Camera for hire.

This school year has ended, my tenth and most frustrating. Let's just say that "sweeping changes" in education has swept away any hope I have for retiring. Let's not go into taking public school money and funneling into private charter schools or demanding more standardized testing for all classes. Losing 4 weeks to istep teaching last year and 3 weeks in my high school class this year do to istep and eca testing evidently isn't enough. But how all teacher salaries are essentially frozen where they are. Experience is no longer valued, it's a liability. Salaries are determined by test scores, seriously who wants they're salary based off hormonal, moody teenagers. Anyone ever see the Monty python skit about teaching?( YouTube it, I can't remember my password to get ok'd to watch Monty python sex Ed) and it's not only that. It's the promise of merit pay and how good teachers will shoot up the salary schedule because dangling a carrot in front of my nose will make me teach harder better more efficiently to the test more passionately. But better than that, after cutting 300 million from education, our gov'ner set aside money for his merit pay system to be effective. 9 million dollars that will be divided among all the teachers in the state of Indiana. That is a huge boost to educators.

Well at least some provisions didn't make it into law, like the one that stated a certain percentage of teachers were require to be marked as ineffective despite how good they were. That's kind of like saying 'Indiana schools are failing because 30% of our students fail istep.' despite the fact the cut mark is set after the test is distributed and is set so that a certain percentage must fail.

With all this said and done. My moral is the lowest it has been in ten years of teaching, and I know I'm not the only one with these opinions. I can see a teaching shortage in Indiana within a few years. Anyone wanting to go into education is nuts to begin with, but now it's just madness.

So, without ranting more (it's hard to type on an iPad) I'm letting you know my camera is now for hire. Call and pay me lots of money too ;)