Teachers Professional Development Day

Every couple months, teachers in public schools around the nation have a day set aside for 'professional development.' Maybe sometimes these days are used in a professional manner that develops the teacher into a better teacher, but in my years of teaching in various districts I have been forced to give myself a full frontal lobotomy during these days just so that I didn't go crazy from frustration, anger, and boredom.

This might seem like venting and more of a journal entry, but what I am trying to do is let you all see into the education world through the little window of my mind. Perhaps after understand what goes on in education you may vote differently when people run for office on different education platforms.

At our last professional development meeting, all the social studies teachers in the district got together in one big room. An administrator came in the room and gave us a form to fill out, and then left. What that form will be used for, we are not really sure. Why the administrator wants the form filled out, also not explained. Who fills out the form, unspoken.

After sitting for an hour complaining about students, the economy, and other teachers, we get to the issue at hand, which is figuring out whether the classes that we are teaching are meeting the benchmarks that the state asks us to meet.

Teachers are driven by the system, I believe, to design classes that accomplish as little as possible, so the very first thing to do is to shame and harass any teacher that feels that the standards are too low and too easy to accomplish. If there is a teacher in the district who is having students do more, and getting high test scores, and going above and beyond, they are a threat to all the other teachers, and rather than find out what the best practices are and how that teacher is doing so well, the group savagely attacks these teachers and drags them back to the rest of the herd.

Step one is figuring out how to avoid the benchmarks, or misconstrue what they say for something else. Step two is to figure out if anyone ever hinted at possibly meeting the benchmarks, and thus 'taught that benchmark.' And step three is to fill in the document in the most unhelpful manner, making it seem as if schools and education are perfect and the problem is with students and the administration.

Oh, I know, I am really venting and some of this is unfair or unreasonable, but you really should know that because education is a government-run business, it does not respond at all to your child's concerns, it does not use time or money or resources in an economical manner, and the goal is not to leave no child behind and drive to the top, but to drag every child behind and drive towards the bottom. Moving kids through the system is our goal, just as it is in every government program.