Our school district has a way of jostling teachers out of their comfort zones. Take this year, for example. We’ve known for a long time that we’ll have new standards for English. The logical way to let teachers transition to these new standards is to let them take their existing lesson plans and retool them as necessary to meet the new standards. True, they are, by and large, almost the same standards, but there are some new items on that list which will take some time to unpack and figure out how to teach. Perhaps letting us focus on that during the first year would be a good move.

We’re also getting new textbooks this year. This means that a lot of the stuff we’ve done in the past might not necessarily work with the new selections in the new textbook. A lot of it will, but not everything. The logical way to transition to this new textbook would be to give teachers a year or two to make the move over. After all, we’ll likely be using these books for six or eight years. We can take our time with transitioning and make sure we do a good job.

Or our district could manage these transitions as they actually chose to this year:

• Provide new standards (actually the state did that, but…)
• Provide a new text book
• Provide a detailed unit pacing guide that we must follow to the letter
• Provide a 35-question, 18-page mandatory test for the end of that unit, a test that has some questions that are not even covered in the unit
• Demand all teachers make the transition immediately
• And best of all, do all this the day before students return for their first day of the school year.

There are a lot of stressed teachers today. I had to talk an experienced teacher out of walking out and simply quitting today. This is her last year before retirement, and it’s not how she wanted to end her career. If she’d walked out, I wouldn’t have blamed her.