After only two days back at school following Spring Break we have been granted a two-hour delay tomorrow due to rising flood waters from all the rain we had, and especially the areas northwest of us had, over the last few days. It rained here from Saturday night until Tuesday morning.
I'm not sure how the students will react to this unexpected change in their schedule. They don't handle changes to their routine well. We'd just started getting back on track today.
This school year is winding down quickly. We have only 6 1/2 weeks to go. Some of my students were saying they cannot believe this school year is nearly over.
Summer will be here soon, and before then we have the End-of-Grade tests. While we're all looking forward to summer, none of us are looking forward to the EOGs. Yet the tests will come.
Depending on how you count it, either Saturday was the first day of my school's Spring Break, or today is. Either way, this year's Spring Break was too long in coming and, I'm sure, will be too short in duration.
Over the last two weeks you could tell both the students and the teachers were much in need of a break. The students were getting antsy and fights were becoming more common. Teachers were getting short-tempered with the students, and with each other.
This has been a long and trying year, and based on the headlines, next year will be even more, uh, challenging.
I am glad Spring Break is here, and I am looking forward to Summer with more anticipation than I've ever felt in my 15 years of teaching.
Today my classes were to take a test on the Circumference and
Area of Circles and the Perimeter and Area of Compound Shapes. Yesterday, I
conducted a detailed review of exactly what was going to be on the test. I also
wrote all the formulas the students would need to calculate the answers to the
questions on the test on the white board.
One would think the students would be ready to take and do well
on such a test. Reality proved very different. Of the 22 students present in
class this morning not half-a-dozen were able to make a good start on the test.
Most of them stared at the test with a blank look on their faces as if they’d
never seen a circle in their life.
This is precisely what I expected to happen. These children sit
in class paying scant, if any, attention to the lesson. Being prepared for this
eventuality, I had the students put their heads down on their desks and raise
their hands if they knew they hadn’t paid enough attention and hadn’t studied
for the test.
The students were refreshingly honest. Fully 2/3 of them
admitted they hadn’t paid enough attention and hadn’t properly prepared for the
test. I was prepared for this.
I abruptly cancelled the test. While I had their attention, I
went over the vocabulary, each of the formulas, and how to use them to
determine the dimensions of a circle and a compound shape. The students listened
and watched with laser focus. It discouraged me that I had to resort to such a
drastic measure to get them to behave like students in a classroom instead of
anarchists at a Starbucks.
On Monday, when they take the test again, I’ll learn if this
shock treatment did any good.
(Title should be sung to the tune of Billy Joel’s song “We Didn’t
Start The Fire”)
This school year started off with promise. The problem being the
promise wasn’t that good things were coming. Just the opposite. The promise was
that this year would be interesting. Interesting in the manner of the Chinese
curse, “May you live in interesting times.”
This first semester has been nothing if not interesting. I
stayed in the same grade level but am teaching a different class. Math this year
instead of the Social Studies/Science split I had last year. I don’t mind
teaching Math. It is a subject I know well. But if I had my druthers, I’d
rather teach Social Studies.
Interesting, in the way of the curse, aptly describes what’s been
happening here at school and in the world at large over the course of this
first semester. The US Presidential Election being near the top of the list of
interesting things. Here in the school we’ve also had our share of interesting
times.
Topping our list would have to be the big girl fight that took
place during 7th grade lunch in the cafeteria earlier this year. The
fight ended with four young ladies being sent away to the alternative school
with pending charges against them for disorderly conduct, assault with intent,
and assaulting a school system employee, among other things. Two teachers were
assaulted. One was pushed out of the way by a surprisingly strong 12-year-old
girl (large for her age), and the other was hit by a tray another girl
attempted to throw at the first girl. Thankfully, neither teacher was seriously
hurt.
In the immediate aftermath of the fight, and for several days
following, most of the students were on their best behavior. That didn’t last
long. No more major fights broke out but Oh The Drama.
Civility seems to be a lost with these children. When asked to
be quiet or sit down, they respond with anger, as if the teacher has no
businesses telling them not to disrupt the learning environment.
And they lie, easily, about anything and everything. I’ve had a
child who was standing next to his desk tell me he wasn’t standing up even
while he was right there standing up. He looked me right in the eye, and said, “I’m
not out of my seat. Why are you picking on me?” Another student, when I asked
her to spit her gum in the trash, told me she didn’t have any gum, even though
I could see the gum in her mouth as she was saying it.
Now children have always tended to try and bend the truth when
caught doing something they shouldn’t. I expect that. But these students will
be caught red-handed, on video, misbehaving, with several witnesses, and will
lie to a teacher or administrator’s face and insist they didn’t do it. This
goes beyond fibbing to try to get out of trouble. This goes right to the core
of their still developing character. And it also speaks to their upbringing. It
speaks to the character of their parents and community, and our nation.
When our politicians and leaders lie to us regularly, as a
matter of course, how can we expect our children to place any value on honesty?
When the example set for them is that truth is a relative thing, and
inconvenient facts can be ignored, why are we so puzzled when our young people
choose lies even when the truth won’t hurt them?
When your students complain about having to go spend two hours
in the gym instead of staying in the classroom and taking a math test, you know
the powers that be have not come up with the best way to handle the latest round
of State Mandated testing. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, the State
Testing for certain elective classes was supposed to take place Wednesday. Due
to unforeseen circumstances the testing was postponed until today.
This morning finds us, the whole 7th grade, sitting
in the gym, half the students on the floor, half the students in the bleachers,
watching the movie PRIDE. Not the 2014 PRIDE about gays in Britain, the 2007
PRIDE about a black swim team from the Philadelphia ghetto. We’ve used this
movie for several years as a character education movie. It tells an
inspirational story, but I’m not sure it is interesting enough to keep the
attention of nearly 200 7th graders sitting quietly on the floor or
in the bleachers.
These tests some of the students are taking this morning are
known as CTE Tests. CTE stands for Career and Technical Education. Students who
took the modern version of Home Economics, Computer Skills, and Science-Technology-Engineering-Math
Lab, are tested with a relatively short, multiple-choice, online test. Like the
other standardized test here in North Carolina, CTE Tests are not used by local
or state administration to rate the students learning. Rather, the results are
used to punish teachers if the scores are not high enough. If the scores meet
or exceed expectations, there is no recognition given to the teachers involved.
This is true of all Standardized State Tests given to students in North
Carolina.
This is two weeks in a row we’ve lost half a day of instruction
due to State Mandated Testing that, in reality, has no beneficial effect on
learning because the students have no stake in the outcome so the results are
not indicative of what they actually learned. Instead the results are
indicative only of how much effort the students feel like putting into
answering the questions.
This whole testing regimen just doesn’t make sense.
