Mr. Farrelly, high school English and was school newspaper advisor, and Mr. Smith who taught seventh grade math and electronics.

That's the "reform" instrument being pushed on local districts by Obama, Duncan, Gates and assorted numbskulls. Two consecutive years of 'ineffective" ( arm-wrestling in case 1, failure to differentiate for different "learning styles" in case #2) and you are outta there.

Ta-ta, Ms Peters. Sayonara, Mr. Tarasawa.

That's the NYS protocol, anyway. Most other states are installing something similar. Local Ed bureaucrats just can't resist the RTTP $$$$ coming from DC.

Now I wonder who's going to be keeping an eye on how that cash is actually, y'know, spent.

Hmmm.........

a) I don't what you mean by "ineffective". I saw people who didn't care get all excited going to Ms. Peters' class.

b) NYS?

c) RTTP?

I admit I don't know what current educators face.

( I'll give myself an "ineffective" on that one).

I meant "Race to the Top" ( Actually RTTT). That's the Obama-Duncan scheme to use billions of fed. tax-dollars to entice local districts to enact alleged "reforms" such as Danielson-style teacher observation and the resultant micromanaged, stilted , boring, mindlessly conformist pedagogy.

NYS = simply "New York State".

"ineffective" is the lowest of 4 categories that Danielson ( and spinoff methodologies) are employing. It's "ineffective" "developing" "effective" "highly effective". All of the states are adopting this scale more or less verbatim.

"Danielson, Oh Danielson."

Whoa... that's pure *gold*. I didn't think I'd ever laugh at this miserable nonsense but I guess I was wrong.

Thanks for posting.

(Aside to OPer: "1" means "ineffective". )

on the BAT group at FB, I couldn't get it out of my head. It was stuck for a few days.

It would have to be Mr. Meeker who taught biology. Not my favorite science, but I got an A in it. He had a Colbert-esque sense of humor. He would describe DNA as imagining his taking a large, metal ladder and hitting it against a telephone pole at an angle so it would wrap it in a spiral. And then he would crush the pole in his hands just leaving the ladder. He would be happy to demonstrate, but he forgot to put his ladder in his beloved truck, "Trigger." When I was a freshman in college, I ran into some former classmates still in high school in a mall, and they told me that Trigger had finally given up the ghost. We were right next to a Hallmark store so we went in and bought a Sympathy card and told him how sorry we were for his loss. They later told me he thought it was great.

He would buy a piranha every year and have small goldfish in a smaller tank and every day it was a different class' turn to feed "Dr. Death." When we were working on in-class assignments, he would be working as well, and often, he would rip out a sheet of paper from a notebook, crumple it up, and throw it at the trash can on the other side of the room. Whether he made it or not, he would then start taking bets of Snickers on making the next shot. I was never fast enough to be the kid who bet him, but inevitably he would play on the greed of the kid he was betting on, constantly doing double or nothing until he finally made it, rarely having to pay out. One time I went up to ask him a question, and as a joke, I picked up three very breakable items on his desk - two small glass globes (one with a spider in it, the other with a cobra head in it) and a calculator - and said, "And now for my next juggling trick. He looked at me, smiled, reached into his desk and came out with a package of eight full-sized Snickers bar and said, "Those are yours if you can do it." I left that desk rich in Snickers (juggling was a hobby - could do six in high school). I know he became vice-principal and possibly principal after I had graduated.

He and the principal at the time loved to play practical jokes on each other. One day, Mr. Meeker was talking about going to a sporting store to get a new rifle for hunting so the principal left early and got there before him and just walked around the store browsing. When Mr. Meeker walked in he exclaimed, "Steven Meeker! When did you get out of jail! Great to see you again!" and left the store.

TlalocW

It is acceptable to document failure to perform a task, but it is unacceptable to perform it without documenting it.

(The task referred to here was following up on the most commonly-missed questions on a district-wide benchmark type exam.)

Made my eyes pop, and that ain't easy after all these years.

Your post has made me reminded my school days I remember my geometry teacher, she was very good with all of them, and I want to tell you that I was not good in geometry she used to teach me in polite manner and somewhere she understands the students personally because she was my class teacher.

also I LOVE!!!! Portland, I have spent over a year there and would love to live there!