MONTBELLO aka THE BELLOS aka THE ‘HOOD’- Denver, CO
Hello world. This will be the first of a series of posts wherein I will attempt to shed some light on what it’s really like to work in today’s public school system. I can’t promise to make you laugh. I can’t promise to make you cry. I can’t promise to make profound statements about the meaning of life. However, I can promise you that what I write will be true. I may change names on occasion to protect identities, but, since this is my little corner of the Internet, and I have no idea whether anyone will really read — let alone believe — what I put down. When I need to speak out, I will.
So let’s do this, yes?
This semester in AP English Language and Composition, I’m asking my students to focus on producing authentic pieces of writing. What this is really intended to be about is assessments that are as authentic as possible. I came up with this brilliant idea after attending the NCTE conference which is truly soup for the English teacher soul. You can only imagine, upon returning from break, I had the best of intentions. We began our new novel, “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, we read and used Nowcomment.com to collaboratively annotate “Dulce et Decorum Est” as our anticipatory activity, and we even began some light discussion about perpetual warfare — with weapons or words — as it shows up in American society (See #Blacklivesmatter and #Intersectionality).
Nevertheless, As I write this, students are doing one of the most inauthentic tasks we ask them to do in the world of education, they are taking a AP and ACT practice tests. Why am I having them do this? Well, as with any complicated situation, the answer is even more complicated. There is tremendous pressure to drive scores up up up even while engagement levels go down down down. There is the desire to live up to the promise that we as an “innovation” school have made to deliver “significant” gains with regard to student achievement in return for more pay and flexibility with scheduling. There is the fight within us rising up to fight back against continual deficit language used with regard to “urban” and “underperforming” schools like mine. When we hear that, “Your kids always perform badly,” or “Your school has been failing kids for decades,” — which isn’t actually true. It is hard not to want to fight back. Conditions like these keep us in perennial purgatory between the inspiring, fun, innovative, collaborative place that school should be, and the often oppressive, limiting, individualist environment it has become.
So there you have it, the beginning of 2016 and the end of the 2015–2016 school year has gotten off to a rather lackluster beginning. I recently read, “To Change Education, Change the Message,” and I so agree with this. Consequently, I suppose the first step is to fight for my students and their right to write their own narratives or message about what it means to learn in today’s schools. I’ve decided that one of their first authentic assessments will be social commentaries published online. Look for their voices here, alongside mine, in the coming weeks as we push into 2016 with purpose.
