To be fair, student evaluations are highly valuable in higher education, where students not only have the frame of reference to compare their professors, they have a mature set of expectations, and usually are not in the mindset of children who are inevitably going to be reprimanded and have consequences imposed upon them. Students in college are there, by and large, due to their own drive while elementary students are compelled to go to school and are being molded to fit the society—the differences therefore in the frame of mind for allowing such surveys to be given to these largely different populations are—regardless of the form and level of maturity required for the test—unsettling for teachers who already feel their ability to impose consequences on students for disciplinary infractions has been decimated. Now, with the fear that a seven-year-old’s contempt may keep you from a satisfactory rating, the rise of unrequited misconduct is likely to skyrocket.
So, that’s where “another day older” comes into play, because that’s really all we’re going to get. Meanwhile “the sixteen tons” that we are hauling seems heavier and heavier as workloads then are ever increasing and have far surpassed the amount of hours in a day. While many have often criticized teachers for their short work days and ample vacation time, few realize that teachers never stop working—even in summer—are constantly planning lessons, grading papers, shopping for classrooms, and taking continuing education or professional development courses. Teachers never stop working, teaching, planning, or building classrooms. Unfortunately with all of the “accountability” being put in place to make politicians look involved in the education systems and high stakes data collection, teachers barely have time to teach to anything but the tests, and hardly have time to plan because of all the ridiculous data they have to collect—which more often then not is collected, reported, and discarded because the next round of data has to be collected.
The deadlines on this data are incredibly stressful because teachers are made to feel that it is due-or-die and are certain that it will rain hammers if 30+ particular assessments aren’t graded, alphabetized, and analyzed by a certain date. The sixteen tons gets heavier and heavier because everything starts to encroach on personal time. There are many nights teachers work well into the morning hours from the moment they get home—sacrificing their family lives, relationships, sanity, and health with assessments that continually treat students like products and dehumanize the humanities. We spend so much time being accountable, that there are no practices to actually be accountable for…therefore there’s nothing to base our assessments on except standardized exams. Exams for which students are going to be invariably poorly prepared for if teachers are left without a clue as to what is on the test.
We can’t speak out too much about it because we’ve “sold out souls to the company store” and fear all our bills, credit, and especially student loan debts (some of us due to continuing education loans rather than initial loans for college and masters degrees). We’re silenced because we have due-or-die schedules on bills that, unpaid, could potentially lead to the revocation of teaching certification. If Saint Peter does happen to call us, that debt will be passed along to our families, and our sixteen tons will be hauled by another hapless teacher who fell into the same trap as us.
Only time will tell what the blanks will reveal in the “Mad Libs” style document that has been placed and passed by the unions and the government regarding New York Teacher Evaluations but without a doubt, the card are stacked against the teachers. Any system of this sort, that has been accepted without full terms in place is sketchy…and this document hasn’t even been fully sketched out yet. It seems to be yet another cog in the machine being assembled to steamroll public schools into parking lots. Now with teachers feeling completely out of control over their own effectiveness and observation statuses they will no longer feel comfortable enough to actually be effective. With sixteen tons on their backs which test paper is going to be the one that breaks the system? I hope we don’t find out any time soon…
The system is more like trying to figuring out a Rubric’s Cube.
The lines quoted at the beginning of the post constitute the chorus of “Sixteen Tons,” and refer to the peculair economic system that prevailed in many coal-mining towns back when the song was written. The miners weren’t paid in cash, but in “scrip.” Scrip was not legal tender, but could only be spent by the miners and their families at company stores — the coal companies operated the general stores in mining towns — or to pay the rent for the company-owned housing where they lived.
Yes Rickie, sounds just like the direction our Government is heading..
Yes Ricky, you are absolutely right. Since te government owns me outright between employment and debt, and since they’ve stacked it so that manyike me will fail I felt it was an appropriate parallel. Tha is for reading!