Blogs by Leslie P Garcia
Forests, Educators, and the Terminally Puzzled
10/12/2004 9:05:20 PM
Attendance in triplicate, voices no one hears...no time to teach, but points for show...who says our public education system has "issues"?
Remember that ages-old question? Not the one about the chicken—in fact not any of the ones about the chicken. This is the question about whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound if no one hears it.
Came about because I was screaming in the forest again…no, I was in the classroom again today. The classroom wasn’t the problem. The problem is the forest, represented by bureaucrats, administrators…choose your poison. (And no offense to those mythical creatures of the forest, administrators who both listen and think.)
I finished administering another round of tests to my first graders. Although this verifies stuff I already know—like, they can’t yet read—I actually think this battery of tests, the Texas Primary Reading Inventory and its Spanish counterpart, Tejas Lee, provides useful information. Add to that a technological device that really worked—the whole test on a palm-held device rather than in a mountain of forms and manuals—and hey, I actually liked doing this test. It’s true that while I tested, I couldn’t teach, but this testing went quickly, and although the results are erroneously used to hold schools “accountable,” instead of just for planning instruction, I wasn’t fazed.
But I was absent yesterday, and hadn’t caught up on all the goings on of the foresty types. We now do attendance in triplicate. Why? Don’t know—it all goes to the same office. We have breakfast in the room, after the first bell, and it has been delivered progressively later for the last several days. We have a lengthy form to fill out listing students’ birthdays for the office. My beef? (Besides the milk spilled on the floor, that once would have been spilled in the cafeteria before the bell)
Well…practically none of my kids read on that marvelous computerized test. The office has four people—not counting the folks in charge. The birth dates are on the computers, as are rosters. No one can explain exactly why three different attendance forms going to the same place are necessary. Why the unnecessary demands on time already stretched too thin? Why is "instructional time" a phrase flung our way at in-services, and denied us by administrators and "support" staff the world over?
Sometimes, in grade level meetings, I make suggestions. Like, wouldn’t it be better to let the office staff do their job, and save time for teaching? Like, isn’t one attendance roster enough? And my favorite—if we actually were allowed to teach, instead of testing and filling out forms, wouldn’t the odds swing in favor of success, instead of frustration?
Now and then I hear the faint echo of my voice in the wilderness. My first grade colleagues agree, but point out that we’ve been screaming for years, more loudly this year than ever, and we’re never heard. On a recent walk through to evaluate high level thinking, the most pertinent point made was that the teacher had a beautiful desk. (She saw the walker coming and shoved everything in a closet.) When I protested—said stuff and nonsense—she shrugged. Reality, she said.
So, does the tree make a sound if it falls and no one hears it?
One of my former first graders came by to visit me today after school—she’s in sixth grade now, and is volunteering to help our school volleyball team. Her hug shut me up for a while. Didn’t think about trees…oh, for hours. But now, in just seven hours, it starts all over again. And those darned trees just keep falling around me.
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