Finally, what was supposed to take one or two days took almost a week, but the site at the new host is up and running.
Please join us over at the new site: es-kay.net
Don’t forget to change any links you might have to the site.
See you at the new site.
Goader
“…if more teachers knew about the… policies established as a result of the Whitehead case… they would be more empowered to speak out and utilize those policies” (Motel Special Ed)
I began teaching in 2003 as an ESE teacher. I taught special education students my first four years of teaching. There were many times I questioned how things were done or how accommodations were implemented. For example, at times a student’s Individual Education Plan (IEP) would call for a small learning environment (SLE). However, their were no resource classes with less than fifteen students. Somehow fifteen students in a classroom didn’t seem like a small learning environment.
So, I inquired of more experienced teachers as to what was considered a small learning environment. They said three or four students, and this is what I had thought that term meant—it sounds more reasonable than fifteen students. I would follow up my inquiry with the observation that IEPs were calling for an SLE but those students were placed in classes with fifteen students in them. The other teacher’s eyebrows would rise slightly and then he or she would proceed to say that it is in the eye of the beholder or some such retort.
The small learning environment quandary was only one of several observations I made as a “green” ESE teacher. I find it interesting that had I known about the Whitehead case I would have been much more likely to pursue my inquiries when I discovered inconsistencies with the way accommodations were implemented. I guess that is precisely why to this day the Whitehead case all but does not exist unless one stumbles upon it by accident.
It’s hard to say how much we remember of what we learned in college, but one thing I do remember and live by faithfully. We were talking about classroom management and when students are particularly relentless in their disruptive behavior. Sometime during the discussion the professor said to always remember that the child who is your current terror is some parent’s treasure. That child, however unruly for you, is the very best his or her parent has.
When talking to parents of disruptive students, I am sure to repeat that mantra to myself before calling. Likewise, when conferencing with a parent and the classroom terror sits in to listen, he or she is always on their best behavior. They sit like veritable angels, never revealing the wildness that lies just beneath that model student facade. Isn’t it amazing how controlled they can be when they choose to be so?
From what I have overheard of my colleagues talking to parents about disruptive students, most follow the adage that to the parent he or she is best they have. On the occasion I hear other teachers discussing with parents the misbehavior of their child I hear compassion and understanding from the teacher to the parent. It can be difficult to remain professional especially when the teacher figures little will change. None-the-less the teachers I have heard do remain professional virtually without exception.
Sometimes we forget that while the public complains and bemoans teachers for one thing or another, those same teachers faithfully educate that same public’s students without a hitch.
This is a temporary site until EsKay’s new home is ready next week. The only address you need is es-kay.net, which will direct you here and to the new host site when it goes live.
EsKay is moving to a new home and is going to a new host. The new official domain name will be es-kay.net instead of es-pressco.com, which was its official domain previously. Readers have always been able to get to the site by using es-kay.net; however, that actually was a redirect to es-pressco.com/blog, which used the domain name at the previous host. I owned both es-kay.net and es-pressco.com, but I have preferred the former for awhile now. Therefore, starting next week the official address will be http://es-kay.net
In the meantime, consider the following post as summer begins:
Basing a teacher’s bonus pay on a group of students’ standardized test scores, makes as much sense as basing the bonus pay of a basketball shoe salesman on how many points are scored by players wearing his shoes in a particular game. Teachers have as much to do with how well students learn as farmers do growing crops. All they can do is provide the best that he or she can in as progressive a way as they are able, and after that only God knows how things will turn out. For every aspect of their respective fields a farmer or a teacher can control there are a hundred influences that are completely out of his or her control.
Merit pay is smoke and mirrors, which mollifies the taxpayer who can’t stand that some make a dollar off his dime. This person hates the thought of other people attempting to make intelligent choices by collectively bargaining for the best terms possible. He has fallen victim to the relentless barrage of rhetoric coming from every obedient boss that unions are evil. He has relinquished his power of organizing and he wants everyone else to do the same. Instead, he would be better served to support those like teachers who have managed to preserve a semblence of unionizing. He needs to realize that he is continuing to help those who beat him down by disrespecting unions and the institutions they support.
School systems test students on one particular day and base an entire years bonus on those results. Additionally, forty percent of the criteria for bonus pay is based on a subjective evaluation by a single person. It is not the culmination of several independent evaluations or even multiple observations by one person. After all, even American Idol knows to judge people based on a committee decision rather the whims of one person. Maybe they fought with their wife that day, and now they are going to determine the fortune of someone totally unrelated to his domestic situation.
People bitch and moan about getting quality teachers, then offer low starting pay and a rigged scheme of so-called merit pay. Why use the money to negotiate liveable salaries that might attract some quality people into the teaching field. There is much talk about running public education like business, that is except for the pay. For that, we will do anything to keep it on the cheap. In business one gets what one pays for but sometimes pays for what one doesn’t get, i.e. consultants who tell us what we already know. Maybe, education follows the get-what-you-pay-for law of business. It most definitely espouses the paying for not getting part, at least at the district level.
EsKay 