A crazy week at school. Next week is the statewide HSPA test, which is a graduation requirement for all students. Tuesday is the math portion, and I am responsible for providing calculators for all 251 juniors. However, we only have 224 calculators available since the rest were assigned to students for the entire year. So I surveyed all the student calculators, and three of us will collect them from our students Friday for the test next week.

We will have three days of no morning classes and short afternoon classes during the test days, which really cuts into our teaching, not to mention that the test itself is so intrusive into our curriculum that teachers spend a lot of time preparing the students for the test. The state standards in math, which form the basis of the test, are so sprawling that basically all we have time to do in secondary math classes is introduce students to topics before sprinting on to something new. One of the reasons other countries’ students perform so much better than us in secondary math is because they cover a lot fewer topics and actually go into depth teaching them. We don’t have that luxury, and I truly believe that math education would be considerably better if we could take our required curriculum and arbitrarily split it in half. But the state will not give us that luxury since they believe they know better than professional educators what should be in the math curriculum.

This is just one example of what is wrong with education in this country.