girlfiend

My job is incredibly frustrating. I teach the kids who are two years or more below grade level in reading. Because these kids struggle in reading, they struggle in most of their classes. Many of my students fail at least one class a marking period, if not more. Many of them fail my class because I won’t accept laziness. If a kid does his or her homework and pays attention in my class they won’t fail. I try my best to make my class easy enough that a kid has to try to fail.

Here’s the really frustrating part. My vice-principal deals primarily with fifth graders. Most of my fifth grade students are failing my class, social studies and science. Since reading is the most important of these subjects at this grade level, the vice-principal has decided that I have to test the kids and formulate intervention plans for them.

In the past few weeks, I’ve discovered that my students are not reading two years below grade level. In one on one situations, they’re quite capable of reading a passage and answering both explicit and implicit questions about what they’ve read. Students whose tests cause me to mutter, “dumb as a fucking rock” under my breath as I grade, have proven that they are not only instructional at a fifth grade level, they’re capable of understanding texts written at a sixth grade level. Yet, these scam artists are unable to pass a quiz when I’ve spoon fed them the answers two minutes earlier.

All but one of these kids has tested as reading at a higher level than my sixth grade students on two different reading tests. So why the hell are all of my sixth graders passing, while almost all of my fifth graders are failing? How the hell do I write up an intervention plan for kids in classes of 25 students who clearly need to be isolated in order to succeed?