Reply to If teachers are leaving left and right, is it the principal's fault?

Forum Index » Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)

Reply to "If teachers are leaving left and right, is it the principal's fault?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What I would love is a teacher who is brave enough to write an expose of FCPS.  Maybe someone who is planning to quit anyway.  I really don't think the general public has any clue what it's actually like these days in the "responsive classroom."[/quote]

I've been expose-ing fcps on this board since I quit 10 years ago.  It's pointless.  The system is so broken there.  Parents have no idea, and the county likes it that way.  If you read through these forums you'll see many many teachers posting the same things I have been saying.  It's not a secret.  But it's so bureaucratic that nothing can be changed.  The whole top-down structure where all the decisions are made by people who are basically politicians and haven't been in a classroom in 30 years, and teachers are powerless.

Not sure why you are targeting RC though - it's just one of a million programs that gets adopted for a while and then replaced with something new a few years later.  It's one of the better programs FCPS has, actually.[/quote]

I'm targeting RC because it's a trendy program that simply doesn't work.  Kids with behavioral issues continue to disrupt the class because they know there are no consequences.  Kids who really want to learn continue being ignored while the teacher deals with the troublemakers.  Rinse and repeat.  RC does no one any favors.  Troublemakers should be immediately dealt with, with real consequences (missing recess, actually getting yelled at by the principal, parents called, etc.).  Babying them along and trying to relate to them emotionally is a waste of time for everyone.  Teachers shouldn't be expected to devote their time to soothing the troublemakers back into good behavior (which does not work) at the expense of the other kids who simply want to learn.[/quote]

None of those things you mentioned ever worked.  Yelling and missing recess make things actively worse.  I know this from experience, but it's also been well-documented, to the point where taking away recess isn't even allowed anymore.  Calling parents is also completely ineffective.  A good deal of the time the kids are like that because they come from pretty bad places, and that call is more likely to result in the kid being beaten than in any real change.  Ask me how I know.

This was the nonsense advice that I got when I started teaching, and it took a while but I eventually learned that none of it worked.  I figured out my own way, and it worked for me.  Then came RC and lo and behold, it was pretty much the same thing I'd been doing, but put into a stupid canned format and accompanied by a bunch of fluff that made it seem much sillier than it is.  [/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