This is where I belong

My classroom. I was there until 7:45 last night. People think, "oh, but you have summers off." Or maybe, "But you get to leave by 3 o'clock."

That's only partially true. It's not that I'm complaining about what I do, I'm complaining about the misunderstanding so many people have about what I do.

I've been entrusted with the teaching of the 62 California state English standards. No wait, not just teaching, but assessing how well the students have acquired those state standards. Also, I must work with my fellow teachers in the school and district so that we have common assessments of our students.

What that means is that we are supposed to be giving the same tests. Tricky, considering that I might be teaching metaphor and alliteration with The House on Mango Street, and another teacher might be doing it with a poetry unit. Ah... there's the push. There's nothing our administration would like better than to have all teachers on the same page of the same book on the same day.

And developing these common assessments? We aren't given any extra time or release time to create these. We're just supposed to have them. If we don't, and our students don't continue to make improvements every year on the state standards test, we will be sanctioned by the state and the federal government.

We are supposed to, by the year 2014, have all students at all grade levels, perform at 100% proficiency on these standardized tests. Tests that were not created by teachers, by the way. Testing standards such as this one:

Literary Response and Analysis, Structural Features of Literature:
3.1 Determine and articulate the relationship between the purposes and characteristics of different forms of poetry (e.g., ballad, lyric, couplet, epic, elegy, ode, sonnet).

Do you know the difference between an elegy and an ode? I didn't either; had to look it up. Now, don't get me wrong, I think it's good to have standards. Just not standards that force us to treat students as if they were a product on an assembly line.

I've heard people say we need to use a business model to "fix" our schools. Bullshit. I'm a teacher. I work with kids. Kids who have lives outside of school. I can't control anything other than the 49 minutes or so they get with me. Students are not widgits. They don't all perform at the same time and the same way. And I don't want them to.

Oi. I have to go. I've only gotten started on this rant. Just you wait.