How much should I, as a teacher, be expected to do between 8:00 a.m and 3:00 p.m.?

And don’t those expectations change depending on what is going on between 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m. in a student’s life?

Some kids come into my room ready to learn. With the tools to learn.

And some don’t.

Some need me to be play the role of their parent, their advisor, their taskmaster, their shoulder to cry on, and so on.

Others just need me/want me to be their “English teacher”. (And by that I mean the person who guides them in skills pertaining to advancing their abilities in the realm of Language Arts: reading literature, writing, discussing philosophy, applying 21st century skills, that sort of thing.)

If I only take on the role of being their “English teacher” (as I define it above), am I being derelict in my duties?

If I take on more than the job of being their “English teacher” am I over-stepping my boundaries?

I don’t know. And worse, I am not sure where I can turn for a credible answer.

After all, the state standards, those things I have been hired to teach (and which are supposed to instruct me), speak nothing of showing empathy for a student who, for example, just learned their favorite uncle was sent to prison for a decade. (A recent event in my teaching day.) On the other hand, if I allow this event to be an excuse which exempts the student from working in class, where does that leave me?

This is what is so silly about bubble tests: they do not take into account the ingredients which make up the stew. They just assess the stew… and then the finger gets pointed at teachers as if we are the only chefs contributing.

In fact, I’d say while we can most certainly be one of the most important contributors, we’re not number one. Not by a long shot.

What goes on between 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m. in a student’s life greatly dictates what goes on between 8:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. ( I gotta give a shout-out to JoAnne for raising this point in response to a previous blog post of mine!)

And anyone who tries to tell you that it doesn’t is trying to sell you something. And in my opinion, none of this is “excuse making” as some hard-liners would have you believe.

To the hard-liners, I think karma should give them a migraine headache and see if they can perform their job at the same ability as they would without the migraine.

That’ll learn them some compassion for “mitigating factors in performance”.

BTW, Happy Cinco de Mayo! And for those of you who can expect low attendance on either May 5th (getting a jump on the partying!) or on May 6th (too much partying to get to class), remember, the bubble tests don’t care… so STEP UP!

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.