Graduation Day

It is very early in the morning on Graduation Day, and I am contemplating rigor.

When I worked with Teach For America there was a great deal of talk about making each day count. Given the nature of the challenge (large groups of students who year after year learn less than their suburban counterparts) TFA corps members set goals to produce one and a half years of learning in one year. Often that is the measure of success. Have you taught students what they needed to learn in a year?

At the end of each year, I find myself asking the same question. For some of my students I am certain that I have, but there are always a wide variety of students that I am not so sure of. Reasonable people, with reasonable memories of school, know that they did not learn everything they could in every class they took.

The challenge for teachers becomes that the expectations are changing. It is good that the expectations are changing, as reasonable people with normal jobs are expected to achieve something every day they go to work. Thus, the discussion has changed, moving away from an understanding of learning (kids learn in fits and starts, and only when they are motivated), and towards an understanding of production. I am expected to produce gains on tests.

Few of us can claim (us being the American worker) that we achieve our absolute best everyday on the job. While at my best I might be capable of convincing my students to remember the discreet facts of history, or help them to understand the value of being a citizen, doing that requires a perfect storm of my own energies, the circumstances of class, and the circumstances of the students.

Next year, thanks to the school reform movement at play in my city, I will be judged for the first time on whether or not I achieve my best every day. This makes perfect sense, and I support it, I am just not sure about how to make it happen day after day after day.

I need to make every day count. Students need to learn something, efficiently, quickly and daily, if they are to have any hope of keeping up with their suburban counterparts. The best of us have trouble achieving that, and those teachers are far from the majority.

Motivating students... that is the challenge. I was motivated by parents who gave me a hard time if I got less than a B-. That's why I was a B student, but that rarely translates to my work. There are a million books, thousands of programs, but at the end of the day there is a reason that parents send their teenagers to school after all.