Jonathan Paul Loomis

February 24, 1999

Independent Study: Education

Mona Wineberg

Today was an interesting day at Hyde, as all of our half days are. It really started last night when the snow began to fall. This morning I looked up the school closings on the Internet and found that DC was still open so off I went. A fair number of parents, however, did not feel that messing with taking their kids to school through the snow for only a half day was worth it so our class was a bit sparse. This bothered Mary Ann, Ms. Moffitt, and I because it means that both we blow off the day and just do minor assignments or we end up reteaching everything later in the week. Neither case is ideal but today we chose to plow ahead.

During the very first part of the morning the students were working on some packets that had been assigned by the principal. He is officially the principal of Hyde, but is stationed at Hardy Middle School and an assistant principal serves Hyde. The principal, however, feels that it is his job every once in a while to take a look at what's going on at Hyde and when this happens he often intercedes and imposes some activity on the daily life of the school. This is, generally, the opinion of most of the teachers that I've talked with. In this case he felt that the fifth graders should complete a particular battery of worksheets to help prepare them for this spring's standardized testing. The merits of this particular workbook were debatable, and they didn't really fit into anything we were doing, but we did them anyway.

From everything I understand concerning this principal and the tests, far more importance is placed on it than is ever necessary. Any teacher who's worked with a class all year could make an easy assessment of any particular student. No test is required, and in many cases I think that the test could confound reality. But what is going on right now is that the administration does not trust the teachers and feels like it must administer tests to see how the students are doing, and then further force the teachers to administer these worksheets to prepare the students for the tests. These are ten-year-olds we're instructing; I'm not sure who's testing whom here. The only real problem I have with entering the educational profession at this particular time is that current national political trends have forced many community and state leaders to mandate tests right and left. These tests, at least for fifth graders, are not healthy. Testing at this level should be done to see who needs help, not to determine how much money schools should get or if particular students should pass a grade.

Later in the day, after the class had PE, we worked on reading. I took two students out into the hall to read because they often get distracted when they read in the larger group. They worked well for me, and I was pleased with their progress. One of these students has an interesting habit of reading a line and rephrasing parts of it in his own way. He does this as he reads and I'm not sure if he knows what he's doing. Perhaps if I have the chance to work with him again I will try to find out. I might be an interesting exercise for him in metacognition. I think he would be the kind of student to get into this kind of activity, although he does need the reading practice.

After reading I worked individually with our classic "everything is late" student. My goal was to see if I could get him to write a page of instructions for some activity. He chose "entertaining a baby" which I though might be good because his home life is incredibly chaotic and he probably does take care of his siblings quite a bit. Although his paper didn't turn out in the first-then-last format that we had intended the "How to give instructions" lesson to teach, his work demonstrated that he did know how to write and think critically about what were and what were not good instructions. In the end what was most important was that he did anything at all.

I stayed for the afternoon of the half-day to help Mary Ann finish off some projects and start up some new ones. I personally finished the large Chesapeake Bay map project that I had started during AU's winter break. The final product was impressive (I'm planning to take pictures that will be included for you later) and I was terribly pleased, both that it turned out so well and also that it was done. Afterward I photocopied packets for Black History Month.

To end the day I joined the upper grade teachers to help construct a rubric for a standardized writing assessment. The format for this rubric tended to remind me a lot of what those over enthusiastic professors who love the copy machine give us in college. It struck me as being way too much for even a fifth grader to deal with. I think simple is the best way to go, and to give a student this chart with explanations like "Includes some story details but they are not in a logical order" seems silly. On the whole this chart constitutes more of a composition than any of their stories will. I foresee a half an hour spent just trying to explain it to them, and even then I think it will only serve to terrify them into thinking that these stories have to be the most incredible works of literature ever written. Our students know what good work is. If a rubric has to be made it should be for the teachers to insure fair grading, not for the students.

In conclusion, a good day. Each time I have the opportunity to be at Hyde for one of these crazy kinds of days it's an informative look into the daily lives of public school teachers. What I see I like though, in spite of all of the garbage they put up with.