Description
Administrators can really make it tough on teachers. I’ve had numerous conferences with her about what’s going on in this school, but she doesn’t seem to want to hear it. We had a very rough time when we started this year. Students who can work by themselves do okay, but the others continue to fail. Since my time to work individually with them has been cut in half, they don’t stand much of a chance. The problem is how the students are distributed among the classrooms. We had this meeting and the principal asked me to take notes on what happened and what was decided. I was supposed to watch her to see how she handled a difficult situation. Needless to say, it didn’t go very well.
She listened to what everybody had to say, but she seemed to get defensive when one teacher described her classroom as a “dumping ground” for all the problem students. I don’t think an administrator should say that she wants to listen to people’s concerns and then cut them off when they say things she doesn’t want to hear. It took a long time to get to the real problem. We have so many students moving in and out and being tested for different programs that we just don’t have any stability. The racial and socioeconomic levels vary greatly among our students, and she seems to want to ignore this completely. After about an hour, she said she had another meeting and that we would have to meet again to discuss this further.