Earlier today, I suggested a “teacher survivor contest” and invited readers to propose candidates to teach, as well as the rules of the competition. A reader suggests that teaching in an urban classroom is no more challenging than teaching in a rural classroom. I did not specify teaching either in an urban or a rural setting. She proposes a rural edition of the contest:
| I’d like to see the contest as the RURAL edition. Bill Gates and the Waltons assigned as the teacher in a 1 or 2 room school, teaching from 7:30 AM to 4:00 PM, 4 days a week with students in grades K-8. Lunch is a brown-bagger with students. There is a morning nutrition break, which the teacher must prepare, serve, and clean-up.The teacher has all duties, and there are no “specials”, except music for 45 minutes, once a week, about 3 out of 4 weeks per month. Of course, there is no on-site special education teacher, so the classroom teacher must make all accommodations and modifications within the regular classroom, and/or must facilitate, (in the regular classroom with all other students to attend to) therapy via computer teleconferencing.The teacher(s) must provide lesson plans for every grade, every subject, every day, with reference to state and common core standards. There are no colleagues within a 75 mile radius. All disciplinary problems must be handled by the teacher, on site.Parents may show up at any time and may remove their children for such reasons as “he [a 5-year old] is needed to work the round-up”, or “he [an 8-year-old] has to go on the deer hunt with me if we are to have any meat this winter”. Oh, also, on a fairly regular basis, the teacher must deal with scorpions and with sidewinders on the playground, and the yearly tarantula migration that goes right through the school yard. No special training is provided or required to deal with these issues, and of course, they were not likely covered in the 5 week training (or even in a 4-year course). The teacher is expected to live on-site in a trailer. The nearest grocery store and gas station is 75 miles away, and the prices are much higher than in the city.None of this is made up or exaggerated; these are the actual working and living conditions in a Nevada rural school where I taught for 3 years., and the same conditions still apply. More often than not, the teacher hired for this position has little or no experience teaching, so perhaps the 5-week preparation isn’t all that much of a factor. I’m betting the oligarchs wouldn’t last a month, but if they should survive, they get the lowest pay in the state for their efforts, and if they leave before their year’s contract is over, their contract specifies that they will be billed for the cost of finding a replacement for them. Of course, they could also be sued for “abandonment” in this state, and lose their teaching license into the bargain. |
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Off topic comment: I just got on my email a beg from Michelle Rhee referencing her Olympic ad where she portrayed our schools as an inept Olympian, a disgrace to teachers, schools, and the Olympics with overtones of bullying special needs students (and some say racism and homophobia). She is using it as a fundraiser, pretending that our schools are really like this and asking for $3, a tactic borrowed from the presidential race to get contributions from grassroots voters. That woman hates America.
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Well, yes. The ad is disgraceful. Read my two posts about it. It ridicules America, teachers, public education, obesity, and gays. She has no shame.
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I read them. They were right on. Commented too. Don’t want to sound, oh what is the word for people who hate immigrants, but, was Rhee born in America? Could she be angling for a presidency or maybe a vice or Secretary of Education? Can you picture Bobby Jindal and Mchele Rhee as President and Vice-President?
One thought, the International Olympic Committee is very protective of its trademark. Years ago they made the folks who sponsor the Gay Games change their name from Gay Olympics (although they did not do that to Special Olympics or Senior Olympics). Do they know about this ad?
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I think Jeb Bush would be the Secretary of Education before Michelle Rhee gets the job in a Romney administration. However, he wouldn’t really need to get rid of Arne Duncan inasmuch as he is already doing the party’s bidding.
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How do you do therapy by computer? You could break the child’s leg or his hip could pop out if you don’t do it right. That even happens with professional therapists occasionally.
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Unexpected learning moment…Tarantulas migrate!?!! Holy expletive Batman! I’m safe living in the Pacific Northwest, right? I mean, climate change and everything, but there’s a LOT of water out here. I am now SERIOUSLY considering moving to Canada, perhaps up by the Arctic Circle. They must need teachers in the Northwest Territories…
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Teachable moment for me too! I have heard that crawfish can migrate and once were all over the streets in St. Bernard Parish (near New Orleans. Thing is with crawfish you can pick them up, throw them in a pot of boiling water and some seasonings and they are very delicious! But tarantulas, I never heard about that. I have never heard of spiders migrating. And I don’t think Americans eat them since they are spiders. But they rarely bite.
See, you are a teacher. Teachers never stop learning.
Oh I looked at teaching in Alaska a few years back. They pay well and give a large bonus if you teach way out in the rural parts. They also provide housing attached to the school for the teachers and you fly into Walmart in Anchorage before winter sets in and get groceries for the next 6 months. It would have been a great place to work had I been in my 20s. There was a teacher who had a blog a few years ago about teaching there, male, one room school.
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I did not know there were still schools like that. I was in one larger but about as bad in 1972, but you had a true Little House on the Prairie situation! My situation was not as bad as yours but I have been in a couple of schools where kids were pulled out for the first day of hunting season and at the school below they were also pulled out to pick cotton. I quickly became an urban inner city teacher and loved it the rest of my career. At least the city kids had bathrooms and could get to the doctor and the grocery store.
On top of that, mine had racial issues. They had just been forced to integrate a 12 grade school in Billingsley Alabama, Billingsley High School, a 12 grade school 50 miles from Prattville and 30 from Clanton. They had all the black teachers and most of the black students, except the ones considered bright or who had activistic parents, from the school they had shut down in portables with some of the kids sitting two to a desk. The white teachers and students were in the main building except for the social studies teacher who had the other half of my trailer. He had supported the wrong man for school board, as had the coach who had been the principal the previous year. They promoted the agriculture teacher who had supported the right board member. My half-trailer had a hole in the floor. Midyear the handle fell off the door and I had to push a 1st grader (son of the social studies teacher) in through my window, which I left unlocked, every morning to unlock my door from the inside. When one of my students injured his leg and got an infection I brought bandages, hydrogen peroxide and antibiotic ointment and treated him myself and got rid of the infection. His family had tried to treat it with a warm rag heated over the fireplace. All but one of my students lived in sharecropper shacks with no plumbing and many of the first graders (no kindergarten) had never seen a flush toilet when they started school. The one with plumbing, my only white student, was considered as being from a “slow family” as the third grade teacher, who had not been to college and was grandfathered in had taught her father and brother. When I listened to her brother’s speech I immediately knew he was not slow. He was severely hearing impaired! He pulled the family’s rotten teeth with a pair of pliers. But they were so sweet. All those kids were incredibly sweet and way too smart to have been labeled retarded. Just incredibly disadvantaged. And I WAS the special ed teacher—fresh out of the University of Alabama (Roll Tide) no experience and it was 3 years before special ed was required by law in 1975.
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Oligarchs to teach school: Bobby Jindal. Urban inner city middle school that includes some frustrated 16 year olds who can’t pass the LEAP. One to two weeks assigned. 30 students. No paraprofessional. He has been made unrecognizable. Make it a poorly run charter to add interest. Will last maybe one day.
Then he goes to a severe/profound/ multihandicapped class where the paraprofessional is out sick. Assigned for a week. Any longer and he might accidentally kill a child. (For the safety of the students give him training in what to do if a student has a seizure.) Three walk out of 7 students. Everyone wears diapers which have to be changed at least twice a day and 4 use a wheelchair, two are tube fed and two have activistic parents who may walk in at any moment. One of those mothers is a sandwich short of a picnic, won’t talk to white people and thinks her child sits in a dirty diaper all day. Another is a very large woman who runs a barroom and delivers the runner while she herself is barefoot and in a t-shirt with a hole over her breast. She has to be caught, lead to a table and sat down to sign her child’s IEP because she won’t come to a meeting. And these are NOT the activists. One child is a screamer and one hurts herself. The class includes a runner with autistic behaviors. He has to manage 4 wheelchairs and a runner including getting them on and off the bus. Bobby will last one hour! Tops!
During his first term, when Bobby first started knocking teachers and said that a Masters Degree, national certification and experience don’t raise test scores I proposed in a letter in the local newspaper (Advocate) that Bobby and state superintendent at the time, Paul Pastorek, go downtown to a rather reknowned local university and earn a teaching certificate and spend a couple years in the classroom before they open their mouths to criticize us.
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