The strangest things are so exciting

The most exciting part of my summer thus far (considering I got a few extra days tacked onto it) has been spent with other teachers coming up with a new curricular direction and aligning standards to the common core, as well as in talking about schedule changes coming up in the next school year — we’ve decided to play around with our daily calendar and move around one class that’s been irking me for years.   Now, this calendar change was not my decision, and I don’t have any involvement in it other than to give suggestions/praise/criticism whenever a new draft is shown, but it’s also a change that I’ve wanted for years.

Without getting too specific about it, we have an advisory class.  Oe  homeroom class, if you’d like.  The class meets every day for the same amount of time as a regular curricular class.  We meet midmorning and the class serves several functions:  It is a place for teachers to create strong bonds with a core group of students so that they can advocate for those students.  Teachers track those students and monitor their progress both socially and academically and help out wherever they’re needed.  We also serve as a place where students are to learn practical moralistic/ethical skills (usually dealing with anti-bullying, leadership, friendship, citizenship, etc.).  And finally we serve as a reading class where students spend thirty minutes a day reading novels or other writing — this decision was made years ago when the district eliminated reading classes (don’t get me started on that).

Anyway, the class has always landed in the middle of the morning, tucked between other classes.  Over time, for me, the class has become nothing more than a frustration — a place where students know no academic work will be done, and for which they need to do nothing in order to pass.  As a matter of fact, of students actually Fail advisory, the teacher is reprimanded.

I’ve argued that the class is too long, and too unstructured for me.  Much of this is my fault.  I have a hard time pumping kids up for this class.  I have a hard time making students read in a non-academic course, especially when they will not open a book, or if they do they will choose a new book ever day of the week for the entire school year and try starting somewhere in the middle, or they will throw the books around, or they will finally go to the library and grab something that’s interesting to them, only to take it home and forget it and rack up library fines that follow them through to high school.

For me, no matter how much prepping, planning, and clowning around I do with and for the kids in this class, it becomes a one-hour session in seeing how many times the kids can get me to redirect them.

Other teachers are much better at this class than I am, and somehow they end up creating wonderful relationships with their students even though I see them resort to military measures in order to keep the students in line or paying attention: this means there are times that students spend the hour with their heads down on their desks, or sittin in corners; kids are marched in single file lines around the school going from point A to B without saying a single word or snickering a single snort, else it’s turned right back around and tried again.  The kids write letters and make public apologies and they do it every day of the year while the teacher sits around and scolds them.  I don’t like this method, but I’m certainly not doing much better myself.

I’ve long thought that this class should be moved to the end of the day, for a number of reasons:

• Homework
  • We often have homework days in advisory — times when students are supposed to do the day’s work they’ve accumulated 00 but no kid has homework after two periods of school, especially when the majority of the students in our grade level and on our team have spent at least one of the two class periods in elective courses.  If advisory were moved to the end of the day, there’s a greater likelihood that kids will actually have something that could be done, and they can also be reminded that they will take any unfinished work home directly after the end of that class (versus the idea that they’ll have homework after six more class periods, because the truth is: no one wants to do homework in the middle of the day in a non-academic class, they need to do it closer to the time they will actually be going home.  Now, instead of this being: “You’ll have homework in five hours if you don’t do it now”, it’s more a “You’ll have homework in twenty minutes if you do’t do it now.”  Much closer to home.).
• Closure
  • It makes so much more sense to go through that whole: “Where are you, grade-wise” thing with a student at the end of the day versus the middle of the morning.  In the middle of the morning kids don’t know why their grades haven’t changed from yesterday.  They don’t  know why Mr. so-and-so hasn’t graded that one assignment.  They don’t know there’s a test coming up in tomorrow.  In the middle of the morning, there’s no connection to the rest of the school day because it hasn’t happened, and therefore is an unknown.  It’s a nice way to be able to wrap things up from the day before because, again, kids don’t remember if they ended up talking to that one teacher yesterday about that one assignment.   Here, with nothing academic afterward, I can send that kid directly to the teacher without interrupting anything.
• Discipline
  • With advisory at the end of the day, I can hold kids accountable for a variety of things that are more directly painful for them.  Not that I want things to be painful, but lets say I want my room cleaned at the end of the day.  Usually it’s an academic class that has to do this.  They didn’t make the mess, and they’re very reluctant to pick things up.  With an advisory class, at least I can make the argument that it’s their room, and that they should help me.
  • When it comes to homework and grades, anything not done and any item with which a student has not complied, can be dealt with as an after-school detention, and during this time I can actually call that student’s parents and set it up.  No more having to wait around for the end of the day.  No more trying to call parents who’ve just gotten to work.  No more having to remind students throughout the day that they’ll have to show or suffer more consequences: it’s going to happen right now.
  • Holding kids after class no longer means I have to send out an email to my team or to any other team saying: “Sorry!”  It’s my problem and no one else’s.
  • My books haven’t been properly returned?  Well, after school we have all the time in the world to do that.
  • The students decided to move the desks around or draw on them?  Same thing.
• Shorter
  • Not treating this with the same importance as an academic class means both teachers and students can change their opinions about it. We no longer have to pretend it’s just as important, and the students don’t have to put on a show complaining that it’s not important.  Now that it’s shorter, it’s different.  Being different is what makes it important.
• Nicer Me
  • Advisory has always been a disruption. Now it’s a bookend.
  • It’s always interrupted the flow of a working day.  Now it’s closure.
  • It’s always been about me and/or the school.  Now it’s about the kids.
  • You want to make it about support?  Now it’s supportive.

And now, anger.

Summer school, for me, since I generally teach a completely different grade level at a completely different school, requires quite a bit of preparation.  There’s new materials to learn and read and re-read prior to teaching the class, and then there’s the whole process of creating materials for the students to work on.  And despite what anyone tells you about teaching or about teaching remediation clases, it’s not easy.  The materials have to be worked into a shape that is different from what the students are expecting because, since this is summer school again, they’ve already been over this material once before.  It cannot be the same stuff, have the same requirements, and it cannot be boring.

So, since I got the call that I’d be teaching summer school a month ago, I’ve been wondering about what I’d be teaching.  I even asked the person running the program what I’d be teaching.  He said he’d get back to me within a week.

A week passed with no information, so I sent him another email saying, “Hey there, just curious if you knew what course(s) I’d be teaching?”  He asked me to wait another week.  After that week passed I decided to hold off, so as not to be annoying or a burden to someone prepping the entire program.  I’ve run a summer program before, and there’s a surprising amount of managerial, budgeting, and bussing work that goes into getting it rolling.

Three days before school let out, and one week before summer classes began, the person running the program sent out a message saying everything was rosy, and that orientation would take place within a week.  He also said that classes were still being finalized and that if we wanted to know what we’d be tentatively teaching to shoot him an email.  

So I did.  Again.

He answered three days later, giving me only the weekend to prep. He said I’d be teaching two classes that I truly do find interesting.  Two periods of that same class during the first summer semester, and then two periods of a different class during the second summer semester — and this is good news.  

Summer school is broken into two semesters so that teachers can effective teach two years worth of materials during those months.  Each day is seven-and-a-half hours long with thirty minutes for lunch.  Each day consists of two periods that are 3.5 hours each.  You get to cover a lot of material for those classes, and thus prepping early is a must.  I only had two real days to prep for this, and having two periods of the same class is good because it gives me the opportunity to overprepare for just one class and see how it flows.  I can make adjustments for the second class as necessary — something didn’t fit in the time restraints?  I can change it.  Something went short?  I can add more, and I can make the next class period run more smoothly.

Teaching two separate classes during the day means prepping for two separate courses and getting just one shot at making them run in a coherent fashion.  I did this last year, and while it was fine, it’s a bit of a struggle to keep everything uncluttered.  Also, teaching two separate courses means you may have the same students all day long, and that’s a frustration for both the students and the teacher.  Mainly for the student(s), though, and I think it makes the coursework more difficult as well when they know there’s no way out of that room or away from that teacher.

So, in all, I was happy teaching just one course per semester and this made the short prep time a bit more bearable.  I was able to throw a few things together, get some papers and videos and articles collected, was able to prep a few essay prompts and essay expectations, and began mapping out an overall scope for the class.  

Got an email that evening welcoming me and the rest of the teachers to the summer program, a reminder about yesterday’s orientation meeting, and a powerpoint that we were asked to show off to all students in each class just to go over the summer school rules and regulations for students.

I put that powerpoint and all the documents I’d created for class together in a nifty little folder on my computer and made another copy on my jump drive that I took to the school yesterday so that I could start printing off my documents after orienting myself in the school, getting a classroom, and going through the other procedures necessary for setting up the summer program.

Drove the half-hour to the school, and went to the office to wait for the summer school lead admin to meet with me to get me my keys and show me around the campus.  Waited another half-hour for him to show up.

When he finally did show, he shook my hand and said: “Yeah, I don’t need you here until July.  We had lower than expected enrollment and had to drop you from our roster first semester.  During second semester you’ll be teaching two different courses.”  And neither of those courses was the course I’d prepared.  Thanks for the heads-up, sir.

So, no summer school for me for a month.  There went a day’s worth of planning.  There went the necessity of me canceling summer vacations and other appointments with family and friends.  There went a few thousand dollars I’d been expecting.  There went every ounce of excitement I had about the whole thing.  And there went any respect for the program being run this year.  I am concerned for the students and the education they’re going to get out of this summer program.

Ah, but, don’t forget to feel worse fo the summer program admin who said: “Hey, how do you think I feel?  I had to tell another teacher this morning that I didn’t need her at all anymore.”

 

I’m not Mark Harmon

Summer’s over already.  Today is the orientation day for summer school, and the summer school kids show up tomorrow.

This is an annual thing for me — I like summer school because it keeps me on my toes with the new materials, multiple grade levels, and different environment and coworkers — and I know it’s not for everyone.  Most people think I’m nuts, but the truth it this: if I had a true summer off, I’d either get nothing done at all, or my wife would have me working on a myriad of projects. Best keep myself out of the house.

‘Course, the money isn’t bad.  Honestly, it pays more than my normal salary, and that’s pretty interesting in and of itself.  See, on a normal salary, I have large class sizes, few resources, little help from administration, and there is very little done in the way of discipline or in setting expectations for students to meet.  In summer school I get paid like a king, have classes of fewer than 20, access to a variety of resources (be they books, paper, pencils, markers), and the administration is constantly out in the classes and hallways making sure the teachers are fine, and that the students are meeting the academic expectations (again).

Not that that’s the perfect environment.  It’s a bit stifling for the students, very prisonlike.  But it’s a marked turn from what I see during the normal year where we pussyfoot around hurting anyone’s feelings, hold kids to a zero-accountability standard (see prior posts), and take and take and take away everything meaningful and useful about an education.

Plus, it’s at the high school, and I get to read some pretty cool stuff with those kids.

 

Not signing yearbooks this year.

Nope.

This time I’m cutting these out and pasting them to the pages.

 

 

 

 

There are others, but this is what I have for now.

Your Final

I struggle with Finals.  Don’t like them one bit.

Part of it has to do with the fact that creating multiple choice tests for English classes is frustratingly difficult — the answers are either simple and obvious, or hidden between three other similar option.  The other part is the writing option.  I do like to have students write essays, and I do like to read them when they put a little effort into them (and the truth is, students actually perform better on written work when it’s labeled as a “test” and not as an “assignment”), but my students just finished a fairly involved literary analysis paper, and they followed that with another lengthy work with eight separate pieces of writing.    It’s time for a little break.

It’s also time, here at the very end of the school year, to do something serious.  Most of my students’ work this year has been fairly half-assed, and I want them to know that school is also an opportunity they have to do something meaningful. I want to hear about who they are and about what’s going on inside their heads — you know, what makes them tick and what they think about.  These are real people and no one ever asks them about what they believe.  And when they do, they tel them they’re wrong.  Like the testing, it’s not fair.

So, our final is spoken word poetry.  Here are the examples I gave them.  Their poems should aspire to be this:

Guess we’ll see what we get.

The Goodbye Party™

Our lovely, Star-Wars-obsessive son, spent his last day of being four years old with his family, running around town and having fun.  Throughout the past few weeks his mom and I have been going through that conversation of: it goes by too quickly, where did the time go, he’s too tall, where’s his moustache?  She and I were washing dishes tonight and I realized that we spend too much time focusing on the next year, and the next big party, and making sure we’ve bought some cool shit for him to play with.  

What we haven’t done is recognize everything he’s been through and everything he’s accomplished.  Like most parents, we’re focused on giving him cake and buying outlandish overprices objects, and we could do something more productive (which, in turn, should help our son be more cognizant of his own skills and goals).  

Instead of making a big fuss about the next year, let’s have a goodbye party.  (I just trademarked that up there in the title; don’t go thinking this is your idea.)  LEt’s spend some time looking at photos and watching movies.  Let’s talk about everything he did and what was new this year.  Let’s take a chance to step back and reflect; then we can look toward next year.

Whoa, now.

If I’m not careful, this will only become about education.  Better slow down.

Enjoy this.

Hey, monster — Part IV

No Punishment

This post is part of a series about how my school has damaged our students.  Read Part I here.  Continue the series with Part II, here.  Get up to speed with Part III, here.

The major intent of everything we’ve done is done in support of the student — we’ve tried to set up a new grading system that supports the idea that kids change, learning styles change, homework habits change, and (given that we work in a low-income district where about 75% of our students are on free or reduced lunch) many of our students have engagements outside of school that are much more important than sports or other extracurricular activities; many of these kids are taking care of families. We changed our grading system to reflect the fact that students are learning, but they may need other opportunities to show that understanding.

This is wonderful, really, and it pushes teachers to find new ways of reaching students and to elicit their understandings.

What this does not do is help instill a work ethic within the student.  In fact, I believe we’ve done just the opposite and have basically created a system that tells students not to work, not to care, and to expect to pass on with no consequences.

Let’s just break this down into a list of behaviors you might expect to have consequences in a “normal” school.  There are no consequences for:

• missing work — because there’s no grade on the formative stuff.
• late work– we take it up to the last moment.
  • And this is fine, I don’t like giving consequences for late work, either.  What I don’t like is that we’ve created a “drop dead date”, and we market that to kids.  This is the one day after which we absolutely will not allow work to be turned in.  So, as you might guess, it is on this date that many, many, many students turn in their missing work.  After this date, teachers have about a week to grade the hundreds of papers that get turned in, many of which are several months past the expected return date.
• purposely failed work– students don’t study or practice for anything any more (see above, and see posts below)
  • What they do is wait for a test, take it, fail it, and then they retake it as many times as possible
  • Again, retaking tests is not a bad thing, but when this becomes the student’s habit, then we have a behavior issue and not a learning or teaching issue.  We have taught the child to expect to try something with no knowledge of it, and then we allow the child to figure out the simplest, lowest-level understandings of how to maneuver through the test.
• refusal to do work– you think kids do the work in class, when they don’t do any of the other stuff?
  • ha!
• plagiarized work– we used to have a policy in place for this.  We’ve dumbed it down because it was too harsh on kids.
  • Now the student can turn in work completely written by another party, and if the teacher is savvy enough to catch it and call the student on it, the  student has as many opportunities as possible to fix that work and create something on her own.  (I only say “her” here because just the other day I argued for 10 minutes with a student about the authenticity of her work, going so far as to prove to her not only did she not write her own poem, but that the poem was well documented online as being written by a different person and well before her birth.  I went on to show her that three other poems in a compilation she’d produced were also written by other people.  She maintained, despite this evidence, that she wrote every word.  With our old policy in place, I’d have given the student an F and then challenge her to turn in any other plagiarized work.  The F is the consequence.
  • Now, I have to let her redo the assignment without parents being contacted until the second or third time this infraction happens, AND I have to give her a passing grade on it as well because some of the work was actually hers.
• Missing work in multiple classes– you think kids only do this in one class?
  • ha!
• Failing classes
  • I don’t know what else to say here.  There are students in my class who failed every single one of their classes last year.  They moved on to the next grade level.  We have current students who are not prepared to move on to the high school, and yet they will.  Students at the high school level move on from grade to grade despite failing scores of their classes.
  • In the lower grades, this is not even addressed — there is no credit recovery program for these students.  They fail their classes and prove on scores of teacher-made and state-run tests that they are not capable of showing a grade-level understanding of grade-level expectations and yet they will be promoted on to the next grade level.  This is allowed from kindergarten through 8th grade.
  • Students can also move on up at the high school despite failing their classes.  These kids do have protections in place to ensure they get those credits (i.e., summer school or online courses), but they also have to move on to the next grade level to attempt more challenging work without being able to do the lower-level work they already did not understand.

So, when we changed things up to benefit students and to help them find simpler ways of bringing their knowledge to the table, what we actually did was take away all of the structure that helped instill a work ethic or a sense of responsibility for one’s own behavior and learning.  I get the feeling that our new system, that does not require any effort on the child’s part, actually celebrates apathy and rewards the students for doing as little as possible.

It needs to change, and though I and several other teachers have been screaming about it for months, we are not going to be able to formally address it with administration until next week, one day before school lets out for the year.

Hey, monster! — Part III

No Grading

This post is part of a series about how my school has damaged our students.  Read Part I here.  Continue the series with Part II, here.

Or at least none that make sense.  We also set in place a system wherein we no longer give out zeros for any assignment or work that a student neglects to turn in.  Thanks Mr. Reeves!  We’ve rethunk our zero to the point where zero no longer means zero, it means 50%.  That’s an empirical fact I think that most people can get behind: that when you have zero evidence of something, that non-evidence actually means that half of that thing exists.  We’ve written into policy at our school that we will no longer give out zeros and that any missing assignments in a student’s workload will be graded using the terminology “INCOMPLETE”, and the student will receive a 50% on the assignment.

So why do we do this?  Because a zero is defeating.  A zero really pains a kid and makes them feel bad.  And if they start to feel bad, there’s a greater likelihood they will not work as diligently — why work hard in the first place if all it gets you is an F?

We’ve decided as a school that if the student refuses to turn in an assignment, that it becomes the teacher’s fault.  Beyond that,  we are again at fault for creating within students the idea that it’s not worth working to study, not worth taking the time to turn in work, to learn new material, or to show up for class.

With this policy in place, it makes it impossible to actually prove that a student has in fact failed a class.  Sure, the student may fail to turn in a single piece of work throughout a quarter/semester/whatever (and it happens more often than you might think, and there should be a procedure in place in cas that happens…more on that in a bit), but if that student is able to exhibit any evidence whatsoever of his or her knowledge of a given subject, then we have to alter the student’s grade to reflect a better understanding.  We are encouraged to elicit verbal explanations from students whenever possible; not from special-needs students, but from all students. We are encouraged to have the students show us in non-linguistic ways their understandings of the core subjects.  And the overall outcome of this is that it is very simple for a child to spout off a line or two about the definition of minor terminology, draw a picture of it, and receive enough extra within their grades to raise them up from zero evidence (which, again, is half of a complete understanding) to a passing grade.

Our current grading structure asks teachers to grade by the standards, and I am all for it.  When we introduced the concept, I latched on pretty quickly — it’s not as though I wasn’t assessing my students based on standards of achievement, or by the standards outlined by the state, but I was certainly ingrained in the assignment-based ideal.  Once we moved to the standards-based model, I thought it helped me better teach students about our educational expectations.  Instead of “We’re going to write a literary analysis essay,” I moved to the more specific: “Today we’re going to practice evaluating an author’s figurative language,” and “We’re going to purposefully outline our argument against the character’s beliefs.”  And so on.  (Actually, with the Common Core standards being introduced soon, I see this becoming more specific, and I actually like it.  There aren’t many people like me who truly think the Common Core sets a standard of rigor and that it is very clear about how to meet and assess for that standard.)  Giving a grade for this type of assignment isn’t easy, though, because we’re still using a letter-based software.  We can’t assess the standard in levels of understanding, as we ought — that’s how standards-based grading works: you assess a student’s ability/skill with a standard and rate it along a scale along the lines of “Incomplete, Very Low, Low, Knowledgable, Above Expectations, Mastery”.  These sound like letter grades, but if you assume that a grade of C means “average”,then that does not equate with “Low.”  Average is not Low.  Average is where we expect people to be.  It’s where we want people (I guess). “Low” is failing.  ”Low” indicates that the student does not understand what is expected at his/her age.

We can’t give scores like that because they don’t exist in our grading system.  So we have to go with D or F.  F is kind of a grey area because of the whole 50% thing explained above, and a D?  Well, a D is passing.  And that’s all right with most of our students — especially those who have been through this new grading system for all three of their years in middle school.  They’re fine with that D, and so is the state.

It’s actually much more difficult to prove what a student does not know or understand, that requires RTI and PRTI paperwork, it requires logged descriptions fo specific incidences, it requires photocopied proof of each intervention given to the student, it requires logged incidences of telephone and email contacts, it requires photocopies samples of the assignments the student has chosen not to attempt or to complete, and it requires that the teacher has furthermore made several attempts to make extra time for the student during the teacher’s lunch break or during the time the teacher has after school.  If all of the above is met, then it is possible to explain the student might not know what is expected at the grade level.

But that would violate our next rule.

Hey, monster! — Part II

No homework

This post is part of a series about how my school has damaged our students.  Read Part I here.

• Thanks Alfie Kohn!  Thanks Robert Marzano!  We totally thought that was cool!  What a wonderful idea.  Actually, both propose less homework and to make it, for the most part, ungraded, but my administration saw it as a blanket for all students and at all levels.  No homework, and if it is done to make it an absolutely minimal part of the grade.  This is the formative work, and thus it is the formation of knowledge.  Students have to practice it, and teachers have to track it, and together we can show each other that hard work and personal perseverance really do pay off.
• Of course in a school that grows by about 70-100 students per year, this is becoming increasingly more difficult to get kids to understand.  What they understand is that the homework is not graded and thus it is not required.  Therefore they simply do not do it.

• Summative work is the only thing we do grade, and we expect teachers to follow suit.  Most do not.  Most have homework policies the require a certain amount of reading at home and a certain number of math problems to be completed every night, and they are very up front about it.  They get talked to by the Principal and yet they just keep plugging on saying this is how they run their own ship (that’s sailing on top of the water filling up the bigger ship — see how that metaphor works?   One of them is going to make it).
  • Now, this creates a glut of fundamental problems.
    • 1. Kids notice this.  They notice that one teacher tells them that, as a school, we’ve decided not to grade homework, but that we believe the kids will learn to accept, understand, and respect the need for practice.   The kids will nod their heads and they will try it out for a while, until they notice that other teachers are assigning and grading homework.  The kids also notice that they actually have to do that homework because their grade is going down the shitter in that teacher’s class. They keep forgetting to do the work and then they start to ail the class.  Simple.  The connection is clear even to the students.
    • It notclear in the classes that only grade the summative work because the student only has to sit around and wait for a test.
      • And they can do this because we’ve also decided, as a school, that when a student fails a summative test, then it’s likely a combination of factors that led here: the student did not practice enough, and the teacher likely failed to find a way to engage this student, and now needs to come up with yet another way to meet this student’s needs, ignoring the fact that this is a teacher’s bread and butter, and ignoring the idea that another part of a teacher’s job is to instill a sense of responsibility within the student.  The kid gets another opportunity to take this test, given that they do a bit more work.  (Oh yeah, it also requires the teacher write another version of the test addressing the same standards).
      • At the time we implemented this rule, we allowed for students to retake and retake these tests, because we didn’t set an understood limit on the number of times a student could retry.  And teachers were giving the tests over and over again and students were not using the study guides they’d been provided, and they still weren’t practicing at home, and they weren’t creating stud groups, and they weren’t coming back with any self-acquired knowledge or deeper understandings of the concepts they’d failed to practice and learn in the first place.
      • What the student ultimately gets out of this is that a teacher will eventually give up and hand out a D, showing that a student understands just enough to pass.

Which gets me to grading.