Gasp...Progress?

I won't get on my soapbox here about education and testing and all that, y'all have all heard it before I'm sure. Probably after I've had a few glasses of wine, but I will say I was heartened to read this story in Yahoo news today.

Imagine that. Tracking how students GROW over a period of time. Not how they stack up randomly to other groups of students, ignoring changes in demographics or student population or even, wow, how THAT STUDENT IMPROVES OVER TIME.

Have I just heard a grain of sense from the wacked out administration shovelling this education model on us? Obviously it's only a test and if you read closely, Tennessee and North Carolina are given the *option* of tracking students this way, but hey, baby steps.

People often ask me if I will go back to the classroom once the Bean and the Peabo are at an age; I have to say, I'm not sure. I don't know if I can stomach teaching under the current asinine curriculum "standards" and guidelines. While I was teaching, social studies didn't fall under the auspices of "MUST TEST MUST TEST"...but now it has. And the last I heard, you test in 8th grade...but you test everything the kids have learned in 6th AND 7th AND 8th grade. If you aren't familiar with the California social studies regimen, in 6th grade they do Ancient History. In 7th, they do Modern World History. In 8th, they do US History through WWI.

See anything a tad funky with that? Yeah, that's *exactly* what I want to do with 40 minute periods, 6 times a day, with a bunch of hormonal teenagers who can barely sit still long enough to learn the stuff I'm "supposed" to be teaching according to the state friggin' standards. I REALLY want to re-teach 3000 years of world history, oh, and cram US history on top of that.

So the answer is no, I will not be returning to the classroom. Call me a quitter, but I did my time in the trenches, and I simply don't have the patience to endure that mess again. I love teaching. I just hate the public school system. And yes, my kids will go to public school, but I think being a public school PARENT is going to be tough enough without adding public school TEACHER on top of that. I may go get my master's and try to pick up a few part time gigs at the community college level; I'm under no illusion that the students want to learn anything more intensely, but I won't be saddled with the extra folderol that frankly doesn't seem to do much of anything anyway. I had kids in 8th grade who had gone through 8 or 9 years of public schooling in California, not some foreign country...who couldn't write a coherent sentence in English OR Spanish. Believe me, I would have taken well written Spanish in place of what I had to decipher.

It's a damn joke. And I love being pregnant because I get to be strident! Yay!

Shoot. I got on my soapbox, didn't I?

You're so much less Canadian when pregnant. I like u knocked up. U sassy, girl.
;)