I am at a crisis point. For the entire second quarter, I have done so many best practices of teaching. I have reflected on my teaching, I have done detailed lesson plans, I have followed my lesson plans, I have striven for higher-level questions, facilitated student self- and peer-evaluation, I have gone back and changed things on my lesson plans to do for next time. I have done ALL these things and more. I have given one-on-one attention where I have needed to give it. I have maintained contact with parents, keeping them informed about failing grades and strategies for helping their children at home, as well as celebrating successes. I have really paid attention to my students so I could give detailed evaluations of their personalities, strengths, and weaknesses. I have done everything I can.
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I am enthusiastic, I am creative, and I am committed. I spend hours each week of my own time to invest in my students. I sit on my couch with my laptop until 9 pm so many night, exploring the Internet, refining and detailing my lesson plans, making sure that my plans were of the highest quality and that I was prepared to deliver them in the highest-quality manner. And I believed all that effort shows. I have felt like as a result, I have earned the respect of the other professionals in the building.
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I have had meaningful conversations with my students and more than half of my students have earned All-A or A-B honor roll for the second quarter. Those assignments I assigned them throughout the second quarter were not easy, fluff assignments that would give them an easy honor roll. They were the same assignments assigned by the whole grade level, and I have invested thought and foresight in those assignments so they were truly assessing the targeted learning. I have had the end in mind in any unit or marking period I have embarked upon so that I would be truly reflective and self-evaluating, and I have consistently challenged the students to evaluate the facts I am teaching them and their own thinking, so they understand the why and how, not just the what.
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And then here I am, with two quarters’ worth of failing quarterly assessment scores. I feel like I have been putting myself out there, passionate, enthusiastic, and intensely committed to my work, only to find I have walked off a cliff. There are teachers who put in a fraction of the time and effort I have invested who have earned higher scores with a more challenged group of kids, so maybe I should be guided by that. Maybe I should come at 8:30 each morning and leave at 3:45 each day, and have the students silent read throughout reading time rather than teach my lessons faithfully and hold guided reading groups. I am an intelligent woman who uses her intelligence and skills every day to do the best job she can, and I feel like for nine weeks, or even for a whole semester, I have been channeling all of my talents and passion down the wrong road, only to wake up now and find that my aim and the aim of my school are completely diverged. And waking up is an accurate description. I feel like I have been dreaming for a semester, for four years, really, feeling like I have truly been improving as a teacher and making a difference and creating life-long learners, but in fact I have been asleep at the wheel. I am flabbergasted that I have been so wrong. How could my instincts have been so misleading that for all those years I have been thinking I have been going down the right path? The entire time my head was up and my eyes were looking around and I have been assessing every choice and every destination and adjusting my speed and direction at the slightest data and feedback. How can you do that for so long, so diligently, and still find that you were doing everything wrong?
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I have already felt many times overwhelmed with the paperwork: data cards, reading cards, writing cards, writing portfolios, child study paperwork, conference sheets, report cards, interim reports, pacing meeting agendas. And I have plugged through it with a generally positive attitude because I felt there was a greater purpose. Every job has a downside. There was a reward for all that work: I got to make a difference with students and finish off the year having taught them both information and life lessons. Only now I can only see the paperwork.
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I feel at this point that I am receiving a vote of no confidence, that I have been exposed as a completely ineffective teacher. If no one is confident now in the quality of my teaching, how can I continue in this line of work? I would grieve if I had to leave teaching, but having been slapped so hard, I feel there is no point. What is the point in investing in these students, in choosing the calm or the sensitive or the humorous when faced with a choice of how to react, if there is no point? What is the point in spending so much time and energy and heart in planning quality lessons when they go nowhere? What is the point of exploring the professional development so I can be a better teacher, with committees and conferences and discussion groups, if it doesn’t yield any fruit?
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I felt when I first started seeing the second quarter’s scores that a possible reason for my students’ failure was that all of the questions explicitly assessed Knowledge and Comprehension, and maybe I had taught and discussed the Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation that they couldn’t relate on such a low level. But at this point, I have no real theories. I feel like my scores speak for themselves, and even if there’s something else I want to say, no one will listen. They can only hear that test score. But I can’t help wondering why that one score, when it diametrically opposes the performance of an entire marking period, should be the only piece of data that counts.
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I cannot say my students will improve on the SOLs. I have my theories, that my students haven’t learned endurance and stamina yet, or were intimidated by the passage, or that we hadn’t learned test-taking strategies yet. But all of my scores are dismal. Does that simply show I have not been teaching and my students have not been learning? Today I had to drag myself through my lessons, no enthusiasm, no conviction, no sense of the worth of it all. I kept thinking to myself, “What’s the point? I can’t teach them well enough, and they won’t learn anyway.”
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I know how my students feel now, when they have been learning throughout a unit, feeling like they are getting it, and with that one, final test score, they see that they really didn’t learn anything and they can’t do it after all. They become discouraged and wonder what is the point of trying if they can’t see any way to change or improve.
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I felt like I was creating life-long learners, overflowing with enthusiasm in my teaching so I could infuse them with it in their learning. And here I was supposed to be creating test-takers, or my job and my reputation is on the line.
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One asks what I will do to address these issues. I can’t feel there is much improvement I can expect, not as much as needs to be seen. I will teach my students test-taking strategies. I will punish them if they don’t find all their answers in the passages, taking away their recess or dropping their clips or having them redo it or taking points off the grade. I will exhaust them and use up valuable instructional time giving them painfully long passages every week, and more frequently as SOLs approach. I don’t know how we will find the time when each day is crammed with the prescribed reading curriculum, which I feel didn’t prepare the students for the very assessment the curriculum was leading up to.
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I wonder, finally, what is the point of investigating 21st century education. The only thing that matters is this one test score. There is no time or resources to teach our students critical thinking skills or improved social skills. What is the point in reading articles and discussing with colleagues and attending conferences and getting all fired up for better education when we are mired in the mud? Is it really going to change?
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I am dealing with disillusionment, with days as bad as the few bad days I’ve had this year. I feel like I am being told that my students failed, so I failed, so I cannot teach. I have no answers as to why my students failed or if and how they will improve. You talk with my students and they can tell you all kinds of things they learned. I guess it’s just not enough.
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