Tenure
June 08, 2009
Alfred brought something up on twitter, here's the tweet:
|
I'm one of those teachers who needed tenure a few years ago, and had it as close as you can get to having tenure in Texas. I caught my principal in a lie, accidently, at a faculty meeting. I am not sure anyone noticed except her -- it took me a while for it to dawn on me. Plus I'm pretty sure she didn't like overweight, white woman who were "dog people", as she ran one out of the middle school a few years before she got to me, and tried it on another one. Yes, they were both acquittances. We "dog people" stick together.
If you do an internet search on her name, you'll see an interview with the Dallas Morning News where she explained how she got rid of teachers: made them teach a subject they were not comfortable with and made them float. Well, she put me in a portable as far from campus as she could and gave me the worst kids in the building. She didn't KNOW I was comfortable teaching math so that backfired on her. The other thing she did was take me away from computers, but I had my own plus my own internet access through my phone.
The fun part is that I came out of the situation smelling like a rose -- I managed to get the majority of those "bad kids" to pass algebra, do better on the bench marks than they had ever had and managed to get them to pass the TAKS. Quite a few of those kids graduated and they weren't expected to graduate.
She has gone on, but she has made me very gun shy of administration and I don't trust new principals. Sadly I'm at a school where principals don't stay long -- they usually get promoted though she ended up retiring.
The old saying is that respect is earned, not given. However, most administrators don't hang around long enough to earn much of anything. I teach at a 'good' school and we have had 4 principals and 11 different associate/assistant principals in the last 12 years. In my experience, the more ambitious a principal or asst. principal is, the less trustworthy he/she is. Ambitious principals tend to believe district administrators when they say they know what is best for kids, rather than trust the teachers who are with the kids every day.
Posted by: James | June 08, 2009 at 08:18 PM
Congratulations! You're an excellent writer (and apparently also an excellent math teacher.)
Posted by: Linda | June 11, 2009 at 01:52 PM