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Ignoring the Bad News

For the past two months, I’ve been trying to avoid the news, blogs, and articles about the state of education in America. If you listen long enough, there’s really no place to go but depressed. In the search for yet another scapegoat, teachers are getting hammered. The only solution everyone (but teachers) seems to have come up with is the teacher/Mother Teresa. In order for our children to get a quality education, all teachers must work 12+ hours per day (to make up for that long summer vacation), spend all weekends and vacations planning, collaborating with co-workers and tutoring students, leaving a few hours on Sunday for family and friends.

Then, of course, there is all of the end of the year stress. Testing, testing, test. State tests, AP tests and year end monitoring tests. Then I get to collect and analyze all the data, deciding the elective fate of approximately 300 students. Oh the power! The power to refrain from stabbing myself in the eye.

And… toss in a bit of planning for next year. Our department decided to divy up the course sections ourselves in hopes of avoiding overcrowding in our classes. We presented a proposal to drop the number of 9th graders to 25 per sections and raising seniors/juniors to 30; explaining that if the freshmen aren’t passing 9th grade english, it’s unlikely they will make it to junior/senior english. These numbers are arbitrary really; so classes will have 30+ and others will be 16 due to pressures elsewhere. Our hope is that if we have enough sections for 9th graders to get to 25/class, at least there is less of a chance of 35+ in a class. I’m just hoping that we didn’t shoot ourselves in the foot by agreeing to 30+ for seniors/juniors and getting 30+ across the board. Our proposal had 2 more sections than the administration really wanted.

These are things that I can not control, so I’m practicing active ignoring everything outside of my control.

Comments

Jill said…
Our district is going through a decline in enrollment, and we cut a team-worth of teachers (five positions) total last wee in our building. They "promise" that the numbers will be kept low, but that just means that in the on-level classes, the numbers will be huge. There are no easy answers . . . but we'll make it work as always.
8:01 AM
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