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| RI high school fires all its teachers who refuse to work harder and longer | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Feb 24 2010, 04:37 PM (601 Views) | |
| cks | Feb 25 2010, 03:56 PM Post #16 |
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I would agree that the unions have been the ruin of the teaching profession. I would also agree that there are far too many people (this a result of unionization) that saw teaching as a sinecure and as a result have given all teachers a bad name. I will also say that teaching as a profession is little regarded. I had a father tell me once that if I was so damn smart, why was I teaching - I should have a real job because everyone knows that teachers are those who could not do anything else. Unfortunately this attitude is more widespread than one would like to believe. My husband is in Europe a good part of the year on business. His colleagues and the people that he meets regard the fact that I am a teacher as the highest possible profession. There is a respect for teachers and the profession that does not exist here. This past summer I happened to meet a number of people in Germany, England, the Netherlands, and Belgium who are teachers - they were appalled at the manner in which teachers here are treated by students, administrators, and parents. I am not saying that there are not grave problems with the educational system in this country - there most definitely are. But i would posit that a number of those problems are rooted in societal norms. How many on this board can remeber those days when you got in trouble at school you could expect to get in even more trouble at home? Today teachers are expected to "entertain" their students rather than teach - drill work in math, expecting students to learn to spell correctly, memorization - these have gone by the bye. There is this "what ever" attitude. Homework is not graded, every child should get an A for showing up....what is the result, well, it is an inability to learn and retain basic information. Nothing fires me up more than the subject of education. But I will have to say that after fighting the good fight for so many years, I am weary. I actively encouraged my children not to enter the profession that has been my life's work even though they have the temperament, discipline, love of their subjects, and the inquisitiveness that a teacher must possess. My middle son will be doing a stint for Teach for America for the next two years - his goal is to become a force for policy change and feels that he cannot advocate any changes if he has not been on the other side of the desk as a teacher. I hope that there will be changes - but there needs first of all to be a scoietal change - the importance of education should be stressed by the politicians, the leadership of all colors and stripes in this country. Excellence in the classroom on the part of students should be expected and excellence on the part of teachers should be demanded. Teachers should be certified in their acadmeic areas - they should have ore than a passing knowledge of their subject matter - one should not be hired first because he can coach and then slotted into an academic area as needed. (This has too often been the case in my discipline - history). School systems should not look to balance their budgets (as the Lakota system in suburban Cincinnati announced this morning) by giving early retirement to its veteran teachers so that it can hire newlly minted teachers at a substantial savings. I have ranted enough - I have papers to grade and lessons to prepare. Sorry, this thread has just caught me at a bad time in the school year. |
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| cks | Feb 25 2010, 04:46 PM Post #17 |
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Joan - I agree with the points that you raised in your posting. With four children in a variety of schools I have seen quite a bit - much of it not pretty. I work with a number of teachers who, I truly believe, were once excellent, but who have been so tromped on over the years that they are merely putting in the time. It is quite sad. However, they have more subject knowledge than do the majority of students coming out today that even as discouraged as they are, they are still more effective teachers than their younger cohorts. I do not purport to know what the answer is. At the present, I am discouraged at my own school for a number of reasons. Not with my students - who, I feel (with one or two exceptions) come in each day that I have them ready to learn and willing to do what I ask of them. It is all the other stuff - administrative bull crap - that wears one down. I am trying to adopt the mantra of closing my door each day after the class enters (both figurateively and literally) as a way of clearing my mind of any negativity that I might have so that I can concentrate on what is really the reason why I teach - to encourage young minds to be open to the possibilities of the world before them by a rigorous study of the past. I want them to be able to smell in their minds a medieval fair; I want them to trmeble as they read the 95 Theses as they contemplate how such a document could shake the world; I want them to walk in the shoes of those Germans who defied the Nazis and helped their fellow citizens escape the fate that the government had planned for them; I want them to question if other choices, better or worse were present at each stage in the unfolding of history. That is what I try to do - some days I am more successful than others - and each day brings with it a time of soul searching - what workd, what did not - why or why not, what could have been done better? That is part of the teaching process as well and a teacher who fails to engage in that aspect, fails as a teacher. So yes, my actual class time, as Tom E. put it is only 4 and 1/2 hours - but that is just the performance aspect of teaching - there are many hours each day both before and after that one must do as well. That is why teaching, unlike being a plant manager, a nurse, or any of a number of other worthy and honorable professions, is all consuming if done as it should be. Edited by cks, Feb 25 2010, 05:05 PM.
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| Joan Foster | Feb 25 2010, 04:58 PM Post #18 |
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Beautifully said, Cks. I should also add...I loved subbing. I loved teaching. I have framed upstairs drawings from long ago that kids made for me when I left one long term temp position. When you make that connection, see their excitement, see the LEARNING...it's such a high. I should have been honest enough in that post to say I've known some superb teachers....because I have. |
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| Joan Foster | Feb 26 2010, 08:00 AM Post #19 |
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Last night I blogged about the Rhode Island school district that got up the courage to fire their teachers' union. Unfortunately, reform isn't going as well in my town. The NY Times has a surprisingly fair article this week about the near-impossibility of firing an NYC public school teacher: n the two years since the Education Department began an intensive effort to root out such teachers from the more than 55,000 who have tenure, officials have managed to fire only three for incompetence. Ten others whom the department charged with incompetence settled their cases by resigning or retiring. It's not as though the city hasn't tried. The city’s effort includes eight full-time lawyers, known as the Teacher Performance Unit, and eight retired principals and administrators who serve as part-time consultants to help principals build cases against teachers. Joel I. Klein, the schools chancellor, said that the team, whose annual budget is $1 million, had been “successful at a far too modest level.” So it took 16 lawyers/administrators two years to get rid of 13 teachers. Practices that would immediately bankrupt a private company are considered normal for the public sector. If were continue to grow the public sector, we are indeed on a Road to Serfdom. The teachers’ union claims principal could fire bad teachers if they just followed the steps required. But that’s disingenuous. On my last FBN show I displayed the pages of steps required. [Video here.] One teacher that the city wants to fire is Michael Ebewo. During an inspection of his classroom, the principal found: "a chart with misspellings and unclear instructions,"... "students students staring into space and doodling rather than completing their worksheet, which contained questions that the students, who were in special education, had difficulty understanding. Rather than pressing the students for answers, Mr. Ebewo simply answered himself, making the students only more confused." At Ebewo's latest hearing: Mr. Ebewo’s lawyer interrupted with objections more than two dozen times, but the arbitrator overruled him in nearly every instance. The hearing, which covered lessons dating to 2005, lasted four hours... the hearing will probably go on for months, because of a rule the city agreed to four years ago. You'd think that since it's so hard to fire a tenured teacher, schools would be careful about who they give lifetime jobs. You'd be wrong. Last year, 93 percent of eligible teachers obtained tenure after the end of their three-year probationary periods. After all, it's your money the schools are spending. Read more: http://stossel.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2010/02/25/impossible-to-fire-teachers/#ixzz0ge8zqIVD |
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| cks | Feb 28 2010, 12:28 PM Post #20 |
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The problem with getting rid of teachers (and believe me, there are many who should not be teaching) is a combination of things. Of course, in those systems (public) that have unions, there is the whole procedure that was put in place, added to, and made terribly expensive to boot that to be honest defeats almost all attempts to get rid of incompetents. I can sympathize to this extent - you would be surprised at the number of parents who feel that a teacher should be fired (and agitate to that end) if their child does not get the grade (forget about learning the material) that they think their little darling should. Teachers need to be protected against such attempts. Additionally, administrators do not (in my opinion) really have a handle on what their teachers are doing in the classroom. I have been teaching at my current school for seven years. The total time that I have been observed is twice (for fifteen minute total each time). No one really asks me what I am doing. THe only thing that the administration seems to be concerned with is whether I have posted grades each week. No one has ever engaged me about how I am approaching a specific topic - my philosophy about grading, etc. Now, I hear from the guidance counselors at the beginning of each school year how I am so difficult - they have students trying to drop down from my class to a lower level (they believe that they will not have to work as hard - however my colleague and I are adamant that while the level at which we teach may be different, the amount of work - reading, writing, and study - is still the same and we both are teachers who believe that the student does not get an A jsut because he/she shows up for class. In fact, we hold strong to the belief that a C demonstrates competency, not an A. If an A is your desire, then you will have to work, and work hard. But, that is as much feedback as I get. This is more often the case than not. How can one legitiamately get rid of a teacher when there has been no observation - or, when the observation deos occur, it is so short in duration that nothing measurable can be determined? I do not know what the answer is in this regard - administrators should be out of their offices and observing what is really happeneing in their schools. That would be a good first step. There should be a culture of learnng instilled in a school - teachers whould be hired who have a strong competency in the subjects that they teach - rather than just being a warm body. Teachers should be hired - not coaches who can be funnelled into a class to sit behind a desk. Administrators should make it clear that there are standards and they want those upheld. However, given that way too often those who serve as administrators are those same teachers who either hated to teach or were not very god at it, we have a situation wehre too often the foxes are guarding the hen house. |
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