10 Hours/10 Weeks

Ten hours of spring break left.

Ten weeks of school left.

It's sort of time to start counting down. I mean, after this week, we're in the single digits. And the last week is only a half-week. Also, before school's out, we've got a couple more field trips, a ton of tests (duh) and assemblies. It's just taking all the strength in my body not to get upset, nervous or just sad about going back to school tomorrow. My strategy is to not think at all about the school day, and to just think about 3:00 p.m.

I just can't explain how much I enjoyed not being at work. It's really sad. I hardly missed any of the children, certainly didn't miss working... I'm beginning to think that perhaps I am not cut out for this profession, but I feel so stuck. I don't know what else I could do now, especially since I'm so used to having so much time off.

I've thought about switching to a higher grade level. My friend is teaching sixth grade now, and says it is much more enjoyable than second or third grade. I think I'm just tired of playing maid, mommy, nurse and teacher. With older kids, we could have actual conversations and they definitely won't want me to baby them, wheras my students now almost require it.

Ten more weeks...I can get through that. I think.

Recess

A few days ago I mentioned something to my class about recess. By "mentioned" I guess I mean that I basically said, "ha-ha, when I was a kid we got 30 minutes of recess every single day."

Honestly and seriously some of the kids in my class did not even know what the word 'recess' means.

Recess, is, of course, outlawed at my school. In fact, in the first few days I was teaching last year, I believe the Assistant Principal's exact words were, upon finding me outside playing with the kids for the last 10 minutes of the day, "Miss ---! Recess is not allowed at this school! You are wasting valuable instruction time!"

Ok, so we could have been inside drilling our multiplication tables, but my question is this: when are these children going to learn the types of things you can't learn in a classroom? Social skills. Conflict resolution. Physical activity for the sheer joy and fun of it. [Gee, I wonder why there are so many obese - and I mean obese - kids at my school? I won't even go into the sad state of Physical Education at my campus...]

The biggest problem, in my eyes, is that the students never have an opportunity to blow off steam. They sit in a classroom all day. When they go to P.E., some days there are so many students crowded in the gym that they can't play or exercise. On the days when they go to the computer lab or library, they don't go to P.E. So they sit all day, sit in front of the television or XBox when they get home, and they don't get recess.

I should add that my school administration does believe that the five minutes the kids get to run around on the playground after lunch counts as recess. They already only get 30 minutes for lunch, five of which are wasted on lining up and such; another ten minutes are wasted getting through the lunch line, since we've installed these fancy computer checkout systems that have slowed things down considerably.

So, they literally get about eight minutes to eat and then run outside and try to play for five measly minutes. [And, of course, on cold or rainy days, they are placed in the auditorium - imagine the frustration they feel after being told they don't get to burn off any of that kid energy, instead they have to sit in a hard wooden chair and be quiet.]

During this time, there are many fights. One person is generally all that is outside to supervise five to seven classes. I teach second grade - seven-year-olds - and even they get into violent arguments. On Wednesday of this week, I was greeted after lunch by two of my finest students - academically gifted, kind, polite boys - on either side of the assistant principal, both sweaty and angry, one with a torn shirt and a scratch, the other with red hands.

I realize that kids will fight, but we're talking anger here. Rage. True contempt for other people.

Yesterday my grade level got special permission to spend the last half hour of the day outside playing, and we witnessed things that were highly disturbing.

Each of the five teachers broke up at least one fight. Imagine a little kid pinned to the ground by two older kids, while one of them punches and the other one kicks in the head/face. Imagine one big boy pinned and crying to the ground, too weak to fight back because he's so overweight, getting pounded in the face by an older boy. Imagine hearing kids use profanity so explicit even I won't repeat it.

If we saw adults behaving this way, we'd call it crime. When criminals are asked why they do violent things, they often answer that they lost control of themselves. I think that's what's happening here with these children. They have no opportunity to release the stress that's built up inside their bodies. And these kids have a lot more stress than most of today's adults ever did as children.

Ninety-nine percent of the students in my school, and I'd venture to say more than 70 percent of the district, are extremely poor. I know when my mom and I went through tough times when I was small, her stress definitely trickled down to me. I was just one kid. Many of my students are members of very large families - some have six, seven, even eight [!] siblings/cousins at home.

And one parent working. And very little food on the table. And no money for entertainment or fun. And a two-bedroom apartment in an unsafe part of town. No privacy. Ever. No solitude and quiet. Ever. At school, the teacher's beating test! test! test! into their heads. At home, it's "help with the baby, clean the dishes, help, help, help." Add to that the fact that a lot of these kids came to this country with only part of their family, so they're missing and pining for the daddy that's left behind in Honduras, the big sister who stayed in Mexico with her boyfriend, the Guatemalan grandma they'll never see again because nobody in their family can afford the papers they need to travel between the two places (these are all actual scenarios some of my students are going through).

And because of the test! test! test! these kids get more homework than I ever got in high school, starting in Pre-Kindergarten. Homework in preschool. It's insane to me. We load them down with stress and work, feed them garbage [Seriously. You should see the stuff that they have to eat in the cafeteria. Makes me want to kiss my mother's hands for never sending me to school without a lunch when I was growing up.] and send them home to another world of stress and work.

I truly believe if we'd feed the kids actual healthy, tasty meals and allow them half an hour a day to move their little bodies freely, we'd see a lot of improvement - if not in test scores, at least in the quality of these people's lives.

And besides, I must say, my life was so much easier yesterday. Discipline problems? None. That threat of having playtime taken away kept everyone on their best behavior. With no privileges to take away and no threat of punishment in school, I don't have to wonder why kids act up. Why wouldn't they?

Off the Wagon

Right, so it seems I haven't had a thing to say since sometime last year. The truth is I've had plenty to say, most of it, of course, about the state of American public education - something I decided a while back not to discuss anymore.

But it's started getting to me again. It's less of an "I hate my job! I'm so stressed out!" sort of thing, more of an anger about how the whole system is set up, and how it's just so wrong. Wrong for the people who work in the schools, wrong for the people who teach, wrong for, most importantly, the students.

Lately the buzz is that superintendent Dr. M wants 25 percent of our teacher evaluations to be based on student performance...which sounds good until you get to the rest of it: on standardized tests.

There are some grades [including the one I currently teach] that do not have to administer the big, nasty, evil TAKS test. The tests that grades PK-2 administer include the Texas Primary Reading Inventory [TPRI] and Dallas ISD-created Benchmark tests.

The TPRI is extremely time consuming - the test is administered one child at a time, and can take anywhere from 15 minutes for a very good reader, to an hour if the student is really struggling and reads below grade level. During the time that these tests are given, the rest of the students in the class are basically left unattended, since, at least at my school, there are not enough teacher's aides to go around. Besides, unless you're a bilingual teacher, you'd better forget about asking for the help of an aide.

So, there are 18 kids in the classroom doing busywork, one kid and the teacher in the hall doing a test. Now, I'll admit that the TPRI does seem to be a good measure for tracking student reading progress, but I must add that there is a lot of room for errors in this thing, and I wouldn't doubt that some teachers might fudge their findings a little to cut down on testing time and paperwork.

The District benchmark tests, too, leave a lot of room for, let's say...freedom in scoring. I have to begin by stating just how asinine these tests are. Fellow teachers and I have speculated on what variety of monkeys created the tests, or perhaps, we concluded, they were created by someone in a district Microsoft Word training program. The Social Studies test alone was so filled with clip art that it led me to, somewhat jokingly, sadly, somewhat seriously, note on a data analysis of the test that I would need to incorporate more clip art into my lessons to ensure higher passing rates on the next round of Social Studies benchmarks.

The math test included things that we were instructed by our Scope and Sequence [a sort of blueprint of what we're supposed to teach and when - Jim Schutze wrote an excellent article about the contradictions and flat-out errors in these documents for the Dallas Observer back in November] not to have taught yet; the reading test was far too challenging for, at least, my school's population, as most of them are still struggling to acquire English, their second language. Bottom line: these tests are filled with errors, they're hard for students to read due to poor quality of copies - they don't really mean anything! And now the boss wants this to be one quarter of the measure of my aptitude as an educator?

I know these people. I spend eight hours a day with them, and know some of them better than their own families know them. They tell me things they don't tell their parents, and I see them do things that no test can measure. I see other teachers with their students, too, and it's pretty much the same everywhere. We work and work with them, we teach and reteach, we struggle and we try, and so do the kids. But we all still get to feel like failures when we receive the benchmark scores - few kids score above 80 percent; most kids fail at least one of the tests. I only had two students in my class pass all four tests. Does this mean I'm a bad teacher teaching a class full of idiots? I don't think so, and I don't think that my evaluation should be measured this way.

Why not talk to the students? The parents? I don't know...maybe the teachers themselves? We are required to do a small self-evaluation, but it's not anonymous, so I'm sure many people are not totally honest. Speaking of - these benchmark tests? How might you think they're scored? Do the students enter their answers themselves? No, no. Not in the primary [PK-2] grades. They're too little to fill in circles on a Scantron sheet, so the teachers fill in the answers from what the students have marked in a test booklet. What's to say a teacher, in fear of a negative evaluation, won't just go ahead and fix some of those incorrect answers? No one audits this stuff, and no one would ever know.

My idea to solve some of this mess? Start with a totally anonymous self-evaluation by every teacher in the district. Ask tough questions - things like, "Do you yell at students in your class?" "Do you feel that your school's principal is a good leader?" Ask things that we're afraid to answer when our names are tied to it. Get the real truth about what's going on in classrooms. No silly benchmark test is going to tell you that.

My Fun Trip to Mexico

The Texas-Mexico Border in Laredo

The two hours I spent in Mexico were great. I called one of my students to express my excitement about being in Mexico, went to some stores, ate lunch and walked around. Yeah, so it wasn't really a trip to Mexico, but more of a trip to South Texas, which sounds bad but really wasn't. There are, contrary to what people will tell you, some kind of pretty beaches in this state. I really liked Mustang Island, where I had my first lesson on how to drive a standard transmission automobile. 

Since my vow to not talk about work on this site anymore, I've been pretty silent. It's not that I've got nothing to say, it's just that any time I start talking about anything interesting, like politics, current events, etc. it always comes back to my job and the frustrations surrounding it. So...

I don't know how I do this - I get near the computer and suddenly time lapses and I'm up past when I need to be in bed. Only one more week and I'm on vacation...35 more hours in that building....but I'm not talking about work, so goodnight.

Taking a Break

I think I need to quit this thing. It's enough that I worry about work at work, when I wake up in the morning, when I go to sleep at night...I could at least reserve myself some time to not deal with my increasingly stressful job. I'm making one last entry, tonight, then this site is going to have to become something else.

Last year was, minute to minute, much more stressful than this one. Last year was all about survival, getting through each day. I can do that now - it's no problem - but now that I'm out of that mode, now that I [sort of] know what I'm doing, I get more and more frustrated each day. Why? Because now I know what things could be like if only we had the resources in our schools. Let me share a few examples:

At my school, we are in week four, yet we are still unable to make copies. There are those who say that "good teachers should not need to make a lot of copies." Fine. I agree that doing pointless worksheets all the time is, well, pointless. But when every element of the curriculum that we are required to use calls for doing worksheets that are included in the curriculum, it becomes very necessary for the teachers to have access to a copier. It was made clear to us by the administration that we would not be reimbursed for any copies we made on our own time at public copy shops like Kinko's. And while Kinko's does give us a discount, it's still very expensive - $1.50 a foot for laminating [laminating machine's broken, too], and something like nine cents for a copy. This adds up fast. The district does provide us with $250 for supplies and expenses throughout the year, but this money does not come to us until our September check. Most of us just can't afford to spend $30 a week on something that should be provided by our school. Of course, this problem could be very easily solved if the district would spend the money on consumable workbooks for each child in each subject. Things would be so much easier on the students and teachers.

Many teachers at my school, including me, still do not have enough textbooks for our students. We don't have teacher's editions for all the subject areas. I have a friend who teaches fifth grade at another school. In fifth grade, the high stakes test is in Science. At this particular school, there is one copy of the Science curriculum, and it is in the library. Teachers must go to the library to do their lesson planning. They do not have the TE, which is vital to presenting the lessons, at hand in the classroom.

It just seems to me like so much money and time are wasted on things of no importance. Training that teaches us nothing. Laptops that no one brings to school, because if we don't buy the expensive insurance [with our own money, of course] we're liable for the cost of the computer if it's stolen or damaged at school. Computers that sit unused in the classroom because the kids don't know how to use them, we don't have computer classes for them, and technology isn't a required part of the curriculum, so we're not allowed to use time during the day for it. How effed up is that? We live in a technology-driven world, we have the resources to educate the students about technology, yet we're not given the time to do it.

And I can't even go into my opinions on the war in Iraq, the evil Bush Regime, Haliburton, Republicans in general, the war...

I think we need to get back to basics. Memorize times tables, learn long division, write vocabulary words in a notebook, do science experiments. All this nonsense cooperative group work, new ways of teaching math - it just doesn't work. Bring corporal punishment back. My students from Mexico are, aside from the language barrier, far ahead of the students who were born here. There's still a fear and respect of teachers instilled in students there, I guess. These American kids know there's really no consequences for their bad behavior - the worst we can do is tell their parents, and they usually don't care or are too busy to care. I've written before about how parents see it as the teacher's responsibility to teach ethics and morals. I'm not saying I want to beat my students, I'm just saying that being sent to the principal's office used to mean something.

So...I might come back every now and then and post something about my job, but probably not. Wish me luck this year - I need it.

Corrections

This week there was an article in the daily paper that mentioned me, and the performance of my class at my school last year. It was a positive article; however, they got my numbers wrong! I have no idea where they got the percentage that they put in the article. In discussing this with a coworker, I began to wonder just how much in our newspapers is wrong. I realize this is an old issue, but I'm guessing that most people assume that facts they read in a major daily newspaper are accurate. It seems that lately, this is becoming less and less true.

School's going pretty well, by the way. My students this year are just so eager to behave well. Last year was so much harder. I suppose I know a little bit more about how to handle kids now, but I really think this bunch is just better behaved by nature. Their English is so very low, though. I went to some special ESL training yesterday and it was outstanding (shocking!). I can't wait to go in to day and try some of the things I learned. I'm going to spend a lot more time just teaching vocabulary. I can teach grammar and structure all day long, but if they don't have the words, they can't write interesting essays.

I'm pleased...Yo la Tengo tickets are on their way to my mailbox, as is an order from Insound. Also, one of my neighbors moved out and gave me her microwave. I've never had one before! It's so much faster than having to do everything on the stovetop. Now all I need is a toaster so I can quit using the broiler to make toast.

And now I'm talking about toast, which means that I am just looking for a reason to sit at this computer and not go get ready for school. The third grade plague has hit me already - I feel like death. The last thing I want to do is go expose myself to more germs.

Sabado Gigante!

How pleasant it was to have an extra day off this weekend. Two Sundays. That's how Monday-off holidays feel to me. Friday-off holidays feel like an extra Saturday, and are therefore better. I like Saturday. I like the combination of feeling like you should take care of a million different things yet having the option to be as lazy as you'd like. That's my definition of relaxing.

The electricity's not great in my apartment building; I blow breakers almost daily doing nothing at all. So, I can't run both the television and the stereo at the same time. They can't both be plugged in. Tonight, while I was watching the television and kind of wanting to just listen to music, I was thinking I might try putting the TV in my bedroom, where I never go, and just having the record player in the living room. Maybe see what it's like to not watch TV. I'm just as bad as anyone else - I come in and have to turn the TV on for noise or I get nervous. Something bad happened to (American?) children somewhere along the way; I know very few people who are content to enter a quiet room, not add any noise, and sit in the room comfortably. I'd go insane from the quiet.

Of course, it's rarely quiet here - the clicking of my fingers as I type, cars with crazy sound systems blaring by the window and the cat's constant screaming keep this apartment pretty filled with an adequate amount of white noise.

The TV does it for me though - I guess it's hearing other human voices that's comforting. But I'm going to try to do without it. I don't have cable, so there's really not that much that I want to watch, anyway. And I never watch movies. I only have a few, and my television set is really too small to watch them on. Plus my living room furniture is so uncomfortable. It's beautiful 50's stuff, in perfect condition, but it would be better for a fancy parlor in someone's house or something. I need a squishy couch to curl up on when I get home from work.

I can hear the television set of someone from another apartment complex through my bedroom window. Insane. I couldn't even sit in the quiet if I wanted to. There is no quiet anymore. Maybe that's why I enjoyed my vacation so much. It was very quiet almost everywhere we went. Peaceful and calm. Some places didn't even have stores or hotels. Just little mountainside towns with a few conveniences for tourists. California...some of the cities in that state just blew my mind. I can't imagine being able to live there. I can't imagine living anywhere besides Texas but I get the feeling I need to - soon.