Paul's Infrequently Updated Blog

This school year, our administration has decided to have regular early release days at the school. What this means is that, at least once every month, the students are released from school at 12:30pm so that the teachers can then spend the afternoon on professional development, discussing test score results, and how we, as teachers, can work to improve student test scores.

If you have read any of my previous posts, you will know that professional development and teacher workshops are a waste of time. I feel the same way about these early release days. I actually think that the time could be better spent teaching or, at the very least, turned over to the teachers in order for them to plan lessons and grade.

For our latest early release day, we had to get together with our respective departments and go over portions of some reading and writing test that students took last year. When we looked at the Social Studies portion of the test, we found that students did not need any knowledge of Social Studies. That is because all the information they needed to answer the Social Studies questions could be found in the reading. Basically, the whole exercise was a waste of time and, yet, we had to spend over an hour going over this stuff.

In addition to early release days, we also have our wonderful faculty meetings. These are usually held on the first and third Wednesdays in the month and, again, I get very little from these meetings. I honestly think that instead of wasting an hour of my time that the administration can just email everyone about what is going on and what events are going to be going on soon. These meetings should be kept to an absolute minimum. They are pointless, waste everyone’s time and actually take time away from teaching.

Today, one of the teachers that I work with had his last day at school. We are not yet sure if it will be his last day ever because he is taking some time out due to a health issue. He was recently diagnosed with cancer and needs surgery and chemotherapy. He hopes to be back after Thanksgiving, but I somehow doubt that this will happen.

The teacher in question is in the room next door to me and I have always enjoyed chatting with him and seeing him around. I have this feeling that, despite what he says, his health will prevent him from returning to class and he will be forced to retire. I will not blame him if he retires, but I will miss not seeing him in school.

I hope that his surgery goes well and that he can return to school very soon.

Today, I had to go to a funeral. As you can probably guess the person who died was called James. James was a 2008 graduate of Gering High School and a student in my American Goverment class his senior year.

From what I understand, last Sunday night James ran an errand to the local Wal-Mart store for his mom. When he came out of the store, he got into a fight with another former Gering student. The fight was broken up in the parking lot by other customers and both James and the other former student drove off the parking lot. It appears that what happened next is that they drove down 33rd Street in Scottsbluff and that a second altercation occurred at 33rd and Avenue D. During the second altercation, a knife was pulled out on James and he was stabbed at least ten times, of which two stab wounds penetrated his heart. James died not long after arriving at the hospital.

The former student who killed James, Arte Lowery, has been charged with second degree murder. Arte’s brother Joseph has also been charged with trying to cover up the crime and disposing of evidence. This whole event has been truly awful. It was so sad today to see James’ mother and family go through the grief of having to hold a funeral for a son and close family member.

While James was no angel, I always thought of him as basically a good guy who sometimes makes mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes in life and I knew the James had recognized he had made mistakes. At the time he died, he was doing pretty well in his life, had a steady job and a girlfriend, and had recently bought a new truck. He did not deserve to be killed by some punk who did not like James.

We are now in the third week of the 2009-2010 school year. So far, things are going well.  It is a little different for me this year because I now have my very own classroom and I am no longer divided between two buildings, instead I am at the high school full-time. This year I am teaching three classes of the new International Relations class, two sections of U.S. History, and one section of World Geography.  I am happy to teach the World Geography as it is interesting and fun, I am okay with U.S. History although it is not my favorite subject to teach and I am still unsure about the International Relations or I.R.

The I.R. class is a semester long class that all graduating seniors have to take. Before this year. all seniors spent a year learning American Government, but this year they will have a semester of I.R. and a semester of American Government. While teaching I.R. content will be easy, since I know quite a lot about the subject, there are no classroom materials and no textbook. We did look at textbooks, but they are all geared towards college level I.R., which means I cannot use them in a high school setting. What I am going to do for this class is pretty much make all my own materials and/or articles and readings that I find online or in books and magazines.

I still think that I.R. is not an appropriate class for high school students. I feel that it would be better for students to spend a year in their senior year learning American Government/Civics so they have a firm understanding of how our system of government works and what their duties, responsibilities, and rights are within that system. Because we now have to teach a semester of International Relations we have to cut back on the amount of content that we teach in American Government. I think this is sad and means that important facts about American Government that could be useful to students will now not be taught.

I.R. is really a college level subject and we are only teaching it because certain people in the school pushed for its inclusion in the curriculum. The thing I find funny is that those who want us to teach this subject are not prepared to teach it themselves or be involved in developing the curriculum. I have had to develop the curriculum and, that being so, I decided to include things that I want to teach. I also made the IR  curriculum flexible because, after all, international events are constantly changing.  Even though I am not happy having to teach the I.R. class, I can at least pretty much do what I went in that class.

Today was the first day back at school for teachers. Actually, we were not at school, but, instead, had to go to the Gering Civic Center to attend an all day workshop. In my opinion, this is not the right way to bring teachers back after the summer vacation. For me, the first day back should be spent in our school buildings with a welcome back by the administration, an outline of what the major goals will be for the school year, and then allow us to spend time getting our rooms and lessons ready for the new school year. Instead, I and all the other teachers in the district had to spend the day listening to a presentation on how to improve literacy using RtI.

The problem I have with most workshops is that they are of not much use. I often find the ideas and concepts presented to be impractical and of no use to me. Even worse is that most of these workshops are boring and this was no exception. I often find it ironic that, while teachers are told to create lessons that will appeal to students and not be boring, these so called experts create workshops that are boring and unappealing. I have to say that having had to spend a day listening to this, I left having not really learned anything of much use. I suppose at least I did get paid and I should not have a problem when I am at least getting paid.

Tomorrow is another teacher “workday” in which our time will be spent attending a faculty meeting and then we are supposed to spend most of the rest of the day working with our individual departments. I can guarantee that this will be another waste of a day.