Time to Get Serious

For me, finishing the dissertation process (and earning the degree) offered some breathing room.  I took time to sleep, actually get my teaching work accomplished during work hours, and walk my dog more.  I've since caught up on all that sleep and have pleasantly remembered that I love to read (or listen to audiobooks on my hour-long daily commute).  I've been painting - canvas, not rooms - and have quite a few do-it-yourself projects completed and in-progress.  Life is nice, normal, and relatively academically stress-free.  There is no degree left to earn.  I feel finished.  No more school, no more books, no more editors dirty....revisions.

All of this is not to say that I've been professionally hibernating.  My school has offered a multitude of technology trainings, and even a couple of opportunities for me to present my research or my own technology upgrades.  Lori Carter, educator extraordinaire, and I have collaborated on several conference presentations.  The latest presentation was to a small group of independent school leaders/technology specialists in my area.  And that was the tipping point.  People around me now know my name.  Maybe they don't care, but my name is out there.

So now, I feel a bit of creative energy to turn that dissertation into a journal article.  (If you are out there reading this - publish me!) A new desire to present at larger conferences has begun to develop.
Something's brewing.

Intense Pressure

As a new school year peeks around my weekend corner, I feel pressure to create a smooth start to the new year for my fresh, new students.  From minute one, I want my students to feel community, excitement to have landed in my room, and an urgency for their own education.  That's pressure, right?

How's this for pressure:
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/philadelphia-english-teacher-explains-why-she-helped-students-160244016.html

I appreciate this English teacher's blog primarily because of Arne Duncan's generalized stance presented at the end of the article.  As an intelligent, educated man, he cannot be so naive as to assume that the consequences of standardized testing pressure on teachers creates better (much less adequate) teaching.  Therefore, I must conclude that he is boldly turning a blind eye publicly.  In a previous teaching assignment, I received bonus money if my students performed well on standardized tests.  For some teachers, that enticing lure would be enough to cheat as well.  In the same assignment, it was equally as possible that I could lose my job if my students didn't perform well on standardized tests.  Fortunately for me, that possibility was a couple of years in the making; however, that school had been "fresh started" by the state.  So, just the year before an entire teaching staff lost their jobs based on their students' test scores.

Many people, myself included, default to the high road when it comes to test integrity, professional ethics, and abhorrance to cheating.  But, the truth is I left that high pressure teaching assignment before I truly had to walk in those high-stakes shoes. 

Let us not delude ourselves.  The real losers here are the students and the future opportunities they cannot possibly have.  The real loser is our own future stability and prosperity as a nation.  Do my students feel the same pressure I do?  I hope they feel more - but for the right reasons.  As I begin a new school year, I hope my students feel pressure to authentically belong to our community.  I hope the pressure of their excitement causes action and research.  I hope they become true participants in their own learning.  At least that's what I'll work on habitualizing for them in the next 193 days.

Maybe I'll have my students write letters to Arne Duncan explaining what adequate means. 

Summer Interrupted

It all started with a normal summer morning - the kind that I looked forward to all year.  I enjoyed the aroma of freshly ground coffee brewing and the sacred act of swirling maple syrup into my bowl of oatmeal.  While I cannot imagine my life if it wasn't spent teaching, sitting down to eat breakfast is a luxury reserved for summer mornings.  My whole self relishes the slow ease into morning.  Teachers during the school year do not get this slow start to the day unless they wake up ludicrously early.  Personally, I hit the snooze beginning at 5:00 a.m.; consequently about 200 breakfasts a year are guzzled, dribbled, and wolfed down on the drive, and that means no gooey, maple syruped oatmeal most of the time. 

This summer day diverged a bit from the others.  Today I planned on meeting an incredibly talented colleague, Lori Carter, to map out my online presence as a professional educator.  We’d just attended (and presented a session at) The Martin Institute’s Summer Conference in which the use of technology in classrooms boggled my mind.  Allow me to provide some context.  I am beginning to use more technology authentically in my classroom; however, I am still the person who clung dearly to her Sprint flip phone (with antenna) and spurned texting until 2009.  Two thousand nine.  Now I have a smart phone, and I do seem much smarter.  My use of technology has grown exponentially, too, both in the classroom and in my personal life.  Lori advised me that it was time to make the leap into the online world of professional presentation and networking.  Brave New Me. 

Since Lori and I planned to meet at school, I emailed my instructional leader to see if I could pick up my standardized test data.  It had just arrived, and I was antsy.  Allow me also to share that I teach in a fantastic, private school at which I am allowed a considerable amount of creativity and autonomy.  My school does not view my success as a professional solely on test scores.  We use formative assessments, report cards, parent and student feedback, classroom observations, and professional development that I can control, but numbers speak.  Volumes.  

My apprehension was steeped in judgment and desire to succeed.  I do not teach to the test.  I will not begin teaching to the test, and I think teaching directly to the test is one of the most unethical things a professional educator can do.  This is especially true if the standardized test is substandard in preparing students for anything beyond the test.  Many teachers are forced to teach to the test every. single. day.  I was one of those teachers for the 5 years I taught in a large, urban, underperforming public school system.      

So, I hadn’t taught to this test.  But the rub was that I taught well.  I had hard-working, hungry students this year, and I knew they deserved great test scores.  While I hadn’t taught to this test, I had taught with the necessary skills in mind.  We moved well beyond the skills needed for this test and my students focused on selecting books they knew they would love based on prior reading.  We learned math basics in order to play math games.  They were a fun bunch.  After such a great year, any teacher would want the scores to reflect the level of success I could so easily document in so many other ways. 

At the end of this day, the scores were a mixed-bag, maybe a bag of trail mix.  You love the chocolaty greatness mingling with peanuts, but you might get a raisin in any given bite.  The scores were an overall improvement for me as a teacher with many of those chocolaty bites, but there are still areas to improve.  Standardized test data and their results are a slippery slope.  I have quantitative specifics about how to improve and enhance my practice.  The challenge now becomes how to integrate everything new to enhance and improve students’ test scores.