Things I love about my school part II

This past Friday, a new sign (below) appeared in one of the stairways of my school. It's a sign advertising the school's Gay-Straight Alliance organization. Why is that so cool? Well, at my previous school there were a couple of attempts to start such clubs. Both times, the students who tried to recruit were met with outright hostility and reportedly even death threats.

The response of the administration? You'd think they'd go to some lengths to encourage these students, to support them, to protect them. Well, you'd be wrong. The school's response was to require that the students meet somewhere other than school. Their response was, to say the least, more supportive of the anti-gay sentiment than anything else.

Here though, we apparently have enough support that the students can place a 3' x 5' orange sign in a main stairway and I'm sure there are other around school.

Ahhh... the joys of teaching in a Bureaucracy

This year marks the third consecutive year where we have a brand-new computer system to deal with. First it was "Verify", a system for taking attendance and other things. It was actually a great system. Easy to use, intuitive, and popular. I'm sure you can see the need to replace it last year with "IMPACT". It was, in short, a train wreck. It kept crashing, was complex to learn, didn't work right, and was a pain. This year we now have "GradeSpeed", a combination attendance and grading system. CPS has outdone themselves this time. Not only do we have an overly complex system, we have a system that takes away one of our most important autonomous rights - grading.

The system has a default grade scale. A=97% B=91% C=84% D=77% F=74%. The only way to change the scale is to have your Principal request the change with the programmers downtown. Otherwise, you have to go in an manually override all of your grades. If you don't use the system for grading, you have to create a basic assignment and override the grade on that.

It is by far one of the most complicated interfaces I have seen in a computer program. There are so many other grading programs out there that are much more user-friendly and effective I think CPS was trying to find the most complicated system.

We're in the process of printing progress reports today and my Principal just came in this morning and told me all of my grades that entered the other day were lost by the system and he's now scrambling to try and fix them. I gave him a print-out of my grades and the programmer is trying to fix them. I'm on my way down there now to see how things are going.

Thank you Arne Duncan for making our lives more difficult for no apparent reason or benefit.

Taking on the mentor role again

As I have in the last two years, I'm taking on the role of mentor teacher again. This time however, I will be working with another teacher instead of a student teacher. Lindblom has created their own new teacher mentoring program (one that will likely be head and shoulders above the one CPS put together) for first and second year teachers. The teacher I am working with is, like me, a career changer although she worked for much longer outside of education than me. I'm very excited about the opportunity and I'm hopeful we'll be able to work well together.

In addition, there will be a grad student from Northwestern who will be observing my class once a week. She's about to begin her student teaching in a couple of months and is working with the entire history department for her pre-student teaching clinical hours. I've only met her once but she was very eager and had a lot of questions. I'm looking forward to the challenge in this new environment.