Education Matters:

Before launching into this week’s topic, I want to tie up a few loose ends from last week’s. Part of what I wrote got lopped off due to space limitations, so I’ll just tack it on here. I don’t want to belabor the point, but I would like to finish a point only partially made last Friday.

Just to recap, the state of California and our school district are telling me that my 35 years of service will count for nothing and I will be terminated if I do not acquire a supplementary credential for teaching limited English speakers in my class (which last year amounted to three such students).

The CLAD (Cross-cultural Language and Academic Development) program offers some good suggestions, but unfortunately they come in the form of mandates, and that will inevitably engender resentment among some of us who have spent the greater part of our lives teaching.

By all means, some of us would ask in our ongoing quest to become better teachers, give us more arrows for our quivers, but let each of us who call ourselves teachers choose which arrows we will use. Like the students we serve, we are individuals, and there is a tendency for some of us to resist being lumped together with all others, as if we were all common dispensaries of information.

The state should have offered, and school districts throughout the state should have demanded, that there be a grandfather clause in this whole thing for those of us who, for whatever the reason, have not found the need to supplement our teaching with “new methodologies.”

Teaching is such a personal thing. Yes, it’s about imparting knowledge and conveying information, but it’s so much more about getting to know, as much as you can in the space of nine months, kids you see day in and day out. Getting to know them and trying to reach them on an individual basis rather than applying educational formulas that herd them together in common assessment.

Some of us nearing retirement suspect that the state (and perhaps our district) is looking to entice a whole bunch of old teachers like myself into an earlier retirement and replace us with recent college graduates at half our salary. What better way to accomplish that than by throwing up a roadblock this late in our careers which is sure to have a good number of us saying, “_____it, I’ll retire early.”