A certain post goes viral, showing that the protests in Wisconsin could easily be happening all over:

So now I’m into my 35th year of teaching.  Last July my district had offered a $20,000 bonus to any teacher who could retire, in order to save money.  It struck me as odd that they’d want to get rid of experienced teachers.  I didn’t take it because I felt I’m not ready to retire.  It’s been such a big part of me forever, and I’m not ready to give it up yet.  Besides I’m only 55, and even though I’ve been teaching so long, I’m just barely old enough to retire.            

But then one Thursday, on the eighth day of my 35th year of teaching, I suddenly thought for the very first time ever, “I don’t want to be a teacher anymore.”  It’s so weird how it just came over me like that.  I don’t know if it’s like the challenges in Survivor where they keep adding water until the bucket finally tips over and the slow leak of problems finally made my bucket tip over.  Or maybe this is how it happens for all older teachers.      

It wasn’t a single thing that gave me this feeling.  I’m hoping it doesn’t last.  Maybe it was the severely autistic boy who showed up at my door the first day with no notice, but I don’t really think so.  Maybe it was the rigid schedule the principal passed out for everybody to be doing the same subject at the same time of day, or the new basal reader we have to use that we aren’t allowed to call a basal reader.  Maybe it’s the look in my student’s eyes when we’re reading the newly required dry textbook when I’m used to wild and crazy discussions about amazing novels.   

Maybe it’s that for the first time, our school didn’t meet AYP because two few English Language Developing students in the entire school didn’t pass their reading benchmarks.                

When I heard this, I instantly thought of the two English Language Learners in my class who hadn’t passed their reading tests last year and how unfair I thought it was that they even counted on our test scores when they came to our school in January and were absent at least twice a week from that point on.  I was wondering how I could possibly have gotten them to benchmark level in three days a week for three months. I was thinking how if only those two students hadn’t counted on our scores, we would’ve met AYP as a school.  When I mentioned it to my principal, she just said there are no excuses.  We aren’t allowed to have any excuses.  We have to get kids to the level they need to be no matter what the circumstances.  I thought of the little boy I had with an IQ of 87 who could barely read.  I thought of the little girl in a wheelchair who’d had 23 operations on tumors on her body in her eleven years, and the girl who moved from Mexico straight into my class and learned to speak English before my eyes, but couldn’t pass the state test.  Somehow it doesn’t feel like making excuses to acknowledge that they had good reason not to pass their benchmarks.            

Maybe it was the e-mail I got saying that the department of education in Oregon has raised the cut scores again this year by six or seven points per grade level, even though they just raised them a couple of years ago.  I found out that if they would have used these new cut scores last year, over half of the students in grades 3-8 who passed their benchmarks wouldn’t have passed.  That led to a realization that as a school we have very little chance of meeting our adequate yearly progress this year, but of course I’m not allowed to say that because there are no excuses. It’s hard not to feel discouraged.  

          Maybe it was one of the two parents who contacted me in the first few days of school to tell me that their child doesn’t particularly love my program this year.   I’m so not used to that.  I’ve always had kids achieving highly and loving my class.  I’m just not sure how I can use the mandated materials in the required time periods, focusing on the required skills and still get kids to really love it.            

Maybe it’s the fact that I lost a third of my retirement when they reformed our Public Employee Retirement System a few years back and now I keep reading about how they want to slash it even more because of the greedy teacher unions and how this is the main reason for the budget problems in our state.Maybe it’s that I haven’t gotten a real raise in a really really long time, or that we had to cut eight days again this year to solve our state’s budget problems.  So I’m taking a big hit again, and nobody seems to notice or care.

In the meantime, the ones maintaining the protests in Madison despite the now-limited access to the capitol building there, are the seemingly tireless TAs who need your support.  Go here now to contribute.  And while you're at it, put something in the First Draft tip jar for the seemingly tireless work Scout, Jude, Athenae and company are doing on all this.