Salty

Ten years.  My how time flies.

I'm moving classrooms and grades again and I just found my portfolio from my masters program.  Although I'd wanted to be a teacher since I was 5, I took the roundabout way and started in my 40's.  The benefits of starting late - life, wisdom, maturity.  The drawbacks - I don't know how many more years weeks I'm going to be able to get down on the floor with the kids...

Colleagues who started at 22 are retiring.  Others are going into admin or considering out-of-the-classroom opportunities.  Someday I may need to, but for now, my heart is still in the classroom.

The greatest changes over the past ten years have not been the Common Core, or even standardized testing, although what and how we teach and assess has become more challenging as education continues to be a hotbed of competing political platforms - everyone wants to help us, bless their hearts.

For me, the biggest change has been how social media fuels the fire.  It's not just from political sources who want to save education. It's not so much the media, whose sensational headlines about our inability to score the highest compete improve our scores on international tests makes us clutch our collective pearls and fret about the future of other people's kids and wonder if public education is good enough for our own.  In my effort to use social media for good, I've sought out "positive" educational sites that provide articles and information I can use.  Additionally, there are some great educators who've become teacher entrepreneurs who provide great resources and professional development.  I've created a professional learning network of some top notch talent and inspiring edugurus...

and yet...

I've discovered this nagging pain in my teacher side.  I'm being carpet-listed with 5 things to do and 8 things to stop doing.  I'm professionally overdeveloped with a smorgasbord of learning opportunities that resemble a church pot-luck; it all tastes great, but I've got too much piled on my Chinet plate.  But the most annoying irritant comes from swimming with an undercurrent (riptide), of fear factor facetwitting.  It's not just the layperson who complains about the dumbing down of the "new math", or the pseudo research that shows maps of states with more new teachers and pie charts of where most of the education dollars are spent (hint - it's staff, because educating), but also the "educational groups" who seem to like to create drama with provocative titles and opinion pieces presented as news articles.

As a teacher and a learner, I find my frustration growing as I see educators judging a half-cocked post and not asking more challenging questions - why aren't we smarter about this?  Why aren't we practicing what we teach?  Frustration grows and overflows into a blog dripping with cynicism and sarcasm, and a sad story of a portfolio of wide-eyed hopes and idealistic dreams scattered in the dust of the crumbling public education system...

Then she set down her wine glass and said, "Enough of this bullshit."

...to be continued.