What in the fresh hell, another ‘viral’ teacher resignation?
The viral Facebook post follows the same narrative. A teacher leaves her district by and large because of the following:
Like many other teachers across the nation, I have become more and more disturbed by the misguided reforms taking place which are robbing my students of a developmentally appropriate education.
Teachers like myself, especially those in early childhood, have felt the same frustrations, but can’t/won’t simply quit in the middle of the school year. I can also state, with confidence, that developmentally appropriate teaching is possible, even in this reform climate, but with some caveats. You will meet resistance and will get frustrated. Yet, nothing worthwhile comes easy.
I recall during a district wide PD with every K teacher in the city present, I declared, with audible gasps, that my students have almost an hour of free play every school day. We get back from our special class at 2:15. Typically, depending on the day and general mood, we do some silent or partner reading for 15 minutes. I then go over to the board and draw a box, the numbers 1-4 at the top and four or five choices on the left. Yesterday, the choices were tablets (pre-loaded with some good apps), the sand table, playhouse (built with PVC pipes and replete with a kitchen), blocks, and legos. The legos closed quickly because we just got a series of Star Wars figures in the mail. I limit each area to four students, and we draw names at random.
I’m not saying that free play, or choice time, is all that matters for developmentally appropriate practice. What I’ve explained above doesn’t take a lot of effort either, although it does take some additional money on my part to fund these activities. There’s no money in school budgets for dress up clothes, play-doh, and What in the fresh hell, another ‘viral’ teacher resignation? | @ THE CHALKFACE:
Looks like we’re going to use “early warning” data, something new to me. Although, it’s a new title, but relatively old concept of trying to use BIG DATA to solve all of our problems.
I’m looking some things up, but a very preliminary Google Scholar search was kind of funny to me. Searching for “early warning systems education data” brought up entries on West Nile Virus and natural disasters. This is how we talk about education nowadays.
This is also funny/interesting. Absenteeism data is apparently one of the risk factors identified as an early indicator of dropping out of high school. It can also be used to identify a potential outbreak of disease. Who knew?
