*Zabe Showed me how to Title my BLOGS!!*

Well, Elena made a 38 on the MCAT, second-years are getting the best test scores in the state, and I still can't, for the life of me, figure out how to put a title on a blog.

Good times.

Last week I tried a little procedure we like to call "muddiest part of the lecture," only I kind of let them ask questions about anything we'd been learning in French for the last few days (instead of just my lecture) because, first, we had a quiz the next day and I wanted to be able to review what they needed rather than what I might think they would need and, second, because they said they didn't have anything they were confused about at first so I decided to broaden the base.
The idea with this procedure is that you tell each kid to write down, at the end of a lecture, anything that they're still confused about so that you can get feedback from everyone, even the kids who aren't going to say anything in class or ask you to stop and explain. In my case, the other option was to write down anything that you'd like to learn more about if you swore you didn't have any questions (for some of them, this may even have been true -- the kid who said, "I don't have any questions, there are just some things I don't understand" totally rocked his test).
I wasn't sure at first if this would actually help; the responses are a little overwhelming since you have 17 or more kids who all have problems with different things, and also since I didn't say the magic words "this is for a grade" I didn't actually get a response from every person, but there were a few patterns and if nothing else it made me stop and realize that even though I get really great participation in class, not EVERYONE is on the same page as me and NOT everyone is absolutely ready to move on. Wake-up call, I guess, informal assessment, what-have-you.
I spent a little bit of time comparing the make-a-question responses to how they actually performed on the test, and here's what happened: A couple of them did really well even in the areas they were concerned with, a couple of them were spot-on with what they said they needed to work on, and then a few of the answers were just a bit too general to provide solid feedback (Reminder: always be PAINFULLY clear when giving any type of directions!!)
I might do this again, but I think in a setting in which I have a class consistently and can set up my own room it might be more effective (?) to just have a box FOR this type of thing and remind them each day that they have the option of adding to it so that (a) I don't have to go through 120 responses every day and (b) if they have a pressing question THAT DAY they will always have an easy, direct, alternate-route avenue to getting it adressed, not just on special days when I ask.

Overall this was a good exercise, but hopefully the base idea could be applied more constructively. We shall see.

Focus Paper Response

I read Adryon Wong's paper on the No Child Left Behind Act, largely because I know it's a big deal but I know I don't know enough about what the rules are and what the results have been thus far.

Adryon says that students run the risk of spending too much time being educated for a state test and too little time "being genuinely educated." Unfortunately, that's the part where I keep getting stuck. Who makes the rules about what a "genuine" education consists of?? One complaint is that in an effort to teach to the test, schools spend less time on physical education, fine arts, foreign language, and vocational studies. The problem is, it's all important. Teaching to a state test is not going to encourage individuatlized instruction, and it's certainly going to discourage teacher creativity and spontaneity, but I have a really hard time saying it's a bad idea. Even in the brief "education" training that I've had in the last two weeks, we've talked a bit about this. In the video we saw we decided that the important part was not which reading system was implemented in critical-needs schools but that all the teachers and the administrator were working towards a common goal. Yes, the items covered on the accountability tests are inevitably limiting and limited, but it is a clearly defined set of competencies that gives EVERY teacher something to work with and something to work towards. The problem of individual school accountability is not solved by this act, but it is at least addressed. If every school knows what areas it needs to improve, that gives every teacher a concrete goal to address. And even if, one day, every student passes that standardized test and we realize that the test could have been better and the students might still not know all the right things, at least they know something, and at least everybody's moving in the same direction towards the same goals.
And I realize how this sounds, and I'm aware of all those things that people HAVE to learn to be successful that just can't be measured, but I do think that there needs to be a standard. Even if it's not perfect and even if it stifles somebody's creativity, there is no right way to address this problem. I was thinking again about the two literacy programs that the critical-needs schools in the videos implemented, and yes, to the creators of those programs it probably would be a little insulting to have us say that either one works just as well, the point is to have a program, to dedicate resources and energy in a similar direction, but I think that that IS the point. And on a larger scale, that's still the point. Education is one of the most ill-defined topics in our society, nobody really knows what it is or how to do it, and we're unlikely to reach a consensus anytime soon. In the meantime, some things on those state tests are probably worth knowing and some probably aren't, and you're sure as heck not going to get a job because you know how to form a simile or identify a paradox, but it IS important to know how to read and it IS important to be able to do basic math and if state standards push teachers to ALL have their students up to SOME kind of standard ... arguable as that standard may be, I think it's bound to help.

Contradictory opinions welcome.

Item the first: MTC.

We've been at it about two weeks now, and it's been fairly intense. The first few days were mostly introduction, but now that we've started into the summer school I'm acutely aware of how little time we have. In college courses it would occur to me now and again to wonder if I was actually getting "educated" enough, and if, after taking 12 or 20 or 48 more classes I'd know enough to justify receiving a degree, but this feels like a whole different ballgame.

My thesis professor laughed at the idea of me in an "education" curriculum, at how easy it would inevitably be, but the pressure is so much higher here because every day, even as we're learning to plan lessons and about which state tests we'll have to get our students to pass and why, I am facing head on for the first time the realization that these kids' EDUCATION is in some small way my responsibility. And the thing is, there are no ready answers. Even if I understood everything they're teaching me, even if I had no doubts that a young, small, white girl could control a class of high schoolers, even if I knew the format of a lesson plan like the back of my hand, those are all just TOOLS and ultimately it is UP TO ME to figure out really what to teach these kids.

And that's a big deal. And yes, there are state guidelines, and yes, I am surrounded by resources and people who know so much more about this than I do but ultimately, come august, I'm going to close that classroom door and decide what my kids are going to learn.

Assuming that I've assimilated enough experience in our brief 8 weeks of training to take care of all the technicalities.