Five Happy Thoughts

Boy, what a week.  It began with, literally, hundreds of essays to grade; having lost so many days from the beginning of the year, I had no choice but to push everything to the last day possible (and even asked for an extension so I could finish marking them over the weekend and still get a little sleep.)  A deep breath and then we launched right into the second quarter: new lesson plans, new texts, new questions.

I laid down the law about absences and trips out of the classroom, both of which students have more control over than they’d like to admit.  (One student asked me first thing if she could use the bathroom; I asked her to wait. Once I’d outlined the new policy limiting everyone to four trips per quarter, it turned out she didn’t have to go after all.)  Discussing these things is awfully tedious for everyone, but when they’re not addressed, loads of tiny interruptions add up to a vaguely chaotic feeling in the classroom, and ultimately it distracts everyone from our real goal: teaching and learning about English and life.

But there were so many bits of happiness sprinkled throughout all this drudgery.  Here are the highlights:

• ONE father called to thank me for tutoring his daughter, who has several rather severe learning disabilities. We’d been studying techniques for test-taking on the SAT, and when her newest scores came in, the guidance counselors were simply shocked she had done so well.  She was accepted to her school of choice within a day, where she’ll be able to play field hockey (her sport of choice) and get an education with the supports she needs.  “I have two more kids,” he said at the end of the conversation, “so you’ll be hearing from me soon.”
• TWO former students flew at me for hugs and gushing greetings.  “Mrs. LOWE!  How ARE you?  I haven’t seen you in so long!”  A third thanked me for all my help preparing her for the SAT; it was even more of a gift to see how much she’d matured in the intervening years, from an awkward and slightly-sullen teenager into a glowing, self-possessed young woman.
• THREE students who were struggling took the time to complete an extra-credit assignment (seeing a play and comparing it with the written work we’d studied in class.)  They enjoyed the experience and their grades rose along with their confidence.  
• FOUR pianists are progressing by leaps and bounds because they get to work together.  It’s amazing to see how much more they learn from each other than from me.
• FIVE minutes after the bell rang, I dashed into class (my first tardiness of the year; I was blindsided by a schedule change and sabotaged by an uncooperative copier.)  When I entered the classroom, breathless and on edge, every student was sitting in her desk with her book open.  “Oh, hello, Mrs. Lowe,” one called out.  “We’ve just been discussing what we think of Hester Prynne.”

So, you see, it wasn’t all bad.  It rarely is.

Part Parent

“… and what about this last section?” I ask.  

“It’s Writing.  Sentence Improvement.”

“So how will you do these?”

“Read the sentence first to see if anything sounds off.  Then trim it — cross out interrupters, prepositional phrases and modifiers.  Eliminate the wrong answers.  Guess if I have to.

“How many will you do?”

“At least half, but they go easy to hard, so if I need to I’ll skip the last ones.”

“Very good.”  I close the book.  “I think you’re ready.”

“Thank you,” she says, and she means it. “This helped, like, so much.”

I walk her out to the living room, say goodbye to her dad.  “I’ll miss seeing you — ” I say, and mean it just as much.

“I know; me, too,” she laughs.

“I’m proud of you,” I finish.  “I know you’re going to do a great job.  Let me know how it goes.”

“We’ll call you with the results,” her dad says, as they close the door.  “Thanks again.”

I wave, turn on the porch light, lock the deadbolt behind them.  

That fluttery feeling — out in the real world, what will happen? Will she meet her goals?  Did I do my job?

This must be what it’s like, interrupts my subconscious.  Being a parent.

Be Prepared

AP Exams are over.  I didn’t administer any myself, but boy, did I see the ripples: students missing class to study, showing up with that hollow, distracted look about them, asking for prayer and showing they needed it.

On one of the first days, I asked a student how her exam had gone.  “It was fine,” she said smilingly.  “My teacher prepared us really well.”  Toward the end of the exam period, I asked a different student about a different test.  “It was awful,” she said.  “My teacher didn’t prepare us at all.”

As someone who took a lot of AP exams herself, I was surprised to see how closely these students linked their teachers’ efforts to their successes and / or failures.  I remember studying a LOT on my own during these classes, and some teachers were certainly better instructors than others, but when I aced the exams (History, for instance) I tended to pat myself on the back, and when I left feeling defeated (Chemistry, which it’s a miracle I passed at all) I assumed it was because I hadn’t put enough time into preparing for it.

I’m not sure whether this is a generational gap (more consumerism) or just a personality difference, but it made me wonder, especially since I’m in the final throes of preparing my own students to take the SAT in two weeks.  I am torn between anger and despair, some mornings, when I ask a question none of them can answer: am I going crazy?  Have I not explained this multiple times before?  Are they just not interested, not aware, not engaged?  Or am I simply not doing a good enough job preparing them?

This time of the year is really the worst.  It’s all about the bottom line: when are the quizzes, and can I take them later if I have a really good excuse?  How much homework do we have, and are you planning to check whether we did it?  What, exactly, do we have to know for the exam, and what can we forget forever?

And for my part, I’m wondering where I went wrong in teaching them to be better students, curious people and informed citizens – and whether I did anything right at all.

Calm in the Midst of Chaos

The strangest thing happened last week.

It was a really awful day.  Rainy and cold.  The mulch shivered under inadequate tarp protection, icy puddles pooling on the surface, breaking and sliding down to the asphalt.  So much for our designs on a day in the garden.

At school, too, plans fell by the wayside.  My nefarious ambitions rivaled King George's; I concocted schemes for a Staple Tax, a Printer Tax and an Anonymity Tax as students scurried around with almost-finished assignments and valuable class time slipped away.  Not everyone got to present their projects.  Meanwhile, I struggled to defeat the worst feeling of all -- the feeling of Not Being Heard.  Colleagues and students alike seemed bent on talking over and cutting under my ideas.

I arrived home just in time to meet a student who was coming over for tutoring.  Still, I remained grumpy.  This was the icing rosebud atop the cupcake of my inconvenience.  The last thing I wanted to do after a day like that was teach.

But here's the strange thing.  Almost instantly, I felt the tension of the day slip off my back as I eased seamlessly into the role.  With one student, I could be patient, smile at her insecurities and encourage her strengths.  She didn't bring a pencil, but it was no problem -- honestly -- to walk into the kitchen and select a nice, sharp one, the same kelly green as her headband.  It seemed an easy, enjoyable job: making Geometry a little clearer to one person for one hour.  She left empowered and charged up, her target SAT score one step closer.  And I left with more peace and centeredness than I had found all day.  In the hubbub of red tape and record-keeping, it was a great relief to finally be able to focus on pure, simple instruction.

My dear friend Michiko's words came to mind then: "I am very close to my teaching.  What I mean is that I do it as easily as I breathe. I have come to realize that I am most relaxed when I am teaching . . . I have become it and it has become me."

It is.  I have.  I am grateful.

The Pentavirate

If you’re at all prone to conspiracy theory, avoid reading this interview with John Popham, an educator and former standardized-test writer, in which he gives some awfully sobering facts about standardized tests:

A nationally standardized achievement test is given in about an hour. In about an hour, you can't test all that much, so you have to sample from larger domains of knowledge and skills. And what you end up with sometimes does not match at all well with what's being taught in school or what's supposed to be taught in school. Some studies suggest that fully 75 percent of what is on a test is not even supposed to be covered in a particular school. Clearly, it's unfair to judge the quality of schooling based on a test that's largely covering things that ought not be taught.

[Later]

If one compares the content of textbooks used in mathematics with standardized achievement tests in mathematics, you will frequently find that fully half of the content in the test is not addressed in those textbooks.

So the tests aren't assessing retention of the facts and concepts we teach in class?  What are they intended to do, then?

You want to have a very substantial spread of scores. And one of the best ways to do that is to have questions that are answered correctly by about 50 percent of the kids; 50 percent get it right, 50 percent get it wrong. You don't want items in there that are answered by large numbers of youngsters: 80 percent, 90 percent. Unfortunately, those items typically cover the content the teachers thought important enough to stress.

So the more significant the content, the more the teacher bangs at it, the better the kids do. And as soon as the kids do very well in that item, 80 percent, 90 percent getting it right, the item will be removed from the test. ... So you miss items covering the most important things that teachers teach. ...

The rest of the interview is just as troubling: he mentions, among other things, that the cheapest test-scoring option (multiple choice) is the most frequently used, even though more expensive options (written and performance-based responses) are far better at measuring the nuances of a student's knowledge. Overall, the piece does give an ominous feeling of behind-the-scenes collaboration, the kind designed to make educators and policy-writers look good at the expense of struggling students.

The only encouragement came from Popham's own opinions about how to write tests.  Here, the interviewer asked him how he would go about creating a fair assessment:

I'd go to a specialist and I'd say, "Isolate the things that you want children to be able to do and put them in three piles: the absolutely essential, the highly desirable and the desirable." And having done that, then I get those two piles away and just go with the absolutely essential. And then I would say, "Now rank them from top to bottom; the most important, the next most important," and so on.

And then I would have the assessment people come in and say, "These four can be assessed in the time we have available, and can be assessed in such a way that teachers will know how to promote children's mastery of them."

Advice worth taking for any teacher who writes a test.  I like that: separate the essential from the desirable, and figure out how to assess knowledge.  Sounds simple enough, but I'm guessing it will take a lifetime to even come close.