I love the article… poverty vs. achievement seems so obvious to me. You can’t possibly ignore where a kid comes from and the baggage they carry into the room.

I often wonder if the extremist of “no excuses” would learn well if they sat on a bed of hot coals in class. For some kids their life outside (and inside) of school seem just as bad. To tell you the truth, for some of those kids, it really might as well be that bad.

However, this article is fairly far from the topic the thread was about.

With high-quality PD and some classroom coaching*, every teacher can accept that all students can learn. Yes, I don’t just say that all students can learn–I say that every TEACHER can believe it too.

Too bad PD is hit-and-miss and true coaching is rare. I think Dan’s visits to other classes, and his amazing self-reflection are part of this.

I’ll say one thing though about PD, most high school teachers haven’t been trained to remediate students effectively when they are below grade level. They may give procedural interventions (e.g., practice your times tables, do extra algebra, etc.) but students need to be helped conceptually for the long term.

Saddest of all, many students are incorrectly placed in the “is learning” category because the go quite far on memorization alone.

There’s a lot to be learned from our elementary colleagues in this regard!

http://tinyurl.com/6pomxa

Moral: There are just days when I feel I want to do anything else but stay with students after school, let alone 10 students before the test day. Some days I refuse for my own sanity. This is one change I see in myself. I would stay after school 4 days a week my first years of teaching. Then again, I was also doing 10 times the work compared to my students. AND… I felt guilty about my poor teaching.

Techincal Issues: I settled with the fact my 2nd year that I’ll never be done with them. Though I do agree with a previous posters comment of “… I know how to fix them now.”

I have really changed my style of teaching just this year towards student responsibility rather than giving every opportunity under the sun for students to pass. (i.e. corrections, corrections on their corrections, retests, etc)
This may seem a bit crude or that I want to cut my workload, but it comes from a very different point altogether. The world is about firsts. For most of us, you do it right the first time… or… “they’ll” find someone else that can. Maybe I am thinking about this all wrong and these 120 guinea pigs are being deprived of something they deserve this year. It has definitely been a slow process, but I think I’m seeing the sun rays peeking over the hill. It scares me to death waiting/hoping for that sun to rise.

Rich‘s comments can be summed up (IMHO) as: “That sounds good, but you’ll never actually reach that goal, so there’s no point in trying.” Reminds of a conversation with that teacher who plays solitaire for 2/3 of each class period.

I’m not successful 100% of the time. Students fail. I fail. I put in time where I can but I’ve learned my limits. Some weekends I choose to not do any school work, some days after school I choose to sit around and relax. Simply because I’m not burning myself out doesn’t mean I can’t aim for lofty goals.

http://tinyurl.com/5wswq4

I think Rich totally nails it up in comments #14 and #15.

Seth Godin said “If you can not state your position in 8 words or less you do not have a position.” Here is my position (written in 2002) ‘Discovering and nurturing possibilities to transform the world.’ Still true today.

Sir, I will do it.