Thursday, May 10, 2007

Well Happy Day. It is Teacher Appreciation Week all over Texas.

We teachers here in Texas sure feel appreciated.

We feel appreciated when we spend hours grading papers at home in front of the TV and then come in to work bleary-eyed the next day to find a small packet of Gummy Bears in our mailboxes with a “Thank You For All That You Do” message.

Gummy Bears? Do I LOOK nine years old?

We feel appreciated when Rick Noriega gets the state House to change the infamous performance pay bill altered to an across the board pay raise for every teacher in Texas, only to have the State Senate put performance pay back in.

We feel appreciated when we try to do something new with our lives, like other non-teacher people do, only to have some rabid, spittle spewing parents call the media and complain about a young single elementary school teacher appearing in a bathing suit on a reality TV show.

We feel appreciated when one of our own, who is now a Texas State Senator, keeps filing bills that are hurtful and hateful to teachers.

And finally, we feel appreciated when some nitwit in the mainstream media petitions the Texas Education Agency through an open records request for the teacher certification test scores of thousands of teachers in southeast Texas. . . and publishes all of them on the internets.

What is it about being a teacher? Don’t we deserve a modicum of privacy? Sure there are some bad teachers out there. There are some real stinkers. But these test scores are not reflective of how good or how bad a teacher is in a classroom. I know. I checked the scores of all my peers and the scores do not match their competency, neither in their content area, nor in pedagogy.

But KTRK reporter Wayne Dolcefino, who was very probably hated by his teachers, thinks this data is newsworthy. Look Wayne, the reason that there are teachers out there who continually fail their competency tests and remain on the job is because NO ONE WANTS TO TEACH ANYMORE.

They can’t find anyone to replace these marginally skilled people. Or the replacements are worse.

And no wonder. When there are people like Wayne Dolcefino and Florence Shapiro out there taking potshots at Texas’ teacher community, who would want to put up with this load of excreta?

3 comments:

Mudarisa said...

I find this guy to be pathetic! Is there such a thing as privacy anymore?

Anonymous said...

Did you hear about the time Muckraker Dolecefino was sicced onto our Pct. 2 J.P. Joel Clouser by a political opponent? He came snooping around looking for a smoking gun on Clouser, only to be given all of the records he asked for, and went away with his tail between his legs. He couldn't even find a damp firecracker!

Hal said...

I've cruised around the web these past few days since Dwayne - what a pathetic name - put all of our test scores on the internets. Outside of one clueless idiotic teacher who thrives on looking into the lives of her colleagues, the teacher reaction has been one of outrage. If teacher ExCET tests are to be made public, let's make everyone's test scores public. Everything.

Heck yes, let's pass a law that requires that we post road signs that warn motorists that they are about to use an overpass designed by a civil engineer who graduated from high school with 504 modifications.

It's only fair, and the public has a right to know.

Right?