I work as a tech for an intermediate school district. Every year the entire staff is required to sign up for and attend classes as part of “Professional Development Day”. They sign up people to present on different educational topics. Each class offered has four sessions so that people can sign up for up to five sessions and have a good likelihood of getting classes they would like.
This year they are offering Applied Kinesiology as one of the classes.
I just had a go-around with our superintendent about how this is pseudoscience. He doesn’t believe so and thinks people should have choices. I told him that he and the district are being irresponsible for offering this. He told me basically that I should volunteer to be on the professional development committee if I have any complaints.
I think I will be conveniently sick that day. I am so disgusted right now and really am ashamed to be working there.
I’ve heard the term “kinesiology” but never really gave it much thought until now, so I looked it up. I’m still not sure I understand its purpose. Is this some kind of feng shui for the body?
Applied Kinesiology is not the same as Kinesiology, which is a legitimate course of study.
AK is a highly dubious form of muscle testing for diagnostic purposes. Of course, the question becomes why is a public school teaching staff medical diagnoses? Most won’t even let a nurse give a kid a tylenol.
Well, I thought that our superintendent would listen to reason, look at the evidence I provided him, and at the very least, admit that a mistake had been made because I figured it was already too late to pull the class. Instead he defended the decision and didn’t even look at the evidence I provided him either. To me it was a slap in the face from a guy who claims to take education seriously here.
Funny… For some strange reason I thought he would be the kind of guy that got the job because he was smart, but apparently once you become superintendent here, all rational thought leaves you.
Pity. He is kind of a nice guy. Too bad my respect for him just went down a whole lot.
Not that I don’t agree with your distaste, but every time I’ve heard of the “you should be on the committee” response, what that means is, “We’re stuck with this because no one else wanted to be on the committee - maybe you want a chance at fixing it and/or seeing what they have to deal with?” I wonder how many people he’s heard gripe about “why are you offering ________, that’s boring/sucks/is stupid/is looney” and who have also brushed off the request that they help fix the problem at its base.
Vinyl Turnip:
I’m a computer network tech for the district, so I don’t normally deal with the student population or make decisions on curriculum. I also don’t normally have to worry about professional development in this context as I only need to keep up on what’s going on in computer technology and security.
Ferret Herder:
You may very well be right and I do plan on joining the committee to make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen again. Still, the superintendent had to give his final approval of the classes. But using “You can’t complain unless you were in on the decision,” to me is just and excuse to redirect blame that ultimately falls upon our superintendent. I’m sure he did not like it when I told him that by simply offering the class, it was an endorsement by him and our district of AK.
In this case though I know who is on the professional development committee and how this particular item got accepted. There are at least 2 people on the committee who believe in all sorts of woo woo. One is a secretary, the other is an assistant working in the Agri-science class. The rest of the committee unfortunately has the tendency to just vote yes on most anything as long as it sounds educational, and they don’t ever bother to research anything before they vote yes. I can’t tell you how many times they have brought people into our organization to teach a class for PD and those people turned out to really suck at what they do. All because nobody researched that person or class ahead of time.
