EdObserver

In the continuing saga of state assessment testing and long homerooms, I spent a relatively enjoyable hour-and-a-half with a group of sophomores. We had an experienced teacher subbing for our homeroom teacher who was proctoring an exam. One of the boys who had the teacher last semester called her by a diminutive of her last name.

I’m not even fond of students calling teachers by their last names only, as in “Nice work, Findlay!” accompanied by the ubiquitous high-five. But calling Ms. Goldfarb, Goldie, is over the top – just too friendly, too “peer-ish.”

If it makes me sound old fart-ish, I don’t care. We’re not their friends. We are adults. We can be friendly, we might even be cool, but we are not their peers. To expect respect for position is a good thing. That’s what coaches expect, and even team captains. Today’s young teachers – which means anyone under thirty – just try too hard to be loved. The banter between student and teacher sounds more like two kids hanging out. And it almost never works out. Somewhere in the course of a term, some student will step over the line in class. The young teacher must either stand there and take it, or stand up for what’s right and shock the class when he or she turns “mean.”

We started our state assessment tests for juniors (eleventh-graders) this week ; the English portion which includes a writing sample based on a topic chosen from a list. This portion of the test took over two hours to administer.  The rest of the students had a two-and-a-half hour homeroom. There was a forty minute class assembly and the rest of the time was a study hall. The rest of the day was a regular schedule with shortened class periods. The testing will take three days, though the next two will not be as long. Once again, classes will be shortened to accommodate the tests.

This is one of the reasons that teachers and parents condemn standardized assessment tests: we spend too much time on them.

Why? If kids can miss classes for a field trip, or a week because their family wants to go skiing, why is it crucial to screw up the day for everyone just to test juniors? Because the more intrusive and difficult the testing becomes, the more regular families will complain about the testing. This is what the teacher’s unions want. If Johnny goes home and tells mom he wasted two hours in homeroom because of state assessments, mom will complain and say what a waste, talk at the next PTA meeting and everyone will jump on the bandwagon. They’ll all blame NoChildLeftBehind and convince themselves that we don’t need to test a kid to find out if he’s learned anything.

The kids do lousy on the tests anyway. First, because the tests are poorly designed with some questions that are flat out wrong. And second because we aren’t teaching our kids anything that we expect them to know for any length of time – that is, any time longer than the lesson unit. Think about my high school situation. We’re on a Block Schedule. That means that students take four classes a day, one-and-a-half hours for each class, one full year of a subject in a semester. It’s supposed to be more like college.

If sophomores took English in the first semester, they completed a year’s credit of English by the end of January. They didn’t have to take an English class for the rest of the year. If their junior English class is scheduled for the second semester, when they step into the state assessment test for writing in January of the junior year, they will have done no serious writing for twelve months. Worse, they will have spent the year IM-ing and text messaging, where spelling never counts, and LOL and OMG are their new vocabulary words.

I once worked with a teacher who blamed NoChildLeftBehind for the fact that she had to take a Teacher Praxis exam to prove she was capable of performing as an English teacher. The problem was that she didn’t feel it was fair for the state’s department of education  to expect her to know algebra. Not advanced mathematics, just simple algebra. She went to college to teach English.

Today I sat in a chemistry class with a teacher who, while teaching a lesson on mixtures, used overheads that misspelled both homogenous [sic] and heterogenous [sic] by leaving out an “e.” In my second chem class another teacher read aloud an article about the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah. She hesitated on the word “proving,” stopped cold, and then decided that the word was pro-ving, with a long “o” – like in probing. I guess science teachers don’t think they have to know English.

When I walked into the school today the line from the attendance office stretched all the way down the hall to the main lobby. This is the daily morning line of students who are submitting early dismissal permission notices from their parents. For a moment I thought I had confused the date of next week’s long Presidents Day weekend. Kids get released early for long weekends and vacations because families travel. I wasn’t confused. I had just forgotten that this was the day of the Winter Pep Rally.

The school day is adjusted for pep rallies. It’s the same here as it was in my old high school in New England: shortened classes all day with one or two hours scheduled at the end of the day for fun, to build school spirit. Pep Rally days draw a larger number of requests for early dismissal than even vacations, where many kids just take the whole Friday off. And all day long kids sit in every class saying that they wish they could go home and not have to attend the rally.

For the life of me, I don’t get it. I know that I’m old enough to remember the days when you went to school to go to class and a field trip was a big deal. I think we would have given anything to miss an hour or two of classes to sit in the bleachers and cheer. Many kids still love it. But why do so many want to cut out, and why do their parents think it’s a good idea to let them?

Welcome to the EdObserver.  In the coming weeks and months, you’ll find comments on the state of public education in the United States by someone who’s seen the system, day to day, from the inside.