Reply to The school year is more than 10 months for staff and 2025-26 is extra long for students-Must be shortened

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Reply to "The school year is more than 10 months for staff and 2025-26 is extra long for students-Must be shortened"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Maybe the 2025-2026 calendar will be changed.[/quote]

They are not going to shorten the school year. They would need to remove either the federal holidays or the new religious days or shorten the Winter Break and I don't see them doing any of that. The only one I potentially see them doing is removing the federal holidays. Losing the new religious holidays will cause a stink with the various religions and shortening winter break will piss off the people who take a month at that time of year to travel to Asia/SE Asia visit family and the parents who want two weeks in Europe or skiing. [/quote]

If religious holiday must be kept as days off for all students, then schedule Teacher work days (professional development or planning days) on religious holidays and allow specific teachers to take off religious holiday on Teacher workdays if relevant to their religion.

-Teacher[/quote]

Teacher here.  They are doing that for some of them that year - Lunar New Year and Orthodox Good Friday.  But there are way too many Professional Workdays - we don't need 10 throughout the year.  [/quote]

I would be thrilled if our workdays were all actually work days, not professional development days.

I get [u]nothing[/u] out of the PD days. They do not help me to be a better teacher, they do nothing positive to impact instruction in my classroom, do not help me to better understand my students or their families, and usually piss off me and most of my colleagues.

We have PD on how to better run meetings with other teachers. We don't need that. No teacher I know cares a lick about meeting protocol. We care about teaching and our students. We don't care if every team meeting has a unique opening grounding question. Why are we wasting time learning how to write icebreakers? Such a waste of time.

We have PD during which the facilitators always say "I invite you to read over our goals and working agreements" before they remind us how to run a meeting. Waste of time. It is infantilizing and demeaning and not at all helpful to us doing our jobs.

In a 90 minute PD, 45 minutes is spent on these reminders of how to run meetings. Why? We aren't in the business of meeting. We want to teach. If the PD actually helped us be more effective in our classrooms, we'd probably be more receptive to it. But it's all about how to run meetings. It's a waste of time. The people who design these PD sessions haven't stepped foot in a classroom in years if not decades so they are clueless about what effective PD looks like. But they don't ask the people who are working with children everyday because our opinions and feedback don't matter.

If we ran our classrooms the way our PD is run, students would receive no more than 2 hours of actual instruction per day. [b]The rest of the time would be us saying ridiculous things like "I invite you to read over our class rules for the 350th time this school year... Now I want you all to share your answer to 'if you were to travel to a new place, blindfolded, what would you need to know?'... Now that we've heard from all 30 students about what they'd want to know, let's review our class working agreements again... Great, now let's talk about our goals for today... Now that we've talked about our goals for the day, I invite you to read our class rules again... Thank you for engaging in that review. Now let's take out our folders... Wonderful. You've all followed me direction to take out your folders. Let's review our class working agreements again to discuss which working agreement you just followed..."[/b]  :shock:  [/quote]

To be fair I'm pretty sure that some teachers actually do run class this way.

I'm thinking of you middle DC's second grade teacher.[/quote]

Probably because teachers have essentially been told to do so. It's ridiculous.

Senior teachers ignore that advice and teach the way they know kids learn. [/quote]

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