A friend of mine posted the following in her Facebook status: HOW DID WE MEET? Everyone play this game! Copy and paste this phrase on your profile, you will find it amusing to remember how you met and how you know each of your friends!! Before you do that, answer for me!
I thought it sounded fun and so I responded to her post and copied it into my status. I smiled at the comments of family members and friends. It was fun to read and reminisce about going to haunted houses and how the mother of one friend used to load us all up in the minivan to take us to ballgames, concerts and movies.
However, the most meaningful comments came from my former students and dance team members--ones thanking me for helping them, teaching them and being there for them--as a teacher and a friend. Some of them were not a surprise. After all I speak to some of them on a regular basis and remain good friends with them but some of them...I haven't seen since their graduations and only converse with online. Those were the comments that grabbed me and reminded me of my purpose.
As a teacher today, it is easy to become frustrated and bogged down in all the ... stuff. There's not enough money, and there's too much testing. Some students are out of control and the administration is out of touch. It feels endless.
When we return to school on Monday, my darling freshmen will continue to take part of a reading and English assessment as part of NCLB; while this testing does provide us with some data about their learning, they lose at least two days per testing window. They'll be assessed three times this year. They're as frustrated as I am. I've sold them on Romeo & Juliet and they're eager to start...but they have to wait.
In two weeks, the entire school will lose an instructional day for practice testing. The state requires juniors to take the ACT in March and so we practice...a lot. On that assessment practice day, the freshmen will take a practice form of a test that they will take as sophomores...again. They've already practiced once in October when the juniors & seniors took another portion of the state mandated assessment. The sophomores & juniors will practice taking the ACT and the seniors will take the state's technology assessment.
Unfortunately this is not the end of our assessment nightmare. The entire school's schedule will be disrupted in March when the juniors take the previously mentioned ACT and at the end of April, everyone but the seniors will take some form of state assessment.
Before Mother Nature so graciously gave us a four-day weekend, I was lamenting the fact that I'm now testing these children more than I'm teaching them. I was worrying that I'm not adequately preparing them for the next step in their academic lives; that I'm not helping them develop the skills needed to be good citizens and their own advocates.
Then one simple post puts it all in perspective. They reminded me of why I put up with the nonsense--it is for the kids like them. The ones in need of another caring adult in their lives; the ones who need some to teach them to read, write, interpret, think; to express who they are and who they want to be.
Overworked and underpaid? Yeah. Worth it? Oh yeah. I just needed "my kids" to remind me.
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