Thanks to the friends who inquired about my moving plans.
The wife and I will be moving to the Dallas area in mid-August, when we hope to begin our new jobs. I’ll start studying in September.
We had a shocking bit of news last week that kept me out of touch with everyone…sorry I haven’t been blogging or keeping up with emails. One of our close family members died suddenly and unexpectedly, and we’ve been grieving with family for the past eight days. We’re back at work now, and everything seems to be quieting down.
I’m posting my email address here. Those students and friends who want it can write it down and stay in touch when I move to Dallas. Sorry to all of you who didn’t get this from me the last week of school. Crazy time.
You thought it could never be. Math, Science, History, English…sure. Art? Maybe. But P.E.?
Yes.
For the past four days, my colleagues and I have been proctoring the equivalent of a Physical Education TAKS.
The soul-killing machine is running on the high-octane fuel of public paranoia: this time, paranoia about teenage health and obesity. And the state government now requires public schools to gather data, not only on high school students’ academic abilities, but also on their height, weight, physical strength, endurance, and flexibility.
(Yes, I did say weight. Every student must step on a scale with a teacher watching. The teacher then records the weight on a clipboard. Humiliating.)
This year, our campus decided to let the English teachers proctor the P.E. exams DURING OUR ENGLISH CLASSES, for the simple administrative reason that every student has an English teacher. It was a question of efficiency. The easiest answer to the question, “how do we make sure we test every student on campus, none excluded? Where will every student be in the next week?”
So here’s what I have to do. First, I cart my class down to the gym. Three, four, or ten of them complain along the way because they forgot to dress comfortably, and they want to know if they can go to the locker room to change. (Official party-line answer: No way. Takes too long. Too many students to get through. You’ll just have to do your situps in the skirt you’re wearing. Wait–are you kidding me?)
When we get to the gym, the students line up. They listen to the gym instructor as he demonstrates the proper posture and execution of a situp. Then he calls out, “Okay Mr. Tran, we’re ready!” And somewhere in the depths of a technical cavern, Mr. Tran hits a button. Then, blaring over the gym’s overhead speakers (loud enough for students to hear, though their iPods have already ruined their eardrums), comes the most abrasive voice I have ever heard. It says, “Okay, now we’re going to do the pushups. Ready? Down. Up. One. Down. Up. Two…”
But the kids are already in the SIT up position, not the PUSH up position; and the last-minute change confuses them silly until the coach shouts at Mr. Tran to skip that track on the CD because we’re doing the situps first.
Then the right cadence sounds, and the kids do their situps. With the cadence. Up, Down, One. Up, Down, Two. And when they finish, they come to me, and I write down how many they did. One at a time. “How many, Francis? Eight? Jerome? Thirty-seven?”
Eighty situps and the CD stops.
Then it’s time for pushups.
We have been doing this (and variations of this) since Tuesday. We will continue until this Monday.
In case you are wondering, we had ONE DAY of instruction time in between the academic TAKS and the required Physical Education exam. One day. After playing Gym Instructor, I will have preciesely one day to teach my students before they take their Advanced Placement Exams. Is anyone feeling overtested?
Despite being an invasion of privacy and, like so much that our state mandates, utterly soul-killing, this phys-ed exam MAKES NO ACADEMIC SENSE. I cannot believe that anyone thinks it is a good idea.
One of the things that TEACHERS do to cope with the soul-killing effects of TAKS: we hum. Around noon today, a student noticed and asked, “Mr. Schmidt, are you humming?” And I said, “Yeah, a song from Rent.“ “Oh, I love Rent!” she said. This was the song:
Coming tomorrow: more TAKS-evasion tips for teachers. I’ve been collecting them from colleagues around the state. (Contribute if you have any good ones.)
I’ve been proctoring TAKS, our state’s standardized test, for the past week; I waited until the test was over to blog about it. I’ve written a whole series of posts; these are thematically connected and make more sense if you read them in order. If you’re interested, I recommend you scroll down and start at the bottom of the page. The newer posts get added to the top.
Although the state of Texas has equivocated on this point, our district has been perfectly clear and consistent: there will be no reading of non-test materials during test time, even by students who have finished their tests. All must remain seated and book-free until every student has finished the serious business of testing. (Some will take all day. That is inevitable.) Then, and only then, may students resume the frivolous game they call “reading my book.”
Students who arrive punctually, finish the test, and cannot sleep–either because of their misguidedly helathy habits or because of an unfortunate natural youthful vigor–craft extraordinary stratagems to keep their minds active during the four to six hours of soul-killing stillness.
All is not lost for the punctual student, though. For the student who fails to plan ahead and foolishly arrives on time, the first and most obvious course of action is to fall asleep so that the day will pass quickly. Students have been known to try this strategy both during and after the test, both of which can work if executed with prudence.
Teachers and administrators insist that students arrive on time to school, but whatever our words say, our actions do not encourage punctuality.
Students know that we do not record tardies on TAKS day. It is too hectic for such a nuanced approach to attendance records; we mark “present” or “absent,” and then our administrators phone home like E.T. to get the absent kids’ butts in their chairs. The state grades us on our attendance statistics on TAKS day, and we’re too busy working for one hundred percent attendance to bother marking tardies. So it makes sense for students to relish these last few minutes of soul-breathing autonomy before we shackle them to their desks for six hours.
This is the first in a series of posts about TAKS–the state assessment that, for the past week, I have been proctoring at the high school where I teach.
These posts will NOT discuss the test itself: its narrow focus, its cultural bias, its stultifying effects on curriculum. This is not a “standardized-testing-is-ruining-our-schools” post.
I will, instead, discuss the soul-killing effects of the test administration. The part that I, the proctor, am responsible for. I am writing this post because I am personally, individually, directly responsible for killing several souls this week.
Okay, friends, here are the handouts that you need to study for tomorrow’s quiz.
(For all casual and friendly readers of this blog: my course blog crashed last night, so this one is temporarily converting from a personal page to a student-friendly page.)
