Rambling and piggybacking on others

Somehow, I was wiped out after a mere two days of contemplating materials submitted by teachers for evaluation of their readiness for a credential. California has recently mandated that every new teacher in the state must (wait for it)–pass a test. Or I should say, pass another test. The good news is, it’s not a standardized multiple-choice paper-and-pencil test, but what’s known in the ed biz as a performance assessment. This means it’s actually directly related to what teachers do, and attempts to evaluate how well they do it, and not just how well they can regurgitate low-level knowledge about facts and theories. It also means that going through the process can have beneficial effects both on individual teachers’ learning and on the program (can have–depends on how well we all implement it.) The bad news is–someone has to score the things, and they take a long time to score (estimates are running 3-5 hours per individual assessed). California credentials tens of thousands of teachers every year, which means we’re talking about fives of thousands of person-days of work. One of the outstanding issues (in at least two senses of the word) is how the scoring is going to be paid for, and who’s going to pay. Since California’s state government is famous for its unfunded mandates, I anticipate interesting times ahead.

So anyway I, along with colleagues from across the state, was getting trained in how to score the assessment system our department has chosen to use. Two days of looking at materials and discussing why they had been rated as they were, to acquaint us with the rubrics used and to calibrate our judgement so that the system overall achieves inter-rater reliability. I’m not so sure my judgement is sufficiently calibrated or ever will be–I tend to think differently from other people–but we’ll see.

Yesterday I was wiped out, did as nearly nothing as one can do and stay alive. Well, I kept the dogs alive too, but that was about it.

All that wasn’t what I started out to write about. I wanted to write something about the Virginia Tech killings and the subsequent events–I’ve thought about it a lot–but find myself not up to the task. Instead I’ll refer you here, to a blog called Phronesisaical. He expresses many of my own thoughts and feelings on the matter more clearly than I could.

While I’m at it, let me refer you also to Hoarded Ordinaries. Her latest two posts almost make me nostalgic for winter, which is apparently finally beginning to loosen its grip on the northeast. She has some beautiful pictures accompanied by some beautiful writing which give welcome relief from the guck and politics of testing and the horrors of murder.

And finally I’ll leave you with this. Keep firmly fixed in your mind that I’m totally agnostic about the existence of God, and totally disbelieving about the God of traditional Christian theology. . .

In every situation God is somewhere–

God is in the comfort, God is in the healing, God is in the strength that gets you through, God is in the understanding, God is in the unexpected joy and pleasure that comes sometimes in the midst of daily busyness, and God is in the rest and relief when you don’t make it through and s/he catches you on the other side.