Saipan Ramblings

After a wonderful evening with cheap, good food, visiting with good friends and a good nights sleep, I am trying to gain a more relaxed perspective on the last two weeks. It still is hard!

Yes, the economy is bad! Yes, the scores of our students are low! Yes, their reading levels are lower than we would like! Yes, if we hired teachers that knew the english language things might improve more quickly! Yes, if more of them passed the Praxis, teaching would improve!

But, there a lot of other factors that affect our students, our schools, our classrooms and our teachers! For instance, lack of support from political officials, school system administration and yes, sometimes parents.

I have been lucky in this area, as this last year my students' parents were supportive of both myself and their kids. Working together, we helped to raise the students reading levels to the highest in our grade level! Partnerships can and do pay off!! I hope this will continue this next year as I will be looping with my kids. We still have lots of hard work ahead of us and will continue to do what we can. That is one of my pet peeves, "Just Try!". Well, I will try to be a partner in this two year program and hope that it will benefit my students!

Enough rambling for today!

2 Weeks --Oops-- YEARS

I'm sitting here in a little bar on the beach getting ready to eat my dollar tacos and finally relax after a grueling 2 weeks workshop, which I(along with co-harts) found out will actually commit us to 2 years of our lives. An instance of stakeholders not being involved from the beginning.

They informed us one week into the study we would recieve NO compensation for anything, because it was voluntary. As a few, know this was NOT voluntary!! The system is now trying to back-peddle and find a way to compensate us for our time. I'm not reassured that this will happen knowing the economy here, but at least they are trying.

It has been nice getting to know the new team that I will work with next year and meeting other teachers. But beyond that, I really did NOT need a basic Education 101 course. If we hired education majors and those with education related degrees, we would not need to go back to the basics. It also would have been nice if the system had given us a real choice as to our involvement or not.

Oh well, the sand, the beautiful water, the lagoon, and the dollar tacos are calling! More installments of this saga another day!

Bye, All
Angie

Stakeholders Speakup

Hi All! As part of this global community, I find myself a stakeholder in many ways. I'm a stakeholder in my family, my school(I teach), my community(both where I live now and where I came from) and in the organizations in which I choose to support. I will be using this Blog to give my view point(s) on various topics that will have to do with these areas and to journal my life.

Many of us do not get the opportunity to be full stakeholders in any of these things, but I will use this opportunity to try! I hope that you will continue to follow this saga as it unfolds.

In this instance my entire group from my school were truly stakeholders. It showed and we were rewarded.

Sincerely,

Angie