Tag: PD

Let’s see if you can make me II

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

We have, like a lot of districts, an e-learning day scheduled for November 3rd, which is Election Day. Schools still get used as polling places frequently and a lot of districts have decided it’s safer and easier on everyone if they just get the kids out of the building for the day. We found out yesterday that we were going to be expected to be in PD all day. I’ve gone back and forth on whether I should post this flyer or not, and landed on “fuck it”:

You’re already starting off in a deep, deep hole if you want me to take you seriously and the first thing I encounter about you is a fucking AI flyer. I’m stunned that it’s not in that AI font that is absolutely fucking everywhere all the sudden over the last couple of months.

I had a few minutes this afternoon and, knowing full well I was about to piss myself off, I looked into the company behind this, again, six hour training. A six hour training at which they have already told us they will be taking attendance twice. We have been instructed to bring “a writing utensil and a hard surface to write on,” because we’ll be stuck in fucking auditorium chairs all Goddamned day. What this means is that we’re going to spend at least a third of the six hours “reflecting” and “sharing” with an “elbow partner.”

So you can imagine just how excited I was about this even before finding out that the person behind the company has all of four and a half fucking years of classroom experience, and all of that was at a high-ranked district in Georgia, and all of that was as a special ed teacher, meaning that she’s very likely never been in charge of a full classroom, and all of that was before Covid and before 1:1 tech instruction, where we handed all these demonic little fuckers perpetual distraction devices.(*)

Their website also offers a free brochure (“free” meaning “give us your email address”, here you go) with five “tips to give teachers what they need to thrive in the classroom.” There are more typos in the brochure than there are useful tips. The first page calls it an “ebook.” It is nine pages long, counting the cover.

No.

This person has nothing to say to me that I need or want to hear. The last time they pulled this shit on us it was a three-hour presentation where the guy began by promising to “respect our time” (not once in the history of humanity has anyone said those three words and meant them) and whose most insightful contribution to behavior management through his three hours was assigned seats, which he presented as if he’d invented the idea himself. This time it is six hours, followed by a “mandatory” presentation by the superintendent that falls entirely outside of our contract hours and which I have already bitched to the union about.

And again: they’re telling us they’re taking attendance twice, so they know good and fucking well that they’ve spent a lot of money to bring this asshole here to waste our time.

I’m not doing it. I’m calling in sick that day, and if for some reason I’m prevented from calling in sick I’m going to show up with a bag full of rotten fruit and I’m going to heckle until I get fired. Just because you can con bureaucrats into shoveling money into your gaping maw does not mean that you have anything relevant to say to me, and we’ll see how your little behavior management techniques work on a grown-ass man who is pre-tired of your bullshit.

(*) I’ve found her LinkedIn, too. She has four and a half years of teaching experience, four years in three different behavior analyst jobs, and then founded her consulting company. She is a fetus, and she knows nothing.

In which even complaining is too tiring

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

To the right: my actual profile picture in my Canvas account, after all of ten minutes of the “professional development” I had to do today.

Y’all, I have done so much complaining about how terrible and boring and flat-out insulting education professional development is over the last 20 years that even I don’t want to listen to myself doing it any longer. E-learning was done as of May 20, and the kids have until this Wednesday to complete any outstanding work, even though it really doesn’t matter because their grades can’t go down from 3rd quarter anyway by state policy— which is super great for the kids who have legitimately been stressing out about their grades during all this, to let them know that none of it mattered at all– but we are still on the hook until June 2nd. We have three days this week where we are supposed to complete “10 to 12 hours” of professional development from a menu of “courses” on Canvas, literally none of which are remotely relevant to middle school or to math teaching. That’s not an exaggeration– screening the offerings for my grade level offers two courses that are not, in fact, relevant to my grade level, and screening for “math” gives me nothing.

It is only hitting me as I’m typing this that we have not been told that we’re using Canvas next year. It is not impossible that they’re only using this to deliver PD, in which case the time I spent today to learn how to use Canvas was wasted.

Actually, who am I kidding– it was a waste anyway, as one of Canvas’ strengths appears to be how intuitive it is, which means that people like me do not need to watch hours of videos explaining how to do things, because we already know how to do them. An example: I am to watch a four-minute video about how to rearrange questions in a quiz.

ME: I bet it’s drag and drop.

VIDEO: Four minutes– four fucking minutes— about how to drag and drop a menu item. Which is not very long in a literal sense, but imagine that you have to watch 70 of these damn things, and even at 1.5x speed they’re still ponderous and unbearable and also you already know how to do everything they’re telling you.

This may be how some people learn, but it is not functional for me, particularly when all the narrator is doing is reading text off a screen. Because when I see words I read them, and I read them faster than any narrator would ever read them, except the narrator is yelling in my ear, so I’m not comprehending what I’m reading very well, and I can’t stop reading and listen to the narrator because I can’t have words in front of me that I’m not reading. I understand, because I have been a teacher for two decades and I have heard this from too many people at too many times for it to not be true, that some people are capable of choosing to not read text that is placed in front of them. I am not able to do that. If I see words, I am reading words.

The entire exercise was estimated to take, no shit, 9-12 hours for the entire course, and I finished it in less than three. (Even if I’d watched every second of the videos at regular speed, it wouldn’t have taken 9-12 hours; I have no idea where that estimate came from or whether anyone meant for it to be taken seriously.) Part of me feels like that means I’m done with my 10-12 hours of PD, since this was supposed to take that long. I dunno; I’ll probably find one more module that doesn’t look too objectionable and do it tomorrow. We’ll see.

6:01 PM, Tuesday May 26: 1,676,401 confirmed cases and 98,787 deaths. I have seen it reported that we’ve officially hit the 100,000 mark in deaths, but I don’t know where that data’s coming from, and I’m not changing my source now. I don’t know if it’s reporting a little slower or being more conservative in what counts a death or what.