Teacher Evaluation: What It Is (Not)

The Seven Cs
(care, control, clarity, challenge, captivate, confer, consolidate)

A popularity contest established by research
as a valid and reliable set of measures
focused on issues that have nothing
to do with learning.  A low value
of student and teacher time
and an opportunity to increase
student outcomes
by using their insights
to improve teacher practice.

Focused on issues that have nothing
to do with learning--
an invitation for students to complain.

(Lines found in Tripod Student Survey:  What It Is And What It Is Not)

The Eighth "C" (Creepy)

Will the Real Administrator Please Stand Up?

Teachers are begging: just a peek at the test!  Please
so I may drill
as a dentist would
into their minds
the seven Cs
Because I'm drowning
Drowning in the Seven Cs
They are not
Caution, Creativity, Craziness, Craving,
Cramming, California or Colorado.
No, they are not.

Found Object

This is a musical instrument made on Neptune.  It is dark inside and there are sounds of gold miners making their way to the dredges inside--to the fields--they are carrying heavy packs but laugh at their burdens.  They are as rich as they'll ever be.

This depicts a wolf with white legs or white stockings.  The wolf holds a continent next to his belly.  I remembered his name some time ago.  His name was Bohemia.

This is a doorknob from off the captain's quarters on a pirate ship--this is a round version of a flat world that sinks into the galaxy's teeth like a flat pizza.

What happens next is that I remember going to the store and finding nothing like it ever again.  A draft has opened my door and I wonder if it is the apparition I felt/saw last night while sleeping.

Something creeped around me in the bed, sniffing.  It was small and harmless and then it crouched down on my chest.  It was a black and white cat.  Was it there to tell me to sleep peacefully, that all was well with everything? 

Richard Brautigan's Please Plant This Book weighing heavily on my mind.

Lead Me Deceive Me

The dregs of the day unfold in a silly way.  Too many educators and not enough education.  The students smarter than I am, solutions at their fingertips.  Impatient when I speak out loud.  Words. They are spoken too slowly, there is too much listening.  Delete the verbose.  Delete the verb.  If this essay told you a secret about itself, what would it whisper?  

Mission: Unlikely

Cooking up trouble has become my middle name.  Especially with the meetings.  Foggy shapes corrode memory as only endless meetings can.  It has become the norm to do nothing and then when one is tired of this the bell rings.  Same at the meetings.  Any move toward aliveness or being alive or action is taken as a threat by the group.   All of the members shift toward the drunk silver back, the one with a loud voice and words.  It must be illegal, somewhere.  My own taxes are going to this.

Learning Targets

1.  Break them apart into smaller categories interchanged with similar terms from other lists.
2.  Scramble and jumble into a comlex set that is a game of Memory, a pile of Chance cards, a robotic Tarot deck.
3.  Don't eat too much salt or consume too much caffeine.  Your face will look like a pillow in no time.
4.  The students fall in the middle part of the Venn diagram.  That is their learning. 
5.  They fall between the targets, between the categories with their dead uncles, sick moms and absent dads.  They are hungry but don't eat their Title One food, would rather smooch by the stairwell than ever enter the caf' they are starstruck by new sneakers and fights they film to review on their phones.  What would happen if the thing in H.D.'s poem came true?  If all of Greece hated Helen so much in their utimate worship of her?  What would happen if this would really be read in the morning announcements?  Would the world exist?  What would happen to the wireless?

Once and for All

Today's Casualties:

Two students left out of Teenbiz.  Reason:  trip to the bathroom derailed by social obligations at the drinking fountain.

Students left out of career presentation:  10.  Reason:  shyness peer pressure.
Senior students without a plan for next year:  35.  Reason:  family.
     I began the day with the usual rituals and soon fell prey to vog.  The nearby volcano makes the residents ill.   It feels like perpetual jet lag or else waking up after being stung by bees.  Hot black tea with honey helps, also, plunging into the ocean repeatedly and pretending nothing is happening also helps.  Unfortunately, when on duty, this is all nearly impossible.  Dickenson, Harjo, Blake, Poe.