this is not a journal title

I guess there's a reason my union is very strongly against having students run the course evaluations.



From PostSecret

theferret asked his readers for causes to get outraged about. My response is below.

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Cause: Education (primarily K-12, but sometimes higher ed as well)

Who to target: Your Senator and Representative

Who started the protest: The National Education Association, the highest-level union for K-12 and higher ed teachers and professors.

General: Issues are ever-revolving and to be entirely honest despite being a teacher I sometimes disagree with the official union stance. But when I check out that page every month or so, and when I feel strongly I use their tool to write to my legislators. They always include information about why they have the stance they do too, which is quite informative. Many of the issues are based upon No Child Left Behind, which unfairly punishes K-12 teachers for aspects of student performance which are out of the teacher's control, without providing the means to teachers and schools to improve student performance.

The NEA webpage can generate an email to your legislators that you can customize to your heart's content, or you can insert their suggested text. You can also write letters separately if you like, but I've gotten responses from my legislators to my emails sent via the NEA's email tool that were no less personalized than responses to my physical letters.

Details: The issue currently on the legislative action page is regarding No Child Left Behind, and under what conditions it would declare teachers "unqualified". Every year the current proposal would automatically declare that the bottom 25% of teachers were not qualified to teach - even if everyone were super excellent, this would mean that the bottom 25% who were merely excellent would be set up for being fired. And if everyone were crappy, only the bottom 25% who were super crappy would face punishment while the 75% merely crappy would get away scott-free.

It would make this decision based primarily on students' scores on standardized tests, which is not a judgment of the teacher's ability, but a judgment of (1) the socio-economic status of the district that the school is located in, and (2) how much the teacher teaches to the test. Schools in poor neighborhoods would end up continually firing teachers, and wouldn't be able to find anyone to fill those holes as the applicants would all know that they had no hope of being in the top 75%. And it would target reading, math, and science teachers, when we already have problems filling all the math and science teachers' desks.

Very complex one again. My Dad and I were trying to get into a museum? The Rotary was outside it, connected to The Boulevard. (I didn't realize there were street sets in my dreamscape.) We had to get on a subway, but the subway wasn't stopping at that station. In fact, it was passing through the passengers standing on the platform. Some of them were slightly injured in the process. My Dad couldn't fly so I flew to the next station, it was The Elevated Station. No tangible trains there either, though someone had gotten third degree burns by one passing through her, so they were getting more real. I flew to the next station, The Underground Station. Also no real trains. Well, Dad could fly, but only by putting one foot in front of the other exactly like he was walking on air, so he was limited by how fast he could walk and I could fly faster than that. And we had to get back to ??? which was three piers away or so, too far to walk easily, so I was scouting out other methods of transport so Dad could get there.

I went back above ground and somehow found a bus being driven by one of my students, standing next to him was kadath. At first I wasn't sure it was her, she was really short, had curly dark brown hair, big rimmed glasses, and a white sweatshirt, but then we both said "hi". I found myself thinking half outside the dream "ah, we were supposed to meet tonight so I guess this is instead." I asked my student / the driver to try and find my Dad and we stopped outside a coffeeshop that was also some sort of ethnic food resturaunt. The driver stopped really close to the building, on the sidewalk, so the doors could barely open so the other passengers wouldn't get out. We didn't want them to know I was picking up my Dad and we'd kinda hijacked the bus route. I went inside the shop and found Dad in the back, yelled and waved at him that I'd found a bus, and he came out.

I'm not sure if this was last night or the night before...

<dream>
It was the first day of classes, and the lab manager had brought me some equipment for demos. The students were really rowdy and I couldn't get them to settle down enough to even read the relevant parts of the syllabus to them. Maybe it's because I was sitting in the back of the room. Then one of the students yelled out that his hand was stinging from the acid in one of the demos he wasn't supposed to touch and he needed something to neutralize it. OMG. Thank goodness T$ was sitting next to me in the back, so with a look I asked him to watch the class and he agreed and got up while I walked the kid over to the lab.

On the way I started to scold him how he shouldn't play with things outside the lab and he did the "yeah yeah I know" - but I cut him off by pointing out that at the least, there's gloves in the lab that'll protect his hands when he's doing things he isn't supposed to be doing. We got there and he kept asking for lime (I forget what he really did ask for, but this is the closest I can come up with), but I said I had something better: baking soda! And after pouring it all over his hands, everything was better. I walked him back to class and the class was 5 minutes over by the wall clock, and everyone was trying to get up to go and T$ was in the front of the room, but my clock said we had 5 more minutes, so I talked more about the syllabus.
</dream>

There was another part to the dream I don't remember.