It began on a Monday with an all-day meeting euphemistically called an inservice. Topic? Analyzing test data. Purpose of record? Learn to use the data to become more effective teachers. Real purpose? In my n-t-b-h opinion, to use the data to target specific students to bring them up to a higher level so that their scores can help the school look more effective.
Tuesday: Minimum day for students. Purpose? So teachers can meet in their grade-level groups and -- you guessed it -- analyze more data. Oh, and collaborate so that each classroom is more like the others in the grade level. Heaven forbid any of us think or perform outside the "box."
Wednesday: Morning begins with each kindergarten teacher having to hastily tell a substitute what to do for two hours while we are pulled out of our classrooms to attend yet another meeting. (We had not been informed that our meeting was to take place first thing in the morning.) Purpose? To plan a lesson to be delivered in a style extremely contrived and script-like, and not at all comfortable to me.
Wednesday afternoon: Another impromptu meeting was called for the kindergarten teachers, thankfully after our students left. Purpose: essentially to say, "Never mind!" to the lesson plan we spent two hours away from our students planning.
The burning question I have is this: How do all these meetings help my students learn more? It makes absolutely no sense to me to take me out of my classroom to teach me a new way of teaching which, by the way, is not new at all. It is the same as that which I learned in my credential courses 25 years ago -- only the names have been changed. No one has been able to satisfactorily answer my question of why I must learn a different way to deliver my lessons when I have proven over the years that the majority of children under my tutelage leave to first grade well-prepared to continue their road to being readers. As it has been said numerous times: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"
A lot of this nonsense is directly because of No Child Left Behind. The bureaucratic &$#@* hangs on us like a two-ton weight. Instead of helping our students truly learn and be happy, it has made schools become nothing more than data-driven institutions. We are not teaching young people anymore. We're producing data that hopefully will make public education look good.
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In my last blog I was lamenting about the lack of music education in our schools. To go with that, I would like to tell this true story: there is a young woman who is an aide at my school. She is nearing completion of her college requirements for a teaching credential. However, in order to do her student teaching, she needs to pass a state teacher's test -- the CSET, I believe. She has passed all the sections of the test except a section on Art History, PE, and Music. This young woman graduated from a California high school in 2002. California schools have not had art and music as anything more than an elective for about fifteen years. How, I ask you, can this young women be expected to pass this section of the test when she never elected to take music or art? Moreover, why does her student teaching rest on her success at the test when, unless big things change in public education in the very near future, she will not ever be able to teach either art or music?
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