Taylor the Teacher

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Every single morning when I wake up there are several new murders. This makes me sick to my stomach.  And if one more person says to me “Welcome to New Orleans” as some kind of excuse for this shit I’m going to split in half. On the spot.

When putting in for a substitute last week for a professional development trip I was supposed to take ~which the district backed out of paying for at the last minute and was therefore canceled~ I saw this:

I did the screen cap because I didn’t think anyone would actually believe me. I’m assuming the assault in question is the type of assault that happens in the school, otherwise it would be plain old sick leave, right?

I can’t breathe. Seriously.

It’s typical for me to come down with pneumonia once each school year, but I thought I had avoided it this year since up until March 13, it was so far so good. Then Friday it started.

Friday was also payday, which is how I found out that I don’t have any sick days. Apparently working in that filthy school full of germs you can’t see and openly disgusting dirt you can doesn’t qualify me for days off when the germs make me sick. So when I got my check, it was short because of a sick day I took a few weeks back.

Also, I’m still working on getting the district office to send me the necessary forms for health insurance. So no doctor for me.

Which is why I spent the weekend coughing and trying to breathe.

Yes, all Taylor does is bitch these days, which is why I don’t post as often. Who wants to hear that, right?

But I just wanted to say that this hellcat was invited to write for Clay Burell at Change.org several months ago, and has now done so two times without giving him proper link love.

There are many great articles there on education, and other stuff too, which I would write about if I could breathe. You can read more about the happenings at our ridiculous district office here.

Given the way things are run, I shouldn’t be surprised that I can’t seem to get anyone to mail me some health insurance forms in the mail, but I am.

There’s a teacher I work with who sneers the word “blog” at me a lot lately. She’s frustrated as hell, because there are a couple of technology coaches who have been sent from the state to “help” us, and they are constantly recommending blogging ~and other bells and whistles, her words~ for her math class. These technology coaches are one part of a contingent of people who come to “help” on a regular basis ~due in part to a situation entirely of the district’s own making which i’m expected to view as a crisis.  will blog about that nonsense soon, here or somewhere else~

My colleague is pissed about all the craziness that goes on around us, and I feel her exactly, but I wish she wouldn’t insult blogs in this way.

Blogging has certainly been a challenging writing task for me.

My colleague says blogs are meaningless because you can just write anything. So I started thinking about what blogging entails:

Blogging means I have to write even when I don’t feel like it. ~which is further complicated by the decision to write a personal blog, something I was amply warned against doing~

Blogging means thinking every single day about the world around me.

Blogging means reading other blogs, and formulating responses in the form of comments. ~how many times just this week have students asked me what i mean when i ask them to “respond” to a poem?~

Blogging means thinking carefully about online identity management. This, it turns out, means thinking carefully about identity in real life as well.

Blogging means evaluating, regularly, one’s purpose for writing and adjusting tone, style, and content to accomplish this purpose given a particular audience.

Blogging means thinking through issues on your own and expressing them clearly so others can understand. This public forum also means peer critique & review of ideas.

Not to mention grammar, spelling, usage, and punctuation. In short, blogging means writing, and it’s bloody difficult.

So whenever this colleague says blogging is nonsense because anyone can do it and you can write “anything you want” it really bugs me.

Newsflash: anyone can write anything they want any time they want. Always could. Blogging just makes it interesting and interactive enough for more people to want to write.

And that’s not nonsense.

Our superintendent announced today that he’s leaving New Orleans to run for President of the Cook County Board in Illinois. He told the Chicago Tribune that he “likes to fix things.”

Could have fooled me.

When I was in South Carolina I used to say that the school board was drunk at the wheel because they got rid of superintendents about every five years. A school district is a big ship, and every time a new captain comes on board the whole program changes. So far in my teaching career, this has happened before the changes of the last administration had time to be even fully implemented, much less for their impact to be measured.

Two years is not enough time for a superintendent to fix anything. But political careers can be built by using a superintendent’s chair as a stepping stone.

As long as it’s only the schools that suffer….

UPDATE: He’s not leaving until after next school year. And he hasn’t officially announced his candidacy, either. So yesterday’s “news,” simply put, wasn’t.

Did I mention it’s 82 degrees in this room?

I can’t blame the students for falling asleep in an 82 degree room right after lunch, can I?

Just came from a professional development meeting in which we learned the RAFT writing strategy. RAFT stands for

Role (role of the writer)

Audience (to whom or what the RAFT is being written)

Form (the form the writing will take, as in letter or song, etc)

Topic (the subject or focus of the writing)

So, once students have learned a concept, RAFT can be used to rework, apply and extend understanding of the material. Examples include a letter from a frog to a tadpole about the lifecycle of a frog, or a tour through the water cycle with a water drop as tour guide.

I decided to apply this strategy to review what I’ve learned so far about school leadership.

How to Demoralize a Faculty

1. Extend the school day, but add no additional pay for the extra work.

2. Be sure to take all planning periods away for meetings and professional development.

3. Lie on national television about the level of technology in the school. That way when people wonder why the schools aren’t performing, blame will fall squarely on the shoulders of the teachers.

4. Tell the students they can become 9th graders without passing the federally mandated 8th grade standardized test. Then, when you get busted for this, take back what you said.

5. Separate these 8th graders into a different Language Arts class, and watch student and teacher morale fall.

6. Visit the school every week for evaluations. That way you can tell the public you’re holding schools accountable. When you find something wrong in a classroom, just mark it down but never ask the teacher if he or she needs support or even basic supplies to make the classroom more successful.

7. Speaking of supplies, do not reimburse teachers for money spent in the classroom. Promise them gift cards from Staples, Office Depot or similar, but don’t worry about following through. All that matters is saying the right thing at the right time.

8. Do not enforce state law regarding attendance. This way, students will come and go as they please and no parents will get mad at you. This will make teaching supremely frustrating.

With a little effort, you too can make teachers feel inadequate to do their jobs. Don’t worry about turnover. You can always replace experienced faculty with Teach For America fellowes.

I was just on my back porch ~the rooftop~ listening to some Floyd, thinking I was going offline & closing up shop for the day. But Roger Waters reminded me of the need to call the dogs on their bullshit.

I was home on inauguration weekend watching CSPAN ~because i’m cool like that~ and I saw that our superintendent ~who is a very important man~ was invited to an “inaugural discussion” of public schools along with Rhee and many other notables. Yay for him.

But he said that every high schooler in New Orleans has a laptop.

Bullshit.

It is almost the end of January, and I just got working laptops on Friday, which were not charged. So they charged over the weekend, but Monday the wireless didn’t work. The ones we had up until Friday didn’t work at all.

I thank It was Grate But I ditining like It u dute now hiw to ? It bite on my nove - thay that no I shuying Bade can you hape me!!!

The above excerpt is character-for-character the response I received from a ninth grade student this morning. The assignment was a short post-project self evaluation. The students were asked to explain each of the group members’ contributions to the project and to give a fair grade to each member of the group.

I didn’t understand most of the response, but I understood the last four words.

A week ago one of my students confessed to murdering a woman in the French Quarter. A woman is dead, her family is devastated, and this child’s life is over.

At least 25 girls in my school are pregnant and many others are already parents. There have been at least ten fires in the school since the school year started, and many of the students are in school because they’re wearing ankle bracelets and have to report their activities to their parole ~or is it probation? not up on the criminal justice lingo yet~ officers.

And the special ed student who wrote the above sits in my classroom every day, unable to keep up. I spend the majority of my time on discipline issues. If I don’t get more support from the school district, I seriously doubt that I can help her. Every student can learn, but students cannot learn in just any environment under any conditions.

With these things in mind, consider the district’s recent decision to cut a teacher from our faculty last week. It’s also unclear whether more cuts are coming. This means that one of the Climate Control Specialists ~quasi administrative types who help with discipline in the halls~ had to go back to the classroom.

So the RSD figured what was needed at this school was fewer adults in the building.

Am I the only person that is annoyed by the self-congratulatory orgies of the Hollywood types? Ask me how much I care how much Angelina Jolie’s dress cost? Ask me. I dare you.

Seriously. I love movies. But these people need to have 2 or 3 nights EVERY YEAR wherein they congratulate each other for doing their jobs? Jobs which, mind you, consist of pretending to do the everyday things the rest of us do day in and day out 365 with no awards ceremonies and no twenty thousand dollar gift bags.

I couldn’t care less about the Golden Globe awards. I’m insulted that they think I care.

I’d rather watch “School of Rock.”