Romanticizing The Data

Jejak PandaTerima Kasih Telah Kunjungin Web Kesayangan Anda
bandarq terpercayaA young woman came to talk with me today during my office hours. She’s a freshman who’s very interested in becoming a high school English teacher. She wanted to discuss everything about the profession, and was particularly interested in picking my brain about my own career trajectory.

One of the things she was most concerned about was that when she visited her old high school to talk to several of her former teachers about her intentions to become a teacher, many told her not to do it. They were very dissatisfied with their own jobs and were dismayed with the state and direction of public school education.

She wanted to know if it was worth going into education. I told her yes, but not without caveats.

One of the most difficult things to impress upon the undergraduates who are studying to become teachers is that the profession is not going to conform to their fantasies or meet their idealized expectations. Yet I don’t want to discourage them. One of the problems I see, however, is that most of the students grew up with a love of books and a fascination with words. They wrote elaborate stories as children and kept journals and wrote poetry as adolescents. They were good at English, were in honors classes, and got good grades.

What they don’t realize is that this will not be the case for most of their students. Furthermore, they are largely unaware of the mandates that will be imposed upon them--the required assessments, the data collection, and the documentation that expands each year and reaches into every crevice of the day-to-day functioning of the teachers and their students.

This is not what they signed up for when they applied to the school of education, and yet they will have to learn to negotiate these demands if they are to succeed and if they are to avoid burnout.

I was at a meeting tonight at seven in the evening. I’d already had a long day that began with a frustrating 504 and PPT meeting for my son, followed by several hours of meetings with advisees and current students to discuss scheduling for the spring (already!) and to hold paper conferences. Then teaching till 5.

So I was sitting in this meeting planning a series of professional development workshops for the English, Language Arts, Social Studies, and Special Education teachers for a middle school on the shoreline. We were discussing CMT tests, disaggregation of data from content stands, Common Core Standards, changes to be made to CAPT that will significantly affect this year’s current eighth graders, and Common Formative Assessments, to name a few of the areas relevant to the workshops we’d be running for this district.

We paused for a bit toward the end of the meeting, and I thought of a former colleague I had as a high school teacher who used to say the funniest things in faculty meetings. He wasn’t an especially good teacher but his observations always cut through the BS and made us laugh ruefully at the morass of bureaucracy we all felt trapped in at times.

One day we were discussing CAPT and the implementation of monthly CAPT practice tests in grades 9 though 11, and how these were going to affect the greater curriculum, and how they should be scored, and how they would be incorporated into the quarterly grades, and how they should be standardized, and how this standardization should be accommodated according to tracks. You get the idea. In the midst of all this, my colleague speaks up during a pause and says, “Let me get this straight. I still require the kids to read books and write papers, right? ‘Cause I just want to be clear on the concept of what I’m supposed to be doing here.”

Another time we spent an entire faculty meeting discussing changes made to the attendance policy, and how these changes would affect all sorts of things. And my colleague speaks up and asks, “So I just want to make sure I’m clear on the policy here. If a kid is not in my class, I mark him absent, and if he is I mark him in attendance, right? Again, I just want to be clear on things.”

It made me think of my advisees and their love of language, and the very poised young woman who came to me today wanting to know if it was worth going into the profession, and I felt a pang of regret as I recalled spending many days as an undergrad sitting under a tree just reading a book. I never foresaw all this bureaucracy and data collection, either, and sometimes I long for my romanticized ideas that I seem to have outgrown so long ago.