Skip I know that I am posting on the weekend. I know that our agreement is to take a break and let people read back articles on weekends. But the queue is really jammed. So I will post more this weekend and try to follow our new “weekend rest” policy next weekend. Really, August/September is the time when the discussion is and has to be the most intense. This post is really just a long note to Jen. I’ve put it into four sections. Here is the first:
So Jen ever since you’ve been talking about your lone wolf status, I’ve been thinking about it. I had the same painful experience, which I somehow feel that on some level I will never recover from bc it was so intense, of fighting tooth and nail about ideas with nine people at East High School here in Denver from 2009-2001.
It was a mental battle but the fighting hurt physically, and I’m not making that up. Those people were stubborn and aggressive with me. They didn’t want to hear a word I said even though I asked them to come in anytime to my classroom, which they never did. DPS had not quite yet turned the corner from Old Street to Diana Noonan street, and I think that the battle is always worst right at the end.
We have the win now with at least 60 out of 100 WL teachers (20 new teachers last year and 20 new teachers this year so we may be up to 75 out of the 100) doing CI and the other running like hell in the other direction, or lying about their intent, or going quickly to find cover, or just standing there like idiots at our trainings. They want the inservice credit, but they know that the same caustic questions that they used to pepper us with five years ago at meetings now fall on our deaf ears and sound, honestly (we still hear a few of them at meetings) just stupid. When it’s pretty much been proven that the earth is round, the people who still want to aggressively claim that it is flat sound pretty stupid.
At East the problem for me was made much more severe by a true bumpkin brain who as a principal of the flagship high school in Denver, the dominant one for almost 100 years in everything, vocally criticized (to me privately) Diana and what she had been bringing to the district since 2004. He didn’t get her. This guy had no pedagogical or research-based knowledge, saw the conflict in the department, and my mental health was deteriorating fast under that pressure.
God blessed my with both hands by helping me find a job at Abraham Lincoln HS and I went part time in 2011 and am now starting my second year there in a full-on TPRS/CI department led by the incomparable Annick Chen, and I am starting to recover from the wounds I sustained at East, but very slowly.