Gladly Would I Teach

I strongly believe that good teachers are highly organized and well prepared for class, and maybe that’s why it is stressful to me when school leaders are disorganized. This week we have an adjusted schedule for Monday through Thursday so our juniors can complete their graduation tests, the tests over math, English, science, and social studies that they must pass in order to receive diplomas next year. Even though I detest the change in schedule (two hours in first period, followed by 40 minutes in second period), I understand why we need to adjust the schedule.

We have known about the test and the schedule change for several weeks, and we were prepared.

Late Friday afternoon, however, we received an email that our sophomores would also be taking a practice test on Tuesday and Thursday during the long test period.

We found out on Friday afternoon after the students had gone home!

Friday afternoon!

Did administrators decide on Friday to make sophomores take the test? Surely not!  I have no idea why we were not told previously.

In homeroom today, I apologized to the kids for telling them so late and assured them that their performance on the test on Tuesday and Thursday would let us see if they would benefit from tutoring or extra help in preparation for next year’s graduation tests. The kids were initially upset that they had not been told  about the test, but they are good kids and took the information well.

Everything went well and I reviewed with then where they need to sit tomorrow and Thursday when they take their tests.  They were happy when they left homeroom this morning.

Two hours later I received a revised plan for sophomore testing. Tomorrow I have to tell the kids that the tests will be given on Tuesday and Wednesday instead of Thursday!

Disorganization drives me crazy, but I suspect it bothers students even more.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

Based on standardized test scores, this year my school has focused on improving our students’ reading comprehension. Every now and then we have been shown scores and have been encouraged to increase the amount of reading that we require, particularly the reading of nonfiction texts. We’ve had staff development on how to increase reading comprehension and have been asked to document reading activities. Recently, we were told that scores from our upcoming spring tests will measure how successful we have been this year.

We weren’t asked why our students reading comprehension scores have declined. If we had been asked, however, I could have immediately explained part of the problem. Until this year, my school embraced “Quadrant D” learning, or learning that is performance based (at least that’s how it was described to us). We brought in “experts,” who are no longer in the classroom, and they taught us what we needed to do to engage our students in more meaningful learning.

Kids don’t need to sit around and read and discuss Shakespeare, we were told. They need to be up moving around and performing Shakespeare or working on group activities, or working on computers. Traditional reading and writing activities were strategies of the past that no longer worked with today’s students.

So most teachers, particularly the young teachers with little experience that would have helped them filter the  suggestions from the “experts,” jumped on the bandwagon and constructed lessons that allowed students to spend more time performing, more time drawing, more time acting. Reading and writing declined.

Now our students’ reading comprehension scores have declined, something that any veteran teacher could have predicted (and did predict) years ago when we drifted away and decreased how much reading and writing we required from students. Our kids were so engaged, just not engaged in reading and writing.

I am reading Diane Ravitch’s new book The Death and Life of The Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. In the introduction, Ravitch chastises educators for jumping on the latest fad without any proof that the fads work.

We will continue to chase rainbows unless we recognize that they are rainbows and there is no pot of gold at the end of them.

Our kids declined in reading because we chased a rainbow that seemed so happy and colorful and enticing. Well-meaning people chased rainbows, and our kids suffered. I would like to hope that we have learned from this and that we won’t jump on the bandwagon of the next greatest fad, but I know we will.

Why do we always think that the “experts” who have little contact with children know best how to teach them?

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

Like many teachers, for the past week I have been thinking about the Rhode Island high school that fired all of its teachers because the school repeatedly failed to reach NCLB standards. I don’t know much about the school, but I suspect I can guess what kind of school it is. I suspect it’s in a lower socio-economic level neighborhood and probably has a high transient rate for students and probably teachers and administrators also. I guess that few of the parents attended college, and I would imagine that some of the students who graduate from the school will be the first in their family to do so. Isn’t this the scenario of most schools that fail to meet NCLB?

Regardless of the students’ background, however, most Americans expect students in  schools like this to score as high on standardized tests as students in suburban, upper middle-class areas. How absurd!  Yes, students in impoverished areas can indeed meet the same standards as suburban kids, but it would require an extraordinary faculty and student body.

As I read about the firing of the Rhode Island teachers, I thought of my own high school in suburban Atlanta. We have a beautiful campus, and the facilities are only ten years old. Students have access to about 30 AP courses and scores and scores of extra-curricular activities and sports. The faculty is well trained and usually enthusiastic. Students perform well about the national average on standardized tests, and among the 2500 students, the only students we have to worry about are several hundred students who are not as economically advantaged as most of our students, the very type of student who probably makes up the majority of studens in the Rhode Island high school.

People who visit our school always compliment us on our facilities, the energy, compassion, and academic performance of our students, and the diligence, enthusiasm, and devotion of our teachers.

We are a wonderful school!

I wonder, however, what would happen if the couple of hundred of students who struggle academically were the majority of the student body instead of the minority?

What would people then say about our school?

Would someone step in to fire all of our teachers?

Would Arne Duncan, the United States Education Secretary, step in to applaud the firing of the entire faculty?

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

Teachers across the country are frustrated with the seemingly constant tests that we require our students to take. My seniors seem to be trapped in a never-ending spiral of college admissions tests. This isn't new. In fact, most of their parents also spent at least one Saturday morning many years ago confined to a high school gym or another testing site so they could take the SAT or ACT.

While I may have complaints about these admissions tests, for the most part I just accept that they are a necessary evil for students who want to attend college, and I try to help prepare students to take the tests.

For the life of me, however, I cannot figure out the SAT Writing test, the test that was added to the SAT a few years ago.

The test should be easy for my students. They are presented with a quotation or prompt and given 25 minutes to write a 2-page paper. For Advanced Placement students who routinely write a 40-minute timed writing once each week, the SAT Writing test should be simple.

Simple!

So simple that after practicing AP timed writings for ten weeks, my students' SAT Writing scores are just as likely to go down as up.

How is this possible? How valid is a test when students who score 5s (highest score) on the AP English Language and Composition test make only average scores on the SAT Writing Test? What does it mean when many of my best writers make lower scores than some of my weaker writers?

When students have trouble with critical reading passages or vocabulary sections or grammar exercises, I know what to do.

I have no idea how to help students increase their SAT Writing scores.

Since students are not allowed to discuss their writing prompts or the papers they write, we can't even discuss what they could have done to improve.

In the end, all I can do is rely on the advice that my best students share with each other. These outstanding students have surmised that if they want to make high scores on the SAT Writing exam they need to write like ninth graders with a formulaic five-paragraph paper and make up facts and statistics. They are convinced that students are punished for creativity and rewarded for common papers completely devoid of style, personality, and voice.

Is this really what we want to teach students?

The first email arrived a little after 8:00 on Friday night with the subject heading “Major Crisis.” Two students needed help because they were having a “panic attack” since they couldn’t access one of the school’s online tools they needed for their group project.

The second email arrived a couple of hours later from a group of students who were upset because they could not access the same website and thought they had lost all of their work.

We resolved the problem by Saturday morning, but in the meantime, too many students were stressed out on a Friday night about an assignment that wasn’t due for days. Why weren’t these students at the football game, or at a movie, or out on a date? Why were they doing homework on a Friday night? Why were they back at work on a class assignment on Saturday afternoon when the leaves were changing and the weather was gorgeous?

On Saturday I accessed Facebook to check my students’ online responses to this week’s topic of the week. I had asked students to read the essay “Growing Up Scripted” and then respond to Doyle’s Assertion that today’s teenagers have little freedom. I posted the article a couple of weeks ago. Here it is again if you missed it:

Growing Up Scripted

When I first posted the article, I stated, “Whereas Doyle makes many interesting points, I’m not sure that my students see themselves as having little individual freedom.”

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Although most students admitted that parents and teachers had good intentions, student after student described a life of too much work, too many activities, too much homework, and too little time to relax. Here are three examples:

“Sometimes I just wish that I could go back to the days when we would go outside after school and play with friends until it was dark and it was time for dinner. I wish sometimes that our generation could go back to the times like Doyle described and get “on our bicycles on summer mornings and came
back home at dinnertime.” [from an excellent young woman who is kind, intelligent, cheerful, a teacher's dream]

“I am going to enjoy only my second full day of fun this entire semester tomorrow. Between my working every Friday, Saturday, and Tuesday, church on Sunday, youth group on Monday, school throughout the week,
and a very consistent 3 a.m. bedtime, ‘fun’ is just no longer an option. The
pressure to get near perfect grades, score higher than should be done on
standardized tests, and dedicate ourselves to countless clubs and organizations to show our commitment to excellence has morphed our age group from one that is typically filled with learning from new experiences and an overall ‘fun’ high school into one that is more or less like slavery. We do not make our own choices; society pressures us into making them. We either agree and follow the stream, or we try to fight it, to retain our inherent freedom and drown. “ [from a National Merit Semi-finalist who is hard working, charming, funny, and a joy to be around]

“The many activities we try to cram into 24 hours is outrageous. Where did relaxation ever go? For the past semester the only “me time’ I can find is in the middle of the night with my family asleep and half my homework finished. I have to force myself to go downstairs, chill on the couch, watch some television, eat ice cream, and learn some guitar. Otherwise, I would be working from the time I wake up until I go to sleep. There needs to be a cutback in the amount of involvements we subject ourselves to.” [from a student ranked third in a class of over 700 students, a warm, intelligent,  highly motivated, and kind young man who also admitted in his post that he had previously given up a sport he loved because he no longer had time to play it and keep his grades up]

When the media and politicians focus on the apathetic students with low motivation, low test scores, and few skills, it’s easy to overlook the hard working, highly motivated, and extremely intelligent students who are close to drowning under college prep classes, AP classes, extra-curricular activities, community service projects, excessive testing, and living up to their parents’ expectations as well as the expectations they have for themselves.

As a teacher, I often struggle with how much work I should assign and how hard I should grade when I know that many of my students are taking 3 other AP courses (on a block schedule – four 90-minute classes daily). Instead of having a full year to learn the subject matter thoroughly, students now have to speed through the entire course in only one semester. In the old days, students had six 50-minute courses daily for the entire year (math, science, social studies, English, maybe a foreign language, and always at least one elective). Our most gifted and most dedicated and diligent students today, however, have no idea what an “elective” really is.

Sometimes I just want to tell these students to relax and play a little more and be happy if they have a “B.” Unfortunately, among these highly motivated students, a “B” is often equivalent to failure. They would like to slow down, but they don’t think they can and probably wouldn’t even know how to slow down if they had the option.

On Sunday night I noticed the Facebook status of one of my students:

I have wonderful students. I just wish I knew how to ease their stress. Suggestions?

Yesterday I spent all morning administering the PSAT to my 10th-grade homeroom. Since Georgia pays for tenth graders to take the test, my school decided to test all sophomores. Juniors who wanted to take the test, most of the junior class, had to pay for it. Just for good measure, all ninth graders took the PSAT as well. So, virtually the entire school shut down this morning to take the test.

My students were not happy about taking the test because they had taken it last year as freshmen and remember how painful the experience was. The test was so hard, and their scores were so low. Why would they want to take it again? Earlier in the week we discussed that the test was hard because it was really designed for juniors, and I did my best to encourage them to do their best and to just look at the test as a free practice exam in preparation for next year’s test. They listened politely and nodded their heads, signifying compliance.

Whereas the attendance of my homeroom students is usually outstanding, yesterday 5 of my 26 students did not come to school. I wasn’t surprised since a few had intimated that there was no reason to appear since they were not attending their regular classes. One student showed up an hour late and used the time to sit in the classroom and work on his homework since late students were not allowed  to take the test.

The twenty-one students who took the test remained cheerful, followed my directions without question, and never complained.

Fifteen minutes into the first 25-minute sub-test, however, 7 or 8 of the students were already finished.

As the day progressed, the students finished each sub-test earlier and earlier. Clearly, the test was either way too difficult for them or they just gave up on the test because they could not see that performance on the test would benefit them. Out of the 21 students I tested, perhaps 5 or 6 worked their hardest and appeared totally engaged in the test for the full morning.

Only 5 or 6 students

Why do educators believe that students will improve on a test simply by taking it repeatedly? If we thought we could scare students into working harder in their classes so they would be prepared for the PSAT and SAT, didn’t the lackluster performance of ninth graders disprove that last year? How will my homeroom students who failed miserably on the test last year and probably performed only slightly better this year fare on the PSAT next year? Will this experience actually help them?

All educators complain today about how much instructional time we waste because of standardized testing, standardized testing over which we have little or no control.  Yesterday, however, my school did indeed have some control over who took the PSAT.
In essence, we did this to ourselves, and I wish I knew why. I suspect if I asked that question, the answer would be the always-discouraging “because we’ve always done it this way.”

“Data driven” has become a new buzz term in schools. We all like to say we make decisions based on data or that data drives this program, this procedure, this course. Too often, however, I’m afraid when we say we are data driven it really means that we are driven only to create data because we rarely spend the time analyzing that data to ascertain what it shows us about our students or our programs and whether or not we need to continue, discontinue, or modify what we do.

In the end we have lots of numbers but little understanding of the significance or meaning of those numbers.

I suspect that the handful of kids who stayed home today instead of showing up to take the PSAT might not have had such a bad idea.

When did we reach the point where we believe that testing for the sake
of testing is helpful?