This morning Google pointed me to this article: 10,000 Petition to Scrap Stats.

Teachers have mounted a campaign to end the tests and are threatening to boycott next year’s unless the government promises to end them. They say the focus on testing, and the league tables the results feed into, have narrowed the curriculum and forced teachers to teach to the test, undermining children’s learning.

The article is talking about the UK’s tests, but doesn’t this sound familiar to those of us on this side of the pond?

NEA, are you listening? Can we haz standardized test boycott, plz?

(Then again, it might just be easier to move to England. Proper health care, teacher unions organizing against standardized testing… let’s Mayflower ourselves back over there, and leave the tea-baggers here…)

I have finally, officially, left the classroom. Applying for a job outside the classroom really taught me a lot about how people view schoolteachers, and it wasn’t pretty. But I did find a job, still in education, but not trapped in a classroom with too many students whose needs a normal human cannot successfully address.

I like the new job. I work with tutors for an after-school tutoring program working with disadvantaged/”at-risk” youth. So I get to do the fun stuff about teaching (planning lessons and such) without all the day-to-day soul-sucking drudgery of the classroom environment. We’re working with small groups, so we can actually get to know and address the needs of the individual students.

There are no bells in my new job. My second day “at the office” I went to the bathroom three times during the day. This was a new and liberating experience for me. I had to go, so I got up and went — didn’t have to wait for a bell, didn’t have to worry about an AP showing up in my room and making snide comments into his walkie-talkie because I’d left class unattended and/or wasn’t doing my duty guarding the hallways during the passing period.

Lunch has also been a surreal experience.

I have AN HOUR for lunch. One full, 60-minute HOUR. My first day, I took my lunchbox and walked downstairs. Down two flights of stairs, until I reached an outside area. Turns out, right outside those stairs is a little walkway with a nice spot to sit, next to a little lake and almost-waterfall. I can sit there, in the shade, listening to the water, feeling the breeze (thawing out from the A/C abuse inside the building), eating my lunch. For a full hour.

I was done eating in 20 minutes. And that was after leaving the office and going down two flights of stairs, looking for a place to sit and eat.

When I was in the classroom, first, there was nowhere nice to go. The school did have a courtyard, but the students were there. Or they could see you from the classrooms, since all the windows faced out to the courtyard. The only sanctuary was your own classroom, where you’d been  cooped up all day anyway.

And while I know I had 30 minutes to eat, those minutes seem different. School-minutes must run faster than office-minutes; how come now I finish eating in less than 30 minutes, but then I barely finished wolfing down the same amount of food in supposedly the same amount of time?

It doesn’t make sense. Time as we know it must suffer some sort of molecular time warp when it passes through school doors…

Here in Texas school starts tomorrow. Good luck, patience and inner peace to all of you going back to the trenches this week.

(I received this in an email this week. I’ve seen it before, and maybe you have too, but I found it worth posting. It’s sad to see how far… back… we’ve come since 1895.)

COULD YOU HAVE PASSED

THE 8^TH GRADE IN 1895?

I remember when my grandparents and great-grandparents stated that they only had an 8^th grade education.  I was impressed with their literacy and the breadth of what they knew because they were taught in one-room school houses with no more than two teachers.  None of the teachers that they described would have met the SACS standards of today.  My forebears seemed to “know so much.”   Maybe it was the result of what took place in the one-room school houses.

What follows is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina, Kansas.  It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, Kansas and reprinted in the Salina Journal.  Try your hand at this exam.  The exam consisted of five (5) sections and each student was given six hours to complete.

Part One – Grammar (Time, one hour)

1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph.
4. What are the principal parts of a verb?  Give principal parts of “lie,” “play,” and “run.”
5. Define case; illustrate each case.
6. What is punctuation?  Give rules for principal parts of punctuation.

7 – 10.  Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the

practical use of the rules of grammar.

Part Two – Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)

1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 ft. long and 3 ft. wide.  How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weights 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50 cents/bushel?  Deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000.  What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find the cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest on $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards, 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per metre?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grade) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance of which is 640 rods?

10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

Part Three – U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)

1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following:  Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates:  1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865.

Orthography (Time, one hour) (What is this anyhow?)

1. What is meant by the following:  alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication?
2. What are the elementary sounds?  How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each:  trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?
4. Give four substitutes for caret ‘u.’
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final ‘e.’  Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling.  Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word:  bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound:  card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences:  cite, site, sight, fain, feign, vane, vain, veil, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

Geography (Time, one hour)

1. What is climate?  Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?
3. Of what use are rivers?  Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of North America.
5. Name and describe the following:  Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecia, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers in the U.S.
7. Name all of the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth.  Give the inclination of the earth.

I urge you to notice that the exam took SIX HOURS to complete.  Can you pass the exam during the allotted time?  I believe that this exam from 1895 gives a whole new meaning to the saying – “He only had an 8^th grade education.”

Another post I wrote and never posted. This I emailed to myself November 16th, right before the Thanksgiving break:

I need to re-read How to Teach so Kids can Learn. Every time I go into a conference (today during my conferene period, today after school, and then set up another for Friday) I feel I’m under attack. I’m in defensive mode, ready to deflect any and all criticism toward me (which is, in my head, each and every word uttered by the parent or student).

Things have been better at this school, because the counselors are AMAZING. I always schedule conferences with a counselor, because I feel the need to have a third party there. This afternoon’s meeting, however, had no counselor… too many meetings, parent wanted to meet before the break, so we met. Just me and the mom. I hated it. Too tense, too defensive, too angry (me, not necessarily the mom).

It probably didn’t help that I was observed today. I think it went well, but I started second-guessing myself the second the bell rang to end the period. ARGH!!!

Is it Friday yet?

I can’t complain: we have ALL next week off. And with the economy the way it is, my job security is all but guaranteed. And I do like my job. I just need to remember I like it.

***

Here we are, again a week out from a week off (Spring Break). But I have finally been brave enough to be honest with myself and admit that I do not, indeed, “like” my job. I like my paycheck and I like my job security — the job itself? Pure hell. And, on a side note, tonight is “Open House.”

Sure, it was written on the calendar, so we “knew” about it. But other than that? Not a mention of it. Which is why I completely forgotten it was happening, until I heard a student in the hall this morning asking another kid if we got out an hour early today because of it.

Awesome. I’ll be here until 9:00 PM.

I found another lost post. I wrote it the week (or so) before school started, then must have completely forgotten about it because I wrote a new post that I actually posted on here. Since the beginning-of-the-year stuff doesn’t really matter (and I wrote about it anyway, even though with a different, not-quite-so-morbid tone), I cut that part out. This is the part that I want to share with you know, when all the illusions have come crashing down for the last time:

Now, the flip side of this fresh, new beginning every August is the high expectations for utter perfection. We all know what we need to be – we’ve seen the movies of the superhumanly inspirational teachers who save the world. The Freedom Writers, and the Mr. Hollands with their Opuses, and the Akellahs and their Bees. The Mother Teresas of teaching.

And we’re all expected to be just like that.

The problem is, in your school, there’s going to be someone who excels at one of the many individual facets of teaching, and you – and kids, and parents – will compare yourself to each in turn. And now, August, is when you remember all those things, and vow to live up to those (most of the time unreasonable) expectations.

Your classroom must be perfect – posters perfectly aligned, desks in a productive yet open and friendly configuration, files color-coded to allow for instant access to student’s records and that lesson you taught that one day like three years ago on that thing about plants where the kids made that diorama and you showed them all off at Open House, remember that lesson?

Lesson plans ready the Friday before (by noon, preferably), with differentiated instruction noted for each student with an IEP, higher order thinking skills present in every activity, multiple intelligences and learning styles included and celebrated throughout the lesson, and brilliant anticipatory sets and thought-provoking lesson conclusions.

Constantly and eternally available to students, whenever they may or may not need you.

***

That’s when I stopped writing. But this is one of the reasons I gave up: the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Expectations are set so high for teachers; set by the teacher herself, by the parents, by the administration… and when that teacher realizes that she’s far from the ideal (because the ideal is, truly, superhuman), she crashes. She can’t take it.

Or, rather, I can’t take it.

So I crashed. Again. And this time I’m staying down. TKO’d.

I found a post I wrote a while back and never posted.  I figured I’d go ahead and throw it out here, just for grins. I probably wrote this in December or January.
Sometimes I wonder if I just barely made “sane.”  As in, you need a 70 or above to score medication, and I got a 68.

I’m hating my job right now.  And I’m doing a terrible job at it — the students have been working on their semester exam reviews, so I’ve just sat at my computer NOT working.  A lot of time is spent on Twitter, Google Reader and personal email.

But then again, part of that time is spent looking into new technology (stuff like Moodle) that I discover through Twitter, or activities like the RPM Challenge or February Album Writing Month.  Part of me is getting ready to attack next semester, and incorporate outside-the-box stuff like teaching Spanish by having my students record songs, but when I’m at school, face to face with the students, I can’t stand them.  I’m done with them.  I don’t want to bother trying, because they stopped bothering so long ago.

I have all these lofty plans, but my bubble is so thin looking at it pops it.

Because I’m insane, I’m also trying to start an after-school writing group.  Is this just one more task I’m adding to my plate, adding to my burn-out?  Or is this the little ray of light that will help me get through the week?

I’ve been reading John Ortberg’s If You Want To Walk On Water, You’ve Got To Get Out Of The Boat. Chapter 3 is about your calling, what God wants you to do with the gifts He gave you.

God wants me to realize teaching is not my calling. And He’s not shy about beating me over the head with it:

If Palmer had taken the job, think of what the results would have been in his life: fatigue, discouragement, a loss of joy, lack of energy, and a sense of inadequacy. This is one of the causes of what psychologists have come to call the “imposter phenomenon” — the sense that people (especially successful people) often have of spending too much time and effort trying to conceal their inadequacy from others. If he were like most of us, Palmer then would have been tempted to think that the problem was that he had joined a dysfunctional organization, or that the board had let him down, or that he had a troublesome faculty.

Or, if Palmer were a teacher instead of the president of this educational institution, he would have been “tempted to think” the students were rude, disrespectful and apathetic, the counselors were inept, the administration was antagonistic, and the faculty was stagnated, bitter, and burned out.

While some of those things may be true, the bigger fact is that I am in the wrong job.

I already quit teaching once, May 2006. Then I couldn’t get another job (for a variety of reasons), so I went back to teaching. I thought the problem was I was not an elementary-school teacher, that if I went back to high school I’d be okay. Turns out I was wrong.

Back in December I was pretty sure I was wrong, and each day, since I’ve allowed myself to tell myself that this is not where I need to be, I’ve felt more and more strongly that I need to GET OUT. But I can’t, until June. But that’s a topic for another blog post.

Now that I know what my calling is not, I need to figure out what it is. I still want to be involved in education, just not in the classroom (for my sake and the students’.)

Tomorrow is the Reading/English Language Arts Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.

That’s about all I’m going to say about that, because, really, at this point words fail me.

However, someone else has better words than I. Please read the following posts by Not Quite Grown Up (she says it better than I ever could):

Testing frustration

Reading testing!

Who’s ready for an education revolution?

I spent most of Wednesday, Thursday and Friday emailing back and forth with a student athlete’s mother.

I don’t want to get into the details of WHY I’M RIGHT, but trust me. I am. And she’s wrong.

But I caved. The student’s principal was involved into the ridiculous conversation, and the parent even went up to school to meet with the principal late Friday afternoon. So I caved. Not because the principal made me, but because I was sick of dealing with this stupid mother, and I didn’t want to inflict her on anyone else (she was, more than likely, going to go to the head principal with this, I’m sure).

This kid does not deserve to pass and play. She is smart enough to do the work, she just chooses not to — which is the most infuriating kind. There are kids who can’t do the work, or struggle with it; she’s capable when she wants to be. She just doesn’t want to bother, because she’d much rather flirt with the other worthless lumps in the class.

I graded her assignments fairly. I made an allowance for her taking the late assignment the mother wanted me to take. I made an allowance taking the late assignment turned in incorrectly (wrong file format; I did not take the wrong file format from other students because I have to click on seven different things to open the bleeping file. No, not a big deal, but when you have to take an extra minute to open the file 90 times, because you have 90 students in that course, then that’s an extra hour and a half, isn’t it?) I made sure to grade her test the same way I graded the other students’ tests.

I entered all the grades.

Her average?

68.53

Seriously.

I took the shreds of remains of my principles that were left and threw them down the garbage disposal as well, and added 10 points to each of two quiz grades to give her the 1.5 points she needed to move up to a 70.03.

This makes me want to throw up. Which might happen, on this student’s face, if the student dares say A WORD to me about grades tomorrow morning.

I used this as part of my lesson Thursday and Friday last week, after the Inauguration.  I had the students compare and contrast the message in this song with that of Juanes’s “Odio por amor” (we also did CLOZE activities with the song, etc.)  I came across the link through one of the people I follow on Twitter, and I just felt the song had to be shared.

“A Few Honest Words” by Ben Sollee feat. DJ 2nd Nature