Priorities

I lost my good friend Ingrid recently. She was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor two days after Christmas, and then she was gone less than a week later. It made me think about priorities. What do I hold dear? How do I want to be remembered? What matters in the big picture?

The day after she died, I sat in a long staff meeting after school going over all the paperwork that each teacher needs to fill out to show the state of California that our school is teaching the standards in the way the state sees fit. You see, our school district's test scores are "too low". We're a "PI" district which means Program Improvement. So the state sends in a team to poke around and decide why the test scores are not going up to their satisfaction. So all the teachers at my site sat there in this meeting making lists of our students who are struggling, documenting our daily agenda, showing evidence that we've been using the tests they want us to, providing our pacing guides to prove we are teaching at a dictated pace, etc., etc, etc.

I couldn't concentrate too well because I was thinking about priorities. Is it a priority to have a roomful of highly competent and qualified teachers filling out redundant paperwork? I thought about the irony of the state telling us we need to teach better so test scores will improve, but instead of letting us use this time to build our meaningful lessons, we are pushing papers so they can say, "See, we're making teachers accountable." What a crock. I'm tired of being dumped on by the district and the state. Here's an example: We are given roomfuls of students that are learning English, but no additional funding, resources, or teachers to help these kids. (There's a plethora of other examples that I will spare you.) Gee, I wonder why the test scores are low when the ONLY measure of success that is used by the state is a culturally biased bubble-in multiple-guess-test covering ONLY Math and English Language Arts.

Not only is this the hardest job I've had, it's the most impossible. You can't lift an elephant with a plastic spoon. (I don't know where that just came from...but I think it works.)

My friend Michele and I decided that our district needs to purchase t-shirts that read:

We're in PI
So I'm P.O.'d
Cuz it's PU
Ah, let's go to P.E.!

Or perhaps I can expand this into lyrics and send it to the Angry Tired Teachers band set to the music of "We Care A Lot" by Faith No More (as long as they remember to credit me).


P.S. The pictured bumper sticker and other precious gems are available at http://www.cafepress.com/