The Talking Teacher had to brew on this one for a bit. After reading the headlines :"Horton defends fee payouts" The Talking Teacher has to speak on this, so here goes. The article goes on to state how there has been thousands and thousands of dollars spent out for advisers, consultants, and all sorts of other "experts". The interesting thing is that nothing really has changed, well, other than the state of certain people's pockets, and more is being dished out.
The Hopkins report exposed the classroom teacher for being inadequate and targeted the teacher as the weakest link in the whole chain of education in Bermuda. The Talking Teacher has to ask, if the "problem" is in the classroom, why is it that some of those dollars haven't trickled down into the classroom. Now I don't mean more texts, or fancy gadgetry that do all sorts of top notch things that the average teacher won't even use. But I mean the little things that teachers pay out of pocket for day in and day out. Things like flour, lemons, plastic bags, you name it, in order for the classroom to be successfully interactive, one has to pay out of pocket for these things. This money is spent out with no hope, or thought of being reimbursed whatsoever!!
There is a yearly order that is placed at the end of the year for certain things, but wow, that list has had to be in existence since the times of Noah. The list is full of things such as staples, pencils, and the usual good things, but is only specialized for the math teachers, the the extent of that portion is math manipulatives such as blocks and fake money. The science teacher, who needs basic supplies such as chemicals, the social studies teacher, who would love to take their class on an outing, the language arts teacher, who could use sets of reader level appropriate books, the librarian, with the ample space on the shelves, would love to have the ability to have even a small amount of money to improve, upgrade and expand.
Now is the Talking Teacher sour that none of these dollars have trickled down to the classroom? Not quite, but if for example, you take one fee that has been paid out, according to the article, which is a cool 60,000, you could supply the 5 middle schools and the two high schools, with unseen amounts of supplies. WOW!!!!! (The Talking Teacher salivates at the thought) And let's take the sum or 100,000, imagine the numbers of library books, playground equipment, in school workshops, and cool teacher manipulatives that those at the primary level could be exposed to. WOW!!!
But no, we hire more people, we enlist more consultants, we review more things, we get more "experts" to sit and study the problem. In some ways, we have become like the father and son who were taking their donkey to the market, you know the story, as they pass different groups of people, each group suggests that they do something else with the donkey. All to their detriment, as they end up dropping the donkey overboard, to their shame. Are we similar? hmmm....
So my question for today is....can I get a little change for my class? Can you break us off a small piece of that very large pie?
No comments:
Post a Comment