“Current”

I am the youngest teacher in my department by 5 years. And, given that I am about as young as you can possibly be to be a first year teacher, I’ve got to be one of the youngest in the school.

M and Lab Manager, in anticipation of Lab Manager leaving for back surgery, have started organizing the prep room. In addition to chemicals and glassware, the prep room contains a random assortment of other instructional materials for science teachers: calculators, stop watches, school supplies, meter sticks, rulers, gluesticks, etc…and videos.

The videos are basically worthless. Most are cheesy VHSs from the 70s that no teacher has touched in a decade at least.

M and Lab Manager have started a box labeled “Things Older than Brittany” to store all of the instructional materials we have that are older than me.

They’re going to need more than one box.

It’s absurd. The older teachers in my department are still teaching using yellowed transparencies that they created when I was in elementary school. Old Chemistry Teacher uses mimeographed lab sheets for AP Chem that are almost impossible to decipher, and she refuses to re-type them because she claims that having to struggle to decipher instructions is part of the challenge of taking AP Chem. None of the old teachers have electronic copies of anything, which boggles my mind. If we were a school without resources and overheads were the limit of our technology, then it would be excusable.

But we are extraordinarily well-funded. They have so many resources at their fingertips, and yet they still just dip back into the filing cabinet to pull out the 25+ year old, typewritten original.

Change it up, old teachers. It is embarrassing to work in a department that uses instructional materials older than one of its teachers. /endrant

9 Notes/ Hide

  1. jetstopia reblogged this from iamlittlei
  2. allisonunsupervised said: Speaking as someone who had her first teaching job when you were two, that kind of crap ticks me off. Except with the more profane vocabulary I used first. Good grief. “That’s part of the challenge?” Oh, the profanity.
  3. iamlittlei posted this