Today we met with out faculty advisory. She seems like a good teacher – she teaches at an alternative school for older students who are too old for middle school but don’t have the skills/knowledge for high school and had all of her students pass the CRCT. She doesn’t have any rules for her class because she can simply command respect. It will be interesting to see how her class reacts to our group having a more formal set of rules. Oh, and she mentioned we’ve currently got 26 students enrolled and we’ll probably get four more, maybe six.
I’m really starting to wonder about whether or not TFA’s summer tracking based on the diagnostic test means anything for the summer. While I can’t say I’ve got a better method, I don’t think most of the summer school teachers had the students take the diagnostic seriously so the data we’ve got is seriously flawed. The teacher told us the students knew a lot more than they showed on the test – she said some of the students were up to about 80% mastery and the struggling students were at 45% - 55% mastery. The highest score on a diagnostic test was about 40% so somewhere something’s not right.
The other thing that’s bothering me right now is how strictly we are supposed to adhere to the state objectives. I understand the purpose of teaching what the objective says and not expecting so much more without first laying the foundation, but sometimes I can’t help but wonder if we’re being too strict with the objective. For example, one objective I’m supposed to be teaching is to “identify” a graph on a number line of an inequality. Since it’s only “identify” and not “draw,” I’m limited to multiple choice questions where I give them four graphs and they pick the right one. What tangible benefit do these students get from learning that if they can’t at some point draw it themselves? Real life isn’t multiple choice.
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