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Pro-Cert classes

In WA state, anyone certified at 2001 (or something like that) has to go through a "professional certification" process after teaching at least two years. The teacher has to take a pre-assessment seminar to figure out where their deficits are and how to improve them. There's a period of time (1 to 9 years) in which the teacher can work to improve these deficits and then it's on the assessment seminar. In theory this sounds like a positive thing.

Yesterday, my pre-assessment seminar included a 5 minute discussion on how the "refresh button" works on a browser and how everyone should just take a picture of documents because "scanning and shrinking is just too difficult." And let's not forget the conversation about how our "evidence pages" are all on power point and should include pictures, rather than graphs or results. Why are we creating what will be a roughly 50 slide power point? No idea. If we have to present it to anyone I may have to quit to avoid deep embarrassment.

I realize that everyone is very, very busy. We are all required to teach full time during this class - because we're experiementing...mwaahhhaaahaa - not to mention coaching, serving on comittees and tabulating the number of copies made this month so far... but I don't think it's too much to ask that people take the time to learn how to resize their documents or to produce a document that includes actual data. We're teachers... we're supposed to like learning.

After two years, how jaded can you be?

Comments

Ryan said…
I was one of the first to go through the ProCert program at EWU. There's a couple hundred hours of time and effort that I'll never get back--thanks, State Certification Requirements!
4:02 PM
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