Sunday, February 04, 2007
Blue Monday
So tomorrow at my school there's a huge series of staff meetings, during which we are to meet with our respective, ulp, DATA teams. School administrators are coming around to visit our meetings to make sure we're not mixing cocktails and eating canapes when we should be finding new ways to capture our students' learning in numerical form.
But first, let's re-wind. Since the beginning of this year, all teachers at my school have gone from working from a curriculum and having quite a bit of latitude in how they teach what's on that document to collaborating with other teachers at our grade levels on the exact questions on a test in each unit. Then we were to have students fill out the same Scantron sheet for the purposes of scanning their tests into the computer, then crunching the numbers on which students did best, which questions they answered with the most success, etc.
Tomorrow, we're supposed to hammer out, in line with the curriculum, what we're doing EACH DAY and exactly how we're doing it. That's right....all teachers will be doing the same lessons on the same days in the same way. Oh, yeah.....this has to be done for all the teachers' preps through the END OF SCHOOL in June. That bubbling noise you hear is my boiling blood.
All this leads to a bad feeling I've been having ever since this mess started. I laugh when I say it (because I'd cry or tear my hair out if I didn't), but perhaps what we're going toward is growing teachers on a stalk, Matrix-style, so that we're all drones dispensing knowledge to our students. All we need is for them all to have outlets built into the backs of their heads, so we could just hook them up to a cable and do away with the whole classroom management issue.
I wonder if the "rapture," as the Mayor calls it, will be further hastened by this. Apparently, there are quite a few teachers already planning their departures next year. Will our fearless leaders be chastened by an exodus? Or will they see it as less resistance to their evil plan?
Maybe I'll just chill and take the blue pill...
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They also want us to go see that stupid movie to see what CARING is all about. They want teacher-robots, but they want those teacher-robots to be willing to make HUGE sacrifices in the name of reaching kids. It doesn't add up.
Either teaching is the most important thing in the world and can be effectively done only by a select few, or your lesson plans should be detailed enough that anyone could come in off the street and teach your lesson. But you can't have it both ways. (I'm marinating on my own post about this.)
And, for the record, the mayor stole "the rapture" from me.