Tag: growth

Oh god I’m a nerd

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, TeachingLeave a comment

It is Friday night, and I am sitting at my computer, listening to the first concert of Pearl Jam’s new tour, featuring the first live performances of half a dozen tracks from Dark Matter, and interpreting data from charts and spreadsheets.

In other words, this is very close to the perfect evening, and at 47 I may as well accept what I am because it’s not changing.

I am a rock star, ladies and gentlemen. We took the final NWEA of the year on Wednesday and Thursday, and … goddamn. I was elated by last year’s scores. I am fucking ecstatic with these. I have never seen results as good as what I got on this year’s spring NWEA before. And the really awesome thing is that I could go a dozen different ways after that sentence and they’d all be just as awesome.

Let’s back up a bit. The NWEA is administered three times a year and eats up a grand total of about twelve hours of instructional time over the course of the school year. It is primarily a growth test, with no concept of success or failure– the scores are indexed against grade levels, but you can’t fail the NWEA; you only show high achievement or low achievement compared to your grade cohort and high growth or low growth compared to other people in the score band of your grade cohort.

This is the kind of test I want. I get kids all over the map– kids taking a class two years above grade level and kids with 60 or 70 IQs. I don’t care whether or not my kids are successful against some arbitrarily designated cut score that can be manipulated depending on whether the politicians think we’re passing enough kids or not. I want to know whether they got better at math under my instruction. And the NWEA provides me with that data.

And it also provides me with something I really like– the ability to compare my own kids’ performance in Math against their performance in Reading, which I don’t teach, which is as close as I can get to an unbiased check on whether I’m doing my job right. Two years in a row now my kids’ Math growth has kicked the shit out of their Reading growth. It was rough last year; it was staggering this year. Which brings me to that chart up there. That’s my second hour. The pluses are their Math scores and the squares are their Reading scores, so each kid is represented twice on the graph. The farther to the right their boxes are, the better they performed, and the higher they are, the more their growth was. In other words, you want them in the green box and maybe not so much in the red box. Orange and yellow are on-one-hand-on-the-other-hand territory.

Here, let me clear the Reading scores out:

Now, this particular chart shows the two things I want to highlight more clearly than the rest of my classes, but believe me, these are common threads across all of my students. First, look at how many of them are high growth. I have four fucking kids at the 99th percentile in growth– in other words, kids who showed more growth than 99/100 of kids who took this test, nationwide. I have eleven across the 117 kids I have scores for. There were nine of them at the 90th percentile or above, just in that class. There were 26 across all of my classes– in other words, 22% of all of my students were in the top ten percent in growth in America.

I want a fucking raise.

The other thing I want you to notice is that yellow box, the one for kids who are high achievement but low growth. Notice that that fucker is empty.

If we look at my low-achievement kids, 44 of them were high growth and 44 were low growth. Which sounds exactly like you might expect, but “what box are they in” is kind of a blunt instrument. Almost 2/3 of my high achievement kids– 19 of 29– were also high growth. And the high-achievement kids are widely considered to be much more difficult to get to show growth.

This is interesting to me in terms of what it says about me as a teacher. I did a good job with my low-achievement kids. I want to dig into those numbers more and look at averages and medians to get a little more detail, but I’m still pretty damn happy with a 44/44 split. But I did a fantastic job with my high achievers. I am doing a mathematically demonstrably better job achieving growth with my high-achieving kids than with my low-achieving kids. Which, believe me, I’m going to make a point of when I campaign to get a Geometry class and maybe the other Algebra class back next year. I would love to see numbers from the guy who teaches the Geometry class at the only middle school in the district where it’s actually taught. If he’s beating the numbers I put up this year, I need to be sitting in on his class.

God, I love being a numbers nerd, and God, I love it when I get a chance to brag about my kids.

Wait, I have to do what now?

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I don’t get it.

Y’all, I spent all day teaching math. I know, it’s my job; this shouldn’t be surprising, but really: I spent all day today teaching math. To 8th graders. And a handful of 7th graders, but mostly to 8th graders.

And you’re telling me, that after spending the whole day doing that, I have to go back tomorrow and teach Math again? To the same damn kids? Don’t they know math yet? How the hell could they possibly need more math after all the mathing they did today? This is a scam, I tell you. A scam!

Anyway, righteous indignation aside, I’ve managed to get myself planned for tomorrow, and partially for the day after that, in a sort of “give them something they’ll have fun with so I can mostly ignore them” kind of way, since I have a ton of administrative deadlines for various things this week and frankly am going to need some time to work at my desk. Y’know, like a regular person, who doesn’t have seven hours of presentations as part of their job every damn day.

The good news? I’ve said repeatedly that I’m having a great year, and we just got results for our first test of the year back, and … damn. My kids cooked the other 8th grade classes, y’all, not only in overall average but in growth too, and it’s tough to hit both. I haven’t looked at NWEA results yet, because COVID knocked that off my radar and ultimately their results on the first test don’t matter all that much anyway– it just sets a baseline for the winter and spring administrations, and frankly (and cynically) it makes me look better if they don’t do great on the first test anyway, right?

God, it’s nice to come home from work and not have hours of complaining to do.

On giving up

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

My kids took the NWEA this week, which ate up my Tuesday and Wednesday, and will knock another couple of kids out of class on Monday while they finish up. I would, in general, prefer not to have to worry about standardized tests, but as such things go the NWEA isn’t bad. It hits most of my checkboxes for what I want for these things: first, it’s a growth test, meaning that it’s keyed to individual students and it’s possible for a very low student to demonstrate a lot of growth and have that treated as a positive thing even though they don’t do objectively as good as a more advanced student who stayed the same. Second, there’s no notion of passing the test. Their score is keyed to grade levels, yes, but there’s no cutscore where a student is arbitrarily determined to have “passed” or “failed” regardless of their grade. And while we administer it three times a year, any given administration doesn’t take very long– I was able to get most of my kids tested in a single block, and two blocks got basically everyone who was present to take the test in the first place done. That’s not that bad. Realistically, we’ll lose more days this year to me being sick or absent for training than we will to the NWEA.

The median percentile score (also: percentile scores are more useful than arbitrary scores, although the NWEA generates both) of my three groups, nationwide, was 19, 16, and 13. Meaning, in case you haven’t studied measures of central tendency recently, that if 100 randomly-chosen kids took the test, 81 of those kids would outscore half of the students in my first block, 84 would outscore half of my kids in 2nd block, and 87 would outscore half of my kids in 3rd block.

Eight of my students are in the 1st or 2nd percentile, meaning that 99 or 98 of those randomly-chosen kids would outscore them.

Let us, for the moment, simply postulate that there are a number of possible reasons for these scores including but not limited to that a large percentage of them effectively took 1/4 of 6th grade and all of 7th grade off and then lay that aside. I’m not especially concerned with why for the purpose of this post.

We are supposed to discuss these results with our kids, which for the record is something I support. If we don’t talk about how they did, the test becomes meaningless to them, and there is absolutely nothing that is more of a waste of time than a standardized test that a student isn’t taking seriously. So it’s useful to let them know how they did, what it means for them, and what they might want to do to improve.

Where I am struggling right now, though, is this, and forgive me for another post whose point gets boiled down to a single sentence after five paragraphs of lead-in:

I do not know how to tell a fourteen-year-old kid “99 out of every 100 people who took this did better than you” in a way that does not sound functionally identical to “You should give up.”

I can couch it as as much of a pep talk as I want, and I already know that at least one of those eight kids is going to work her ass off for me this year because that’s who she is, and if I have her at a third- or fourth-grade understanding of math by the end of the year it will be a triumph. And unlike many years, I think all of these eight kids are at least potentially reachable still. There have definitely been years where I had a kid at 1% who I was privately convinced was going to stay at 1% out of sheer spite for the rest of the year, and these aren’t those kids.

Similarly, it is difficult to communicate those median percentile scores to a classroom of kids without a number of them concluding that they’re just dumb and should give up. When the highest-scoring kids in the room aren’t past the 60th percentile (which is the case) they all need extra help, and I can’t provide “extra” help to 27 kids at once. One of my classes can barely get through a basic lesson right now because of the number of behavior issues I have. And that’s before I have to give them information that demoralizes the hell out of them for what are, unfortunately, entirely reasonable reasons. In most circumstances, if 99 out of 100 people are better than you at something, you are probably going to stop doing that thing! So what the hell am I going to do in a situation where not only are 99 out of 100 people doing better than my kids in math, but many of them don’t even want to be good at it? Remediating this would be a Herculean effort from someone fully invested in improving. And right now I just don’t know how the hell to ask for that kind of effort (and expect to actually get it) from people who, to be charitable about it, don’t have academic success as a high personal priority right now.

Sigh.