Teacher: Year Going “Pretty Shitty”
FAKE EDUCATION NEWS
Omaha, NE–
Tim Laudner, 26, is a second year history teacher at Norris Middle School in Omaha, NE. Mr. Laudner is not having a good year.
He hasn’t lost all hope, but neither is he optimistic. I made an appointment to meet with Mr. Laudner before school to talk with him about his experiences as a second year teacher.
We got right to it.
Teachbad Education News (TEN): Thanks for agreeing to meet with me this morning. You told me over the phone that your first year was pretty rough. How is your second year going? How does it compare?
Mr. Laudner: You’re welcome. Yeah, this is my second year. Legally, I believe a teacher’s first year is required to suck. I knew that going in. We all knew it. It sucked and that was fine. It sucked a lot. So, after digesting that whole shitty ten-month cluster fuck over the summer, I thought that by this point in the second year it might be better. But it’s still pretty shitty. And that’s been a big disappointment.
TEN: Of all the shitty things this year, what would you say has been most shitty so far?
Mr. Laudner seemed hard-pressed to choose. He paused and folded his hands. He looked down; appearing deep in thought. He appeared to be asleep. Then suddenly he stood up and began to dart quickly around the room.
He paced and examined details of the room as if it was his first time being there. He seemed also to be running through a list of sorts in his head; counting events or circumstances on his fingers; muttering to himself. He kept looking back and forth between his right elbow and a stain on the west wall of his classroom; possibly estimating the change in the angle formed between a line created by these two points and a line created using another fixed point in the room as he moved about. I couldn’t really tell why he was doing that.
After four minutes, I threw coffee on him. He calmed down a little and began to speak, sort of.
Mr. Laudner: Standards frod stan(?)…check, check, check…ha ha fuckers!!!…do you like the way I check my boxes?!?!?!…we don’t need no stinking boxes!!…why do we do this why do we do this why do we do this?…meeting waste fuckstick warm up and into the differentiated assessment tool..change everything!!!…tool…change it now for kids…who are we? lazy assholes! lazy assholes!…parent log…cigarettes and beer…lazy hate you groblant…groblant…GROBLANT!!!(?)…no lunch again…this is a required meeting…I need lunch…time, time, time…Nooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!…I know I should I know I should I know I should I am bad…bad…bad…data…bad data bad data bad data….
That’s not all he said, but it’s a pretty good summary. He went on like that for a while. Much of it was unintelligible. After about four minutes it was time for another splash of hot coffee in the face.
(This was the first time I had to throw hot coffee on someone twice in the same interview since Bill Clinton realized that Monica never washed the dress.)
As Mr. Laudner wiped the coffee off his face, he seemed to realize that he had had some sort of episode. He apologized. He asked what had happened and what he said, who I was, and where we were. I explained as his students slowly began arriving for first period.
I asked if I could meet him for an interview after school. Mr. Laudner agreed and suggested that we meet at the coffee shop on the corner. When I arrived at the coffee shop, Mr. Laudner called to me from a bar across the street. I walked over.
Cigarettes and beer. Things were starting to come together.
After some chit-chat, which curiously included nothing about this morning’s failed interview, Mr. Laudner began to speak, this time much more lucidly.
75 percent of my bosses, and I have a lot of bosses, are either retarded or so frightened or committed to a dogma as to appear retarded;
My students are already taking practice tests for AYP;
I have been required to submit nearly 15,000 data points about standards tracking bullshit to my retarded and/or brainwashed assistant principal. I know for a fact that he hasn’t looked at it and would have no way of knowing whether or not I was qualified to evaluate it and make decisions about instruction based on this awful, awful data;
Three days after I submitted the nearly 15,000 data points, the rubric was changed so that we had to include “focused area corrections” tracking data. This would necessitate rereading all of the diagnostic essay exams for nearly 200 students and submitting an additional 1500 data points;
I am beginning to understand that there has been a massive social capitulation which adversely impacts teachers. Society does not expect parents to raise their kids. And kids are not expected to work in school. But somehow, by some kind of dark magic, I am expected to correct for this by…what?…differentiation? Really?
I always want to smoke. Always.
I’ve started spending my planning period looking for jobs. My lunch duty includes 8 minutes of my planning period.
The poetry club, every member of which sucks at poetry, meets in my classroom right after school.
Organizationally speaking, my dignity and time are pretty strictly undervalued. I’m not sure I’m gonna make it.
The first part might be fiction, but the rest is right on target!
Time. That sums it up. Never enough time here in Teacher Land. Our new time waster this year is requiring every subject teacher to assign an essay to all our students every week, grade and then summarize the scores. Every WEEK.
But wait – there’s more. Not only must we enshrine thrse summaries in our Data Binders, we must also maintain an individual file folder for our students’ weekly essays so administrators can check at a glance if we’ve been doing this frantic & pointless activity.
So Johnny ends up having 7 file folders of his crap enshrined in 7 different classrooms all over the building with a 3, 2, 1 rubric stapled carefully on each of his precious essays.
150 kids per teacher =
150 essays a week X
Approx 37 weeks a year=5550 essays!
(Teaching ain’t for sissies)
Unless the school sinks under the accumulated weight of all this pointless ho-hah, come June 23 we teachers will throw all that wasted time and paper into a dumpster along with the unread crap in our Data Binders and wait to hear what surprises wait for us next September.
I’ll meet all of you at the bar down the street. Last one there has to buy everyone a round.
That would be 5550 essays per teacher.
STOP! Just don’t do it. Have an administrator do the math. It is impossible to grade the essays/constructed responses, input grades, track standards, etc…that they blithely ask for within the constraints of a teaching week. Ask them to show you how to do it because you can’t seem to grade all those essays and teach. Assign the essays, bundle them up, and drop them on the nearest administrator’s desk. If everyone stops playing along they will move on to something else.
Our district fires/ burns alive any teacher who rocks the boat. Our assistant superintendent is the eudcational equivalent of Idi Amin.
That said, our teacher survival instincts are kicking in and our silent rebellion is well underway:
1. no standards are given to the kids. All we ask is a paragraph. Length not important. (Q: Miss, can a paragraph just be one sentence long? A: Yes, depending on what you have to say.)
2. Since the rubric doesn’t rank spelling or grammar errors – or even whether a statement is a sentence – we don’t touch that stuff. This is easy
3. We don’t file. Hand all the crap out to the kids, tell them to put the latest responses in their folder, collect folders. Repeat weekly.
4. My favorite: “peer editing!” The kids exchange papers, circle a score on classmate’s rubric. Teacher tallies scores, kids put crap in folders.
This is what we teachers do to survive.
We are required to call the parents of every student who is failing. This includes the parents of students who have huge numbers of absences and whose parents have already been called about this numerous times. Yet we must also use some of that dark magic to cause these kids to pass too. Very difficult to teach kids who skip 2-3 days a week – or more (like the one who wandered into my class Monday after not attending a single day since school started.)
Yes–we are also required to call parents of any kid whose grade falls below a C at any moment of the nine weeks grading period. I have 220 students. At any given moment by the middle of the second nine weeks, I have a good 30-50 students who are failing or have a D. I should be calling all of these parents on a regular basis (at least twice per nine weeks, before progress reports and before report cards) even when it has already been tried and has made no difference. Administration tells us, “We get so upset when parents tell us they had no idea their child was failing.” Well, here is news for those parents: you have access to your child’s attendance and grades on a daily basis through the parent portal on the district website. Give it a try sometime. If you don’t have Internet at home, do it at work, or from a friend’s house, or at the freaking public library. Or try looking at your kid’s progress report or report card. And if he tells you he hasn’t gotten one, and we’re already 4 months into the school year, get a clue and try calling the office of the school. You have several ways of finding out how your kid is doing. If I have to call you more than once to tell you, then probably nothing is ever going to change and I do not need to waste my time calling you again and again and again. Please stop wasting my time. Thank you.
Don’t you understand how difficult it is for parents to work AND keep track of their one or two kid’s grades? It is obviously much easier for us to work and track the grades of our own one or two children AND the 130 children that we teach. We are magic and it is rude of us to expect parents to parent.
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we are supposed to be calling parents too and occasionally get chastized by the parents for not doing so…via a forwarded voice mail from the front office…..thatnk goodness none of the phone numbers on file in the student database are good for longer than a week after school starts…..my year is slighly better than last since it is the FIRST TIME IN 8 YEARS I haven;t had to change schools, rooms. grade levels or curriculum….or maybe it’s just the anti-anxiety meds…
Sent home to parents on web-grader email the week before winter break -
Aloha,
Please do not contact me tomorrow and ask me what your students’grades arefor the final 5 paragraph essay project.
132 badly written 7th grade essays
X 20 min grade rubic
= 44 hours of grading
I will have all grades uploaded by JANUARY 10 at 3:00pm as required by the state.
Enjoy the school break with your child!
Mrs. K
Interestingly enough, I had one grade request with in 24 hrs. REALLY?!?