Rachel K. Acronyms

I promised that I would write more in my blog, and here I am making an effort. 

I joined the staff of Gumball Elementary School for a meeting during which all manner of results and numbers were half-heartedly explained in attractive, powerpoint graphs. We were asked to pinpoint what "we did right," "what we didn't quite get," and "burning questions." Having never worked at Gumball, I had very little to say on these matters, but it was an insight into how boring real life teacher meetings can be. It was simultaneously disheartening and reassuring to see how confused the teachers were, and how many of them were content to sit at their tables and whisper things like, "what does any of this mean?" And the fact of the matter is, these people are teachers; THESE PEOPLE ARE SMART. So, rather than you, the reader, losing faith in the public school system, please instead consider how ridiculous standardized test scores can cause everything to appear. 

Students aren't kids named Aidan or Beverly or Tien, they are numbers that go in all manner of categories like "Pacific Islander or other," or "special education," or "ELL," or sometimes all three. These categories all have their own numbers -some percentages, some percentiles, and all of them color coded. I heard things like, "this is something to celebrate - the black kids increased their progress in reading by 14.2%!" But really, all black kids aren't reading better, it just means that the handfull of black kids in the specific 4th grade cohort had watched enough sesame street, whereas the previous cohort may have all been refugees from some African country you're pretty sure you've heard of, but pray nobody ever asks you what region it's in... because you're pretty sure it's in east Africa, but really it could be near the Baltic Sea for all you know about geography that is anywhere east of Europe and west of China. 

Geography aside, it is really strange to look at demographics and numbers and to think that a good number of kids who really need to know stuff like how to read and add sums aren't up to grade standard. Can we all just take a moment for those kids? OK, back to the numbers. 

Seattle Public Schools are apparently in trouble; only 35 schools in the state qualify as at or above standard on our standardized tests (all of them with horrible acronyms like the MAP or WASL or MSP, which I guess isn't technically an acronym although it could arguably be pronounced, "misp.")  

On the upside, the 5th grade team seem very happy to challenge their assumptions, change things around and never be set in their ways. Mrs. Cake is my teacher, Mrs. KLRZ is another teacher (she would fit in the "Pacific Islander or Other" category as a Samoan-American), and Mrs. Short, who used to be KLRZ's teacher intern back in the day. I am looking forward to working with them and seeing how on earth planning for 5th grade works when there are 3 people in charge of it. As I may have mentioned, Gumball is an open concept school, so our 5th grade classrooms are all in the same space and the teachers are very involved in one another's planning. 

Eventually the meeting ended, and my friend who will be working in the 1st grade classes (Hannah is her name) drove me home and we listened to Ludacris circa 2003 and it was awesome. 

I hope that I teach in Seattle long enough to create my own acronym for standardized testing. I'm thinking along the lines of FISH (fundamentals of integrated school humanities), RAIN (ritual assessment of intellectual (k)nowledge) or TSFTWHTT (that stupid ****ing test we have to take). I am open to other ideas, too.