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lunadelcorvoTeaching here is a strange journey. It's so wildly different from teaching Uni (more than the obvious stuff, I mean), and even from teaching at the private school (to distinguish from the Islamic School. More on that here.)
For reference, my former teaching (aside from uni) was at a small Classical school with rather self-selecting students, all very much dedicated to learning. These were your textbook nerds, and they were awesome! The vision for the school was the classical model; shared inquiry, the value of the past, the life of the mind, and so on. Students began Latin in 3rd or 4th grade, and by 8th, were reading Virgil in Latin. My 8th graders read (in one year) Huck Finn, Nineteen Eighty-Four, All Quiet on the Western Front, an abridged version of the Mahabharata, MacBeth, Oedipus, A Doll's House, and usually some shorter contemporary YA novel, like Piecing Me Together. That was in addition to what I now realize is a very advanced grammar and composition curriculum (that I created) and a year-long program of Latin and Greek etymology. When those same 7th & 8th graders took a half-year Research Methods class, they wrote 8-page, thesis-driven research papers, on topics like "Queer Representation in the Marvel Cinematic Universe," or the "Ethics of the Dresden Bombings." My 7th grade history class read excerpts from Dante, Machiavelli, and Castiglione, and understood them. We didn't have desks, we had a huge table, and we all (including me) sat around the table and learned by discussing. Oh, and our academic schedule was 4 days a week, with Mondays reserved for study hall, electives, and so on. We had recess twice daily, and had music and art for all students every quarter. It was living the dream, more than I ever realized at the time.
So now that you have that picture for reference, time for the reality check. My school now is what's called a magnet school, meaning it is essentially an urban public school in a low-income area, but has special programs to attract high-performing students from otherwise better-funded and better-performing schools. In our case, that's STEM stuff, so we get a huge chunk of Asian kids. (I'm seriously not profiling here, it's just the actual makeup of who the AP kids are.) The theory is that it brings funding, raises overall test scores, etc.
And I'm sure it does do those things. But what it also does is put higher achieving kids or 'AP kids' (more on that in the next installment) in the same classrooms not only with all the regular kids, but also the special-ed kids, including kids who, for example, read at a roughly 2nd-grade level, or have serious emotional or behavioral issues. It is on me to 'differentiate instruction,' that is to say, find a way to challenge the higher-level kids while building up the lower-level kids. In the same class. At the same time.
Mind you, this is a 55-minute class, and along with all of this, I have to teach vocabulary, take attendance, award points for behavior in four areas (like resilience, ownership, etc., because that's a quickie, right?) for every kid, every day, teach and reinforce expectations, track and report on reading milestones for those with deficits in reading, track and report both behavior and academics on every special-ed kid, and document how every activity conforms to standards which are, to put it mildly, opaque. Oh, yeah, and teach content, too.
So in any given class, I have a handful of kids who could probably already be in high school, have full parental support, all the tools and supplies they need, access to a computer and other reference materials at home, read several years above grade level for fun, and have been raised to value education. I have another handful that quite literally cannot read, cannot write a sentence, may be homeless or have parents in and out of jail, don't have a computer (or even internet access) at home, have no supplies, and have been raised with a major cultural bias that says being smart is uncool. The rest fall somewhere in between. Multiply that by 30 kids to a class.
It is, in theory, my responsibility to reach these two extremes, and everyone in between, and to assign grades that reflect effort, meaning the kid who writes a cogent, thoughtful, two-page essay gets the same A as the kid who manages a paragraph that has at least a few words spelled right, and you can more or less tell what they mean (and for that kid, maybe that was a monumental achievement; never think I don't appreciate that!). What that means in real life is that, on paper, those kids end up looking the same, which means the A earned by the kid who really worked hard, understood the material, and produced really good work is essentially meaningless. (Ask me about grade inflation sometime - don't even get me started!)
Don't get me wrong - I absolutely think the system has failed these kids on the lower end of the scale. And I absolutely believe we need to work with the kids who can't read and all of the other challenges and bring them up to a functional level of education. We should be pouring SO much money, time, and effort into that! No kid should get to 7th grade unable to read or spell; there is a whole series of failures on the part of the system that led up to those kids being here, now.
But all idealistic, rose-tinted imaginings aside, those kids CANNOT make up those gaps by sitting in the same classes as AP kids; learning doesn't happen by osmosis. And we are robbing the AP kids of the chance to truly excel at the same time. Put those AP kids in one class, and let's do some real learning that challenges them, takes them to the next level, and lets them achieve their full potential. And put the kids that need to make up skills in one class where instruction can be tailored to them and the skills they need to learn, so they, too, can reach their potential (which, I firmly believe is just as high as the AP kids, if they can ever get the tools they need to get there!).
However, because some white guys in suits with a warped sense of the 'white man's burden' decided that the AP kids would 'elevate' the others just by, what? Being in the same room? That's not how it's done. As it is, it's a numbers game, and because so much of the accountabilty for everyone from teachers right on up to whole districts runs on test scores, I have to prioritize not the kids who are thirsting to learn, and not the kids who are falling off the edges, but the ones I can chivvy along to a baseline passing grade.
Even then, we pad the numbers so hard! We dial down the difficulty of the 'summative assessments' to where I feel dirty. And still, half of them fail.
For reference, my former teaching (aside from uni) was at a small Classical school with rather self-selecting students, all very much dedicated to learning. These were your textbook nerds, and they were awesome! The vision for the school was the classical model; shared inquiry, the value of the past, the life of the mind, and so on. Students began Latin in 3rd or 4th grade, and by 8th, were reading Virgil in Latin. My 8th graders read (in one year) Huck Finn, Nineteen Eighty-Four, All Quiet on the Western Front, an abridged version of the Mahabharata, MacBeth, Oedipus, A Doll's House, and usually some shorter contemporary YA novel, like Piecing Me Together. That was in addition to what I now realize is a very advanced grammar and composition curriculum (that I created) and a year-long program of Latin and Greek etymology. When those same 7th & 8th graders took a half-year Research Methods class, they wrote 8-page, thesis-driven research papers, on topics like "Queer Representation in the Marvel Cinematic Universe," or the "Ethics of the Dresden Bombings." My 7th grade history class read excerpts from Dante, Machiavelli, and Castiglione, and understood them. We didn't have desks, we had a huge table, and we all (including me) sat around the table and learned by discussing. Oh, and our academic schedule was 4 days a week, with Mondays reserved for study hall, electives, and so on. We had recess twice daily, and had music and art for all students every quarter. It was living the dream, more than I ever realized at the time.
So now that you have that picture for reference, time for the reality check. My school now is what's called a magnet school, meaning it is essentially an urban public school in a low-income area, but has special programs to attract high-performing students from otherwise better-funded and better-performing schools. In our case, that's STEM stuff, so we get a huge chunk of Asian kids. (I'm seriously not profiling here, it's just the actual makeup of who the AP kids are.) The theory is that it brings funding, raises overall test scores, etc.
And I'm sure it does do those things. But what it also does is put higher achieving kids or 'AP kids' (more on that in the next installment) in the same classrooms not only with all the regular kids, but also the special-ed kids, including kids who, for example, read at a roughly 2nd-grade level, or have serious emotional or behavioral issues. It is on me to 'differentiate instruction,' that is to say, find a way to challenge the higher-level kids while building up the lower-level kids. In the same class. At the same time.
Mind you, this is a 55-minute class, and along with all of this, I have to teach vocabulary, take attendance, award points for behavior in four areas (like resilience, ownership, etc., because that's a quickie, right?) for every kid, every day, teach and reinforce expectations, track and report on reading milestones for those with deficits in reading, track and report both behavior and academics on every special-ed kid, and document how every activity conforms to standards which are, to put it mildly, opaque. Oh, yeah, and teach content, too.
So in any given class, I have a handful of kids who could probably already be in high school, have full parental support, all the tools and supplies they need, access to a computer and other reference materials at home, read several years above grade level for fun, and have been raised to value education. I have another handful that quite literally cannot read, cannot write a sentence, may be homeless or have parents in and out of jail, don't have a computer (or even internet access) at home, have no supplies, and have been raised with a major cultural bias that says being smart is uncool. The rest fall somewhere in between. Multiply that by 30 kids to a class.
It is, in theory, my responsibility to reach these two extremes, and everyone in between, and to assign grades that reflect effort, meaning the kid who writes a cogent, thoughtful, two-page essay gets the same A as the kid who manages a paragraph that has at least a few words spelled right, and you can more or less tell what they mean (and for that kid, maybe that was a monumental achievement; never think I don't appreciate that!). What that means in real life is that, on paper, those kids end up looking the same, which means the A earned by the kid who really worked hard, understood the material, and produced really good work is essentially meaningless. (Ask me about grade inflation sometime - don't even get me started!)
Don't get me wrong - I absolutely think the system has failed these kids on the lower end of the scale. And I absolutely believe we need to work with the kids who can't read and all of the other challenges and bring them up to a functional level of education. We should be pouring SO much money, time, and effort into that! No kid should get to 7th grade unable to read or spell; there is a whole series of failures on the part of the system that led up to those kids being here, now.
But all idealistic, rose-tinted imaginings aside, those kids CANNOT make up those gaps by sitting in the same classes as AP kids; learning doesn't happen by osmosis. And we are robbing the AP kids of the chance to truly excel at the same time. Put those AP kids in one class, and let's do some real learning that challenges them, takes them to the next level, and lets them achieve their full potential. And put the kids that need to make up skills in one class where instruction can be tailored to them and the skills they need to learn, so they, too, can reach their potential (which, I firmly believe is just as high as the AP kids, if they can ever get the tools they need to get there!).
However, because some white guys in suits with a warped sense of the 'white man's burden' decided that the AP kids would 'elevate' the others just by, what? Being in the same room? That's not how it's done. As it is, it's a numbers game, and because so much of the accountabilty for everyone from teachers right on up to whole districts runs on test scores, I have to prioritize not the kids who are thirsting to learn, and not the kids who are falling off the edges, but the ones I can chivvy along to a baseline passing grade.
Even then, we pad the numbers so hard! We dial down the difficulty of the 'summative assessments' to where I feel dirty. And still, half of them fail.
