Time Does Get Away From Us

The highlight of this month for Bailee was the late Christmas gift she received from one of her dance buddies, Mary. Mary took some of the girls to a local nail salon for gel nails. They also went shopping in the mall and took in the movie Tangled. She had a great day! Her teens are coming at us like a runaway locomotive. Sure hope we are ready for this!

This month has been busy, hectic, stressful, and crazy for the adults of the house. Mostly crazy. Diana and I are both dealing with lots of challenges at our schools, and our durned fool of a State Superintendent of Public Instruction has complicated our lives beyond measure with his plan to totally overhaul the education system (basically union busting and disenfranchising teachers in the process). If all this goes through, we will be little more than serfs.

Some of the items on the table include -

• firing 770 teachers and increasing class sizes (my class sizes are 27 and 41 right now)


• issue laptops to every 9th grader in the state every year (the issues inherent there boggle the mind)


• require students to take 2 classes a year online (yup, today's kids need MORE time in front of a screen)


• eliminate all Master Agreements between teachers and schools (this would eliminate safe working conditions, sick days, personal leave, etc. etc. etc.)


• go to a merit pay system (there's no mention regarding how this would be funded in a recession OR how teachers would be evaluated - not very well thought out)


• change the focus to parents and children as consumers (with the customer always being right)


• eliminate tenure from this point forward (why would ANYONE want to come here to teach?)


• restrict collective bargaining (hello serfdom)


• focus on technology, technology, technology (with no mention of practicality, implementation in aging schools with inadequate wiring, issues regarding sustainability etc.)


• restructure the current retirement plan (even though our PERSI has been named as one of the most successful retirement systems in the country - if it ain't broke...)

There is much more, all of which is upsetting. Seems that the bottom line is to ultimately deliver all public education via the Internet. The bottom line for me is that none of this seems to have been thought through. There are objectives, but no plans to back them up. I also question the fiscal implications since we are in a recession. Who is going to be responsible for sustaining these programs? Idaho usually shoved unfunded mandates off on local districts. I especially want to now about the upkeep, repair, and cost of dealing with viruses and hacking. Will local districts have to bear that burden?

School just gets more and more demanding. We are expected to cram more and more into our limited day. This month we were told to add a new grammar program (we were given one teacher's guide to share among 5 teachers, and we scanned the 800 pages for use on our Smart Boards). The school board told us to cover all the material in what remained of the year, so we're craming an intensive nine month program into four months (since state testing begins at the end of April). Somehow, challenging just doesn't seem an adequate word.

This month has also seen a marathon of testing for the school board and the federal government. We do monthly writing assessments for the board (which they now want in cursive), plus we have now added the grammar assessments (the last one I gave took two hours because the kiddos have to copy everything from a test bookletcopies we made of the test. We don't have enough $ to allow them to write on the paper like they're supposed to.) Add this to our math, science, reading, and history assessments; and it seems like all we do is test.

The feds demand that we assess our entire class three times a year in comprehension, fluency, and vocabulary. Individually testing 27 kids was certainly time consuming. I'll tell you, sometimes I feel more like a proctor than a teacher.

Like I said, this is a rough time for us. I, personally, am counting the minutes until retirement. I love my kids, I love teaching ... but I despise the state of Idaho and how it treats educators.