re: 9 reasons why public educ fails

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Did you retire by choice or felt yourself getting pushed out?

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Voluntary retirement.

I was mentally and physically exhausted. I lived for the classroom experience and would go back to that in a heartbeat.

What I could not do was the planning to meet the transition to the new common core curriculum requirement. We had volumes of planning requirements and dozens of workshops to facilitate them. It was all meaningless as far as I was concerned because it was an example of form over substance.

I put every ounce of my energy into preparing for class each day - trying to present material at a level the entire class could understand and build upon, as well as challenging the more advanced students and not bewildering the students who should not really have been in an advanced math class. It was a practicably impossible task, but I loved beating my head against that wall every day.

Now comes all the planning. We had to predict what the class average on a standardized test would be when taken at the end of the year. Our evaluations as to effectiveness would be driven primarily by the accuracy of our prediction made in September. What we should have done was to give the Final Exam on the first day of class and record each students performance so that it could be compared to what they had learned at the end of the year. Trouble was that nobody told us to do that and even if they had, we didn't have a Final Exam ready to give them. == totally incompatible expectation vs resource and time.

We also had to match up the newly defined objectives to the previously defined 'grade level expectations' when both sets of curriculum description were written in awful form, both from a grammar standpoint and from a relation to real mathematics understanding standpoint.

I spent hours trying to decipher what GLE may not be entirely covered by the new objectives and how I would 'bridge the gap' between the two inane descriptions of just what the lesson should be on a particular interval. These definitions tended to be so specific as to be trivial or they tried to encapsulate an entire year's instruction into one convoluted statement across several threads of instruction. It was maddening if you tried to make sense of it all - and not one moment of that time did anything to enhance the produce presented to the students the next day. All it did was provide the bureaucrats with something to track and report to their higher ups with.

I will say that the new Common Core statements were a lot better than the prior GLE statements - those were practically unusable and I just ignored them and taught math.

I could see that my personality would not fit in well with these requirements. I do not fault the administration for any of my problems here - they were as frustrated and I was about the conflicting requirements. However, I was just too old and tired to make a decent effort. I did not want my failures to perform reflect on their performance - I didn't want to become the 'problem' that they would have to deal with when talking to the School Board bureaucrats.

And - I was physically and mentally exhausted. I was 75 years old, and had given every ounce of energy I had for the past 11 years. I have battled two separate cancers for the past four years and felt that one of them was beginning to sap my strength even more. One week after I retired I got the bad news - my lymphoma had spread to my colon and spleen and I was being put on a clinical trial.

Tomorrow is the last day of that initial trial and I am hoping for good news when they do the final evaluation four weeks from now.

Sorry for the rant - You asked and when I started typing I could not quit.

I love math - had been an aerospace engineer since 1960 - and started a photography business in 1985. Came back to my home town in 1998 and started teaching math in 2002. Loved every moment of the classroom experience and the day I left was I saw the biggest outpouring of student appreciation I could have ever imagined. Even the students who were failing were crying. I will be forever humbled by that experience.