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So I have two more kids that will miss the last week of school. That brings it up to six. I'm not going to bore you with the details.

But here is the GREAT part...the test that the district gives over the internet will be given next week:

In order for [us] to have the student data it needs for its analysis, administer the exam to your students during exam week next week. The online portion of it won't be available for preview, because we need to tighten up security for it if the item analysis is to be valid.

So I have no access to the questions and it won't be put online until next week. This gives me every reason to write to the superintendent, principal, and district math leadership to tell me what to do. Should I:

• lower my standards regarding attendance, or
• expect high standards and give them zeros for missing the exams?

I'm also under the wonderful watch of the gods because the calendar for finals was released in March of 2007 - that is 15 months before exams...is that enough time for parents to plan? Since I'm always told that if I expect high standards from the kids (attendance included!) I can't wait for the replies.

Certainly not a graduate of the SAT Prep Course decided to move the class to another room.


This has been around the school for quite some time. Kids that need help in math are going to struggle trying to figure out what "Starting 11/12-24th" means.

One:

This is a reminder that ******* will be traveling beginning on June 6th and will miss the last few days of school.

His responsibility is to make sure all of his assignments are in before that time. I will have him contact each of you to make sure he has everything done that needs to be in before June 6th. Please let me know if there is going to be any problem with him completing course work by then so I can help him focus.

Two:

I am writing this letter on behalf of our family and *****'s family. We wanted to let all the teachers know that the two girls will be gone the last 2 days of school for a volleyball tournament in Florida. I'm not sure the timing could have been planned any more poorly, but it is what it is,

...

If you could let us know by the end of this week, we can make sure the girls are studying for tests or working on projects that will need to be completed (especially with the availability of the long weekend coming up).

Thank you so much for your help and again we apologize for the inconvenience-

Three:

Mr. [IB]:

****** will miss the last five days of school to attend camp - it is his first year as a counselor and he needs to be there early. Will you be doing anything at the end of the school year that he can miss? If so, he'll need to do that work before he leaves for the camp.

This year is the first year where I have to give district assessments. Since they are done over the Internet and I have no control over when they are given, I can just sit back, relax, and write that they'll have to miss the final exam since it is all beyond my control. That makes me quite happy indeed. I would love to be the staff at the College Board that gets the same phone calls - Timmy can't take the SAT because he has a dentist appointment. Can he take it after the others have finished?

With a student teacher, I can certainly get some work done. Generally I go across the hall and work in an office and peek in every ten or fifteen minutes to see if everything is going well ...she only teaches two hours. Today I walked down to one of the calculus teacher's room just to see what was going on...many are my former students. Since the AP exam is over with, he's been teaching statistics. Today they were working with binomial distributions. One kid asked why the variance of a binomial distribution was npq. The teacher wasn't sure...I left the room and found out how to prove it. I came back in and presented. Kids were happy, I was happy, and the teacher was happy.

While I was out looking it up, I was in another room where kids were doing probability. The problem was just an introduction problem - but I was curious on how it could be solved. In my room I found the solution using a nice layout on Excel and sent it to the teacher who will show his students.

This is just with one extra hour since my student teacher had my fifth hour. With the holiday on Monday, I had no homework to correct, so I could see and participate (directly and indirectly) in their classrooms. And I think that all three benefited from my time "off" today.

Why we don't have more time to work with each other is something that I've never understood. The chart to the right is from the OECD and shows the number of hours secondary teachers are in front of a classroom during a year. It is nice to know that the rest of the world decides that it is in the best interest of the educational system to let teachers have proper time to grade, contact parents, and work with students one-on-one. An hour a day just isn't cutting it for me, particularly since my prep period happens to be the same period that many of my students in special education have their support class, which means that they come down to me for help at times. No, I don't mind it, but with kids in the morning, kids during my prep, and kids after school means very little time for me to work on my own or with colleagues. Beside, with only 1/6 of the school's teachers preparing any given hour, the chance that someone is preparing for the same lessons I am is negligible (this year I don't have any planning periods in common with teachers who teach what I do).

I suppose people will look at the fact that teachers "only" teach five hours a day as a perk. But I know that the time that gets spent making those PowerPoint demonstrations in business meetings dwarfs the amount of time presenting them. When can we expect the same amount of time to perfect our lessons?

Honors reception in the media center!