At the Bottom of the Educational Totem Pole: A First-Year Teacher’s Story

K. Pardue

The author is an 8th grade teacher of Language Arts in her first year of teaching

A screaming throng of thirteen and fourteen year old girls moves through the hallway - a mass of eyeliner, lip gloss, and Abercrombie jeans. A few shout out their cell phone numbers, while others sing their IM names. They all want to be seen and heard. They are all desperate to make eye contact with the person in the inner circle, the new student, the new boy who could change their opinion of the “average” school day as they know it. This was the scene on a recent Friday afternoon in the eighth grade hallway on which I am in my first year of teaching eighth grade Language Arts. I wasn’t sure what to worry about more: the physical safety of this poor boy who unwillingly had to transfer schools in the middle of the school year, or the standardized grammar test these students would be sitting down to take in fewer than five minutes that would unfortunately count for 50% of their Language Arts grade.

I have known from high school that I wanted to become the quintessential English teacher who enjoyed a nice cup of tea while correcting a pile of student essays. I genuinely embraced the stereotype and here I am: I work as an eighth grade Language Arts teacher in Massachusetts during the school year, and as a book seller in an independent book store in Maine during the summer. I genuinely love the English language; I love reading, writing, and exposing impressionable minds to what the English language has to offer. I am a firm believer in the power of communication. Someone who has the ability to communicate well (in either speech or writing) will go further in life than someone who lacks this ability.

I am also a firm believer in proper grammar. Although this may sound strange, I love to correct grammar. I am not saying that I am the most articulate, grammatically correct writer myself, but I gain an odd sense of pleasure and accomplishment when I fix a misplaced modifier or make a subject agree with its corresponding verb. I have been doing this ever since I was a young girl, correcting my mother’s speech at the dinner table. I then progressed to editing my peers’ emails and term papers. English has definitely become a huge part of my life, and I am genuinely excited to be in a profession that grants me the opportunity to work with others on a topic I love on a daily basis.

I naively began my first year of teaching with the hope that I would create “miniature masters” of grammar and literature in my students; and, if they didn’t already love reading, I hoped that my students would learn to love it. I was determined that my students would write well. They would embrace the writing process and allow their narratives to slowly develop and flourish through brainstorming, writing, revising, and polishing. They would be allowed to learn from their mistakes and continuously improve their writing until it was to their personal satisfaction. They would master the art of proper punctuation and be as repulsed by run-on sentences and fragments as I am. They would be empowered by their ability to communicate through writing. They would never embarrass themselves with a homophone mistake in a corporate memo or e-mail. My students would move on to be great thinkers, readers, and writers.

Although I still have high hopes for my students as I continue through my first year of teaching eighth grade Language Arts in the state of Massachusetts, I have realized that unfortunately there are circumstances beyond my control that can at times cloud my philosophy and goals from view.

The first time I visited what would become my brand new classroom, I was surprised by the old fashioned set up of the desks. I quickly went to work setting up the desks into groups of three and four. I wanted my students to be able to learn and grow together in a respectful and comfortable community; they would not be robotic passive individuals in rows of desks. I glanced over the curriculum and sighed. Although the amount of information seemed impossible to squeeze into a meager 180 days of school, I figured that everything would fall into place one day at a time. My peers informed me that they based their lesson plans on what went well and what did not go as well over the course of previous years.

Obviously, I do not have this advantage as this is my first year of teaching, but I figured it would be a wonderful opportunity for me to enact formative assessment at its best – I would focus specifically on what the students need to know. Rather than planning specific grammar lessons, I would look at student writing in conjunction with KWL charts and observations in order to guide students through the curriculum in a way that is customized to their needs. I was eager and excited to begin the school year.

On one of the first “teacher days” of school (before the students arrived), teachers worked in the computer lab to set up their online grade books. At this time, teachers had the opportunity to establish the different categories that would be assigned percentages to make up the average grades. Several seasoned teachers plugged in the traditional categories: homework, quizzes, and tests. Science teachers added their own group: labs. Thankfully, my mentor teacher, who was sitting next to me, shared her categories with me: homework (20%), participation (10%), quizzes (20%), and tests/compositions/projects (50%). Although my mind began to race wondering what this would all mean for my future students, I also just wanted to go with what seemed to work. As a first year teacher, I was not about to question what had already been established by my colleague and mentor. I plugged in my categories with their corresponding percentages and hoped for the best.

One of the first obstacles for this eager first year teacher has been the issue of time. I see each of my one hundred students for forty-five minutes every day of the week, at the same time each day. At times, this forty-five minute period can seem like the perfect amount of time for a cookie-cutter eighth grade Language Arts lesson: a warm up activity may last about ten minutes, the meat of the lesson is about 20-30 minutes, and the conclusion of the lesson involves a closing activity which usually involves a homework assignment for further practice, or a “ticket out the door” to help me understand what the students have retained in order to plan subsequent lessons.

However, there are times in which forty-five minutes per day cannot scrape the surface of what I am trying to teach. How can my students fully grasp and internalize the atrocities of the Holocaust (as well as the lessons of social justice and tolerance) when I have three weeks to teach what is suggested to be a twelve week unit? When will students ever have a chance to carefully reflect on their personal growth of the year and set goals for themselves if every day is already preciously packed with what simply needs to be covered? And then what happens when district or school-based common assessments and standardized assessments are an unavoidable requirement? What happens to the curriculum at that point?

It is only my first year in this school system, so I am still digesting the grade eight Language Arts curriculum. However, time is a precious (and rare) commodity that, because of its scarcity, interferes with true formative assessment. For example, when students turn in their composition assignments such as essays, short stories, or poems, I personally believe that they should be given a chance to continuously improve their writing until they are as proud of their work as they can possibly be. However, it is extremely time consuming to read one hundred essays or short stories. On my best night, it can take up to twenty minutes per student, because I assess the piece on many different levels, including overall organization, coherency, grammar, and mechanics. I enjoy leaving honest feedback in the margins of these pieces; I balance the positive comments with suggested areas on which to work further. (Apparently my stereotypical English teacher who enjoyed hours of correcting papers in her plush armchair had no other obligations in her life.) Ideally, students would be able to make further revisions and improvements in their writing. In a perfect situation, the entire process would never end; as students continue growing, learning, and maturing throughout their year, their writing would develop and grow as well.

Unfortunately, by the time I am able to read and comment on everyone’s work, (and stay on top of lesson planning, meetings, and correcting other various assignments), students have already moved on to a new unit of study. There is always something else in the curriculum that desperately needs to be covered and there are new curriculum initiatives that need to be piloted. By the time students receive their compositions back, only a handful of students are motivated enough to actually revisit and resubmit their work with appropriate revisions and corrections. And these are the students who already have perfect averages in the grade book!

I continuously remind students that learning is a process; almost everything can be revisited with fresh eyes and taken to a new level. However, it is ironic that it is my careful attention to detail that actually presents an obstacle to true formative assessment. Nevertheless, I have still used the student writing, albeit a month after they turned them in, to formatively assess the areas in which they need to focus their grammar studies.

Mandated common assessments have also clouded my optimistic philosophy of formative assessment. Thankfully, these common assessments are few and far between, but regardless they are certainly not welcomed. This is due to the fact that I believe that students should be given multiple opportunities to show me what they know, because each of my students are individuals who have good days and bad days. On any given day, what seems like the most insignificant occurrence to myself as the teacher may actually be a huge distraction for my adolescent students. Furthermore, my students each have different learning styles. Some students thrive by taking notes and studying those notes. Others need to dive in to the material and experience it firsthand through playacting or debate. It is for these reasons why it would be completely unfair for me to assess my students according to one culminating summative assessment at the end of each unit. A few intelligent students could possibly “bomb” the assessment if they were distracted by rumors during lunch. Others could be sick on the day of the assessment, distracting themselves and others.

Instead of relying on these mandated common assessments, I often provide opportunities for students to show me what they know through a mix of discussions, journal entries, compositions, and traditional quizzes. For example, during a recent lesson taught during the Holocaust unit, I wanted students to understand that not all victims of the Holocaust were Jewish, nor were they all from Germany. Each student was assigned an identification card of an actual person from the Holocaust, borrowed from the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Each student summarized the information from his person in writing, orally shared his information with the rest of the class, and then illustrated one hopeful aspect of the person’s life in the form of a quilt square, done on paper. After student presentations, I asked students to reflect in their Holocaust journals on “what they now know about the individual victims of the Holocaust that they previously did not know.”

In the end, it turned out that many students did an excellent job working independently. They were able to accurately describe an individual victim with great detail, and understand how their individual may not have fit the stereotype of a Holocaust victim, yet their journal reflections still showed that students carried a stereotype about “all victims of the Holocaust.” Therefore, in addition to sharing their new learning through oral presentations, I have students share their quilt squares in a classroom collage. Perhaps after quietly viewing illustrations of hope from individual victims of the Holocaust, students can gain a better understanding of who these people actually were.

But mandated common assessments thwart my efforts at customized and formative classroom assessments. Since the beginning of the school year, I have been working with students to self assess their work in order to locate their personal areas of grammar weakness. It turned out that the majority of students needed assistance with run-on sentences, fragments, and homophones such as their, there, and they’re. Many students actually had never even heard of a run-on sentence or sentence fragment! We spent months practicing and correcting these areas, using sentences anonymously taken from student work as models of what not to do. Once students showed me that they understood these grammatical concepts, they were informed that if they were interested and motivated to do so, they could go through their old work and make grammatical corrections in order to boost their original score. It seemed like everything was running smoothly; now that the students knew what run-on sentences were and they knew they would be held accountable for run-ons, they were beginning to write fewer run-ons in their writing. Homework assignments and a mini grammar quiz proved that my students had made a significant improvement from the beginning of the year.

My high hopes were unfortunately squelched when I was informed by a more experienced colleague that “it is now time to administer the grammar test that is given around this time of the year.” Although I was confident that my students would be able to ace this exam because they had already shown me that they knew this information, there were a few red flags that made me slightly uncomfortable about this upcoming assessment. The common assessments were very reminiscent of standardized tests such as the MEA or MCAS assessments. This particular common assessment on grammar would be given on the same day for all three eighth grade teams in order to avoid hallway and lunchtime discussions regarding answers. Furthermore, for ease in grading, the test was a multiple choice exam which could be completely graded by machine on the same afternoon on which it was taken.

I knew my students had taken the MCAS test every year since elementary school, so they had experienced the #2 pencil fill-in-the-bubble timed exam numerous times before. However, these students had never taken this type of exam in my class. I looked over the seven page test and realized that although run-ons and sentence fragments were part of the test, there were other areas on the test that would be completely alien to my students. I therefore decided to give a test very similar to the grammar test to my students as a “pre-test.” After taking the pretest, we would work on studying and clarifying those areas on the test with which students needed the most help. Students would have worksheets as homework assignments that would hopefully give them practice in those areas that were their weakest.

After about two weeks of intense grammar practice, grammar worksheets, grammar videos, and grammar discussions where I found myself voraciously defending my views on the importance of grammar to my decidedly doubtful eighth grade students, it was time to take this grammar test and simply put grammar away for a few weeks. I was beginning to feel like I was overly preparing my students for the test. In addition, I was beginning to become nervous about becoming one of those teachers who teaches to the test. Suddenly, it seemed that all my efforts to carefully prepare my students for the content of the test were in vain, because the same Friday that brought the dreaded grammar test also brought a new addition to our eighth grade team in the form of a new student.

If you know middle school students, you know that anything new can potentially be the best thing in the world. On the day of the scheduled grammar test, this new student actually needed bodyguards to navigate through the throngs of screaming adolescent girls. It looked as if Brad Pitt was attempting to walk down our hallway. As you can guess, students were overly distracted while trying to take the grammar test. Not only did they have to focus on these grammar concepts, but they had to remember how to carefully transfer their answers from their question page to the bubble sheet. In addition, they had to overcome their extreme curiosity about the new student in order to even remember their names. Many of my A students, who had previously done exceptionally well on many of the homework assignments and quizzes, did not do as well as they had hoped on this test.

Unfortunately, only students who have specific accommodations in their IEP’s are allowed to retake common assessments over for a better grade. Therefore, I had many sad students - and parents - who felt that they had been cheated out of their honor roll grade because of one chaotic day. The only thing students could do to remediate this issue was to do their absolute best on all assignments following the test.

Why should the students who have already shown me that they understand these grammatical concepts be penalized for their one day of distraction? Why should these exams count for so much of their overall grade for the term, when so many distractions can interfere with the process and therefore the results?

On the other hand, another part of me wonders how I am preparing my students for the future of their education if I do not expose them to these experiences. They will inevitably experience common standardized assessments in their high school and college careers; in the state of Massachusetts they are required to pass the MCAS exam in order to earn their high school diploma. Even though I am using a variety of assessments in order to accurately gauge what my students understand over the course of an extended period of time, how am I preparing them for inevitable future standardized assessments?

Currently, everything is back to “normal” in my classroom. Although the next standardized test looms in the near future, my students have weathered the storm of the initial grammar test. I have noticed that in their most recent essays, many students have mistakenly inserted apostrophes when pluralizing nouns. Therefore, this will become our next unit of study. Once students show that they understand this concept, I will invite them to revisit their essays and make necessary revisions.

There are also test-taking skills that will need to be carefully addressed and practiced. Although I cannot control outside circumstances such as arrivals of new students, the weather, or what rumors circulate in the cafeteria, I can help students practice test taking skills in the room where they will be taking the actual test. This includes filling in the little bubbles completely, or erasing completely in case of an error. Furthermore, students need practice in transferring information from the question booklet to the answer page. In addition, if a student happens to skip one question in order to address it later, he or she needs to practice keeping track of the numbers of the corresponding bubbles.

As a first year teacher, I have been explicitly told by more seasoned peers that there are a few things that I must not do during my first three years of teaching in the district: I must not question authority, complain about anything, or get pregnant. It has been suggested that I stick to the same lesson plans that were conveniently left behind by the retired teacher whom I replaced. (The most repeated phrase of the year was “why reinvent the wheel?”) Although I am aware that many teachers shut their classroom doors and teach what they are most comfortable with, I have been instructed to pay close attention to the curriculum coordinator because I need to do exactly what she says during my first three years.

I understand that with any profession, there is a certain order and hierarchy within the working people. As a first year teacher, I am at the bottom of the educational totem pole. If anything happens, I would be the first to be thrown to the wolves. However, does this mean that my students have to suffer through awful standardized grammar tests simply because I am a first year teacher who does not have the power to override and change the established order within the curriculum? Should I have done something different during that fateful day in the computer lab when I set up my online grade book? Would I have been asked to teach again next year if I had asked why more often throughout the school year?

Although it is frustrating to feel like there are times during the school year in which I do not have any time to do anything other than read student papers, and my voice as a first year teacher is not as loud as it may become in the future, I am excited to do this all again next year with a new arsenal of strategies and experiences to help inform my instruction. I now know what to expect when determining the categories and weights of my grade book. I will carefully read my students’ papers and leave as much formative feedback as necessary. I will still prepare my students for the grammar test because it is an unavoidable ritual for students to be exposed to standardized testing procedures, but I will work with my department leaders to possibly weight the test grades according to what students have already shown me they understand prior to the day of the test. A new year will bring a new set of student needs, concerns, and exciting moments of brilliancy. Regardless of what comes, I am ready to continue reaching to new heights.

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