Another One “Bites the Dust” (Year, not person)

I have one week of school remaining before summer vacation. I have been away from my blog for a while since I not only had to finish the school year but also our plant nursery work was requiring extra attention and I had to finish working on a book about dwarf conifers.

A number of things have been going on at school- some good and some questionable. Students completed the science test (HISPE- might not be quite the correct acronym, but who cares?) They were told by a vascillating legislature that they had to pass it to graduate. We worked on revising the biology curriculum and my Natural resources class for next year to accommodate the students who don’t pass it. They would have to take it again, although then it would be an end-of-year (EOC- another g-damn acronym) exam that they must pass to graduate. I even coined my own acronym- PMS – for Primary Middle School.

Guess what? The legislature waited until a week after the test was given to postpone the passing requirement until the class of 2018. So the EOC will have no teeth to it, will not be used to improve the educational process, and will serve the role of an evaluative tool to demonstrate how bad our public schools are. Meanwhile, our curriculum changes involving Natural Resources are out the window since upper classmen will not have to take the class. Oh well, another day in the politically controlled public school system where we try to teach everyone to feel good about themselves and to go to college.

Graduation was last night. I have several graduated seniors who are returning to class tomorrow to take the final exam. I gave them that option as an opportunity to improve their grades. They are chemistry and physics students. That doesn’t happen very often. It’ll be interesting to see how many actually show.

Two weeks ago I had one of my ninth grade wastrels come to me during class (not on his own time) to tell me that I had to give him the twenty assignments he hadn’t done so he could make them up. His father had been in to the office about his grades and they told him that his “little boy” could make up any and all missing work. So I took two minutes to show him on his grade printout what he was missing. Surprisingly, the work still hasn’t been turned in.

One of the goals I have always strove for was to hold students accountable to deadlines. That disappeared this past year. It is now school policy that we accept late work as far back as 18 weeks, even if the student wasted class time and just screwed around instead of completing it. We are allowed to only give half credit. Students are now able to copy other students’ returned work and turn it in and we have no way to check to see if it was copied. That takes care of another life skill I tried to teach.

The latest buzzword at school is the Power Standard. (Actually two words but then I went to public school and have trouble with my numbers. Everyone knows the United States produces terrible math students). Someone wrote a book taking old concepts, relabeling them, and repackaging them as something new. Now he goes around the country presenting expensive seminars and sells books and videos about this wonderful new concept that I was doing back in the 1970’s. Meanwhile the district is spending all kinds of money on training and rewriting curriculum (copying old curriculum and relabeling it would serve the same purpose). We are not the only district doing this. The really sad part is that the book publishers and state standards committees have already spent millions of dollars doing the same thing.

The math EOC was given and the results will be back sometime in August. That will be just in time to rewrite schedules for thousands of students across the state who will have to go into math remediation classes. Unfortunately the problem is not that they cannot do the math. They can’t read, interpret, and apply their math skills because they are not trained to work with math in that way. I see that in science all the time. Whenever we have physics problems that only involve algebra, my students, many of which are on geometry and calculus have no idea what to do. They have poor written problem solving skills and they haven’t done basic math for one or more years.

I have to break this off and go to a couple of graduation parties. Both of these boys had issues when they started high school. One would not do any school work while the other vandalized school property and was always in trouble. The former turned it around in his junior year and did alright in my physics class as a senior. He just needed to decide on a goal and to go for it. The second student changed during his sophomore year, and as a junior became my regular TA in Physics (he told everyone he was in physics). He was still my TA as a senior and even became senior class treasurer. Two success stories: one is going to a private college and the other is going into a family business to work with his brothers.

If I get on my soap box once in a while, it is because I hate to see what happens to students because of political tinkering with the educational system. Too many well intentioned (and lots of self interested people as well) people who have no idea as to the realities of the classroom have their own opinions as to how to fix it all. Meanwhile it is the students who suffer.

I have been a classroom for forty years and have pretty much seen it all. I will retire in the next year or two and I am sure I will be replaced by some new teacher who will know all of the answers and will treat any suggestions or curriculum I leave behind as the ramblings of some old fart who was burned out and has nothing appropriate to the modern world (I’ve seen that happen more than once. Of course sometimes it was true!).

Next blog I might just ramble on about teacher evaluations and RIFing and I have a good story about a budget email I sent out to all staff.