OrganizedChaos has been lamenting the reaction she gets at cocktail parties when she says she’s a teacher.
I quite enjoy being asked. Here’s what I do. When someone has the American crass gall to ask what I do for a living (something done no where else in the world in polite company), I say the following.
“I’m a teacher.” ((Pause for effect)) “Which is a highly respected profession,” ((Pause for effect)) “in many other cultures.”
The Title One school where I work had Open House today. It amounts to registration and meet your teacher day.
Everything went without a hitch, except of course for the parent-initiatied incident of the “extra baby.”
At one point, a family could not get their pram up the stairs, so they rolled it into a classroom near the bottom of the stairs and disappeared for 30-40 minutes. Luckily, the teacher there is a loving mother herself, and although rather surprised to find an unannounced 6-month-old awake and crying, carried the baby around, soothingly, until the mystery was solved.
As the building filled up, I loved it. Schools without children are just tombs of directionless souls, bumping into one another, with no other purpose than to get ready for their purpose. “Purpose,” we learned in our weeks of not having one (or at least getting ready to have one), is critical to happiness. Well, in retrospect, THAT explains a lot.
But the kids were back today. The directionless souls came alive and focused. Hugs were given and received – much more so than when the staff got back together. It’s not that we don’t love one another–we do.
It’s just that we all share a common trait. No matter how much we might love our co-workers, our husband, wife or soul-mate. We all know, down deep in our hearts, that children are just better than adults.
This realization came to me during my first interview to become a teacher, six year ago. When asked by my interviewer why I wanted to spend all day with children instead of adults. I said, almost to myself, “Unlike adults, the personality foibles of children, are rarely self-inflicted.”
A PLC is not a thing.
As Heidegger put it, there are “thingly” things and “unthingly” things and a PLC is a very unthingly thing, unless of course you happen to be lucky enough to find yourself in one and then a PLC is everything.
I’ve worked for principals who could count the number of PLCs they had created — horrible, dark, depressing workhouses these. By counting the PLC things, they could then compare themselves to other principals to see who’s better, “I’ve created 11 PLCs.” “Really, we created five last year, but we added another eight PLCs this year.” These are the utterances of children trying to win a game of “Who’s is Bigger” with phantom progress.
In my current school we are banned (not explicitly) from using the jargon of PLCs, because if we called something PLC, that would exclude everything else, and that would be wrong. Everything is PLC: Teacher Research, Literacy Collaborative, Happy Hour, Team Meetings, Joking Around in the Office, Teachers Who Are a Groups of Friends, Teachers Going on Vacation Together, Committees Working on Solutions for Struggling Students, Clairvoy, Co-Teaching, Grade-Level Long-Term Technology Projects and Everything Else.
It can be compared to the approach of Eastern and Western religion. For a time there during the 1900s Eastern religions brought something new to Western religions. Yogis would say Hinduism is a “way”. Although many Westerners couldn’t quite fathom what that meant, they knew they were missing something and that sounded like it. In the West, religion is a thing. You know, a “thing” you do on Sunday morning, a “thing” you give money to, a “thing” that will keep you from going to hell.
The truly religious in the West (I have a long line of ministers in my family) knew and know it is both. Religion is a way of being, and you need some “things” to help folks along that don’t know what they are doing.
It is when the “things” overpower the “way” that the “way” gets lost. That’s probably why at my school we don’t use the word PLC. Like Lord Valdemort, we know there is a huge unseen presence of PLC, but we treat it as the thing that must not be named. We fear if we speak the jargon of PLC, the thingly things of educational bureaucracy might sweep in and overtake our unthingly everything, causing everything to go down the tubes.
In our kitchen growing up we had a sign which read, “Love One Another”, and in a professional teaching environment, that sums it up just about as well as anything.
Airplaines B.o.B.
The set up pipes belongs to Hayley Williams of Paramore
We teach how to read a book, its parts, how to interact with the object …
Gestures from João Machado on Vimeo.
This assumes you already know what RSS is … if you don’t, this video is a good introduction.
Step 1
Do an eBay search as you normally would.
Step 2
Scroll to the bottom of the results page, and look for the orange “RSS” button.
Step 3
Click the button to add the feed to your reader. Now, whenever what you’re interested in is listed on eBay, you’ll get an RSS update.
That’s it. Hope this helps.
