Thursday, April 29, 2010

Grades vs. Phases

In this school district we have something called the continuos progress model also known as the phase system. The phase system was created so that students could move at their own pace as they progress through their education. There are 19 reading phases, 19 writing phases and 24 math phases. Once you pass all of them you are done. You could finish when you're 16 or you could finish when you're 21 or never. You might finish all of your reading phases but take another two years to finish your math phases. Again, the idea is that a student can move at her own pace.
There's a lot that is good about this. Students are grouped according to ability rather than age, social promotion is bypassed and specially designed instruction - the method of delivering special education services - is built into general education classes.  (This is usually a real problem elsewhere.  Here it's a non-issue.)
Downside is that if the students don't pass the phases (this means passing quizzes in math, completing a particular set of pieces for writing and demonstrating certain skills in reading) then they don't move up to a new grade level. This has resulted in 15 year old students in 5th grade (normally 11 year olds are in 5th grade) and very few students graduating at 18. Also it has led to a great deal of "teaching to the test" in math. Students learn a skill well-enough to pass a short quiz but often don't understand the underlying concept which leads to problems later down the educational road.  Also, you might have students in 4 or 5 different phases in one class making instruction very difficult.
Students here often tell me that the grade system is easier which is why I, and almost everyone I know, graduated at 18. I have often told them that I would have graduated at 16 in the phase system. The debate has been, "Which one is easier?".
Typing this I realize that the phase system would probably be easier for me because I was motivated and held accountable by my parents (and of course, was taught in my first language and the language spoken in my house). In addition, the expectation of my community and most of the community I grew up in was that college was necessary so high school graduation was a must. Here, some students are expected to do well in high school but very, very few people in this community have attended college. The upshot is that many students move very slowly through their phases because there's no real worthwhile goal at the end of high school (because there are so few jobs here) and little expectation to do be successful at school coming from the community.
There are other factors at work here too: drug use and drinking are problematic.  Plenty of kids in my high school drank and smoked pot but for the vast majority of these students they kept their partying to the weekend. Not so here. Many students are up very late every night making school success very difficult the next day. Also, the kids are bored. They don't have to participate in subsistence activities most of the time and there's not much else to do. Bored teenage students without the expectation of school success is a pretty good recipe for failure at school. Finally, the school has a rotating cast of teachers experiencing 30-50% turnover per year.
This is all to say that the question of Grades vs. Phases is not answerable.  My circumstances (and the circumstances of most of my classmates) were such that we were set up for school success.  The circumstances here are quite different.  There's no comparing beyond that.

I have been tagged

I'm not much, usually for chain letters or anything that seems sort of chain letter-ish. However, this is my first time being tagged (by ecocheapo, whose blog you should definitely read), and that's sort of exciting, so I figured I'd go ahead and...what's the verb for doing the thing you were supposed to do according to the tag? I've no idea.

The original tag is simply "7 Random Things About Me" but in keeping with the theme of this blog, I've changed it slightly to "7 Random Things About Me in Alaska"

1. At B's insistence, I've started writing nearly every day.
2. I never thought I'd turn 30 during the winter, but it's shaping up that way.
3. I've never been very good with new languages, even romance languages with their cognates and consistent vowel sounds, and my Yup'ik (all 7 words of it) is laughable. The problem is that there are sounds in Yup'ik I've never tried to make before, and my tongue and throat just can't work it out.
4. I like waking up at 7am better than 6am, but...
5. I hate going to the gym after work, rather than before (or even better, during).
6. I almost never get tired of B. It's actually rather amazing to me that the proportion of time annoyed at each other:time with each other is extremely low. Can I quantify? Let's see, outside of school we probably spend an average of 7 hours a day in the apartment on the weekdays, and if nighttime counts we'll call that 16 hours per day during the week, and then of course pretty much all weekend, so that's (16x5) + 48 = 128 hours together every week. B and I never really fight, exactly, but occasionally one of us gets annoyed with the other, or we have a disagreement that becomes an argument, and estimating very roughly I'd say that probably happens between 1 and 2 times every 2 weeks, so we'll call that .75 times per week, and just to make it easier, we'll say that each time it lasts an hour (I don't think it ever lasts that long, but we'll be conservative). So, that would be .75 hours of bad vibes for every 128 hours together, or 0.5% of our time together. Not bad!
7. I like 13-year olds, but I like 10-year olds better.

I don't want to put anyone on the spot here, so I'm not going to out-and-out TAG anyone, but there are a couple of blogs I like, by friends of mine. Blogger-friends, consider this a gentle tap on the shoulder, rather than a tag, and if you'd like to post 7 random things about yourself, why, I'd like to read them: eric, B, Darci, and Mason Jars and Mixing Bowls (do you have a blogger name, MJ&MB?).

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

The End in Sight, So Warm, and Will We Starve?

Note:  I began this post a week ago and just finished it today. 

We're down to five weeks before we are done with our Alaskan adventure. We've mailed some boxes home already and we've thrown some stuff away. Also, we haven't ordered any more food for several months so the cupboards are starting to get bare. More accurately, we're running out of a diversity of food. We have tons of quinoa and jelly left but we're almost out of, for instance, peanut butter and cereal. We are still getting vegetables delivered every other week but we run out long before the next box arrives. This is all to say, the pickings are slim when dinner rolls around. The situation is as it should be as the alternative to this would be buy a bunch of food that we might not eat and then either spend the money to send it back to Portland or leave it here for someone else. We will probably try to scrounge a little food at the local stores but the shelves are often nearly empty so that can't be counted on. Anyway, no emergency but lean times ahead.  (Update:  I bought soymilk at the local store!  It was $9 but worth it. I also bought two boxes of cereal and some salsa.  Total = $25.00!)

Also, it's 41 degrees out right now. Additionally the sun is up for 15 hours (but seems longer with a drawn out twilight). The snow is starting to melt along the roads where it's thinnest but is still piled several feet in some inconveniently placed drifts.  (Update:  It's down to the 20s and more snow has been falling.  The wind has really picked up to.  When does winter end here?)

I think S and I are going a little stir crazy.  However, my job is all locked up for next year - it's different from the year before and I'll  write about it some time soon.  New jobs are being posted in the Portland area so S is on the job hunt.  Less than 4 weeks to go.

Monday, April 19, 2010

Random moments with kids

I have this one student, C, who came into my class at the halfway point of the year. She's 10 years old but seems younger, maybe because her learning disability has set back her reading level, or maybe because she's spent a few years in the transition classroom, where each year her classmates were a little younger than she. I used to work with her on a pull-out basis in the afternoon where her short attention span and weak short-term memory would drive me kind of crazy. Now that she's in my reading and writing class I enjoy her much more, I think because I've been able to adopt a sense of humor when it comes to her sometimes eccentric behavior. She often will ask or tell me things that seem like total non sequitirs. On Friday I was in the middle of a lesson on the short I sound, literally mid-sentence, when I hear her little voice: "Do you love B?"

Also, a 5th grader informed me, when I remarked on how strange it was that we'd had so little snow all winter and are now getting lots of it, "It's not spring, it's winter." When I tried to argue that according to the calendar, it was in fact spring, he dismissed me with this rock-solid logic: "If it's snowing, it's winter."

And finally, today in Math, a student picked up a laminated equals sign I'd made for a hands-on algebra lesson, wrote me a little note, and taped it to my bin of math supplies. I discovered it on the way back to my own classroom: "What will you name your son if you have 1?"

A child's mind is a nearly impossible thing to predict.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Spring

I will admit that the weather has been quite warm lately - in the 20's, even into the 30's occasionally. And I don't know if we've truly acclimated or if it's just relative, but I never thought the mid-20's would feel balmy. The other day B and I were walking up to school and commenting on how warm it felt. When we got to school we mentioned this to OFL, who said, "Yeah, it's 4 out, and no wind!" 4 degrees, people. There's something very wrong here.

Anyway, despite the warm weather, this past weekend has been our most wintry one yet. We had a major snowstorm on Friday, a real blizzard, which here means something different than in other places. When I was growing up in NH, a blizzard meant, basically, a ton of snow. Here, the term blizzard is less about the amount of snow and more about the combination of snow and wind, which on Friday night was truly impressive. The wind took the wind that was falling, along with the powder already on the ground, and whipped it around so furiously that from the BIA building I couldn't see the school at all.

Our village hosted a dance festival this weekend, and the bad weather kept a few of the other villages away on Friday - and one village that did come ended up with a few people lost on the tundra, which meant some search and rescue teams had to go out looking for them. Luckily they were found and returned safely that same night.

The snow and wind kept up, off and on, all weekend, though to a lesser degree of intensity. I'd say (and I'm really bad at estimating these type of things) that maybe another 12 inches of snow fell in all? But because of the wind, it's not distributed evenly - instead there are patches of grass that are bare, just feet away from snowdrifts that come up to my waist. It's a somewhat surreal landscape. On the south side door to the BIA building, the drifts must be 7 or 8 feet high. Up on the hills, though, the warm weather has started melting the snow away.

Even though we hardly got any snow this winter, what little we did get stuck around, since it never got warm enough to melt. Now that it's warm enough to melt what's here, apparently mother nature would like to make up for her lackluster winter efforts. Hopefully the warm temps will prevail and this snow won't last. I'm sick of winter. Especially because every time I hear anything from anyone in the lower 48, they're having beautiful spring weather.

Perhaps because of all the changes in the weather lately, or maybe just due to bad luck, I've got a nice little sinus infection going - runny, sore nose, nasal voice, pressure headache, all that lovely stuff. Another reason to hope that something resembling spring arrives soon.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Statewide Testing: System Failure

This week our school is engaged in that beloved educational traditional: high stakes testing. This is the third state I've taught in so I have a small amount of perspective on what constitutes rational testing procedures. The procedures in Alaska, in my experience, are utterly irrational.
This week, all students from 3rd through 12th grade will be tested. (Tenth graders and higher are exempt if they have already passed their high school equivalency test in previous years. Otherwise, they keep taking that test until they pass.) Tuesday is reading, Wednesday is writing, Thursday is math. Fourth, eighth and tenth graders also take the science exam given on Friday. Right away one can see this is problematic. Cramming all of the high stakes testing into one week doesn't provide the students with the best chance of passing or even demonstrating what they have learned.

The tests are not timed but the students are expected to keep working on the day's test until they finish it. You have to apply to the state department of education in order for a student to be allowed to work on a test over multiple days. Students take any where from 2 to 6 hours to finish their tests. I don't think you can reasonably ask any student to work on a test for more than a couple of hours and expect their best work from them.

The instructions that accompany the test require that no one leaves the testing room until all students in the room have finished the test. If we need a bathroom break, we all take the break together in silence with one person entering the bathroom at a time. I'm supposed to lock the room to secure the tests while we're away. In the morning when I get to work I have to sign out the tests and when I return them the principal signs them back in then locks them in the safe. So test security is important to the test makers and this is good. However, all of the tests are in one book. This means that on day #1 a student could theoretically look up the math test questions then spend the next two days reviewing the necessary math. The most vigilant test proctor wouldn't catch this because no one inspects the test page numbers that a student is working on. I don't think this happened at all in my room but it could have.
In sum: 3 or 4 tests in one week, the expectation to work on the same test until completion in one day, one shot to pass each year = fail.

I didn't like the testing scenario in New York when I was there but at least the tests were spread out over a couple of days so that you could maximize the amount of concentration you got from a student. Additionally, the tests in different subjects were spread throughout the year so you didn't have one miserable week in which everyone experiences testing fatigue and wished we could have a regular school day.

Oregon has a much more reasonable testing schedule in my experience. First, all testing was computer based (with paper and pencil tests an option for all). No tests get lost, no worries about security and instant results for reading, writing and science. Also, the tests were truly untimed. You could take more than a week on a single test in order to work on the it a little bit each day. This was a boon for my students who were quick to be frustrated, had short attention spans and/or had experienced a lot of failure at school. (I taught in a program for students with behavior disorders.) Finally, you had multiple chances to take the test each year. If you passed, you were done. If you didn't, you could try again a couple of months later. The best results were kept from all of your attempts and it was easy to track growth or regression.

Conclusion: My experience with testing in Alaska leads me to determine that this is an example of epic failure when better options are at hand.

Monday, April 5, 2010

Wildlife

I've had two run ins with wildlife in the last couple of days. On Saturday the musk-ox herd was visible from the village - just a mile or so away up the hill. The hunting season was over so three of us decided to have a walk up the hill in order to get as close as we could. It was a nice day for a bit of a hike - about 5 degrees with no wind. Even before we got going the herd had moved further away. Throughout the hike they kept moving further and further up the hill. Twice when we were very close to them we spoke too loudly and they took off galloping in the opposite direction. We finally got to the top of the hill (two miles or so) where there is a plateau so we could see them even when they moved away from us. They all stared at us as we approached. We stopped about 100 yards away - maybe less. There's only 40 or so in this herd (which is about half of what they were two months ago prior to the hunting season) and they grouped up like they were circling the wagons. We watched each other for a while until it got cold at which point we slid back down the hill to home.

Today was a different type of run in. I was walking from my classroom to the office about 30 minutes into the start of the day when a parent who was carrying a large plastic tub said I should follow him because he had something I've never seen before. When he got to the 4th/5th grade classroom he opened the tub to reveal a baby spotted seal. Apparently it had been inside its mother when she was killed yesterday. It was white with some gray mixed in and had gigantic black eyes. Apparently the fur will turn brown later but for now the white acts as camouflage. The kids were amazed at its huge eyes and they took turns petting it. They were told that the seal would be sent to Seward where it would be raised and then brought back to The Village in about six months to be released (assuming it survives captivity).

I know it's 80 degrees in New England but we've got a baby seal in the school and musk-ox nearby. Take that.