- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 1
- 4
-
Sparkle (0)
Lately, my posts about education are getting more and more frequent. There is also, of course, the creeping in of posts about pregnant girls that lead naturally back to my own pregnant teen years. It’s hard to miss that the word “years” was plural. The more I do that, the more I get questions (via e-mail or messages) about whether or not it’s okay that I write about my work. I’ve been called “gutsy” and “brave” for writing about my job and people wonder how I fly under the radar at work. Truth be told, I’m not under the radar.
Plenty of people know about my blog and read it. Including the superintendent. I mean, I don’t think he hangs on my every written word, but he brought it up to me recently at a dinner with book publishers we both attended. Every boss I’ve had knows about it because I just go ahead and throw it out there.
Hey. I write. On the Internet. With readers. It’s very Internetty. Don’t worry if you don’t “get it.” I also write using lots of parenthetical statements, so just ignore me if that’s not your thing. (But don’t lurk forever.) (Lurkers who never comment freak me out just a little bit.) (Especially if they only like to email me their comments.)
I’ve been asked recently if I’m worried about losing my job, but not because of the writing. Just because of all the things going on in education. For instance, there’s the Rhode Island superintendent who just fired all the high school staff due to low test scores. Or the letter from Bill Maher calling for the firing of parents, not teachers. To say that education is a battlefield right now is not giving the issue its due. But parents are pissed. Teachers are scared. And students are, as usual, getting short-changed. Our own district has proposed budget cuts that call for 50-some teachers not being offered a job again next school year in their current positions and having all administrators (including yours truly) take a salary freeze.
Personally, that last one will hurt. Quite a few people are dependent on my salary, including my children and my mother who is without health care –- the other hot issue at the moment. Apparently, some people think I make too much money, but that’s not really the point of this post.
Whatever option comes our way out of the four that are proposed by federal government (1. closing the schools, 2. using a restructuring/transforming model by replacing the principal, 3. firing all staff and rehiring up to 50 percent and 4. becoming a charter school) will hurt. It’ll be a hard pill to swallow because we don’t choose to leave students behind. Many of them come to us already behind, and our job -- without the aid of the community or any planned social structures -- is to bring them up to speed.
I could go on and on about how teaching is hard. There’s no doubt about that. Some stories help spur me on like the Englewood Urban Prep Academy for Young Men in Chicago because it’s about digging in and doing EVERYTHING POSSIBLE to make students successful. It’s not beyond our reach, it’s just that we, the collective “we,” don’t want to do that work because we get caught up in protecting ourselves.
This is not a popular opinion. I’ll get lambasted for saying it, because it will appear like I’m insensitive to teachers.
If you’re in this business of schooling students, then I hope you know we’re in this together. We get what we get. Parents aren’t keeping their better children at home. They’re sending us the best they have. What we see when we get them isn’t what we’d like to see.
If you’re going to go into teaching, you’ll get unmotivated, hard-to-like students who have short attention spans. Your content that you teach won’t be relevant to them. They won’t care one iota about it. They’ll be disorganized and selfish. When you mention that you have to get through the body of knowledge and standards and benchmarks, their faces will turn blank, and they’ll just keep blinking until you say something that matters to them. The fact that you have units to get through and tests to give are not what keeps them up at night. Your lesson plans are not their concern. Your homework will be completely uninteresting to them. Your lengthy lectures will not necessarily inspire them to
