Since I am now on spring break, and since I have effectively dropped off the radar for the past few months, I wanted to take a few minutes to send out an update. Once again, I’m very sorry to anyone who has attempted to contact me over the past few months. While never a great correspondent, I’ve become an even worse one than usual over the past months. This has been a very difficult year for both of us. Retrospectively, Jenn and I have been able to recognize God’s grace at work in not allowing our first year of marriage to coincide with her first year of graduate school and/or my first year of teaching. Our routine has oftentimes felt overwhelming, and leaving little time for life, outside relationships, or even things like doing the dishes.

My weekdays look largely the same. I wake up at 5:00AM (or 4:30, if I bike to work, which I have tried to start doing). I get ready for school and eat a hurried breakfast of homemade granola (assuming that one of us has had time to make it sometime the previous two weeks). I then drive or bike to school and do any last-minute preparation, including copies, writing down things on whiteboards, beginning to answer school emails, practicing lessons, cleaning up the classroom, or grading school papers. By about 7:10, students start entering the classroom (understandably surly most of the time, with large cups of coffee in hand), and my day begins.

My first period is Spanish 5/6 (which, confusingly, is third-year Spanish; for some odd reason, Washington High School delineates languages courses by semester rather than by year). First period is different from the rest of my day, which consists of second-year classes, for several reasons. First of all, although I have some students with some home background in Spanish in all of my classes, in my third year class, these students are majority. Consequently, it is particularly necessary to try to create lessons which can reach out at the same time to students who have only learned “book Spanish” and other students who only know “street Spanish.” In theory, this shouldn’t be overly difficult; after all, both groups have something unique to offer, which could make for a very enriching experience if they are both willing to share. However, I have found that the problem is not so much teaching the necessary concepts, as getting students to actually find the motivation to learn them. Most of my third-year non-native speakers are taking the class because they actually have some motivation to learn Spanish. However, most of my students with Spanish-speaking background are taking the class because they are hoping for an easy “A”, and that creates a situation where getting student engagement is challenging. Last unit, for example, we were learning about the Future tense (which, as you can probably guess, allows you to talk about things that you will do or that shall come to pass). However, in the colloquial Spanish of my students, this tense is very rarely used, being replaced by the more casual phrase “going to.” (The difference is the same as the difference in English between saying “I will go to the store” and “I am going to go to the store.”) Afterwards, I gave a quiz on this. With one exception, all of my non-Spanish speakers passed with flying colors; with one exception, all of my Spanish-speakers bombed. When I talked to them about it afterwards, however, they did not see any reason why they should have to learn this in the first place. One girl told me, “I went to my parents and showed them the notes that you gave us, and they said that they were wrong.” It’s hard to argue, as a gringo non-native speaker, why they should learn the “correct” way of speaking; why should they care what the Royal Academy in Madrid says? If anything, some almost take pride in street Spanglish in the same way that some black power activists have embraced Ebonics—as a way of asserting their identity and differentiating themselves from the system that they are resisting. Consequently, they generally have very little intrinsic motivation to learn the material. This leaves only the extrinsic motivation of wanting not to fail the class, and since our grading system allows endless penalty-free retakes of any tests (more on that later), they find that it is much easier just to retake the test two or three times than to actually engage with the material.

At 8:25, I begin my long slog of second-year classes. Unlike my third-year class, these tend to consist overwhelmingly of non-native speakers. Even with its challenges, third year is a cakewalk compared to the majority of my second-year classes. In my first-period class, the behaviors I get are largely due to the early-morning hour—lack of engagement, reluctance to participate, sleeping at desks, etc. It is a passive resistance. The resistance I encounter in the rest of my classes is much more active. The reason for this is (once again) motivation. Third-year is entirely optional; however, students have drilled into them from the very beginning of high school that, if they want to go to college (and the word “want” here is used very loosely), they have to take at least two years of a foreign language. When I gave a poll at the beginning of the year to all my students, I asked them what their reasons were for taking this class; over 60% of them said that they were taking it because they had to, either because they mistakenly thought it was a graduation requirement, or because it was necessary to get into a four-year college (which, anymore, is viewed with the same sense of matter-of-fact obligation that a high school diploma once was). For the vast majority of my students, then, Spanish is in the curious position of being a “mandatory elective”—they have to take it (or, at least, they think they do), but they don’t actually have to learn it. It is simply a box to get checked off as they jump through the many, many hoops that have been set before them in order to get to their distant goal of escaping the educational labyrinth and doing something else (anything else). Consequently, the goal for most of my students becomes how to pass the class with as little effort as possible. In this goal, they are substantially aided by one of the strangest ideas yet devised by the educrats who dictate educational policy: Standards Based Grading (or, since everything education-related must be reduced to a three-letter acronym, “SBG” for short).

There are several components that set SBG apart from more traditional, points-based grading systems. The first of these is that the only things that can impact a student’s grade in a class are scores (based on a 1-4 point scale) of common “standards” on standardized tests. This means that homework, participation, and other “formative” work can no longer be taken into account in determining the student’s final grade. It also means that, even on tests or projects, items which are not official “standards” of the course (such as neatness, creativity, or even turning things in on time) cannot be taken into account in determining the final score for a student’s grade. Furthermore, in this system, students are allowed to retake any “summative” assessment as many times as they like until they reach what they consider to be a satisfactory grade. Finally, their grade in the course is determined by the mean (or “average”) of the mode (the number which occurs most often) of scores for each individual standard. To make things even more complicated, you can arbitrarily set the number of scores that you would like to be considered in determining the mode. (If you don’t understand this, you are in good company.)

The idea behind SBG is understandable—perhaps even laudable. Like Common Core (another fantastically bad idea, by the by), it strives to make sure that “no child is left behind” by implementing a common standard of assessment across the board. Furthermore, it attempts to measure with precision students actual competency with the material that is being studied, rather than the preference of the teacher. In other words, it attempts to take subjectivity out of grading. SBG (like Communism) would work very well if people were completely different than they actually are. However, it doesn’t take anyone (at least, anyone without a Ph.D. in education) very long to realize what happens: as soon as students realize that “formative” work doesn’t count towards their grade, they stop doing it. What’s more, since participation doesn’t count for anything either, they feel no qualms about carrying on side conversations, walking around the classroom, braiding each other’s hair, or being on their cell phones while I am attempting to teach or while they are supposed to be working. Consequently, when they get to the summative assessment, they either bomb it, or (more commonly) find somehow to cheat their way into a satisfactory grade. Stopping cheating in this system is surprisingly difficult. With thirty or so students per classroom, each armed with a smart-phone which can be surreptitiously accessed at a propitious moment, and one proctor (who does not multi-task well), it is very difficult to catch them in the act. When I read their answers, I may know that a student is not responsible for them; proving it, however, is another matter. Initially, I took a student’s test to administration (a case where Google Translate’s errors were copied directly into the student’s answer). However, after a series of unpleasant phone call with the student’s mother and a long and tedious meeting with the student, her mother, and the principal (during which both the student and her mother steadfastly maintained her innocence of any wrongdoing, but also argued that “even if she had,” it wouldn’t have been her fault), the student was allowed to retake the assessment without penalty. Afterwards, I largely gave up on trying to enforce the no-cheating policy. When confronted, students invariably protest their innocence, ask me “How do you know I cheated?” and, if I cannot tell them exactly the mechanism by which they did so, take this as proof of their innocence (or, at least, “reasonable doubt” of their guilt). The ironic thing is, of course, that if the students put half the effort into studying that they do into protesting against studying or finding ways to cheat, they would learn the material, no problem. But, where’s the fun in that?