Meddling with the conduct and content of education has been going on from the very beginning and what has always been clearly lacking is anything approaching empirical science been applied. Instead we have the ideological fashion of the day often been applied blindly in a top down fashion with blind faith in the consequences.
Does it not occur to even our educators that we can do way better.
It is not even about rewriting history every generation that is much of a problem unless of course it is suddenly hijacked to support pro Muslim antisemitism which is so utterly wrong on every measure. There common sense helps and life time education soon resolves obvious bias.
It is about physically advancing the human mind itself with the application of skill and effective tools. There three months of Euclid or three months of Jesuit natural ethics is amazing. any other approach is muddy and a half measure. My point is that there exists core sessions that truly educate a successful citizen. Let us master all that. The rest should be simply fun to learn and practice.
Teacher’s resignation letter: ‘My profession … no longer exists’
This is not from me. This was eloquently written by a true expert in
their field whom everyone should listen to, educator, Gerald J. Conti. I
picked it up from an article in the Washington Post by Valerie Strauss.
Read it and learn...there will be a test after.
Teacher’s resignation letter: ‘My profession … no longer exists’
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By Valerie Strauss April 6, 2013
i-quit
Increasingly teachers are speaking out against school reforms that they
believe are demeaning their profession, and some are simply quitting
because they have had enough.
Here is one resignation letter from a veteran teacher, Gerald J. Conti, a
social studies teacher at Westhill High School in Syracuse, N.Y.:
Mr. Casey Barduhn, Superintendent
Westhill Central School District
400 Walberta Park Road
Syracuse, New York 13219
Dear Mr. Barduhn and Board of Education Members:
It is with the deepest regret that I must retire at the close of this
school year, ending my more than twenty-seven years of service at
Westhill on June 30, under the provisions of the 2012-15 contract. I
assume that I will be eligible for any local or state incentives that
may be offered prior to my date of actual retirement and I trust that I
may return to the high school at some point as a substitute teacher.
As with Lincoln and Springfield, I have grown from a young to an old
man here; my brother died while we were both employed here; my daughter
was educated here, and I have been touched by and hope that I have
touched hundreds of lives in my time here. I know that I have been
fortunate to work with a small core of some of the finest students and
educators on the planet.
I came to teaching forty years ago this month and have been lucky
enough to work at a small liberal arts college, a major university and
this superior secondary school. To me, history has been so very much
more than a mere job, it has truly been my life, always driving my
travel, guiding all of my reading and even dictating my television and
movie viewing. Rarely have I engaged in any of these activities without
an eye to my classroom and what I might employ in a lesson, a lecture or
a presentation. With regard to my profession, I have truly attempted to
live John Dewey’s famous quotation (now likely cliché with me, I’ve
used it so very often) that “Education is not preparation for life,
education is life itself.” This type of total immersion is what I have
always referred to as teaching “heavy,” working hard, spending time,
researching, attending to details and never feeling satisfied that I
knew enough on any topic. I now find that this approach to my profession
is not only devalued, but denigrated and perhaps, in some quarters
despised. STEM rules the day and “data driven” education seeks only
conformity, standardization, testing and a zombie-like adherence to the
shallow and generic Common Core, along with a lockstep of oversimplified
so-called Essential Learnings. Creativity, academic freedom, teacher
autonomy, experimentation and innovation are being stifled in a
misguided effort to fix what is not broken in our system of public
education and particularly not at Westhill.
A long train of failures has brought us to this unfortunate pass. In
their pursuit of Federal tax dollars, our legislators have failed us by
selling children out to private industries such as Pearson Education.
The New York State United Teachers union has let down its membership by
failing to mount a much more effective and vigorous campaign against
this same costly and dangerous debacle. Finally, it is with sad
reluctance that I say our own administration has been both
uncommunicative and unresponsive to the concerns and needs of our staff
and students by establishing testing and evaluation systems that are
Byzantine at best and at worst, draconian. This situation has been
exacerbated by other actions of the administration, in either refusing
to call open forum meetings to discuss these pressing issues, or by so
constraining the time limits of such meetings that little more than a
conveying of information could take place. This lack of leadership at
every level has only served to produce confusion, a loss of confidence
and a dramatic and rapid decaying of morale. The repercussions of these
ill-conceived policies will be telling and shall resound to the
detriment of education for years to come. The analogy that this process
is like building the airplane while we are flying would strike terror in
the heart of anyone should it be applied to an actual airplane flight, a
medical procedure, or even a home repair. Why should it be acceptable
in our careers and in the education of our children?
My profession is being demeaned by a pervasive atmosphere of
distrust, dictating that teachers cannot be permitted to develop and
administer their own quizzes and tests (now titled as generic
“assessments”) or grade their own students’ examinations. The
development of plans, choice of lessons and the materials to be employed
are increasingly expected to be common to all teachers in a given
subject. This approach not only strangles creativity, it smothers the
development of critical thinking in our students and assumes a
one-size-fits-all mentality more appropriate to the assembly line than
to the classroom. Teacher planning time has also now been so greatly
eroded by a constant need to “prove up” our worth to the tyranny of APPR
(through the submission of plans, materials and “artifacts” from our
teaching) that there is little time for us to carefully critique student
work, engage in informal intellectual discussions with our students and
colleagues, or conduct research and seek personal improvement through
independent study. We have become increasingly evaluation and not
knowledge driven. Process has become our most important product, to
twist a phrase from corporate America, which seems doubly appropriate to
this case.
After writing all of this I realize that I am not leaving my
profession, in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists. I feel as
though I have played some game halfway through its fourth quarter, a
timeout has been called, my teammates’ hands have all been tied, the
goal posts moved, all previously scored points and honors expunged and
all of the rules altered.
For the last decade or so, I have had two signs hanging above the
blackboard at the front of my classroom, they read, “Words Matter” and
“Ideas Matter”. While I still believe these simple statements to be
true, I don’t feel that those currently driving public education have
any inkling of what they mean.
Sincerely and with regret,
Gerald J. Conti
Social Studies Department Leader
Cc: Doreen Bronchetti, Lee Roscoe
My little Zu.
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