100% F.F.R.

I don't know which my administration likes more acronyms or meetings.

When I left school Thursday afternoon I looked at the teacher notice board across for our mail boxes in the main office and thought, finally a morning off, I can get around to grading the ever growing stack of papers taking over my desk. I can't grade the papers during class time, although it is tempting to give my students busy work and dive into the forest springing up on my desk, but then I would be making more papers because I would have to grade the busy work. I am to old school, I don't want to give the students each others papers to grade, besides at an inner city school that is never really a good idea anyway. So Thursday night I left school and thought I'll get to school early Friday morning and grade until classes start.

Friday morning I arrived 30 minutes earlier than normal and I immediately noticed the new message posted on the dreaded teacher message board "Friday: Freshman Teachers meeting (All Staff Meeting)". I have to admit, I get a kick out of the assistant principal's use of misdirection. We are only going to address the freshman teachers, but everyone needs to attend anyway - we don't want those upperclassmen teachers having some extra time in the morning to do something silly like GRADE PAPERS!!!
These type of postings always confuse a very sweet, yet rather eccentric teacher in my department who only reads the first part of the post, and then spends the rest of the day close to tears and shaking because she thinks she will get written up, or fired. She doesn't have tenure. She may get fired. On the other hand, I have tenure and i go to the meeting so I have something to talk about for the rest of the day.

In this meeting all the teachers were handed a variety of lists, one with our names, next to our name was our freshman failure rate. Another longer (23 pages to be exact) document had the names of the freshman, what classes they were failing and the teachers name. Then there were action plans and what not we needed to fill out and turn in. All of this is so we can get our freshmen on track. Let me stat for the record, I agree with most of this. Targeting students so they don't fall through the cracks is a good thing.

What I don't agree with was the assistant principal pointing out people on the list with the highest failure rates so rest of the staff could make suggestions to failing teachers.

By the way since I have the highest F.F.R.(freshman failure rate) in the building 100%, I was first. I teach mostly upperclassmen, I have one class that has all four year groups mixed in, it is an elective. I have one freshman in that class. He is currently making a third attempt to become a sophomore. He sleeps in my class, at least he comes now - getting him to show up was a LOT of work.

So, Friday morning I had to sit through what felt like an intervention. Colleagues of mine were telling me things I could do to mentor and help my little freshmen get their grades up. i thought I had done a pretty bang up job it took 5 weeks to convince the kid to come to school every day. I figured it would take at least that long to get him to stay awake.

I have to admit I was crabby for the rest of the day. So as i walked around the room talking about my subject I made sure to kick/trip on the desk of my only freshman, apologizing to him every I woke him up. "Is your desk out further than everyone?", "maybe the leg is bent?", "I am sorry, I am all left feet today."