Obligatory post on New Year's Resolutions By Catherine on 1/07/2008 08:33:00 AM
New Year's is my favorite holiday-- a symbolic fresh start on life, when pretty much everyone bands together and tries to improve life with small (or large) changes and at least a little motivation to follow through on it. Historically, I fail at New Years resolutions. The only exception was senior year of college, during which I was inhumanly productive. Also very thin and stylish and feeling fabulous, but the Real World has beaten that out of me. I reached my goal of wearing a size 4 pants, kept my resolution to gym at least 3x per week, ate so little crap that my cholesterol was like a newborn baby's, and maintained a 3.8 GPA (for the year, not my whole college career. I had a life, jeez.)Last year, my goals were simpler-- one year out of college and my resolution was to lose the pants size I gained in being a couch potato workaholic half-time grad student, wake up earlier for work, do my laundry consistently and save money for a computer. Well, none of that happened, and though I do have a new computer it's more because of a good deal than because I saved up enough for it.
This year, I didn't even think about resolutions until this weekend. I've been ill-ish and tired, as I'm not 100% healed from tonsil surgery and we honestly haven't had a blessed minute since I started functioning again. The Real World makes one cram as much as possible into weekends, which is both cool because you feel popular and in-demand, and annoying because JUST ONCE you'd like to sleep past 8 on Saturday. So here's my obligatory list of resolutions for the year 2008, which I will now start implementing one week late:
1. Wake up earlier for work.
2. Eat breakfast.
3. Go to the gym or do a video 3 times per week. This will be slightly easier since I joined a weight-loss group at work.
4. Do 200 sit-ups per day. I used to have awesome abs.
5. Write for at least half an hour a day. Ideally the new laptop makes this easy. :)
6. Blog 2x per week.
That's really it-- I just want to make my life more streamlined and organized so that I don't constantly feel like I have no time to do anything. Maybe I should stop complaining about it and actually do it... I'm so good at procrastinating. :)
Labels: clutter, frustrations, List, working through the block, writing
On modifying tests, and the Revolutionary War (against Special Education) By Catherine on 10/02/2007 07:32:00 PM
So, today I modified three exams from teachers on the Revolutionary War. There's a couple of versions to each, so I spend a good chunk of today cutting and pasting from their original document files and trying to figure out what's most important to retain. For example, I decided that being able to define what "republic" means as more important than what year Cornwallis was defeated. (It was 1781, if you're keeping track.) These tests were huuuge, upwards of 100 questions each, which for students like mine is quite a lot more than they can handle, both mentally and emotionally.I can so vividly remember sitting in front of tests like that and feeling so hopelessly lost and overwhelmed I could barely focus. And I was considered "bright" or whatever. Maybe less bright than OCD. I am glad that I understand enough about certain specific learning disabilities that I am able to pare it down to the bare essentials for the students that need it. I worry though, that I'm cutting out too much. When will we make it so easy that we're no longer learning? Providing social and emotional support to students has been the job of the teacher for as many years as education has existed, though it has morphed from a Church-based curriculum to one based on the Platonic arts: language, literature, mathematics, and science. I can honestly say I am about leveling the playing field for some students, but unfortunately it may have gone too far for me, and I almost can't agree anymore.
I'm interested to find out some of the parents' stances, however, because I feel like it's slightly dishonest to say that some Special Ed programs don't push kids through the system. I disagree entirely with the whole premise of passing through on the minimum, but increasingly it feels like that is how we're expected to deal with the issues that arise. It's much easier to modify a test beyond recognition than to pay for two extra years of special ed services through the state Department of Education. I'm not saying at all that this breakdown is in any way the fault of the kids, but the parents and the system will eventually have to answer to someone. What
happens when the student is crushed because he has been passing along all these years, and then doesn't get into college because no one was honest with him about his abilities?
The Wall Street Journal did a piece on Special Ed a while back, and interviewed with a pair of parents who took the opposite stance as many of those I've worked with personally: they didn't want their child's unearned diploma:
"I felt proud because he had worked so hard," says Michael's
mother, Beverly, her voice breaking. "You don't want to take that away from him.
But you knew it wasn't real. What's he going to do in the future? Will he be
able to go to college and get a job?"
The Bredemeyers represent a new voice in special
education: parents disappointed not because their children are failing, but
because they're passing without learning. These families complain that schools
give their children an easy academic ride through regular-education classes,
undermining a new era of higher expectations for the 14% of U.S. students
who are in special education.
No one's denying that scores on standardized tests have gone up in the past nine years since the MCAS was developed, and in the past six since NCLB was instituted. But we're lying to students, we're lying to parents, and we're lying to ourselves as educators if we think that SpEd is the catch-all for students with disabilities. Inclusion, yes. Putting your child in a class where he or she clearly cannot grasp the materials presented in any way, let alone with enough understanding to have any real degree of retention, is a big, ugly lie. Providing a scribe or someone to read aloud to a child in study is he or she has a language-based learning disability? Sure! Sounds great. But passing students who put in minimal effort because they too have learned to dupe the oh-so-PC system is not:
"Mardys Leeper and Carol Merrill, former teachers at West Philadelphia High School in Pennsylvania, say a special-education administrator there ordered them to pass special-education students. Ms. Leeper says she made concessions for students with disabilities, such as letting them write shorter essays or copy paragraphs she wrote onto a word processor rather than composing their own. But when those students didn't make an effort, or skipped class, both teachers say they sometimes sought to fail them -- only to have the administrator insist on passing grades. The reason they were given: Students had met the goals of their federally mandated individual education plans, IEPs, spelling out goals and services for each special-education student."
Last year, with seniors, I saw this a lot. Not necessarily from the administration (see, NG, I don't blame you, I blame the system) but from teachers who were either so frustrated or felt so terrible for the student that they allowed a pass undeservedly. Something glaring that comes to mind is when we discovered at the end of the year that one girl was 5 credits shy of graduation. Miraculously, two days later she walked with her class: someone had changed a grade from her sophomore year to reflect passing (and therefore credit). But she didn't earn it. In fact, I don't think she or her parents ever even knew that this happened.
I'm having a crisis of faith-- I want my work to be meaningful, but I also want it to be honest. I wonder what I have to do to reconcile these issues, which become more disheartening for me every day, for the rest of the year until I get my own classroom, out of the realm of Special Education. That doesn't mean the problem goes away-- no, in fact I daresay it's even more difficult for academic teachers, because they're constantly strapped with providing accommodations that are either unnecessary or quite inconvenient. I guess I'll find out. I love being a teacher, despite my earlier comments, and I have hope that somehow I'll figure out how to make a difference in spite of the challenges teachers are faced with everyday.
{Please ignore my earlier rant, I was entirely too frustrated with all of the issues I've since brought up here to think clearly and not sound like a prima donna. You love me, right? RIGHT? Oh, God, rejection! No!}
Labels: dreams, education, frustrations, learning, modifications, politics, revolutionary war, school, special ed, STRESSSTRESSSTRESS, unfunny, wall street journal, working through the block