Thursday, January 08, 2004
How to Retain a Teacher
Every alternate Wednesday, I am expected as a first year teacher to attend a program called the "New Teacher Academy." It's held in a school on the exact opposite side of the city from where I teach, and it takes a good 45 minutes to drive there and another 30-40 minutes to drive home afterwards.
The exact reasoning behind the program eludes me at the moment, but I believe it is intended to provide additional strategies and teaching methods and instill us with a level of professional respect for the work. In reality, the program comes off more as a waste of time than as a beneficial or desirable thing. All of the ideas that we discuss were presented at the District orientation earlier in the year or in the graduate courses we are required to take on methodology .
Instead we occupy our time focusing on a rather inane combination of activities. The most notable of these is the process of writing a $250 grant for a school related activity. I say this is inane, because of a simple cost-benefit analysis. Simply stated, from my perspective the amount of work we will need to put into the grant does not balance out the relative benefits one might obtain from the $250. Even if we set aside the opportunity cost of the time lost writing, revising, promoting the grant (you need official administration support), etc., there is the additional joy of chronicling the project for a presentation to be given at the district local office! (Oh yes...they want a posterboard.) Frankly, it's silly.
And in my case...it gets even sillier. Because I wrote my grant to finance the start of a quiz bowl team. (Although my new teacher coach, whose primary job these days seems to be providing advice on the grant in addition to my teaching wondered how closely I could link it in with the "measurable achievement" and "parental involvement" components of the grant.) A week after turning in the grant, I got an offer to run my school's robotics team. The opportunity to get a new set of skills and additional support from the school (in the form of the math dep. head) was appealing and also seemed to circumvent a major issue: how to use $250 to buy a buzzer system, questions, and pay for tournament fees if I started a quiz bowl team...
My teacher coach said not to worry about revising the grant, but now I've submitted a grant for one project, but have now been given the go-ahead and the by your leave from all other sources to use the money for this very different project! I wonder how I'll spend the money, since I'll be getting all the robotics equipment through the district. $250 would be some nice pocket money.
So now I go every alternate Wednesday for reasons I still don't understand completely. If it weren't a requirement of employment, I guarantee you I would not be wasting my Wednesdays that way.
As one colleague mentioned after the session yesterday, with all the other stuff we have to deal with as first year teachers, does the district think adding an additional commitment, and a frustratingly pointless one at that, will serve to increase the retention rate for new employees?
Every alternate Wednesday, I am expected as a first year teacher to attend a program called the "New Teacher Academy." It's held in a school on the exact opposite side of the city from where I teach, and it takes a good 45 minutes to drive there and another 30-40 minutes to drive home afterwards.
The exact reasoning behind the program eludes me at the moment, but I believe it is intended to provide additional strategies and teaching methods and instill us with a level of professional respect for the work. In reality, the program comes off more as a waste of time than as a beneficial or desirable thing. All of the ideas that we discuss were presented at the District orientation earlier in the year or in the graduate courses we are required to take on methodology .
Instead we occupy our time focusing on a rather inane combination of activities. The most notable of these is the process of writing a $250 grant for a school related activity. I say this is inane, because of a simple cost-benefit analysis. Simply stated, from my perspective the amount of work we will need to put into the grant does not balance out the relative benefits one might obtain from the $250. Even if we set aside the opportunity cost of the time lost writing, revising, promoting the grant (you need official administration support), etc., there is the additional joy of chronicling the project for a presentation to be given at the district local office! (Oh yes...they want a posterboard.) Frankly, it's silly.
And in my case...it gets even sillier. Because I wrote my grant to finance the start of a quiz bowl team. (Although my new teacher coach, whose primary job these days seems to be providing advice on the grant in addition to my teaching wondered how closely I could link it in with the "measurable achievement" and "parental involvement" components of the grant.) A week after turning in the grant, I got an offer to run my school's robotics team. The opportunity to get a new set of skills and additional support from the school (in the form of the math dep. head) was appealing and also seemed to circumvent a major issue: how to use $250 to buy a buzzer system, questions, and pay for tournament fees if I started a quiz bowl team...
My teacher coach said not to worry about revising the grant, but now I've submitted a grant for one project, but have now been given the go-ahead and the by your leave from all other sources to use the money for this very different project! I wonder how I'll spend the money, since I'll be getting all the robotics equipment through the district. $250 would be some nice pocket money.
So now I go every alternate Wednesday for reasons I still don't understand completely. If it weren't a requirement of employment, I guarantee you I would not be wasting my Wednesdays that way.
As one colleague mentioned after the session yesterday, with all the other stuff we have to deal with as first year teachers, does the district think adding an additional commitment, and a frustratingly pointless one at that, will serve to increase the retention rate for new employees?
