September 3, 2008

People at work can really get on my nerves. Again today, our grade level meeting time was taken up almost entirely by other people wanting to show us things or tell us things. We have 100 minutes of plan time for grade level meeting on Wednesdays and we had barely 15 minutes to collaborate between the three of us. I really am starting to think that it's being done on purpose. It just infuriates me.

We had to talk about pacing for science, social studies and math. We also needed to decide what was going to be covered in the lesson plans for next week for those three subjects. Thank goodness we'd already decided on that stuff for com. arts for the next couple weeks. It is just stupid that we're are required to write lesson plans as a team (which I really find idiotic and counter productive) but yet the time we are supposed to be doing this is monopolized by other things.

When we first became a Reading First school, we were told that half the time of grade level meetings were supposed to be spent collaborating and discussing teaching methods and activities that we could be doing in our classroom. We were told that we'd look at data for DIBLES several times throughout the year, but that most of our time was supposed to be the teachers on the team collaborating. Instead, most of the time these meeting times are taken up by just about anything else and data is presented to us and we're supposed to analyze it almost EVERY meeting.

Something else that really pissed me off in our meeting today was as statement that was made about data. We were told that data was the most important thing. Excuse me? Ok, I guess I'm in the wrong profession, because I thought our children were supposed to be the most important thing. I'm so SICK of the freaking data and my children at work and my children at home being nothing but a bunch of freaking test scores. We are inundated with data but not given time to plan what to do with it.

Sometimes I really wish I could quit work and yank my kids out of school and just home school them. But, I really do enjoy teaching (when I actually get to teach) and I know that the teachers that are working with my kids are there because they care about their students and want them to learn. I really wish more parents would wake up and see what all this crap ass standardized testing is doing to their children and the quality of their education.

People keep thinking that this testing crap is a measure of how well a school is doing when in reality it's just hindering the learning process. And, I wish that more of admin in school districts would have some freaking faith in the expertise of their teachers. They think putting restrictions on us is what is going to make it all work, when they've never given us a chance to prove ourselves without putting the damned hurdles in our way and making us jump through hoops.

Our educational system did not start going to hell in a hand basket until we started putting so much stock into standardized tests. It didn't uncover problems in our educational system, it created it.