It’s been quite a week.
A few of the highlights:
*Two of my classes are reading To Kill a Mockingbird, and this week we read one of my favorite sections, the two chapters when Scout goes to first grade for the very first time, and meets her new teacher, Miss Caroline. These chapters are the first which show the novel’s dominant theme, the idea of empathy, that you don’t understand someone until you see events from their perspective; Miss Caroline, seen from Scout’s perspective, is a terrible person who treats Scout badly, shames a poor farm boy named Walter Cunningham, and has no idea how to teach or manage a class. But when you see these chapters from Miss Caroline’s point of view — she is a 21-year-old woman, this is her very first day teaching, and in addition to several other problems, one of her sweet lil angels calls her a snot-nosed slut. First graders, man. Freaking savages. — you recognize that this teacher has had the very worst day ever. I explain the chapters from Miss Caroline’s point of view, which I understand as a teacher, and I show students how she is not bad, she’s just having a bad day. A lot of times in the past, when I’ve taught this, they get it; my students understand how frustrating and soul-searing Miss Caroline’s day is, and they realize she shouldn’t be blamed or hated for her choices, even when she screws up, as she does a few times.
Part of Miss Caroline’s bad day is that she reads her favorite children’s story to the class — and they don’t react at all, because they are, as Scout puts it, “immune to imaginative literature.” And I look out at my class, half of whom are looking at phones or computers, another third of whom are chatting or spacing out while I talk about this novel, which I have told them is one of my very favorite works of literature, and I say, “Can you imagine what that’s like, to share one of your favorite stories with a class full of students who just don’t care? Who aren’t paying attention? To whom the story makes no difference at all? Can you imagine what that would feel like?”
They couldn’t.
*Yesterday a student climbed up onto a metal stool in my room in order to unplug another student’s Chromebook, which was plugged into an outlet that for no good reason is about seven feet off the floor, near my whiteboard. The student then called out “CANNONBALL!”, jumped off the stool, kicking it out sideways, landing awkwardly as the stool shot out and crashed into a bookcase.
*One of my other classes, in reading through a passage from the novel Maud Martha, by Gwendolyn Brooks, commented “I didn’t think these characters were African-American. They don’t have African-American names.” The names in question were Maud Martha, and Helen. One student pointed out that Helen is a Greek name, as a way of proving to me that these were clearly not African-American names. (I refrained from pointing out that the student’s name is Roman in origin, though the student in question is Southeast Asian.) Another student told me that the activities the family pursue in the passage are rural, country kinds of activities — specifically gathering wood for a fire — and that made them think the characters were White. To which I responded “Because rural areas are only White? And African-Americans don’t gather firewood?”
Did I mention that my principal was observing me that class? He was. His comment later was that I had had “several teachable moments” in the period. (He also said I handled it well, so that was okay.)
*Today one of my students came back from the restroom, started talking to the other students about something (This was, by the way, while I was talking about Miss Caroline and how it feels when students don’t listen to your favorite story), and at some point I realized that what they were saying was that this student, on the way across the hall to the restroom, had seen someone they didn’t recognize outside the school door (Which is mostly glass and is at the end of the hall near my classroom — who needs that “security” stuff?), that my student had let them in, and that the person in question, referred to both as “kid” and “guy,” was wearing a mask, carrying a backpack, and was currently in the bathroom. Refraining from asking the student why IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS GOOD AND HOLY they had let some literal masked stranger into the school, I went to the bathroom to see who was in there. There was someone in the stall, but I could only see shoes. So I quickly went to get an administrator to check on the bathroom, and then I went back to my class — where I received the clarification that the student had not let the person in, a teacher had, which almost certainly moved this from “Possible crisis precipitated by a student who lacks critical thinking skills” to “A student went out to a car, with permission from a teacher, came back in, and my student didn’t recognize them.” And the second option is what it was, and a few seconds later the administrator gave me a thumb’s-up on the way back from identifying the person in the restroom as one of our students.
But it was a fun five minutes.
None of this is what I wanted to write about tonight, however. (Actually I wanted to write about it last night, but another thing that happened this week is my phone stopped working, so I spent last night ordering a new phone.) What I wanted to write about tonight was the worst thing I’ve dealt with in the last week. One of the worst things I’ve had to deal with all year.
Data Day.
Last Friday was our first Data Day. And the big problem with this particular occasion was that it was our very first Data Day at this school. At least the first one involving my department. To be sure, we have looked at data before: data is inescapable in public schools today. We start every school year with a brief overview of the school’s test data from the year before. Which is all about students who have already left the classes in which the data was collected, which might seem to some people as though it reduces the value of the data.
Some people.
Anyway, we look at data all the time. But I work for a small charter school, which has a hell of a lot of turnover in the staff and the administration, and every year things get a bit discombobulated and confusticated and lost in the shuffle; and so we have never done a Data Day like this Data Day. Unfortunately, those in charge of Data Day thought we had all surely done Data Days before, and so didn’t think we would need specific instructions about how one carries out a Data Day. But since we have never had a Data Day before, we did need those instructions, and we didn’t get them, and so the day was — awkward.
But hold on. Before we even get to the awkwardness of the actual day, I can hear you asking “Wait — what even is a Data Day?”
A Data Day is when teachers get together in groups and look at the data for our students — in other words, their test scores. This Data Day was scheduled after we gave our first major standardized test this year, a practice ACT. The ACT, a sort of West-Coast cousin of the SAT, has four parts: Reading, English (grammar, that is), Math, and Science. Now, as I assume that all my readers are among the most astute people in the population, so I assume you have noticed that this selection of tests leaves out a few of the usual departments in a high school: Art, PE, foreign language, computer science, ESS (or SPED) — and, of course, history and social studies.
But that’s fine! Even if not all teachers have data and so can participate in Data
Day, the thing to focus on is the subjects which do have data. And lucky for me, English has double the data! And EXTRA lucky for me, this is my first year as head of the English department. So not only do I have double the data — but I get to run the meeting!
Did I mention that my principal was observing my meeting? He was. He did not tell me that I handled this one well. I think I did okay. We had several teachable moments.
But we didn’t have everything. We should have had our individual class data, from the shorter single-subject quizzes we’ve been giving over the course of the semester; we should have all been looking at our individual laptops and comparing our individual data to the school wide data, so we could find where our specific classes were different from the school population as a whole — that is, what are my 10th grade students failing to learn in my class, which the school as a whole is mastering? Those are the areas where I can make changes in my class in order to improve the instruction and the learning in specific skills and knowledges, to help my students catch up. And that was where we were supposed to develop our Action Plan, building SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) so that, when we have our next round of ACT practice tests in December, we can move straight into our second Data Day, and we can see what areas have improved and where we need to keep working, maybe finding new strategies that can make a difference in the scores. That is the goal of a Data Day.
I ran the meeting. Completely making it up as I went along, because I have never done a full Data Day. I didn’t tell everyone they needed to bring their laptops and individual classroom data. I didn’t have my individual classroom data. I had not examined the school wide data previously, and so while I pointed out a couple of obvious things — our students did better on reading and English than they did on math and science (I work at a STEM school, if you didn’t know.), better on English than on reading (which mystified me because they mostly can’t answer a single grammar question correctly — but I guess they can correct grammar on a multiple choice test?), and in some cases better, in others worse, when compared grade to grade. But everything I said was obvious. I didn’t know that we were supposed to create a SMART goal, or how to do that, and I didn’t take notes or guide the discussion or watch the time — or delegate any of those tasks. I did a bad job with the meeting. It was uncomfortable. That was my first Data Day.
So.
You all know that whole thing is a pile of horsepucky, right?
I knew you were all astute.
Okay, let me be clear: the basic idea of examining what my students know and what they don’t know, identifying areas where they have mastered the class content and where they still need work, and then strategizing methods to improve their learning? All of that is fine. None of that is horsepucky. We can get general ideas about how things are going, and we can find some ways to maybe make them better; that’s fine. It is a lot of work, for a questionable reward, and since I am already obscenely overworked, and still behind where I should be, I question whether or not this is the best way for me to spend my time; since I have 300 ungraded assignments turned in on my online education platform, I have a better idea of how I could spend a good couple of hours on a Friday afternoon.
Yup. Drinking.
I grade on Sundays. I shouldn’t. But I don’t have any other option. I’m not kidding about the 300 ungraded assignments, and that’s after I spend at least a few hours working every Sunday, and have done since the school year started August 1. A couple of hours on Friday afternoon, even if I hadn’t used that time as I deserve and gone drinking, would have helped make a dent in that pile — though of course it wouldn’t have eliminated the pile. But Data Day didn’t help at all. In fact it stressed me out so much that I didn’t even get my other tasks finished on Friday: I went home and collapsed uselessly on my couch. I did play some Minecraft, so that’s a win, I guess.
But let’s imagine that I did have some extra time, a couple of spare hours that I didn’t have to spend teaching class or working with students or grading essays. I could have done Data Day. I could have compared the results of a test which the students didn’t care about and didn’t try their hardest on, because they knew perfectly well they weren’t going to get graded on it, and that it wasn’t the official ACT, and therefore this test didn’t give them a chance to get a high score they could use to get into college or win scholarships; to the results of a series of short, five-question multiple choice assessments I give in my class, one for each standard they are supposed to master this school year. Those, also, the students didn’t care about and so didn’t try on. But hey, that makes the comparison more valid, right? The students taking it didn’t care, in both cases! Matching apathy! Also, neither set of tests was designed by me, or related directly to the content I used to teach the standards — none of them are on To Kill a Mockingbird, for instance. Oh, and also, the ACT is not broken down by standard, so I’m comparing a five-question multiple choice quiz on a single standard to a 40-question reading test and a 75-question English language test, on all of the standards taught in all four years of high school, and also quite a few that come up in middle school and a couple that are only used in college or adult life. Because one aspect of the ACT is that it is designed to be too hard, in parts, for any student to get a 100% on. Because the goal is to find the extent of a student’s knowledge and ability, right? If I give you a quiz on what you know, and you get 100%, I have not found the extent of your knowledge: those questions might cover every single thing you know on the subject — or they might only scratch the surface of your galactic levels of knowledge. To find out for sure, I have to make the questions get progressively harder until you cannot answer them correctly. That’s where I can assume your knowledge ends, when you can’t answer the questions any more. Which means the ACT tests, like all similar tests, is intended to get progressively harder until it becomes impossible for any high school student to answer the questions.
Which means, of course, that there will always be gaps and areas for improvement, no matter how spectacularly I teach and the students learn, because of the way the test is designed. So if I take this concept seriously, that I need to teach my students enough for them to be able to score 100% on the test, I can never be complacent. Ever. I will always have more to teach. But of course, my students will move on out of my class before I finish teaching them; but that’s fine, they can learn the rest of everything in their next class.Right?
Sure.
More to the point, did you catch where I described how different the two tests are? Five questions on a single standard, compared to 115 on the general areas of reading and writing. Also, the standardized tests are given in very short timeframes, because the ACT’s base assumption is that the more you know about a subject, the faster you can answer the questions. An assumption that is so deeply flawed that it casts doubt on all of the ACT results — because of course speed has little if anything to do with knowledge or skill. A genius with bad eyesight or dyslexia or a headache the day of the test will not be able to answer all the questions within the time limit, which is 35 minutes for the 40 reading questions (which are about four different reading passages, with 10 questions each), and 45 minutes for the 75 grammar questions, which is just cruel. Oh wait, sorry: that’s only for the 11th graders. The 10th graders took shorter tests in shorter time limits — 24 reading questions in 30 minutes, and so on. But that’s fine, I’m sure we can compare the two classes and get some kind of useful idea of how much students know. Right?
Right?
Sure.
Here’s the part that killed me. Right at the start, when I’m trying to fumble my way through the schoolwide data we have about the ACT and Pre-ACT tests, and the middle school results from an entirely different assessment which the 6th-8th graders took, we were told to ignore the gaps in the test results that were caused by students who were having a bad day, or who had a headache the day of the test, or who didn’t care and so didn’t try. Because we can’t control those things. We need to focus on the places where we can have an impact, where we can raise those scores.
Uhh — excuse me? How can we know which areas are lacking because of a flaw in the program, and which are lacking because students didn’t feel like trying their hardest? That’s right: we can’t. Just like we can’t see the specific standards for the questions on the ACT (I don’t think; there might be a way to break it down like that, but I didn’t know it, so.), and we can’t know if the five-question multiple choice quizzes give us good information, either, because in addition to being skewed by student apathy and also student humanity, five questions won’t do a good job of determining what the student knows and what they don’t. You can randomly guess on five multiple choice questions and have a not-insignificant chance of getting them all correct even if you couldn’t read at all. And also, let’s not forget that if a student learns all the material, but then fails the assessment because of a non-academic reason like a disability or an illness or a lack of motivation or a grudge against the school or the teacher or a bad testing environment or a bad breakup or a bad bit of potato they ate the night before which gave them vivid dreams in which they were visited by three different spirits of Christmas — that student did not succeed. They do not pass Go, they do not collect $200, because our system is based largely on high-stakes tests and the ability to pass them. And it doesn’t matter what I teach or how well I teach if a student who fails the assessment, despite knowing everything about my subject, is considered a failure. All of the things that I was told to ignore, because they are out of my control, are the entire reason why that hypothetical student could fail my class.
But guess who would still get at least some of the blame for that student’s failure. And who would have to make SMART goals to try to improve that student’s test results. And who would have to examine that student’s data, again and again, to find the reason why the student was unsuccessful. But please, keep ignoring the aspects we can’t control, like a lack of motivation.
Right.
Sure.
And while we’re at it: who the hell told educators that we could control anything? Listen, you don’t know how hard I tried today, to make my students learn the lesson of Miss Caroline. And instead they were distracted by the possibility that someone had let in a school shooter — which was exactly where all their thoughts went when they heard that there was a possible stranger in the school, in a mask and carrying a backpack. Because of course that’s what they thought. And I’m supposed to teach those kids? To control their learning? To specifically assess the lessons that worked and the ones that didn’t, and to make adjustments which will ensure all the learning happens exactly as we want it to, which will then be shown clearly on the test?
Let me also say: if I go back tomorrow and try again to teach the same lesson, my students will say “We already went over this yesterday.” And if I say “Right, but you didn’t learn it as well as you should have, because you were distracted,” they will then reply, “That’s okay, we learned enough. We should move on.” And it wont matter how much I try to teach the lesson, how hard I want to reteach it, or whether I know exactly how to make that lesson more effective: it was ineffective because of events outside of my control. The opportunity was lost. We did not have a teachable moment today.
Here’s the truth. That neat, data-driven ideal, where teachers do the math and find the perfect way to help students reach mastery? School doesn’t work that way. Students don’t work that way, learning doesn’t work that way, even tests don’t work that way. None of it is scientific. None of it is precise. There are real benefits to teachers getting together and talking about what works and what doesn’t, and trading ideas and strategies; to that extent, Data Day was a real success. But otherwise? There is no data. Not anything real, not anything reliable. It’s all guesstimates, all gray area. Teachers do things that seem like they work, that seemed like they’ve worked in the past; students seem to learn things, and seem to get grades that reflect their learning. Somewhere in there, real learning happens, and part of it is probably because of what teachers do. But not all of it. And none of it for certain. Data Day is an attempt to pretend otherwise, to pretend that we can capture a mathematic truth about human beings, who are not by our nature quantifiable. And it just doesn’t work.
But hey, maybe that was just this time. All those things about human nature and whatnot? All out of our control. Let’s try to focus on what we can control, and we’ll circle back around in a few months and see what the data tells us.
Can’t wait.
Just Dusty 