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Re: Blog Thread IIIb : Look Who's Blogging Now

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Carl-E:
You GO, girl!  Be careful with the caffeine, though - you may want to use truly inert pills.  If you're really ADHD, caffeine can have some unpredictable results. 

(one source of inert pills are the "week off" pills in birth control.  They're pretty much just cornstarch.)


--- Quote from: Barmymoo on 27 Oct 2012, 10:21 ---Carl, I am staggered by that article. This might be the first time I have ever understood why people could be opposed to the concept of a union. What the actual fuck are they doing paying teachers to do nothing at all?

--- End quote ---

These teachers have been accused of wrongdoing, and have the right to an appeal.  IN the meantime, if they're guilty, they can't be teaching; but if they're innocent, they're entitled to the salary they would have been earning.  The real crime here is that it takes 2 to five years to get a hearing in these cases. 

And the rubber room's not the union's idea, it was set up by the city to make the teachers give up.  You study prisons - don't tell me you missed the similarities? 

However, you're right in that it's a thoroughly broken system!

Omega Entity:
What I also got from that article, though, is that the union hasn't done what it should in ensuring that those in that union are doing a satisfactory job, which seems like that's important when it comes to being responsible for educating people.

Lines:
If you want to be even more depressed about public schooling, watch Waiting for Superman. It talks about teacher unions, but also talks about shuffling bad teachers around from school to school. Most of it is about charter schools, but some of the other issues they talk about are very enlightening, and not in a good way.

Redball:
My wife started teaching in Detroit in 1963, two years before Michigan law permitted collective bargaining by public employees. She defended her union as necessary to protect teachers from bad, stupid administrators. She told hair-raising stories about bad, stupid administrators, but also about bad, stupid teachers. Unions have gone overboard to protect the worst of their members in many professions and trades. On the other hand, I think they've also done much to create a middle class in the U.S.

Full disclosure: My newsroom was unionized from 1971 on, and my little pension comes from my union, not from my newspaper. And I once, with no official portfolio, no position as union steward, tried diplomatically, speaking in a kind of parable, to convince a resentful, distrusting editor that the union would probably roll over if he fired an obviously incompetent reporter. He did, eventually, and the union rolled over.
tl,dr
And there's another story:
The reporter made some egregious fuckups. On Memorial Day, 1975, he covered the suburban Detroit holiday observances, including one in a town at which the new congressman (and governor-to-be) recited the Gettysburg Address. The reporter returned to the office and wrote the story, paraphrasing the Address and attributing it to the congressman. Next day, the managing editor, normally pretty good at his job, left the attributed paraphrase intact.
A few days later, the congressman told us later, he and aides were chuckling in D.C. at our article when a Capitol Hill newspaper reporter happened by. The newspaper wrote about it. Rolling Stone picked up the story, followed by the Washington Post, the LA Tribune and the Chicago Tribune.
One of them called our managing editor for comment. He was heard to say, "Well, you know what journalism schools are turning out these days."
For five years running after that, the newsroom staff held a Dubious Achievement Awards banquet, a potluck at which everyone in the newsroom got an award for something dumb in the preceding year. But our maximum award was given to the person, usually in management, who'd done the most to bring the newspaper into public disrepute. It was named for the hapless reporter, who by that time was no longer employed there.

jwhouk:
I don't really have to say anything about my situation, especially if you remember anything about what happened in February of 2011. Just Google "Wisconsin Act 10 State Employees".

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