Professional “Funk” Continued
Could I have found a better blog post?!
After stressing about my responsibilities for report card marks for the research classes I teach, I finally went to my principal for some clarification. She managed to relieve my 2 weeks of stress in five minutes and gave me hope beyond hope that there are some administrators out there who actively seek to destroy the “martyrdom” syndrome in their staff while still maintaining high expectations of “good” teaching. AND I had a colleague come to me to ask for help for several of her students because “the kids connect really well with you.” Thank you for making my day.
All of this got me obsessing on this topic again. Bopped back to Dan Meyer’s blog and re-read the comments on his post about this issue. I came across Chris Lehmann’s post here . On Chris’s blog I find this great post by another seemingly amazing principal. On this blog I am reading about “making Faustian bargains” (don’t even want to know how many of those I’ve made), working 10 – 12 hrs/day (I actually drove 200km/day to teach and spent around 14 hrs/day working/commuting for 10 months!), “reducing authentic assessment to its simplest form” and “teaching from textbooks…” (all I ever did).
In my former school system teaching was considered a “calling”. That was used to reinforce the insane notion of martyrdom and minimal pay. Now I work for a principal with similar thinking to Chris Lehmann. I can go to work without having to constantly challenge the notion that I chose to teach because I was called to it by God. Oh yeah, Dan, I received one hell of a pay hike over this system change and it is awesome.
