Saint Edward

I actually never did this, but someone said I shouldn't consider myself a saint, so I decided to look up Saint Edward. For you Jew folks, or others who don't know how it works, all us Catholic babies have to be named after a saint. Anyway there are apparently two saint Edwards. One was called Edward the Confessor and the other was Edward the Martyr. The confessor was a nice guy who gave money to poor people and and eventually in his 40's was asked to marry a woman called the virtuous Edith by his subjects. He agreed but only if he could live with her as if she was his sister because he had made a vow of chastity.

The second was Edward the martyr. He was sitting on his horse drinking mead when an assassin hired by his step mother stabbed him. He was a defender of the faith and so a light shone on him when he died and he became a saint. Obviously this is the Edward I was named after. I'll take mead over chastity any day, though I do seem to have problems with evil step mothers.

Of course I am not a saint. The person that keeps pointing this out to me is correct. This person also thinks I didn't do all my observations last year and that is a total lie.

I do feel that their are rational ways to deal with bad teachers. There are certainly ways to deal with them when they are just starting. The hardest thing I have ever done is to fire someone. Particularly when I liked them. But some people should not teach, or they should not teach at that point in their lives. I have also been guilty of pushing bad teachers out to a different place instead of working to get them to stop teaching. This is not something I am necessarily proud of.

To get back to management. The problem with the formal observation is that it quickly becomes formalistic. It does not serve anyone. When I was a young Catholic boy I would go to confession. I was really too little to have sinned, but you had to say something to the priest. So you made up some little kid sins. I disobeyed my mother 3 times, I said bad words. Stuff like that. This happens in observations all the time. Not just mine, because I have read other observations and I have sat in on post-ops with the principal. You have to say something, so you do. You sit there and act like the expert. This is absurd. This is education. Some of us know more than others, but almost none of us can be called experts. The principal thinks she is an expert, the AP security thinks he is an expert, but the truth is that they are just two voices among many. We need to stop dealing with experienced teacher as if we are "the" expert. We need to start having a dialog.