Second Quarter Good-bye, We Can’t Stop The Liars

(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 7^th 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?

There’s Got To Be A Better Way

CC0 Public Domain

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 7^th 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 7^th 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.