Entry #30 - April 19, 1999

"We sometimes think we are the only school wrestling with our particular problems, and that people in other places have everything working smoothly. A conference is a good reality check in that department...."


Last week here we had an interesting one-day Middle Schools Association conference that several of us at my school got to attend. Why is it a rule about conference workshops that the ones you most want to attend are invariably offered all in the same time slot?

I went to one in the morning on "later literacy skills" development. The speaker was energizing and had many useful ideas and strategies to share. I had trouble restraining myself, however, when she said "I know many of you Grade 7 and 8 teachers have students who are two years behind in reading...." Two years? If they were only two years behind we would consider ourselves blessed by the gods!

Try five or six years behind.... Even the "easy reading" books often offered for this age group prove too difficult for many of our students. Vocabulary and syntax are the chief culprits, as our second language learners wrestle with dependent clauses, connectives like "nevertheless" and "consequently," and lack a lot of basic word knowledge, particularly concerning idioms and figurative language.

While the presenter described strategies mainly appropriate to one-on-one instruction (a luxury not available to us), I did come away with some ideas I think I can use in smaller groups, and had a chance to swap insights and "war stories" with colleagues from other schools.

We sometimes think we are the only school wrestling with our particular problems, and that people in other places have everything working smoothly. A conference is a good reality check in that department: you find that while schools may experience different challenges, there are few where people think everything is running perfectly! We need to stay focused on improvement but not get discouraged when it seems at times that our goals are impossible to achieve.

A computer workshop in the afternoon presented opportunities to compare notes with teachers from other schools and districts. I never cease to be amazed at how extreme the differences are in resources and programs, despite an official policy of "standardization" and homogeneity. Somehow, other school districts manage to get new textbooks into all their schools on a regular basis. All their schools have computer labs and intranets; and basic supplies, while not plentiful, are at least available.

The workshop leader started by announcing that stand-alone, non-networked computers were really not "computers" at all any more -- they were passé. What?? I said. We only have two up-to-date (Windows) computers in the school -- and they are both "stand-alone." Other than that, we have Commodore 64s and an old, locally produced model (something like a TRS -80) that has been out of date since the 1980's. The workshop leader couldn't believe that I was from a public school (!), until another teacher (also from my district) chimed in with a similar story.

It does make you wonder, though -- how come some of these other districts, without better funding, manage to supply their classrooms with at least the minimum books, equipment and supplies? It sure suggests there are dis-economies of scale, as our district is enormous, as well as differences in spending priorities; but seeking accountability for expenditures is like nailing jellyfish to the wall. The money trail is so convoluted and circuitous, you can't follow it.

Back at school, we are still waiting for our eighth grader turned teacher-stalker to return after his one-month suspension. He was due back two weeks ago, but family sent him to visit relatives in "the old country" while he was suspended (makes you wonder whether he was difficult to manage at home, too) and we secretly hoped his vacation would be an extended one.

Student behavior has been better overall without his influence. The staff (especially the young teacher he was stalking) are more relaxed and a co-operative atmosphere has reasserted itself. But while on duty at lunch this week, I saw him outside the school over the noon hour, talking to his band of admirers. He's baaaaaaack. A case conference is scheduled for next week -- we apparently MUST take him back, because there is nowhere else he can go. Treatment centers and so forth have long, long waiting lists. So the rest of the students at our school must endure the presence of this violent and abusive individual whose needs cannot be met in our setting without specialized staff and resources.

This offends and angers me; while disturbed and violent students have real needs that must be addressed, I believe this should--must--be done in some other environment so that average students can come to school with the expectation of a safe and harassment-free climate for learning. Maybe that new Safe Schools law will force our district to provide alternatives for these students -- I hope so. Sometimes it is the parents who are uncooperative in seeking help for the child, but in my experience it is more often a lack of appropriate help than it is parental recalcitrance. Often the parents, too, are at their wits' end.

Our staffing model has gone in for approval, so we'll see whether it causes a stir with its non-inclusionary design. It will be clear that we cannot "service" students in mainstream classes in any meaningful way (not that we do now, as far as that goes), with a half-time learning support teacher for about 60 students! We could see "ability grouping" in the homerooms-- there is some support for that idea, but only from some of the more senior teachers--or our principal may put together a submission requesting additional Special Education staff, based on identified student needs.

For the first time since I've been at the school--three years now--we are scheduled to have some in-school planning time to determine how we will do programming and curriculum delivery for next year. I'll believe it when I see it--we are so short of substitute teachers that I don't know how such can be arranged--but it's a step forward if we can do it. Surely we can brainstorm better ways of meeting student needs than what we are doing now! And we need to collaborate so that we don't duplicate each others' efforts or undermine discipline or work completion policies.

It's difficult to make any school improvement initiatives effective when we all operate in isolation; the lack of coherence and overall unity affects the students, too. An inner city school like ours really needs to go to extra efforts to build a sense of community, identity and systematic expectations and standards for the students, and we need TIME to work TOGETHER to bring that about! Funny, isn't it, that more and more often we hear demands for more of a "businesslike" approach to education -- but NO successful business tries to operate without employee training and planning time!

Read next week's entry >>>

<<< Read last week's entry


Post a comment about this week's diary entry

Find out more about Susan

Back to Middle School Diaries index