1 post from February 2008

    I get so used to thinking about teaching as the temporary challenge that it is for me that I often forget that people do this for their entire working life. At this point, I know I won’t be teaching next year. I’m comfortable and happy with that decision, but I still wonder what it would be like to stay at my school another year.

    Today’s professional development was future-oriented. Our principal told us we’d be getting our letters of intent this week. We talked about the testing schedule and how we were preparing our students for May. Then he described a major scheduling change that the district is considering for next year, something that made me curious enough to want to stick around, if just for a little while. TST (Teacher Support Team, the process for identifying and remediating students in danger of failing) paperwork is a pain for teachers at our school, and we have two employees working full-time on TST. It must be far worse for teachers at other schools, provided they do anything at all for TST (unlike my last school). Our superintendent is thinking of cutting the high school schedule short an hour, dismissing most students at 2:30 rather than 3:30pm, and then holding one hour of remediation and TST work for only those students with at least one failing grade. If the change looks successful at the high school level, the superintendent is open to applying it to the middle school for the second half of next school year, although it’s more likely that he’d wait to start with a new school year.

    I actually think this could be a pretty good idea. For a school like ours, running on an alternating block schedule, an earlier regular dismissal would mean reducing blocks to 80 minutes, rather than 92, but I think that change would be negligible for most teachers. The advantages of this program are similar, I think, to those that Mack Currie of Tupelo High School cited for his school’s schedule. The majority of students would qualify for early dismissal, giving a highly visible incentive for doing well academically. It could even foster a kind of positive peer pressure to get out of school early. The one major problem I could foresee with this schedule is that teachers might be encouraged to pass students. There’s already an incentive to pass kids in order to avoid paperwork, but I’m afraid teachers might pass even more undeserving kids if it also meant getting rid of them an hour early. Still, it’s an experiment. If there’s one thing that has persuaded me to try something other than teaching, it’s the feeling that little about the job changes from year to year. This scheduling idea is change, and it’s exciting.