Inservice

We didn’t have the day off for Columbus Day today at our school. (Actually, it is kind of hard to think about Columbus with the strong Native population here.) We had an inservice day. These are those “teacher institute” days we used to love as kids. The kids had the day off but the teachers had to attend meetings. We got to listen to a workshop on RIT scores and Lexile numbers.

First of all, where do I begin? They are trying to boil down a student’s learning to one single number. It’s supposed to be an indication of where that individual student’s level of instruction is. That’s all fine and dandy but then it gives teachers an interesting dilemma. Now that I have all of these scores for individual students, what do I do with it? I can’t come up with 22 different lesson plans for third period—and that’s just one period out of the six that I teach. Where am I supposed to get the time for this?

You know where all these computerized numbers are going, don’t you? That’s right. Every single student will have an individual computer that will be linked to lessons that that student can do in successive order. They can get better from where they are individually. So we’re all going to be taught by robots.

The problem with this whole numbers thing is that students are either going to lose social classroom structure and the inherent competition that it is supposed to possess or sit in front of a computer screen all day. (Isaac Asimov wrote a short story on this very thing—two siblings have their own robot teachers in the house that they feed their homework to and listen to lectures. The older brother one day tells the younger sister about how school was in Grandpa’s time with a “real flesh and blood” teacher.)

Is that where this is going? Individualized education plans (IEPs) are already working toward this. Back in Bremerton, they decided not to do the plan for just those that needed help—they decided to do it for everyone. (Although it was just a check-off-the-box worksheet that didn’t really say shit, but that’s another story.)

I don’t want to sound like I am complaining. I want to know where students are. I want to meet needs. I just need help on how to accommodate this into my classroom. How do I teach a class and accommodate twenty-two separate learners based on these scores?

This doesn’t even start talking about how we meet the GLEs (Grade Level Expectations). How do I skew these scores that show me their actual instructional grade level with where they are supposed to be? If they are reading at a fourth grade level, how do I make them meet eighth grade level expectations? That’s the big question.

Some of these are questions that I cannot answer. I am just an individual teacher in one classroom. Some of these are questions that need to be answered at the district or even the state level.

My classroom is a challenging environment for most levels (depending on whether they want to be challenged or not, but that’s a whole other quagmire that I won’t get into today). That is all I can do today.