November112009
too angsty to work… lets start a blog!
Life at school has been rough recently. Winter months are looming ahead. Kids’ attendance is sparing. Homework completion is worse. Detailed data reports reflecting those obvious facts are due weekly. The one teacher printer is out of ink. Again. Staff morale is at an all time low. We grumble a series of complaints every morning up the four flights of stairs, during our lunch break that’s been taken by another meeting, and at every last minute announcement over the intercom. On the upside, there seem to be less fights in the hallways than last year and the copy machine is working, though with sometimes unreadable low levels of ink.
While this blog will inevitably cover the “woe is me, my children can’t read at their level, can’t write a paragraph at 17, and teaching in the city is hard” moments that are a day to day reality, that’s a little too Dangerous Minds for my taste and doesn’t seem to serve too much purpose in and of itself. I hope to write more about WHY my school operates the way that it does. What are the decisions… and yes, the drama…. going on at the adminstrative level? Do they think that less fighting means that things are ok here??! What discussions are happening at a national level that are affecting what we have to do everyday inside of the school? Seriously, how many of these people have ever been teachers? Michelle Rhee’s two years don’t count. What new policy was just created that will somehow make education in the city and therefore in my classroom worse than before? Just keep testin’ em…Surely education is about producing numbers. And what backhanded decision did the New York City Department of Education deliver to our school that will just further ruin our chances of success? Oh, its two days before the school year starts and you want us to add a whole other class of 7th grade students, requiring us to hire two new teachers and throw off the whole schedule?
Really, what does it take to make a successful school in the city, why is my school failing at it, and what can that tell us about the system as a whole??
I’m also, truthfully, doing this because teaching in this kind of system is starting to get to me, and I need a new release and new purpose.
So for all of that…. here we go!
Tags: /goals! /small schools
