So, there we all were, all day, sitting at the lunch tables, listening and watching and each and every one of us feeling more and more demoralized as the day went on.  What exactly is the purpose of this rehashed bunch of tired ideas? I think demeaning is a word I would use.  Some of us are now tagged as teachers with value. The rest have no value? Well, that’s the way to build the kind of spirit your school system needs. Value added in. I feel like a can of coke – Just add the value, pour it in.

The lower grades will have a part of their assessment based on Dibbels. Dibbels for God’s sake!! Dibbels is supposed to be used as a tool for teachers to gage where there student’s are strong and where they are weak. You use it to see where you need to help that child. While tests do perform the same function it isn’t the same thing. On top of this we also find out that the evaluation process is not complete. Some of it, the basis for Non-Value Added, for instance, will be determined later. Have you ever given your students a test and not told them what they would be tested on. It’s like giving an assignment and saying the rubric will be determined later.

I also could not believe the baseball analogies we were given.  We’re in a baseball game.  But if we were would you really want to play for a coach who made you feel so lousy about your position?  A new teacher told me that the speech given at the New Teacher Orientation was equally dispiriting.  Just what is the thinking here? Does anyone really believe this to be productive? Constructive? At least doing no harm?

I found myself so filled with anger while sitting there listening to the administrator (the bearer of ill news) and reading the information and thinking that some consultant and a Teacher for a Year were paid quite a lot of money to come up with this mind-dead document. The level of imagination here is non-existent.

I loved, too, the teaching clips we watched. The “best” teacher didn’t even know how to pronounce the name of Daedalus (from the Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus) – she kept saying Deedlius.  I thought at the beginning she said Delius and was wondering how she confused Daedalus with an early 20th Century English composer.  Besides the wrong pronunciation she has now passed on to her many students (how many years has she been teaching this story this way?) she also managed to give them a very misguided interpretation of Pieter Brueghal’s famous painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.  Somehow it is a painting that demonstrates that we really should be looking out for one another. Go figure. I always felt that the true meaning of Brueghal’s painting was distilled beautifully in W.H. Auden’s poem, The Musee des Beaux Arts.

auden

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

W.H. Auden 1940

A poem about sufferring and how life goes blandly on while sufferring occurs. Yes, today we knew sufferring. For myself I have somewhere to get to and must sail calmly on.