Three
weeks ago I transferred to an impoverished school because my former
school needed to lose another teacher. Not enough students
attend now to support a programming teacher. We lost our
Chinese teacher the month before. So many teachers over 40 had
been constructively dismissed by the administration in the year prior
I took the opportunity to escape. I moved to a new school and I
am glad I did.
The
administrative team here is supportive. The teachers are
forging a culture of camaraderie to do the improbable. The school
offers art, dance, music and socio-emotional learning opportunities
which make it a good place to be. The students are good kids
but there are still barriers in place due to the poverty of the
population.
Parents
are so busy trying get the complex needs of their families met that
aren't able to give as many opportunities. If it is going to cost $8
to put everyone on the bus to go to the free day at the Frist. The
free day on Oct 18 becomes a $16 day. That $16 may be needed to pay
the light bill. The issues these children are facing are not the
fault of their families or of the students. Poverty is a
handicapping condition.
Stressed
out students in poverty do not retain information as readily as their
less stressed peers. For example, I taught them the day before
about a blue moon being an event where there are two full moons in a
calendar month. The next day they asked me to tell them how the moon
turns blue. They remembered the term blue moon, which is good,
but none of them remembered the concept.
They
do not have the same baseline knowledge. I gave them an article
on the Pope coming to speak at a poor school in Harlem. I
thought they would be excited to hear about the papal visit by a
pontiff who has compassion for kids living in similar situations. I
asked them to write any vocabulary they did not know on the board so
we could go over it. They wrote Pope, Catholic, and Cathedral.
I doubt you could understand the text without these concepts. I
used it as a teaching moment. I may create a humanities center
for my classroom.
I
gave a Math test using the questions formulated by Pearson because
these questions are supposed to be very much like the questions my
students will face on the upcoming TNReady, a thinly veiled Pearson
exam. I taught the ways I've always taught. I have high scores
so my methods have demonstrated success. My new students did
not do well on this test.
I
began to deconstruct why they performed poorly. The test
questions are high level word problems. If you cannot get the meaning
out of the text and find the right algorithm, then you never get to
show you know the Math. We will attempt to train them to
survive the test but we are told we must. That's really not a
great basis for a full, rich, broad education.
This
lovely little school will live or die by these upcoming test scores.
Survival looks bleak with the form of testing we are facing. I
now see clearly how elitist education reforms have become. For
our high stress, low income, students who struggle with reading and
vocabulary this test is unnecessarily burdensome and is limiting
their education. We need a revolution. We need education that hones
each child's unique giftedness instead of forces conformity to an
unreasonable testing standard.
Sir
Ken Robinson has written a book to highlight the path. The link
to Creative Schools is listed below.
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