I've solved the education dilemma!
March 18th 2010 14:59
I promised I wouldn't bitch or complain about my past education experience, but I had an epiphany the other day that I feel compelled to share:
The solution to America's education dilemma is to allow teachers' "planning time" to actually be used for planning! Genius, isn't it? Someone get Obama on the phone with me. We can make this happen!
Seriously though, my past experience has been that "planning times" were so chock full of bullshit "team" meetings, staff development, department meetings, curriculum development, parent conferences, returning phone calls, grading papers and answering emails that I seriously never got a chance to get down to actually planning what I was going to teach my students! Am I the only one that experienced this??? Someone please set me straight if need be!
The closest I ever came to having a planning time, used for planning, was at a small primary school in Upstate NY. The students left at 2:20 each day which left a 40 minute chunk of time for all kinds of meetings and other crap-ola that we were still "on the clock" for until 3:00. This was in addition to our allotted planning time during the day! Crazy isn't it??? I actually had the chance to sit down and write a lesson plan EVERY DAY, rarely had to take work home, and never had the urge to jam a pencil into my eye. Are there any schools in the "south" that have a set up like this? I'd really like to hear about it, if there is! And yes I am probably being biased but here's why:
While teaching in Metro Atlanta, the schools were so far behind and failing that administrators knew for sure the answer to this problem was to fill our planning time with all kinds of "solutions." Not only did I not have time to plan lessons during my paid work day, I was sitting resentful in one meeting after another, my time being sucked into whatever bandwagon the school district had jumped on. I felt like I was in a crowd of lemmings heading for the cliff. My favorite waste of planning time was when the school had assigned so many students detention, we had to take turns covering the detention room because it was too much for one teacher to cover. Awesome isn't it? Ask me again why I stopped teaching?
The icing on the cake was the staff meetings at least once a week. Students were out of the building by 2:40 and our paid day ended at 3:00. That leaves 20 mins. for a brief, to the point, staff meeting right? Nope, guess again! These meetings often went on until 4:00 or 4:30. The principal leading the meeting didn't even get the point when I would slouch down so low in my chair, practically to the point where I was laying on the ground. I frequently fantasized about just getting up and walking out of the meeting.
Ugh! Anyway, I know this has become a rambling, ranting, grammatically incorrect entry, but deal with it. And ask any teacher you know about their experience with "planning time" and I'm sure it will be similar. What's that you say? Why don't we just take our lesson plans home and work on them? Oh duh! That's a great idea! Especially because we don't have lives outside of school and are on a salary so generous we feel VERY motivated to do work outside of the school day.
The solution to America's education dilemma is to allow teachers' "planning time" to actually be used for planning! Genius, isn't it? Someone get Obama on the phone with me. We can make this happen!
Seriously though, my past experience has been that "planning times" were so chock full of bullshit "team" meetings, staff development, department meetings, curriculum development, parent conferences, returning phone calls, grading papers and answering emails that I seriously never got a chance to get down to actually planning what I was going to teach my students! Am I the only one that experienced this??? Someone please set me straight if need be!
The closest I ever came to having a planning time, used for planning, was at a small primary school in Upstate NY. The students left at 2:20 each day which left a 40 minute chunk of time for all kinds of meetings and other crap-ola that we were still "on the clock" for until 3:00. This was in addition to our allotted planning time during the day! Crazy isn't it??? I actually had the chance to sit down and write a lesson plan EVERY DAY, rarely had to take work home, and never had the urge to jam a pencil into my eye. Are there any schools in the "south" that have a set up like this? I'd really like to hear about it, if there is! And yes I am probably being biased but here's why:
While teaching in Metro Atlanta, the schools were so far behind and failing that administrators knew for sure the answer to this problem was to fill our planning time with all kinds of "solutions." Not only did I not have time to plan lessons during my paid work day, I was sitting resentful in one meeting after another, my time being sucked into whatever bandwagon the school district had jumped on. I felt like I was in a crowd of lemmings heading for the cliff. My favorite waste of planning time was when the school had assigned so many students detention, we had to take turns covering the detention room because it was too much for one teacher to cover. Awesome isn't it? Ask me again why I stopped teaching?
The icing on the cake was the staff meetings at least once a week. Students were out of the building by 2:40 and our paid day ended at 3:00. That leaves 20 mins. for a brief, to the point, staff meeting right? Nope, guess again! These meetings often went on until 4:00 or 4:30. The principal leading the meeting didn't even get the point when I would slouch down so low in my chair, practically to the point where I was laying on the ground. I frequently fantasized about just getting up and walking out of the meeting.
Ugh! Anyway, I know this has become a rambling, ranting, grammatically incorrect entry, but deal with it. And ask any teacher you know about their experience with "planning time" and I'm sure it will be similar. What's that you say? Why don't we just take our lesson plans home and work on them? Oh duh! That's a great idea! Especially because we don't have lives outside of school and are on a salary so generous we feel VERY motivated to do work outside of the school day.
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