thinking or what's happening where you work, and we can discuss that a little more as well.