So, this year I am not only teaching the eleventh graders who have to take the English Regents in January, I am also CO-TEACHING aka TEAM TEACHING. You know what they say about there being no “I” in team…well, essentially, there’s no ME in TEAM either, unless you scramble and get rid of some letters anyway. My co-teacher berated me in front of Igor about my supposed low expectations for my students because, um, I thought we should like EXPLAIN things before asking them to DO things. Imagine a world where teachers TEACH their students something and THEN grade them on whether or not they can actually do it. It seems like my co-teacher wants to play a game where we GRADE them and hope that they learned something from some other teacher long, long ago.

Why is this major drama? My job could be on the line if the eleventh graders bomb the test. My co-worker assures me that the co-teacher will get the blame because she’s taught for 10 years and she’s our Literacy Coach (she helps us do our literacy groove thing, team teachs and figures out curriculum). My co-worker also is pushing me to talk to the principal so we can discuss things like how the co-teacher doesn’t believe in spending 6 weeks on a 250 pg. book and really just believes the kids should read it all at home—3 chapters a night!!!!