NEA-RA Update

Basically all that has happened is a single state caucus and a speech by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, which I will comment on later. I need to review my notes and organize my thoughts, but right now I’m bushed and am going to sleep.

NEA-RA

Well, I fly out at 6 am for the NEA Representative Assembly. I’ll post my thoughts on the national union assembly as things happen or in the evenings. Is anyone else going to be there?

San Diego is such a beautiful city and area. I heard the temperature will be mid-60s for the lows and high 70s for the highs. Sweet!

Thank Goodness

The courts got the decision right regarding strip searches: read about it here and here and here and here and here.

Summer Planning

My wife is out of town for a few days, so I’ve decided this will be a big part of my summer planning. My idea for this next year is to teach a different writing skill (sentence structures, thesis creation, editing, etc.) or grammatical skill each week. While we focus on each skill each week, I’ll introduce the skill on Monday, which is our vocabulary day, and reinforce that skill at least three other days that week.

Thus, my few days as a bachelor this week will be spent deciding which skills the students need to learn or relearn. Exciting stuff, eh?

Tiger Woods and the State Test

You know, I tire of the commentators’ beef with Tiger Woods not winning every tournament he enters. Sometimes people just have a bad day or a bad few days. I think about this with a few of the students I would expect to easily pass the state test, and then they just have a bad day. It happens.

Tiger Woods just barely missing a few putts at the U.S. Open is like the kid who misses a couple points here and there and those putts and points add up. Bad days occur; they just do.

Of course, at the other end of the spectrum we have David Duvall who made more money in the U.S. Open this weekend than he has the last four years on the PGA Tour. I’ve had kids who haven’t passed a thing all year and then pass the state test. Sometimes good days happen, too.

The first baseball game in high school I ever played I had three doubles and a walk. Then I went 0 for everything the next two weeks. That’s how I got my nickname “O-fer” because each day my box score read “0 for 3″ or “0 for 4″ and so on. This is also how I became a pitcher instead of a fielder and hitter. But again, good days happen.

My point with this, which I have very slowly lead this post to, really is that I feel for the kids who barely miss a passing score on the state test and those who should’ve passed it and didn’t. My school–with no consideration of just a bad test day–forces students to take a reading and writing class for students who failed the state test (if those sections were not passed) or a remedial math class (if that section was failed). No questions. No exceptions. That’s it.

I guess I don’t like high stakes testing in the first place, but I also don’t like the idea that some kids are pigeon-holed based on a single measure. Maybe I’m just a case by case kinda guy.

Oh, and I bet you that Tiger comes storming back to win a few titles very soon. (He almost came back this weekend despite such a bad start to his tournament.)