GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

1. 

   Smith

   January 16th, 2009 1:32 pm

   For all those outside the system who believe the myth that the UFT is a powerful union, here’s yet another example of teachers being given extra work and stress, without negotiation, for the same amount of pay.

2. 

   doe

   January 16th, 2009 11:05 pm

   DIIT is the IT side of the technology in NYC… OIT is the instructional side. They overlap in some of their mission/vision…

3. 

   doe

   January 16th, 2009 11:06 pm

   also, why does it have to be a union issue of ‘more work and stress’ - the job of a teacher at the root is to instruct and inform. keeping parents and students in the loop with communication is not a ‘burden’ - it is a basic requirement. the idea that this is more than that is shallow and lazy.

4. 

   Smith

   January 17th, 2009 12:13 am

   It’s work.

5. 

   miss malarkey

   January 17th, 2009 8:11 am

   Smith, I do get your annoyance, but I think this will be an advantage to us in the long run. I’m using an online grading program and have set up accounts for many parents. It emails them whenever I update the grades, letting them know that they can log in to look at their kids’ progress. I can look at how often the parents check their kids’ grades. Some have yet to log in. So it gives me an additional way to cover myself- it puts the onus on the parent to log in and check. They can’t complain that I wasn’t keeping them informed. Frankly, I hate calling parents and using email this year has allowed me to cut back a little.

6. 

   Smith

   January 17th, 2009 10:18 am

   I’m using doing all the same stuff and I agree with you about the benefits and I like how it takes some of the stress out of parent-teacher conferences. But it can be a lot of work - I have about 168 kids on my roster and the grading program has problems, so sometimes I have more email than I want to deal with, especially silly stuff from the students, like “why is my average lower than it was three days ago”?

   But my original post wasn’t really about this topic. It was about a contract that allows our employers to add extra work without having to negotiate with our union even though many outsiders believe we have a powerful union that has a great deal of control over the terms and conditions of our employment. I realize that we’ll always have to do a significant part of our jobs at home. But if I’m going to be up late at night doing work, I want to be planning lessons or grading homework rather than editing a message to a parent to make sure it sounds OK or deciding whether to help out an irresponsible student who didn’t write down the homework or explaining to an angry parent that her child is not telling the truth. With a stronger union, this work (and the class web page, etc.) could be done at school and be part of a Circular 6 assignment.

7. 

   Rich

   January 18th, 2009 3:26 pm

   There are a few issues presented here; not insurmountable problems necessarily, but at least issues to be thought through:

   1. If Smith’s students send their teacher only one e-mail per week, that’s 168 messages. In addition, if each parent (even assuming only one parent per family does the e-mailing) sends an additional weekly e-mail, then Smith has 168 more messages to read for a grand total of 336. Of course, most will need responses. That’s a few hundred more messages. A typical teacher might have fewer students than Smith, but the numbers are still likely to be in the hundreds. Is this really what we want our teachers doing?

   2. Would teachers’ e-mails to parents be considered official DOE correspondence? Most of us can relax somewhat when sending e-mail at work. We can write quickly, use a sort of shorthand, even make the occasional typo or spelling blunder, knowing that this is common in 21st century electronic communication. But woe betide any teacher who slips on an e-mail to a parent. Remember that one of New York’s daily newspapers is openly hostile to public education, and both tabloids love to pounce on faux pas such as the Stuyvesant High School diploma error a few years back. Headlines, anybody? “City Teacher Needs Spelling Tutor, Parents Complain.”

   3. Most of us who work in offices can start the day by answering a raft of overnight e-mails and take periodic breaks from other duties to respond to those messages that come in during the day. How would we educate parents to understand that most teachers have to TEACH during the first period of the day? Even homeroom is not free time for teachers, as there are routine tasks, announcements and unforeseen problems raised by students. Yes, a typical teacher could answer a few messages during a preparation period, but when does that weekly quiz get written and duplicated? Suppose the teacher has time to answer five messages during a free period, but the sixth, unanswered, is an urgent request from a parent who innocently thought the teacher would tend to the matter immediately, perhaps with a return message?

   4. Doe is bothered by a reference to the unions and perhaps by implication to the teachers’ contract. I too have often been frustrated by the extent to which New York’s public schools are bound up by complex rules. But we have just been presented with an excellent example of an issue that cries out for an organized expression of the teachers’ point of view. What better vehicle for that expression than the agent the teachers themselves have chosen to speak for them?

   Providing for better communication between teachers and their students and the students’ families certainly is a net plus for any school system. But it’s not a simple matter to be imposed from above with the assumption that teachers should just go along and embrace a new responsibility.

8. 

   Marie

   January 23rd, 2009 9:02 pm

   I really liked this information. Nice work!

9. 

   Mr. Jones

   February 19th, 2009 5:27 pm

   Why would any student use the Dept of Ed email address? They have their own Gmal, AOL, Hotmail and tons of other email options. And the same with parents. This is just another waste of time and effort for the NYC Dept. of Education. No one is going to use that email system. Besides, it will not be private. Another bonehead DOE idea.

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