When is enough, really enough?
This has been quite a year for me (and for a number of fellow teachers and other co-workers) and for the Far Northeast Community in Denver where I work. Sometimes things happen in our lives that cause profound ripples of change within. I have been through a painful metamorphosis of my own over the past year and on this end of it I can honestly say that I will not ever take, or silently remain in a job where I am expected to drill and kill kids on mere skills in the name of improving scores or improving things for kids in low SES schools. I refuse to play along. As a nation, we have spent the years since 1997 doing just that and my unease about and resistance to skills based, teacher directed approaches as a new teacher have solidified with my own experience, education and the steady (yet insistently ignored) data that demonstrate that w