Post Script

In regards to my last post, where I request your help changing the educational system, here are two things you can do RIGHT NOW to help.

Please visit the two following sites to help Bertie County (a TFA placement site) and Teach for America, nationally.

Thanks.

Not deleted, but still not excellent. Oh February

February's been rough. And I needed to put some distance between myself and what has happened in order to write about it.

Our EOC retests went... okay. Science - 5 of 9 passed. One passed English. No one passed Algebra or Civics. That being said I had a solid majority meet our Big Goal (73% or higher average) and probably a third or half meet our smaller goal of improvement of 3 or more points from one EOC to the other. And two passed the test percentage-wise, even if they didn't get 3s (which seems strange to me...).

After far too much drama, we lost our battle with the district and our kids are taking lower-level (i.e. not needed for graduation) Foundations/Fundamentals classes this semester. They are also not telling us what these classes are supposed to entail, so planning for HS has been very difficult. My colleagues have mostly transitioned to GED-prep, since it's obvious the district is not going to allow most of our HSers graduate before they age-out at 21.

Given this turn of events with the HSers, we have redoubled efforts for MSers and set the goal of a 100% pass-rate for the MS End of Grade (EOG) tests. I'm dissatisfied with this goal as I think it is not feasible. 80% passing and 100% showing growth would be a much better school-wide goal, but as my TFA colleage and North Carolina BFF keeps reminding me, growth for individual students isn't what matters in a system governed (read: owned, dictated, tyrannized) by Adequate Yearly Progress. I'm going to borrow her words for this one:

Schools look at their bottom lines the same way any corporation would. Decisions are made everyday with one goal in mind -- make AYP, make AYP, make AYP. .... I have students that have made significant growth in our time together and yet, according to the records, will show 0 improvement by federal standards. In the push for higher scores, our EOG 1s (the most in need) are pushed aside to push our middle-range 2s to the wondrous 3s and 4s pedestal... which mostly proves they can play the test-game better than the others.

Well said, Ms. Martin. Well said.

If nothing else I learn about during these two years touches you - not the institutional racism, not the classism, not the sexism and victim blaming, not the poverty, not the gang culture, not the absolute lack of economic development - if nothing else touches you, please allow the need for educational policy reform to become clear to you. Please consider fighting this battle with me. Each of us is part of that missing link, keeping meaningful and necessary reform from happening. Please, for my kids, for Ms. Martin's kids, and the thousands of others like them, please find the time and heart to care and take action.

Middle School doesn't have an EOG for social studies, so in someways the pressure is off me, and in other ways, I have even more pressure to find ways to increase literacy instruction in my classroom. Especially with this new 100% pass rate goal. Reading comprehension and analysis is the big thing (other than behavior/attitude) holding my MS students back from achieving all they are capable of, so it is on all of our shoulders to increase their functional literacy.

So we're reading more from the textbook (Guess what!! I actually have 6 whole copies of the 7th grade book!! Woo HOO!) and completing the exercises in there to test comprehension and basic analysis/synthesis/evaluation skills. I'm teaching them a system of annotation that (hopefully) will get them to pay more attention to what they are reading. We're doing weekly current events assignments to get them reading things other than the textbook and I've bought two resource books that have high interest social studies readings on a variety of reading levels. And I'm trying - so hard - to hold them to a higher level of behavior performance each day. Which means that I did five write ups in three days.... but we gotta learn to behave, or we're never getting out of the alternative school.

All this adds up to a huge feeling of keeping my head barely above water, but I'm trying. And my TFA Program Director has (for some reason unbeknownst to me) unwavering faith in me, so I guess I'll follow his lead and trust I can make this happen too.

Unrelated side-notes:

1. My roommate's girlfriend and her dog, Greta, are visiting this weekend. I LOVE having a dog here this weekend. Greta loves to break into my room and claim my stuffed animals as her own. I'm sitting in the living room and she just brought me a small gray kitten stuffed animal. Yesterday she dug my orange cow out from under the bed. Mmmm, dog slobber. :) But I love her. She is so sweet and cuddly.

2. I watched two incredible movies on Netflix last night. I'm still on a high from the second one: Philadelphia and Itty Bitty Titty Committee. I needed the influx of crazy feminism provided by IBTC. So satisfying. And Carly Pope is gorgeous and one of my fave actresses ever.

Snow day, take 2

My room smells like the cats. I'm living on the couch.

The locals think there will be no school tomorrow either. As of now we have a two-hour delay.

SNOW DAY... and other assorted rumblings

Yes. It snowed two or three inches almost three days ago. Of course school was cancelled today. Why would that be crazy? Not like we needed that last day of review before EOC retests or anything. *sigh*

The last two weeks of school has been anything but ordinary and frustrating beyond measure. 3:30 on Tuesday, I and the other academic core teachers found ourselves responsible for all-day EOC remediation for all three alternative schools in our district. This essentially doubled our high school population for the rest of the week and transferred our middle schoolers back to the purview of long-term subs. Poor middle schoolers. When EOC retests are said and done, they will have not had real class or real teachers for almost 4 weeks. Also at 3:30 on Tuesday, my spring schedule of courses has changed. Instead of teaching U.S. History and World History to the high schoolers, I will be teaching Foundations of Social Studies. What exactly this means, I don't know yet; the district curriculum coordinator is still working on developing the class. Hopefully I'll get the particulars before Friday (when the class is supposed to start), but I'm not crossing my fingers at this point.

I think my new iteration of TFA's "One day all children in this nation will have access to an excellent education" is "One day all (insert district here) teachers will know what they are teaching before the semester starts" because this is looking just as impossible at the moment.

On a non-school note, I have stray cats living under my house. Because North Carolina doesn't believe in insulation, each time they use the kitty potty, we can smell it in the corresponding part of our house. Except for the smell, I wouldn't care that they live under the house, but some days it is really stinky. And yet I can't have a trained cat or dog live in the house. Go figure.

The other night we three roommates were sitting on the front porch, sharing a drink and enjoying the warm night (24 hours before the snow, I will note). We were watching the cats wander the neighborhood while we sat, and Roommate 1 was telling us his theory that cats are the new rodents. Because really, the only thing that separates "wild" rats from "wild" cats is that at some point human ancestors decided that cat ancestors were cute enough to constitute pets, but rat ancestors were not. As he finishes this theory, a furry white, black and brown head and shoulders pokes out of the vent in our house's foundation, about two feet from where Roommate 1 is sitting. He stands up so fast he knocks over his beer, and cursing walks over to the other side of the porch. The cat, startled, scoots back under the house. Roommate 2 and I are in stitches. Roommate 1: "See! Nothing but rodents!"

The last thought I want to leave you with is from The Onion (read: 98% satire). Another friend in TFA sent this to me while I was freaking out last Tuesday when second semester went to hell. Hope you enjoy.