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New teacher Naomi Rubinstein feels the stress and fatigue of her first
round of standardized testing
By Sarah Pekkanen
Naomi Rubinstein is tired. It’s a crisp fall weekend, blue-skied and sunny—perfect
for a long walk, for raking leaves or picking apples, for a last chance to
soak up the outdoors before the gray cold of winter sets in.
But Naomi is at home with a stack of papers in front of her and an anxious
feeling in her stomach. Yesterday her fourth-grade class at Potomac Elementary School took a standardized
math test, as did fourth-graders all across Montgomery County. It’s a way for the county to determine how well Naomi’s students
are learning their math lessons—and how well Naomi is teaching them.
It wasn’t a great day. Naomi, who admits she’s something of a perfectionist,
felt stressed and worried about her pupils’ performances, even though she’d
stayed after school on her own time the previous week to hold a math review.
Plus her students were acting up, talking and giggling when they were supposed
to be paying attention, which meant that Naomi spent a lot of time sitting
at her desk not saying a word, waiting for the children to notice, and correct
their behavior.
“It was a tough day,” acknowledges Naomi, who is beginning to realize, a
few months into her first year of teaching, that her fantasy of a harmonious
classroom filled with bright-eyed kids who come to school every day aching
to learn might have been a touch overly optimistic.
It’s not that her kids aren’t wonderful—Naomi was brought to tears a few
weeks ago when her children read their weekly encouraging words to each other
and one piped up with this message: “You’re the best teacher in the world!”
And it’s not that her students don’t try hard—usually. But sometimes Naomi
can’t help but feel frustrated when she has spent an entire weekend preparing
lesson plans and thinking of ways to maximize the very different learning
styles of her 25 students, and then a kid comes to school without having looked
at his or her homework.
“I wish I had a little more time to myself, and in a way I think it would
be better for the kids, too, if I had a break, but I’m OK,” says Naomi, whose
perfect grades in college and graduate school illustrate that she’s no stranger
to hard work.
Still, the grueling pace the county has set for its teachers, who are given
thick binders detailing the amount of learning that must be squeezed into
each day, is taking its toll. And Naomi’s husband doesn’t love the fact that
she spends every Saturday doing her grading and every Sunday planning her
lessons.
But 27-year-old Naomi has no regrets about giving up her job as a financial
analyst in New York and moving back to Maryland
to begin this second career, even if the demands of her new job, while less
glamorous, are no less exhausting. Take a simple small reading group. Naomi
sits at her usual place at a curved table, with her back to the wall, facing
the half-dozen students seated before her. Her other pupils are reading quietly
at their desks—for now.
“Today,” Naomi begins, “we’re going to focus on how readers use the strategy
of skimming and scanning.”
Then Naomi pauses. One of the boys at her table is clearly having a hard
time staying focused, so Naomi asks the kids to switch seats, putting the
boy next to her.
“Skimming,” Naomi continues, tapping her pencil on her paper to keep the
distracted boy’s attention, “is looking over the text quickly to get a feeling
for what it’s about.”
The school’s PA system crackles to life, warning that a black car in the
parking lot has its headlights on. Naomi continues with her lesson, but a
moment later, a student leaves for the bathroom, and the classroom door noisily
squeaks. Then a kid gets up to get a drink of water, and another one loudly
sneezes, and three children line up at Naomi’s “question chair,” hoping to
get her attention.
Before she knows it Naomi has gone over the time allotted for this lesson—and
she isn’t completely sure her students have grasped the concepts of skimming
and scanning.
When she used to envision her new career, Naomi pictured all her children
gathered on her classroom’s rug, raptly listening as she led discussions about
social justice. She was confident that by giving her students just a little
time and encouragement, the lessons she taught would click firmly into their
brains.
She’s slowly coming to the realization that no matter how hard a child tries,
and now matter how well he might be taught, there are times when he needs
extra time to understand the material. And other than her end-of-the-week
encouraging words moments, she hasn’t had as much time as she’d like for talks
about fairness and treating each other kindly.
“Next year,” she says, “I’ll have more time for it. Hopefully.”
Sarah Pekkanen lives in Chevy Chase.
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