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.