10/9/15; B Day

“What kind of music do you listen to, Miss? Kurt Cobain?”

My jaw dropped. “You…know Kurt Cobain?”

“Wait, you know Kurt Cobain?”

“Of course I do. What band was he in?”

“Band?! He’s not in a band! You don’t know who he is!”

“WHAT? KURT COBAIN? Of course he was in a band!”

Turns out the kids were talking about a rapper named Kirko Bangz.

It was a real life Who’s On First sketch. Everyone involved was getting really frustrated.

Yesterday and today I gave all classes new seating charts, seeing as how it’s been over two weeks since the last one.

Most kids have come to accept it for what it is, and don’t give me any fuss. In one of my first classes of the day, I immediately had to move three kids from a group, since they wouldn’t stop talking. After a bit of push back, they moved.

Then, in my last period, I had Bryan again. Bryan’s been at my school for a week or so now, and it was clear he really likes his seat. He sits in a group completely by himself, and that works for him. When I made the seating chart, I put him with only two other students, in the group of desks right by the one he normally sits at.

After I had read out the seating chart, I asked all the kids to move. Bryan didn’t want to move.

“Miss, this is my spot. I work good here. Let me stay.”

“Sorry, Bryan. I can’t let you stay. If I let you pick your spot, everyone has to be able to do that.” At that point, he moved to where he needed to be.

I started the lesson, and Bryan kept grumbling, “you’re makin’ me mad, Miss.”

I handed out the Fill-in-the-Blank notes, put the PowerPoint to the first slide they needed to fill in, and asked Bryan to talk with me outside.

“I like what you contribute to the class. I like what questions you have, and what you have to add to the conversation. But we have to be respectful to each other.”

The last few days of class he’s been getting more and more vocal, so I wanted to make sure I addressed that point.

“And I know you like your spot. And you’re right, you do work good there. But if I move you right now, everyone will think it is unfair that you get to move and they don’t.”

An idea popped into mind. Wasn’t sure if it was the brightest compromise, but I figured it might work. Thing is, I want him to shut up (the part of him that is offensive and picks on people), but I don’t want him to shut down. There is a delicate balance with a student like this.

“Here’s the deal I’m willing to make. If you can prove to me that you can be good this time, and you can work where I put you, then next time, go ahead and sit in your seat. If you go in there right now and sit in your spot, everyone will think it’s unfair. Show me you can do this.”

He agreed, and then returned to his new assigned seat.

I’ll have to wait until the next time I see him to see how the other kids react to his seat change.

Everyone in my department had a one-on-one meeting with our teacher evaluation appraiser today, who is also one of our APs/the AP who oversees our department.

As you might expect, teacher evaluation systems are a bunch of baloney. While it sounds good when politicians say they support “high standards,” because who can argue with that, teacher eval systems do not do that. Teacher eval systems (ok, let’s just abbreviate it TES from now on) only encourage one thing — the fudging of numbers.

Now, I don’t do that. But I know a lot of people who do.

Firstly, TES scores have not even affected salaries in my district, and yet people still fudge the numbers. Secondly, everyone knows that TESs don’t work.

I am a capitalist. I believe that in the public sector you can incentivize workers by giving them bonuses based on how much they went above the status quo. But, I do not believe that works in the public sector.

The main reason is because TESs discourage failures.

As a normal person, you might think, “Good! We don’t want more failures! The less failures, the better the teacher.”

Problem is, that is inherently flawed.

I teach 9th grade World Geography. I am not a suicidal person, but if I taught English, I might kill myself after seeing the papers the kids turn in.

How can a kid get to 9th grade if they can’t read or write?

Simple. The teachers are afraid that if they don’t pass a kid, it will reflect badly on them. So, they pass the kid, even though they have no acquired the basic skills needed to survive in the next grade. This is the opposite of high standards.

By the time they get to my campus, we’re limited to damage control. We are not reading teachers. An extremely flawed system has failed the children. Instead of incentivizing success and prepared students, they have incentivized social promotion.

“Let’s just change that one to a seven…now he has a 70! Congrats, you’re now an 8th grader!”

My AP went over two main parts of my evaluation from last year. One of parts was based on observations done in my classroom. I did very well on that section.

The second part? Failed that. Got as low as possible. Let me explain how that happened.

This second part is supposed to measure “student growth.” Sounds great, doesn’t it? At the beginning of last year we gave our students a district-created Pre-Test. This was an impossibly hard test, to see how much World Geography the kids knew before the class started.

At the end of the year, they re-took the test, now dubbed the Post-Test. In a computer system, we added our students, their Pre-Test score, and their Post-Test score.

After that data was entered, the AP checked to see how many reached the “goal” of a 70%.

Not many of my kids reached that. To be fair, I included my SPED kids on that list.

However, if you looked at the Pre-Test scores versus the Post-Test scores, you would see a massive amount of growth. Sometimes doubled, sometimes more than that.

They claim that these numbers are to measure growth, but anyone who looks at the reality can see that is not true.

As I said, we are doing damage control. Should we do as much as we can to help those students get a 100% on the test? Of course.

But are we miracle workers? No.

Why don’t they just measure the growth by subtracting the Pre-Test number from the Post-Test number, to see how much they grew? You know, to measure student growth?

Oh, because that makes sense, and schools never do things that make sense.

“Don’t worry about it. We know that you’re an effective teacher,” my AP said, pointing to the results of the first part.

Does she not see there is something inherently wrong in that statement? Does the system not see that?

There are two parts of the evaluation — the data, and the observations. I did horrible with the data, and great with the observations. How can I be considered an “effective teacher,” when this system has a bunch of holes in it? It should clearly be more congruent.

Don’t get me wrong — teachers should be held accountable. There are way too many teachers in schools who should not be teaching. They’re either jaded, have negative attitudes, or are all-around incompetent.

The toughest thing about all this is I can’t figure out what the answer is. This system is bad, just like all the other ones. What is the solution? What is the system that will work? Quite frankly, I don’t believe it exists. It’ll be decades of trial and error, and we still will not have a system to measure teacher effectiveness.

After we discussed the TES, my AP brought up the two trouble-making teachers in my department, keeping me up-to-date with some recent events.

Every day each teacher is required to have the date, topic, content objective, and language objective on the board. Before this school I had never even heard of a language objective. Most teachers have just written one on their board, and never erased it. They don’t agree with the policy, but they obey it enough so they won’t get in trouble.

One of my teachers decided, in an effort to be funny, to write, “Students will learn gooder English” on the board. An AP (a different one than the one I was talking to) came through to observe his class, and noticed it on the board. The AP talked to the teacher about how it was unprofessional, and the AP talked to the AP in charge of my department.

My AP explained that she enjoys his sense of humor, but that it’s beginning to be detrimental. In addition to that, he’s being openly defiant. When the APs talked to him he just shrugged it off, saying it’s probably his last year of teaching anyway, since he wants to go to law school.

My AP is a very hands-off kind of leader, because she hates to be micromanaged. She explained that her hands-off style doesn’t work with the teacher because he won’t get stuff done on his own, but when she gets hands-on, he doesn’t like that, either. I completely understood what she was saying, and empathized with that difficult place to be in.

I told her that he and another teacher in my department act like children, and I’ve called them out on that a few times, but I don’t think it’s stuck. How he reacted to the language objective situation was just like a child would. Yet, he is the first to complain about a kid acting like that.

The whole thing brings up a great leadership question, though. How do you deal with a person like that? One who acts like a kid, and doesn’t respond well to either of the two major types of leadership? Yet another question I don’t have the answer to.

This teacher constantly talks about extreme politics as though he is 100% right on every issue. He thinks he has discussions and debates with others, but in reality all he does is steamroll. Because of this, I think he thinks he has big ideas, since he knows what would actually work.

What he truly doesn’t understand (there are a lot of things he doesn’t get) is that there is a huge difference between being a game changer and being a pain in the ass.

Can a person be both? Absolutely. Can a person be either or? Yes. Which one is this teacher? The latter.