School politics

There are a couple of political issues at school right now of concern to me, and probably of little concern with most of you readers. But oh well.

The first is the concept of minimum grades. Invariably, I'll have a kid who just does nothing, or skips all the time, or didn't do summer reading and lets it snowball, or something like that. They'll earn a low grade, sometimes a very low grade. Right now in my classes, you'll see a number of grades that are extremely low - a 9% in one class from a girl who has done no homework and has missed half the time, a 24% from a kid who does almost nothing, a 17% from a boy who comes an hour late to first period everyday.

I'm sort of used to this. I do what I can. But with a load of 170, I can't do much if a kid isn't there or never does anything and the student and his/her parents do nothing about it.

Now, I would not actually report the grade as such. I've only seen these kids about twenty class periods so far. By the end of the year, I'll have seen them ninety class periods. Since this quarter grade will end up being worth 20% of their overall year grade {we're on a 20(Q1)-20(Q2)-10(midterm)-20(Q3)-20(Q4)-10(final) system}, I feel I have to give them something they can come back from. I don't want kids giving up in November and not being able to pass English. I usually have decided that this minimum grade is a 45 for the first quarter. A kid who cares and changes his ways can get straight 75's or so from that and still pass with a 70. As far as I'm concerned, this worked fine.

A couple of weeks ago, the Principal told us that the district wanted to impose 60 as the minimum grade. Teachers don't like being told what to do with their instruction, especially when it seems to be being done with lowered expectations for students and political reasons in mind. Sixty percent of the faculty signed a petition against it, and forwarded it to a bunch of higher-ups.

Basically, the argument most gave is that a kid who never, ever comes does not deserve a 60 in the class, especially when another kid in the class could work hard and get, say, a 62. It's not right. Plus, it encourages a brainy kid who does well in the first three quarters and feels not doing anything in the fourth quarter to completely blow it off if they feel like it.

So, today we took a vote in the faculty meeting of what we wanted the minimum grade to be. I was excited about the vote and thought a lot about what I would put. Some argued that there shouldn't be a minimum vote, while others argued that there should be different ones for different quarters. However, none of this thought was put into our ballot. We were given three options - 55, 60, and 65. In other words, the lowest "minimum" the ballot offered was five points lower than the minimum grade than the district offered. It's absolutely ridiculous.

I'm also pissed because they acted like it was the teachers' choice. Oh, we'll listen to the faculty. In the years to come, they'll say that this policy was adopted by the teachers. But it was all a farce! This is a lowering of expectations and a slippery slope into laxation. It sucks.

I'm trying to figure out how to approach this. At first glance, it looks like the administration simply wanted the 55 and acted like they were giving teachers a choice so they could say we "approved" it. I want to put something on the record that clearly states that we did not approve it, that it was not an authentic vote. But I have no idea how in the hell to do that. I could run something off and throw it in all my colleagues' mailboxes, but I don't really know if that will mean anything at all.

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The other big issue right now is dealing with something called milestones. Basically, a milestone is a test that assesses whether kids are learning what they should be learning. A few years ago, aware that we would probably be pressured to do this later and it would be better if we empowered ourselves, we developed our own milestones for different courses and months in the school year. I'm not crazy about them, but we developed them ourselves and it has led to some fruitful discussions about what we expect from students' writing. The milestone grading was always a grand activity done in teams - we would get together, figure out what is a good example of a certain score on the rubric, then score them, sharing results and calling on our colleagues to settle ones in between scores. It was actually pretty cool.

The district is now catching up to us. This is not a bad thing! We're happy about it. However, they gave us these milestones to do, and the turnaround time was very quick, and we weren't happy with how the 9th grade and 10th grade milestones were the same, and the rubric sucks. Plus, our teaching loads are enormous. I have 170 kids, all who took this thing. Science and Math don't have to do anything like this. Neither does the teacher who teaches juniors or seniors. It's just freshmen and sophomores. It sucks.

Plus, I just couldn't find a good day to do it. Taking 45 minutes out of a class period when time is precious is hard. But I worked it in. Then, though, we heard we weren't getting time during our professional day to score these. This flies in the face of what we have done before, and put more undue burden on us.

To sum up, we're happy that it's being done, but we're unhappy with the process, and unhappy with the unfair burden it's placed on us. And we're worried that every quarter, we're going to be asked to stop what we're doing and give a milestone and score it, something we've been doing all along on our own and something we're not being given any extra time to do - extra time that could easily be pulled out from one of the bullshit sessions I'm going to be attending on Friday about things like "Technology in the Classroom" (when the teachers, let alone the classrooms, have no computers).

So we're thinking about protesting it and not doing it. In fact, we've written a long petition explaining all the points. We're not sure if anything has come of it. We'll see if we're actually going to get any time on Friday or not. If we don't, we're going to just send them back to the people who made us give them, totally unscored.

I'm getting bold the deeper I get into my career.