The Teacher Diaries

Here I go again sharing my two cents on something that came across my feed on Facebook. The title of the post “My Title 1 Kids Have $300 Shoes. And It’s Nobody Else’s Business” immediately caught my attention, because 1) I teach at a Title 1 high school and 2) I do judge the students and their parents when I see them with expensive products. The author of this article wrote with a strong tone of sympathy and compassion for her, presumably, immigrant student and his choice to purchase a pair of $300 soccer cleats. She doted on the fact that his family struggled financially and that he actually paid for the shoes himself by working with his father doing landscaping. She complimented the student’s motivation to work hard to get what he wanted and warned teachers against making assumptions and judgements about what our students and their families chose to purchase with their money. Now this is all fine and good, but it is not the narrative for most of the students that I t...

I have always said that I appreciate professional development that is well-executed and practical. With that being said, during the first two days of my summer vacation, I attended professional development workshops that focused on backward planning and improving school climate and culture. All presentations were led by the same consulting firm, but each presenter was vastly different. The first presenter, on the first day, was engaging enough due to her personality, but she was solely “teacher-centered” and did not provide any activities to break up her lecturing, nor did she provide any handouts to accompany the many slides that she read from and referenced during her presentation. The second presenter was excellent! Since she presented in the morning on the second day, she set the tone for the rest of the day. She began with a fun ice-breaker and implemented (modeled) practices that we could use throughout her entire presentation. She also provided handouts, included vide...

It seems that every year there are changes in pedagogy. However, in my opinion, these new concepts are really old ones that are just repackaged and given fancy new names. With the constant influx of theories and research that dictate how we are to teach comes the teacher training workshops usually run by well-paid consultants who have rehearsed their presentation dozens of times to schools across the country, but never actually implementing them and of course not with the at-risk students that I teach. And let’s say that they have worked with students in a school district similar to mine. They most likely worked with a group of hand selected students or at a charter school. Needless to say, this is the case for me yet again this summer. My Title 1 school was awarded a grant to make improvements and one of those improvements is working with a program to improve overall academic performance and to give all  students the option to attend college. That’s perfectly fine with me,...

I may be a bit selfish, but I am also extremely reasonable. Our school district is pretty generous when it comes to the number of sick days that are given to the staff. When some teachers retire, they have as many as 200 days because if they don’t use their days during a school year, they rollover to the next year. Some school districts even compensate retiring teachers for their unused sick days for a portion of their daily value. With that being said, teachers take sick days each year for mental health, to rest or recover when sick, to take care of a sick family member, and many other personal reasons. I am fortunate to have days left over each year. Again, I can be compensated for these days when I retire, or If necessary, I can use these days should I ever need to take FMLA. In my school district, we are allowed to donate our unused sick days to other staff members who have exhausted their own so that they can continue to receive pay while on FMLA. Our district does ...