Today was, in its way, an excellent example of top-down educational decision making at its finest. We were supposed to have pre-assessments, which are how teachers (and more importantly, the central office) gauge what the students know at the beginning of a semester. Pre-assessments especially help to measure what has been taught over the course of a school year (i.e., they’re compared to the scores of high-stakes standardized tests such as the HSAs that are administered at the end of the year).
All of this is irrelevant. All of this is irrelevant because the central office sent us the wrong Scantron sheets, so we couldn’t administer it. WTF.
Mrs. Blank did her best at making up for this. She had the class practice procedures for doing group work, which is a surprisingly useful and necessary activity. But what, really, can be done? The students will have to take the pre-assessment tomorrow, and some of them will have to finish it up on Wednesday, which means that we can’t do anything content related because they’ll have forgotten it by then.
An interesting aspect of teaching is this constant level of pressure, of being under the gun. In other work situations, a central-office fuck up like the one that happened today wouldn’t have been a huge deal.
So we do it tomorrow? So what?
Here, there is so little room for negotiation. There is a list of things the students absolutely have to know, and a limited duration in which we can teach them. A strategically placed snow-day can rearrange a whole month of lesson plans. And for the source of this stress to be caused by an administrative oversight rather than nature’s fury is all the more irritating.
No comments:
Post a Comment