New Term Resolutions

*I will work smarter, not longer hours.

I once took a survey that asked me to figure out how many hours I actually work as a teacher, including planning, grading, and attending meetings and training. It averaged 45-50 hours a week...FOR 50 WEEKS A YEAR! I LOVE my school children, but I also LOVE my home children, who happen to be growing up without me. For them, I WILL find a way to assess English skills in many ways other than JUST essays. I will create multiple choice tests and grade things in class and host writer workshops. I will grade essays WITH students to make it happen DURING class (and to make the feedback more meaningful for the writer). No longer do I want to say, "Oh my word! You've grown so much since the last time I saw you. How are you?" to my own sons. No more I-didn't-see-the-sun-today-because-I-got-to-school-before-it-rose-and-didn't-leave-until-it-was-long-gone days. Or, at least, a great reduction in the number of those days (of which there were FOUR last week because I was behind in grading).

*I will plan for grading. 

Despite tweaks to my assessment techniques, grading will still occur weekly on my own time. I will plan which assignments I'm taking, and I will plan when I will grade and return them. I will not take a trunk-full of projects home on weekends or holidays. I will not grade work in the last week of the term. When I have more hectic personal weeks, I will take less work (or send more back with a check mark). By planning for my students' assessment needs and balancing it with my family's personal needs, I will have enough of the right kind of grades to measure my students' growth without going weeks without seeing my family. (I really, really hope.)

one-man-band-source yoga-source

*I will stop and allow a few minutes for closure before the bell. 

I always feel enormous--admittedly self-derived--pressure to have kids actively engaged and LEARNING until a few seconds AFTER the last bell. I panic when they start packing up as the bell approaches. I will do anything to get them to focus for another minute or two (or our last few seconds together). I will sing, dance, flip (or if I'm in a bad mood, yell, demand, hold after the bell) to keep them in the room mentally and physically. I have realized that we all need time to process and connect (and put our books back in an organized fashion instead of leaving my room looking like a post-Katrina Louisiana, for which I have to form a nightly, heartfelt, contrite me a culpa for the poor facilities staff who must all hate me). Instead of a tension fraught battle of wills over the no-man's-land of the academic period, I will turn these final few minutes into a decompression chamber with assigned tasks that transition students from my class to the passing period. I will have them do things like stand-up, hand-up, pair-up to share things they learned during the lesson. I will have them put sticky notes on the various wall charts to track our learning. I will have them write reflections (that I will NOT grade).

Hopefully these three things will help me to improve my progress monitoring and data management while improving student learning without being arrested for child abandonment.

Have you tried any of these resolutions? Do you have any advice for me on how to manage these issues? What coping mechanisms do you use to balance home and school?

Evidence-Based Urban Legends

Education treats the idea of "evidence-based" a little differently than the rest of the data-using world. We have fallen in love with the idea of a number. That number does not necessarily have to relate to the concept we are trying to support; if it is a number, it is good enough.

http://davidmlane.com/ben/

I learned my favorite evidence-based urban legend in a curriculum training. According to the slide (which was supposed to justify the county's choice in curriculum), 62% of students who took Advanced Placement (AP) courses at the time of the survey went to college.
Let's break this down, shall we? First of all, an AP course is a college level course. Any child who took the course and passed the test earned college credit. If 62% of the students passed the test and NOT ONE ever stepped foot on a college campus, some would still report the statistic the exact same way.
Now let's pretend that 62% of those students actually went to a college campus and even graduated from college. There's still a problem: the students who took the AP classes at the time of the survey were HAND PICKED for their performance and ambition. 100% of them were predicted to go to college. Only 62% of the students the school system designated as college bound actually made it.
Let's follow the extrapolation further. The curriculum publisher was telling us that these numbers meant that the AP courses CAUSED 62% of students to go to college. Therefore, if we put all of our students in AP courses, our college rate would rise substantially, to 62%. Suspiciously, even though the slide data was nearly 20 years old, there have been no progress monitoring reports  or updates since its original publication. I personally schedule each of my home children for 2 AP classes to give them a 124% chance of attending college.

http://davidmlane.com/ben/outlier.gif