Okay, that's not true. I took the webinar last year and I got the message. Report them. Report everyone. Call up and give names and numbers. While I hate seeing members rat one another out over things that are relatively meaningless, I don't have an issue with reporting outrageous behavior. Hey, if President Trump were my colleague, I'd report him in a Mar a Lago minute. Why wait until the Post puts up a piece about how some pervy teacher plans to grab women?
I got in very early today and tried to log in. I waited and waited, and nothing happened. A colleague tried the same. He got some message about timing out. You'd think they'd have learned something from the miserable rollout last year, but evidently the great minds at Tweed can't be bothered analyzing their mistakes from last year. Anything they do is Good Enough, if not Highly Effective. Teachers, generally assumed to be superhuman, are held to a higher standard.
That's not true only in the feeble minds of Tweedies. I myself figure if I have a job to do, I ought to get out of bed in the morning and do it. Not only that, but if I screw up, I look at why I screwed up. I either adjust or eliminate the lesson in which I did that, depending on whether or not it can be remediated. The DOE, on the other hand, is the Great and Mighty Oz, that must not be questioned.
After all, if your mother got you that cool admin job after you taught for two years, you must be smarter than I am. I mean, look at me. I've been teaching for 35 years now. Not only have I never attempted to become an administrator, but I've further never even bothered to go to administrator school.
If the people who ran this had a brain between them, they'd create options for us. They'd offer to show it to groups during PD sessions. That way, people could get it over with. They could get through it in one sitting, as opposed to depending on DOE bandwidth, up, down, in, out, gone and whatever. No one would have to start over again when the webinar failed to keep your place.
The ineptitude of this rollout, along with the total failure to analyze, let alone improve on what happened last year is inexcusable. If I screwed up on a task at work on this scale and decided to do it again, I would not be receiving a letter of commendation from my AP and principal. They would not tolerate it, and indeed they shouldn't. Likely they'd find someone else to do it next year, and they'd be entirely justified in doing so.
It's intolerable and unacceptable that the NYC Department of Education lacks this fundamental level of basic introspection. However, along with tens of thousands of my UFT colleagues, I'm entirely accustomed to it. I sent them an email:
Like last year, like my colleague across from me, and like thousands citywide, I am unable to log in to the required sexual harassment webinar. Last year it took me several months to get in. It's very disappointing we have to waste so much of our time trying to open a link. It's further disappointing you make no allowance for us to watch this in groups during our PD sessions.Very sincerely,Arthur Goldstein
I got a form letter back, just like last year. It did nothing to resolve the issue, just like last year. I'll try and try, waste my time, and maybe complete this thing months from now.
We have a new chancellor with a new vision. But until the mayor allows him to make all the Bloomberg leftovers walk the plank, this is going to remain par for the course.
Posts
