It's November 1.
I'm exhausted.
I have three Regents prep classes - one is remedial class with students who have failed the Regents exam three times.
I have two senior classes.
I'm helping out with college admissions twice a week.
And I just started writing college recommendations.
I taught this senior class when they were freshmen, so I know them for four years.
I am going to be writing a lot of recommendations, especially since a couple of the CUNY schools just started looking for them.
I won't even get into all the MOSL/APPR/ADVANCE jive.
Suffice to say there's a lot of energy-sapping documentation work this year that doesn't make me a better teacher but sure does take a lot of time and energy from me.
I don't know about you, but it feels like March to me.
It's only November.
This is Common Core/corporate ed deform in a nutshell - burn and churn, burn and churn, burn and churn.
Thank God it's the end of the week.
Even during the week, there's no feel of working towards Friday, or what a Friday is. It's one overly-busy day after another. Teachers are swamped.
ReplyDeleteYup - I have another "focus group" meeting today. There's never any time because it's been taken up by meetings and paperwork.
DeleteWhy should we have teacher recommendations anymore? First and foremost, all the media outlets and the general public believe that teachers are people who should not be listened to because they are incompetent. Secondly, the staff at a school has such great turnover these days that you could never really get in touch with a teacher if you wanted to follow up with the recommendation and the students can only have senior teachers write their rec's because all the other teachers have left. Thirdly, from my experience, people have such a short attention span and can not read a formally written recommendation. Just like teachers can not get a well written observation these days, we should have a college recommendation checklist. Let's spread the word that in this new age, we need to rid ourselves of the college recommendations.
ReplyDeleteYou make three good points. That first one especially resonates. Teachers are too stupid to create their own tests or write their own lessons - why should anyone take what they write in a recommendation seriously.
DeleteMaybe they can make a recommendation rubric!
ReplyDeleteMaybe they can make a recommendation rubric!
ReplyDeleteI call Charlotte Danielson and see if she can get started on that right away - for a price, of course.
Delete