highlights and lowlights

Highlights:

Reading biographies to the kids! One of the things I'm loving about fifth grade (as compared to first) is the awesome books we get to read for read aloud. So far we read about Li Cuinxin (sp?), a ballet dancer in communist China, and Jose Limon, a Mexican dancer and choreographer who became world-famous. (Dancing to Freedom and Jose: Born to Dance) The kids are so smart! They totally picked out symbolism and even rocked an allegory about a frog stuck in a well in Dancing to Freedom. It's really gratifying to set them up for that and hear their conversations and watch their faces when they figure it out... heh heh. And they think they thought of it all on their own!

When we finished Jose, I said, "Ladies, don't worry, because next up I have a selection of biographies about courageous and powerful women." (Wilma Rudolph, Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart) And the class groaned! (Mostly the boys, I guess, since they're at that boys vs. girls age.)

Naturally I was appalled and righteously indignant and told them how offended I was as a woman, launching into an only partly-sensical tirade about the centuries long fight for women's rights. Connecting it to segregation (which, I'm proud to report, is totally like a popular buzzword in the class since MLK day) seemed to make them sufficiently sheepish. And as a bonus my face turned all red (as it is wont to do when I get flustered or worked up,) and the students always enjoy that immensely.

BUT, the real payoff came the next day when the class went to choose their new book club books, and one of the groups (all boys!) chose a book about this suffragette women that I'd never even heard of myself... and J was like, Ms. D, we chose this book because of what you said yesterday!

I was totally floored... I'm still feel pleasantly surprised and mildly shocked when I find proof that they've listened to what I've said. And the book also led to a really interesting conversation about their parents' jobs the glass ceiling and present-day slavery in Bangladesh. J said of his mom, who cleans houses, "she only makes like $350 a week but she still buys me and my sister everything we want." Which I thought was quite touching.

Lowlight, to off-set all this feel-goodery, is the insane amount of diagnostic testing that I have had to subject the kids to, ostensibly to prepare them for the real thing... but my thinking is, what's the point of having them shackled to their desks in silence, in a sense performing (trained monkeys!) for others to analyze them and statistic-ize them and make them into little colored boxes on grids and data graphs and pie charts... the nice thing about my non-neophyte big-kid 5th graders is that they are actually aware of what they don't know... some of them were saying to me only yesterday, I still need help with adding fractions! I'm getting stuck on common denominator!

Which is timelier and more specific "data" than will be provided by the fancy computer program anyway. So meanwhile I've given up like five entire periods in the last two weeks when I could've been imparting actual information, in order for them to prove to the higher powers of data collection what they don't yet know (which I and they could've already told you anyway) which will then be reported back to me with lots of fancy labels and analytical break-downs, .. Aaah, the circuitous song and dance of over-sized bureacracy.

I would love to calculate the number of instructional periods that are sacrificed this way, between the predictives and practice tests, acuity tests, simulations, principal's content assessment 3 times in three different subjects... All the "data" doesn't directly help the kids - Yes, the teachers use the information gathered from these tests to plan their teaching, but there are other less intrusive, more immediate ways for us to do that.

Producing all these stats is like manufacturing currency for all the administrators and politicians to use for trading horses and counting pennies and pushing agendas. The real reason for the tests is totally external to what goes on inside the classroom. It's for principals and senators to compare and scrutinize, to fly the flag of their policies and practices high when scores go up, or bury them quickly and deeply if the scores did not pan out conveniently, when the exalted facts and figures contradict their personal and political interests.

And, in excess, all this testing robs the kids of actual real learning time that they are entitled to by law. Could someone try to find a legal argument along these lines?

But, not to be overshadowed by the lowlights, I feel like test prep is going all right so far... I tell the kids 'We're in it to win it!" and make them do cheers and chants and make stupid sound effects to keep them awake. Today my Professional Development group came in to use my classroom as a lab site, and the kids got great feedback from the teachers... it was so bizarre and kind of hilarious to see them parroting all the weird stuff I've been doing to try and get them to remember all these strategies and what not. Watching it all from the outside, as if they were in a fishbowl, was kind of strange and unnerving but mostly made me cover my mouth to keep from laughing.