Monday, September 04, 2006

Why my boss is a moron, part 1

So, today the joo-ster held a staff meeting. As someone without a break and a series of tests to rewrite after their mysterious disappearance, I was generally unpleased by the time wasting. However, he made a silly statement that caught my attenntion. He is unsure as to why Heritage is a very popular school for the 1.whatever books but not popular for the 2.whatever books. Now, I have pointed out in similar bullshit meetings that it is very, very obvious that the change in level between the 1.6 and 2.1 books is too drastic. Basically, it's too hard. The kids don't understand the stories and the schedule doesn't allow us enough time to explain them to the kids. Especially the Tuesday-Thursday kids, because in a moment of pure scheduling genius at some point in the past, it was decided to make up schedules for Monday-Wednesday-Friday kids and just teach the same schedule to the Tuesday-Thursday kids, who have one less class per week (or in some particularly fun cases, to make up a schedule of a five day a week class and just apply that to the Tuesday-Thursday kids too). So, one would think that a) soo yong would think that perhaps it might be an idea to find some textbooks to bridge the levels in such a way that we might actually teach the kids in a way that they have a chance of understanding rather than continuing on with the present "trimming the herd" technique we presently have going on, where some kids manage to make the transition and the others drop out (survival of the fittest, education style!!!) and b) that once this has been pointed out to you by the same teacher on more than one occassion, it is pointless to pretend you don't understand the problem. Because if you don't? Bascially, you are an idiot. And that isn't good.

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