R-Day

I recently read an interesting article in my cousin's blog about teaching high school math in California. She wrote about how teachers' successes and failures are inextricably linked to the successes and failures of their students. There's much in the US news these days about reward/punishment schemes that use student scores on standardized tests as a means of measuring teacher efficacy. Whether this is effective, advisable, necessary, welcome or The Coming of the Apocolypse is not for me to speculate on in this space. The most interesting thing about this particular blog post was the sentiment that teachers often have to face up to their failures when exam time rolls around: when the results comes in, teachers need to acknowledge that something went right or wrong somewhere along the line, be it in their classroom or somewhere else during the students' life experience. There are a number of students in classrooms across the world who have negligible negative outside influences. These students have relatively stable lives and come to school regularly. It is these students agains whom we test our mettle. If we can help these students succeed, or at least gain reasonably ground in a push to catch up to grade-level literacy, then we've done our jobs. But what if these students fail?

I'm facing this same issue at the moment here in Auckland. We start school tomorrow and we'll face R-Day i.e. Resluts Day: we'll finding out who passed English last year and who will have to resit the year. These results mainly show how the students fared on their big end of year exam last year. These exams where extrenally graded, meaning I didn't give them out and, when finished, the exams were sent out to someone else for grading. So bright and early Tuesday I'll get a full breakdown of how my students from last year scored. As Geetha mentioned in her blog I'll have to take the results as hard evidence of how well I matched my activities and lessons up with my students' needs. Which failures will I have to bear as my responsibility? How many external factors contributed to these failures and which, if any, of them were more influential than me? I can only speculate at this point and feel nervous for my students all over again. The day they went into their test I took a stroll past the testing site and chatted with a few students before they went in. After the exam, word on the street was that the exam was fair and students overall felt pretty good about it. This made me feel better at the time but the aprehension is coming back to me today.

I do know the fate of a few of my students. From looking at the class rosters, I have a few students from the Level 1 class I taught last year on the roster for my Level 2 class this year. For the most part I wasn't worried about these guys and I'm actually looking forward to having them in class again. They were all pretty on top of their game and turned in thoughtful, interesting essays. I'm really excited to get to work with them again next year.

One student was a complete and pleasant surprise, though. This young man struggled all year, and I mean really struggled. The ideas in his head fly at Mach 2 and when you talk to him he'll often end one sentence half way through it in order to start another. Following conversation with the guy is a real challenge. It's no surprise, then, that he has a hard time slowing his brain down enough to organize thoughts in longer pieces of writing. When I saw him on my list for this year, my first thought was "holy shit, he did it." I say this because he put in a herculean effort during the last month of class to identify gaps in his essay writing skills. He knew that if he didn't pass with x% on the exam he wouldn't make it into Level 2. He asked me one day how he could improve and I told him to write practice essays at home on any of the essay topics that were on the mid year exam. The best thing he could do was timed writings, I said, so write a full essay in 40 minutes and then stop when the timer goes. The end result would give him what he had actually turned into long-term writing and thinking habits. I told him to bring in anything he wrote and I'd give him feedback. So he wrote practice essays. He practically shoved essay after essay at me, asking, "could you look this over for me? I'm not sure how to get past the third paragraph." This was at least twice a week for a full month. I was a bit worried because his skills still lagged behind the rest of the class, even with this extra work. Evidently it was enough, though, because I'll get to work with him again next year. He'll be a challenge again this year, to be sure, and I'm wondering if he'll be able to keep his momentum up. He's a very pleasant student, though, and I'm looking forward to seeing what he produces this year.

I know I don't speak for just myself when I say that teachers take the failure of their students almost as hard as the students. There are those teachers out there who genuinely believe that they did everything they could and that a failing grade is the result of a mish-mash of controllable and uncontrollable factors, if not simply laziness on the student's part. How many of these untouchable teachers actually exist, I can't say. Personally, I can't silence the little voice in my head when I look over results sheets and question-by-question scoring breakdowns. The voice frequently whispers questions like, "why didn't that work" and "what was so difficult about that section for these students?" Like good scientists, good teachers are trained to be sceptical. We're told that there is always something more to be done, always another way to get the point across to one more student. There are laws on the books that imply that when our students fail they have "fallen behind" because of poor leadership by their teachers. How can I keep my morale up on R-Day when there is no possible satisfying R-Day in sight? If there is always something more to be done, there is no peg on which to hang my hat at the end of the day. This is an ultimately exhausting proposition for many of us but is enough to keep some of us going. I wonder how long I'll be able to last.