I have been teaching in and out of classrooms for 25 years. I thoroughly enjoy each day with my students. I know that sounds trite, but I do. Everyone who meets me knows, within minutes, that I am OCD. I know it, I embrace it, I try to control it.
I love MATH. I love to "Crunch" numbers, do mental math, play Sudoku when I am supposed to be sleeping. I teach my third graders to embrace the Math in their everyday lives; shopping, allowances, baking, telling time, going for walks and knowing the distance, telling temperature, and many other real world applications of math.
I do not have any difficulties with keeping records of my students' achievements. I keep databases of their scores in Math facts, DRA records of their Reading, Excel Spreadsheets of their stages of Word Study, grades in my grade book of their curriculum assessments, write rubrics for assignments, and keep many other records; too many to list.
I do find that I am spending more time than I would like on records. We teachers are now Statisticians. We spend time disaggregating more and more data. WHY? Because we have to validate EVERY decision we make, EVERY grade that we post, EVERY detail of a classroom project.
I miss the days when I could spend a month on my plants unit. We used to go for "Seed" walks, create murals of Rain Forests, plant gardens around the school, any other exciting projects. NOW, there are SOL's to be covered, data to be disaggregated, and records to be posted.
I still love what I do; that's why I am still doing it. I wish I could spend less time with data and MORE time with my students.
What are your thoughts?
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Data disaggregation
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6 comments:
I was talking to a friend yesterday who works for a software company that develops "middleware." She exlained that their "middleware" is developed for large financial institutions and other large companies that have to use data from huge numbers of documents.
Cancelled checks for instance at the bank. The documents are scanned and then the middleware locates information (date, check number, amount, etc.) from the scan and populates it to a database.
Seems like someone should development some "middleware" for education. We could dump all the records and spreadsheets into a scanner and it would create a database with an entry for each student.
Kind of like the District Data Warehouse, but at the classroom level.
I think that is a great idea. Maybe I might work with a great friend of mine to develop that software.
KathY - I couldn't agree with you more. I haven't been teaching as long as you, but I do "remember when" we had more time to expand our units.
When Katie mentioned "middleware" for education...don't we already do something similar with all the scores that arrive on our Principals' desks during the summer? Our SOL scores are broken down by classroom. The BART scores are also broken down by student, classroom, grade level, etc. Just my 2 cents worth. :)
JudY
Opps...didn't mean to make it anonymous. JudY
JudY,
I miss the time spent "playing". Wasn't that what, "Ender's Game" was all about?
Anyway, I am working through the Waltham Data now and will post my analysis by tonight.
Thanks for posting to my blog. I enjoy our conversations.
I find the data useful, but like you I spend more and more time on it. The numbers don't restrict our teaching. Pace at which we have to go through the curriculum is what is affecting our teaching. I find it interesting that some countries take the stance that they want their students to learn fewer topics in a year, but to a greater depth. We, however, keep adding but don't take anything away. And of course there is this thought: Aren't our students more than numbers to be crunched?
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