Archives for category: Teachers and Teaching
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

The Hardest, Most Rewarding Career Ever

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2012 //
5

An earlier post asked which was harder: Teaching or Rocket Science. It received some great responses. Here is one of them:

I’ll add my vote here. Former engineer, now a teacher for 17 years. Teaching is much harder work. It takes a really long time to get very good at it (which TFA and other organizations like it don’t seem to grasp). It also takes a unique blend of patience, thick-skinned tolerance of minor (and sometimes major) injustices, humility and hopefulness that might be thought of as love.
I work with teenagers and I think the hardest thing I do is walk that constant, minute-by-minute tightrope walk of trusting in the goodness of kids while maintaining the integrity of everything you and every other adult in the school has worked so long and hard to build. You have to believe in the kids, or you might as well not even be there. But then again, they will often let you down.
I think the only people who think teaching is easier than working a “real” job are those who have never taught. I have watched a half-dozen smart, confident people come from highly successful careers outside teaching and get chewed up and spit out in less than a semester. I wonder, if the deformers get their way and we end up with a teaching profession that makes 40-50% less than it does now, where they are ever going to find people to do this very difficult job.
Just today, I got an email from a former student who I convinced to try my AP Chemistry class when he thought he wasn’t “smart enough”. I worked my tail off helping him convince himself he could succeed at that level and he gained enough confidence that he changed his future plans and enrolled in college. He earned his engineering degree and was proudly informing me that he had just taken his first job. He is just one in a thousand kids that have passed through my classroom, and I hadn’t thought about him since he graduated and the next batch of diamonds in the rough came through my door and began consuming my time and energy. But he said in his email, “There have been four distinct times when I have consciously made a decision that has forever changed the course of my life and you were involved in one of them . . . Your class changed my life . . . I can definitely say I would not be where I am today if you had not been my teacher.” That’s what keeps us going, right? But in this brave new world of VAM we’re entering, what teacher will ever have time to waste on changing someone’s life?

Categories Teachers and Teaching

A Student Reports on Education Nation

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2012 //
1

Stephanie Rivera is preparing to be a teacher at Rutgers University, where she is a junior. Stephanie has her own blog. But what’s special about Stephanie is that she has strong values, she has guts, and she is articulate. As an activist devoted to educational equity, she rightly is suspicious of faux reforms sponsored by billionaires and corporations.

Stephanie attended Education Nation. This is her report on te various panels and town halls. It is well worth reading because Stephanie brings a fresh perspective to the issues and personalities.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Students, Teachers and Teaching

Las Vegas: Class Size Up, Morale Down

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2012 //
14

In response to the transcript of President Obama’s interview with NBC, a teacher writes:

Class sizes here in Las Vegas are not going down. When they reshuffled on count day we lost teachers at our sites There are now 36 kids in all our 4th and 5th grade classes. Schools are only staffed at 93%. I think it is the districts way of punishing the Union for winning arbitration where it was clearly proved the money for salary was there. This district is so obscenely top heavy with administrators and coordinators. Every elementary has at least one instructional strategist or more. These strategists basically help coordinate testing and have almost no contact with students. I feel that money would be much better spent on another teacher to help lower class sizes. The position is a joke. Morale is so bad here.

Categories Teachers and Teaching

Union Leaders Who Are NBCT

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2012 //
3

When I wrote about the Chicago strike, I said that Karen Lewis was one of the few–if not the only–union leader who was a National Board Certified Teacher.

I have heard of two more NBCT union leaders. Let me know if you are aware of others.

Stacey Miller, the president of the Maumee Education Association in Ohio, won NBCT status in 2001. The other is in Tacoma.

A member of the union in Tacoma writes:

One comment, my union, Tacoma Education Association, was on strike last fall for 8 days. We were on strike over how displacement is determined and our union leaders along with a new superintendent put together a great solution. Our president who led us masterfully through the strike is Nationally Board Certified and upon completing his term of office took the position of COO for the National Board. Our current president who was VP for the last term is also National Board Certified. Granted we’re much smaller than Chicago with only about 2400 members in our council but we do elect master teachers to lead us.

Categories Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching, Unions

The Tale of the All-Powerful Teacher

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2012 //
0

Students Last has been thinking about how teachers can solve poverty once and for all.

SL shows how it is done.

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Humor, Teachers and Teaching

A Teacher-Parent Shares Her Outrage

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2012 //
5

This teacher won’t let her child participate in state testing but she cannot shield him from the test-prep curriculum. Perhaps if everyone opted out, it would change. She thanks the teachers of Chicago for taking a brave stand. So much more is needed to change the direction of education in this nation and to make it worthy of our children and our nation. What advice can you give her?

Second career, 14th year in the classroom, tears in my eyes… Having a child in our public schools has left me with more enemies than colleagues – within the District and our neighborhood.

I know in my heart my teacher friends want to be and do better for my son, and all of their kids, but can’t or won’t stand up to rage against the machine. Watching our kid suffer in order to stand up and speak out for public education, our kids, and our communities has been one of the most difficult things my husband and I have ever done. While we do opt out from State testing (and I wish EVERYONE would), that does not opt our son out from the dull-dry-dead test prep curriculum his teachers and schools are measured by – not to mention the loss of social status by not buying into the notion that performance bands are a valuable label of one’s humanity, for those not afforded the privilege to make their own labels.

I hope for a better day, and our Chicago brothers and sisters have been INSPIRATIONAL, but after spending a PD day on the common core today I am assured, more than ever before, that I can hope in one and wish in the other but neither will result in anything but disappointment and disgust and anger over an utter erosion of our precious democratic ideals – which for those with the means and wherewithall matters NOT ONE IOTA. Raised fist, big sigh…

Categories Students, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

The Pattern on the Rug

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2012 //
6

A reader sees how the pieces of the reform movement fit together:

I think that all the double-speak is just to divert attention away from the major process of dismantling education that has been taking place across the country, and the smoke and mirrors is to conceal the intention to ultimately declare brick and mortar schools obsolete and teachers expendable and unnecessary. Effectively, the goal is to not have teachers anymore.

One online teacher I work with put it this way recently, “We’re just glorified graders now.” Honestly, for a teacher, there is no glory when your job boils down to just grading. But politicians, corporate reformers and companies like Pearson and K-12 seem to think that education can be reduced to presenting material on a screen and testing, and that they can train virtually anyone to be graders.

Actually, online, you can set it up so that tests are self-administered and automatically generate grades, so currently instructors are grading papers, class discussions, group projects, participation, etc. and I can see how that might one day be considered superfluous to the powers that be.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, On-Line Education, Parent trigger, Privatization, Race to the Top, Stand for Children, Teach for America TFA, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, Technology, Computers, Unions, US Education

He Didn’t Get the Job

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2012 //
20

Kenneth Bernstein explains why he didn’t get the job:

“I was once interviewed for a teaching position where because I had done my own homework I knew that the principal wanted everyone on the same page at the same time.

I was being interviewed by the department chair and an assistant principal. Having signed an open contract for that district, the only question on the table was at what school I would teach. It was clear they wanted me, having mentioned that if I came I could probably also be the boys head soccer coach.

But the following exchanged ensued.

Me: I understand your principal wants everyone on the same page at the same time.

Assistant Principal: – Yes, she is a strong instructional leader.

Me: I don’t doubt that. But I know you called my current school for a reference and I know what they told you, that if it made instructional sense I could have my six different classes doing six different things. Why would you want to hire me and then take away from me what makes me an effective teacher?

The two of them looked at one another, and I knew I had made certain that they would not select me for that position.

It goes further than that. For much of my career I taught government and politics. It was important for me to be able to be responsive to news that was relevant to the course and to the students.

And most of all, if students in one class failed to fully grasp a content, why should I be moving on, merely to stay on the pacing guide? How is that helping their learning? If in another class it was clear they grasped the material in less than the expected time, why could I not enrich their learning by doing something else.

When I first worked with computers in the Marine Corps in the 1960s, our primary source of input was punch cards which were labeled “Don’t fold, spindle or mutilate.” When we insist upon teaching our children and the classes they attend exactly the same way, when we ignore the differences among them, we are folding, spindling and mutilating them and their opportunity to learn in a meaningful way.”

Kenneth J. Bernstein is a retired award-winning Social Studies teacher, who before he switched to teaching late in life spent several decades working in data processing.

Categories Teachers and Teaching

The Effects of “Reform”

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2012 //
10

Will Richardson has his own blog, where he writes about many topics, especially technology.

I invited him to write for us, and he graciously consented.

Will Richardson writes:

Last week I had the opportunity to work with a group of teachers and administrators in a state that is supposedly leading the way in education “reform” here in the US. It’s a state where schools are getting letter grades, where teachers are being assessed in large measure by results of student tests, and where not surprisingly, educators at the ground level are not given a very large voice in the conversation.

Two things struck me in my discussions with them over those two days. First, despite the barriers, these 100 or so educators were more than willing to tackle the conversation around what now needs to happen in classrooms and schools now that we have access to so much information and knowledge and so many teachers through the devices we carry around in our pockets. Almost all agreed that we urgently need to begin to redefine the value of schools and rethink what relevant learning looks like if we are to fully prepare our students for this new world of learning that the Web is creating on a global scale. Their excitement and energy were palpable

But what struck me even more was this: their appetite for that change conversation is being driven in no small measure by their sincere frustration with what the state is imposing in their classrooms. Frequently, teachers spoke of their inability to take risks, to be creative in their practice, or to deviate from the script for fear that results on statewide assessments would regress. One teacher told me that when administrators visited her classroom, the expectation was that she should be teaching the same topic in the same way at the same time as all of her colleagues who were teaching other sections of that class. Another said that regular weekly objective assessments to measure “progress” were raising her kids’ stress levels “through the roof” as well as her own. Lesson plan titles reflect the day of the school year (as in “Day 47”) rather than the unit or goal of the lesson. And more.

Some of the administrators I spoke with expressed concern that many excellent veteran teachers are choosing to retire rather than deal with the new expectations. One actually said that he counseled his son to pursue a career outside of education given the new realities of the evaluation system and its after-effects. And almost all of them said they felt hamstrung by the ever narrowing measures that the state was placing on “learning.”

But here might be the most troubling piece: according to most of the folks I talked to, parents, by and large, just want the scores. Policy makers and corporate reformers have done a great job of convincing the public that the tests tell all, that if a school gets a “D” by some formula that didn’t exist a year ago, that means the kids in that school aren’t learning much. And if their kids don’t do well on the tests, it’s their teacher’s fault.

We have many battles to fight if we’re to build an effective counter narrative to the “reforms” that seem to be currently in vogue across the country. I’m becoming more and more convinced, however, that until we articulate a message for parents that can scale, one that can convince them that their children need much more than the tests are measuring and that there is a lot more to “learning” than just numbers on a scorecard, we’re going to have a very difficult time gaining a voice in the “reform” space.

(Will Richardson blogs at willrichardson.com, Tweets @willrich45, and is the author of the just released “Why School? How Education Must Change When Learning and Information Are Everywhere.” Details at whyschoolbook.com.)

Categories Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, Technology, Computers, Testing

A Teacher Explains How to Fix the Schools

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2012 //
6

Bruce Adams, a veteran teacher and artist in Buffalo, explains how to fix the schools in nine not-so-easy steps.

His recipe does not involve firing teachers or closing schools. It does not rely on standardized testing. It takes time.

Wall Street hedge fund managers, Eli Broad, and the Gates Foundation won’t like his plan, because he warns against expecting quick results. In fact, he says, “don’t expect overnight success.” That no doubt disqualifies him in the eyes of our impatient reformers, who can’t wait.

Adams writes:

We don’t give schools enough time to implement one educational philosophy before replacing it with a trendy new one. Radical improvement doesn’t occur overnight. If we overhaul the system tomorrow and remain consistent, we could expect comprehensive results by the time this year’s newborns reach their senior year. Seventeen years may sound like a long time, but if we had spent ten years transforming our system after “A Nation at Risk” identified the problem in 1983, last year’s graduating seniors would have provided the first cradle to grad results. Think long term, not quick fix.

Of course, it does matter if you implement sound ideas to begin with. If you impose bad ideas that demoralize teachers and turn children into test-taking robots, then seventeen years will be a hard and ugly eternity.

 

Categories Arts Education, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Students, Teachers and Teaching
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »