According to Our Estimates, You're Screwed

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At one time I thought about having a third child, but had to drop the idea when my husband said we'd have to name it "OMG, Now I Have to Work Until I'm Dead."  He had a point, especially since we both started on our careers a bit late.  (Well, it's stretching things a bit to call my meandering path through the field of education a "career."  It's more like a cautionary tale.)

Anyway, I see all these articles about inequality and the anxiety of the middle class.  Now, too, all the presidential candidates are mouthing concern about us, this vanishing breed with the audacity to want an annual family vacation and a retirement account. 

The vacation and the savings piece are linked by more than just money.  They tie into another trend, which is our growing awareness that Americans spend considerably more time at work than Europeans, while still falling further behind economically.  So time really is money, except only in the sense of taking time off.  You'll pay for that.  However, the 20-30 hours per week of overtime that you routinely give your corporate employer?  There's no bonus for that, it's just running to stand still.

Don't even get me started about the time demands of teaching. I'm not talking about interaction with students, which I loved, and which is why I still volunteer at the school where I taught.  I'm talking about the endless, often circular administrative tasks put on teachers.  One small case in point:  North Carolina, like many states, bought into Pearson PLC hook, line and sinker.  Pearson provides the software to track student information, which in this age of 'data driven' education is supposed to link seamlessly with the testing software they also produce. The testing data, in turn, is supposed to interface with the teacher evaluation program with which one also develops multifaceted professional development plans (PDPs).  Sounds good, doesn't it?  

During the two years I used it the Pearson software it randomly deleted my PDP several times. And my students' test results?  Well, as a special education teacher I had some students who took a modified end of grade (EOG) test.  Many of them made significant progress, but their improvement was nowhere to be found, because the other software the state purchased to track and predict EOG scores didn't report on the modified test.  It was as if my students' progress didn't exist.  

After sitting through dozens of workshops and meetings in which the teachers were exhorted to use the Pearson software to "create 21st century learners," my colleagues and I set out.  Let's just say, the implementation was not smooth. I saw seasoned data managers brought to tears as hours of work inputting schedules and student data mysteriously vanished, not just once, but time after time.  We resorted to paper scheduling for the first several weeks of school.  

Once the system was running, teachers began administering the "short cycle" and "benchmark" assessments that the district requires. These tests are supposed to track readiness for the EOG exams.  Anyway, teachers quickly learned to make paper copies of the tests as back-ups, because the system would routinely freeze, lose student answers, or crash.  Then, once the students had written their answers on the paper tests, the teachers would have to hand enter each student's answers whenever the system came back up. (Now that is ten hours of your life you'll never get back.)

In a just world, every teacher and school staff member who had to work through these fiascoes would be awarded some stock in Pearson as compensation for the company's growing pains. However, that is not how things go.  How things go is that the plunder class complains about the under class, while seeming to make nice-nice to the middle class... but only around election time.  

Modern "homesteading" starts to look more and more attractive.  I've been thinking that I'd better learn to make my own soap.  Before the goat chewed the mail I thought I saw stamped at the bottom of my last pension estimate (the pension plan that took a mandatory 6% of my extravagant teacher salary) this statement "According to our estimates, you're screwed."