I’d probably move to another type of library(ish) work if I weren’t so close to being able to retire with a pension. That, and the fact that I really do love the kids I work with, will almost certainly keep me there for the next three years. My main talent is the ability to help kids see the good in themselves, because I can almost always see it. They know I’m still there for them even when they drive me up the wall. In a library setting I often see talent that classroom teachers don’t, since students have the opportunity to discover new interests.
Managing behavior is still a big challenge. It doesn’t help that our new library is bigger than it needs to be, with distractions like a wheelchair lift for the stage. There are also too many nooks and crannies that make supervision difficult.
I’m hoping that after being back in school for a year some of the more challenging students will be less out of their gourds. I really like a lot of these “challenging” students, and will do what I can to help them, but it can take a lot out of me.
That was a big pain for me, especially near the end of the year. It’s not as if the subbing was difficult; I’m usually put in with a pre-K/Kindergarten class because I don’t get overly excited when they act like preschoolers. What bothers me most about that is that the library is less available. Less opportunity for students to use the library often results in behavior issues when they are there. I didn’t feel like I could complain too much about co-workers’ absences since many of them pitched in and help when I had to miss most of April due to the deaths of my parents. If I have to sub several times a week soon after we return, though, I’m gonna want to scream. If it’s a result of positions not being filled, that won’t be good. I almost left the last time that happened.
I hear you. My wife who has been passionate about teaching since I’ve met her, confided in me that if this upcoming year was like the previous year, she may think about leaving. This is someone getting her Masters in Art Education and is very involved with the County. So that was a massive thing to me. Teachers are just getting emotionally abused in so many ways these days.
Apologies for the hijack, but I’m curious as to how that’s a “distraction”? Is the lift set up so that kids can play with it at will, rather than being restricted to the function of getting wheelchair users on and off the stage with proper supervision?
Because if so, yeah, that sounds like not only a distraction but a potential liability issue.
Penn had a faculty of education that gave, IIRC, a BEd degree. Columbia, where I taught for two years, had a Teacher’s College.
At Penn I took a course in geometry that was required for math ed majors. The professor struggled to present a course that was sufficiently low level for math ed, but still interesting for math majors. He succeeded with the latter objective; not sure about the former. I think he decided there would be no grade below C, no matter what.
This is a beautiful and well-articulated analogy; thank you for it!
Yeah, when I went back to school to become a teacher, I had this old dude professor in a “concepts of math” class who clearly knew his subject but didn’t know how to teach. I never went beyond precal in school, but I have a reasonably good head for math, so I was able to struggle past his monotone lectures to understand the coolness. But I remember one class where he decided to teach us how to manually derive square roots, and a girl in my class turning around, catching my eye, and putting a finger-gun to her head to blow her brains out. He was clearly not reaching all students.
I’ll also go back to my analogy to nonfiction authors, because I think that might be illustrative. Say you need to hire someone to write a text on the history of Appalachian bootlegging, and there are three authors you could hire:
Alice knows nothing about the subject, doesn’t realize she’s ignorant, and can write beautifully.
Beatrice knows nothing about the subject, realizes she’s ignorant, and can write beautifully.
Candace is an expert on the subject and writes terribly.
If it were only Alice and Candace, I’d probably hire Candace, knowing that the resulting book would be very difficult to use and wouldn’t teach many folks about the subject. But I’d definitely hire Beatrice over the other two, because someone who knows that they’re ignorant of a subject can educate themselves on the subject much easier than a terrible writer can become a good writer.
That said, if the subject were high-energy particle physics, I’d reluctantly hire Candace, thinking that there’s no way Beatrice could educate herself well enough to write the book in a reasonable timeframe.
Before kids get back I’m going to find out if it can be disabled until we need it. How can anyone not see that it’s 1) going to be irresistible for some kids, and 2) a safety/liability issue. During the renovation it would have made sense to make the stage office space (the new library used to be the auditorium). Of course a librarian with over 30 years experience wouldn’t know as much as an architect how to set up a library space, so all my input was ignored.
Oooh, that’s frustrating. Much as I honor the teaching profession and respect the majority of teachers (and librarians!) who are conscientiously working their asses off to send me improved crops of students for my college calculus classes, I have to admit that some of the negative stereotypes about the education-administration complex have some basis in fact.
There are just a whole mess of people running schools who have, shall we say, an unjustified amount of confidence in the rightness of their individual unaided decisions.
But I fear that the GOP has been examining the voter demographics carefully and can see that the more educated a voter is, the less likely they will vote Republican.
When I was growing up in Des Moines in the 1970s, we’d always ask the teachers at the beginning of the term why they didn’t go on strike. We were always told that teachers’ strikes were (and still are) illegal in Iowa, and stopped asking when one teacher told us that if they DID strike, we’d just have to go longer in the spring. (This teacher also pointed at the board with her middle finger, FWIW.)
Men who want to go into education, especially at the lower grade levels, are also having to deal with the same thing as many male nursing students (and other female-dominated professions) and it’s this: “But what about the single mom who won’t be able to get a job because of you?”
That one I’ve heard, albeit not directed at me. A teacher at our kids’ school was a pedophile and is in jail. There were apparently red flags beyond his gender, though.
One of the teachers at my high school got pregnant by, and married, the student body president. He’s someone you would have heard of if you live in a certain metro area, and they are still married. I don’t know that she became a teacher for that reason, though.
I have to admit that some of the negative stereotypes about the education-administration complex have some basis in fact.