Endspurt

Actually, the title is German, but it's a great word to describe what's happening at this point. The TPA deadline and the end of the quarter at my placement school are both happening on the same day a week and a half from now. I have literally hundreds of reaction papers (about 11 per student, for 60 students) on To Kill a Mockingbird to grade by then, and the commentary on my TPA videos and the student assessments I chose to spotlight is due as well. Which do you think matters more to me?

My students' work, of course. What kind of a teacher would I be if my own grade on an assessment I don't really believe in was more important to me than my students' learning? It also helps to remind myself that I am in the final "beta phase" cohort, meaning that my TPA grade does not actually count towards me getting my license.

This is more evidence of how the TPA can actually prevent future preservice teachers from getting the most out of their student teaching experience. If I had been smarter about the TPA process (and I probably would have tried to be smarter, if it had been a factor in my licensure), I would not have assigned as much writing to my students this quarter. From the quality of the reaction papers I have read this morning, it's clear that this would have been detrimental to my students. They are making huge strides in their ability to think synthetically about literature, thanks (I believe) in large part to my insistence that they pause every couple of chapters and write at least 250 words about what they have read - and that they grapple with the text, as opposed to summarizing it. All the hours I have spent thus far writing comments like, "And what does this fact tell you about Scout? About Maycomb society? About the times Harper Lee is describing?" have had an effect. Those were all hours I could have spent filling out my 10-page commentary on the TPA assessment.

I don't want to bring my personal life too much into this blog, but another incident worth noting came up this week. I thought I had finished grading all of my students' comparison essay tests on Wednesday afternoon, but as I was entering the grades into the computer system I realized that I had not graded one essay. I put it aside to do that evening, once my daughter was asleep. After I had turned off her light and cuddled a bit with her and sung her current favorite lullaby, "The Ants Go Marching One by One," she wanted to cuddle some more. I obliged her for a few seconds, then whispered, "I have to grade another paper, sweetie."

"You have to put your daughter to bed, too," she reminded me tartly.

So much of the student teaching experience seems to be geared toward a nostalgic Hollywood version of what being a college student  is like; the TPA, in its current incarnation as a preservice teaching assessment, apparently buys into that. Maybe I am suffering from typical college student myopia, even though I am 51. But there really is not enough time in the day to fulfill all my obligations to my students and my family, much less to myself (and I consider the TPA an obligation to myself, because it is supposed to benefit my economic future). This is true even though I don't need more than six hours of sleep a night and can get by relatively comfortably on five.

The TPA is inappropriate for anyone who has obligations beyond herself and her students, because of its pretensions to comprehensiveness. I say they are pretensions, because I always come back to the meager compensation of the evaluators. If I received 10 minutes of video and 30 pages of double-spaced text to grade, I would be happy to spend an hour or more on it for $200. For $75, I will unquestionably give it short shrift. I can't emphasize this enough: The TPA cannot be fair or even workable as it is currently structured, because there is not enough balance between the effort the candidate puts into the evaluation and the effort most evaluators will expend at their end.

I feel like a chimpanzee raging in its cage, though, because I know that this is the one thing that won't change about the TPA. It is this way and will remain so because it's a public/private/political partnership. Stanford, which developed the TPA, has the public interest in educational accountability at heart; the politicians who are adopting it want that credibility too, but Pearson wants the profit to be made from charging candidates $300 and paying evaluators less than a third of that. It's a mismatch made in hell.

Watch Me Teach

There is so much about this TPA process that is frustrating, and so little that is edifying. My mentor teacher filmed me teaching my three big lessons - the plans for which I submitted to Pearson weeks ago - this week. Yesterday, during my student teaching seminar at the university, I found out that I can actually change the lesson plans up to the point when I submit the TPA on November 6th. This means that I didn't have to drive myself crazy setting up the whole unit almost a month in advance.

The worst part about all of this up to now has been getting through the buildup to these three lessons on these three particular days, while I'm also trying to learn how to teach - getting to know the kids, figuring out the attendance and grading systems, creating the unit as a whole, etc. Now I find out that all of this was unnecessary. In all likelihood the better way to structure this (even if it wouldn't have been quite as honest) would have been to film lessons I thought were probably going to meet the criteria for getting a high score on the TPA, choose my two 5-minute clips, and then craft the lesson plans in retrospect and write the commentary.

The fact that the "right" way to do this was actually the way that interfered more with my learning to be a teacher - the sense of freedom I had as of Thursday, when the filming was over, is indescribable - points to a limitation in the design of the TPA. The fact that the only way to make it conform more to the real rhythms of teaching and learning to teach would be to fictionalize it, at least to a certain extent, point to a more serious flaw.

But what's interesting, now that I'm looking again at the rubric for choosing my two 5-minute clips out of 150 minutes of classroom video, is that the highest points go to teaching students strategies for comprehending a difficult text, not helping the students to comprehend or dig deeper into the text itself. I suppose this goes along with the New Testament dictum, "Teach a man to fish . . . "

Watching all the video, by the way, is excruciating. I look old and fat. I love getting lost in the moment when I'm in the classroom, focusing totally on the students and the content; and now I'm incredibly self-conscious about what I look like. Yet another unedifying aspect of this process.