Wow, it's funny how with not having class this week it slipped my mind that I should write an after-class post. So, here it is (a few days late). I really enjoyed having the SMAC alumni speakers. I don't know if it was planned, but they seemed to cover a wide range of teaching environments, student backgrounds, and in-school technology availability. It was especially interesting, to me, to hear how Lauren was dealing with the almost complete lack of computers in her school. It was completely new to me to hear about the clicker devices. Since I'll be at Huron where Daver teaches, I'll have to find him and see what I can learn about possible applications. The talk about writing grants for classroom equipment was also new to me.
The video we watched was illuminating, although I think it was certainly clearly pushing an agenda. No matter what we may think about the usefulness of some of the new education technologies, in order to be effective teachers I think we have to put ourselves inside the heads of these tech-savvy kids and figure out what they need to most effectively learn.
And the discussion about teacher unions is very relevant one that should be continued in the fall. I won't repeat my thoughts stated in a response to George's blog other than to say that I'm very unsure about whether I'd want to teach in a public school system with a union and a poorly constructed teacher assessment program.
If you don't want to teach in such a unionized district, where would you like to teach? I am curious because I have similar concerns...
ReplyDeleteMichigan is a union state; many southern states do not require a union (they're known as "right to work states" -- Tennessee, where I used to work, is one). You might look around this year to see the difference between independent schools (no job guarantee) and public schools to see if one suits you better than another. I agree with you that unions are complicated. In my old district, my evaluation form gave the administrator two scoring options for me: Acceptable and Unacceptable. How does one grow under that system? How does one note a struggling teacher's progression from Not Good to Getting Better to Really Great?
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