Taking The "School" Out Of Summer School

I am “teaching” summer school this summer. I was drawn in by promises of money fame and power, uh, ok just by the chance for some extra cash to help the home purchasing along. I was also told that there would be a set curriculum so there would not be too much work involved even if I had to teach classes I had never taught before. Turns out the “set curriculum” is an online program piped in from Arizona. All students have to do is read a little, take a “submission” for each bit of reading and we grade sparse written portions after they are through. The reading is very specific and the written work is more regurgitation than thinking. We do so little work and get paid so well that I almost feel like a superintendent.

Naturally this makes me uncomfortable and squirmy.

Students are finishing classes at lightning speed. Many of them failed two or three classes for the entire year and are making up every, single, class in three or four days. We started with enough students to warrant several teachers with classes of 25 each, we are down to 12. Something tells me that these students who received failing grades (a few from my classes were in the single digits in May) are not suddenly becoming geniuses.

Students love it. They are completely unaccountable for their lack of action through the entire year, have a near full summer and move up a level when they come back in the fall. Guess what they are going to do next year. Guess how they will do on the state tests. Guess what they have learned about the roll of the system in bailing them out when they shirk responsibility…

Making it harder to swallow is that the district is going to sing the praises of this program because they will not have to support it financially through the entire summer term saving them some serious cash.

I am getting paid and at the rate the students are finishing It'll all be over in a few days and I can try to forget it all happened. At least until I am passing out the Fs to these same students again next year.