Monday, June 12, 2006
A Block Headed Scheduling Idea
The last full week of school has arrived at Underwood and everyone is just trying to weather the remaining days with as much good humor as possible. For my part, this is the last full week of my public school teaching career, a thought that leaves me simultaneously nostalgic and relieved. For although I have had a (small) number of excellent students this year, the majority of them are no longer coming to school since final exams concluded last Friday.
I should note, for the record, that my exams were once again multiple choice, open-book, open-note tests, and that despite these benefits, my grades were further curved before inclusion in the gradebook. (The curve I used was recommended by a veteran colleague of mine and consisted of mutliplying the square root of the actual score by 10. This allows for a max. gain of 25%, for a student who scores a 25% will earn a 50%. Students who score higher than that earn a steadily decreasing number of points until a student who scores a 100% earns...a 100%.) And even after all that, the average scores were in the mid-60% range. (If you actually read the last parenthetical, then you would realize that kids were scoring in the 30% range uncurved...)
In any event, the finals are finished and besides a few chemistry extra credit projects being turned in tomorrow, my grade book is basically closed for the year. The kids know it and the teachers know it, but certain members of the administrative team do not. One vice-principal took the math department chair to task because students were not continuing with instruction. But despite her entreaties to have students make their own board games or work on puzzles, teachers are scrambling to just keep what few kids show up contained and in the classroom.
Originally, I had intended to play You Don't Know Jack with the kids for the remainder of the school year. But a colleague of mine suggested that if I played games, then the children, both good or bad, would continue to show up everyday. So today I brought in an episode of one of my favorite television series, Connections, in the hopes of maybe teaching the kids something about the history of science and driving the remainder away. Of course, this has proven less than effective since there's no incentive to pay attention. However, maybe it will drive some of the rotten kids away so that I can play trivia games by the end of the week with only 4-6 kids per class. That would be nice.
There is one group that seems to thrive in the chaos surrounding this time of year, and that is the administrative team. Our principal held a surprise meeting at 8 this morning to announce planned changes to the curriculum and schedule. It seems that the district has decided that literacy is going to be the key that allows us to finally break the cycle of low test scores. Can you believe it? Finally...after all these years. Learning to read is the answer! No news yet on how math scores will benefit, although word problems do involve reading at times!
The scheduling changes are more disheartening. Currently, teachers at Underwood teach 5 classes, each one 60 minutes long for a total of 300 minutes of teaching per day. Unfortunately, since each student has only 6 periods in the day, a chance to earn 6 credits a year, and therefore only 24 credit slots possible during the course of their time as a high school student. But...you need 23.5 credits to graduate. There's no room for error. And what's more due to the highly rigid graduation requirements, passed down from on high, there is almost no room for electives. In total, one or maybe two classes distinguish the rosters of students in the finance academy from those in the health academy, for example.
The suggested solution? Change the schedule to include a block period in the morning, running approximately 80 minutes long, with students switching between two classes on a standardized block schedule. This adds an extra course into the mix, addressing the need for greater variation between academies as well as providing the students with a few extra courses to fail without undermining their graduation requirements. The remainder of the day would consist of five periods, fifty minutes long. The net effect of all this finagling is a twenty minute reduction in total teaching time, allowing school to get out approximately twenty minutes earlier. Unfortunately, whatever benefits the new schedule might create are undermined by the inclusion of mandatory weekly professional development sessions every Friday. Strangely enough, the principal presented these meetings as a viable selling point for the new plan during our morning meeting. I think she has been brainwashed by the research that explains how very crucial such meetings are to our continued success as teachers rather than our firsthand evidence to the contrary.
Regardless of the rationale, it is clear that I am leaving Underwood at just the right time. Despite the good intentions of the people in charge, I fear that very few lasting institutional changes will be effected that will actually improve the school. Neither the district nor the school's leadership has the patience, wherewithal, or finances to make the changes that are actually required (e.g. smaller class sizes, shifting focus away from broad curriculum initiatives in favor of more focused, content-specific approaches, etc.) for a long enough period of time to improve the school's situation. Even if they did, I wonder how many teachers would actually go along with it. The crusty, veteran teachers in particular will be especially hard pressed to put up with what they perceive as heavy-handed, ham-fisted attempts to ram new teaching methods down their experienced throats while newer teachers are still having a hard time devising their own unique set of systems for their classrooms. Either way, there's still the greater question of the students, because what no amount of professional development can resolve is the fact that education is a two-way street...
The last full week of school has arrived at Underwood and everyone is just trying to weather the remaining days with as much good humor as possible. For my part, this is the last full week of my public school teaching career, a thought that leaves me simultaneously nostalgic and relieved. For although I have had a (small) number of excellent students this year, the majority of them are no longer coming to school since final exams concluded last Friday.
I should note, for the record, that my exams were once again multiple choice, open-book, open-note tests, and that despite these benefits, my grades were further curved before inclusion in the gradebook. (The curve I used was recommended by a veteran colleague of mine and consisted of mutliplying the square root of the actual score by 10. This allows for a max. gain of 25%, for a student who scores a 25% will earn a 50%. Students who score higher than that earn a steadily decreasing number of points until a student who scores a 100% earns...a 100%.) And even after all that, the average scores were in the mid-60% range. (If you actually read the last parenthetical, then you would realize that kids were scoring in the 30% range uncurved...)
In any event, the finals are finished and besides a few chemistry extra credit projects being turned in tomorrow, my grade book is basically closed for the year. The kids know it and the teachers know it, but certain members of the administrative team do not. One vice-principal took the math department chair to task because students were not continuing with instruction. But despite her entreaties to have students make their own board games or work on puzzles, teachers are scrambling to just keep what few kids show up contained and in the classroom.
Originally, I had intended to play You Don't Know Jack with the kids for the remainder of the school year. But a colleague of mine suggested that if I played games, then the children, both good or bad, would continue to show up everyday. So today I brought in an episode of one of my favorite television series, Connections, in the hopes of maybe teaching the kids something about the history of science and driving the remainder away. Of course, this has proven less than effective since there's no incentive to pay attention. However, maybe it will drive some of the rotten kids away so that I can play trivia games by the end of the week with only 4-6 kids per class. That would be nice.
There is one group that seems to thrive in the chaos surrounding this time of year, and that is the administrative team. Our principal held a surprise meeting at 8 this morning to announce planned changes to the curriculum and schedule. It seems that the district has decided that literacy is going to be the key that allows us to finally break the cycle of low test scores. Can you believe it? Finally...after all these years. Learning to read is the answer! No news yet on how math scores will benefit, although word problems do involve reading at times!
The scheduling changes are more disheartening. Currently, teachers at Underwood teach 5 classes, each one 60 minutes long for a total of 300 minutes of teaching per day. Unfortunately, since each student has only 6 periods in the day, a chance to earn 6 credits a year, and therefore only 24 credit slots possible during the course of their time as a high school student. But...you need 23.5 credits to graduate. There's no room for error. And what's more due to the highly rigid graduation requirements, passed down from on high, there is almost no room for electives. In total, one or maybe two classes distinguish the rosters of students in the finance academy from those in the health academy, for example.
The suggested solution? Change the schedule to include a block period in the morning, running approximately 80 minutes long, with students switching between two classes on a standardized block schedule. This adds an extra course into the mix, addressing the need for greater variation between academies as well as providing the students with a few extra courses to fail without undermining their graduation requirements. The remainder of the day would consist of five periods, fifty minutes long. The net effect of all this finagling is a twenty minute reduction in total teaching time, allowing school to get out approximately twenty minutes earlier. Unfortunately, whatever benefits the new schedule might create are undermined by the inclusion of mandatory weekly professional development sessions every Friday. Strangely enough, the principal presented these meetings as a viable selling point for the new plan during our morning meeting. I think she has been brainwashed by the research that explains how very crucial such meetings are to our continued success as teachers rather than our firsthand evidence to the contrary.
Regardless of the rationale, it is clear that I am leaving Underwood at just the right time. Despite the good intentions of the people in charge, I fear that very few lasting institutional changes will be effected that will actually improve the school. Neither the district nor the school's leadership has the patience, wherewithal, or finances to make the changes that are actually required (e.g. smaller class sizes, shifting focus away from broad curriculum initiatives in favor of more focused, content-specific approaches, etc.) for a long enough period of time to improve the school's situation. Even if they did, I wonder how many teachers would actually go along with it. The crusty, veteran teachers in particular will be especially hard pressed to put up with what they perceive as heavy-handed, ham-fisted attempts to ram new teaching methods down their experienced throats while newer teachers are still having a hard time devising their own unique set of systems for their classrooms. Either way, there's still the greater question of the students, because what no amount of professional development can resolve is the fact that education is a two-way street...
