Better? Better than what?

Today was a little better, although as soon as I get on the train in the mornings, I start to think about imbalance in children and I start to get angry. What is the imbalance you might ask. Walking through the other end of the seventh grade hallway, I kept noticing that one or another of the teachers would be classless. After questioning one of the teachers, he told me that they had so few kids, they were able to combine two classes!

This news was so hard to hear because for the last two weeks, I have been watching my technology pilot teachers struggle with the group of kids that they were given: all the repeaters (kids who failed last year), and all of the lowest performing students. Why is this? Well, part of the problem was that no one did any scheduling last summer. Seriously, many of the students and teachers did not have a schedule or class list the first week of school. Crazy huh? It gets crazier. Myself and another teacher went to great lengths to survey ALL of the students in the building on their preferences for their electives for the following year. At the beginning of the second week, I find out that the principal has ordered all of the elective teachers to survey the kids again? Why? I don't get it. It was no secret that we did this already last year. We had the data in a spreadsheet. Honestly, I just don't think they understand what we did well enough for it to make a lasting impression. If we had brought in a huge plate of food, or maybe some nice trinkets form corporate express they might have remembered, but when you start talking about online...survey...spreadsheet...data...preferences...modalities....stuff like that...the people in charge at my school seem to tune out.

I think this new blog is just turning into a place for me to bitch. Maybe I had better change my name so I don't lose my job. Maybe, unconsciously that is WHAT I'm TRYING to do!

In fact, it was in that same survey that we polled the students learning styles and modalities so that we could better place them onto the technology team. We were attempting to make one class of students whose learning styles might lend themselves to technology. This was one of the premises that I was given the grant on. At the time, the principal said this would be no problem. So this brings me back to the scheduling.

I gave all of this information to multiple administrators and explained to them what they needed to do as far as scheduling, and as I said, nothing got done. I have no idea what they did up in that building all summer. I have a feeling that there was a lot joking, fun and food...there always is...while the place goes to shit.

So, this morning after I did my daily technology deliveries, I went around and did an informal survey. I already new that that my team had some difficult kids and a lot of them. But I needed to see what was going on in the rest of the school. Wouldn't you know, there was only one other team of teachers in the school that had four classes total. ALL THE REST HAD THREE. I couldn't believe this. I feel like my team has been set up for failure. And the other team that does have four, they have all of the top performing kids: 701, 702, 703, 704. I can't believe it.

This weekend I am going to look at the MSA data as well as the IEP information and see how my team compares to the rest of the school and I don't believe it will look any better.

So, the bottom line is this. I got this grant to give these teachers great teaching tools as well as solid training in how to use it and how to infuse technology into their curricula. We are hoping to show some solid academic gains, but at this point, I am not confident that this will happen. Sometimes when I go down there things are just nutty. Maybe I have lost faith to early. Maybe I need to go down and help out more. I don't know.

Ms. G took her classes to the computer lab today. I found a CPU heat sink and fan smashed in the corner--It didn't come out of a working computer, but it did fly through the air during class time....Baltimore City Public Schools....