School Supplies and our wallets

As the beginning of the school year comes closer, we see more ads for back to school supplies from Staples, Walmart, Target and other supply friendly stores. But with a recession that is still floating around in our communities, how deep into our pockets are we willing to go to buy school supplies?

It does seem that parents are more willing to purchase school supplies for their kids, but nothing fancy or beyond the necessities. Although children tend to wear out their backpacks and clothes because, well, kids are kids, parents are reusing what still works and handing down clothes that can still be used.

Teachers tired of failures: an effort to change the way we educate.

As tuition rises and California grows more and more in debt, students aren’t the only ones struggling; education itself is taking a beating throughout the state.

Many college graduates struggle to find a job right after graduation, but luckily for some there are organizations like Teach for America that help college graduates not only by giving them a job and helping them attend grad school, but also help the children in our communities by giving them an education that public schools just simply can’t afford to anymore.

In this article, we see that some teachers take their work seriously, and are greatly affected by the lack of knowledge that their students have obtained throughout their childhood education.

In an effort to change this, Dominique D. Lee and other teachers have made it their goal to turn their school Brick Avon Academy in Newark into a modern “teacher-leader” environment. This method is now being used in different cities throughout the nation, including Los Angeles.

Administrative officials do not interact with students as much as teachers do (unless it is in the form of a Teacher/Parent Conference) for various reasons such as budgeting, employee evaluations and other legalities (although some administrators do make an effort to sit in classrooms once in a while) that teachers do not have the experience in or simply don’t time to deal with.

But after spending 8 hours a day in a classroom with a child (not including after-school tutoring and field trips) these teachers definitely know their students well enough to know what learning style and strategies might help them learn best (after all, not all of us learn the same way).

The best solution for these “teacher-leader” models is to keep teachers in the classroom and administrators stuck with the paperwork so that the children’s best interest is always the priority. And most importantly, every administrator should have some type of teaching background to better understand what daily toils inside the classroom holds. This type of dual-relationship allows teachers to not only  have input in the lesson plans, but also the overall function of the school.