Under Assault: teaching in NYC: Mulgrew morphs

December 22, 2009

Mulgrew morphs

I'm really happy to learn that UFT Prez Michael Mulgrew has changed his angle on the school closings issue.

His campaign to label Tweed "Mismanagement Central" — which lasted about a week-and-a-half and got my knickers in a twist in a post last Saturday — seems to be morphing into something else.

You can't find the word "mismanagement" at all in an editorial he wrote for the Daily News two days ago. I did a word search, it's not there.

Mulgrew's now calling Klein's ed policies "misguided," which is a few steps closer to the way I'd describe Tweed's sociopathy.

I suspect we'll be watching Mulgrew test-drive one so-called strategy after another as he tries to protect teachers against the very people his caucus has been collaborating with for a decade.

What a position they've put us in.
What a waste of labor clout.

3 comments:

ChazDecember 23, 2009 at 5:22 PM
You beat me to it about how the UFT aided the Tweed "mismanagement" for the last eight years.

Now I will have to write a different post.
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Under AssaultDecember 23, 2009 at 7:14 PM
Write it anyway.You're good at the details.
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NYC EducatorDecember 27, 2009 at 1:22 PM
I've said this before, but neither of those words really makes the point for me. I'd go for "sabotage" instead, because both the others suggest this course of action is somehow unintentional.
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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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December 22, 2009

Mulgrew morphs

3 comments: