Professional Development Guaranteed to Impress

Had another "let us give you tools so you can teach better" session after school Friday.

Friday. That would be Halloween.

You know. Bad traffic. Everyone trying to get home early so you are off the roads before kids on sugar highs hit the streets.

So, the tool they are going to give us comes with power points and a test bank. Since it was a class of all math teachers, naturally they used a social studies section as an example. That would be because we all know how easy it is to teach math without, you know, actually doing the math.

So the example they used was a segment on American History. One that had so many blatant errors it would have been funny if most of could not sit there and calculate in our heads how many cases of paper we could have bought instead of an incorrect product.

You know, paper to replace the books they don't want to buy because the math changes too fast.

Well, not the math but the way they want us to teach it.

But, it's ok, the presenter assured us. (The same presenter who could not answer any of our questions about what the math parts looked like.) Yes, we will be able to go into these power points and make changes.

Yep.

We don't want it. We have other things that work better. But you want us to use this piece of excrement system - and we can fix it as we go along.

Did I mention that the people who decided to purchase this are certified in social studies.

(I guess they thought the math department was so one dimensional that we wouldn't notice.)

Color me underwhelmed.

Professional Development - what is the point?

I am a firm believer in education - my own as well as my students. In my prior job, information was power, so I want to know everything. Not to be a know-it-all (although that is a failing of mine), but I really want to know it all.

When I started teaching, they were talking about standards-based learning. I bought books. I spent my summers attending additional classes to really understand the point behind this.

We have professional development every week. It is in part because of our status with AYP. I understand this and the importance of attending and participating.

We have three specialists who were hired with stimulus money to help us teach. They were elementary school teachers. (Remember? I teach high school)

They keep coming up with really REALLY juvenile ideas for us to use with our students. I know some will fly - with upper level kids. You have to be very careful with kids in lower level math classes.

Today's lesson? She read a book to us, one I read to my children before they could read. I'll call it the One Fish, Two Fish. Then we were to write our response to the standards based lesson in the style of the book.

I did not use the words that came to mind, although they were short words.

I feel like I am wasting my personal time investigating some of these ideas if they are going to feed it to me in a manner I would have understood by 3rd grade. Well, I can take that off the list of things I used to waste my personal time on.

{Disclaimer: there are good professional development ideas out there. We don't use them]

professional development

I HAD THE BEST PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT EVER TODAY AND I AM SO STOKED!!!!!!

It was small, it was specific, I can see how I can use it. I had a chance to vent (as did the others) and then come together with solutions! The person in charge came by and we had a chance to talk with her about problems and solutions and long rage how-are-we-going-to-address-this.

It was like going to heaven for a couple of hours.

It is worth all of the years of crap I have endured!!

Wow!

And I do not care at all if I get credits toward recertification.