The "Make or Break" Term

Monday, January 6, we begin the Spring Term 2014 at Oklahoma Centennial Middle/High School.  This will be a crucial, really a "make or break" year for our school.  This term is the last in our School Improvement Grant, the money given to us to "turn around" the school from its "failing" ways.  So far, the results have not been all that positive, though there are some positive signs.

On the state department of educations "A-F" report card, we rose from a "D" grade to "D+". The feeling is that we will have to show much more improvement for the school to remain as it presently exists.  If this does not happen, we all face the possibility that we will need to apply for new jobs next year. I am not going to borrow trouble. I have enough to deal with right in front of me.

The district chose to send our principal, Charmaine Johnson to another school. Ms. Johnson did wonderful work during her two and a half year tenure. She helped me improve my teaching methods and taught us the importance of relationships in working with our students, among other improvements.  But it was judged that a change was needed, perhaps more than anything else to impress on us the seriousness of our situation.

There are many things beyond any teacher's control.  Those things I can't worry about. There is a need in front of me.  The young lives in my classroom need to know how to read, write, speak, and think well to succeed. Our goal as a school is to increase STUDENT achievement. All things that do not lead to this are distractions.

A Visit to Ingalls

Hotel that was the site of the Battles of Ingalls

Yesterday, we decided to take a little car trip. Cat and I have always loved to take small trips to parts of Oklahoma we have yet to see. Skylar, our granddaughter has come to enjoy this also.  She wanted to go to see Stillwater and Oklahoma State University. I remembered that not far from Stillwater was the community of Ingalls, Oklahoma where a big Old West gun battle took place called "The Battle of Ingalls".

Other building from the Old West in Ingalls, OK

I was very pleasantly surprised to see so many of the original structures still in place. I wonder why more has not been made of this incident which was far larger than the much more famous "Gunfight at the OK Corral"?

Oklahoma Historical Marker detailing the battle.

Another building of interest to us was the old school building in the town. This was in much better condition than the rest of the building making me think that it is still in use for one purpose or another.

Ingalls School

Skylar found a friend while we were there.

Skylar and friend

On the Cusp of 2014

In a few minutes it will be 2014. Of course, a teacher's "year" bridges the old year and the new. At the end of my 2012-2013 year, I was a miserable teacher. I did not feel as though I had the respect of my principal, nor did I feel that I had done well as a teacher. I had struggled with my classes, particularly the seniors that year who seemed more interested in fighting one another than they were in learning. That began to change when the students, the juniors at the time began to report on their End-of-Instruction (EOI) test scores, which seemed to be much better than in past years.

 When I finally got the results, it turned out that over 80% of them has passed their EOIs. When the non-full time students were factored out, it turned out that 80% of the full-time students had passed, the highest scores in the school's history.

While I did not feel that I was the sole factor in this result, I did feel a great deal better about myself as a teacher, and it seemed to make all the difference to my morale and approach to teaching at Centennial. I felt that if there were one thing that made a difference, it was the fact that I had begun to develop relationships with the students that has deepened over the months. I have tried to help students celebrate their time in the school by cheering their victories and commensurating their losses.

 I also had much help from many of the consultants who came to aid our schools. The best advice they gave me was to go with my instincts to perform for the students. I have always felt that teachers are to some degree actors, and that I needed to "sell" what I the knowledge I wanted them to master. That freed me up to become a knowledge salesman, and that helped to get them involved in their learning.

 As I face this new year, I will continue to do what I have done. We have some changes coming on in our school. We will have a new principal starting on Friday. The students are expected to show improvement over last year.

Who knows what the state or district will do with our school. We will just have to carry on and remember that the only ones who really matter in all this are our students, our future.

Happy New Year!

The Template for the Hard-Boiled Detective

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read this book because it was listed on a book lover's web site entitled something like "Great Books Too Short Not To Have Read" or something like that.

Raymond Chandler created the template for the hard-boiled detective story. He was not the first to write in this genre. In fact, the origins can be traced back at least as far as the knight-errant tales of the Middle Ages. Chandler's Phillip Marlow is cynical, world-weary, and tough, but he is honorable and honest. His honesty is both his greatest asset and greatest curse as he makes his way through a world of self-serving deceivers. He won't betray a client, even when the client deserves betrayal. He helps the weak, especially women, but he won't be taken in by their seeming helplessness.

In The Big Sleep, Marlow is summoned to the home of General Sternwood, a wealthy, elderly man who has two daughters in their twenties whom he done a very poor job of raising. Sternwood is being blackmailed for something his youngest daughter, Carmen has done. This is not the first time this has happened with Carmen. Sternwood wants Marlow to take care of the matter. He also mentions that his eldest daughter, Vivian, has recently married a hood named Rusty Regan, but Regan has disappeared. Marlow's job does not include finding Regan, but Regan's disappearance figures into the plot of the story.

I am not a fan of detective novels or murder mysteries. Chandler's writing, though, I find fascinating. He is so fond of similes and analogies, that I wonder if he kept a bank of them somewhere close to his typewriter to pull out and insert in appropriate places. For example:
"The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work show-girl uses her last good pair of stockings." The sentence captures both Sternwood physical and moral decrepitude.

I also loved Chandler's setting descriptions. He describes Vivian Regan's room thus, "The room was too big, the ceiling was too high, the doors were too tall, and the white carpet that went from wall to wall looked like a fresh fall of snow at Lake Arrowhead. There were full-length mirrors and crystal doodads all over the place. The ivory furniture had chromium on it, and the enormous ivory drapes lay tumbled on the white carpet a yard from the windows. The white made the ivory look dirty and the ivory made the white look bled out."

I recommend The Big Sleep to those who are detective and murder mystery fans as well as English teachers looking for a great source for teaching descriptive writing and the use of figurative language.

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Even the Browns

Even the Browns: Baseball During World War II by William B. Mead
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book looks at the years baseball played under the shadow of the Second World War when most of the top tier players were called into the service. While the quality of play dropped throughout the major leagues, the Browns, baseball's perennial losers during that era, were affected far less than other teams largely because their players were largely cast-offs, has beens, and never weres. The Browns won their only pennant in 1944 and played the St. Louis Cardinals in the first, last, and only all St. Louis series, "The Streetcar Series", played in old Sportsmans Park.

William Mead, who as a young boy lived in St. Louis and watched the Browns and Cardinals play, gives us a fast-paced, informative account of how baseball managed to continue on during this war (professional baseball was suspended during World War I) giving accounts of how the league and its owners successfully lobbied to have the games go on for the sake of morale, how baseball adapted to war time conditions (night games became more and more a part of the schedule to allow war industry workers the chance to go to games), and how various players who otherwise would have not had the chance to play managed to make and contribute to their teams.

Recommended for baseball fans, war history buffs, and sports fans.

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Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the second installment of Scott Westerfeld's alternative history trilogy. In this book Aleksandar, or Alek, an heir to the throne of the Austrian Empire, is on the British airship, Leviathan, a living airship made from the combined genes of whales and other animals, on his way to Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. With him are his Austrian companions Count Volger, Klopp and Hoffman and the British crew including a young woman named Deryn who has disguised herself as a young man named Delyn.

Together they try to keep the Ottomans from joining the German and Austrian side of the Great War raging in Europe between their "Clanker" war machines and the British, French, and Russian "Darwinist" animal creations.

This is typical Steampunk high adventure with narrow escapes, conflicts over divided loyalties, and new mysteries to be solved.

Recommended for everyone who, like me, enjoys the Steampunk genre.

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Tomorrow Is The First Day of School in the Oklahoma City Public School District

Tomorrow we begin school in the OKC school district.  This is the 3rd year we have had the "continuous calendar" starting school in early August with longer breaks during the year than we had under the system used by most of the districts in the state.

Friday,  Centennial teachers ended 2 weeks of "pre-school" workshops and orientation.  On Friday, we given the preliminary data from last years end of school tests.  There was bad news and good news.  Our middle school math and English scores showed only slight improvement. Our high school math score remained about the same. However, there was good news in the high school English scores.  The English II scores showed that 73% of the students who took the test passed while in English III (my classes) had 81% passing including 7% who scored in the advanced range!

I wish I could take more credit for this than I deserve.  However, in light of the fact that I missed about 6 weeks of instruction due to my shoulder injury, I have to say that this was mainly due to a very good group of students, and the fact that students are starting to take the End of Instruction (EOI) tests very seriously. This is something that I have long expected would happen once passing the EOIs became mandatory.

Before, every time the students would take one of the high stakes tests, they would ask if they "had" to pass the test in order to graduate.  We tried to put lipstick on the pig of truth in those days  by saying that while they did not have to pass the test in order to graduate, their score would appear on their permanent transcript.  I could see the students beginning to shut down when they hear the first part of the previous sentence.  Now, I can answer their question with YES.

Now students take the test very seriously. They have seen a couple of years worth of students who did not pass the tests and had to retake and retake them till they did. (They have other options, but passing the EOI is the best, most efficient way to meet graduation requirements.)

This is the last year we will do the EOIs as we have known them. Next year comes the Common Core Standards with new tests.  We will hit the "reset" button and begin once again.

So ready or not, here we go again!

A Teacher Evaluation System That Rube Goldberg Would Love

Rube Goldberg Machine

Today our district explained our Teacher/Leader Evaluation (TLE) process. At least that was the objective of the "lesson" we were given. (We're all about objectives now that we are following the Marzano---ALL HAIL MARZANO--system.)  I am not certain that the lesson was completely clear for everyone.

But here is as much as I was able to take away from it.

Basically, there are three parts to the system (like Gaul in a way). 

First there is the Marzano (ALL HAIL MARZANO) part, which is 50% of our evaluation.  We will be evaluated on how well we are doing on the "Domains" that Marzano (ALL HAIL MAR--well, you get the joke) has established as the practices of effective teachers, things like posting learning goals, classroom management, assessing student progress, and so on. 

All Hail Marzano, the new God of Public Education!

Ok, fair enough. This provides an effective model for classroom instruction, though most of this is pouring new wine into old wine skins. In other words, it's stuff we have been doing in one form or another just given new names. 

Then it gets a little weird.  The next part of our evaluation comes from student performance. How well students do on their high performance tests.  This accounts for 35% of our evaluation, and it makes teaching a high poverty student body a very risky prospect indeed.

  But we are told to have no fear, that all is well.

Our student performance evaluation will be based on the Value Added Model (VAM).  What this bit of magic professes to do is PREDICT how much a teacher should be doing to bring his or her students up to speed and evaluates how well the teacher did. The model takes in factors like how much time the student is with a particular teacher, how that student has performed in the past, how well the student should be doing if he was with a teacher given how the student has performed in the past, family factors (I swear that during part of the presentation that fairy dust, unicorn horns, and the Elder Wand were involved), and so on.

The creator of the VAM

And now it gets really weird.  There is still 15% of our evaluation left.  And that part is up to us, sort of.  We then have to come up with 

Actually, that is OAM or "Other Academic Measures." Here we select a couple of things we feel we should be evaluated on that are appropriate to our teaching area.  For example, if I were to teach Advanced Placement English, then I might choose as a part of my evaluation how my students did on the AP exams.  Or if I taught music, then how my students did in competitions.  So in all, 50% of my evaluation could be centered on student performance.

Of course, all of this is really a first impression, but the impression is that this system is rather complex and rather subjective.  I fear that due to this evaluation method, teachers will more and more choose NOT to teach in schools that are already low-performing because of the inherent risk factors involved in an evaluation process that rides on whether or not those students, despite their socioeconomic backgrounds, respond to the teacher's best efforts.  The schools with the highest need will be the ones that the best teachers will avoid at all cost.

I fear that this is a train wreck in the making.

The Practice of Teaching

Today was the last day of the Centennial Teacher Academy, a five-day professional development teach-in done by folks from the Marzano Research Laboratory and the Pearson Corporation.  Much of it, especially for those of us returning to the school, was stuff that has been covered over and over again. However, we have many, many new teachers to our building and students. Should be interesting to see how they do when they finally meet our students.

Tomorrow, all teachers in the district report back to our schools for 3 days of work in our rooms and an introduction to procedures, rules, and "how-to"s.

Tomorrow, we will have an introduction to our evaluation process which the district will use to rate our effectiveness. So far we are not being rated on our test scores, but I am sure that is coming.

This will be my 20th year as a public school teacher.  I believe that I have about 4 more years to go before I am eligible to retire with full benefits. I have never had a year where I felt I was a 100% effective teacher.

Perhaps that's a good thing because I know more than anyone else how much room I have for improvement. Teaching is, after all, a practice just like the law and medical profession.

I am still practicing to be a teacher.

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Siddhartha is Hermann Hesse novel exploring Eastern religion and philosophy, particular the teaching found in Buddhism. The book was written in the 1920s, but not translated into English until 1951 upon which it had a big influence on the Beats and hippies of the 50s and 60s.

I read books like this to gain what knowledge and wisdom I can find in them. In this book I gained a better understanding of Buddhism, and I appreciated one of the central themes of the book, the holiness of everything. However, I find that I can only go so far with that because for me there are actions and choices that are good and evil. Slavery is evil, always has been evil (even though there are verses in the Bible that seem to contradict this.) Justice is good; it is impossible for a society to be too just.

However, I do believe that our understanding of what is good and evil is limited because, as St. Paul stated, we carry our knowledge and judgement in "earthen vessels." Therefore, it is imperative that we gain as many different perspectives as we can to help us transcend our limitations.

That is the primary reason I like reading such a wide variety of ideas and opinions so that I can fill my vessel of understanding to capacity.

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I Really Love My Job

I feel that after the last couple of posts I need to clarify something. I really do love my job.  Let me emphasize that: 

I Really Love My Job!!!!!

I do not want anyone to think that because I write about all the problems associated with teaching that I would like to do anything else than being a teacher.  I may complain about all the paperwork, the regulations, the pressures put on my profession, but in the end, I enjoy working with the kids, love the feeling I get when the light comes on in their eyes, when they tell me later on that I helped them succeed in college or their career. (It happens and teachers live for those moments.)

I also love teaching at Centennial, with all the challenges that come with it. I feel as though the work I am doing there is important, is healing some wounds in our community. None of our students asked to be born in the circumstances they find themselves in. They did not ask to be born in poverty, to be born in a state where they may be hated for their skin color, to be born in dysfunctional families.  I need to remember this in my moments of frustration and work to heal and not further harm.

I love working with my colleagues who day in and day out commit themselves to the same work I am in.  Those who are not a part of the teaching profession, particularly teaching in an urban school, cannot understand the challenges we face and often make facile statements of condemnation.

I also like our administration.   Principal Johnson was brave enough to step into a tough situation.  She keeps challenging us to step up our game.  Reginald "Reggie" Smith and Andrew Pearson our assistant principals do their best to keep up with the demands of working with a student body whose maturity and social growth have been stunted by their poverty and culture. 

H. Charmaine Johnson, Principal of Oklahoma Centennial Middle/High School

I intend to write a good deal about the school this year, but whenever I write about problems the school or I am having, be assured that I do so out of love for the school and my profession.

Go Bison!

Feeling Overwhelmed

Drinking from a fire hose

Today was the 3rd day of the Oklahoma Centennial Teachers' Academy.  I feeling as if I am expected to get a drink from a fire hose.

We have been going over many classroom instructional procedures: learning goals (both simple and complex), lesson segments (each with "Design Questions" and "Elements"), protocols, formative assessments, tracking, and so on, each of which we have to build into our lessons and upon which we will be evaluated this year.

And that's just with the folks from Marzano.  Next we people from the Pearson Publishing Corporation get a crack at us.

We've been working on getting our first unit of instruction put together. I thought I had mine pretty well done, but during the last minute of the session we were told that we would have to add a new element to our planning. I feel like each year, sometimes each week, someone moves the goalposts further away.

Teaching to the Test

For the last two days I have been in the Oklahoma Centennial Teachers' Academy over at Langston Univ. in OKC. This will be my 20th year teaching in public schools in Oklahoma City. I began at old John Marshall High School in 1994. It is easy for me to remember the year because in the Spring semester of '95, the Oklahoma City bombing happened. 

There are many, many new faces in our faculty and staff. Somewhere around 35 teachers chose not to return to our school. I cannot speak as to what motivated them all, but several expressed a desire to get away from a school that has been given a "D" rating on the state's A-F grading system and is under constant scrutiny due to the fact that we were the recipients of a federal "School Improvement Grant" (SIG). This is the 3rd year of the grant, and we if don't show improvement, there may be serious consequences for our staff and administration. Right now, we are being schooled once again in the "Marzano" method of instruction. How well we do in following Marzano concepts as outlined in his many books including Classroom Instruction That Works and The Art and Science of Teaching will be part of our teacher evaluation.

So far we have been working together to get a unit planned for the first weeks of school.  In our Language Arts Department, we will begin with the short story and teach the students in how to read critically and identify story theme and elements.  I will be responsible for teaching the 11th grade and probably for helping students prepare for the ACT and other college entrance exams.  I will not be teaching as I have done in the past to introduce students to the scope of American literature, although American literature will form the bunk of the selections I will teach in fiction. Instead, I will be trying to prepare my students to do well on standardized tests.

At long last, the political forces have succeeded in getting me to teach to the test.

Designed by Laura E. Kelly (Click to view at original large size.)

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The Twisted Tragedy of Miss Natalie Stewart by Leanna Renee Hieber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Really enjoyed this book. Even better than Darker Still.

The Twisted Tragedy of Miss Natalie Stewart find Natalie and Jonathan Whitby, Lord Denbury on the run. Natalie rescued Denbury from a spell that had his soul trapped in a painting while his body, inhabited by a demon, roamed the streets of late 19th Century New York City murdering young girls. There we have two gothic and steampunk progenitors: Oscar Wilde's A Portrait of Dorian Gray and Robert Lewis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

In this book, we get an added dose of Frankenstein as it turns out that Jonathan, as well as his mother and father, was the victim of secret group called "The Society" who seem to have several agenda including resurrecting the dead.

The main interest in the novel for me is how Natalie is developing as a character. A former voluntary mute, Natalie comes to more and more realize her strength and resourcefulness as she along with the clairvoyant Mrs. Northe and her friend deaf and dumb friend Rachel, who is in touch with the ghosts of the victims of the Society, uncover the group's plot and once again face down the demon who possessed Jonathan's body.

The plot is fast paced. The characters are multidimensional, the good not being wholly good and the bad, except for the demon, not wholly bad. Natalie and Jonathan have their moments of jealousy and even petty fights. The men involved in the Society's ressurection work are motivated by their grief for past loved ones. There are others with worse agendas, but they are only visited and, I assume, will play a role in future books in the series.

Recommended for horror, fantasy, steampunk, and gothic romance lovers.

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Flight by Sherman Alexie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am reading liking Sherman Alexie books. In Flight, a young Indian boy who goes by the name "Zits" because of his bad skin finds himself bouncing from foster homes to halfway houses to jails in an downward spiral of destructive, self-loathing behavior.

Zits lands in one more jail where he meets young white boy who calls himself "Justice". Justice breaks Zits out of a halfway house Zits has been taken to after his release from jail. There Justice teaches Zits to kill and convinces him to go to a bank and begin to shoot everyone there.

Zits does this killing several people until he is killed by a security guard. But that is only the beginning because Zits finds himself on a journey through time, space, and alternate lives. Zits has to live many different lives: an FBI agent, an Indian child at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, an adulterous husband and his own father. Each time Zits learns something about himself and about the human condition.

In some ways this book reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five and the book's protagonist, Billy Pilgrim. Alexie's use of magical realism makes the story more than a study of the plight of Native Americans. This story is about the plight of being human.

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Jeff Shaara creates a very good Civil War novel

Gods and Generals by Jeff Shaara
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Jeff Shaara uses the formula used so successfully in Killer Angels, an historical novel about the Civil War battle of Gettysburg, in Gods and Generals which covers the battles of Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville. Each chapter focuses on one of the major figures in these conflicts including Lee, Jackson, Winfield Scott Hancock, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, and others.

I appreciated Shaara's in-depth research which matches that of his father's book. The characters are complex and nuanced. The reading never bogs down. The descriptions and actions are as good as any created by Gore Vidal and Stephen Crane on the same topics.

One more thing. The book is better than the movie.

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I Like Big Books and I Cannot Lie Post Card from Zazzle.com (clipped to polyvore.com)

Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season by Jonathan Eig
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Eig's biography of Jack Roosevelt Robinson's first year as a Brooklyn Dodger is a scrupulously balanced account of an oft-told legend. Eig reseaches many of the stories told about Robinson's rookie season such as Pee Wee Reese's gesture of support for Robinson by giving Jackie a shoulder hug during a game when the opposing team cursed and jeered baseball's first modern black player. Eig is somewhat skeptical that it happened, if at all, as the stories about the hug claim.

Robinson is portrayed as a complex hero who felt very deeply hurt by prejudicial treatment, but chose to follow Brooklyn General Manager Branch Rickey's direction not to fight back when attacked. Instead Jackie chose to challenge his angry through his play. Eig demonstrates that it was Jackie's presence, particularly his speed and daring on the basepaths that enabled an otherwise average Dodger team to win the National League pennant in 1947.

I would recommend this book to baseball fans, social scientists, and history lovers for its honest portrayal of a game and a nation in the process of change.

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Great for my African-American Students

How Stella Got Her Groove Back by Terry McMillan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I got this book for my high school students through a Title I grant. The books we ordered with the funds are to be used for high-interest young adult reading. I ordered this book because our student body is majority African-American, and I knew that Terry McMillan wrote her books about black characters.

When the order arrived, How Stella Got Her Groove back came with a note asking me that I preview the book because of its sexual content. So I did, and I am still making this available for the students despite of the fact that the "f" word is used liberally and there are a couple of sex scenes that, while certainly erotic, are not, in my opinion, graphically pornographic.

Stella is a 42 year old professional woman who decides that she needs a change in her life. She works in finance, a job she does not enjoy but which pays her quite well. She is also divorced with a 10 year old son. Stella sees an advertisement for Jamaica and decides to book a vacation in Montego Bay. There she meets 20 year old Winston Shakespeare who soon wins her heart. The conflict revolves around her age, his youth, her previous poor experiences with love, and her conflict over whether she feels true love or just chemistry.

I liked the book well enough. I like it better for my students, who often complain that books with black characters stress with negative sides of African-American life. McMillan has created a successful, professional character who struggles with human size problems rather than political systems. I think they, particularly my female students will enjoy this book.

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