a life in flames

So, question.

If what they’re doing to “fix” public schools clearly isn’t working, why do they keep doing it?

I don’t mean it’s kinda sorta not working, or it works some but not completely, or even it’s not working now but it shows promise of working in the future if we bang our heads against the wall long enough.

I mean it’s not working. More and more kids are getting left behind at the same time as they’re pushed ahead, deeper and deeper into material they don’t even have the proper foundations to understand. As a sixth/seventh grade math teacher, I regularly see students who can only multiply by writing out rows of tallies and counting them–if they can multiply at all. But there are things more frightening and depressing than the lack of multiplication fact knowledge. For example, a staggering portion of my students have no real understanding of decimal place value, and many of them don’t even really get whole number place values. We are supposed to learn to multiply and divide fractions, but first I have to reteach simplifying, adding, and subtracting fractions to students who you’d never guess were supposed to already know how to do that. Worst of all, there’s very little basic math sense. A student once solved this problem:

Potatoes are $.89 a pound. If I buy 2.2 pounds of potatoes, how much will it cost?

with $19.58. We were learning to multiply decimals. Setting aside the fact that the student should already know the rule for moving the decimal, I was horrified at how few students could explain why $19.58 couldn’t be correct. Or even knew that it couldn’t be correct, for that matter!

At least at my school (and probably at many in the county, if not the state and the country), students are almost never held back, even in a single class. A student can fail all four quarters of math not just for lack of understanding but because they don’t put in the effort to try, and they’re still pushed into the next level of math. No wonder so many of my students can’t multiply!

I’m a first year teacher. In three of my five classes, I have over 30 students with no classroom support for them. It’s just me and 30+ kids for over an hour. Granted, as a first year teacher, my classroom management skills are far from top-notch. I’d be the first to say they’re lacking, though I do expect to improve dramatically with experience. Still, the school climate is not one conducive to creating a community of learners. The students don’t care. There are no steep consequences for not doing their work in class, so many of them don’t bother. When I was growing up, failing alone was a steep enough consequence, but not anymore.

We’re supposed to teach conceptually, but we’re also supposed to leap frog from topic to topic all year long. In my IM class, the students are expected to cover their geometry unit in 5 weeks. This is a unit that covers area, surface area, volume, properties of angles, the Pythagorean formula, congruency, similarity, scale factor, and constructions. Even if I saw these students every day and they had the prerequisite foundation knowledge, I doubt 5 weeks would be long enough for conceptual understanding of all those topics. Close, maybe, but not quite there. And let’s not forget that I’m talking ideal circumstances, not kids with weak foundational knowledge and a crazy rotating schedule that sometimes means I only see kids two days a week for 70 minutes each time. (I hate the rotating schedule at my school. Seeing kids at different parts of the day is cool, but it wreaks havoc on keeping a regular schedule and routine.)

I just don’t understand why we keep pushing NCLB testing standards and this stupid “spiraling” curriculum when it’s not helping the students. It’s more stressful for everyone. We’re supposed to be getting a new “Common Core” curriculum in a couple of years, but I’m not super hopeful about how much that will change. I’m in a bad place right now to be very optimistic, and I’ll admit that. But I’m skeptical about how much the county is willing to pare down its list of standards students are expected to master in a single year.

Going into teaching this year, I didn’t fully understand what they say about teachers being under-appreciated, under-respected, and underpaid. I get it now. I chose a profession with homework. I chose a profession where students I’m trying to help ignore me, talk when I’m trying to teach, steal things from my desk, call me names in notes, openly defy my instructions, talk instead of doing their work, and then come begging me at the end of the quarter to help them make up their missing grades. My work is never done. And the teachers in my county haven’t gotten yearly raises in quite a long time, much less public respect or appreciation.

It’s all very frustrating. But how do we change it?