Friday, April 16, 2004
"There was only one catch..."
I wrote a little while ago about the district’s New Teacher Academy, the state mandated program in stupidity intended to provide novitiates in the city school system with all the pedagogical fundamentals to be an expert teacher. Thankfully I have survived 14 of the required 18 sessions, held biweekly at a school in the exact opposite end of the city from mine. The sessions are not so much evil in and of themselves, just inconvenient and unhelpful. It regularly takes at least half an hour to get from Underwood High to Nikola Tesla Tech including a stint on the highway during peak traffic...and once there, most of the session is spent discussion abstract pedagogical theories with very little relevance to my classroom.
In any case, I arrived at the last meeting close to on time last Wednesday only to discover that in doing so I was inadvertently missing another entirely separate meeting at the grad school where I am also taking classes regarding next year’s student teaching program. Now setting aside for a minute the apparent absurdity of having a student teaching program when I am already independently working in my own classroom...a quick phone call to a friend at the meeting suggested that without attendance, one could not participate, and without participation, one could not get a teaching certificate. He promised to forge my name on the sign-in sheet, but after hanging up I began to think over the situation:
"So...if I don’t attend this meeting at Tesla Tech, then I don’t complete the New Teacher Academy and I can’t get certified."
"But...if I attend the meeting at Tesla Tech, I don’t attend the mandatory meeting downtown for student teaching, fail to enroll in the student teaching program, and end up without the graduate credit necessary to get certified."
I’ve never been a big fan of meetings one absolutely must attend or else...but this was ridiculous. The least the grad school could have done is sent out an e-mail reminder that this meeting was so damnably important! But that must have slipped under the radar too. And thanks to all this bureaucratic gobbledygook, I was so busy getting certified, I accidentally forgot to go get certified!
Most likely, all of this chaos will be worked out within the next few weeks. I’ve already sent an e-mail to the head of the grad school’s continuing and professional education branch: Major Major Major Major and between the two of us, I’m sure we’ll figure out a way to escape this Catch-22.
Until then, I’ll be keeping an eye out for Nately’s whore.
I wrote a little while ago about the district’s New Teacher Academy, the state mandated program in stupidity intended to provide novitiates in the city school system with all the pedagogical fundamentals to be an expert teacher. Thankfully I have survived 14 of the required 18 sessions, held biweekly at a school in the exact opposite end of the city from mine. The sessions are not so much evil in and of themselves, just inconvenient and unhelpful. It regularly takes at least half an hour to get from Underwood High to Nikola Tesla Tech including a stint on the highway during peak traffic...and once there, most of the session is spent discussion abstract pedagogical theories with very little relevance to my classroom.
In any case, I arrived at the last meeting close to on time last Wednesday only to discover that in doing so I was inadvertently missing another entirely separate meeting at the grad school where I am also taking classes regarding next year’s student teaching program. Now setting aside for a minute the apparent absurdity of having a student teaching program when I am already independently working in my own classroom...a quick phone call to a friend at the meeting suggested that without attendance, one could not participate, and without participation, one could not get a teaching certificate. He promised to forge my name on the sign-in sheet, but after hanging up I began to think over the situation:
"So...if I don’t attend this meeting at Tesla Tech, then I don’t complete the New Teacher Academy and I can’t get certified."
"But...if I attend the meeting at Tesla Tech, I don’t attend the mandatory meeting downtown for student teaching, fail to enroll in the student teaching program, and end up without the graduate credit necessary to get certified."
I’ve never been a big fan of meetings one absolutely must attend or else...but this was ridiculous. The least the grad school could have done is sent out an e-mail reminder that this meeting was so damnably important! But that must have slipped under the radar too. And thanks to all this bureaucratic gobbledygook, I was so busy getting certified, I accidentally forgot to go get certified!
Most likely, all of this chaos will be worked out within the next few weeks. I’ve already sent an e-mail to the head of the grad school’s continuing and professional education branch: Major Major Major Major and between the two of us, I’m sure we’ll figure out a way to escape this Catch-22.
Until then, I’ll be keeping an eye out for Nately’s whore.
