Tag: teaching

This is Only a Test

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Everything is a test.

No, seriously.  There are no exceptions.  If you’re not testing yourself, you’re being tested by your peers, and if you’re not being tested by your peers, then you’re being tested by your kid, and if you’re not being tested by your kid, then you’re being tested by THE UNIVERSE.  But here, today, specifically, I’m talking about academic testing, and to be ultra-specific, I’m talking about academic testing in public schools.

America has lost its mind over testing.  The education system is so twisted up in knots over the issue, it’s like a drunken octopus having a bar brawl with another octopus, except that the other octopus is just the first octopus’s own back arms.  There’s no way to tell if he’s winning or losing, it’s just flailing and drowning and sucker-arms and ink.  Is that squids?  That’s squids.  Okay, it’s like a squid…

With one hand, they (politicians and boards of education) tell us (actual educators) that it’s not supposed to be all about the test.  That the test is secondary, that there are other, better ways to assess what students have actually learned.  (What are those ways?  Hem, haw, well, that’s, you know, we don’t know.  Performance assessment?  You can grade those fairly, right?  RIGHT?)  With the other, they shut down schools for weeks at a time to do what?  Oh yeah, assess student learning in the only way that really makes sense, the only way you can really measure it.  TEST.

But we’re not supposed to teach to the test.  No, no.  Teaching to the test is teaching in a vacuum.  Bad, bad.  Connect what you’re teaching to the real world.  But is that on the test?  NOPE.  Because you can’t test that.  Not efficiently.  So we go around in circles not unlike a tremendous deuce circling the drain.  Teach this, not this.  Here’s the test, but ignore it.  Whatever.  I don’t have the answers to the problems of this testing issue, and I won’t pretend to.  What I will do is share with you some testing-related absurdities.

It’s no wonder students freak the fargo out when it’s time to test.  It’s not uncommon for schools to have counselors on standby in case some kid has a total nervous breakdown.  Like just shutting down and refusing to pick up a pencil.  Or throwing a desk.  Or staging a potato salad riot in the cafeteria.  That didn’t happen?  Okay, but the first thing definitely happens.

Other things happen, too.  Here are a few things which have happened in my school over the past week of End of Course Testing.  All of these things require a full written account by the testing administrator to justify after-the-fact corrections to an answer sheet and, in some cases, a rescheduled testing session for the student in question.

1.  A student nearly came to blows with a teacher trying to confiscate his phone in accordance with testing rules.  The student would later claim he “didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to have it” despite signs on every door in the building, a verbal admonition at the beginning of every testing session, a warning on the morning announcements, and general goldfingered common sense.

2.  Numerous students (like, too many to count) misspelled the name of the school.  And, I’m sorry, our school does not have a funky name.

3.  A student misspelled his own name.  I am not making this up.  (By the way, is it bad that as an English teacher I had to look up how to spell “misspell”?  I think that’s bad.  It’s also ironic.)

4.  A student fell asleep and drooled all over his answer sheet.  (This, apparently, happens all the time.)

5.  A teacher fell asleep and was therefore unable to call time at the end of the session, thus negating an entire classroom’s testing session.  (Okay, that wasn’t my school, but holy sharknado.)

*Heavy exhale*  It’s not my goal to be a dumper.  I really try to find positives and find productive ways forward, but this whole squid-octopus bar-brawl clusterfargo over testing is so asgard-end-up that it’s impossible for a guy like me to see any kind of light at the end of any sort of tunnel.  We are deep underground, running out of air, and at times it feels like it’s time to call off the search.  Don’t even get me started on a Common Core debate.

Aaand this is the part where I realize I’ve lost what little audience I have.  Too many education-related posts on my non-education-themed blarg and I’ve burned the souffle.  Or the souffle went rogue and attacked the chef with a blowtorch.  Don’t fargo with souffles.

FINAL THOUGHT: Testing is like a butthole.  It stinks.

No, that’s it.  You were expecting something more eloquent?

Don’t worry, next post won’t be about work stuff.  It’ll be about… I dunno.  Space unicorns.

15 Tips for Writing an Actual Graduation Speech that Actually Doesn’t Suck

Pavowski1 Comment

Remember you're unique, just like everybody else.
Remember you’re unique, just like everybody else.

In a surprising twist yesterday, the little blarg here got a handful of hits from, presumably, high school students looking for ways to write a graduation speech.  Oh, dear.  They stumbled into my lair, hoping for advice, only to find me talking all about ME.  I cackled.  I chortled.  I guffawed.  But then I thought.  Wait a minute.  I’m a teacher.  There are students out there looking for help.  My tiny little minuscule platform, for better or worse, was a source they came to in search of that help.  Am I not obligated, then, to provide some measure of that help?

I thought some more.  Obligated?  Perhaps not.  But it could be fun, and it might even help some of them (henceforth, some of YOU) out.  MAYBE I could actually provide a service.

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How About a Graduation Speech that Doesn’t Suck?

Pavowski5 Comments

One of my students came to me for help writing a speech today.  She’s in the running to be one of the speakers at graduation and wanted my help in ironing out some of the details.

She’d written … not a bad speech, but a boring one.  It bespoke the regular regurgitated platitudes of high school: these are the first days of the rest of our life, the things which seem so important now are really very small in the scheme of things, limitless potential, blah blah blah.  Nothing wrong with it, but nothing particularly right, either.  I asked her what her goal was in this speech:  why did she want to give it, rather than let one of her classmates give it?  Why did she feel it was a speech worth giving?

She responded by saying that she wanted to write something people would enjoy.  HMM WHERE HAVE I HEARD THAT, OH WAIT, THAT’S MY GOAL.  She said that she wanted to write something that her classmates could relate to. YEP THAT’S ME TOO.  It didn’t occur to me at the time but in retrospect, by which I mean a few minutes after she left the classroom, it struck me that her fears are the same as my own.  She wanted to write a speech with broad-based appeal, and it was falling flat.  She wanted to be inclusive to everybody, and ended up sounding placating and boring.  She wanted a speech that would be memorable, but had written something utterly forgettable.

Where had she gone wrong?  I dutifully examined the speech with her, taking it line by line and thinking of ways to strengthen this sentence, simplify that idea, and all that stuff.  But the underlying problem, the one that I couldn’t point to and say, “here’s where you screwed up,” was the absence of heart.  She was so focused on getting her audience to connect with the speech that she had forgotten to write something she could connect with.  As a result, and not surprisingly in the least, her words were bland, disjointed, and uninteresting.

What to do?  When words give you trouble, you bust out the WordHammer. Go for the jugular.  Write what’s real and immediate and bloody and visceral.  Throw judgment out the window, kick doubt right in its asgard, and write some TRUTH.

The theme of the speech is time?  I shared with her a paradox which baffles me every day.  The days are so long, but the years are so short.  Every day it feels like there are so many hours to fill.  There’s time to go for a run.  There’s time to go to work.  There’s time to do a bit of writing.  Cook dinner.  Play with my kid.  Relax with my wife.  Watch some TV.  Read a few chapters.  Do some laundry.  So much time.  And yet, it feels like my high school’s 10-year reunion (such as it was) was just a few short weeks ago.  (Spoiler alert, it was five years ago.)  For that matter, it feels like I was in high school just a few years ago.  (Spoiler alert, it was MORE THAN five years ago.)  My son is two, running circles around me in the yard and counting to ten and happily calling out the color of every object in the house, but it feels like just last month he was a newborn, red-faced and squalling and unable to even roll over on his back without help.  I told her those things and reminded her that the days are long but the years are short, then I asked her why she suddenly seemed enraptured.

“I just hadn’t considered your life before.”

It’s indicative of the human condition, I think, that we turn inward.  That we focus on the immediate, that we focus on ourselves.  But it’s that very tendency that limits us as storytellers.  It’s a bizarre paradox.  To tell the best story to the widest audience, we have to make it accessible and real.  But to make it accessible and real, we have to forget about appealing to the audience and share the gooey, tasty bits of ourselves that we never think to tell about.  Try too hard to appeal and the story sounds forced, awkward, and hollow; tell a personal and nuanced tale and suddenly readers you don’t even know can relate.

You know that old adage about the student becoming the teacher?  The other half of the equation is that the teacher sometimes becomes the student.

Things I learned:

1.  Know what you want to say.  My student was so preoccupied with giving a good speech that she hadn’t bothered to determine whether she was delivering a message worth sharing.  The message matters.  In a lot of ways, it’s all that matters.

2.  Focus on the story before you focus on the audience.  The story has to come first.  After you know the story, then you can fine-tune the words and the metaphors and the way you tell it to your specific audience.  But if the story sucks, no amount of turd-polishing or clever wordplay will make it not suck.

So she left feeling better about her speech (I think) and I got back to work on my story with perhaps a bit more clarity and confidence.  Twelve hundred words today, and I think they tell a pretty good story.

By the way, I’m not sure if it’s a bastardization of a better known aphorism or what, but I first heard “the days are so long, but the years are so short” a few years back from my dad, and it proves more and more true every long day and short year.  Thanks, dad, for helping me to see something I hadn’t before.  (ALSO, SEE, I DO LISTEN.)

I wish I had had a teacher like me in High School, I’d have thought I was hilarious

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It’s the end of the year for teachers and students.  Inevitably, irrevocably, ineluctably (whatever that means, I just wanted another “i” word [okay I just looked it up; basically it means the same as inevitable, GOD English is a silly and redundant language, I feel silly and cheated but also my vocabulary has increased by 1 so yay]), things are spinning down and wrapping up.

We’re all tired, kids and adults alike.  Summertime ennui is creeping in at the edges of our vision and it’s becoming plain that, soon, there will be nothing to fill our long days but the sound of our own thoughts and the hum of crickets in the night.  And the screaming of children.  Don’t forget the screaming of children.  (That’s mostly for the adults.)

It’s creeping in at work, too.  Things are so nearly finished that it’s hard to put the same zeal into creating assignments and leading lectures and discussions.  That’s the challenge, of course, and the job, no doubt, but some days it’s easier than others.

In creating the last project grade for the year, (I wanted to make it easy in the interest of giving my students an opportunity to improve their grades before the final, but I also want them to know that I KNOW it’s easy and that they should feel silly if they don’t do it) I found traces of my Pavorisms voice creeping in.  I felt it, and I went with it.  Then I went back and rejiggered the whole assignment so that it would have a bit more flair.  It just felt right.  And it feels like it belongs here.  In fact, I think I may start presenting all of my assignments this way.  (In this voice, I mean.  Not here at the blarg.  I’d like to keep my handful of readers.)

So here it is, copy-and-pasted for your pleasure.  The better bits are toward the end.  Enjoy, and if you have any questions, see me after class.  I’ll be in the parking lot, headed for a barbecue.

For the record, I teach Seniors.  And yes, I’m giving them this assignment, pretty much as you see it here.

 

 

End of the Year Macbeth Project

  • Yep, there’s a project.  Yep, it’s a bit involved.  But don’t worry, IT’S EASY.  As long as you’re not a slacker.  This project is presented as a dialogue between you (in italics) and me (in the bullet points).  This line is me speaking.  The next line is you.

Why would you give us a project NOW?  You stink, Mr. P.

  • I know.  But one day you’ll appreciate the fact that I made you think about this story, and that I didn’t let you take the easy way out, and that I reached into your brain and pulled from its squishy depths the kind of thinking that…

All right, all right.  FINE.  What do we have to do?

  • Select and Illuminate 4 key moments from the text.
  • Explain in a paragraph of 5 sentences or more how each of your illuminations exemplifies both the plot (what’s happened) and the mood/theme of the text (the feeling).  (That means 4 paragraphs, y’all.  One for each illumination.)
  • Why explain?  Just because YOU think it’s obvious DOESN’T MEAN it’s obvious to EVERYBODY.  And don’t say “I drew him like this because he’s crazy.”  You can do better.

What do you mean “Illuminate”?

  • It means you’re going to create something that sheds light on the text (the story, the characters, etc.).

Okay, so what should each illumination look like?

  • I’m glad you asked!  Each illumination should have its own page (or slide, or square, or whatever) in a clear Moment -> Illumination -> Explanation format.  Say you do some art!
  • —  Moment: Act 2, Scene 1: Macbeth sees the ghostly dagger.
  • —  Insert your own Illustration!
  • —  Explanation: We drew Macbeth mostly in shadow because his thoughts are turning dark in this moment.  The hallway is bare and foreboding, symbolizing his decent into evil… (extrapolate to your heart’s content, but make sure your heart’s content is five sentences at minimum.)

How can we present our ideas?? We are delicate snowflakes, each unique and wonderful!

  • —  Yes, and you are all delightful.  Be creative.  Here are some ideas:
  • —  Soundtrack (choose songs to suit your moments)
  • —  Storyboard / Illustrations (illustrate a scene or key moment)
  • —  Original raps / poems (write something that sums up the moment or one character’s take on it)
  • —  Maps of key locations (use details from the text)
  • —  Character Biographies (again, be specific and text-based)
  • —  Artifacts (for example, the dagger they use to kill the king – just make them school safe)
  • —  Family crests (what images would symbolize the characters?)
  • —  See me if you have another idea – I will probably say it’s okay!
  • —  UNLESS YOU ASK IF YOU CAN USE IMAGES FROM THE INTERNET.  NO INTERNET IMAGE COLLAGES – THAT’S LAZY

But how will we be graded?

  • —  An EXCELLENT project (A-B) will show lots of detail, color, neatness, and evidence of thought, because you care about your work.  It might even be typed, or even (be still, my heart) run through a spell-checker.  Your explanation will be grounded in the text with CITATIONS (the knife is covered in blood because in II, i, 46 Macbeth says “on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood”).
  • —  A PASSABLE project (B-C) will show some detail and evidence of thought.  It will be reasonably neat because you worked reasonably studiously on it.  Explanations will be grounded in the text, but you will forget to cite your specific textual connection, because, really, who wants an “A” anyway?
  • —  A CRAPPY project (read: failing) will show little detail or evidence of thought.  It looks rushed and messy because you put off working on it and then rushed to finish it at the last minute.  It will not bear much connection to the text because there is not time to do your work properly when you rush it.  You will turn in a crappy project because you are either passing so strongly that one bad grade won’t hurt you, or you’ve been failing since September and you just don’t care.
  • —  By the way, don’t turn in a crappy project.

Why should we bother?  I mean, the year is basically over, right?

  • —  Well, who knows?  MAYBE this assignment will be worth so many points, Mr. P feels ashamed even talking about it.
  • —  MAYBE it will give you the chance to eke out a few more points before the final coming up soon (Oh, by the way, your final is worth 20% of your overall grade, can your grade survive that?  NO?  Then think of this assignment as a few extra pillows at the bottom of the Grand Canyon you’re jumping into.)
  • —  MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, if your project is extra-awesome, you can earn some extra credit points.  MAYBE.
  • —  I am obligated by my conscience to tell you that you can substitute the word “Definitely” for the word “Maybe” above.

Fine, we’ll do it.  But when is it due?

  • —  Even classes: May 6
  • —  Odd classes: May 7

Holy crap, that’s a lot of time!

  • —  Yes, it is, so you have no reason NOT to finish it and turn in something awesome!

Will you accept it late?

  • Yes.  BUT.  (There is always a but, just like there is always a butt.)  The closer to the end of the year you turn it in (the last day for grades being May 16th) the less likely I am to get around to grading it.  I can’t help it, I’m lazy.  Make my job easier if you don’t want to sweat it.  Get it done on time.

Do I have to do this alone?

  • —  Heck no; I don’t want to grade that many projects.
  • —  Grab three of your closest friends (well, don’t grab them, you know what I mean) and knock this thing out together.  Maybe you’ll learn something about each other as you work toward a common goal.  Maybe there will be a sappy soundtrack played in the background as you work.  Maybe you’ll have cake when you’re finished.  (Don’t bring cake to my classroom.)

But what if my friends are lazy?

  • —  BETTER YET, grab the smartest people who will work with you and make NEW FRIENDS.  Nobody smart will work with you?  WORK ALONE.  Better you do a decent project alone than a crappy project with the kids who will be here next year.

What should we do with the extra blank space on this paper?

  • I don’t know.  Smart money says use it to make some notes!  Or doodle a spaceship hauling a cow into deep space.  Or cover it entirely with penguin stickers.  The world is your oyster!

You’re weird, Mr. P.

  • Sorry, I didn’t hear you.  I was busy jumping in my spaceship so that I can haul this cow into deep space.  (I’m making Astro-Burgers.)

 

 

 

 

 

Yup, Summer’s here soon.

Questions Not To Ask Your Teacher: “Is My Grade Going Up?”

PavowskiLeave a comment

Another teacher post, here.  I try to keep them from coming too often because I know that I have readers of all walks and I don’t want to alienate by writing too much about any one thing.  That said, sometimes it just has to be done, and the first day back from spring break brought with it an incident that my inner Id-Writer won’t turn loose of until I purge it.

Kids are lazy.  I get it.  I see it in my own two-year-old, and he doesn’t even know how to be lazy.  I shouldn’t say lazy.  I should say they are efficiency seekers.  Nature abhors wasted energy.  A tree grows only as high as it must in order to harvest the sunlight it needs to reproduce.  A pride of lions hunts only when they are hungry, otherwise they are basically enormous housecats looking for a patch of sunlight or shade to lie in, depending on the season.  So, too, do humans, and by extension human children, have a biological imperative to get as much for as little as they can.  I understand this.    It makes perfect sense.  The problem is, we are no longer driven by survival.  A child does not risk starvation if it does not complete its homework.  It will not die of exposure if it does not get its room clean on time.

The energy that would once have been devoted to survival is now (in a perfect world) devoted to making a child the best future human it can be, and that means enriching the mind.  The yachts and mansions and shiny red convertibles don’t, as a rule, go to the dunces.  They go to the smartest and then to the bankers and then to the politicians (the rest of us are just BORROWING their money).  So while academic achievement doesn’t benefit a kid in the immediate, (working hard & getting good grades would be “wasted energy” in a survivalist sense) it benefits them in the long term.

This leads us to selective laziness.  A clever future human quickly does the math and realizes that there is a balance to be struck between doing the best that you can (applying all of your energy) and doing only what you need to do in order to survive.  Of course, the risk-assessment portions of our brains don’t fully form until we are, I dunno, thirty or so, so it’s even harder for a kid (and let me clarify that I’m talking about any kid in government-sanctioned school age, which is to say, any 5- to 18-year-old) to grasp that “doing your best” in school might be a wise course of action.  Mom and Dad can push you in that direction, of course, but you can only fight nature to a point, depending on how big your stick is (anybody else out there get punished for bad grades?  Yeah, you can spot us pretty easily, we’re the ones not dropping out of high school in droves).  Incidentally, this is why a student’s grade in a class is not a good indicator of their intelligence.  Any teacher will tell you that the smartest kids in the class are rarely the ones with the highest grades.  The smartest ones are usually the ones barely passing.  (NOTE THAT I DID NOT SAY ALL THE ONES BARELY PASSING ARE THE SMARTEST.  WE’LL GET TO THEM.)  They’ve figured out exactly how hard they need to work to pass (and by virtue of passing, get their parents off their backs, and by virtue of getting their parents off their backs, how to do what they want to do, which is be a teenager, sleep in, eat pop-tarts, and play Call of Duty).  Selective laziness allows them to do this. I have a host of students — very nearly half — in my English class whose grades have hovered within a handful of points of 75 for most of the year.  They could do better.  Easily.  But they don’t.  They haven’t made the connection.  One day they will.  Maybe there will be regret, and maybe not, but the best I can do is to try and help them to see this situation for what it is.  A waste of energy, and a waste of potential.

Whew.  This brings us to the fun part, which is pointing out how dumb some of my students are.  I shouldn’t say dumb.  I should say lazy.  And this time I mean lazy, which is to say, they don’t want to do ANYTHING they’re not interested in, whether they pass or not.  That’s not selective.  That’s just, well, a failure of evolution.

I’ve got a handful of kids who are not passing.  It’s unfortunate, but in the majority of their cases, it’s what needs to happen.  They haven’t yet learned what they need to (and I’m talking about the ability to read, analyze, and make sense of what they’re reading — you know, the things you, dear reader, can do without really pausing to think about it) and they need to go back and try it again.

It doesn’t stop them, bless their hearts, from trying, in whatever ways are available to them.  Of course, hand-in-hand with this extreme aversion to work is an aversion to common sense.  Which brings me, finally, to the comment that set in motion my ramble for today.

The child in question has been failing since about the second week of the year, which is to say, since the time I put in the first grades.  His grade has been no secret to anybody, least of all him, and he has, since the end of the year is suddenly upon us and he has realized that he will be a senior again next year, finally taken an interest.  We talked briefly prior to Spring Break about his grade and what he needed to do to have a chance at passing for the year.

So he comes to me today (first day back) and asks me, “Is my grade going up?”

I teach over 100 kids.  It’s virtually impossible for me to know offhand what an individual student’s grade is off the top of my head.  Thankfully, there are apps for that, and we have wonderful technology at our disposal to garner this information at a moment’s notice.  Which I do.  I start logging in to systems and pulling files.  Then it dawns on me.  He hasn’t turned in anything since we spoke.

This I tell him.  He nods and says, “yeah, I just wanted to see if my grade’s going up.”  I look at him oddly, in much the way I imagine God must have looked at Adam (if you believe in that sort of thing) when Adam told God that, yeah, he had actually had some of the fruit from that one tree God had specifically told him not to touch, you weren’t serious about that, right, God?  (Did I just analogize myself with God?  I think I did.)

I ask him how he expects his grade to have changed when he has not in fact done any work, and he just sort of looks at me like I’m speaking in Latin.  They do this a lot when I move my modifiers around or use big words like “appropriate requirements” or “requisite amount of work”, which I do for the purpose of seeing them look at me like I’m speaking in Latin.

I am torn between feeling badly for him and his parents and the teachers that will teach him again next year, and being abjectly horrified at the amount of taxpayer dollars and man-hours that have gone into this child’s education only to bounce aside, as impactful as spitballs to a Panzer.  Dribbles from a spigot in his ocean of academic indifference.

Sidenote: Thanks to this post, I’m going to be calling all my students “future humans” from now on.