I look back on the experience so far and the relationships I've built, and it's been quite the whirlwind. At the same time, I feel like I have missed a lot back home. I had a conversation with another person who works at the school a few days ago that centered around how it's hard when the supporting cast of people in our lives either are not here with us or are here but are not enjoying themselves. I think both of us are struggling a little bit in that regard.
Now on to some things that have happened in the first month. Teaching is going well, but I'm drowning myself in grading. It's a struggle to know how much work to assess. I've been talking a lot with other teachers here about how grading goes against everything in education, and grades should be geared more toward just a simple pass/fail. Why should we grade a student down when they do a quiz early on in a unit and get a 3/10 but clearly show they possess the skill and also be able to tell they will be fine in another week. All they need is a little more practice. Why can I not turn that assessment into something more qualitative?
Our school system is built around quantitative results. It's hard to justify giving a pass/fail when everyone--students, teachers, parents, administrators, politicians--want quantitative results in order to gauge everyone in the process. Everyone thinks numbers are needed to gauge the success of a student. People think numbers are detrimental to gauge the effectiveness of a teacher. What happens if I have brilliant students one year and ninety percent of them go on to major in biology in college, only to have artistic and non-analytical students the next year who struggle mightily in science? On paper, my thoroughness will have dropped significantly as a teacher, no matter what I do because I will have kids who just don't understand the content as well. And that's okay.
Any good professional educator will raise the argument of assessment changing every year depending on the students in the classes, which is absolutely true. But if society moving to standards-based curriculum and inquiry-based instruction with the student constructing their own knowledge, then teachers should be moving to formal assessments of the benchmarks in place and nothing else. Much of the motivation for high school students will be thrown out at this point, because so many of them are motivated by getting good grades. One could rephrase that and say students are motivated to not fail.
My students are great, but the sense of entitlement they all feel they have is wearing on me a little bit. My forensic science class was acting out crimes and doing an observation activity about two weeks ago and all of the skits called for the students to make some fake money. Instead of making fake money, one of my seventeen-year-old juniors pulls out somewhere between six and twelve U.S. one-hundred dollar bills. I told her I was uncomfortable with her pulling out that much money and she just looked at me and said, "Oh don't worry Mr. McMahan. It's not really a big deal." It's not a big deal because 96 percent of all the students who go to this school have access to that kind of money.
On a lighter note, last Friday was a holiday, "dia de las Mercedes." I do not know who Mercedes is, but I'm very appreciative of her. I ended up going to the north coast and stayed in a villa with seven other teachers about 200 feet from the beach. The drive was about 200 kilometers and took about 3.5 hours. We literally had a good highway for about half of the drive and then turned off to go up and over a mountain range. The road had switchbacks up the side of a mountain and was pretty incredible. The road was MUCH worse than this and had a lot more curves, but this is as close of a youtube video as I can find that shows what it was like:
We had a great time. I'll leave you with a "selfie," the self-taken picture of me and the beach. Hope everyone is doing well!!!
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