This Week in My Career
By: Patte Carter-Hevia
A couple of days ago, I was talking to a union official about my teaching assignment, Life Skills, with a decision to emphasize leadership. I teach in a leadership academy that for years has not taught a leadership class. When presented with the opportunity to teach Life Skills again, I jumped at it. The focus of leadership has been in my brain for years.
This person asked me about my curriculum. I told him there wasn’t one as far as I knew.. He said it was problematic. He talked about instructional council. Getting something approved could take over a year. There was an approval process that involved reviewing the curriculum and the teaching materials to make sure that no copyright laws were being violated, a budget, a pre- and post-test for teacher-evaluation purposes.
I get it.
Sort of.
I’m the teacher who for years has used toothpaste to teach my kids that their words matter so choose them carefully. I’m the teacher who was moved to Track 3 (minimally effective), accused of stealing instructional time from students last year, and placed on an improvement plan for teaching that lesson in these days of high-stakes testing. I had to scratch and crawl to be rated effective at the end of the school year.
I have been teaching Life Skills on and off for years. I have never been given curriculum. I have never been given teaching materials. I have never been given a budget. To be honest, I never asked. I don’t want to be scripted or pigeon-holed by someone else’s definition of Life Skills and Leadership.. As long as I have been teaching I have considered lesson planning (what materials to use, how to use them, what to say, how to evaluate student learning) to be part of my job. Standardized sucks the life out of authentic teaching and authentic learning.
I scavenge. I find. I develop. I buy. People who know I spend my own money and who believe in what I do help me when they can.
I teach.
Students learn.
I am a work in progress, even after over thirty years working in education, twenty-five of them as a certified teacher. So are my students.
How do you measure self-esteem? Self-confidence? Responsibility? Decency? Respect? Communication? Listening? Stepping outside one’s comfort zone and possibly making a difference? Integrity? Motivation? Common sense?
Pre- and post-test be damned. Are we so far gone in education that if we can’t measure it on Badass Teachers Association: