Edclicking Keyword Cloud
By Dr. Harry Tennant
Sunday, March 18, 2012 Education Ride 365: A Real Gamble---> Teacher Unions---> Dam(n) Good Or Dam(n) Bad?! On Day 70 I somewhat reluctantly left San Diego (I think I could live there!) bound for Las Vegas NV. I am not a gambler and life's experiences seem to make me less so by the day! I do like the game of Roulette, but I prefer to watch the human drama play out with other peoples' money! I just 'people watch'....sometimes gambling in my mind by placing numbers and keeping mental track of how much I've (ultimately) lost. It is not quite the same as the thrill of placing chips, but my bank account remains the same...which is thrill enough when the house holds the advantage!  Much more exciting to me than casinos are wonders of nature, including the human capacity for harnessing nature through engineering feats like Hoover Dam. Conception, politicking, and construction of the Boulder Canyon Project---just outside of Vegas---spanned four presidential administrations!  The wall holding back the waters of what became Lake Mead is so massive
it is difficult to photograph in one camera frame. Winds often whipping
through the canyon seemingly threaten to lift you up and toss you off the
top of the towering dam. Only roughly two-thirds of the height is visible in the picture directly below and a tall truck on the hill above the dam can barely be seen. It is an intense place!  The picture below was a moment of heart pounding intensity for this mild sufferer of vertigo! The winds were high as I held my camera over the great wall to picture a wee bit of its lower section, the river flowing out from its base, and the new bridge built after September 11, 2001 to keep trucks potentially used as weapons of terrorism off of this massive wall. That bridge is, in of itself, an engineering marvel to behold. Can you see the tiny outline of an 18-wheeler to the very right of the bridge? Pictures (especially those taken into a late-afternoon sun) simply can't do the scale or magnificence of the place justice!  Below you can see two pictures of the dam's reservoir. The first is the Nevada side. The second is the Arizona side.  The reservoir reminds me of a conversation I had with an educator who teaches in San Diego. It made me wonder if teacher's unions unwittingly 'dam up' the reservoir of potential great educators have. If so, to what degree and does the cost justify the benefit? Here is a portion of the (informal) conversation: I don't like teaching where I'm at. I don't work with a single teacher I respect. The union is so strong here that most teachers have settled into a mindset of "what's in it for me?" this just results in poor work ethic. The child is forgotten. My principal asked me to create a web site for our staff around problem-based learning, and I was only able to get a 30% participation on a survey I sent out. If something is not in their job description or within their contract hours, most won't do it. The union rep at our school actually came and asked me to stop working with kids after school and stop being so creative because it was "making the rest of us look bad." Unbelievable. Teacher unions protect educators from unfair treatment by management. I have seen unfair treatment by management firsthand. Administrators are human...and not all humans are fair people. Even fundamentally fair people make mistakes that can affect peoples' lives. Absent protection, teachers and other educators can be washed downriver through little to no fault of their own. The flow of unchecked human management can be fierce, turbulent, and destructive. However, if the dam (union) is too restrictive of the flow, conditions can be created as related to me by the teacher quoted above. Stagnation sets in. Not enough change is effected downriver. The dynamism that was once possible by a steady flow of energy is stymied, stagnation of the pool of potential sets in, and the positive change the flow could make (for students) is contained in a reservoir of inactivity.  Teacher unions---> Dam(n) good or dam(n) bad? Yet another case of dam(n)ed if you do, dam(n)ed if you don't (unionize)?! Feel free to let your thoughts flow by entering a comment! Riding Stats: Day 70---329
miles traveled, 5 hours and 19 minutes of moving time, 2 hours and 19
minutes of stopped time, 61.8 miles per hour average moving time, and 43.1
miles per hour overall average. Posted at 12:48 PM Keywords: Education Ride 365 , EdClick , Cycle Of Education , Teacher Unions 1 Comments |
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Harry said... Beautiful pictures. Ugly story. I hate the thought of this teacher being told essentially not to be involved in her work. It short changes the students. But the union exists for the benefit of teachers, which is its proper role. But this sort of notion short changes the *teachers* too. It is contrary to the purpose of the union. We spend the majority of our time working. If work is not an important component of one's well-being, the capacity for living happily is seriously diminished. For one's work to contribute to happiness it must be meaningful (teaching certainly is meaningful) and must be an activity in which you can immerse yourself. If the union is telling members to hold back on their efforts, it sabotages the potential for fulfillment that the union members can get from their work. It sabotages the teacher's happiness that could derive from full immersion in teaching. And, of course, it sabotages the benefits for the students. Sunday, March 18, 2012 4:07 PM |