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Union Busting

  • Posted on February 24, 2010 at 9:29 pm

Central Falls High School

Every union in the United States of America will be busted in time.  Unions really built the middle class.  If it wasn’t for unions all wages would have been kept low for most people.  When a union goes into a community it puts pressure on other companies to up their wages in order to recruit good workers and also to include things like health insurance.  Since Ronald Reagan it has been fashionable to bust the unions.  He busted the air traffic controllers.  It’s been down hill ever since for anyone belonging to a union.  Today I think there are only about 8% of the people that even belong to a union.  The next unions to take the hit are going to be the teacher’s unions.  They are going to be busted.  The government is doing everything they can to talk about the poor quality of teachers, which really is bogus.  Teachers are more qualified today than they ever have been.  They have degrees that include a major in the area they are teaching.  Many have other things they bring to their teaching experience whether it is other work experiences or even travel experiences.

Today I came home and saw this on the news.  http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/02/24/rhode.island.teachers/index.html?hpt=T2

The Superintendent stays and every teacher, principal, etc. is fired.  This is incredible.  If you read the article you will see that they have made some gains with testing.  The trouble was in the negotiations.  This is a drastic move by the board of education.  I know I wouldn’t want my child to go to this school.  They care so little for the children that they will expose them to an all new crew.  They may hire up to 50% back but who knows who the “chosen” ones will be.  Probably the ones that keep their mouths shut and don’t ask any questions or rock the boat in any way.  Any one with a brain knows that not all of these teachers fired are poor teachers.  Maybe none of them are as it is a largely Hispanic community where English is a second language.  NCLB has very difficult standards of testing for these new English learners.  It amazes me that they expect so much from them so quickly.  Our Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, applauds this move.  http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=433×195524 This shows me where Obama stands on the issue of unions.  When the government wants to go into communities and fire teachers and staff and then create a new or charter school in its place that is all about destroying public schools and unions.  I cannot be convinced that this is a great move for this community.  I know how I feel about my students and I know how hard I work each and every day to help students find success.  I don’t believe this school in Rhode Island doesn’t have hard working, talented teachers that just got fired!

As I was looking online I came across this.  http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://newsblog.projo.com/mocchi_poster.jpg&imgrefurl=http://newsblog.projo.com/2009/08/funeral-set-for.html&usg=__bxvIHLt5FbMjPvVznexbC1TmHRo=&h=341&w=512&sz=58&hl=en&start=5&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=GgLaNIjFpBvt6M:&tbnh=87&tbnw=131&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dcentral%2Bfalls%2Bhigh%2Bschool%2Bteachers%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26rlz%3D1B3GGGL_enUS231US233%26tbs%3Disch:1 This school started the year with tragedy, a well liked teacher died in a crash and now their going to lose all of their teachers.  Wow, this school is in crisis and these poor kids are being treated like just a bunch of numbers on a score card for testing!

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Great Teachers Have a Great Heart

  • Posted on February 10, 2010 at 12:24 pm

I was listening to Dylan Ratigan’s show this morning as we have a snow day and it got me thinking and this is why I felt a need to write today.  He had a man on from New York that was pushing charter schools.  They talked about how to improve education.  This always gets me going because these talking heads from the media and the so called “leaders” of education never talk about the one thing that’s going to make a difference in a child’s educational life.  The child needs a teacher with a heart as well as the educational ability.  You can’t make someone love teaching but there are a lot of people out there that love to teach that are kept out of the education system through the “screening” process of interviews during college.  If we rely solely on the resume of a person for hiring teachers we will never end up transforming schools.  To transform schools we must have people teaching and administrating that care not just about their own children but about everyone’s children.  We must have teachers and administrators that have a heart and understand that the job is not about them but about the children.

I’ve been busy over the past month.  I was working on the middle school art curriculum review.  My school has been very supportive of the arts in education which includes both the visual, and the performing arts.  I needed to make an assessment of what I was currently doing and what I thought would be the best direction for the future.  I was to compile a wish list of items that I feel are necessary to develop the best possible art program.  I want to say, “I love my job.”  I needed time to do the review and do the work on Atlas, (A program on the web that helps teachers develop curriculum.) that was required of me.  I was given two days with a substitute, so I could get the work done.  Of course I had to devote time outside of this as well to adequately complete the review.  The reason I’m writing about this is to share the fact that my time wasn’t wasted.  Often times in school we are asked to fill out papers or some other request that ends up being put in a file and forgotten about.  Many teachers know this and get tired of repeating the same old task only knowing that it will end up being a big waste of their time.  Time is often wasted in school when we are asked to sit through meetings where it appears that we are working together as a team on some big plan.  Often times I believe the decisions are already made about the plan by the administration and the meeting is set up to make the teachers feel like they we’re a part of that the decision.  This time the decisions were made by me, the teacher, with the final financial decision made by the administration.  To me this makes the most sense as I am closer to what is happening in the art classroom than anyone else.  When treated with respect, as I was, a teacher will rise to the occasion.  When treated disrespectfully a teacher can also fall to failure.  I’m happy to say my requests were honored.

I know there are teachers out there that are not like me.  They go through the motions waiting for the day they can retire.  I’ve even heard young teachers discuss retirement, which always puzzles me.  They may think they are doing the best possible job for their students and blame any failures on the system, the parents, and anything else that pushes their buttons but the truth is there are many reasons for failure and one of them is at the heart of why someone becomes a teacher.  If we are to listen to the government the implication is that teachers today are not qualified to do their jobs.  Teachers are tested even though they just went through four or five years of test taking in college.  Teachers are required to have a major in the subject area they are teaching which means many classes taken in a single area whether it is math, science or art.  The government leaders would have us believe that we need to improve the teacher quality through their math, science and other abilities.  I think this is a false premise.  While there may be teachers that slip through the cracks with their educational abilities.  I think we need to have teachers that have the heart of a teacher.  We need teachers that are excited about children.  We need teachers that can look at a troubled child and see possibilities not problems.  We need teachers that can develop relationships with their students to ensure success.

Students today have a lot more going on than when I was in school.  Many of them come from homes with multiple marriages or live in relationships.  They have half brothers and sisters, dads out of the picture and moms and dads out dating.  I don’t remember anything like that when I was going to school in the sixties and seventies.  The lack of stability in many of their home lives can create chaos for any young person.  I think that the school system needs to insure the quality of their teachers by making sure that they hire people with great paper credentials that also have that heart necessary to teach in these troubled times.  You can improve your resume through classes and professional development but your heart is another matter.  If you are considering teaching ask yourself, “Why?”  Is it because you want the summers off, or you think it’s a good job while raising your own children, you like sports and want to coach or do you really love working with children and helping them develop their abilities?  To be a great teacher you have to stop thinking about what you need and start thinking about what your students need because it’s not about you!  You have to not be the star of the show but be able to set yourself aside and help develop the true stars of the show, your students.  Some people are too self-centered to be a great teacher.  Great teachers inspire others.  They don’t suck out the air in the room with their verbosity and pomposity.  We can all think back to the teachers that inspired us.  I bet you will remember teachers that made you feel good, smart or special.  The teachers we remember with hatred and disgust made us feel bad, stupid, small and unimportant.  If we really want students to excel in this world they keep labeling the “global community” than we must hire teachers that inspire and are devoted to their students.  We must hire teachers that have a heart and love teaching children.

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Teaching in a Disconnected World

  • Posted on January 9, 2010 at 12:59 am
Global Children

Let's Embrace the Creativity in our Children

The word we always hear about today is “global”.  We are either “going global” or we’re standing still.  However in the American classroom my life as a middle school art teacher has probably helped to make me a bit skeptical of new government educational plans.  We seem to be pressured to make our children “global” beings that will “beat” all the other “global village” people as the government keeps telling us our children are not quite up to par.  The arts are always the first to be cut because greater minds than mine have decided that they must be a “frill”.  I always think those people simply must have absolutely no talent and imagination.  The arts are far more than a “frill” and serve a far greater good than most people can even imagine.  If you are wearing beautiful clothes, driving a highly designed vehicle or live in a fabulous home thank the artist that brought the design to fruition.  I know that many people have absolutely no idea of how most items are created and even brought to market.  If it wasn’t for the very artists that create the cool designs that make us all want to buy the next great thing, we’d all be driving around in box shaped cars and still be computing on the old box shaped computers.

Artists have been treated poorly in this old educational process of teaching for a “test”.  I think picking a, b, c, or d on a test is basically pointless.   The truth is no one will really know the end result of all this testing until these test takers become productive tax paying citizens that the government and business clearly want to be the next little worker bees.   I, on the other hand, believe that a true education will encompass all aspects of our intelligence.  This fight for the “core” subjects is disheartening to those of us that are on the cutting edge of embracing our creativity.  It is through real creativity that we all can find our true purpose in life.  Creativity allows you to learn how to think and make decisions based on realizing that there might be more than one answer to a problem.  Test taking makes us believe there can only be one answer and it is the “right” answer.

In life we all know that sometimes things aren’t easy for us.  Sometimes we actually have to think our way out of problems.  The answer isn’t covered on a test.  I think it’s time that we taught students how to think and make creative decisions.  Many children are lost in this test taking mold.  Many have shut down because their exuberance is not appreciated.  Sometimes teachers are so busy teaching for the test that they can’t see the marvelous gifted mind of the student that may be simply struggling with the test taking process.  I don’t blame the teachers or even the administration.  I blame a society that allows arbitrary politicians that promote programs that are just a boon for the test taking industry and a peril for the poor student confronted with all of the tests they have to take.

I think students need to spend much more time using their hands and brains in the classroom whether it be a core subject or my art class.  Students today are spoon fed information and then given countless hours on the computer where things are really quite pointless in many ways.  It’s just a click here and a click there browsing through things but usually not really reading them all that clearly.  We are in such a hurry today that I think we have forgotten the true wonder of education.  It is a joy in my art classroom when I watch a student that didn’t think he or she could draw figure out the drawing process.

Education used to be a wonderful thing to embrace.  Students need to feel that thrill that comes with the discovery of new intelligence.  If we want students to be excited about learning then we have to embrace the creativity that the arts empower in individuals.  The true joy of learning comes through self expression.  While the arts are a power onto themselves they can also enhance the learning in the core classes as well.  It is the individual we need to embrace and cultivate to be the creative adult they are meant to be.  It is not the test taking process that is going to build the next “greatest” generation.  It is the almost innate creativity we all have within us when we are a child that has been suppressed through years of “drill” type instruction that needs to be embraced and nurtured.  If the government wants us to be a “global village” then we should empower our children through creativity in all of their classrooms.

Below I have included an excerpt from Eliot Eisner that I think needs to be examined further.  The truth is number 10 is what I have really been talking about.

10 Lessons the Arts Teach

1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships.
Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it
is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution
and that questions can have more than one answer.

3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives.
One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.

4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving
purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects.
The arts traffic in subtleties.

7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material.
All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said.
When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.

9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source
and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

10. The arts’ position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young
what adults believe is important.
SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications. NAEA grants reprint permission for this excerpt from Ten Lessons with proper acknowledgment of its source and NAEA.

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Dress for Success

  • Posted on January 2, 2010 at 12:15 pm


Dress for Success

The other day I was walking down an aisle in Wal-Mart and I ran across some Michigan State University sweatshirts with hoodies.  Now having graduated from Michigan State I was intrigued.  I was shocked because they looked old and worn out.  The silk screened image was barely there.  I thought a hoax has been carried out on the American people.  I have students that come to class with holes in their jeans all the way up to the crotch area.  They think they look cool.  I, being the age I am, think they look like they should be milking a cow.  Some how in the last forty or fifty years that “Dress for Success” thing has been thrown out the window in favor of the “Come as You Are” model of success.

In the past year my son interviewed for a job.  Of course I told him to wear his suit because he would make a better impression.  He thinks the suit may have been a detriment because while the work demanded professional credentials the work place was extremely casual in nature.  Even at school it is difficult at times to tell the students from the teachers.  When I was growing up the male teachers wore suits and women dressed up.

Recently my sister and I have noticed that we seem to be heading for a class system of dress.  Most people will fall under that “casual” crowd.  They can dress with holes in their jeans, wear tennis shoes with everything or whatever but there is another class that will show a definite separation between the “commoners” and the “wealthy”.  Eventually, the commoners won’t be able to compete with the wealthy.  Labels on clothing have become very important from your jeans right on down to your shoes and even your purse.  As a young woman growing up I never knew much about labels.  Even today I don’t know a lot about them but I know that eventually those labels will separate us all, rich and poor, so that you will know who you “peeps” really are.  The wealthy can occasionally “slum” with the poor but they can’t “marry” them.  They can have fun with them but “those people” will never be invited to the party unless they happen to be working at it.

In politics this clothing issue is more than evident.  While politicians are having their “state” dinner parties and dressed to the “nines” the poor are living on the streets getting handouts to stay alive.  The divide is drastic and yet we are so busy accepting this casual attire we can’t see the class system that is really developing from all of this.  While my students think it is “cool” to wear ripped, tattered clothing they lose the sense of style that comes with developing attire that fits who you really are and what you really care about as well as appropriate for the time and place.  Clothing can be used to express yourself but when you start looking like a massed produced person expression is lost.  It used to be we had our every day clothes and our church clothes.  Many people don’t go to church on a regular basis any more and maybe don’t feel the need to dress up but when you do dress up you tend to walk a little taller.  Your sense of self is stronger.  You feel more confident and self assured.  You know when you look good and you can feel it.

Today so many are so busy being part of the crowd and buying the lies that are being sold to them that they don’t even realize how their sense of style and self is being whittled away by corporations putting out shoddy merchandise with little or no standards.  Trust me the wealthy are not dressing like the masses.  They are still buying fancy designer gowns and Armani suits and attending everything from the opera to those state dinners.  They are still dressing for success but now they know who their “peeps” are and those peeps are the people that hold the power in America as well as the world.  Those huddled masses that make up the rest of us, they are the commoners that will never be invited to the dinner except as a maid, an usher or a specimen to pull out to show what good deeds the wealthy are doing for the rest of us, yes, we the commoners.  The next time you get dressed think about what you are saying by what you wear.

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First Post: What is there to say?

  • Posted on December 19, 2009 at 2:10 am

365 Days of Kindness:

As a middle school art teacher I have confronted all kinds of inappropriate behavior from youngsters in my art classroom.  The very culture in which we live in is filled with greed, contempt and hatred for each other.  We are a competitive society that loves to cheer for the hockey hero that smashes the head of the other team’s players.  We scream with glee when a football player is tackled with such force that he lands in the hospital.  Our children emulate the world wrestling champions they see depicted on television.  We angrily yell through our car windows at drivers we think are crazy.  We cut in line at the store when we see the slow old lady pushing her cart towards an empty lane.  Anyone witnessing this type of behavior would laugh and say we need an anger management course.  I think we need to learn to be kinder and we certainly need to set examples for our children to follow.  If we are to change society we must change ourselves and become the example that we really want to be for our children.

As a middle school art teacher I recognize that I have the power to do something in my own small way to change the course of our society.  Being kind isn’t that difficult.  Sticking with a program of kindness isn’t that difficult.  Convincing students to become the person that others look up to also isn’t that difficult but of course taking the first step is the hardest.  If I want to see a change in my classroom or in the world for that matter, I must start with myself and my students.  I have always been what I consider to be a kind hearted person but I have never really given a lot of thought to how I could help others become more thoughtful about their actions.  In our school we have many caring professionals that find ways to show students how to do nice things for others.  Different teachers have for many years held can drives, spaghetti dinners, “adopt a family” at Christmas time and many such other ways to do things for people in need and to show students how they could help.  My goal isn’t to do a “one time fix” but to actually try and change the culture of meanness that I was witnessing on a daily basis in my classroom and in the hallways of my school.

I started out small by doing something nice for the students like making cookies and in turn asking them to do something nice for someone else that day.  I passed out nice coupons encouraging students to pass them on when they did something nice for someone else in the hope that the person receiving the coupon would do something nice for someone else and pass the coupon on creating an unending cycle of goodness.  I have since done many different things that have helped to change the culture in my classroom.  I challenge other people to do the same.  I create a safe environment for the students.  Students know they won’t be bullied in my classroom.  I have a close connection to the students and I encourage them to try and be their best.  Truly, isn’t that what we want for our children?  What can you do to challenge yourself the next time that crazy driver cuts you off or something at work sets off your “crazy” button?  I choose to be kind and find a way to push that kindness into the discussion.  What will you do?

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