I just read a blog from my friend Coil, and it reminded me of an article I read this morning. First about her blog. She talked about books that we've read after doing a library search. go to her blog to read more: jennysfreckles.blogspot.com (I hope she doesn't mind - I'm sure she'll give me scornful looks if it does).
Anyway, she lamented that we should create a staff library filled with books for us because our fine young Americans don't appreciate all of the great books in the school library. It really is pretty good. We receive books from the state librarian and our Principal-Mr. Dan let's us buy books when he has extra funds (tell me what schools have that kind of monetary discretion - suck it public school monkeys). So, she mentioned that a lot of the books she's read come from the school library. I should tell her that we have a request list that we give to the state librarian twice a year and we should go through Borders Books sometime and put them on the request list. Do you think the state librarian would get suspicious if we requested stuff like Picasso at the Lapin Agile?
So, on to the article...I was reading the Gazette this morning and on the front page was this story about this English teacher (Air Academy or one of the schools on the north side of town) that keeps in touch with her students over the summer via the Internet. She had a few kids that weren't logging in for the summer reading and discussions and she contacted the parents etc. etc. The article says one was in Hawaii blah blah blah. She said it's given her kids a head start. Some do the summer reading right away in June and some wait until like now to get their summer reading accomplished. The article talked about advanced placement kids in art had better be sketching all summer long and the AP history kids have a 40+ page paper due on the first day of school. Again more blah blah blah, but it got me thinking. I don't know if that was the best thing for these kids. Some of the summer reading listed were things like the Bible and the Quaran. I wondered was it the whole Bible or was it just excerpts. Plus, did they have to buy a prayer rug or rosary beads...just curious. Anyway, I don't know these schools and I only have my FY Americans as a reference, but I'm kinda glad I don't deal with those kids.
Critics say that teachers have summers off and they don't work hence the low wages, but after reading this article, it sounded like these teachers do a lot of work on their time in the summer. I could be wrong, but contacting kids and parents during the summer when you know they'd rather be doing anything other than summer reading lists. My kids spend the summer trying to avoid the cops but end up coming back in the fall when they don't go to school. It's a wicked cycle. I can't imagine the kids where I work worrying about completing a summer reading list.
On a side note, I read an article about how the new Sec'y of Education's new platform is moving to a performance pay scale and promoting charter schools. Where I work that would be kind of a Catch-22 suck for me. Half of our students are only with us a short while 2 days or 2 weeks or sometimes 2 months. The other half of our students are with us apprx. 9mos to 1 year. About half of one percent of our students are of age and eligible to complete their GED - next to none are eligible to graduate with a high school diploma. One problem with this scenario is that they stopped going to school when they were freshmen or sophomores in HS (some stop going in 7th / 8th grade). If we are paid for performance what would be our criteria? Residents improve their ability to hot wire a car in under 1 minute or would we be judged on the number of residents who graduate to adult incarcerations? Too much sarcasm there, but it really is unfortunate if our district moves to that type of pay scale.
No comments:
Post a Comment