Sacrificial Lambs

Another school year is behind me. I was invited to several graduation parties and was able to visit all but one. It is always nice to mingle with students’ parents, especially when they appreciate the work you have done with their “graduated senior”. At one party I was talking to a parent of a former student who graduated last year. I had her daughter in my ninth grade advanced earth science class (which I no longer teach, having assumed responsibility for two chemistry classes). She told me how much my class helped her be successful as a college freshman. I had discovered that my ninth grade students were woefully lacking in study skills. They could not outline a chapter, had no note taking skills, did not know how to studey for a test, and did not know how to take a test.

When I discovered this lack of preparation among the best ninth grade students, I did something about it. I would spend the first four weeks of my science class focused on study skills and I would use the science subject matter as the tool. She remembered a lot of what we had done and applied it to her college work. It made things a lot easier for her. I felt good hearing that for a couple of reasons. First, it showed that my efforts were successful with some students (for every one I hear about there are probably several others that I heaven’t heard about). Second, it helped her get over one of life’s hurdles.

I had good relationships with a lot of my students who have now graduated. I will be making new ones with students in my classes during the next school year. Hopefully I will have some successes and only a few failures. This past year I taught two sections of non-college bound ninth grade students. Three of the students failed every class they were taking. I would have liked to have gotten through to them that they were making a serious mistake. This year I will have two more classes of the same type of student. I plan on varying my methods a bit and being a “loving hardass”.

Since school is out I thought I do a couple of posts on the state of education from my point of view as an experienced educator who gets more good results than bad results. I’ll focus more on my classroom happenings when school resumes in September for what will probably be my last year as an educator in a public school (I will decide in January).

In education there are some groups of kids that go through the educational system who are what I call “sacrificial lambs”. They are sacrificed on the altar of “educational improvement”. For example, throwing high stakes standadrdized tests at kids that establish their “stupidity” cannot be a good thing. Those kids have an esteem disruption that the middle school with its excessive focus on esteem cannot overcome in a realistic way, especially when the testing continues. Then the waffeling of the politicians over how to use the test results only adds to the confusion. Eventually the tests are watered down and simplified so most students pass or the consequences of failure are put off for a number of years from the original schedule.

Then someone has the bright idea to use these tests to evaluate teachers since the student failures must be due to bad teaching. When that happens, then teachers “pull rank” to get the best classes where students will be successful regardless of the teaching methods. The schools in the tougher parts of town see more of an exodus of their most experienced teachers to schools in the higher income parts of the district or even to other districts. Then the youngest, least experienced teachers have the students that tend to show the least improvement on standardized tests.

“Sacrificial lambs” are taught self esteem in middle schools (replaced junior high schools) and have a disatrous year as high school freshmen. “Sacrificial lambs” are taught newly designed curriculum that ignores past successful teaching methods as being antiquated and out of date (modern math). “Sacrificial lambs” are not able to take shop and home economics in middle school (eliminated) and cannot take basic trade classes in high school since many have been eliminated for computer based trades classes and besides, they need to take remediation classes to pass standardized tests. “Sacrificial lambs” can’t take music or art because something had to be eliminated due to budget constraints and high stakes testing programs. “Sacrificial lambs” are created when our politicians adjust our educational system to try and catch up with Asian and European school systems that produce students who test higher than our students. That is such a farce as to be almost unbelievable.

I’ll go into that more in a future post. I also plan to blog about teacher evaluation methods and layoffs. Other topics will appear in my blog this summer based upon whatever public education bashing I read in the paper.