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.