School Visit 9

May 12, 2010

This was my 9th visit to my school. I have now logged 22 hours, and I plan on making one more trip into the Bat Cave. Today, the students Declaration project was due. They needed to memorize the first few lines of the Declaration of Independence, and be able to recite it to Mrs. Qwerty. Between the two classes that I help out in, only three students were able to successfully.
The problem that I saw with this process was that Mrs. Qwerty was grading these students completely arbitrarily. The students would either finish reciting what they had memorized, or they would do the best that they could, and she would randomly assign them a grade. I was there when the assignment was first given to the students, and there was no rubric given to the students. A student would go up and present it, and she would give them a grade like a “78” or a “96,” or whatever the grade was, but it did not seem like there was any rhyme or reason to it.
Today was also the day that the deficiencies were due. Deficiencies are given to the families of students who are not doing well in the class, so that their families will know how they are doing in class before report cards come out, in order to get their child to do better in school. Students were freaking out about getting deficiencies. Students who normally ignore their work were struggling to get half a quarters worth of work done in just one class.
I worked with one student in the second period that I tutored in, named “Ladybird.” I was working with her, answering questions at the end of the chapter as usual. I found that the could follow directions, but she could not think critically. I told her where to find an answer, or what paragraph she would need to read, and she would read it, and tell me that she did not understand what it said. She was constantly asking me what sentence she needed to copy to get the right answer. I would ask her what she thought each paragraph meant, and try to get her to understand what she was reading instead of just copying an answer.
I also finally learned Mrs. Qwerty’s creed today. She claimed loudly that school is designed to do nothing but teach students about deadlines. This, coupled with the fact that she only gives book work, and does nothing else in class, is exactly what Anyon was describing in her working class classroom. The students are not learning the value of thinking critically, but instead are learning to follow directions, and to get their work done on time, neither of which many of these students have been very successful at.