A description of teacher training days that made me laugh and cry.

[madfloridian]

Laugh because of the absurdity of treating professionals like children, even to timing their bathroom breaks during a 7-hour conference.

Cry because I remember so many training days, we called them in-service, that were so similar and so lacking in real content.

From a blog called A Phillie Teacher.

I especially have empathy with the statement at the top of the blog.

"I was a starry-eyed teacher from New Jersey. Now I work for Philadelphia Public Schools."

A Week of PD (professional development

Workshop Format:

* They read every word of every slide to us.

* Every video clip showed irrelevant elementary classrooms and teachers in nice suburban settings. We teach in poor urban high schools.

* We were forbidden to even *look* at our cell phones.

* There was only one break in our 7 hour day, and that is at lunch.

* Bathroom breaks were noted, including the length of time a person took away from training.

And more about Day One:

Day One’s agenda:

Morning: How to arrange desks in your classroom – I kid you not. All morning. First there was a lecture (with brief, irrelevant videos of elementary school classrooms) illustrating various seating choices such as rows vs groups vs semi-circle. Then each group was given large pieces of paper to draw our ideal setups. One by one each group “reported out.” Finally we were subjected to a PowerPoint that restated everything we already covered. Presenter read every. single. word.

Afternoon: Classroom procedures, including how to manage student use of pencil sharpener and Time Outs for students who misbehave. (yes they knew we are high school teachers. They didn’t care. One size fits all!)

If we disagreed with a particular point, we were told we were wrong.

In short, this was awful. I am angry, resentful, bored and tired of being patronized.

Teaching high school teachers with experience how to arrange classroom desks. Reading every. single. word. when it was over.

It is ridiculous they were covering pencil-sharpening 101.

But then those who do the training are not held accountable....the teachers surely are.

[knitter4democracy]

1. Ah. PD. The worst part of the job, hands-down.

The worst one last year was an hour and a half on the differences between evidence-based education and research-based education and how very much better research-based education was (she didn't seem to handle it well when I pointed out that research is based on evidence and that doctors use the term evidence-based instead). We were put into groups to "look up" research from a handout and apply it to our classes--problem was, we're an alternative high school, and the research didn't apply. At the end of the entire thing, she admitted that there's almost no real research into alternative ed at all. :eyes:

Rarely, PD actually gives you a good idea or something you can use after tweaking. At worst, you seriously start considering stabbing your eyes out.

[Fearless]

4. Sadest thing is that there's so much poential...

And so little actualized.

[knitter4democracy]

65. That's what gets me grumpy every time.

I get my hopes up, thinking this one sounds like it might be good only to realize it's the same dreck that didn't work last time with a new name.

What I find odd is that the conventions almost always have great sessions with good ideas. Why can't school-level PD be that good? What would be wrong with having us all sit with a given topic and share our best ideas?

[Fearless]

76. There's nothing wrong with it.

But too often I think that administrators are afraid of those kinds of discussion. Maybe they're afraid of being blamed. I don't know.

[MadHound]

6. Ah, a use for pencil sharpening 101, eye stabbing.

:evilgrin:

[bertman]

23. Heh heh!! Nice one, MadHound.

:7

[Posteritatis]

28. Okay, I've been rendered curious...

How did they define "evidence-based" and "research-based" education?

[knitter4democracy]

67. Oh, this one's good!

Evidence-based education is only based on raw data or on a study or two, while research-based education is based on a study or two and data from something published. It's so much better, can't you see! :silly:

When she started saying doctors had gone to this instead of practicing as they'd been taught, that's when I spoke up. My ex is a doctor (I helped him get through med school, residency, and his first two jobs after that), and I knew they use the term "Evidence-based medicine" and wouldn't make a distinction between research-based and evidence-based, as they're the same thing. She couldn't answer me, and the science teacher in my group thanked me for saying something, as she was about to blow herself.

[Posteritatis]

77. I think their definitions caused me to lose IQ points. (nt)

[RayOfHope]

34. Not always! Our district has some fabulous PD. We love it n/t

[knitter4democracy]

68. We're in AYP trouble, so ours is being done by a team of consultants.

Frankly, the PD's been awful. I wish they'd just let us do more group work and work together instead of sitting and listening to these people tell us how to teach in research-approved ways when the same research says those ways don't work in alternative schools.

[RayOfHope]

72. We are in huge AYP doo doo, however the state wiped our slate clean, so to speak

previously our district had attendance centers (we have about 4800 students k-12). All of preK and K was in one building, all sections of first and second were in another building, third and fourth grade in another building, and fourth and fifth grade in yet another. The kids were switching buildings every two years. This does not bode well for MAP scores, because our subgroups for each grade were all in one building, so their numbers were bigger which put their scores into the big pot instead of keeping them separate.

This year we reconfigured all those elementary buildings into k-5 neighborhood schools which quite frankly was a bitch. HUGE undertaking. Because of that, even though we are officially in School Improvement, the Powers That Be are giving us a break.

[MadHound]

2. Wow, that's just sad.

You don't treat college students taking their first practicums like that, much less experienced teachers.

[maryf]

3. K&R what a waste of time and money

thanks for the laugh at the ridiculousness; I've been there too often. Our district finally is giving us more time for prepping in our classrooms or with our departments on Inservice days...sadly because I think they are saving money, not because it really is more practical...

[mrmpa]

5. I hate freaking PD and in service days

I get called out all the time. I refuse to partake in "games" and simulated programs. I once was asked to write down my thoughts about something the trainer was talking about. I called out "I can't, my brain is numb from your rambling".

[proud2BlibKansan]

7. We had a convocation and each school had to do a cheer

And of course the news media was there to capture the whole thing on film.

Then we had an inservice on our new reading program where we were taught to read the teachers manual. An entire day on reading a manual.

Leave me alone and let me prep my classroom. Please. :)

[madfloridian]

9. lol we had pep rallies for the FCAT. Press was there to record it.

We all felt like fools.

[southerncrone]

13. Amen. Let us work in our rooms ACTUALLY preparing for TEACHING!

The education system has reached the Tipping Point of the Peter Principle. The weakest minds are now running the show.....running it right off a cliff.

Most of our administrators have been out of the classroom so long they have NO IDEA what it is like to teach in today's classrooms. The demographics of our society have changed enormously in just the past few years, then add on NCLB/RTT & you end up w/ a mess. Most of these "well-paid presenters" have also been out of the classroom for a long time. Most of ours are "administrators" who "turned poorly performing schools around". Sorry, but they didn't do it alone. Our admin sees one of these presenters at THEIR conferences (where they belong) & instead of taking their ideas & putting them in action at the admin level, they have them talk to us. (Guess they think that will make everything wonderful.) We have no control of making these changes & if they do make changes at their level it is so mismanaged it just sends the school into turmoil & chaos.
Our current super wants to try everything he hears about RIGHT NOW! Too dumb to understand that schools w/over 1500 students can't turn on a dime.

Throwing good $ after bad. Money that we need IN the schools....repairing broken bathrooms, buying books, etc.

I'm going to give TERRIBLE reviews on every one of the stupid presenters we have. Maybe they will stop getting them. You can't help but wonder if there aren't kick-backs going on.

This profession insults it's members more than any other. Why do we allow it to continue?

[Ishoutandscream2]

42. Our convocation last year - the speaker was Laura Bush

I was incensed, and refused to go. No one dared try to force me to go. They knew better.

[proud2BlibKansan]

49. OMG Laura the pretend teacher/librarian.

That's so insulting.

[Ishoutandscream2]

54. Yep. Representative Ralph Hall (R-Bushbot) introduced her

He mentioned how the "liberal media" had trashed her husband. Her talk was totally non-political, however.

I didn't attend, refused to. I was told this by some fellow lefties who attended. One told me she had to do everything possible not to storm out.

[LWolf]

8. Coming up next week:

We'll spend most of the day in a staff meeting, at which we will go through the school handbook one page at a time, and it will be read to us word for word.

This is a binder that includes all school policies, schedules, maps, duties, etc..

We will also have trainings on the copy machine AND the telephone.

We will meet with our sped teachers to go over all IEPs and 504s. We'll meet with speech and ell teachers to discuss every student who gets those services. Various school committees will meet. We will have our usual "back to school" session to meet with parents and students before the first day of school.

I will meet with my student teacher. I'll meet with that st's supervisor. I'll meet with the SSC, with our instructional coach, and with our CLC coordinator. I'll also meet with our PBS committee, with a district employee to discuss what we're doing this year with proficiency-based grading and reporting, with our district's TAG coordinators, with our new PE teacher, and with my teaching team.

Any actual lesson planning, for the year or just for the first week, will happen before the start of the work day, or after the end of the work day.

That's the only time they leave me.

Still, they cut two days of district meetings out of our contract to save money, so I'll spend 2 fewer days a captive audience than usual.

[SoCalDem]

10. My friend's first day on the job would make an opening scene in a comedy

She was a special ed teacher & on her first day, they were decorating the classroom. She was introduced to the class & they all liked her:)

She was a very small young woman and was having difficulty with the aluminum ladder needed to hang stuff from the drop ceiling.

She was moving the ladder when the maintenance guy showed up to help her.. as she handed off the ladder to him, she hit a kid in the head with the ladder & knocked him out of his WHEELCHAIR..

she was horrified & started to cry and all the kids were laughing their asses off..including the little boy who was the "knockee"..

She taught in PA for 35 years:)

[madfloridian]

11. Great story. Thanks for sharing.

I had mixed feeling about decorating rooms. I usually loved it, until one year I had 5 huge bulletin boards to decorate. We would go a few hours a day before school started to get it done. I hated hanging stuff from the ceiling...

[roody]

12. The presenters are probably well-paid.

[lolly]

14. I was just going to say that

Probably much more than the teachers.

They make the rounds of school districts teaching this crap.

4-5 years from now, they'll be back teaching something entirely different (probably a switch from "research based" to "evidence based").

Plus a whole new pile of buzzwords and new powerpoint slides.

[madfloridian]

16. We used to complain about our in-service presenters...

Once we worked up a petition to the school board. They said it was out of their hands. No one would take responsibility for the childish presentations that we were forced to sit through.

[Odin2005]

33. smells like corruption to me.

[Bucky]

46. Presenters are "consultants". About 1 out of 5 is worth the time.

A second one in five gives us something to learn from, but take too damn long getting their point across.
The remaining 60% are certainly a waste of time.

In all my years of PD, I've never had an experience as bad as what the article presents. But there have been some real groaners.

[madfloridian]

15. .....

When I added this to my journal just now I could see it said <0 recs.

How absurd really. It's not that much of a post, not that big a deal to anyone but teachers.

<0??

[lolly]

20. Big deal to the companies that make $ off of it

It's a racket, IMHO.

Like those inspirational speakers that come to businesses--these folks are pulling in big bucks to "turn schools around" or "revitalize your business environment" or whatever.

[MurrayDelph]

17. It brings back memories, and reminds me of why

even though I am currently unemployed, going back into education is NOT an option I want to pursue.

32 years ago, I had just the one Monday afternoon to get my classroom ready for the first day of school the next day, when the PA system rings to tell me that there is a new-hire orientation across starting in 30 minutes at a location that is 25 minutes away. I tell the office manager "It's a shame you didn't find me to give me that message."

Some time the next year, the principal, in order to have items in his calendar, schedules and "In-service" where he wants the K-3 teachers (which included me) to tell the 4-6 ones how we teach beginning reading skills, since they work in remedial skills. I question this since, to the best of my knowledge, the 4-6 teachers also had to go to college to become teachers. This is when he admits that it is just calendar filler to make himself look good. I tell him I stand behind the kids with a cattle prod and yell "Read, dammit!"

When I left public school teaching, I spent 16 years in industrial education. Near the end of my tenure for a computer training company, they brought us all in from around the country to try to instruct is in "Effective teaching skills," which included emphasis on the wool content of our trousers, as well as the correct choices for eyeglasses (contacts preferred), jewelry (no metal-banded watches) and facial hair (beards allowed only to cover imperfections; which several of us pointed out that what they considered an imperfection, we considered our faces!).

All of this reminds me that while I do not subscribe to the old adage of "Those that can, do" I DO believe that those that can't teach try to tell teachers how to do their job.

[burnsei sensei]

18. Free teachers.

If you free teachers to do their jobs, then you will have the best educational system in the world.
The weak ones will winnow out in a system that demands more of them professionally.
We live in such faithless, graceless times.

[Jakes Progress]

21. That's what we had.

The best system in the world. Then ronnie and his ed guy, bennet, told everyone that schools were failing. A huge lie. It took a while, but with the help of MSM and a gullible public, they decided that the school system that was the envy of the world, was failing. Then the corporate neo cons developed crap tests that were designed to show failure and never attempt to measure anything meaningful. Again the gullible public ate it up. Must be those nasty teachers that used to catch me in the bathroom smoking. Gotta fire them. First we narrow curriculum to nothing but the test. Then we bust up the unions that would keep us from firing teachers who wanted to teach rather than do test prep. And here we are. Now we have a Democratic president who has fallen for the sales job of a neo con in Chicago clothing. So we have Race to the Bottom, the end of public education, brought to you courtesy of the Democratic party.

People like to say that if you are upset with Obama, you have to imagine how bad it would be under mccain. Trouble is, if mccain had tried this crap, the Democrats would have stopped it dead. Without Obama, ronald reagan's dream, grover norquist's scheme, and bill bennet's scam wouldn't have worked.

[lolly]

24. Good new ideas are always welcome

Education research has produced some great new principles for teaching, especially recently in fields like Math. And research into how children learn to read and decode can translate into better classroom practices.

But that's not at all what they're doing. They're just repackaging slick pseudo-ideas in shiny new forms every few years.

[Iwillnevergiveup]

19. For me, faculty meetings

were as bizarre as in-services. At a middle school where I taught for 10 years, the principals always provided those crappy Costco danishes. But I know I phenomenally increased one of my skill sets during those times: surreptiously note-writing to other teachers.

:evilgrin:

[southerncrone]

61. You mean you got food at faculty meetings?!?!

Lucky! We just get a load of boring BS.

[knitter4democracy]

69. I hated the year I was in a school where we couldn't bring grading.

We'd sit there for hours after school while the same few argued with each other and the rest of us passed notes on how bored we were or made lists of what we needed to get done.

I will never forget the two hour screaming match over uniform code changes. If I could have left, I would have.

[proud2BlibKansan]

73. A New York teacher told me about something they did in a meeting

Their contract calls for no meetings during planning time but their principal called them anyway. So all the teachers went to her meeting and sat there grading papers. They were quiet and just sat there, working on what they normally worked on during planning time.

He said that was the last meeting this principal called during their planning time.

[bertman]

22. It's a sad commentary on the state of 1) our estimation of the intelligence of

our fellow citizens, 2) the literacy rate among our teaches, 3) the mental level of the instructors who use those PowerPoint presentation.

The Reading-of-the-Slides disease is epidemic in America. It's not just teachers who get trained that way. It's everybody. It's disgusting and degrading and should never be tolerated unless it's in a class for the illiterate.

How do these "instructors" get away with this shit?

Rec.

[lolly]

25. Powerpoint brings on the stupid

I think somebody on here posted this earlier--a discussion of how Powerpoint's method of packaging information degrades and distorts it, while boring people to death in the process:

http://www.create.ucsb.edu/~matt/Tufte_Cognitive_Style_PowerPoint.pdf

[AngryOldDem]

63. I so agree with you.

I went back to a community college after being out of school for some years, taking generally personal interest classes. I was shocked and dismayed at the number of instructors who used PowerPoint as their **only** teaching tools. They didn't vary one iota from the script, and even acted lost if they had to go off that script. Some even copied their presentations, bound them, and sold them for their own profit as "study guides".

PowerPoint, if used responsibly, has its place. But more often than not, it's a lazy way to teach.

(But I do admit to paying close attention to the slide numbers at the bottom of the screen -- it was a good way to gauge how much more hell I had to sit through.)

[Versailles]

26. One of the many reasons I left education....

Never failed that I'd be the one that would piss off the presenters/administrators by pointing out the flaws in their management and the situations where it just didn't work. The irony is, that for all their talk of managing a classroom, they couldn't manage the one teacher who called them on their BS. So glad I don't have to put up with that crap anymore...now I work for the Air Force where bureaucracy and time and money wasting is expected...but at least I don't have to go through in-service trainings.

[madfloridian]

27. lol well said.

I remember once a fellow teacher and I spoke about the ludicrous presentation...after all they asked for feedback at the end. We were polite, but said that is was not appropriate to present this kind of stuff to teachers who had been in classrooms for years. I think we had spent over an hour role-playing a word game of some sort like moving human scrabble letters. Good idea, but an easy concept to use with kids. We said we thought that could have been presented briefly, and other teacher said that way we would have time to work in our classrooms to get ready for the students.

Our principal did not like it and let us know it later. :evilgrin:

They have always managed to insult our intelligence by keeping us in our proper places.

[roguevalley]

29. we usually had two days of this led by our psychotic admin.

that is why I retired. I cannot tell you how hard it is not to gun down a fat slob reading off transparencies about everything including hazard training you hard EVERY. SINGLE. YEAR. Same. TRANSPARENCIES. SAME. PRESENTATIONS. FOR. THIRTY. YEARS.

Did I say I wanna shoot someone?

[perdita9]

30. The Mark of a Bad Principal

It's the principal who sets these things up. Good principals will look for relevant topics to be present during in service days; bad principals are just trying to check off a state requirement.

[Odin2005]

31. That sounds like most "team building" meetings. PATRONIZING WASTE OF FUCKING TIME

It sounds like the crap that goes on at our meetings at work every Tuesday. :banghead:

[lolly]

59. Anybody remember "Quality Circles?"

That was all the rage when I was in a business environment 25 years ago.

What's the latest business environment enhancement garbage these days?

[Orsino]

32. Filling air time with unctious nonsense.

Like cable news.

[Daphne08]

35. Complete waste of time! n/t

[Jakes Progress]

36. Don't know why they need training to pass out worksheets

that are just test prep. That is what education will be reduced to now.

[truedelphi]

37. When my son was in fourth grade, he had the worst teacher in the world.

But the school district refused to get rid of her, because she constantly attended, voluntarily, these types of training sessions.

My son was an honors student, and he got all "A's"

Yet he was terrified of this teacher. Despite my having a corporate, nine to five job,with few sick days, etc, I had to spend 45 minutes each morning convincing him that she would be nicer to him today than she was before.

At the very end of the school year, I heard two of his classmate's Moms discussing this teacher. I went over to the grocery aisle they were standing in, to find out from them that they were holding weekly parent's group, that met to discuss how to get their kids through the school year with Ms. Scary as the teacher.

I was not invited, because "After all, your son has an excellent report card, and we didn't think she bothered him." But almost every other classmate had one parent in attendance at some of the meetings.

Even with all this clamor from so many parents - the District HQ's people liked this teacher and praised her for "going the extra mile and attending conferences."

[lolly]

38. Anybody here from LAUSD remember LEARN?

I don't remember what the acronym stood for, but the premise was that teachers, parents, and even community members would all share "stakeholder" status and work together to run the schools.

In practice, the whole thing consisted of dragging parents who wanted to help at their kids' schools into these things.

Many of us volunteered thinking we would start getting a say in things that had always been controlled by administrators. To qualify, we had to go to things like "leadership style workshops," where we played games to find out if we were "orange square" type leaders or "green circle" leaders--etc. etc.

Early in the process, they announced a meeting for parents who wanted to focus the school on its new direction. It was a long meeting--something like 3 hours--but about 60 of us who really wanted to see the school improve came.

It turns out the whole meeting was spent coming up with a "mission statement." We soon learned that anything specific about improving math instruction or improving the classrooms was not "mission directed" but "program directed," or something like that. We filled up a dozen flipcharts with suggestions, and then the "facilitators" chose the best ones, and the whole process yielded a piece of gibberish about "helping students meet real-world challenges with real-world tools for learning . . . " etc etc. It's still printed on the masthead to the school's stationery 15 years later, but has had absolutely no effect on anything in the school (how could it? it doesn't mean anything!)

[Catshrink]

39. Last week, one of our district's sped specialists

sent me an email telling me what I needed to do to meet the needs of one students out of 33 in a class. I teach high school, her suggestions were appropriate for the lower elementary grades. She has no clue about high school kids or a high school class or the methodology we use in my content area. I told her to stuff it, but very politely, and inundated her with research about our method of instruction. Haven't heard a word.

Oh, and when she did the district presentation on sped requirements, she read the fucking slides to us -- and we had copies of the powerpoint presentation in the little folders she made up for us with little decorations on them. I fully expected to see hearts when I opened the cover. There's a reason I don't teach elementary school....

[lolly]

43. What, no heart stamps?

Well, I hope you at least got some smiley faces!

People keep mentioning that presenters always read slides to them.

The problem is--what else do you do when you show those powerpoint things?

There's very little actual information, and the stock pictures most of them use don't really convey anything.

So, to justify having everybody there (as opposed to just handing them a booklet with the necessary info) they HAVE to read everything aloud.

Of course, the other thing they could do is have everybody play a game, so it could be worse.

[Catshrink]

44. And the print was really really tiny and filled up all the space on the slide.

A very poor presentation

I do use powerpoint in class occasionally but only bullet points, I embellish a lot, and show diagrams, photos, etc. Oh, and a few animations to keep the kids awake. I don't do it often -- the PowerPoints have their place.

[lolly]

60. They're a good slide show organizer

They help you organize and present relevant slides to enhance your presentation.

But when they're the whole presentation, they get silly.

When I get into one of those deals where we watch while they reveal and read the whole time, I just wish they would hand me the printout and let me go and read it on my own time.

[proud2BlibKansan]

48. I've been to lots of training where real teachers were the presenters

and they passed out a power point and actually taught from it. We talked in groups, we added items to slides, we discussed how we had experienced this very example in our classrooms.

There are many ways to be creative with a power point demonstration. But presenters who don't actually teach for a living usually don't have a clue.

[Catshrink]

52. Amen to that!

PowerPoint is a tool - it doesn't replace teaching. This person who did ours hasn't taught in years.

[proud2BlibKansan]

58. We had an outstanding PD session yesterday

It was led by a teacher. The textbook company hired her to do a refresher presentation on our Math program, which we have had for several years and don't really need to learn how to use. This woman was outstanding. She brought in Writing and Reading and connected those subjects to Math. She talked about our new curriculum and how well our Math series fits in. And even though she was working for the publisher, she understood that instruction is driven by curriculum, not by a textbook.

I had been volunteered to be a facilitator in her session and had reluctantly agreed. I said I could only do it for a half a day because I was behind in setting up my classroom. (School starts Monday.) But at the end of her session, I wanted to stay for the afternoon. She was that good.

[Catshrink]

40. Consultants - in education and otherwise

http://www.despair.com/consulting.html

[Swamp Rat]

41. k&r

[DRoseDARs]

45. I always wondered what teachers did for fun...

Slamming your head into the table to dull the pain of "professional development" sounds, er, delightful.

[proud2BlibKansan]

50. Actually some of us come here and hang out for fun.

:)

[Dinger]

47. K & R

Sad, just sad.

[northofdenali]

51. What ever happened to teaching?

[Catshrink]

53. You mean that thing I do every day?

Believe me, if I were left alone to teach without most of the administrative crap they throw at us, I'd be the best teacher in the world. As it is, I'm damn good but there are only so many hours in the day. I could reach more kids if I had a few fewer of them, but I get up every day determined to do the best I can despite the obstacles the bureaucrats put in my way.

[proud2BlibKansan]

56. Ain't that the truth??

Whenever anyone comments that my job must be stressful I tell them yes but the stress comes from the grownups, not the kids.

[chervilant]

62. hmm...

I'm right there with you. And, yes, there are many more of us working our tushies off to TEACH.

We teachers will continue to teach in the face of almost insurmountable obstacles.

Furthermore, we teachers seldom take time to whinge, so this post provides a sanity check (no, I'm not crazy--it truly IS that bad everywhere).

[BrklynLiberal]

55. WNYC had an interestng show this AM - "Retesting Teachers"

http://beta.wnyc.org/shows/american-radioworks/2010/aug/28/

Kids need good teachers. It's something people know in their gut, but it's only recently that researchers have begun developing ways to measure the quality of teachers. What they're learning is shaking up schools and leading education reformers to call for radical changes in the way teachers are trained and evaluated - and the way they are hired and fired too. This documentary will take us to some of the nation's poorest schools to understand why teacher quality is fast becoming the next frontier in the fight to equalize educational opportunity in the United States.

some interesting things said about the DC system and the Michelle Rhee..not all complimentary.

[proud2BlibKansan]

57. Which documentary is this referring to?

There are several just coming out that slam teachers.

[Sparkly]

64. I have a theory about lack of respect for teachers being rooted in sexism.

Yes, sexism. It's just a theory, lest anybody get upset!!

When I was in elementary school, which wasn't all THAT long ago, teachers were nearly all women, and principals were all men. The work of raising children -- including teaching them -- was considered "women's work." And "women's work" was secondary, even seen as something for "pin money."

(In fact, when teachers asked what we wanted to be when we grew up, they only asked the boys. Girls knew, however, that we could be secretaries, nurses, teachers, or ballerinas, but it was more likely we'd just be "nothing," meaning wives and mothers.)

Some of that's changed, of course; but it's not gone entirely. It still happens that TV ads show women, not men, doing cooking, cleaning, and child care; and in the real world, I suspect more women than men are K-12 teachers (although not in higher ed); and more important, the further away from the classroom you look, from the school's administration to the state dept. of ed to federal dept of ed., the more power there is to decide and mandate what happens IN the classroom. That is at LEAST a left-over from the days when men were telling women what to do. The relationship between male doctor and female nurse, male boss and female secretary, male "head of household" and female "housewife," was the same model as male principal and female teacher. The little woman must be told what to do, what not to do, etc.

On top of that, more recently, the powers that be (in administration and politics) of either gender need to cover their butts when students aren't succeeding in school. Surely it's not about the lives the children have out of school -- nothing to do with socio-economic issues or the fact that the kid's community is a drug-infested high crime ruin or that their parents can barely feed them and can't be home when they return from school etc. etc -- NO, it must be the teachers!!!

It's like a factory manufacturing widgets, and along the assembly line the hammers are missing the nails and smashing the widget on all sides, the joints are barely holding together, it's off-balance and falling apart but at the last stage, when the widget is supposed to get painted red, it falls apart -- so everybody yells that there's something wrong with the painting process. (Does that make sense?)

Anyway, just my two cents. I've been in schools where they rationed CHALK from the teachers, as if they were going to abuse the chalk somehow!! It's just infuriating.

:rant:

[Stinky The Clown]

66. You're clueless

Do you have any IDEA what chalk sells for on eBay these days?

DO YOU?????



:banghead: :grr: :spank:

[madfloridian]

70. lol

No fighting, now. :rofl:

[proud2BlibKansan]

74. Actually I believe her

The way they ration supplies this doesn't surprise me at all. I also doubt any of our administrators buy stuff on ebay for us. LOL

[Catshrink]

71. We had a presentation by the district lawyer about sped

All the regs, parents' rights, kids' rights, etc. and what would happen if we didn't follow the IEP to the fucking letter. This year our class sizes have increased by 20-30% but we're suppoed to follow that IEP - even if it means not teaching the other 35-40 kids in the class. What if a teacher has more than one sped kid in a class and the accommodations "conflict?" What if a student needs to have a test read to him or her, when is the teacher supposed to do that? Stop the class and read to that one student? Read the test to that one kid while the rest try to concentrate (and who is proctoring to be sure the kids aren't cheating?)? The sped department says yes, implying that they only students who matter are those with IEPs.

The lawyer threw out a couple of lines about judges understanding the burdens teachers face but still, if we don't follow the IEP - even though the district's overcrowding make it impossible to do so - we're gonna get sued.

Now the sped department has been militarized and has been demanding the unreasonable and teachers are rebelling. One said, "Well call your lawyers and sue me." Caught in the middle of course are the kids who need help and we want to help them but also have 35+ other students who need our attention. What do we do? The situation is untenable and going to get worse as the Legislature cuts even more education funding - which means fewer teachers and more overcrowding. One solution is to force charter schools to accept their share of sped students instead of turning a blind eye to their exclusion. But that won't happen here when many Legislators either own charter schools or have families who do or sit on their boards.

We're screwn.

[LostInAnomie]

75. That's one reaaon I'm glad I got out of teaching.

The district I was in was out of control. Nepotism ran wild, resources were incredibly short, and adminstrators were either underhanded, vindictive, or impotent. Add to that, the fact that my school had a near 25% IEP rate and it was a virtual breeding ground for lawsuits. A group of fellow teachers and I were talking to a lawyer that gave a presentation on SPED law once and we explained our situation to him. His basic advice was to either find a new school district or a new profession because a lawsuit against one of us for not following a student's IEP to the letter was imminent. I was laid off the next year because of budget cut-backs (but amazingly they found money in the budget to hire one of sons of a district pricipal) and within the next two months of the following school year one of the people that talked to the lawyer with me was sued by a parent of a child with an IEP.

I miss teaching a lot, but it's not worth it anymore.

[Javaman]

78. "They read every word of every slide to us."

I can't even begin to tell you how much I hate that.

I work in an office of "professionals" yet when they give a power point slide presentation, the presenter insists on reading every freaking slide.

This is my #1 reason why I think power point presentations are completely useless.

All they do is present pretty pictures. They add nothing to the discussion and prevent conversation and or discussion of the topic.

No one instructs, they simply talk at you. It's so obvious that they are doing what ever they can to just get through the material.

ugh.