Are we doing anything today?

The French Rule

Since I was small, I have had fantasies about living in France. A friend forwarded this link to me in which the writer's son has a note from his teacher regarding his tardies

“This is to inform you that your children arrived at 8:35 am this morning.  [ie, 5 minutes late but a good 10 minutes or more before class actually starts]. This tardiness is becoming more and more frequent. Please provide me with a written justification as to why. May I remind you, that I also have a class to take care of. These continued late days disturb me in the preparation of said class. Please rectify it.

Okay, who wouldn't want to send a note like that home to one of their regularly tardy students? I made calls about a couple of students this year and both times the parents said they didn't know what to do with their kids and asked for suggestions.

Mom commented:

The attitude of this missive just about sums up how teachers view parents in France. With disdain. Superiority. Essentially, parents are considered larger children. And simpletons to boot. It’s a bit maddening.

Yes, maddening. As opposed to here in America where parents view teachers with disdain, often questioning reading selections, pedagogy, classroom rules.
If only I could remember which newsletter (NEA? NCTE? ASCD?) last week ran an article about teacher-parent conferences and the battering more and more teachers receive. Should I have snipped comments from a recent SF Chronicle story in which posters disparaged teachers as if it were sport? One saying (roughly) that anyone who teaches had no more than a C average in college otherwise he or she would not be teaching.

I do not long for the power of the French teacher, but less disdain by the public would be nice.

 

Bell to Bell

There is no shortage of issues facing educators or bloggers. NCLB? Budget shortfall? Class size? Exit exams?

Today, I delve into mysterious world of Instructional Minutes. (Do you hear the spooky Vincent Price music in the background?)

Try to find clear and specific information regarding instructional minutes online and you'll spend time clicking through references such as the state's FAQ, and the "specific requirements" as part of the School Accountability Report Card (SARC).

The Specific Requirements are noted as: "The total number of instructional minutes offered in the school    year, separately stated for each grade level, as compared to the  total number of the instructional minutes per school year that are required by state law, separately stated for each grade level." (64,800 for 9-12, I believe)

In true bureaucratic fashion, information is obscured forcing schools to scramble to meet minutes requirements with arduous bell schedules.

What time do your students go to bed? Do they work? Do they play sports? Is adding additional instructional minutes helping our students? Are they suddenly better educated? Or are the additional minutes the wrong kind of fix.

Our class sizes, for example, are capped. My sophomore classes have about 30 students in each from 36 last year (I am below class cap due to several students leaving for the alternative schools). I can tell you there is a difference. Thirty-six to 33 to 30, there is a difference. These are still not small classes, but cramming kids into classes isn't helping them learn.

Moreover, school conditions affect student learning. Local High School in Nearby Bay Area City has boarded up windows. Its teachers opted to take on a sixth period to keep class sizes down. How do you create a safe environment for students when there is no light, no beauty, no life in their environment? How do you make them feel they have value and potential? Local High School isn't the only school with such conditions. Fremont High School in Oakland

Adding minutes isn't the answer. I believe in the impossible -- a school system that doesn't fund its schools based on local property taxes but funds based on needs.

Oh my, I went on a rant. Maybe my department meeting went too long?

Merit Pay Back in the News

Time Magazine pubished a piece yesterday entitled, "How to Make Great Teachers," raising the issue -- annual, it seems -- of merit pay vs. the present system of college credit/years in service for pay.

I think I've commented on merit pay before, and think it's a good idea. Teacher friends decry merit pay, suggesting that it would be a biased system. However, having worked for magazines, newspapers, and Internet companies that all gave raises based on merit, I concede bias can be an issue, but should not be the reason to avoid merit pay.

As a writer and as a web producer (the person who manages the bits and pieces of the site), I had goals that my manager and I reviewed and agreed upon at the beginning of the year (or work cycle). I do that now, as a classroom teacher, with my AP; I provide three goals based on district, school site, and classroom standards and suggest how I will meet those goals.

The merit systems described once again, this time by writer Claudia Wallis, relies on test results. Wallis dutifully trots out the test-based review, suggesting that "in an era when states are testing all students annually, there's a new, less subjective window onto how well a teacher does her job."

I don't agree. This era's so-called objective tests are arguably subjective:  who writes the tests?; questions favor white, male students; have you read the prompts from the CAHSEE written exam?; material (the history test for 10th graders in California routinely includes materials that are NOT part of state standards for history); but most importantly, a one-day, all or nothing approach provides a sliver -- and an unclear sliver -- of student performance.

I do not ignore test results altogether. In fact, I review STAR scores to assess teaching needs for my classroom. However, a test should be only one measure of my overall success for that year. Classroom management, invovative lessons, literacy strategies, technology instruction are other areas for consideration.

It seems I am not alone in feeling this as Wallis notes, "Teachers rebelled against the notion that a year's worth of instruction could be judged by how students did on a single test on a single day."

Merit pay, however, could be the "next big thing" in keeping teachers in the classroom. "In Denver, for example, Professional Compensation, or ProComp, is the product of a seven-year collaboration among the teachers' union, the district and city hall. Rolled out last school year, ProComp includes nine ways for teachers to raise their earnings, some through bonuses and some through bumps in salary. New hires are automatically enrolled, while veterans have the option of sticking with the old salary schedule. But in just one year, half of Denver's 4,555 teachers have signed on." Huh, I wonder what the wonder package is. (Note: I will look it up.)

Amused by the Muse

My students are finishing up their mythology projects. I was dinking around from blog to blog, reading what people are up to. I ended up at Kristin Gorski's "Write Now is Good," her blog about writing and creativity. Her lovely choice of pic    (The Nine Muses by dunechaser) made me laugh. I wonder what interpretations of their myths they will find.

Turnitin -- the discussion continues

I read over the links from Andy, JackieB, and Charles regarding Turnitin.com and potential intellectual property rights violations. Harvard isn't the first university to turn down turnitin.com; a Canadian unversity had a couple of years ago for the similar reasons as  secretary of Harvard College’s Administrative Board, John L. Ellison said in an article for the Harvard Crimson:
"I think educating students on time management, and also on how to ask for extensions and accommodations, is far better than trying to catch them [plagiarizing]. I would prefer that we had no examples of plagiarism and that, of course, is our goal.”"
I, like the Harvard professors quoted in the article, have picked up on copied statements in essays. Sometimes I can't find the match to the statement(s) in question when I google, but often I can. It's a lot of legwork in the midst of grading essays but doable. And, in the classes I teach, the bulk of the violations have been from EL students who find someone saying what they wish to say and copying the text. But, as I mentioned before (I think) I have also had students who copied essays that were turned into a partner teacher's class the day before. I wouldn't necessarily know that my student lifted an entire paper off her student's desk and copied it. I was suspicious because the student was far behind, but the essay was possible. Until the student owned up to stealing it from a friend (without, the student said, the friend's permission).
A teacher at a neighboring school used it with her AP students. The first time they turned in papers, roughly 80 percent of her class had plagiarized. We can talk about teaching kids to do the right thing, but in a high stakes world, one in which corporate and political leaders regularly get away with not doing the right thing, it's a difficult lesson for some students learn.
The Washington Post article featured students at MacLean High School who rebelled against the program.: "It irked a lot of people because there's an implication of assumed guilt," said Ben Donovan, 18, a senior who helped collect 1,190 student signatures on a petition against mandatory use of the service. "It's like if you searched every car in the parking lot or drug-tested every student."
I can see how this might be considered true except that students have, in a public school, less privacy  and, I am not really checking my students' work as much as I hope to thwart another kid using one of my students' essays.
It is a good discussion and one I hope to continue to have. Is it a violation? Charles explores this issue more eloquently and in depth here.

My Thanks to the Muse.

One of my planning partners and I decided to include a mythology mini-unit this year, including a bit o' research. I have friends at other schools who've been doing myth projects for years, and someone at my school did some work this year on it, which gave us a leg up on pulling materials together. (We teach Latin and Greek roots, as required by the State of California, Reading 1.0.)
Still, I thought a webquest would be helpful since we hadn't spent that much time in the lab, but I found Calliope, Muse of Eloquence and thought it made a jumping off point. The teacher, Carla Beard, who created the page did a great job. My kids couldn't just whip through finding the line for "nox" and filling it in, they actually had to read a little. I turned it into a jigsaw, with five groups in the lab filling in Ms. Beard's original worksheets (available as PDFs from her class website, thank you!). Then, I made Download myth.webquestjigsaw2.pdf . The first groups get together and fill it out, then jigsaw into their second groups. Now everyone has 15 or so new words, as well as an understanding that the myths have modern day applications. (This last part is important as they must include something similar in their report.)
My kids are in the middle of the project, and will finish their jigsaw next week, so I'll have to update. But the excitement in the lab is amazing. They are flying around sites, comparing information, checking out each other's heroes/gods/goddesses with genuine interest. Awesome.

Out for the Day. Again. And again. and again.

I have had to take a number of personal days this year which has been disruptive to my class. My kids are fine, though when I came in the other day (half day) I ran into the morning kids who wondered where I been and sweetly said they'd missed me.
When I worked before teaching, a personal crisis affected my day, but standing in front of 35 faces and being "on" when you really aren't is a feat. My partner teacher went through a divorce, another teacher's best friend died (suddenly) and yet there we are, discussing scansion or imagery or atmosphere as if nothing were going on.
I have no intention of telling them what's up (it's not serious) but a few are curious though no one has asked me directly why I'm out. (One student asked the sub if I was pregnant (I'm not).) I feel guilty taking the time off. I look at my calendar and trade off classes so that I don't miss the morning ones only. I've been leaving real work for them to do, no popping in videos. Creating plans that keep us on track, challenge my students, and don't overwhelm the subs is complicated and sometimes exhausting but I think it's worth it.
There is a healthy tension between our personal lives and our classroom lives.  Students need to know their teachers are human.
They just don't always need to know how human. :)

Online Discussions - an option

Our school uses turnitin.com for paper registrations. If you haven't used it, it's a subscription program in which schools register for a site license that allows teachers to create accounts for classes for paper submissions. When a paper is filed, the system scans its database (and supposedly other databases) for plagiarized lines.
You can do other things on turnitin.com like manage grades, but what I've started using regularly is the discussion board. My students have a couple of weeks to post, respond, question, and discuss their outside reading with their peers. The second quarter postings were far more interesting than first as they began asking questions beyond, "Why did you pick this book?" and started making connections to other texts they'd read or to their classes. It has generated a solid reading list for my classes with a few stand-outs. About half of my students have read Animal Farm because of the discussions, several are reading Johnny Got His Gun, and a few are considering reading Catch-22. Other favorites include Fight Club, The Color Purple, and Night. Go team!
The assignment requires they write a short summary of the book and recommendation, comment on five other posts, and respond to two.
Yes, I read them all.

Finals: a poem

I was a smug surveyor of my new test questions.
I was proud, oh, so proud of these new clever
questions that would make the kids think.

Then I ran my scantrons.
Oh, there I was, cringing at the machine's

rip

25
36
40
11
23
36
34
29
12
39

side after side

I wonder if we were in the same class together.

Building a Better Test

Twice a year for five years I have given myself a timeline -- finals will be completed seven days before they come, including copies.
Check me out, groggy and sniffly and needing to go in early to make copies of my finals. Yes, they are this week.
I know, how can this be? Why wait until the last minute? It's not like I didn't know what should be on their final exams.
I have no defense. I procrastinate.
This year, though, I rewrote about 40 questions (between two tests) and came up with two new essay prompts. And, well, I'm pleased with the results. I included better higher-level questions, some of which are patterned after AP English questions (for honors students) and all of which require combining concepts such as persuasion and text-analysis. For example, I include excerpts from Antigone for which the student has to determine the rhetorical appeal. We studied Antigone before rhetoric (though you may think that's crazy, it worked. We focused on the tragic hero and elements of drama in the play). If I'd tried to do both, I think my kids would have imploded, but in this way, they have been able to apply what they know to something they studied in depth.
(My rationale for the separation was this: I wanted them to read through the play looking for the elements of drama, conflicts, and imagery.)
The questions aren't perfect, but it seems that I achieved a better mix of challenging and testing for understanding rather than knowledge, which is my goal.