Part I:
Part II:
How would I deal with the swine flu at my school? Look no further....
This is one of those moments where I reflect upon my own thoughts and realize that some of the ways that teaching has changed me are profoundly negative. Reading about the current Supreme Court case on schools pressing for the right to conduct strip searches, I feel terrible that there is a part of me that sees it as reasonable. While the case is concerned with drugs, which I see no reason to conduct a strip search for, I can relate to the paranoia felt by teachers when it comes to students hiding razor blades and other dangerous items in their clothes. While it does not seem to be a problem at our school, I know it is at many and I can not imagine how one could deal with that kind of fear of one's students on top of the other difficulties of teaching. However, the concerns of teachers should not determine what rights someone may or may not have. The concept of rights exist to defend human dignity from concerns of convenience and even security. To me, it is appalling to think of principals and vice principals having the right to decide whether or not there is probable cause to invade the privacy of a teenage boy or girl. Schools will never be completely secure and even if they were, ti would not justify making students an even lower class of citizen than they already are considered.
For that reason, the majority of my thinking falls on the inside that such a development would be truly awful. Beyond ethical concerns, it does not make pedagogical sense either. Schools and classrooms, at the best though certainly not at present, are supposed to model for children the kind of society that we would like them to perpetuate. What message are we sending if we tell them that their privacy can be invaded by the people in charge of their education? Also, I cannot speak for my students, but how do we expect children to obtain a meaningful education in a place that is essentially a minimum security prison? As it is, I think we are seeing the effect of public schools causing students to feel antagonized by academics and it seems like we are only making it worse by the year and, like I said, there are times where I can't help but feel a part of it. While I am still ideologically opposed to corporal punishment and authoritarian approaches to education more generally, I am on a daily basis engaged in a system that does it, without being disgusted, and am often pleased when a student is paddled or when I succeed in putting a trouble making student in his or her "place". Of course, these schools are in such conditions that I'm not sure there are many other approaches to take to it, but I remain unhappy with the system I am complicit with and this article only makes it worse.
Of all the things in education that I am the most apathetic about, I would say that assessment probably bores me the most. There is nothing less interesting to me than grades and, while its sometimes interesting to compare what one student got to another, I would much rather have my grades count little and be based on my subjective sense of how they are doing and how much they are trying rather than spending these last few weeks being forced to obssess over some state test, the content of which seems to correlate very little to what I consider to be the meaningful aspects of algebra. Of course the assessments in the video seemed like something that might be far more interesting and I can see myself giving something like them a try in some ways before I finish teaching, but the video seems to ignore the reality that in any class in any school, not just the North Panolas of the world, there will be a good number of students who do not buy in to the mentality of an alternative assessment and their grade will be significantly lower even though they might have comparable math skills. Of course, they could be punished for that, but it seems that so many of the alternative assessments reward so many other things besides the primary subject being taught that those things that make them alternative might make them weaker as the assessment of the material that matters. Now, I have no problem with that as I do not care about objective assessments in the first place, but I cannot imagine these kinds of assessments ever taking the place of the standardized tests for that reason.
In my classroom now, the primary form of assessments are tests and quizzes. I have done a couple "projects", which are really just an extended graphing assignment rather than anyhting like we saw in the video and a few poster sessions that encourage problem sovling and presentation, which are graded by a rubric, but I struggle to see myself going far beyond that this year. There are just too many students who do not understand the meaning of the word "project", which to our students most commonly means finding something to copy and paste from Wikipedia (or, slightly more progressively, writing by hand after reading it on wikipedia), and putting it on a poster board. Over the summer, there might be some more room for those kind of assessments, as the students seemed to be more motivated, or at least are a more captive audience than the students during the regular year. On the other hand, the fact that many of the classes will be being led by first years might make it less than ideal to have them practicing doing something they may not get a chance to do during the year. I would like to take the time to model some of the poster sessions we did this year that were modeled by us for the institute for mathematics innovation at Ole Miss. Hopefully that will allow me to perfect the rubric and the procedures for that kind of activity, as I plan on using them more frequently during the year. Going into next year, I have decided that my only real objective for next year should be using math to teach kids how to think critically. I will be doing that in the blind faith that it will help my test scores for next year, as students will be more able to reason through word problems, but I wouldn't be bothered if it did cause our scores to drop. As some of us at the school discussed, things are so backwards in eduation that the best thing we could do for next year would be to lower our test scores, miss AYP, and continue to get extra funding and assistance from being under conservatorship. If standardized tests were meaningful and had real incentives for performing on, rather than disincentives, I might care about them as a form of assessment. As it is, I will try to take part in as many of these kinds of alternative assessments as possible insofar as they actually provide a meaningful benefit to students. According to a book by W. James Popham called Transformative assessment that I will be using as a reference for next year, formative assessments, which as far as I can tell alternative assessments tend to be, "can have a positive effect on both students' in-class learning and students' subsequent performance on accountability tests" (Popham 2). If he is right, then everyone will go home happy. If he is wrong, however, and these assessments promote learning but don't prepare them for the high-stakes test, then only I will go home happy.
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.
Articles such as this one by Heidi Hayes Jacobs remind me of how absurd I find the industry of education as it exists in our country and, it seems, especially in Mississippi (Perhaps I just resent any piece of professional development material that uses the term "21st century" approach) (Jacobs 3). It brings me back to staff development sessions where common sense is built up into new ideas that somehow warrant full days of being talked at on how inclusion should really be inclusive and how different students learn different ways, hence differentiated instruction. Now I learn that it is better to plan ahead and across grade levels than to plan day to day and in isolation and that Ms. Jacobs, who I am sure is very well-educated and knowledgeable, seems to be traveling around charging school districts for workshops to explain her discovery that following a curriculum map is better than wandering like a lost child, as I do, through a desert of frameworks. The struggle to be a good teacher, and my occasional failures to do so, rarely result from a lack of knowledge about what should be done but rather from a logistical or individual inability to follow through on what one knows to be more sensible. All that being said, however, let me consider the article's merits and how it relates to my school's planning processes and my plans for planning out the summer curriculum.
Where Jacobs seems to be going beyond simply saying that you should do long-term, micro- and macro-planning, is her idea of it needing to be calendar-based, as she expresses when she writes, "without a commitment to when a skill will be taught, there is no commitment" (Jacobs 2). Here, she is contrasting what my school seems to have in place in terms of vertical planning, that is, a list of what students should know in what grade, to what my school perhaps should have, which is a calendar detailing precisely when students were expected to learn what, which, I believe she is arguing, would imply more of an obligation for teachers to get to all of the material that later teachers will expect their students to have learned. Again, this seems sensible enough, but, even though it seems more ideal, I am not sure how it exactly could be imposed without a complete upheaval in what is done with North Panola. By that I mean that the level of turnover is so high that the stability required for effective vertical planning simply seems not to exist. Furthermore, in my individual experience, what should have been covered when and how long it should take to cover the next thing seems to be utterly meaningless, at least in my dealings with my remedial math classes. For me to try to cover all the frameworks that the next teacher expects my students to have learned would ignore the fact that for them to learn anything at all, being as behind as they are, more time is going to have to be spent on any given topic for it to have been worth teaching at all. In terms of horizontal planning, I have had good experiences with that as my school as the other Algebra teacher at my school is another MTC teacher and we were able to plan out what will be covered when and update that plan frequently throughout the course of the year, albeit with her taking the lead as she is far more organized than I.
In terms of planning Summer 2009, I anticipate fewer obstacles as it hardly resembles, and therefore takes on so few of the problems of, a real school. That is to say, the students tend to be more motivated to keep up with the material as their family has spent money for them to go and they are already losing their summer to the subject, thereby reducing the problem of topics dragging on forever due to lack of student motivation. On the other hand, one difficulty is that, while we are expected to cover the same amount of material, we are faced with the difficulty of teaching 4 classes to each group of kids in one day. Now they may end up taking a fair number of classes, but any subject, and particularly math, takes time to ingest. 4 lessons in one day, I believe, it is not as valuable as 4 effective lessons over 4 days. The mind needs time to process information, but the curriculum map must still work in the entire curriculum under constraints. My plan is to meet with my fellow teacher and discuss ways to blend frameworks as often as possible, so there is both a more holistic approach to the mathematical concepts and an increase in the pace in which the topics can be addressed. My goal is to plan out the curriculum of Algebra I, which I anticipate teaching again in the fall, in such a way that accomplishes this blending of frameworks, as well as finds time for projects and a greater number of problem-solving activities, as I feel these were both lacking in my plans for the current year. Hopefully, the long-term planning I am about to engage in will increase my effectiveness as a teacher next year, as I have found scarcely enough time to do it over the past 6 months.
