Under Assault: teaching in NYC: Sharp-shootin'

August 4, 2008

Sharp-shootin'

Two great new posts by the indefatigable Norm Scott over at Ednotes.

The first for the picture — "Three Amigos"— and you'll have to see who these nasties are for yourself, since I've cut their heads off here. (A metaphorical pleasure, it turns out.) Then do what he says and let the NYC Parents blog connect the dots for you.

The second is Scott at his best, taking shots at BloomKlein, Tweed, McCain, Sharpton, the widening achievement gap between white/Asian and other populations, the decrease in the number of minority teachers, and the contemptible non-transparency and stonewalling of this chancellorship that gives "reform" a very bad name — all in under 400 words.

It's like watching a pit bull do its thing.

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UA retired from teaching after 24 years, having built more than a couple of dozen school choruses and conducted them in well over 100 concerts. Her absences have been infrequent, her ratings satisfactory, and she teaches with enthusiasm. In some years, up to 450 students have passed through her classroom each school year.

UA was a musicologist before she became a teacher and held the position of senior staff editor on the world's largest and most comprehensive encyclopedia of music (The New Grove Dictionary of Music, 29 vols.). She is known for her scholarly work on some of the longest (and most tedious) bibliographical articles in the main work and the subsequent offshoot reference books. She also trained as a coloratura in New York, London and Italy, and has a working knowledge of several other languages.

After a flirtation with rumba and tango, UA wrote a play on ballroom partner dancing called Real Changes, which makes side trips into Zen, intellectualism/eroticism, tragedy/comedy, a parody of Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost, Nietzsche's early works, and nirvana. (She is still not clear which of these should dominate the psyche, but is happy to have spent four years trying to find out.

Before her recent retirement, UA thought she could pass the remaining years of her career in relative calm. But this was not to be. She was excessed for the second time in her career and was for a year and a half a sub, or in the vernacular, an ATR. A successful grievance restored her to a position, but a principal has many ways to keep someone squirming. Teaching fully out of license was one of them, during which time she lost her desire to teach at all.

It is very hard to tell whether she was excessed in that period because her subject is music (which is not particularly respected in this school system), or because she was becoming too old, too expensive, or too ... "vocal."

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August 4, 2008

Sharp-shootin'

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