SB6: All Teachers Left Behind.

As you may have found out from my Twitter feed today, the Florida senate passed a bill this morning, Senate Bill 6. What does this bill do? For starters, it ties teacher pay directly to student performance on state exams. It also eliminates seniority, advanced degrees, and any notion of job security as far as teachers are concerned.

I have a nickname for SB6 -- I call it the "All Teachers Left Behind Bill." As you can tell, I'm not too optimistic about this. Not because my students do not perform well on state exams -- I actually have a decent passage rate in my classes -- but because I think it is jeopardizing the future of students, teachers, and public education in general.

While I do think assessments are important in education, I do not believe it is fair to base educator pay (which is already terribly low to begin with) upon student performance. What if I have a class of students who are poorly motivated, despite my best efforts to inspire them to pass the FCAT? So many of my students come from low-income families and have to work jobs themselves just to help make ends meet. Their motivation is more often than not getting a paycheck over getting a grade. In addition, a great number of my students are immigrants from Cuba and other nearby foreign countries, and so they have a language barrier to cross before they can hope to pass a test like the FCAT. Is it fair for these students' scores to affect my salary if these issues are out of my control? And is this bill fair for teachers whose students are enrolled in ESE or ESOL courses?

Someone wrote a great letter to the editor of a local paper about this:

In response to the March 15 Teachers' pay faces big overhaul article on teacher evaluations and teacher pay, here are some issues I hope to raise with my elected representatives in the Florida Legislature:

• Will we be scientific about applying this new evaluation system? For example, will we pilot-test the system before rolling it out statewide? And will the results of this pilot test be published and open for peer review? And if the pilot test shows that the system cannot validly identify which teachers in a school district are ``better than'' others, will we still keep the system?
• So that teachers can be relieved of their fears that this new system is an insidious attempt to lower their meager salaries even more, could the state publish some figures showing, on the positive side, how high a teacher's salary could rise if that teacher's students have high test scores?
• If a teacher's pay will depend on how high a teacher's students score on state tests, wouldn't it be fair to make students and their parents sign contracts promising that they, too, will take the necessary steps to ensure that the students' test scores are as high as possible? And if a student fails to come to class every day or fails to do his or her required assignments in a class, does that contract become null and void? And should such a student's test scores be factored out of a teacher's salary calculations?
• Considering that it has never been easy to put a highly qualified teacher in all of Florida's classrooms, will we heed Hippocrates' famous caveat that the new evaluation system, first and foremost, do no harm?
• If increasing a teacher's pay based on seniority is such a bad thing, shouldn't the state banish it for all state employees and all other civil-service jobs including for college professors at state universities; UF, FSU, and FIU; troopers with the Florida Highway Patrol and corrections officers?
• If it is fair to make half of a teacher's salary contingent on student test scores, couldn't the state devise similar systems for its other civil-service employees? How about 50 percent of the salaries of our state court judges tied to decreases in criminal recidivism? Or 50 percent of the salaries of doctors in state-funded hospitals tied to decreases in patient's weight and cholesterol levels? Or 50 percent of the salaries of elected officials tied to honestly representing the needs of their constituents?

SHAWN ERIC DeNIGHT, Miami

DeNight raises some valid questions, but unfortunately, Sen. John Thrasher, R-St. Augustine, who wrote the bill, apparently did not consider these issues upon writing Senate Bill 6. Its future now lies in the hands of the Florida House, whose members will ultimately decide whether or not to pass this bill. I hope for the future of Florida's public education, and more personally, for my own future, that the house decides not to pass Senate Bill 6, now House Bill 707.

picture via flickr

To learn more about Senate Bill 6 and what you can do to help, visit these sites:

Read the entirety of Senate Bill 6 here. (You need Adobe Acrobat for this .)
The Answer Sheet -- Disaster for Florida teachers: Senate Bill 6

United Teachers of Dade

ETA: Call 850-488-1450 and tell the Speaker of the House that SB6/HB707 is UNACCEPTABLE!

Teaching is a Three-Ring Circus

While I was with my friend yesterday and she was commiserating with me about the shitty pay that teachers receive, I said something that I personally feel is very true: "Teaching is a performance art." If you cannot grab your students' attention and maintain it, you will not survive even one year as a teacher. I know this as sure as any other lesson I've ever learned, because I had to learn it the hard way.

So how does one go about becoming a teacher?

It's not enough to do your bachelor's degree in education, not even a master's degree or a doctorate will really prepare you. Not really. Sure, learning about famous, dead, white, male teachers has a purpose - it helps you attain certification so you can actually get hired to teach - but once you're sitting at your desk and there's five minutes left before the first bell of your teaching career rings, none of those textbooks will do you a whit of good. I'm sorry to disappoint any aspiring teachers out there, but this is the God honest truth.

So what can you do to prepare yourself to become a teacher?

The best advice I can give you is to practice in an actual setting with real live students. Tutoring one-on-one, either by hiring out yourself or working with a service like Kaplan, Full Potential, etc., is a good way to start, as it gives you an idea of the rapport you will need to build with students, but in order to get the full experience of a class dynamic, you need to teach an actual class. I've been fortunate enough that almost every woman in my family is a teacher or works within education, so as a young girl, I got to go in with my mother, who's a teacher-aide, on school holidays (I went to a private school while my mother worked in a public school) and witness teaching from a different perspective.

Another thing that truly helped me was my experience working for the first principal to hire me, Mrs. Furmanick. A large part of my interview process involved my teaching English to a class of 7th graders, and I only had a few days beforehand to prepare. With great energy and excitement, I searched online for a short story that would capture the attention of these middle schoolers. I don't remember the exact story I used (this was six years ago and my memory is a freaking sieve), but I know it was fantasy and involved some kind of dragon. Whatever, I thought it was cool and I had a good feeling the students would, too. After finding my story, I prepared questions and planned my lesson down the milisecond. Heck, I even bought my first "teacherly" outfit, this silky blouse with sleek beige khaki pants.

I thought I looked professional. I thought I was prepared. I thought wrong.

Sure, the first half of my lesson plan went great. I introduced myself and asked the students to say a little about themselves so that I could learn about them, too. I introduced the story, taking great care to emphasize the fantasy and action elements of it. Then I called upon various students to read, stopping the reading every so often to ask pointed questions to make sure the students understood the story and were paying attention. I was so smug, thinking I had the job in the bag. I was as good as hired, I thought. Then suddenly, the story was done, all my questions had been answered. The students were all seated in their desks, looking at me attentively, waiting for the rest of their lesson. But my script was done. Despite the fact that I still had 15 minutes left in the class, I was done.

That was the moment I realized that teaching is not an exact science. You can plan your lessons, and yes, you should plan lessons ahead of time so that you are prepared, but you have to be ready for anything. You have to have back-up plans so that you don't have dead space and time to kill. Because the students will smell the blood in the water and nothing, nothing is worse than showing the students you're not prepared for them.

Did I get that job? Yes, yes, I did. But those 15 minutes I did not plan for were brutal. I had to scramble and call upon everything in my power not to flounder. I equate this experience with a comedian who's planned for a 20 minute routine, and then realizes mid-act that his jokes only take five minutes to tell. It was hell, but I've always been a good ad-libber, having been an active participant in my drama club during high school.

This year is my sixth year as a teacher. I have taught students in grades 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, and 12. I even had two brief experiences teaching at the college level, just one class apiece for an undergraduate English class and a graduate English class. I am not perfect, but I am experienced and feel I can handle just about anything a student can throw at me - barring violence and anything of that sort, of course. It's not the classes I took in education or the workshops that have made me the teacher I am today - if I am to be honest, it's 60% on-the-job learning and 40% experience from my years acting in high school.

Listlessness

Is it wrong to want the school year to be over already but still feel like I'm already beginning to miss my students? Well, the good ones, anyways.

I'm just so listless. I don't have energy to do anything except read the Twilight saga (I'm already on Book 3, Eclipse, which I'd better finish rereading soon because I promised I'd lend it to one of my students) and write ficlets. I finally reached another milestone the other day and wrote my 400th ficlet. Freaking insane. My boyfriend gets on my case because I haven't done lickety squat on my thesis, but there's always the summer, I reply.

The scary thing is that I'm going to have to hold myself to that, if I want to graduate anytime before 2008 ends. Which I do! Not just because it will get rid of this heavy albatross strung around my neck, but because I will receive a $3,000.00 increase in my teaching salary.

But in the meantime, I write ficlets and read, read and write ficlets. When the guilt starts to set in, I grade. I've actually gotten a lot of grading done in the past few days. I'm even almost caught up with my AP English Language & Composition classes. Ironically, I'm behind on the grading for my remedial reading students, which is the easiest grading to do. I guess that's why I've put it aside for now.

So I will be glad when June 6th rolls around and the school year is over. It's not that far away. Amazing how fast this school year has flown. How fast the year itself has flown. We are almost in summer. Already I can feel the heat starting to creep in, those humidity-soaked scorching days that Miami does so well. But it will be worth it, because then I'll be able to sleep in and not have to worry about grading anymore, just writing my thesis.

But I am starting to miss my students. I've forged a lot of great connections with many of my students this year. I was blessed to receive a mostly good bunch of kids. I have to remember to take my camera with me to work tomorrow so I can take pictures of them. I know I'll regret it in the future if I don't take advantage of the time I have now.

OK, enough sentimentality for one blog post. I must be PMSing, I'm never this way. Not this bad.

Before I close, one more obligatory Twilight reference: I found a pretty cool website that seems to be the quickest at posting updates about the series and the film and anything relating to both: Twilight Lexicon. I'm still a fan of everglow because it's such a creative and well-run site, but I'm digging this new one, too. Will this Twilight addiction never end?!