Catching Waterfalls
Trying to solve the problems in the schools is like standing under a waterfall with buckets. You can stand under the waterfall with as many buckets as you can find and you will never be able to withstand the water. Like the water, the problems continue to cascade despite our persistence to prevent their destruction.
The district where I teach is like an attention deficit student. Never able to commit to one thing, always starting new projects and never finishing the first one. Someone always comes up with some bright idea about why the schools are successful and develops this elaborate plan to intervene and improve. The district contracts an exorbitantly high priced consultant to remedy the issue. And when that doesn’t work, the district hires another consultant with the next new theory to fix it. Yet, like the above analogy, patching up one hole or bandage is only a temporary solution. Once you bandage one area another area surfaces and eventually you have too many problems with few solutions.
One of the roads to a solution is to ask the experts that are already employed by the district. Most of these educators are highly qualified and more than capable of collaborating to tackle the problems in our schools. Who knows best than the teachers?
The solution is for you to become an education consultant who bills at a high rate.
Even if it doesn’t help the school system finances, it ‘ll help with yours.
Ed,
Thanks for reading. Now I know who to ask for some money making ideas.
I call it the “flavor of the month”… Which new strategy will we use this year? Which overpaid, arrogant, often under-capable (or at least no more capable than an experienced teacher) person will be monitoring us under a microscope? And it’s USUALLY not even the admiin’s fault. In my opinion, if administrators weren’t pulled in so many directions, they would be able to be a more consistent, authoritative presence and thus consistent with discipline …which is what trickles down to the classroom and causes us to not be able to actually teach and creates a feeling of entitlement for the student who feels offended when they are actually disciplined or even simply asked to sit in their seats or to stop taking during class.
At my new school, this year, there is not as much as a problem with discipline but I certainly can see it starting. There are entire days where we don’t see our admin AT ALL, ALL DAY because she is in meetings the entire school day… So, we, teachers, become the disciplinarians and the enforcers, which doesn’t always work.
Yes, I agree that the problems trickle down from the superintendent level to the administrators. They have a great deal of responsibility and are most certainly pulled in a many directions. But, remember how much they make and how little teachers make. For over a hundred thousand a year they should have to work for it. And, I would argue that they don’t work any harder than a teacher but earn double or triple of what we make. Like you said, there are the ones who are conveniently never around. Scheduling meetings all day is not an acceptable use of their time. They must have a presence in the building, so that they can discipline and teachers can teach.