Thoughts On Teaching » education-needs

No Way Out

Todd — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 04:47:10 +0000

As this school year year rolls on and you no longer have a bookroom clerk, librarian, subject area coordinator, testing coordinator, repro clerk, counselor, career center adviser, campus monitor, activities director, student services adviser, and any number of other positions that have been eliminated, you face a difficult choice. And no matter what you choose, you’re in trouble. We need to keep schools a safe and positive place for students while sending the message that we cannot do even more work with fewer resources.

The One Hand

You pick up the slack. You start to check books out to students yourself. You find library resources and pass them on to your students. You arrange for testing materials to be delivered and scan answer sheets. You take requests from friends, spending more time next to the copy machine than on your couch. You meet with students before and after school, at break, and at lunch to talk about their next steps and how to manage through the tough road they find themselves driving along. You counsel students through difficult guidelines for work permits. You do all the things that used to be done by others.

The Other

You teach. Nothing else. You take your primary job with the highest degree of seriousness and don’t venture into any other area.

It seems that no matter which path you choose, you’ve done some significant harm. You’ve perpetuated the myth that schools will be just fine no matter what we cut by covering all of those things that have vanished. Either that or you’ve pushed the pain of cuts onto the backs of students who now no longer have the support systems that make school a possible and exciting thing.

Take Away

If there are ballot measures that give your local school districts more money, consider all your options before voting. I’m not even saying to vote yes. All I’m asking is that you take a look at what schools are being asked to do and compare that to how much money they are given to do it. And line up a few different schools, both basic aid and revenue limit campuses. Do some work here and don’t let someone else tell you how to vote on this, be that person on a blog, a radio show, a magazine, a pulpit, or the phone.

I’ll get back to some classroom application ideas next. Some cool stuff with The Things They Carried and we’re wrapping up Animal Farm; I’d like to do post-op on both of those units.Similar Posts:

How’s It Going?

Todd — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 23:12:41 +0000

How have things started off for you? Are you doing things you always wanted to do? Did you revamp anything that you’re excited about? Are you anxious to share something you’ve put in place this year? Do you see this as a year where things are really going to be different? How have financial matters impacted the opening of this school year for you? What’s the beginning of the year been like so far? What’s one big change you’ve made that has made all the difference?

My answers: great, no, yes, YES!, probably, terribly, thrilling, themes. More detail to come. How about you? How’s it going?Similar Posts:

Your New Job

Todd — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:14:33 +0000

You are probably going to be asked to do a lot of things this year. Last year, those things would have been done by someone else. This year, you’ll be expected to do them. You’ll be asked to take more students in your classroom. You’ll be asked to volunteer at this event. You’ll be asked to watch the library one day a week. You’ll be asked to supervise a few more hours. You’ll be asked to enter in these numbers. You’ll be asked to attend these meetings. You’ll be asked to run these photocopies.

It’s your new job, added smack dab on top of your old one. What will you do when you’re asked to do work that was another person’s job last year?

Several tests exist in my district. Really, only two of them are of any importance. Those two tests are used when determining student placement from freshman to sophomore year. Those two tests give students a chance to show that they would do fine in the next level of English, that they should be moved on even if other marks don’t show it. So the DRP and benchmark are important to give to our freshmen because it allows them another chance.

Trouble is, we don’t have a testing coordinator. Now, that’s trouble on many different levels because she rocked and will be sorely missed. But from this vantage, she was the one who printed out answer sheets, gathered test booklets, counted out booklets and answer sheets, distributed said booklets and sheets, collected them all, and stored them. Whose job does that now become?

Who should take over these things when there’s no one around to do them and it doesn’t fit into anyone’s job description? These things need to be done, but there is no one around to do them. Now what?

What’s your union’s stance on this issue? Does that match your personal philosophy?Similar Posts:

What’s New?

Todd — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 23:14:47 +0000

Stopping by summer school a few times has lead me to the irrefutable conclusion that a resource teacher for summer school English 1 was a colossal waste of district money (roughly three-thousand dollars of a waste). I have yet to contact other resource teachers (a huge failing on my part), but I would imagine their experience to be similar to mine: no one wants the help. I’m basically just going from room to room in order to hear, “Yup, everything’s fine!”

I’m generally a friendly guy and I’m putting on even more of a helpful face for this position. I’ve been a teacher for a several years, department co-chair for a few, and campus technology coordinator for many. I’ve got nothing to do except help you create even better materials for your students. Please, let me know what I can do for you. Anything you need? Can I help you with anything? Can I observe your class for just ten minutes and then give you a write up? Why not have me in when you’re doing something new and you’d like a second set of eyes to check it out? Can I offer you any other materials than you are using? What types of things do you wish you had access to?

Every time I swing by classes, things are going well, no trouble, keeping up with pacing guide just fine, plenty of access to stories in the textbook, it’s all good. Let me be clear: this may indeed be the case. Worse yet, I may simply not be the guy for this task and teachers aren’t willing to ask me for the help they need and/or they don’t think I’d be able to provide it even if they did ask.

But if teachers don’t take each other up on offers for help, how can we get better? What are you doing to make next year an improvement over last year? Are you putting things into place to make next year simply the same as last year? If it’s not a resource teacher and it’s not professional development and it’s not Saturday classes, then what it is that will make us better? I ask this not because I think such things are not in existence, but because I don’t know what they are and I should. What should I tell my district to spend this money on next summer in order to ensure a standard level of teaching quality over the summer? Then how can we put that into play during the regular school year?Similar Posts:

An Unsolved Problem

Todd — Mon, 25 May 2009 01:19:11 +0000

Out for a run yesterday, I listened to Act One of a deeply disturbing episode of This American Life. In New York, there’s apparently a place called the Rubber Room. Essentially, teachers report there when the board decides that they shouldn’t be in the classroom. Instead of firing teachers or even accusing them of anything, they are removed from the classroom and told to show up for their regular work hours to sit in a room. This happens to hundreds of teachers. The room is very loud. They are paid for their time. They wait for nothing.

Some teachers are there for months, others for years.

Of the teachers covered in the piece on This American Life, two stay in my mind. One threw a chair across the room and it accidentally hit a kid (listen at 12:19). That teacher should be let go. Another’s principal leveled an abuse charge because he let a swear word fly in a conversation with another teacher as he walked past an open eighth-grade classroom (listen at 14:30). That teacher should be brought back.

If the teacher really did abuse a kid, they wait. If the teacher didn’t do anything wrong, they wait. In either case, the actual issues that brought the teacher to the Rubber Room are not dealt with. So even though there is clearly a problem, it’s ignored.

Rubber Rooms are simply a way to avoid the difficulty of saying, “You should no longer be a teacher. Good-bye.” There’s an admission of a problem by the creation of Rubber Rooms, but there’s no solution provided by putting these people into a system that is basically a prison. I’m horrified at what Rubber Rooms suggest about the way my profession works.Similar Posts: