Meeting The Fellow

(Getting caught at the end of each line by this guy was almost the best part of the adventure.)

Flying through the air is a great way to meet people. As we zip lined across the Jamaican Hills, I started a conversation with a nice young teacher from Manhattan. After a while, he admitted to being a teaching fellow. I gasped! How could this bright, caring, obviously good teacher be a fellow, a teacher whose sole mission in life is to steal the jobs of tenured teachers? How could I even admit to liking this guy? Here he is, a first year teacher, with four weeks of student teaching under his belt and he has a job while my ATR buddies are still floundering away, searching for that impossible to find teaching position.

Well, first let me say that this guy is a special education teacher, one of the few new teachers actually hired this year. And, let me say, he is a great guy that does not deserve the bad press and bad feelings he gets from people like me.

Getting back to my conversation with him, we both agreed that they system created the hostility between the old and young teachers. We both agreed that the students are the losers because of this. He told me his school had been closed and then reorganized recently. The paras got to keep their jobs. All the teachers were let go. This school teaches life skills. How bad could all the teachers have been that they all had to be let go? Where are the veteran teachers these young people might need to go to for advice? Why are the veteran teachers sitting around without classrooms? How long will this type of situation be allowed to continue?

Posted from Delta airline, on my way home from a wonderful vacation. Now to catch up on all the blogs I missed all week.