A teachers life....

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Having begun to come to grips with the idea this will be my last year teaching at this level, I'm now left free to look at schoolish things in a new light. I also feel a certain freedom beginning to encroach regarding speaking aloud about situations faced by teachers.

Take, for instance, a meeting held yesterday at school days end. It revolved around one of the 'new' administrators, and his plans to rebuild our task grids in line with our curriculum and centering around the states new programs of study standards.

Let me boil that down into everyday engrish: The state department of education has come up with their own lists of exactly what tech schools need to teach in each program. In some rare cases, these lists actually align with the realities of that industry. To encourage schools to comply with this new five year plan..... er..... carefully constructed and considered plan for edukatin the youngens, the DeptEd folks will tie compliance into such things as continued funding, and being allowed to breath, and such things.

The new 'Curriculum Director' has the idea that our schools 'task grids', or as we like to call them "The stuff we actually teach the students', must resemble the DeptEd's decree. To the last dot and dash, I suppose.

To this end, The Meeting, in which was presented a confusing mess of data and wishful thinking... which all boils down to this: The instructors are going to be handed days, or weeks worth of work in resolving the issues of bringing the schools curriculum stream into compliance with the new state mandates. What they will NOT be handed is the time in which to do it. They are expected to just 'make it happen', as is almost always the case.

It's the burro-cratic version of ordering someone to squat and shit out a brick, just because you want some bricks for your new garden wall. Only, teachers can usually manage to make the bricks appear, so they keep getting more orders to create bricks.

In my case, knowing I will be leaving, I had the pleasure of looking him in the eye as I said "Wow, I guess YOU have a lot of work ahead, don't you?"

The other teachers laughed, and then went back to greasing up their brick laying orifices.