Frustrated, Fed Up, and about ready to give up...

For the first time in 12 years I feel like I hate my job, and I feel like I am a complete failure as a teacher. I haven't felt this bad since my first year teaching. This is my 2nd year in 4th grade and I love the age group and I enjoy teaching them. I went through a period of time where I wondered if I made a mistake moving from Kindergarten to 4th grade and I had a profound "ah ha moment" that helped me put things into perspective. However,  it seems like every week I get the wind knocked out of my sails all over again. Every week we have Data Meetings, I feel like these should be called Stress Meetings because they do more to add to my stress level than they do to enlighten me about the data. We now have, at my school, a Data Room where everyone's data is posted for all to see. Now, I'm not sure the reason behind this, all I can think of is that maybe they think that if they post our data up there for the world to see it will make us better teachers because, let's face it, who wants to have the lowest percent of students on target for any skill. Well apparently that would be me. Week after week I bust my backside to get through to my students and week after week they continue to bomb the mini assessments being used to humiliate me in these weekly data meetings. I don't know what I am doing wrong! They seem to get it when we are working through it in small groups or whole group but then when they have to do it on their own they act like they have never seen the material before.

 I am just so frustrated because we have what are called FCIM lessons, that we have to do each day. They are a 15 - 20 minute math/reading concept lesson. Basically we focus on one math and one reading benchmark a week. Well that's what it looks like on paper, in reality we are focusing on one math and one reading benchmark for about 15 minutes a day 2 days a week. The schedule for these FCIM lessons looks like this; Monday we introduce the concept and do basically 1 or 2 modeled practice questions/problems, Tuesday we do 2 - 3 guided questions/problems, Wednesday we give a pre-assessment of the skill, Thursday we assess the skill, and then Friday we reteach. Oh and up until last week the order of the math lessons were based on our weakest strand (as a grade level) which were skills we had not yet taught them because they haven't come up in the math curriculum yet. So basically I am being judged on 30 minutes of instruction a week in reading and in math. I see that other teachers on my team are getting 70% - 90% of their students on target and I can not for the life of me figure out what I am doing wrong. When they are asked, in the data meeting, what they are doing to get their scores so high they say the same things that I am doing and I am just so frustrated. I don't know what else I can do. I have stopped teaching science and social studies and have integrated it into my reading block and I still don't have the time to go in depth in these lessons. I am so frustrated and so angry and so embarrassed by the scores that are posted for all to see that I just want to give up and do something else. I have thought and thought about switching to a non-testting grade level next year but that isn't going to do anything to get me through the rest of this year. I always say to myself "I don't care what their data shows because I know its not an accurate representation of my students or my teaching" but week after week it starts to wear on me and it makes me wonder what I am doing wrong. I don't know why I thought I could teach in the upper grades. My speciality has always been early childhood. I was an idiot to think that I could be successful in 4th grade. I need to figure out what I want to do. I just don't know, I have not been this miserable in a very long time. I even sent my resume to a principal opening a new school on the other side of town. Right now I live literally 5 minutes from my school but because I am so miserable this year I actually considered adding about an hour commute (one way) to my day. I don't know if that's the answer but I do know I can not do another year like this. I have to figure out what I'm going to do. I haven't felt this bad about my job in a very long time and it is not a good feeling. Right now I am just so miserable, I don't know what to do.