In the end, the system was purely data hungry. Research had gone from being helpful, a tool…something to assist our teaching…to an entity to be worshipped. More details, more schedules, more numbers, more charts…it was a sacrificial system…a blood lust with minimal return.
‘Data better informs our teaching practices’. The ancient numbers hymn intoned with hypnotic strength; waiting for all those forced to listen to the siren song; drawing in the uninformed and the newcomers.
Everyone scrambled to print, share, produce, file. Then the lull…then the stream of requests flowed again, bursting out from the gullet of downtown…ravenous…’new and improved’…all agog with novelty…as if somehow we had never traversed this path before. Then silence.
After a time, after observing the continual data tsunami…we each grabbed a life raft and divided amongst ourselves. Those choosing to fight to change the system went one way.
Those choosing to work outside and around the edges of the system…under the radar, through the side door, hand held heavy on the delete button? Well, we scurried off in another direction.
Would those blasted test scores ever inch upward? Would the enraged data gods ever be satiated?
The hymn! The hymn! Clanging on dreamily wherever we were forced to listen…
690 Saint Paul 