A teacher's rant against the current educational system.

The BBQ Pit
81

I find it nearly impossible to believe that this wasn’t in her IEP (Individualized Education Program), something that all classified (meaning special ed) students must have in order to receive services. Extra time and/or a scribe and/or use of a word processor can and very often is written into IEP’s to guarantee that students like your sister MUST receive these accomodations. All teachers get a copy of the IEP and we all know that we must follow it or risk a law suit. It is illegal to violate an IEP. I’m not saying your story isn’t true; I’m saying, any teacher stupid enough to willfully and vocally violate an IEP is going to get the district sued, and rightly so.

I don’t think that most of my special ed kids get coddled. Most of them need the accomodations they get and I’m happy to give them. I do think that the NCLB testing is ridiculous now-- every grade level in NY middle schools has an English Language Arts exam, which requires hours of grading and tests some things whose value I doubt guarantees competency. But I do have another bone to pick…

Right now, in my school, homework is being called into question. Some factions are claiming that ALL work required to be done outside the classroom promotes inequity because kids who are low income, single parent, or racial minorities cannot get their homework done at home. The reasoning is, their parents work and can’t spend time with their kids to help with homework, or the kid has to do work in the home (like caring for younger kids), or their parents just don’t have the skills to help. Thus, these already underprivileged kids will get lower grades, maybe even fail, because they can’t get their homework done, while kids with the involved parents will do better, thus perpetuating the privilege.

OK, I can see this, but… I have a state mandate to get a certain number of books read and teach a curriculum with certain topics covered. I cannot read 3 novels, a Shakespeare play, do a poetry unit, a short story unit, and promote reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills, but not give any homework. It’s just not possible in 39 minutes 5 times a week. What am I supposed to do? Read all the novels in class? Some people say that I should read them all ALOUD in class, because the kids read too slow! Sure… Write all essays in class? Sure. Do all independent reading in class? SURE.

Homework is a fact of life. If we don’t give homework in middle school, our students will be sorely unprepared for high school and college, where hand-holding is not the order of the day. Plus, if I don’t give homework, I can’t keep up with the curriculum, and the kids suffer from being undereducated rather than from not being able to get homework done.

I have no idea what’s going to happen with this, but I am quite aggravated at the idea that homework has to be abolished. It’s PRACTICE, in reading, writing, and self-discipline. It’s part of academic life, and we’re going to abolish it to assuage our consciences that some kids have a crappy home life? Ridiculous

Yes, my answer IS to throw money at the problem. Hire real, professional teachers, instead of free tutors, to stay after school and help kids with homeworks. I’d stay a couple of hours later and do direct instruction one evening a week if I were getting PAID for it. I do plenty of work and helping after school and at home on “my own time” as it is. Also, hire bus drivers to bus kids home if they stay after for an hour or two. This is what will help these kids, not eliminating homework.

Whew. We’re having a staff meeting to discuss the future of homework tomorrow after school, and since I don’t have tenure, I have to be real quiet, so I guess I just vented it all right here. Thanks for reading (or not…)

82

Your students read slower to themselves than you read out loud? Wow. My “out loud” reading speed, assuming decent expression and inflection, is perhaps half of my “read to myself” speed. In fact, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t even less than that.

83

I, too, was a gifted kid bored to death by the one-size-fits-all uninspiring and unchallenging cirriculum offered in my schools’ weak and pathetic attempt to offer honors education.

However, I have another friend that is just as gifted. He was was consistently placed in remedial classes. Why? He had a Mexican last name. It’s pretty common for overburdened councilors to have to make snap judgments on not much information. So they figured he probably spoke limited English and at the least would want to be with his friends. Every year it was the same dance- his mother came in, showed them the last years’ report cards, and they moved him into honors classes. But what if his mother hadn’t been a self-assured person who knew her kids’ potential and her kids rights? Once you get stuck on a ‘bad track’ it can be almost impossible to get out.

The answer has got to be something more flexible and responsive, and less likely to guarantee people an inferior education because of something that someone thought about them when they were eight, then across-the-board tracking.

84

My wife has run into this in recent years. They now have testing at every grade (even in pre-literate grade levels…I have yet to figure out how this works exactly). But the test they use, the Iowa Basic Skills Test, is a norm-based exam (so you get grades in percentiles) rather than a criterion based exam (that measures absolute skill levels). Any child that scores below a certain percentile must have an academic improvement plan drawn up as per NCLB. Thing is, my wife has children in the top 25% of her class- kids that are on, even above grade level- that have to have these plans because their peers have done better. So they are treated like they’ve failed, when they are actually doing okay. And yes, I’ve heard the district’s adminmistration make statements to the effect that all of these kids should be able to perform above average. sigh

-stonebow, who thinks that all classroom teachers should have secretaries to handle the mounds of paperwork now required for student records

85

This reminds me of a horror story from my past. I went to high school at a public school, but a public school in a wealthy neighborhood, so I was getting an excellent education. Then, during my junior year, my parent moved to Connecticut for a year (for reasons that are not really worth going into at the moment). I was signed up for classes at a new high school, a public high school in a rather poor neighborhood. And for some reason, I was registered into “normal” classes instead of the advanced classes that I really should have been in.

My god, what a culture shock. The most amazing aspect of all of this was the “normal” Social Studies class. In this class, the poor teacher was beset with students the majority of whom could barely read. This was demonstrated by the fact that class sessions would consist of him having students read a paragraph out of the social studies book, and many (far too many!) struggled with the words, trying to read them out loud. Sometimes, the teacher would have to help them with the big words.

And this was 11th grade! And this was not a remedial class. I have so much sympathy for that teacher, you can’t imagine. I don’t know what he could be expected to do if his ability to keep his job depended on getting good academic results out of these students.

Oh, and for the conclusion of my story: after a week or two, it was realized that I shouldn’t be in the “normal” classes, and I was moved into all “advanced” classes for the most part, but I still was stuck with a couple of non-advanced classes, which were total jokes. (I could go on about the Spanish I class I had, but I don’t think there’s much point. I do have a funny anecdote or two about my Algebra II class, though.) Fortunately, the advanced classes were far more what I was used to, since there was a segment of well-educated students, which might be due to the presence of Yale University nearby.