Tuesday morning

It’s been awhile since I’ve written anything of significance on my blog. So instead of running at 5:20 this morning (I ran last night), I decided to get some blogging in.

I have so many ideas bouncing around that it’s difficult to begin. So much is happening that I need to write about - the wedding (less than 80 days!), parents, sixth grade basketball, our curriculum meeting, selecting our textbook and technology for our curriculum cycle, To Kill a Mockingbird, 300, Little Miss Sunshine, the end of the quarter, the 145 RU Ready essays I read and evaluated, our pets . . .

So I’ve got myself a cup of strong Star Bucks and I’ll just let the ideas loose.

“It’s amazing we (teachers) do what we do with what little we have left.” That’s a note I scribbled in my tablet from our English committee meeting last Wednesday. All day, every day kindergarten is either on the chopping block or has been cut and they’re trying to get it back. The middle school teachers are clamoring for their ‘school within a school’ program (it’s a program for non-special ed students who are struggling where they can be pulled out and placed in small classes and receive extra help) at the sixth grade level, which had been cut. One teacher said, “I can think of a lot of kids in the sixth grade who are reading at a third grade level, yet there’s nothing for them because school within a school has been cut from the sixth grade.” This caused one teacher to reminisce about all the programs they used to have - not just school within a school in grades 6-8 but also aides to help them and, I believe, school within a school for other subjects besides reading. But they’ve been cut over the years.

The same is true at the high school. When I started we had seven full time English teachers. But one position has been cut (actually, they just never filled a position once one teacher retired). Sure they will add a half-time position once in a blue moon when it’s absolutely necessary (45 kids in a 9th grade class), but it’s like trying to fix a gun shot wound with a Band Aid. (Now I know some will attribute this to declining enrollment. We don’t have as many students as we did ten years ago. Then tell me how the hell we still all have 30 kids in many of our classes?)

But now I see that it’s all across our district. Yet, schools are constantly pressured to prepare children for the global community, NCLB, get them through the NWEAs and MCAs, teach them the standards and benchmarks, introduce them to the latest technology, teach to their multiple intelligences, and on and on.

We could do so much more with these kids with, well, more. Instead we do are forced to do less with, well, less. And that’s a damn shame.