Frustrating
On Friday, I sat through a really interesting training for the Accelerated Reader and Accelerated Math programs, which my school apparently bought and wants to use as a supplement to Houghton-Mifflin and Everyday Math.
The AR and AM programs seem really interesting and really helpful - especially individualizing instruction for students who are behind or ahead, and filling in holes that Houghton-Mifflin and Everyday Math leave. The thing that frustrates me is that AR and AM both assume that the teacher using the program has a working, networked computer hooked up to a laser printer, and space to store files and the scantron scanner machine. In my classroom we have computers that can go online (a huge improvement from last year) but we do not have any extra space for anything (I don’t even have a desk or anything) and as for printers, if you can find me one in the school that is hooked to a computer, I’ll give you a cookie.
These half-assed kind of solutions are what makes me so angry at the school, the system, everything. Great curriculum! But we are so unprepared to actually implement it. So not only did we waste all our money on the curriculum that we will probably never use correctly, we also wasted an entire two days of training, and we will probably fluff around about the AR and AM curriculum and get like half of the supplies we need before actually moving forward teaching with what we do have.
Maybe it’s just because it’s Sunday night but I hate this kind of bullshit the system pulls on us. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it now: do it right, or don’t do it.
