When I heard the story about challenges to Illinois Senate candidate Mark Kirk's claims that he was a real teacher:
According to the NY Times: "a year in London at a private school and part-time in a nursery school as part of a work-study program while he was a student at Cornell University."
--- I said to myself: He has more teaching time that Randi did. But before I could blog about it EIA's Mike Antonucci came up with this:
U.S. Rep. Mark S. Kirk (R-IL) is being accused by his Democratic rival of overstating his teaching experience. His campaign failed to issue the obvious response:
“Rep. Kirk has enough teaching experience to lead a national teachers’ union.”
From the Village Voice:
“[Weingarten] has been on union leave since 1997, accumulating a total of nine years of pensionable city time though she only did one semester of full-time teaching.”
Make sure to click the above link to the Voice piece - it is priceless even thought it was written by the vicious anti-teacher/UFT Wayne Barrett. [See Afterburn for a section.]
I once heard Randi claim on NY1 that she taught 5 classes a day for six years. Or I think I heard it because it is hard to believe that someone would lie so openly and feel they could get away with it. Foolish me! You hear that Joel Klein is not an educator. But even he taught for 6 months or so during the Vietnam great draft escape (I was one of them too). Funny how Randi talks about her minimal teaching experience while Klein never seems to mention it. Even though he taught full time I know full well that it must have been hell for a new and untrained teacher - the 6 week special! He went running the minute he could. But so did many others, so I am not blaming Klein for that. What I blame him for is not having exhibited even a clue to how schools really work based on even that minimal experience.
Why would someone use a claim to have been a teacher as a positive talking point when teachers have been degraded for so long. You know the "those who can do, those who can't teach" mantra? It turns out that Kirk wsa trying to use his "experience" in controlling a nursery school class as a resume for how he would function in the US Senate. Hmmm. He may be on to something. But it turns out he didn't even run the nursery school class.
Follow-up reports say that Kirk wasn't even a nursery school teacher at all but came in to "play with the children." The Huffington Post piece says, "As a former nursery school and middle school teacher," Kirk said in a March speech to the Illinois Education Association, "I know some of what it takes to bring order to class." His supervising teacher said "Kirk was not responsible for "bringing order" to the nursery schoolers."
Well, if he wins (it is the Obama Senate seat by the way) Kirk can go in and play with the Senators.
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Afterburn
The VOICE Article:
In urging Klein "to walk in the shoes of teachers" .... she described how she'd done it, claiming that she "taught, sometimes full time, sometimes part time, at Clara Barton High School for six years." Actually, records reviewed by the Voice indicate that she taught 122 days as a per diem teacher from September 1991 through June 1994, roughly one in four days. She then did what she told the Voice was her only full-time term in the fall semester of 1994, followed by 33 days as a per diem teacher in the spring of 1995.
I don't believe that Randi actually went in even as a per diem sub and taught a full load. People at Barton said she usually had 2 periods of teaching and then left.
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Why that graphic? Just a representative of the look on people's face, whether Randi or Klein or the Teach for America crew as they escape from teaching.
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