Karl's Blog

How would I deal with the swine flu at my school?    Look no further....

This is one of those moments where I reflect upon my own thoughts and realize that some of the ways that teaching has changed me are profoundly negative.  Reading about the current Supreme Court case on schools pressing for the right to conduct strip searches, I feel terrible that there is a part of me that sees it as reasonable.  While the case is concerned with drugs, which I see no reason to conduct a strip search for, I can relate to the paranoia felt by teachers when it comes to students hiding razor blades and other dangerous items in their clothes.  While it does not seem to be a problem at our school, I know it is at many and I can not imagine how one could deal with that kind of fear of one's students on top of the other difficulties of teaching.  However, the concerns of teachers should not determine what rights someone may or may not have.  The concept of rights exist to defend human dignity from concerns of convenience and even security.  To me, it is appalling to think of principals and vice principals having the right to decide whether or not there is probable cause to invade the privacy of a teenage boy or girl.  Schools will never be completely secure and even if they were, ti would not justify making students an even lower class of citizen than they already are considered.

 For that reason, the majority of my thinking falls on the inside that such a development would be truly awful.  Beyond ethical concerns, it does not make pedagogical sense either.  Schools and classrooms, at the best though certainly not at present, are supposed to model for children the kind of society that we would like them to perpetuate.  What message are we sending if we tell them that their privacy can be invaded by the people in charge of their education?  Also, I cannot speak for my students, but how do we expect children to obtain a meaningful education in a place that is essentially a minimum security prison?  As it is, I think we are seeing the effect of public schools causing students to feel antagonized by academics and it seems like we are only making it worse by the year and, like I said, there are times where I can't help but feel a part of it.  While I am still ideologically opposed to corporal punishment and authoritarian approaches to education more generally, I am on a daily basis engaged in a system that does it, without being disgusted, and am often pleased when a student is paddled or when I succeed in putting a trouble making student in his or her "place".  Of course, these schools are in such conditions that I'm not sure there are many other approaches to take to it, but I remain unhappy with the system I am complicit with and this article only makes it worse.

Of all the things in education that I am the most apathetic about, I would say that assessment probably bores me the most.  There is nothing less interesting to me than grades and, while its sometimes interesting to compare what one student got to another, I would much rather have my grades count little and be based on my subjective sense of how they are doing and how much they are trying rather than spending these last few weeks being forced to obssess over some state test, the content of which seems to correlate very little to what I consider to be the meaningful aspects of algebra.  Of course the assessments in the video seemed like something that might be far more interesting and I can see myself giving something like them a try in some ways before I finish teaching, but the video seems to ignore the reality that in any class in any school, not just the North Panolas of the world, there will be a good number of students who do not buy in to the mentality of an alternative assessment and their grade will be significantly lower even though they might have comparable math skills.  Of course, they could be punished for that, but it seems that so many of the alternative assessments reward so many other things besides the primary subject being taught that those things that make them alternative might make them weaker as the assessment of the material that matters.  Now, I have no problem with that as I do not care about objective assessments in the first place, but I cannot imagine these kinds of assessments ever taking the place of the standardized tests for that reason.

In my classroom now, the primary form of assessments are tests and quizzes.  I have done a couple "projects", which are really just an extended graphing assignment rather than anyhting like we saw in the video and a few poster sessions that encourage problem sovling and presentation, which are graded by a rubric, but I struggle to see myself going far beyond that this year.  There are just too many students who do not understand the meaning of the word "project", which to our students most commonly means finding something to copy and paste from Wikipedia (or, slightly more progressively, writing by hand after reading it on wikipedia), and putting it on a poster board.  Over the summer, there might be some more room for those kind of assessments, as the students seemed to be more motivated, or at least are a more captive audience than the students during the regular year.  On the other hand, the fact that many of the classes will be being led by first years might make it less than ideal to have them practicing doing something they may not get a chance to do during the year.  I would like to take the time to model some of the poster sessions we did this year that were modeled by us for the institute for mathematics innovation at Ole Miss.  Hopefully that will allow me to perfect the rubric and the procedures for that kind of activity, as I plan on using them more frequently during the year.  Going into next year, I have decided that my only real objective for next year should be using math to teach kids how to think critically.  I will be doing that in the blind faith that it will help my test scores for next year, as students will be more able to reason through word problems, but I wouldn't be bothered if it did cause our scores to drop.  As some of us at the school discussed, things are so backwards in eduation that the best thing we could do for next year would be to lower our test scores, miss AYP, and continue to get extra funding and   assistance from being under conservatorship.  If standardized tests were meaningful and had real incentives for performing on, rather than disincentives, I might care about them as a form of assessment.  As it is, I will try to take part in as many of these kinds of alternative assessments as possible insofar as they actually provide a meaningful benefit to students.  According to a book by W. James Popham called Transformative assessment that I will be using as a reference for next year, formative assessments, which as far as I can tell alternative assessments tend to be, "can have a positive effect on both students' in-class learning and students' subsequent performance on accountability tests"  (Popham 2).  If he is right, then everyone will go home happy.  If he is wrong, however, and these assessments promote learning but don't prepare them for the high-stakes test, then only I will go home happy.

Reading the required article on Summer School and thinking how the MTC Summer School might or might not resemble and ideal school by the standards it offers, I realized that, as much as we might like it to be or pretend that it could be, the primary purpose of the MTC summer school really is not the same as that of the goal of a normal summer school.  While we want to be putting the kids first, the article suggests that any summer school needs to be part of a "year-round" approach to help students.

    Consider the 5 factors that the article lists for helping students (SREB 9) and I fail to see how the MTC Summer School could really be an ideal summer school.
          1.  High quality teachers:  The problem here is that MTC Corps members in their first year, while they may present unique strengths, are generally not high quality teachers at the outset.  Only recently do I feel like I am starting to figure out what it really means to teach and, given that we recruit people who have likely not given a lot of thought to what teaching is before coming here, that would seem to a common obstacle when it comes to providing high quality teachers in a summer school.

       2.  Adequate, Reliable Funding:  In this category, I am going to assume that the MTC is not significantly better or worse funded than any other summer school program, so this is not a weakness of our summer school, just any summer school in Mississippi
 
       3.  An emphasis on reading or math:  Since our summer school is designed to address specific failed subjects, I do not see how we have effectively emphasized basic math or reading skills in our curriculum.  In fact, I would think that our summer school might be less likely to provide such an emphasis considering that we are trying to get our teachers to practice teaching regular school curricula, not a separate curriculum for remediating students, which the article implies should be an entity unto itself

    4.  A climate of innovation and creativity:  This might be an advantage of MTC teachers, but, in my own case, I am not really sure how creative or innovative a teacher I have been or how much I have made an effort to inspire those things in my students.  I recognize that they are important to develop, but MTC teachers are so out of their element in their classrooms, that I am not sure that they have found an effective way to implement their creative ideas by the time they are teaching in summer school that first year.

    5.  A comprehensive plan for research and evaluation of results:  Again, it seems that an effective summer school would have a regular staff in place with some consistency in practices.  In our case, our teachers and administrators change from year to year, so whatever the research suggests is likely obsolete or at least diminished in relevance by the following year as entirely new people have taken over who might have very different results.

Of course, all this being said, the MTC summer school is almost certainly better than any other summer school program in the state or at least the districts that we teach in.  However, I just wonder whether or not an ideal summer school program really likes what we are doing, as I have occasionally let myself believe that it would.

In terms of this summer, my vision of Summer School in Holly Springs in 2009 is more or less what last year was.  It would be best if we could provide a stable, orderly school environment for students that have never seen one before to perhaps cause them to adjust their perceptions of what school can be like.  Paradoxically, however, in addition to being stable and well-run it must also be as much of an approximation of what the regular school year will be like as possible.  As creative as our incoming first years might be, it might be necessary to check some of their ideas, particularly about discipline and classroom management, so as to give them a more realistic picture of what they will have to do when the regular school year comes along.

Success for my summer school students will be learning the material that they either failed to learn or failed to demonstrate learning in the past year, while hopefully, and perhaps more importantly, remaking their image of themselves as a student as they learn in a more supportive and less chaotic environment.

This success will be demonstrated largely informally, but I plan on giving the Algebra practice test as well as tests that focus more on assessing their conceptual knowledge of math, which is something that is perhaps much easier to address over the summer, when there is signficant unfettered one on one time, than it is during the year.

To achieve this success, I am not sure what else I can say other than follow my classroom management plan and make sure that our first years take the workload seriously, as most of the people in our class did.  The schedule is such that one person can do a lot of damage if 1/4th or eventually 1/2 of their lessons are being taught by someone on a different page from everyone else or who is apathetic about putting in the work.

As for the proposal for year-round schooling on p. 18, I have mixed feelings.  It is very difficult to argue with the idea that it will improve scores and help struggling students do better in school.  While the elective options for advanced students or on-track students might alleviate my concerns, I have always been concerned about children's rights when it comes to school and have never felt that schools have earned the right to dominate students' lives in the way that they do.  They are incredibly inefficient at doing their job of providing an education and I am troubled that our only answers to providing better education is more school.  That being said, I would be curious to see how it would work on some of our students.  School should provide only a fraction of what a child learns, but given that our kids are living in such under-stimulating environments, it would be hard to argue that school would not be a significant step up from what they would be doing with their spare time.  I certainly lack any better ideas.
   

Articles such as this one by Heidi Hayes Jacobs remind me of how absurd I find the industry of education as it exists in our country and, it seems, especially in Mississippi (Perhaps I just resent any piece of professional development material that uses the term "21st century" approach) (Jacobs 3).  It brings me back to staff development  sessions where common sense is built up into new ideas that somehow warrant full days of being talked at on how inclusion should really be inclusive and how different students learn different ways, hence differentiated instruction.  Now I learn that it is better to plan ahead and across grade levels than to plan day to day and in isolation and that Ms. Jacobs, who I am sure is very well-educated and knowledgeable, seems to be traveling around charging school districts for workshops to explain her discovery that following a curriculum map is better than wandering like a lost child, as I do, through a desert of frameworks.  The struggle to be a good teacher, and my occasional failures to do so, rarely result from a lack of knowledge about what should be done but rather from a logistical or individual inability to follow through on what one knows to be more sensible.  All that being said, however, let me consider the article's merits and how it relates to my school's planning processes and my plans for planning out the summer curriculum.

Where Jacobs seems to be going beyond simply saying that you should do long-term, micro- and macro-planning, is her idea of it needing to be calendar-based, as she expresses when she writes, "without a commitment to when a skill will be taught, there is no commitment"  (Jacobs 2).  Here, she is contrasting what my school seems to have in place in terms of vertical planning, that is, a list of what students should know in what grade, to what my school perhaps should have, which is a calendar detailing precisely when students were expected to learn what, which, I believe she is arguing, would imply more of an obligation for teachers to get to all of the material that later teachers will expect their students to have learned. Again, this seems sensible enough, but, even though it seems more ideal, I am not sure how it exactly could be imposed without a complete upheaval in what is done with North Panola.  By that I mean that the level of turnover is so high that the stability required for effective vertical planning simply seems not to exist.  Furthermore, in my individual experience, what should have been covered when and how long it should take to cover the next thing seems to be utterly meaningless, at least in my dealings with my remedial math classes.  For me to try to cover all the frameworks that the next teacher expects my students to have learned would ignore the fact that for them to learn anything at all, being as behind as they are, more time is going to have to be spent on any given topic for it to have been worth teaching at all.  In terms of horizontal planning, I have had good experiences with that as my school as the other Algebra teacher at my school is another MTC teacher and we were able to plan out what will be covered when and update that plan frequently throughout the course of the year, albeit with her taking the lead as she is far more organized than I.

In terms of planning Summer 2009, I anticipate fewer obstacles as it hardly resembles, and therefore takes on so few of the problems of, a real school.  That is to say, the students tend to be more motivated to keep up with the material as their family has spent money for them to go and they are already losing their summer to the subject, thereby reducing the problem of topics dragging on forever due to lack of student motivation.  On the other hand, one difficulty is that, while we are expected to cover the same amount of material, we are faced with the difficulty of teaching 4 classes to each group of kids in one day.  Now they may end up taking a fair number of classes, but any subject, and particularly math, takes time to ingest.  4 lessons in one day, I believe, it is not as valuable as 4 effective lessons over 4 days.  The mind needs time to process information, but the curriculum map must still work in the entire curriculum under  constraints.  My plan is to meet with my fellow teacher and discuss ways to blend frameworks as often as possible, so there is both a more holistic approach to the mathematical concepts and an increase in the pace  in which the topics can be addressed.  My goal is to plan out the curriculum of Algebra I, which I anticipate teaching again in the fall, in such a way that accomplishes this blending of frameworks, as well as finds time for projects and a greater number of problem-solving activities, as I feel these were both lacking in my plans for the current year.  Hopefully, the long-term planning I am about to engage in will increase my effectiveness as a teacher next year, as I have found scarcely enough time to do it over the past 6 months.

I won't pretend to have pored over Ruby Payne's "Framework for Understanding Poverty" with the level of detail that a meaningful review would require.  Times are tight, life is stressful, and I am an inherently weak and lazy person.  I will make my best effort and apologize in advane for the little that I am bringing to the table.

My initial response would be to complain that the book overgeneralizes about people in poverty, people in the middle class, and people with wealth, but thats essentially what sociology is: generalization.  Are there certain behaviors that appear significantly more often among poor people than among the middle class and the wealthy?  Yes. Is it still an oversimplification of any individual to use them as a case study to prove or disprove one of those larger trends?  Absolutely.  So, while I recognize some of the points that she makes about how poor children respond to certain things in comparison to more middle class children, I do not think that it would be fruitful to bring it back and apply it to the classroom.  Part of the challenge of teaching is to doggedly insist on seeing your students as unique individuals and not further instances of angry, poor children in a struggling school district.  I'm as soft and high-minded of a liberal as any one here, but as much as might want to or naturally try to apologize for and excuse the behavior of some of my students, its very easy at the end of the day to start to view them all as part of one big problem and respond to them as though they were all the same.  Now I'm sure with more attention to the book's findings I might have something of value to go back to class with to respond to some of those individuals, but I'm not interested in any catch-all "framework" for understanding poverty, when poverty is really, insofar as we are trying to understand it, a diverse group of people who are experiencing it.  

Contrary to what the title of this post might suggest, my first two days were, by and large, successful, free of obvious failures, and, most importantly, a release of the almost unbearable anxiety I was feeling from the thought of getting up in front of a new set of kids.  It is true that that anxiety has been replaced by a new weight upon my soul as I contemplate the vast sums of paperwork, planning, and drudgery that await me on top of somehow continuing to manage my classroom successfully without possessing any natural aptitude for it, but I appreciate the variety. 

As I prepare to reflect upon my first days in school with kids, I will continue to stick to my pledge of avoiding negativity and excessive complaints.  However, since my stress level is so high that some complaining is going to be inevitable, I'm going to set certain ground rules for what I deem acceptable and unacceptable complaints.  If only my classroom had such clear procedures.

1.  No complaining about the education level of the students.  
    To me, it seems absurd, if tempting, to complain about or disparage the children that you have because they do not read, write, speak, or complete math problems correctly.  This is like signing up to help fight forest fires and immediately complaining about the heat, quantity of fire, and the fact that all the trees are burning up.  Except, instead of volunteering, you are being paid 32,000 dollars a year (a respectable sum for most people in this country and especially the world) and receiving a free graduate degree and a laptop (courtesy of the recovering Morgan Freeman) to do a job that, while incredibly stressful and time-consuming, puts you in no life-threatening danger.  At the end of the day, at least in the case of teachers in the program, you probably have the easiest life out of all the people in your classroom, whether we are talking about the long or short term.  I am very willing to argue this with anyone.  No one feels more exhausted than I am, but I will refuse to build myself back up by disparaging my students, even the ones that appear poised to irritate me in the coming months, and I absolutely refuse to dwell on the skills that they lack.  The fact that these deficiencies are primarily not their faults as individuals seems to be the whole point of coming here in the first place.

2.  As little complaining as humanly possible about other teachers and the administration:
    One pleasant surprise about North Panola has been the high quality of administration and teachers at the school.  If I was being honest with myself I would say that I feel like I have a chance to be pretty good teacher (though there are other possible outcomes), but I would not be surprised if, at the end of the year, I was still in the lower percentiles of teachers there.  Like I said, that has nothing to do with me, but is a testament to the extent that having experience, a shared background with your students, and a certain personality type are incredible advantages when it comes to teaching.  This again makes me wonder a little about our program design.  On average, does someone like me, a relatively soft-at-heart, well-meaning, well-educated, white northener (no, this does not describe everyone in the program, but it represents a good portion) have the same ceiling for teaching-quality as someone who came out of the schools that we are teaching in, has been successful in spite of that, has the same background, and has always wanted to be a teacher, suggesting their personality type might be more in line with an ideal teacher than people who decide to give it a shot after graduating?  I would say no.  I still think this program does a very good job by supplying these schools with good teachers.  I just think it could do even more good if it offered its benefits (or at least more of them) and its training to people who deserve it more, are more suited, and are more likely to stay in the field and especially in the area.

 Back to the main point, however, the reason I'm witholding my complaints about the administration is that, while of course there are things that could have gone smoother, disruptions that could have been avoided, and information I would have liked to have had earlier, it seems like an incredibly hard job.  I find managing a single classroom and coming up with a file for each person to be incredibly intimidating, I do not know how I would react to trying to handle an entire school.   Of course, there are plenty of bad principals out there in Mississippi, but I'm willing to give mine the benefit out of the doubt and, if that benefit runs outs, I'll try to channel that energy I would devote to complaining towards the things I need to improve in handling my small, sliver of what goes on in that school.

3.  I will not complain about the cultural difference between me and my students or the problems that result from them.
    My students did not ask me to come to Mississippi.  Reggie Barnes, my favorite part of summer training, made the point that we are the intruders, not the students.  It is true that my students do things, make statements, and possess names that appear unusual to a white person from New York.  That is not their problem.  It is mine.  I will make my best effort to have my world fade into theirs as much as possible.  To the extent that it is not or that I resist, I will not hold our differences against them.  I can handle them being held against me.  They have more things of true importance to worry about in their own lives and possess less rights as human beings than I do.

With these limits in mind, I'll hold off on writing anything until later when I have more time to think and have gotten more preparation and organization done.  To be honest, a lot of my stress and general edginess stems from personal issues rather than professional.  If I was doing this without massive credit card debt and car trouble and while continuing to live with my girlfriend for the next two years instead of dealing with the separation, it would still be hard but I would be significantly more confident in my ability to handle it than I have been lately.  All that said, I am still alive and taking it one day and many, many hours of preparation at a time.  Part of me hopes that I'll be able to come up for air at some point in the next couple months and feel a little more in control, but life has very little to do with hope and a lot more to do with surviving, managing, and finding some kind of happiness in whats in front of you.  It very truly could be a lot worse.

So, my final required post of the summer.  This is a free write, so you might think that would promise a good post, but I'll be honest: I dont' have it in me today.  I'm driving up to Memphis in a couple hours to pick up Sarah, which is exciting, I'm beginning real school in a week, which is frightening, I finished doing my classroom management presentation effectively concluding the program for the summer, which is relieving, but all of these things combine to make me dead inside, trudging towards an approximation of the necessary length of a blog post.  All of these words, one after the other, in succession, combining to form some kind of mean, serve only to extend a post that deserves to die now.

With that behind us, I have elected to write about the attitude I am gong to force myself to maintain as events intensify, loyalties waver, and long-held beliefs are cast aside.  More than anything else, I'm going to eschew martyrdom.  I tire of the negativity that accompanies teaching, even if most of it is justified by the sad state of certain districts.  I said this at the beginning and I still hold to it, now that I'm a real teacher or at least somebody with a teaching license, but this is not a sacrifice, this is a job and, in the grand scheme of things, a very good job.  I will not be paid more than 34,000 dollars a year, but neither are 99 percent of people in the world and most people in the country (or at least most people my age).   I will be disrespected routinely, will likely have to follow procedures that do not seem to make sense, and may be underneath people who do not seem to deserve their position, just like almost everyone at almost every single job in the country.  I will not be undergoing unbearable physical stress.  I am in no way entitled to anything that pays better or has more prestige or power.  I will have plenty of time off.  I will be working a white-collar job, one that would be considered a great success for almost all of the students that I will be teaching. I will be getting a free education and certificate.  I will have the support of an organization and a group of peers.  I will be receiving loan reimbursement.  I will continue to type away on this free laptop.  So, please, if you hear me complaining about how my life is hard, tell me to shut up.  Likewise, if you notice me becoming self-congratulatory on my selflessness, chastise me as well for that.  I don't' know what the hell I'd be doing if I wasn't here.  I was told today that a lot of us might be giving up six-figure incomes to come here.  I am not in that category.  I am much closer to giving up 6 dollars an hour to come here.  All that said, I acknowledge that it is going to be difficult and I empathize with some of the struggles that people have had, but I would rather be having a headache every day teaching than go back to some of the jobs I was working at before I came here.  I am going to do everything I can to dedicate that energy that I might spend complaining to being optimistic, efficient, and achieving some degree of success and happiness.  That is all for now because the social is in a matter of minutes, but I will write more later, possibily with a more liberal use of paragraphs.

The first part of my evaluation will be evaluating the evaluation procedure.  We had 5 separate formal evaluations to fill out this morning and now we also have to write a blog offering our evaluation, which, in addition to being redundant, seems to undermine the anonymity of our previous evaluations.  Points have been docked.  I guess I'll just try to hit a few things that might be of interest to outsiders.

Summer School:  The summer school is pretty much as good a training experience a program of our size can set up.  While it would be nice to have larger classes and a more realistic classroom environment, I had enough practice and headaches to get some sense of what the year will be like.  I have some objection to the activity club, though from the perspective of a teacher I really enjoyed it.  It just seems that summer school is hard enough on kids, they shouldn't have to stay an extra 45 minutes for "fun" activities when they probably have more fun things they could be doing without us.  The added interaction with kids and practice in those kinds of club environments is good, but it seems a little cruel to do it everyday.  Altogether though, the summer school is probably the best part of the summer training

Evaluations/Role Plays:  The evaluations were generally helpful, but I wish that helpfulness carried over into the role play evaluation process, insofar as one existed.  The team teachers all put in effort and had good plans, but there really wasn't enough structure to make them into legitimate learning experiences.  For example, if we're acting out a scenario where a kid gets in a verbal confrontation with a student, there should be specific guidelines or a handful of different guidelines for different teaching styles, concrete approval or disapproval of what the pretend teacher did, and a limit on the behavior of the people playing students so that role play doesn't become about something else entirely.  Altogether, as much as I didn't enjoy them personally, I'll admit that role plays have the potential to be beneficial, but I'm not sure that they were this time around.  I would say this needs the most improvement.

I expended most of my pithy comments and obnoxious references on my classroom management today, so, with my arsenal sapped, I will move onto the last required post of the summer.