Bridging the Gap

Wow, so many of my closest friends and family have no idea what it is I have been up to for the last 6 months, why I moved to Arizona, or what it is I even do here. I'm going to attempt to update you without boring you to death....and if I can figure it out I might even include some pictures. The difficulty is that I now have to figure out where to begin...

So back in about February of 2007, I made a decision that I would not continue teaching after the school year ended. Part of me is very disappointed in myself simply because by making that decision I grouped myself into a statistical category that contains a majority. Though the statistics very depending on who is your source, the consensus seems to be that more than 50% of teachers quit within their first five years of teaching. I've always prided myself in not being grouped into a statistical majority; I even wrote an essay about what the statistics say I should be based off of my background/upbringing and who I really turned out to be. That essay won me a full-ride scholarship to the University of Texas at Austin. Now back to the story...

I decided to quit teaching because I felt like every moment I spent teaching, I was loosing the content knowledge that supposedly qualified me to be a teacher. I earned my B.S. in Mathematics in 3 years with a 3.9 GPA and Highest Honors from the largest university in the country. I could write you a formal proof on the infinitude of primes, encrypt a message for you using RSA and modular arithmetic, and was the only student in the entire class to receive an "A" in two of my upper-division pure math courses. Yet with every lesson I had to teach, a little less I could remember about the subject that I loved so much that I decided to teach it so that a small portion of the kids in our country would for once have a teacher that knew what they were teaching.

I absolutely hated the politics involved that I believe to be the cause of this phenomena. There was a common saying in Texas that their goal as educators was to "bridge the gap" between high and low achieving students. What this meant to the majority of policy makers in the districts was that all funds and focus had to be dedicated to the low end of the group, thus raising their scores and achievements. Now you can read all the research there is online about and look at their statistics, but look at who the source is. Most of the research out there is funded by Department of Education, of course they're going to make their policy sound good. Would you believe a study that said Big Mac's were good for your cholesterol if it was McDonalds' that was funding the study? So this is what they are doing: imagine a scale, one of the old fashioned ones like this:
Now imagine one side is the low achieving and the other is the high achieving; obviously the end holding the higher achieving students would be higher up. Ask yourself what happens when they "raise" the lower achieving students up. Do the higher achieving students stay where they are? No, in order for one side to go up, the other must come down. I know this isn't a perfect analogy, but it makes my point in what I saw first hand happening by "bridging the gap". They didn't really care what happened to their high achieving honors students so long as the low achieving students made progress. This usually resulted in the high achieving students becoming, well, not as high achieving as they were.




I taught a very small class of very high achieving students, they were 8th graders taking Geometry. Now for those of you long past the years of remembrance, you are considered "average" if you take Geometry in 10th grade. These kids were brilliant. I envied the mind that most of these children had. You would think that the school would continue to encourage minds like these to reach their full potential. Before I decided to stop teaching, there were discussions going on in the district as to what would happen to the next group of kids destined to be in this position in the following year. The group was smaller, 3 kids shy of being able to create a class for them. While it was trying to be worked out what to do for these kids, the option of distance learning in a zero hour class came up. Now despite what you might think about the typical "nerd", these kids were different. They were the scholarship bound future Rhodes scholar type. They were in band, cross country, basketball, football, dance, theater, you name it.

A zero hour class would effectively make them choose between their academics and these VERY important electives because they both occurred at the same time, and well, unless you're Hermione Granger you can't be in two places at once. One of the facilitator's for the district that was in charge of the math education for the entire district said to me when I brought this up, "Well, it's there fault for trying to be so advanced". It was about then that I decided if I really wanted to make a difference, I would have to be a politician and rid the country of it's long standing, unconstitutional, Department of Education. I later realized that I didn't need to become a politician, but I could support one that believed like me. Go Ron Paul!

So most of that turned out to be a rant about education, but I have so much to say. I will try to post a few times each week and slowly update everyone. Here's a picture of me and Tyson for those of you that haven't seen us in a while. I'll add more later.