180 Students Turn in Work. Teacher Doesn’t Know Whether to Weep for Joy or Fear of Paper

This year I am blessed with the highest numbers of my short and semi-illustrious teaching career. I have 38 desks, and about 38 students in each class. I have one of 40 and a big winner of 42.  One student uses a barstool for a desk. Another uses a clip board. In another class, student 39 sits on the barstool and uses counter space in the back.  With the exception of one student who has been absent, EVERY SINGLE ONE turned in their first assignment, and most were well done. Given, it wasn’t exceptionally challenging (it did require grappling with a graduate-student level vocabulary word), but I didn’t even have to force anyone to come after to complete the thing.

Thankfully it was an easy one to grade, and all 180 of them look dang cool plastered upon the back of my classroom.

Assignment number two is a bit meatier, and tomorrow I begin tracking down the 20 or so stragglers after school.

Fear and Loathing of Testing (and numbers) in Los Angeles

The LA Times blew it open last Sunday. In the first of a series of articles pertaining to teachers and Los Angeles school performance, the Times unveiled findings of research intending to discern how teachers affect student performance. Researchers employed a “value added” analysis for over six thousand LA elementary teachers, using test score data to track whether students improve, maintain, or fall behind throughout their tenure with a given teacher.

Not surprisingly, teachers in the same school serving the same demographic had wildly different “effects.” Whether or not the increase/decrease was due to the teacher is currently being trampled in the subsequent dust-up, and it’s definitely a dust-up–not only did the Times print names of teachers, they are going to publish a database, open to the public, of all the teachers and their “value added” results!

It is all quite juicy.

Whether or not this is the best way to evaluate teachers is sure to be debated more heatedly than ever, and much thanks is due to the LA Times. This question was not being openly discussed in California before now, and now it’s blowing up nationwide.

I can’t say I’m surprised that A.J. Duffy, head of the LA teachers’ union, called for a boycottof the LA Times shortly after the article was published. Once again, minimal if any interest in learning from the data. No love to the teachers who might actually learn a thing or two from the results (the teachers with poor value-added scores in the article indicated that the score information would be useful for their instructional practice). Just shut the Times up. Classic.

Thankfully, he seems to have backpedaled a bit, thanks to some reasoned response from the head of the national American Federation of Teachers. And bonus props to one of the candidates to replace Duffy at the end of his term, who said he was disgusted by Duffy’s call to boycott the Times.

I don’t know if evaluating teachers based on “value added” is the answer, but I definitely see it as a useful component in the evaluation process. Ironically, much of the credit for this report is due to folks like Duffy and like-minded union leaders who disseminate inaccurate information regarding how test scores might be used in evaluation, and resist any objective measures that might contribute to judging teacher effectiveness. I have had multiple conversations with teachers who tell me, “Oh no, we can never have merit pay. They will base all of our pay and evaluation based on how the kids do on the state tests.” When straw-man sloganeering substitutes for informed debate, you’re bound to get served a big fat helping by the Los Angeles Times.

Humble hat tip to the LA Times, for unearthing information that will be valuable for parents, administrators, and ESPECIALLY for teachers (absolute shame on Duffy for trying to suppress the Times on this one).

I can’t wait to read the rest of the series.

8th Grade. Year 8. Day 1.

Seven years ago a timid 22 year old sat on a barstool occupying himself with a Monday morning paper while students only five years his junior trickled raucously into a moldy (seriously; the San Bernardino Sun wrote an article about mold in the English wing of this particular high school), bare-walled classroom.  Yes, that was me, and after 7 years of teaching English I still switch from 3rd to 1st person point of view mid-paragraph.

I used to think that the chaos would subside, I would figure out how to manage a classroom and its daunting paperload, and I would no longer need to spend hours planning for the next few days at a time. At the outset of year 8, I have a handle on class management, paper control is a little less mysterious but still elusive, and I don’t know exactly what I’ll be doing one week from today.

Teaching, I’ve found, is about strong content knowledge, planning well, and adapting even better.

Know. Plan. Adapt.

I have improved on each of these, and I look forward to my best year of teaching. Our scores last year showed impressive improvement, and my individual students demonstrated gains from throughout the academic year.

Tomorrow, this year’s crop turns in their first assignment. I’ve told them how it is my personal mission to ensure that they complete every assignment.  I’ve mentioned how it’s impossible to pass without doing all of the work. I don’t think they understand. And yet, I am predicting that at least 90% of them will pass my class, the end result of their hard work and my tenacious harassment.

At lunch today a coworker marveled at how technology may be digitally disintegrating students’ attention span. I have a feeling kids have always been like this, but I don’t doubt phones, iPods, and wireless internet are having an affect. It made me think that teachers simply need to find a way to be a glitch in that technology. An annoying flicker, a burst of static, anything to penetrate the ever-shrinking attention span.

“A pop up ad!” he sat back in his chair.

That’s it. This will be “the year of the pop up ad.” You can shut them out, hit “ignore”,  install blocking software, but somehow the message still gets through, whether you like it or not.

Harass with tenacity. Penetrate like a pop-up ad.  Know, plan, adapt.

Here we go.