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April 12, 2006

Reassignment

The biggest disappointment of my professional career happened last week. After two very productive years of development of my AP Language classes, creating content and honing the curriculum, I'm assigned only regular classes for next school year. No explanation, no reason given. Just reassignment, slave.

It takes a while to figure out exactly what needs to be and can be taught to high-level juniors in a college-level composition class. There's no textbooks, no district curriculum or materials, just the teacher and the exam and lots of knowledge and writing skills to be taught. Exposition, narration, close reading, critical thinking, rhetorical devices, argumentative techniques, research skills: a very difficult class to teach. Practically everything for the class must be created from scratch, which consumes an enormous amount of preparation time outside the paid workday. I'm proud to say that I think I've provided a top-notch experience for my students.

So it saddens and mystifies me why the administration feels I don't need to teach these classes any more, but it doesn't surprise me. Teacher advocacy and an educational environment are not top priorities on my campus. It's more athletic fixation and pissing contests.

So I'm outta here. Denise and I have talked about moving back to East Texas so the girls can be closer to family as they grow and we can get out of the mean, mean city, which we have grown tired of. The insult of demoting me without the courtesy of an explanation removed any doubt I had about the move, so we're starting the process of applying for jobs and selling the house. This will be move number twenty for me, as far as I can remember. Sigh.

Posted by tat at 10:41 AM | Comments (9)