Rocking Out In "California Educator"

Our school is profiled in this month's issue of California Educator, as working successfully to close the so-called student achievement gap. Accompanying the article are some rock star pictures of my colleagues pointing, thumbing, and visually exhtorting. Additionaly pictures accompany the lead article. Although many pictures were taken inside room D2, none were used, and I can't help but feel this represents tremendous editorial judgement on behalf of the photo staff.

I'm quoted a few times throughout, and while these are more or less accurate, it seems like I got a little dumbed-down. An occupational hazard in allowing someone to edit a thirty-minute conversation into two-sentence chunks, I know, but there's one that stands out as particularly flawed.

“We didn’t pay a high-priced consultant to tell us how to teach; instead, we talked to each other.”

This quote makes me sound like an aggrevied unionista, and I'm really not. POY called me a B.U.M. -- Bitter Union Member -- and I'm not that either. I was speaking of the importance of teachers committing to a process a constant improvement and continual dissatisfaction with the status quo. I was trying to articulate a vision of professionalism that possessd a measure of self-determinism and rejected outside pressure as the only source of development and improvement. "This is what it means to be a professional teacher," I said, but that didn't quite make it into the final version.