The business of assessing and evaluating students is Rob McEntarffer's day job these days.
But stepping back into the classroom this fall after a 16-year hiatus has allowed him to gather a few of his own observations lately.
High school students are as awesome as ever. The arc of a school year — as he calls it — provides a nice routine and rhythm to life. Missed assignments and student absences are a pain. But that moment when things click — nothing beats that.
Teaching is hard work, McEntarffer knows, and, things have changed (to put it lightly), but the frog, he says, is glad to have jumped back in the boiling water.
That was the conclusion McEntarffer expressed in which he described his experiences going back to school to teach a small advanced-placement research class at Lincoln North Star High School.
A recent Nebraska State Education Association survey of more than 3,000 teachers confirmed that, with more than 64% of respondents saying their stress is worse than last year amid a shortage of substitutes and a rise in behavioral and mental health issues among students.Â
While McEntarffer doesn't pretend to share in that experience as his colleagues — he teaches just one morning class of four students before heading back to the district office — he understands the realities they face.
"I think what we're finding is a lot of students are catching up to being used to being in school and dealing with a lot of stress in the classrooms," he said. "Getting students from a place where they're stressed ... that takes a lot of time and effort."
McEntarffer taught psychology and philosophy at Lincoln Southeast for 13 years before leaving to complete graduate work and take a position in LPS' assessment and evaluation office. On the side, he taught some graduate-level courses, but that just wasn't the same.
"I was craving to get back to a high school classroom," he said.
A chance to do that came this fall after North Star was looking for a teacher to lead a new class at the school — AP Research. The course is part of the new AP Capstone program offered at North Star and Southeast in which students take AP Seminar as juniors before embarking on dissertation-style projects in AP Research as seniors.
McEntarffer jumped at the opportunity.
"It’s a bit unprecedented for a district office administrator to 'go back' to the classroom," he wrote in the blog, "but my hidden agenda (which isn’t very hidden at all) is to try to convince other administrators to figure out how to teach a class."
LPS administrators with teaching certificates have done just that this year to help shoulder some of the class-cover load for teachers with substitutes in low supply. Teachers have had to drop crucial planning time to cover when a colleague is out because of the lack of subs.
"I think our school district would be stronger if we could figure out ways for more administrators to spend more time teaching," McEntarffer continued. "I think our communication would be better and we’d make better decisions if we were also teaching."
Much has changed since he left the classroom, of course. Gradebooks are online, students have Chromebooks and research papers are, well, paperless.
"At Southeast (teaching AP Psychology), students would print out a draft of their literature review, and I would mark those and they would have to file the marks and print it out again," McEntarffer said.Â
"I'm convinced they're working harder and working faster, so that's been a difference. Students are tackling bigger challenges," he said.
In his AP Research class, seniors undertake a yearlong research project examining topics of their choosing — from school dress codes and social media to incarceration and restorative justice.
Students start with an inquiry, look at initial scholarship, then develop a literature review and conduct their own research through surveys and studies before crafting a 4,000- to 5,000-word research paper and giving an oral presentation.
One student in Kelsey Sejkora's class at Southeast, which collaborates with McEntarffer's, is even exploring serial killers.
"It's really based on student passion and student interest," she said. "From the teacher side, it's really about guiding students. It's all student-directed, which is different from an English class, where you read a short story together and analyze it together and then write a paragraph or a paper."
North Star senior Zein Saleh is studying the impact of AP teachers of color on enrollment in differentiated classes. McEntarffer's work in the assessment office has been especially helpful for gathering data.
"I think considering his experience, he's been a really good fit at North Star," Saleh said.
And McEntarffer is glad to be there, too. Yes, teaching is hard work, but it's rewarding at the end of the day.
"I'm glad that I jumped back in the boiling water," he said. "I hope I get to keep teaching."Â
Rob McEntarffer, an assessment and evaluation specialist at Lincoln Public Schools, went back to the classroom this fall to teach an AP Research course at Lincoln North Star.