A Short, Humorous Look At Rigor In The Classroom
Are your students struggling?
Are test scores in the dumps? Do you spend all of your time researching, planning, teaching, and refining, to continued mediocre returns on state and district tests? And most importantly, do you have an instructional coach, admin, department leader, or mentor offering vague, over-simplified and non-specific advice on how to make it all better? Never mind them.
Administrator: Your test scores seem to indicate that your classwork isn’t rigorous enough. Do you include rigor in your class assignments?
Teacher: …yes, I include rigor in my class assignments.
Administrator: We need rigor in all class assignments.
Administrator: “Your students wouldn’t fail if they cared about your lessons. Do they care about your lessons?’
Teacher: They don’t seem to.
Administrator: How do you know?
Teacher: They say, “We don’t care…”
Sometimes, you have to laugh so you don’t cry.
