Unified's Doings.

1. This is the first year of the "Central Office Redesign", or "What do you mean you don't know about our redesign?"  Unless you'd made it your business to read the Powerpoints the District entertains itself creating (this one had a cow theme, if I recall correctly), you may not have known a redesign was in the works.

This summer I sat on a panel of SFUSD educators.  We were asked about the redesign.  Of the five panelists, two were aware of its existence and neither of us were certain that they really intended to roll it out this year.  SFUSD also did a study of redesign awareness among teachers, helpfully pulling the teachers to be interviewed from the teachers who were at the central office over the summer helping write assessments to be used as part of the District-wide systems creation meant to accompany the redesign.

I'm guessing that knowledge about the redesign among that select group was pretty high.  In the end I was also interviewed for this study and my knowledge was pretty high, I suppose, but also far more skeptical (well, I'm assuming).

I am not really enjoying the redesign because it means that there are now some other people in power who have a different idea of what EDUCATION looks like.  Whatever the wallwalkers before them liked, they don't.  If it was standards, now it's objectives.  If Do Nows were in, now it's class meetings.  Whatever.  I have been teaching for a long time.  I have a documentable record of success in the classroom.  I am always interested in learning something new and whatever feedback I can get, but I am not adopting the latest craze in reform just because someone at 555 Franklin read a neat new book over the summer.  And at this point, how I do what I do in the classroom flows from what I believe education should be.  If I don't know your philosophy and you don't know mine, then it's very hard for your advice to be applicable to my situation.

2. I was going to yammer about the special education report, but what I think about that is so complicated that I had better not.  Also my laundry is done and I must hang up my harem-panted jumpsuit before it is too wrinkly to wear to school.  It is a key part of my hot-weather wardrobe.