Oh, I know, you just had a Friday, but did you have a “the assistant superintendent of the entire district pops in for an entirely unexpected surprise observation during your worst-behaved class” Friday?
BECAUSE I DID.
Tag: evaluation
On pedagogy… sorta
Kind of pointlessly meandering about on the interwubs right now, looking for something interesting enough to talk about. I used to be really, really good at this game; my previous long-term foray into blogging was basically all about looking around on the Internet until I found something that pissed me off and then ranting about it until I ran out of steam. Granted, it was the Bush years; I was easier to piss off back then, but that model really doesn’t work very well for me anymore. I can’t remember the last time a blog post on this blog was a result of finding an article online, unless it was (as will be happening later this week, possibly as early as tomorrow) me finding a topic I wanted to emulate, rather than argue against. What entertains me most about this is that just within the last week I’ve been referred to in comments as both “irascible” and, I believe, a “sadistic fucktard,” both by people who meant them affectionately– and that’s on the blog where, by comparison with previous work, I’m nice all the time.
I’m off from regular job tomorrow morning, because I have another probation assistance team meeting– that’s the thing where I’m working with (and, supposedly, helping) a teacher who has been placed on probation for one reason or another. We’re drawing close to the end of the process at this point; it’s not supposed to run for longer than 100 days and can end at 40; this will be the 40-day meeting. I don’t expect us to arrive at an answer (and by “an answer,” I mean “this probation process is terminated” or “you are terminated”) tomorrow, so there will be at least two more half-days out of my classroom in the next few weeks, one to observe again and one to have another summative meeting. I don’t remember if I blogged about the last time I observed this teacher or not, but what’s frustrating about the whole process is that this person is teaching their(*) classes more or less exactly in the way the corporation wants– it’s just that I don’t find that method terribly effective.
This puts me in a weird position. In terms of teaching “by the book,” so to speak, this teacher is actually miles ahead of me– they’re doing things that I’m supposed to be doing in my room, but never do, because I either find them ineffective in general or have not personally ever been able to make them work. But I’m still a more effective teacher. I know this intuitively and I suspect that I could prove it if necessary; my numbers on the state assessments that are supposedly used to evaluate us are really, really good, and if their numbers match mine then they probably shouldn’t be on probation.
What makes it weird is giving advice on how the class should be run on an instructional level– I’m kinda forced to say “do it this way” when in fact I don’t do it that way, and in fact I kinda think doing it that way sucks sometimes, but when we’re in a position of having to rebuild this person’s pedagogy from the ground up, maybe we shouldn’t be trying to rock the boat too much.
The other weird thing was that at the last meeting everyone but me had seen a classroom that was in total chaos. I didn’t see that, and that’s not just my lens for viewing instruction being calibrated differently from anyone else. I’m confident that anyone who had walked into that room the first day I was there– and, frankly, the second day I was there as well– would see a classroom that was at the very least being managed adequately. Classroom management isn’t everything, at least not under most circumstances, and it certainly isn’t teaching, but without classroom management you generally can’t teach effectively. That’s sort of another problem with this process– we’re supposed to be evaluating teaching, not classroom management, but it’s tough to see through the weeds sometimes. I just went through my own notes and deleted a bunch of stuff that I didn’t ultimately think was relevant to what we’re supposed to be looking for before sending it in to the committee chair– that’s not to say that it wasn’t important to making this person a better teacher, it’s just not exactly what I’m supposed to be looking for.
Gah. Am I even making any sense here? I’m powerfully ambivalent about this entire process, if that’s not obvious, and it makes it hard to write about. We’ll see how tomorrow goes, I guess.
(* The last time I talked about this, I played the gender-neutral pronoun game throughout and it ended up hurting my brain; this time I’m just using plurals the whole way through. Screw grammar.)
In which it’s been a long two days
I didn’t get around to writing a post yesterday, but it wasn’t because of parent/teacher conferences. I didn’t make it to parent/teacher conferences, in fact; my mother in law had either one stroke or a series of minor strokes over the last couple of days and ended up in the hospital yesterday. She’s fine, for values of “fine” that include “had at least one stroke in the last two days;” there is little to no apparent physical damage (no drooping facial muscles, difficulty swallowing, paralysis, anything like that; she can get up and move around) but she’s having difficulty recalling words and talking– although that has improved since I saw her yesterday. I found out toward the end of the day, tossed an “I’ll call you later” sign-up sheet in the hallway and headed to the hospital.
I had already taken this morning off because of the first meeting of the probation assistance team; that meeting was supposed to be from 7:45 to, most of us thought, 9 or so, and I’d have a couple of hours where I wasn’t supposed to be anywhere in particular and then would go back to work and teach the afternoon half of my classes. Between the stress of my mother-in-law’s hospitalization and a recurrence of the “no-real-symptoms-but-exhaustion” illness I was struggling with a few months ago, I decided to go ahead and take the afternoon off too.
Half days for middle school teachers in my corporation go until 11:00; the meeting that was supposed to be just over an hour long took until 12:30. I’d have had to scramble to get sub coverage in the afternoon anyway even if I’d been planning on returning to work. I won’t get into the reasons why but we hit some unexpected snags in putting the improvement plan together and it took forever to get everything done. It’s not like any particular member of the team dragged the meeting out; we just ended up having much more to do than anyone, including the more veteran members of the PAT process, had expected for us. My first observation is next week; we’ll see how it goes.
Another good reason– not that I needed one once the meeting ran so long, but whatever– for me to take the afternoon off was my frustration level has been through the roof lately. You may have noticed I haven’t mentioned my “don’t yell at kids” policy lately; it’s because the last several weeks have represented nothing but crashing failure in keeping that goal alive. My kids are manifestly not behaving or acting worse than previous classes (particularly last year) have, but for some reason it’s getting to me a lot more this year. I don’t know exactly what’s going on but I’ve got to find a way to get over it.
Something for me to work on, if I ever manage to drag myself out of bed again.
On teaching and money (and Miley and Sinead)
I am– forgive me for knowing about this, much less bringing it up– kind of really enjoying the Sinead O’Connor/Miley Cyrus thing going on right now. The first one was just interesting in an intellectual sort of “hey, this happened” kind of way; the second one interests me as a writer. I knew Sinead O’Connor was kinda fucked up but I wasn’t aware she had a bitchy side and I certainly wasn’t aware that her bitchy side was awesome. The second letter has this wonderful sort of “Ok, look, we can end this now, but here are my knives if you are foolish” sort of feel to it, as if O’Connor has absorbed Cyrus’ semiliterate trailer trash Twitter response to her initial letter, shrugged, and moved Miley to her mental “destroy” file. The phrase “you have one last chance” doesn’t appear anywhere in the letter, but it should. I really hope there’s a third.
I mean, Christ, the line “You could really do with educating yourself, that is if you’re not too busy getting your tits out to read” is art.
I voted to approve the contract, but I’m not terribly happy about it. Oh, it’s not bad, as they go– we’re getting a small stipend this year basically just for the hell of it and we actually get our first real raise in seven years (two whole percent!) next year, that is assuming we don’t get placed in one of the two lowest evaluation categories. More money is good. I like money, even if 2% after having frozen salaries since 2007 is kind of bullshit. It’s still better than the no-money we’ve been getting on the last several contracts.
The problem is that this round of negotiation really has driven home one important fact for me: That two percent hike got eaten by inflation years ago. We are never really getting a raise again, and by “we” in this case I basically mean all of Indiana’s teachers. I get a yearly pay raise at my fucking minigolf job, people. The way things used to work, we got yearly step increases until you hit sixteen years of experience and after that you’re depending on actual increases to the pay scale (ie, “raises”) for any further increase in salary. What this meant is that if you stuck it out long enough eventually everybody made the same amount– sixteen years is a long time, granted, but it leveled you out sooner or later.
Now? Anyone in my district who makes more money than me right now is going to make more than me forever, and anyone under me– particularly anyone unfortunate enough to have started in the last few years since even step increases became impossible– is going to make less than me forever. There’s no merit pay of any kind that can increase salary– not that I even think that’s a good idea, mind you– and no bonuses for good performance. There’s only the stick; you don’t get any raise of any kind if you end up in the lowest two evaluation categories, but it’s not like you get more money if you get a superior ranking.
It’s unfair in a way that I really, really don’t like. Teaching is already a career with effectively no mobility– a teacher is a teacher is a teacher and while most districts do name team leaders and things like that (a job I’ve held myself on a few occasions) there is no actual salary increase attached to that. As a teacher, I’ll never be anyone’s boss unless I move to administration– which isn’t teaching. There’s literally no way to be promoted. Which means that the fact that there are teachers in my district who not only make ten grand more than me but will make ten grand more than me forever really stick in my craw. Similarly, I’m mentoring a first-year teacher this year; I make fifteen thousand dollars a year or so more than she does and I will make fifteen thousand dollars a year or so more than her forever, until she wises up and realizes that spending her entire life making $32,000 a year is untenable. (She gets a raise to $34,000 in 2014-15; the poor schmucks stuck in the bottom two pay steps get a little bump. But she’ll be stuck there forever.) Once she realizes that she can make better money and have much less stress in her life doing something else, she’ll be gone, and she’ll be replaced by another 22-year-old making the same $34K that she did until she quit.
Note, also, that while teachers making more than base pay will be quitting a lot, or retiring, they will only be being replaced by teachers making base pay. Which means that you travel far enough down the road– and I bet it won’t be more than seven or ten years– and something perilously close to all of us will be stuck at that base pay level. Which people will put up with until they have kids, then they’ll move on to jobs where they’re actually treated like educated professionals, and kiss teaching in a public school district goodbye.
Which is a feature, and not a bug. This is what they want, and this is what state law is written to do.
I fucking hate Indiana.
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