January 17, 2012
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1 And so this is Tuesday.
2 Really?
3 A school week should never begin on a Tuesday.
4 That’s my feeling.
5 In fact, if you are any sort of DN aficionado, then you know of my mild campaign to eliminate Tuesday as a day of the week.
6 I could run for political office on that one issue alone.
7 Case in point: if we had already eliminated this ridiculous day as a day of the week, it would be Wednesday already. Wednesdays can be altered to be as useless as Mondays, if you really consider it.
8 At our school, the faculty brilliantly voted a few years ago to make Wednesdays minimum days.
9 I don’t get it, because it seems to me that Wednesdays should be the days when our best learning goes on. Mondays should be for minimum days and shorter periods, since Mondays in California are considered by most to be the tail end of the weekend, which in California begins on Thursday night.
10 Good God we are useless.
11 I mean Californians, not teachers. Teachers are just stupid, not incompetent.
12 For example, I think it was two years ago that our district voted to begin school in late August, and to end the school year in May, changing the entire classic landscape of learning for California kids.
13 The idea was that instead of the first semester going into January, it would end before Christmas. This would give the students a much-needed rest between semesters, and they could enjoy the holidays with family and friends.
14 <basketball buzzer> As a teacher, I saw it as a lousy idea. I assumed it would create tremendous stress on the students right before the holidays and I was right. I assumed that many teachers would give huge assignments and mountains of studies over the holidays anyway, and I was right. I assumed that it would make us work harder over the holidays to get grades done, and I was right. The grades used to be due well after Christmas. Finals usually were the second week of January, giving plenty of space for us to grade things, and more time for shopping, and for family and friends.
15 With the new decision, grades were due on the Wednesday of our return from Christmas. Sounds good on paper, but really? What the general public doesn’t understand about teaching is the amount of preparation time we put in.
16 If you are remotely close to being a good teacher, you spend the majority of your life grading papers and planning lessons.
17 By making Christmas the end of the semester, our deadline for semester grades comes in two weeks earlier. This means that whatever days we have for family and friends are annihilated. The grades are now due on the Wednesday of our return.
18 This means that we spend almost two straight weeks grading essays and finals, and then preparing for lessons that re-teach what we spent most of the first semester grading. The students will come in as zombies with no recollection of anything except constant studying, football games, candy, presents, and sugar highs. Most of what we taught won’t be remembered for at least two weeks. They will be hyper at the exact time that we need some quiet time to consider every kid’s grade; in my case, the number exceeds a hundred-fifty.
19 If the semester goes into January, we have much more time over the holidays to spend with family and friends, and by coming back and preparing for finals, we are back into the rhythm of normalcy. We also have three minimum days for finals the week after our return, which gives us hours more to work on grading and which gives us much more natural deadlines.
20 Graduation and summer would then hit in June, like normal, and school would begin in early September. That formula worked for ages. Everybody in America lived that sched as kids. Family vacations revolved around that, and traditions had already been established for decades.
21 But the teachers voted for this new idea, “for the kids”. The idea was that the students wouldn’t have to worry about school during the Christmas holidays, and that they could enjoy time with family and friends, and that the teachers were being selfish in wanting finals in January.
22 Okay, so we did this thing. From my perpsective, it was an absolute failure. I spent nearly half of the Christmas season in a race to meet the grading deadline that came two days after New Years. I had essays, finals, and normal homework stacked up higher than Everest. I had been grading each day until five or six, and still had mountains of papers. I couldn’t talk to family or friends because of those deadlines.
23 Heaven forbid if there was any sort of family crisis.
24 As for the students?
25 We had teachers giving them mountains of homework over the holidays, much like summer reading for Advanced Placement. The students had to worry constantly over their break about reading and being held accountable for massive amounts of homework which was divvied out by the same teachers who felt they should not need to worry about school during the holidays. This defeats the purpose of the change that was voted upon, which was to give the students an end and a beginning to the semesters. Fail. Big time. Fail.
26 I personally became sick because of the stress of the deadline this year. I had a little time to see people, but not nearly enough. The holidays demand lots of family time, so the time between visits was spent with stacks of papers everywhere in my living room, and School Loop demands from parents and students flooding in. “I DID that assignment!” “Why has my student’s grade gone from an A to a D?” “You haven’t gotten your TB test updated!” “I don’t mean to be pushy, but did you write my recommendation?”
27 It used to be normal to spend time with these issues. We had until the second week of January to iron all of that out. I knew it at the time the issue came to vote.
28 I tried talking to everybody and his/her brother/sister about it, but they were all sympathetic with the notion that “It’s not about us; it’s about the students.”
29 I was about the absurdity of changing not only Christmas, but summer as well. How many staff and students have traditional things going on during summer? How many people plan their summer vacations around the school year? Millions?
30 Tahoe was cold this last year, because we changed vacation plans. The water was freezing. Each year our entire family plans a huge two-week bash up there. It has been a tradition for years. This last year everybody’s vacations were altered, and that stupid vote had a huge impact on my family.
31 This didn’t just affect my family, it affected everybody’s. And it wasn’t just our district that decided school should begin in mid-August. It was a state trend, and to me, a trend that failed. I doubt very seriously that the students made any inroads into a better education. What I saw was disoriented students and teachers returning from the holidays completely dazed and out of it. Massive fail, in my eyes. The original vote to put this in place was really close, but somehow this decision is probably now set in stone.
32 I tried telling everybody I could see that changing traditional summer was a huge mistake, but it fell on deaf ears. There are still people out there who think this new scedule, passing by a slim margin, mind you, is better for the students.
33 It will never revert either, because someone, somewhere thought they were innovative, and that more learning would take place, and studies prove this, because it worked in one Lodi school, and blah, blah, blah. Studies. Really? Anyone who has ever worked on a “study” knows how those things work.
34 I’m waiting for the school year to end in April and begin in July. That seems to be the idiotic trend. Someone probably already has studies that show this to be an intelligent thing. I could probably rig a few surveys to make it a reality; that’s the scary thing.
35 I wish that when people vote on things, they would think more carefully about the realistic impact of their decisions. Simplistic things like, “It’s about the kids” just don’t match up with reality. The kids had just as much, if not more homework over the holidays. I heard horror stories of “all-nighters”. Many kids took off on vacations that they are still on as of this writing. No consideration of Chinese/Vietnamese New Year ever entered the mix. No accounting for cultural differences. The kids returning from vacations this week are going to be screwed for the entire next semester.
36 So here I am at 5 a.m. scratching my head about yesterday. Our dog Phoebe was having multitudinous health issues, so she spent the entire day in surgery at the vet. I spent the day writing vocabulary lists and planning lessons while waiting anxiously by the phone.
37 I did get a chance to watch the Niners game. That I did make time for, but couldn’t enjoy it with my Dad because the stress of those deadlines got me sick.
38 We brought Phoebe home last night at around seven, and she wobbled sideways on the front lawn. She looked like a guy returning home after last call. She’s okay now, but she had a few teeth extracted yesterday, poor thing.
39 And so this is Tuesday.
40 Did I tell you about why I think changing the entire school year calendar was a really lousy idea?
41 Okay, so the coffee started bubbling, Phoebe is up, the lights are on, and I guess it’s time to prepare to go in there and try to teach after yet another “holiday”.
42 If Tuesdays were eliminated, today would be Wednesday.
43 Just sayin’.
44 Have a good one.
45 Peace.
~H~
