3. 24 March 14:38 United States (dallasisd.org)
Ok, so that bothers me. Every now and then, I look at the stats just to see what brings people to this page. The third person to visit this page on March 24th visited from a Dallas ISD computer. This means one of two things:
1) One of my two friends who knows about this page looked at it at work.
2) Somebody who I wouldn't want reading this site found it.
I've been back through all the entries I've done over the last three years that I've had this site [fourth year now - crazy!] and edited and unpublished and even deleted some entries. When I saw that someone had looked at this site from a district computer, my first instinct was to take the whole thing down.
But, upon further thought [it's several hours later now] I realized that it doesn't really matter, because if anyone did happen to read this site they probably wouldn't take me seriously anyway.
I had some great conversations today at work about just exactly what's wrong with the system, but now I'm a little afraid to spill it all.
On a different note, I must express my new dislike for hardwood floors. I was all for them and loved them until tonight, because I've given away both of my couches, so the room is virtually empty. Every sound is amplified. Hmm...I think I'll go play some records and pay my next-door neighbors back for their blasting alarm that wakes me up every morning...
And one more thing: When I go back and read what I write here, I realize that it sounds like I hate teaching. This is so far from true - I absolutely love teaching, I just don't really care for all the BSthat goes along with it. Important business managers and lawyers and doctors don't do all of their own administrative work, and I don't feel like teachers should have to either! Our time should be spent planning lessons, assessing student progress, and teaching. Nothing more. We shouldn't have to worry about buying supplies, making copies or creating curriculum. The tools provided to us should be the best, and should be aligned with the goals we're given. We should have assistants - one for every two teachers, or at least one for every grade level. These jobs could be filled by college students studying to work in education or research. How valuable it would be for a person planning a career in education to really experience what goes on in the classroom - to get a feel for classroom management, to see what it's like to deliver a lesson.
I'm not talking about student teachers in the traditional sense; I'm talking about college kids interning in the schools as an assistant to the teachers. Student journalists work for free - I remember when I was in journalism school nearly all of my friends worked at local publications for little or no money - they just needed to get experience. I worked for MTV Online for a year for free, just to get experience writing for someone other than myself or my professors. The same is true for business students, law students - whatever field you're talking about, there's usually some kind of internship thing that happens at some point in the educational process. Think about the high school kids who volunteer in hospitals because it will look good on their application later when they're applying for pre-med programs. It looks good for a reason!
I really believe that if school districts would tap into the resources that are already present in the community, they could make a huge change in the performance of students and schools. If the teachers' time is freed up to plan and implement lessons, things can only improve.
Last semester, I had a girl from the area high school that came a couple of times a week to tutor my students. One day, she showed up a half hour early, on a day when I was really swamped with things to do, paperwork to complete, and too little time to get it all done. She asked how she could help, and I told her it would really help me out if she could just go laminate this huge stack of posters that I needed to hang in the classroom that afternoon. It was a simple task, laminating the posters, but it would have taken up 20 minutes of my planning period. Anyone who teaches knows that 20 minutes is a long time! You can do so much with just 15 or 20 minutes.
My point is that Lucia was only in my classroom a few hours a week, and her presence made a huge difference. Imagine if I had someone to help me full or part time every day! If I added up all the time I've spent laminating, copying, checking homework, cleaning up the classroom, finding supplies, sharpening pencils...If I added up all this time, it would probably be so much that I could still have these kids where they need to be in their studies, and actually have time for some enrichment and one-on-one activities with higher-level kids - not just the students who really need the one-on-one instruction.
And that's another thing. If a second adult or young adult was in the room, it would help so much with small-group instruction. For example, while I'm leading the class in the whole-group lesson, the assistant is correcting homework or filing papers. When I finish and the class breaks up into groups - let's say four - the assistant comes over to help. One group works on the computers, [that's one thing I will say for this district - at my school we have excellent technology resources and a wonderful tech teacher who actually teaches the kids to type and to use the computer] one group works with the teacher's assistant, and the other two groups work with me. The opportunities I have had to work in this sort of situation [when, for example, one group of kids are away from the room testing or getting hearing checked] have been wonderful and the lessons have gone very smoothly.
The thing that irritates me the most is that bilingual teachers not only get $3,000 more in pay, they also get a teacher's assistant. We ESL teachers probably need an assistant more than the bilingual teachers do, since we have to spend more time on concepts because we can't just translate a confusing word for them. Honestly, I don't know enough about the bilingual ed program to make a statement like that. I just know what I know, and that is that I do not speak Spanish fluently and there have been many occasions when I really could have used some help because I needed to spend some time one-on-one with a student who was a new immigrant and needed some extra help due to language issues.
It's not just language issues either. I have a few students who can't write the thoughts they have in their heads. I won't go into details, but it's not their fault. The only way, sometimes, to get a writing assignment done with these students is for them to tell me what they want to say, which I write out exactly in their words without corrections, and then they copy it in their writing. I basically act as a machine, or a link in a chain, for these kids. Something like those computers that type what you say into the microphone. These kids get so excited and feel so proud when their thoughts and their handwriting come together. It helps them learn so much in the areas of sentence structure, vocabulary development, sequencing...all things that they have to know for the most important subject in school: reading.
The problem is, this activity takes a lot of time. On average, for a one-paragraph assignment, it takes about 10 or 15 minutes - for one child. I have three who need this much one-on-one attention to complete a writing assignment. That's at least 30 minutes right there - and we only have 30 minutes of working time during writing! That means if I work with these three kids each day, I'm only reaching three of 20 students with one-on-one help. All of the students need one-on-one help. Some only need 30 seconds of my time to explain contractions once more or to remind them how to punctuate dialogue, some need a few minutes, some maybe five or seven to help edit a paragraph. But, if I'm tied down to those three kids every day, I'm never able to help any of the rest of the class. Sure, I can have other students in the class help those kids, but they have their own work to do!
If I had a high school or college student assisting me in the classroom, working with just those three students each day, I could make the rounds to every other student in the class every single day. I could monitor everyone's writing progress and make suggestions to each child every single day. That sounds a lot more desirable than working with three then staying at school an extra hour to check the writing journals of the other 17 and write comments in the margins. And I don't know - maybe I'm crazy - but it seems to me that an active conversation between the student and the teacher about their writing is a lot more effective than some red ink scribbled on the side of the page. I know that when I was in journalism school it helped me so much more when a professor actually talked to me about problems with my writing rather than drawing arrows from one thing to another in the middle of a paragraph.
So, my grand scheme to fix education is to use high school and college students as slave labor in public schools. Joking! Create an internship and mentoring program similar to those in other professional fields, and employ qualified high school and college students who wish to work in education in the future. The cost will be minimal because the interns don't need to be paid. They're getting paid in experience, just like I did for MTV. They will be better teachers when they begin their career because they won't be jumping in with no knowledge of how a school runs.
This makes so much sense to me that it seems insane that it's not already happening. Maybe it is somewhere.
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