“Scenario: You just got a job as a grave digger. The job pays $25,710. You are so happy! But unfortunately, you smell bad when you come home – even worse than when you worked in the pickle factory — and you are being kicked out of your house. So you have decided to get your own apartment. After taxes, you take home $17,000. You owe $600 on your two credit cards which have a limit of $2,000. Your car payment is $200 a month with an additional $100 or so going to gas. How much can you spend on an apartment? How much should you spend on an apartment? What are the most important factors affecting your choice? List 3.”
Having stumbled on this while cleaning up my desktop computer, across the years, I still like the short scenario I wrote. I probably would have given credit for “not enough money due to the risk of zombies and price of apartments,” then and now. Scripted common lesson plans were a real loser for me. It was seldom worth the time to try to get everyone to use my scenario. It was easier to use the one someone found in a book. I am certain those by-committee plans did not benefit my students.
John LeCarre once said that “a committee is an animal with four back legs.” That was my experience of education toward the end, as my foreshortened, slightly early retirement paperwork was put in the pipeline. I could have helped more, I’m sure. But those eight meetings a week were wearing me down. I still remember people looking at me, their eyes saying, “Say something!” I had always been a person who could be relied upon to stand up against the more blatant craziness. I stopped saying my somethings, though, because too often my best efforts failed and they always lengthened the meeting.
From NPR:
“This is the canary in the coal mine. Several big states have seen alarming drops in enrollment at teacher training programs. The numbers are grim among some of the nation’s largest producers of new teachers: In California, enrollment is down 53 percent over the past five years. It’s down sharply in New York and Texas as well.
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/03/03/389282733/where-have-all-the-teachers-gone
Eduhonesty: That coming teacher shortage? Teaching was once a creative job that did not pay well, one that offered an uplifting chance to help children. “Educational reformers” are sucking the creativity out of the job, while simultaneously making the lives of those children a nonstop stream of sometimes incomprehensible work. Too often that work is designed by outsiders who have never met those children. Teachers may not be allowed to design or use their own materials. Teachers may have virtually no autonomy — at which point, as students become more lost, some begin to feel like failures.
Umm… as I look at today’s teaching environment, I wonder: what part of today’s teacher exodus is even remotely surprising? To paraphrase Harry Potter’s nemesis, Lucius Malfoy: What’s the use in being a disgrace to the name of teacher, if they don’t even pay you well for it?