I asked Michele to recap what happened on Friday. She kindly obliged in spite of “two meetings with upper ups, and one with the TPRS community, and ACTFL coming up and documentation for Teacher of the Year (ironic that I was the only one to apply for that in Alaska…it’s too much work…so I got it) to provide, [and not being] ready for classes tomorrow…”.
Wow. And this person who is Teacher of they Year in Alaska is under this kind of heat? Anyway, here is her summary of last Friday:
1. I was asked to lead the Russian teachers for inservice day to come up with Academic Plans.
2. I got worried about that because of the makeup of our group of very traditional teachers. I made preparations that never got used.
3. Our Curriculum Director sent out the Power Point for us to copy. (I forwarded it to you.) It had four or six slides of information about TPRS that looked negative to me.
4. Our Director created a webinar because he couldn’t meet in eight different language groups all at once. Also, he was going out of town. He asked us to check the webinar to make sure it worked. He sent it to us the day before we were going to meet. All of us had Parent Conferences until 7:00 pm that evening, so I’m probably the only one who read through the PPT in advance.
5. After Parent Conferences, I sat down to check whether the webinar worked. I scanned through to find the section where he discussed TPRS. It was so awful that I made a copy of it and sent it to other TPRS practitioners so that they could be ready to deflect conversation on the method and not lose sight of what we were supposed to do that day. I didn’t think that many would get my email in time, because by the time I sent it, it was already 10:00 on a school night.
6. Through the day on Friday, responses were coming in. A number of CI teachers were upset that we were under attack. Meanwhile, someone in the group forwarded my entire message to the Director.
7. By the end of the day, the Director wanted a meeting with me and said I was unprofessional for sending the message and should have asked his permission to share the webinar. He asked that I not send out the links to anyone else. (By that time, I had sent it to you, a school board member, and another Curriculum Director. I wrote to them, asking them to not listen, but evidently the link keeps working though deleted.) I sent out a note to the twelve teachers and apologized for unprofessional behavior, copying that note to the Director.
8. I went to our union for assistance. The Director did not understand why I should need to do that.
9. Now there’s a lot of drama, which I could have avoided by simply letting everyone watch the video and respond on their own terms.