Community Corner
Refusing to Drink from Toilet Bowls
There are 5000 teachers in Anne Arundel County Public Schools and I am one of them. We have been given additional work this school year called SLOs. SLO stands for Student Learning Objectives. I have already spent 10 hours this year working on my SLOs. My guess is that the average per teacher is more like 20 hours. If you multiply 20 hours by 5000 teachers, you get 100,000 teacher hours on this mandated work. The 100,000 hours by teachers does not count the work administrators are doing to make sure the SLOs get done.
At a meeting yesterday, the AACPS SLO Czar compared SLOs to his cat drinking from the toilet bowl. Another leader compared SLOs to flying a plane while building it. We are not getting paid extra for this latest boondoggle from Washington. We are getting extra work and no compensation. We are also getting lots of pressure to finish these SLOs.
If I sound jaded, it is because in my 20 plus years of teaching I have had to march with other teachers in parades of new educational ideas/fads like Dimensions of Learning, Common Core, Open Space, Eliminating the Achievement Gap, and Differentiated Teaching. The motto of the geniuses who come up with these things seems to be REJECT THE PAST, EMBRACE THE UNTESTED.
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According to the Wall Street Journal, American Public Education is slipping further behind other nations. Contrary to the well known cliché about the oldest profession, teaching is the oldest profession. We have a long track record. We know what works and we know what does not work. We need educational leaders who will embrace what has worked over the millenia and leave the R & D to the universities which get grants for extra work.
I don't want to drink toilet water. I don't want to fly a plane while building it. I do want to keep teaching.
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Ned Cosby
English Teacher
SHS