You can't get water from a stone and you can't get any more work out of a teacher by requiring them to go to that G-d awful library five days a week to tutor.
Library tutoring sucks! There are too many kids to give any of them meaningful instruction. Wednesday, I had twelve waiting when I arrived at my assignment. The kids were a mixed group, geometry kids, honor, regular and repeaters, math B kids and integrated algebra kids. No one could get more than one or two questions answered. One poor kid (a regular) missed a day of school and wanted me to teach him some stuff about statistics. There was no way I could do that.
Now, I never mind tutoring kids outside the library. Most of my colleagues feel the same way. On almost any period, you will find the halls lined up with kids and teachers working away. The difference between the library tutoring and the hall tutoring is that we help the kids we want to help, the kids in our classes and we can give them the individual help they need and cannot get in the library. We don't mind giving our time as we only are going to the library 2 or 3 times a week.
Now there is talk of changing our tutoring to a five days schedule. That means, our hours are regulated and our free time is cut to nothing. I don't know if the admins can do this, I am not part of the exec board anymore. I know I won't put in for tutoring if this occurs. I'm going to take a nice, easy hall patrol assignment instead. (Since I have had tutoring and have seniority,this should not be a problem.) The admin might be able to win this battle and make us (even me) tutor in the library daily, but they will lose in the long run. All that extra help, the hallway help, the help that really helps will dry up. The admins will look good on paper but not where it counts.
5 comments:
This absolutely happened in our Long Island school district. Once the extra help became formal and mandatory, teachers started eyeballing the exit sign at the end of the day. There is absolutely less extra help now than there was.
But it must look good on some administrator's self-evaluation that they have 'mandated formal teacher extra help times'.
And, as usual, the kids lose.
This is the Principal you like? Five days of useless library tutoring rather than classroom tutoring.
Bring back Suit!
Suit tried to pull this on us before he left. he tried to change the rules mid game.He even tried to lie about the C-6 posting. At least here we will know what we are getting into first.
Would it push your anger over the edge if I hid behind a chair and meekly posted a comment completely irrelevant to your point? I have also used the phrase, "You can't get water from a rock/stone" (since there IS a fable about a giant attempting to do so). I was recently corrected, told that the "proper" metaphor is that "You can't get blood from a stone." (I wanted to pop back with, "Yeah, and I also hear you can't get blood from a turnip...") Either way, from one teacher to another, is there a chance that trying to squeeze blood OR water from a stone would be equally proper?
System sucks the blood out of everyone who works init.
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