A breath of fresh air came back to North High today, and it couldn’t have come soon enough.
Anh Nguyen returned to North after a lengthy absence due to an ankle/foot injury. She hobbled all the way out to my room, gave me a hug, and told me of her journey back to teaching, which was anything but easy. Seeing her back at school made my day.
Students used to tell me things about her–mainly because they received low grades in her Honors Geometry class–but, over the years, I found out it was on them. We both taught Honors, shared many students, and our grades were eerily similar, even though the disciplines of math and English are often not so. If a student got a good grade from her, they were a good student for me. Same went for kids who did not do well.
It takes effort to not do well these days in school. You have to work at not working. Teachers are trying every politically correct assignment they can to coerce points out of each student. There’s everything you can imagine in the world of getting work done in class–heaven forbid if we ask a student to take a book home and read it. We read to them, or have the audio playing on our computers (I was guilty of the latter today). There’s projects, group work, presentations, annotations–I’ve posted all that here before.
It just makes our school look questionable, though, when students with 4.5 GPAs can’t pass any of their AP tests, or score woefully on the SATs or ACTs. How does that make our school look in the scholastic community? Just looking up a random student at North High (one of mine, actually), I find that a 3.94 weighted GPA gets you ranked 69th out of 441 total seniors. That means that around 15% of our seniors have over a 4.0 GPA. Seems a bit high to me.
Either way, numbers should add up. Many don’t. Problem. What’s our brand?
But Anh Nguyen is back, and that means there’s another oldtimer on campus with me. I know we will keep helping students, but we will also keep testing them, too. My guess is that students’ grades and performances in our classes will be mirrored in their standardized test scores.
Welcome back, Anh. Together we will start a de-evolution revolution.