Flu Frustrations
Mrs. Bluebird has about had it with parents who expect teachers, at a moment's notice, to gather missing work for sick kids and then don't even bother to come in and pick it up.
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Mrs. Bluebird has about had it with parents who expect teachers, at a moment's notice, to gather missing work for sick kids and then don't even bother to come in and pick it up.
Teach Baltimore reprints the lengthy, no-nonsense e-mail message he sent to parents after his IB students performed poorly on a quiz on Richard III. "I wonder if you can read between the lines in this email that I'm actually kind of seething," he asks. Well, yes, you can, but that's part of its charm (so to speak). We especially liked this part:
I do not recommend using a translated, modernized text, mostly because I'm finding that most students who have them rely on the modernized text and nothing else. Every student who did this failed the quiz yesterday. If you see one of those "Shakespeare Made Easy" texts at home, they can be dangerous. ... Additionally, using online sites like Sparknotes do not help students immerse themselves in the language, and thus are not useful in the course.
A worn down Mrs. Riz, who works with emotionally disabled students, is looking for balance:
Since school started some 3 weeks ago, I awaken at 5:30 am, and am on the road by 6:30. I've been arriving at school early to be ready--really ready---for the day. I'm lucky if I get home at night before 6pm. Even when the kids are reasonably good, there's committee meetings, subcommittee meetings, clinical support sessions, team meetings..... drama with new, untrained staff members who think the kids are simply bratty.... It sucks the life out of you. And I am old enough to know better.
It surely didn't help that only one of her students' parents showed up for back-to-school night.
Contrarian G.S. Feet, a prospective school librarian, says there's a reason why communities generally get far more upset about cuts in school sports programs than they do about cuts in school library or media programs: "Sports are more important to schools and communities than school libraries." He explains:
Sports are the ONLY reason many, many students attend school at all. Take away sports and attendance at high risk schools will decline because the former athletes -- often among the lowest socio-economic class -- will have no reason to get up and come to school. ...
Nothing galvanizes a school like a winning team. When's the last time your school held a pep rally and devoted "prime instructional time" to a new shipment of books or new computers for the media center? When's the last time your library produced revenue for the school? Instead, our institutions are a drain on revenue. When's the last time, other than a faculty meeting, that the entire district population was "encouraged" to attend a library event like a bookfair? Never?
Point taken. But perhaps the question is whether this is way things should be, or whether schools and communities have their priorities backwards.
Teacherninja, a ELL teacher in training to be a librarian, responds that it's difficult to argue with the notion that school communities are more devoted to their sports teams than to their library offerings. His hope is that recent news about beloved sports programs being cut will prompt more people to reexamine the way schools are currently funded.
Robert Rubis, a teacher-librarian who appears to be working in Thailand, explains that his teaching philosophy has been affected by the "growing sense of impending doom" he feels about climate change and the condition of the environment. He thinks, in particular, that educators caught up in Web 2.0 fads might have the wrong view of the sort of technological skills kids will need in the future:
Should I continue to obsess about flavor-of-the-week technological wizardry, or should I concentrate on rubber-meets-road learning skills that will transcend "the long emergency", when being able to learn, from a technology not dependent on electricity, how to purify unsafe drinking water, will be a skill more prized than knowing how to assemble a cloud-based mashup of irrelevant extrivianza?
Doug Noon Johnson responds here.
Bill Ferriter offers some reflections on a recent virtual dicussion on "structuring professional learning communities" led by PLC experts Rick and Becky DuFour. One point that stuck out for him: PLC's can often be especially draining and frustrating for the teachers who are most committed to them. This is where administrators need to step in:
For school leaders, this means that a critical requirement (responsibility?) for driving successful change is keeping a finger on the emotional pulse of those core staff members that push their peers in positive directions. Take time to touch base with them often. Celebrate their efforts privately and publicly. Find ways to acknowledge and reward their efforts. Ask for feedback about school strengths and weaknesses, and offer specific guidance for overcoming immediate challenges.
Teachin', an 8th grade language arts instructor, finds she gets a lot of milage out of attending students' extracurricular activities—no matter how tired she is.
(Hat Tip: Uncomfortable Adventures.)
Here's a nice idea: Veteran Florida spec. ed. teacher Dayle Timmon's daughter, Courtney, following in her mom's footsteps, has just started her first teaching job, and the two of them have started a blog together "to share our conversations during her first year as a teacher." It's called, appropriately, She's the Apple of My Eye.
In an early entry, Courtney (clearly a real newbie in the workforce) finds herself overwhelmed by her first pay check:
"WOWZERS" - I’M RICH!!! I’ve never seen this much money at one time in my life. I can’t even imagine having this much money at one time.
In response to which, her mom winks to readers: "don't tell her how fleeting that feeling will be!"
Ed-tech expert Scott McCleod unloads on school Internet-filtering policies:
This is a loser strategy that prevents educators from accessing potentially-powerful educational material and damages employee morale. Does this make sense to anyone? Nice job, administrators…
At the end of the first week of school, Ariel Sacks gets her 8th graders' minds humming by having them write about a short quote on education by Yeats. (The project, Sacks notes, was inspired, by Renee Moore).
Will Richardson argues that the controversy over President Obama's back-to-school speech says a lot about how we as a nation have conceptually narrowed the role of schools:
If schools are the fully functioning learning communities that we hope they are, they should be the place where our kids learn to make sense of ideas, not to fear them. ...
Instead:
School is the place kids go to learn the stuff they need to pass all of the tests, not the place that they go to engage the diversity and complexity and beauty of the world. If we cannot offer our students wide ranging opportunities to examine the world from many sides and teach them how to do that with rigor and respect, then we subvert the very idea of school.
Richardson suggests, in sum, that the fact that idea of the president's speech gave rise to such consternation is yet another rebuke to teachers' professionalism and autonomy.
Mei Flower's year is off to a truly awful start. She could probably use some positive vibes if you feel like commenting. ...
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