Month: January 2010

What Makes a Teacher Whose Students Perform Well on Standardized Tests?

I just finished reading this article,”What Makes a Great Teacher?”, from The Atlantic for the second time.  Lots of good stuff…yet, at the end, I still feel like punching somebody in the nuts.

Here’s what I’m taking away for my own teaching practice:

  • “[G]reat teachers…set big goals for their students. They [are] also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness.”
  • “Great teachers…constantly reevaluate what they are doing.”
  • “Superstar teachers [have] four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruit[] students and their families into the process; they maintain[] focus, ensuring that everything they [do] contribute[s] to student learning; they plan[] exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they work[] relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.”
  • “[O]ne way that great teachers ensure that kids are learning is to frequently check for understanding: Are the kids—all of the kids—following what you are saying? Asking ‘Does anyone have any questions?’ does not work…”
  • And as one interviewee said, “…it’s the mind-set that teachers need—a kind of relentless approach to the problem.”

OK, great!  I like it.  I’m for it.

And at the same time, the article is titled “What Makes a Great Teacher?”

The ONLY criterion used to evaluate teachers as great or non-great is student performance on standardized math and reading tests.  The author, Amanda Ripley, concedes in one sentence out of the whole article that “the data could never capture the entire story of a teacher’s impact”.  Damn straight!  What about the kids’ citizenship? creativity? tolerance? interpersonal skills? self-expression?

I want my students to perform well on standardized tests.  I do.  I think they have value:  they show whether students can read certain materials and answer certain types of questions about said materials and calculate and fill in bubbles.  But if my students have high growth and achievement scores on standardized tests, that makes me Effective at Getting My Students to Perform Well on Standardized Tests.  It does not make me a Great Teacher.

New Feature: Ask the Avid Bruxist

Reader Rachel asks

Today I’m consumed with the question: even though it’s so staged, corny and shameless that it causes me actual physical pain, why do I keep watching The Bachelor?

The Avid Bruxist answers

If I had TV*, I would watch it because doesn’t a size-2 girl with straight, white teeth and shiny hair—a person with no cellulite whatsoever—get rejected each episode?  Good stuff.

*I don’t have TV.  I mean, I have a TV set and DVD player that my friend Angie lent me when she moved temporarily to Spain, and I NetFlix the hell out of some shows, but I don’t get, y’know, channels.  Somebody told me recently that I could just connect my computer to my TV set and, voila, programs!  Here’s why I’m NOT going to do that:  I grew up without TV.  I came from parents who thought TV rotted the mind.   And my folks were right, of course, but the complete prohibition of it creates TV JUNKIES.  Exhibit A: there was a time in my childhood when the gods sent HBO(?!) to our 13-inch, black and white TV, and my siblings and I absolutely gorged ourselves on “Fletch” and “The Legend of Billie Jean” when my parents weren’t around.  We must have watched each of those movies 25 times.  (I can go note-for-note with Pat Benatar on ‘Invincible’.)  To this day, I have no governor on my TV consumption.  If I were to have unlimited programming, I’d probably be watching a rerun of Maury when Mr. Povich and his gang showed up to film the episode “It’s Official…I’ve Grown into My Couch”.

Viva Anita

I did a quick count yesterday, and I’m pretty sure I have

twenty-

one

readers.

Twenty-one is a legion, right?  I’m pretty sure twenty-one is a legion.

Anyhow, I’m completely tapped tonight, dear legion.  So I offer up a topic for the comments section:

Anita Baker vs. Anita Bryant

Discuss.

The Definition of Insanity

  • The condition of being insane, a derangement of the mind
  • Law Such unsoundness of mind as affects legal responsibility or capacity
  • Psychiatry (formerly) Psychosis
  • Extreme folly; senselessness; foolhardiness

I’ve heard it a eleventy billion times:  “Isn’t that the definition of insanity?  Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?”

Just so we’re clear, No.  Not the definition of insanity.  If I want to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result, that might mean I’m persistent, or insistent, or hopeful, or maybe even dumb.  But I’m not insane.

E-I-MFing-O

I have my crankypants on.  And my bossyboots.  Makes for a lovely ensemble.

  • My throat’s all scratchy.
  • I ate too many cookies, so now I have a belly-ache.
  • Scott Brown won the special election in Massachusetts.
  • I have to be at work at 7:15am every day.
  • My mechanic is $1,200 richer than he was this morning.
  • Not one of you has done my laundry lately.
  • And my Scrabble rack on Facebook looks like the fucking chorus of “Old MacDonald”.

Of course, the happenstance of having been born to white parents in the United States in the 21st century means I have an education, a house, a job, a car, (truly crappy) health insurance, cookies, a voter registration card, and a washing machine.

Nothing to be done about that passel of vowels on my Scrabble rack, though, I guess.