Work started yesterday. I have been avoiding August 20th all summer, and was successful for a couple of weeks. (I know that wasn't really funny, but it's what work does to me.)
So it's one more year at West Oak Lane Charter School. I've yet to mention my teaching experience on my blog. It's difficult to know where to start talking about it, since it is a very broad and farreaching experience with a plethora of accompanying attitudes, but I will say now (for those who don't know) that at the end of last year I did join the union at WOLCS. While I enjoy teaching and love my students, dealing with the school's administration and jumping their hoops is one perk I - along with the rest of the WOLCs faculty - do not enjoy. Take the current school year, for example. The first two weeks are a slow and painful trek through hours after hours of "Professional Development", sessions which are meant to improve us as teachers but really just waste time and demean our intelligence. Today we spent upwards of 4 hours practicing analyzing student data to inform our teaching. Have we not all been to college? Do we not know how to interpret a graph? My group accomplished our data analysis in 30 minutes, and the rest of the time was just wasted as we sat around "learning" things we already knew.
The plus side to all this is that being really bored allows me to create some fun doodles. These are Alien Astronaut Kitty and Hipster Snake-Man.
But back to the union.
We have 7 or 8 members of the administration (yes, that many, and no, they are not running a small country, just a school) who enjoy pretty loaded paychecks while the teaching staff is left to subsist on a below $40K salary with a measly 2% yearly raise regardless of teaching experience or education level. The excuse we are given for not getting better pay is that the money goes into maintaining our facility as it is newly painted and does not smell like urine. (Quite a bar, huh?) While our Chief of Staff rountinely gives us lectures about how lucky we are to be at WOLCS and how teacher retention is a big part of maintaining stability in a school, in the same breath she will turn around and remind us that she sees a teacher's time at WOLCS to be a stepping stone to bigger opportunities. (Let me remind you that it is cheaper to constantly hire new teachers than to keep an experienced teacher happy with pay raises.)
This list of offenses continues, but suffice it to say that the teachers last year were unhappy enough that the union membership went from 5 to the 30s, a solid majority of the teaching staff. While the school day tomorrow will only bring more mindnumbing hours of "Professional Development", I will be looking forward to the results of the afternoon contract negotiations, in which our union rep will be bargaining for a step-scaled salary and paid maternity leave. Wish us luck - we friggin' deserve it!
1 comment:
You just described something that is indicative of the status of education in America. that's sad and i empathize with you. It reminded me of the incessant sessions of ideological indoctrination in China. I would have thought only in China one would be subject to such bureaucratic and wasteful BS. I was surprised that in this country which puts so much emphasis on efficiency, such practice is also prevalent.
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