Reply to Why is there a teacher shortage?

Forum Index » Schools and Education General Discussion

Reply to "Why is there a teacher shortage?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]I spent ten years working in a high FARMS/ESOL school. I work in a wealthy school now because I have children and cannot deal with the demands of the job.

I loved my first school. It was a fantastic place in the sense that the teachers knew they had to go above and beyond to reach their students. We did a lot of really creative tactics to try to push our kids to grow. And the data we had tracking kids through the school showed growth every year. What it also demonstrated was that the kids were not progressing to grade level and were falling further behind as they progressed.  The latter is the sole metric the county and state and federal government care about.

But it's a losing battle. Because you are spending all of K getting the students up to speed on concepts they should have grasped in preschool. And it just adds up. Combine this with the fact that a large chunk of the kids do not have the language skills to access the curriculum (meaning they don't know what the hell is going on because they do not understand enough English), you are going to be destined to have lower test scores. I am dually certified to teach K-6 and ESOL and worked as both a classroom and specialist. I saw the frustration first hand.

I really liked my school and think we were doing a great job in terms of getting kids out of ESOL services and proficient enough in English to access the learning content. It's hard and crazy unfair that a level 2 student is taking the SOL with the expectation that they would pass because they spent a year in a US School. I get angry when I think about it because it puts the kids in an unfair position, it puts the teachers in an unfair position, and it sets up the cycle for long term learners because the ESOL student gives up on school when they aren't successful. The rub is that the kid was never going to be because it takes 5-7 years to become proficient enough in a second language to access learning content on the same level as a native speaker. The studies support that. The politics don't.

I gave up and decided to transfer because my school was basically going to get the hammer thrown at them. I think the county now requires all lessons plans to be reviewed and critiqued by the admin as well as a central admin. The county also put in tons of other administrative requirements, including extensive documentation requirements to show why the students cannot meet benchmarks. And if you were under review, this data would be considered in terms of determining your effectiveness.  According to friends, this has added 15-20 hours of work on top of what they were already doing. We were given no additional planning time to do this administrative work. Or pay.

I saw the writing on the wall and decided to transfer. I work at a wealthy school. It's a complete breeze. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics