This is a short video message filled with inspiration and passion, directed to the thousands of unemployed and underemployed college graduates who are currently clerking in big box stores, waiting on tables, and performing other work that does not utilize their knowledge and skills.
The speaker is Jamaal Bowman, principal of the Cornerstone Academy for Social Action, a middle school in the Bronx. Bowman is a member of the board of directors of NYSAPE, the New York State Alliance for Public Education, a group that has done so much to build the opt out movement and change the direction of New York state’s education policy agenda.
Watch this video and get a life, a life where you can make a difference instead of sticking with a dead end job!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This would get me to consider teaching in a tough Bronx school: having to teach half of a regular course load. That would give me time to strategize, lesson plan, grade, call homes, do professional reading, and visit other classes during the work day, instead of after school when I should be resting, cooking, exercising, socializing and keeping myself healthy and un-burnt-out.
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Or you can come to a small rural SD with a low student to teacher ratio upstate where you are only required to teach 3 class periods ….. Union protected too…. Where not much is expected of staff or the students…. Where the cost of living is much lower than NYC too …
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I appreciate the passion and commitment Mr. Bowman shares. I too am a proud public school teacher and union member. I wonder how his message is different from that of TFA? Telling college graduates they’ll have a job within weeks…? All you need is a degree, that doesn’t sit well with me.
Many of us professional educators are fighting to maintain the status of our jobs!
All that goes into teacher preparation programs is essential: understanding child development; working with students with diverse needs developmentally and physically; how to honor and celebrate English Language Learners; the craft of developing lessons and units; an understanding of core curriculum; the art and value of integrating lessons; an appreciation of Art, Music, Library, Social Emotional Learning, PE and their benefits to our students; pathways to create a true community in your classroom and school; the importance of advocating for students, families, and colleagues; the ongoing support schools of education provide the communities they are in… These are just a few of the benefits of teacher education programs. Alternative pathways to licensure ensure none of this in potential colleagues.
I want to work with educators whom are both licensed by my state AND certified.
Sincerely,
Amy Miller
5th/6th grade teacher and union president
Shorewood, WI
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I don’t that Mr. Bowman is looking for TFA
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I agree. But his message of “get a job in a few weeks” isn’t far from TFA’s, is it?
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I wish he was my principal!! I would work for this man in a heartbeat. I’m a high school math teacher in upstate NY.
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Get a teaching job in a couple of weeks with just a college education?
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IMPORTANT POINT; my work in earning a teaching degree, completing an observation period, learning through hands-on student teaching, and procuring an educator’s license was why I was able to function my first years of teaching. We should not be so quick to dismiss the PROFESSION of teaching.
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Yes! Get ready to go Back to School in so many new ways.
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From a teacher who works in a Bronx Public School, I sincerely hope that Mr. Bowman doesn’t come around armed with an iPad and a cookie cutter Danielson rubric. Please be one of those principals who ignore the DOE’s mandates that suck the life out of real, authentic learning.
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Mr. Bowman is a board member of NYSAPE, the opt out leaders.
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Yes, Diane, but if he is doing what RL suggests and if he follows and institutes the testing mandates, then he is playing both sides and in my thinking a poser.
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CROSS-POSTED AT :
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/A-Message-to-Unemployed–in-Best_Web_OpEds-Diane-Ravitch_Education_Jobs-Finding-Them_Public-Service-Jobs-161001-935.html
WITH THIS COMMENT
I loved teaching. I cannot describe the joy of being with children who want to gain knowledge, learn how-to do things, how much fun it is to teach, when I was in charge of creating the curricula and engaging the kids…motivating them to learn. I can recall their faces, to this day, laughing and engaged in learning. “The Schwartz is with us,” the middle schools kids would say, in that last assignment when my kids were at the top of NY State, not just the city, on the new writing ELA.
I began my teaching career in 1963, although I stood before my first students in 1962, when I was a student teacher, during those years when novice teachers gained experience as they studied pedagogy and the psychology of learning.
http://www.opednews.com/author/author40790.html
Even when the top-down bandits took over the NYC schools and began the destruction that led to this, https://vimeo.com/41994760 I closed my classroom door and spent the day with delightful youngsters who wanted to learn what I knew how to do– to think critically, and to write.
We need to allow teachers the autonomy to show emergent learners what they know how to do — to share the ‘how -to’ (the -ways-in-which) one can do something.
That was until Bill Gates and his billionaire pals of the EDUCATIONAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX https://greatschoolwars.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/eic-oct_11.pdf created a process to replace experienced TEACHERS with temps, so the schools could tank and be replaced by charter schools. Top-down management replaced the autonomous teachers like myself, who knew WLLL– what learning looks like, (and what it did not).
Thanks to the NCLB act , the Duncan rant and the media narrative of those bad teachers, http://www.opednews.com/articles/Learning-not-Teacher-evalu-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-111001-956.html the public never saw THE PLOY to empty the schools. http://www.perdaily.com/2011/01/lausd-et-al-a-national-scandal-of-enormous-proportions-by-susan-lee-schwartz-part-1.html
Now, we the people, must put the teacher-practitioners back in our schools, and give them the autonomy to practice what why know, just as we give that autonomy to a doctor, or an attorney. Intelligent, educated teacher-practitioners can make classrooms a place of LEARNING.
Let’s change the narrative to one ABOUT LEARNING, not teaching, and let the authentic educators whom we call ‘teachers’ practice in their classrooms. They will do it for the joy of being with active, emergent human minds.
http://www.perdaily.com/2011/08/subverting-the-national-conversation-a.html
Come teach, and make a difference.
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Looks like CASA middle school is a 7 Habits/Leader in Me school. Count me out. I’d rather work a “dead end” job than subject children to Mormon business character trait indoctrination.
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Can you expound on the “Mormon business character trait indoctrination” please? TIA, Duane
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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