{"id":3025,"date":"2013-07-20T09:18:37","date_gmt":"2013-07-20T08:18:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elbonia.cent.uji.es\/jordi\/?p=3025"},"modified":"2013-07-20T09:23:07","modified_gmt":"2013-07-20T08:23:07","slug":"carta-de-dimision-de-un-maestro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elbonia.cent.uji.es\/jordi\/2013\/07\/20\/carta-de-dimision-de-un-maestro\/","title":{"rendered":"Carta de dimisi\u00f3n de un maestro"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"970986_580602441971589_1103909027_n\"Hace unos meses Gerald J. Conti,\u00a0un profe de sociales de la\u00a0\u00a0Westhill High School<\/em> de Syracuse, N.Y.,\u00a0colg\u00f3 en su cuenta de Facebook su carta de dimisi\u00f3n. En unos d\u00edas la carta se hizo\u00a0viral<\/a>, hasta el punto que la public\u00f3 el\u00a0\u00a0Washington Post<\/a>\u00a0y muchos otros medios.<\/p>\n

No puedo resistirme a reproducirla \u00edntegra. Y si alguien la juzga muy alejada de nuestro contexto, que espere un tiempo tras la aprobaci\u00f3n de la LOMCE y los proyectos de tablets + libros de texto y las evaluaciones estandarizadas y la vuelva a leer.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mr. Casey Barduhn, Superintendent
\nWesthill Central School District
\n400 Walberta Park Road
\nSyracuse, New York 13219<\/p>\n

Dear Mr. Barduhn and Board of Education Members:<\/p>\n

It is with the deepest regret that I must retire at the close of this school year, ending my more than twenty-seven years of service at Westhill on June 30, under the provisions of the 2012-15 contract. I assume that I will be eligible for any local or state incentives that may be offered prior to my date of actual retirement and I trust that I may return to the high school at some point as a substitute teacher.<\/p>\n

As with Lincoln and Springfield, I have grown from a young to an old man here; my brother died while we were both employed here; my daughter was educated here, and I have been touched by and hope that I have touched hundreds of lives in my time here. I know that I have been fortunate to work with a small core of some of the finest students and educators on the planet.<\/p>\n

I came to teaching forty years ago this month and have been lucky enough to work at a small liberal arts college, a major university and this superior secondary school. To me, history has been so very much more than a mere job, it has truly been my life, always driving my travel, guiding all of my reading and even dictating my television and movie viewing. Rarely have I engaged in any of these activities without an eye to my classroom and what I might employ in a lesson, a lecture or a presentation. With regard to my profession, I have truly attempted to live John Dewey\u2019s famous quotation (now likely clich\u00e9 with me, I\u2019ve used it so very often) that\u00a0 \u201cEducation is not preparation for life, education is life itself.\u201d This type of total immersion is what I have always referred to as teaching \u201cheavy,\u201d working hard, spending time, researching, attending to details and never feeling satisfied that I knew enough on any topic. I now find that this approach to my profession is not only devalued, but denigrated and perhaps, in some quarters despised. STEM rules the day and \u201cdata driven\u201d education seeks only conformity, standardization, testing and a zombie-like adherence to the shallow and generic Common Core, along with a lockstep of oversimplified so-called Essential Learnings. Creativity, academic freedom, teacher autonomy, experimentation and innovation are being stifled in a misguided effort to fix what is not broken in our system of public education and particularly not at Westhill.<\/p>\n

A long train of failures has brought us to this unfortunate pass. In their pursuit of Federal tax dollars, our legislators have failed us by selling children out to private industries such as Pearson Education. The New York State United Teachers union has let down its membership by failing to mount a much more effective and vigorous campaign against this same costly and dangerous debacle. Finally, it is with sad reluctance that I say our own administration has been both uncommunicative and unresponsive to the concerns and needs of our staff and students by establishing testing and evaluation systems that are Byzantine at best and at worst, draconian. This situation has been exacerbated by other actions of the administration, in either refusing to call open forum meetings to discuss these pressing issues, or by so constraining the time limits of such meetings that little more than a conveying of information could take place. This lack of leadership at every level has only served to produce confusion, a loss of confidence and a dramatic and rapid decaying of morale. The repercussions of these ill-conceived policies will be telling and shall resound to the detriment of education for years to come. The analogy that this process is like building the airplane while we are flying would strike terror in the heart of anyone should it be applied to an actual airplane flight, a medical procedure, or even a home repair. Why should it be acceptable in our careers and in the education of our children?<\/p>\n

My profession is being demeaned by a pervasive atmosphere of distrust, dictating that teachers cannot be permitted to develop and administer their own quizzes and tests (now titled as generic \u201cassessments\u201d) or grade their own students\u2019 examinations. The development of plans, choice of lessons and the materials to be employed are increasingly expected to be common to all teachers in a given subject. This approach not only strangles creativity, it smothers the development of critical thinking in our students and assumes a one-size-fits-all mentality more appropriate to the assembly line than to the classroom. Teacher planning time has also now been so greatly eroded by a constant need to \u201cprove up\u201d our worth to the tyranny of APPR (through the submission of plans, materials and \u201cartifacts\u201d from our teaching) that there is little time for us to carefully critique student work, engage in informal intellectual discussions with our students and colleagues, or conduct research and seek personal improvement through independent study. We have become increasingly evaluation and not knowledge driven. Process has become our most important product, to twist a phrase from corporate America, which seems doubly appropriate to this case.<\/p>\n

After writing all of this I realize that I am not leaving my profession, in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists. I feel as though I have played some game halfway through its fourth quarter, a timeout has been called, my teammates\u2019 hands have all been tied, the goal posts moved, all previously scored points and honors expunged and all of the rules altered.<\/p>\n

For the last decade or so, I have had two signs hanging above the blackboard at the front of my classroom, they read, \u201cWords Matter\u201d and \u201cIdeas Matter\u201d. While I still believe these simple statements to be true, I don\u2019t feel that those currently driving public education have any inkling of what they mean.<\/p>\n

Sincerely and with regret,<\/p>\n

Gerald J. Conti
\nSocial Studies Department Leader
\nCc: Doreen Bronchetti, Lee Roscoe
\nMy little Zu.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A mi me parece una lecci\u00f3n de pedagog\u00eda, pero que cada lector\/a saque sus propias conclusiones.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hace unos meses Gerald J. Conti,\u00a0un profe de sociales de la\u00a0\u00a0Westhill High School de Syracuse, N.Y.,\u00a0colg\u00f3 en su cuenta de Facebook su carta de dimisi\u00f3n. En unos d\u00edas la carta se hizo\u00a0viral, hasta el punto que la public\u00f3 el\u00a0\u00a0Washington Post\u00a0y muchos otros medios. No puedo resistirme a reproducirla \u00edntegra. Y si alguien la juzga muy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[280],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p74JOR-MN","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbonia.cent.uji.es\/jordi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbonia.cent.uji.es\/jordi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbonia.cent.uji.es\/jordi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbonia.cent.uji.es\/jordi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbonia.cent.uji.es\/jordi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3025"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/elbonia.cent.uji.es\/jordi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3025\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3030,"href":"https:\/\/elbonia.cent.uji.es\/jordi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3025\/revisions\/3030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbonia.cent.uji.es\/jordi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbonia.cent.uji.es\/jordi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbonia.cent.uji.es\/jordi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}