Summer School

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.