Posts tagged differentiation

Holy Cannoli, life!

Teaching consumes my life. I love it and I hate it. I want to explain everything, but I don’t have the time, so I’ll just explain a little chunk of why this job is basically impossible:

Budget cuts in education are a terrible, terrible thing. Worse still, we are investing the little money we have in a bunch of technology that we can’t use because we don’t have the basic resources necessary to use them, like COMPUTERS and PRINTERS and functioning PROjECTORS, mmmkay?

and most of all… we need more teachers and administrators. Since so many admin positions have been cut in the past 4 years, all that work now gets delegated to the teachers. and guess what? teachers already have an impossible job, and our work is never ever done. I love this job, but I am seriously discouraged by the changes I am seeing in education right now. It is messed up stuff. People need to know about what’s really happening in schools.

I have one real quick soapbox to jump on:

Differentiated Instruction.

Nobody really knows what this means, and everyone has their own ideas about how it should or shouldn’t look. I get so much conflicting advice from people at work about this. No one is on the same page.

To me, differentiated instruction is an approach to teaching in which each student is met where he/she struggles the most, while simultaneously harnessing the power of each individual’s strengths. Additionally, teaching is designed to cater to individual learning styles. Imagine this in a classroom with students whose abilities run the gamut from special education and varying IEPs to true AP students all in the same classroom. I do the best I can, and some days are better than others, but truly, this is an impossible task.

I know I sound like a grandpa when I say this, but BACK WHEN I WAS IN SCHOOL, the classes themselves were ALREADY DIFFERENTIATED! There were different tracks to choose from. We had a special education department, a technical diploma, college prep, honors, gifted, advanced placement courses, and even joint enrollment! Why can’t we have THAT again???

Now, we use the inclusion method in which all students, no matter their level of motivation, behavior, achievment, or ability, are lumped together in the same class. This is to ensure that “no child is left behind.” Right.

okayz, i’m done here for now. more on my crazy teacher life later.