Tiny Bubbles

Nostalgia is a powerful and often faulty lens. It can distort and makes the view seem at times softer and at times harsher than, in fact, it ever was.

I’ve been indulging myself in nostalgia these days as it occurs to me that my first 4th graders turn forty this year. Coincidentally, I turn thirty-nine. Go figure.

I have all their pictures hanging on the wall. They are gorgeous ten-year olds and it is quite impossible that they have pot bellies and graying temples and children in college. They will always be ten.

Likewise, my experiences teaching in the suburbs of Salt Lake City are frozen. Like the blood drive my 6th graders organized complete with our press releases written in curly cursive with every word spelled correctly.

The Mountain Man Rendezvous with tall tales of buffalo hunts and music on animal skin and wood and bone. The medieval fair with fair maidens in cone hats and tattered humble peasants who had to wait on swaggering obnoxious knights and the discussions of how our republic, based on equal rights, differed from a feudal system based on inherited family privilege.

Paul and Mark Richards are brothers who work for Congress. Paul was one of my students at Orchard Elementary in 1982 when he was in 4th grade.

The Shakespeare plays my friend, Sue, produced with kids who never before had turned in a written assignment on time, but who turned in perfectly delivered lines of Hamlet on opening night, covered in inner torment, (her inner torment at rehearsals, covered in Tums).

I know it wasn’t all quaint Norman Rockwell calendar pages. But it was good stuff. We did some really very good stuff to make our lessons come to life for our babies. We taught. The parents thanked us. The principal supported us.

I didn’t know that would all come to an end in so many ways.

My friend with the Shakespeare plays told me a few months ago she didn’t want to be a teacher anymore. She said she had just left a faculty meeting where the principal had informed them that this year would focus only on The Bubble Kids.

I had to ask her, “What’s a Bubble Kid?”

They’re the kids who didn’t quite hit the cut score on the No Child Left tests the previous year. Or those that just barely hit it. The goal was to get off the Adequate Yearly Progress Shame List where her school had been placed because not enough of their students had hit the cut score.

The school has a high transient population of low-income immigrant families. I’ve been there. They are beautiful children. Many resettled from Southeast Asia where they were never permitted to attend school before. They want to learn.

But learning now is limited to hitting a cut score on a standardized test. There are no more Shakespeare plays. No blood drives. No pen pals. No school chorus. No art fair. No recess.

NEA Photo/Norman Lono

They eliminated anything that wasn’t on the test. Of course, that meant eliminating opportunities to learn teamwork on science fair projects and have open discussions where they could debate different points of view. Creative answers are punished on standardized tests. Wouldn’t want to handicap them with higher level thinking skills.

No. Time to take it to another level. Teachers and aides would be given special instruction in how to drill for the tests, special practice tests, scripted lessons that were purchased at great expense and specifically aligned to the test. And now a Bubble Kid strategy.

They were told not to “worry” about the high-scoring students. (They were bound to pass the tests.) Not to “worry” about the low-scoring students. (They might be able to make some progress toward the cut score, but hitting it would be a long shot, so it wouldn’t count.)

Studies on testing strategies showed it was most fruitful to concentrate all efforts on the precious little Bubble Kids. The low-hanging fruit.

I told her story to another friend who said, “We’re all being given the same lecture. My principal said the same thing to us.” He smiled at me and said, “But my principal added a little something.”

He told me that his principal had read the memo from the district office on Bubble Kids to the faculty. Then he put the paper down and said, “Ok, then. We’ll be giving the tests. We’ll do the best we can.”

“But I’ll be damned if we’ll let some test get in the way of us giving all our kids a good education.”

And so we will. We will all be damned if we – teachers, support staff, principals, superintendents, school boards, governors or presidents – let anything get in the way of giving every blessed child what he or she needs to be prepared to live the lives they deserve to live after they leave our schools.

I’ll be damned if I stop teaching.

BAVUQMKJVH8T