What makes a great teacher? Andy Waddell tries to answer the question in “I’ll Never Forget Mr. White” in American Educator.
‘Creative … motivating’ and fired
March 12, 2012 By
Sarah Wysocki struggled in her first year of teaching fifth-grade at a Washington D.C. middle school, but she earned excellent evaluations in her second year. Then she was fired for low value-added scores, reports the Washington Post.
A majority of her students took the fourth-grade test at a feeder school suspected of cheating. Some who’d tested as “advanced” could barely read when they started fifth grade, she said. When their scores slipped, her value-added score took the hit. With a low score from her first year of teaching, Wysocki was out.
In classroom observations in her second year, Wysocki’s teaching won praise.
“It is a pleasure to visit a classroom in which the elements of sound teaching, motivated students and a positive learning environment are so effectively combined,” Assistant Principal Kennard Branch wrote in her May 2011 evaluation.
Branch asked her to share her ideas with her colleagues. He also praised her ability to engage parents.
After Wysocki was fired, Principal Andre Samuels wrote a glowing recommendation describing her as “enthusiastic, creative, visionary, flexible, motivating and encouraging.” She was hired immediately by a Fairfax, Virginia elementary school, where she’s again teaching fifth grade.
Most teachers with low value-added scores also score poorly on classroom observations, says an architect of D.C.’s system for teacher evaluation. But there doesn’t seem to be a way to apply common sense when the system goes wrong.
After years of very low performance, D.C. needs to stress reading and math scores in teacher evaluations, Rick Hess writes.
In response to MetLife’s survey, which found teachers’ satisfaction has declined, he wonders who is unhappy. “If a teacher is lousy or doing lousy work, they should have lousy morale. Hopefully it’ll encourage them to leave sooner.”
Teacher suspended for chicken-nugget lunch
March 7, 2012 By
A pre-k teacher has been suspended for giving a girl a school lunch in addition to her brown-bag lunch sent from home, reports the Carolina Journal. Apparently, a scapegoat was needed for the infamous chicken-nugget incident. The assistant superintendent’s letter to parents said the teacher violated district policy, though it didn’t state which policy or why the teacher had to be removed from the classroom.
A consultant for the state health department told West Hoke Elementary to supplement homemade lunches if they didn’t include milk, two servings of fruit or vegetables, a serving of grain or bread, and a serving of meat or meat alternative.
A teacher offered a 4-year-old girl a cafeteria tray with chicken nuggets, a sweet potato, bread, and milk to replace the turkey and cheese sandwich, potato chips, banana, and apple juice her mother had packed for her.
Thinking her homemade lunch was unhealthy, the girl didn’t eat it. But she didn’t care for the school lunch, so she ate only the chicken nuggets. Her mother thinks blaming the teacher is ridiculous.
“We are concerned for Ms. Maynor [the teacher] and want her back in the classroom, as she was only following guidelines,” the mother wrote in an email to her state representative, Republican G.L. Pridgen of Robeson County. “It’s the government that needs to be reprimanded and changed.”
State health officials say the girl’s homemade lunch was just fine: Cheese can substitute for milk, it’s fruit or vegetable and there are no demerits for the potato chips. In fact, the carb-heavy school lunch doesn’t sound all that healthy, even if there was enough sweet potato to count as two servings of veg. And what about lactose-intolerant kids?
My Favorite No
March 2, 2012 By
My Favorite No features the warm-up routine of an eighth-grade math teacher whose school couldn’t afford clickers. Student analyze what’s right and wrong about a classmate’s wrong answer.
Alexander Russo calls it “my kind of flipped classroom.”
Teacher suspended for ‘teachable moment’
February 21, 2012 By
After a sixth-grade girl used the “n-word” in a note, Lincoln Brown discussed racial slurs with his predominantly black class at a Chicago school. A writing and social studies teacher, he thought it was a “teachable moment.”
Principal Gregory Mason, who’s black, walked in as the white teacher was using the “n-word.” He said nothing at the time. But two weeks later, Mason suspended Brown for five days on charges of “using verbally abusive language to or in front of students” and “cruel, immoral, negligent or criminal conduct or communication to a student, that causes psychological or physical harm.”
Last week, Brown filed a federal lawsuit, alleging his free-speech and due process rights were violated.
Brown says he told students about the use of the racial slur in Huckleberry Finn to show “how upsetting such language can be.” He also cited “Spike Lee’s comments about rap music and racial profiling in movies.” Students were engaged in the discussion and later told Brown how much they enjoyed it, he said.
“It’s so sad — if we can’t discuss these issues, we’ll never be able to resolve them,” Brown said Thursday.
I guess we never will.
The son of liberal parents who named him after Abraham Lincoln, Brown, 48, grew up in integrated Hyde Park, where Murray Language Academy is located. He attended local schools, where he was in the white minority. He’s taught in black neighborhood schools for 21 years. Many parents are supporting him, especially the ones with kids in his after-school Shakespeare program, he told the Chicago Sun-Times.
Ironically, his lawsuit is titled Brown vs. the Board of Education.
As a former headline writer, I feel for the ESPN headline writer fired for using “chink in the armor” to describe Jeremy Lin’s turnovers. The c-word may not even resonate as a slur to the younger generation. And you’d be amazed at the double entendres that headline writers can miss.
An ESPN sportscaster (with an Asian wife!) also used c-word in armor in reference to Lin. He was suspended.
Why some black men succeed in college
February 11, 2012 By
Black males who do well in college have parents — and at least one K-12 teacher — with high expectations, concludes the National Black Male College Achievement Study.
Black male achievers typically come from working-class families, concludes Shaun Harper, an associate professor higher education at Penn who founded the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education. Nearly half have parents with no college degree. “As a group they shun the idea that they are cognitively smarter than their less-successful friends or cousins or other peers (and their high-school academic records largely back that up),” notes Inside Higher Ed.
In addition to parents who considered college a “non-negotiable” goal, and a teacher who took a special interest, achievers had adequate financial support to pay for college and support from black juniors and seniors when they started college.
Sixty percent grew up in homes with two parents. “Census data show that 35 percent of black children grow up in two-parent homes,” reports Inside Higher Ed.
Harper asked each of the 219 black men to talk not only about themselves but about the experiences of their three best black male childhood friends — and these differences virtually jump off the report’s pages.
“When asked what differentiated their own paths from those of their peers who were not enrolled in college, the participants almost unanimously cited parenting practices,” the study states. “Their friends’ parents, the achievers believed, did not consistently maintain high expectations and were not as involved in their sons’ schooling. By contrast, most of the achievers’ parents and family members more aggressively sought out educational resources to ensure their success — tutoring and academic support programs, college preparatory initiatives, and summer academies and camps, to name a few.”
Like the well-to-do parents in the preceding story, the black male achievers’ parents invested in their children’s success.
Life of an online teacher
December 8, 2011 By
Kristin Kipp, national online teacher of the year, talks about teaching high school English online.
Life’s a carnival
September 14, 2011 By
Bellringers is hosting the Meet the Teacher edition of the Education Buzz Carnival.
Darren wonders if official collaboration time is overdone.
Mister Teacher could use help with the new math curriculum, which chews up most of his class time trying to get reluctant third graders to perform High Level Tasks.
Notes from a Homeschooling Mom is hosting this week’s Carnival of Homeschooling.
A 9/11 vow: I will become a teacher
September 9, 2011 By
On Sept. 10, 2001, Marilyn Anderson Rhames flew home to New York City, pas the Twin Towers. The next day, as she interviewed the grief-stricken for her newspaper, she decided to become a teacher, she writes in Ed Week.
. . . the shock and devastation of the terrorist attacks exposed the shallowness of everybody’s excuses for not pursuing their passions. . . . When I die, I remember thinking, I want to be around the people I love, doing the work that I love.
She returned to Chicago, earned a master’s degree in education and began her second career as a science teacher.
As we near the 10-year commemoration of the terrorist attacks, I am reminded of all those loved ones who died too soon, many still waiting to achieve their dreams. . . . I teach because I love children. I teach because I want to serve my country. I teach because I want my fragile, little life to somehow continue to have meaning when I am dead.
In shaping the minds of the next generation, “I honor the victims of the terror attacks each day I enter the classroom.”
Confessions of a bad teacher
September 1, 2011 By
In Confessions of a bad teacher in Salon, publishing executive John Owens recounts his foray into teaching English at a small New York City school.
Assign spelling words or read a short story in class, and it would take all of my wits to keep the texting, talking, sleeping and wrestling in check. But make it 80 words on “Would you give up your cellphone for one year for $500?” and every student — even those who never did any schoolwork — handed in a paper. When I read these essays to the class in dramatic, radio-announcer fashion, there was silence punctuated by hoots of laughter or roars of agreement or disagreement.
It was almost magic. It was really fun. And I often could squeeze in some spelling, even punctuation. But we weren’t always quiet.
And, according to my personnel file at the New York City Department of Education, I was “unprofessional,” “insubordinate” and “culturally insensitive.”
In other words, I was a bad teacher.
Told to control the class “with the force of your personality,” he told his eighth graders to quiet down or stay after school. After less than 10 minutes standing in the doorway, the principal intervened. She “reported the incident to the police and the Department of Education as ‘corporal punishment’.” He survived a disciplinary hearing, thanks to a union representative, but the principal put a letter in his file saying he’d “barricaded” the students in the room, endangering their safety.
Offered a job in publishing, Owens quit in mid-February.
He sees himself as a victim of “Crazy Boss Syndrome” in a system that gives principals the power to crush new teachers.
Recent Comments