Teachbad Gives Himself a Pass
Hi, Folks.
Look, I’ve been out of commission for several days and am just barely starting to get my poop in a group now. I’m swamped. So, rather than go dark, I decided to pull up a couple of posts from back when only me and an English teacher down the hall were reading this blog. These take us all the way back to January of ’10. This is back when I used to start each post with an original Teachbad Poem.
We’ve got Technocracy and the School Without a Soul and Technocracy and the School Without a Soul, Part II.
Sorry if that’s lame.
For next time, let’s do an Ask Mr. Teachbad. This is where you provide me a succinct description of your problem/question and I provide advice that is not guaranteed, in any way, to be helpful, but would probably lead to a great many laughs and your termination/arrest if followed. Try it!
Send to mr.teachbad@gmail.com and put ADVICE in the subject line.
Mr. Teachbad
Mr. Teachbad. Please come and visit me today in my office when you get a chance…
I’m suspicious that you haven’t realllllllly been “out of commission”.
From now on bring a Dr’s note!
Oh, and call every morning that you think you will need to take a sick day.
What’s that?
“Say what” is guaranteed to you in your contract?
Pssssshaw!
PS….feel better!
Not lame at all–if you have what’s going around, I know how miserable you’ve been feeling.
Also, your reposts reminded me I’ve been wanted to go back and read each and every one-in the process now-you just keep getting better! Please know your efforts are really appreciated by one burned out, angry-but-getting-over-it, forty year veteran middle school teacher!
It has been going through Texas like ” Sherman through Georgia.”
When you can eat, Campbell’s Chicken with Rice is your friend.
Come on slacker, buck up! I’m not interested in your poop, grouped or ungrouped (ew, yick). The important question is, what can you do for me?
In the last Ask Mr. Teachbad, I needed advice on bringing my students up by 5 grade levels in under 5 weeks. Clearly the advice was ineffective (the standardized tests showed they slipped by 6 months). But I do have someone else to blame, which as we all know, is the most important administrative issue.
Now I am being told to add in two weeks of remediation without changing the curriculum. I have tried to point out that adding in 2 weeks of work will result in losing 2 weeks of work from the end of the curriculum, since they can make me come in for 2 weeks after school gets out in June, but there are unlikely to be any children present.
I am being labeled a troublemaker for pointing out this nicety. Other teachers who have been included in this edict are telling me off. How could I possibly say that this is changing the curriculum? Am I mad?
I have a background in Physics, and I still don’t know how to adjust the space-time continuum to satisfy the sudden urges of my bold and decisive administrators. Please, Mr. Teachbad, learn me how.
I hear ya, crazedmummy. I’ve given up trying to have dialogue and/or conversation with admin because any suggestion or idea not totally in alignment with traditional curriculum or the admin’s particular bias is seen as trouble-making. And note: I have had a lot of training and experience in communicating effectively, so it’s not the way I’m presenting ideas that is the problem. Everyone–especially administrators–in the schools need to be trained in how to have decent, fucking communication with one another!!!! Listening is the first step.
Dear TW/SATP:
Do you suppose admins have to go to Stupid School to have their brains rewired for stupid speak? I don’t think they could learn it on their own. It is so far from real communication that it is really, really scary.
gilda, my hubby (also a teacher) says that before an administrator can sign a contract, they have to have a lobotomy.
Sounds like my administrator…never mind that the 4th graders at my school can’t write…the 4th grade teachers have been at their wits’ end trying to get the writing scores up. When it was suggested that the lower grades (I teach 2nd) adopt the same writing strategies that the upper grades have in order to have everyone on the same page, she said no. Oh, and she told the lower grades to eliminate our writing block and do math centers instead. My class average in math is 90%. They don’t need math centers. They DO need to learn how to write a proper sentence and paragraph, so that they’re not in the same predicament as our 4th graders. These “ideas” are part of her plan to get our school to exemplary. It’s a good thing dreaming doesn’t cost a thing. She’s insane.
When it was suggested back in November by a respected teacher that it would be important for the middle school staff to get the message that we all needed to tighten up on hall duty in between classes, not allowing lates to class, and carefully monitoring who left the classroom, when, and how often they left, the principal replied that he would rather not because he was “uncomfortable” with the kinds of conversation and comments that this suggestion might elicit–he did not want the staff meeting to get off-track with teachers discussing how we might better manage our students and intervene in problems that seem to start in between classes. UNBELIEVABLE! So we never had the conversation and the inmates are still running the asylum in many ways. Who’s in charge????
Obviously the inmates–so funny, because this EXACT same scenario happened at my school as well. Your principal has many, many clones out there I would guess!
MTB: These two posts have been well-worth reviving. Choose more. Back to the future! Accountability, Motherfuckers–what a great line, and the list of ten was Ahhh-inspiring. It is all the same–school to school to school. In my school, dress code violations are taken almost as seriously as real bad stuff. Kids are held captive in Time Out all day because they don’t have the proper pants. A kid is kept from all instruction for 7 1/2 hours for wearing sweat pants or cargo pants. Holy shit. We are struggling to move some of these kids forward and we are locking them up for what they are wearing. Let’s get real.
Dear Miss Crabtree,
I have been showing up in the wrong clothing day after day, in the vain hope that someone would hold me captive or send me home. Sadly, it has not happened. I think I may in fact be in the wrong body entirely. Since we pretend to be “teaching” tho youth about behaviors important to job performance, surely I should be up for a rest day by now?
One great thing about the web community is we found we were not alone. When we got that first little video of teacher/admin communication, and we realized it was EVERYWHERE, our group of teachers almost wept. Because they have been trying to tell us that we are crazy. Now we know, it’s not us.
We haven’t figured out how to fix it yet, but at least we know we are not insane.
I am spending every other Monday going to the school board meeting to tell them that my students need text books and pencils (no wonder they want to get rid of tenure, pesky teachers demanding that the school board obey State law). It’s not much, but it’s a start. I have invited people into my classroom since they seemed skeptical about the facts (yes, it’s March, a tad late, I know).
But I’m not crazy.
crazedmummy, et.al. – I can so relate to your tears of joy when you stumbled across this site and found that you weren’t crazy, that we weren’t all just in this Alice in Wonderland world alone. That it wasn’t just my school, my district, my administrator.
Folks would tell me, “It’s just where you teach, it’s not like that everywhere else.” And I’d think, “How the fuck do they know? They don’t teach ANYWHERE!” But they seemed SO sure that they were right. After all, they watch the mighty news!! Oooooo…
I swear these days everyone is an expert about teaching except us teachers. Isn’t it nice to find a community where we can be assured that we aren’t insane.? That it’s THEM who have gone crazy, not us? Our hearts are still in the right places. To me, at least, the KIDS still do matter. It’s the system that’s gone insane, NOT us. The more I read this the more I feel relieved to know this is true.
It’s like coming out of a long brainwashing, shaking my head, and saying to myself, “I KNEW it all along!! Whew…I really can trust myself. They didn’t get to me.”
Isn’t it sad that we have to work so hard to protect ourselves? Let alone the kids??!!!