Future teachers – failures before we even start
Are new teachers undermined before they even step into the classroom? (AP Images)
Anabel Fender is a graduate student in education at the University of Georgia. This is her first essay on the Get Schooled blog.
I think it is terrific and an ideal follow-up to the survey results I posted earlier today. Read them both and you will get a sense of what teachers are experiencing right now.
By Anabel Fender
I am an idealist. A dreamer.
An…Oh-My-Goodness-Scared-To-Death-Future Teacher.
And I am made out to be a failure before I even start.
I am battered and bruised from the war against teachers and I haven’t even started teaching yet.
Scripted curricula tell me that the “higher ups” have no faith in my words. My Words! An integral part of what makes me a teacher is not trusted, so I will be given a script telling me exactly what to say, when to say it, and how to say it. In what other profession do we not trust the words of the professional? Before I start, they make me question my words.
Merit pay initiatives imply that the teachers of America are not working as hard as they can already. In theory this initiative reflects the business world, but in the business world workers design their own goods and services. Teachers no longer have the freedom to design their goods and services – those are ready-made and required from above. It makes more sense to hold those creating the standards, curriculum guides, and scripted curriculum accountable for test scores – they are the ones making the “goods” and “services.” Before I start, they make me question my power.
In an effort to “improve” the teacher with scripted curriculum and merit pay, governors, federal government, and educational “reformers” favor alternative routes to certify teachers. Colleges of education are accused of using students as cash cows for funding research. Flyers for Teach for America hang on bulletin boards in the same universities. I am completely invested and have worked hard for my undergraduate and graduate degrees in education. I have made personal and financial sacrifices for a profession that will not give me great returns monetarily.
And policy makers have the audacity to think that a 22-year old business major spending six weeks of summer training to be a teacher is better equipped for teaching than I am. They help pay her loans, find a job, and offer funding for further education. But me? I graduate with education degrees when no one is hiring, teachers have no job security, and my student loans equal a teacher’s annual salary. Before I start, everyone is questioning my capabilities.
Teachers want what is best for students, but the current war against teachers is enough to wear anyone down. Teachers are constantly being told they are not good enough and then considered a threat when they speak out against injustices in schools.
Teachers’ tenure has been all but eliminated, furlough days are required, salaries are stagnant, and policies are written to fire teachers for being tardy but not to compensate them for their long evening and weekend hours. And since Georgia is a right-to-work state with no union to protect its teachers, teachers do what they must to keep their jobs. Teachers are afraid to speak out as intellectuals. Before I start I am questioning whether I am “allowed” to be an intellectual as a teacher.
I am battered and bruised but I am not going to question my words, my power, and my ability to be an intellectual. I will not let others define me, but I need teacher allies – former, current, and future teachers who will stand up with me and for me against this war on teachers. This is not about competition or jobs or our future. This is about improving our quality of life in schools so we can make schools powerful places for idealists to make their dreams a reality.
–from Maureen Downey, for the AJC Get Schooled blog
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126 comments Add your comment
Ron F.
March 7th, 2012
10:53 am
“The rest of us, 99.9999%, are following the company line on who/what/when/where to sell and support.”
Yes, but your company, in the interest of its bottom line, will make sure that raw materials/products are of sufficient quality that profit can be made without excess waste or damage to the company’s ability to continue its products/services. Businesses make sure what comes in has the quality level needed so that what goes out reaches standards.
In education, we have absolutely no control over the variety, grade, or workability of the raw material we get. We have to educate every kid, every day, regardless of any mitigating factor. There’s no quality control over what comes in and a myriad of standards we have to get that raw material to pass before we can be successful. The fact that we typically get better than half of kids passing many tests says a lot about our ability to work with anything you give us. How many businesses would be willing to take that risk? They’d be fools to try.
irisheyes
March 7th, 2012
10:55 am
I keep hearing how teachers should be experts in their content areas and not education majors. It sounds great for middle and high school, but what about us elementary teachers? What would our majors be in? I teach reading, writing, math, science, social studies, and health (not to mention 10 ESOL students and 2 special ed students).
MiltonMan
March 7th, 2012
10:55 am
She complains about the profession but still decides “too rough it out”??? Let me guess. She does it for the “love of children”.
Back in the day an education degree was one of the easiest degrees to obtain. I bet that has changed very little. Sacrifices??? Try going to school to be an engineer & then having your job “outsourced” because “better/cheaper” engineers can be found overseas. Then having clueless elected officials state that this country does not produce enough engineers, scientists, etc.
Ron F.
March 7th, 2012
10:56 am
“A little outside perspective would be very useful for school systems. A lot of the parents have no jobs or have had salary freezes or cuts or furlough days as well. Its not just teachers having a hard time right now.”
And they are allowed to discuss it just the same as we are. We’re all allowed to complain a little if we feel the need. I don’t anyone posting here thinks the rest of the world has it any better.
Ron F.
March 7th, 2012
10:58 am
MiltonMan: go get an education degeree and you’ll find it isn’t as easy as you think. Maybe it was until about 1985, but let me assure you it got much, much tougher after that. I’ve been teaching over 20 years and I doubt I would want to try for a degree in elementary ed.
MiltonMan
March 7th, 2012
10:59 am
irish, my junior high Algebra teacher was the PE teacher who did not understand the quadratic equation enough to explain. When we complained we were told “tough” and to quit being “disrepectful”. We ending up teaching ourselves the material.
MiltonMan
March 7th, 2012
11:01 am
Ron I will make a deal with you buddy. Go obtain an engineering degree & I will do the same for an education degree. Then post-completion we will compare notes. BTW: Given that most engineering degrees are 5 years, you will need an extra year.
irisheyes
March 7th, 2012
11:18 am
@Milton, you didn’t answer my question. I asked about elementary teachers. I said I understood the idea of requiring middle and high school teachers to have a degree in their content area, but I teach lower elementary. Which one of the six content areas that I teach should I have a degree in? Or, should I have one in teaching ESOL or special ed?
Future teachers – failures before we even start « GAERA
March 7th, 2012
11:55 am
[...] http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2012/03/07/future-teachers-%e2%80%93-failures-before-we-even-... [...]
Mary Elizabeth
March 7th, 2012
11:56 am
@carlosgvv, 10:39 am
===============================================
“Mary Elizabeth – 9:08
My “pessimistic” observations are known as reality. Your rosy recollections of your teaching career seem to indicate an exageration (sic) of the good and a total ignoring of the bad.
===============================================
Carlos, my “reality” has simply not been your “reality,” and I do not believe that you have spent 35 years in teaching our young, or in educational leadership. As to my “rosy recollections of (my) teaching career,” I seem to recall the day that one of my students had brought a loaded gun into my classroom, which I promptly reported. I seem to recall the day that I broke up a fight between two huge guys who were exiting my classroom, when I was a young teacher. Moreover, if you have read any of my instructional posts, you would have noticed that I have shared, on this blog, that 1/2 of all 9th grade students, who had entered my high school, were reading on 6th grade level and below, yearly, for over a decade. Those examples are not such “rosy” recollections.
However, the good news is that I have, also, shared ways that I have found to improve those situations. It is easy to make sweeping generalities either about me, personally, or about the state of education, in general. I have been where the “rubber hits the road” in public education, and I know, firsthand, how to improve it because I did improve it, both with students’ academics and with their behavior. I believe that it is more productive to work to improve the problems within education and within society than to assert that the problems are unsolvable. I know otherwise.
Prof
March 7th, 2012
11:58 am
@ Tad Jackson, 8:44 am. You certainly relate your amusing tale of driving off your substitute teacher with relish. But I’d like more details.
When you note: “We delivered for the next two and a half hours a highly coordinated psychological attack on Miss Anderson” that caused her to “have a nervous breakdown,” what did she do to deserve this retaliation? What exactly was the two and a half hour psychological attack? And why are you so proud of this now as an adult?
Beverly Fraud
March 7th, 2012
12:01 pm
In the LONG RUN, you can make a case that teachers like Fled FLEEING are doing the best possible thing for Georgia students. I say that because it may just take Georgia losing ALL of its quality teachers for the legislature to get a clue.
Already whining
March 7th, 2012
12:14 pm
This new teacher will fit right in on these blogs. She’s not even in the classroom yet and she is already whining.
Good grief. If whining is her idea of “idealist” then she can keep her degree and go back to school to do something else.
We need adults in the classroom, not more whiners to babysit.
GM
GM
Ron F.
March 7th, 2012
12:26 pm
MiltonMan: I’m no math whiz, but I guarantee I could tough it out if you could. If you’re still teaching after the first year, I’d owe you.
I don’t judge engineers because I’m not one and don’t know your job well enough. How about you do the same buddy…
As I’ve said many times- if you think it’s sooooo easy to be a teacher, come do it and get back to me after the first year.
Tom B.
March 7th, 2012
12:31 pm
Elizabeth
March 7th, 2012
7:18 am
“Now I am waiting fora ll the dissenters to start their “whiner” comments again.”
Starting with the whiner who wrote this drivel? Does she really think this problem started while she was getting her degree? I take it she is not a History Major.
Proud Teacher
March 7th, 2012
12:34 pm
As a veteran teacher, I am weary of being ridiculed and chastised for everything that is wrong with public school education. I still love to be in the classroom, but I’m not sure that I could recommend teaching as a career anymore. Being a “whipping boy” for things that are not in my control and not being allowed to teach to the students in front of me rather than teaching canned lessons are good career qualities. I no longer can teach the volume of material that I used to teach because of the testing and administration demands for more paper work that have nothing to do with my students.
Tad Jackson
March 7th, 2012
12:43 pm
Prof … relax, bud. Have a little fun.
Dr. John Trotter
March 7th, 2012
12:52 pm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/creative–motivating-and-fired/2012/02/04/gIQAwzZpvR_story.html
Stuff like this happens to good teachers all the time. At MACE, it is our goal to protect good teachers against bad administrators. Bad administrators are usually extremely insecure, small-minded, petty, vindictive, and abusive. They are, more times than not, threatened by good teachers. Hence, they go after good teachers because they feel more comfortable when good teachers are not around.
http://www.theteachersadvocate.com
Beverly Fraud
March 7th, 2012
1:00 pm
SB 469 sounds like more intimidation pure and simple. But GAE sounds like it’s worried it won’t get PAID. Maybe if GAE had a TENTH of the passion about issues like DISCIPLINE and administrative RETALIATION, they’d sound a little more credible about SB 469.
Let’s make no mistake however; if those who put forth SB 469 ALSO had a tenth of the passion about discipline and administrative retaliation, we might actually have some LEGITIMATE gains in education in this state.
Beverly Fraud
March 7th, 2012
1:02 pm
Of course perhaps it’s hard to have passion about administrative retaliation if you REPRESENT those who retaliate and the SYSTEM that allows it.
Dr. John Trotter
March 7th, 2012
1:08 pm
Well said, Bev. I forgot to mention that MACE does NOT represent administrators nor supervisors. This is a classic conflict-of-interest. You know that I always appreciate your emphasis on discipline and administative retaliation.
Beverly Fraud
March 7th, 2012
1:09 pm
Maybe if the Georgia General Assembly were more concerned about providing “egress” to SEVERELY and CHRONICALLY disruptive students OUT of the learning environment, instead of trying to curtail FIRST AMENDMENT rights to peaceful assembly with the twin red herrings of “entrance and egress” Georgia wouldn’t be a NATIONAL embarrassment in education.
These guys think this will lead to higher SAT and CRCT scores? I’m not sure they can even SPELL the acronyms, much less implement policies that will improve the scores on either.
Beverly Fraud
March 7th, 2012
1:18 pm
Dr. T, I gotta think GAE has their collective (undergarments) in a tightly wound wad right now LOL
GAE has been WEAK and TEPID when it comes to TRULY advocating for teaching conditions, ALL BUT acquiescing to all manner of foolishness from the General Assembly, and now the Senate wants to take away their cheddar!
The question a GAE member MIGHT to ask themselves right now; is GAE willing to FURTHER acquiesce to the Gold Dome crowd, in order to get the cheddar (automatic payroll deduction) back?
If there IS a “quid pro quo” in order to get the cheddar back, will it be in the best interest of teachers, or the best interest of GAE?
Perhaps a GAE member can offer an ALTERNATIVE take on it. It’s a BLOG after all LOL
Prof
March 7th, 2012
1:20 pm
@ Tad Jackson, 12:43 pm. “Fun,” like pulling wings off flies? I bet you enjoyed dropping rocks off traffic overpasses when you were in 6th grade, too.
Prof
March 7th, 2012
1:29 pm
I’d like to follow up on the point by “Douglas” at 10:46 am that Georgia’s Constitution is a “right-to-work state” because it does not allow unions to automatically deduct dues from employee paychecks.
Georgia’s constitution has a ‘right to work’ provision which prohibits interference with employment to compel any person to either join or [note!] refrain from joining a union. And also, as Mary Elizabeth reminds us, SB 469 will prohibit mass picketing outside private residences. It will force union members to put into writing every year that they want to pay union dues or organizational fees through paycheck deductions (additional source: today’s AJC, B6).
My question: even with the state constitution, and the passage of SB 469 and approval by the Governor—what is to prevent teachers from forming a union and then sending in their union dues voluntarily rather than having them deducted automatically from paychecks?
Even better….why couldn’t GAE and MACE combine into one big teachers’ union?
Beverly Fraud
March 7th, 2012
1:35 pm
Simple Prof. MACE represents teachers only, GAE teachers AND administrators, and in the current educational environment, isn’t a teacher joining an organization that represents administrators about as nonsensical as a chicken asking Truett Cathy for career placement assistance?
jm
March 7th, 2012
1:55 pm
Kids are better off using this (with parental help) and dumping their lousy teachers
http://www.khanacademy.org/
Brandy
March 7th, 2012
2:07 pm
Well written. I hope she becomes a successful and engaged educator. I also hope that her writing of this Op. Ed. does not prevent her from gainful employment.
Beverly Fraud
March 7th, 2012
2:18 pm
On the other hand Brandy, if it does prevent her from gainful employment, in the long run it may spare her years of miserable teaching conditions.
Fled had some EXCELLENT advice for those who insist on trying teaching in this environment.
Parent Teacher
March 7th, 2012
2:18 pm
GM
I would love to see how wonderful a teacher you would be. If you have all the answers and can solve the problems in education by bringing your positive attitude and brilliant selve to the classroom, by all means do. Until you work as a teacher and understand what it takes to educate children you should stop posting on this blog and all education blogs.
Mary Elizabeth
March 7th, 2012
2:19 pm
GAE, a branch of NEA, is credible and advocates for educators in Georgia. I have been a member for 40 years. GAE keeps its members informed, offers legal counsel, and supports public education for the benefit of students.
dc
March 7th, 2012
2:29 pm
Maureen, it would be such a breath of fresh air if you had a blog where teachers and administrators came on and actually shared ideas that might work….instead of just talking about how stupid everyone else’ ideas are…and how the ideas that were potentially good were “of course implemented all wrong”.
Oh, and “more money” isn’t a good idea…been tried, failed miserably. As a parent, I had no idea there was such a large group of whining, griping teachers out there who were so convinced everyone else is wrong and stupid, but had no ideas of their own….it’s really scary.
William Casey
March 7th, 2012
2:47 pm
@dc: I’m a “retired teacher” now but I have LOTS of ideas including many on how to improve and “professionalize” teachers.
Common Sense
March 7th, 2012
2:48 pm
Frankly, it’s hard to have empathy for anyone that gets into a profession and then complains about it.
These are the same debates I had with college friends as they were going into teaching.
Their desire to teach outwighed their income potential.
To choose teaching is something they have to live with. But don’t complain to us the rest of your career about the choice you made.
William Casey
March 7th, 2012
2:59 pm
@irisheyes: I’m well aware of the challenges in Early Chilhood Education as my first wife was a K-3 teacher. When I was advocating “content area” undergrad degrees, I was thinking of Middle and High schools. However, I think that it also might be true for the early grades as well. It takes more than “loving kids” to be a good teacher. Maybe use a “team” concept. I’m not certain on this, though.
Beverly Fraud
March 7th, 2012
3:06 pm
Mary Elizabeth, like so many GAE advocates who dare to tread here, you AVOID the issue.
How, with administrative retaliation PART and PARCEL of the current education climate in Georgia, can GAE FULLY advocate for teachers and FULLY advocate for administrators?
And how much of GAE’s opposition is DIRECTLY related to the fact they won’t get their cheddar (AUTOMATIC payroll deduction)?
And if there is a “quid pro quo” with the Gold Dome crowd, what will GAE’s teachers lose in return for the unfettered cheddar?
I would challenge any GAE advocate to explain why these aren’t fair AND legitimate questions to ask of GAE.
Prof
March 7th, 2012
3:26 pm
I got my acronyms mixed up in my 1:29 pm post: Why couldn’t GAE and PAGE combine into one big union? And maybe a ceasefire arrangement with MACE?
Oh yes, I know what an outsider I am….and I now remember some of the news stories I have read about activist MACE… But I gather that PAGE also includes administrators. I don’t know the percentages of teachers vs. administrators in those organizations… but it just seems that somehow the state has managed to divide and conquer the educators. Three main organizations…a strong grass roots dissatisfaction with the educational status quo… As I believe Benjamin Franklin said about the American revolutionary cause: “If we do not hang together, assuredly we shall hang separately.”
Beverly Fraud
March 7th, 2012
3:35 pm
Prof PAGE actually took to this very paper and said that a proposal to remove an educator’s right to run for elected office where they live and pay taxes “has merit”.
Not exactly the stand up kind of attitude teachers need right now, IMHO. Why PAGE teachers weren’t OUTRAGED by this, is beyond me.
Prof
March 7th, 2012
3:59 pm
@ Beverly Fraud. When? What year? Maybe teachers/PAGE are more activist now that they’ve undergone furloughs, layoffs, all the classroom indignities, the national testing debacles, climaxed by the cheating scandal with its truly fascist atmosphere. For this latter indignity was not confined to APS, we now learn. I would think that those who taught/educated through the 2000-2010 era would be more militant, more cognizant of what happens if one is quiescent.
I understand (I think) some of the political nuances involved here….and I also lived through the 1970s when social and political activism ran the gamut. But it just seems like a traditional political ploy to get an underclass (here, educators–surely there are some decent administrators along with the teachers!) to splinter into groups that turn on each other, as a way of preventing them from joining and turning on the dominant class that is victimizing them all.
Beverly Fraud
March 7th, 2012
4:04 pm
Prof, the PAGE editorial was in the last year of Perdue’s administration, if I remember correctly.
Perdue nixed it. I have NO idea why Georgia teachers aren’t more OUTRAGED, both at the legislature AND their advocacy organizations.
I would think, at least in some small part, Georgia teachers need to ask if they themselves are not active co-creators in their own misery.
Mary Elizabeth
March 7th, 2012
4:13 pm
@Beverly Fraud, 3:06 pm
“Mary Elizabeth, like so many GAE advocates who dare to tread here, you AVOID the issue.”
====================================================
(1) You assume conflict between teachers and administrators. More often than not, there is not conflict between teachers and administrators, and both work together, in harmony, for the benefit of students. When I was an Instructional Lead Teacher, part of my job function was administrative and part of it was teaching. I had state certification as a Supervisor of Reading, as a Teacher of Reading and English, and as a Data Collector. Where would my role, as ILT, have fit into a strict division of labor? In fact, part of the job function of the ILT is to coordinate instructional objectives between the administration and the teachers. If some teachers desire to be part of a more exclusionary professional organization, there are those they can join, as well.
(2) You assume that GAE’s opposition to SB 469 is mainly for its own benefit. I find that extreme thinking based upon my association with GAE. I have found that GAE works diligently and effectively for its members. I have never observed inordinate self-interest from GAE. From my experiences, GAE places its priorities squarely on the purposes I described in my 2:19 pm post.
(3) You assume that there is a “quid pro quo” from GAE with “the Gold Dome crowd,” and you assume that teachers will “lose” something, as a result. I have observed neither of these assumptions to be true.
(4) If you wish to pursue more questions regarding GAE, I think that you should call GAE, directly.
Barry Krakovsky
March 7th, 2012
4:29 pm
Well said! I am a teacher and I am with you!
To Parent Teacher
March 7th, 2012
5:01 pm
You have forgotten something very important. You work for parents. Parents are the stakeholders and we pay your salary.
We matter. What we think is important.
If you don’t get that basic concept, find another profession where you work but you don’t have any customers…good luck with that.
GM
jdl2
March 7th, 2012
5:20 pm
Where in the world did you come up with…”but in the business world workers design their own goods and services”. Hon, I don’t know where you got your “business world” expertise, but I hope it wasn’t a teacher. And teaching lives on a different planet than the business world, the two are like night and day. Tenure is outdated and a joke, there’s no tenure in the “business world.”. Guess what else? In the “business world” no one is hiring, and workers “have no job security” either. Finally, if you think you’re “battered and bruised” now, wait till you finally leave the school yard and go to work to start crying about how hard your life is. Nobody is making you be a teacher. Do it or don’t but don’t start whining before you even start working.
Ben
March 7th, 2012
5:53 pm
I’m not going to say anything negative. I wish you all the best, be well and watch your back.
duke
March 7th, 2012
5:56 pm
We can certainly sympathize with a young person in her position. She has no way of knowing what this is about; it all happened before she was born. All she knows is what she was taught in grade school, and then in college in her education program. The problem is with what she was taught. The criticism is not against teachers; it is against the curriculum in the grade schools and in the colleges of education. This has been going on for a long time. John Dewey began his experimental programs in progressive education in 1904. It was a failure from the beginning, and continues to be a failure to this day. The United States entered World War II with a literacy rate near 100%, including segregated Black schools. Today at some universities, as many as 25% of freshmen require remedial work in basic literacy. Companies are complaining that they cannot find job applicants who can read, write, add, and subtract. It is simply not a tenable position to deny that US education is failing. The only remedy the education establishment knows to suggest is more money, but the inverse relationship is very clear: down through the decades, as education spending has steadily increased, the quality of education has steadily decreased. The problem is in the textbooks and the curriculum, and the problem is very severe.
Get a copy of John Stormer’s book, “None Dare Call It Treason-25 Years Later”, and read the chapter on education. It begins with a quote from Admiral Hyman Rickover, my old boss in the nuclear submarine force, which he wrote in 1959: “America is reaping the consequences of the destruction of traditional education by the Dewey-Kilpatrick experimental philosophy…Dewey’s ideas have led to the elimination of many academic subjects on the grounds that they would not be useful in life. Thus the individual receives neither the intellectual training nor the factual knowledge to understand the world in which he lives, or to make well-reasoned decisions in his personal life or as a responsible citizen.”
Non only does that describe the problem with education; it also describes Annabel Fender, and explains why she has trouble making sense of all this. She is a product of this educational system. Man cannot live without ideals, but his ideals must be based on truth. Modern western man does not believe in truth. President Obama has said, “Christianity is true for me; I cannot dictate whether it is true for anyone else.” He has no concept of a truth that is truly true for everyone, independent of what anyone believes.
A good author to explain what has happened to our concept of truth is Francis Schaeffer. He says that unless we reach an agreement that there is such a thing as truth, we will be talking at cross-purposes forever. The way to understand it is to study the history of philosophy, to see how our notion of truth has been manipulated. Schaeffer is a good author for that study. He has a very deep compassion for intellectuals who have been led into the ideals of a false philosophy, and then find themselves completely lost in a world which does not match their false understanding of it.
I love teaching. I hate what it is becoming...
March 7th, 2012
6:12 pm
@GM “You have forgotten something very important. You work for parents.”
Actually, I work for my students, and sometimes the needs of my students and the desires of their parents do not match. When that happens, I will ALWAYS advocate for the student. All citizens help pays my salary, and that includes more than just parents.
@jm… I use khan academy in the classroom, usually as a follow up review to lessons I have already taught, or as a different way of presenting material in hope of sparking interest with some of my more distractible learners. The videos are not perfect. My students have caught occassional errors. However, I am not perfect either, and have made mistakes. It is always gratifying when my students catch the errors. It means they have learned the material well enough to realize something is incorrect!
Old Physics Teacher
March 7th, 2012
6:29 pm
jdl2,
What world do YOU live in? I spent 20 years in the private sector. There IS tenure in the business world. What do you think those golden parachutes are? What do you think happened to the failed execs of Enron, Lehman Bros, et al? You really believe they went to jail? Boy you do live in a dream world.
If you believe “tenure” which is education-ese for “Before you fire me, you have to tell me what you’re firing me for, and I get to defend myself.” is the cause of the problems in education. Let’s look at some facts: You know those things that have a “liberal bias” – like reality?
Administrators (education-ese for “boss”) lost “tenure” almost a decade ago. Principals (bosses) and assistant principals (assistant managers) get fired all the time — actually they don’t! Occasionally, very rarely, one of the many total incompetents (you know – like the AP who suspended the student for having a Tweety-Bird knife) gets called in and told “Don’t you ever do that again!” The teacher who created the slave math got in so much trouble he quit. Tweety-bird guy is still at the school.
Even rarer is the administrator who gets fired. He/She generally quits and becomes a principal/AP at another school system.
As I said, the administrators lost tenure and the overall quality of administrators either stayed the same OR WENT DOWN. You think getting rid of tenure will do better? Remember Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Losing tenure has already been tried and found worthless.
Old Physics Teacher
March 7th, 2012
6:40 pm
You parents want better schools? You can do what the best private schools do: get a better class of student.
East Cobb teachers aren’t any better than the teachers in any school system. My first year teaching I decided to go to the National Science Teachers Association and learn how to teach from the best teachers in the nation. I listened to a teacher from a public middle school in the cough, cough, North Western Atlanta area. He said he taught density by bringing a 55 gal drum into his classroom and had his students get into swimming trunks and get weighed. He then had them get in the full 55 gal drum, and he measured how much water came over the edge. He then divided the student’s mass by the volume of water displaced.
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?? You want me to let MY students leave the classroom, go to the bathroom, take off their clothes and get into swim trunks during the regular class-room day? They’ll be all over the school. Where am I going to get a 55 gallon drum from that is clean enough to have my kids dunk themselves? What am I going to do with the 5 kids who are severe discipline problems when my quiet well-mannered kids get harassed in the boys bathroom? What about the girls in the girls bathroom? – I CAN’T GO IN THERE!! His response was that they didn’t tolerate that type of behavior at HIS school!
I left and went home and learned how to work with my red-neck kids the best way I can. Complain about us all you want; just don’t blame us for the ills of society. YOU FELLOW CITIZENS caused that; not us!
southside teacher
March 7th, 2012
6:57 pm
Proud teacher, I am with you. When students cannot be required to follow the rules, much less do their work, thanks to spineless administrators who let them get away with everything under the sun, my job becomes pretty much hopeless. When I can’t get anyone to care about a student who has walked out of class- WALKED OUT OF THE ROOM because he feels like it- there is a serious problem in the school. And it isn’t me. I spend many extra hours each week, on weekends, and during holidays, locating engaging materials and devising creative solutions to my disctrict “Curriculum Map”. You knnow, the one that makes no provision for the days lost to benchmark testing, nationally-normed standardized testing, etc. The one that has me three weeks behind despite my best efforts. I explain my expectations for the behavior or 14-16 year olds in my eighth grade class. When I try to hold them to those expectations, not only do the kids (and parents) make excuses, but admin gets on the bandwagon as well. If you have a problem with expecting a kid to make up work/quiz/ whatever after school, on the grounds that this is an athlete whose time is too precious, then I wish you would ask him/her what they were doing DURING CLASS that prevented completion of such. If we took care of that issue, there would be no schedule conflict. when you allow parents to dictate discipline in the school, you have given up the keys to the store. Without good order, how can we perform the miracles that are expected on a daily basis. I’m sorry to vent my spleen like this, but I had a student strip down to his basketball shorts today in my room, and that’s supposed to be okay with us. He will be in high school soon, and driving shortly after that. Brace yourselves, here he comes.