CURMUDGUCATION: Teachers and the Toll of Disinterest

CURMUDGUCATION: Teachers and the Toll of Disinterest

Teachers and the Toll of Disinterest

The closest I ever came to leaving public education was almost twenty years ago, when I was the president of our local union, and we were on strike.

It was a challenging time. The contract negotiations started with stripping (a technique where the district proposes to gut the contract so that they can pretend to make concessions later by agreeing to only partly gut the contract, which of course involves them giving up nothing). The lead negotiator said publicly, "We have the money. We just don't want to give it to them." And my phone never stopped ringing.

This is a small town, and while I'm not exactly a public figure, I'm pretty easy to find. And so people called to offer their thoughts on the contract negotiations and the strike.

The worst were not the raging teacher-haters. It was the other folks, some of whom I knew personally, who wanted to explain calmly and rationally why teachers had no right to expect things like good pay and decent benefits, how they should simply accept what the board offered and be happy they were so much better paid than fry cooks and convenience store clerks. 

I had to stare into the abyss of--well, I can't even call it disrespect, Disinterest. It's always a little background buzz that you learn to ignore, that buzz of all the people who really don't much care about public education and think that teachers are a glorified over-paid bunch of women who CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Teachers and the Toll of Disinterest

America's teachers are running on empty - Axios

America's teachers are running on empty - Axios

America's teachers are running on empty

School districts nationwide are facing a worsening teacher shortage because of the coronavirus, further complicating the tough decisions about whether to have in-person classes.

Why it matters: When teachers test positive, fall seriously ill or are self-isolating from potential exposure, many districts don't have enough substitutes to keep up.

Where it stands: There's early evidence children and schools are not major vectors of the virus, especially with proper social distancing, ventilation and mask requirements, but the risk for adults at school is not zero.

• Districts in Tennessee, Michigan and Maine and many other parts of the country have dozens of teachers absent at a time and had to close classrooms.
• Since the beginning of the 2020-21 school year, at least 751 Arizona teachers have resigned or quit, according to the Arizona Schools Personnel Administrators Association.
• The risk of infection has also triggered some early retirements and sick-outs.

What they're saying: Teachers have demanded more personal protective equipment and better CONTINUE READING: America's teachers are running on empty - Axios

EdWeek: Teacher Evaluations Resume, Despite Pandemic and Chaotic Conditions | Diane Ravitch's blog

EdWeek: Teacher Evaluations Resume, Despite Pandemic and Chaotic Conditions | Diane Ravitch's blog

EdWeek: Teacher Evaluations Resume, Despite Pandemic and Chaotic Conditions

Madeline Will wrote in Education Week that many states plan to resume teacher evaluations, despite the pandemic and the difficulties of teaching remotely and/or in-person. Some will incorporate student test scores, which is absurd. Many teachers believe this is unfair, since teaching conditions are adverse. Unfortunately, Will relied on the “National Council on Teacher Quality” for its “expertise.” This is an organization launched by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Foundation that has no professional credibility and that issues an annual rating of teacher education programs based on its reading of course catalogues and on whether the programs offer instruction in Common Core, for example.

The best authority on VAM in the nation is Audrey Amrein-Beardsley of Arizona State University, who earned her Ph.D. as a student of David Berliner and Gene Glass. She has written the definitive studies of test-based teacher evaluation. Her blog VAMboozled! is the go-to place for updates on this fraudulent evaluation CONTINUE READING: EdWeek: Teacher Evaluations Resume, Despite Pandemic and Chaotic Conditions | Diane Ravitch's blog

How Are American Teachers Doing, Really?

How Are American Teachers Doing, Really?

How Are American Teachers Doing, Really?

Imagine you’ve got a business, housed in the basement of a single building. A tremendous storm sweeps in, and the basement floods—standing water, four inches deep. Some workers are asked to stay at their station, working ankle deep in water. Others are moved to the first floor, forced to use unfamiliar equipment that they must learn to use on the fly while trying to do something that is kind of, but not really, like their usual work. Nobody knows when the storm is going to end, or when the basement will be pumped dry.

You would think that upper levels of management might send someone in to check up on the workers. To see how they’re doing, what problems they’re encountering, maybe even ask what can be done to help or hire extra people to deal with the extra work the chaos creates.

You would think.

But in the pandemic storm of U.S. education right now, that’s mostly not what’s happening. Across the nation, we have next to no data about how things are working, about how teachers and students are CONTINUE READING: How Are American Teachers Doing, Really?

NYC Educator: Into the Great Wide Open

NYC Educator: Into the Great Wide Open

Into the Great Wide Open

I'm in the second week of teaching remotely, and I'm flabbergasted by the challenges. I've been teaching over 30 years and there aren't a lot of situations that surprise me. Nonetheless, these are odd times. 

Most of my students are from Asia, and learning their names is a challenge for me every year. This year, though, it's even more challenging. I have one class with 36 students, and while that won't last forever, it's really hard to keep track of everyone. Today I started taking notes on my class list, but that only makes me recall people at one extreme or another. It's the Great Middle I'm worried about.

As if that's not enough, I'm experimenting with the technology. I've figured out how to use Zoom breakout rooms. They work fairly well when I put students in pairs, but when I tried groupwork today they were a total failure in not one, but two classes. Sometimes I come into a room and see all avatars, with absolutely no one talking to each other. Other times I come in and hear really animated conversation, but in Chinese. 

Now I can't really blame my students. If I were sitting in China and the teacher grouped me with native English speakers, I'd probably lapse into conversation in my native language. In a classroom, if there were a teacher jumping around, I might be more careful. In Zoom, though, you don't actually see the teacher. In fact, you don't even get a warning he's coming. You're just there, having a grand old time, and he appears out of nowhere. That's not really fair, is it?

Last year was quite different. I'd been with the same classes over six months. I knew everyone's names. They all knew just how crazy I was. Now I'm with a bunch of kids who have no idea who I am, and what's more I have no idea who they are either. Will I be able to find out? I'm not sure. For example, I have one student who's heavily into cosplay. You could tell who she was every time she walked into a room. On the computer screen, she looks like you or me. If I hadn't known her previously, I'd be missing out on a huge part of her character.

Today, two students told me they hadn't been in Google classroom. This explained a lot. Now I know why they hadn't done any homework, and now I know why they haven't been participating. What I don't know is how they found my Zoom classroom, because I informed all the students where it was on Google Classroom. The thing is, when you have a class of 36, things like that tend to slip through the cracks. In fact, with a class of 36, a lot of students slip through the cracks, likely more than in an ordinary classroom. 

From everything I hear, conventional live classrooms will be no walk in the park either. Now that the chancellor has backed up on insisting magical teachers would appear out of CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: Into the Great Wide Open

The Everyday Exhaustion of Teaching During a Global Pandemic | gadflyonthewallblog

 The Everyday Exhaustion of Teaching During a Global Pandemic | gadflyonthewallblog

The Everyday Exhaustion of Teaching During a Global Pandemic 

Teaching is one of the few things in life that is not concerned with now.

It is essentially about the future.

We put all this time and energy into helping kids learn. Why?

Not so that they’ll be able to do anything today. But so that they’ll be able to do things tomorrow.

Sure they may be able to read better or solve math problems, but the reason we want them to know that isn’t so much about what they’ll do with it as adolescents. It’s how those skills will shape the people they grow up to be.

It’s an investment in their future and ours.

We take a bit of today and invest it in tomorrow.

And during a global pandemic that can be especially hard.

The west is on fire. Storms are threatening our southern coasts. Police brutality is out of control and bands of neofascist thugs are given free rein to beat and murder protesters. We’ve separated immigrant families and put their kids in cages. The President has lied to us, disparaged our troops, bragged about breaking countless laws and the government is powerless to stop him. Our political system and social fabric is coming apart at the seams. And everyone from the average Joe to the CONTINUE READING:  The Everyday Exhaustion of Teaching During a Global Pandemic | gadflyonthewallblog