Wednesday before vacation

Wow--just wow.

And there are still two more days?

Tomorrow and Friday we are learning about the Bill of Rights. Or is it more accurate to say that I will be teaching about the Bill of Rights? I surely* want them to learn. We'll have "translations" of each right, we'll create pictograms that incorporate the number of the right with its meaning (picture a bear holding a gun-shaped number two), we'll chant--but will they LEARN? Only one way to find out...

[*Don't call me Shirley.]

a little low...

There are such highs and lows in this line of work; I'm experiencing a bit of a dip at the moment.

I and many of my colleagues are reading The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need--And What We Can Do About It by Tony Wagner.

We had a wonderful meeting; the book is interesting and so are the people I work with. But I left feeling terrible. The gap between what I believe is best for my kids and their current reality is vast. The gap between the teacher I aspire to be and my current reality is equally wide. The gap between our culture's obsession with fame, pleasure, instant gratification and ease, and the road to true satisfaction and success and joy is even wider.

If there were any sand in my house, I'd be inclined to bury my head today. I need to take a walk and breathe the December air, and try to remember what is most important about any of our lives or jobs on a daily basis: love and conscientious effort, love and conscientious effort.

tragedy in the bungalow on a Tuesday

Oh little birdie
I will keep my blinds lowered
In your memory

Bye Bye Birdie

Note from my sub: "Toward the end of the period, a little sparrow flew into the classroom! I saw it & quietly walked toward it, so as not to make a scene. It flew in an arc across the room & smacked into a window, and dropped to the floor, dead. I grabbed some paper towels & carried it outside. I put a little cross ...on the window as a memorial for the poor little birdie : ) So much for not making a scene."

This just happened to happen in my big ol' huge toughest class.

So now there is a yellow cross on one of the windows, inscribed: "R.I.P. Little Birdie". So sad. School is supposed to be a safe place.

Scantron: love/hate

Normally the tests I give have a smattering of matching, some "use the vocabulary word in a sentence that demonstrates you know its meaning", and an abundance of short answer and mini-essay questions. They take HOURS of brutal boredom to score. Such a test is a snapshot into a kid's brain--I can see what they comprehend and where they make connections and where their thinking is fuzzy or their understanding is lacking.

With a Scantron™ test, students bubble in responses. The tests take minutes to grade, and I can see which questions were missed most. But I can't see how they interpreted a question to arrive at a "wrong" answer that actually does best align with their interpretation.

Worse yet, I can't tell with a Scantron™ test if my questions are well-or poorly-designed. See, I try to design even multiple choice tests expecting kids to think about their responses. I do not believe much in rote memorization, and even my Scantron™ tests reflect that. They are not generally straightforward; they require making inferences.

Well, the kids BOMBED their first Lola Scantron™.And now the tension in my head: did I do a poor job teaching this? Or did they blow off studying because I told them it would be a multiple choice test, or did they rush through it without deeper thought?

Can't tell. It's hard to go forward without a diagnosis...

Book Club: The Global Achievement Gap

Our professional book club starts soon. We will be reading a book that posits that our schools are failing to teach students the skills they need to succeed in the best jobs around because we are too busy "teaching to the test", the Almighty state standards test that NCLB mandates.

Before I go further, have any of these critics seen the tests that are being taught to?

Is it possible for a multiple choice test to measure critical thinking?

I really want to know. In my class, tests always have a healthy portion of short answer/essay questions, and the homework I assign/design requires originality and thought. Hmmm...

swine flew....

Oh H1N1
Take your filthy snout and fly
Far away from here