I go to school at one of Pennsylvania’s state schools. As some of you may have heard, the state schools here may be going on strike .
Rumors abound, but no one seems to know what is actually going on.
Our main concern is what might happen to our classes if the strike does happen. Will all the work we’ve done so far suddenly become null and void? Will everything become pass/fail?
Has anything like this ever happened to you, my fellow Dopers? Strike stories from grade school as well are welcome, but I am most interested in those from college/university faculty stikes, especially those involving state schools.
A few years ago our entire educational system went on strike. Both K-12 and the University system. Us college students were out about a week and the school teachers were out about twice that. What they ended up doing was just extending the school year by the same amount of days we lost.
If it had gone on further they were going to cancel the semester. However they never decided what they were going to do about our money and our grades and our effort.
The fact that the state may have to end up giving back millions of dollars to students probably means there is going to be enormous impetus to solve it before it comes to that. So that’s what I’d expect. A week or two off that gets tacked onto the end of the semester.
A few years ago our entire educational system went on strike. Both K-12 and the University system. Us college students were out about a week and the school teachers were out about twice that. What they ended up doing was just extending the school year by the same amount of days we lost.
If it had gone on further they were going to cancel the semester. However they never decided what they were going to do about our money and our grades and our effort.
The fact that the state may have to end up giving back millions of dollars to students probably means there is going to be enormous impetus to solve it before it comes to that. So that’s what I’d expect. A week or two off that gets tacked onto the end of the semester.
If the PA schools go on strike, I am going to be very not happy. There’s far too many details for me to worry about.
My profs have chosen to assume that a strike probably won’t happen; if it does, they won’t accept work that they themselves have not given out. Semester’s canceled early, they’re not giving out credit for a month’s worth of work. (Which is why my health prof intends to hold class off-campus in the event of such an occurrence…which he says is unlikely, but I don’t know.)
Hmm, I guess the big difference between our strike and the one you may find yourself in is that ours happened in the spring rather then the winter. You can expand easily into the summer. Pushing the semester’s end too close to christmas seems like a move designed to make everyone angry.
All of the teachers in Marysville Washington (where my daughter and I live) have been on strike for almost four weeks… somewhere around 11,000 kids K-12 have yet to begin their school year.
From what I hear, the teachers and the district are no where near any resolution. Several hundred students are spending the second night of a “sit in” at the district headquarters, saying they with stay there till it is resolved.
These kids WANT to start school…they understand and are trying to support their teachers, but, the ones who are paying are those who have had to scramble to find daycare, and , all this time will have to be made up (shorter Christmas vacation, not getting out till perhaps next July…ect.) It is frustrating, to say the least.
In my third year of University, Dalhousie (Nova Scotia, Canada) went on strike. Our classes were suspended for a month in all. It went from approximately the first of March to the first of April. Before it happened, we had no idea that it would last that long. We thought it would probably be a week or so, but things didn’t really resolve very quickly. A lot of my profs gave us assignments over the strike, although they weren’t allowed to give tests or collect papers the day that it ended (since nobody knew when that would be the whole time). I ended up doing all of my term papers while it was going on. It was really hard from a student perspective: nobody wanted to drop out and get a refund because of that off chance that school colud always start up again tomorrow. We also were constantly afraid that we’d lose the whole semester and have to make it up at some point (i.e. that summer). In the end, we started school again with less than a month of to go. A lot of exams got cancelled because the adminnistration condensed our three week finals period into three days in order to let us all out of school on the scheduled date. Overall, it sucked. I wasn’t like a month long vacation because nobody knew what was going on, and we din’t really get what we paid for as far as our classes that semester went…although the University seemed all too happy to give us credit for the truncated version of our classes rather than offer refunds.
My teachers went on strike for a while when I was about 16-17.
We could go to school were some non union people were teaching but I and most everyone else would not cross a picket line. Went and got drunk instead. Oh how we loved “mortgaging our future” as we called it
