Today was the first day that I was required to go to school. It was for some prep work we're doing to ensure our 1:1 computing initiative doesn't fall flat. Last year I worked on a grant writing team that met numerous times throughout the year to draft a proposal for a $250K grant given to schools with a solid plan to improve middle schools. We got it and with it we bought 300 laptops for our middle school. Funding it otherwise would have been impossible, but the mission of the school demanded that we get to this point somehow. This mission was part of the reason I signed on with this school- it involved preparing students for work and college and using technology to do it.
My opinion on the use of computers is anything but lukewarm. I wrote a master's thesis last year dealing with a related topic. To save you from reading the terribly boring manuscript, an important piece can be summed up as:
Students know how to use computers to communicate informally via things like facebook, myspace and AIM. This is an issue because they develop no skills that are academically or professionally pertinent. Generally students use these technologies to talk about themselves and to entertain themselves. Formal instruction on how to use communicative technology is absolutely necessary if our students are going to develop the skills they need to be successful.
Using laptops in the classroom can certainly be a headache. Sometimes I feel like I'd rather set the laptop cart on fire than get the things out only to deal with a thousand questions about why Windows is closing word documents because it thinks that it would be funny if you lost half an hour of work and why it's sending warnings that a virus is about to leap through the screen, kill the user and then destroy the world. To say the least, teachers who use laptops often know very well that troubleshooting problems on the computer can take up a great deal of time that should be devoted to instruction. The older the equipment gets, the worse the problems get.
In spite of issues with computer use, it has become the duty of teachers to incorporate it into widely and diversely into curriculum. I feel this is especially the case in the core classes. If the students do not learn in school how to communicate appropriately via social-networking and communicative, technology they generally don't at all. Because of the way they know how to use technology (see my post on sexting), NOT teaching them to use technology appropriately is actually hurting them far more than simply not giving them applicable skills in the work force.
Funding is a major problem when it comes to getting reliable technology into the classroom. The only reason we were even able to get so many laptops was because of the grant we received. During my thesis defense a couple professors backed me into a corner when I implied that both great teachers and up-to-date technology are the most important things to concentrate on getting for our students. I turned red and admitted that I had no answer to the question as to how we get both. Great teachers have to come before great technology, but the lack of money in education is the reason that there is a lack of great teachers. It's going to take a lot more money and public investment in the education system to get better teachers and technology. In spite of those difficulties, I firmly believe that getting technology into the classroom is imperative to our students' success.
Today's Wine: Chianti Ruffino, whose distributors hails it as a major reason people even drink Chianti today. It made me drink the wine, anyway. We served it at the restaurant I worked at back in Kansas. Chianti is produced in the Tuscany region of Italy.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Hiring Freeze Frenzy
Today the New York Times ran an article about the hiring freeze in NYC titled "Amid Hiring Freeze, Principals Leave Jobs Empty." Basically the freeze on hiring means that no one can be hired as a teacher who didn't already hold a teaching certificate last year. I've been pretty riled up about the whole situation and it seems a little common sense would clear it up.
Point 1
New York City has 1,500 schools. Among them are some of the most difficult to staff in the country. Principals EVERY year at this time are scrounging to find decent candidates to put on their payrolls- candidates that will survive the first year in a new school and that will actually teach their students something. There is a reason so many millions of dollars are used to recruit people to work in New York. People are brought from around the world (Philippines, Austria, etc.) to fill vacancies because there are not enough qualified candidates to go around.
I talked just a bit in my previous post about how poor/mentally deranged some of these candidates are. While the union thinks it's protecting its workers by making sure they are given jobs before new hires, it certainly isn't protecting the students. The people who have been unable to find a position for the past year or two probably should never be given a position. These principals are not "quietly defying" the hiring freeze. This is New York City!! If someone is going to defy something like this they'll scream it from the rooftops. These principals are looking out for the best interests of their students by NOT hiring these people, just as they do every year. Pressure is put on them by the city to have a successful school. Who is going to hire someone that has been unable to find a job for twelve months in a city that can't even staff it's schools every year?
There is also some pressure on principals, however morally grounded, to look at cheaper employees. This means hiring younger, less-experienced teachers because their salaries are much lower. This is a problem with the budgets that I feel needs to be rectified. Here's a solution I've bounced around for a while:
Deduct the same amount of money from a principal's budget for every teacher hired. This would eliminate the concern about having to hire younger teachers or forcing older ones out and enable principals to simply hire the best teachers available. Who would pick up the rest of the tab for the salaries of these teachers? Tricky. Principals' budgets would need to be reduced as a whole, presuming they would need less money if they were only paying first-year rates to all teachers. That reduction of course would be highly contended and scrutinized, but if done correctly, most of the schools in the city might benefit.
A problem with this plan: Principals already receive pretty much the same budgets across the city. Some have made it a practice to have a young, slightly less-experienced staff in order to have a few more dollars to buy things like textbooks and computers. The bottom line is that there is simply not enough money to go around. Schools can either have great programs and technology or experienced teachers, but not both with the funding they're given by the state and federal government. The principals who have elected to have younger staffs to afford better programming would take a hit because they would probably lose enough of their budget that they wouldn't be able to afford the special program(s) they offer.
Perhaps this can be offset with grants to inflate budgets, but grants cannot be relied on year after year. If we move that direction in education I fear schools will open and close so often that the idea of "school culture" will be obliterated in the city, eliminating a major incentive for students to come to school.
Easy solution? There is none. Easy to rant about? Sure.
Point 2
Coming out of the school of ed we were all super stressed about getting jobs, understandably. This year it seems like it would be far worse. Because of the hiring freeze, all the people coming out of schools of education are not even eligible to be hired. These students of education did not have a teaching certificate last year and are therefore ineligible. If I had moved this year instead of last year I would have been sent right back to Kansas.
A loophole to this is if you are going through a non-traditional program. Teach for America candidates and New York Teaching Fellow candidates are still being allowed into the classroom without any experience. Regardless of how you feel about the traditional route to the classroom or the alternative routes, I personally think it's a bunch of crap. If traditional education students are worth that little, perhaps we should revamp those programs to make the future educators more valuable.
The hiring freeze, at any rate, as the potential to discourage a lot of eager, great candidates from even joining the field. What kind of message is the Department of Ed and the United Federation of Teachers sending if solid candidates are being rejected while the bottom of the barrel is being placed in schools?
Today's Wine: A Cabernet-Malbec blend at Libertador Parrilla Argentina. Apparently Malbec is oftentimes used as a blending grape, more especially in France, though. This one was from south of the border.
Point 1
New York City has 1,500 schools. Among them are some of the most difficult to staff in the country. Principals EVERY year at this time are scrounging to find decent candidates to put on their payrolls- candidates that will survive the first year in a new school and that will actually teach their students something. There is a reason so many millions of dollars are used to recruit people to work in New York. People are brought from around the world (Philippines, Austria, etc.) to fill vacancies because there are not enough qualified candidates to go around.
I talked just a bit in my previous post about how poor/mentally deranged some of these candidates are. While the union thinks it's protecting its workers by making sure they are given jobs before new hires, it certainly isn't protecting the students. The people who have been unable to find a position for the past year or two probably should never be given a position. These principals are not "quietly defying" the hiring freeze. This is New York City!! If someone is going to defy something like this they'll scream it from the rooftops. These principals are looking out for the best interests of their students by NOT hiring these people, just as they do every year. Pressure is put on them by the city to have a successful school. Who is going to hire someone that has been unable to find a job for twelve months in a city that can't even staff it's schools every year?
There is also some pressure on principals, however morally grounded, to look at cheaper employees. This means hiring younger, less-experienced teachers because their salaries are much lower. This is a problem with the budgets that I feel needs to be rectified. Here's a solution I've bounced around for a while:
Deduct the same amount of money from a principal's budget for every teacher hired. This would eliminate the concern about having to hire younger teachers or forcing older ones out and enable principals to simply hire the best teachers available. Who would pick up the rest of the tab for the salaries of these teachers? Tricky. Principals' budgets would need to be reduced as a whole, presuming they would need less money if they were only paying first-year rates to all teachers. That reduction of course would be highly contended and scrutinized, but if done correctly, most of the schools in the city might benefit.
A problem with this plan: Principals already receive pretty much the same budgets across the city. Some have made it a practice to have a young, slightly less-experienced staff in order to have a few more dollars to buy things like textbooks and computers. The bottom line is that there is simply not enough money to go around. Schools can either have great programs and technology or experienced teachers, but not both with the funding they're given by the state and federal government. The principals who have elected to have younger staffs to afford better programming would take a hit because they would probably lose enough of their budget that they wouldn't be able to afford the special program(s) they offer.
Perhaps this can be offset with grants to inflate budgets, but grants cannot be relied on year after year. If we move that direction in education I fear schools will open and close so often that the idea of "school culture" will be obliterated in the city, eliminating a major incentive for students to come to school.
Easy solution? There is none. Easy to rant about? Sure.
Point 2
Coming out of the school of ed we were all super stressed about getting jobs, understandably. This year it seems like it would be far worse. Because of the hiring freeze, all the people coming out of schools of education are not even eligible to be hired. These students of education did not have a teaching certificate last year and are therefore ineligible. If I had moved this year instead of last year I would have been sent right back to Kansas.
A loophole to this is if you are going through a non-traditional program. Teach for America candidates and New York Teaching Fellow candidates are still being allowed into the classroom without any experience. Regardless of how you feel about the traditional route to the classroom or the alternative routes, I personally think it's a bunch of crap. If traditional education students are worth that little, perhaps we should revamp those programs to make the future educators more valuable.
The hiring freeze, at any rate, as the potential to discourage a lot of eager, great candidates from even joining the field. What kind of message is the Department of Ed and the United Federation of Teachers sending if solid candidates are being rejected while the bottom of the barrel is being placed in schools?
Today's Wine: A Cabernet-Malbec blend at Libertador Parrilla Argentina. Apparently Malbec is oftentimes used as a blending grape, more especially in France, though. This one was from south of the border.
Friday, August 28, 2009
On the Other Side of the Table
Yesterday and today my new team was interviewing math candidates. We had three interviews from incredibly different people, but it wasn't difficult to decide who we wanted. Being on the other side of the table is WAY better than being on the interviewee end, by the way.
I've never interviewed for teaching jobs outside of New York City or outside of the Bronx, so to say I'm an expert on interviewing candidates would be a stretch. When I worked at 65 Court Street my office was in charge of recruiting. I did sit next to dozens of interviews, some with people singing and dancing for our recruiters, some yelling at their interviewer, some very strong candidates who just happened to have a first point of contact with someone at our office, and some whose only contact with a government institution should have been to be institutionalized, not to apply for jobs through the Department of Ed.
Part of that job was also to help with massive career fairs attended by sometimes well over a thousand candidates where row after row of principal/hiring team would take resumes and listen to candidate after candidate in an attempt to find people to fill their open positions. These events were high-stress, generally very hot, full of people who got angrier and angrier (especially as the summer wore on) and wondered why no one was getting a job and no one was helping them specifically. For some these events were life-savers, for many others they were entirely frustrating gong shows that, from what I could tell, could really be run no other way except in an online setting, which wouldn't necessarily be any better. The fact of the matter is that there are only so many positions and generally a lot of people looking for jobs, in spite of general teacher shortages (or shall we say good teacher shortages).
I was fresh off the plane from Kansas during that summer, not really knowing anything about the city and not sure where I was going to want to teach a year down the road when I would be looking for jobs. As one of the fairs was winding down, I was brought into a conversation with a principal from the South Bronx by the Bronx Recruiter, one of the craziest and hardest working employees in the DOE, who was also my immediate supervisor and for whom I was a lackey, assistent and most importantly an intern. This principal was going on and on about the lack of qualified people for her school, which was apparently a rough one. She took one look at me, leaned over the table and said, "No offense, but I wouldn't hire you. You look too nice."
I was of course indignant. Did this woman not know that I had one of the highest GPAs in the School of Education?! Was she aware that I had been substitute teaching in rural Kansas for an entire semester?!
Of course she didn't know. I hadn't told her. What's more is that I knew full and well- in a very textbooky sort of way- that those things didn't matter when it came to teaching the students she was teaching. In fact, they matter very, very little, if at all. From her perspective I was a scrawny white guy, clean-shaven, looked like I was about seventeen and I was quietly listening to the conversation, seemingly very passive. Based on that interaction alone, I wouldn't have hired me in a million years.
As for me hiring people(haha), I had three options: wet-behind-the-ears-guy, the scared puppy and the decent candidate.
Wet-Behind-the-Ears-Guy This guy, according to a couple other people at the interview, was almost a carbon copy of me at the beginning of last year. I agreed, save for the moppy hair and bigger ears. He was slinging post-grad vocabulary, soft-spoken but confident and full of what seemed like good ideas, especially on paper and in textbooks. We thought he'd be an acceptable hire- the students would shred him and we'd help him regain his footing and make it through the year with some level of success (pretty much what I experienced).
Scared Puppy She came from another school in Washington Heights serving a similar population. It didn't show. She answered few questions well, none with complete confidence and was very intimidated by the whole process. Not very becoming of a one-year veteran. Had she been hired, she would have been shredded and would have made it through the year, but she would have been a weak link on our team.
Decent Candidate Sometimes it's hard to describe a good interview (again, I'm not an expert). Sometimes you just know that a candidate will work well with you. This candidate was leaving a job for respectable reasons, lives and works in the community our school is in, and easily answered all the questions we had. Out of the three, the team agreed unanimously to extend an offer to her first. She has the potential to be an incredible asset to our team and school.
Yesterday's Wine: A glass of Malbec at Josie's West in Manhattan. Personally I've never had a glass of Malbec that I didn't like. This one was from south of the border.
I've never interviewed for teaching jobs outside of New York City or outside of the Bronx, so to say I'm an expert on interviewing candidates would be a stretch. When I worked at 65 Court Street my office was in charge of recruiting. I did sit next to dozens of interviews, some with people singing and dancing for our recruiters, some yelling at their interviewer, some very strong candidates who just happened to have a first point of contact with someone at our office, and some whose only contact with a government institution should have been to be institutionalized, not to apply for jobs through the Department of Ed.
Part of that job was also to help with massive career fairs attended by sometimes well over a thousand candidates where row after row of principal/hiring team would take resumes and listen to candidate after candidate in an attempt to find people to fill their open positions. These events were high-stress, generally very hot, full of people who got angrier and angrier (especially as the summer wore on) and wondered why no one was getting a job and no one was helping them specifically. For some these events were life-savers, for many others they were entirely frustrating gong shows that, from what I could tell, could really be run no other way except in an online setting, which wouldn't necessarily be any better. The fact of the matter is that there are only so many positions and generally a lot of people looking for jobs, in spite of general teacher shortages (or shall we say good teacher shortages).
I was fresh off the plane from Kansas during that summer, not really knowing anything about the city and not sure where I was going to want to teach a year down the road when I would be looking for jobs. As one of the fairs was winding down, I was brought into a conversation with a principal from the South Bronx by the Bronx Recruiter, one of the craziest and hardest working employees in the DOE, who was also my immediate supervisor and for whom I was a lackey, assistent and most importantly an intern. This principal was going on and on about the lack of qualified people for her school, which was apparently a rough one. She took one look at me, leaned over the table and said, "No offense, but I wouldn't hire you. You look too nice."
I was of course indignant. Did this woman not know that I had one of the highest GPAs in the School of Education?! Was she aware that I had been substitute teaching in rural Kansas for an entire semester?!
Of course she didn't know. I hadn't told her. What's more is that I knew full and well- in a very textbooky sort of way- that those things didn't matter when it came to teaching the students she was teaching. In fact, they matter very, very little, if at all. From her perspective I was a scrawny white guy, clean-shaven, looked like I was about seventeen and I was quietly listening to the conversation, seemingly very passive. Based on that interaction alone, I wouldn't have hired me in a million years.
As for me hiring people(haha), I had three options: wet-behind-the-ears-guy, the scared puppy and the decent candidate.
Wet-Behind-the-Ears-Guy This guy, according to a couple other people at the interview, was almost a carbon copy of me at the beginning of last year. I agreed, save for the moppy hair and bigger ears. He was slinging post-grad vocabulary, soft-spoken but confident and full of what seemed like good ideas, especially on paper and in textbooks. We thought he'd be an acceptable hire- the students would shred him and we'd help him regain his footing and make it through the year with some level of success (pretty much what I experienced).
Scared Puppy She came from another school in Washington Heights serving a similar population. It didn't show. She answered few questions well, none with complete confidence and was very intimidated by the whole process. Not very becoming of a one-year veteran. Had she been hired, she would have been shredded and would have made it through the year, but she would have been a weak link on our team.
Decent Candidate Sometimes it's hard to describe a good interview (again, I'm not an expert). Sometimes you just know that a candidate will work well with you. This candidate was leaving a job for respectable reasons, lives and works in the community our school is in, and easily answered all the questions we had. Out of the three, the team agreed unanimously to extend an offer to her first. She has the potential to be an incredible asset to our team and school.
Yesterday's Wine: A glass of Malbec at Josie's West in Manhattan. Personally I've never had a glass of Malbec that I didn't like. This one was from south of the border.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
"All the Wrong People are Leaving"
In this day and age email is the medium through which professionals collaborate. Yes, there are conferences and meetings when necessary, during which half the attendees are on their blackberries irritating those who are not. Email has taken the place of the cubical walk-by, the prep room fly-by and the hand-written note in the mailbox.That said, email in the workplace needs to be professional. It's official, documented correspondence between colleagues. That means it should be free of slights, heavy criticism and very rude remarks. In the business world if you send multiple emails slighting all the employees in the company I can guarantee that you'll get canned pretty quick.
"All the wrong people are leaving" was a one-line email sent to the entire staff today. It was meant to say that there are a couple people leaving our staff who the sender respected, and that he believes a number of others should quit. It's not the first time this person has sent emails like this and I'm sure it won't be the last. The person's email was actually shut off two years ago because the remarks became excessive.
I was at school today going through books and materials for the coming year and a student worker was helping out. She had the "sender" as a teacher two years ago and she, along with a lot of other students, think he's a fantastic teacher. From what I hear the administration believes the same- he is a great teacher; he gets students excited about the material and holds them accountable for everything they do. From what I know about this person, it doesn't actually surprise me. Whatever you do in the classroom, however, part of your job- and a necessary part- is showing your coworkers respect. If your students respect you and they see you disrespecting the rest of the staff, you are undermining the efforts of all teachers in the building. That is completely unacceptable.
Part of our jobs as professional teachers is to act like professionals. Part of that professionalism is to work with coworkers, not against them. Running around, believing spiteful emails are "fighting the good fight," and that the administration is what we should be fighting against is not going to help anyone. It certainly isn't going to help the students in the school, nor is it going to rally the "troops" to a cause. What is more, teachers are attacked as being unprofessional, often times for their appearance, but also for reasons like this.
In order for our education system to improve, teachers must gain more respect from the populace. Behavior like this is not going to do it.
Today's Wine: 3 Buck Chuck pumped from yesterday
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Sexting- Sex Texting in School?
There are articles all over the web right now talking about Houston's ban on "sexting". Basically Houston is trying to combat really inappropriate pictures and videos of students being sent through their airwaves at school. I picked up on it at detentionslip.org, where the author made a really good point- why are we not taking action on the use of the cell phones in schools, rather than one thing the students are able to do with them.
Cell phone use was a huge problem in our school last year. Suspensions sky-rocketed because of them. Students would be on their phones in class and would be asked to turn them over as per New York City's Chancellor's Regulations, which forbid electronics in school except for students with medical conditions. When students refused to turn them over they were suspended, plain and simple. The long and short of it: it is IMPOSSIBLE to teach a student if they are chatting on their cell phone during class. It is also IMPOSSIBLE to teach a student if they are suspended every other day because of they use a phone in class. What is more is that calling parents is completely fruitless, as students being suspended are often-times using friends' cell phones. The response from the parents when their students are suspended is: "my student doesn't even have a phone." Solution: ban cell phones from the school.
Now, some parents complain that they need to be able to reach their student at any given time in case of emergencies. This has beenappealed to the New York Supreme Court several times. In one case the defendant claimed that cell phone usage was the only thing that saved her daughter from a stalker after school. Other cases seem to concentrate on what happens after school rather than during school. Solution: Instead of banning phones outright, have students check there cell phones in at the beginning of the day and give them back at the end of the day. Recommendations by parents revolve around "punishments" being delved out to repeat cell-phone abusers or they point to cell phone policies at schools like Bronx Science (one of the best high schools in the city, full of academically prone, self-motivated students) as examples of why having a rule against cell use in the classroom is completely adequate. If there is some kind of an emergency during the school day, I'm pretty sure most schools are equipped with phones these days. In fact, most classrooms have them. Students simply do not need their phones in class, nor any other time during school.
At the end of the year last year, most teachers agreed that it is incredibly necessary to have students check in phones if are to get anything done. When it comes to "sexting" in class, we certainly don't want any more of that either. Last year while a sub was in a sixth grade classroom, a girl filmed herself grinding on a male classmate and posted it to the web. Bing, bang, boom- just like that. Had the phones been taken at the door, it wouldn't have happened.
As for inappropriate use of cell phones in general, I believe that if parents aren't going to teach their children how to use the things the kids shouldn't have one. If it's generally accepted at this point that the internet can be a dangerous place for children given no direction, why in WORLD would you give your child access to it 24/7 without any supervision? Personally, I don't feel it's my job to patrol what a child does on their cell phone during school hours. When it comes down to it, any court will say that's an invasion of privacy. If students are doing inappropriate things under our watch, however, we are liable. This is why we restrict websites and access to inappropriate materials in schools. If parents are going to just hand over access to their children anyway, what are we trying to protect them from?
How do other schools approach the cell phone issue?
Today's Wine: Charles Shaw Cabernet
Cell phone use was a huge problem in our school last year. Suspensions sky-rocketed because of them. Students would be on their phones in class and would be asked to turn them over as per New York City's Chancellor's Regulations, which forbid electronics in school except for students with medical conditions. When students refused to turn them over they were suspended, plain and simple. The long and short of it: it is IMPOSSIBLE to teach a student if they are chatting on their cell phone during class. It is also IMPOSSIBLE to teach a student if they are suspended every other day because of they use a phone in class. What is more is that calling parents is completely fruitless, as students being suspended are often-times using friends' cell phones. The response from the parents when their students are suspended is: "my student doesn't even have a phone." Solution: ban cell phones from the school.
Now, some parents complain that they need to be able to reach their student at any given time in case of emergencies. This has beenappealed to the New York Supreme Court several times. In one case the defendant claimed that cell phone usage was the only thing that saved her daughter from a stalker after school. Other cases seem to concentrate on what happens after school rather than during school. Solution: Instead of banning phones outright, have students check there cell phones in at the beginning of the day and give them back at the end of the day. Recommendations by parents revolve around "punishments" being delved out to repeat cell-phone abusers or they point to cell phone policies at schools like Bronx Science (one of the best high schools in the city, full of academically prone, self-motivated students) as examples of why having a rule against cell use in the classroom is completely adequate. If there is some kind of an emergency during the school day, I'm pretty sure most schools are equipped with phones these days. In fact, most classrooms have them. Students simply do not need their phones in class, nor any other time during school.
At the end of the year last year, most teachers agreed that it is incredibly necessary to have students check in phones if are to get anything done. When it comes to "sexting" in class, we certainly don't want any more of that either. Last year while a sub was in a sixth grade classroom, a girl filmed herself grinding on a male classmate and posted it to the web. Bing, bang, boom- just like that. Had the phones been taken at the door, it wouldn't have happened.
As for inappropriate use of cell phones in general, I believe that if parents aren't going to teach their children how to use the things the kids shouldn't have one. If it's generally accepted at this point that the internet can be a dangerous place for children given no direction, why in WORLD would you give your child access to it 24/7 without any supervision? Personally, I don't feel it's my job to patrol what a child does on their cell phone during school hours. When it comes down to it, any court will say that's an invasion of privacy. If students are doing inappropriate things under our watch, however, we are liable. This is why we restrict websites and access to inappropriate materials in schools. If parents are going to just hand over access to their children anyway, what are we trying to protect them from?
How do other schools approach the cell phone issue?
Today's Wine: Charles Shaw Cabernet
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