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Herein lie more reasons to be glad you are not a teacher. Today was our first official day back at work. (Yes, some of us worked Friday, but we're ass-kissers.) We were in a meeting from 8:30-12, had lunch from 12-1:30, more meetings from 1-3:30, and left at 3:50. At the start of the 8:30 meeting, we were told that our New Kid Orientation is TOMORROW at 9, and that we should make sure our classrooms are decorated and welcoming. We had twenty minutes of unencumbered time today, and most of us were running around doing setup stuff--getting book numbers straight, touching base with core teams, scheduling still more meetings. No time to decorate my room. Not gonna be very welcoming. Maybe I should just put up a sign, "Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here." Y'know, set the tone for the year. What did we do in our meetings? One was about "differentiation," which means coming up with ways to reach all the different interest levels, readiness levels, and learning modalities in the class. In other words, doing what good teachers do, adapting. We got two hours of pretty much unintelligible administrative blather on this topic. (I sat next to a very nice PE teacher who kept asking me what words like "heuristic" and "algorithmic" meant.) After lunch, we spent our time looking at our SOL scores, which are good overall, except that 90% of our Special Ed students can't pass the tests.However, the "good news" is that over the last four years, the SpEd kids have remained the same distance behind. At least we suck consistently! It's all how you spin numbers. We kept pointing out that our SpEd teachers need to be given the same materials as the rest of us, and use the same curriculum, but different methods. (What the SpEd teachers have been begging for for YEARS.) This is also known as differentiation! Remember that? From this morning? "Not cost-effective," we're told. Whah? Huh? See, Public School Administrators all attend Illogic School and Surrealism University before they come to us. We also determined that our Asian/Pacific Islander kids are doing worse since the Filipino gangs got active in our area. No foolin'. The real hoot was the item-by-item analysis. We had a list of items, objectives they measured, and percentages passed per item. The 6th and 7th grade teachers kept asking the eighth grade teachers, "So what did that question look like?" We had to shrug; we were analyzing items we had been forbidden to look at. We can't see them until May 2004. Your tax dollars at work! Must go drag out my grim reaper costume for tomorrow's orientation. |
 
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Tax dollar$