The Heart for Teaching.

This Thursday I wrapped up my time tutoring with the 4th graders I had been working with, and I did not expect my last day with them to go quite the way it did. I let them know at the beginning of the session that this would be the last day I had with them because I play softball and my season is starting up. With this knowledge I expected them to be somewhat unaffected, and more willing to be good and get the work done. I was wrong on both accounts.

When I told them I wouldn't be back anymore, I received a lot of this:
"I'm not coming to tutoring anymore if you're not gonna be here."
"I don't even wanna be here anymore, I hate tutors. You're the only nice one."
"I can't stand subs, I'm not gonna keep coming if there's gonna be a sub. I only like you."
"Why do you have to play softball? I don't want anyone else to teach us."
"If our new tutor is gonna be a man I'm not coming because I don't like them."
...and so on.

At first these statements were a little bittersweet, making me happy to know that they enjoyed their time with me and considered me one of the "nice" tutors, but sad to know I would be leaving them. However, once I began to really think about what they were saying, the happiness faded. Here these kids are at 9 and 10 years old, talking about how much they can't stand other tutors. Mind you almost all of the students in the tutoring program I work for have been in tutoring programs similar to this before. These types of tutoring sessions are old hat to them. They've had different types of tutors, and from what I can tell they were not exactly fond of them. This problem right here is one I believe lies at the core of all problems in our school systems today.

There is a saying that goes "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." This is so true, especially in terms of children. If kids do not think you have an interest in them, or if they simply don't like you, they do not care what you have to say. It is imperative that teachers and tutors build a relationship where students can feel comfortable and learning can thus be maximized. However, I feel that most teachers are too busy trying to do the teaching aspect of their job without working on the relational aspect that comes with it. If more people took an interest in these students, I can guarantee that some of these kids would not need to be in tutoring year after year after year. Kids don't need a teacher or tutor who lectures at them all day long. That is not how kids learn. Kids need a teacher or tutor who works at getting to know their students and incorporating their interests into the work.

Teaching these days goes a lot more like this:

Instead of teachers focusing on the interests of their students and getting to know them better, they just move right along with what they decide should be taught, regardless of whether students are actually learning the material or not.

The last 10 minutes of the tutoring session, my students went up to the chalkboard to draw me pictures and to write messages about how much they will miss me. They also requested a group picture so I would remember them. If there was ever any inkling of a doubt in my mind that I shouldn't be a teacher, that day completely erased it. Right then and there I thought "I am absolutely in the right career field."

Those students may not remember a single thing that I taught them (although I really, really, hope they do), but they will remember me and the way I treated them. I had to come down hard on them sometimes, but I didn't treat them like they were 5. I took their interests into consideration, I gave them opportunities to compete and win prizes, and I even let them tell jokes. I made an impact on them, and one that I hope will resonate positively with them and the subject of English for a long time. More teachers and tutors should consider working just as hard, if not harder, on building relationships as they do on building knowledge. I guarantee they would see a difference in their students.

To Teach This Topic or Not to Teach This Topic, That Is Not the Question

It may seem like I keep complaining about the same old thing, but I am not alone in my belief that there is much to complain about in this standardized test driven era of schooling. The Ohio Achievement Test is rapidly approaching in April, and as both a tutor for the OAT's and an observer of a middle school class that is preparing for them, this is the first time I've gotten to experience standardized tests from the perspective of a teacher. Teachers hate standardized test just as much, if not more, than students. They not only dictate the curriculum, they also dictate WHEN certain standards should be taught.

This probably comes as a surprise to many people. I for one was under the assumption that it didn't matter when you taught each standard, so long as it was taught according to the grade-level indicators. Is it really necessary to regulate when standards are taught within each grade? Apparently so.

A few weeks ago when I was observing in my 7th grade classroom, my collaborating teacher mentioned a countdown to the OAT's (I think 60 days, but I could be remembering incorrectly). Initially, I thought it was just a friendly reminder or an attempt at motivating students to do the work. However, after class she told me that once the countdown begins, there are very specific standards and topics she has to focus on each day. In a way, I see this as almost demeaning to teachers. Teachers are already given strict standards to teach to all throughout the year, yet once OAT's start to close in, teachers are not even given the freedom to decide what they will teach and when. Are teachers not competent enough to assess where their students are, what they need to work on, and what should be taught first, second, or third? It sure doesn't seem like it, at least not to me.

I need to make it known that I am not opposed to standards. In and of themselves, standards are not a bad thing. Experts have done the hard work of figuring out what students need to know throughout their 13 years of schooling and when, which is certainly helpful. But what I am opposed to is the standards completely ruling the curriculum and teachers not being given the freedom to do what they do best: just teach. Teaching for the enjoyment and for the students, not for a test.

Student Learning Plans: Helpful or Frustrating?

In my last post, I talked about how standardized tests are inefficient because a student scoring badly on a standardized test is not necessarily indicative of a lack of knowledge. This has been proven to me in my own personal experiences both with taking standardized tests and with prepping students to take them.

The 4^th graders I tutor in English for their Ohio Achievement Tests (OAT’s) each have their own Student Learning Plans that tell me what they did not score well on during practice tests and thus need to review and build skills upon.  I thought the learning plans would be extremely helpful in directing me to the needs of each student. However, what I soon found was that every single student had the same student learning plan. Each plan has the students name on it, their grade level, and their parent signature showing that they have reviewed the plan and agree to the tutoring program. But how is it possible that every single student has the same weaknesses? I tutor 5 students, all 5 coming from different elementary schools, so surely it can’t be a specific teacher or school at fault for this. If it is merely a coincidence, it is the biggest one I have ever seen. This aspect of the learning plans is less alarming to me than when I actually began to put them into action, though.

One of the first things my student learning plans told me was that my students needed to work on homonyms, homographs, and homophones. This was not surprising to me, considering I am a junior in college and know quite a few peers who could use a refresher course in these themselves.  However, when I began a lesson on them, my students had no problem identifying the correct usage of the words I gave them. They were given a list of 40 words sharing the same spelling and pronunciation, and they only incorrectly used 5 of them. Which lead me to wonder…

Did the practice OAT just happen to ask them to use the 5 sets of words they didn’t know?

Did my students not understand the question?

Did they run out of time and not make it to those questions?

Were they simply not trying on the practice OAT?

I find the first possibility to be highly unlikely, but the last 3 are each probable. If my students didn’t understand the question, how can I ensure that won’t happen again? And if they had trouble understanding that question, there are potentially quite a few more they had trouble comprehending. If they just ran out of time and weren’t able to make it to those questions, there isn’t much I can do at all to help them but remind them to answer the easier questions first and save the hard questions for last. For those students that just decided not to try their hardest on the test, it would be hard to pour on the importance of the test any thicker than I already have. What is scary to me is that these situations are out of my control. If students simply did not know the material, that I could work on. But if students are more than competent when I have them do the work then score badly on tests, what can I do to make them better at taking standardized tests?

If anyone has an answer to that, I would be forever indebted to you.

Why Standardized Tests Are NOT Working

Since the creation of the No Child Left Behind Act, teachers nation-wide have been pigeon holed into a strict curriculum dictated by the state. This leaves little room for teachers to teach things that are important but not necessarily tested. Teachers who believe standardized tests are adequate assessments for their students are few and far between, and there are numerous reasons why teachers feel this way. One of the most prominent reasons that standardized tests aren't working? It's the tale of at-risk students versus everyone else.

Standardized tests have specific standards and objectives expected to be achieved by every single student in a particular state at each grade level. Here's where the problem comes in: at-risk students are at a great disadvantage. Students attending well-funded schools from middle to high class families score well on the tests; students attending low-income, ill-equipped schools from low class or even homeless families do not score well on the tests. It's as simple and as difficult as that. Yet these students, with very different backgrounds and learning abilities, are being expected to learn the exact same things. Most of the at-risk students do not even have the basic skills needed of them at each grade level, and they certainly have not mastered them. But the state does not take this into consideration. Instead, at-risk students are expected to score just as well as other students in much better conditions...which they don't. They don't do well on their tests, their schools lose funding, their teachers get in trouble, and eventually their schools get closed down. This is happening all over the nation. Instead of schools who need state funding the most to improve their conditions, they are losing money due to their students inability to do well on state-mandated tests. Right here in Ohio, nearly 50 percent of students from families with incomes below $20,000 failed standardized tests. Compare that to 80 percent of students with family incomes of over $30,000 who passed the tests. It doesn't take a genius to notice these patterns.

Higher test scores do not mean more learning. In fact, it actually means quite the opposite. Teachers spend all of their time prepping their students for what they are told will be on the tests. Students may be experts on 2 and 4 point written responses, how to interpret a graph to answer multiple choice questions, or how to complete 60 math questions in 60 minutes, but they know almost nothing about music, art, foreign languages, or black history. And just because a student doesn't score particularly well on a standardized test doesn't mean he or she doesn't know the material. I for one can vouch for that. Give me a standardized test full of multiple choice questions and I will get a measly score, but have me write an essay on the same topic and I would score off the charts. It's all about how students learn. Different students learn differently, but there is no room for that in standardized tests.

Standardized testing has been a debate for a long time and will continue to be as long as tests such as the Ohio Achievement Test and Ohio Graduation Test dictate the curriculum and school systems. Every form of assessment has its flaws, but when standardized tests are so blatantly hurting specific students and their schools, it is time to take a step back and figure out what to do differently so every student can succeed and so truly no child is left behind.

Homework: A Controversy

Since the beginning of time (or at least since the beginning of schooling), most students have despised homework. I would be willing to bet that even those that don't necessarily mind homework wouldn't be too saddened if they were told they never had to do it again. That's basically what has happened in the school district I am working with.

Being an urban, low-income district, graduation rates are not as high as other districts, so a main concern of theirs is to improve graduation rates. The thought is there, and I understand they are trying, but it is hard for me to agree with one of the ways they decided to go about improving graduation rates: by eliminating homework.

To administrators this seems logical. To teachers this seems absurd. To students this seems too good to be true. But it is true, to the dismay of many teachers in this district. The no homework decision is new, this school year being the first time it is in effect. The reasoning behind this decision is that many students who were failing were simply falling behind because they either weren't doing their homework or weren't turning it in. This didn't seem fair, administrators determined, that students who were attending class regularly and were doing the in-class assignments but not doing the work required outside of class were failing and thus not graduating. I can see where they are coming from on this. But getting rid of homework all together does not fix the problem.

Teachers can still assign work outside of class, but it cannot be counted as a grade. B.F Skinner theorized long ago that (many) people are motivated by positive reinforcement. This can be getting verbal praise, gaining a sense of satisfaction or accomplishment in one's work, or earning good grades. Of course this is just a theory, but think of any assignment you've ever had--if you weren't going to get a grade for it, would you see much point in doing it? Students aren't receiving grades, so there is no positive reinforcement for doing the work, and since teachers aren't allowed to require homework, there is no negative reinforcement for not doing it. Now teachers are still struggling with students not doing work outside of the classroom, so they are having to devote time in class to work that should be completed at home. This makes it very hard to fit in all of the things that need to be taught, especially with standardized testing rapidly approaching in March.

A simpler solution, it seems, would have been to adjust the grading percentages so homework did not count for as much of the students grade. Those who tended to not turn in their work would still get a lower grade in the homework category, but not one that would cause them to fail. Instead, administrators opted to controversially eliminate homework, a decision that has become a burden to teachers who are already limited to a strict curriculum and tight schedule. Administrators are not dumb, and they do a lot of things that help schools to run effectively and efficiently, but I have a hard time believing that getting rid of homework is helping this district to be either of those things.

A Lost Art.

Most of the problems I have with the school system these days stems from the strict curriculum teachers are forced to follow for the various standardized tests students must take throughout their years. It isn’t that I have a problem with the idea of a curriculum. It does make it easier having a specific set of standards to follow so you know what to teach your students and are aware of what they should know both by the time they come into your classroom and by the time the school year concludes. However, having to stick so closely to the standards provides little room for teachers to focus on other topics that are important, but not regarded as such because they do not fall under the core four subjects that are tested: reading, math, history, and science. A major topic that is vital to learning but being taught less and less in schools is writing.

That may come as a surprise to some people, because writing seems so closely related to reading (which is tested). But writing itself is not tested, and thus is often not taught. Writing is a subject that is imperative across all subject areas, but teachers either cannot make it fit into their lessons, or choose to not fit it in because it is not needed according to the creators of the oh so wonderful state tests.

Being an English major and future English teacher does make me a little biased, but I cannot fathom how anyone could see writing as not important. Writing builds comprehension skills in all subject areas. If a student can put what they have learned into their own words, that shows they are grasping the content. That goes for writing about the theme of a story, stating the importance of the Industrial Revolution, creating a hypothesis, or explaining how they know triangle A has an obtuse angle. Writing is also a way for students to express themselves, both academically and emotionally, when they may be too shy to speak out loud or to someone. Yet more and more students are writing less and less.

I am doing field experience in a 7^th grade classroom, and the teacher I am working with let me take home student writing from two class periods so I could read their responses to a book of their choice that they have been reading, and to get a feel for what the student are like. Some writing was good. Very good. But most writing was heartbreakingly bad. Their poor punctuation and grammar was what I was least worried about. I was just interested in their reactions to what they had been reading. Sadly, these students cannot express themselves through the written word. They mostly just summarized what they read…kind of. Granted some of the students tried really hard to express themselves, but overall the skills were just not there. I imagine it is just as frustrating for the students as it is for the teacher. But how can they build their skills if most teachers they have do not require them to work on their writing? It’s simple: they can’t.

In districts, like the one I am working in, where writing is not emphasized, I am not at all surprised that many students are not meeting state standards in reading, science, math, or history at any level.