Delete comment from: CURMUDGUCATION
The mantras: "high expectations" and "differentiation." Almost every special education teacher I ever worked with, including myself, had very "high expectations" about the academic achievement for their students. Not that I expected much from this alone but at least once a week I explained to my students that passing the RCTs was "nice" but that what I expected was for all of them to score at least a 55 on the Regents Exams...we chanted and yelled "What do we want?" "The Regents Exams." Sounds a bit pitiful by itself but it was part of communicating regularly and very loudly what we expected to do. As for "differentiation", which is the hardest part of a SpEd teacher's job, when I was told to by my principal to "differentiate" more completely in my classrooms, which meant essentially writing a separate lesson plan for each student (I taught algebra and geometry to Regents standards in my self-contained classrooms), I asked her to demonstrate how I might differentiate more appropriately the factoring of quadratic equations. Of course, she had no idea what an quadratic equation was and promptly threw me out of her office. Thanks, Arne, for all the good and spectacularly useless advice and policy changes here on behalf of my fomrer struggling SpEd students who in high school could not simplify low order equations such as 3/9=1/3. My principal would not let me diverge from the Regents curriculum to do a unit on fractions so, of course, they could never solve a Regents problem that included a fraction in the question. No wonder that of the 200+ Algebra Regents exams I scored for my students while at my former school exactly three were able to score 55 or better, despite my high expectations, serious test prep and my own, inadequate attempts to differentiate lessons to ten students in my class all at different levels of math competency.
Harris Lirtzman
Jun 25, 2014, 11:32:32 AM
Posted to Quite Possibly the Stupidest Thing To Come Out of the US DOE