January '09 Blog #2: Lower My Standards? Freewrite

I am so disgusted with the lack of motivation of my 1st period class. My students do not realize how their actions will affect them over the course of the next four years. My failure rate in that class is extremely high; however, I feel wrong giving students’ grades that they did not earn. These students, generally speaking, are used to everything in life being handed to them. If I challenge them to think or try to teach them how to attempt to answer a discussion question, they assume that I don’t know what I’m talking about and “can’t teach”. I have called parent after parent who promises me that they child will do better in the upcoming days, but this is not the case. I don’t know if I am mad at the students or madder at their previous teachers. What type of disservice are they performing for these students? Giving the students the information all of the time will cause their brains to just shrink up and become useless. Why should you think for yourself is someone else is always going to do it for you?

I wish many times that other teacher were on the same page as me. Their cooperation would make it so much easier to do my job. If all of the teacher s made the students look for the answers to similar test questions on a study guide instead of giving them the question and the answer to MEMORIZE then maybe, they wouldn’t assume that the Bad Teacher was being too hard on them when they saw her study guide. At the rate these students are going they are going to be so unprepared for the real world.

I talked to our guidance counselor about my failure rate. She assured me that tit wasn’t just me and at other teachers had had problems with students just not doing anything and not caring about it. She told me one thing that really stood out to me, “Don’t lower your standards.” It felt so good to have someone support me in my decision. The problem with students now is that teachers have fudged grades in order to keep their failure rate to a minimum. I know some of these students could not have mastered 70% of the material last year, because this year they know absolutely nothing and are content with being that way.

So no I did not inflate my grades. Yes, I just created much, much, much more work for myself with TST and RTI. I felt that I did it for a good cause though. It just feels right. We had a faculty meeting the other day and our principal mentioned how much work we are going to have to do in response to the failures. As I talked with my coworker, who shared the same failure belief as me, she seemed almost disgusted at the speech made from our principal earlier. She exclaimed, “There is already an issue with grade inflation! And I am not exactly sure, but from what I gather from this meeting is that either you change your grades to reduce your failures or you will be piled with so much work, more that you can imagine!” I laughed, because I had that some feeling from leaving that meeting. After the meeting another coworker joked, “Well in that case, let me go back through and just give out some seventies. I don’t have time for this headache!”

In every profession there are dilemmas. I believe that students should master the material, before I pass them. What you EARN is what you receive not what I GIVE you. No, I will not lower my standards. Yes, I do have to stop writing, because I have a lot of post-failure paperwork to do!

January ’09: Blog Response to Most Likely to Succeed article

I think that this article has a lot of merit. Good teachers are hard to find. I also agree with the author, Malcolm Gladwell, when he suggests that once a good teacher is found, you need to pay to keep that teacher there. I was surprised at the statistics suggesting that it is better for a student to go to a bad school with excellent teachers than to a good school with bad teachers. It was also interesting to see the difference in the amount of progress that a good teacher achieves verses a bad teacher.

No one is going to spend the necessary amount of money to hire good teachers. Most people say that they value education; however, they do not spend money to support their so called belief. Lawmakers must realize the importance of education and put it in the fore front in order to make a difference in the quality of education. I agree with the author as well when he points out that capping a teacher’s salary is another way to discourage good teachers from entering the field. The field of education needs to become more competitive. This competitiveness prevents the good teachers from becoming complacent and it also encourages the mediocre teachers to step up. This whole scenario reminds me of my Build Your Own School District Project. When I had to create my own school district and money was not an option. I built a model that allowed an extensive teacher pay growth over time.

I have mixed feelings about paying teachers according to their students’ progress. On one hand the teacher is able to show what she has done over the last year. Consequently, children are risky variable. One teacher may be blessed with children who care about education and want to learn. Another teacher may not be so lucky. Is it fair to pay the teacher with the educationally inclined attitude more, because her student progressed more? The other issue with paying teachers according to student progression is the method in which student progress will be measured. I won’t dwell on that issue for the sake of time.

The last intriguing point of this article occurs in the last paragraph when the author and the football scout were discussing a bad play that the quarterback made. The author suggested that after this bad move, it was the end of his never-beginning NFL career. The scout simply stated, “In a great piece of the pie that was just a little slice.” Some teachers who enter the profession are not great their first year, but learn from their mistakes to become a good teacher. When scouting for “withitness” observers must realize that even good teachers make mistakes, but the point is that they learn from those mistakes in order to do their jobs more effectively.