Logan D. Hurricanes Posted May 27, 2023 Report Share Posted May 27, 2023 I am so glad I don't do this anymore. Every time I miss teaching, you guys remind me why I left. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Man Posted May 27, 2023 Report Share Posted May 27, 2023 2 minutes ago, Logan D. Hurricanes said: I am so glad I don't do this anymore. Every time I miss teaching, you guys remind me why I left. Yeah but now the kids are gonna be that much stupider. The pandemic really messed up a lot of kids academically, including mine. Youngest boy spent much of his freshman year of high school relearning how to care about deadlines. He's gotten better, but his GPA took impairing damage. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tkdguy Posted May 27, 2023 Report Share Posted May 27, 2023 Is this a fair assessment of the US educational system? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pariah Posted May 27, 2023 Author Report Share Posted May 27, 2023 (edited) 19 hours ago, Cancer said: Dealing with similar stuff on a collegiate level. The pandemic seems to have spawned an attitude that rules and policies are write-only memory, irrelevant, or applicable only to, well, who knows. Last labs were this week, etc, and last classes are Monday June 5. The pandemic screwed up education in a lot of ways. When it hit in March 2020, we went fully online and the big emphasis was just to make sure the kids could finish out the academic year. Our district and state relaxed academic standards a lot. We were specifically directed not to issue failing grades, but to give anyone who was close to passing the benefit of the doubt and anyone else an Incomplete. Seniors were basically graduated if they made any kind of reasonable effort, irrespective of the actual results. It was a mess. When we came back the next fall, it was with social distance protocols (as if that can really be a thing in a public high school where the average class size is 35) and ongoing testing. A certain number of positive results would result in an immediate shift to distance learning for two weeks. We invoked distance learning three times just in the first semester, as I recall. At that point, I pretty much just designed my classes to be distance learning and counted any day I actually had kids in the classroom as a bonus. Not the ideal way to run high school science classes. Then our state legislature stepped in and saved education (to hear them tell it) by passing a law that district and local government leaders could not initiate distance learning; only a board appointed by the state legislature could do that. You can undoubtedly guess how that has gone. But during this entire time, the idea of academic rigor seems to have gone the way of the dodo. Attempts to reinstate academic expectations to pre-pandemic levels has been met with proportional pushback from the students—and especially from their parents. Teachers have to tread very lightly to avoid being accused of being too demanding of the fragile students whose parents pay their salaries. To complicate things further, our district has spent the last five or six years implementing a proficiency/mastery-based grading system (sometimes also called standards-based grading). Under the system, attendance and behavior cannot be used in any way to determine a student's grades, it's (nominally) based only on academic performance. If a student never comes to class, is a complete PITA while they're there, and/or does no assignments other than the tests, that's okay. They can still earn an A if they do well on those tests. There are PBIS and other programs to try to emphasize responsible social and academic behavior, but there are no meaningful consequences for students if they don't. So they don't. I have a collection of Murphy's Law books, and there are a couple of statements from them (I forget the attribution at the moment) that read something like this: 1. Things will get worse before they get better. 2. Who said things will get better? So it's been rough the last few years, and with teaching a completely new subject next year, it's not going to get any easier, at least for me. But I'm 14 years in at this point. What am I going to do, quit and go dig ditches? - Edited May 27, 2023 by Pariah Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Man Posted May 27, 2023 Report Share Posted May 27, 2023 23 minutes ago, Pariah said: What am I going to do, quit and go dig ditches? Probably pays better. The flip side is that recent events have been extremely difficult for teachers too. Many good ones have quit and I don't blame them. But the students feel that in the classroom when the schools get stuck with a few teachers that aren't good. I've already told you guys about my kid's RWNJ AP US history teacher who taught alternate history, or my other kid's math teacher who grades nothing until after the end of the quarter. These people would not be teaching in an environment that didn't drive better teachers out of the field. Society will be feeling the effects of the last three years for a really long time. Pariah 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted May 27, 2023 Report Share Posted May 27, 2023 Deriving considerable amusement from doing this again. Amusingly, we're now 12.5 hours after the deadline and only 25 of 33 students have emailed me about the assignment. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Man Posted May 27, 2023 Report Share Posted May 27, 2023 Over 75% is more than I expected. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Logan D. Hurricanes Posted June 5, 2023 Report Share Posted June 5, 2023 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Logan D. Hurricanes Posted June 5, 2023 Report Share Posted June 5, 2023 tkdguy and Starlord 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pariah Posted June 5, 2023 Author Report Share Posted June 5, 2023 In preparation for the middle school science content knowledge high stakes standardized test I'm taking a week from Saturday, I took a practice test on the Praxis website today. I scored 116 out of 125. I'm pretty pleased. My lowest content area score, not surprisingly, was in life science, where I scored 32 out of 38. I was a perfect 32 for 32 in Earth and space science. Old Man 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted June 5, 2023 Report Share Posted June 5, 2023 Just to show how far gone I am, right now my favorite song lyric is "As far as I'm concerned, the world could still be flat." L. Marcus 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Logan D. Hurricanes Posted June 5, 2023 Report Share Posted June 5, 2023 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted June 6, 2023 Report Share Posted June 6, 2023 Drop-dead final deadline was 11:59 last night (my time). I logged out of email about 3:15 PM, stayed that way until about ten minutes ago. Accumulated overnight email count: 31. Count arriving between 11:05 and 11:59 PM: 6, one of which had three different assignments attached. Count arriving after 11:59 PM: 2, the last at 2:28 AM. Still trying to decide whether I should read them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted June 6, 2023 Report Share Posted June 6, 2023 "irritative writing assignment final draft" Subject line on the email with a student's final draft of the Iterative writing assignment. OTOH, that description is not far off. Logan D. Hurricanes 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Logan D. Hurricanes Posted June 10, 2023 Report Share Posted June 10, 2023 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted June 10, 2023 Report Share Posted June 10, 2023 (edited) Grading final exams. I swear that my daughter's excessively large collection of house plants might do better than some of these kids. EDIT: "Hey, kid, you seem to know less about this stuff than the begonia that wasn't even in the room all quarter." Edited June 10, 2023 by Cancer Pariah 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted June 11, 2023 Report Share Posted June 11, 2023 Six of eight questions graded. One kid still throwing a shutout. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted June 11, 2023 Report Share Posted June 11, 2023 I'm guessing that's a baseball reference? Is a shutout a good thing? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grailknight Posted June 11, 2023 Report Share Posted June 11, 2023 Most definitely not. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Man Posted June 11, 2023 Report Share Posted June 11, 2023 Well, that depends on the viewpoint. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted June 11, 2023 Report Share Posted June 11, 2023 Hm, let's make it an ice hockey reference. The guy who gets checked into the boards within seconds of coming onto the ice, and when trying to stand up again slices his femoral artery with one of his skates and is carried off immediately for medical attention. Still not an apt comparison, since the hockey loser gets credited for 1 minute on the ice, which is more than this student has been credited for. Logan D. Hurricanes and Pariah 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Logan D. Hurricanes Posted June 11, 2023 Report Share Posted June 11, 2023 Teacher's pet, obv. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pariah Posted June 11, 2023 Author Report Share Posted June 11, 2023 (edited) The Eight Days of Suffering and Gibbitude have begun in earnest. Yesterday was the high-stakes Earth & Space Systems test. If the preliminary score I got back is anything like the actual score, then I passed it. It was a lot more specific on certain things than I'd anticipated: mineral characteristics, geologic epochs, properties of atmospheric sublayers, etc. We'll see how it goes. Or went, as the case may be. Official results should be available in about a month. Today is a day of rest. Tomorrow I begin a 3D Science Methods course that runs 8:00 to 4:00 Monday through Friday. I'm going to be using public transportation to get there and back, because driving in that part of the world is obnoxious during business hours. But it will require me to wake up at the same time that I did during the school year, which is not my favorite way to spend a week of my summer "break". And then next Saturday is the other high-stakes test, covering Junior High School science. This one I'm less worried about semicolon I do need to brush up a bit on cell biology. Wish me luck ... or at least some semblance of sanity. . Edited June 11, 2023 by Pariah Stupid ytpos Old Man and L. Marcus 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted June 11, 2023 Report Share Posted June 11, 2023 (edited) Sanity? Not in this part of Esher! Edited June 11, 2023 by L. Marcus Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted June 11, 2023 Report Share Posted June 11, 2023 There is altogether too much synergy in grading these exams while FailFactory is on TV at the same time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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