It's A Blue Ribbon Committee - I'll Use A Military Term To Describe It

I never imagined that I'd make a reference to a military term that was used in Vietnam in my blog but today it will happen.  But first, a review of the scholars activity for the past week.

A fifth grade scholar was sent to our room for the day.  His fifth grade teacher was absent, they couldn't find a substitute for the class, so the Big B decided to break up the fifth grade class amongst all of the classrooms in the school.  It's a little unusual for our room to participate in this break up process but on Friday in walked The Head.  He arrived with both math and literacy worksheets and sat at an empty desk and started working.  He stay focused for several minutes and then got up and started to walk across the room.  I asked him where he was going and he said there was something on the floor that needed to be picked up.  As he was passing me on his way back to his desk he told me he had an obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and items out of place bothered him.  A couple minutes later he says to me, "this math is too hard."  I say to him,  "join me at my desk and I'll help you."  He then tells to me that his teacher allows him to use a calculator.  My BS detector goes up right away so I ask him to show me his math worksheet.  I looked at it and then said to him, "what is nine times two"?  He responds "eighteen" and I said "good you don't need a calculator so get to work".  A short while later it is time for our specials class (music) and the scholars are lining up at the door.  Just as we are about to depart The Head walks back into the classroom.  Again, I asked him "where are you going?"  He responds, "all the chairs need to be pushed in under their desks."  By the end of the day I'm thinking I like OCD and I wonder if we can trade a few ODD (oppositional defiant disorder) for a few OCD.

I've been watching reruns of M.A.S.H. on Netflix for about a week now.  One of the episodes was called "5 O'clock Charlie."  This is an episode about a North Korean fighter pilot who is trying to bomb an ammo dump near the 4077th M.A.S.H.  The North Korean arrives promptly at 5 o'clock, hand drops his one bomb, and badly misses the ammo dump every time.  We don't have a 5 o'clock Charlie but we do have 2 o'clock first grader I'll call Quiet.  Quiet has been coming to our classroom for a couple weeks now.  He apparently looses his focus around 2:00pm and becomes quite disruptive in his classroom so he comes and visits Gnu and I in an attempt to get him to settle down.  When I was called to pick him up this past Friday he was wearing a big red and white Cat In the Hat hat and was holding what looked like a baton.  When I got his attention and ask him to come with me he responded, "no".  So I walk over to him and say "pick up your worksheets, it's time to go."  Again, I get "no".  So I say to him, "if you come with me you can wear your hat but the baton needs to stay in your room."  I'm successful and we are off.  Because The Head is occupying the desk nearest to me Quiet has to sit at my desk which he promptly does.  He immediately starts on his work sheets but I notice that he keeps adjusting the hat on his head.  Finally I say to him, "If your hat is bothering you, why don't you take if off."  He leans forward a little and takes off the hat.  As he does, out falls from his hat an eraser, a few Lego pieces and some round sight word cards.  Quiet then scratches his head for a few seconds,  picks up all of the items that fell out of his hat, puts them back in the hat, and then places the hat back on his head and gets back to work.

The case conference to finalize the situation with Buxton occurred on Friday and as expected he will be a permanent member of our classroom.  The reality of Buxton being in the room hit home about 3:55pm on Friday when Gnu and I were in the classroom alone.  Gnu was first to discuss the matter when she said "I'll have to start gathering academic material for him."  "I guess I'll have to do that over the weekend as he will walk in the door a little after 10:00am on Monday."  Therein is the challenge, Buxton will add a third academic level to the room and one that will require a lot of personal, one on one, teaching.  That means the other four scholars will work as a group and that presents a problem because two of them, Grr! and EM, require a lot of individual attention as they are learning to read.  If Gnu works with Buxton and I take Grr! and EM that means that Uh-Uh-Uh and MiniJ will have to complete assignments by themselves and they are only capable of doing that for short periods of time.  In addition to the academic challenges there is this.  Buxton and MiniJ do not get along.  Buxton in particular does not like MiniJ and has already been in shoving matches with him.  In addition, Buxton tried to cut MiniJ's hair with some scissors and has hit him in the head with a spiral notebook.  Quite surprisingly MiniJ has maintain his composure and not struck back.  The unknown is for how long can MiniJ stay calm and not retaliate?  Hopefully for a real long time because if he can't then Buxton will feel the full force of a round house right hand right up the side of his head.   

One of the lowest life forms, the politician, has decided to form a Blue Ribbon Committee to try and address a teacher shortage problem here in the state of Indiana.  In order to do this forty nine people have been hand selected to be on this committee.  There is a military term that is used when there are too many people in close proximity to each other and it is called a cluster f.......  Do you know what good comes out of one of these clusters?  In Vietnam, a lot of good men can get killed quickly.  In the political word nothing good can happen when a one of these clusters is formed.

So you have a feeling for the make up of this political cluster I'll share with you information on the participants.  To start with, there are seventeen PhD's and two politicians.  There is only one member from a charter school and one member from a private school but there are three members of union organizations.  There are three members from one school district (who happen to be from the same school district as the co-chair of this cluster) but not one member from my school corporation. 

The first meeting was held about two weeks ago and the first order of business was to hire to consultants to present "data driven evidence" that there is a teacher shortage.  Brilliant!  A forty nine person cluster with seventeen PhD's was just formed to address the teacher shortage and two consultants were hired to confirm that there is a shortage.  As I said before, nothing good ever came out of a cluster f......., especially one created by a politician.

Several days ago a good friend of mine, I'll call her 30+Sped, posted a video on my Facebook page.  This video is called "Where Have All the Teachers Gone?" and was created by a organization called AJ+.  The lead-in to the video stated there is a teacher shortage in the U.S. so we got some hardworking teachers to tell us what's wrong with public education.  I tried, for about an hour, to post this video on my blog but I was not successful so I've recreated the talking points below.         

Where Have All The Teachers Gone?

• "Well, if teaching were easy, we wouldn't have a shortage, right?" 
• "It is a result of the sick and fractured system of education."
• "I think I always had it in me to become a teacher, but I never wanted teacher pay."
• "We're underfunded, we have less resources, we're kinda expected to give up our time, we're expected to go the extra mile all the time, without being asked even if we can."
• "You know, I think it's as important to guide students through an education as it is to help someone in the hospital who is sick or uphold the law in a courtroom."
• "There is a certain amount of demonization of teachers that goes on.  Knowing how hard we work, and knowing what's actually happening in a classroom, it's hard to hear people put down your profession."
• "In somebody's class is the next bio scientist.  In somebody's class is the next discoverer.  It's so important that we renegotiate what we think about teachers."
• "I would say on a national level, it's too much politics involved in public education.  There's too much money tied to policies and ideas about what education should be and how education should happen.  There's not a lot of actual educators in that conversation which I find extremely problematic."
• "If you look at the education system, the highest-needs students usually have the lowest, smallest amount of resources."
• "It is difficult, especially when you teach in communities of color or low-income communities.  They bring a lot of trauma into the room."
• "If you have students arriving every day and their minds are elsewhere, they don't know where they are going to sleep at night, they're cold, they're hungry, their stomachs are growling, across the board generally, like, they're not going to thrive."
• "I think when you talk to teachers the thing we're most frustrated with in regards to our kids is the amount of testing that they have to go through."
• "We are testing children to death and we're testing teachers to death.  Twenty years ago, we might have spent as much as two weeks testing.  Today, in 2015, the average number of weeks a child spends taking tests can be up to six weeks."
• "And it just seems like a recurring thing that's just happening over and over again.  Let's try a new test, let's try new standards, let's mandate them, let's see what happens."
• "We've been putting on Band-Aids and we've been trying to backtrack and replace parts.  Why don't we look at a way to create a more holistic education, which includes social, emotional content and curriculum?"
• "Of the best part, where do I begin."
• "The kids, right?  The students, the young adults, they're the best part of the job."
• "I wouldn't give it up for the world.  It's the best choice I ever made, to be an 8th grade English teacher."
• "For every teacher, it's when you see the spark.  When you see a student engage, they're doing something that they love, they're good at it, and they feel confident.  They feel like they found their place in the world.  That's my favorite part."
• "A teacher I worked for kinda mentored me and he thought that I could be a good teacher, but he was wrong - I'm not a good teacher, I'm a great teacher!"
• "The person sitting in that room is teaching to our future, is teaching to the hope of a nation, is teaching to the potential of a world.  Might we value that more as a society?  Might we value that more?"

This video ran about six minutes and the quotes you see above come from either six or seven classroom teachers.  As I watched the video I recognized that there was no unique characteristic about any of these teachers.  There were just teachers sharing their feelings about being a teacher, why there is a teacher shortage, and in my opinion them summed it up pretty well.  Sadly, the state of Indiana and the lowest life form, the politician, decided to form a cluster f..... of forty nine people and hired two consulting companies to determine why there is a teacher shortage when all they had to do is watch a six minute video. 

The sunset right now is beautiful.  My daughter and son-in-law drove out to the suburbs today for a belated birthday celebration and they came bearing gifts.  The meal we consumed was excellently prepared by my part time consultant, part time editor, and full time spouse.  Life can't get much better.  I'm out. Thanks for continuing to read the musing of an old guy who just aged another year.

Nuts!  I forgot something.  One of the teachers at my school has been absent for a while to address a health concern.  It's not one of those easy to address health concerns but something a little more complicated so I'd appreciate it very much if you would keep her in your prayers.