For many educators, Fall Break is the best break because it marks the end of the hectic march connecting school years. Since Spring Break, we have ended one year (with the endless reports) and started another. Then in August, school starts again, and a new generation of reports begins. Virtually everything converges in the days before Fall Break, from grades to budgeting, so for your local educators, it really can be the Fall Breaking Point. Thankfully, hunting season is here!  

We lowly educators are not alone this year, however. Many parents and students have also developed a twitch, or worse, a blank stare. I also see it across the service industries:  restaurants and retail workers and customer service people are at the Fall Breaking Point. Whether they work at a drive-thru or the counter at City Hall, ask them, and I bet they have been cussed lately. People are downright mean. Surly. Abusive. Beavis and Buttheads. No wonder people are quitting in droves. Economics are surely a factor, but I bet they are also tired of getting attacked over the most trivial of matters. 

My job connects me to people from all walks of life, so I can assure you that it’s not just limited to frontline workers. If you are nearing the breaking point, just consider those in law enforcement. In addition to endless attacks on their credibility in recent years, they face Beavis and Buttheads who are also potentially armed. Furthermore, substance abuse is the other pandemic in this pandemic, exacerbating domestic abuse, child abuse, and other horrendous crimes. When I knock on a door during the school day, I am greeted by happy children, but when they knock on a door, they brace for violence instead of smiles. 

It gets worse, however, for those who have traditionally maintained our safety nets are nearing the Fall Breaking Point, too. Pastors and counselors are dragging after this two-year slog through COVID and all the baggage it has produced.  Our medical professionals, however, may have suffered most after living in bizarro universe for the past two years. When our mental and physical health providers are barely holding on, what will the rest of us do?

Regardless of your profession or position, however, the COVID age has depleted you. If you are human, something about this is getting to you: politics, economics, supply-chain issues. Did you realize there was a Funyuns shortage recently. Come on, man!  Funyuns, for God’s sake!  

Fortunately, I read in a good book once that none of us is facing anything alone. If we are stressed, we can be reassured that our fellow brothers and sisters are stressed, too. Sometimes, just knowing that we are not suffering alone is the blessing. When you’re ready to tear into that clerk because you cannot get your favorite snack, consider how many cussings they have endured lately. Don’t be the one who breaks them this fall.  

We have heard that misery loves company, but that only applies if that company somehow makes things better. More accurately, it should be misery loves kind company, for we can only reduce others’ stress if we offer love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control as alternatives. Against such things, Beavis and Buttheads don’t stand a chance. Otherwise, we just make each other more miserable. So if you are near the Fall Breaking Point, just remember that literally everyone you know is also angry about something. Instead of pushing them over the edge, however, reassure them that we will somehow get through this. And if that doesn’t work, get a hunting license. Even if you don’t kill anything, sitting out in the cold for a few hours would likely do us all some good. Wear lots of orange, however, because the other hunters are mad about Funyuns, too, and they are definitely armed. 

Tom Deighan is currently the superintendent of Duncan Public Schools. Email him at deighantom@gmail.com  Read past articles at www.mostlyeducational.com

Generations have been taught that the spike-tailed Stegosaurs had a brain the size of a walnut, but I recently discovered that its brain was closer to the size of a tennis ball.  I also learned on the interweb that those iconic battle scenes between Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus from Land of the Lost never happened because they reportedly lived millions of years apart.  This fake news makes me question everything I learned from Saturday morning television.  Were the Sleestak lizard people really evil, or were they simply misunderstood by the unenlightened Pakuni?  Most importantly, does the fossil-record tell us if these ancient peoples went extinct because the maskless Marshall family infected them with the COVID?  Where are the fact-checkers when we need them! 

Nevertheless, Tyrannosaurus Rex was the Cretaceous classmate of a 15,000 pound sauropod with a brain the size of two walnuts. The 50-foot long Ampelosaurus lived about the same time as T-Rex, which we compared last week to the impractical federal testing system with high-stakes teeth that relies on the itty bitty arms of keyboarding 8-year-olds for survival. If T-Rex is “The Testing Dinosaur with Little Arms” (last week’s article), then the Ampelosaurus is the TLE Dinosaur with the Little Brain.

TLE is the Teacher-Leader Effectiveness model adopted by Oklahoma eons ago in 2010 as part of Oklahoma’s failed bid to receive Race to the Top funds that inadvertently hatched two voracious monsters: Common Core State Standards and Oklahoma’s TLE.  TLE was part of an ambitious federal plan to tie teacher performance to test scores and usher in a golden age of incentive pay, but just as the testing dinosaur struggles with little arms, the TLE Dinosaur wrestles with a brain too small.  Consequently, for over a decade, teachers and principals have wasted precious instructional time corralling the Ampelosaurus while simultaneously chasing pterodactyls away from children on the playground. (Disclaimer: state-mandated drills have virtually eliminated staff and student carry-offs by Pterosaurs.)    

While TLE may have begun with great intentions, it is now an outdated model tied to the federal testing dinosaur that compares groups of children to other groups of children. Although politically useful, this testing system is educationally worthless as a real-time guide for instruction.  In 2021, teachers now rely on short, age-appropriate diagnostic tools to monitor individual students’ growth during the school year. Unlike federally mandated tests, these tools impact a child’s day-to-day education.

Unfortunately, in over a decade we have not implemented the quantitative (measurable) portion of TLE with any fidelity.  To-date, we only use the qualitative (subjective) portion.  Since the TLE dinosaur has never tied the federal tests to teacher performance, we now have a giant, time-wasting, paperwork dinosaur that exhausts teachers and principals as it gobbles up learning time from students.  Like the Sleestak and Pakuni from Land of the Lost, however, educators have learned to survive these dinosaurs by employing technology and better practices from this century.  Unfortunately, this creates two testing systems in school – one that is helpful and one that is mandated.  

If we really want to tie teacher performance to tests, we should tie them to the classroom diagnostic tools that impact instruction, and these tests should be aligned to college-and-career readiness standards.  Restoring local and state control of teacher evaluations based on meaningful data would reduce time-wasting, create more robust evaluations, and make it possible to implement incentive pay based on measurable outcomes.  TLE needs to follow the federal testing dinosaur with little arms into extinction. If not extinction, we should send them to an island off Costa Rica where they can frolic with other dinosaurs like Stegosaurs, Common Core, PASS, and NCLB.  

If Land of the Lost perpetuated such fake news, then I am no longer convinced that the Pakuni or Sleestak lizard people are extinct, either.  Maybe Ancient Aliens is on to something, but that is a subject for a different time.  Meanwhile, please do not forget to pray for the safety of our schools this Second Sunday of the month.  Trust me, it works.  Not a pterodactyl in sight. 

Tom Deighan is currently the superintendent of Duncan Public Schools. Email him at deighantom@gmail.com  Read past articles at www.mostlyeducational.com