Announcements from Kathy - Marie won't be back until next year. Good for her, bad for us. Doug will minimally take over her duties, but be polite if he needs help. Mr. Ryan is no longer at this school - he had been waiting for another assignment, but other stuff came up too. There may or may not be a replacement. If you have concerns about a student being on alcohol or drugs, send a sealed note to the nurse asking the student to be escorted out. Be delicate. Neutra tour flyers were distributed. Neutra's son has visitied the school and wants to be included in the modernization project. April 9th there will be a continuation of the UCLA beautification project. Rumor of fence is overstated - there will be a fence, but students will be allowed on during nutrition and lunch. We are getting an e-mail re positive behavior support team. Next Thursday (the 7th) there will be a one hour after school discussion on beginning to build the master schedule. We will start with a 38 to 1 norm, hoping for better news from the district. David is passing out flyers but they are color copies from color copies so they are hard to read. CSTs suck, but we have to do them so we may as well make the best of it and try to have the kids do good so that people who judge us by one number based on 8 hours out of the entire school year can be assured that we are a "good" school. A teacher expresses that she is feeling frustrated that she is caring the burden of improving scores and that she wishes that we could share the burden amongst the full faculty. Even though our math scores are worse than our English scores, the district is funding and prioritizing English right now. David is updating us on upcoming UTLA activities and inviting us to join him on a bike ride on Friday.
We will break into small groups and discuss how we want CST test prep to look, who, what, when, where (don't discuss why - 'cuz you have to do it). Our small group is discussing that we don't mind doing general test taking strategies in ET, but that AR has proven benefit and we should stick with it and that we should do AR April to reinvigorate reading. Content should be taught in the content areas because that person has expertise that the ET teacher may not have. ET teachers should give the previous year CST scores to the students so teachers can discuss as needed. Teachers have some wicked twisted ideas for how to incentivize buy-in. Pay students for scores? Bubble This? T-shirts. Still want t-shirts for 1,000,000 word readers. Still doing free books? We've paid for them, but who is doing it? Group feels books shouldn't have to be AR or academic, should be anything that interests kids. Should spend ET stressing to kids that testing is important because it gets us money and freedom - tell them what is really at stake and encourage them to do a personal best. It would be great if we could get mints for the kids to suck on during testing. Teachers should give treats (smart cookies and other food especially), kids love to eat.
Each of our three small groups are going to share their discussions. Tina leads the discussion. I don't know about others, but I am confused about what we are doing now. I guess we are deciding who to send our suggestions to, but I am not sure what will happen then, especially as there isn't department meeting time scheduled until at least after spring break. It doesn't sound like we are trying to come around to a cohesive action plan that all teachers carry forward and so I am not sure what my personal next step should be. I guess I will just keep on with what I was planning on doing anyhow and preparing as I see fit. Lots of ideas and directives and few procedures. Asking if people want to do test prep in ET and/ or X period, but I and my group think this is a bad idea. Robin reviewed our ideas from our group and there seems to be consensus on buying mints for kids and teachers can provide non-messy snacks on their own dime. Bubble This shirts got a laugh, but are probably a no-go. Doug is reviewing the info from his group. Ahh, the bell. Me and Pavlov, man. My brain seems to stop caring right at the bell, like a switch. Sounds like most of us agree - content in content classes, test taking strategies in ET and mints for all. Kathy says we will talk in departments, but no department meetings are scheduled, so not sure how that will work. Joel suggests "Up Yours (test scores)" t-shirts. Those are funny too.
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