It’s a beautiful day off from school. The sun is out, Bacon is asleep on the couch, The Cult’s “Love Removal Machine” is playing throughout the living room, the wife has her feet up, the boy is in his lair, and I’m taking a break from homework. Yes, we will get outside later. It’s not even noon–we’ve still got seven+ hours of sun (maybe less depending on the marine layer).
My homework today is curriculum-driven. I have a class where my students aren’t the most motivated, though I’m not sure they are not capable. It’s one of those instances that happen every now and again in teaching–students don’t want others in the class to know that they know anything, or that they do well. Really. This happens. I’ve made mistakes in the past by praising students and telling them, in front of the class, how well they were doing and how much improved they were. They showed me–they stopped doing work until they weren’t doing so well. Doing well sometimes gets associated with being a loser, or being uncool, which is so middle school, but sometimes it hangs around high schools, too.
My strategy is two-fold. One reason I’m creating extra work for myself is that I want them to pass. Even though they don’t deserve it, based on the work they have turned in, there has to be that level of osmosis learning. Unless they have completely closed off their hearing, something has to have seeped in, right?
The other reason is to compete with the new Turks out there–the online schools, or Opportunities for Learning, or El Camino College, or anyone I don’t know about. Quite the worry these days in education, or so I hear, is that schools are losing students to these new forms of education. Losing students equals losing teachers, which is no fun.
Schools whine. They try to bully students into taking courses again. Can you imagine getting a D (a passing grade) in a class one semester and, because of a school’s a-g eligibility percentage greed, taking the entire class over again to raise your grade to make the school look better? Because if you have a D, you probably have a C (or two, or three, or more) and those Cs, though they make one a-g eligible, aren’t going to get you into many 4-yr schools.
They also try to question the validity of this online or packet-driven “education.” Word on the street is that some districts won’t even allow the classes from these schools. That doesn’t seem right, since all the schools I’ve seen online look like they have all their boxes ticked for approval. Yes, they are new and don’t require 159 hours of seat time per class like some districts, but they seem like they’re working out for kids. It’s the districts and schools that they aren’t working for.
So, I’m making mastery packets for my kids today. They will cover reading, writing, listening, and speaking, and will not be easy. I have never done this before. However, despite my advanced age and desire to leave teaching sooner than later, I can still create material that fits my students needs. Am I selling out? Maybe. Am I dumbing it down? Ha. Don’t even get me started on that one. I’ll only write that in a world of essential questions and Socratic seminars–“I agree with Skippy, who makes a valid point that I agree with, even though I didn’t even check out the book . . .”–I still give tests, and the results, which are reading-based, are not very pretty.
But, since students can now go to these other “schools,” why not create some competition? They will probably end up doing the same work per packet, plus they have 140+ hours of seat time already. The bottom line is always the same, no matter what we do in the shadows–it’s on them.