All the concern over "a computer on every desk" is merely a distraction; teachers are trying to find excuses for the fact that they're miserable failures when it comes to teaching, and saying "oh, we need this nifty gadget, then everything will be hunky-dory!" is just the latest excuse. Parents, many of whom are themselves products of the government edjukashun system, seem to lack the critical thinking skills to realize that computers didn't even exist (in practical terms, anyway) when they were in school, and yet, schooling has been going on, with some modicum of success, for centuries.
See, this is the kind of crap teachers have to put up with. What other job can you have a Master's degree, and yet any bozo with a 2nd grade education can get on the school board and think they know how to tell you to do your job. You want to know why education sucks these days? Because for the most part kids have no work ethic whatsoever, and they don't have to. Try to flunk a kid nowadays, the parents are in screaming, administrators come and have a cow and tell you to pass them, and you graduate morons. Parents scream they want tougher standards, but not for THEIR kid. Why do you think so many people you deal with on a daily basis are totally incompetent? Because they still get through school and get jobs, no matter how big of a moron they are. One of the same teachers I had in school is still here, teaching AP English. She still does some of the same paper assignments on classic novels, only now instead of 2000 word papers they do 500 word papers, because she says they just can't do a 2000 word paper. You should see the 500 word ones.
I'm currently the librarian for our school. When I started I had a full time aide. This was largely because besides all the library duties, we are also considered to be in charge of all the audio visual stuff, so if some teachers vcr dies in the middle of a movie they are squawking they need you there NOW. I also had to set up my own computer network. My budget has been slashed to around $3000, partly because heck, if you have computers, why do you need books? A set of encylopedias costs somewhere between $1000-$2000 depending on the set. Our newest set is a 2000. We won't be getting a new set in the forseeable future. Our technology encyclopedia set is a
1972 set--wanrt to guess how usefull that is? The computers we have which obviate the need for books? The newest ones I have are pentium 400's, at any given time at least 1/3 are down because of tampering, and I have to find the time somehow to fix them myself--something its hard to do when they have a zillion kids in her from study halls, regular classes wanting to do research, and the odd trouble making kid they have sent here because the teacher kicked him out and the principals "don't like doing discipline". They canned another 7 or 8 teachers for next year, but still have to teach the courses, so I have been told that in addition to all my other duties I have to teach 3 business courses next year. I "shouldn't have more than 20 students at a time"--I have around 5 or 6 working computers at any given time. The main thing I have to be teaching is computers to satisfy state regs. Guess how THATS going to go? Not to mention that all of the teachers who have classes those periods can now never bring their students to the library for research because there will already be a class there, and if you're a student who happens to have your only study hall then, I guess you're going to some public library after school. They have slashed jobs, textbooks, etc, and we have old computers that don;t work, because there is no money, yet strangely we have twice as many administrators, all hauling down six figure salaries, than we did 10 years ago--somehow we can afford that. The local newspaper reported that administrator salaries and benefits have gone up 68% in the past 5 years. Want to know what the teacher salary increase has been? Well, for the past 2 years we haven't had a contract, so it has been 0%--yes, thats 0%. While fuel prices and everything else have been skyrocketing, we have had a 0% increase. The last one we had was 3%, which is less than cost of living. Oh, and there is not a teacher here--even ones who have been here 35-40 years, who makes even CLOSE to six figures.
Oh, and teachers are supposed to get 175 credits of continuing education every 5 years. How many do you need to get for your job? Your job might even pay for them, if they do require any, huh? Nobody pays for ours. Our business manager got a $10,000 raise for finally getting his ONLINE master's degree. We get $400 when we get ours (which is a requirement).
Our one principal (yes, we have more than one in our building) who doesn't like doing scheduling or discipline (she they hired another administrator to do discipline and foisted scheduling a new teacher--for no more pay of course) has decided she wants to "focus on curriculum", which apparently means she tells all the teachers we have to rewrite our curriculum. It now has to be in a different format, and then put in little "houses" with "pillars" and such, so it looks cutesy. We've spent a hue amount of time doing this--has to be in just the right format that she wants or you have to do it over, and they seem to not really have any idea why or how it should be done really, so they can't explain it, they just know when it hasn't been done right. Then they can turn it in to the school board and the state and say "see how we've made all our teachers work and come up with this great new curriculum?".
Sorry for the rant, but there's a reason why most teachers quit in the first 5 years--and its not the kids. I like the job, there is seldom a kid I can't reach. But the BS level is catastrophic, and the best teachers are often the first ones to get drummed out--the ones that just want to teach the kids and are great at it and resist wasting time rewriting their curriculum, say--they are gotten rid of. The ones that couldn't teach their way out of a paper bag and are happy to use the latest buzz words and suck up and are thrilled to rewrite curriculum, particularly if it means they can get out of teaching for a few days since they don't really like kids anyway...well, they are probably future administrators...seriously...
We can do so much with Macs, like overpay.
