“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” – Grumpy Old Teacher

“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” – Grumpy Old Teacher

“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

And a #2 pencil.

The quote is attributed to Winston Churchill as he received the King’s appointment to be Prime MInister in May 1940 to form a new government and prosecute the war with Nazi Germany. However, for the last 20 years, it is the plaintive cry of every American school child in grades 3 through 10 taking numerous state tests because we must have data to measure … it used to be student learning, but now takes in school quality, teacher accomplishments, administrative worthiness, and district whatever … Grumpy Old Teacher (GOT) supposes that in the year of 2021, school testing is used to measure everything but the level of water in the kitchen sink.

It is 2021 and the ‘compassion and grace’ of the previous year has been replaced by the driving need, which rhymes with greed, of the Testing-Reform Complex to measure learning loss, a dubious concept at best that actually means how much worse will kids score on the tests this year.

Yes, we are testing this year and doing our best to intimidate parents and children who opted to continue their learning in their bedrooms to come onto our campuses because the test must be taken. CONTINUE READING“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” – Grumpy Old Teacher

Grumpy Old Teacher – Generations of public investment in a quality public education system should not be thrown away

Grumpy Old Teacher – Generations of public investment in a quality public education system should not be thrown away

Decisions, Decisions–What’s a School District to Do?

Let’s survey the audience.

Even as we close out the Covid school year, districts are wrestling with deciding how to open schools in August. What mitigation measures should they keep in place? What should they drop? What does the community want? Parents? Students? Teachers and staff?

Grumpy Old Teacher’s (GOT) district has put a survey online to gather stakeholder input. (Stakeholder is a fancy word that means anyone whose life is affected by what takes place in the city’s schools. Employees, parents, students, obviously. But it also includes community organizations, local businesses who depend upon the school for customers, people who live around a school, etc.) You can find the survey here.

If you’re expecting a bash post, you will be disappointed. GOT is going to CONTINUE READING: Grumpy Old Teacher – Generations of public investment in a quality public education system should not be thrown away

Closing Out the Covid Year – Grumpy Old Teacher

Closing Out the Covid Year – Grumpy Old Teacher

Closing Out the Covid Year

It has been a year like no other. While a pandemic disaster did not strike to close all the schools in Grumpy Old Teacher’s (GOT) north Florida district, as we once anticipated through the holidays, Covid mitigation and adjustments have still had their effect. As we close out the school year (thirteen school days left [yay!] along with a boatload of testing [boo!], how are we doing in our schools?

• Warm and sometimes humid weather has arrived, which makes mask wearing uncomfortable for students. They are weary of the mitigation measures, yet will still comply with the mandate when told to do so. Everyone is done and ready for the end, including teachers, administrators, and support staff.
• Almost all parents are sending their home learning children to the campus to take the state tests. It seems that the test-taking culture is well-ingrained into our culture. They kept their children home for health and safety reasons, but it is the test after all and the almighty test must be taken.
• The usual strain on school resources, time, personnel, and space, has been CONTINUE READING: Closing Out the Covid Year – Grumpy Old Teacher

Love, American Style – Grumpy Old Teacher

Love, American Style – Grumpy Old Teacher

Love, American Style

If you’re old enough, you might remember that television show from the early 1970s that featured comedy skits about couples and their relationships.

It’s almost teacher appreciation week. Are you feeling the love, public school teachers?

Teacher Appreciation Week has come upon us as well as the charter attempt to coopt the week into a celebration of themselves.

Wait, Grumpy Old Teacher (GOT) googled that and it seems this year charters will wait for the second week of May to celebrate themselves.

What can a GOT say? If you have to give yourself a birthday party, … how much does anyone else care?

But the moment is here when we thank our teachers for the work they do.

How do we show teachers our love?

• Ignore them until we want something from them. Then, write flowery letters of praise with an ask buried in the middle.
• Ask them about their test scores and sniff if we don’t think the scores are high CONTINUE READING: Love, American Style – Grumpy Old Teacher

Love, American Style – Grumpy Old Teacher

Math Path – Grumpy Old Teacher

Math Path – Grumpy Old Teacher

Math Path

Several years ago, Grumpy Old Teacher (GOT) took a MOOC provided by Stanford University’s Jo Boaler in which she presented ideas about better maths teaching in schools. That’s not a typo, Dr. Boaler is British and they pronounce the subject with an ‘s’ on the end.

GOT is a math teacher and one of the lessons has stuck with him; the one in which Dr. Boaler described a public high school classroom where students were learning by discovery. Observers and visitors could hear the excited buzz pouring out of the room as they came to find out what was happening.

There was only one problem. Parents and others who said, “This is not how I learned math and so no one else should either!”

Sigh.

It wouldn’t help, GOT supposes, to tell you that this is what the Common Core developers have in mind. By now, the phrase ‘Common Core’ is a ringing bell that causes everyone to drool in response, usually a response that involves a lot of growling, snarling, barking, and snapping at the nearest flesh-bearing CONTINUE READING: Math Path – Grumpy Old Teacher

Putting On the Ritz – Grumpy Old Teacher

Putting On the Ritz – Grumpy Old Teacher

Putting On the Ritz

Forget Fred Astaire, imagine if you will, (oh, my, Grumpy Old Teacher–GOT–is mixing metaphors or at least pop culture references–apologies to Rod Serling) the face of Miguel Cardona, our newest, brightest, and shiniest U.S. Secretary of Education, or something like that on the face of the premier danseuse (that means the guy in front.) Testing must go on. So in school after school after school across the land, it’s time to put on the Ritz.

GOT googled the meaning of that phrase. It means to dress fashionably. Yes, that covers it. Time for testing and we are going to dress up poorly written, badly constructed, devoid of sound pedagogy tests in fancy clothes. We’re “putting on the Ritz!”

Time to threaten 8-year-old children that we will hold them back a year if they don’t score high enough on their reading test. We’re putting on the Ritz.

Time to threaten teachers with VAM scores that are more meaningless than CONTINUE READING: Putting On the Ritz – Grumpy Old Teacher

The Biggest Loser – Grumpy Old Teacher

The Biggest Loser – Grumpy Old Teacher

The Biggest Loser

Florida Politics, a media platform,* has a weekly feature whereby it names the biggest winners and losers of the week in Florida politics. This week, it named Richard Corcoran, Commissioner of Education and erstwhile-House Speaker who was known for always getting his way (is that code language for a bully?), as the week’s biggest loser for issuing a memo to school superintendents to suggest (go back and read the previous parentheses) that mandatory mask policies serve no purpose and should disappear when the next school year begins.

Florida Politics:

THE BIGGEST LOSER: RICHARD CORCORAN. COVID-19 cases are increasing in Florida (and many other places). The Florida Department of Health Tuesday reported 9,068 additional virus cases.

That’s the highest one-day increase since Feb. 5.

That makes the pronouncement by Education Commissioner RICHARD CORCORAN all the more bizarre.

IN A MEMO to public school district superintendents, Corcoran recommended they drop the mandatory mask requirements for the 2021-22 academic year.

Why?

Corcoran’s memo said, “they serve no remaining good at this point in our schools.”

It’s long been obvious to Florida educators that politicians like Richard Corcoran are ignorant about public schools, Florida’s school districts, and CONTINUE READING: The Biggest Loser – Grumpy Old Teacher

What’s in a Name? – Grumpy Old Teacher

What’s in a Name? – Grumpy Old Teacher

What’s in a Name?

That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, or so the Bard said as he put these words into the mouth of Romeo.

21st century update: That which we call a turd by any other name would stink like spoiled meat.

In Jacksonville, Florida, we are refighting the Civil War, sometimes known as the War Between the States, and by some on one side of the argument, the War of Northern Aggression Against the Southern States.

As a famous Miami Herald Columnist would say, Grumpy Old Teacher (GOT) is not making that up.

At issue is the renaming of six schools whose monikers match that of five Southern Generals for the Confederate Army, Robert E. Lee (1928), J.E.B. Stuart (circa 1965, the building began as Nathan Forrest High School), Kirby-Smith (1923), Joseph Finnegan (Confederate general who won the Battle of Olustee, opened 1968), and Stonewall Jackson (Google, you failed me, but the location makes GOT suspect the 1960s), as well as ol’ Jeff Davis himself, the president of the Confederacy (circa 1961).

That’s not a real rose! But it’s a CONFEDERATE ROSE.

The process kicked off last summer after the Black Lives Matters protests across the nation that caused many to consider the ways that racism and white CONTINUE READING: What’s in a Name? – Grumpy Old Teacher

Part Two: The Rose

Part Three: Take Down That Flag!

Part Four: What’s In a Name? Part 2