Have you heard of “a Bank too
big to fail”? How about “a School too big to succeed”? I bet you have never
heard this one, yet it reflects a sad reality…
Schools became industrial
monsters with a mission to input as many students as possible and output them
as fast as possible; preferably never beyond four years… what happens in
between is a black box…
How do schools do that? How do
they enter thousands of students through their gates and make sure that they do
not entangle on their way out four years later? Well, this is a very big,
well-oiled, machine that uses a huge amount of resources. With years of
practice and history of experience, the system runs, technically, quite
smoothly, but on the way to efficiency, it forgets its exclusive purpose –
educating young people; it loses its human factor. Who has time for that?
Deans of discipline have tens
of students lining up in front of their office every single day. Counselors
never have enough time to catch up, being responsible for programming hundreds
of students and for other endless duties, while their real job, counseling, is
at the bottom of the list due to lack of time.
And what about teachers?
Teachers at a public school see, typically, two hundred students a day!
Imagine, first, trying to learn names of two hundred kids, and this is without counting
those who come and leave, especially at the beginning of the school year. A
good way to handle it is creating seating charts. It really helps, but it takes
a long time to create, and even longer to maintain …
One of my yearlong assignments
was teaching algebra to 9th graders, replacing a teacher who left
for maternity leave. It was the beginning of the school year and I had a pretty
good start. However, as soon as I created seating charts, a special education
teacher came to tell me that they are re-arranging class assignment for their
students, and thus, number of students from each class had been replaced with
new students… Few days later an administrator said that due to a crowding
situation they are moving students around to create a satellite campus… again
certain number of students were removed and others joined… Less than a week
passed when another teacher announced that he is switching some of his students
with mine so that he can continue a program that he started during the summer… By
that time I realized that all my good students were replaced with not so good
students, my seating charts are worthless, and it is going to be tough. And it
was…
Even at classes that do not
change that dramatically, sometimes it takes almost a whole semester to master
all 200 names. At one school, where I started mid-year, teaching math lab to
students who failed algebra, I had a tougher than usual time putting names and
faces together. It was a new school, new material, and new students’
population, where, to my inexperienced eyes, many of them looked alike… To make
it more confusing, some first names were similar, and even worse – numerous
last names were the same. It took me almost the whole semester to learn who is
who… At last, when I thought that I had it all figured out, all of a sudden I
realized that during third period, there is a student that I could swear I had already
seen at first period. I didn’t give it much thought until the next day when I
had that same déjà vu. When, at last, I decided to check it out I discovered,
to my great embarrassment, that these students were identical twins…
The amount of work that goes
into monitoring two hundred students is quite impossible. A weekly quiz of only
5-10 problems, one minute each to check, becomes more than three hours job,
without rechecking any. Add few rechecks, several notes and, of course, recording
grades, and you have spent well over five hours a week checking just one tiny
quiz. What about a chapter test every few weeks, a semi-final or final test? How
about a project? An assay? And of course it will be nice to be able to check
homework assignments from time to time, just spot checking, only twice a week… It
will be eight AFTER HOURS hours!
It might not be the right
place to talk about preparation since teachers have to do lesson plans regardless
of number of students. It is, however, the place to mention that a teacher is
supposed to create three different lesson plans – one for average students, one
for the special need students that are probably part of your class, and one for
the high achievers who need extra challenge. I don’t know too many teachers who
actually do that on a regular basis, but this is what a teacher is expected to
do!!! …And if you are in a teaching credentialing program, or some other
program to upgrade your qualifications, (and teachers are always in one program
or another), you are sure to be required to obey this rule…
So how did the system make
this impossible time-frame possible? One of the most genius inventions of the
twentieth century was the multiple-choice tests and the beloved scantron. The happy noise of the scantron machine
grading your students’ finals can be only compared to the noise of a gambling
machine pouring rain of coins when you hit the winning combination (and they
don’t even have those anymore L). Listening to the scantron doing the work for you and thus saving you
hours and hours of work is just as exciting as winning big! Real big!
Yes, it is such an efficient
tool – yet, with so many deficiencies… We are losing to its effortlessness a
big part of teaching and learning. Using it, teachers are unable to see where
students are mistaken, what part of the learning needs re-enforcement, and do
students know the material or just guess the answers. To make it worse - we
created a whole system that trains students in being good at guessing the right
answer; a whole industry for teaching students how to work around the need of
actually understanding the material, how to fake a knowledge… We teach them how
to be successful test takers, not successful learners…
Do you think that students
don’t get the message? You bet they do! They learn early in their school life
that the main goal is to ace the test. They don’t bother too much with the
journey, then, they just want a shortcut to the results. By the time they are
in high school they are accomplished test swindlers… Seconds after receiving
the test form, they already figure out how many versions the test has, and who
is their best copying resource. They have more ways of doing that than we can
imagine, including using technology. We, the teachers, joke that if students
were only half as resourceful learners as they are swindlers, they would be ‘A’
students. Yes, the system is smart about mass evaluation, but students outsmart
the system.
One of my colleagues tried a
way to control different test versions. Being a very well organized person, he
created color-coded versions. This method might have worked for him, having
excellent class control, but it didn’t work quite as well for me. As soon as
the students realized what the colors meant, a secret trade started
immediately. As naïve as I was I didn’t catch the trade on time, and was quite
surprised to find a pink next to a pink and green next to a green. It was not
until I saw an actual trade happening in front of my eyes that I realized what
was going on… students were making sure they have the same color as their
resource …
I tried to outsmart the
students by numbering all the tests and secretly coding the version (even
numbers, numbers ending with 5). I don’t know that it worked. I suspect that, somehow,
they managed to break the code (never underestimate students) but one thing is
sure, it didn’t help my reputation with students…
Additional, interesting,
comment about copying - it always surprised me that some students would rather copy
a test from someone, anyone, and not try themselves …
Another masses nightmare is
communicating with parents. To shield teachers from the need to meet with all
200 parents, frequent report cards are mandated, 8 report cards a year! If you are not a teacher you don’t know how
much work it involves. Every single grade has to be well thought and well
documented; it is a very time consuming process that has to be done every 5
weeks! Is it a good system? Better than nothing, but the problem is that it
cannot replace the value of meeting with parents face to face. For one thing –
some parents never see those report cards. Their students have a way of hiding them.
Others do not know the whole picture or cannot use their authority to push the
student in the right direction, and when at last they realize how poor their
student’s performance is, in many cases it is too late…
Some schools use automated
phone system to inform parents about students’ absence from school or class. Some
schools use automated calls to inform about bad behavior or academic problems… And
yes, it is better than nothing… but in order to really solve problems and keep
students on track there should be a direct communication between teachers and
parents. But with all good intentions, it is not realistic for a teacher to
call periodically every student’s home, let alone schedule a10 minutes meeting
with 200 hundred parents, because 200 appointments times 10 minutes each, equals
2000 minutes… over 30 hours of extra work…
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