the home stretch

This week has been a wacky one--my kids are taking their CRCTs, I'm barely in the classroom, and institute has definitely shifted from worrying about the well-being of my nine students to focusing on how the heck I'm going to take what I've learned in the last five weeks and apply it to my third-grade classroom. But it's also been wacky because of all the other crazy stuff going on around me. I think that how my fellow CMs and I have handled all this is a testament to how much we've grown over institute: I'm now able to take things in stride that would have completely derailed me in my first week of teaching. For example:

1. If you're up on your education news (though I don't blame you if you're not--I just learned about this in the last week), you have probably heard something about the CRCT scandal that has been rocking Atlanta Public Schools over the past two years. Cliff notes version: a report was just released yesterday detailing the extent of the cheating that occurred on the CRCT in 2009 (more than 75% of schools in APS were involved to some degree). One of the schools implicated, though not nearly as severely as others, was the middle school I've been teaching at.
This has a lot of ramifications for us: at another middle school that corps members are teaching at, they aren't allowed to see their kids at all until testing is completely over (we're kept very far away from the testing classrooms while the CRCT is being administered, but we got to see our kids at breakfast and after they finished the reading test today). Many of the students we have in class this summer were possibly pushed along in school because of falsified tests. And, as we spent a long time discussing this afternoon, what went down at APS gives the impression that the only way to raise achievement levels among low-income kids is to cheat.

This is something that definitely upsets me and probably will make me more angry/sad as it sits with me for longer. But if there's one thing I've learned at institute, it's locus of control: I can't control the teachers my kids had before they got to my classroom, and I can't control what the American public thinks of the school system I've been teaching in. What I can control is how I teach my students, how I treat my students, how I empower my students. This summer has shown me that kids can without a doubt grow and achieve even in the most challenging of situations. I'm really proud to say that my kids, on average, achieved 75% of the very ambitious growth goal we set for them at the beginning of the summer (essentially to perform in the top quartile of last year's institute students). Three of them exceeded their growth goals, and two more came within 5% of hitting their target. Did we fall short? Yes. Did some of our kids finish the summer where, or worse than, they started? Yes. Does that make me sick? Yes. But the fact that in just three weeks we were able to move most of our kids to a place where they can feel confident when they take the CRCT tomorrow (!) is something to be proud of.

2. Earlier this week, I happened to (by chance) find out a lot more about one of my students' situations. Benton is a kid who has struggled through our class all summer, and we know that he has pretty severe special needs. We know that an IEP exists for him, but we don't know what it is. He's supposed to have a special ed teacher with him in every class, but he's had that teacher for exactly one of my lessons and exactly zero of Jon's. Despite all this, he remains an incredibly upbeat kid, near perfect in behavior, and one of the kids who has been quickest to buddy up to me this summer. We've tried to do as much as we know how to do for him--when Jon's teaching, I'm sitting with him, and when I'm teaching, Jon's sitting with him to make sure that he stays on track (he can't see the board very well)--and I think most of the time he's genuinely happy to be in our class. But concepts aren't getting through to him, and the worst part is that most of the FAs have pretty much thrown in the towel with him. Even before the summer started, we were told that he was pretty much a hopeless case and that we should focus our attention on other kids.

On Tuesday morning, I was heading down to the cafeteria with Felicia, one of the reading teachers who also works with my kids. On the way, she stopped her FA to ask her if she would be willing to pull a few kids out of the reading lesson to work on a practice CRCT with them. The FA was quick to agree with two of the kids, but with Benton, she wasn't sure that it would matter. It was then that I found out a key piece of information--Benton doesn't even take the regular CRCT. He takes a special version called the CRCT-M, one that neither Felicia nor I have ever seen or heard of. This poor kid has been being prepped for a test all summer that, for all we know, looks nothing like the test he was handed this morning. Then Felicia clued me in to what exactly Benton's special needs were--he has fetal alcohol syndrome. He'll most likely get pushed through to high school but might not ever make any more significant academic gains.

I feel like we were able to do a lot for Benton this summer, and I hope that when he takes the math CRCT tomorrow he feels more confident than he did when he took it in the spring. From talking to him at breakfast this morning before his reading test, I think he does. But I still feel like we didn't do right by him. We didn't fight hard enough to make sure that we knew what accommodations we needed to make for him. I didn't do enough to make sure that he was protected from the jeers and hurtful comments of his classmates. There's a reason why when, last night, I was asked to put down five non-negotiable rules I want to have for my classroom in the fall, no put-downs was at the top of the list.

What I've learned is that in the fall, I need to fight harder for the kids that need my help the most. I can only hope that Benton walks away from this summer taking the positives--the times when he worked out an answer for himself and, with some encouragement from one of his teachers, raised his hand and proudly announced that answer to the class, or our lunch conversation yesterday, in which he was absolutely amazed to discover that I had, once upon a time, been a firefighter--and leaving the negatives behind him. And if I could, I would first apologize to him for not being the best teacher I could have been for him, and then thank him on behalf of my future students. Because of him, I now know how important it is to fight to make sure every kid gets what he or she deserves.

There were a lot of positives to this week too, most of them coming today. Because most of our kids were in the reading CRCT, Jon and I had Anton, one of our best-behaved and most driven students, to ourselves for about a period today. Because we couldn't get into our normal classroom, his other teachers brought him down to our CMA room, where we were working, and there he hung out for half an hour. Just a typical Wednesday: six 20-somethings poring over sets of state standards and a 14-year-old sitting next to me, alternately working out multiple choice problems and telling us about his newest Lego construction. The best moment of the morning, though, was when we handed Anton back his post-test with his grade on the top: 81%. He had gotten a 33% on his pretest. Upon seeing the grade, he broke out in a grin, and when Jon pulled out the tracker and told him that he'd grown a whopping 144% during the summer, he looked up and said "I didn't even know that was possible." (Mental note--make sure to explain the concept of percents better next time I teach middle school math). He then told us about how, if he passes the CRCT, his mom has already made sure that he can go into the engineering and technology track at his high school next year. It's so exciting to see a kid like this work so hard and really go after his dreams (he wants to be an architect).

During our final period of the day, we let our kids compete in Jeopardy against another class. This was, in many ways, a hot mess. There were 17 kids and five teachers in the room, and it was still barely-controlled chaos. But I was incredibly proud of my class. Not only did they beat the other class, giving me and Jon bragging rights for eternity over Marissa and John Mark, but they were well-behaved (for the most part) and actually working in teams. Jarvis, who has been one of our biggest behavior challenges this summer, was put on a team with a few kids he didn't get along with because he was late to class. By the end of the period, he was gamely explaining his answers to questions to his teammates to make sure that his team would get every bonus point we could give them. To see him care enough to make that effort really warmed my heart and made me feel like, despite the countless consequences I've given him this summer, we might have actually made Jarvis invested in math.

My kids take the math CRCT tomorrow, and I likely won't see many of them after tomorrow afternoon. Send good vibes their way--they've worked so hard, and they all want so badly to get to high school. I can only hope that we've given them the tools to get there.