Sandy Davenport

Busy Busy Busy

May gets a little crazy sometimes. Michael commented yesterday that it seems like I've been out of the house a lot. I told him that's because I have been out of the house a lot. In the space of three weeks Ella has five concerts, a sleep-over and the opening of Star Trek: Into Darkness, plus a band car-wash fundraiser. I have two graduation ceremonies, one retirement dinner, an all day workshop in Syracuse, a school budget hearing, and a meeting of my school reform group.

This is in a family where we like to come home from work, walk the dogs, go to yoga, eat dinner, watch a little TV, then do the crossword puzzle before bed.

Here I am at tonight's recognition dinner hosted by my union with my colleagues Liz and Jacqueline. There was a lady there who has worked for the same organization for Forty Years, which kind of blew my mind.

13.1

I know you've been waiting to hear how my half marathon went on Sunday. It was mixed, to tell the truth. The good news is that I finished and I got pretty much the same time as in last weekend's practise run: 2 hours and 21 minutes. The social side of the race was surprisingly  nice - chatting with other runners, low-fiving young spectators, hearing my name called out by people I know.  This is a small town and I've lived in it long enough that I have acquaintances from lots of different areas of life and I will miss that when we move away in 2018.

Michael took some video of me crossing the line which I will not share. Instead here is the photo he snapped of me and Donna running by our house, just past the 9 mile mark.

The frustrating part is that I fell apart at mile 12 in a way I totally did not expect. I thought, honestly, that I was going to puke, and I even had to walk a few blocks, which is not at all what I wanted to happen. Donna kept running and she ended up shaving 3-4 minutes off our time. So, I'm proud of her, but now I need to run the race again next year so I can do it without stopping. 

Next year I will not do a two and a half hour yoga workshop the day before. Also, I will not use the same energy gummies because they did not sit well in my stomach. I may still let Michael take me out for dinner afterwards though. It was a two-drink dinner, which is one more than my usual limit.

Testing Testing

Teaching isn't always pretty. For example, look at this picture one of my students took surreptitiously today, after 3 hours of Public Policy. It ranks high among the least flattering shots of me ever, and I'm just glad she likes me enough not to share it in the wrong places (I hope).

Lately education has been getting down right ugly all over the place, and a lot of it centers around testing. I remember when I first heard people complaining about the growing emphasis on standardized tests. It was the mid 1990s, I was in grad school, and New York State was just starting to ramp up the Regents exam system. I thought, hey, I took a few standardized tests when I was growing up and they didn't hurt me much, so what is the big deal?

Turns out it is huge. Over the last 20 years testing has started at earlier and earlier ages, the tests are more frequent, they're much longer, and they're including nearly everyone, regardless of special needs or abilities.

There was lots of chatter around New York last month when all elementary students spent three days on English tests and another 3 on math. Educators were complaining and parents were talking of opting their students out. There are many well reasoned blog entries and editorials floating around that you can read, I won't repeat their points here.

But you know what? It is going to get worse. This month your average New York State high schooler is starting a 6 week stretch of testing. On Monday next week the Advanced Placement exams start. They run for 2 weeks.  In mid-June high schools stop teaching altogether as they run all the New York State Regents tests that are required in core subjects for graduation. And in between, around mid to late May, are the new post tests for the SLO. These in particular are pretty bad and once parents learn what is going on, I think they might lose their minds completely.

Here's the short version of the SLO story.  Obama's education policy, Race to the Top, required states to submit competitive applications for grant money. New York won quite a lot of funds, but had to promise to implement a new teacher evaluation system, a new data collection system, and the new Common Core standards.

The Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR) measures teacher effectiveness. Most unions across the state negotiated that 60% of teacher effectiveness scores would come from administrator evaluations, while the other 40% would come from a combination of state and local measures of student performance. Making that 40% equitable across disciplines, grades, and student ability is an enormous challenge. If you teach a class that has an existing Regents exam, then you get to use that test as a measure. If not, you develop Student Learning Objectives (SLO). Students in all classes, all grades, all subjects, were given SLO pre tests at the start of the school year. As in "welcome to school, here's a test on stuff you've never seen and we kind of hope you don't do well."  In May all the students will get post-tested to see if they know anything more than they did at the start of the year.

Have you ever seen school-wide testing? Classes stop. Everyone is roped in to proctor. Adminstrators scramble to find quiet rooms, scribes, readers, and extra time for students with testing accommodations. Substitutes are brought in so that teachers can grade (only no-one is allowed to grade his or her own students, so scheduling gets complicated). The tests are "secure," so they are kept under lock and key and teachers are not allowed to talk about what was on them. All this is happening as the schools are trying to review for the needed-to-graduate Regents exams in June (when they just send home any student who isn't taking a test).

Man, already this post is too long and I haven't even gotten to the quality of the tests. Let me just say that I participated in some test creation, and although I signed a non-disclosure agreement as to the form and content of the exams, I don't think it is illegal for me to state that they are not exactly robust measurement tools. Hundreds of professional development hours and dollars were spent as district after district hurredly wrote many many tests in order to meet state deadlines. Every teacher seems to have been told something different about how the tests should look and how they are to be administered, and every teacher has a bunch of stories about glitches in the process. The first year of anything isn't perfect, but this year has been rough on everyone.

Now, I am happy to be evaluated. My principal is welcome in my classroom any time. I just had a great post-observation meeting with him, actually, and I'm going to change up a few things because of it. We need a way to effectively encourage good teaching and to either get rid of poor teachers or help them become better. But the SLOs as they currently stand are not the solution.

One day after another

Damn, I need to be getting out there with my camera. I've got nothing to show you from April. I ferretted around for a bit and finally came up with this picture that my friend Dolores took of Ella's flute chorus and teacher at a judged competition they did recently. What else is going on?

• I tended to Michael when he got a nasty cold. He was pretty much the sickest I've ever seen him for a week, then he spent a week at 65%, and he still has a lingering cough. No one likes being sick, but Michael likes it less than most people, so it was rather sad to watch. 
• I went to an "Alumni Leaders" conference that I thought was going to be more interesting than it was. I met some nice people, but after a while I'd heard enough about how impressive the university is, so I left early to enjoy the sunny afternoon.
• I went to a business education conference at the very pretty north end of one of the Finger Lakes because it looks like I am somehow going to be a business teacher next year. It was more inspiring than I expected. 
• I ran a lot, including a 13 miler in preparation for the half marathon this coming Sunday. I can't quite believe I did that. 
• I planted peas and spinach and lettuce. 
• I walked around the neigborhood one sunny afternoon collecting signatures to get a candidate on the school board ballot and chatted with people about the school budget. 
• We had to have Wiley euthanized, finally. He rallied for a bit, then progressively got weaker until one day he just didn't get out of his litter box. It wasn't as sad as you might think, because it really was the right thing to do. 

I'm pretty sure there was more, but you get the idea. It's April and life toddles along.  I leave you with a picture of Ella's dad's dog, who came to visit for the day. Instead of one emotionally needy dog following me around constantly trying to anticipate my next move, I had two. 

 

 

Learning Curve

The Binghamton School District announced layoffs last month in a whole slew of programs. It is the result of a state education budget crisis that has been building for a while and which isn't going to go away soon.  Parents got very upset during the last School Board meeting,  especially over the music teacher cuts, but the problems are widespread and deeply rooted in both state and federal policy. My friend Lizabeth has started a group to try and advocate for educational reforms and I'm joining in.

Right now I'm just trying to understand what the heck is going on, and it isn't easy. New York State school funding formulas are long, complex, non-transparent, and politically driven.  In addition, American schools are funded substantially by local property taxes, so district wealth varies shockingly. Add in pension costs, the on-going recession, and increased testing and curriculum requirements, and the result is a quagmire that we're all going to drown in if something isn't done. 

My head is kind of spinning as I try to learn about all of this and figure out just what I can do about any of it. 

Also, I'm not sure if I have any photo that will adequately illustrate this post, so I'm just throwing in some random shots. The first one is a diorama one of my students made of her ideal classroom. The second is taken without permission from Lizabeth's FB page. I'm sure she'll let me know if she wants me to use a different one, but I like it because that''s what our work looks like right now  - a lot of staring at the computer screen trying to sort through it all. 

 

Special Brownies

I know you think that all we do around here is bake, run, and solve crossword puzzles.  And here's some more evidence for you:

Michael's grandmother sent Ella a cook book from 1960 called "All About Home Baking." While I was off at teachers' Conference Day last week, she decided to make brownies out of it. The recipe had been circled and Inez (or someone) had written "special" next to it. 

Since Michael has been experimenting with going gluten-free (no allergies, just seeing what it would be like), Ella used a non-wheat flour mix and they came out just dreamy. She made them again when we went over to Dave and Diane's on Friday. I think they have been officially added to the repertoire. 

Forks XV

Well, that was a humbling experience. Yesterday Donna and I ran the Chenango Forks XV, a fifteen kilometer road race, as part of our half marathon training. I never caught up with the early starters, which means that I was about the 3rd to last person to cross the finish line. With a time of 1.42 I was 271st out of 285 finishers. You'd think crossword tournaments would have inured me to coming in at the back of the pack, and no matter how often I remind myself that I'm not a 23 year old male, it is still a mystery sometimes as to why I run so slowly. Of course, the enormous (well, it felt huge at the time) hill on mile 8 did not help much.

By the time we reached the finish line, all the commemorative hats and the mugs that said "Finisher" had gone and in our oxygen deprived haze we got a little crazy trying to track some down. We did find a very nice volunteer who gave us his because really, he hadn't actually "finished" the race (unless leapfrogging us in his SUV to call out our times and some very sweet encouragement every couple of miles counts). So we had a mug and a hat between us and while we came dangerously close to stealing an unwatched mug, we just couldn't quite bring ourselves that low. Which is just as well, because when I got home I realized that I really have enough mugs in my life.

One thing this race taught me though, is don't slack off on the yoga. I mean, I'd do yoga anyway, just because, but I truly believe it makes me a better and safer runner. I just feel looser and stronger when I'm running if I've been disciplined about my yoga practice. Also, I couldn't ask for a better training buddy than Donna. 

Puzzle TIme

Last year Michael spent the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament weekend on the floor of the hotel bathroom with food poisoning.

This year he won a trophy! 

First in Upstate New York, and 41st overall in the tournament! Look how happy!

I broke an important barrier of my own, coming in at 399 and thus being in the top 400 for the first time ever. Yay me! 

We had the usual amount of fun with our wonderful crossword friends. Eating, drinking, talking, playing games, doing puzzles, and generally just hanging out. 

Angela took this photo, along with a lot of other great ones, and she has inspired me to get out the manual for my camera and finally learn how to use the damn thing properly. 

Train Rides

I am quite tired right now, so I could end up making lots of typos. We just got back from our annual excursion to the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Usually we take the bus down and back, and while the trip down is fine, Greyhound Terminal at the Port Authority in New York City is an unregulated disaster and getting back is unpleasant. So instead we drove down to Cornwall-on-Hudson, left the car with friends, and caught the train in to Grand Central, which, unlike the Port Authority, was built in an era when cities wanted their civic architecture to look, well, grand. 

Damn, I love trains. You don't have to do anything but look out the window. Michael took this cool photo of my hand. 

You get to see the back yard of the world, all the things that have been hidden from the main road. On the way down had just snowed and everything looked like some post-apocalyptic steam punk universe, with lots of industrial wreckage emerging from the granite. The tracks are so close to the river that Metro-North must be worried about what will happen with just a little more climate change. 

I took a bunch of quick and dirty photos out the train window because I wanted them as notes for an idea I had that I won't tell you about in case it comes to nothing. 

I just have to figure out what the blue building is for. 

I will write another post shortly about the actual tournament, because that was lots of fun too and I have stories to tell and photos of crossword friends having fun together to share. 

Sunshine

Early March can be just brutal in Binghamton. It is grey, dusty, dirty, brown, and windy, with the odd bit of snow thrown in for good measure. You can smell Spring coming, and every now and then there's a day that smells a little warm, but mostly it is about hanging in there until the end of the month. I have to give myself lots of pep talks to keep up my enthusiasm. My students have senioritis (an American affliction contracted by many high school students in their final year with symptoms ranging from mild to severe distractedness and not-really-caring-much-because-they-already-got-into-college) and they need lots of pep talks too, so if I'm not in the right spirit, it can all go to hell pretty quickly.

Here is a happy smiley photo to make me remember that there is a point to it all.

It is Ella and her fellow West Middle Schoolers who made it into the Broome County Music Educators' Association (BCMEA) band festival. She had to audition, there were lots of rehearsals, and a concert on Saturday. And that is Ms V, one of a set of truly inspirational and hard-working music teachers in our school district. I really hope they don't cut the band program like they did at a neighboring district. A combination of the recession, property tax caps, a silly school funding system, a high poverty district, and maybe some poor financial management have put our district on the edge. Sigh. This was supposed to be an uplifting post and instead I'm getting sucked back into the morass of public education politics. 

Next weekend is BCMEA orchestra, which Ella is busy practicing for downstairs as I write this.