Year Three

I took the summer off. Should have spent some time writing, but it's funny how the allure of beaches, sand and relaxation will keep one away from the computer.

Today was the first day back at school for the teachers. It's out of character for me to say this, but I feel really good about this year. I like the people I work with in my grade level. It's an easygoing group, but serious about making sure the kids are ready for middle school when we close the doors at the end of this year.

Oh, yeah, I moved up to sixth grade. It's a big change from second grade. I'm very pleased with my decision to move up; I think a large part of my frustration with my job over the last two years has been dealing with little, tiny children on a daily basis. They're adorable and quite charming sometimes, but they are just so needy! I'm ready to work with people who are a little more capable of taking care of themselves. Just the little stuff - tying shoelaces, knowing their birthday - simple things like that really got to me with the second graders.

I'm no fool - I realize that a room full of 11-13 year olds is no place to be. I collected a wardrobe of conservative attire and plan to try to make myself look older. My position is a dream - I'm only teaching Science. I absolutely love Science and can't wait to share how interesting it is with my students. I know some will think it's boring, but I'm going to change their minds. I have so many ideas - so many MORE ideas than I've ever had before - about projects and thematic units I want to plan. Science offers so many opportunities for fun. We've got a garden at school that is quite neglected; it will be fun to have the kids grow vegetables and flowers out there. We'll go to the IMAX and we'll have pets, maybe some fish or turtles. No hamsters, though - warm-blooded animals are too much trouble.

I'm actually looking forward to going to work tomorrow. This is so weird.

33

Thirty-three days. That's all that remains of this school year. Take out at least four or five days for tests, another field trip, field day, and the last day of school, and that leaves only about 25 more days. It's sort of hard to believe.

My brain's so wiped out with the overwhelming stress of my job, not to mention my personal life...what's that? I remember as a child thinking it was so weird to see a teacher at the grocery store or out at a restaurant - those people weren't supposed to have lives outside of school! Many don't, and now I understand why. There's just too much to do. I could stay at work until 7:00 every night for a month and still not get it all done.

I just hate how uncertain everything feels. I have no idea what grade I'll be teaching next year, no idea what classroom, no clue who I'll be working with or working for - our principal retired. So much flexibility is required of everyone working in a school. That's fine, but sometimes I wonder if a little stability would do the system some good. Keep someone in the same grade for a few years. Let them really get to know the age group and the curriculum. I know if I get put in an upper grade next year, I'll feel like a brand new teacher all over again. Hell, I still feel like a brand new teacher now.

Maybe the flexibility wouldn't bother me so much if it wasn't combined with such mass disorganization. So many discrepancies between the curriculum, tests, scope and sequence and expanded curriculum exist. Meetings and training sessions are often delayed or canceled due to poor planning.

A couple of weeks ago, for example, there was supposed to be a training session about classroom management on my campus from 3:15-4:00. One representative from each grade was all that the principal required, but my grade level decided as a team that we all wanted to go. Arrangements were made, tutoring sessions were canceled, and after school plans were altered. We all showed up, on time, for training that we all felt we needed. We waited. And waited some more. Finally, a woman showed up, but stated that she was there to train support staff only; the teachers' training session was from 4:00-6:00 p.m.

Who knows where the communication chain was broken. None of the teachers had made plans to attend training until that late in the day, so no one was there when (or if, I should say) the facilitator showed up. People have lives outside of their jobs. Our workday is scheduled to end at 3:45. We were already altering our schedule to stay until 4:00. Asking us to stay another two hours was out of the question. I have no problem with staying at work late - I stay until 6 or 7:00 at least a couple of times a week. And had I known the previous week - even the previous day that the training session would be an after-hours sort of thing, that would have been fine. It's just unrealistic to expect that 15 people can alter their schedules at the last minute like that. People have kids of their own to pick up, classes to attend, lives to lead. The worst part is that we all really could have used that training. And it wasn't rescheduled. No one ever told any of us what happened or who screwed up the planning.

Ugh. It's Saturday morning. I'm done thinking about this right now. Besides, I have five classes worth of grades to average this weekend. I'd better get to work.

P.S. Don't tell me that it's my own fault for waiting until the last minute to average grades. The six weeks ended on Friday, and grades have to be entered into the computer by 4:00 on Wednesday. It takes at least a half an hour per class to average the grades, and probably 20 minutes to enter the scores into the (very archaic) grade system. That's 50 minutes times five classes...250 minutes...at least four hours worth of work - probably more. I get 45 minutes per day of work time. And I can pretty much forget about getting anything done during that time - there's always so much else to do. Last week three days of my planning period were spent dealing with one kid from my class's out-of-control behavior problems. I thought the kid I had last year that cursed me and made fun of the other kids was bad - now I've got one that threatens, kicks, and punches kids - sometimes right in front of my face and once last week right in front of the principal. I have to do all this paperwork, call home, write letters to mom, develop and institute a behavior plan, when all the kid really needs is a good spanking. Kids have absolutely no fear anymore. They know there's nothing that you can do to them that will really harm them or make them unhappy in any way aside from telling their parents about their behavior, which, for some kids leads to spankings at home. The students in my class who know that a letter home will lead to a 'whuppin,' as one of my boys calls it, behave very well most of the time. It's the group of kids who know that all their parents will do to them is send them to time out or take away video games for a couple of days that are the problem. No fear, no respect, bad behavior...doesn't it say somewhere in the Bible something about sparing the rod and spoiling the child?

Help for the Teachers

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.

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.