Philosophy Without A Home

The Illinois Association of School Boards or IASB has resolutions , "If approved by the Delegate Assembly, resolutions become Position Statements or Belief Statements in the IASB Constitution, and thus give IASB staff direction on legislative positions." Resolution number one proposed by Mercer County School Board w ould  " allow voluntary district employees, in any capacity, the ability to carry a concealed firearm on district property,". This resolution failed last year, but they came back with added rationales.  Their rationales: " In our district, we could allocate funds to hire a full-time SRO in each of our five buildings, but it would do no good, because there aren’t enough officers or deputies on staff in our community to fill those positions. " " Another problem, mainly found in rural areas, is the distance school buildings are from local law enforcement teams. " ... " response

Not my test the students took a test. We covered area, surface area, and volume or everything we focused on during first quarter. Oh my was that difficult. I called 16 of 62 parents, these were not the only failing grades these were the tests with nothing. Like what did we do for the last 10 weeks because they had no idea. 26% of my students seemed to have no idea what we did for the entire first quarter of math class. On the flip side only 21% passed. 79% of my students could not pass a 7th grade math test after spending an entire quarter learning and 3 days reviewing. Through my disappointment it occurred to me that if this many students failed maybe something else is wrong. Could I be failing as a teacher? Probably, I'm mediocre at best. All my innovative thoughts of differentiating down to the level of my students and building from what they know to what they need to learn just failed miserably. Did they just freeze on the test? Were the questions too complicated? Did

I spent all week telling students that the quarter ended on Friday and if they want to change their grade they had to turn in work on Friday. Still at least three students asked if they could turn in work today. I did have a big pile of work to review on Friday. Much of it was not good enough to make much of an impact on their grades. I try to use grades as a measure of student knowledge. Instead of making 25 packets of missing work, most of which will be thrown out, lost, or scribbled on and then deal with students demanding to know why their grade hasn't gone up because they "did the work", I make a review test of sorts. I offered it on Wednesday for students to take it home and prove that they know and understand the concepts I taught. Every single question included a second question asking how did you solve this question. Then I gave everyone the opportunity to work on it in class on Friday. This test could take anyone from an F to an A depending on the quality o

I meant to sit down Sunday and write, but well you know life happens. So the new curriculum is really going well. We had our first common summative assessment last week. Most students did fairly well.  I know most 7th grade math curriculum starts with ratios and use that as a theme, because it leads nicely into expressions and equations which are the starting point for 8th grade. Then a lot of intervention focused curriculum usually start with number sense and then on to ratios. I wanted to start with area. First of all most of the time students are short changed with area and statistics because they come at the end of the year and are most often left out because the teacher runs out of time. More importantly I know from experience that I have a lot of students, sometimes up to 50%, who struggle with basic math facts. I wanted my students to spend a lot of time practicing those math facts to start the year. There are also a ton of ancillary skills that come with multiplicati

Wow was I busy last week. I usually had time to stop at home and grab some dinner, but 30 minutes later I was out the door again and not home until at least 8:30. The weekend didn't bring any respite, we drove to Lisle for a marching band competition and picked up a dryer along the way. I was up until 11:30 catching up on laundry, then up again at 5:30 to clean the basement and backyard for a some up coming construction. I did finish by 3 so I could grade papers and go shopping which is good, at least I won't go hungry next week. The problem with such a busy week it that I also had to spend hours on Sunday grading papers. I would rather return the work the day after with notes so we can integrate the feedback into lessons. Come Monday morning most of my students, and myself, will have forgotten what we did on individual days so looking at old papers is hard. You have to remember the assignment and think back to what you were thinking at the time and then try to make sense of

I've been in the education field for almost 20 years, but in the classroom only about 11. Five years ago I took a position as a 7th grade math teacher. For the first few yeas we had no curriculum and were expected to build everything from scratch. Holy smokes starting a new grade after being out of the classroom for 7 years and creating everything from scratch is tough. Especially in a school/district renown for it's constant change. I thought, shoot if we could just get a decent curriculum we'd be great. I should have been more specific. The school choose an opensource curriculum known for it's rigor. Personally I hate it. Not nearly enough concrete work. I struggled each day trying to get through the lesson and keep the students engaged, while they struggled to understand something speaking in a language they can barely understand. So this year I went back to building my own curriculum, not completely from scratch. I will still use the content in places, but st