Under Assault: teaching in NYC: The Bronx vs Diaz Sr.

April 27, 2010

The Bronx vs Diaz Sr.

The Bronx UFT took up the fight against Diaz's bill on teacher layoffs with a rally outside the senator's office on Rogers Place. If he had been there, he could have heard this fun chant in support of senior teachers:

GRAY WILL STAY,
THE BILL WILL GO AWAY !

Kind of catchy. I like it.

I also liked what District Rep Annette Carlucci had to say when it was her turn at the mic:

It has been my honor to service 65 high schools in the Bronx.

For them I say to you Sen. Ruben Diaz, Sr. —

SHAME ON YOU for giving up your integrity to become a puppet for the city.

SHAME ON YOU for disrespecting those individuals who chose teaching as a career and have dedicated their lives to education.

SHAME ON YOU for dismissing their knowledge and expertise . . . reducing them to just a dollar sign.

SHAME ON YOU for demeaning their contribution to education and the impact they have on the children of New York City.

There's a better way to save money, and it is not at the expense of our children.

You should have known better, Senator Diaz!
SHAME ON YOU

You go, girl!

1 comment:

AnonymousApril 28, 2010 at 8:03 PM
UA - This is so cool! I'm glad you put this in your blog.
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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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April 27, 2010

The Bronx vs Diaz Sr.

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