Lost Time, Man

Logical reasoning is the ability to follow an idea along its path, pursuing it through potential twists and turns and into theoretical rabbit holes.

It lets you know when you are being insulted, in other words.

For example, as I write this, I am sitting in an LTM, or Learning Team Meeting.  These are meetings we have about twice a month on Thursdays.  The students love these days, because they get to sleep in late and come to school by 10:30.  Many of them skip on these days, because they feel they don’t count, and when they do show, up, they resent us giving work on a ‘half day.’

Mean while, we teachers come to school at the normal time, and spend three hours in one big meeting, ostensibly to better educate us about how to teach our kids more effectively.

There are about a dozen LTMs in an average year, and each of those days takes away about two hours of instruction time, while teachers are in the meetings.

These meetings are usually run by county employees or outside consultants, and are universally reviled as repetitive, redundant, pedantic and useless.  And repetitive.

When I first heard the rumor about LTMs I laughed at the person who told me, because the idea was too ridiculous to be true.

I was wrong.

It’s about FCAT, pure and simple.  For those who do not know, FCAT is the standardized test that all Florida students must pass before graduation.   They take the test at multiple grade levels, and it dominates the public school system.

LTM’s started several years after FCAT came along, after it became apparent that students were consistently failing.  Since schools are rated by the A+ plan, which influences funding to schools, and since FCAT scores were the biggest factor in those grades, the Palm Beach County School Board decided they needed to take drastic action.

Thus, they came up with LTM’s, additional training for teachers to better equip them to reach students and help them to pass the FCAT.

See the insult?

Let’s analyze the facts of the case and present a basic if/then/therefore argument, shall we?

Fact 1: the students in the county are not performing to an acceptable level.

Fact 2: The proposed solution to this problem removes class time from the students themselves.

Fact  3:  That missing instructional time was replaced with meetings designed to educate the teachers (whether or not those meetings actually work is not germane to this discussion right now.)

So, the county’s argument goes like this:

IF we spend less time on teaching kids and more on teaching teachers,

THEN we expect to see an improvement in FCAT scores

THEREFORE teachers are the entire problem.

Simple logic.

We are so bad at our jobs, that you can have students spend less time in class and still expect an improvement.  The idea that students have little to no impact on their own learning, that it is the teacher alone who creates learning, is inherently corrosive, not only to teacher (and student) morale, but to the overall culture of education.

The message?  Teach harder.

And as to how fascinating and enriching these meetings are?  I direct you back to the beginning of the third paragraph.