The problem and my initial gut feel from reading both your posts is that you make it sound like doing nothing is better than trying to do anything. You sound like a teacher that will get bounced and even though I believe you aren’t in that profession now, it just has a tone that any attempt to fix anything will not work no matter what we do.
Everything is big business motivated and we’re all sheep for trying to boot bad teachers. Bad teachers do no one any good and if it’s good teachers vs. bad teachers, we should all rejoice. Maybe like with corporations, teachers can share a salary/bonus pool so bad teachers who no one likes and is ineffective will get voted out.
I suppose like with healthcare, I think we have a broken system and maybe changes to tenure laws, evaluation by honest parents, who knows, something else is worth a shot to “try”.
I didn’t see a solution yet, but maybe teachers can be evaluated a year out or half a year in the next grade?
If the kid learned stuff, obviously, no matter how much the parents/kids hated the teacher, they did a good job maybe.
Again, let’s go in a dialog to fix things rather than throw our hands up saying nothing we do will help…that’s what I got at least reading the 2 posts.[/quote]
You’re right about my not teaching now, and wrong about my being someone who would be “bounced” from the position, even if I were still teaching.
The problem is that I’ve seen other teachers who were terrorized by administrators and wrongfully terminated (and won lawsuits as a result). I’ve seen parents in the vocal minority who were hell-bent on trying to oust a particular teacher just because she was older, or didn’t do things exactly the way this particular group liked. I can’t think of any other profession (other than politics) that is so scrutinized and so beholden to such a large number of people who have no education, experience, or knowledge about the profession.
Your desire to “do something” is much like the desire of the anti-gun groups who haven’t a clue about what to do about crime, so they just run around like chickens with their heads cut off because “doing something” is better than carefully evaluating the complex issues involved and intelligently coming up with solutions that will actually work.
I’ve posted before about ideas that will most certainly have better results than blindly scrambling around for perceived solutions that are being fed to us by people who have no teaching experience and whose sole purpose is to dismantle the benefits and rights of working people. The societal and economic damage that will result from that is far, far greater than what we’re getting with the current system, even if a few below-average teachers slip through the cracks.
