Summer School- Turning the Heat Up On Achievement
by – One Fired Up Teacher
NOTE: This was written by a teacher in a high poverty district somewhere in the US. Child and Teacher Abuse in full effect
A time to maintain achievement, right? To prevent the “summer slide” and keep students engaged and excited about learning. After all, it’s building relationships with our students that can extend far beyond the confines of classroom walls.
But what happens when the school offering summer school has no air conditioning? Does that sound beneficial? Healthy? Safe? Temperatures inside the classroom reading 98 degrees on the thermostat. How about that for the student with Epilepsy who’s seizures are triggered by heat exhaustion and dehydration. Sound safe? Healthy? Beneficial?
If that doesn’t have your attention, let’s turn up the heat a little more. Requiring teachers to supervise lunch for the students but not allowing them to eat. Not allowing them to sit down. Oh no, teachers must waste instructional time. While students eat inside the fiery furnace called the cafeteria, their teachers are commanded to stand and do flash cards or another educational task. Teachers are expected to not only suffer these conditions themselves, but to sit by and watch their students suffer, too. Every minute counts, right? Don’t waste precious time walking kids to the drinking fountain, either. The water is not only warm, it’s “against district policy” to use instructional time in too many transitions.
Yes, the fire has been lit, folks. Our kids, who deserve better, are being burned. They deserve the best and brightest education. Your highly qualified, certified teachers and their students are suffering in silence while those at the top are sitting inside their air conditioned offices on the phone with the next best corporation who’s in the running for the silver bullet. The next “new program” they will demand the teachers use in the classroom to bring up those test scores. Here’s an idea for administration and school boards.
If you want to bring up the scores and raise the achievement gap, turn down the heat on your teachers. Take some of the pressure off your teachers. If you can’t do it for them, do it for our students. Provide them with safe and healthy learning conditions. Foster an environment built on the foundation that our teachers and students deserve nothing short of the best. Stop burning the candle on both ends with the corporate world. They don’t know our students. You don’t know our students.
We, the teachers know our students. You want to know why your good, hardworking teachers are leaving the profession? They’re sick, physically and emotionally. They’re tired. They can’t stand being on the front line every single day sacrificing blood, sweat and tears, all to no avail. They, along with their students, are dying inside while fires set by you rage beneath them, threatening to extinguish all they’ve ever known and loved. Each other. Hang up the phone, step away from the computer in your chilled office and save our teachers and students from the blazing inferno you’ve put them in.
Signed,
One Fired Up Teacher
Poetic Justice 
Reblogged this on Reclaim Public Education.
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Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé.
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Back in the late 1970s early in my thirty years of teaching, the air conditioning went out at our middle school in September and the principal requested that it be repaired. The superintendent said no while the district office was getting new carpet and an upgraded HVAC system. The carpet at the school was stained and threadbare and stunk. The desks were all gouged with graffiti cut into their surfaces.
The HVAC system was centralized behind the office building and the duct work ran underground into the three buildings that housed the classrooms.
Outside, the concrete was cracked and some areas were higher than others creating the danger of tripping and injury.
Our principal requested that the outside concret areas be repaired so kids wouldn’t’ hurt themselves. The superintendent said no, we didn’t have the money while the district office was getting repainted after the new carpet and HVAC system went in. This district office used to have window units for cooling and they had just updated to a big, expensive unit with all the duct work that took to get done.
Then the superintendent, who expected to be treated like royalty, came to that middle school with her entourage for a walk through in a few minutes. To say she was overweight and couldn’t see her feet is probably politically incorrect today since 70% of adult Americans are fat or obese, but she was.
While crossing the quad to the first classroom she was going to grace with her presence, she tripped on the uneven concrete and broke both of her wrists in the fall.
:o)
The next day, the contractor showed up with workers and started to fix the uneven concrete. She never did make it to the first classroom for her walk through, because she was rushed to the hospital.
Those broken wrists must have also caused her to have second thoughts about getting the HVAC system running again so the kids and teachers wouldn’t be sweating and gasping for breathe in the ovens called classrooms.
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Reblogged this on Armor Of God Foundation.
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In VA I attended a high school that had no heat or AC. They also had REALLY strict dress codes: no jackets. No zip-up, button-up jackets…if it opened in the middle, no. Hoodies were the only thing we could wear. We had to go to school in winter, and it snows there. It would be below freezing and all we’re allowed to wear is a hoodie? Freezing in a school with no heat?
I can sympathize with your situation, though yours sounds much more cruel.
Somethings seriously wrong with our system when we allow children to sit for hours in extreme heat and below freezing temperatures.
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I knew a Canadian public school teacher who went to Japan to teach for a few years. I think it was some sort of teacher swap. He said that his classrooms in Japan had no heat in the winter (with snow on the ground outside) and no cool in the summer. There were school uniforms but the children were allowed to wear heavy jackets.
Maybe the Bill Gates funded and supported RIGOR being forced on America’s children, parents and teachers through the Common Core Crap agenda without their consent means that Bill Gates wants U.S. children to become just like children in Japan. Note that the children of Bill Gates are not subjected to such treatment.
My friend also said he had fifty students a class in Japan, and they were incredibly obedient generating huge amounts of work for him to correct since all the students did everything before school ended and they were off to corporate cram schools for the evening to get ready for school the next day.
For instance, raising a hand and sitting mute waiting for the teacher to ask what they wanted and then asking permission to stand (at attention) and ask a question of the teacher. Heaven forbid that the child would be allowed to ask the question from a relaxed sitting position.
Again, RIGOR fanatic Bill Gates and all of his puppets from Arne Duncan on down don’t sent their children to schools with overcrowded classrooms.
RIGOR and GRIT – the battle cry of the 0.1% except not for their children.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
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