Went to a Small Schools Fair in San Francisco over the weekend. What a wash that was. I'm glad we had plans in the City that night, or we would have been mad about the wasted trip.
Let me get this straight, folks. You call yourself a small school, but you're housed in a massive, prison-style building with four other small schools. And you have no restrictions on teacher-student ratio beyond what is mandated by the state. And you're run by SFUSD. Riiiight. I think that I would rather work for one of the bigger schools, because then at least there might be more resources.
(and, and as an aside, I went in to make some last-minute copies before class today, and both copy machines were broken--both! And, yes, that means that for a school of 1200 kids, there are two photocopy machines. One, actually; the other is an electric gestetner. Wondering what the hell a gestetner is? Three clues: chunk-chunk-chunk!)
So, I was talking with one representative of a "small school" and she was saying that for next year, they need a teacher who can teach 10th grade English, a 12 grade elective, and a newcomer class. What's a newcomer class, you ask. It's for ELL students who have been in the U.S. for less than a year. What grade levels in the section? 9-12. How many kids? 37 at last count.
Thirty-seven! 37 kids from 10 different countries, I imagine, with performance abilities all over the map, each with a particular set of strengths and challenges, all crammed into a room with one teacher. Can you think of another profession that would require its professionals to do such a ridiculous and impossible task day after day?
And then, while we're in the car, listening to NPR (state-mandated required listening for liberal educators) and there's some kind of panel talking about the state of education. How timely. People are wringing their hands, wailing about how we're failing our children, gnashing their teeth and groaning with confusion and despair. One guy flat-out blamed the teachers. Teachers today, he bemoaned, are more worried about their contracts than providing excellent education for our kids. Grumbles of assent from the panel.
Teaching is fast approaching police work as the lowest paid, hardest, and most thankless profession in the nation. The "Small Schools Fair" was not my brightest day.
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2 comments:
I was at that fair too!
I got there kind of late and didn't catch some of the negatives that you're pointing out, though I obviously noticed the school facility itself.
I wonder if it's possible to set up the small schools' idea of having every student known well in a big school?
Anyway, I agree that there are certain benefits of being in a big school, though I'm not really sure at this point what my preference is. The issue with these small schools is that they also have a small number of faculty, so there are fewer possibilites of teaching there anyway.
Definitely agree about teaching being thankless. I can't complain about it being underpaid (well, right now anything over $0 sounds pretty good) since teachers get the summers off, but the bureaucracy and being blamed for social ills that are far larger than any teacher can be expected to handle is so frustrating given the ridiculous workload teachers have, especially English teachers.
Thanks for the commiseration, EYV. It felt good to rant a bit.
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