Weeding Out

Well, last week was a good week with the kiddies. We're right where I need them to be, now. I'm almost done with a second round of reading assessments and some of the kids have already jumped a level--yay! I had an especially fun lunchtime with the kids on Friday and a restful weekend, so I was, on Sunday, more or less ready to face a new week. Even a meeting that could have been totally soul-sucking this afternoon wasn't so bad.

But.

Have you ever Googled "Teachers College Reading and Writing Project sucks"? I have, in a moment of pique on Sunday afternoon, and came up with this from your friend and mine, Norm Coleman, over at Ed Notes Online: "Weeding Out." I think this may be something of an Ed Notes classic, because it's still quite high in the Google results 2+ years after its initial publication. I suppose my mention of it here speaks for itself, but I'll come right out and say that I feel like I'm weeding myself out. I just don't want to believe in the new program. I know, I know--if I try to leave, even if I find another school that doesn't have this program, leadership changes all the time, and there's nothing stopping a new principal from instituting something else I don't believe in. Which kind of bothers me, too. So I don't know.

I'm really trying to be positive. Hardly anything negative (or positive, really, but no news is good news) has actually been said to me. Principal X really is not a negative, nasty person like some principals are; on the contrary, s/he seems genuinely cordial, pleasant, and not totally unreasonable. I don't want you to think that I'm working for some ogre. Indeed, in some ways, Principal X is actually an improvement over our old principal. So maybe I should, like I said in my last post, "get with the program," because really, if I take the long view, maybe my working life would improve?

But it isn't that simple. At least not the way I see it. In my next post, I'll explain why.