Diary of a Wimpy Kid is about to absolutely rock the Hollywood box office this weekend. And it has been a rip-roaring success in the world of book publishing. As a teacher, when I see this I know that I can leverage the power of an author who has found a way to reach real kids into classroom success for me and my kids.

Here’s how I do it.

First of all, I know that the state has hired me to teach the content standards. (They clearly say so.) And when they assess my student performance, the material they test is not text specific but rather, standards-based. This means that they are not going to be testing my kids on Kafka, Twain, and Joyce but rather on denotation vs. connotation, theme, tone and so on.

And hey, Diary of a Wimpy Kid uses all of the literary elements of denotation vs. connotation, theme, tone and so on. So why not use Diary of a Wimpy Kid as a text to teach the standards in my classroom?

I do.

Now before I get crucified as being someone that does not revere the GREAT BOOKS of human civilization – a canon blaster, if you will — please take a few things into consideration.

California is a state with 6.4 million students. And 1.6 million of them are English Language Learners. This means that I need to differentiate, accommodate and be responsive to the real literary needs of the students that are sitting in my class — all while still teaching the appropriate grade level content standards.

I am not sure if there is a more accessible book for English Language Learners out there right now than Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

-It’s funny. (And kids will wrestle with text when the reward is material that will make them laugh).
-There’s a lot of white space on the page. (Check the research on the value of that to a student with low literacy skills – especially when English is not their first language).
-It’s relevant and kids relate. (The bumbling, fumbling shenanigans of Greg allow students to see their own lives reflected directly in the text.)

And Diary of a Wimpy Kid (for those who want to take a moment to jump off their high horse of that books in school absolutely must be dense, erudite art) is a good read. Personally, I greatly enjoyed it because it’s an energetic, funny and page turner.

Plus, guess what? There’s a theme. (A few of them, in fact: 1) We learn from our mistakes. 2) Self-image is very important. 3) No one escapes problems in their life. 4) You’ve got to show initiative if you are going to get anywhere in this world.)

And there are examples of denotation vs. connotation.

And the text provides me examples of tone, perspective, hyperbole and on and on.

The same stuff that the standards ask me to teach.

Should Diary of a Wimpy Kid replace Mark Twain? Nope, not even close. But can it be used as a bridge to build capacity? Can it be used as a text to illuminate literary devices?

Can it be used as a vehicle to get 100% of your class to do ALL the assigned reading? (And how often do our classes do that? I mean “faking it” through books has become so ingrained in our culture that there’s a multi-million dollar industry to provide resources as to how to better fake it — Cliff’s Notes, Spark Notes, Pink Monkey and so on.)

Yes, I read Diary of a Wimpy Kid with my classes. And guess what? It was a home-run success and a great teaching tool.

And guess what else?

We had FUN!

Since when are fun and and learning mutually exclusive to one another?

But, don’t worry — keep using those 20th century tools to reach today’s 21rst century kids. After all I am sure Hollywood is going to race right out and make a movie of your classroom textbook any day this week.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid… it certainly can have it’s place in a classroom where students are achieving.

Since ya’ll know how much I love data-driven assessment, I decided to uncork a wee bit of Super Bowl data and show you why I deserve one of those high-fallutin’ ETS jobs, the kind that pays over six-figures if you are selected to work in the hallowed halls of this “non-profit” institution.

Stand back and watch I sew the seeds of Bubble Test Brilliance while using nothing but our Holy Day of pizza, chicken wings and potato chips to make our schoolchildren squeal.

(Cause if they don’t squeal, it’s not a good test question, is it?)

–4,000 tons of popcorn were estimated to have been eaten yesterday. If one would have stringed/strung/strunged all that popcorn together, the ring would circle the earth 5 1/2 times. According to this information, what is the earth’s radius? (Ya feelin’ me, ETS? Ya feelin’ me?)

–15,000 tons of chips were eaten. If an elephant weighs 2 3/4 tons and a textbook weighs 1/62,476 of a ton, how many textbooks would you need to stack up in order to equal the amount of potato chips our nation ate yesterday?

Please express you answer in terms of elephants.

–8 millions pounds of guacamole were consumed on Super Bowl Sunday which ranks second to Cinco de Mayo. How many English Language Learners does a school need to demonize in order to create enough guacamole to sustain us through 3 Cinco de Mayos in a Leap Year?

Helpful ETS hint we’ll offer to make sure all test questions are not culturally biased: Cinco de Mayo occurs on May 5th — except during a Leap Year when it occurs on, well… May 5th.

–Each year we, in America, eat 3 billion pizzas as a nation. During the Super Bowl 350 slices of pizza are being consumed each second over the course of a 12 hour day. If 1/11 of those pizzas are pepperoni and 1/14 are veggie, who was driving the pizza delivery car when it took them a freakin’ hour and a half to deliver Paulie and his drunk friends a cold pie?

Come on ETS, I am lofting softballs to ya right here. Think of the bubble tests that could be created from this American phenomenon!

Am I hired? Am I hired?

One last FYI… Did you know that Indianapolis public schools took Super Bowl Monday off? Yep, they shut down. Burned a snow day. And why? Cause last time the Colts went to the Super Bowl on the Monday which followed the game, 64% of the kids came down with what was affectionately named the “Blue Flu”… but their parents miraculously healed them all by Tuesday when attendance returned to normal.

So this year, IPS took no chances and called off school before the game even kicked off.

We fired a bunch of teachers due to “budget cuts” at the end of last year. And yet, guess what? We currently have a few long term subs in place in some of our core classes — STILL, right now, in the sixth week of school! — because we have job openings for teachers that have not yet been filled?

Hmmm.

And in this story, D.C. is letting go of hundreds of teachers about 2 months into the new school year. I’m sure that’s not going to cause any chaos/demoralization/bitterness/grumbling/chain reaction types of negative impact by-products though.

Now I don’t want to go down the road of “how in the world are schools supposed to thrive in the midst of all this administrative dysfunction” right now, but really, “how in the world are schools supposed to thrive in the midst of all this administrative dysfunction”?

I know for a fact that there are schools all across the country that still do not even have their basic staffing issues resolved yet. And it’s October!

Are the teachers to blame?
What about when some kids get changed into your class 6 weeks into the school year so that you have a room of mix and match kids where a few students have been there from Day 1 and others are just experiencing Day 1?
Will NCLB take this into account this year when looking at API and AYP scores?
Will my “merit pay” evaluation reflect these “considerations”?

Though I have said this before, while it’s easy to blame teachers, aren’t we really having a crisis of leadership in American education? Principals are overworked, school districts are out of touch and parents are kicked to the curb. I mean we have educators around here with over 240 students on their total roster… but it’s going to be the teacher’s fault if we don’t see marked improvement in these English Language Learners this academic year?

What a farce. I mean can you really blame the cook on the Titanic is his lobster bisque tastes like seawater? After all, he wasn’t piloting the boat — just cooking and doing the best job he could at what he was hired to do. Instead of wearing business suits to work, some of these people ought to be wearing red noses.

I love sports. I love hoops, football, baseball, boxing, soccer, hockey, tennis and so on. And when I mean “and so on”, I mean, I can watch table tennis, badminton, lacrosse, rugby and golf.

Yep, I can watch golf.

But I only like to watch when there is level competition. If a game is a blowout, it’s off. If a team has a 35 point lead heading into the 4rth quarter, a 3 goal lead late into the second half, an 11 run lead in the bottom of the seventh, I am usually gone. Got other things to do and if I miss the comeback of the century I’ll catch the highlights on ESPN.

See, for me, there is no pleasure in watching sports when there is no element of a fair, heated competition between the players. If there is extreme competition though, the kind that calls on all opponents to reach deep down to give their best, I am all with it.

So, here’s an idea… what if we handicap our much discussed upcoming teacher/student/school evaluations like we do the game of golf? I mean we all realize that some schools have such a built in advantage before we ever tee up the school year that if we simply go head up (as we currently are), our score vs score comparison is going to make the competition a blowout.

So unexpected, too, right?

Almost without fail the upper-socioeconomic educational institutions in the U.S. are kicking butt and taking names. And despite the occasional “feel-good” anomaly (the kind which I strive to create in my own classroom), the low socio-economic schools are getting trounced.

But if we take into account mitigating factors such as English Language Learners, students living at or below the poverty level, degree of transience in the student body, special ed populations, and so on, suddenly there might be a way to really get a true glimpse into which teachers/schools/kids are really making strides.

Of course, from this point on, it’s all conjecture and academic with little need for me to draw up the “how we can do this” because, though I am no cynic, I see almost no way in the world whereby the parents who send their kids to schools like Beverly Hills High are ever going to allow a system of data to be implemented whereby the kids at inner-city schools like mine at Lynwood High will be able to actually outperform them.

Not when they pay those kind of property taxes, live in those kind of houses and support political candidates with those kind of fundraisers.

Nope, not a cynic… but not a naif either. Those parents would have heads a rollin’ if they saw their weighted test scores in the newspaper showing them to be getting whooped like a Greek mule on Crete during high tourist season.

Yet, to handicap the competition would level it out? Or would it?

See, now I don’t know. On one hand I think yep, applying a true growth model whereby we use baseline measures and then end-of-year evaluations to the data in order to show true achievement over the course of the year makes a lot of sense. But if we take mitigating factors like poor academic history, non-English speaking homes, lack of internet access, ability to hire private tutors to remediate under-performance, and so on into account (there’s gotta be a mathematic formula for this, right?) then, on one hand we are creating a level playing field whereby my kids can go up against any kids in the country. (And we’d LOVE to do that!) Yet, by handicapping our schools accordingly are we sending a mixed message?

Or even a wrong one?

Are we saying that “since you come from less, we expect less”?(And are therefore “lesser”?) See that troubles me deeply.

In my own class in Los Angeles, I tell my kids “no excuses” and we work to beat the metaphorical Beverly Hills High kids from day 1… cause I know that’s how the real world works.

But when I see my school get the “data” back from the state, I realize that to not take into account mitigating circumstances such as all the urban challenges we face, I realize, we’ve been set up for slaughter like a junior league baseball team taking on the New York Yankees.

Sure, the Yankees may give up a game now and then, but over the course of a season, the Yankees are gonna absolutely steamroll the junior leaguers time and time again.

And if I am the Yankees, I am not sure where the fun is in that. Yankees want to play the Red Sox. Ali wants to fight Frazier. The USC Trojans wants to kick Notre Dame’s butt… not Akron Community College’s butt.

At the end of the day, golf is ultimately a game you play against yourself and the course. You can only control what you can control — your own effort, preparation, practice time and so on. But if it rains, there’s wind, someone plays at 8 am when there’s no wind and another person tees off at 3:p.m. when a tsunami-like gusts are howling… what can you do?

You play the round that is on front of you. Some schools have kids where 98% of the parents went to college. And some have an 18% parent attended college ration… complicated by high truancy numbers and less resources cause there’s no real PTA out there raising a few hundred grand a year to make sure that the arts haven’t been killed off for their kids.

Yet the thing for all players to remember is, you gotta remember to love the game. Otherwise, you’ll never be the best you can.

There is most certainly a very interesting tidal wave on the horizon. And in the mighty seas that are swirling these days in education, that’s no small feat (to create a potential tsunami that is teacher evaluation, that is. See here for the Obama chides California article which this blog post references).

Now, I have no problem with accountability. And no one is above it. I do have a problem, however, with evaluating a professional based on what I consider to be a weak, and quite possibly, inadequate means of assessment to make one’s decision… but I am holding back judgement right now on this Arne Duncan/Obama plan.

See, I think the tests are flawed to a degree. I believe we need growth model assessments to see how much kids learn over the course of the year under the direction of an educator in order to be able to fairly evaluate that educator. Otherwise, by comparing this year’s students to last year’s kids, it’s really apples to oranges (as I have said many times). How my 10 graders measure up this year should be based on where their skills were when they started the year with me — and then we can see their “growth” (there’s that word again). However, to evaluate my 10th graders this year against my 10 graders last year is practically an arbitrary comparison. All kids are different and if we can’t agree on that, then we can’t agree on much at all.

Additionally, my hope is that in this plan comes a recogniztion that there are a few different criteria to “evaluate” teachers — and please tell me that there are more tricks up their sleeves than the simple “kids taking bubble tests in May” approach which so often favor the upper socio-economic areas of our nation.

For example, a teacher who works in a suburban school with a population of kids where 98% of their parents went to college is, if we use our present data system, going to have students that (for the most part) outperform students where greater than 50% of the kids are English language learners.

Sure there might be some anomalies but for the most part this data holds true. The more wealth and education that the parents own in a community, the higher the test scores.

But, does this mean that the teachers who work in elevated socioeconomic areas are “better” teachers than those who do not?

Really… I question it. Because as of right now, I do not see how the teacher evaluation system that is being proposed does not seem to slant towards this end result. (Yet, I am trying to be patient, reserve judgement and wait to see what is actually on the table for all of this.)

But if it does end up that the teacher evaluation system slopes towards this end result, it’s almost un-American.

Two scenarios: Teacher 1 in the suburbs with kids who get high test scores. Teacher 2 in a Title 1 school with all the problems that run attendant to our nation’s lowest performing academic institutions.

Test time comes and the students of Teacher 1 outperform the students of Teacher 2. No one is shocked by the way by the result of their bubble tests.

Now, does this mean that the teacher in scenario 1 in the suburbs is a “better” teacher? Does it mean that the teacher in scenario #2, if the kids struggle to even read the tests, is a worse teacher? See this is where the problem exists for so many. And for me, I don’t want to stop working with the Title I population in inner city Los Angeles.

I LOVE IT!! However, I also don’t want the tests to demonize me as not measuring up because on the whole, my students do not score on these bubble tests at the same level of proficiency as kids who have lawyers, doctors and MBAs for parents.

American society is bifurcated along socioeconomic/class divides and while we all want to be rich, the truth is, all of us are not… and there are a great many of us striving to do 10 dollars worth of work with 5 dollars worth of resources.

My fear is that, unless these teacher evaluations take into consideration all the other mitigating factors that go into making for a really “great professional” what we are going to see is that folks who work in areas where the families have solid educational backgrounds and deep financial pockets are going to be rewarded while the folks who work in our more “troubled areas” are going to inevitably thrown under the bus.

And that is, as I have said many times before, un-American. Accountability is fine as long as it is not used as a weapon and if this plan is going to chase everyone to pursue jobs where the kids are already high-performers even before the school year starts, then we are going to do a disservice to the kids who most need our attention, care, solid efforts and skills.

Just when you think the bubble tests are over I get slammed with a bubble test that all my 9th grade students must take in order to “place them” in an appropriate 10th grade class.

70 questions. Passage upon passage of reading that is almost purposefully dry and needs a sense of prior knowledge of its historical context to appreciate… and what’s it going to show?

Zilch, if you ask me. I mean to give this kind of test to my kids right now is to beg them to simply Christmas tree the thing. Didn’t we just undergo a HUGE series of bubbles tests, the kind that shut down the entire school? And aren’t we but weeks away from the end of the year? And aren’t I about ragged about fighting with the higher-ups about the ridiculousness of these tests?

Are we over-testing? Geesh, we just got done with state tests, we we required to give district worksheet pre-tests as practice for the tests and now they want us to simply give these tests?

What the hell do they expect these tests to prove? Let me guess:

Our English Language Learners have low literacy skills. Check.
Our Gifted and Talented Kids overwhelmingly do not score in the “Highly Proficient” realm when standardized tests are given thus calling into question whether or not our “gifted” kids are really gifted. Check. (But if you know anything about G.A.T.E. one can be identified as G.A.T.E. as a result of aptitude in any number of modalities and just because a kid is wicked with visual puzzles doesn’t mean they are going to score off the charts in the grammar section of Bubbleville, U.S.A.)
Our district is struggling with how to do something to get the state off its back because we keep sliding lower and lower down the NCLB Dante Circle of Hell Scale since it seems we are a wee bit behind when it comes to having all of our kids be at “proficient level within the next 5 years” — so they are starting to turn the screws on us now. Check.
Our kids have absolutely no breaking point and if they do, we are going to find it so we know what not to do in the future. Check.
Our teachers? Oh they are just chimps-for-hire… it’s their job to simply do what they’re told. Check.

It’s freakin’ lunacy! And I stormed out of school ready to pop a blood vessel cause, of course, there was no notice given to me. There was no feedback sought about the sanity of this system. There was no input asked for whereby my opinion — or any other teacher’s — was courted to see how this might fly. I mean, what are we, chopped liver?

But these bubble tests were simply delivered to my door today with the mandate that they get administed so that kids could be properly placed in next year’s class sections.

Huh? Excuse me. A couple of questions? Are these tests the only criteria for their placement next year?
No answer.
If not, what weight do they hold?
No answer.
Are there other mitigating factors in determining who will be “placed” where?
No answer.
Who wrote this test?
A textbook company. That’s right, they simply copied it from one of the pre-packaged, corporate monsters that have their meathooks in our school’s wallets. Here’s question number 30.

The following question is not about the reading selection. Read and answer the question.

We borrow words as well as customs from other cultures. From the names of the Norse gods Odin, Thor, and Freya we get which words?
F) Wednesday, Thursday, Friday
G) origin, thirsty, frightened
H) alpha, beta, kappa
J) January, February, March

Like I said, this is just one of 70 questions. Anybody else think that there might be something wrong with this.
1) I taught absolutely NO Norse mythology this year.
2) Why do they use an F, G, H, J system. First of all, 99% of bubble tests use A,B,C, D and if you work with real kids, you know that to throw in F, G, H, J is to throw them for an unnecessary loop. Furthermore, why did they skip the letter I? Look at it, it goes F, G, H, J — it’s ridiculously and unnecessarily disconcerting.
3) Not even the teacher knows the answer. Burn me in the pyres of Odin but I don’t really have a freakin’ clue what the correct answer choice is — and I have a master’s degree in cross-cultural language arts. My 15 year old English Language Learners though, I am sure they are gonna nail this.
4) How much money did my school pay to this textbook company for these kind of resources again? And in light of the fact that a big percentage of our staff was laid off due to budget cuts, might we not be accused of financial imbecility?

Do I need to go on? About a thousand demoralizing questions popped up… and so, I left. I left school without even raising the issue.

Way too infuriating. Way to mindless. Way too cooked up in the ivory towers of people who do not really know what’s going on down on the ground floor. And no one even explained that we’d be giving this test to me face to face.

Then again, I can kinda see why? I mean would you want to be the one to tell me this is the program, now jump onboard and close your mouth please? That’s why they simply sent a student, an office T.A. with a pile of tests and answer sheets and absolutely no information at all so that if I dared to interrogate this kid, he’d legitamately know nothing.

Of course I snapped at him, “Who gave these to you?”

“I was just told to give these to you.”

“Who told you?”

“They did?”

“Who?”

“The front office.”

“Who?

“I dunno. They just told me to give you this.”

Yep, they sent a patsy!

Makes my blood boil. But of course I know where it came from. But that person got it from a person who is having the screws turned on them. And that person is having the screws turned on them. So in the midst of all this screw turning, stuff like this happens. “I mean we gotta do something, right?”

Aaarrggh!

And then, just when I thought all is lost, I came home to this email… and I calmed down.

Dear Mr. Sitomer,
I just received my copy of your newest book, The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez and felt compelled to write you to tell you not only how excited I am to read your newest book, but how much of an impact your books have had on hundreds of my students.
I am a middle school math and reading teacher in an low-income, high minority, industrial area of Denver, CO, called Commerce City. (Not much unlike the Commerce City in California.) I discovered your books 2 years ago when I was attempting to instruct quite possible the most reluctant readers on the planet. Since that time, I have purchased over twenty of your books and used them to convince hundreds of teenagers, especially boys, that reading in fact does not “suck.” Your stories more closely resemble my students’ lives and they are able to see themselves in the characters. I anticipate your new book will hit even closer to home for them.
I hope you continue to write for along time so that my students will always have something amazing to read.
Thank you for what you do,
Lacey S Taschdjian
Adams City Middle School
Commerce City, CO

Is it just me or is every teacher’s life one of mood swings from depression and I hate this shit! to Man, it’s great to do what I do, trying to help kids and other teachers… like every day of our professional lives?

Aaarrggh!! And to think that some people are on summer vacation and I am going through this right now. For those of us on staff still, we approaching the point of requiring medication.

This stuff is starting to make my head spin.

On one hand, our courts ban same sex marraige,on the other hand a high school in Los Angeles elects a male prom queen and on the third hand 1 in 4 U.S. school-aged kids are Hispanic, but they are not recent immigrants.

Jeez, I don’t know whether to be homophobic, heterophobic or xenophobic at this point. Goodness how I wish the myopic, closed-minded folks who steer public sentiment could give me a better sense of direction. These days it’s confusing to know who I’m supposed to hate.

Los Angeles Unified has also decided to cut summer school due to the budget crisis — but we’re going to keep credit recovery courses at the secondary level for high schoolers. Now this makes complete sense to me. I mean come on, what kind of hit would this school district’s iconic educational image take if we weren’t still offering the chance to make up 18 weeks of F work with 4 weeks of D work (via worksheets, of course) and kept funding programs that had been proven to help that small little segment of our state’s population like elementary age English Language Learners.

Good call! I mean heaven forbid we actually associated an F with the idea of failing or recognized that young kids who need more time in class but don’t get it while they are still young will turn in to old kids who don’t care about spending any time in class because they already know it all.

I mean I don’t want to say that this is a jilting bigger than that of Betty being passed over for Veronica by Archie (not sure I agree with this one, Arch, my friend) but still, if I was going for where my buck will get more bang, I’d be betting on the little kids who are trying to learn the language over the big kids who just had their chance to earn credits oh, 2 week ago.

And you wonder why teachers need aspirin.