Testify!

Hooray! Evaluation time again! This time my administrator came in on the day I had a raging sinus infection, but c'est la vie. I really didn't care because frankly, the Cornelius door is ALWAYS open.

Anyway, the kids tried their very best to make me look good (bless their little hearts!), we had a great discussion, and I showed up the next day for my post-observation conference.

She was very complementary. Very. She actually said that she believed I was the best teacher in the department (which isn't true, but is still very nice to hear). But she was pretty insistent about it and cited numerous examples. For well over half an hour, and I was pretty embarrassed, let me tell you. She said she actually stopped scripting because she got lost in the lesson and was actually learning.

But...

(There always is one, isn't there?)

The reason I mention the complements is to discuss what was written down.

Nothing.

Boilerplate language: "Ms. Cornelius is competent in her knowledge of subject matter." "Ms. Cornelius works with other staff members."

If she really thought that my teaching was that awesome, it would be nice to see her testify to that. And you know the etymology of the word, "testify," don't you?


( In the ancient world, men swore the truth about something by putting their hand on their testicles. Thus, they were "testes- fying.")

Our administrators have apparently been completely warned against saying anything complementary NO MATTER HOW STRONGLY the administrator believes that complements are in order). The top ranking on our evaluation forms is "meets expectations."

So, in other words, our evaluations are NOT actually supposed to indicate any real evaluation.

Yes, and Arne Duncan wants me to roll the dice on merit pay, right? I can already tell you what would happen if that were instituted in my district. Either NO ONE would get merit pay and raises would actually disappear except for the superintendent and his staff, OR the nattering nabobs of nepotism that haunt the office and the eight-legged administrators (those with a staff member so far up their administraors' keisters that they look like they have eight legs).

I know I am a good teacher. But I would like my written evaluations to honestly reflect my strengths. The administration has been instructed to write these non-evaluations so that they can later fire us at will with no evidence that we were ever anything but "adequate."

It's actually insulting.

How DOES one take away collective bargaining rights?

Watching the mess in Wisconsin from afar, I have been, as only a kid whose college tuition was partially paid for by union wages, appalled.

Why, oh why, did the millions of us in the same boat allow unions to be painted as evil to its own constituency? Now the governor of Wisconsin and his friends in the state senate are demanding that the Democratic lawmakers come home and bend over to allow them to steamroll the death of collective bargaining.

Wisconsin! Home of Robert LaFollette! Robert LaFollette, who was also (for most of his career in politics) a Republican. That sound you hear is him spinning in his grave.

The governor claims that breaking the unions of public employees (except for the police and fire unions, who are specifically exempted because they supported his election as governor, tit for tat) is absolutely necessary to right Wisconsin's financial ship.

Now look, I have nothing against expecting everyone-- EVERYONE-- connected to government in Wisconsin to take a pay cut or contribute more to pensions, and aspparently those represented by unions have stated they are willing to do this. But the Republican majority and the governor have stated that they will have all, or.... deadlock.

But I wonder if the sacrifices being demanded of workers been distributed evenly. Have the legislators agreed to contribute to their own pensions (which in most places are for LIFE even if you served for a few years) and pay for their health insurance (which are usually offered for full-time jobs, which is usually NOT the case for state legislatures).

I know that many people are jealous of people who still receive pensions, which exist today mainly in fairy tales outside of the public sector. I contribute to my own pension, which I will be fully vested in only after I have taught for thirty years at a full-time job. And I would be a chump to give it up, too, without some sort of a fight or a good reason why it is in my and my family's best interest to do so. Why is it when tycoons fight for the continuance of their generous tax-breaks, they're good capitalists, but when working people fight for a hard-won benefit, they are commies? What else has Governor Walker and his pals been up to, budget-wise? Let's see:

...For his first month in office, though, Walker's been focused on spending money through tax cuts. Two tax cuts he's already signed — along with one that's passed the Assembly — would add about $117 million to the state's budget problem over the next two years...

I imagine the governor of Wisconsin and his pals will get their way in the end. It then remains for the unions to make sure that they remind their members why it is important to re-certify the union each and every year after this, which will be required.

Oh, and Ohio is next.

One reason why I oppose merit pay plans

Last week I received my final evaluation of the year. My administrator saw me juggle a class with various learning disabilities, conduct a class discussion that encouraged participation-- even the young lady with social anxiety disorder spoke up once-- deal with two interruptions, and if I do say so, it all went very well.

This AP was very complementary as we discussed his visit. He highlighted specific strategies I used, noted the help I have given colleagues, committees upon which I have served and activities I have done with my students on my own time. It was really very nice, and I appreciated the fact that he had been paying attention and was very nice and collegial.

But....
When the written record was handed to me, it did not reflect any of those specifics of which he was aware and about which he had been so complementary. First of all, the highest level of evaluation for each specific behavior on our evaluation forms is "meets expectations." And I am fine with that, under our current system.

But the administrators have been warned to only use a canned list of comments for the individual comment section, and they are so bland they make pureed baby food seem as exotic Thai cuisine. "Ms. Cornelius helps her colleagues when it is needed...." "Ms. Cornelius has an orderly classroom...." "Ms. Cornelius engages her students using a variety of strategies...." Administrators are not supposed to put praise in writing, in case, at some later point, the administration should wish to fire me. Because, at least here in the Land Between the Coasts, the teacher unions are not that powerful.

And this is another reason why I oppose merit pay being implemented. Administrators would have even more pressure put on them not to put praiseworthy-- and raise-worthy-- evaluations in writing, because it would cost the district money. Meanwhile, I would be expected to give up my annual adjustments, and after reading some of my friends' blogs from California and New York, I am grateful that I even get those. Don't sit there and tell me because my principal acknowledges my hard work verbally that that would translate into any cold hard cash, especially in this tight and uncertain economic climate.

Now I'm not complaining about my evaluation-- at least not under this system. I get why it is the way it is. But I also understand that these evaluations do not literally reflect my efforts as a teacher. And given that I am not a snivelling sycophant to the higher ups, merit pay would be a big fat zero for me. I think I like my bird in the hand, thanks just the same.

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.

Backbiters and hypocrites

So how do you handle it when people who refer to your principal as "the Precious Leader" or "Madame Chiang" somehow also have managed to grab her ear and hang out in the office giving advice to her all the time? And then return to regale all who will listen about how clueless she is and how she would be completely lost without their "help?"

From the get-go, they've been afraid of her based in sexist fears of women in power, and they actively work to undermine any policies. But when a new policy is announced, if she is adamant that it be implemented, she is an arrogant "ball-buster" who is out of touch. If she listens to objections and modifies the policy, she is a "spineless woman who can't make up her own mind."

I'll admit, I'm stumped. And I begin to wonder if I should even care.

Why gender stereotypes are bull@&t

So I asked a bunch of students to generate a list of adjectives and phrases that describe males, and a list that describe females. After we generate these two lists, we categorize the adjectives and phrases according to positive, neutral, and negative comments. Some of the comments that came up over and over again for females is "holds a grudge," "petty," and "pouty."

Ha.

I am currently dealing with a colleague-- a big, burly, he-man type-- who got his skivvies in a wad over a misunderstanding over some inconsequential -- really-- request that I made to a principal. He actually used the term "chain of command," which is odd, given that A) I am not going to get a fellow teacher's permission to email a principal, ever; and B) he is not actually my "commander" in any stretch of the term. This was six months ago. I promptly and sincerely apologized for his upset at the time. I was extra solicitous of his needs and helped him out on some other matters. He is still acting like a baby.

I have to work with dis guy, and he is still in full pout.

See, I just don't get it. Someone does something you don't like. First, you decide if it's worth getting upset over. If yes, communicate displeasure to miscreant. Accept apology. End of story. This is how I operate. You know there are myriads of eamples of times when he hasn't done what he was supposed to, or he's made an error, and jeez, I've let bygones be bygones.

Jeez. What a prima donna.

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.