Posts Tagged ‘kremen school of education’
One day, our professor began class by asking us whether or not we should teach morality in public schools.
It took about 12 seconds for my credential class to decide that yes, we should. We wouldn’t want our little rapscallions running in the streets, taking baseball bats to our windshields and setting fire to hobos just because they didn’t get taught morality at home. In true Socratic fashion, he almost immediately posed another question.
Whose morality?
We thought it was another gimmie.
Why, Judeo-Christian, we said. That’s pretty common and acceptable, and we don’t need to add in all the theology when we teach it.
In true Socratic fashion, that was another setup.
Who here doesn’t think they subscribe to this Judeo-Christian morality, or something close to it?
Just about everyone grunted in the affirmative.
Who doesn’t?
Silence.
Hah. I bet you guys are a bunch of hypocrites.
We insisted we weren’t.
Alright, then. Let’s prove it. Could I have everyone who is married or was married come and stand up in the front of class for a moment?
We did so.
O.K. This question isn’t for the people standing up. This is for the people sitting down. How many of you are virgins?
One of us raised a hand.
The rest of you are hypocrites. According to Judeo-Christian morality, if you weren’t married, you should be a virgin. Therefore, according to Judeo-Christian morality, there is only one moral person among everyone sitting down in this class.
Now my question to you is: How can you teach morality if you don’t practice it?
Good question. Awkward way of showing his point, but a good question nonetheless.
There are quite a few arguments the committee probably considered, arguments that ostensibly linked my blog to unprofessional conduct. Due to a request or two in the comments, I’ll run them down pretty quickly, sparing you my four pages of single-spaced retort.
You talk about students online. That’s unprofessional.
That’s a observation better noted the hundreds of professional teachers who share student anecdotes online each week. My view, and the view of others, is that it’s high-level staff lounge gossip, and there’s negligible danger of outsiders figuring out who is who; only faculty at my school could even begin to try to figure out which student is which. Those who can figure it out have probably already heard the story, anyway.
Maybe my problem is that I used actual teachers as models for professionalism. Sorry about that.
You write about teachers online, breaking an unstated, implicit confidentiality between you and them.
They gave helpful, specific advice, and they weren’t put in a bad light. Nothing sounded confidential, and nothing seemed like a problem.
What about the BTSA entry, where you write that BTSA is bullshit? At least one teacher was put in a bad light, there. You’ve written similar things about the credential program being “useless.”
I didn’t say that BTSA is anything — I quoted a teacher, making clear that his view represented a wide consensus of teachers, from the most novice to the most veteran, so everyone’s already in that light, bad or not. I didn’t create the light; I just photographed it.
As for the credential program, while I have written extensively on my personal view that the rigmarole surrounding it is useless, this is an even less controversial viewpoint than BTSA. In my scouring of the profession, I’ve met exactly two people who believe that their credential program, outside their student teaching, prepared them for the classroom. I found both of them online, where all those unprofessionals are.
Booting me out isn’t going to fix your extant public relations issues. They’ll continue to flourish, and I’ll take great enjoyment in it.
Don’t you realize that having a blog lowers the chance you’ll find a job?
Yes, of course. It also raises the chances of finding a job where I’d be happy to work. The first advice I got from my first master teacher went like this: There’s nothing as good as a good administration; there’s nothing as bad as a bad one.
Good and bad, in this context, are exactly relative to how supportive they are of my professional development. That’s this blog. If an employer sees my blog and is turned off, chances are that I didn’t want to work there anyway. If an employer sees my blog and is turned on, either he likes pictures of the sun setting or his school district is exactly where I want to work.
If there aren’t employers like that, I’ll wait until they wise up. There are other, non-teaching jobs out there.
You could have been anonymous, as all professionals would be.
You mean like most of the top 50 education bloggers who, as teacher blogger Dan Meyer noted, write using their real names?
The first thing we told you was that Facebook and MySpace will get you in trouble.
Blogs aren’t Facebook and MySpace. Blogs are worthwhile, not only serving a legitimate purpose but giving the author complete creative control over the content, to boot. Facebook and MySpace are where your friends upload pictures of your drunkenness for all the world to see, whether you want them to or not. Subtle difference.
You could have asked us for advice, you know.
In my experience across multiple colleges at our university, most professors who say “I love talking to students all the time” are liars. I had no reason to believe that Kremen was any different. I address these concerns with greater detail in the given statement.
You’ve irreparably damaged the relationship between your school and this college with your unprofessional behavior. We need that relationship to place more student teachers.
Considering the perceived efficacy of the credential program among teachers and from even within your department, my perceived unprofessionalism among teachers is a drop in the bucket.
I doubt there was much lasting damage, either — I’ll bet you that half of the teachers have already chalked my actions up to the foolishness of one arrogant, self-absorbed, egotistical youth.
This arrogant, self-absorbed, egotistical youth hasn’t officially heard back committee yet. Wish me luck, even if the lucky path is getting kicked out, with prejudice.
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to speak before my college’s Admissions and Standards board, to defend my blog against allegations of unprofessionalism. I decided that I had better things to do, and I submitted a lengthy statement instead.
My sister graduated high school yesterday. If I was going to get back to the house in time to leave for the ceremony, I’d have to leave Fresno at the same time the board convened. Showing up, I decided, was not worth the effort.
What bothers me most about the whole ordeal — I’ll detail it briefly, if at all, tomorrow — is that I’m not bothered. When I first came to grips about the possibility of not being a teacher, I didn’t panic, and I didn’t get stressed. I was relieved.
Even before the first meeting, I had already developed quite a bit of trepidation about entering the profession. The decision to become a high school teacher came when I was in high school, back when I liked high school. Without any other motivation or guide, inertia continued to propel me forward along that track.
Three years after I entered college, I entered the credential program, with no real job to my resume — pocket change came from being a columnist for the school newspaper, working as a camp counselor. I had no real-life experience, and that worried me.
After having experienced the highs and lows of the teaching job, and weighing my options, I realized that leaving teaching forever appealed to me. That was back in my first, unblogged semester of student teaching, so instead of heeding that instinct, I kept working at becoming a teacher.
It makes no sense to give up now, especially because everyone has a messy, uneven and, until the end, unsatisfying student teaching experience.
I took that advice to heart.
I convinced myself that my dislike of teaching ended once I saw my students, ignoring that it ignites up again at the end of the day, when I would be ridiculously tired, even more tired than I had been after the many 15-hour days during summer camp.
When finally it seemed that my aeroplane of student teaching wasn’t soaring, but sputtering after that first “blogging is unprofessional” meeting, I considered saving grace and goodwill. I would have done it, if I were heartbroken, and I would have ended my blog if I thought it would save my career.
Teaching, I decided, isn’t my career.
Rather than land gracefully, I took the controls of my aeroplane of student teaching, making a sharp nosedive, come what may. I decided to continue my blog, this blog.
Continuing this blog wasn’t a nosedive because I thought blogging, the way I did it, was perfectly acceptable, though I did and do believe that. Continuing this blog was a nosedive because my program disagreed, and minced no words about it.
Dr. Bruin disagrees, I reasoned, but the worst he can do is to kick me out of the program. When I don’t want to be a teacher, that doesn’t faze me, does it?
My biggest worry yesterday wasn’t staying in the credential program and eventually redoing TaskStream, or even the chance of being booted out of the program and never having to redo TaskStream. Why would it worry me? My credentialing sheepskin won’t do me a whit of good outside a profession I decided I didn’t want join, a profession I didn’t very much like.
Yesterday, I didn’t really want to speak in front of the Admissions and Standards board. I didn’t do what the Kremen School of Education wanted, to begin with, because I didn’t want to be a teacher, and a simple do-or-die-but-mostly-die meeting wasn’t going to change that. All I worried about yesterday was making it to San Jose, in time to see my sister graduate.
I made it in time. Yesterday was a good day.
