“'Did you ever get fed up?' I said. 'I mean did you ever get scared that everything was going to go lousy unless you did something?'” or SOLUTIONS TO THE PROBLEMS

In my last entry, I posted my version of the 95 theses that have me fed up and ready to start a new movement, or, in my case, move to a new job, away from the deeply embedded institutional complacency.

But, one of my peccadilloes, which is as much my strength as my weakness, is my need to offer solutions to any problems I see. I admit I suffer the limitations of an English teacher’s perspective, and I have a touch of pie-in-the-sky syndrome, but somewhere in this list is a way to fix things--again, at least, as I see it:

a culture that allows middling teachers to present mind-numbing, misguided in-services designed to pander to the promoters of standardized tests and the bogus data these tests generate

SOLUTION 1:
Observe teachers, know their strengths and weaknesses or establish a team of teachers to do this, and “differentiate” "professional development" (usually a misnomer!) around more general departmental “directives.” 

If the directive is to examine data--departments and administrators should take a HARD look at what teachers are asking of their students to see whether expectations are clear, whether the assignments are appropriately stimulating, rigorous, and relevant to the course of study, whether the students skills meet the  requirements of the assignment, and whether the teaching aligns with these requirements.

a culture that uses “data” as if  that data were sacrosanct, objective, and instructive, when it is most often skewed and misleading

SOLUTION 2:  
The data needs to aims higher, so the teachers will aim higher. 

1. All teachers should have to turn in a legitimate syllabus that shows what they are expecting to teach in their classes week to week and what students are expected to do.
2. The department must take a look at the "scope and sequence" of the literature that should be taught from grade to grade and the kinds of assignments we are giving at various levels in each grade. 
3. Go back to Solution 1 to determine if the teaching matches what's assigned and expected.  

a culture that blithely hires sows ears and spends all its resources trying to turn them into silk purses (at great expense to those who were silk purses to begin with)

SOLUTION 3: 

1. No more in-services that patronize teachers by teaching them how to do what they were supposedly hired to do. If you have to give a teacher a script, if you have to teach a teacher to break down a reading or an assignment, if you have to teach a teacher how to read or analyze a text, if you have to teach a teacher when to jettison poorly written, picture-filled text books in favor or more quality readings, then you need to be observing those teachers, writing them up, and getting them OUT!
2. Learn where your strengths reside. This is where the rubber meets the road, as the expression goes: with the excellent teachers and use those teachers effectively.
3. NURTURE GOOD TEACHERS by allowing for and working with their strengths. But you will have to KNOW them first (See Solution 1--again observe them and see what they are teaching, expecting and receiving from their students). 

a culture where enormous class size kills the ability to offer class variety 

SOLUTION 4: 
Be brave! Offer tried and true rigorous courses to tried and true rigorous teachers, even if the classes are small. Show that you are pandering not to the lowest but aiming to teach everyone to aspire to becoming the best! 

It it's only about money, CUT STANDARDIZED TESTS, WHICH GENERATE AN ENDLESS STREAM OF NONSENSICAL IN-SERVICES AND MEETING AGENDAS, ESPECIALLY SINCE THE CREATION OF THESE TESTS IS OUTSOURCED FOR A SMALL FORTUNE AND THE GRADING OF THESE TESTS DURING FACULTY MEETINGS  IS MORE OFTEN THAN NOT A DEMORALIZING WASTE OF TIME.

a culture that doesn’t understand that enormous classes will mean that either the lowest or the highest performing kids will be left behind 

SOLUTION 5: See Solutions 1- 4.

a culture where so many kids who have no interest in education get to oppress, practically with impunity, anyone who dares take the enterprise seriously

SOLUTION 6: 
THIS SHOULD BE CAMPUS WIDE AT THE START OF THE SCHOOL YEAR:  ZERO TOLERANCE FOR DEFIANCE. 

1. Early in the term defiant students should be sent to the office immediately, not with lengthy notes that take a teacher’s time, but with a bright colored pass (like a library or nurse pass), and they must REGISTER as an offender with the counselor or dean and be put on a list. This way a paper trail can begin. If the student has been asked to “register” by several teachers, we will see the pattern immediately and know where to put our attention, just as we do for IEPs.

2. Determine how many students are really the problem. Is it a few in each class who move from class to class? Once true numbers are determined, solutions can be tailored. 

a culture where rude kids don’t know what rude means

SOLUTION 7: See Solution 6

a  culture that tolerates back-sniping teachers whose professional jealousies and unchecked inadequacies ruin any hope for collegiality and change

SOLUTION 8: An administrator must never allow a “witch-hunt,” where teachers can air out their personal feelings about any specific teacher to an entire department (or to any student for that matter). 

Here’s how to prevent this:

1. GO BACK TO THE TEXT, as I tell my students. The teachers with the problem and the teachers being attacked should be asked to take out their work; then all should look at what they are doing in their classes, asking of their students, and getting from their students. Try to find the common ground based on what the teachers are producing or trying to produce in the classroom.
2. Insist that teachers cut down tension and stay focused on the issues and NOT the personalities.
3. If the problem turns out only to be personal, just as a meeting with parents must stay focused on teaching methods and reasons for students’ success and/or failure--and NOT on a teacher’s personality--personal condemnations should be prohibited.

a culture where standardized testing eats into so much class time it’s really testing the testing instead of  teaching and learning

SOLUTION 9: 
JUST SAY NO TO STANDARDIZED TESTING. There are already outside contractors like the COLLEGE BOARD, who offer good enough standardized tests for all students. 

To further help our students, we must create our OWN benchmarks, but this goes back to Solutions 1-4: 
Presumably we provide these benchmarks in AP classes, and this same mentality should govern every class: we need good teachers, clear and consistent scope and sequence, and consistent and equivalent practices and rubrics for those practices, so that teachers can effectively grade one another’s papers and exams in each grade at each level by using the same standards.

a culture that is willfully blind to its tendency to defend and promote only the status quo

SOLUTION 10: See all above

a culture of mediocrity and enforced enervation

SOLUTION 11: See all above

a culture where isolation rather than collegiality is the route to survival

SOLUTION 12: See all above

a  culture bent on moving towards teacher accountability, a meaningless pursuit since teacher standards vary so widely 

SOLUTION 13: 
Departments should create consistent department-wide rubrics based on clear goals that all teachers understand, that all teachers understand how to teach, and that all students understand.

a culture that believes self-esteem is generated by empty praise instead of hard work and genuine accomplishment

SOLUTION 14: 
Consistent and equivalent syllabi, rubrics, classroom standards. The A grade must be as justifiable as the Fail!

a culture that can neither praise nor punish

SOLUTION 15: 

1. Recognize the only goal of any teaching institution is to NURTURE GOOD TEACHERS SO THEY AND THEIR STUDENTS CAN THRIVE, and notice and handle everything and everyone that obstructs that goal! (See all above!)
2. "Differentiate” teacher professional development, which means presumably to treat all equally by attending to their different needs with the same goals in mind. 
3. Let the students have a voice and INSIST on student evaluations that ask the hard questions about teaching practices (as in the 7 C' --a teacher's caring, controlling, clarifying, challenging, captivating, conferring, consolidating) to discover whether a teacher’s work is in line with the simple goals of teaching kids to read and write independently, analytically, and intelligently!

a  culture that, to borrow from the late coach John Wooden, mistakes activity for achievement

SOLUTION 16:  

1. Meet only when necessary; have a tangible and relevant goal that relates to students writing and reading independently, analytically, and intelligently; craft a clear plan for how to reach that goal; and make the focus of each meeting a clear step towards that goal.
2. Teachers and students should never be asked to do busy work!
3. See All Solutions Above 

"And you all know, security is mortals' chiefest enemy."

When I look at the pictures of the suffering sea birds in the Gulf, I see an apt metaphor. Being a good teacher in this school district forces one to feel like one of those sea birds covered in so much muck it’s impossible to fly. 

That pretty much sums up the reason for my impending departure from the district at the end of this term.

Naturally, I look around at the kids who were counting on me next year, and at the circle of chairs in my room, and I sob. I think about what I will leave behind--a solid reputation, a pretty good schedule, a strong purpose in life that allows me to sleep at night--and I sob. I think about the ease of slipping back into my routine, bumps and all, next year instead of trying something new, and I sob. I think about the few colleagues who understand me and see me as a valuable peer and good friend, and I sob. I think about losing the key to the gate near my classroom, which I finally got after years of begging, and I sob. I think about cleaning out my room and closing the door for the last time, and I sob. . . .

Then I think about what I might be missing next year:

a culture that allows middling teachers to present mind-numbing, misguided in-services designed to pander to the promoters of standardized tests and the bogus data these tests generate

a culture that uses “data” as if  that data were sacrosanct, objective, and instructive, when it is most often skewed and misleading

a culture that blithely hires sows ears and spends all its resources trying to turn them into silk purses (at great expense to those who were silk purses to begin with)

a culture where enormous class size kills the ability to offer class variety 

a culture that doesn’t understand that enormous classes will mean that either the lowest or the highest performing kids will be left behind 

a culture where so many kids who have no interest in education get to oppress, practically with impunity, anyone who dares take the enterprise seriously

a culture where rude kids don’t know what rude means

a  culture that tolerates back-sniping teachers whose professional jealousies and unchecked inadequacies ruin any hope for change

a culture where standardized testing eats into so much class time it’s really testing the testing instead of teaching and learning

a culture that is willfully blind to its tendency to defend and promote only the status quo

a culture of mediocrity and enforced enervation

a culture where isolation rather than collegiality is the route to survival

a  culture bent on moving towards teacher accountability, an ultimately meaningless pursuit since administrator and teacher standards vary so widely 

a culture that believes self-esteem is generated by empty praise instead of hard work and genuine accomplishment

a culture that can neither praise nor punish

a  culture that, to borrow from the late coach John Wooden, mistakes activity for achievement

Hmm, so why am I still sobbing?

Rigor. . . . Mortis?

It’s prom night. Most of my seniors are absent, except my first-period Shakespeare students who had to turn in an annotated bibliography for the research paper due next week. I am expecting papers that compare Iago to Milton’s Satan, Iago to the Imaginary i (a math student’s impressive, if daunting, take), Othello to the nameless protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the play Othello to the libretto for Otello. I am expecting papers on Othello and the medieval Dance of Death; Othello and “blackness”; race as depicted and explored in Othello, Dutchman, and Invisible Man. I am expecting papers that compare and contrast the significance of women’s roles in tragedy and comedy as evinced in Othello, Hamlet, and 12th Night; papers that trace the development of the staging of Shakespeare’s plays; and papers that explore the roots and purposes of the music in Shakespeare’s plays. 

 
Though my last entry revealed the level of burnout we all face at this late date in the school year, particularly when we are still facing stacks of paper, I am actually looking forward to reading these. They will reveal what my students have accomplished after three or four years of having had the same teacher. For these students, the actual tools of scholarship are deeply ingrained--research skills, proper manuscript format, how to formulate analytical theses, how to select and analyze textual support, how to convey and respond to arguments--and now they get to have the scholar’s fun. They get to learn through research and hone their voices and their thoughts. Not only can they watch as the professional writers in the academic journals and other critical sources argue about nuances, but they are actually ready to participate in the arguments with their own points of view. This is the best any teacher can hope for.

 
So why, you ask, after building a Shakespeare class and a Creative Writing class (which I described at the start of my last entry), to reputable numbers--26 in the former, 36 in the latter, do I have to struggle yet again in order to keep the classes alive? Last year, we had an administrator who tried to close the Shakespeare class because the enrollment number of 26 was not high enough to meet the class “norms” (a bizarre word for class-size) that went up dramatically from the maximum 34 to anywhere from 36-43. I had to fight to keep the class open, and for my efforts, I can now look forward to reading those papers I mentioned. 

The Creative Writing class, a class that is often a class for slackers who usually don’t want to do anything but write the equivalent of "I’m alone, I’m alone, My cat, My cat," has become a serious academic class, where students generate myriad polished small pieces, two fully workshopped short stories (one 1500, one 3000 words), several poems in different poetic forms, and two author studies, where they read 1000 pages by an author of their choice and an entire collection of poetry by the poet of their choice and write New Yorker style reviews for each. All the work is designed to illuminate, support, and inspire the process of writing. Any student can go online to my class page to see exactly what is assigned all term, if clarity is what they need. But the question remains, Why’s no one signing up? What’s the problem here?

 
After I told my students that the classes that they seem to love might not be offered next year because numbers are so low (and frankly, I don’t see the wisdom in combining kids who selected Creative Writing with kids who selected Shakespeare as a possible solution for the low numbers; that feels like a lose-lose to me), they told me that they tagged everyone on Facebook and told them to sign up for what they described as important classes. They said several former students, now in college and some graduating, chimed in to say that these classes shaped them as thinkers, writers and as students in general. While that is nice and all, and it really does validate me enough to enable me to continue grading so much and feeling tired all the time, I still have to ask whether what should be sustaining these classes is ultimately what will kill them. 

 
Those who have never set foot into my class (or if they have it’s been for 10 minutes or so), say I am an “intimidating” teacher; this means some could say, I am the cause of my own problems. Am I the problem or are rigor and high standards actually the problem.  When students say, “I’m not sure I want to work that hard next year” when I ask them whether they have signed up for one of these classes, that indicates something more than just my perceived personality.

 
So here’s my next question: If rigor and high standards are the reason no one is signing up, why, then, does an administration, who proclaims the importance of rigor and the need for true college preparation, not wholeheartedly support keeping these classes alive at any cost? And by support, I am not talking lip-service. 

An even better question is why by their senior year in high school do students fear Shakespeare (and often poetry in general) and want to avoid such a course? The district demands all students be allowed "access" to rigorous courses. Doesn’t "access" to AP, to college, to a richer life in general begin in 9th grade? And doesn’t "access" really mean exposure to the rigors and high standards most students in more competitive schools (read schools where those in charge are not buried under mandates, mediocrity,  malaise) might be facing in most of their classes year after year? Does "access" mean reducing what we do in an English class to writing summaries and creating dioramas? 

I guess these are the real questions: Does the kind of education that will lead to a diverse and complex life matter? Is it it important that education afford one the ability to see the poetry in everything? If so, shouldn’t all students be given "access" to this kind of education, this kind of vision, starting in 9th grade? And if they are given this "access," will they still shy away from the rigors of a college prep. Creative Writing course?

      Maybe I have just answered all my other questions.  

Grating Grading

I’m now in my typical weekend perch: a comfortable chair with my lap desk, a stack of papers and an array of colorful fountain pens. I read a story of obsessive love and murder, then another story of obsessive love and murder, then a story about zombies, and another story about zombies. Amid the many predictable plots that tell me more about the repressed feelings of the students than the actual feelings of their characters, I get to read a story about a girl doing something unthinkable in a school library, two Russians who go to a circus but cannot connect with each other because of the brutality that defines everyone in the story. I read about a dad's suffering vaguely inappropriate feelings for his daughter and aimless teens reaching out but not connecting. I read about a dissolving marriage and a parthenogenetically born child, a boy in awe of his religious grandfather, a trip to the beach that forever changes two friends, and two children’s stories with neat and tidy morals at the end. Stories about a gay boy singing and a straight boy dreaming. The stories are for the most part well-written, earnest, often moving. Extraneous description, flat characterization, and general aimlessness no longer fill the pages, so I can see the kids have learned something from their workshops. Though I like to complain to them about having to spend my weekends reading their work, this work is actually lovely to read. Yet somehow I still can’t push through all of it; I cannot keep my eyes open. It’s May, and I know I am tired, but there may be more to this grading wall.

I have yet to grade stacks of reader responses, where the students were asked respond to the comments I had written on a previous essay and to use their understanding of those comments to redo one of the messier sections of the original essay. I also have to grade reader responses, where the students were asked to select what they think is key text from a reading, analyze it (by identifying and explaining the workings of the figurative language), and discuss the text’s relevance to the entire reading. Then for variety’s sake, I have to grade first paragraphs and working theses for upcoming essays. In theory I should be eager to read this work, to see what these kids have learned this year. But my eyelids start to feel heavy. Just as I begin to scan a paper, a beam of sun cracks through the blinds. But I cannot keep my eyes open.

Finger yoga, ear squeezing, toe crunching fail, so I get up to sprinkle water on my face, look in the fridge for something to chew, and quickly settle back into the chair. I pick up another page and start to read. The prose soars across the page, the commas are in place, and I feel an A coming on. I read the next few papers with the same fluency, and I can proudly say I am rolling along. Check marks everywhere, high marks all around. Then I get to pages where the student loses himself in the struggle between immense ideas and insufficient skills, and my eyes get heavy, my forehead throbs, I cannot keep my eyes open. 

I push myself through a couple more pages and write the usual “Why?” or  "Vague!" or “How is the text working?” or "Can you rephrase this?" or  “Clarify,” “Refine,” “Distill,” and soon I am not sure whether I am talking about a paper or butter or booze. Truth be told, I am not as bored with their writing as I am with the comments I write. I am tired of seeing the mistakes I have already gone over; and I am too tired to correct those mistakes yet again, though I know I will. I am lost in that murky feeling of failure. Then, all at once, as I realize the work isn’t the problem, that I am the problem, whad’ya know, I cannot keep my eyes open. 

NY LOVES ME, ME, ME, ME. . . . .

Today I was walking through the normal crush of students on the quad right before school, and I heard one voice above the rest say to her friend, “Yeah, me and him are goin’ after school.” Unfortunately, all English teachers respond to such phrasing reflexively, and I have been known to be half-listening in meetings or social gatherings only to suddenly wake up at the sound of a grammar gaffe, and, before I can stop myself, yell out a correction. 

Today, when I heard the grating “ME AND HIM. . .,”  I did not place a hand on the student's shoulder and gently offer the corrective, “He and I.”  Instead, I had what I think was an epiphany about WHY this particular grammatical problem is so pervasive in our culture.  

The problem lies in the difference between subject and object. Here is what I tell my students (and remember, by high-school, it’s really last-chance grammar, hence the informality): 

 “ 'I' is always a subject; ‘I’ always DOES the verb, even if the verb is just a state of being: I am, I run, I eat chocolate, I love you! ‘I’asserts a self and acts! ‘Me,’ on the other hand, is NEVER a subject. ‘Me’ is ALWAYS an object. ‘Me’ never does anything. Can you ever say (and I say this in my best Bronx meets cavewoman accent),‘Me go to movies, me like you, me happy?’” 

The kids laugh and laugh, and I think I have made the point. Yet, even without walking through the quad at break time, even in my own classroom after what I think has been my brilliant grammar lesson (as if), I still hear the "me" as subject gaffe peppering the teen-age conversations around me. So what’s up?

The Me-Generation may be behind us but the detritus of all those love-thyself-above-all-others movements still haunts us, and, I posit, has irreparably changed our way of thinking about ourselves and our relationship to the world around us. 

These days it’s all about what’s good FOR ME! But look closely at this construction. “Me” is the object of the preposition “for.”  In fact, “me” is often the object of prepositions: He looks LIKE ME; the story is ABOUT ME; I want you to be WITH ME. Object city! The “me” gaffe reveals how teens, hell, many in our culture, tend to see themselves: as inactive, complacent objects at the center of the action-- not as subjects who act on things and assert a self by doing or being.

“I” rarely starts the simple declarative sentence anymore and is instead usually used incorrectly at the end of a sentence, as if to strengthen the notion of one's deserving: “That gift is for her and I” or “That is a portrait of him and I” or “Let’s keep this a secret between you and I!” Here, "me" just is not strong enough. One needs an "I," a more active recipient.

It turns out the Me-Generation has not empowered people as much as it has rendered them passive objects. My pal in New York capped this notion for me just today. She writes: “Remember the old “I love (heart symbol) NY” t-shirts? Well, the latest t-shirt sported around town says, “NY loves ( heart symbol) ME.” Methinks that sayeth it all.

Land of Nod

Today was one of those days. I thought it would be a quiet day, two classes writing an essay, one class reviewing an essay and thinking about how to rewrite it.  But the moon must be full, the stars aligned, hormones in sync. . . 

The first class bell rings, I distribute the essay prompts, the kids start writing, and then I hear it. Heavy sighing, loud, dramatic girl suffering. I finally call the student aside; then tears, fear, more tears. Bell rings, one down. 

Then the next class bell rings, and the student in the deepest hole is absent (that word we use only in school, never in life). Okay, now it’s a lengthy e-mail to her concerned parent and twenty minutes later, there she is, standing at my door, still wiping sleep out of her eyes. 

The period ends and another girl makes her way to my desk to apologize for her essay and the waterworks start. I find myself saying that she should volunteer somewhere in order to lift her spirits, to help her rise above her feelings. I tell her to put her body where she wants to be and her mind will follow. She repeats the words like a mantra and says she already has ideas about where to start. Crisis averted, maybe. 

Meltdown central today and a lots of time spent counseling and trying not to cry myself.

I should have known the day was off, when I got to work and found that the Dictionary.com word of the day was Land of Nod, the mythical land of sleep. 

As a public school teacher, I have spent years taking education classes and attending meetings where I have been taught how to get my kids to participate in vocabulary relay races; where I have been taught how to put up huge, wall-size Post-Its to create “gallery” spaces for my students to stroll along the walls of the room to view one another’s thoughts; where I have been taught “strategies” like “scaffolding” and “backwards planning” and “vertical teaming.” 

You would think I would have a callous on my heart that would prevent these excruciating time-wasters in the Land of Nod from getting to me anymore. After all, I have taught for over twenty years and have NEVER had occasion to use what I have been subjected to in any of these in-services, even though the swag--Post-Its, pens, markers, glue-sticks--have come in handy. It’s really hard to build resistance to nonsense, especially when it seems as if many of those around you swallow it all without question or protest. 

I always leave these sessions in a tizzy, thinking I am not doing my job well, thinking that if I do not employ these strategies the same way these “professionals” (often people who have opted out of the classroom) employ them, I am doing something wrong. I second guess myself and then struggle to get back on track in my own classes. It’s all I can do to remember that I teach a complicated, multifaceted subject to often resistant students. Unlike these in-service presenters, I don't normally face a docile audience with a high BS tolerance.

A refresher on how to teach “Informational Texts” was the gist of today’s mandatory meeting and today’s presenters "shared" a list of “strategies” designed to teach students how to read “informational texts.” If you can get past the phrase “informational text,” you are doing better than I am, but here’s what I saw as the premise for these sessions: students will not want to or know how to read the deadening “texts” that the California standardized tests demand the students read, so give them the same kind of deadening “texts” in class to show the students “how” to read them. Let’s break down the reading into sentences and paragraphs; let’s make them talk in groups about translating and rephrasing these sentences and paragraphs; let’s make them learn vocabulary that is unrelated to anything but these sentences and paragraphs. In sum, and based on my experience in this in-service, the gist was to make reading MORE of a chore than it already is for students reluctant to read. 

Don’t get me wrong. I do see the value of teaching kids how to read any text closely. It’s just that I am wary about the line between making reading accessible--even enjoyable--and reducing it to nothing more than a chore. 

Because I had first mistaken the date of this meeting and I had scheduled parent conferences and a medical appointment, I made the second mistake of asking those in charge the following questions: What if I already do a lot of close-reading work in my classes with texts relevant to the literature I teach, like critical essays, reviews, even grammatical instructions? Do I still have to attend this meeting? Naturally, I was met with a resounding, YES!

Aye, there’s the rub. Just as we teachers are asked to “differentiate,” teach our students based not only on our curriculum but based also on their different learning levels and needs, those in charge never differentiate. But that’s the problem with the entire in-service, professional development philosophy in my district. The district hires teachers who cannot do the job for which they have been hired, and then spends lots of money and time figuring out ways to make whipped cream out of horse manure. The problem is that those who are teaching well are swept up into that effort at great cost to their time and their morale. 

During meetings like this I think too much about the time spent vs the information gained ratio.  I then get to thinking about all the time I sacrifice when I work in the evenings and on weekends. I am reminded that there is simply no good reason for anyone to do more than show up in a district where contracts are disregarded, where pay is diminished at will, where no one really has a voice, but most important, where all teachers are treated as if incompetent and all students treated as if they are stupid. 

And then I think to myself, no wonder there are so many bad teachers--what a cake job for someone who sees it only as a day shift. Why these in-services probably don’t even phase them as much as they give them a chance to appear busy.

Yup, it was meltdown central today, lots of crying and time spent counseling and trying not to cry myself. 

  

Test-Score Tyranny

When I last wrote, I set off quite the stir, and by quoting some in my department, I may have created an irreparable rift. To recap, I had suggested the department read one another’s Shakespeare essays and after assessing them together, give an award for the best of the essays. According to lists I generated at the end of last year, I could see that most of my colleagues teach at least one of the plays or sonnets and most of them require that their students write essays about their reading, so I honestly thought that reading what we ourselves generate in our classes would be compelling and instructive for us all. Unfortunately, this suggestion ended up revealing the emotional temperature of a  beleaguered faculty, where any suggestion can sound like extra work, though I maintain no extra work and no harm was intended. 

I bring this up because right after I emailed the essay contest suggestion to the department, we received not only those benchmark tests that I have complained about in previous entries, but we received an additional test to give to our students: a diagnostic for the California Exit Exam (CAHSEE).  Now we have to take at least six hours (roughly a full week) out of our class time to accommodate these tests and suspend whatever we are teaching. In addition, we will have to carve out some class time to give standards tests preparation exercises, and we will have to deal with altered and diminished schedules in order to accommodate the roughly three weeks of CAHSEE testing that awaits the students this term. 

Now we will have at least two department meetings spent on assessing the benchmark and diagnostic essays. But before we read any of the essays, we will first have to determine appropriate grading criteria since none of the rubrics or after-the fact “Decision Rules,” designed "to guide us as we assess the quality of the work," are ever adequate for assessing ACTUAL student writing.  

Yes, this assessing our students’ writing is the exact task I had suggested in my Shakespeare contest email, but in this case the faculty dread has been fulfilled: we now face extra and irrelevant work--both proctoring these tests and grading the results--and have to deal with one more district obstruction of any progress we hope to make in our classes. 

The problem with the CAHSEE diagnostic essay is that in addition to presuming that students know something about global warming, green thinking, energy conservation, the essay prompt itself is confusing in that it seems to at first ask the students to talk about how to conserve energy; then it asks them to use examples and anecdotes to persuade other students to conserve energy. The prompt is so overwritten that its intention is unclear, and it seems to have garnered two kinds of response from the students: “Listen to me! Here’s why” essays and “Here’s how to conserve energy” essays; one persuasive, the other expository. So how are we to assess these essays? Do we just look for good, clear, thorough writing, or do we hold students accountable for reading carefully a prompt that was, to my way of thinking, not written carefully?

What is perhaps most vexing about the “assessment” tests, the other tests to which we treated our students to this week, is not only the low benchmark they set, at least in English, but how often these tests are wrong-headed and just plain wrong. This problem is in keeping with why NCLB is not working: when states and districts set their own standards and essentially lower standards to punch up scores, the tyranny of these scores, which are spun as a district’s attempt at progress, only hinders progress.

Here is a quick “benchmark” minute brought to you by one of my astute 10th graders (and I am not even going to mention how stupidly the question itself is written!). The students are first given a quotation from a previous reading (and I am not going to mention the problems with that reading either!):  
Now here is the actual question:
"Even ladies were wading in the water, thinking it was fun." 

To delete "thinking it was fun" from the quotation above, what would be the correct way to punctuate the sentence?

a) "Even the ladies were wading in the water [   ]."

b) "Even ladies were wading in the water:"

c) "Even ladies were wading in the water--"

d) "Even the ladies were wading in the water. . ."

Before you give your answer, read this explanation of the ellipsis, which I pulled from a GOOGLE search:

The MLA Handbook recommends using square brackets on either side of the ellipsis points to distinguish between an ellipsis that you've added and the ellipses that might have been in the original text. Such a bracketed ellipsis in a quotation would look like this:

"Bohr […] used the analogy of parallel stairways […]" (Smith 55).

Now read this direct quotation from the MLA Handbook (6th Edition):

Some instructors prefer that square brackets be placed around ellipsis points inserted into quotations, so that all alterations within quotations are indicated by brackets (cf. 3.7.6).

Given these rules, what's the correct answer for students who were taught to err on the side of caution and add the brackets around all ellipses they add to any quotation?  There doesn’t seem to be any correct answer among the choices they were given, though the choices seem to allude to the MLA rule by offering an answer with empty brackets and an answer with only an ellipsis. 

Here is my question: If I taught the MLA rule in the interest of college prep. and told my students to err on the side of caution and use brackets when in doubt, am I a bad teacher? Are the students then incorrect for adding brackets when they insert their own ellipses? Of course, the students figured out the issue and opted for answer D, but they were definitely confused.

Then there was this question:

The students were asked to pick the “correct way to rewrite this sentence”: 

“The event remains one of the deadliest natural disasters has occurred in United States history.”  

Here are two of the choices they were given:

1. The event remains one of the deadliest natural disasters, which has occurred in United States history.
2. The event remains one of the deadliest natural disasters that has occurred in United States history.

I have no quarrel with B as the best answer, but in explaining why B is the best answer, the Administration and Scoring Manual, which teachers are to use in order to teach to the standard that this question is presumably testing, offers the following explanation (NOTE THAT I USED A NON-RESTRICTIVE CLAUSE, OR DID I?):

A--The clause “has occurred in United States history” is nonrestrictive so it cannot be introduced by which, which introduces restrictive clauses.

B--That is used to introduce nonrestrictive main clauses.

UH, WHAT?!?!?!?!?!?!?! 

Keep in mind that there were only 19 questions on this  benchmark test, so possibly missing two of the 19 can hurt a student’s score. In addition, wrong answers can cast aspersions on a teacher’s ability to teach a certain standard since both questions relate to the same Language Conventions strand, as they call it. 

So, I say yes, let’s spend valuable collegial time looking closely at our students’ earnest work generated by these bogus instruments, then let’s publish the scores and feel like failures because of tests that PRETEND to test kids on what they have learned, but instead confuse everyone and ignore the real grist of any English class--literary analysis, critical thinking, correct mechanics, in-depth reading comprehension. In such a budget crisis time, a district’s giving boat loads of money to the company that creates these tests, specifically the bogus benchmarks, and demanding that their teachers pander to such imprecision and confusion is not good for anyone! Yet all this testing will be effective in one thing, that's for sure: the erosion of everyone’s good will, the teachers’ and the students'.