Opening
Monday night was Open House, so I was at work from 7:00 a.m. until 8:30 p.m. I was so exhausted, and the next day wasn't much better. This morning I got caught by a slow train and spent 45 minutes getting to work when it should've taken 15.
So I had a bad start. Then I walked in to discover that the algebra teacher in my pod has quit. And that's just lovely, because it means that every kid I teach is getting a sub for an hour a day for who knows how long. You could already feel a slight difference in them today. The scary thing is that it could be this way for a long time. There's apparently some special certification requirement needed on top of the math certification that you have to have to teach algebra. Math teachers are hard to find; algebra teachers are harder. That's what I'm told, anyway. I don't know jack about math certification myself. Anyway, it must be true that it's hard to find algebra teachers because they just hired this girl about a week before school started, and she was 23 years old, fresh out of college (she moved out of the dorm the day she set up her classroom), and was an alternate route teacher like myself, which means her original degree was in math, not education. As much as it pisses me off when people throw down on alternate route teachers, I have to admit that you walk in less prepared on day one. That certainly doesn't mean you can't do it if you want to, but you walk in without having done any student teaching, and with very little (if any) in-classroom experience. All your training in the field of education has been on theory, then you're thrown into practice and nothing you learned in school helps.
No one seemed surprised that she quit, but I thought she would make it. I guess the unfettered insanity I dealt with in my first two years has given me tough skin, and the situation we're dealing with this year is in no way comparable to what I did last year and the year before. She had it easy, and still quit. So maybe she didn't want to do it in the first place.
Sucks for the rest of us.
So I had a bad start. Then I walked in to discover that the algebra teacher in my pod has quit. And that's just lovely, because it means that every kid I teach is getting a sub for an hour a day for who knows how long. You could already feel a slight difference in them today. The scary thing is that it could be this way for a long time. There's apparently some special certification requirement needed on top of the math certification that you have to have to teach algebra. Math teachers are hard to find; algebra teachers are harder. That's what I'm told, anyway. I don't know jack about math certification myself. Anyway, it must be true that it's hard to find algebra teachers because they just hired this girl about a week before school started, and she was 23 years old, fresh out of college (she moved out of the dorm the day she set up her classroom), and was an alternate route teacher like myself, which means her original degree was in math, not education. As much as it pisses me off when people throw down on alternate route teachers, I have to admit that you walk in less prepared on day one. That certainly doesn't mean you can't do it if you want to, but you walk in without having done any student teaching, and with very little (if any) in-classroom experience. All your training in the field of education has been on theory, then you're thrown into practice and nothing you learned in school helps.
No one seemed surprised that she quit, but I thought she would make it. I guess the unfettered insanity I dealt with in my first two years has given me tough skin, and the situation we're dealing with this year is in no way comparable to what I did last year and the year before. She had it easy, and still quit. So maybe she didn't want to do it in the first place.
Sucks for the rest of us.
