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.)

The World Cup and Education

I was listening to sports radio today when I heard a few callers demand that the head coach for USA soccer be fired. I thought, “why?” The United States is leagues away from even being a real contender in soccer on the world stage. It’s the 4th or 5th choice of most Americans when choosing a life-long team sport, and our best athletes don’t play soccer. The best athletes play soccer in Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Germany, and so on; however, our best athletes play football, basketball, hockey, and baseball.

Imagine if Bo Jackson, Herschel Walker, Michael Jordan, Cal Ripken, Jr., and others played soccer! If our best athletes of today played soccer, imagine the possibilities. How about Dwight Howard in the goal, or Kobe Bryant playing midfield, or Adrian Peterson as a striker. How would USA soccer change?

Ultimately, it comes down to this: is the coach going to be able to overcome the lack of having the top athletes in the country while others use only the best athletes?

When I thought this question in regards to soccer, I then thought about all of the comparisons made between the USA and other countries of the world. How about changing the question above to this: is the school system going to be able to overcome measuring all of the students in the country (not just the best) when other countries only measure their best students’ progress?

Years ago when I lived in Germany, students would take tests to determine which schools they would attend. Aptitude tests decided whether or not Gustav was going the university way or the trade school path. In Korea a buddy of mine detailed how he taught and a disciplinarian remained in the room at all times to assist, and that the schools there began to separate the kids from an early age into ability groups to decide their future schooling. In this way only the top students are assessed in the comparative tests. I’m sure not all countries do it this way, but many do.

So, who are the coaches in education? Those in charge making the decisions or those in the classroom, the teachers? This is a critical question.

However, I get the sense that the rhetoric is challenging the teacher rather than those in charge. From President Obama to my state legislature, the verbage seems to center on more stringent requirements for licensing teachers, more comparisons based on test scores to award pay, more competition between classrooms for pay, more raised standards for continuing education courses, and so on. Is the teacher really the crux of education’s woes?

I can’t say I have a definite answer, but I don’t know very many teachers who don’t give their all to their students. From where is this anti-teacher rhetoric stemming? Then, this rhetoric quickly turns into calls for competition in schools.

In fact, I’d say that the more competition brought into education, the more isolated classrooms and schools will become. If teachers and schools have to compete for pay, what happens to collaboration? Will you want to share your best lessons with your neighbor when it could cost you financially? Will schools share their best programs with neighboring schools? Will we begin to create schools of haves and have-nots?

The one thing I do know is that firing the coach may not change Team USA’s outcomes in soccer, and making it more difficult to hire and keep teachers is not necessarily going to improve student scores either.