It's good to be back.
I wrote most of the following post over a month ago. Then my wife and I and two dogs went on a road trip in a camper van because we never had. Now it's five weeks and seven thousand miles later and we're back in L.A.
At some point in your life you have to do things because if you don't, you never will.
The trip was incredible and I may talk more about it in future posts once I've had some time to make sense of it. I just want to acknowledge that, for those of you still in the game, getting up at 5:30 every morning, making phone calls and grading papers every night, lots of things have gotten worse.
One thing that hasn't? Retirement is fucking awesome.
What's up, Doc?
I began this whole blog adventure with the announcement that I had retired and written a book. Well, that was a year ago and so far I am alarmingly close to becoming an example of how to waste a perfectly good retirement. Do not let this happen to you.
Those of you toiling every day in unsafe conditions for no credit and very little money while ruled by imbeciles whose only concern is avoiding the critical eye of their superiors long enough to move up another rung on Peter Principle's ladder know that the job is impossible.
Only it's not. Not quite. Used to be that summers were awesome. I remember actually thinking "There's no vacation like a teacher vacation." I'm sure it was because I finished every semester of every year completely destroyed, and then you walk out of the building on that last day and your room is done and your rollbook is turned in and you've got all your signatures including the computer nazi (used to be the AV coordinator) and you were free. Really free. Fucking free.
And you didn't have to think about school or school kids or for fuck's sake school administrators for months. You could breathe. You could laugh. You could drink all day and sleep at night--or the other way around. Anyway, I could. If you're married with kids, your mileage may vary.
That wasn't true the last five or ten years of my career. I had summer trainings and hilariously named Professional Developments. I had extra lesson plans and tests to write to satisfy consultants and administrators who never read them but criticized them anyway. It was not the same feeling.
And then I retired, and it's all good once again. Like when the world was young.
What I'm saying is that retirement is totally fucking worth it, and I haven't even done it right yet.
But I'm going to. After back surgery left me pain-free for the first time in ten years, after rehabbing for a year and losing twenty pounds just by walking every day because I now have time to walk every day, I'm about to do one of those things retired people say they're going to do when they retire but often never do. I'm going on a cross-country road trip in a camper van.
Never done it before--camped my way across the country. There's lots to teach myself and lots of unknown unknowns that I'll just have to solve on the fly. It's project-based learning! Unlikely to show up on any state-sponsored standardized test. What would the standards even be?
ELA r.m.20.22.1
- Consult general and specialized reference materials to select routes and identify appropriate stops.
- Interpret signs and symbols in context and analyze their role in travel.
Math v.v.20.22.1
- Solve problems involving velocity and other quantities that can be represented by vectors.
- Given two vectors in magnitude and direction form, determine the magnitude and direction of their sum.
As you can see, this set of "standards" is like any set delivered to you by people who have no idea what thinking is or what students do or what a real classroom looks like. These, like all of them, are as worthless as an ELA standard that says, "Write a sentence" without dealing with "about what?" and, fundamentally, "how well?" Standards are easy; analysis is hard. Evaluation is hard. Coming up with meaningful rubrics? Hard.
What would a rubric for my trip look like? How well do I have to interpret signs and symbols, understand their context, and analyze them? How do I know well from a little less well from not well at all? What if I make a mistake and end up someplace wonderful? Does that count for me or against me?
And how would you test for it? State-sponsored standardized tests use the same yardstick for everything whether it is meaningful or not. How successful is Hamlet? How "proficient" is Between the World and Me? Standardized answer? One hundred seventy-six pages.
How do you measure a project requiring multiple skills and a broad range of expertise, which is as much art and chance as math and evidence? How well did you perform your trip? Six thousand miles. How did you do with those vectors? Thirty days.
Bullshit.
Success, proficiency, mastery. If I survive the trip and have fun, I won't need to ask myself if I had enough fun to be proficient. I'll be a success.
I may write about school if something in particular gets under my skin, but mostly I'll just keep you posted on the joys of retirement--if only to give you something to look forward to and encourage you to keep going. It gets better.
No comments:
Post a Comment