[Editor's note: Bronxteach is a third-year elementary school teacher. He blogs at bronxteach.com, where this post first appeared.]

I’ve had a lot on my mind lately, and I hope I get a chance to sift through it on here over the next few days. In the mean time, there’s one incident stuck on my mind.

It happened the other day when one of my students got caught with his finger up his nose by the math cluster teacher. She sent him to wash his hands and I escorted him to the sink in our classroom to help him out. He’s a third grader who can’t tie his shoes and can’t really use scissors, so I figured he might need some help using the faucet and the soap.

As he was soaping up I thought it was a good opportunity for a quick hygiene tip: “Do you know a good way to know if you’ve washed for long enough? You can sing your ABC’s while you soap.”

“I don’t know my ABC’s.” More »

In her Dec. 6 “Edwatch” commentary in the Providence Journal, columnist Julia Steiny says, “No evidence anywhere shows that merit-pay systems aimed at individual teachers improves education. Incentives to groups of teachers are effective, but not individuals.”

She is to be commended for making this both striking and strikingly obvious observation. She cites Jeffrey Pfeffer, who in a 1998 Harvard Business Review essay, exposed the fallacy “that individual incentive pay drives creativity and productivity.” It has instead, he notes, “been shown to undermine teamwork, encourage employees to focus on the short term, and lead people to link compensation to political skills and ingratiating personalities rather than to performance.”

Steiny identifies several “boondoggles” that she associates with individual merit pay. More »

[Editor's note: Ms. Flecha is a third-year teacher in an elementary school in Queens. She blogs at My Life Untranslated.]

This is my third year as a teacher but in many ways it’s a first. It’s only my second year in the classroom and it’s my first year teaching 5th grade. In my self-contained ESL class, we’ve grown from 20 to 28 students since September — all of my new students are brand new to the country. This means I have roughly 20 beginners in a multi-lingual, multi-level class. Eleven of my students speak languages that I don’t: Indonesian, Chinese, Bangla, Urdu and Pashto. The rest are Spanish speakers. Their reading levels range from AA to Q. My colleagues tell me it’s like I have my own one-room schoolhouse. This is exactly the type of class I’ve always wanted, and yet sometimes it feels like it will be the death of me. More »

Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend is an odd time for the Dept. of Education to publish the new class size numbers.

But a quick look at them suggests why: class sizes rose virtually across the board, for the second year in a row. This occurred despite $150 million in targeted state funding to reduce class sizes in New York City in each of these two years.

DOE obviously knew since September that class sizes were up. They told the Daily News Sunday that the just couldn’t help it because of budget cuts. That may be true, but then why stay mum and then publish your report over a holiday?

A UFT survey in October found that 70 percent of high schools and 63 percent of elementary and middle schools had larger classes this year. It was no surprise. But DOE has sort of slinked around on this issue, saying principals are in charge of their individual school budgets so Central is not accountable for how this state class size funding is spent. This doesn’t sound like the kind of accountability Central imposes on everyone else. More »

If workers keep their mouths shut, their noses clean and stop busting chops and bucking their bosses, they will, if management sees fit, be paid fairly so that, provided they are not ingrates or spendthrifts, they will do just fine being one paycheck ahead of eviction and the need to forage through dumpsters to find sustenance for their sick kid who is medically unattended because his parent’s employer is no believer in investing in cost-ineffective luxuries like health insurance.

That’s the credo of the business community and their shills in the Department of Commerce and the Republican Party.  That’s why the American Society of Employers has published a “toolkit” including links on “Warning Signs of Unionization,” and “Strategies to Stay Union Free.” More »

Highlights from the Nov. 26 issue of New York Teacher:

At a time when workers’ benefits are eroding and becoming more costly nationwide, the UFT is enhancing the package of benefits offered by its Welfare Fund, UFT President Michael Mulgrew announced at the Nov. 18 Delegate Assembly.

With state midyear budget cuts up in the air as Gov. David Paterson and state lawmakers remained locked in disagreement, the outlook for school budgets remains murky.

To visit Elizabeth Josephson’s classroom at Island Academy, you go through the same routine, and checkpoints as someone visiting an inmate at Riker’s. She left teaching at college and private school to reach out to these students.

UFT delegates at their Nov. 18 meeting overwhelmingly approved a resolution that authorizes the union leadership to seek the intervention of the state’s Public Employment Relations Board if necessary. More »

As the United Federation of Teachers heads toward our fiftieth anniversary in 2010, we find ourselves facing a challenge greater than any we confronted in the last half-century of our history. Our union has been tempered by many extraordinary struggles over these last five decades, but never have we seen what we are witnessing today: a direct assault on the public character of American education and on the very right of teachers to organize collectively in unions. While the UFT has withstood these attacks as well as any teacher union in the nation, it would be a serious mistake to look at developments in New Orleans and Washington DC and proclaim “it can not happen here.” If we fail to grasp the critical nature of this moment and mount an appropriate, vigorous response, it can and will happen here.

At the center of this challenge is the charter school movement. More »

[Editor's note: miss brave is the pseudonym for a third-year elementary school teacher in Queens in her first year as a classroom teacher. She blogs at miss brave teaches nyc, where this post originally appeared.]

In response to my last post, in which I confessed to jumping up and down as my two most notoriously troublesome students changed schools, one of my readers wondered: “What ever will you post about now?”

Oh, I don’t know, how about the time there was a lizard in my classroom?!

Scene: Monday morning, second period. My kids are finishing coloring in some turkeys that a substitute teacher gave them last period. Everything is relatively, blessedly mellow. Then I hear a voice say: “Um, Miss Brave? There’s a lizard!”

I look. My eyes see, but they do not believe. Actually, at first I think, Who brought in a toy lizard and dropped it by the door?

Then the toy lizard scurries across the floor. Then I think: A lizard? Seriously? Why me? More »

Do you know a special high school senior in need of a scholarship?

Each year, the Albert Shanker College Scholarship Fund of the UFT proudly gives out nearly $1 million in undergraduate and graduate scholarships to academically excellent and financially eligible students from New York City public schools.

The deadline to apply for the 2010 scholarships is Jan. 31. Encourage students to apply today.

Visit the Scholarship Fund Web page for more information.

In his Nov. 19 Washington Post column, Jay Mathews spotlights the decline of research (term) papers as routine high school assignments and relates the experiences of a diligent history teacher, now retired, whose 3000 word term papers shrank over the years so that she finally ceased assigning them at all, begrudgingly bowing to the endemic decline in the ability and readiness of students to do the grunt work of note cards, paraphrasing direct quotations and linking them with transitions, footnotes, bibliographies, outlines and drafts.

The teacher, Doris Burton, described the term papers as “a regurgitated version of an encyclopedia.”

That might be putting it too kindly. Text vomiting implies that there has at least been partial processing of information.

Burton’s decision not to assign major research projects did not constitute dereliction of duty or abrogation of her profession’s commitment to feasible idealism as means to curry kids’ intellectual potential. It was not a case of “burnout.”

It was submission to an overwhelming reality: that we have kept kids ignorant of basic skills and found all kinds of excuses to justify it. More »

[Editor's note: Marie Boo is a school psychologist at PS 45 in Queens.]

“Brace yourself — I have bad news and you’re not going to believe it.”

The phone call came on the eve of Memorial Day last year from our school secretary. I listened in disbelief as she told me that our guidance counselor had died that afternoon. She explained that it appeared to be a sudden heart attack but I don’t really recall the rest of the conversation as I tried to absorb this horrific news. I kept thinking No…not Steve…it can’t be true…he was at work last week and seemed fine…his poor family…how will we tell the students? Then it hit me as I was telling my daughter about the call. I didn’t just lose a coworker; I just lost a very dear friend.

The next few days were the most difficult of my twenty-two-year career. As a member of the district crisis team for several years, I have had to report to other schools and assist staff and students cope with the loss of someone from their community. Now I had to call the crisis team and ask for assistance. With a constant lump in my throat I had to offer support and comfort to my own and I remember one moment when I thought, “Damn it Steve, you’re suppose to be here with me helping others deal with the death of someone else. It’s not supposed to be you.” More »

United Students Against Sweatshops scored a big victory on behalf of 1200 Honduran workers who lost their jobs when Russell Athletic closed their plant in response to organizing efforts. Russell, owned by Fruit of the Loom, agreed to reopen the factory in Choloma, rehire the workers, recognize their union, and collectively bargain in good faith.

From the Times:

From the time Russell shut the factory last January, the anti-sweatshop coalition orchestrated a nationwide campaign against the company. Most important, the coalition, United Students Against Sweatshops, persuaded the administrations of Boston College, Columbia, Harvard, New York University, Stanford, Michigan, North Carolina and 89 other colleges and universities to sever or suspend their licensing agreements with Russell.

…

“For us, it was very important to receive the support of the universities,” Moises Alvarado, president of the union at the closed plant in Choloma, said by telephone on Tuesday. “We are impressed by the social conscience of the students in the United States.”

[Editor’s note: Kansan in the Bronx is a second-year teacher in a Bronx middle school.]

There were a lot of things I was anxious about when I came out of the School of Ed. One was the switch from being the graded to being the grader. It was really an odd sensation to grade someone else’s work in black and white. All that time spent at a liberal undergraduate school attending vegan potluck dinners, talking about how terrible judging people can be, and now I was being paid to judge people every day.

It gets easier with time. At first you might pore over your grades for a very long time, thinking about how many points a student really deserves based on their effort and the demonstration of their comprehension of an idea. You might come up with rubrics for the littlest assignments to ensure fairness and award points to papers only after covering up their authors’ names. A lot of that will disappear under the sheer workload that is grading. Really, looking at students’ work takes forever! A very good friend of mine back in Kansas has more than 150 students on her rosters. Think about it: you assign a two-page paper in all of your classes and all of a sudden you have a 300-page novel to tear apart, comment on, revise and turn back to its many authors. Who has time for that? More »

The Metro NY Labor Communications Council is sponsoring an “organized conversation” about health care reform tomorrow, Tuesday, Nov. 17, from 6-8 p.m., at the Center for Worker Education (CWE), CUNY, 25 Broadway, 7th floor auditorium.

View the flier here.

Participants include:

• Bill Henning, 2nd vice president, CWA Local 1180
• Janine Jackson, FAIR
• Rev Earl Kooperkamp, St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Harlem
• Luella Toni Lewis, MD, president, Committee of Interns and Residents
• Trudy Lieberman, CUNY School of Journalism
• Hank Sheinkopf, political consultant
• Nick Unger, AFL-CIO

Contribution: $5 / $3 seniors & unemployed / students free
Beverages and light refreshments will be served

Everyday heroes are not always unsung. On occasion they actually get the recognition they deserve. If they performed their heroism while on “company time” and their unselfish deed conflicted with company policy and compromised productivity and the “bottom line,” they might not get the approbation from the front office, but at least there usually remains some media attention, even on a slow news day, or a “key to the city” to write home about.

Credit must be given, you might think, to a person whose split-second reaction to sudden danger, saves the lives of strangers.

Such a reflex, as much spiritual and physical, reveals and defines that person’s true character. Virtuous acts, especially when spontaneous and dramatic, are not done for glory, promotion, or an “employee of the month” citation. Although their reward is self-validation, even heroes like to be thanked, I am told.

Here is a summary of how three school bus drivers, under similar circumstances, were celebrated. More »