I am honestly still reeling from the illogical path our government has taken to change education over the years. Every bit of evidence says that smaller class sizes, reading to children, having recess, access to health care, and reducing child poverty would have large benefits to our kids. But what do we get instead? Testing and paperwork. Paperwork and testing. Punitive teacher evaluation systems. Field trips to see what rich, successful schools do to see if we can emulate their results. News flash: We can’t.
Several years ago, we went on a trip to Carmel Junior High to see their model. One of our teachers asked about their ESL (English as a Second Language) numbers. Their ESL teacher said, “Two.” Our teacher said, “Two percent?” They responded, “No, two students. They both speak Japanese as their first language.” Every single one of us groaned. Clearly, Carmel Junior High had different issues than we did.
Years after that, I was the school representative in charge of the school improvement plan committee. As the chair of the committee, I was also expected to tour other schools to evaluate their school improvement plans. I think the evaluation body was North Central or something like that. The first and only time I went on such a trip, the teachers there were so stressed out that they were asking me what they should be doing differently like I had all the answers. I told them to relax, because I didn’t have any more insight than they did. I hated being put in that position, so that was the only time I ever agreed to be an evaluator.
Still later, I served on the Superintendent’s Advisory Committee for the Use of Data in the Classroom. I had just read Moneyball, and I was interested in how they would use numbers to improve instruction. What they did was to buy into the Marzano program out of Denver, which meant purchasing books for everyone, training everyone, and creating “data teams” to break down and analyze scores generated from our own testing. Now, I read the book cover to cover. And as a degreed secondary math teacher, I had to take statistics and courses on test validity, so I kind of knew what I was talking about. And the book was just utter nonsense. It expected non-math teachers to know more than I did. From that moment on, whenever I referred to the numbers we were collecting, I called it “data,” including the quotation marks. And when I resigned from the data coordinator position out of frustration for being pulled out of the classroom to take classes in Excel (which I had already done for graduate credit), Two other teachers took my place and just botched the job completely. They were using circle graphs to compare classes of vastly different sizes as if they were identical. Our special education teacher was nearly in tears because her big red circle of four failing kids was the same as our groups of 75-100. The misleading graphs made her look like an abject failure.
Many of my friends will say that it’s all part of an effort to get rid of public education, and I could buy that. But I also hesitate to assign malice where incompetence is more likely.
My final point: I went to a conference on the importance of reading in middle school. I was the lone math teacher from our school, and because I’d written a book, I was chosen to go. And the presenter, every time she tried to include the importance of including reading in math, said, “And this is where you talk about your logarithms.” I couldn’t quite believe what I had just heard, logarithms not being part of our middle school curriculum. But she said it again. And a third time. I wondered what state she was from, and thought just maybe logarithms are a bigger deal there. On the fourth mention, the context was finally revealed. She wasn’t talking about logarithms. She was referring to ALGORITHMS.
So, sometimes it’s not intentional. Sometimes, the harm is done because of simple ignorance.
Office Space republished from my Blogger blog, May 29, 2011
I haven’t written in my blog very much during this school year, and with good reason. The stuff I would have written about probably would have gotten me fired, and while it might have made a good point about how tenure really doesn’t give a teacher a job for life, I didn’t really want to put that to the test.
Suffice to say that the turnover in our main office this year is now complete. At the end of last year, we lost our principal, our only assistant principal, and one of our two counselors. We also lost our head custodian to retirement. During the course of the year, our head secretary/office manager retired. And now, with the end of the school year coming, we’re losing our other counselor to another school system. The writing, it appears, was on the wall. So now, we go into the 2011-2012 school year with an entirely different administrative/counseling staff than we had a year ago, when our test scores actually improved so much that we jumped up two levels in Indiana Public Law 221’s ranking model. It’s probably not a coincidence. One staff member (not me) was heard to say, “They’ve taken what we’ve built over the past five years and destroyed it in nine months.”
I’ve felt what others have felt, that I have to look over my shoulder. Things have been reported about teachers in our building that are patently untrue as if they were documented fact. When the teachers in question were confronted about it, the source of the information was quickly deduced and confirmed by an independent source. Then, another backstabber was identified through direct quotes. I was also singled out in a most unprofessional way earlier in the year for, heaven forbid, raising my voice.
The curricular changes that we have experienced this year in tandem with teacher accountability models approved by the state haven’t helped, either. Let’s put it this way: We are supposed to be using these new curriculum materials to support the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), but the evaluation tool being used to determine our pay is based on the Indiana Academic Standards (IAS), and that will remain the case until 2013-2014. So, we were told to teach to standards that won’t be tested for two more years, and to not worry about the IAS that are not included by the new curriculum. I mean, our evaluations will be based up to 50% on test scores yielded from an entirely different set of criteria. It’s only our paychecks and our job performance rating. What’s to worry about? The textbook series that was adopted last year is so egregious, that it has actually driven innovative teachers to retire. In one meeting last year, a math teacher I greatly respect was told that an activity that he had created, very similar to the one presented in the new text, could not be used and that the textbook material had to be used verbatim, like it was some sort of holy writ. This was his last year, and he could have retired some time ago.
Meanwhile, at mid-year, our new principal made our school part of the 8-Step Process, by which windows of standards are taught and assessed every three weeks. This three week schedule was made without communicating any detail to the staff. Unfortunately, the curriculum we were handed is made up of eight books that take at the minimum, four weeks to complete. The 8-Step Process aligns with Indiana Academic Standards, and the curriculum doesn’t. We ended up reteaching one of our 4.5 week units for three more weeks before the high-stakes test, and left out a lot of critical instruction that students needed to move on to high school.
Just a short while ago, I posted how happy I was to be getting free of that curricular nightmare with a new opportunity for next year to teach problem solving. The joy was short lived. The next day, I attended a meeting where I was essentially handed three units of the new curriculum to teach to each semester class. I was warned I might have to teach “one or two” units of it and I agreed to it. That turned into a hard number three in less than 24 hours and was told that I could simply deal with it. When calculated using the suggested timeline for those units, that left 10 days each semester to implement my grand plan to really teach kids math that they could use and would enjoy and remember. That’s not in any way what I signed up for.
I don’t know when it happened this year, but at one point I just wanted to watch “Office Space.” When my brother first introduced me to this movie almost 10 years ago, I remember thinking how lucky I was not to have a job like that. When I watched it again this year, I thought, wow, now I have a job just like that. No one listens. Screwups advance, while people who toe the line and work hard go unrewarded or even punished. The people to whom teachers report contradict themselves and each other with alarming regularity. There’s no motivation to work harder, because all it will lead to is the promotion of the administration. Let me put it this way: I’ve had six principals in my building in 14 years. Many of us feel like we have footprints up our backs. We’re just a stepping stone to high school administration. It’s made me as cynical as Peter Gibbons and on Friday I was about ready to start cleaning fish on my collaboration reports. I even went so far as to put a red Swingline stapler in my Amazon wish list to put on my desk next year. It was really frustrating to feel that way about the career that I’ve loved since the first day in my classroom.
These feelings all came to a head last night. I was at Barnes and Noble with my friends Eric and Rob, and as we were leaving the store, I spotted it. The Office Space Kit. It comes with a little red Swingline stapler, an Initech coffee cup just like Lumbergh carries around, some flair, and TPS report cover sheets. I thought about it, decided against it, and walked out to the car. As I sat there, I reconsidered it. I could just see myself, thumbing my nose at authority, my private little in-jokes mocking the situation. And then, believe it or not, the words of Yoda came to me: “Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.” I started up the car and went home, resolved not to do that.
I’m not going to break. Not now, and not ever. I am going to do what I set out to do next year. I’m going to teach kids how to solve mathematical problems. I will adhere to both the Common Core State Standards and the Indiana Academic Standards, but I’m not following slavishly the poor textbooks with which I’ve been saddled. I found a little passage that Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett sent me in an email yesterday that opens the door:
Due to the emphasis on the Standards for Mathematical Practice, the cluster design of the standards, the increased depth of the CCSS, and the grade-level content shifts from IAS to CCSS, curriculum planning teams will need to evaluate their current instructional materials. This is true for schools who have already adopted instructional materials, as well as those who will adopt materials aligned to the CCSS. In either case, chapters and lessons may exist that do not meet the full expectation of the CCSS, and others that do not meet the full expectation of the IAS. School corporations will very likely need to exclude certain lessons or chapters in order to focus on what is required of the standards. They will also need to determine which chapters or lessons should be used to teach the required content to ensure coherence in the curriculum. This will likely require teachers to teach out of order from the textbook and only use the lessons needed. It will also likely require teachers to develop gap lessons and to adapt lessons to meet the full expectation of the standards.
Yes, you read that right. If the book doesn’t do the job required by the state, we have to pare it and supplement it. And that’s just what I plan to do. I’m going to approach this next year with renewed vigor. I’m going to create “gap lessons” like you wouldn’t believe. I’m going to Lowe’s tomorrow to get a big sheet of bulletin board to mount on my basement wall to organize the lessons around the standards that the awful textbook doesn’t hit. And every one of those lessons is going to be my flair. And there’s going to be a hell of a lot more than the fifteen minimum pieces of it, let me tell you.
Next year I’m going to express myself, and I’ll never, never have a case of the Mondays.
A story I’ve never written about before. It was the fall of 1982. I’d just had my senior pictures taken, we were in the middle of football season, and my circumstances were a bit unusual, to say the least.
Earlier in the summer, my father had left his fourth wife while I was vacationing for my annual two weeks of visitation at my mother’s house in the upper peninsula of Michigan. He’d had me pack all my things, not that there was a lot to pack, and leave them in places where he could find them easily. When I came back, he had moved to a one-bedroom apartment in Cadillac, away from Mesick, where I had lived ever since seventh grade. The apartment was in the adjacent building to the one where my grandma lived, just down Pearl Street, at the end of which was the ubiquitous Big Boy restaurant that had been such a large part of my childhood. I slept on a futon in the living room, while my dad had the bedroom. I didn’t have a problem with that. I was glad to be away from Number Four.
The problem with living in Cadillac was that I would have to switch schools for my senior year, which my father promised I would never have to do. The solution was unique. my friend, Ken LaFountain, lived in a farmhouse with his mother in nearby Copemish, with his mother, Joyce, who was a foster parent. We negotiated a $40 per week payment for me to stay there with them for the year. My dad was gainfully employed at the time (for a change) but I wanted to support myself, so in the winter, I got a job at Crystal Mountain Ski Resort, where Ken worked. I worked Saturdays in the cafe, and Sundays in the buffet room. Because I had taken all of my academic classes except for two, math analysis/pre-calculus and civics, I enrolled at the Wexford-Missaukee Area Vocational Center. I took electronics, in hopes of becoming a computer systems engineer. This becomes important a little bit later. The vocational school was located in Cadillac, just down the hill from my dad’s apartment. So, I got dropped off at the vocational school on Monday morning, stayed the week with the LaFountains, and my dad picked me up after the Friday night football game to take me back to Cadillac from wherever we were playing. It was really a pretty elegant solution.
So, one Saturday, I had to drive to Traverse City to take the ACT. We didn’t have the money for me to take the SAT, and none of the colleges I was going to apply to needed it, so the ACT was it for me. I drove all the way to Traverse City from Cadillac, my longest solo drive ever, in my dad’s beaten up 1974 Chevy Nova. I got to the college campus where the test was being given, and it was a gorgeous sunny day. I left my jacket in the trunk with my duffel bag, locked the car, and went in. The ACT was given in four parts, and math was first. I didn’t care for math, but it went okay, I thought. I knocked out social studies and English. Those were my best subjects. And then came science. I froze. There was so much on this test that I simply hadn’t learned. I was terrified. What was I going to do? I muddled through the test as best I could, and looked up at the clock to see that there were only ten minutes remaining and I still had about 15 questions to answer. I started to panic until I saw what the next section was: Ohm’s Law. As fate would have it, we had just gotten done with Ohm’s Law in my electronics class at the vocational school and I absolutely crushed the last 15 questions with time to spare. Flushed with victory, but feeling like someone had sucked all my brains out with a vacuum cleaner, I walked outside in the fresh, crisp fall air to my locked car.
And I did not have the keys in my pocket.
I panicked. Where were the keys? Then I realized exactly where they were. They were in my jackeg pocket. I had locked them in the trunk! Now, these were the days before cell phones. I used a quarter and a dime to call the police to come help me unlock my dad’s car. I waited about an hour until they showed up. They popped the door lock for me, and I knew well enough how to get into a trunk by taking down the back of the back seat. I retrieved my jacket and my keys, and they asked me to unlock the car door to prove it was my car. The key didn’t work. I thought, oh no, they’re going to think the car is stolen. I went back to the trunk and the round GM key opened it right up, but the rectangular key didn’t open the door. I was puzzled. I was able to start the car, though, so the police were satisfied that I hadn’t stolen the car. But I was sure confused why the key wouldn’t open the door. That was a mystery for another time. I thanked the officers and commenced with my post-test celebration.
My dad had given me $10, and I wasn’t going to bring change home. I drove just down Garfield Street to Bonanza. Back in those days, Bonanza was where you could buy a steak and baked potato, and then eat off the food bar until you couldn’t move for about five bucks. And in those glorious days, I was burning about 4,500 calories a day so I could pack it away. I was 6’4″ and 210 pounds and pack it away I did.
When I got home, My dad grabbed my grandma and took us both down to the Big Boy. I told them both of the great adventure I’d had and my brush with the law. My dad said, “Oh, I forgot to tell you. Those are replacement doors. Don’t lock them.”
My back may argue against me, but my brain doesn’t. Although I retired over six years ago, I really wasn’t ready to. I may never be. I settled into a boring daily routine of substitute teaching and doing puzzles to keep my brain sharp. I worked on my supposed reitrement hobby, buying, repairing, and selling old Mego action figures, and tried to keep my brain engaged with the world.
It didn’t work.
I got so bored that, three years ago now, I wrote a novel. You’ve heard of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)? It takes place in November every year. I didn’t join the website or the official group or anything like that. I just read the guidelines, which suggested writing a 50,000 word draft during the month of November and off I went. I wrote 60,000 words in 26 days. Done. Are you ever going to read that novel? No. It was a romance novel set in 1998 and the main characters are two middle school teachers who work in a school very similar to one that shall remain nameless, where very early in my career, many shenanigans were going on. “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental” was a complete lie. I just wanted to see if I could do it.
When I gave up, bored, and went back to the classroom full-time, I was not in the best mindset. I started off teaching freshmen, who were feral wolves during COVID and didn’t know how to behave at all. And then I had to transfer to the city’s grade 10-12 building because I was the only one certified to teach most high school classes. That turned out to be even worse. I was saddled with teaching students Algebra I. These were students who had failed Algebra I in eighth grade, and ninth grade, and were now on their third try. With the academic challenges came behavior challenges and by the end of that year, I was ready to walk away again and go mine coal or something.
But this past year, an opening at my old middle school came up, and I found myself not just teaching in a school where I had worked for 18 and a half years previously, but in a classroom I had taught in previously. I was home. And with that change came the return of my best and favorite creation, Solution Squad. Here I was, teaching seventh grade math again, and one of the first standards we were expected to teach was writing the prime factorization of a number using exponents. What else would I use? I had created an entire graphic novel based around prime numbers, prime factorization, simplying fractions, and solving proportions with them. And the target audience was here, right in front of me.
Earlier in the summer, I had used ChatGPT and became familiar with it and Canva as well, and suddenly I was able to make my characters appear in presentations without drawing new images, as described here. And when school let out for the year, I sat down in earnest to see if I could make my kids come to life.
3 x 5 Banner for my classroom next year
One of the first things I did was to create animation-style turnarounds of each of the characters. And no, this wasn’t a case of simply prompting with words. I have had to refine my prompts at least 100 times to get the results I want. And even then I have to go into Photoshop and adjust the boots of the costumes and make sure the colors were consistent. Generative AI is known to have its own ideas and is not intended to follow specific guidelines. That tool may be coming down the road and when it does, I’ll be all over it. But for now, I’ll work with what I have available.
Now, I’m not taking any work out of the hands of actual artists. I haven’t paid anyone to draw in years, except for the occasional blog banner or profile picture. I’m not going back into the comic book publishing game ever again. I’m doing this for my classroom. Once I got my turnarounds done, I dug through my old Solution Squad papers and found the first page of a comic book story I never finished. It was pencils only, no backgrounds. Here’s what I got back:
All I need to do now is drop these elements onto Canva slides and add letters and balloons. I don’t need to be fancy and use Illustrator. Again, not looking to publish. These 72 dpi images are good enough for Canvas. My digital comics are back in the game!
As opposed to my short period of retirement, where I thought I had to adjust to doing nothing, I have a million things I want to do. I want more comic stories for my kids. I want to try animation. I want to put music to the stories. I want to learn again, and it’s been a while since that’s been true. So, do I feel 90 anymore? Heck no.
My daughter Sera came home for a visit this week. Yes, it was a visit. She’s 20 now, and lives in Indianapolis while she goes to Purdue, majoring in mechanical engineering. She stayed in Indianapolis this summer, subletting from an intermational student while she does an internship at Glassboard. She had this week off, and is flying to California to spend a weekend there with friends.
It’s hard.
It’s hard to be a parent who did their job well. She’s independent, confident, competent, and brilliant. She loves us, but she doesn’t need us; not really. Yes, we pay for school, but that was always the plan. She pays for a lot of her living expenses, and her travel. This is her second trip to California this year. She never asks for anything.
It’s hard.
The energy in our house changes completely when she’s home. Her things are on the bathroom counter, a reminder that our family is complete under the same roof once more.
When she said goodbye a few minutes ago after packing up her car, I sat on the edge of my bed, holding back tears. It was the same way when we dropped her off at school two years ago in August. I don’t think it’s ever going to get easier. My wife and I rely on the saying, “Don’t cry because it’s over. Be happy it happened.” Every single day, we tell stories to each other about raising Sera. We send each other Facebook memories. Occasionally we peek in her bedroom.
It’s hard.
Her life is an absolute joy to witness, and thank goodness for instananeous communication. I love seeing projects she works on (the ones not covered by NDA, of course), and photos of the places she goes, and I just think to myself, this is how we raised her. We gave her the skills to live this life. We can’t be sad that she’s doing it right.
It’s hard.
It’s a few hours later now, and I just checked her progress on Life360. She’s almost back at her apartment. I don’t stalk her during normal life, but I watch her when she travels. I want to know that she arrives safely. In a few days, life will return to our new empty-nest normal, and we’ll start looking forward to seeing her just before school starts again. But for now…
One of the favorite characters I played in Champions was Silverwing. When I first joined the Aegis campaign right out of college, with Scott Burnham running, I initially played a speedster, which Scott wrote up for me. Scott and I had been friends while I was in college but I didn’t have the time to devote to gaming that he did. I had my studies to concentrate on. Scott ran DC Heroes for us when our little gaming group could get together, and he often playtested his scenarios on our little group before he ran them against his group down in South Bend. Once I graduated in June 1987, I got to sit in on an Aegis game, but there was no room for me as a player. As fate would have it, however, Scott was in a major car accident that summer and was in traction for a month, having broken his hip. He also had permanent nerve damage in his ankle and couldn’t move his foot up and down on the accelerator of a car. When he was well enough to travel, he asked me to drive him to South Bend every Sunday, and they made the concession to let me play since I was useful to the person running their games.
I didn’t really know much about Champions at the time, having only played once before, early on in college. But after two lackluster performances, I knew I didn’t like my speedster and wanted to try something else. At the time I was living in my grandmother’s spare upstairs room and substitute teaching for a teacher on maternity leave in Allegan. My evenings were pretty free. So, I dug into the Champions books to learn what I could about what I was doing wrong. I knew I wanted to play someone fast, someone with martial arts skill and a shield, Captain America being one of my favorite Marvel characters; and Alpha Flight was a popular book at the time, so the flying battlesuit sounded like a fun idea, too. And so I wrapped my patriotic character up in Honolulu blue and silver like my Detroit Lions and off we went.
I really got into playing Champions. I mean really got into it. I bought a game bag in my character’s colors, with matching 12-sided dice. I customized a metal miniature of Vortex, the flying character from The Elementals, and glued a triangular shield on his arm that I cut away from a D&D miniature, and painted it.
By the time January 1988 rolled around, I started tracking my experience points on a piece of graph paper. I also made notes of what or who we faced that week in the game, which later came in handy when I wrote adventure recaps. Just today, I found those experience point trackers in my character folder. I played Silverwing until June 1990.
This progression of character sheets shows not only the changes in the character over time, but also the changes in art styles and even game systems, as the final character sheet is in 4th Edition Champions with the hero creation software.
