The Eight-legged Administrator Rides Again

It's amazing how bosses everywhere seem to think that meetings are actually productive uses of ANYONE'S time. Faculty meetings are no exception. When I first started blogging, there was a great blog called "The Endless Faculty Meeting." I loved it because if faculty meetings were that cutting, we might actually enjoy them.

In one school in which I taught, we had faculty meetings on Fridays after school. It's amazing that someone didn't throw a ninja star made out of overhead projector parts at her head. You can already guess that this idea occurred to at least one person trapped there every other Friday.

My favorite thing is when we have faculty meetings on the shank end of parent-teacher conferences, and the PTB allow the tech dude Mr. Babbage (who smells like what I imagine Snoop Dogg probably smells like, if you get my drift) twenty minutes of every single meeting, even if he has nothing productive to say. So far, the only thing that Mr. Babbage HAS said every single meeting is this: "Well, this isn't working right now, but if it WAS working, this is what you'd see...." and then a fifteen minute wall of sound complete with reverb about what the imaginary techie thing might look like. I am tempted to say: "If it won't work on your brand-new MacBook Pro, it sure as HELL isn't going to work on my ten-year-old iMac," but that would then prolong the meeting, so many of us amuse ourselves by playing BuzzWord Bingo and messing around on our smartphones. I personally have sought to perfect a fixed expression in which I unfocus my eyes and meditate with a faint smile on my face.

I was right in the middle of a mantra when I suddenly came back to earth with a bang in the last meeting. First, some backstory: we have the bottom part of an eight-legged administrator on staff (Mr. Leckmichhorst) who haunts the main office, filling our principal's head with loads of sweet nothings for hours on end. He sucks up as only one whose vast incompetence and mental inertia is matched by his naked ambition to rise into the lofty ranks of middle-management can suck up. Only if he started biting on his pinkie finger while wearing a leer and a Nehru jacket could this performance be any more perfect. After his tete-a-tetes at the feet of the Throne of Power, he then comes back and regales his clan of hyenas with how stupid the principal is. Leckmichhorst's unintentional impression of the late Alexander Haig claiming control of the White House is spot on, I have to admit, and just as delusional.

Imagine my surprise when Mr. Leckmichhorst rose upon his hindlegs at the podium and started talking about how our school was going to be absolutely TRANSFORMED by adopting a new behavioral management system that rewards the kiddies with gold star stickers and that utilizes weird acronyms like PAHTOOTY or DERRIERE or something like that. His assurance that this NEW! FABULOUS! SYSTEM! wouldn't put any more work on the plates of teachers was truly jaw-dropping in its disingenuous brilliance. We were led to believe that we would practically be able to play SkeeBall in all the halos sprouting above kids' heads under this system, and that all the old referral forms that would be henceforth obsolete could create a bonfire from that would be visible to astronauts on the International Space Station. There wasn't even a whiff of ozone detectable as this dude sat up there and lied his face off promoting a plan he has ruthlessly mocked for months. So that, in his own words, "I can get a $30,000 raise next year!"

Wow. What a performance-- and just when Oscar nominations are being handed out. But you can't save people from their own moral squishiness OR their own naivete, so back to the meditation.

Om. Om, dammit.

Watch it, kid, or you might grow up to be president.

As well all tot up our final grades for our students at the end of the school year, we teachers (and parents) often despair of those underachievers who scrape along with the Ds and C-minuses and seem not to care.

Well, now we've got a new threat that could really scare them: If you don't get your grades up, you might end up being the president.
As Ann Sanner of the AP writes, Kennedy was almost expelled, Truman struggled with punctuation, and Eisenhower could be rude:

Lyndon Johnson got a D in his third-grade grammar class. John Kennedy scored a 55 in eighth-grade Latin. George H.W. Bush's high school transcript shows marks in the 60s and 70s for many classes.

"We want to believe that there is a class of people who emerge early on as heirs to the throne, so to speak, but that's not the case," said Timothy Walch, director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library.

The youthful days of presidents are the subject of "School House to White House: The Education of the Presidents," an exhibit at the National Archives.

Through their own accounts, the cursive script of their early writings, report cards, playbills and photographs, the exhibit highlights just how normal most of them were in their youth.

Most attended public schools where math, reading and science were the core of their education. Some were also graded on citizenship and physical training. Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy and Bush attended prestigious boarding schools.

Outside the classroom, they were athletes and performers.

Johnson, Roosevelt and Richard Nixon showed their talent in school plays. Bill Clinton was the drum major of his high school marching band. Gerald R. Ford captained his high school football team.

Dwight Eisenhower's competitive streak ranged from the class spelling bee to baseball diamonds and football fields. Spelling was his favorite subject in grammar school. "Either because the contest aroused my competitive instincts or because I had learned that a single letter could make a vast difference in the meaning of a word," he wrote.

Each had his own vulnerability.

Jimmy Carter was shy, but a high school teacher encouraged him to join the debate team. Roosevelt wrote home from boarding school almost every day and spared no details. In one letter, the father of the New Deal revealed he had gained several pounds and received no "blackmarks." He also asked his family to send grapes or other fruit.

Some were known for their behavior — good and bad.

Herbert Hoover's teacher described the 10-year-old as "a real boy, loved play, but his lessons came first." She said she never had to tell him to redo work or punish him for not completing it.

Kennedy's headmaster once said the teen had a "clever, individualist mind," though he might have called him a "Mucker," too. Kennedy and several of his friends from boarding school formed a group called the "Muckers," named after the headmaster's term for boys who failed to meet the school's standards.

He was nearly expelled during his senior year for his antics as a Mucker at Choate School in Connecticut. He broke up the group and was allowed to stay.

In a letter, Kennedy's father once told him to step up his efforts in class. Instead of working hard in all subjects, Kennedy mainly focused on his favorites — English and history.

"It is very difficult to make up fundamentals that you have neglected when you were very young, and that is why I am urging you to do the best you can," Joseph Kennedy wrote. "I am not expecting too much, and I will not be disappointed if you don't turn out to be a real genius, but I think you can be a really worthwhile citizen with good judgment and understanding."

Punctuality was a problem for Johnson, whose ninth-grade report card shows that in two months he was tardy eight times.

Eisenhower could have skipped a grade if it weren't for his bad manners. "My conduct was not the equal of my reading ability," he once wrote.

Some of their junior high school writings show glimpses of the leaders they would become.

Nixon contemplated a career in politics even as eighth-grader.

"I would like to study law and enter politics for an occupation so that I might be of some good to the people," he wrote in a class autobiography.

Harry Truman's writings show his idealism but not a knack for appropriate punctuation. "A true heart a strong mind and a great deal of courage and I think a man will get through the world," he wrote in an English theme book in the archives' collection, a reproduction of which is on display until Jan 1, 2008.

In a classroom filled with eager students, picking out a future commander in chief is impossible, Walch said. "There's no way that you can identify some young man in the fifth grade and say he'll turn out to be president."

I would love to see this exhibit, but having been an underachiever myself in school, I would hate to think of MY report card as being on public view. This just goes to show that it's never too late to turn your life around-- or, if you're a curmudgeon, that some slacker kids eventually DO get punished with one of the hardest jobs in the world. So work now, kids, or risk being worked into premature wrinkles later.

This will keep me off the blog list of NEA Today forever....

...but I'm going to do it anyway. It is time to speak out.

Incompetent teachers should be fired. No ifs, ands, or buts.

I was reading the debate about proposition 74 in California, which comes up for a vote soon. Prop 74 would, among other things, increase the amount of time necessary to gain tenure as a public school teacher to five years from the current two years. But increasing the lagtime for tenure is only one tiny piece of the puzzle. Unspoken is the fact that those teachers were hired by someone, observed by someone (supposedly), and rehired by someone. Bad teachers do not pop out of nowhere. I don't see laws addressing these facts. Instead, I see yet another attempt to demonize teachers, while leaving untouched the larger issue of making teaching an honored and valued profession.

I'll say it again: incompetent teachers should be fired. However, I hope people understand that simply raising the years until teachers get tenure will hardly end incompetent teachers in the classroom.

First of all, the hiring process needs never to be based on nepotism and cronyism. I remember well sitting in a human resources office in a chichi district, listening to the director talk about how he was going to hire the son of so-and-so for this spot-- then he tried to hire me as a $12K a year assistant so that I could hold the hand of Junior. One of the most incompetent teachers I know was hired because he was a graduate of the high school at which I taught. And he's still teaching.

Second, teachers need to be evaluated by someone who knows what to look for in establishing judgments of competence and incompetence. This means that administrators should get out of their offices and be cognizant of what is going on in the classrooms. If they are too busy to do this-- which would seem the most important job of all-- then work should be reassigned so that administrators can do this. This should be their primary job, not number-crunching or stating the obvious ("There's an achievement gap!"). If administrators did this, it wouldn't matter how long it took to get tenure-- because they would know what's going on.

If there is a problem, they need to provide feedback and guidance to give the teach a chance to improve. They need to have the knowledge and experience to be able to provide this feedback and guidance. They need to amass documentation to use in getting rid of the deadwood. I knew an AP who falsified observations for 4 years-- she hadn't been in a classroom to observe since Clinton's first term. And it took the other administrators 6 years to figure this out. Might I point out that that is more than the amount of time it would take to get tenure under Proposition 74?

But you don't hear about passing laws forbidding these types of practices-- because it doesn't make teachers look bad, it makes administrators look bad. It doesn't allow the continued myth that there are a multitude of rotten teachers in our schools.

If a teacher is fired, they should not be given a good recommendation to go quietly just to make things nicey-nicey legally-- that just passes on the problem to some other school district, and betrays our sacred trust. And as Redhog says in his post of October 28, teaching IS a sacred trust.

We teachers have our part to play in this. We must not remain quiet when we see a problem. We must be able to trust that if we report a problem, it will be acted upon. School districts and teachers must demonstrate the will to get rid of bad teachers-- we know who they are. There's not a lot of them, but there are some. We need to understand that we teachers have an investment in this-- after all, the guy who reads the paper every day instead of teaching may well be the administrator of tomorrow.