Moon rising in the autumn sky over Parks Field. You see it, and you almost don't believe it.
Many faculty have seen summonses this week from their supervisors becasue it's time for classroom observations--mandatory for all those in a contract-renewal year.
So far we have been encouraging classroom teachers and supervisors/peers to agree on a day and time rather than doing observations unannounced.
Why does the college believe this practice is important? Let me answer that question with the same story I told the Arts & Sciences Department Chairs when we met last Friday.
I come from a "teaching" family. My grandmother was an elementary teacher and principal in both the Chicago Public Schools and Cook County, IL. My aunt, who was like a second mother to me, taught third and fourth grades in Evanston, IL, and St. Joseph, MI. My mother taught elementary school in Illinois and mathematics Michigan and also served as a high school principal. My biological father was a long-time English teacher in Sioux Falls, SD, and--catch this--advisor to the yearbook. My stepfather taught history and government before finishing the last 20 years of his career as a high school guidance counselor. I come to teaching both by nature and nurture.
The year I was nine, my stepfather lost his job teaching social studies at Grant High School. The only reason for this disgrace was that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Superintendent in Grant summarily fired all the teachers in the high school who had been there before he came. Mr. Schroder began his tenure in Grant in the Fall of 1952 and fired the entire high school faculty the following spring. No investigations, no documentation of competence or incompetence. Just no contracts for the next year.
This frightened me and angered my parents. They began job searching all over the state of Michigan. We went to interviews in Warren, Flint, and other tiny towns scattered in the lower peninsula, and it was not until well into that summer that both my mom and dad landed jobs in Watervliet. My dad finished his career there retiring in 1982. My mom only stayed for 2 years, moving in the fall of 1955 to St. Joseph, where she taught until she retired.
One effect of the job loss was a pragmatic and tough activism. Both my parents were strongly opposed to unionization for educators; mentioning the American Federation of Teachers always provoked them to make negative comments. They insisted that teachers were professionals, and that as such they should negotiate
professionally for fair salaries and important benefits like health insurance, sick days, personal leave days, and protection from the sort of injustice that my dad and all the other high school teachers suffered at the hand of Superintendent Schroder in Grant. In those days the professional organization--not yet the union it is today--was the NEA and its affiliates, MEA (Michigan Education Association) and the local __EA in each school system. My mom served as president of the SJEA several times when she worked in St. Joseph. One of her motivations was, of course, protection--job security and just treatment of individual teachers.
My attitudes toward things like self-evaluation and peer/supervisor observation grew out of these events and the conversations I overheard all the years of my childhood and adolescence. I learned that having another teacher or a principal in your classroom could protect you from the whims of a demagogue. Documents in a teacher's personnel file demonstrating competence in teaching, the notes of a peer or supervisor observation, were also important to refute the attacks of disaffected parents. Helicopter parents are not an entirely new phenomenon.
So, though it may seem a bit unnerving to have your supervisor in your classroom and somewhat inconvenient to complete your self-evaluation and planning form, these things can be job savers. Seeing injustice done to my dad and many family friends made a believer out of me. So, for whatever it's worth, I pass this wisdom on to you.
tion from classes and ungraded papers is a blessing that gives me time to reflect on the fall term and plan for the spring, and it feels like a a wonderful gift. The rhythm of the academic year ebbs and flows. Some things that need to happen during this break are thoughtful completion of my mid-year evaluation, syllabi for spring courses, and reading for FUN. On the front end I'll write my Christmas cards and put up the Christmas tree. On the back end I want to baste a quilt together so I have lapwork to do for long winter evenings.
