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My Point Exactly

Governor Richardson’s plan to give all teachers a seven percent raise just doesn’t make any sense. Some of those teachers deserve MUCH MORE than a seven percent raise, and some of those teachers don’t deserve any raise at all, and a few of those teachers don’t even deserve their job. If you don’t believe me, read this:

As I was saying, given these past [testing] experiences, the “Instructional Council” at my school had a great idea. So great, I separate the idea into its own paragraph….

Send the kids home and have our Spring Parent/Teacher conferences in the afternoons of three testing days.

This idea kills so many birds with so few stones that worldwide bird populations would be decimated and we could still build a sturdy stone gymnasium. Kids test at the optimal time, “studies” show, are sent home during the useless afternoons, Parent/Teacher conferences don’t wreck other school days, conferences don’t last all day leading to teacher coma and basically having to put name tags on the parents to tell them apart. This is possibly the greatest single idea ever developed through a school leadership committee, imho, and I’m considering nominating this idea and “council” to the people at Nobel, Fulbright, etc. for an award of some type.

And that’s where we finally reach the point of this little story. Several teachers (total number unknown) didn’t like the plan. They didn’t like it because it involved we teachers extending our work day from the normal 3:05 final bell (and roughly 3:20/3:30 hitting the parking lot) until 4:00 in order that parents would have more time to see us.

They framed the objection as being made without sufficient staff input, but in truth they really just didn’t like having to stay until 4:00. I cannot stress how embarrassing it is for me, as a K-12 teacher, to have typed the previous sentence.

I recommend you read the whole post.