Progressing

At least three times a day I have moments and thoughts that I would love to flesh out in this journal, but then I have my planning period, run errands and do other activities that dissolve some of the intensity of those moments. That's a shame because there have been a lot of hilarious and/or horrifing moments at school recently. Although knowing Christmas is not far ahead, moving in with Heather and going out more have certainly made the job more bearable. Let me try and back track to some recent events...

On Friday we had professional development. Now, if there is one area of public school education that can exist as a microcosm of all that is wrong professional development would be it. Many failing urban school districts build a lot of professional development into their school calenders. These full and half days could easily be used in a number of positive ways but of course never are. As far as I can tell professional development days are full and half days where exhausted, paper-swaped teachers are asked to sit together in a room to watch useless videos that don't apply to our situation, listen to speakers inform us of things we are well aware of (and of course offer no solutions, or, as it was this week, play ice breaker games and discuss how we as people respond to conflict. Perhaps this could have been worthwhile I don't know if we ever got to how to resolve conflicts with kids or how to teach kids to incorporate conflict. But naturally all we did was write words and emotions we have during conflict and discuss how conflict can be postive. Whoopie doo.

Also on Friday one of our teachers got moved to another school. Let me set the stage for you - this teacher is also a member of my alternative certification program. He is in his first year and resides on the 8th grade floor. He started out the year teaching one class - creative writing. He is a social studies teacher. Later on they added a social studies class and effectively made him an in-house substitute. Baltimore City, seeing that he teaches out of content deemed him surplus and decided he needed to be moved to a higher need school. So where did they move him? Elementary school! Not only out of content area but also out of certification area! Brillant. And when does he start at his new school? Next Tuesday. Oh Baltimore City, you must work hard to make such bad decisions. What kind of message does this send to our children? What are we telling them by yanking away one of their teachers 3/8 into the year? That they don't deserve teachers, that your classes don't really matter (they are spliting the children up to be placed in random other classes)? C'est la vie.

I'd love to write more but I have to go to Target and buy gifts for my students of the month and do tomorrow's lesson plan.