On pedagogy… sorta

On January 12, 2014January 12, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching5 Comments

original-1 Kind of pointlessly meandering about on the interwubs right now, looking for something interesting enough to talk about. I used to be really, really good at this game; my previous long-term foray into blogging was basically all about looking around on the Internet until I found something that pissed me off and then ranting about it until I ran out of steam. Granted, it was the Bush years; I was easier to piss off back then, but that model really doesn’t work very well for me anymore. I can’t remember the last time a blog post on this blog was a result of finding an article online, unless it was (as will be happening later this week, possibly as early as tomorrow) me finding a topic I wanted to emulate, rather than argue against. What entertains me most about this is that just within the last week I’ve been referred to in comments as both “irascible” and, I believe, a “sadistic fucktard,” both by people who meant them affectionately– and that’s on the blog where, by comparison with previous work, I’m nice all the time.

I’m off from regular job tomorrow morning, because I have another probation assistance team meeting– that’s the thing where I’m working with (and, supposedly, helping) a teacher who has been placed on probation for one reason or another. We’re drawing close to the end of the process at this point; it’s not supposed to run for longer than 100 days and can end at 40; this will be the 40-day meeting. I don’t expect us to arrive at an answer (and by “an answer,” I mean “this probation process is terminated” or “you are terminated”) tomorrow, so there will be at least two more half-days out of my classroom in the next few weeks, one to observe again and one to have another summative meeting. I don’t remember if I blogged about the last time I observed this teacher or not, but what’s frustrating about the whole process is that this person is teaching their(*) classes more or less exactly in the way the corporation wants– it’s just that I don’t find that method terribly effective.

This puts me in a weird position. In terms of teaching “by the book,” so to speak, this teacher is actually miles ahead of me– they’re doing things that I’m supposed to be doing in my room, but never do, because I either find them ineffective in general or have not personally ever been able to make them work. But I’m still a more effective teacher. I know this intuitively and I suspect that I could prove it if necessary; my numbers on the state assessments that are supposedly used to evaluate us are really, really good, and if their numbers match mine then they probably shouldn’t be on probation.

What makes it weird is giving advice on how the class should be run on an instructional level– I’m kinda forced to say “do it this way” when in fact I don’t do it that way, and in fact I kinda think doing it that way sucks sometimes, but when we’re in a position of having to rebuild this person’s pedagogy from the ground up, maybe we shouldn’t be trying to rock the boat too much.

The other weird thing was that at the last meeting everyone but me had seen a classroom that was in total chaos. I didn’t see that, and that’s not just my lens for viewing instruction being calibrated differently from anyone else. I’m confident that anyone who had walked into that room the first day I was there– and, frankly, the second day I was there as well– would see a classroom that was at the very least being managed adequately. Classroom management isn’t everything, at least not under most circumstances, and it certainly isn’t teaching, but without classroom management you generally can’t teach effectively. That’s sort of another problem with this process– we’re supposed to be evaluating teaching, not classroom management, but it’s tough to see through the weeds sometimes. I just went through my own notes and deleted a bunch of stuff that I didn’t ultimately think was relevant to what we’re supposed to be looking for before sending it in to the committee chair– that’s not to say that it wasn’t important to making this person a better teacher, it’s just not exactly what I’m supposed to be looking for.

Gah. Am I even making any sense here? I’m powerfully ambivalent about this entire process, if that’s not obvious, and it makes it hard to write about. We’ll see how tomorrow goes, I guess.

(* The last time I talked about this, I played the gender-neutral pronoun game throughout and it ended up hurting my brain; this time I’m just using plurals the whole way through. Screw grammar.)

In which see if you can make me

On October 24, 2013October 25, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching5 Comments

whutever First things first, because this post is going to be a bit of a downer and you deserve something at least a little funny: I somehow managed to make it through the entire day with a massive hole in the crotch of my pants that I didn’t notice until I went to the bathroom during my last-hour prep period. I assume no one else noticed it; I can’t imagine a universe in which I don’t get the hell mocked out of me for it if they did.

I did something I’ve never done today: got pissed off and stormed out of a faculty meeting.

(Second disclaimer, and lemme put this right up at the top of this post so I’m not misunderstood: I am manifestly not blaming the people who brought me the information that caused me to storm out of the faculty meeting today; I am not shooting the messengers and they were just doing their jobs. Nor am I pissed at my boss. The fact that at least two of the people involved may well read this is in no way related to the early disclaimer. 🙂 )

I’ll try and nutshell the background for those of you who aren’t teachers: Every three weeks our students get a math test and a language arts test. The tests are the same across grade levels– in other words, every seventh grader takes the same math test– and are supposed to be the same across the corporation as a whole, although I’ll admit right here and now that the math team at my school has altered individual questions that we thought were unfair or poorly written in some way and we didn’t bother getting permission for it. We’re required to display the results of these tests on what are called data walls, because us educators like having complicated names for things. I generated an Excel document for everyone that takes the test results and spits them out into pie charts that are broken down for the test as a whole and each individual math objective (generally, three) that is being tested. The data is genuinely useful; I can keep track of where my kids are at relative to each other, to the grade as a whole, and I can see where my instruction doesn’t seem to be working– if my kids bomb one objective that the other teachers did well on, that may be an indication that I’m doing something wrong.

The data, again, is displayed on a class level in the classroom. No individual scores, no names. Just how each whole class did.

Apparently some lord high muckety-muck downtown has decided that that’s not good enough. We’re now required to do “student-centered” data walls; the charts aren’t enough.

A “student-centered” data wall is one where the kids are posting their results on the wall– supposedly thinly veiled by using student numbers instead of names or some such shit like that. The idea is that the kids are “aware of” and “own” their results, which somehow isn’t the case when I give them their tests, discuss them, and then discuss the class results with them, which I do every time I give a test. We’re supposed to create some sort of bulletin board somewhere in the room where we can have the kids put their little name-tag thing up in the band (red, yellow, green) where their score landed. In case it’s not obvious, green kids did great, yellow kids passed, red kids… didn’t.

I’ve talked about him before but I can’t find the post: my freshman year Algebra teacher was the worst goddamn teacher I’ve ever had in my entire life, and a large part of what made me hate him as much as I did was his practice of rearranging the seats after each test– by test score. The kids who did the worst would be in the front row, all the way back to the kids with the highest scores, who ended up in the back. The very worst score in the room would end up right in front of his desk. And you’d stay there until the next test, when, more than likely (because he was a shit teacher) you’d get planted back in the front row again.

I spent a lot of time in the front row my freshman year of high school, and over twenty years later I can still feel the humiliation. Note that I teach freshman algebra now, so this clearly wasn’t a result of my poor math abilities. I literally teach the same class I flunked when this asshole taught it. And I do it better than he did.

Anyway.

Here’s what this means: you fail a math test in my class, not only do you fail a math test in my class, but you are supposed to get up and move a doohickey (that is supposedly, but not really, safely anonymized) so that not only do you get to be reminded that you failed every fucking time you walk in the room but everybody else gets to know about it too. If you’re the only kid in a class who failed? You get to be down there in the red zone all by yourgoddamnself and if the class doesn’t already know who the one kid who failed was they’re sure as hell going to do their best to find the fuck out.

I’m not doing this.

No.

Fuck you. And fuck that.

I put my hand up and said, out loud where everybody could hear me, that I don’t like this goddamn job enough that I’m going to humiliate kids in order to keep it. And then I left the meeting.

I don’t know what happened after I left; I don’t know if there were further riots or not. But I’m putting my foot down on this one: I will not do this. Not under any fucking circumstances, period. And if they don’t like it they can fire my two-time Teacher of the Year ass and I’ll go to a district that isn’t fucked in the fucking head. Or just get the hell out of this demeaning fucking career altogether and leave the public school system to fucking rot like the Indiana public clearly wants it to anyway. Fuck it. My job isn’t worth this. No.

In case you can’t tell, it was a long fucking day.

On my future

On August 11, 2013August 11, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

Higher_learning

This is going to be my twelfth year of teaching, and my fourteenth year of thinking of myself as a teacher.

It’s time– it may be well past time, honestly– to start seriously figuring out what the next step in my career is going to be. This is the weird thing about my job; unlike basically every other career out there, there isn’t really any way to get promoted as a teacher. While I’ve spent my career in middle schools and I’ve often sort of thought of the eighth grade math teacher as the apex predators in the building, I don’t actually think that for any real reason. The person who had my job last year was a second-year teacher; it’s not like you have to prove yourself to get into that end of the building any more than you do anywhere else.

I can change jobs as much as I like, but short of flipping school districts somehow (and I suspect the other districts around here actually pay less than mine does) there’s no way to actually increase my salary that way. I can increase my marketability for other districts in various ways and I can shift my own focus on my teaching in some ways, but precious few of them will lead to a whole lot of change. Let’s run through the possibilities, shall we?

Go back to school and get my doctorate. This will not actually increase my salary so long as I live in Indiana, whose wise Republican government decided a couple of years ago that there’s no point rewarding teachers for getting education. It will also cost me money unless I can manage to get someone else to pay for it, and while I haven’t actually looked too deeply into this I don’t really think that there’s a whole lot of money for funding out there. I cannot acquire more student loans. I currently owe nearly ninety thousand dollars for student loans as is. That number will not be increasing under any circumstances. Further issue: there is no college offering an Ed.D or a Ph.D in education within non-pain-in-the-ass distance of my home. Online degrees are a bloody joke and there are any number of obvious issues with, say, trying to commute to Ball State (nearly three hours away) for classes. This takes something that already had major issues and nudges it thaaaat much closer to impossible. That said? I want a doctorate. I know lots of people with advanced degrees and goddammit I want one too. I know it’s irrational; shut up.
Administrative certification. This would require classes, but not necessarily another degree. That’s kind of weasel-talk, though, since most of the time admin prep programs are meant as Master’s Degree programs anyway, and I already have two of the damn things (that’s where 89 grand in student loans came from) and don’t want a third. Becoming an administrator would, beyond a shadow of a doubt, increase my salary. I would also probably hate the job, as principal jobs– and, especially, the Assistant Principal job I’d certainly have to spend a few years in before becoming a principal– basically mean you spend all of your time doing precisely the parts of this job that I hate and seek to minimize at all costs. I posted “Do I want to be a principal?” as a Facebook status the other day; damn near every single person said I did not.
I can always get certified in additional subject areas, which widens what I can teach and ensures that I can continue job-hopping every few years for the rest of my life. This does have its attractions, mind you, but I’m already one of the more heavily certified teachers in a district that employs thousands of them and it ain’t like it’s putting money in my pocket. You do reach a point where you hit overkill, y’know?
National Board certification. This provides flexibility in that it instantly certifies me in most of the states across the country, meaning that I can move somewhere where having your National Boards actually matters. Most states provide financial incentives– some of them quite sizeable– for teachers who attain National Board certification. Indiana, naturally, is not one of them. Board certification is difficult and moderately expensive, but cheaper than an entire degree and, frankly, it would probably be more helpful. Effect on my day-to-day life as it exists right now: zero.

Noticing a pattern? I’m kinda stuck, and I don’t like it one bit. The best answer appears to be “move to a state where people actually give a shit about education,” and that would be great if, oh, I lived by myself. It gets rather more complicated with a wife and a baby in the picture, particularly when moving means taking both sets of grandparents’ only grandchild away from them.

Seriously? The only thing I can think of that might be workable is to start writing books. I can’t make myself write fiction to save my life; my struggles with that have been amply detailed in any number of blog posts since forever, but I can sure as shit talk ad nauseam about teaching. The weird thing is, while I can’t actually make myself write fiction, I have tons of ideas for stories, and I can actually get myself to sit down and knock out a thousand words of nonfiction at the drop of a hat but I have absolutely no idea what a book about teaching from me might actually look like. Like, none. I’ve fiddled with the idea from time to time and gotten nowhere with it.

Although I WILL SLAP RAFE ESQUITH IN HIS STUPID LYING FACE would be a great name for a book, wouldn’t it? And its sequel, MAYBE YOUR HAIR IS ON FIRE BECAUSE YOUR PANTS MADE THEM THAT WAY, YOU ASSHOLE, due a year or so later.

Bah.