Saturday, January 21, 2017

Watch it Oklaed

Watch it #oklaed. Our youth are watching you. You are their educators. Some of the things I saw intelligent, witty, and honorable people saying yesterday on social media were not intelligent, witty or honorable. If you have an opinion that's fine. If you want to protest thats fine, but please make sure you are keeping your cool and being smart. Stay classy in all you do. Even if you oppose  and despise that fact America must face for the next four years, keep your head. You are smarter than that and you are charged with making sure the youth is following your example.

Say you just became the principal of a new building. You wanted that job because in your opinion, and lets face it many of the people in the neighborhood too, you see the school falling apart and its running down your city. You want to get in there and change up the culture. You get the job only to find your teachers are throwing toilet paper down the hallways and flooding the toilets because they wanted someone else.

Say you are a teacher who just accepted the job in a school you wanted to be challenged in. You wanted to take a job in a school that may be lower performing in your opinion, but the students wanted the same dang thing they have been doing before. They don't want you for various reasons. You walk into class and they have set your desk on fire. They ripped the pages out of your books and put your face on a naked pinup at the front of the class.

Teachers - don't spray paint the walls of your students minds with anarchy. Form your opinions and give them, but keeps your wits about it. #notmypresident? Well, guess what...he is. If in four years he is doing a bad job...don't vote for him again. Rise, don't stoop.

That is all.

Friday, January 6, 2017

Epic the Red Headed Step Child of Education

For all of my readers out there that are red headed and also step children, please know I aim not to offend you. This colloquialism is commonly used and means:
 With red hair being rare, a child born to non red headed parents was often assumed to be the child of an affair. Thus was treated badly. 
Many of you know I work for a charter, a virtual charter at that. I and all enrolled at or working for Epic must therefore be passed over, like the colloquialism suggests, when it comes to anything that matters to anyone. EXCEPT, hello! We matter too. Anyone that attends or works for this school matters like other teachers and students across the state. Just because we are different doesn't mean we are less.
Every teacher working for the state of Oklahoma this year just got a survey from the OK Dept of Ed...even Epic teachers. It is a survey that wants to know about teaching methods and all sorts of other things. The first question asks the teacher to choose a county. I chose Creek as that is where I reside and work. Except Epic Charter School is not in the drop down list for schools within Creek County.
Ok, so I back up and chose Oklahoma County as it obviously means county on file in which the charter must be written. But no, Epic isn't available to choose from there either.

Let's get this straight:
Epic is now the 14th largest school in the state of Oklahoma - Check
Epic has students in all 77 counties - Check
Epic has students of every single socioeconomic background found in Oklahoma - Check

So why is it that we are still not being taken seriously?

To be fair, several people from the SDE got ahold of me and let me know that going forward things would change. Everyone is so quick to bash us, but nobody is really tracking us or paying much positive attention to the school at all.  They still have us listed in the system with Graham-Dustin. This is the district that housed our charter 3 years ago, before the Oklahoma Virtual Board took over those duties. Many in #oklaed are really starting to open their minds to this school, but it's because I have had to have many one on one conversations. People are so quick to read and believe articles printed in the paper.

We are here. We have been here and are in our 6th school year. We have close to 10K students in our school. We are really working hard over here. Why must there be a hurdle at every single turn?